TWELVE
During the Easter court of 1166 at Angers Eleanor became pregnant for the eleventh time, possibly as a last attempt to keep some kind of relationship with Henry despite her resentment at being shown by him none of the respect due to the queen of England; in recent years, all he had used her for was to beget more sons and daughters he could trade in some alliance. With the menopause approaching, she knew she would be completely discarded.
The widening rift between them may have been triggered by his giving her a venereal infection, caught from one of the many whores he used. Gonorrhoea and chancres were common. Although syphilis was not formally identified in Europe before contact with the Americas, what was called sexually transmitted leprosy was a condition which, in symptoms and treatment, had much in common with syphilis. Before returning to France on 16 March, Henry had been very inactive for six months, apparently due to ill-health. He was only thirty-three years old, but in later years limped badly from a leg broken when a horse kicked him and badly set, so this may have been the cause. But after Easter he was ill again at Chinon and did not recover until July.
He suffered increasingly debilitating bouts of malaria, but may also have had other health problems. Whatever this one was, his being ill meant that Becket could not include him when, at the great pilgrim church of Vézelay, he excommunicated just about everyone else involved in framing the Constitutions of Clarendon. At Henry’s request, Pope Alexander annulled the excommunications and warned Becket to desist. His health improving, Henry turned his attention to Brittany, forcing Count Conan IV to abdicate in favour of his daughter Constance and betrothing her to eight-year-old Prince Geoffrey.
Eleanor had put up with much to be Henry’s partner in building an empire, but her pride would not let her sink to being ‘just another vassal’. Determined to bend her to his will, he issued a summons from Caen, calling all her vassals of Poitou and Aquitaine to meet him at Chinon on 20 November. There he announced that he would hold a Christmas court in Poitiers, at which they would be required to swear allegiance to Young Henry as nominal duke of Aquitaine in addition to the titles to England, Normandy and Anjou which he already held.
Eleanor was furious at this dispossession of Richard. Returning with him and Princess Matilda to England, she spent a troubled Christmas at Oxford with all the children except Young Henry, whose Channel crossing with a considerable retinue to impress her vassals in Poitiers had cost £100. On 27 December 1166 at the age of forty-four she gave birth in Oxford to the last of her brood, christened John after the Baptist, whose feast-day it was. Within a few hours of the birth Henry was forcing the barons of Aquitaine to swear fealty to Young Henry in Poitiers. The anger Eleanor felt coloured her attitude to John from birth, for she never liked him. In Aquitaine, Henry’s latest high-handedness lit the fire of a rebellion led by her uncle William Taillefer. Its swift repression did not stop another dissident vassal, the count of Auvergne, from appealing for feudal justice directly to Louis.
Heading east to put him in his place, Henry met Count Raymond of Toulouse at the monastery of Grandmont. In order to marry Richilde, widow of the count of Provence, Raymond had just divorced Louis’ sister, who had been very popular with the citizens of Toulouse. Furious at this insult, Louis was threatening armed intervention. The count therefore placed his domains under Henry’s protection by declaring himself a vassal of the duke of Aquitaine. In this roundabout way, Eleanor saw the breakaway county temporarily re-attached to Aquitaine, ironically at a time when her hold over the duchy was at its weakest.
This was the excuse for Louis to reopen hostilities against Henry in Normandy, ostensibly over a long-running dispute as to how the money raised in both their territories by the current crusade tax should be spent.1 Hardly had a truce been arranged in August 1167, to last until the following Easter, than Henry marched west to subdue some independent Breton lords who refused to recognise Prince Geoffrey. That campaign was cut short by the news that the Empress Matilda had died on 10 September. Aged sixty-five, she had been politically active to the last, firing off letters urging bishops to arrange a truce in Normandy and castigating Becket for his ingratitude to the king who had raised him to greatness.
It is indicative of the emotion and respect Henry still felt for his mother that he executed Matilda’s will to the letter and did not filch property or wealth from her estates. In poor health once again, he attended her funeral with a frigid Eleanor. The rift between them had gone too far to be bridged. With Becket his sworn enemy, the Empress Matilda dead and Eleanor irrevocably alienated, Henry was without any close advisers.
To ensure that Princess Matilda’s long-delayed marriage to the Lion of Saxony did take place, Eleanor took her back to England. The first of the princesses to be married off, she was given a suitable dowry and a regal send-off that together cost around £4,500, or a quarter of the realm’s annual revenue. By feudal custom, this money was raised by an auxilium tax levied for the occasion. In addition to a trousseau that cost £63, the twelve-year-old princess was provided with luxuries such as scarlet saddles with gilt fittings for her palfries and a train of thirty-four packhorses to transport her belongings. All this was to enable her to arrive in fitting style in Saxony, where the wedding was eventually celebrated at the beginning of 1168.
After accompanying her to Dover for embarkation on a German ship, Eleanor busied herself assembling her own movable property with the intention of leaving England for good. Historians have argued that it was Henry’s plan for her to take over the government of Aquitaine in order to leave him free to govern his northern domains, but that would not have involved moving seven entire shiploads of her furniture and other belongings across the Channel.2 Nor would weakening her authority by replacing her appointee Richard with Young Henry as titular duke have been an intelligent move on Henry’s part if he intended Eleanor to resume direct rule of the duchy.
Of the fourteen and a half years since the May wedding in Poitiers, she had spent the equivalent of six entire years pregnant, bearing Henry five sons, of whom four were still living, and three daughters. This was after the three pregnancies by Louis that produced his first two daughters, and in an age when every pregnancy could be lethal, the slightest complication resulting in agonising death.
When she married for the second time, she was no manipulable under-age bride dominated by an older husband, but a woman of thirty with fifteen years’ political and life experience behind her – and the strength of will to break free from Louis and his powerful clerical and lay advisers. She knew many examples of royal and noble ladies who had chosen not to have large families, whatever their husbands wanted.
Henry’s own mother had grudgingly borne three sons before refusing to produce any more. His maternal grandfather had married Edith-Matilda, daughter of St Margaret of Scotland, and found her more interested in good works, like washing the feet of lepers and kissing them on the lips, than in sharing his bed. After dutifully producing a son and a daughter in the first three years of her marriage, she ‘ceased to become pregnant or give birth, and tolerated with equanimity that the king was occupied elsewhere’3 while her husband proceeded to father more bastards than any other English monarch.
Apart from abstinence, contraceptive methods included magical spells that worked as often as the law of averages allowed. Clemence of Burgundy, the wife of Count Robert II of Flanders, practised ‘womanly arts’ after producing three sons in three years, according to Hermann of Tournai.4 Mechanical methods included tampons soaked in vinegar, olive oil and other liquids. By observation, the so-called rhythm method was known, if unsuccessfully practised. Prolonged breast-feeding never lost its reputation for preventing ovulation, although the conditions under which it has an acceptably low failure rate were not understood. Anal and intercrural inter-course, coitus reservatus and coitus interruptus were penalised by confessors, who considered abortion and infanticide as murder, but the penalties show that the practices existed. In addition, the Church proscribed intercourse for pleasure, during pregnancy and menstruation, on the Sabbath and a whole list of feast-days and during Lent.
Henry’s own register of wards and widows compiled in 1185 and covering 112 large noble families in England gives an average of less than four children per couple. By one means or another many noble and royal wives succeeded in limiting the number of children they bore, in order to avoid exactly the problem by which Henry was hag-ridden into his early grave: too many sons fighting over their patrimony.5 For an example, Eleanor needed to look no further than Henry’s great-grandfather William the Conqueror, who fathered nine legitimate children, only to die while one son was in armed rebellion against him, leaving an empire over which the three surviving legitimate sons fought bitterly. After William Rufus’ death, Henry I kept his elder brother Robert Curthose in prison for twenty years to debar him from the throne.
So why did Eleanor want all those sons?
Given Henry’s promiscuity, she had every excuse after producing a couple of sons to take refuge in real or feigned religious vocation or simple frigidity and tell Henry she had done her duty and was no longer interested in bearing more children. But she chose not to. And since she was aware of the problems of dynasties with too many sons, one has to ask, why?
The only satisfactory answer to the question also unlocks another great mystery: why did Henry appoint Becket archbishop? The standard answer of contemporary chroniclers and modern historians is that he needed a compliant prelate through whom to curb the independence of the Church. But if Henry was at times violent, cruel and arrogant, he was also one of England’s more intelligent monarchs, and such a move was unworthy of a chess-player of his intellect. With many years’ experience of interfering in ecclesiastical elections in England and in France, he could have manoeuvred any of several ambitious and compliant churchmen into the post – Roger of York, Henry of Winchester or Gilbert Foliot, to name only three. So why throw away his versatile and extremely competent chancellor and companion to do the job that one of them could have done?
Becket had also served him in the field on the Toulouse expedition and during the Vexin campaign of 1161, when he had acquitted himself well in command of Henry’s vanguard totalling 6,000 horse and foot. So, in chess terms, appointing him to the see of Canterbury was the equivalent of trading more than a knight and a castle in order to have only a bishop on the board, albeit the chief bishop of England – unless there was more to the move than meets the eye.
Historians have seen the dispute between king and primate as the turning point in Henry’s fortunes. The clerical chroniclers portrayed the problems of his later years as divine retribution for his part in Becket’s martyrdom, but the downturn came before the murder in the cathedral. Their difficulty in discerning Henry’s game plan lay in a tendency to present success and failure, health and illness, riches and poverty in terms of divine reward or retribution – and in medieval maps, adequate as route planners but not for reading strategy in Henry’s league.
An alternative analysis of the evidence is that Becket’s appointment was intended to be a once-in-a-lifetime game-winning move, so that when his hitherto obedient lieutenant refused to play the role allotted, Henry knew that the endgame for which he had worked so long was lost. The sustained fury with which he persecuted Becket was curiously similar to the fury he directed against Eleanor.
It was no secret that Henry had had frequent trafficking with papal legates for years before the break with Becket. According to the nineteenth-century French historian Alfred Richard, who spent his life immersed in the medieval charters of the Limousin region of Aquitaine, these negotiations were in furtherance of Henry’s ambitions ultra montes, that is, south of the Alps, where he had been seriously considering an invitation to become king of Lombardy6 as a springboard for all Italy.7
His obsession with the return of Toulouse and the alliances with the northern Spanish kingdoms, his support for Popes Adrian IV and Alexander III in the schisms of the Church, the marriage alliances he effected with Saxony, Castile, Maurienne and Sicily, and the placing of Becket on the throne of Canterbury, can all be seen not as disconnected ploys but parts of a unified grand design if Becket’s appointment was not an aim in itself, but the vital step in him becoming pope.
There is nothing far-fetched in that. Pope Adrian IV was English and had been rejected by the first monastery he applied to join because he was a Saxon, illiterate in Latin. If an illiterate Saxon from St Albans could make it to the top without any patronage, it was entirely within the bounds of possibility for an astute, politically experienced Anglo-Norman with Becket’s background to gain the see of St Peter.
There was no way Henry could foresee that Adrian’s successor Alexander III would turn out to be the longest-serving pontiff of the twelfth century. For the most part appointed elderly, patriarchs tended not to be long in office. Within the century, six lasted a year or less. By making a man as accomplished as Becket Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162, Henry could reasonably have expected him to be elected pope in a few years’ time, given the backing of one of the two most powerful monarchs in Europe.
After this, with Becket’s military experience directing the considerable forces of the papal territories with their castles and wealth, Henry would have had in the spiritual leader of Europe a temporal ally, enabling him to secure that part of the long peninsula of Italy subject to the German Emperor and link up with the Norman presence in Sicily, Puglia and Calabria. And having done that, what more logical than to drive the frontiers of the empire back from the Rhône to the Rhine?
Was this Henry’s grand design? 1. Young Henry and Marguerite. 2. Princess Matilda and Henry of Saxony. 3. Re-attachment of Toulouse/Prince John and Alix de Maurienne/the Crown of Lombardy. 4. Princess Joanna and William II of Sicily. 5. Princess Eleanor and Alfonso of Castile. 6. The winning move: Becket to Pope.
And why stop there? There were vast territories inide Germany controlled by bishops who did not support Frederik Barbarossa. With the pope on his side, Henry could have been the master of all Europe. From a less advantageous beginning, Charlemagne had done it. While such a plan to dominate the whole of Europe cannot be proven, it explains a great deal that is otherwise inexplicable.
Henry had spent the formative years of his childhood in an intense relationship with the powerful, intelligent and scheming Empress Matilda in the west of England during the civil war. He had been raised to reclaim at all costs what she regarded as her birthright north of the Channel, in addition to inheriting the duchy of Normandy she had kept for him and his father’s cluster of territory in Anjou, Maine and Touraine.
Given her behaviour in the on-again, off-again marriage to Geoffrey the Fair, Matilda must have had a powerful reason to bear the three sons she gave him. Was it to ensure that one of them would eventually rule the empire and give her back her place in history as the mother of an emperor – there was no greater destiny for a noblewoman – out of which she had been cheated by her first husband’s early death? Germany, where she had as consort shared power with the Emperor Henry V and Italy, where she had commanded Henry V’s armies in her early twenties. It was there that she had wielded her greatest power, and it was there that Henry’s manoeuvrings are otherwise hard to fathom.
The only way Charlemagne had worked out of ruling the vast empire he had conquered had been by using his sons as viceroys. William the Conqueror had had the same idea. A paranoid ruler like Henry might well have thought that, if he could rely on no one else, at least the sons of his own blood could be counted on, each to rule a share in the greatest empire the world had known since the Roman Empire split into two parts in the late fifth century.
If Matilda did implant such a grand design in Henry’s youthful head – and plans like this are unlikely to be put in writing between two conspirators who trusted no one else – it would go a long way to explain all those sons and Eleanor’s bitterness at being discarded now. It would also explain why she was to support her sons against him after Becket’s obstinacy had aborted the grand design, and made it unlikely ever to be primed again.
The Christmas court in Argentan was a frigid affair. Just over a month later, on 1 February 1168, Princess Matilda was married in faraway Brunswick to Henry the Lion of Saxony. Before Eleanor could continue her journey south, encumbered by the seven shiploads of belongings and furniture, her vassals of the houses of Lusignan and Angoulême, knowing that Henry was overstretched, renounced their allegiance to him and appealed to Louis to accept their fealty directly. While he vacillated, among the Poitevin strongholds Henry stormed and razed to the ground in violation of both the Truce and the Peace of God was the castle twenty miles south-west of Poitiers belonging to Hugues le Brun, a prisoner of the Saracens in the Holy Land, where he had been on crusade since 1163.
Before Easter Henry departed for Normandy, leaving as Eleanor’s constable or guardian Count Patrick of Salisbury, who took his orders directly from the king. With Eleanor’s encouragement, Patrick made a quick pilgrimage to Compostela, after which he was escorting her near Poitiers on 6 or 7 April when they rode into an ambush sprung by the Lusignans in retribution for the loss of their fortress. After conducting his charge to safety in a nearby castle while his men kept the intruders at bay, Patrick returned to the scene of the fighting.
Possibly they had been out for a day’s hunting or hawking, for which he had left his armour behind in Poitiers. Alternatively, it would have been normal on a hot day to remove his mail cotte and leggings, to have them transported on one of the packhorses in what should have been safe territory – just as the four knights who arrived to kill Becket on 29 December 1170 first checked that he was in the palace by the cathedral before going outside to put on their armour, packed away for the journey.
Mounted on a palfrey and not his charger, Count Patrick was at a triple disadvantage, lacking the manoeuvrability of his destrier and the protection of the high-cantled and -pommelled war saddle as well as any body armour. Stabbed in the back by either Guy or Geoffrey de Lusignan, he fell to the ground mortally wounded. The last thing he saw was his nephew William also cut down in attempt-ing to save him.
Taken prisoner and denied treatment for his wounds by his captors, the young knight was ransomed by Eleanor, who rewarded his courage and loyalty with gifts of arms and armour, horses, money and clothes, setting the man who would become famous as William the Marshal on a long career of loyal service to Henry and her sons, during which his path would cross hers many times. She could have kept him in her household. Instead, she commended him to the king as a suitable master-at-arms to teach the skills of war to Young Henry and keep him out of trouble – which gave her, as his patroness, a useful pair of eyes and ears within the Young King’s household.
William epitomised Chaucer’s ‘parfit gentle knight’ before the concept of chivalry was generally accepted. Tall, brown-haired and with an open and frank demeanour, he was a grandson of Gilbert, Marshal to Henry I. His father had at various times been Marshal to Henry I and Stephen of Blois. At the age of five or six William had been given as a hostage during the siege of Newbury Castle, and narrowly escaped being hanged when his father cheated on a truce to bring in reinforcements.
King Stephen was not a vindictive man. He offered to hand back the young hostage if his father would surrender the fortress. John Marshal refused, adding that his son’s fate was of no great moment, since he still had ‘the hammer and the anvil to forge better ones’. By way of reply to this insolence, some of the besiegers advised catapulting the boy alive into the fortress from a siege engine, but Stephen placed him under his personal protection. How often gallantry begat gallantry is a moot point, but this was an auspicious start to the career of the noblest warrior of the twelfth century, which would peak when he was appointed regent for Eleanor’s grandson Henry III in 1216.
Exactly how the Lusignans knew where Eleanor would be that day in April 1168 is an interesting question. Plainly Patrick thought there was no danger. Since his death paved the way for Eleanor to surround herself with her own advisers, there was conceivably an element of guilt in her lavish provision for Masses to be said at St Hilaire in Poitiers for the dead constable’s soul. The charter bore both her seal and the autograph crosses of the members of her immediate entourage, whose names recur many times in the coming years: Hugues de Faye, the viscount of Châtellerault, her seneschal Raoul de Faye, her constable Saldebreuil, her steward Hervé and her chaplain and secretary Pierre.
Before Henry could intervene, he had to march again into Brittany, where the latest unrest had been sparked by his own lust. Having taken as hostage Aelis, the daughter of Conan IV, he was now accused by her family of having abused her, for the good reason that she was pregnant and about to give birth to his child. Embroiled in this entanglement, he had to hurry back to Argentan when Louis invaded Normandy yet again.
Count Patrick’s death, accidental or otherwise, suited Eleanor’s plans to regain control of her inheritance. Like her father and grandfather, she travelled widely, receiving homage in Niort and Limoges and as far south as Bayonne, meanwhile dismissing a number of Henry’s administrators, renewing former rights and privileges that he had abolished and restoring many of her vassals whom he had dispossessed.
After a decade and a half of being the perfect feudal wife and queen for Henry and doing in public everything that he demanded – and fifteen years before that during which she had visited Aquitaine as wife of Louis, similarly exercising the ducal powers that marrying her had conferred on him – Eleanor was determined to enjoy the years remaining for herself. Her personal wealth enabled her to dispense great largesse to her relatives and favourite individuals and charities, one of which was the Benedictine abbey of Fontevraud, geographically in Anjou but within the see of Poitiers. Founded by Robert d’Arbrissel on the principle that women – especially elderly widows – were morally better than men, its rule provided for an abbess to rule twin communities of monks and nuns totalling several thousand, divided into the houses of Grand Moustier, La Madeleine for repentant prostitutes, St Lazare for lepers and St Jean de l’Habit for male religious.
Similar thinking made Eleanor respectable at last. A spin-off of Hippocrates’ theory of the uterus moving about in the body was the current medical–philosophical view that women were fouled by their own menstrual blood. For either sex, attaining what we should call middle age was in itself an achievement when so many died young, but women who lived through the menopause were after-wards considered purified, as though infertility turned them into quasi-men, just as the clerical gown excused men from proving themselves as such.
Poitiers was a fitting city for Eleanor’s capital. The palace itself had been extended from its original Merovingian confines by a suite of chambers unlike the comfortless quarters Henry inhabited most of the time. Clustered at one end of the spacious new audience hall – still magnificent as the salle des pas perdus or concourse of the law courts – these rooms afforded space and privacy and comfort to Eleanor and her ladies, which makes it a reasonable assumption that they were built to her design in the first place, for Henry would have had no use for them (plates 11, 12).
Not for the countess of Poitou as mistress of her own house the dirt of horses, dogs and hawks, the noise of armourers and blacksmiths, the stink of unwashed sweaty bodies, the ribaldry of soldiers and whores, the discomfort of unglazed windows and public halls heated, if at all, by smoking central fireplaces. This, by the standards of the age, was comfort and elegance such as she had not known since her sojourn in Byzantium and Antioch, whose oriental architecture was echoed in the neighbouring church of Notre-Dame-la-Grande, its ornate triple façade crowded with statues illustrating biblical or moral stories for the illiterate believer.
The city walls had been rebuilt and extended after being partly demolished to make way for the palace extensions. Formerly outlying parishes were now within the walls, providing space for new churches and collegials but also the shops and craftsmen’s workshops and market space that constituted the secure facilities necessary for the development of a prosperous merchant class. The cathedral under construction was fittingly enriched for the seat of a palatine count, with a huge window above the altar depicting Henry and Eleanor in suitably pious poses.
At Montmirail in January 1169, she gained a significant victory when Henry acceded to her pressure to give Aquitaine back to Richard. Eleanor’s favourite now swore loyalty for the duchy to Louis, while Young Henry did homage for Maine and Anjou, after which Louis assented to Prince Geoffrey’s betrothal to Constance, Countess of the Bretons, who was also a hostage in Henry’s keeping. Although the match was consanguineous, Henry had obtained a papal dispensation. By Geoffrey swearing fealty for Brittany to Young Henry, Louis retained suzerainty by subinfeudation.
Henry’s main achievement in this exercise was to persuade Louis to give him another of the ‘superfluity of princesses’. This was nine-year-old Princess Alais, who was now betrothed to Prince Richard.8 Her dowry was the Berry, which lay between Aquitaine and Burgundy, a piece of land Henry had long wanted to strengthen his eastern frontier. Louis had now given away two princesses in the hope that one would become queen of England and the other duchess of Aquitaine.
Thus, as a respectably sterile dowager duchess-queen Eleanor became the guardian of offspring by both her husbands and many other great families west of the Rhine. Young Henry’s seventeen-year-old wife Marguerite Capet, her younger sister Alais, betrothed to Prince Richard but destined to become yet another of the king’s entrapped mistresses, Constance of Brittany, now betrothed to Prince Geoffrey and Alix of Maurienne, betrothed in infancy to Prince John. All of these young people spent time at the court of Poitiers, which must have seemed to them afterwards like a glorious extended summer day. In addition, Eleanor’s own namesake daughter and the Princess Joanna graced the Poitevin court, as did their brothers Richard and Geoffrey. Even Young Henry came on occasion.
Historians have criticised Eleanor for showing little affection towards her offspring, but in this they have been perpetuating the bias of their sources, themselves all too eager to retail gossip and scandal and impute to a woman of whom they disapproved the ultimate opprobrium of failing to live up to that paragon of motherhood, the Virgin Mary. The accusation that she chose to abandon her two eldest daughters in Paris on leaving Louis is unfair because she had no choice in the matter: they were assets of the French Crown, who would have been brought up by others and used in the same way, whether she had stayed with Louis or not.
There were certainly long periods when she did not see individual sons and daughters of her second marriage, but many of these separations were necessitated by her duties and Henry’s requirements for them to be where she was not. Her often-exhausting travel schedule and the fashion of putting children to live with tutors, like Prince Henry with Becket, meant that even when they were near her, little time was actually spent together. With layers of nurses, maidservants, tutors and grooms between her and the royal children, there was a lack of intimacy, but that did not mean she failed to care about them.
During much of the period 1168–73, which she spent in Aquitaine, various of the princes and princesses were with her or lodged at Fontevraud Abbey, where Henry considered them safely on his land, but where she visited and from where they could easily be brought to her. Nor were Eleanor’s daughters sent away to husbands at very tender ages, despite their father’s penchant for infant and child betrothals. Princess Matilda was twelve at the time of her postponed marriage to the 36-year-old Lion of Saxony; Eleanor the middle daughter departed to live in the household of her Castilian fiancé at the age of nine; Joanna, the youngest of the three girls, was not dispatched to her fate in Sicily until she was thirteen.
Of the princes, Young Henry was a profligate spendthrift, quickly bored when accompanying his father on the endless tours of inspection and justice, balancing the income and expenditure of the realm. Tall and endowed with the good looks of his paternal grandfather Geoffrey the Fair, the Young King dressed and lived with style. His easy charm drew a large circle of friends of his own age who enjoyed his open-handed generosity.
His greatest passion was for the tournament, that lethal mock battle said to have been invented by the Angevin knight Geoffroi de Preuilly,9 who died in the year of the Conquest. This was not tilting, that bloodless test of skill and horsemanship in which a revolving board was struck with the lance at full gallop, nor the sanitised joust, with two knights separated by a stout wooden barrier attempting to unseat each other at one pass. In the mêlée, no blows were barred and being unseated could mean death from being trampled on by one’s own and all the other horses, as one of Eleanor’s sons was to find out firsthand.
So popular were tournaments that several hundred knights converged on a chosen venue in northern France and Flanders to show their prowess twice a month during the season from Pentecost to Midsummer Day. These lethal entertainments were banned in England by Henry because he feared that so many knights coming together armed and equipped for war might mask the start of a rebellion. Louis banned them in France because of the damage to property. They had been outlawed by the Church at the Council of Clermont in 1130 and were theoretically forbidden throughout Christendom10 because they resulted in the death of so many knights and warhorses who might otherwise have gone on crusade to kill the Saracen.11
Starting with the confrontation of two armed bands before spectators in a town square, a mêlée often continued in wild pursuits across country involving damage to property and crops. Once broken on impact, lances were discarded and combat continued with swords, maces and other close-combat weapons. The custom of bearing heraldic arms on a shield arose out of the need to identify immediately as friend or foe in the confusion of the mêlée another knight whose features were concealed behind the face-piece of his all-enveloping pot helmet.
The aim of each team was to batter into submission and take captive as many as possible of the opposing knights, who were then held for ransom with their mounts and armour. It was a practice for battle that also satisfied the urge to gamble, for a poor knight could make his fortune or be ruined financially, his destrier alone being worth a year’s income.
Of acceptable prowess at arms himself, Young Henry relied on William the Marshal to keep him out of trouble in the field and also to top up his over-spent allowance by taking for ransom other knights and their horses when the princely purse was empty – with many a loser left to walk home, deprived of even his sword and armour. With a quick brain, a sure hand and eye, and the skill and strength of an Olympic athlete, William took in his first season over 100 captives, and went on to claim more than 500 in his career. Nagged on his deathbed to hand over to the Church a sum equal to all those ransoms, he politely but firmly declined.
Chivalry as a code of honour did not then exist. Whole fiefs changed hands in the space of a mêlée and so many vavassours were held as surety for their overlords’ losses and imprisoned when debts were not honoured that Henry enacted a law making the practice illegal in his territories. Another decidedly unchivalric aspect of the sport was when unscrupulous tourneyers agreed beforehand with opponents to allow inexperienced but wealthy knights on their own side to be captured, so that they could share in the ransom.
The main attraction was surrounded by a horse fair, displays of arms and armour and performances by jonglars of songs celebrating great deeds against the Saracen. Smiths and armourers worked night and day repairing and improving equipment to be tested at risk of life and limb on the morrow. Huge feasts were set out in the open air and paid for by wealthy patrons like Young Henry.
It was a man’s world, where women of whatever rank came to be thrilled by death, broken limbs and lost fortunes. As might be expected, Betran de Born loved the whole tournament scene:
Bela m’es pressa be blezos
coberts de teintz vermelhs e blaus
d’entresens e de gonfanos
de diversas colors tretaus
tendas e traps e rics pavilhos tendre
lanzas frassar, escutz trancar e fendre
elmes brunitz, e colps donar e prendre …
[The mêlée, with its thousand charms: / shields vermillion and azure / standards, banners, coats of arms / painted in every bright colour, / the pavilions, the stands, the tents, / shattered lances, shields split and bent, / blows given, taken, helmets dented …]
One of the backhanded compliments the chroniclers dreamed up for Eleanor was that she was wise but unstable.12 The second adjective, but not the first, fitted Young Henry like a glove. Forever dragging his friends into wild ideas soon dropped,13 he was subject to mood swings from elated defiance to abject submission, from baseless optimism to dark depression. Some said that he never recovered from being abruptly wrenched away from Becket’s household at age nine to be given the falcon treatment throughout his adolescence by the very man who had his foster-father murdered. What is certain is that he resented bitterly being kept on a leash by his father when his younger sibling Richard appeared to be enjoying real freedom with Eleanor in Aquitaine.
It was Richard who was coming to most resemble, physically, not his father as he now was – limping, bandy-legged, prematurely grizzled and bent from all those long days spent in the saddle – but Henry as he had been at the May wedding in Poitiers. With the same trained warrior’s stance, the same reddish hair and burly build, Richard preferred the hunt and real warfare to the make-believe kind on the tournament field, but when he did appear in the lists he was ruthless. The other side of his complex character included a love of music and poetry. Like his great-grandfather William IX, he could turn out a neat sirventès to plead a case, and loved to sing with gusto in church, exhorting his fellow choristers to give their all and admonishing by voice and a blow monks who sang too quietly or out of tune.14
In adolescence and later life he could be impulsively generous to his friends of the moment, and was soon predictably surrounded by young nobles whose pleasures were his: campaigning and, in between, the good life and the hunt. The moments of generosity were unpredictable. Cooks were important members of a noble household because their mistakes or ill will could kill their masters. On one occasion Richard elevated his to the nobility after a particularly good meal and made the post a hereditary fief. Yet the dark side of Eleanor’s favourite son was a love of slaughter and a greed for gold that would literally be the death of him.
Prince Geoffrey was of smaller build, and darker-complexioned. While fond of the tournament scene, he fought only when he had to, but had the best brain of the four sons. Saved by having a younger brother from being put into the Church, he would in fact have made an excellent cardinal, for he had a lawyer’s gift with words and the smooth-talking ability to make black seem white that convinced even those who well knew his reputation for untrustworthiness.
The last of the brood, Prince John resembled Geoffrey in looks, shorter and darker than the two oldest princes. But he lacked Geoffrey’s intellect, Henry’s generosity and Richard’s undoubted physical courage. To his father he served primarily as a way of annoying his older brothers; to his mother, he was the runt of the litter. Left out of the arrangements announced at Montmirail because there was no remaining Plantagenet territory to which he could be entitled, he became known as John Lackland or Jehan sans Terre, and suffered the fate of so many other landless younger sons, being put into the Church – in his case as an oblate at Fontevraud. The experience inculcated in him a lifelong loathing of religion and priests. Growing up envious and scheming, he was convinced from an early age that he had been deprived of his rightful share of the double realm. Cursed with a generous measure of the Plantagenet paranoia, he was an unloved and unlovable prince.
Henry once had a wall painted depicting himself as an eagle being attacked by four eaglets; a better image would have been that of a huntsman holding four hounds on intertwined leashes, he curbing them at every turn and they forever snapping and snarling at each other, each ready to take a bite of one of the other dogs or even the huntsman himself when the occasion offered. With John in the cloister at Fontevraud, why did the king not make some space by sending Geoffrey or even Richard to carve out his own place in the sun, in the Holy Land? Was he still hoping that the grand design would one day see the Angevin Empire so vast that it would need to be divided between four kings of his own blood?
Since feudal law proscribed marriages without the prior approval of the spouses’ suzerain, and since Eleanor was the overlord of Aquitaine, her court became a marriage mart. The princes were far from being the only young men to amuse the noble maidens and older ladies – numbering as many as sixty on occasion – in the glittering palace dominating the high ground above the confluence of the Clain and Boivre rivers. Of course, it mattered that the young bloods had proved themselves by sword or lance, knew how to set a balking lanner falcon on its prey and ride a destrier centaur-like, as though of one flesh, in the mêlée of battle or tournament. But the prizes at Eleanor’s court went to men who had manners, dressed well, showed gallantry, could pluck a lute or turn mere words into poetry.
A l’entrada del temps clar,
per jòia recomençar e per gelós irritar
vol la reina mostrar qu’el’ es si amorosa.
El’a fait pertot mandar
non sia jusqu’a la mar pucela ni bachelar
que tuit no vengan dançar en la dança joiosa.
[In spring the queen of romance / summons to her from far and wide / every unwed knight and maid / to join her in the joyous dance / and worries her husband by these proofs / that she still knows what love is.]
La reina aurilhosa, the April Queen was back where she belonged. Among the troubadours who flocked to her side was Bernat de Ventadorn, lean after his years in disfavour but later recounting how his lady read and rewarded the new compositions he wrote for her. Life at the court in which Prince Richard spent his adolescence was such fun that he continued to regard Poitiers as his home for the next twenty or so years, and was happy to be known by the traditional title of count of Poitou, rather than duke of Aquitaine, until he was crowned king of England in 1189.
The lavishness of court life in Poitiers was criticised by Bernard of Clairvaux, who commented sarcastically on the excesses of make-up and dress. Although he criticised the long trains and floor-length sleeves of the fashionable gowns, according to the chronicler Geoffroi du Vigeois, so great was the surge in demand for furs and fine cloth at this time that prices doubled in the south-west, with even bishops and viscounts taking a new interest in their appearance and blushing to be seen in clothes their fathers might have worn, slashing their outer garments to show off the precious stuff below and wearing sleeves so long they had to be knotted up out of the way most of the time.
But life was not all dress and show. There were the courts of love, with noble ladies imposing tasks on lovers and judging them worthy or not of favours, such as a handkerchief to sport on helm or lance in a tournament, in a fantasy reversal of reality. In the famous canon of amour courtois that love cannot exist between spouses lies the plight of the noble wife, for whom ‘being married does not prevent one falling in love (with someone else)’.15 According to Andreas Capellanus, even Eleanor in a wistful moment expressed the thought that it would be a fine thing if a wife could find love and marriage consonant. To ladies even as highborn and beautiful as Eleanor, who were locked in marriages over which they had little or no say, an anonymous troubadour offered the beguiling dream of being able to escape into the haven of a lover’s arms:
En un verger, sotz fuelha d’albespí
tenc la domna son amic còsta sí …
Bèls dous amics, baisem-nos ieu e vos
aval els pratz on chanto’ls auzelós.
Tot o façamen despiech del gilós….
[In an orchard, beneath the hawthorn tree / the lady holds her lover lovingly. / O, sweet my friend, let us kiss in bliss / while down in the meadow birds sing this / sweet defiance of my jealous husband….]
The trobairitz Clara d’Anduza yearned for a lover to tell her, ‘I shall always be true …
… si’m pregavon d’autras dònas un cen
qu’amors que’m ten per vos en sa bailia
vòl que mon còr vos estui e vos gar.
[… though a hundred other ladies / begged me for the love that keeps me yours / and makes me guard my heart for you alone.’]
And what could be more deliciously seditious that a man on his knees, a slave to love?
Ma belha dompna, a vos me valha Deus!
Que mil aitanz soi melh vostre que meus
obedïent plus que serf ni judeus
e de vos tenc mon aloc e mos feus.
[God save me from your power, O lady fair! / I’m a thousand times more yours than mine, I swear / and more your slave than any Jew or serf. / ‘Tis from you I hold both allod and my fief.]
Appropriately, the church onto which Eleanor looked from her apartments in the Maubergeonne Tower was consecrated to the Virgin, for what was happening in Poitiers was a rebellion against the bloody masculine business of war and the tournament and the harrying and killing of beasts with hawk and hound in favour of the subtler pleasures of life – fine clothes, good conversation, poetry, music and all the gai saber of Mediterranean civilisation. In a very short time Eleanor re-created a way of life essayed during her reigns in Paris and London. On the banks of Seine and Thames she had been merely a consort, and yet had introduced fashions and comforts and entertainments, in some cases with lasting effect. Here, where she had grown up to the sound of lute and laughter, she was more a queen in her own right than any other woman in the world.