1173-1189: Henry II Part II - Securing the Plantagenets

The first major rebellion after Becket's death took place in 1173 and once again the Scots tried to take advantage of it with an invasion. Henry was forced into the expedient of using mercenary troops to put down the revolt. He succeeded and the reign was relatively untroubled by armed revolt from that point on but the rebellion may have strengthened the realisation in the immediate aftermath of the murder that division from the Church was unwise.

From the point of view of dynastic continuity, Eleanor of Aquitaine proved not only wealthy and formidable but also fecund. She secured the Plantagenets by ensuring there was no lack of heirs to the throne in an age when the first sign of weakness in the direct line would be seized upon by the barons to push their own agenda - even displace the monarch for a puppet or one of their own.

There were four players in the medieval political game, three of consequence and one to be watched with care lest it become troublesome - the indigenous English whose 'middle class' were embedded in the lower reaches of the Church. The barons (always incipient warlords) were only controlled through energetic use of power under conditions of dynastic strength allied to the ideological legitimacy that royalism was given by the Church in the local version of the Constantinian Settlement. Authority was vested in a secular overlord in return for the overlord's acceptance of the moral boundaries to be set by religion and the privileges to be accorded to its guardians.

The rapid acceptance that murdering Becket was an error is testimony to Henry's understanding that he needed the Church to rule. Another result of Becket's murder may have been a new sensitivity to the opinions of churchgoers on the part of the Crown. In 1177, for example, for whatever reason, a monk stole the bones of St. Petroc from Bodmin Priory and took them to Brittany. The King proved himself active in the search for them and their return.

Henry's sexual activity represented another facet of royalism - the need to strengthen the primus inter pares of the ruling family in any tussle with the barons where any debates over legitimacy might permit these barely suppressed warlords an opportunity to test their own strength against the centre and rivals alike. The swiftness of Henry's reaction to Strongbow's irruption into Ireland (which we will deal with later) is testament to his sensitivity to any one mainland-based aristocrat developing sufficient material strength to take advantage of weakness in the royal house.

Henry's second son (another Henry) by Eleanor of Aquitaine was born in February 1154 but William, the heir, died in 1156 (aged three). In the same year, they had a daughter, Matilda. Then, in 1157, Richard (Duke of Aquitaine and later to be King) was born. There was Geoffrey (Duke of Brittany) in 1158, Eleanor in 1161, Joan in 1165 and John (later King John) in 1167 so an already a healthy line of heirs and marriageable assets for the Dynasty existed well before the Becket crisis. The old Empress Matilda, meanwhile, had died in 1167.

The young Princess Matilda (who died in 1189) started the asset-building process by being married off to Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony in 1168 at the ripe young age of 12. Princess Eleanor (aged 17) was to be married off to Alphonso VIII of Castile in 1176. In 1170, Prince Henry, meanwhile, at the age of 16 was crowned 'King of the English' (even referred to as Henry III by some chroniclers but not to be confused with the later Henry III) in order to establish his position as heir-presumptive. He died in 1183 of a fever, leaving his brother Richard as heir. Geoffrey, next-in-line, died in a tournament in 1186. The attrition rate on royal heirs was high but when Henry died, he still had two sons who could succesively take up the Crown.

Becket's murder and the reining back of Henry's ambition to centralise judicial power at the expense of the Church and eliminate or reduce corruption and criminality in order to control the barons (which was the essential political purpose of the reforms in the earlier part of his reign as well as to connect the royal house with the people through direct rule) meant that many issues had to remain unresolved. Nevertheless, the King's commitment to reform continued in 1176 with the division of England into 'circuits', each with its own set of travelling judges. This system, adapted to the needs of each period, continued until reforms in the nineteenth century but the Assize system was not finally abolished until as late as 1972 (to be replaced by the Crown Court).

There was also a major reorganisation of the English militia with the Assize of Arms in 1181. The intention was to create a country force loyal to the King that would offset the retained forces of the barony but also preclude the need for mercenary forces with their attendant costs to the Treasury.  All freemen of England were to own and bear arms in the service of the King, swearing allegiance on pain of "vengeance, not merely on their lands or chattels, but on their limbs". The link between 'freemen' (basically the equivalent of the propertied middle class today) and the Crown on the one hand and the opposition to the Crown of the 'free' Barons with their individualism and attempts to constrain centralised power is perhaps the start of the great political division in the Kingdom between what were later to be called Tories (the party of the Crown or State) and the Whigs (the Party of increasingly tamed warlords and their retainers).

Money was always a concern and the King would expropriate where he could - evidently not from the barons but, in 1186, Henry had no compunction in appropriating the fabulous wealth of Aaron the Jew of Lincoln, whose wealth was said to exceed that of the King himself, on Aaron's death.

The Church, in its own self interest, had checked the growth of administrative order at its own expense (an order that also looked like tyranny to the freebooters in the aristocracy) and ensured that the royal attempt to transfer control of the population was limited. The Church's position, with its sixth of the population given clerical privileges, remained essentially unchallenged. The balance of power between barons, dynasty and church was thus very fine.

Caught between potential anarchy, incomplete order and ideology, the probability was that violence or the threat of it would return in some form as soon as the Crown weakened, a baronial faction achieved significant national power or the Church was instructed to intervene in politics from outside or decided to use its reserve ideological power to intervene for or against a King who 'went too far'. In fact, the 'the proto-Tories' could rely on the Church so long as they respected it and no doubt the Church's protective stance towards the 'free men' who attended mass helped cohere the population around the King, a process which eventually led to a coherence around the 'nation'.

Remnants of Old London Bridge

The second part of Henry's reign, though secure, was troubled by disasters (although how much the disasters were a result of better reporting through chroniclers and how much a genuine upsurge is a moot point). The Choir of Canterbury Cathedral was gutted by fire in September 1174 and its rebuilding (completed in 1185) saw the first appearance in England of the pointed arch introduced by William of Sens (which we will cover in a later posting) alongside other cathedral building. 1176 also saw the building of the first stone bridge over the Thames - the Old London Bridge. A great fire destroyed much of Rochester in Kent in 1177. Glastonbury Abbey was also badly damaged by fire in 1184, with rebuilding starting immediately. Lincoln Cathedral was destroyed in an earthquake in 1185 and in 1186 a great fire swept through Chester. One suspects a connection here between heavy use of wood in construction and increased use of artificial light (a sign of economic prosperity) which might lead to the heavier expenditure but greater security of stone for important building works.

Henry left England for the last time in 1188 and died at Chinon the next year to be succeeded by his son Richard.

1100-1154: Cathedral Building and Abbey Foundations

Archbishop Anselm died in 1109. His see remained vacant until Ralph, Bishop of Rochester, was appointed to it in 1114.We will not otherwise list the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and will only refer to those who are the most prominent or interesting from a political point of view. The accession of Henry II in 1154 will eventually bring out the inherent tension between Crown and Church. This would be expressed in the tense and ultimately violent relationship with Thomas A Becket and the King which we will review in a later posting. Until then, the symbiotic relationship between national Church and the miltary Norman aristocracy continued regardless of civil strife. Indeed, it is the return of a strong Kingship that precipitates a crisis - and we should remember that the Church was largely staffed at the highest levels from the literate members of the same international class whose Anglo-Norman branch ran England.

As we have noted in our posting on Henry I, cathedral and church building began again after a long gap following the start of construction of Durham Cathedral in 1093: Southwark Priory (1106 - the basis of the later Southwark Cathedral), Southwell Minster (1108), Exeter (1112), Peterborough (1117) and with Llandaff and Bangor asserting Church authority in Normanised Wales (1120). Building work then shifted to Abbey foundations within a couple of decades: Hexham (1113), Tintern (1131), Quarr (1131), Buildwas (1135) and Jervaulx (1145), all but the first Cistercian in origin.

These buildings are not to be assumed to be under direct royal patronage by any means (for example, the Cistercians were introduced to England by Walter Fitz Richard, of the powerful Clare family who funded Tintern Abbey) but there is always a political aspect to the foundations if only in terms of aristocratic status. It is not accidental that the last two of the new cathedral foundations were in the borderlands with Wales which were in the process of being 'tamed'. The slowing down of cathedral foundation after 1120 was both a sign of internal civil strife but also of the natural expansion of Norman power to its English and Welsh limits at that time. Internal strife (as we will see in the next posting) was as much a sign of the collapse of any form of English alternative to Norman rule as of the potential for anarchy arising from a warlord Norman aristocracy during periods of central weakness. Similarly the abbey foundations represent the exploitation of the conquest by aristocrats and churchmen alike.

An example of the growing militarisation (albeit defensive) of religion and its close marriage of interest to the Anglo-Norman aristocracy and their English subjects comes from the Battle of the Standard in 1138 where it is Archbishop Thurston of York who organises an army to counter a Scottish invasion. The Archbishop himself carried into battle the banner of St. John of Beverley alongside those of St. Cuthbert, St. Peter of York and St. Wilfred, all hung from a large pole 'like the mast of a ship' on a four wheeled cart on which the Archbishop stood. The Battle was a resounding victory for the English.

This is also the period of the Second Crusade (1147-1149) which offers us yet another example of the militarisation of religion as if the civilising influence of the Church on barbarian use of unbridled force had been bought at the cost of the Catholic Church itself becoming an agent for the redirection of that violence onto the 'other', in this case the Muslims and often the Eastern Orthodox Church. The period is also notable for having the first and only English Pope in Nicholas Breakspear, elected in December 1154 as Adrian IV, although this only tells us what we knew already - that the Catholic Church was a Universal Church (at least in Western Europe). What is more interesting perhaps is that there was no English Pope after the middle of the Twelfth Century.

Cathedrals and Minsters under Henry I

[Please note, once again that, the Norman element in these buildings, unless specified, is usually well hidden under later accretions. Many Cathedrals, such as Exeter, were fundamentally rebuilt later in the Middle Ages.]

Norman Nave of Peterborough Cathedral started after 1117

The Nave of Southwell Minster started in 1108

Norman Arch in Llandaff Cathedral started after 1120

Norman Nave of Durham Cathedral started in 1133

Abbey Building in the First Half of the Twelfth Century

Hexham Abbey rebuilt as an Augustinian Priory in 1117

Tintern Abbey founded in 1131

Ruins of Quarr Abbey founded in 1131

The Norman Holcroft of Fountains Abbey started in 1132

Rievaulx Abbey founded in 1133

Buildwas Abbey founded in 1135

1035-1100: The Anglo-Norman Church

We have already seen the pattern by which English Kings, including Danes who became English Kings, consolidated their rule. Once they had established power by brute force and the support of the aristocracy they would make an accommodation with the English Church, the provincial branch office of Rome. Certainly since Charlemagne, English Church and, better, Roman Church approval of a succession added significant lustre to the Crown and made it very much more difficult for a challenger to make an alternative claim although we should be in no doubt that it was the sword that counted in the end. The question of whether the English Church was always to take orders from Rome was another matter, one which became very relevant in the power struggles before and after the Norman Ascendency that emerged after the abortive English revolts of 1069.

The Church may have had no role to play in establishing power but it had a considerable role in maintaining power securely. Its role was to ensure order (since disorder was generally crueller even than a cruel autocracy for most people most of the time) on behalf of its charge, the mass of the population, and on behalf of itself given the financial and landed patronage necessary to maintain its mission. The general population had, of course, little or no say in this authoritarian structure. It wanted the order of Kingship but not necessarily the consequent taxation. Sections of the wider population also needed the limited welfare, celibate employment and protection that the Church could provide.

The people's own resources were, as often in history, redistributed to its own poor through a bureaucratic mechanism for the sake of peace with a 'take' for the clerics that grew larger with time. The similarities with twntieth century bureaucratic European socialism are clear for those with a mind to see them. The clerisy and its economic claims would grow larger with time until this thing that was 'too big to fail' got gutted by Henry VIII who saw that a bit of redistribution back to the English middle classes might secure his own base more effectively than relying on the Church to do so.

The Church never, of course, offered the threat of potential rebellion - this is not what it does, at least not while kings remained within the faith - but it did legitimise royal rule through explicit divine sanction in the coronation. Its preaching of quietitude and submission sat alongside its delivery of alms and its creation of meaning for existence and death as guarantors of a conditional order. "You give us the people", implied the Church, "and we will give you their submission and, incidentally, also save them from your brute plundering". It is the perhaps unhappy and unsatisfactory compromise required for a society that remained poor in resources and education and within which there are still few constraints on the exercise of force by those with weaponry on their side. The history of the liberation of the people from the whims of aristocratic brutes is one story. It takes a lot longer to effect liberation from the hollow ideologies of the Church. This scarcely starts for another half a millennium.

The creation of national saints is an essential part of this process. Our period starts with the canonisation of Archbishop John of York (died in 721) in 1037, known for his kindly concern for the poor. This sent its own signal in the middle of the brutal infighting that took place between the reigns of Cnut I and II that the ruling elite cannot and should not sink to its habitual and instinctive 'pagan' barbarism. Similarly, within a year of the burning down of Worcester Monastery by Cnut II after a tax rebellion (with the rebels inside it), Bishop Wulfstan had started to rebuild it on a larger scale in defiance of the royal sacrilege. The relationship of the English Church to the English people, manifest in the war of defence against the Danes, seems to have created a problem for the Normans in 1069-1070 and to have resulted in the latter's call on the Papacy to help bring the Church to heel.

Westminster Abbey in the Eleventh Century

The Church is never not part of the struggles for power at the very heart of the dynastic State. As we have seen, its leadership could be decisive just as it was in the power struggle that started in 1051 between the Anglo-Danish interest of the Godwin family and the pro-Norman position of Edward the Confessor. The shift in that year (temporarily) to the Norman interest was expressed at the highest level with the appointment of the Norman Robert Champert of Jumieges to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. There is something going on here in terms of Edward the Confessor's own sense of what sort of cleric will support him and his vision of a 'civilised' (perhapsd Charlemagnic) European monarchy. Edward is very active in his patronage of the Church. He founds Westminster Abbey (completed in 1065), which will be the future centre of the royal cult in England, in 1052. Waltham Abbey is completed and consecrated in 1060.

Battle Abbey - ruins of the East Range.

The political significance of the Archbishopric is demonstrated when the return of the Godwin interest under Godwin's son Harold Godwinson, after a brief Norman ascendency at court, results in the expulsion of Robert of Jumieges and his replacement as Archbishop of Canterbury with Stigand who is also Bishop of Winchester, still the primary see of the Wessex interest. We have covered this elsewhere. When William of Normandy became King, he quickly used the Church to seal his position by commissioning the Abbey at Battle on the site of his victory over Harold but he initially lets the Church continue as it had done under Edward until the rebellions of 1069-1070 break out.

His response is to invite three Papal Legates to Winchester in 1070. These legates gave him virtual carte blanche over the English Church after a ceremonial crowning. He promptly called a number of Church Councils and undertook a purge of Anglo-Saxon churchmen, deposing Stigand as Archbishop of Canterbury and replacing him with Lanfranc, a celebrated Italian jurist. What is going on here is also perhaps a Papal-driven frustration with the independence of the English Church, represented by the 'Anglican' Stigand (who was to be imprisoned). The reasonable suspicion here is that Rome saw the Norman Ascendency as an agent for imposing its control on a Provincial Church that had shown too many signs of independence in the recent past. The war crimes 'up north' would not have figured in the Church's moral reasoning at this point.

Church-State politics continued to calibrate in the years after the Norman coup. A controversy over the primacy of Canterbury over York, initiated by Lanfranc, was settled in 1072 at the Council of Winchester although not finally (the dispute would continue until the Fourteenth Century) but it is clear that both King and Papacy found this tiresome. In 1080, Pope Gregory VII tried to push his luck with William I by demanding that the King do him homage as his vassal in an attempt to make feudalism work for the Papacy. William simply refused. Such homage had not been offered by his predecessors. This in itself is interesting. William remembers that his Conquest was based on a right of succession to a line of English kings. He does not allow the Papacy to make the mistake that his power was owed in any way to the Pope. This tension, similar to that emerging from medieval interpretations of Charlemagne's coronation, between the inherent right of kings to rule by dynastic succession and the right of the Papacy to give God's blessing on kings would be a constant theme in European history as the balance of power between Church and State shifted and changed. However both sides agree that thrones can no longer be seized by warlords claiming right by mere conquest.Or at least if a warlord does this, he would soon want the Church to sanctify his seizure as legitimate.

Canterbury Cathedral - Norman Arcade

Much as we have come to expect, when kings cut
deals with the Church the subsequent years see a massive redirection of funds to building major churches. Following a fire that destroyed the old Anglo-Saxon Cathedral in 1067, Canterbury Cathedral was rebuilt and 'Normanised' from 1070. Recompense is also made for the plundering of monasteries that took place in 1069 as the Normans put down a Saxon rebellion that may have had some succour from parts of the English Church. New cathedrals are started at St. Albans (1077), Old Sarum (1078), Winchester (rebuilding - 1079), Hereford (1079), York Minster (1080), Rochester (1082) and Ely (1083). The commitment continued under William I's successor, William II: Worcester (1089), Chichester (1093), Lincoln, Chester & Tewkesbury (1092), Durham (1093) and the completion of Norwich and the start of the Crypt at Canterbury in 1096. This commitment of investment is massive and it indicates the equally massive political comitment to partnership with the Roman Church that helped transform England into a catholic feudal dynastic State although much of these funds are not onlybased on land grants from kings but also from powerful aristocrats in a feudal state that was never entirely an autocracy.

It should not be assumed that the relationship between Church and State was ever an easy one. The tension over their respective rights between King and Papacy under William the Conqueror became something more serious in the four years after Lanfranc died and before Anselm finally agreed to be Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093. Relations between King and Archbishop worsened further. William II attempted to bring Anselm to heel in 1095 by convening a Council at Rockingham but Anselm defied him by appealing over his head to Rome, stating that he could not be tried in a secular court. In 1097, Anselm finally quit Canterbury, leaving the Church's estates in the hands of the King, in order to confer directly with the Pope. He chose exile rather than total submission and so left the problem of the relationship of Church and State to the next King Henry I. For Anselm, the Church was universal with the absolute right to maintain its own internal authority whereas for William II the issue was one of ultimate royal control of both Church and State. What we have here is a culturally strong Church but one not as materially strong as any warrior King, albeit that many warriors, worried by the immortality of their souls, would continue to bequeath estates and property to the King's main rival for power. This ideological tension will be one of the grand themes of English history until the Reformation.

The Norman Cathedrals

(Note that the original Norman (or Romanesque) element in these Cathedrals has sometimes to be extracted visually from beneath later Gothic accretions and in one or two cases has been largely overwhelmed. Nowever, Norman architecture can generally be recognised by its simpler 'blocky' and less ornamented style with more rounded arches.)

St Albans' Cathedral started in 1077

Ruins of Old Sarum started in 1078

Norman Transept of Winchester Cathedral started in 1079

Norman Nave of Hereford Cathedral started in 1079

Nave of York Minster started in 1080

Nave of Rochester Cathedral started in 1082

Norman Nave of Ely Cathedral started in 1083

Norman Arch of Worcester Cathedral started in 1089

Chichester Cathedral started in 1091

Norman West Front of Lincoln Cathedral started in 1092

Norman Arch at Chester Cathedral started in 1092

Norman West Front at Twekesbury Cathedral started in 1092

Durham Cathedral started in 1093

Norwich Cathedral completed as a Norman Cathedral in 1096

Norman Crypt of Canterbury Cathedral started in 1096

Saint Margaret of Scotland

There is an additional footnote of interest in the career of Margaret of Wessex, sister of Edgar Atheling, in exile in Scotland. Canonised in 1250, it was she who ordered the rebuilding of Iona Abbey in 1072 and was credited with civilising her husband Malcolm III and with bringing Scotland closer to Rome under the influence of Lanfranc. This alone suggests that it would be foolish to position Lanfranc as anything other than servant of the Papacy. Her story also reminds us that the Church was a solace to aristocratic women married to near-barbarian warlords and that the aristocracy of the day bore no ethnic petit-bourgeois grudges once it was clear how the power game had played itself out. We cannot read ethnicity back too easily into contemporary power relations where being part of a universal Church and of an aristocratic and kingly caste was of far greater importance than one's racial origin.