Part I
1
In 1152 King Stephen of England decided to execute a five-year-old boy. This child – William Marshal – had committed no crime. He was a hostage, given over to the crown as surety for his father’s word, a pawn in the great game of power and politics then being played out within a realm wracked by civil war. When William’s father promptly broke his pledge to the king, declaring that ‘he did not care about the child, since he still had the anvils and hammers to forge even finer ones’, Stephen was furious. In his rage, he ordered the boy ‘to be seized and taken to the gallows for hanging’, and young William was duly led away to face his fate.
Through the long years of his life, William Marshal seems never to have forgotten this moment of intense drama. It was, perhaps, his earliest childhood memory. For all the fame and success William later enjoyed, fêted even as the ‘greatest knight in the world’, he began as the boy forsaken by his father and condemned by his king. So why had William’s young life been placed in such danger, and how did he survive?
THE LAND OF ‘STRIFE AND DISORDER’
William Marshal was born in England around 1147, at a time of unrest. The kingdom was in the grip of a ruinous, fifteen-year-long conflict, as King Stephen struggled to resist his cousin Empress Matilda’s attempts to seize power. Both possessed strong claims to the realm, so the country was divided in its allegiance and spiralling towards anarchy. One medieval chronicler described this as a period of ‘great strife [and] disorder’, in which England was ‘plagued by war . . . and the law of the land was disregarded’. Great swathes of the landscape were left scarred and ravaged, such that one could ‘go a whole day’s journey’ and yet find only empty villages and untilled land. Amid such desolation, the ‘wretched people died of starvation’. One contemporary admitted that in these years many ‘said openly that Christ and his saints were asleep’.
Yet for all the chaos and horror of this era, there were those who prospered during the civil war. With the collapse of crown authority, local warlords were left in many regions to impose some semblance of order, and this power was often abused by the predatory and the unscrupulous. One such was William’s father, John Marshal, a nobleman of middling rank, with a lordship centred in England’s West Country. By birth, John was not English (or Anglo-Saxon), but a French-speaking Norman. Back in the tenth century, his Viking ancestors – known then as the ‘Northmen’ – had settled in a region of northern France that came to be known as Normandy (literally ‘the land of the Northmen’). They embraced some of the customs of their new homeland and even adopted French, or Frankish, names, but remained warlike and land-hungry. In 1066, their leader William, duke of Normandy – William ‘the Conqueror’ – led an invasion force across the English Channel and scored a stunning victory at the Battle of Hastings. This Norman triumph left England’s last, short-lived Anglo-Saxon king, Harold Godwinson, and the cream of his ruling nobility, dead on the field. In its wake, William assumed the crown of England, while retaining control of Normandy. An Anglo-Norman realm was forged, and it was in this cross-Channel world that William Marshal would be raised.
In some respects, 1066 marked a decisive break with the past. William the Conqueror established a new and enduring royal dynasty, and England’s ‘native’ peoples suddenly found themselves the subjects of foreign invaders. King William I distributed land north of the Channel to some 150 Norman warlords and officials, and together they pacified the realm through brute force and threw up an extensive network of imposing castles to secure their authority. John Marshal’s father – Gilbert Giffard (literally meaning ‘Gilbert Chubby Cheeks’) – was one of these early Norman settlers, who came to England during the first wave of conquest or in its aftermath. By the time of William I’s great Domesday survey of landholding in 1086, Gilbert held territory in the western county of Wiltshire. He also served as the royal master-marshal, an ancient military office, traditionally associated with the care and maintenance of the king’s horses, which over time developed into an administrative post, largely concerned with the day-to-day running of the court.
When taken in context, the advent of the Normans was not as jarring as it might first appear. In a later era, Britain would be seen as an unconquerable island realm: William Shakespeare’s inviolate ‘sceptre’d isle’, the ‘fortress built by nature [against] the hand of war’. But in the early Middle Ages, England seemed fatally prone to invasion. Through the centuries preceding 1066, the Anglo-Saxons (themselves the successors of earlier Celtic and then Roman invaders) had faced repeated waves of Viking incursion and settlement that left much of northern England in Norse hands. A period of direct Viking rule eventually was witnessed under Cnut of Denmark in the early eleventh century, only for the brief reinstatement of Anglo-Saxon kingship, before William the Conqueror’s arrival. As a result, the cultural, ethnic and linguistic identity of the ‘English’ was far from uniform, and the notion that the Normans crushed an otherwise untrammelled, pure-bred Anglo-Saxon society has little basis in reality.
The Norman colonisation of England proved to be remarkably successful. The Conqueror and his followers found a wealthy land, renowned for its natural resources and ripe for exploitation. More than one-third of the British Isles remained heavily wooded, but England boasted in excess of seven million acres of cultivated farmland in the late eleventh century, tended by a predominantly rural population of around two-and-a-half million people. A period of climatic change also saw the average temperature rise by about one degree centigrade, increasing agricultural yields (and even allowing vineyards to be planted in middle-England). For the ruling elite, at least, this was a time of plenty. A semblance of political continuity was also maintained after King William’s death in 1087, as he was succeeded by two of his sons, William Rufus (1087–1100) and Henry I (1100–35).
It was during this latter reign that John Marshal began his career, gradually accumulating status, land and wealth. By 1130, John was in his twenties and had succeeded to the master-marshalcy, for which privilege he had to pay a fee of forty silver marks to the crown – quite a sum, given that an annual income of around fifteen marks would allow a noble to live in considerable comfort. The position brought no great power in or of itself, but marked him out as one of the great officers of the king’s household. He had oversight of four under-marshals, a group of royal ushers, the keeper of the king’s tents, even the supervisor of the royal fireplaces. More importantly, John had a degree of access to the king and his leading barons, which allowed him to curry favour and seek reward. He owned a cluster of houses close to the royal palace and castle in Winchester, as well as small parcels of land dotted across south-west England, but his prized family estate, which came to be known as Hamstead Marshall, lay in a verdant swathe of the Kennet valley, close to the border between Berkshire and Wiltshire. Around this same time, John secured himself a decent marriage to a minor Wiltshire heiress named Adelina, with whom he fathered two sons, Gilbert and Walter. So far his achievements had been unremarkable, his progress piecemeal. But John Marshal’s day was about to dawn, because the peace of the realm had already begun to unravel.
THE DESCENT INTO ANARCHY
On the night of 25 November 1120, William Ætheling – the seventeen-year-old heir to the throne of England – threw a raucous, wine-soaked party. A throng of young, well-heeled nobles had joined him aboard a fine newly fitted vessel, the White Ship, moored in the harbour at Barfleur, in Normandy. Notable among the revellers were William’s half-siblings, Richard and Countess Matilda of Perche, as well as his cousin, Stephen of Blois (the man who, years later, would order William Marshal’s execution). As the alcohol flowed, even the crew and oarsmen partook, and an atmosphere of drunken merriment and youthful exuberance took hold. When a group of clerics arrived to bless the vessel with holy water they were driven away with contemptuous shouts and mocking laughter. Earlier that day William’s father, King Henry I of England, had set sail from Barfleur intent on crossing the Channel. Boisterous calls now went up on the White Ship for a race to be undertaken. Surely this sleek craft could outpace the king’s vessel, beating him to the English coast? As hasty preparations for the departure were made, some seem to have thought better of this folly and disembarked, among them Stephen of Blois, apparently complaining that he was afflicted by diarrhoea. The great contemporary chronicler of this era, William of Malmesbury, described how the crowded White Ship was ‘launched from the shore, although it was now dark’ adding that ‘she flew swifter than an arrow, sweeping the rippling surface of the deep’.
Within minutes disaster struck. Inebriated and inattentive, the steersman misjudged his course out of the natural harbour and the princely craft crashed at speed into a jutting rock exposed by the low tide. Two planks in the starboard hull shattered and the White Ship began to take on water. In the confusion that followed, William Ætheling was bundled on to a rowing boat and looked set to escape, but the despairing wails of his half-sister Matilda prompted him to turn back and attempt a rescue. As it drew up alongside the foundering White Ship, William’s small craft was quickly overladen by those clambering for safety and capsized. The young prince and all his peers drowned, ‘buried’, as William of Malmesbury put it, ‘in the deep’.
It was later said that the White Ship’s captain, one Thomas FitzStephen, managed at first to swim away from the sinking vessel. But when he realised that his royal passengers had been lost, Thomas gave himself up to the cold water. Only two men survived the first horrors of this catastrophe by clawing their way up the White Ship’s mast to reach the yardarm – one was a minor nobleman, Geoffrey son of the viscount of Exmes, the other a butcher from Rouen named Berold. As the terrified screams of those below eventually died down to silence, both struggled to cling on to their desperate perch. Hours passed. The night was clear and frosty, and eventually Geoffrey lost his grip, plunging down to be swallowed by the sea. Berold alone, dressed in a commoner’s sheepskins, saw the dawn and was rescued by fishermen; one survivor to tell the tale of this calamity.
William of Malmesbury would conclude that ‘no ship ever brought so much misery to England; none was ever so notorious in the history of the world’. This dread-laden pronouncement was born out of bitter experience, for the chronicler lived through the decades that followed, witnessing an end to the stability of King Henry I’s reign and England’s descent into disorder. All of this, so William of Malmesbury believed, could be traced back to William Ætheling’s sudden and untimely demise. The sinking of the White Ship was so calamitous because it deprived Henry I of his only legitimate male heir. The king had never had a problem fathering offspring – he sired more than twenty children – and his voracious sexual appetite prompted one contemporary to conclude that he was ‘enslaved by female seduction’. Though two perished on the White Ship, many of the king’s illegitimate issue prospered, chief among them his eldest bastard son Robert, who was gifted the earldom of Gloucester.
But there was no real prospect that Robert would inherit England’s crown. Illegitimacy had not always been a bar to succession and power. Henry I’s own father, William the Conqueror, was bastard born, yet became duke of Normandy and, in 1066, England’s anointed monarch. During recent decades, however, a reforming Church had sought to tighten the strictures governing marriage, and proven legitimacy became paramount. Henry I’s union with Edith of Scotland (who could herself trace her lineage back to the Anglo-Saxon kings of Wessex) produced only a boy and a girl, William and Matilda, and the king focused his grand dreams for peaceful dynastic succession upon the former. Young William came to be styled with the ancient Anglo-Saxon title ‘Ætheling’ in honour of his royal heritage and status as heir designate. He was to be the king who finally united the bloodlines of Normandy and Anglo-Saxon England.
When the White Ship sank and William drowned, these designs came undone. Nonetheless, the spiral into civil war that followed Henry I’s own eventual demise, at the age of sixty-seven, on 1 December 1135, was not inevitable. Despite first appearances, England had no track record of clear, unchallenged succession; nor was there a fixed tradition of eldest sons inheriting the crown. England’s recent kings had actually come to power through force of arms and speed of action, not unassailable right. Henry I himself stole England and Normandy from his elder brother, Robert Curthose, and then promptly imprisoned his sibling for the best part of thirty years. In fact, it would not be until the early thirteenth century that a king of England was succeeded by his first-born son, and even then the process was fraught and fragile. William Ætheling’s accession was supposed to break this mould, yet the sequence of events initiated by his death might still have been halted. The real problem was that after 1135 neither of the two leading claimants to the throne possessed sufficient strength or sustained support with the realm to secure a lasting hold over England.
The claimants to the crown
One candidate was Henry I’s sole surviving legitimate child, his forceful and ambitious daughter Matilda. It was to her that the king eventually turned after the sinking of the White Ship, declaring Matilda his heir in early 1127, and again in 1131, forcing oaths of recognition for her claim from his leading nobles. But in the medieval world, power and military might were inextricably linked. This was the age of the warrior-king, in which a monarch was expected to lead and command armies in person, and as such, the simple fact of Matilda’s gender was a significant, though not insurmountable, impediment. She was also viewed as an outsider by many Anglo-Norman nobles. Wed as a young girl to Emperor Henry V of Germany, she had grown up in the imperial court, speaking German and learning the manners and customs of a foreign land. The union earned Matilda the right to assume the title ‘empress’, but produced no offspring.
Her second marriage to Geoffrey ‘le Bel’ (‘the Fair’), the dandyish count of Anjou, was a strictly political union – though the couple did produce three sons in relatively short order – but the match was viewed in a dim light by many. Anjou was Normandy’s longstanding rival; its people, the Angevins, were seen as a savage and shifty bunch, with an unhealthy appetite for indiscriminate violence and rapacious looting. It was little wonder then that Matilda struggled to press home her claim to England in 1135. She remained the unfamiliar empress, hampered by her sex and tainted by association with an Angevin, who most suspected might try to steal the crown for himself. The timing of her father’s death also left her at a disadvantage, as Matilda was then around eight weeks pregnant with her third child.
Empress Matilda’s claim was supplanted by a largely unheralded candidate, Stephen of Blois. Like his cousin Matilda, Stephen was a grandson of William the Conqueror, but in Stephen’s case this ancestry was derived through the female line. His mother was the formidable Adela of Blois, daughter of the Conqueror and Henry I’s sister, a rare and remarkable woman, truly capable of wielding power in a man’s world. After the death of her husband on crusade in the Holy Land, Adela looked to secure the future of her surviving sons. One of the youngest, Stephen, was sent to his uncle King Henry I’s court in 1113, where he was granted the county of Mortain (in southwestern Normandy) and additional lands in England. In the years that followed, Stephen prospered, accruing favour and influence, earning title to further territories. By 1120, when he narrowly avoided the disaster of the White Ship, Stephen was already a leading member of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy. His status was further enhanced when King Henry I orchestrated Stephen’s marriage to the wealthy heiress to the county of Boulogne (in north-eastern France), one of England’s most valuable trading partners. Nonetheless, no one seems to have expected that he might stake a serious claim to the crown in 1135. After all, in 1127 Stephen had been one of the first nobles to swear an oath to uphold his cousin Empress Matilda’s rights.
When King Henry I died on 1 December, that promise was put to one side. Emulating his late uncle’s example, Stephen resolved to seize power for himself. Moving with lightning speed, he crossed immediately from Boulogne to London – England’s commercial capital – securing the city’s support, most likely in return for mercantile privileges. Stephen then raced on to Winchester, the ancient seat of royal power, where his younger brother, Henry of Blois, had become bishop in 1129. With his connivance, Stephen was able to gain control of the royal treasury and then to persuade the archbishop of Canterbury, head of the English Church, to crown and anoint him king on 22 December. As 1136 began, rumour of this sudden takeover raced across England and Normandy. To most, Stephen’s position must have seemed unassailable. In the eyes of his contemporaries he was no longer an ordinary human being, but a man transformed through sacred ritual into God’s chosen representative on Earth. Doubts might be harboured about his path to power, but once Stephen had undergone the coronation, properly enacted by the Church, there could be no question that he was the rightful king of England. Empress Matilda’s cause appeared hopeless. Even her half-brother and leading advocate, Robert, earl of Gloucester (Henry I’s bastard son), was forced to grudgingly acknowledge Stephen as the new monarch.
At first, John Marshal also offered Stephen his unreserved support, and by 1138 this show of loyalty had earned John a crucial commission: the castellany of Marlborough Castle. This was one of the most strategically significant strongholds in the West Country, positioned to control the main east–west thoroughfare between London and Bristol, and to police the open, rolling downlands of northern Wiltshire. A castellany was no permanent grant or gift; it merely empowered John to serve as custodian of Marlborough’s royal fortress. Nonetheless, it established him as one of the region’s leading figures, and further opportunities would soon follow.
The reign of King Stephen
The monarch who would eventually hold William Marshal’s life in his hands thus came to power in 1135. The initial position of strength enjoyed by the new king might well have been sustained, had Stephen been a more forceful character. His forebears – from Henry I back to William the Conqueror – all seized and held power through might, not inalienable right. Yet though Stephen was a man of action and ambition, and would prove competent in the field of war, it soon became clear that in other respects he lacked the requisite qualities. Looking back from the later twelfth century, the courtier and commentator Walter Map described Stephen as being ‘of notable skill in arms, but in other things almost an idiot’, adding that he was ‘inclined to evil’, while to William of Malmesbury ‘he was a man of activity, but imprudent’. The truth was that, in dealing with their subjects, successful medieval kings needed to balance a degree of ruthlessness with expedient largesse – Stephen could manage neither.
The first real test of his mettle came in the summer of 1136, when a minor rebellion broke out in the far south-west of England. Stephen moved quickly to contain this insurrection, laying close siege to the malcontents holed up in Exeter Castle. After three months their resistance was broken, and an abject surrender was offered. Every expectation was that the rebels would face stern retribution, ranging from the confiscation of lands and imprisonment, to physical mutilation, perhaps even death. In similar situations King Henry I had been merciless. Renowned by one contemporary as ‘an implacable enemy to the disloyal’, he proved willing to use gruesome punishments against his adversaries and rivals, such as blinding and castration; abhorrent measures that nonetheless caused him to be revered as a ‘lion of justice’.
King Stephen lacked the stomach for such pitiless brutality. Following the counsel of Robert of Gloucester – who must surely have known that he was encouraging Stephen to undermine the crown’s authority – the king showed astonishing leniency at Exeter, allowing the dissenters to leave unharmed, with their freedom and possessions. Most treated this as a grave sign of weakness, and from then on serious questions were asked about Stephen’s competence, for it was obvious that this king could be challenged without fear of full reprisal. One chronicler noted that Stephen soon earned a troubling reputation as ‘a mild man [who] did not exact the full penalties of the law’. By the summer of 1138 Robert of Gloucester felt confident enough to head up his own revolt, openly declaring support for the cause of his half-sister Empress Matilda.
As Stephen’s grip on the reins of power faltered, Empress Matilda became emboldened. Her claim to the crown, so widely disdained in 1135, was resurrected, and in 1139 she crossed the Channel, establishing a power base at Bristol alongside the earl of Gloucester. From this point onwards, the realm split roughly down the middle, with the heartland of the king’s supporters being in the south-east, and Matilda and Earl Robert holding the south-west.
THE CIVIL WAR
For the next fourteen years the kingdom was blighted by a destructive and intractable internecine conflict, in which neither side proved capable of achieving overall victory. Stephen clung to his status as England’s anointed monarch, yet the weakness and innate incompetence of his reign had been exposed. Meanwhile, though Matilda’s lineage suggested she was legally entitled to rule, her gender and marriage remained problematic, and her haughty and imperious demeanour seems to have alienated many in England, further damaging her prospects. The convoluted struggle between Stephen and Matilda was marked by some extraordinary twists in fortune, and punctuated by acts of fortitude and folly. It also offered a man of John Marshal’s character, temperament and ambition manifold opportunities. When hostilities broke out, he was ideally placed to exploit the conflict, holding a position in the West Country between the two camps, frequently playing one side against the other.
The History of William Marshal described this period in some detail, but its account was sometimes garbled and always biased in John Marshal’s favour. He was characterised as a ‘courtly, wise and worthy man’ and ‘a brave and trustworthy knight’; just the kind of generous and admirable figure that other warriors might happily follow, even though he was ‘no earl and no baron with fabulous wealth’. In reality, John’s loyalties may have been far from certain, especially in the civil war’s early stages, yet the Historymaintained that ‘the worthy Marshal entirely threw his lot in with the rightful heir’ Matilda from the start.
At times, the History inflated John’s significance to an almost laughable degree. According to the biographer, ‘King Stephen had the worst of it’ during the war, primarily because John chose to support Empress Matilda, and John was said to have suffered ‘many a combat and battle . . . many a trial and tribulation on her behalf . . . before things were settled’. In truth, the Marshal remained a relatively minor player in the grand scheme of the overall struggle, but it is impossible to know if this overblown representation derived primarily from William Marshal’s own personal recollections, or whether his biographer himself consciously sought to embroider William’s ancestry.
One dramatic story of John’s heroism, recorded in the History, certainly had the flavour of a well-worn family legend that wove together strands of fact and fiction. It was set against the backdrop of a significant crisis in 1141. For a brief period that year, Matilda’s faction appeared to be on the brink of victory, after Stephen was taken captive during a skirmish outside Lincoln. The king was led in humiliation to Bristol and placed in chains. In September, however, the tables were turned. Matilda and Robert of Gloucester had besieged Winchester, hoping to press home their advantage, but were caught by a relieving army loyal to Stephen. In the course of a frantic retreat westwards, the earl fought a gallant rearguard action at the Stock bridge ford of the River Test that allowed Matilda to make good her escape, but which led to Robert’s own capture. A deal eventually was struck that saw King Stephen regain his freedom in exchange for Robert’s own release. Not surprisingly, an atmosphere of intense suspicion and recrimination surrounded the whole affair, with both men having to provide hostages, including their respective sons, as guarantee that the terms of the trade would be honoured.
In the History’s account of Matilda’s perilous flight from Winchester in 1141, John Marshal appeared as the central protagonist, and Earl Robert of Gloucester was erased. Thus John was depicted as the empress’s only reliable advisor, counselling immediate retreat. It was he who told Matilda to stop slowing their flight by riding side-saddle ‘as women do’; supposedly insisting (with a wry hint of bawdiness) that instead she ‘put [her] legs apart’ to ride like a man. And in the History it was John, not Earl Robert, who then fought a valiant last stand to cover her retreat, though at a ford in Wherwell, not Stockbridge, which was five miles to the south.
From here, however, the tale began to trace a more believable path, partially corroborated by other contemporary evidence. It appears that John Marshal did indeed fight on behalf of Matilda’s forces near the nunnery at Wherwell in 1141, and when overwhelmed by enemy numbers, took sanctuary within its abbey church. King Stephen’s supporters promptly set fire to the entire structure and, as the flames spread, searing heat caused the church’s lead roof to melt. According to the History this burning metal ‘fell on the Marshal’s face, with horrible consequences’, charring his flesh and costing him an eye. Left for dead, John eventually stumbled out of the smoking ruin and, despite his grievous wounds, managed to walk to safety.
John Marshal’s character
Intermittent and inconclusive fighting continued in the years that followed, with neither side able to achieve telling gains. But John Marshal thrived in the midst of this unrest. Even the History of William Marshal occasionally hinted at the darker facets of John’s involvement in the civil war. His capacity for ruthless brutality was glimpsed in the description of a dawn ambush, unleashed against a lightly armoured enemy force near Winchester. The biographer proudly declared that ‘no lion ever ran after its prey so [swiftly] as did those who were armed after those who were unarmed’, adding that ‘many a man [was] killed and maimed, many a brain spilled from skull and many a gut [left] trailing on the ground’. The stark reality was that the exploitation of weakness became commonplace during this anarchic period of English history. This was a time of wolves, when aggressive, despotic and devious warlords thrived. The author of the History of William Marshal may not have been comfortable admitting it, but John possessed all of these qualities in abundance.
Other chroniclers, who actually lived through the civil war, brought the Marshal’s character into clearer focus. In the most antagonistic accounts he was portrayed as a ‘scion of hell and the root of all evil, [who] troubled the kingdom by unceasing disorder’; a man who built castles ‘of wondrous design’, but then used them to impose his own tyrannical authority over the land, extorting money and property from the Church. Elsewhere John emerged as just one more brutish, grasping player in a desperately chaotic game. This was never more apparent than in one telling incident in the earliest phase of the civil war that was wholly ignored by the History of William Marshal.
In early spring 1140, Robert FitzHubert, a Flemish mercenary who had sought employ on both sides of the conflict, decided to seize a portion of land for himself. FitzHubert had a particularly unsavoury reputation, being described by one contemporary as ‘a man of great cruelty and unequalled in wickedness and crime’. Rumour had it that he liked to strip his captives naked, slather them in honey and then leave them to be tormented by stinging insects. He was also heard to boast of having watched in glee as eighty monks trapped inside a flaming church in Flanders burned to death.
On the night of 26 March, FitzHubert led a stealthy assault on the stout royal castle at Devizes in Wiltshire, scaling the walls using makeshift ladders in the hope of capturing the fortress before any alarm could be raised. Night-time raids of this type were incredibly risky affairs, and rare in the Middle Ages, because coordinating such an offensive in near pitch-darkness was virtually impossible. The chances of an attacking force being detected, isolated and then butchered were high. On this occasion, however, FitzHubert succeeded. The guards were bypassed and the bulk of the garrison, then ‘enjoying untroubled sleep’, quickly overwhelmed. In theory at least, FitzHubert had been acting as the earl of Gloucester’s agent up to this point, but now he promptly declared his intention to hold Devizes for himself – the mercenary planned to turn himself into a Wiltshire warlord.
However, Robert FitzHubert then made the mistake of contacting John Marshal. The latter’s stronghold at Marlborough lay just fourteen miles to the north-east, across an open and eerie landscape, littered with ancient burial mounds and stone circles – remnants of a forgotten Neolithic age. FitzHubert proposed a parley with his new neighbour, though his precise intentions are impossible to divine. Perhaps he hoped to propose some form of alliance, or expected to scare John into submission with threats of violence. The talks may even have been a ruse, simply designed to gain FitzHubert and his men access to Marlborough Castle, whereupon the fortress might be snatched from the Marshal’s unsuspecting hands. Whatever scheme was entertained, it is clear that Robert FitzHubert badly misjudged John’s character.
The latter readily agreed to a meeting, welcoming the mercenary and a portion of his men into Marlborough. Yet the moment they entered the castle, the trap was sprung. As the gates slammed shut behind them, the visitors were surrounded, disarmed and taken captive. Having outwitted FitzHubert, John threw him ‘in a narrow dungeon to suffer hunger and tortures’. The Marshal seems to have hoped somehow to use his new prisoner as leverage in order to gain Devizes for himself. The treacherous mercenary was first handed over to the earl of Gloucester in return for a payment of 500 marks, then later dragged down to Devizes, paraded in full view of the castle’s garrison and threatened with death unless his men within surrendered. When they staunchly refused, FitzHubert was duly strung up and, in the words of William of Malmesbury, ‘hanged like a common criminal’. In the chronicler’s opinion, this was a just end for such a ‘sacrilegious wretch’, while John Marshal, it was concluded, had shown himself to be ‘a man of surprising subtlety’.
The union of the Marshal and Salisbury families
Through such machinations, John angled for advantage throughout the civil war. In reality, he was neither the grand hero of this protracted conflict, nor its arch villain – merely an ambitious, minor nobleman: canny, occasionally unscrupulous and certainly willing to exploit the turmoil around him in order to climb the ladder. Not all of the Marshal’s schemes succeeded. In the mid-1140s, John came into conflict with one of Wiltshire’s most powerful families: the lords of Salisbury. The head of this dynasty, Earl Patrick of Salisbury, ruled over one of the region’s major fortified towns (now know as Old Sarum), and his loyalties had also shifted in the course of the ‘anarchy’.
The quarrel between these two West Country warlords seems to have been sparked by John’s attempts to expand his sphere of influence eastwards at Salisbury’s expense, with the construction of a small fortress at Ludgershall. When an angry feud erupted, punctuated by raiding and bloody skirmishes, it became clear that the Marshal had met his match. The details of the entire affair are decidedly murky, but it seems that John was eventually forced to back down and agreed to make some form of submission to Earl Patrick. However, the episode did have one concrete, and quite momentous, consequence. John agreed to bind himself in alliance to Patrick of Salisbury’s family through an arranged marriage.
The Marshal already had a wife in Adelina, but this problem was readily overcome. In the twelfth century, an increasingly censorious Western Church sought to tightly regulate the practice of marriage. To avoid any possibility of incestuous union, weddings between members of the same family, up to the degree of sixth cousins, were officially forbidden. In reality, this prohibition proved largely unenforceable, given the labyrinthine web of intermarriage and kinship that bound together Europe’s aristocracy. For many, finding a spouse who was not, in some distant manner, a relation was virtually impossible. But this did mean that, when necessary, bloodlines could be perused and an illicit degree of consanguinity declared as grounds for annulment. This seems to have been the method employed to sever John’s tie to Adelina (and she soon remarried a minor Oxfordshire noble). Meanwhile, the Marshal wed Earl Patrick’s sister, Sybil. This union proved to be an effective means of reconciliation. It brought the feud to a decisive end, enhanced John’s social standing and, before long, produced a succession of new heirs. In all, Sybil gave birth to seven of John’s children: four sons and three daughters. The second-born of these, a boy, appeared around 1147. He was given the name William.
THE EXPERIENCE OF EARLY CHILDHOOD
Nothing certain is known of William Marshal’s earliest years, beyond the simple fact that he survived them. In the mid-twelfth century that in itself was no mean feat. Estimates suggest that in this period at least a third of children died within a year of birth, and perhaps as many as another third failed to reach puberty. The vast majority of these children seem to have been lost to disease and illness, though their susceptibility to these causes of death were gravely exacerbated by deficiencies in diet, living conditions and medical care. Of course, as the son of a nobleman, William’s lot was better than most, but that advantage was at least partially offset by the strife-ridden world into which he emerged.
Parents in the Middle Ages were only too aware that their children might die before reaching adulthood. They must have possessed a sense of mortality’s proximity, even probability, starkly divorced from that experienced by mothers and fathers in much of the modern world. For this reason, it used to be fashionable to suggest that most medieval parents could not possibly have forged close bonds with their offspring. Through the basic expedient of emotional self-preservation, it was thought, parents would have maintained a detached relationship with their children, perhaps even routinely exposing them to neglect. At first glance, this conclusion appears to be supported by the evidence preserved in medieval coroners’ records and collections of so-called ‘miracle stories’ – the popular tales of divine intervention, usually involving Christian saints, that were produced in their thousands in this period. This material throws up frequent stories of accidental death or injury involving children that suggest lack of care and supervision: those who fell down wells, drowned in rivers or were trampled by horses, for example. To this could be added instances of bewilderingly bizarre medical practice bordering on wilful mistreatment. The famous eleventh-century canon lawyer, Burchard of Worms, for one,complained that some parents sought to ‘cure’ children suffering from a fever either by leaving them exposed on a roof, or by placing them in an oven – the underlying suggestion being that this was deliberate infanticide. Should we then conclude that, in William Marshal’s day, few parents cherished their children; that he would have experienced little more than disregard in his first years?
In truth, the nature of our surviving sources means that the emotional landscape of this era will never be fully reconstructed, and the quality and depth of love or grief experienced within families remains uncertain. Nonetheless, more recent research suggests that parents living nine hundred years ago did treasure their offspring in much the same way as we do today. After all, there is a real danger in extrapolating generalised conclusions from self-selecting evidence, like coroners’ reports, that naturally dealt with life’s bleaker occurrences, and miracle stories, which traded in the shocking and the dramatic. A broader search indicates that many parents felt fear and anguish when their children were ill, and suffered intense anguish if a child died. This emotion might be expressed by a mother tearing her hair from her head and beating herself, or by a father literally paralysed with grief. Indeed, from the twelfth century onwards, the Church sought to counsel parents against ‘excessive’ mourning for lost children, on the grounds that it implied a lack of faith in God’s will – a move which must indicate that these emotions were widely experienced.
For all this, there were, it seems, subtle, but significant differences in the forms of attachment made with infants and children in this period, as opposed to our own. An array of evidence suggests that parents experienced a deeper and more profound sense of sorrow at the loss of an only, or sole surviving child. This appears to have been because offspring were highly valued, at least in part because of their potential to act as successors and continuators of a bloodline. Thus, the death of a last heir – particularly that of a male – was keenly felt.
The lord of Châteauroux
This sentiment found powerful expression in a striking tale related by the twelfth-century polymath Gerald of Wales – a famous churchman and author of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries – who was fascinated by everything from history to geography and the natural world. Gerald’s story was centred upon the castle of Châteauroux, in the lawless region of Berry (in central France) – a stronghold that would have a close connection to William Marshal’s own career. According to Gerald of Wales, its ruthless castellan took one of his enemies captive and, so as to ensure that he posed no further threat, had the poor wretch blinded and castrated. These were vicious punishments, yet not unknown in this brutal age; deeds guaranteed to strip a man of his own potency and to snuff out any prospect of a vengeful heir being fathered. Thus emasculated, the man remained a prisoner for many years, but was given the freedom to roam the fortress, crawling and stumbling as he went. In time, however, he ‘committed to memory all [its] passageways and even the steps which led up to the towers’, and through all these long days, forgotten and ignored by those around him, the man nursed his cold hatred.
This anger eventually boiled over and, when an opportunity presented itself, the mutilated captive took sudden and terrible action. Seizing the lord of Châteauroux’s only son and heir, the prisoner dragged the boy ‘to the topmost crenellation of one of the towers’, locking all the doors behind him, and there ‘he stood outlined against the sky, threatening to throw the boy over’. The castle erupted in chaos as ‘everyone screamed in anguish’. According to Gerald:
The boy’s father came running, and no one’s distress was greater than his. He made every offer he could think of in an attempt to obtain his son’s release. [But] the prisoner replied that he would not give the boy up until the father had first cut off his own testicles, [and though] the castellan went on with his appeals, they were all in vain.
Struggling with this horrific dilemma, the lord of Châteauroux eventually resolved to feign agreement and beckoned an onlooker to deliver ‘a mighty blow [to his] lower body, to give the impression that he had mutilated himself’, while ‘all those present groaned’ at the sight. But the blind man was not so readily fooled. He called out, asking the castellan ‘where he felt the most pain’ and when the lord ‘replied falsely that it was in his loins’, the captive stepped forward, readying himself to push the boy over. The castellan had himself struck a second time and, in answer to the same question, claimed that ‘worst pain was in his heart’, but again he was not believed. By now, the blind man had dragged his hostage ‘to the very edge of the parapet’. Finally, the lord realised he could hesitate no longer:
The third time, to save his son, the father really did cut off his own testicles. He shouted out that it was his teeth that hurt most. ‘This time I believe you,’ said the blind man, ‘and I know what I am talking about. Now I am avenged of the wrongs done to me, in part at least . . . You will never beget another son, and you shall certainly have no joy in this one.’
With that, the blind man ‘hurled himself over the battlements . . . taking the boy with him’, and both died, their bodies broken by the dreadful fall. Gerald of Wales concluded this grim tale by noting that the lord of Châteauroux had a monastery built on the spot where the pair landed ‘to save his son’s soul’; a religious house that, supposedly, was still standing.
Much of this story may be fantastical. Certainly its details cannot be verified in any other historical text and, in Gerald’s telling, its style echoes that popularised in miracle accounts – the difference being, of course, that here its conclusion brought not divine salvation, but death and despair. Nonetheless, Gerald expected the caustic, reciprocal violence that drove the action, and the central drama of a father’s love for his son, to ring true for his twelfth-century audience. This tale was designed to be believable. It has sometimes been suggested, therefore, that it demonstrates, in gruesome terms, precisely what a caring parent was willing to sacrifice for their child in the Middle Ages. Crucially, however, this insight needs to be refined. Gerald’s story was grounded in notions of patrilineal inheritance (through the male line) and the immense value accorded to sole surviving heirs. The father’s anguish, his willingness to suffer, and the depth of his eventual grief were all understood, precisely because the boy ‘was his only son’, never to be replaced. With his death a bloodline ended. As a younger son, William Marshal soon learnt that he might not be valued quite so highly.
THE SIEGE OF NEWBURY
It is likely that in his earliest years William enjoyed some of the comforts of childhood in an affluent noble household. This time was probably spent at the family estate at Hamstead Marshall, by now extended to include at least one timber-and-earth castle of the motte-and-bailey form – that is, with a raised earth mound (the motte) ringed by a ditch and a surrounding courtyard (the bailey) usually enclosed by a wooden palisade. Little would have been seen of his father John, but William seems to have forged a much stronger emotional connection with his mother, Sybil of Salisbury. This was not always the case, as noble and royal families frequently made use of wet-nurses, and it was common for these women to play a major role in a child’s upbringing. Richard the Lionheart – William’s contemporary and the future king of England – grew so fond of his wet-nurse, Hodierna, that he later rewarded her with gifts of land, and a small Wiltshire settlement, Knoyle Hodierne, came to bear her name. There may well have been opportunities for William to engage in the kind of simple, childish forms of play that would still be familiar to us today. Gerald of Wales, for one, recalled how, as a boy, he had played happily on the Pembrokeshire beaches of southwest Wales; there his brothers built sandcastles, while Gerald made sand-churches, seemingly already aware of his future career as an ecclesiastic. Children might also play with rudimentary toys, and these were often gendered, with boys receiving toy knights and doll’s houses given to girls.
In 1152, however, at around the age of five, William Marshal’s childhood was violently interrupted in the last gasp of the civil war. The ferocity of the conflict had abated in the late 1140s, as it became apparent that the deadlock between Stephen and Matilda would not be broken by force alone. Now in his mid-fifties, Stephen remained king, but his position had been further undermined by events on the Continent. There Empress Matilda’s husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, used the distraction of England’s disorder to invade Normandy. By 1145 he had seized all of Stephen’s Norman lands and was declared duke of Normandy with the connivance of the French king. Geoffrey stopped short of leading his armies across the Channel to England in a direct intervention, but his occupation of Normandy nonetheless inflicted a mortal wound upon Stephen’s dynastic ambitions.
Almost all of the king’s remaining supporters held land in both England and Normandy, and knew full well that steadfast support for Stephen’s line might cost them their valued Continental estates. A compromise was needed. The best prospect for a settlement was Matilda and Geoffrey’s eldest son, Henry. This redheaded, fiery tempered youth possessed a strong hereditary claim to the English crown through Matilda’s bloodline, and could rule as a male warrior-king in a manner that had always proved impossible for the empress. Henry had already visited England on three occasions, and when Geoffrey of Anjou conferred upon him the title of duke of Normandy, probably in January 1150, his prospects seemed virtually assured. All that remained was to push Stephen into a corner and either force a settlement or seize the crown outright.
It was in these final years of manoeuvring that John Marshal overstepped the mark and came into direct conflict with the faltering king. Ever ambitious to extend his lordship and to expand his sphere of influence, John built a new fortified outpost. His aim appears to have been to assert a degree of control over a significant crossroads, where the route from London to the west intersected that running north–south between Oxford and Winchester. The exact position of this new stronghold is highly debateable. TheHistory of William Marshal located it in Newbury (then a small town), but given the lack of any archaeological remains there, the castle may perhaps be identified with a sizeable motte that can still be found nestled atop a natural slope, less than a mile east of John’s existing castle at Hamstead Marshall.
Determined to horde the last vestiges of his power, King Stephen decided to punish John’s presumption. In 1152 he marched on Newbury and laid siege to the Marshal’s new fortress with a sizeable army. John was not present at this point, and the lightly provisioned castle was under the command of his constable (the leading military officer of the Marshal’s household). Stephen struck hard and fast, offering bounteous riches to whoever breached the defences. This first, furious assault faltered, however, when the garrison threw ‘slabs of stone, sharpened stakes and massive pieces of timber’ down on the advancing enemy as they clambered ‘over the ditches and up the embankments’, and a lull in the fighting followed.
Word of the siege now reached John Marshal, and he made a calculated decision. Using messengers, he established a line of communication with King Stephen and begged for a brief truce, probably on a promise of imminent surrender. Given his reputation, John knew that his word alone would not be enough to secure terms. So, just as King Stephen and Robert of Gloucester had done in 1142, the Marshal offered up one of his sons as a hostage; the guarantor of good behaviour. He did not choose his eldest son by Sybil of Salisbury and namesake to fulfil this role, but rather his second (and, at this point, youngest) son, William. The boy was duly handed over to the king’s troops and Stephen withdrew a distance, so that the Marshal could parley with his constable and organise the castle’s capitulation. But, of course, the king had been deceived.
The threat to William Marshal’s life
The moment John gained access to Newbury castle he began hurried preparations for its renewed defence, installing ‘valiant knights, men-at-arms and archers’ – men who would be ‘unwilling to surrender’. As the History of William Marshal admitted, John ‘had no time for the idea of peace’ and this put his ‘child’s life in danger, because the king [soon] realised that he had been tricked’. The author of the History managed to steer an exceptionally agile path through this whole episode, describing events in close detail, yet never openly admonishing either John Marshal or King Stephen. Instead, when criticism did come, it was directed against the supposedly treacherous and cowardly advisors in Stephen’s inner circle – those described by the biographer as ‘losengiers’ or ‘deceivers’ – who now ‘stepped forward [and] advised the king to hang the child’. They were condemned as ‘wicked and base men’ for making this suggestion, yet remarkably, the biographer offered not a word of censure as he went on to describe how ‘news of all this reached [John], but he said that he did not care about the child, since he still had the anvils and the hammers to forge even finer ones’. Enraged at this affront and deception, Stephen ordered the young boy ‘to be seized and taken to the gallows for hanging’.
So it was that William Marshal came face-to-face with death at the tender age of five. John’s apparently callous disregard for his son’s life might seem deplorable and, even in the twelfth century, it would have elicited a degree of shock. The use of one’s children as diplomatic hostages was commonplace in Western Europe; the act of forsaking a child in favour of military advantage was not. John had a proven track record of duplicity, so the very fact that King Stephen accepted young William as surety for his father’s good faith shows that the provision of such a hostage was deemed a categorical guarantee of fidelity. William may not have been that most prized of offspring, the first-born legitimate son, but he was John’s blood kin nonetheless. No one could have expected him to be discarded in this hard-hearted manner.
It is possible, of course, that John Marshal took a calculated risk with William’s life. Ever since the events at Exeter, back in 1136, Stephen had been regarded as a clement monarch. Time after time, he had failed to act with ruthless resolve. Perhaps John judged that his ageing king would never bring himself to kill a boy in cold blood. If so, this was a terrible gamble. Siege warfare was a brutish, grinding business during the Middle Ages; one in which the battle for morale was everything. In this era, armies on both sides of a siege routinely perpetrated acts of atrocity in order to intimidate their opponents or to force surrender. A defending garrison might hang the mutilated corpses of captured attackers from the walls, or dismember bodies and fling limbs and heads back over the battlements. Besiegers often threatened to hang or butcher prisoners in plain view of a garrison and, as the case of Robert FitzHubert at Devizes attested, such threats were usually acted upon. Considering the events of 1152 in this context, it is clear that while John Marshal might have hoped, even suspected, that his son would survive, this outcome was by no means a certainty. In essence, the Marshal had decided that success at Newbury was worth more than young William’s safety.
In the days that followed, it seems that William Marshal’s life was endangered not just once, but on three separate occasions. He was threatened first with hanging, then led to a catapult to be cast into the fortress so as ‘to strike fear into [the defenders’] hearts’, and finally prepared for use as a human shield during a frontal assault on the walls, where he faced being ‘squashed to a pulp’. William’s mother, Sybil of Salisbury, was said to have ‘experienced such great pain’ and anxiety through this period, because she believed that her young son was doomed to endure ‘atrocious suffering’. But throughout, Newbury’s garrison remained resolute in their refusal to surrender. How then did the boy survive?
The only answer is provided by the History of William Marshal, the sole surviving source to preserve a record of these events. Its author evidently drew upon the oral tradition of William’s own recollections of Newbury. According to this account, his simple, unmannered innocence stayed the king’s hand, time after time: asking to play with a guard’s spear, as he was led to the gallows; or happily preparing to hop into the catapult’s sling, thinking it to be a child’s swing. Charmed by this boy, Stephen halted the execution, apparently declaring that ‘anyone who could ever allow him to die in such agony would certainly have a very cruel heart’.
Later, as the siege continued, William and the king were even said to have played a game of ‘knights’ together in the royal tent, using flower stems as mock swords. Though unharmed, the boy remained a crown hostage for many months, quite probably more than a year. Newbury eventually succumbed to the king’s forces, though John Marshal avoided capture, and Stephen moved north-east to invest the major opposition-held castle at Wallingford. From this point on, negotiations to end the civil war began in earnest, and terms were finally agreed at Winchester on 6 November 1153: Stephen was to remain king, but would be succeeded by Empress Matilda’s son, Henry, duke of Normandy. It was only after peace had been settled that William Marshal was returned to his family. Tellingly, the History noted that ‘William returned to his father’ and added that ‘his mother was overjoyed to see him’, yet made no reference to John Marshal’s reaction.
The impact of William Marshal’s early childhood
In spite of this apparent emotional detachment, John Marshal seems to have loomed large in William’s memory. As a father, he may have been a distant figure – encountered only fleetingly during the boy’s early childhood, and even then at arm’s length – but there is an inescapable sense that John left an imprint. His image – as the grizzled, hard-bitten veteran of the civil war, his face disfigured by burns, one eye a ruin – was seared into the verses of the History of William Marshal, a text which often relied upon William’s own memories.
In later life, William seems to have admired many of his father’s supposed qualities, picturing him as a fearsome warrior and devoted royal servant, but also as a shrewd and ambitious warlord, beloved by his followers. How much William knew or understood of John’s political machinations during the civil war, or his ruthless treatment of rivals such as Robert FitzHubert, remains unclear. On the surface at least, William appears to have forgiven his father for the cold-hearted decision he made during the siege of Newbury. As an adult, William evidently relished the story of his captivity and early brush with death, enjoying this self-deprecating tale of a boy discarded by his father, replete with instructive lessons about cunning and honour. It may almost have acquired the status of a foundation myth – in the course of his long career, Marshal would rise to unimaginable heights, yet he could always remind those around him that he had almost been executed by a king when just a boy.
There is no way of knowing whether the actual experience of being a hostage and facing the threat of death – or, perhaps more importantly, his subsequent reflection upon these events – left any enduring psychological marks. Perhaps the repeated telling of the tale represented some form of defence mechanism or coping device, but William may equally have judged his father’s actions, and his own predicament, as a natural consequence of medieval war. It is notable, however, that in later years William never placed his own kin, nor even his knights and retainers, in such a position of forsaken peril.