King John at New Year

Where did King John see in the New Year?

1199 Normandy, precise location unknown, possibly Caen.

1200 Woodstock, Oxfordshire

1201 Montmorrillon, Poitou

1202 Lisieux, Nornandy.

1203 Brill, Buckinghamshire

1204 Clarendon, Wiltshire

1205 Clarendon, Wiltshire

1206 Unknown, probably Guildford, Surrey

1207 Winchester

1208 Winchester

1209 Guildford

1210 Unknown, possibly Nottingham

1211 Unknown

1212 Havering, Essex

1213 Waltham, Essex

1214 Temple Guiting, Gloucestershire

1215 Newark, Nottinghamshire

The Death of King Harold

Another year, another crackpot Battle of Hastings theory. Last year it was 'the battle was fought somewhere else'. This year it's 'King Harold survived the battle'. This one is, if anything, even more feeble and confused, so let's put it to bed as soon as possible.

Evidence for Harold's death:

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, D version (English, contemporary)
'King Harold was slain, and Leofwine, his brother, and Earl Gyrth, his brother, and many good men'.

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, E version (English, contemporary)
'Harold marched from the north, and fought against him [William] before all his host came up; and there he fell with his two brothers, Gyrth and Leofwine.'

William of Poitiers (Norman, contemporary)
'The king himself and his brothers and not a few of the nobles of the kingdom had perished'.

William of Jumieges (Norman, contemporary)
'Harold was slain, pierced with mortal wounds, during the first assault'

The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio (French, contemporary, before 1068)
'The first, cleaving his [Harold's] breast through the shield with his point, drenched the earth with a gushing torrent of blood; the second smote off his head below the protection of the helmet, and the third pierced his innards with his lance'

The Bayeux Tapestry (Anglo-Norman, contemporary, before 1082)
HERE KING HAROLD IS KILLED

Eadmer of Canterbury (English, 1090s)
'Harold fell in the thick of the fray'

Baudri of Bourgeuil (French, before 1102)
'A shaft pierces Harold with deadly doom'

Henry of Huntingdon (Anglo-Norman, 1120s)
'Meanwhile the whole shower sent by the archers fell around King Harold, and he himself sank to the ground, struck in the eye. A host of knights broke through and killed the wounded king.'

John of Worcester (Anglo-Norman, 1130s, and very pro-English)
'But afterwards, when very many had fallen on both sides, he [Harold] himself fell, alas, at dusk'

Simeon of Durham (Anglo-Norman, 1130s)
'In that battle he [Harold] fell with almost the whole English army'

And [NB], The Waltham Abbey Chronicle (Anglo-Norman, post 1177)
'The king.... was slain by his fierce foe'


'Evidence' that Harold survived:

The Vita Haroldi, a work of fantasy written at Waltham Abbey in the early thirteenth century, 150+ years after the event. (And available in print since 1885).

Eleanor of Castile arrives in England, 1255

On this day (or thereabouts) in 1255 Eleanor of Castile, the new wife of the future Edward I, arrived in England for the first time. The young couple had been married in Burgos, Spain, the previous November, when Edward was fifteen and Eleanor just twelve. The contemporary chronicler and monk of St Albans, Matthew Paris, saw it as yet more evidence that his country was going to the dogs...

'About the time of the feast of St Denis [9 October], when the king [Henry III] was returning from the north of England to London, in order to be present for the feast of St Edward, Eleanor, the sister of the king of Spain and wife of Edward, arrived in Dover in great pomp, and with such a numerous revenue that their arrival was looked upon with suspicion by all England, and fears were entertained that the country would be forcibly taken by possession of them.

 

The king thereupon gave orders that she should be received with the greatest honour and reverence at London as well as at other places; but especially London, where her arrival was celebrated by processions, illuminations, ringing of bells, songs and other special demonstrations of joy and festivity. On her approaching that city, therefore, the citizens went to meet her dressed in holiday clothes, and mounted on richly caparisoned horses.

 

And when the noble daughter-in-law of the king arrived at the place of abode assigned to her, she found it, like the dwelling of the bishop of Toledo, hung with palls of silk and tapestry, like a temple, and even the floor was covered with arras. This was done by the Spaniards, it being in accordance with the custom of their country; but this excessive pride excited the laughter and derision of the people. Serious and prudent persons, pondering over future events, were deeply grieved on a careful consideration of the pleasure manifested by the king at the presence of any foreigners. Indeed, the honours shown to the Spaniards, excited the wonder and astonishment of all, and no wonder. The English, therefore, lamented that they were held in less esteem than the people of any other nation by their own king, and with sorrow perceived that their irreparable ruin was imminent.'

On This Day 1265: The Battle of Evesham and the Death of Simon de Montfort

Simon de Montfort was one of a group of barons who confronted the incompetent King Henry III in 1258 and took over royal government. Their aim was reform but ultimately their good intentions foundered over political and personal divisions; like a lot of revolutions, it ended in civil war. Montfort was the most die-hard reformer, and had a number of personal grudges against Henry III, who was his brother-in-law. In May 1264 he defeated Henry's forces in battle at Lewes in Sussex, capturing both the king and his son, the future Edward I, after which he ruled England for over a year. But in May 1265 Edward escaped from captivity and led a well co-ordinated royalist fight-back, which soon had Montfort on the run. By the start of August Edward's forces had the earl and his small army of supporters cornered near Worcester. Montfort was waiting for reinforcements led by his namesake son, but Edward had just led a surprise attack on them at Kenilworth. Here's how I wrote up the end of the story in A Great and Terrible King:

But by this time Montfort had crossed the Severn. Having seized the opportunity presented by his enemies’ temporary absence, the earl was now camped on the river’s eastern shore. He was, in fact, only a few miles south of Worcester, but Edward, after his exhausting dash through the night, was unable to contemplate pushing himself of his forces any further. Both armies therefore spent an uneasy twenty-four hours resting in close proximity. During this time, Montfort heard the news from Kenilworth, and not all of it was bad. In spite of its losses, his son’s army was still intact. The hope of uniting their two forces therefore remained undimmed, and with this end in mind the earl began to move his army on the evening of 3 August. Marching under cover of darkness, he aimed to give his enemies the slip for a final time. At dawn the next day, which broke around 5am, his forces arrived in Evesham, and there they paused for breakfast.

Three hours later, their spirits suddenly soared: on the horizon were spotted the advancing banners of young Simon’s army. Their stealthy night-time manoeuvres, it seemed, had been a success. With these reinforcements, they would stand a fighting chance. But then, with equal suddenness, all hope evaporated. From the top of the tower of Evesham Abbey, the lookout called down to Montfort in despair. ‘We are all dead men, for it is not your son, as you believed’.

It was Edward. The royalist army had not been given the slip at all. On the contrary, they had silently shadowed their opponents throughout the night, all the while remaining undetected. Playing the advantage of surprise for all it was worth, they had advanced the last few miles under the banners captured at Kenilworth two days before. Now, at last, the lengthy game of cat-and-mouse of the past two months was over: Montfort was trapped. Evesham lies in a loop of the River Avon, closed in from every direction except the north, and it was here, at the top of the hill, that Edward and Gloucester lined up their army.

The old sorcerer had been out-generalled by both his former apprentices, and he knew it. ‘How skilfully they are advancing’, he exclaimed, before adding, with characteristic arrogance, ‘they learned that from me!’. His only possible escape route was the bridge at southern end of the town, but there was not nearly enough time to get a whole army across it. The earl and his cavalry might flee and leave the others to their fate, but the loss of prestige would spell the end of his career. In any case, flight was hardly Montfort’s style. Instead, he rallied his forces for a final time and marched northwards out of Evesham, up the hill, to face his foes. The sky darkened and a thunderstorm broke.

Montfort’s chances at Evesham were terrible. The element of surprise and the command of the high ground, both so useful to him at Lewes, had this time been seized by his enemies. Once again, the earl’s forces were outnumbered three to one. When the two sides engaged, the wide royalist frontline quickly absorbed and enveloped the smaller Montfortian force. Defeat was inevitable.

So too was death. Well before the first blow had been struck, Edward had let it be known that, on this occasion, the normal rules of chivalric warfare were to be suspended. No quarter was to be given, no surrender accepted. Consequently, as the royalists closed in, the killing began. Montfort’s young knights were dragged from their horses, stripped of their armour, and stabbed. At least thirty of them perished in this way, an orgy of blood-letting not seen for centuries. Montfort himself, meanwhile, had received the special honour of a dedicated death-squad – a dozen men, ‘the strongest and most intrepid in arms’, chosen by Edward and Gloucester on the eve of battle, whose sole task was to find the earl and kill him. Yet in the end it was Roger Mortimer, the pugnacious marcher lord with the personal grudge, who struck the killer blow, running Montfort through the neck with his lance. Others then fell on the earl’s lifeless body, hacking off his hands, feet and head. In a final piece of grotesque savagery, his genitals were cut off and placed in his mouth, and the severed head was dispatched to Mortimer’s wife as a grisly token of her husband’s triumph.

Amidst such brutal carnage, there were few survivors. One man dressed in Montfortian armour had a miraculous escape, but not before he had been wounded in the shoulder. ‘I am Henry of Winchester, your king!’, he cried. ‘Do not kill me!’. Roger Leybourne immediately intervened and saved the stricken monarch, but it was Edward himself who led his father away from the battlefield.

Meanwhile, all around them, the killing continued to rage. Those fleeing across the fields were cut down as they ran. In the town, too, the streets were thick with the slaughtered. Even those who sought sanctuary in the abbey church were not spared. ‘The choir, the walls, the cross, the statues and the altars were sprayed with the blood of the wounded and the dead’, wrote one horrified eye-witness. ‘From the bodies around the high altar, a stream of blood ran right down into the crypts’.

‘The murder of Evesham’, wrote another, ‘for battle it was none’.

The Battle of Falkirk

[On this day in 1298 the Battle of Falkirk was fought between Edward I and William Wallace]

 It was not, in fact, until the dawn of the next day that the king finally caught up with his quarry, whose spears were spotted on high ground close to the town of Falkirk. For the English this brought a welcome end to weeks of uncertainty, and an especially restless twenty-four hours. They had spent the previous night camped at nearby Linlithgow in fearful expectation of a Scottish ambush: every rider – including Edward himself – had slept on the ground next to his standing horse (‘with their shields as pillows,’ said Guisborough, ‘and their armour as bedclothes’). For one fraught moment, it had seemed that their foes were indeed upon them; a rumour that the king had been wounded had caused an abortive rush to arms. Edward, it turned out, had been hurt in the night, but by rather more prosaic means. His horse, carelessly kept by its groom, had trodden on him.

Now, in the clear light of day, it was apparent that the Scots had abandoned all thought of ambush; in the distance they could be seen arraying themselves ready for battle. To compensate for his inferior numbers, Wallace had adopted a defensive strategy. His army was drawn up on the side of a small hill, at the foot of which ran an insubstantial stream. His greatest asset, the massed pikemen of his infantry, were arranged in four great circular brigades, or ‘schiltroms’, as the Scots called them. With their bristling spears turned outwards, these giant hedgehogs would give the footsoldiers a fighting chance against a cavalry charge. Nestled between them for protection were the archers of Selkirk Forest, while the Scottish cavalry were stationed at the rear. Both these contingents, however, were tiny in comparison with their English counterparts.

The strength of Wallace’s formation is well attested by the reaction of his opponent. Edward, when advised of it, was inclined to be cautious: superiority in numbers only counted for so much. The last time he had charged uphill at a supposedly inferior foe, the result had been a disastrous defeat. That, of course, had been at Lewes, well over three decades earlier, and was, to be fair, his first taste of battle. But when one remembers that the king’s most recent battlefield experience was the almost equally distant engagement at Evesham, the reason for his caution becomes even more apparent. Edward was now in his sixtieth year; his hair, once blond, had turned to snowy white. In general terms he was in remarkably robust health, but on this particular morning, thanks to his night-time mishap, he was nursing two broken ribs. Having arrived at Falkirk, he proposed pitching camp, and allowing his tired and hungry troops to feed themselves and their horses. His commanders, however, would have none of it: hesitation, they argued, would leave them once again exposed to attack. The king in due course agreed. The order to advance was given, and the battle of Falkirk began.

At first, Wallace’s strategy seemed as if it might well work. The first line of the English cavalry, led by the earls of Norfolk, Hereford and Lincoln, thundered towards the Scots, but immediately ran into difficulty. The little stream they had dismissed as an insubstantial obstacle in fact fed a much larger area of boggy marsh, which halted their headlong charge and sent them veering to the left. The second line, commanded by the bishop of Durham, swerved right to avoid the same pitfall. It soon became apparent, however, that these initial diversions had done the Scots no favours. The marsh, while protecting them from a frontal assault, had merely forced their opponents to attack from the sides, and the Scots now found themselves caught in a pincer. Their schiltroms, as expected, were highly successful in deterring the English cavalry, but this simply meant that the cavalry concentrated on the softer target presented by the Scottish archers. Eventually the schiltroms stood alone, at which point the English infantry unleashed a hail of stones and arrows, which ultimately caused so many casualties among the spearmen that they broke ranks. Seeing that their enemies had lost their defensive advantage, the English cavalry rode back in, and the Scottish slaughter was complete.

The Scottish cavalry – that is, the Scottish nobility – had fled at the start of the battle. (‘Without a sword’s blow’, said Guisborough, derisively). This has given rise to the pernicious but persistent myth that they secretly despised Wallace as a common upstart, and were actually in league with Edward I. As we have already seen, nothing could be further from the truth. The nobles of Scotland had from the first defied the English king and were quite ready to resist him. What separated them from the unfortunate archers and infantry at Falkirk was not their commitment to the patriotic cause, but their ability to flee when they realized that defeat was inevitable. We should not be too quick to condemn as cowards men who faced such overwhelming odds: it was massive numbers and superior firepower, not treachery, that led to the English victory. Nor should we pretend that the behaviour of the Scottish cavalry in any way divided them from their general. Wallace too escaped from Falkirk – presumably on the back of a horse.

A Great and Terrible King, 311-14 

The Birth of Edward I

This story begins in the year 1239 with a girl called Eleanor. Eleanor lives in England, a peaceful and prosperous kingdom, much the same size then as it is now. Eleanor herself, however, is not English. She was bred and brought up in Provence, an independent county in the south of what is now modern France. The reason Eleanor is living in England in 1239 is because, three and a half years earlier, she was married to the king of England, Henry III. At the time of their wedding, Henry was twenty-eight. Eleanor was twelve.

Eleanor is now sixteen years old, or very nearly so, and reportedly a great beauty: graceful, charming and elegant. Henry is very much in love with her, and she with him, but she has yet to win the hearts of his subjects. In the thirteenth century, the English did not take to foreigners with the same easy readiness that they do today. We may take as our witness a monk of St Albans by the name of Matthew Paris, who, as well as being a thorough-going xenophobe, also happens to be one of the most gossipy, prolific and best-informed chroniclers of the entire Middle Ages. Brother Matthew and his contemporaries had observed the effects of Eleanor’s arrival and seen the thing they most feared: an influx of foreigners, surrounding their king, separating him from his ‘natural’ subjects and advising him – so the English believed – badly. Rather ridiculously, Paris tried to pin the blame for this on Eleanor. Foreigners were pulling the kingdom to pieces, he said, and Henry, ‘being under the influence of his wife’, was letting them.

It was also apparently held against Eleanor that, three years into her marriage, she had not produced any children. ‘It was feared the queen was barren,’ said Matthew Paris, with the sympathy of a professional celibate. Again, this was quite ridiculous, given Eleanor’s tender years. What is much more likely is that Henry III, a kind and considerate man, had been exercising a bit of self-restraint. Twelve was the minimum age at which the medieval Church would permit girls to marry, and Henry and Eleanor had probably had sex soon after their wedding, but this would have been for political reasons, to ensure that their union was valid and binding. Common sense and compassion suggested that twelve was too young for regular marital relations and to run the risk that Eleanor might become pregnant.

By the time Matthew Paris made this comment, however, Eleanor was fifteen, Henry was thirty-one, and they were definitely sleeping together. We know this because, on 9 September 1238, in the middle of the night, a knife-wielding madman broke into Henry’s bedchamber with the intention of killing the king. He failed because, as Matthew Paris himself tells us, Henry was not in his room at the time. Luckily, he was with the queen.

And now, a little over nine months on from that dramatic evening, the queen is about to confound her critics and silence the rumour-mongers. 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!’

Game of Thrones, the Norman Conquest, Political Violence and Earl Waltheof

[Warning: contains spoilers]

So I finally got round to watching Game of Thrones. This was partly because my partner wanted to watch it and I wanted to sit on the same couch, and partly because almost all the other medievalists I know have been talking about it a lot over the past couple of years, leaving me feeling very much out of the loop. I quite enjoyed it. The dwarf is very good, isn't he? And the princess with the dragons: she definitely gets a huzzah.

Game of Thrones, in case you've just arrived by spaceship, is an fantasy-adventure type saga with a very medieval flavour. As lots of other commentators have pointed out, it contains, in its plots and characters, historical parallels with the real Middle Ages. People have pointed out similarities, for example, with England in the fifteenth century during the Wars of the Roses. York and Lancaster/Stark and Lannister - you don't have to concentrate too hard to spot that one.

Game of Thrones is also incredibly violent. People are forever being stabbed, mutilated, tortured, beheaded, shot, or otherwise maimed or killed. Very often people get their throats slit. In the dramatic climax of Season Three, the so-called 'Red Wedding', several main characters are dispatched in the most grisly way imaginable.

Well, you might say, that again is simply a reflection of the reality behind the fantasy: the Middle Ages were a bloody and violent era. That's why 'medieval' is frequently employed as a pejorative term. That's why if someone threatens to get medieval on your ass, you run.

Well, not entirely. Such levels of violence did exist during parts of the period we now call medieval. In England, they existed during the late Middle Ages (particularly the fifteenth century, during the Wars of the Roses), and in the centuries before 1066. But in the period I've studied for the past twenty years - the two and half centuries after 1066 - they did not.

The clue here, of course, is the famous date: 1066 was the year the Normans arrived, and the Normans, in spite of their generally negative reputation, did not go in for the kind of extreme political violence that was routinely used in England before the Conquest, and that re-emerged around the year 1300. The Normans were extremely bloody in their warfare - witness the Battle of Hastings and the Harrying of the North - but not in their politics.

A few examples from pre-Conquest England. The reign of Æthelred the Unready (978-1016) saw several bloody purges. Æthelred succeeded to the throne as a child in 978 after the murder of his older half-brother, Edward the Martyr; in 1006 there was a bloody purge at his court orchestrated by his henchman, Eadric Streona, which saw several nobles slaughtered. ('Wulfgeat was deprived of all his property, and Wulfheah and Ufegeat were blinded, and Ealdorman Ælfhelm killed,' says that year's Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). And in 1015 Eadric was at it again: ‘he betrayed Sigeferth and Morcar, the chief thegns belonging to the Seven Boroughs: he enticed them into his chamber, and they were basely killed inside it’.

As you might expect, things failed to improve once England had been conquered by the Vikings in 1016. King Cnut began his reign with a similar round of executions (dispatching, among others, the treacherous Eadric). And the killing continued under his sons: during the reign of Harold Harefoot, Earl Godwine orchestrated the arrest, mutilation and murder of Alfred, brother of Edward the Confessor, and his companions, in 1036. It also continued unabated during the reign of the supposedly saintly Confessor himself. Tostig, son of Earl Godwine, killed his political enemies in Northumbria in 1063 having invited them to a conference. When the survivors came to complain to the king the following Christmas, they too were murdered, this time at the instigation of Tostig's sister, Edith, the Confessor's queen.

All this changed after 1066. 'No man dared slay another', said the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in its obituary of William the Conqueror in 1087, ‘no matter what evil the other might have done him.’ During William's reign, only one nobleman was executed - Waltheof, earl of Northumbria. Waltheof was implicated in a rebellion against the new king in 1075, and though he speedily confessed and turned himself in, he paid the price the following year, when he was beheaded on a hill just outside the walls of Winchester. Quite why William felt he had to make an example of Waltheof is unclear, but the fact remains he is the exception that proves the new rule. After his execution in 1076, no earl was executed in England until 1306, when Edward I commanded the death of the earl of Atholl. If you want to sum up this development in a sentence, you can say that the Normans, and William in particular, had introduced chivalry, in the sense of sparing and ransoming your enemies rather than lobbing their heads off.

Of course, sometimes the taboo was broken. King John (subject of the next book, btw) notoriously broke it by doing away with his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, and later the wife and son of William de Briouze. But look what happened to King John. After 1066, chivalry was a taboo you broke at your peril.

Waltheof, by the way, was executed on this day in 1076 - the anniversary of his killing, as much my recent Game of Thrones marathon, was the inspiration for this post. Inevitably a couple of people have already said (as they did at the time) 'poor Waltheof'. Waltheof certainly felt very sorry for himself, reportedly weeping and praying before he was led to the block, behaviour which later saw him raised to be a saint. During his lifetime, however, he was not particularly saintly. In the winter of 1073-74, a few months before the rebellion that ultimately cost him his life, Waltheof had settled an ancient blood feud with his rivals, the Karlssons, by sending his men to butcher them in the Yorkshire village of Settrington as they sat down to dinner - a scene which must have been very much like Game of Thrones' Red Wedding. Such behaviour had been par for the course in pre-Conquest England, an accepted part of the political process. But was no longer acceptable in the chivalrous era ushered in by William the Conqueror.

1066 words, so I'll stop.