The Plantagenets: The Kings That Made Britain (4 page)

But the war was not won. As soon as the winter had passed, William the Lion was back again, capturing several northern castles, while his brother, David, marched to
Leicester to reinforce the major rebel garrison. The campaign season of 1174 was, like most early medieval campaigns, all about castles. De Lucy captured Huntingdon, but his opponents secured Nottingham. In the north William failed to capture key royalist strongholds at Carlisle and Wark, and Henry’s bastard son (the only son to remain loyal to his father) took the castle of Axholme, the headquarters of Roger de Mowbray, one of the leading opponents of the king. As the war raged to and fro, de Lucy sent repeated appeals for aid to the king, but Henry knew that Louis and his allies also wanted to see him depart for England; they had almost despaired of ultimate victory as long as the Plantagenet led his own forces against them. In order to lure Henry across the Channel, Count Philip of Flanders launched another invasion in July.

Henry now moved. His first port of call in England was at Canterbury. Here he carried out one of the most extraordinary and uncharacteristic acts of his reign. He went barefoot and in penitential sackcloth to the shrine of Thomas Becket, spent all night there in solemn vigil praying for the saint’s forgiveness (Becket had been canonized in February 1173). The following day (13 July) he submitted to being scourged by the monks. It was a dramatic gesture intended to deprive his enemies of spiritual support from the martyr. Four days later news arrived that seemed to support the idea that the king’s contrition had won heavenly approval. On the very day of his public penance William the Lion and his knights had been surprised in their camp before the walls of Alnwick by a force of Yorkshire loyalists who emerged out
of the morning mist and fell upon them. In the following skirmish the Scottish king was captured. With this boost to the morale of his men Henry acted with his customary decisiveness. He marched north and received the submission first of Huntingdon and then of Northampton. The rebellion in England collapsed completely, and Henry was back in Normandy scarcely a month after he had left.

In the 12th-century wars between kings and barons, pitched battles were rare. They were costly in terms of men and equipment, and armies, whether of mercenary soldiers or feudal retainers, were expensive to maintain. Combatants protected themselves and their garrisons within the walls of stone castles, which, as the chroniclers reported, were built throughout the country. A castle served several purposes. It provided a home for the lord and his household. It was a prestigious symbol of his power and wealth. It protected the lord and his retainers. It was a base from which he could set out to engage the enemy or make foraging raids. It served as a refuge for the local community in times of real crisis. It is, therefore, not surprising that ‘war’ usually meant ‘siege warfare’.

Tacticians gave considerable thought to new ways of waging this kind of war – how to breach castle walls and how to make castles more impregnable. The first Norman castles had been wooden structures built on a mound (motte) surrounded by an enclosure (bailey) within encircling ditches, ramparts and palisades. The timber structure at the centre of the complex was soon replaced by a square stone keep (or
donjon
). It was several storeys high to make
scaling difficult, and its entrances were protected by stout doors, narrow passages and drawbridges.

Determined assailants countered by ‘escalade’, climbing ladders laid against the wall while archers supplied covering fire. This was hazardous since the defenders retaliated by hurling down rocks, combustible material and other missiles. If the besiegers had the leisure for a lengthy campaign they might erect towers from which soldiers could fire arrows over the defences and that might even be wheeled up to the castle, providing protection for the soldiers until they were close enough to climb over the ramparts. An opposite approach to going over the walls was going under them. Sappers attacked the stonework either to break into the building or to undermine the walls and bring them down. The ultimate means of attack – again if time allowed – was simply to blockade the castle, preventing food and water getting in and thus starving the inhabitants into surrender.

The security of Henry II’s crown was largely based on studding his kingdom with castles placed in the keeping of men he could trust and making sure that potential troublemakers did not have castles. A great lord, by maintaining a group of castles in an area, could make himself master of it and defy the king. Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, was such a lord. Castles at Framlingham, Bungay and Norton enabled him to be almost the independent ruler of much of East Anglia. In 1157 Henry stripped Bigod of his castles and restored Framlingham and Bungay in 1165 only on payment of a huge fine. The king studied carefully the technology of castle building and was an enthusiastic builder and modernizer
of defence works. He devoted a considerable part of the royal revenue to maintaining about a hundred castles in England, and during his reign he spent more than £20,000 on construction and reconstruction. Dover Castle alone – so vital to a king with cross-Channel interests – cost more than £7,000 to refurbish using the latest technology.

The story of Henry the castle builder is well illustrated by the history of Orford Castle in Suffolk, which, in its day, was the most formidable such structure yet built. When Henry restored Framlingham Castle to Earl Bigod in 1165 he simultaneously began work on a new royal stronghold just 11 miles away at Orford. The new building was sited with two objectives: it formed part of the coastal defences, and it was a safeguard against any future displays of disloyalty by Bigod and his supporters.

The design of Orford Castle was revolutionary. Like earlier structures, the keep stood on a motte and was surrounded by a curtain wall, but the keep itself was of a shape not before seen in England. One drawback of the old square keep was that it was vulnerable to sappers at the angles of the walls where defenders found it difficult for their missiles to be effective. Orford was built to a circular plan with three projecting square towers. The base of each tower was of an extra thickness. Any sappers attempting the formidable task of breaching the walls were now much more vulnerable to attack from above. The success of this concept is proved by the fact that Orford was never subjected to a siege.

It was completed just in time to play an important role in the war of 1173–4. When Hugh Bigod was again tempted
into rebellion he welcomed Robert de Beaumont’s invasion. But Beaumont’s troops had to make landfall well to the south at Walton, near Felixstowe, where Bigod had a castle, and he gave Orford a wide berth as he travelled to Framlingham to link up with his ally. The impregnability of Henry’s new stronghold denied the rebels complete control of East Anglia. After the war Henry did not repeat the mistake of allowing Bigod to keep his castles. They were all surrendered to the king, and Framlingham was razed to the ground. But it was not just the rebels who lost the symbols of their territorial power. According to the chronicler Roger of Howden, the king took every castle in England into his hand and, removing the castellans of the earls and barons, put in his own custodians. Several castles were destroyed and, for decades after the war heaps of rubble demonstrated the powerlessness of the barons against a strong king.

1174–82

Henry loathed civil war. He remembered only too well the devastation it had caused in Stephen’s reign. War was expensive, it took a large toll in human lives and it made good government impossible. For these reasons and also because he wanted to be reconciled to his sons, he behaved leniently towards the rebels. He laboured hard and long to bring about a cessation of hostilities.

On 8 September Louis and young Henry agreed terms with the king, but Richard continued his resistance. Only when Henry appeared with an army before the gates of
Poitiers, Richard’s headquarters, did the recalcitrant son submit to the inevitable. By the terms of the settlement, sealed at Falaise in October, prisoners were released, properties restored and few punishments exacted. Hugh Bigod and Robert de Beaumont were deprived of their castles and not immediately restored in blood. William the Lion had to pay handsomely for his liberty. In December, by the Treaty of Falaise, he was obliged to do homage publicly to Henry at York and to surrender five of his Scottish castles. Only Eleanor did not share in Henry’s well-calculated forgiveness. He kept her at his beck and call, ordering her to appear with him for ceremonial occasions. Her restrictions were somewhat eased after 1184, when Henry and his sons were partially reconciled, but she did not regain her independence until Henry’s death in 1189.

He now dealt energetically with the inevitable lawlessness that had broken out during the war. In January 1176 he issued the Assize of Northampton, which was basically a reaffirmation of the Assize of Clarendon. ‘This assize,’ it was declared, ‘shall hold good for all the time since the assize was made at Clarendon down to the present and henceforth during the lord king’s pleasure, with regard to murder, treason and arson and with regard to all offences … except minor thefts and robberies which were committed in time of war, as of horses, oxen and lesser things.’ Henry believed that strengthening royal justice, limiting the freedom of the barons and providing for the greater wellbeing of all his subjects were all bound up together. More powers were granted to the king’s circuit judges (justices in
eyre
– that is,
travelling judges). In ecclesiastical matters Henry clawed back some of the rights he had forfeited in the wake of the Becket affair.

Henry had yet to forge a comprehensive and lasting peace treaty with Louis VII. The French king was in no hurry to accept the dominant position that Henry had achieved in Europe by war and diplomacy, and in the summer of 1177 Henry decided to force the issue. He summoned all his barons to meet him with their military levies and to be ready to sail for Normandy. At the same time he proposed a meeting with Louis to settle all outstanding issues between them. The message could not have been clearer. The result was a conference at Ivry on the border of Normandy in September 1177. It was chaired by a papal legate under instructions from Pope Alexander III to enlist the support of the two kings for a new crusade. The resulting Treaty of Ivry stated:

We wish all men to know that we are now and intend henceforth to be friends, and that each of us will to the best of his ability defend the other in life and limb and in worldly honour against all men. And if anyone shall presume to do either of us harm, I Henry will aid my lord Louis, king of the French, against all men to the best of my ability, and I Louis will aid Henry, king of the English, as my vassal and liegeman … we mutually agree that henceforth neither of us will make demands upon each other’s lands and possessions and rights as they now stand.
⁴

It was a triumph for Henry, although the ageing Louis was tired of dynastic conflict and was concentrating his efforts in handing over to his son, Philip Augustus, a realm at peace.

Henry now enjoyed the status of senior statesman of Europe. He acted as arbiter in dynastic and territorial disputes, such as that between the kings of Castile and Navarre (1177). In 1176 his youngest daughter, Joanna, was married to the king of Sicily, the last of a system of alliances that connected the Plantagenets to several of the royal and ducal houses of Europe. After the death of Louis VII in 1180 the rival factions at the court of the young Philip Augustus both looked to Henry for support.

In the years of peace, when his prestige was at its height, Henry concentrated on completing the overhaul of royal administration. In 1177 he ordered the sheriffs to carry out a survey of all lands held by the king’s tenants-in-chief (principal landholders). This placed on record the names of all such tenants and the services and payments they owed the crown. In 1178 the king reorganized his royal council (the
curia Regis
), the body of advisers drawn from the barons, senior ecclesiastics and courtiers who sat with the king, wherever he was, to make policy and to hear ‘plaints’ (appeals for royal justice brought by subjects). The political and judicial functions of the
curia
had for some time been diverging, but Henry formalized this tendency by directing that five members should remain at Westminster to hear all judicial cases. This was the origin of the Court of King’s Bench, the highest law court in the land. The Assize of Arms of 1181 ordered
every freeman to equip himself with weapons and military equipment appropriate to his station for the defence of the realm, but at the same time Henry encouraged the development of scutage, the commutation of payment in lieu of military service. By these means the king intended to have troops at his disposal when needed while at the same time demilitarizing the baronage and increasing royal revenue. One outcome of all these measures was the introduction of property tax, for military liability was measured by every subject’s annual landed income.

One measure of the impact of Henry II’s administrative and legislative reforms is the quantity of paper they generated. From this time official records began to be kept more diligently. The regular visitation of the justices in
eyre
to arbitrate in local disputes encouraged all landholders to have transactions documented so that they could be produced in evidence. Important documents were written on parchment on vellum ‘rolls’, which could be conveniently and securely stored. Most important in recording the rights and responsibilities of the king and his subjects were the court rolls, which were produced for every tribunal, from the manorial court to King’s Bench. Of particular importance to the government were the Exchequer rolls. The Exchequer was the department of the king’s household that dealt with money. It handled the collection and administration of royal revenue and all judicial matters concerning finance. The details of its workings have been preserved in one of the most remarkable books of the period, the
Dialogus de Scaccario
(
Dialogue concerning the Exchequer
). Composed towards the end of
the reign by Richard Fitz Neal, treasurer to the Exchequer, it took the form of a discussion between a master and a disciple.