Blood Cries Afar (3 page)

The publication of R. C. Smail’s masterly study
Crusading Warfare 1097–1193
in 1956 should have instantly eradicated accepted thinking.
²⁶
Unfortunately, perhaps due to its being specialist and scholarly in nature, its findings were picked up by only a few medievalists, and at a time when medieval warfare did not constitute a major area of academic research.
²⁷
Its limited impact was also partly due to the failure to apply Smail’s conclusions for the Middle East to Europe. He demonstrates how strategy, tactics, discipline, infantry and leadership all played major roles in the warfare of the period and that battle-avoidance was generally preferred to battle-seeking. In diminishing the role of battle he accentuated the role of the castle, placing logistics, ravaging and the taking and keeping of strongpoints at the centre of medieval warfare. Many of Smails’s views are echoed in J. F. Verbruggen’s
The Art of Warfare in Western Europe During the Middle Ages
(originally published in Dutch in 1954; translated into English in 1997).
²⁸
However, despite his recognition of the castle’s importance, Verbruggen’s focus remains on armies on the field of battle. His important work depicts clearly the professionalism of the medieval knight and dispels the myth of battle comprising large numbers of individual duels to show that knights fought in tactical units, a misuse of the sources having led to misunderstanding. He writes:

In many instances we can show that historians … have simply not read certain passages in their source carefully. They have kept the name of the prominent nobleman who fought at the head of his unit, but in their account of the engagement they forget the words
cum suis, avec sa gent, cum sua acie
, with the result that the fighting of entire formations is represented as a duel …
²⁹

What knights learned from long years of training in small tactical units (
conrois
) they later employed in combat. Verbruggen also gives due attention to foot-soldiers, but again the emphasis is on the early fourteenth century.

With these antecedents, full-blown revisionism began in earnest in the 1980s, launched in 1984 by Philip Contamine’s classic work,
War in the Middle Ages
(translated from the 1980 French edition) and by John Gillingham’s seminal article, deliberately and provocatively titled ‘Richard I and the Science of War in the Middle Ages’.
³⁰
Contamine, in a passage already quoted, stressed the importance of warfare to medieval society and history as a whole. Gillingham gives prominence to the reality of warfare as experienced throughout the Middle Ages: ravaging, discipline, sieges, infantry, battle avoidance, etc. The flood of revisionist research that followed is incorporated into this work and referred to in the notes.
³¹
With the revisionist school of thought now prevailing (except in the area of military revolutions), inevitably there will be trends to counter-revisionism (a manifestation of the eternal cycle of historical debate). This has already been seen with the questioning of numbers, one highly respected historian taking Delbrück to task for the one thing on which he was probably right (relatively small army numbers);
³²
another, more convincingly, believes that the necessary accommodation of new thinking on infantry should not leave the knight now on the periphery and also that discipline was, in fact, more of a problem than is sometimes considered.
³³
By the twenty-first century, the study of medieval warfare has emerged into a major area of recognised research that has moved beyond the regular appearance of books on the subject: the annual
Journal of Medieval Military History
has produced eight volumes of leading-edge scholarship since its inception in 2002 and there is now a dedicated website from the
De Re Militari
group (www.deremilitari.org) that offers an abundance of invaluable information and resources to academic and layperson alike. In 2010, Oxford University Press published its massive three-volume
Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology
, to present an authoritative account of our current understanding of warfare in the Middle Ages from scholars around the world (this author included). Medieval warfare remains, as Contamine noted, a ‘massive subject’.

With all this in mind, the military events leading to the invasion of England in 1216, and the actual invasion itself, will be studied with the intention of revealing the true nature of warfare in western Europe in the early thirteenth century (and, by extension, the medieval period as a whole). Where similarities exist between the nature of warfare in this period and earlier and later medieval periods, these will be highlighted to press home the essential point that the Middle Ages saw relatively little real change in the art of war. Considerable attention will be devoted to styles of military leadership, especially in regards to the commanders-in-chief: King John, King Philip Augustus and Louis the Lion. Throughout this study, the main aim will be to show how war affected the history of this time and how it affected the people it caught in its terrible grasp. For just as war had its effect on society, so it took its toll on the individuals within that society. It is thus fitting to remember the words of the poet William Blake, who was moved to write the following lines on Albion by the historical events covered in this book:

The stars of heaven tremble: the roaring voice of war, the trumpet, calls to battle! Brother in brother’s blood must bathe, rivers of death! O land, most hapless! O island, how forsaken! Weep from thy silver fountains; weep from thy gentle rivers! The angel of the island weeps! Thy widowed virgins weep beneath thy shades! Thy aged fathers gird themselves for war! The sucking infant lives to die in battle; the weeping mother feeds him to the slaughter! The husbandman doth leave his bending harvest! Blood cries afar!

William Blake,
Prologue to King John
³⁴

T
hen, at the age of 21, the young Henry Plantagenet ascended the throne of England in December 1154, he established a new royal dynasty, the fame of which ensured its name would echo through the ages. His sons, the ‘Devil’s brood’, included two of England’s most legendary kings, resulting in a succession of three remarkable monarchs from 1154 to 1216. Henry ushered in an age of constitutional and legal changes against a turbulent background of political intrigue, diplomatic manoeuvring and, above all, war. But, first and foremost, he founded the Angevin Empire.

Son of the Empress Matilda, heiress of England, and Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, and grandson of King Henry I of England and Fulk of Anjou, King of Jerusalem, Henry was clearly born for great things; but even his natural ambitions must have been pleasantly exceeded by the relative ease with which he became King of England. One contemporary chronicler wrote: ‘It is astonishing how such great good fortune came to him so fast and so suddenly.’
³⁵
The struggle for the throne of England which had plunged the nation into the anarchy of King Stephen’s reign was ended by the treaty of Winchester in 1153. By the terms of this treaty Stephen recognised Henry as his heir,
jure hereditario
. Stephen, worn out by the incessant strife of his reign and shattered by the sudden death of his eldest son Eustace, whom he had groomed to succeed him, relinquished any further serious dynastic ambitions for his own house and acquiesced to the demands of the Church, which sought peace for both sides, and to the barely tempered demands of his Angevin competitors. The treaty left Henry as the first undisputed heir and successor to the throne of England in over a century.
³⁶
What Henry had only partially achieved by military force, fate had finished for him.

By the time of his Christmas coronation in 1154, Henry was already a hugely powerful figure on the European stage: Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou and, through his inspired marriage to the divorced wife of King Louis VII of France, Duke of Aquitaine and Count of Poitou. This match with Eleanor of Aquitaine had doubled his continental dominions and halved those of King Louis at a stroke. It was an irony of the French king’s dissolved marriage that Eleanor had borne him only two daughters – a serious, if blameless, failing in any queen – but went on to provide her new husband with no less than four sons. However, despite this temporary blip for the French crown, the Capetian dynasty, founded in 987 and from which Louis was the eighth monarch, was notably fortunate in its long unbroken line of direct and relatively undisputed male successions; Louis later went on to produce a son with a new bride.
³⁷
But Henry had married not only into power – he had also married into considerable trouble. For as much as Eleanor was bored by her unadventurous and unsatisfying life with Louis – she had complained that she had been married to a monk, not a king – it would seem that Henry was more than a match for this extraordinary woman; the result was a clash of two overbearing, ambitious and egotistical personalities. The marriage, even though a royal one, was not big enough to contain them. Henry, eleven years younger than Eleanor, took a series of mistresses, the most famous being Rosamund Clifford; Eleanor herself stood accused of infidelities during her marriage to Louis. Henry was a powerfully built, robust and energetic man who engaged upon an almost frenetically active involvement in the governance of his lands.
³⁸
Eleanor, despite her allegedly amorous appetite, struck an elegant figure as queen and patroness of the arts.
³⁹
In a manner reminiscent of the Empress Livia in Augustine Rome, she channelled her own ambitions through her male offspring; Henry, Richard, Geoffrey and John. These she turned against her husband, so much so that Henry compared himself to a picture in which an old eagle was being relentlessly harried and pecked by four eaglets.

For two decades Henry’s reign was clearly a fruitful one. He re-established order and royal authority in England, leaving himself free to consolidate his continental interests; by 1173 he had accomplished this by becoming overlord of the neighbouring territories of the Vexin, Brittany and Toulouse, a tribute to his formidable diplomatic skills. All were of strategic importance and would prove to be so in the years of war that were to follow. He began the subjugation of Ireland and forged close links with Henry, Duke of Saxony, and also with Navarre and Lombardy.
⁴⁰
The Constitution and Assizes of Clarendon in the mid 1160s added renown to his political authority and, notwithstanding the controversy over Archbishop Thomas Becket’s death in 1170, 1173 saw Henry esteemed as perhaps the pre-eminent ruler in western Christendom. It was at this moment he faced the greatest challenges to his authority, all of which emanated from within his own family.
⁴¹
Motivated by King Louis of France, who never failed to meddle in and ferment Angevin familial discord, and by their mother Eleanor, Henry’s sons allied themselves with disaffected barons and the King of Scotland in a military strike at the crown. However, a lack of synchronisation and coordination by the rebels doomed their revolt and permitted Henry to deal with and overcome one threat at a time. Henry was magnanimous in victory to his eaglets, but unforgiving of Eleanor: for the rest of Henry’s reign, she remained in effective imprisonment.

In 1183 trouble brewed up again. In an acute manifestation of sibling rivalry the young Henry, who held Normandy, Maine and Anjou, allied with his brother Geoffrey, who held Brittany, against Richard, Duke of Aquitaine and their father. The two eldest sons were aided in their task by the new King of France, the eighteen-year-old Philip II. This dangerous instability threatened the Angevin power structure but was removed by the unexpected death from dysentery of the young Henry. Richard thereby became heir to the throne of England and inherited the elder brother’s continental lands. Henry II wished to provide for John, his youngest and most favoured son, by giving him Richard’s duchy of Aquitaine. Richard would have none of this: his many talents were already well established and he successfully countered all moves against him. In 1186 Henry was threatened by Geoffrey, again spurred on by King Philip of France; once again the premature death of a son – Geoffrey was killed in a tournament accident – saved Henry’s position from greater danger. But the last years of Henry’s reign witnessed no alleviation of his troubles. The scent of a new order was in the air and the old King found it increasingly difficult to shake off the hereditary hounds. His initially cordial relations with Philip of France broke down into open warfare. At first he was assisted by Richard against the French king, but then opposed by him. Inexplicably, Henry continued to favour John at the expense of Richard, his most gifted son. Prompted by fears for his inheritance and by Philip’s sly encouragement, Richard joined forces with the French King in a well-organised military campaign against Henry over a battle-ground that was thus prepared for the conflicts of John’s reign. Henry lost Le Mans and Touraine, and hence the struggle. In July 1189 he succumbed to the humiliating terms of Richard and Philip. Two days after signing his defeat, sick in heart and body, Henry died.

True to the ever-changing nature of medieval alliances, when Richard became King of England the familiar pattern of Angevin-Capetian rivalry was renewed afresh, barely restrained even by their combined leadership of the Third Crusade (1190–2). Whatever King Philip had learned from the military genius of Richard in the Holy Land, he could not put it to effective use against him back in Europe, for Richard usually bettered the French King at war. Philip had returned home early from the crusade, making much of an illness that was afflicting him (
arnoldia
), but in reality his purpose was to lay claim to his inheritance of the county of Flanders, using the opportunity to make gains on Richard’s continental territories in the English king’s absence; he was not overly deferential to the protection afforded by the Papacy to crusader’s lands. This was about the only time that Philip made any real sustained headway against Richard; and what progress he did make was often in collusion with John, Richard’s treacherous younger brother. On his return, Richard soon made good any losses he had incurred while in the Holy Land or while incarcerated by Henry VI of Germany.