On Wednesday, 6 February 1861, a young French scholar named Paul Meyer (shown, in later life, bottom right; portrait © by L. Sabattier in George Bonnamour, Le Procès Zola – Impressions d’audience/Wikicommons) attended an auction of rare medieval manuscripts at Sotheby’s in London (the cover of the original auction catalogue is shown bottom left). On that fateful day, Meyer stumbled upon the unknown thirteenth-century text that he would later dub the History of William Marshal (top), though it would be twenty years before he saw the manuscript again.
Born around 1147 in southern England, William Marshal passed some of his childhood years on the family estate at Hamstead Marshall, where the remains of a number of motte and bailey castles can still be seen (top, one of the possible sites of the ‘Newbury’ siege of 1152, when young William’s life was threatened by King Stephen). William was also related, through his mother, to the powerful Salisbury dynasty, who held a formidable fortified town in Wiltshire (Old Sarum, middle; photograph © by Jason Hawkes/Corbis). In around 1160, William was sent to train as a knight at Tancarville in Normandy (bottom, the remains of the château above the Seine, with the medieval tower visible on the far left).
The equipment used by knights in the mid-twelfth century was not so dissimilar from that employed by warriors at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 (shown top, in the detail from the Bayeux Tapestry; photograph © by Myrabella/Wikicommons). The three essential elements were a destrier (or warhorse), a one-handed, double-edged sword (the example shown in the middle probably dates from the thirteenth century; photograph © by kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection) and a mail hauberk (or coat of armour) fashioned from linked metal rings (bottom; photograph © by Richard T. Nowitz/Corbis).
Once elevated to the status of a fully fledged knight, William gained some experience of warfare and the tournament circuit, before entering the military retinue of his uncle, Earl Patrick of Salisbury, and journeying to the southern French province of Aquitaine. There, he would have seen this masterpiece of Romanesque sculpture, the west facade of Notre-Dame La Grande in Poitiers.
In 1168, William Marshal entered the service of medieval Europe’s most powerful dynasty – the Angevins – headed by King Henry II of England. At first, William was inducted into the knightly retinue of Henry’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine (top; Eleanor of Aquitaine, Codex Manesse, photograph © by Andreas Praefcke/Wikicommons). By 1170 William had earned sufficient favour to be appointed as tutor-in-arms to Henry’s and Eleanor’s eldest son and heir, Young Henry (shown bottom at his coronation in 1170 and supposedly being served by his father at the subsequent banquet; Young Henry’s coronation, The Becket Leaves, photograph © by Wormsley Library).
The mid-thirteenth century Morgan Picture Bible (photograph © by Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource/Scala, Florence) sought to depict the chaotic brutality of war, though in reality much of the combat between knights during William Marshal’s lifetime was neither as bloody, nor as lethal, as this image would suggest, because warriors were usually well protected by their armour.
Styles of armour, shields and helmets were all refined in this period. Note the use of mail covering the arms, hands and legs, and the mail coif with tied ventail (covering the lower face), seen in the kneeling knight (photograph © by The British Library). This figure, bearing the symbol of the cross on his surcoat and banner, kneels in supplication before departure on crusade – a reminder that knights were encouraged to offer service to the Church and to adhere to codes of conduct.
By the second half of the twelfth century the ideals of chivalry and courtesy were gaining currency, while new forms of so-called ‘Romance’ literature explored the lives of noble knights, often in the setting of Arthurian myth-history. These ideas and stories were also expressed in art, as seen in these two ‘Romance’ caskets, fashioned from ivory and carved bone, and probably used to hold aristocratic ladies’ jewellery. The late-twelfth-century example (top; photograph © by The British Museum) depicted scenes from the tale of Tristan (an idealised knight) and his lover Isolde, while the artistically more sophisticated casket from the fourteenth century (bottom; photograph © by The Walters Art Museum) shows the ‘Siege of the Castle of Love’, with mounted warriors jousting and battle waged with flowers.
In the later twelfth century it became customary for leading nobles and knights to sport distinctive colour schemes and devices, emblazoned on banners and clothing, during tournaments, and the growing popularity of these ‘coats of arms’ gave rise to the notion of heraldry. By the late 1170s, William Marshal had adopted his own ‘coat of arms’ – a red lion rampant, against a halved green and gold background (third row, second from the right) – depicted here in this mid-thirteenth-century Roll of Arms (photograph © by The British Library).
William Marshal served at the right hand of five English kings in the course of his long career: Henry the Young King (shown above, between his father and brother, as ‘Henr.Iunior’, in the mid-thirteenth century illustration by Matthew Paris); Henry II; Richard the Lionheart; John and Henry III (depiction of five English kings, photograph © by The British Library). As such, Marshal was both a witness to, and leading participant in, many of the events that shaped English and European history in this formative period.
After marrying the heiress Isabel of Clare in 1189, William Marshal took possession of the stone fortress of Striguil (Chepstow), perched above the Wye River, on the Welsh March (left; photograph © by Skyscan). He set about improving this stronghold (which initially consisted of a single-storey stone keep and a timber palisade), constructing a double-towered stone gatehouse (left photo, foreground right) – which can be dated to 1189–90 through the age of its original ironclad, oak gate (right) – and later adding an inner wall (between the keep and gatehouse), with a pair of the three-storey towers.
William Marshal was appointed as earl of Pembroke in 1199, after supporting John’s claim to the English crown, and probably took possession of Pembroke itself in late 1200. The imposing four-storey, eighty-foot-tall great tower that now lies in the heart of the later medieval castle can been dated to this period and can probably be associated with Marshal’s rule.
Strongholds and sieges featured prominently in William Marshal’s career. He probably marched to the defence of the desert fortress of Kerak (top) during his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the mid-1180s. William fought to defend the circuit of Roman battlements at Le Mans in 1189 (middle; photograph © by Guiziou Franck/Hemis/Corbis) and made a failed attempt to relieve the mighty Château Gaillard, positioned above the River Seine (bottom; photograph © by Julia Waterlow/Eye Ubiquitous/Corbis), in 1203.
William Marshal was reputedly the only man who ever bested the famed warrior-king, Richard the Lionheart (top, shown in his tomb effigy at Fontevraud), in single combat. Nonetheless, after Richard’s coronation in 1189, Marshal emerged as one of his most trusted and influential supporters. William also championed King John’s cause (bottom, in a detail from his tomb effigy in Worcester Cathedral), though the latter proved to be a dangerously unpredictable monarch. John presided over the collapse of the once-mighty Angevin Empire, faced a baronial rebellion and was forced to concede the terms of Magna Carta in 1215.
In William Marshal’s lifetime, it became customary to authenticate and empower official documents by attaching wax seals imprinted with distinctive text and images. Leading nobles, like Robert FitzWalter, often adopted elaborate and ornate designs in their seal-dies (as seen above, bearing the inscription: SIGILLUM ROBERTI FILI WALTERI; photograph © by The British Museum). Note the representation of FitzWalter’s coat of arms upon his shield and the caparison cover on his horse, and the heraldic device of his ally, Saer of Quincy, on the shield to the left.
By contrast, William Marshal seems to have always retained the diminutive seal of a household knight, seen here (small green seal on the bottom right) appended to the 1217 version of Magna Carta (photograph © by Bodleian Library) that he re-issued with the papal legate Guala of Bichierri.
After King John’s death in 1216, William Marshal championed the cause of the young King Henry III. In May 1217, Marshal sought to defeat the combined forces of the baronial rebels and the French at Lincoln (photograph © by Richard Klune/Corbis), and the resultant battle reached its climax in front of the cathedral.
Crossbowmen positioned in Lincoln Castle helped to rout the French and baronial forces, driving them from the town. The victory was later depicted in this illustration by Matthew Paris (photograph © by The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College), which also shows the mortally wounded figure of the count of Perche.
After an extraordinary career spanning more than seven decades, William Marshal died on 14 May 1219. His body was laid to rest in the Round Temple Church in London on 20 May, where this effigy (now generally considered to be a representation of the earl) can still be seen today. The precise location of his remains is unknown as the effigy has been moved over the centuries and badly damaged, most recently during a Second World War bombing raid.
A rare photograph of the mid-nineteenth century statue of William Marshal erected in the House of Lords, to the left of the royal throne, at a time when Marshal remained a notable, yet shadowy figure of history.
It was only after the discovery of the History of William Marshal that the full scale and scope of the earl’s achievements began to become apparent, though the sole surviving copy of this work was almost lost in the vast library of Sir Thomas Phillipps (portrait of Sir Thomas Phillipps courtesy of Wikicommons).