11 September 1297 - The Battle of Stirling Bridge

Few men living in the summer of 1297 were genuinely enthusiastic about the prospect of fighting in Flanders alongside Edward I, but John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, was a clear exception. All his life – and this year he would be sixty-six – the earl had been a staunch supporter of the Crown and the king’s close friend.

On this occasion, however, Warenne’s anxiety to serve had less to do with his loyalism, and more to do with avoiding the responsibility that had been foisted upon him the previous year. In 1296, true to form, he had marched with Edward against the Scots, and had led the English in their decisive victory at Dunbar. But the earl’s reward for this feat had been his appointment as Scotland’s new royal governor, and it was a role he clearly did not relish: within a few months he was actively offering the job to others. The king may have been well pleased to have ‘rid himself of a turd’, but his old friend was correspondingly dismayed to find himself charged with its custody. Warenne, in fact, behaved entirely as one might expect in such circumstances, and stayed as far away as possible, saying that the task was bad for his health. According to Walter of Guisborough, the earl found the Scottish weather so unbearably awful that he spent most of his time in the North of England.

Inevitably, the absence of the governor had a deleterious effect on Scotland’s new English government, which by 1297 was already struggling to cope with a host of additional problems. Imposed on the country against the will of its people, the regime was in any circumstances likely to have proved unpopular and been perceived as oppressive. As it was, thanks to the stream of emergency demands emanating from England, the administration was from the first a genuinely extortionate affair. The Scots, like the other peoples of Edward I’s empire, were expected to supply the money and materials that would enable their overlord to prosecute his war against France. When, in May 1297, they were asked to supply the manpower as well, it proved to be the last straw: at that point unrest and resistance in Scotland boiled over into outright revolt. Trouble started in the West, at Lanark, where the English sheriff was killed.

Behind this revolt, it seemed, lurked the usual suspects. One of the prime movers, for example, was Robert Wishart, the bulldog bishop of Glasgow, who six years earlier had stood up to Edward I at Norham. Also involved were several high-ranking members of the Scottish nobility, not all of whom had been captured or imprisoned during the English invasion the previous year. A surprising newcomer to their rebel ranks was the young earl of Carrick, Robert Bruce. Grandson of the late competitor for the throne, son of the disappointed collaborator of 1296, this third Robert might have been expected to toe the family line and aid the English. But instead he broke with ancestral tradition and threw his weight behind the patriotic cause. ‘I must join my own people’,he reportedly told his father’s knightly tenants, ‘and the nation in which I was born’.

Alas for the Scots, however, their aristocratic and ecclesiastical leaders once again proved stronger in their patriotism than they did in arms. Towards the end of June an English army crossed the Border from Cumbria, and within days the rebels were forced to surrender. On 7 July Wishart, Bruce and their allies submitted to terms at Irvine on Scotland’s western seaboard. To the young English commanders who had obtained this easy victory, it seemed that was the end of the matter. They rode east to the government’s base at Berwick, from where a letter was dispatched to the king a fortnight later. ‘Sire,’ it read, ‘your enemies are dispersed and dismayed’.

The author of this now-anonymous announcement was evidently not the new regime’s treasurer, Hugh Cressingham. Unlike the military men fresh in from the field, or his boss, John de Warenne, who continued to linger in England, Cressingham worked in Berwick at the centre of the web. He could perceive the whole picture and, as he explained in his own letters to Edward, it was deeply alarming. ‘By far the greater part of your counties in Scotland still have no keepers,’ he said, ‘because of death, sieges or imprisonment’. There were other rebels massing in the North, beyond the River Forth, and also in the South, in the Forest of Selkirk. Cressingham himself had wanted to march against them immediately – indeed, he had personally raised an army for this purpose – but had been outvoted. The consensus at Berwick was that they should wait for Warenne to arrive. ‘And so,’ the treasurer lamented as he drew to a close,‘matters have gone to sleep’.

While the English slumbered, the Scots were indeed being roused. Those in the North were led by Andrew Murray, the son and heir of a prominent local lord. Captured the previous year at Dunbar, he had escaped during the winter and raised rebellion in the spring. By August a number of northern towns and castles were already in his hands.

Meanwhile, in the South, leadership had been assumed by a certain William Wallace. Unlike Murray, Wallace was a virtual nobody – nothing at all is heard of him before this juncture, bar a possible reference in a court roll of 1296 which mentions‘William le Waleys, a thief’. When, the following year, he bursts unheralded into the picture, he is described by English chroniclers as ‘a bloody man’, ‘a chief of brigands’, ‘a vagrant and a fugitive’. Most likely he was a younger son of Alan Wallace, a minor landowner in Ayrshire; such origins would account for the fact that his earliest activities were concentrated in western Scotland. The death of the sheriff of Lanark in May 1297 had been his handiwork, and thereafter he appears to have based himself in Selkirk Forest with his growing band of followers. ‘The common folk of the land followed him as their leader and ruler,’ wrote Walter of Guisborough, ‘the retainers of great lords adhered to him’. By August 1297, Wallace had his popular army had moved into northern Scotland, where they linked arms with Murray’s forces.

By this point, finally, John de Warenne had arrived in Berwick, and been convinced by a no doubt frantic Cressingham of the urgent need for military action. There was yet more delay while they waited for those Scots who had surrendered at Irvine to complete their submissions (a process which was deliberately drawn out by the likes of Wishart and Bruce). But at last, probably as the end of August approached, the English army and its reluctant captain set out to crush the Scottish rebels.

To do so they had to enter northern Scotland, and that meant crossing the River Forth –a feat easier said than done. The Forth rises in the west, near Loch Lomond, and flows east to meet the sea, and thus effectively cuts the country in half. Moreover, for much of its eastern length it forms a broad tidal estuary, or firth, which could not be crossed except by boat. In fact, in the thirteenth century, the Forth was referred to as ‘the Scottish Sea’, and on contemporary maps, northern Scotland was designated as Scotia ultra Marina – Scotland beyond the Sea.

Warenne therefore marched his army towards the first place that the Forth could be bridged, which at that time was the royal burgh at Stirling. As the principal gateway between northern and southern Scotland, Stirling had a unique strategic importance (indeed, on one thirteenth-century map, the town’s bridge is shown as the only link between the two halves of the country). It was also a brilliantly defended gateway: half a mile from the bridge, on the river’s southern shore, stood Stirling Castle. Nothing survives of the original medieval fortress, but it was almost certainly built of stone, and (like its latter-day replacement) rendered all but impregnable from its situation atop a great outcrop of volcanic rock.

When the earl arrived at Stirling in early September, he discovered that Wallace and Murray were waiting for him on the opposite side of the Forth. By all accounts the Scots were greatly outnumbered, and thus the English commanders naturally assumed that, as at Irvine, their enemies would wish to negotiate. On this occasion, however, the negotiators were turned away with a celebrated rebuke.‘Go back and tell your people that we have not come for the benefit of peace,’said Wallace, ‘but are ready to fight, to avenge ourselves, and to free our kingdom’.

According to Walter of Guisborough, who preserved these attributed words, this was invitation enough for the more hot-headed in the English camp. But wiser heads, the chronicler added, had surveyed the surrounding terrain and foreseen the danger. The bridge, their only way forward, was also their major obstacle, for it was only wide enough for men to cross in two-by-two formation. In addition, there was not much room to manoeuvre once they reached the other side. At Stirling the Forth meanders in large, lazy loops, and consequently the northern end of the bridge connects not to an open plain but to a narrow tongue of land. ‘There was no better place in the kingdom of Scotland’, Guisborough was later told,‘to put the English into the hands of the Scots – the many into the hands of the few’.

Nevertheless, in the final council of war, the voices of caution were overruled. Cressingham, conscious of the enormous daily cost of fielding the army, argued for an immediate advance. Warenne, once woken from a long lie-in, agreed, and the order was duly given. It was late in the morning of 11 September 1297, and events that day unfolded with all the inevitability that had been predicted. The English began to cross the bridge and array themselves on the northern shore, but were attacked while their host was only half-formed. The Scots rushed towards the river, seized the bridgehead, and so divided their enemies. Those English who had already crossed – Cressingham was among their number –were surrounded and killed. Those stranded on the southern shore – who included Warenne – could only watch the slaughter as it happened. Eventually the earl came to his senses, ordered the bridge to be destroyed, and rode hard in the direction of England. From Stirling to Berwick it is nearly a hundred miles. The old man, says Guisborough, did not rest until he reached the Border.

A Great and Terrible King, 301-5.

The Death of William the Conqueror, 9 September 1087

Although we cannot say for certain how tall he was or what he looked like, it is hard to think of William the Conqueror as anything other than a formidable figure. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes him as ‘a man of great wisdom and power, surpassing in honour and strength all those who had gone before him, and stern beyond measure to those who opposed his will’. Another contemporary source suggests that his voice was harsh, and William of Malmesbury tells us that he used it to good effect, employing colourful oaths ‘so that the mere roar of his open mouth might somehow strike terror into the minds of his audience’.

After his return to Normandy in 1086, however, it appears that such theatrics were not having the desired effect. William was by this stage in his late fifties, which made him old by contemporary standards. He was also, according to Orderic Vitalis, extremely fat – a condition not uncommon among medieval aristocrats later in life, as the exercise of hunting failed to counteract the quantities of venison consumed. Moreover, William’s military reputation on the Continent had been nothing to brag about in recent years, following his defeats at Dol and Gerberoy. The king may have rushed home to defend his duchy from attack, but in the event his physical presence proved to be no deterrent.

Trouble began in the Vexin, a region on Normandy’s eastern border which had served as a buffer with France until Philip I had fortuitously acquired it ten years earlier. At some point in 1087, presumably on the French king’s instructions, his garrison in the town of Mantes went on the offensive and made repeated raids into Normandy. According to Orderic, whose account looks to be very well informed, they overran the diocese of Evreux, harrying the countryside, driving off cattle and seizing prisoners. They grew bold in their arrogance, he says, and taunted the Normans.

And, if we believe William of Malmesbury, the cruellest taunt of all came from the lips of King Philip. ‘The king of England lies in Rouen,’ he allegedly joked, ‘keeping his bed like a woman who’s just had a baby.’ William, the chronicler explains, had been confined to his capital for some time, on account of his stomach, for which he had taken a drug. Generally historians have understood this remark to refer simply to the Conqueror’s obesity, but the mention of confinement, bed rest and medicine make it sound as if the king was physically ailing. It may have been knowledge of this, above all, that had caused his enemies to start snapping at his heels.

But Philip’s insult, says Malmesbury, eventually reached William’s own ears, and stirred him into action. ‘When I go to Mass after my lying in,’ he swore, ‘I will offer a hundred thousand candles on his behalf.’ This was a grim joke on the part of either the king or the chronicler, for towards the end of July 1087 William assembled an army and invaded the Vexin, setting fire to the fields, vineyards and orchards as he went. His principal target was Mantes, the town from which the recent French raids had been launched, and this too was put to the torch. The castle was burnt down, as were countless houses and churches. A great many people perished in the consuming flames, says Orderic, and notoriously (for several other chroniclers mention it) at least one of them was a religious recluse.

Inevitably, therefore, some monastic writers saw what subsequently happened to the Conqueror as divine retribution. ‘A cruel deed he had done’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘but a crueller fate befell him. How crueller? He fell sick and suffered terribly.’ According to William of Malmesbury, some people said that the king was injured when his horse jumped a ditch, driving the front of its saddle into his overhanging stomach, but Malmesbury himself follows Orderic in stating that William succumbed to heat exhaustion caused by the flames and the warm summer weather. Quite possibly, since he appears to have been suffering since before the campaign’s outset, William was simply beset by the return of his earlier illness. Whatever the cause, suddenly in great pain, he sounded the retreat and retired to Rouen.

Back in the capital, it soon became clear that the Conqueror was dying, and all his doctors could do was try to minimize his discomfort. Orderic provides a long but gripping account of the king’s final days, which he claims to have carefully investigated and truthfully described. Rouen, he says, was a crowded and noisy city, and so at his own command William was carried beyond its walls to the church of St Gervase which stood on a hill to the west. There he lingered for the rest of the summer, suffering terrible agonies but retaining the power of speech. ‘I was brought up in arms from childhood’, he groaned, ‘and am deeply stained with all the blood I have shed.’ These are, of course, Orderic’s words rather than William’s, but both statements are incontestably true. The king accordingly spent many hours confessing his sins to the bishops, abbots and monks who stood by his bedside, endeavouring to wash clean his soul. For the same reason he also commanded that his treasure be distributed among the poor and divided up among various churches, specifying precise sums for each, and paying particular attention to rebuilding the ones he had recently burnt down in Mantes. Finally he attempted to please God by ordering the release of all the prisoners in his custody – a list which included Earl Morcar and Earl Roger, Siward Barn, and even King Harold’s brother, Wulfnoth, handed over as a hostage as long ago as 1051 and held captive ever since. The only exception to this general amnesty was Odo of Bayeux, whom William insisted was still too great a threat to be at liberty. But after incessant pleading by his other half-brother, Robert of Mortain, as well as various other Norman magnates, the king eventually relented, and Odo was also set free.

During these last days the king also made known his wishes about the succession. Among the throng of magnates and priests by his bedside were his two younger sons, William Rufus and Henry. Robert Curthose chose to stay away, remaining at the court of the king of France. Yet despite this final slight and his own forebodings about the future, the Conqueror in the end felt compelled to recognize his eldest son as his heir. As the king allegedly explained to those present, Robert had been invested with Normandy in 1066 and had received the homage of its barons; such bonds could not be undone.

But this was true only of Normandy – England was not part of the inheritance, but an acquisition obtained by conquest. And because it had been won with so much blood, William declared that he dared not transmit it to anyone. ‘I name no man as my heir to the kingdom of England,’ he concluded, ‘but entrust it to God alone.’ Again, these are Orderic’s words, but their content draws strong support from the fact that the king is known to have bequeathed the royal regalia he used in Normandy – his crown, rod, sceptre, chalice and candlesticks– not to any of his sons, but to his abbey of St Stephen’s in Caen. He did, however, express a personal hope that William Rufus would succeed him as king of England, if that turned out to be God’s will.

At last, on Thursday 9 September, the end came. Having slept peacefully through the previous night, William woke as the sun was rising over Rouen to the sound of a great bell tolling in the distance. On asking what time it was, he was informed that the hour of prime (6 a.m.) was being rung in the cathedral of St Mary. The king then raised his eyes and hands towards heaven, commended himself to Mary, and died.

You and Yours

Here's me on Radio 4's You and Yours (Friday 23 August), arguing that the Battle of Hastings was fought exactly where we had always supposed.

William the Conqueror apologises for 'desolate' North East

In the winter of 1069-70 William the Conqueror famously ordered the 'Harrying of the North', during which his troops deliberately burned all the crops and livestock of northern England, condemning the region's population to a slow death by starvation. Seventeen years later, William himself was dying a slow and painful death in a monastery outside of Rouen. According to the chronicler Orderic Vitalis (half-English, and writing several decades after the event), the king apologised for his earlier actions:

'I treated the native inhabitants of the kingdom with unreasonable severity, cruelly oppressed high and low, unjustly disinherited many, and caused the death of thousands by starvation and war, especially in Yorkshire. This was because the men of Deira and Northumbria welcomed the army of King Swein of Denmark when he attacked me, and slew Robert de Comines and many men-at-arms in Durham, together with my other magnates and experienced knights. In mad fury I descended on the English of the North like a raging lion, and ordered that their homes and crops with all their equipment and furnishings should be burnt at once and their great flocks and herds of sheep and cattle slaughtered everywhere. So I chastised a great multitude of men and women with the lash of starvation and - alas! - was the cruel murderer of many thousands, both young and old, of this fair people.'

The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. M. Chibnall, vol. iv, 94-5.

Queen Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror, was NOT a dwarf

This is, quite simply, a modern myth. There is no evidence, contemporary or otherwise, to support it. It derives entirely from an excavation of Matilda’s tomb in Caen carried out in 1959, during which the scanty remains of her skeleton were measured. The French press at the time reported that she was only 127cm (4’2”) tall, and this arresting ‘fact’ soon found its way into the next generation of history books.

But it was not true. Twenty years or so later, the president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, Sir Jack Dewhurst, didn’t believe a word of it. Matilda, he pointed out, gave birth to at least nine healthy children, eight of whom grew to adulthood. The queen could not have done this had she been 4’2”. Dewhurst, who was writing a book a book about royal confinements, made enquiries with Professor Dastague (Institut d'Anthropologie, Caen) who had led the original dig, and was told that they had never claimed Matilda was so short. In fact they had concluded that she was 152cm (about 5’). As Dewhurst points out in his article, this height is far more compatible with Matilda’s successful multiple pregnancies.

But that doesn’t solve the problem beyond reasonable doubt. In the first place, the skeleton that the archaeologists examined in 1959 was far from complete; Matilda’s height was extrapolated from her femur and tibia. Second, and more problematic still, the excavation of 1959 was not the first time that the queen’s remains had been disturbed. The tomb had been destroyed during the Huguenot revolutions of the sixteenth century and its contents scattered. Whether or not the remains measured in 1959 actually belonged to Matilda thus depends on how diligent the nuns of La Trinite were when they returned to sweep up.

Incidentally, these same caveats apply to the bones of William the Conqueror himself, whose tomb in Caen was excavated at the same time. He is said to have been 173cm (5’8”) – this based on a single surviving femur, which might well have been his.

Conclusion: Matilda may have been 152cm, or 5’ tall – the evidence is far from compelling. But she certainly wasn’t 127cm (4’2”). That’s simply an error caused by bad reporting, and one which doesn’t even fit with the evidence of Matilda’s successful childbearing. It’s high time this pernicious myth was laid to rest.

J. Dewhurst, ‘A Historical Obstetric Enigma: How Tall was Matilda?", Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, 1 (1981), 271–2.

England's Earliest Georges

The cult of St George, which originated in the eastern Mediterranean in the fourth century, transferred to England in two phases. He was known to the Anglo-Saxons, but only in his original manifestation as an early Christian martyr. To judge from the minimal number of references to him, he was never very popular in this guise, and some authorities – Bede, for example – clearly considered him to be a dubious addition to the saintly canon. By the time of the Norman Conquest, however, George had been reinvented as a Byzantine soldier-saint, and his new-found military prowess made him irresistibly popular with the knights of western Christendom, many of whom went east themselves in the course of the First Crusade. Indeed, a quantum leap for George’s popularity in the West was his reported appearance in aid of the First Crusaders during their successful siege of Antioch in 1098; soon thereafter we find some of the earliest images of St George as a knight on tombs and church doorways in England.

When did he move from the margins to the mainstream? One thing is now certain – the shift had nothing to do with Richard the Lionheart. Until very recently, any book on the subject of St George would invariably assert that his first flush of popularity in England, if not his introduction to these shores, was due to the devotion of the famous crusader king. Richard, it was confidently reported, had beheld a vision of George during the siege of Acre, rebuilt a church in his honour at Lydda, and, most significantly, had adopted the saint’s emblem – the red cross on a white ground – as England’s arms. This tradition, however, was completely discredited fifteen years ago by Oliver de Laborderie, who showed Richard’s connection with St George to be entirely spurious, a legend invented for political purposes at the Tudor court and unquestioningly accepted and embellished thereafter. Contemporary sources for Richard’s reign mention neither visions nor church-building, and inform us that the king and his crusaders wore white crosses, not red ones. Apart from the incidental fact that he was married in a church dedicated to St George, Richard has no demonstrable connection with him at all.

As far as can be determined, the earliest interest in St George in royal and aristocratic circles in England was expressed two generations after Richard’s death, in the middle decades of the thirteenth century. In 1245, for example, King Henry III paid a certain Henry the Versemaker for writing an account of George’s life, and a decade later he ordered an image of the saint to be installed over the entrance to the hall at Winchester Castle. Similarly, at some point before his death in 1251, Paulin Piper, one of the king’s closest courtiers, composed some lines of poetry (now sadly lost) in George’s honour, while in 1251 itself, William de Cantilupe, a baron with strong court connections, decided to call his firstborn son George – the earliest person mentioned in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to bear that name after the saint himself.

Possibly this early English interest in St George had something to do with crusading – it is interesting to note that each of the above men – Henry III, Piper and Cantilupe – had taken the cross. At the same time, none of them actually went on crusade; their interest in George equally likely to have been stirred by the growing enthusiasm that his cult was attracting elsewhere in Europe. In England itself that enthusiasm remained muted. These are the only two references to connect Henry III with George in a 56 year reign, compared with the thousands that link the king to his favourite saint, Edward the Confessor, in whose honour he rebuilt Westminster Abbey. Likewise, young George de Cantilupe may have been the first of that name, but for a long time he was also the last. Of the 1550 entries in the Dictionary of National Biography for the thirteenth century, he is the only George.

If there was significant interest in St George at Henry’s court, it is less likely to have been driven by the king, whose model was the peaceable and pious Confessor, than by the more martial and mettlesome members of his family circle. Henry’s queen, for instance, Eleanor of Provence, was an avid reader of romance literature and an enthusiastic devotee of the cult of chivalry. A romance work written for her after Henry’s death contains only a passing reference to St George, but its very terseness shows that by this date (1270s) the saint had become a byword for knightly prowess.

More likely still to have been an advocate for St George was Henry’s son, the Lord Edward, later to reign as the formidable Edward I. Henry may have had no need for a military role model, but that was not true of Edward and his contemporaries, who hungered for glory on the tournament field, and who yearned to go on crusade. For these young men George would have been an ideal patron, and it is therefore probably significant that, when Henry’s reign collapsed into civil war, they rode into battle against Simon de Montfort wearing red crosses on a white ground – the earliest recorded use of the saint’s device in England, although not identified as such in the sources.

Unequivocal evidence of Edward’s identification with St George, and the biggest advance for his standing in England before the founding of the Garter, came in the course of the English conquest of Wales. In both his campaigns against the Welsh (1276-76 and 1282-83) Edward led armies that marched behind St George’s banner, and his infantry were issued with St George’s cross armbands, now explicitly described as such in royal financial accounts. The association of George with the conquest was further underlined on the king’s return to England in 1285, when he gave thanks for his victory by presenting four gold figures at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral: St Edward and St John, the favourites of his father, were now joined by St George and his horse.

Full article available in Kings and Castles

Birth of a future king, 1239

It is June 1239, just a few days short of Midsummer, and Eleanor is lodged in Henry’s palace at Westminster, by the side of the River Thames, on the site where the modern Houses of Parliament stand. And there, during the night of 17-18 June, in a room presumably lit by lanterns and candles, she gives birth to her first child. Her delivery is successful, the baby is healthy, and – best of all – it is a boy. In the most important aspect of her role as queen, Eleanor has triumphed. She has provided Henry, and England, with an heir to the throne.

 

There was immediate celebration in the palace of Westminster. At Henry’s command, the clerks of the royal chapel sang the triumphant anthem Christus Vincit, Christus Regnat, Christus Imperat (Christ conquers, Christ reigns, Christ rules), and messengers were sent speeding off in all directions to spread the good news. In nearby London, a walled city of some 50,000 souls, the citizens went wild, dancing through the streets with lanterns, drums and tambourines. Soon the royal messengers were returning, laden with costly gifts from the king’s greatest subjects. In some cases, Henry apparently felt that these presents were not costly enough, and sent their bearers back to get better ones. According to Matthew Paris, this provoked some wag at court to quip ‘God has given us this child, but the king is selling him to us!’. Paris himself, striking a more serious tone, thought that Henry’s ingratitude had ‘deeply clouded his magnificence’, and the episode, while not very significant, does provide something of a character note for the king. Henry, as other contemporaries observed, was a vir simplex: charitably, a ‘straightforward’ chap; more obviously, a simpleton. Consequently, he tended to act in inept ways such as this. Even when Fortune handed him a silk purse, Henry could generally be relied upon to make a pig’s ear out of it.

A much more important indicator of the king’s personality is provided by the name he chose for his new-born son. Henry, although king of England, was ancestrally and culturally French. He and his family were direct descendants of William the Conqueror, the Norman duke who had snatched England’s throne some 170 years earlier. Similarly, his leading subjects were all directly descended from the Conqueror’s Norman companions. When they talked to each other, they spoke French (or at least a slightly Anglicized, Norman version of it), and, when they came to christen their children, they gave them French names. William (Guillaume), for example, was still a popular name, for obvious reasons. So too was Richard (Ricard), because it evoked the memory of Henry’s world-famous uncle, Richard the Lionheart. And Henry (Henri) itself was perfectly respectable and commonplace. Henry III might have been rather limited in his abilities, but his two namesake predecessors had both been fearsome and successful warrior kings, worthy of commemoration and emulation.

All these options, however, Henry rejected. He had no desire to father conquerors, or for that matter crusaders. Thanks to his own father, the notorious King John, he had grown up surrounded by uncertainty and conflict. John had died in the midst of a self-inflicted civil war, bequeathing to his son a kingdom scarred and divided. What Henry craved above all for himself and his subjects was peace, harmony and stability. And it was a reflection of this ambition that he decided to call his son Edward.

Edward was a deeply unfashionable name in 1239 – no king or nobleman had been lumbered with it since the Norman Conquest, because it belonged to the side that had lost. Edward was an Old English name, and it sounded as odd and outlandish to Norman ears after 1066 as other Old English names – Egbert, Æthelred, Egfrith – still sound to us today. To call a boy such a name after the Conquest was to invite ridicule; he was bound to be mocked by the Williams, Richards and Henrys who were his peers.

But Henry III had good reason for foisting this unfashionable name on his firstborn son. After his father’s death, his mother had abandoned him – Isabella of Angoulême left England for her homeland in France, remarried and never returned. Effectively orphaned from the age of nine, the young king had found substitute father figures among the elderly men who had helped him govern his kingdom. But these men too, Henry ultimately decided, had failed him and, by 1234, he found himself alone once more. It was at this point, though, that the king discovered a new mentor, a man who would never, ever let him down – largely because he had already been dead for the best part of two centuries.

Henry’s new patron was Edward the Confessor, the penultimate king of Anglo-Saxon England. Like Henry himself, Edward had not been a very successful ruler: his death in January 1066 sparked the succession crisis that led to the Norman Conquest nine months later. Posthumously, however, Edward had acquired a reputation as a man of great goodness – so much so that, a century after his death, he had been officially recognized as a saint. Thereafter his reign had acquired the retrospective glow of a golden age: men spoke with great reverence about his good and just laws (even though, in reality, he never made any). Of course, the fact that Edward was not a great warrior had made him an unlikely exemplar for the conquering dynasty of kings who came after him. But to a man like Henry III, who was entirely lacking in military skill, the Confessor seemed the perfect role model. There were, moreover, other similarities between their two lives which must have struck Henry as highly significant. Edward had lost his father and been abandoned by his mother at a young age; he had grown up with war and wished to cultivate peace; he had been misled by treacherous ministers. Above all, Edward, like Henry, was famed for his piety. Edward was the king who established the royal palace at Westminster, in order to be near the great abbey (minster) which he spent the last years of his life rebuilding. In due course he was buried in the abbey church, and his tomb there became a pilgrim shrine. It was the greatest testament to Henry III’s love and reverence for the Confessor that, from 1245, he would spend vast sums rebuilding the abbey for a second time, replacing the old Romanesque church with the massive Gothic building that stands today.

 

It was no surprise to anyone, therefore, that Henry should chose to call his son Edward in honour of his idol. Nor, probably, was it a coincidence that the boy happened to be born in Westminster. Henry spent plenty of time in his palace there, partly to be near the abbey, and partly because Westminster was a centre for some branches of royal government. But the king had lots of other palaces and castles all over England, and to govern his realm properly he was obliged to travel around them. It seems very likely that Henry had deliberately arranged it so that he and Eleanor were in Westminster as the end of her term approached, in order that they would be in the closest possible proximity to the Confessor’s shrine. Being born in Westminster also meant that Edward could be baptized there. A few days after his birth, the new baby became the first king of England to be christened in the abbey, surrounded by a great crowd of bishops, noblemen and ladies. No less than twelve of them became his godparents. Henry was evidently determined from the first that his son would have all the affection and guidance in childhood that he himself had lacked.

A Great and Terrible King, pp. 2-5