Biographies & Memoirs

Part II

ADULTHOOD:
A KNIGHT IN SERVICE

3

A WARRIOR’S LIFE

In 1166, William Marshal was a professional warrior, newly elevated to the status of a knight, in desperate search of work. His first taste of combat at Neufchâtel had left him with an appetite for action, but also cost him his warhorse. Having lost the favour of the lord of Tancarville, William was now staring at a potentially bleak future of poverty and obscurity. Marshal was not the only twelfth-century knight to find himself in this predicament – short of money and gainful employ. This was the era in which knighthood emerged as a distinct class and calling, attracting thousands of young nobles and aspiring, upwardly mobile men to its ranks. The obvious, and increasingly pressing, question was: what were these warriors actually supposed to do? How were they to find an outlet for their military skills and their social ambitions?

In a culture that revered martial qualities, knights like William naturally hungered after opportunities to hone and to display their prowess. They had not spent long years training as warriors for nothing. More basic, practical requirements for financial reward and security also had to be addressed. Many knights might find long-term positions in aristocratic households, or mesnie, but unless Europe was to go up in flames, the need for such warriors in actual war was always going to be finite. The onset of peace in northern France in 1166 showed how any lull in fighting could leave members of the knightly class surplus to requirements. Under such circumstances, a spiral of lawlessness and discord could take hold, as lords actively sought reasons to put their prized warriors in the field – through border disputes or raiding – and predatory packs of ‘freelance’ knights roamed the landscape.*

The knightly tournament emerged in response to this dilemma, as organised contests in which medieval warriors could fight under controlled conditions, earning both renown and financial reward. The first small-scale tourneys appeared in the eleventh century, but after 1100 events became larger and more frequent, especially in north-eastern France, across regions such as Flanders, Hainault and Picardy. This area – nestled between the great German Empire and the small kingdom of France (centred around Paris) – had been particularly unruly in the eleventh century: the site of ruinous, thuggish feuding between rival warlords. By the mid-1160s, when William Marshal was knighted, tournaments were being held throughout Western Europe, including parts of the Angevin realm. These contests captured the aristocratic and knightly imagination, becoming the great craze of the day.

In the wake of the Neufchâtel campaign, news spread through Normandy that a tournament would be held just north of Le Mans. The History of William Marshal declared that ‘any man seeking to win renown would go to tournaments, if he had the wherewithal’. Not surprisingly, William was attracted by the chance to prove his skills, but the question of a warhorse remained. The lord of Tancarville announced his intention to attend the event, leading a group of forty knights, and though Marshal was allowed to tag along, he was said to have been ‘downcast’ at the prospect of having to ride a mere palfrey into the fray. Finally, on the very eve of the tournament, the chamberlain relented – perhaps the prospect of seeing his young cousin shamed by fighting astride a lowly riding horse proved too much to bear.

William was given a destrier, but the very last one available. The steed looked the part, being ‘strong, fine and well-proportioned’, but it turned out that most of the Tancarville household regarded it as unrideable because the animal ‘was so wild it could not be tamed’. William did his best, loosening the horse’s bridle to make it more even-tempered, but he must have looked ahead to the next day with a degree of trepidation.

Entering a tournament was a gamble at the best of times. Success might bring William a measure of distinction and some much-needed financial reward. But the risks were not insignificant. Failure would only deepen his penury – knights, and their families, were known to have been ruined by the debts accrued through repeated tournament defeats – and William chanced injury or worse. Combat in these events was conducted in a ‘controlled’ setting, but there is no indication that tournament knights used specific, blunted weapons. They had to rely on their prowess and their armour to save them. Under these conditions, wounds and broken bones were commonplace, and even death was a possibility, especially if you were unhorsed and trampled by other mounts. Records indicate that in one particularly bad year, fifteen knights died tourneying in Germany. With all these risks and dangers in mind, holding his future in his hands, William embarked upon his first tournament.

THE TOURNAMENT

It would be tempting to impose a modern fantasy of the medieval world upon the twelfth-century tournament. To imagine William pitted against opponents in a well-ordered, almost genteel, joust, bevies of noble maidens agog at the sight of Marshal’s prowess. But the world of the joust belonged to a different age, still more than a century in the future. Knightly tournaments in William’s day were entirely different beasts: imbued with some pageantry and awash with colour, yes, but riotous, chaotic affairs, tantamount to large-scale war games, played out by teams of mounted knights across great swathes of territory. The origin of the term ‘tournament’ gives a sense of the spectacle involved – being derived from the French ‘torner’ (to revolve) – evoking a whirling swarm of knights, though contemporaries also referred to these events as a ‘recreation’, ‘amusement’ or, in Latin, simply as a ‘ludus’ (game).

Tournaments were a critical feature of knightly culture and lifestyle in the central Middle Ages. Kings often viewed these events with suspicion – allowing great lords to assemble with hundreds of warriors seemed like an invitation to insurrection, even open rebellion. To the Church they were dangerous and wasteful extravagances, and it did its best to stamp them out. A succession of papal pronouncements outlawed these ‘detestable revels and shows’ as fonts of pride and vanity, cautioning that anyone who died in such fighting would be denied a Christian burial. By the thirteenth century, clerics liked to suggest that slain tournament knights might either return as tormented spectres or languish in hell, condemned to an eternity in burning armour. But knights and their lords refused to listen. Across France, Germany, the Low Countries and northern Iberia they engaged in and sponsored tournaments regardless.

The vogue for these military contests took hold just as William reached adulthood. They were the closest thing to a professional sport in his world, only with higher stakes and a clear emphasis on the ‘game’ as training for real medieval warfare, and in time they would become a fundamental feature of Marshal’s career. His first tournament, held between Sainte Jamme and Valennes, was fairly typical for its time. Played out not within some confined arena, but across an open area of landscape thirty miles wide, it involved hundreds of knights drawn from across the Angevin realm, as well as ‘a numerous company’ led by King William of Scotland and the revered warrior Philip of Valognes, described by the History as ‘the handsomest knight of all’.

The mechanics of the medieval tournament

In common with so much of knightly culture and custom, the practical mechanics of the tournament – its rituals, rules and regulations – came together during William Marshal’s lifetime. Events were held through most of the year, excepting the period from Lent to Easter, sometimes as frequently as every two weeks. Notice of an impending tournament would customarily be given well in advance, to allow time for preparation and travel, but an established schedule of well-known contests soon developed – the equivalent of a tournament circuit. Northern French events were usually held between two designated sites, as in Sainte Jamme and Valennes, located in the hinterland between established lordships and well away from major cities like Paris or Rouen. Most resembled a war game between two sides, with the likes of the English, Normans, Angevins and Poitevins on one team, and the ‘French’ from regions such as Flanders, Burgundy, Blois and Champagne on the other, and often the ‘teams’ would congregate at the specified settlements at least a day in advance.

The simple fact of hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of knights and their servants travelling from one tournament to the next, all requiring lodging and food, caused significant local disruption. The History of William Marshal described how an event held some years later in Champagne attracted so many participants, all coming from different directions, ‘that the whole district was swarming with them and taken by storm’. Large, prosperous fairs were established at major tournament venues, with armourers, farriers, craftsmen, merchants and entertainers all coming to ply their trade. In time, events acquired many of the trappings of the modern music festival – the massed crowds and tented cities, the glorious spectacle and ostentatious display, even the notion of celebrity.

Most tournaments were fought on a single day, though some preliminary contests might take place on the last evening before the main event: training matches between pairs of swordsmen, or one-on-one jousts in which knights sought to unhorse their opponents with a lance. This was often an occasion for green warriors like William to get their first experience, though he did not do so at Sainte Jamme, perhaps because he was too busy trying to master his unruly warhorse. It also gave knights an opportunity to gain the measure of their opponents, though unscrupulous (or canny) old hands sometimes watched these fight in the hope of marking out weaker, inexpert quarry, ripe for capture the following day. For many, the eve of the tournament was a time for socialising. Wealthier lords and knights typically took lodgings, rather than resorting to the use of tents, and it was customary for the great and the good to visit one another, sharing stories and gossip, renewing friendships and alliances.

The day of the tournament itself began with a flurry of final preparations: the laborious process of pulling on mail hauberks, coifs and leggings, usually achieved with the assistance of a squire, the fine adjustment of shield straps and horse tack, a last check of lance, sword and perhaps mace, a test of helmet fit, though this cumbersome piece of armour would not be donned until just before the fighting began. Amid all of this clamorous activity, most knights found the time to consume some breakfast – a piece of early thirteenth-century chivalric literature cautioned tournament-goers not to forget to eat in the excitement of the moment. After 1200 it also became common for warriors to start the day with religious observance, prayer and the taking of Mass – all steps to gird the soul should the worst happen, though the famed thirteenth-century German knight Ulrich von Liechtenstein admitted that he prayed for luck more than anything else.

Around mid-morning, the various retinues of knights began to gather at one of two opposing ‘lists’. These were the makeshift fences or pens where teams congregated, probably placed on this occasion just to the south-east of Sainte Jamme. William’s biographer described how a more sober atmosphere took hold as the ‘companies rode forward in tight and ordered formation’ to join the Norman and English team. The time for joking, idle boasts and threats was past. Visual display was central to the tournament. Being seen to possess the finest, most resplendent arms and armour mattered to William and his peers; indeed, the History noted that the Tancarville knights were up half of the night burnishing their mail.

The tournament field was also flooded with brilliant colours. The two main teams seem to have been distinguished by huge banners held aloft in their midsts, marked with distinctive colour schemes, patterns and devices, with that of the Norman–English team depicting two golden lions against a red background. The smaller component parts of each massed team – the individual military retinues, like that of Tancarville – also fought under their own identifying banners and by 1166 it was customary for knights to sport these colours and devices, either on shields or on cloth surcoats worn over their armour. The Tancarville colours of the day – and thus, those now worn by William – appear to have been white with a red border.

The use of banners and vivid designs had their origins in practical military necessity. These striking visual markers allowed warriors to instantly navigate their way through the frenzied confusion of medieval combat: to locate and follow their lord and fellow knights; and, just as importantly, to identify opponents and enemies. William soon discovered that, both on the tournament field and in real-life combat, there was enormous advantage to be gained from fighting in packs, not the tightly ordered ranks of a Roman legion, but looser, yet nonetheless coherent, groups of warriors, moving together and protecting one another. In the twelfth century, that type of coordination required unmistakeable visual cues. This seems to be how the notion of heraldry evolved in the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Certainly by the end of William’s long life, nobles across Europe were increasingly expected to adopt specific identifying colours and devices. Soon, the bewildering number of these ‘coats of arms’ was such that individuals were employed to memorise them and then move through the lists before a tournament, naming each contingent – these men were the first heralds.

Sound also had its part to play. Medieval commanders routinely made use of drums, horns and trumpets to deliver aural signals, aiming to achieve some measure of control over their troops, while also stirring hearts. In later decades, rousing music might accompany the preliminary stages of a tournament, inspiring knights as they prepared for the fight to come, though none seems to have been played at Sainte Jamme. However, William and his peers were already using specific war cries to rally and direct one another. At Neufchâtel Marshal had shouted ‘Tancarville’ to rouse his fellow knights, and that was probably the call his retinue used now. Most war cries were similarly simple, invoking single place names, kings or saints, though they could involve slightly more complex formulae. The traditional Norman rally cry was ‘Dex aïe’ (‘God our help’), while knights from the French town of Châtillon, near Paris, shouted ‘Alom lour Châtillon’ (‘Go get them Châtillon’).

Once William Marshal and all the other knights had assembled at the lists outside Sainte Jamme, the two sides rode out to prepare for the main event of the day: the great mêlée. Knights on the opposing sides customarily took up positions, facing one another across an open field, often in single extended lines. Helmets were donned and a hush settled across the throng. Then, at a shout or horn-blast, the main charge began. This awe-inspiring spectacle of blurred colour and deafening noise reached a crescendo as the two sides crashed into one another with shuddering force, and the fighting began. These were the most dangerous moments of the day. William learnt over the years that to panic, lose control of your horse and fall in the middle of this wheeling mass of knights was to court death, and he witnessed many disasters first-hand. Success, even basic survival, required steely nerves, physical strength and masterful horsemanship.

During most tournaments, after the first phases of combat, the mêlée would break up into smaller contests, played out over many miles of countryside. In the course of this extended war game, contingents of warriors might try to use the landscape to their advantage, set ambushes, even attempt to hide. The whole affair could take hours, sometimes lasting till dusk. Like every participant, William’s goal in all this was to capture opponents using a mixture of skill, brute force and guile, while avoiding being taken prisoner himself and protecting his lord. The crucial dynamic of the entire tournament was that success brought reward; not only reputation and honour, but also material gain, because captive knights were expected to pay a ransom in return for release – usually in cash – and might also relinquish their horse, arms and armour. Given that this was his first attempt, William did remarkably well at Sainte Jamme, securing ‘two very valuable prisoners’: one an unnamed knight whom he battered to the ground with the stump of a lance; and the prize of the day, Philip of Valognes, taken early in the general mêlée when Marshal deftly rode in and grabbed the bridle of Philip’s mount. This neat trick – akin to snatching the steering wheel – was devilishly difficult to pull off, but gave William effective control over his adversary’s horse, enabling him to ‘drag [Philip] away from the tournament’. Thus immobilised, he submitted and promised to pay a ransom.

This tournament transformed William’s fortunes, setting him on the path to financial security. ‘Only that day’, the History noted, ‘Marshal had been a poor man as regards possessions and horses’, yet he came away with four warhorses, as well as hacks, palfreys, sumpters and harnesses. After Sainte Jamme, the attitude of the Tancarville household altered. Impressed by the rich pickings he had accrued, ‘they paid Marshal great honour and treated him so courteously, more so than before’. As William’s biographer candidly admitted, material assets symbolised status; they marked Marshal out as a man of means and substance. As the History bluntly put it: ‘You are what you have got, and no more than that.’

Tournaments played an essential role in shaping and defining the knightly class as a whole across Western Europe, and would become a critical feature of William Marshal’s own career. Being full-scale war games, rather than mannered individual combats, these events offered valuable, perhaps even essential, training for war. As one contemporary chronicler put it when singing the tournament’s praises: ‘the science of battle, if not practised beforehand, cannot be summoned when necessary’. William’s success at Sainte Jamme proved that tournaments also provided real opportunities for advancement. But, beyond these practical issues lay deeper, conceptual concerns. The tournament gave medieval knights and their lords a perfect opportunity to display their qualities: to show prowess through martial skill, to prove one’s honour by respecting the rules of the game, to exhibit largesse by organising events or fitting out one’s retinue and to affirm status by being seen either within, or better still at the head of, a large, finely equipped military entourage. In the later twelfth century, the tournament was where you showed yourself to be the archetypal preudhomme – the best kind of man.

All of this served to heighten the importance of visual display. Tournaments were events that demanded an audience; acts of valour and feats of arms had to be witnessed if they were to garner renown. There was more than a whiff of shallow narcissism and conceit about the whole affair, with as much, if not more, emphasis placed on being seen to do the right thing, as the action itself. To modern sensibilities this can all seem rather distasteful, and some contemporaries were equally unimpressed. The famed early thirteenth-century churchman and preacher, Jacques of Vitry, denounced tournaments as breeding grounds for deadly sins like pride and vanity. Nonetheless, in the History of William Marshal, the strong emphasis on spectacle and display seems utterly unselfconscious. For men like William, the need for an audience was a simple fact of knightly life.

Even so, twelfth-century tournaments were not really designed with spectators in mind. Some did attend events, but they were relatively few and far between; peering from the edge of the field, occasionally accommodated in rudimentary stands. Only once, at a contest much later in Marshal’s career, did the History mention a group of noble-born ladies in attendance. For William, then, the tournament was no grand gladiatorial combat waged before a feverish throng; nor was it the formal joust of the later Middle Ages, performed within a contained arena for the entertainment of the crowd. For simple, practical reasons, early tournaments provided few thrills for onlookers. The preliminaries and the first grand charge were certainly worth a look, but after that, once the mêlée fragmented, the fighting moved out into the open landscape and was impossible to follow. In Marshal’s day the critical audience did not stand outside the action looking in, they participated themselves. The key witnesses to all of this dazzling skill, manly daring and ostentatious pageantry were other knights. It was these peers who would stand testament to a warrior’s worth, validating his achievements and broadcasting his fame.

The ideal of chivalry

The History’s account of the Sainte Jamme tournament contained one additional, seemingly minor, observation. In this tiny, incidental detail, the binding mechanic of the medieval tournament is glimpsed, and, by turns, a tantalising window opens on to the mental and moral landscape of William Marshal’s thought world. The History recorded that after William snatched Philip of Valognes’ bridle and dragged him from the field, ‘Philip readily gave his pledge to the Marshal’ and, trusting him, William ‘let him go’. Philip had promised that, when the reckoning came at day’s end, he would settle any ransom or forfeit due, and his word alone was deemed sufficient. Both men shared a deeply ingrained understanding that they had to honour the rules of this game; that by social and cultural convention, any failure to do so would be regarded as shameful. Such a transgression would cause disgrace and a loss of status, not only for the individual, but also for his retinue and kin.

In William’s day, the ‘chevaliers’ or knights who understood and observed these customs were following the principles of ‘chevalerie’ – chivalry. In a literal sense, they knew how horsemen should act. These precepts might be bent, even manipulated, to one’s advantage, but to be seen to break them openly would be to invite scandal and ignominy. The idea that knights ought to adhere to a higher code of conduct had been gradually percolating through Western society since the eleventh century. Embryonic notions of chivalry were stimulated and shaped by a wide array of interlocking forces, from Christian theology and the emergence of crusading and the Military Orders, to Western Europe’s deepening fascination with the myth-history of knighthood. But it was on the tournament field that such concepts came into ever sharper focus, and from the mid-twelfth century onwards these war games were both the catalyst and the cauldron of chivalric ideals. It is no accident that at precisely this moment, authors of popular chivalric fiction began to write of Arthurian heroes like Lancelot fighting at tournaments.

For William and his contemporaries, chivalry was a rather loosely defined set of customs and expectations – a kind of collective sensibility – chiefly concerned with regulating conduct between knights and with establishing what obligations lords and knights owed to one another. As yet, ‘chivalrous’ knights showed little interest in wider social responsibilities; they were certainly not egalitarian upholders of justice or protectors of the poor. It would be decades before these rules became more clearly defined and delineated, and almost two centuries before the traditions of chivalry were refined and encoded in works like Le livre de chevalerie (The Book of Chivalry), authored by the famed fourteenth-century knight Geoffrey of Charny. By this time, foolish warriors might undertake acts of extraordinary folly in pursuit of these heightened chivalric ideals. In the 1330s, for example, a number of English knights went to war against France wearing eye patches, having sworn to ladies at court that they would not open one of their eyes until victory was achieved. Needless to say, thus encumbered, most died as a result.

William Marshal’s career

William seems to have spent the next year, perhaps even longer, travelling around the tournament circuit, operating increasingly as something akin to a free agent, though still sporting the colours of Tancarville. His fortunes varied. At an event held between St Brice and Bouère, to the south-west of Le Mans, Marshal was set upon by a group of five knights all intent on bludgeoning him into submission. ‘They manhandled him terribly’, according to the History, ‘turning the helmet on his head by force from back to front’, and though William eventually managed to break free, the reversed helm covering his face meant he was now riding blind and all but suffocating. The battered helmet proved so difficult to dislodge that Marshal badly sliced one of his fingers ripping it off and was gasping for air by the time he had freed his head. At a later tournament, he was captured by the Flemish knight Matthew of Wallincourt and had to forfeit one of his warhorses. William paid his ransom, but tried to persuade Wallincourt to show leniency by releasing his destrier – seemingly on the grounds that he was still just a young, inexperienced knight – but Matthew flatly refused. Marshal would remember this slight for decades to come. Despite these setbacks, on the whole William seems to have prospered. His biographer observed that through this period ‘he led such a very fine life that many were jealous of him’, adding that his fame began to spread through France.

Modern historians have typically indentified this period, in the mid-to late 1160s, as the start of William’s abiding love affair with the knightly tournament. It has recently been suggested that, by 1170, William was already ‘one of the most accomplished and devoted of the tournament champions of his day’. In fact, the evidence suggests that, for now, Marshal’s engagement with the tournament scene was actually more intermittent. The clearest indication of this fact was his decision, either in late 1167 or early 1168, to return to England for the first time in nearly eight years. William was no longer the penniless supplicant seeking the favour of his elder brother John. He came home, instead, as a man of some reputation and independent means. But in doing so, he was turning his back on the tournament circuit, because these knightly contests had been banned in England by King Henry II for being too disruptive to the peace of the realm. Marshal was looking to take the next step in his career – to gain experience of real warfare. He soon learnt to his cost that it did not always conform to the chivalric etiquette of the tournament.

KNIGHT PROTECTOR

With favourable winds, William crossed the Channel without difficulty and rode straight for the West Country. According to the History, he returned to England ‘because that was the country of his birth and because he wished to see his worthy kin’. But there is no evidence that William made any effort to visit the surviving members of his immediate family at this point, nor does he seem to have paid his respects to his late father, now interred at Bradenstoke Priory in Wiltshire.* Marshal had a different kind of family encounter in mind; one that had little to do with sentimentality or emotion, but was driven by the far more pragmatic pursuit of patronage. He made straight for Salisbury, seat of his powerful uncle, Earl Patrick – a man who had thrived in the aftermath of the civil war, enjoying advancement under the new king, and one who now retained the services of fifty to sixty knights.

William’s brief, bitter taste of life as an impoverished, lord-less warrior in 1166 had left its mark. He had no intention of risking such a fate again. His burgeoning martial reputation might have earned him a position in any number of military households across Normandy and England, but a more permanent post could only be cemented through a close family bond. Earl Patrick was no sibling and potential rival, like Marshal’s brother John. He was an established noble; a man of prospects, capable of acting as William’s mentor, of shaping and advancing his career. When Patrick duly offered him a position in the Salisbury mesnie, a flourishing future looked certain. Shortly thereafter, the wisdom of William’s decision to seek service with his uncle was amply borne out. In early 1168 Earl Patrick was called to campaign in south-western France, at the side of King Henry II himself. Marshal had already met one monarch, King Stephen, as a child hostage. Now he was to be drawn to the centre of the new Angevin dynasty.

The Angevin dynasty

In the first decade following his coronation in 1154, Henry II proved himself to be an astute, dynamic and unfailingly ambitious ruler. Royal authority in England was quickly re-established, as Henry and his diligent officials reconstructed systems of law, justice and governance. Control over the minting of coinage was reasserted, while the determined enforcement of crown rights and strict imposition of taxation soon restocked the royal treasury. Impressively, all of this was achieved while holding on to Normandy and Anjou, and expanding Angevin influence into Brittany, in the far north-western corner of France. Throughout this period, Henry was able to rely on the steadying hand of his mother, Empress Matilda, who lived in semi-retirement near Rouen until her death in September 1167. But Henry II’s power, the extent of his realm and the course of his reign were also defined by his marriage to another remarkable woman: Eleanor of Aquitaine.

In the words of one contemporary, Eleanor was ‘a woman without compare’ – strong-willed, sharp-minded and driven by a lust for life. Frustratingly, no chronicler gave any hint of her physical appearance, even though many described her husband Henry in detail. By birth she was heiress to the great duchy of Aquitaine, with lands stretching across western and south-western France, and dominion over the cities of Poitiers and Bordeaux. Eleanor’s colourful career began long before she met Henry. In 1137, at around the age of fifteen, she was wed to King Louis VII of France, head of the royal Capetian dynasty. This seemed an advantageous union, promising as it did to unite the small French kingdom centred around Paris with the lands of Aquitaine, but Eleanor appears to have felt little warmth for her rather unprepossessing husband – a man whom she later likened to a monk because of his desultory sexual appetite.

In the late 1140s, Eleanor and Louis travelled to the Holy Land during the disastrous Second Crusade, but in Syria the queen was accused of having an incestuous affair with her uncle, Raymond of Poitiers, ruler of the principality of Antioch. Eleanor brazened it out, refusing to be cowed, but the scandalous story spread across Europe. The gravest problem, however, was that the royal marriage failed to secure the Capetian line; two healthy daughters were born to the couple, but no male heir. Eventually, in 1152, the union was annulled on grounds of consanguinity, seemingly by mutual consent. Just eight weeks later – and much to Louis VII’s horror – Eleanor married the more vigorous Henry of Anjou and Normandy, a man twelve years her junior, and an arch-rival of the Capetians. When Henry became king of England two years later, a vast new Angevin realm was created, with lands stretching from the borders of Scotland in the north to the foothills of the Pyrenees in the south.

For the first fifteen years, Henry and Eleanor’s marriage flourished, as a veritable bumper crop of heirs was born. The couple’s first child, William, died at the age of just three, but seven more children followed, all of whom survived to adulthood. The boy who became the Angevins’ primary male heir was born on 28 February 1155 and christened Henry; three further sons – Richard, Geoffrey and John – and three daughters – Matilda, Eleanor and Joanne – came after. King Henry II was delighted. With this brood he could found an enduring dynasty and forge a web of diplomatic alliances through marriage, safeguarding Angevin interests.

Ruling such a huge and diverse empire presented formidable challenges. Chief among these was the enduring and embittered enmity of the Capetians, so recently inflamed by Henry’s marriage to Eleanor. King Louis VII was born of a long-established royal line, but in terms of territory, wealth and military might, he inherited a relatively feeble kingdom. Centuries earlier, under the Carolingians, Francia or France had been a unified realm, but it had long ago fractured into numerous dukedoms and counties. The French monarchy retained only a small territory known as the Ile-de-France, with the city of Paris at its heart, and though the king was the nominal overlord of all the surrounding provinces, in practice his power was eclipsed by many of his supposed vassals.

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The most irritating of all of these, as far as the Capetians were concerned, were the upstart dukes of Normandy, whose territory bordered the Ile-de-France to the west. These belligerent Normans posed a constant threat, not least because they claimed rights to a series of strategically significant frontier fortresses, barely forty miles from Paris, in an area known as the Vexin. Over the preceding century the abiding sense of hostility between the two sides had only deepened as the Norman dukes added the kingdom of England to their lands, and then, under the Angevins, the regions of Anjou, Maine, and most recently, Aquitaine. By the 1160s, the Angevins were unquestionably the dominant power in France. But King Louis had ambitions to restore the glory of the French monarchy, and Henry II knew only too well that his rival would seek to challenge, diffuse and deflect the might of the Angevins at every turn. The festering animosity between these two dynasties would simmer over the decades to come. As this contest intensified, it would come to shape the histories of England and France, and William Marshal would one day find himself fighting in the frontline of this titanic conflict.

As overlord of the grand Angevin realm, Henry II had also to overcome the massive hurdle of scale. He sought to govern an expansive ‘empire’ that stretched almost 1,000 miles from end to end without recourse to the complex infrastructure that we now take for granted in the modern world – the systems that allow expeditious transport and immediate communication. Henry’s solution was to remain almost constantly on the move, travelling incessantly from one province to the next, and he quickly became renowned for his restless, and seemingly inexhaustible, energy. To contemporaries, Henry was a man who never sat ‘except to eat or ride a horse’, the equivalent of a ‘human chariot dragging all after him’. He set a relentless pace for his itinerant court, covering in one day what it took others four to travel, and leaving one chronicler to conclude that ‘he must fly rather than journey by horse or ship’.

The first phase of Henry II’s reign was extraordinarily successful. Only two lingering problems threatened in the late 1160s. The king had become estranged from his former confidant and chancellor, Thomas Becket, after the latter’s appointment in 1162 as archbishop of Canterbury, England’s supreme prelate. Henry had expected his old friend Thomas to be a loyal and malleable ally, but Becket became a staunch defender of the Church against the predatory crown, seemingly inspired by his elevation. After a venomous quarrel, Thomas Becket went into exile in France in 1164, gaining the support of King Louis VII. Despite the papacy’s attempts to effect a reconciliation, the dispute remained unresolved.

The other pressing issue demanding Henry II’s attention was the unruly duchy of Aquitaine. The king spent part of 1167 reaffirming Angevin rule in the region, but in early 1168 news of a fresh uprising reached his ears. Determined to tame this valuable corner of France, the king laid plans for a new campaign to the south. Queen Eleanor would join the expedition, while Patrick of Salisbury was to be Henry’s leading lieutenant. The earl duly crossed the Channel at the head of his military retinue with his newly appointed household knight and nephew, William Marshal, at his side.

IN THE WILD LAND OF AQUITAINE

The Aquitanian expedition took William Marshal far from home. Up to this point his life had been lived in southern England and Normandy, regions that, in the twelfth century, shared a strong affinity in terms of language, culture and landscape. Aquitaine was a different world. In its southern reaches they even spoke another tongue – not the French (or Langue d’Œuil) that William had grown up with, but Occitan (or Langue d’Oc). This huge province – the size of Normandy and Anjou combined – was one of the wealthiest areas of France: a land of rich soils, golden crops and fine wines.

Its people cherished culture and the arts, fostering new forms of music, poetry and song. Queen Eleanor’s own grandfather, Duke William IX, had been one of the first troubadours, or courtly singers, and it was not uncommon for local lords to be acclaimed both as warriors and composers. This was the world of mythic chivalry, from which the Carolingian heroes of old had supposedly marched to holy war against the Muslims of Spain. Local churches claimed to house the body of Roland himself and the very horn with which he had sought to summon aid against the Moors, while one of King Henry’s own favoured shrines – the cliff-top church of Rocamadour – displayed Roland’s legendary sword, Durendal.

Aquitaine’s ducal capital, Poitiers, was the most astounding city that William Marshal had ever seen. Perched upon a plateau, dominating the surrounding landscape, it was home to a formidable stone walled palace built on the orders of Queen Eleanor’s grandfather, and boasted two famous churches. One, dedicated to Poitiers’ fourth-century bishop St Hilary, was closely linked with the dukes of Aquitaine. The other, Notre-Dame la Grande, was a late eleventh-century masterpiece, decorated with some of the finest Romanesque sculpture in France. Not content with these architectural riches, Henry and Eleanor had decided to leave their own mark, commissioning a massive new cathedral dedicated to St Peter in 1162. The construction of this edifice had begun, so the city’s lower slopes were a building site, and the work would continue for decades to come.

Angevin authority held strong in this well-defended metropolis, but William was to discover that the Aquitanians were a proud, fiercely independent and quarrelsome people; little used to bending the knee to anyone, and certainly not happy to bow down before an outsider from the north like Henry II. Beyond Poitiers, in the neighbouring regions of Poitou, Angoulême and the Limousin, lawlessness was endemic. Here recalcitrant warlords expected to assert their own will and many had built small castles to dominate the untamed landscape. The Lusignans of Poitou were a case in point – a minor noble family with a small parcel of ancestral lands, centred on a stout fortress just fifteen miles south-west of Poitiers. They were hardly one of the great aristocratic houses of the south, but the new head of the dynasty, Geoffrey, was hungry for advancement. He was a fearsome warrior and had an equally ambitious and acquisitive brother, Guy, by his side. In early 1168 they began raiding the region around Poitiers, riding through the royal domains in a ‘violent manner’, pillaging as they went.

This was precisely the kind of disorder that Henry II was unwilling to tolerate. When he arrived, with Earl Patrick’s military household in tow, the king fell on the Lusignans like a hammer. William Marshal now received an object lesson in the gritty realities of medieval warfare. This would be no chivalric contest fought on an open battlefield. Instead, Henry’s aim was to inflict maximum damage on the Poitevin rebels, using overwhelming force and brutal tactics to devastate their resources, thus crippling their military capabilities.

A mainstay of this type of campaigning was the chevauchée or destructive horse raid, in which packs of mounted knights conducted vicious sorties into enemy territory, ravaging the landscape by torching crops and razing settlements. The primary victims of these ‘scorched-earth’ attacks were local peasants, farmers and townspeople, and it was they who suffered now as William and his fellow knights ranged across Poitou ‘destroying [the Lusignans’] towns and villages’. This was sadistic and remorseless work, but at times of war most twelfth-century nobles seem to have paid scant regard to the suffering endured by the ‘lower orders’ of society. No evidence survives to indicate how Marshal reacted to this first taste of open raiding – the History passed over this phase of the Aquitanian conflict in silence, and its details have only survived through a brief notice in a contemporary Norman account.

Savage as this type of warfare may seem to modern sensibilities, chevauchées were employed in the vast majority of military campaigns conducted in twelfth-century Europe. Veteran commanders like Henry II and Earl Patrick knew that they were the fastest and safest way to bring any enemy to his knees. As the History later observed, ‘when the poor can no longer reap the harvest from their fields, then they can no longer pay their rent and this in turn impoverishes their lord’. The technique certainly worked for them in 1168. The Lusignans’ ‘rebellion’ was crushed in less than a month, Geoffrey and Guy submitted, their castle was surrendered and Poitou returned to a semblance of order. But Henry also recognised that this type of sharp punitive enforcement could not provide a lasting solution, so he turned to his wife. She had given birth to their eighth child, the boy John, in 1167 and was ready to play a more active role in the governance of the realm. The hope was that, as a native of Aquitaine, Eleanor might be able to inspire a greater measure of loyalty and compliance within the province. She was installed in Poitiers, with Earl Patrick as her lieutenant, while the king left for the north to hold a peace conference with Louis of France.

Treachery on the road

In early April 1168, William Marshal was guarding Eleanor of Aquitaine’s royal cortège alongside the rest of Patrick of Salisbury’s retinue, as the queen travelled through the forest-cloaked hills of Poitou. The purpose of her journey is unclear, but there seems to have been little sense of apprehension within the party on that spring day. Patrick and his men were not dressed in armour and only a small number of knights were present. In all probability, Eleanor had been touring the recently subdued Lusignan lands and was now returning to Poitiers.

Without any warning the small column was attacked, seemingly from the rear, by a large party of heavily armed Lusignan warriors led by the brothers Geoffrey and Guy. The History of William Marshal described this as a calculated ‘ambush’, and although some aspects of its account can be verified in other contemporary chronicles, the exact causes of the sudden confrontation remain unclear and would later be hotly contested. Perhaps enraged by Henry’s recent campaign, the Lusignans were probably hoping to capture some valuable hostages, thereby securing ransoms and gaining leverage in future negotiations. They may well have imagined that Queen Eleanor herself could be taken prisoner.

Earl Patrick recognised at once that his forces were heavily outnumbered and immediately ‘sent the Queen on to the castle’ – probably in Poitiers itself. Patrick, William Marshal and the remaining members of the Salisbury mesnie now had to hold the road so that Eleanor could reach safety. Within moments a vicious skirmish began as Patrick, still un-armoured and riding only his palfrey, cried out for his warhorse to be brought forward and ‘launched himself furiously into [the] midst’ of the Lusignan troops. In the heated confusion of this first contact, the earl seems to have been isolated from the majority of his knights, as many of the Salisbury warriors, William included, were holding back, trying to hurriedly don armour. Nonetheless, Patrick seems to have survived the first burst of fighting unscathed and, as his destrier arrived, he leapt down and prepared to mount his warhorse and re-enter the fray. He was halfway into the saddle, his back turned to the enemy, when disaster struck. A Lusignan knight drove forward and skewered the earl with a piercing lance strike; un-armoured, as he was, the point of the weapon drove straight through his body. TheHistory described, in horrified tones, how as a result of this terrible blow from a ‘treacherous assassin’ Patrick ‘died on the spot’.

The world must have stopped for a fraction of a second, as the enormity of what had just happened dawned on both sides. It is exceptionally unlikely that the earl of Salisbury’s death was ever part of the Lusignans’ plans. Men of Patrick’s standing were simply too valuable to kill in such an offhand manner and, in any case, everyone knew that properly armoured knights were virtually immune to severe injury. In those first moments, Geoffrey and Guy may already have understood that this dark deed would have grave consequences – certainly they would later argue that the incident had been a terrible accident, not deliberate murder.

But for the remaining Salisbury knights – William Marshal in their midst – that was exactly what it looked like. A wave of shock and blinding rage washed over them. According to the History, William ‘almost went out of his mind with grief’, despairing that ‘he had not been able to reach the man who killed [Patrick] in time’ to halt his attack. By now Marshal was wearing a mail hauberk, but he ‘did not wait until he was fully armed’; instead, possessed by an almost berserk fury, he charged into the frantic mêlée, ‘bent on exacting violent revenge’. William fought first with his lance and then, after his horse was killed under him, with his sword, scything down enemies and their mounts. His biographer likened him to a ‘starving lion’ ripping into its prey. But the number of opponents ranged against him eventually proved overwhelming. With the other Salisbury troops either beaten into retreat or battered into submission, Marshal took his last stand, backed up against a hedge, like ‘a boar before a pack of wolves’, desperately trying to hold back a ring of foes at sword-point. It was only when a Lusignan knight circled round to attack from behind – shoving a lance through the hedgerow that ‘went clean through [William’s] thigh and out the other side’ – that he was felled.

When Marshal finally collapsed, the Lusignans warily closed in to take him prisoner. The lance was pulled from his thigh, and ‘once it was out, blood ran from his wounds down his leggings and breeches’, leaving ‘the whole ground beneath him . . . covered in blood’. As the physical pain of his injury hit home, a dreadful realisation must have settled over William. In this far-flung, unfamiliar corner of the Angevin realm he had lost everything; the lifeless body of his lord and uncle lay just yards away. The raw anguish of that loss can only have been deepened by the certain knowledge that, with his patron’s demise, his own future lay in ruins. All his hopes of security and success had come to nothing. Marshal was a largely unknown and severely wounded knight, and the prisoner of a desperate band of rogue Poitevins – men who could surely guess that they would now be labelled outlaws. As the Lusignans prepared to take flight they made no move to tend to William’s injury. Instead, his blood-soaked body was unceremoniously strapped to an ass and led off into the wilds of Aquitaine.

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