Anglo-Norman Studies XL: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 2017 [40] 178327297X, 9781783272976

Table of contents :
ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES vii
EDITOR’S PREFACE ix
ABBREVIATIONS xi
English Kingship: the View from Paris, 1066–1204 (The R. Allen Brown Memorial Lecture, 2017) / Nicholas Vincent 1
Audacity and Ambition in Early Norman England and the Big Stuff of the Conquest (The R. Allen Brown Memorial Lecture, 2016) / C. P. Lewis 25
Ressources et croissance dans le monde anglo-normand: sources et hypothèses / Mathieu Arnoux 53
Becket vult: the Appropriation of St. Thomas Becket’s Image during the Canterbury Dispute, 1184–1200 (The Marjorie Chibnall Memorial Essay) / James Barnaby 63
La Bataille de Bouvines reconsiderée / Dominique Barthélemy 77
Abbot Peter the Venerable’s Two Missions to England (1130 and 1155/1156) / Scott G. Bruce 91
La production manuscrite anglo-normande et la 'Bible' d’Herman de Valenciennes: usage et réception d’un livre vernaculaire (xiie–xive siècles) / Francis Gingras 107
Ralph Niger and the Books of Kings / Frédérique Lachaud 125
From Captivity to Liberation: the Ideology and Practice of Franchise in Crusading France / Anne E. Lester 147
‘Daughter of Fulk, Glory of Brittany’: Countess Ermengarde of Brittany (c. 1070–1147) / Amy Livingstone 165
The Idea of ‘Empire’ as Hegemonic Power under the Norman and Plantagenet Kings (1066–1204) / Fanny Madeline 179
Child Kingship and Notions of (Im)maturity in North-Western Europe, 1050–1262 / Emily Joan Ward 197
Note: A Micro-Economy of Salvation: Further Thoughts on the ‘Annuary’ of Robert of Torigni / Thomas N. Bisson 213

Citation preview

ANGLO-NORMAN STUDIES XL PROCEEDINGS OF THE BATTLE CONFERENCE 2017

This volume offers a wide ranging collection of articles representing the cutting edge of recent Anglo-Norman scholarship. For politics and rulership there are perspectives on English kingship from Paris (Vincent), on the exceptional scale of the 1066 invasion and conquest (Lewis), on legends of the Battle of Bouvines (Barthélemy), on ideas of empire (Madeline), on child kingship (Ward) and on female rulership in Brittany (Livingstone); northern French urban franchises are placed in a crusading context (Lester) and the concept of economic resources is analysed with respect to Normandy (Arnoux); narrative sources are represented in the vernacular by a study of Herman of Valenciennes’ Bible (Gingras) and in Latin by the historiography of Robert of Torigni (Bisson) and Ralph Niger (Lachaud); and two contributions focus on twelfth-century ecclesiastical officers, Abbot Peter the Venerable (Scott) and Archbishop Thomas Becket (Barnaby). Elisabeth van Houts is Honorary Professor of European Medieval History, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Emmanuel College.

ANGLO-NORMAN STUDIES ISSN 0954-9927

Editor Elisabeth van Houts Editorial Board S. D. Church (University of East Anglia) Lindy Grant (University of Reading) Mark Hagger (Bangor University) Leonie V. Hicks (Canterbury Christ Church University) C. P. Lewis (Institute of Historical Research, University of London)

ANGLO-NORMAN STUDIES XL PROCEEDINGS OF THE BATTLE CONFERENCE 2017

Edited by Elisabeth van Houts

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Editor and Contributors 2017, 2018 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2018 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978–1–78327–297–6

ISSN 0954–9927 Anglo-Norman Studies (Formerly ISSN 0261-9857: Proceedings of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies)

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate

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CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES vii EDITOR’S PREFACE ix ABBREVIATIONS

xi

English Kingship: the View from Paris, 1066–1204 (The R. Allen Brown Memorial Lecture, 2017) Nicholas Vincent

1

Audacity and Ambition in Early Norman England and the Big Stuff of the Conquest (The R. Allen Brown Memorial Lecture, 2016) C. P. Lewis

25

Ressources et croissance dans le monde anglo-normand: sources et hypothèses 53 Mathieu Arnoux Becket vult: the Appropriation of St Thomas Becket’s Image during the Canterbury Dispute, 1184–1200 (The Marjorie Chibnall Memorial Essay) James Barnaby

63

La Bataille de Bouvines reconsiderée Dominique Barthélemy

77

Abbot Peter the Venerable’s Two Missions to England (1130 and 1155/1156) Scott G. Bruce

91

La production manuscrite anglo-normande et la Bible d’Herman de 107 Valenciennes: usage et réception d’un livre vernaculaire (xiie–xive siècles) Francis Gingras Ralph Niger and the Books of Kings Frédérique Lachaud

125

From Captivity to Liberation: the Ideology and Practice of Franchise in Crusading France Anne E. Lester

147

‘Daughter of Fulk, Glory of Brittany’: Countess Ermengarde of Brittany (c.1070–1147) Amy Livingstone

165

vi Contents The Idea of ‘Empire’ as Hegemonic Power under the Norman and Plantagenet Kings (1066–1204) Fanny Madeline

179

Child Kingship and Notions of (Im)maturity in North-Western Europe, 1050–1262 Emily Joan Ward

197

Note: A Micro-Economy of Salvation: Further Thoughts on the ‘Annuary’ of Robert of Torigni Thomas N. Bisson

213

ILLUSTRATIONS Frédérique Lachaud, Ralph Niger and the Books of Kings Figure 1 Lincoln, Cathedral MS 25 fol. 33r

134

Figure 2 Lincoln, Cathedral MS 25 fol. 46ar (slip inserted between fols 46v and 47r)

135

Figure 3 Lincoln, Cathedral MS 25 fol. 81*r (slip inserted between fols 81v and 82r)

136

All images reproduced with the kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln Cathedral Thomas N. Bisson – A Micro-Economy of Salvation: Further Thoughts on the ‘Annuary’ of Robert of Torigni Figure 1 Avranches MS 210 fol. 112v

214

Figure 2 Avranches MS 210 fol. 114r

215

Figure 3 Avranches MS 210 fol. 115r

216

All images reproduced with the kind permission of the Bibliothèque Municipale Edouard le Héricher at Avranches

The editor, contributors and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and persons listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publishers will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

EDITOR’S PREFACE The fortieth Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies took place from Thursday 20th July to Monday 24th July in Paris, where several distinguished medievalists and their institutions provided us with a warm welcome and splendid hospitality. Profound thanks are due to Professor Mathieu Arnoux at the Université Paris-Diderot and the École des Hautes Études des Sciences Sociales, who was in charge of the overall academic organisation of lectures and visits. His task was not unlike that of a medieval royal court steward who made sure that our itinerant conference each day reached its different location for lectures and meals. He also hosted the wonderful conference dinner in a Jugendstil restaurant. He was efficiently assisted by Dr Isabelle Bretthauer. We are also immensely grateful to Professor Dominique Barthélemy of the Université Paris-Sorbonne and the Institut Universitaire de France as our host at the Sorbonne on the Saturday, which was especially opened up for the delegates’ lunch. Professeur Jean-François Cottier of the Université Paris-Diderot provided invaluable preparatory assistance but due to illness was unfortunately unable to attend the conference. More happily, Dr Fanny Madeline (Fondation Thiers) was willing and able to take his place at the very last minute. The Allen Brown Memorial lecture by Professor Nicholas Vincent was given on the Thursday at the Institut de Recherches et d’Histoire des Textes in the Salle Jeanne Vieillard where the director, François Bougard, hosted a lavish reception. We thank him most warmly. The Director of the Institut d’Études Avancées, Professor Gretty Mirdal, allowed us the use of the splendid eighteenth-century Hôtel de Lauzun on the Quai d’Anjou on the Friday, and the Director of the Collège Franco-Britannique in the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, Professor François Brunet, welcomed us there on the Monday. We acknowledge our sincerest debt to both of them. The Sunday was reserved for an informative tour of Paris under the expert guidance of Professor Lindy Grant (University of Reading) with visits to two important medieval churches. At Saint Denis we were fortunate in receiving additional guidance from Eliott Boulate, who allowed us exceptional access to the Saint Denis lapidarium and its magnificent lavabo of c. 1200. We would like to thank Dr Nicole Rodrigues, Dr Michael Wyss, and Monsieur Serge Santos for making our visit to Saint Denis possible, and Monsieur Xavier de Montfort of the Musée des Arts et Métiers for giving us permission to visit the church of Saint-Martin-des-Champs. The fourth winner of the Marjorie Chibnall Memorial Essay Prize was James Barnaby, whose essay was praised for the unique insights it provides on the so-called Canterbury dispute about the legacy of Thomas Becket to build a collegiate church for secular canons. This year’s Muriel Brown graduate bursarians were Charlotte Crouch (University of Reading) and Gabriele Passabi (University of Cambridge). As for the conference proceedings, as ever I am most grateful for the expert assistance provided by Caroline Palmer and Rohais Haughton and the home team at Boydell and Brewer. Elisabeth van Houts January 2018

ABBREVIATIONS AD AmHR ANS ASC

Archives départementales American Historical Review Anglo-Norman Studies Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, cited by year (corrected in square brackets if necessary) and manuscript; unless otherwise stated the edition is Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, ed. Charles Plummer, 2 vols, Oxford 1892–9 ASC, trans. Swanton The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, trans. and ed. M. J. Swanton, London 1996 ASE Anglo-Saxon England BAA British Archaeological Association BAR British Archaeological Reports BIHR Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research BL London, British Library BM Bibliothèque Municipale BnF Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France Carmen The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio of Guy, Bishop of Amiens, ed. and trans. Frank Barlow, Oxford 1999 Chronicles, Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I,   ed. Howlett ed. R. Howlett, 4 vols, London 1884–9 CBA Council for British Archaeology Dugdale, Monasticon William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, new edn by Henry Ellis and Bulkeley Bandinel, 6 vols, London 1817–30 Eadmer, HN Eadmer, Historia novorum in Anglia, in Eadmeri Historia novorum in Anglia, et Opuscula duo; De Vita Sancti Anselmi et quibusdam miraculis ejus, ed Martin Rule, RS 81, 1884 EEA English Episcopal Acta EETS Early English Text Society EHR English Historical Review EME Early Medieval Europe English Lawsuits English Lawsuits from William I to Richard I, ed. R. C. van Caenegem, 2 vols, Selden Society 106–7, 1990–1 Freeman, Norman Edward A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest Conquest of England, its Causes and its Results, 6 vols, 1st edn Oxford 1867–79, revised edn New York 1873–6 GDB Great Domesday Book, followed by the folio number, a or b (for recto or verso), cited from Domesday Book, seu Liber Censualis Willelmi Primi, 2 vols, London 1783, I, or from Great Domesday Book: Library Edition ed. Ann Williams and R. W. H. Erskine, Alecto Historical Editions, London 1986– 92; followed in parentheses by the abbreviated county name and the entry number (substituting an oblique for a comma between the first and second parts) used in Domesday Book,

xii Abbreviations ed. John Morris and others, 34 vols, Phillimore, London 1974–86 Gerald, Opera Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. J. S. Brewer and others, 8 vols, London 1861–1918 Gesetze, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. Felix Liebermann, 3 ed. Liebermann vols, Halle 1903–16 GND The Gesta Normannorum ducum of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Robert of Torigni, ed. and trans. Elisabeth M. C. van Houts, 2 vols, Oxford 1992–5 Harmer, AS Writs F. E. Harmer, Anglo-Saxon Writs, 2nd edn, Stamford 1989 Howden, Chronica Chronica Rogeri de Houedene, ed. William Stubbs, 4 vols, RS 51, 1868–71 Howden, Gesta Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi [now attributed to Roger of Howden], ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols, RS 49, 1867 HSJ Haskins Society Journal Huntingdon Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum: The History of the English People, ed. and trans. Diana Greenway, Oxford 1996 IE Inquisitio Eliensis, in Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiensis [and] Inquisitio Eliensis, ed. N. E. S. A. Hamilton, London 1876 JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History JL Regesta pontificum romanorum ab condita ecclesia ad annum post Christum natum MCXCVIII, ed. Philipp Jaffé, Wilhelm Wattenbach, S. Loewenfeld, and others, 2 vols, Leipzig 1885–8 JMH Journal of Medieval History John of Worcester The Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. R. R. Darlington and P. McGurk, II-III, Oxford 1995–8 KCD Codex Diplomaticus Aevi Saxonici, ed. J. M. Kemble, 6 vols, London 1839–48 – cited by charter number LDB Little Domesday Book, followed by the folio number and a or b (for recto or verso), cited from Domesday Book, seu Liber Censualis Willelmi Primi, 2 vols, London 1783, II, or from Great Domesday Book: Library Edition ed. Ann Williams and R. W. H. Erskine, Alecto Historical Editions, London 2000; followed in parentheses by the abbreviated county name and the entry number (substituting an oblique for a comma between the first and second parts) used in Domesday Book, ed. John Morris and others, 34 vols, Phillimore, London 1974–86 Letters of Lanfranc The Letters of Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. and trans. Helen Clover and Margaret Gibson, Oxford 1979 Malmesbury, William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum Anglorum: The   Gesta pontificum History of the English Bishops, ed. and trans. M. Winterbottom and R. M. Thomson, 2 vols, Oxford 2007 Malmesbury, William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum: The  Gesta regum History of the English Kings, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, M. Winterbottom and R. M. Thomson, 2 vols, Oxford 1998–9 Malmesbury, William of Malmesbury, Historia novella: The

Abbreviations xiii   Historia novella Contemporary History, ed. Edmund King, trans. K. R. Potter, Oxford 1998 MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, usually cited from online edn (http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/), with article number and date accessed OED Oxford English Dictionary OMT Oxford Medieval Texts Orderic The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols, Oxford 1969–80 P & P Past and Present PL Patrologia cursus completus, series Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 221 vols, Paris 1844–65 Poitiers The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers, ed. and trans. R. H. C. Davis and Marjorie Chibnall, Oxford 1998 PR The Great Roll of the Pipe for [regnal year, king], Pipe Roll Society; except for 2-4 Henry II, ed. Joseph Hunter, London 1844; 1 Richard I, ed. Joseph Hunter, London 1844; 26 Henry III, ed. Henry Louis Cannon, London 1918 Proc. Brit. Acad. Proceedings of the British Academy Regesta Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum, 1066-1154, 3 vols (I, ed. H. W. C. Davis, Oxford 1913; II, ed. Charles Johnson and H. A. Cronne, Oxford 1956; III, ed. H. A. Cronne and R. H. C. Davis, Oxford 1968) Regesta: William I Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum: The Acta of William I (1066-1087), ed. David Bates, Oxford 1998 RHF Receuil des Historiens des Gaules et de la France, ed. M. Bouquet and others, new ed. L. Delisle, 24 vols, Paris 1869–1904 Robertson, A. J. Robertson, Anglo-Saxon Charters, Cambridge 1939   AS Charters RS Rolls Series (Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages, Published under the Direction of the Master of the Rolls). S P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: an Annotated List and Bibliography, London 1968, and with a revised and updated version largely edited by S. E. Kelly, available at http:// www.esawyer.org.uk/ SS Scriptores (in Folio) [in MGH] s.v. sub verbo, verbis (‘under the word, words’) Tabularia Tabularia: Sources écrites de la Normandie mediéval [online journal: www.unicaen.fr/mrsh/craham/revue/tabularia/] Telma Chartes originales antérieures à 1121 conservées en France, ed. C. Giraud, J.-B. Renault et B.-M. Tock, Nancy: Centre de Médiévistique Jean Schneider; éds électronique: Orléans: Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes, 2010, http:// www.cn-telma.fr/originaux/ Date de mise à jour: Première version, 10 juin 2010 TRE tempore regis Eadwardi (‘in King Edward’s time’) TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society TRW tempore regis Willelmi (‘in King William’s time’)

xiv Abbreviations VCH

The Victoria History of the Counties of England [with county name], in progress Vita Ædwardi The Life of King Edward who Rests at Westminster, Attributed to a Monk of Saint-Bertin, ed. and trans. Frank Barlow, 2nd edn, Oxford 1992 Wace, trans. Burgess The History of the Norman People: Wace’s Roman de Rou, trans. Glyn S. Burgess, Woodbridge 2004 Whitelock, AS Wills D. Whitelock, Anglo-Saxon Wills, Cambridge 1930 × [The form 1066 × 1087 indicates an uncertain date within the range]

The R. Allen Brown Memorial Lecture, 2017

ENGLISH KINGSHIP: THE VIEW FROM PARIS, 1066–1204* Nicholas Vincent In the summer of 1201, King John of England visited Paris. His visit is described for us by Rigord, the biographer of Philip Augustus: John King of England came into France, received with honour by King Philip and most gloriously welcomed in the church of Saint-Denis with hymns and praises and solemn procession. The King of the Franks then led him to Paris, where he was received by the citizens with remarkable reverence and honour, lodged in the royal palace with all things devotedly supplied for him. All the wines of the lord King were placed at his disposal, granted liberally to him and his men to drink. Moreover, precious gifts of gold, silver, various garments, Spanish destriers, palfreys and other more precious presents were liberally bestowed by Philip upon King John of England. And thus in peace and friendship, having received license from King (Philip), he bid his farewells.1

Robert of Auxerre describes the same event in less elaborate terms: King John came to Paris, a city famed as the seat of royal dignity, but more famed still as the meeting-place of pre-eminent doctors in all sciences. There he was received with great honour and procession by the King together with clergy and people.2

There are already points of emphasis here: Paris as a place of solemn procession, of learning and liberality, of wine and song; Paris as a place of abundance, where all visitors to the French king’s court were entertained luxuriously and free of charge.3 Already we find Paris itself personified as a symbol of la douce France, of all things civilized and sophisticated. Parisian accents are themselves more urbane than those of Rouen or Poitiers.4 By Parisian standards all else will be judged. The kings ruling from Paris claimed a dignity, a liberality, and a command over both religion and learning, that set them apart from any mere king of England. In all of this, there was much striving after what was intended to appear effortless superiority. Louis VII is said to have vouchsafed to Walter Map that, where the King of England might boast The present essay could not have been written but for friendships established in Paris over the past twenty years. I think here especially of John Baldwin, friend and fellow Parisian. 1 Rigord, Histoire de Philippe Auguste, ed. E. Carpentier, G. Pon and Y. Chauvin, Paris 2006, 368, there offering pridie kalendas Junii by mistake for pridie kalendas Julii (cf. the itinerary of John in Rotuli Litterarum Patentium, ed. T. D. Hardy, London 1835, sub anno). For the circumstances, in the aftermath of the Anglo-French peace settlement of 1200, see J. W. Baldwin, Paris, 1200, Stanford 2010, 3–5, 117–18, 215. 2 Roberti Autissiodorensis Chronica, ed. O. Holder-Egger, SS, xvi, 260, also as Robert of Auxerre, Chronologia seriem temporum et historiam rerum in orbe gestarum, ed. N. Camusat, Troyes 1608, 96. 3 A theme already found in accounts of the visits to Paris by Becket and Henry II in 1158: Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. J. C. Robertson, 7 vols, London 1875–85 [hereafter MTB], III, 32; ‘Continuatio Beccensis’, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, ed. R. Howlett, 4 vols, London 1884–9, IV, 319. 4 John of Salisbury, Entheticus, lines 135–40, whence J. McLoughlin, ‘Nations and Loyalties: The Outlook of a Twelfth-Century Schoolman (John of Salisbury, c.1120–1180)’, in Faith and Identity: Christian Political Experience, ed. D. Loades and K. Walsh, Studies in Church History Subsidia 6, Oxford 1990, 39–46, esp. 41 n. *

2

Nicholas Vincent

of wealth and power: ‘We in France have nothing, save bread and wine and joy’.5 But such simplicity was itself as sophisticated and hard-earned as the rustic antics of the court of Marie-Antoinette. There too arrogance continued to pose as simplicity. During King John’s visit of 1201, according to the anonymous of Béthune, when the English visitors to the Capetian court drank all the bad wine, their French hosts ridiculed them for not choosing the good!6 John was by no means the first English king to visit Paris. His father, Henry II, went there, probably in the early summer of 1151, to render homage for Normandy.7 He was there again in September 1158, now as count of Anjou and duke of Aquitaine, for the betrothal of his eldest son, the future Young King Henry, to Margaret daughter of Louis VII.8 In mid November 1169, Henry approached as far as Saint-Denis, for negotiations over Becket.9 His sons were in Paris more frequently, most conspicuously in 1173 when Henry the Young King fled to the court of Louis VII, together with his brothers Richard and Geoffrey.10 There, the Young Henry and Richard are to be found, alongside Louis VII, witnessing a charter of Robert count of Meulan granting King Louis’s chamberlain, Walter, whatever Count Robert possessed in the city: in essence the great commercial district of La Grève on the right bank of the Seine, in the 4th arrondissement, today the site of the Hotel de Ville, more or less opposite the Île Saint-Louis where the second of the sessions of the 40th Battle Conference was held in 2017.11 Henry II’s third son, Geoffrey, not only visited the city, but died there in 1186, being one of the first great men to be buried in the newly completed choir of Notre-Dame. There Philip Augustus instituted a chantry of four priests to pray in perpetuity for the souls of Geoffrey, Philip himself and Philip’s father, King Louis VII.12 Geoffrey, like Henry the Young King before him, was the subject of verse laments sung in Paris, set to the new style of polyphonic music associated with the conductus of Notre-Dame, almost certainly composed by Philip the Chancellor (d.1236), known from his place of residence as Philip de Grève.13 Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles, ed. M. R. James, C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford 1983, 450–1, quoted by R. W. Southern, Medieval Humanism and Other Studies, Oxford 1970, 147–8, and directly echoed in Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione, in Gerald, Opera, viii, 317–18 (Et nos certe panem … habemus et vinum et gaudium). 6 ‘Chronique française des rois de France’, ed. L. Delisle, in M. Bouquet and others, Recueil des Historiens des Gaules et de la France, 24 vols, Paris 1738–1904, XXIV, 760, following John’s departure from Paris for Philip’s palace at Fontainebleau. 7 Robert of Torigny, in Chronicles, ed. Howlett, IV, 162. 8 Ibid., 196–7, 319; Radulfi de Diceto …. opera historica, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols, London 1876, I, 302–3, and cf. Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, 492–5 9 MTB, I, 75–6; III, 445–6; VII, 161–9, nos. 606–7. 10 Howden, Chronica, II, 46–7. 11 BnF MS Clairambault 209, 9121, no. 20 (12), and for La Grève, see D. Crouch, The Beaumont Twins, Cambridge 1986, 180–1; Baldwin, Paris, 14–15, 17, 19, 36, 50. 12 Rigord, Histoire, 218–20, and cf. Baldwin, Paris, 216–17. 13 The verses Anglia planctus itera (Walther 1015) appear with music in the famous antiphonary later acquired for the Medici Library in Florence, first described by L. Delisle, ‘Discours prononcé à l’Assemblée générale de la société de l’Histoire de France le 26 mai 1885’, Annuaire-Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de France, 22, 1885, 101–6, whence G. A. Anderson, Notre-Dame and Related Conductus, 6 part 1, Henryville 1981, xx–xxi, 22–3, and cf. Baldwin, Paris, 140, 145–8, these particular verses attributed to Philip by D. A. Traill, ‘Philip the Chancellor and F10: Expanding the Canon’, Filologia Mediolatina, 10, 2003, 230–2; D. A. Traill, ‘More Poems by Philip the Chancellor’, Journal of Medieval Latin, 16, 2006, 74–7. For the lament for the Young King, Da plaudens organo (Walther 4022), see Petri Blesensis Carmina, ed. C. Wollin, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 128, Turnhout 1998, 341–3 no. 2:3, tentatively attributed to Peter of Blois, reattributed to Philip the Chancellor by Traill, ‘More Poems’, 69–72. 5



English Kingship: the View from Paris, 1066–1204

3

It is hard to imagine the canons of St Paul’s London or the monks of Westminster performing comparable services for any son of a reigning King of France. Henry II went to great lengths to impress the Parisians with his wealth and majesty. Witness the procession that he provided for Thomas Becket, as his ambassador, visiting Paris in 1158, deliberately instructed to circumvent the Capetian ban on official visitors buying their own provisions.14 He also issued at least one charter dated ‘at Paris’. Granted during Henry’s stay in September 1158, this confirmed the nuns of Les Hautes-Bruyères near Rambouillet in extensive gifts made by Aimery count of Evreux, Isabella de Tosny and others.15 Hautes-Bruyères was an institution very close to Henry’s family concerns. His great-grandmother, Bertrade de Montfort, had retired there in her widowhood, establishing Les Hautes-Bruyères as a dependency of Fontevraud. Besides being wife of Fulk of Anjou, Bertrade was also, notoriously, the mistress of King Philip of France, grandfather of Louis VII.16 Henry’s Parisian charter of 1158 should thus remind us of the extent to which the Capetian and Anglo-Norman worlds were in constant contact: armed collision alternating with economic and cultural symbiosis. In the past, a number of distinguished historians have set out to describe such contacts. Most distinguished of all, perhaps, was Sir Richard Southern. In a linked pair of essays, both reprinted in 1970, in his collection entitled Medieval Humanism (a book, it should be noted, unavailable in Paris in either the Bibliothèque nationale or the École des Chartes), Southern sought to establish two highly significant principles. The first, set out in 1960 in his essay on ‘England in the Twelfth Century Renaissance’ was that no matter the extent of their experiment and erudition, English intellectuals of the twelfth century stood in awe of Parisian ways. In cultural and intellectual terms, England remained a colonial outstation of an enterprise directed from the banks of the Seine.17 The second principle, established in Southern’s essay on ‘England’s First Entry into Europe’, first delivered in 1966, was that the connection between England and the continent, so much a talking-point in the 1960s, was itself at least a thousand years old. The true state of Anglo-European relations, Southern argued, was of friction, as in an electro-magnet, encouraging both fruitful interaction and mutual repulsion. In the century after 1066, isolationism was replaced by closer symbiosis within an Anglo-French ‘common market’, even by English dependence upon France.18 The intention here was clear enough. In Southern’s telling, future Anglo-European entente could only improve and deepen. This was matitudinal history, written by a survivor of the Second World War himself taught by survivors of the First, confident that tomorrow’s world would be a better, because a more European, For Becket’s embassy, see William fitz Stephen, in MTB, III, 29–33, whence R. Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225, Oxford 2002, 134–5, with the by now customary advertisement of the superiority of English beer over French wine. For other instances of this trope, see Petri Blesensis Carmina, ed. Wollin, 277, 281 nos. 6–6a; Bartlett, Norman and Angevin Kings, 579. 15 The Letters and Charters of Henry II, King of England (1154–1189), ed. N. Vincent and others, Oxford forthcoming, no.1252. 16 For the priory, see A.-N. Rabourdin, Le Prieuré royal de Haute-Bruyère de l’ordre de Fontevrault, Rambouillet 1948. Note also the close kinship between Isabella de Tosny and a succession of Henry II’s mistresses: M. Lovatt, ‘Archbishop Geoffrey of York: A Problem in Anglo-French Maternity’, Records, Administration and Aristocratic Society in the Anglo-Norman Realm, ed. N. Vincent, Woodbridge 2009, 109–11. 17 R. Southern, Medieval Humanism, 158–80, first printed in History, 45, 1960, 201–16. 18 Southern, Medieval Humanism, 135–57, esp 140 for ‘common market’, first delivered as the 1966 Creighton Lecture in the University of London. 14

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place.19 It is a version of English history that, from our rather more crepuscular viewpoint, may require rethinking. It was composed in the shadow of De Gaulle’s 1963 veto, before les évènements of 1968 let alone 2016, and long before Southern planned out his last great work: an attempt to link the world of Scholastic Humanism with the Unification of Europe, both the œuvre and the ‘unification’ here uncompleted at the time of Southern’s death.20 In what follows, Southern’s ideas – of England’s place in Europe, and of the essentially normative role of Paris as arbiter of taste and truth – will feature prominently. At the same time, not everything in Southern’s picture is to be accepted at face value. As long ago as 1983, Rodney Thomson set out to question England’s intellectual dependence on Paris. Far from being essentially colonial or second rate plodders, argued Thomson (himself a historian richly attuned to colonial sensitivities), Englishmen of the twelfth-century renaissance made vital contributions, not only in science and history, administration and natural wonders (the fields in which Southern himself allowed for a degree of English leadership) but in the study of the Latin classics (Osbern of Gloucester, Robert of Cricklade, William of Malmesbury), in grammar and dialectic (Robert Pullen, Adam of Balsham, John of Cornwall, and I would add here Geoffrey of Vinsauf), and perhaps most surprisingly of all in book production: the relatively artisanal yet massively influential means by which the great scholastic leap forwards was achieved.21 Since Thomson wrote, a number of strands have been added to his argument. Paul Saenger, for example, has suggested that the Bible was first divided into its standard chapters not in Paris but in England, in a system later promulgated by Stephen Langton.22 Langton himself, thanks to Mark Clark, can now be presented as the principal disciple and exponent of Peter Comestor, himself thanks to Langton, raised to equal status with the Lombard as twin pillars of the Paris curriculum, and hence of the Paris system of thought.23 Christopher de Hamel has noted the first emergence of small, portable codexes, such as those of St Albans or the Loire valley, some decades in advance of the earliest Paris bibles.24 In other words (and here taking my life in my hands, since I once witnessed a most explosive argument in Paris over just such matters) the Paris Bible was itself an essentially English invention. All of this is important. Despite Thomson’s opening declaration that his topic ‘ought not to be the subject of chauvinism’, there nonetheless remains a risk of replacing one essentially chauvinist extreme (English provincialism) with something equally chauvinist (Parisian dependence upon superior, insular alternatives).25 19 Note that Southern dedicated Medieval Humanism to his former tutor, Vivian Galbraith, a World War I infantry officer, holder of the Croix de guerre avec palme. 20 R. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, 2 vols, Oxford 1995–2000 21 R. M. Thomson, ‘England and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance’, P&P 101, 1983, 3–21, reprinted in Thomson, England and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, Aldershot 1998, chapter 19. 22 P. Saenger, ‘The Anglo-Hebraic Origins of the Modern Chapter Division of the Latin Bible’, La fractura historiográfica: Las investigaciones de Edad Media y Renacimiento desde el tercer milenio, Seminario de Estudios Medievales y Renacentistas (SEMYR), Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca 2008, 177–202. 23 M. Clark, The Making of the Historia Scholastica, 1150–1200, Toronto 2015. 24 C. de Hamel, Glossed Books of the Bible and the Origins of the Paris Book Trade, Cambridge 1984; C. de Hamel, La Bible: Histoire du livre, Paris 2002, 117–18, and cf. Richard and Mary Rouse on the role of Englishmen in establishing the biblical concordance and other instruments of exegetical research: R. H. and M. A. Rouse, ‘The Verbal Concordance to the Scriptures’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 44, 1974, 5–30, and for the book trade more generally, R. H. and M. A. Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris, 1200–1500, 2 vols, Turnhout 2000; Baldwin, Paris, 43–5. 25 Thomson, ‘England and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance’, 3.



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Both sides of the argument strive after absolutes, English exceptionalism versus Parisian predominance. They should remind us, nonetheless, of one very important undertow. As in the satire of another former colonial (Jonathan Swift’s Dublin bearing a relation to eighteenth-century London not unlike that assumed by London to twelfth-century Paris), no matter how much the Lilliputians consider themselves the betters of the Brobdingnagians, the Brobdingnagians will always assert their own essential superiority. From either end of the egg, the other end looks inferior, either because bigger and cruder or because smaller and therefore of lesser consequence. Liesbeth van Houts has shown this very clearly in her essay on European views of the Norman Conquest. What by the Normans was interpreted as a glorious and God-given victory, to an English exile, such as Aelnoth of Canterbury, or a hostile observer such as Frutolf of Michelsberg, could appear the triumph of might over right: an imposition rather than a liberation from tyranny. Moreover, the view from the upper circle could prove confusingly remote: witness the annalist of Niederalteich, writing in the 1070s, who described the conquest of 1066 as an achievement masterminded not from Normandy but from Aquitaine.26 There is one other point worth remembering here. Richard Southern’s Paris was a plausible, but in many ways a highly literary, even a fictitious creation, not a thousand miles from the Paris of Helen Wadell, whose Peter Abelard was first published in 1933 at very much the same time that Southern was coming to maturity.27 Southern himself was a product of a very particular stage in the history of his own university: the university not of Paris but of Oxford. He possessed an unrivalled understanding of the power and influence of Parisian scholasticism. But he came at this, like his Oxford predecessors Sir Maurice Powicke or Reginald Lane Poole, very much as an outsider glancing sceptically sideways, rather than as an acolyte or disciple looking upwards in reverence and awe. However much the Lombard, or Comestor, or Hugh of Saint-Victor had straightened out a curriculum and hammered down a system of thought, theirs remained essentially systematic programmes. After a youthful flirta28 tion with idealism, Southern himself was no great admirer of systems. I remember Southern’s memorial address for Beryl Smalley: an instance here of the historian as eye-, or at least ear-witness. This differed in its first delivery (in the Oxford Schools building, some time in 1985) from the version as published. According to the published version: By the time that Beryl became an undergraduate, the link between Christianity and Socialism, which had been the inspiration of an earlier generation, had largely disappeared: the two components had been transmogrified into Catholicism and Communism, and stood in bitter opposition to each other. These two forces became successively the two intellectual principles of Beryl’s life for the next twenty years.29

As delivered viva voce I recall something rather more Puckish. ‘Most of us raised in the 1930s’, he declared, or words to that effect, ‘were attracted to one or other of the great systems of contemporary political thought: either to Communism or to Catholicism.’ Very few, he allowed, were attracted to neither of these systems. ‘Beryl’, he declared, ‘was unique in becoming passionately committed to both.’Southern, like Smalley, spent a year in interwar Paris, in Southern’s case E. Van Houts, ‘The Norman Conquest through European Eyes’, EHR, 110, 1995, 832–53, esp. 841–2. H. Wadell, Peter Abelard: A Novel, London 1933, ploughing a furrow already traced by George Moore, Héloïse and Abélard, London 1921. 28 A. Murray, ‘Richard William Southern 1912–2001’, Proc. Brit. Acad., 120, 2003, 413–40, esp. 421–2. 29 R. W. Southern, ‘Beryl Smalley 1905–1984’, Proc. Brit. Acad., 72, 1986, 455–6. 26

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in 1933 as a result of an Oxford prize fellowship. This enabled him to attend the classes of Ferdinand Lot and Louis Halphen. Occasionally, amidst instruction on Charles the Bald of which he later admitted to remembering very little, he was able to slip away to the Bibliothèque nationale to read more of Anselm.30 Thereafter, however, both Southern and Smalley read and learned far more in the calm of Duke Humphrey or the Radcliffe Camera than they ever learned in the reading rooms of the rue de Richelieu. Southern’s holidays were passed in Wales or the north of England, not on the banks of Loire or Seine. To this extent, both Smalley and Southern came at Paris obliquely, indifferent to, even slightly contemptuous of the great radial boulevards of Lombard and Comestor, Bonventure and Aquinas; always looking for forgotten side-streets: the thought worlds of Andrew or Richard rather than Hugh of Saint-Victor, of Peter of Blois rather than Peter Lombard or the Chanter, of Stephen Langton rather than Stephen of Tournai. As outsiders themselves (Southern, like Powicke and Galbraith before him, was a proudly self-defined northerner in the southerly worlds both of Oxford and of Paris), they perhaps also overestimated the extent to which the Paris schools, or Paris itself, have ever been a monolithic whole. Even beyond the world of the English immigrés (and as Rodney Thomson has emphasized, the English magistri in Paris, in the century after 1130, constituted perhaps, the only major ‘school’ of such immigrés, set apart from the native French),31 Paris, like all great cities, has always been an assembly of villages. Some of these were urbanized so long ago that they consider themselves the true ‘heart’ of Paris. Like Rome, Paris has several such hearts: Les Halles, the Île de la Cité, even the Montagne Ste-Geneviève, all regard themselves as a cut above what they consider their essentially suburban neighbours. Other parts remained distinct villages into the eighteenth century and beyond.32 Those who attended the 40th Battle Conference in 2017 traversed my own particular village, the 14th arrondissement, as they made their way to the Cité universitaire on the southern edge of Paris on the fourth day of this conference, travelling there via the Réseau Express Régional (RER), one of De Gaulle’s greater achievements. But even the location in which this present lecture was delivered, in the Avenue d’Iéna, in the 16th arrondissement, had no proper existence as Paris before the 1850s. From the sixth century onwards it formed part of the extramural village of Chaillot, itself emerging from the lordship of Nijon or Nigeon, with its own fortress (now buried beneath the Trocadero) controlled by the family of Montfort-l’Amaury, and much later, in the 1470s, given by Louis XI to the historian, Philippe de Commines.33 Land at Nijon and Chaillot meanwhile served as endowment for the monasteries of St-Martin-des-Champs and Ste-Geneviève, an endowment bounded on the south by the lordship of Auteuil, around the present Porte Saint-Cloud, controlled until Murray, ‘Southern’, 423–4. Thomson, ‘England and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance’, 7–8, a community already formed by the 1150s, as noted by William fitz Stephen, in MTB, III, 32, referring to their Parisian creditors, the ciues scholarium Angligenarum creditores. Note also that the earliest college of the future University of Paris, and the earliest inaugural lectures reported of any Parisian masters, were all the work of Englishmen: Baldwin, Paris, 32, 184–5, 200, with figures for the proportion of English masters and students in the Paris schools, approaching a third of the total, at 178, 201, 203, 212. 32 In general, for the formation and physical identity of Paris, see Baldwin, Paris, and the incomparable Colin Jones, Paris: Biography of a City, London 2004, 32–61. 33 J. Lebeuf, Histoire de la banlieue ecclésiastique de Paris, Paris 1754, 42–8, 54, where Nijon’s descent to the dukes of Brittany derived from the acquisition of the Montfort lands by the marriage of Duke Arthur II (d.1312). 30 31



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1110 by the monks of Bec.34 Even here, then, in the heart of modern Paris, twelfthcentury Parisians were never far from Normandy or Norman ground. Meanwhile, there never was one Paris: never one simple view articulated throughout the city to the exclusion of all others. What then were these alternative views? What did Parisians, and hence what did the city itself, make of the English and of English kingship? The best-known view, because most frequently and coherently articulated, was that of the Left Bank, of the schools and their alumni, both French and especially English. This is the viewpoint of Robert Pullen, of John of Salisbury, of Peter the Chanter, and most significantly, as Frédérique Lachaud explains elsewhere in this volume, of Ralph Niger. It is a viewpoint that was first properly excavated at precisely that time, between the late 1920s and mid-1930s, when Smalley and Southern went to work in the Bibliothèque nationale. It is a viewpoint that was only partially glimpsed by Powicke, in 1927, when he delivered his Ford lectures on Stephen Langton. Powicke could see that Langton was regarded in Paris as one of the towering geniuses of his age. He could also see that Langton’s thoughts had been widely disseminated in manuscript: quite how widely and in how many manuscripts would only become apparent much later, thanks to Friedrich Stegmüller and his Parisian collaborators, from the 1940s onwards.35 Powicke went to one particular manuscript in search of enlightenment: the St John’s College Cambridge copy of Langton’s Sentence commentaries. This, as we now know, was a mistake. Thanks to Riccardo Quinto and Magdalena Bieniak, we now know that Langton’s sentence commentaries show virtually no concern for contemporary politics or pastoral theology. Indeed, they are as unlike the rest of Langton’s output as the Consolations of Boethius are unlike Boethian theology, or string theory stands distinct from the works of Sir Richard Southern.36 I am convinced that on blind sampling, no reader could immediately identify Langton’s work on the sentences and the Bible as by one and the same hand. But at least Powicke went to a manuscript of Langton: virtually none of his predecessors writing on Langton had ever done so, not even Mark Pattison, Oxford’s great-grandfather of the history of scholastic thought.37 Powicke turned to Langton’s sentence commentaries. Had he turned instead to Langton’s exegesis, as Beryl Smalley could have informed him within only a couple of years of 1927, and as John Baldwin and Philip Buc have now definitively demonstrated, he would have found material in abundance to reveal the mentalités of Paris as directed against the English of the later twelfth century.38 I shall not rehearse here the entire array of post-Gregorian attitudes to England and English kingship Cartulaire général de Paris … tome premier, ed. R. de Lasteryrie, Paris 1887, 8, no. 4; 142–3, no. 118; 206, no.184; 221–2, no. 202; 257, no. 258; 443–4, no. 538; 445–6, no. 541, and for the exchange with Bec, 175–6, no.155. 35 F. M. Powicke, Stephen Langton, Oxford 1928; F. Stegmüller, Repertorium Biblicum Medii Aevi, 11 vols, Madrid 1940–1989, V, 232–302, nos. 7704–7939. 36 Stephen Langton, Quaestiones Theologiae: Liber I, ed. R. Quinto and M. Bieniak, Oxford 2014. 37 For a conspectus of early authorities here, see N. Vincent, ‘Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury’, in Etienne Langton: prédicateur, bibliste, théologien, ed. L.-J. Bataillon, N. Bériou, G. Dahan and R. Quinto, Turnhout 2010, 51–7. Pattison’s Stephen Langton was published anonymously as one of Newman’s Lives of the English Saints, London 1845. 38 G. Lacombe, B. Smalley and A. L. Gregory, ‘Studies on the Commentaries of Cardinal Stephen Langton’, Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Age, 5, 1930; B. Smalley, ‘Stephen Langton and the Four Senses of Scripture’, Speculum, 6, 1931, 60–76; B. Smalley, ‘“Exempla” in the Commentaries of Stephen Langton’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 17, 1933, 121–9; J. W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes and Merchants, 2 vols, Princeton 1970; P. Buc, L’Ambiguité du livre: prince, pouvoir, et peuple dans les commentaires de la Bible au Moyen Age, Paris 1994. 34

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promoted in the Paris schools. Those who have not read Buc or Baldwin, or Smalley and Julie Barrau on Becket and the schools, have a rich treat in store.39 Here, nonetheless, are a few highlights. England’s kings were usurpers, promoted through violence, itself provoked by oath-breaking.40 Rather than appoint godly leaders, as Moses had done, they chose their bishops from the Exchequer at London (Stephen Langton writing here).41 They remained violent and irrational beings, spreading chaos, in need of counsel and constraint by Church and clergy. Their role was to spill blood (kings who did not hunt, Peter the Chanter had argued, evaded one of the chief functions of kingship), but they must do so according to the law, and to necessity, not for personal gain or vainglory.42 They were the God-given keepers of their people, so that the blood of the innocent would be upon their heads if they failed to discharge their responsibilities. If they ruled badly they became mere tyrants.43 To this, during the course of the twelfth century, various other strands were added. One comes from John of Salisbury and Gerald of Wales: a sense that the kings of England were almost doomed to rule in tyranny, since like Sicily, or Bede’s Albion, England was an island, and islands necessarily breed tyrants.44 Another such new strand, overshadowing most debate from the 1160s onwards, was the emergence of the Becket dispute and subsequently the death, miracles and canonization of St Thomas. Here was an absolute gift to Capetian propagandists, a home goal for English kingship far more humiliating than anything that had been inflicted upon Rufus or Henry I in their quarrels with Anselm.45 No wonder that the new collegial church of the Louvre was dedicated in memory of St Thomas.46 No wonder that the douceur of France, placed under the protection of Christ and the Virgin Mary, was held up for admiration, set against the self-serving materialism of the English court. We find all of this in Langton, in Ralph Niger, in Gerald of Wales. Gerald, for example, writing of the French invasion of England after 1215, declares that the leopards and lions of England (the Plantagenets of course) will inevitably flee from the lillies of France, as good odour forces out bad. Odour, let it be noticed, is a principal theme in Rigord’s celebration of Philip Augustus and the rebuilding of Paris, freed from the stench and chaos of other cities.47 Gerald also raises another

B. Smalley, The Becket Conflict and the Schools, Oxford 1973; J. Barrau, Bible, lettres et politique: l’écriture au service des hommes à l’époque de Thomas Becket, Paris 2013. 40 For Plantagenet oath-breaking, see now N. Vincent, ‘Magna Carta, Oath-Taking and “Coniuratio”’, Le sacré et la parole: le serment au Moyen Âge, ed. M. Aurell (Paris forthcoming). 41 Buc, L’Ambiguité du livre, 62. 42 Ibid., 112–22, and cf. P. Buc, ‘“Princeps gentium dominantur eorum”: Princely Power Between Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Twelfth-Century Exegesis’, in Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. T. N. Bisson, Philadelphia 1995, 310–28, esp. 319–20. For necessity, D. D’Avray, ‘Magna Carta: Its Background in Stephen Langton’s Academic Biblical Exegesis and its Episcopal Reception’, Studi Medievali, 3rd series 38 part 1, 1997, 423–438; J. W. Baldwin, ‘Master Stephen Langton, Future Archbishop of Canterbury: The Paris Schools and Magna Carta’, EHR, 123, 2008, 811–46. 43 J. Van Laarhoven, ‘Thou Shalt Not Slay a Tyrant! The So-Called Theory of John of Salisbury’, in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. M. Wilks, Studies in Church History Subsidia 3, Oxford 1984, 319–41. 44 N. Vincent, ‘Beyond Becket: King Henry II and the Papacy (1154–1189)’, in Pope Alexander III (1159–81): The Art of Survival, ed. P. D. Clarke and A. J. Duggan, Farnham 2012, 277–9. 45 Smalley, Becket Conflict, 202–8. 46 R. Foreville, ‘Le culte de saint Thomas Becket en France: Bilan provisoire des recherches’, Thomas Becket: Actes du colloque international de Sédières, 19–24 août 1973, ed. R. Foreville, Paris 1975, 168–9, 182, citing JL nos. 15901 and 16429. 47 Gerald, De Principis Instructione, in Gerald of Wales, Opera, VIII, 320–1. For Philip’s cleansing and paving of Paris, see Rigord, Histoire, 192–3, whence Baldwin, Paris, 19–20. 39



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highly significant point. The English, from at least the time of Bede, had vaunted their liberties and their sense of personal freedom, as a people even franker than the Franks. On the contrary, the Parisian masters suggested, freedom was impossible in a realm ruled by tyrants. Only under Frankish rule could the Franks truly be free. As Gerald of Wales famously commented in 1216, on Louis’ landing at Thanet: ‘The madness of slavery now ends; times of liberty are granted, English necks are freed from the yoke.’ Like St Augustine or St Thomas before him, also arriving via Thanet, Louis would rescue the English from tyranny and offer them redemption for their souls.48 This is the view of the Left Bank, of the Montagne Ste-Geneviève, of the PetitPont, to some extent of Notre-Dame. But even on the Left Bank it was by no means an exclusive point of view. There were alternatives. Some of these we can hear if we listen to the voices from Saint-Victor, which is to say from the quartier Saint-Victor in the 5th arrondissement, directly neighbouring the Quartier de la Sorbonne, but on the far side of the Montagne: the voice of Jussieu (Paris VI) as opposed to that of Paris I or Paris IV where the Battle conference met for its second session, in the hallowed discomfort of the Amphithéâtre Descartes. To judge from their sixteenthcentury library catalogue (so cruelly parodied in chapter seven of Rabelais’ Pantagruel), the canons of Saint-Victor possessed one of the greater collections of scholastic theology. They thus had a rich hoard of Bede manuscripts, mostly exegetical but including the Ecclesiastical History. They had one of the rare Parisian copies of William of Jumièges, although apparently nothing of William of Malmesbury, and only late copies of John of Salisbury (the Policraticus). Certainly nothing of Henry of Huntingdon or any subsequent English chronicler.49 This is all the more odd because relations between Saint-Victor and England had grown closer rather than more distant as the twelfth century progressed. The theologian Richard of Saint-Victor, perhaps of Scottish birth, was solicited by Simon, abbot of St Albans, an alumnus of the Paris schools, for manuscripts of Hugh of Saint-Victor previously unobtainable in England.50 Ernisius, abbot of Saint-Victor c.1162–1172, may well have been born in England. Certainly he corresponded with several leading figures across the Channel, including the abbots of Bristol and Westminster, and Gilbert Foliot, bishop of Hereford.51 His predecessor, Abbot Achard, subsequently bishop of Avranches, had written to King Henry II over a loan of 20 livres parisis contracted by the King’s treasurer, Richard fitz Nigel, with the author of the Dialogue of the Exchequer here assuming a walk-on part as creditor to Parisian money-lenders.52 The teachings of the school of Saint-Victor played no small part in the Becket conflict.53 Thanks to Henry II’s dependence on loans from Verses noticed and edited by Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 1146–1223, Oxford 1982, 97–8, 222–5, and cf. Southern, Medieval Humanism, 155, citing Gerald, Opera, VIII, 317–22, 326–9. 49 G. Ouy, Les manuscrits de l’abbaye de Saint-Victor, 2 vols, Turnhout 1999, I, 270 (Bede), 286 (Jumièges), 302; II, 240–1, 597–8 (John of Salisbury), and cf. B. Bodemer, ‘Rabelais and the Abbey of Saint-Victor Revisited’, Information and Culture, 47, 2012, 4–17. 50 PL, 196, cols 1229–30, no. 8, and cf. R. Thomson, ‘What is “Entheticus”’, in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Wilks, 296–7, reprinted in Thomson, England and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, chapter 12. 51 PL, 196, cols 1384–7; The Letters and Charters of Gilbert Foliot, ed. A. Morey and C. N. L. Brooke, Cambridge 1967, no.138. 52 PL, 196, cols 1381–2; G. Teske, Die Briefsammlungen des 12. Jahrhunderts in St. Viktor/Paris, Bonn 1993, 414. 53 Smalley, Becket Conflict, 28–30, 55–7, 83–5, 135–6, and cf. The Letters of John of Salisbury, II, ed. W. J. Millor and C. N. L. Brooke, Oxford 1979 76–7, no.161; 162–3 no.175. 48

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the fitz Hardings of Bristol, the fitz Harding foundation at St Augustine’s Bristol, itself a Victorine daughter house of nearby Wigmore, became a major beneficiary of royal patronage. This in turn may have encouraged the King’s cousin, William earl of Gloucester, to found Keynsham Abbey, in the early 1170s, as another Victorine outpost. Here, it was no accident that the foundation of Keynsham in 1172–3, the refoundation of Wigmore in 1172 and the entry of the canons of Saint Augustine’s into their new church at Bristol c.1173 coincided so closely in time.54 For a brief period the Victorines in England were very much à la mode. But even here there were tensions. Saint-Victor may have established cordial relations with England but it remained a centre for the production of Capetian royal diplomas.55 Whatever their attitude towards Henry II, by the early thirteenth century we find the canons of Saint-Victor providing a burial place for King John’s most hated and persecuted subject, William de Braose. William’s funeral, in August 1211, presided over by Stephen Langton, must surely have served as a public protest against Plantagenet tyranny.56 Even before this, as early as 1173, the rededication of the abbey’s chapel of Saint-Laurent in honour of St Thomas of Canterbury had tended in the same direction.57 So, of course, did the Victorine foundations patronized by William earl of Gloucester, himself, by the 1170s, keen to escape from what he had come to view as slow strangulation by his Plantagenet cousin, King Henry II.58 The intellectual interchanges may have extended further still. We have noted the connections between Saint-Victor and St Albans. John de Cella, a versifier and alumnus of the Paris schools, presided as abbot of St Albans in succession to Abbot Simon, collector of the works of the historically minded Hugh of Saint-Victor.59 It was at precisely this time that St Albans began to make strides in the writing of history, gathering the materials subsequently recycled by Roger of Wendover, composer of a chronicle that was to prove bitterly hostile to English kingship, not least in its portrayal of the persecution of William de Braose. This anti-royal strain in St Albans historical writing was notoriously transmitted from Wendover to his successor Matthew Paris (bearer of a name itself never entirely explained away as English, literally Matthew the Parisian, quite possibly because Matthew himself had strong links to the Paris schools).60 Was the particular viewpoint of Wendover and Matthew Paris an entirely insular one, or something rather more cosmopolitan: a debt paid by monks of St Albans to their earlier contacts with the schools of Paris, themselves awash with criticism of Henry II, his offspring and his defiance of Christian principles? Via Wendover, Paris and Thomas of Walsingham, the St Albans view in due course became the canonical mainstream of opinion of Plantagenet kingship broadcast by Holinshed, Speed and, in due 54 J. C. Dickinson, ‘English Regular Canons and the Continent in the Twelfth Century’, TRHS, 5th series 1, 1951, 73–9, 85–9; N. Vincent, ‘The Early Years of Keynsham Abbey’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 111, 1993, 95–113. 55 Teske, Die Briefsammlungen; F. Gasparri, L’écriture des actes de Louis VI, Louis VII et Philippe Auguste, Geneva 1973. 56 Annales Monastici, ed. H. R. Luard, 5 vols, London 1864–9, I (Margam), 31. 57 Foreville, ‘Culte de Saint Thomas’, 169–70, 182. 58 For relations between earl and King, see Howden, Gesta, I, 51n., 61, 92, 124–5, 294. 59 R. Thomson, ‘Some Collections of Latin Verse from St Albans Abbey and the Provenance of MSS. Rawl. C.562, 568–9’, Bodleian Library Record, 19, 1980, 151–61, reprinted in Thomson, England and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, chapter 4, albeit noting the verses in praise of Henry II in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson C568 fols 1r–2v (Invida res gestas Henrici regis honestas = Walther 9532), which may or may not be by Abbot John. 60 As noted, for example, by S. Lloyd and R. Reader, ‘Matthew Paris’, ODNB.



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course, David Hume. Was this, in fact, the chief contribution that the city of Paris made to the writing of English history? Before we leave the Left Bank, one last glimpse of the mingling of students, masters and citoyens, here from Gerald of Wales. Gerald was lodging in Paris on the night of 21 August 1165 when all the city’s bells were rung and men and women charged through the streets with lighted candles to celebrate the birth of the future King Philip Augustus. Gerald poked his head out of the window and saw two old biddies, in Robert Bartlett’s evocative paraphrase ‘gambolling about in the square’. One of them shouted up to him ‘We now have a king given to us by God … who will bring shame and destruction to your king.’61 Thus did Franco-Parisian town meet Anglo-Parisian gown. Stereotypes, of course, were rife here: the English were all drunkards; they all had tails (Anglois coué, a topos already found in the 1150s, in Wace’s Roman de Brut).62 It was the pleasures of ‘Wassail’ and ‘Drinkhail’ that first drew Burnel, the ass who wished his tail to be as long as his ears, to the company of the English scholars in Paris, at least according to Nigel Longchamp’s fantasy of c.1180.63 By contrast, all English women were beautiful, and English history, thanks very largely as we shall see to Geoffrey of Monmouth, was filled with great battles, valiant heroes and noble deeds.64 The French, on the other hand, were notorious for their arrogance and squabbling.65 We can no longer read the graffiti daubed on twelfth-century Parisian walls and bridges, but we can offer a fair guess as to what it might have said about the English and their kings. Might it, for example, have drawn on the verses of Walter of Châtillon, the Jacques Brel or Georges Brassens of his generation, with their refrain ‘O deeds worthy of a royal epitaph!’, referring to the tyrannical violence by which Becket had been murdered: ‘A monstrosity of English history’ perpetrated by a ‘blood-soaked king’.66 Certainly it might have included the legend that Henry II and his offspring were the devil’s brood, descended from the she-devil Mélusine. This was a legend of which the Plantagenets boasted. Indeed it is from a manuscript today preserved in the Bibliothèque Mazarine, itself sited at the heart of the modern (if the adjective is permissible in such a context) Academie Française, that we read of Henry II’s signet or secret seal showing a chariot pulled by serpents: a tribute to Mélusine, Medea and the legends of the sorceress’s chariot pulled by four dracones.67 Gerald, De principis instructione, in Gerald, Opera, VIII, 292–3 (regem … habemus nobis a Deo nunc datum … per quem regi vestro dedecus et damnum, poena pudorque gravis, confusione pariter et aerumna plenus, acrescet), whence Bartlett, Norman and Angevin Kings, 510, and note here the distinctly Christ-like specification of Philip as Puer … nobis hac nocte natus, echoing the angels’ declaration to the shepherds (Luke 2:11, Natus est vobis hodie salvator) and the Christmas-day introit (Puer natus est nobis). 62 Southern, Medieval Humanism, 141. 63 Nigel de Longchamps Speculum Stultorum, ed. J. H. Mozley and R. R. Raymo, Berkeley 1960, 64-6 lines 1515-1538, 1583-4, and for the tail, 32 lines 81–2, and cf. Bartlett, Norman and Angevin Kings, 515-16. 64 For the persistence of these stereotypes, see S. G. McKinnon, ‘The Representation of the English in French Literature Between 1450 and 1530’, Durham University PhD Thesis (2005). 65 For both the arrogance of the French and the tails of the English, see the ‘Palma’ of the Bolognese rhetorician Boncompagno da Signa (before 1230): C. Sutter, Aus Leben und Schriften des Magisters Boncompagno, Freiburg 1894, 123: Teutonici per furorem, Alobroges per latrocinium, Francigenae per arrogantiam, Yspani per mulas, Anglici per caudam et Scoti per mendacitatem a plurimis deridentur. For squabbling, Nigel de Longchamps, ed. Mozley and Raymo, 66, lines 1583-4 (Gallosque tenaces … multiplicare minas). 66 Walter of Châtillon, The Shorter Poems, ed. D. A. Traill, Oxford 2013, 32–5 (Orba suo pontifice: Walther 13411): O monstrum gentis Anglice, scribendum in hystoria …. O regio digna res epithaphio! 67 N. Vincent, ‘The Seals of King Henry II and His Court’, in Seals in Context in the Middle Ages, ed. P. R. Schofield, Oxford 2015, 15–16, 27 n. 68, citing Bibliothèque Mazarine MS 3475.

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So much for the Left Bank. But what now, if we cross by the Petit-Pont to the Île, and beyond it to the right bank? Here we enter the world of the merchants and traders, of Les Innocents, Les Halles and the Paris newly rebuilt by Philip Augustus, from the 1180s onwards. We have heard already of King John’s visit to the city in 1201. This, like other royal visits, was very much a right-bank affair. We must assume that John lodged in the Palais royale on the Île de la Cité. We know that he approached Paris, up the Seine, from the Les Andelys, with the Île d’Andely no doubt posing at this stage as rival to the Île de la Cité. It was at Les Andelys, in 1200, that John’s niece had been married to Louis, the son of the King of France, in what was intended both as a celebration of Anglo-French peace and as a challenge to the somewhat dusty facilities of Notre-Dame, at this time one vast building site.68 In just this way, rivalling the Louvre, the great fortress at Château Gaillard built by John’s brother, King Richard, was intentionally visible from France, as a reminder of Anglo-Norman military superiority. Via Les Andelys and Longchamp John entered the city of Paris proper.69 The rue de Longchamp, indeed, still runs along the bottom of the Avenue d’Iéna where this lecture was delivered. A little further on, it merges into the Avenue du Président Wilson, named in memory of peace negotiations rather more recent than those of 1201. This in turn merges with the Avenue George V at the site of that fateful road tunnel where in 1997 English monarchy skirted closer to disaster than at perhaps any time since the 1640s. For their own negotiations with the French, both Thomas Becket and Henry II approached or departed Paris from the north east, via Mantes.70 Through all of this coming and going, the Seine ran as a great arterial ribbon. By this time, indeed, the Seine and its traffic had become one of the most significant symbols of Paris the commercial as opposed to Paris the intellectual capital of Capetian France. Somewhat anachronistically, indeed quite possibly uniquely for an inland city, a singlemasted ship was adopted for the seal of the city’s leading merchants: the ‘mercatores aque Parisius’, themselves shortly to establish their headquarters in the Place de Grève, at the future Hôtel-de-Ville.71 Thus it was the river itself, not Philip Augustus’s Louvre, nor the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, that became the city’s chief symbol. Yet the river was never an entirely Parisian, let alone a fully Capetian phenomenon. For an equivalent here we might imagine the Plantagenet capital established not at the mouth of the Thames but far closer to its source, in Oxfordshire or the Cotswolds. The Norman empire was sea-born. Hence Anglo-Norman kingship remained an essentially estuarial affair, be it at London, Caen, Rouen, Dublin, La Rochelle or Bordeaux. Capetian France, by contrast, remained in the Moscow stage of development, never quite achieving its Peter the Great leap to the ocean. From the ignominy of his return from crusade, via the burning of his invasion fleet at Bruges in 1213, to the Battle of Sandwich in 1217, Philip Augustus was no more fortunate at sea than his successor, the emperor Napoleon. Nor was the Seine an entirely benevolent stream. Its flooding, not least in the great storms of 1197, Baldwin, Paris, 21, 215. For John’s movements, see the itinerary in Rotuli Litterarum Patentium, drawn from the writs in Rotuli de Liberate ac de misis et praestitis regnante Iohanne, ed. T. D. Hardy, London 1844, 18, where at Paris, on 30 June, John increased the annual pension paid to Peter de Courtenay, count of Tonnerre and Auxerre, from 100 marks to £100. 70 ‘Continuatio Beccensis’, in Chronicles, ed. Howlett, iv, 319; William fitz Stephen, in MTB, III, 31. 71 B. Bedos, Corpus des sceaux français du Moyen Age I: les sceaux des villes, Paris 1980, 389 no. 515, and for the ‘water merchants’, see Baldwin, Paris, 48–9, 246. 68 69



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placed a constant strain upon local resources.72 From a French perspective, enemy control of the Seine was as much a threat in the twelfth century as it had been in the days of Rollo and the Vikings. From Paris to its mouth at Honfleur, the Seine loops a full 356 serpentine kilometres (221 miles), more than twice as far as a crow might fly, indeed slightly further than a crow’s flight from Paris all the way to London (214 miles). From the bridge at Mantes, eastwards and northwards, the Seine flowed directly into enemy territory, through the Vexin to the sea. It is appropriate, indeed, that the very earliest appearance of the city’s ship seal occurs in a charter of 1210, in which the merchants of Paris and Rouen sought to regulate their trade in salt, one of the abiding obsessions of any landlocked settlement.73 Let us follow one particular cargo down this great river: a cargo of especial importance. In 1179, Louis VII of France left his realm and travelled to England. Unlike Henry II or his sons, welcomed into the heart of the Capetian capital as suppliants and subjects, their very visits to France proof of their essential inferiority, Louis made his supplications not at Westminster, London or Winchester, the acknowledged royal ‘capitals’ of England, but at Canterbury, before the shrine of the recently martyred Thomas Becket.74 For an English equivalent we would need to imagine a king of England journeying to France, not to Paris but to a religious centre associated with Capetian tyranny; to that church at Vitry-le-François, perhaps, whose burning in 1142 was ever afterwards considered Louis VII’s most shameful act: spur to his subsequent excess of piety, his pilgrimage to Jerusalem and in due course his humiliation on crusade. The irony here, of course, is that it was Louis’ pilgrimage to Canterbury that was reputed to have brought healing to the mortally sick Philip Augustus and final illness to Louis himself, provoking the succession of a powerful Capetian king in place of his less-than-effective father. In much the same way, the visit of King John to Paris in 1201, and John’s delivery of the vast relief of 20,000 marks promised to Philip Augustus under the terms of the Treaty of Le Goulet, was to supply the Capetians with the financial means by which finally to expel the Plantagenets from Normandy.75 At Canterbury in August 1179, Louis deposited rich gifts for St Thomas and his monks. According to later testimony, he gave the monks a great ruby, the regale, whose red colour was intended to symbolize the blood of the martyr. Much later this same regale is said to have been pilfered as a souvenir by Henry VIII, used as a thumb ring by a king whose girth and enormities made his thumbs all the more impressive symbols of excess.76 Louis also gave the monks a golden cup, presumably a chalice, symbolic once again of bloodshed. This was to be used in combination with an even more impressive gift: 100 measures of French wine, to be taken annually and in perpetuity from the vintages of Poissy on the banks of the Seine.77 The vintages of the Île de France enjoyed a reputation in the Middle Ages quite unlike their subsequent infamy.78 By 1190, when Philip Augustus renewed his

Baldwin, Paris, 18, 76. Layettes du Trésor des Chartes, ed. A. Teulet, H.-F. Delaborde and E. Berger, 5 vols, Paris 1863– 1909, I, 345, no. 913, and for an earlier such agreement, seal now illegible, see E. de Fréville, Mémoire sur le commerce maritime de Rouen, 2 vols, Paris 1857, II, 20–1, no.14. 74 For what follows, see Norman Charters from English Sources, ed. N. Vincent, Pipe Roll Society n. s. 59, 2013, 100, 203, no.77 n. 75 Baldwin, Paris, 71–2, 122. 76 Norman Charters, ed. Vincent, 101 n. 77 Ibid., 203–4, no.77. 78 Baldwin, Paris, 18, 42–3. 72 73

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father’s grant, the wine itself was being grown at Triel-sur-Seine, with vineyards later assigned to Canterbury at Chanteloup-les-Vignes and St-Brice-sous-Forêt, the role of Poissy being hereafter strictly administrative, as the site of a major royal wine cellar. The wine itself, although of extreme northern growth, was intended to be red not white, presumably for use in the mass, once again as a symbol not only of France, the land of wine and song, but of Becket’s martyrdom and hence of the notorious crimes of King Henry II.79 The intention was clear: that the monks of Canterbury and other clergy taking communion in England’s primatial cathedral church were to do so from the largesse not of the king of England but the king of France, a very deliberate and a very potent exercise in Parisian one-upmanship. In Louis VII’s deceptively simple formula, as quoted by Walter Map, what had France to offer the world but ‘bread and wine and joy’?80 But here we return to our cargo bobbing on the Seine. Every year, the wine was to be transported from Poissy down river to the sea, 100 measures, perhaps 1600 gallons or nearly 13,000 pints (or, for those who prefer such things in post-revolutionary metrical terms, just over 6000 litres).81 The King of France granted quittance from toll for this shipment throughout his own lands, as did the King of England throughout his. From the point that the wine reached Les Andelys on the Seine, the archbishop of Rouen was keen to advertize his own largesse, once again offering quittance from toll.82 But long before this, so too did the lords of the Seine valley: the counts of Meulan at Meulan, the lords of L’Isle-Adam at L’Isle Adam on the Oise, the lords of Rosny at Rosny-sur-Seine, those also of Mantes, Maisons-Lafitte, Poissy and so forth.83 Guy Mauvoisin, lord of Rosny-sur-Seine, although insisting on his right to passage money from the monks’ cargo, then granted an equivalent sum, 10 sous parisis, to be symbolically deposited each year on the high altar of Canterbury Cathedral on the feast day of St Thomas, 29 December: a gesture that must have cost a great deal more than 10 shillings each year to fulfil.84 In 1212, at a time when the monks of Canterbury were in disgrace with King John and their archbishop, Stephen Langton, was in exile in northern France, the bishop of Paris, Peter of Nemours, confirmed a further grant of wine to the monks from vineyards at St-Brice-sous-Forêt (north of Saint-Denis, between Oise and Seine), again, we must assume, as a gesture with considerable political significance.85 From this, at least two things should be apparent. Paris itself remained an island of Capetian authority, surrounded by a sea of lesser lords by no means universally or permanently attached to Capetian, as opposed to Plantagenet, kings. And the Seine, although the river of Paris, continued into the thirteenth century to flow through lands over which the Capetians exercised little or no control. No wonder perhaps that to avoid the delays and difficulties of the riverine route, the Paris fish Norman Charters, ed. Vincent, 101–2, 206–8, nos.79, 80; 211–12 no.83, with discussion at 101–2 as to whether this was white or, as seems originally to have been intended, red wine. 80 Above n. 5. 81 Norman Charters, ed. Vincent, 102. 82 Ibid., 235–6, no.108. 83 Ibid., 226–33, nos.100–106. 84 Ibid., 236–7, no.109, and for a comparable quittance from toll at Rosny and Mantes granted by William de Mauvoisin and Manasser his brother, before 1165, for a boatload of French wine belonging to the monks of Saint-Wandrille: Fréville, Mémoire sur le commerce maritime de Rouen, II, 13–14, no.8, where it is published together with various other such quittances from tolls payable at Vernon, La RocheGuyon, Conflans and elsewhere. 85 Norman Charters, ed. Vincent, 239–40, no.112. 79



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markets were supplied with fresh sea fish by road rather than river, even though medieval roads were notoriously tedious to navigate.86 Paris as an island sunk in a sea of potential treachery: even the knights and nobles of its immediate vicinity as potential enemies rather than potential friends. This, if we are looking for our assorted views from Paris, might be considered the most typical view not only from the market stalls of Les Halles but from the Île de la Cité and hence from the Palais Royal. We can view things from this standpoint even in Henry II’s charter granted at Paris in 1158 to Les Hautes-Bruyères, confirming grants by Henry’s kinsmen and subjects, the lords of Tosny and Evreux, to a beneficiary just south of Paris, witnessed by the lords of Meulan and Poissy, all of them with close associations to the valley of the Seine, all of them here identified as clients of the Plantagenet rather than the Capetian kings.87 Later on we find Aubrey count of Dammartin, to the immediate north east of Paris, directly engaged in Plantagenet affairs, granted lands in England and Normandy and, by the 1180s, emerging as one of the most heavily indebted of those who borrowed from Henry II’s pet-usurer, Aaron of Lincoln.88 Those visiting Paris today via Charles de Gaulle airport land in territory that in the twelfth century belonged to the Anglo-French counts of Dammartin. Nor would things be much safer, from a Capetian perspective, were such landings restricted to Orly, Paris’ southern airport. From the Gâtinais, forty miles southeast of Orly, the Courtenay family had, in the 1150s, acquired the English barony of Okehampton, so it was later rumoured, for their role in brokering the marriage between Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, Louis VII’s recently divorced queen.89 Even further east, beyond Sens, the counts of Joigny acquired an unexpected kinship to King John of England following his marriage in 1200. John’s mother-in-law, who lived on until almost the same year as John’s own death, was herself a Courtenay heiress, in succession married to the lord of La Ferté-Gaucher and Montmirail, on the border between Paris and Champagne, thereafter to the lord of Joigny on the Yonne, on the frontier between Paris and Burgundy-Nevers.90 A century before this, when hostilities broke out between Louis VI of France and Henry I of England in 1112, the abbot of the monastery of St-Pierre-le-Vif at Sens, fearing attacks by Henry’s nephew, the count of Champagne, had supplied his burgesses with defences including a wall and a ditch.91 Better safe than sorry, even that far east. This before ever we come to the Plantagenet patronage of religious institutions, encircling Paris east to west, from Vézelay and Pontigny in an arc northwards via Ourscamp, Compiègne, Saint-Germer-de-Fly, Saint-Denis, Pontoise, then south to Vaux-deCernay, Coulombs, Tiron, Chartres and Les Hautes-Bruyères.92 C. Bourlet, ‘L’approvisionnement de Paris en poisson de mer aux XIVe et XVe siècles, d’après les sources normatives’, Franco-British Studies, 20 (‘Structures d’approvisionnement à Paris et à Londres au Moyen Age’), 1995, 5–22, reference courtesy of Derek Keene. 87 Letters and Charters of Henry II, no.1252, and for Henry’s relations with Robert de Poissy, see Ibid., nos. 2076–80. 88 J.-N. Mathieu, ‘Recherches sur les premiers comtes de Dammartin’, Mémoires publiés par la fédération des sociétés historiques et archéologiques de Paris et de l’Île-de-France, 47, 1996, 34–47, and for his debts to Aaron, see Bartlett, Norman and Angevin Kings, 351, citing H. G. Richardson, The English Jewry under Angevin Kings, London 1960, 250–1, no.8 (from TNA E 101/249/1). 89 N. Vincent, ‘Isabella of Angoulême: John’s Jezebel’, King John: New Interpretations, ed. S. D. Church, Woodbridge 1999, 201–2. 90 Ibid., 175–82. 91 Chronique de Saint-Pierre-le-Vif de Sens, dite de Clarius, ed. R.-H. Bautier, Paris 1979, 170. 92 Letters and Charters of Henry II, nos.169–70, 555–8, 699, 682, 1252, 2002, 2088, 2356, 2655–8, 86

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Paris encircled, Paris threatened, Paris the newly walled city on the verge of an Anglo-Norman occupation.93 Of course we know that no such occupation took place, at least not until Henry V and the 1420s. As late as the 1180s, however, it was not so much the threat of the French at the gates of Rouen that excited alarm in northern France, but the very real prospect that Henry II and his sons might soon be at the gates of Paris. Just such an attack, via Mantes, seems to have been contemplated by Richard in 1188.94 Nor would Henry II and his sons have been the first of their line to attempt such daring. Had not King Arthur, Henry II’s role model and ancestor, captured Paris and made it his capital city in France? This following a heroic trial by single combat against its previous captain, Frollo, fought out on ‘the island next to the city’? Had Arthur not later subdued the whole of France before seizing the capital of Roman Gaul, at Autun: an act with imperial significance, presaging his intention to usurp the empire of Rome? With our knowledge of the rivalry between the schools of Paris, Chartres and Oxford in mind here, it is surely worth noting that Arthur’s imperial intentions were first announced at Autun via his messengers, Guerin of Chartres and Boso count of Oxford (Boso de Vado Bovum, in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s deliberately punning account).95 Had not the rulers of Normandy, descended from Arthur’s captain, Bedver (ruler of Bayeux), themselves laid siege to Paris? Had not Rollo of Normandy not only seized but entirely sacked Autun, as reported by Guillaume le Breton, surpassing even the brutality of Arthur?96 All of this, of course, is pure nonsense: fantasy conjured up in the 1130s by Geoffrey of Monmouth, later recycled and augmented by Geoffrey’s followers and admirers. Meanwhile, Arthur, let it be noticed, and Rollo were amongst the few characters in Anglo-Norman history whose deeds were widely reported in Paris; Rollo thanks to Dudo, William of Jumièges and the Carolingian chroniclers, Arthur thanks to Geoffrey of Monmouth. Despite the claims of Richard Southern that ‘history’ and its writing was one of the chief English contributions to the twelfth-century Renaissance, as Rodney Thomson has pointed out, in Paris itself there seems to have been an extraordinary, perhaps even deliberate lack of interest in this supposed English contribution to learning.97 After 1066, at least in part in response to the Norman Conquest of England, Bede gained a Parisian readership, albeit a readership as, or more, interested in Bede the cosmographer/computator or Bede the exegete as in Bede the author of history.98 Somewhat later, William of Malmesbury and Orderic Vitalis

2724–6, 2738, 2750a, 3870–1, 3886, 3931, 3999. For a golden candelabrum given to Vézelay by the Empress Matilda, see Monumenta Vizeliacensia, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 42, Turnhout 1976, 521. 93 For Philip Augustus’ new walls, apparently begun at the most vulnerable point facing towards Normandy, see Baldwin, Paris, 25–30. 94 Philippidos III, lines 242ff, in, Oeuvres de Rigord et de Guillaume le Breton historiens de PhilippeAuguste, 2 vols, ed. H. F. Delaborde, 2 vols, Paris 1882–5, II, 74–9. 95 Geoffrey, Historia Books 9–10, in Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. and trans. M. D. Reeve and N. Wright, Woodbridge 2007, 206–7, 222–49, esp. 229 for Boso, whence Wace’s Roman de Brut: A History of the British, ed, J. Weiss, Exeter 1999, 281–329, esp. 292 (‘Bos d’Oxenefort’), and within the orbit of the counts of Anjou, the chronicle of Amboise, in Chroniques des comtes d’Anjou et des seigneurs d’Amboise, ed. L. Halphen and R. Poupardin, Paris 1913, 9–11. 96 Philippidos I, lines 570–9, in Guillaume le Breton, ed. Delaborde, II, 30. 97 Thomson, ‘England and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance’, 10, 14. 98 M. L. W. Laistner and H. H. King, A Hand-List of Bede Manuscripts, Ithaca 1943. For the circulation of the History, see Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Peope, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A.



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reached Paris, especially Orderic’s continuation of William of Jumièges.99 Henry of Huntingdon was possibly known at St Denis in the early thirteenth century.100 After the 1150s, however, it is hard to think of a single manuscript intended for a Parisian audience of any English chronicler that has significance to our knowledge of historical writing in Normandy let alone in England.101 This applies to the vernacular as much as the Latin chronicles: to Wace and Geoffrey Gaimar as much as to Henry of Huntingdon, Ralph of Diss or Roger of Howden.102 Parisian audiences knew as little of the realities of English history as the inhabitants of seventeenth-century Vienna knew of the true history of the Turks. We must allow here for only one major exception: Geoffrey of Monmouth, familiar to Suger, to Richard of Poitiers, to Rigord and Guillaume-le-Breton and we must assume to many more in and around the Parisian intellectual milieu. At least fifteen medieval copies of Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britannie survive in Paris libraries, mostly un-provenanced but in at least two instances traceable to the collections of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Chaalis (10 kilometres north of Dammartin), the Saint-Germain copy bound up with Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica.103 Geoffrey of Monmouth was certainly read in Paris.104 But in Paris he was also both recalibrated and surpassed. Recalibrated first and foremost as a prophet of England’s impending doom (Suger’s interpretation of Merlin, as later by Richard of Poitiers);105 surpassed (Rigord, Guillaume le Breton) by the identification of Brutus, the ancestor of Arthur, no longer as transmitter of the true imperial blood of Troy, but as an incestuous B. Mynors, Oxford 1969, lxi–iv, including BnF MSS Latin 12942 (from St-Germain-des-Prés, s.xii ex, signed by an English scribe, ‘Radulfus’), Latin 16078 (s.xi, later at the Sorbonne). 99 William of Jumièges survives in at least one twelfth-century manuscript as a copy intended for the canons of Saint-Victor (BnF MS Latin 15047), two other copies now in Paris of uncertain provenance (Ibid. Latin 2769, 6046), and in Orderic’s continuation in at least three s.xii copies, one of them probably from Saint-Denis (Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine MS 2013, before 1131, bound up with Suger’s Vita Ludovici Grossi), and of the late s.xii that belonged to the Grandmontines of Vincennes, founded by Louis VII in 1161 (BnF MS Latin 17656): GND, I, xcix, cii, civ–vi. 100 Huntingdon, cxxii–iii, including BnF Latin 10185, an English MS, perhaps acquired by Saint-Denis after 1204, and for what may be the Bec MS, now BnF Latin 6042, apparently taken by Robert of Torigny for use at Mont-Saint-Michel, see P. Stirnemann, ‘Two Twelfth Century Bibliophiles and Henry of Huntingdon’s “Historia Anglorum”’, Viator, 24, 1993, 121–42; B. Pohl, ‘When Did Robert of Torigni First Receive Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum, and Why Does it Matter?’, HSJ, 26, 2015 for 2014, 143–68. 101 The majority of French manuscripts after 1150 essential to our knowledge of English history were either never in Paris (the Valenciennes manuscript of the Gesta Stephani, for example, itself bound up in its unique surviving copy with William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum, whence Gesta Stephani, ed. K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis, Oxford 1976, xi–xiii), or only reached Paris during or after the Revolution of 1789, as with Robert of Torigny’s copy of Henry of Huntingdon, looted from Mont-Saint-Michel (BnF MS Latin 6042), and as might have been the case with the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, had not Paul Meyer allowed this to slip through his hands, to end up in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. 102 Wace’s Roman de Brut survives in no continental or Parisian copy earlier than the thirteenth century, travelling thereafter not so much as history but as an authorizing narrative for Arthurian romance: F. H. M. Le Saux, A Companion to Wace, Cambridge 2010, 86–7. Three of the four manuscripts of Wace’s Roman de Rou are now in Paris, but none is earlier than the end of the thirteenth century. 103 J. C. Crick, The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth III: A Summary Catalogue of the Manuscripts, Cambridge 1989, esp. 254–96, nos.163–91, including BnF MSS Latin 12943 (from Saint-Germain-des-Près, before 1181) and Latin 17569 (from Chaalis, s.xii/xiii). 104 Here arguing contrary to J. C. Crick, The Historia Regum of Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth IV: Dissemination and Reception in the Later Middle Ages, Cambridge 1991, 213–14, who allows for only limited circulation in France save for Champagne. 105 For Suger on Merlin, see Suger, Vie de Louis VI le Gros, c. 16, ed. H. Waquet, Paris 1929, 2nd edn, 1964. For Richard of Poitiers, RHF, XII, 419; L. A. Muratori, Antiquitates Italicae Medii Aevi, 6 vols, Milan 1738–42, IV, cols 1102–3.

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interloper, outmanned and outmanoeuvred by the descendants of Francion, ancestor of the Franks, son of Hector, grandson of Priam, lord of the city of Sicambria. Hence the essentially Trojan origins of Paris and the Parisians whose original name, in the Greek tongue, meant ‘the audacious’. So at least we are told in Rigord’s, and later Guillaume le Breton’s, inversions of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fantasy.106 Rigord brings us on to two final viewpoints. The first is that of the kings of France. This we shall probably never know with any real confidence, since the voices of the Capetian kings are rarely heard direct. Did Philip Augustus really warn John in 1193, following Richard’s release from captivity, that ‘The Devil is loose’?107 Whose voice is it that we hear in the letters sent from Louis VII to Pope Alexander, immediately after Becket’s martyrdom, calling for the sword of St Peter to be unsheathed against he ‘who not only cruelly but criminally has snuffed out the lamp by which the church of Canterbury was lighted’.108 Is this the voice of Louis VII speaking, or that of his secretariat, indeed of the Paris schools more generally? When Henry II sent Philip Augustus a shipload of live animals (deer and wild goats) to stock Philip’s new park at Vincennes, according to Rigord, Philip locked the animals away, ‘close to the aforesaid city (of Paris), placing them under permanent guard’. In Normandy, of course, from where they made their long journey up the Seine (per fluvium Sequane longo scilicet ductu aquarum), they would have supplied sport for kings who revelled in bloodshed. Philip, defender of the Church, friend of the poor and needy, famously refused to hunt. Was this a deliberate response by Capetian to Plantagenet kingship, or merely an incident to which Rigord alone lent deeper meaning?109 Refrain from hunting though they might, the kings of France kept one potential prey very keenly in mind. In the mimetic fictions of the rhetoricians (for the most part associated with the schools of Orléans and the Loire rather than with Paris directly), we find model letters in which Philip Augustus refers to Henry II of England as the ‘red one’ (Rufus) or the vulpecula, the little fox, reminiscent of the vulpes paruulas que demoliuntur vineas (Song of Solomon 2:15), a phrase elsewhere associated with heretics and the oppression of the Church, not least in the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux.110 Foxes, of course, were hunted as animals of the chase, albeit as a prey inferior to deer. There is perhaps more to this than simply the vulpine simile. The redness of Henry was used elsewhere to draw positive associations. One strand of Plantagenet image-projection, for example, emphasized the association between Rigord, Histoire, 194–201, and cf. Guillaume le Breton, Philippidos, lines 55–96, in Guillaume le Breton, ed. Delaborde, II, 9–11. 107 Howden, Chronica, III, 216–17 (diabolus iam solutus erat). 108 MTB, VII, 428–9, no.734 (lucernam Cantuariensis ecclesie non tam crudeliter quam turpiter jugulavit), and cf. the metaphor of the extinguished lamp repeated in Philip the Chancellor’s lament for Philip Augustus (d.1223), Alabastrum frangitur (Walther 24): Anderson, Notre-Dame Conductus, 6 part 1, pp. lxvii, 72–4, whence Baldwin, Paris, 82. 109 Rigord, Histoire, 160–3, and for other such gifts of live game, recorded in the English Pipe Rolls, see Letters and Charters of Henry II, no. 3523, and to the count of Flanders, nos. 3383, 3426. For commentary, see Buc, L’Ambiguité du livre, 117–18. 110 Recueil des actes de Philippe Auguste, roi de France, ed. H.-F. Delaborde, M. Nortier and others, 6 vols, Paris 1916–2005, VI, 50–2, nos. 24–5, and for the little foxes, cf. G. R. Evans, Bernard of Clairvaux, Oxford 2000, 112; The Letters of Peter of Celle, ed. J. Haseldine, Oxford 2001, 16–17, no.6; 548–9, no.150; 568–9, no.156; The Correspondence of Thomas Becket Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. A. Duggan, 2 vols, Oxford 2000, 16–17, no.5; 100–1, no. 31; Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, lines 1288–9, in E. Faral, Les Arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle, Paris 1924, 236 (urging the Pope, c.1210, during the Interdict against John of England, to protect Christian people against those threatened by the wolf or the ‘vulpecula’). 106



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Henry II, Richard I and the famously red-haired Flavian emperors of Rome, Vespasian and Titus, founders of a new dynasty, conquerors of Jerusalem, avengers of the humiliations visited upon Christ. Both the Flavians and the Plantagenets shared their distinctive ruddy colouring.111 So of course did the ducal dynasty from which Henry II claimed descent. Henry II’s supreme act of literary patronage, indeed, was the commissioning of a history of his Norman ancestors from the poet Wace, known as the Roman de Rou, supposedly after Rou alias Rollo, first duke of Normandy: a name that literally means ‘rufus/red’.112 A positive quality when handled by Plantagenet apologists, Plantagenet redness could be imbued with entirely different associations by the dynasty’s Capetian critics: association with foxes, heresy, bloodshed, even as we have seen, via the rubies and red wine of Canterbury, with the criminal slaying of the martyred St Thomas. As this should remind us, in the rival worlds of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, there is no right way to open an egg. One man’s good is another’s evil. The rhetoricians might associate Henry II with foxes and heretics. Henry himself, in quite deliberate repudiation of such accusations, went to great lengths to emphasize his credentials as a defender of the faith: chief patron of Becket’s shrine at Canterbury, conqueror of Ireland, a land previously remote from Christian discipline, now opened not only to the Templars, directly sponsored by Henry, but to the rhetoric of crusade.113 Henry also posed, after 1170, quite deliberately and self-consciously, as the scourge of heresy in southern France.114 Indeed, the very first use of the term ‘Cathar’ to describe the heretics of Languedoc seems to occur in Ralph Niger’s commentary on the Book of Kings, written c.1190, describing in remarkable (and previously unpublished) detail a sermon preached before Henry II at Limoges, in February 1173, ‘against the abominable sect of the Cathars’.115 To Peter of Blois, writing in goliardic mode, even the simile of the little foxes could be inverted. To Peter, it was the duke of Austria who employed ‘the cunning of the little fox’ (vulpecule versucia), ensnaring a royal lion (King Richard I) just as Judas had betrayed Christ. Likewise, according to Richard fitz Nigel writing in the 1170s, it was certain ‘stubborn little foxes’ (vulpecule pertinaces) who first tempted Henry II’s sons into the great rebellion of 1173–4.116 In other words, against whatever slander the Capetians and their apologists might direct towards English kingship, English kings themselves reacted with intelligence and counter-pressure. Contradiction here was key. And contradiction, as any student of Hegel will know, implies a degree of symbiosis and mutual dependence. The consequent dialectic can be discovered not only in the reactions of the Plantagenets but in those of their Capetian rivals. The arrogance of which the Plantagenets convicted the French was a quality associated in French minds N. Vincent, ‘William of Newburgh, Josephus and the New Titus’, in Christians and Jews in Angevin England, ed. S. Rees Jones and S. Watson, York 2013, 57–90, esp. 78–90. 112 As in the standard-bearer of William the conqueror at Hastings, described by Wace as a son of ‘Rou le Blanc’, literally ‘Red the White’: Wace, The Roman de Rou, lines 7635 and 8674, ed. A. J. Holden, G. S. Burgess and E. Van Houts, St Helier 2002, 262–3, 282–3. 113 N. Vincent, ‘Angevin Ireland’, in The Cambridge History of Ireland: 1 (600–1550), ed. B. Smith, Cambridge 2018, 208–9. 114 N. Vincent, ‘England and the Albigensian Crusade’, in England and Europe in the Reign of Henry III (1216–1272), ed. B. K. U. Weiler and I. W. Rowlands, Aldershot 2002, 68–9. 115 Lachaud, below 129, derived from Lincoln Cathedral MS 26 (Ralph Niger on Kings), fol. 77r. 116 Petri Blesensis Carmina, ed. Wollin, 261, no.1.4 (Walther 16049) verses 2–3: Iudas Christum distraxerat …. sic seuit in leonem vulpecule versucia; Richard fitz Nigel, Dialogus de Scaccario, ed. E. Amt, Oxford 2007, 114. 111

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with Normandy rather than with France itself.117 Henry II’s response to the death of Becket was to pose as an even greater defender of the Church than the kings of France. Becket’s martyrdom also had its effects upon Capetian kingship. If we are to believe Rigord and Guillaume le Breton, it was in the 1170s that both Louis and Philip Augustus pledged themselves anew to the protection of the Church and the encouragement of the Christian faith. It was at this point that a new spirit of austerity gripped the Capetian court. Where the court of Henry II was famed for its histrionic luxury, Philip Augustus, according to Rigord, banished all actors from his palace and insisted that his richest clothes be gifted to the poor.118 Where Henry II sought to profit from the Jews, Philip deliberately persecuted them, ultimately expelling them from his lands.119 Where the oaths and imprecations of Henry II were notorious (especially ‘By God’s eyes’), Philip forbade all swearing by the deity or the saints.120 When at Déols, in the late 1180s, the mercenary soldiers of Henry II struck the arm off an image of the Virgin and child, provoking a miraculous flow of blood, Rigord deliberately contrasts this with the actions of King Philip, already famed for the reverence with which he treated statues, chalices and other such artefacts.121 In much of this, at least as described by Rigord, Philip could almost have been employing the Policraticus of John of Salisbury, with its description of the Plantagenet court of the 1150s, as a guidebook to what not to do at the reformed Capetian court of the 1180s. Here meanwhile, via Rigord and Guillaume le Breton, we arrive at our final Parisian viewpoint: that available from Saint-Denis and the Capetian chroniclers. We must beware of assuming that the views of Saint-Denis and the Palais Royal were necessarily identical. After Suger, I would suggest, relations between palace and monastery cooled distinctly. Four of the first five Capetians (Hugh, Robert II, Henry I, and Louis VI) were buried at Saint-Denis. But not so Louis VII (buried at Barbeau, on the Seine near Fontainebleau), nor his widow, Adela of Champagne, mother of Philip Augustus, buried at Pontigny. The lives of the Capetian kings as written at Saint-Denis are far better known and more widely disseminated today than was ever the case in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.122 Even so, the voices of Saint-Denis are not to be ignored. Suger, as early as the 1130s, for example sought to tarnish English kingship by association: with rebellion by sons against fathers, with violent rather than lawful succession, above all perhaps with the disinheritance of the disobedient, here equating disinheritance unequivocally with tyranny. Acting as regent of France in the 1140s, Suger is said specifically to have refused to impose disinheritance as punishment for first offences, only allowing it when it was more dangerous for a vassal to retain possession of his lands than to Above n.65, and for the inversion here, see Walter of Châtillon, Alexandreis 7:412, ed. M. Colker, Padua 1978: solito Normannia fastu, a description which the biographer of Frederick Barbarossa in due course turned against the Greeks of Byzantium: Historia de expeditione Friderici I imperatoris, ed. A. Chroust, Berlin 1928, 49. 118 Rigord, Histoire, 224–7, and for the importance of clothing to the commerce and court of Paris, see Baldwin, Paris, 45–6, 221–2. 119 Rigord, Histoire, 130–3, 144–9, 154–9, and cf. Baldwin, Paris, 58–61. 120 Rigord, Histoire, 128–31, and for the oaths of the kings of England, see Bartlett, Norman and Angevin Kings, 579–80. For perceptive commentary, see Baldwin, Paris, 77, 79, 226–7. 121 Rigord, Histoire, 146–9, 164–7, 236–9. 122 For the limited circulation of the Saint-Denis panegyrics, see N. Vincent, ‘The Strange Case of the Missing Biographies: The Lives of the Plantagenet Kings of England 1154–1272’, Writing Medieval Biography 750–1250: Essays in Honour of Professor Frank Barlow, ed. D. Bates, J. Crick and S. Hamilton, Woodbridge 2006, 255–7. 117



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forfeit them.123 According to Suger, Louis VI forbade any arrests at his court save for crimes committed there: all of this in pointed, not to say deliberate contrast to the actions of the English kings, Henry I or Stephen, whose own acts of disinheritance and arbitrary arrest were widely reported, not least in the Policraticus of John of Salisbury.124 Were we seeking for further instance of symbiosis by contradiction, only after 1200, when Philip Augustus deliberately adopted what had previously been a distinctively English or Plantagenet resort to the disinheritance of rebel vassals, did the fat truly enter the fire. It was this new willingness on Philip’s part (some would argue this new capacity) to contemplate not only the punishment but the disinheritance of his greater men that led to the summons to, and subsequent disinheritance of, King John: all of this within only a matter of months of John’s visit to Paris in 1201.125 It is Rigord who tells us that Philip promised Poitou and Anjou to Arthur of Brittany, if Arthur could subdue them ‘by right of arms’, here employing precisely the same term (iure armorum) by which Rollo and the pagans had first claimed Normandy.126 Those who profited by violence and the sword were now to be destroyed by the same laws by which they themselves had lived. Other themes emerge from Rigord and Guillaume le Breton: the sense of the Capetian court as a place of prayer and semi-liturgical solemnity, contrasted with the luxury and violence of its Anglo-Norman equivalents. Where the Plantagenets persecuted their bishops, the Capetians laid claim to harmony and close episcopal counsel. Where Henry II, aged and infirm, is shown spreading chaos and destruction in the Loire valley during his final campaigns of 1188–9, Philip finds an almost miraculous crossing point, a ford never before exposed by the summer drought, leading his troops across the river to the liberation of Tours very much as Moses led his chosen people through the waters of the Red Sea.127 ‘Pharaoh’, of course, was one of the derogatory nicknames applied most frequently to Henry II by his opponents in the Becket conflict.128 Becket himself looms large in the Saint-Denis image of French and English kingship, nowhere more clearly than in Guillaume le Breton’s insistence (a deliberate addition to the account supplied by Rigord) that Louis VII placed his son, Philip, directly under the saint’s patronage and protection. Lured back into England by a false promise of peace (a ficta pax), Becket became a victim of Plantagenet treachery. Having nonetheless promised Louis that he would answer his prayers, in death Becket was able to use Philip Augustus as an instrument to reap revenge on the descendants of Henry II, ‘the King of London’: ‘thereby rooting out that race of cruel parricides’.129 Here we touch upon perhaps the most significant underlying theme in all of Rigord and Guillaume le Breton’s portrayals of the Plantagenets, presented as oath breakers and instruments of chaos, so unlike the Capetians with their solemn and William of Saint-Denis, Vita Sugerii abbatis, PL, 186, col.1196, N. Vincent, ‘Rank Insubordination: Disobedience and Disinheritance amongst the Anglo-French Nobility, 1050–1250’, in Rank and Order, ed. J. Peltzer, Stuttgart 2015, 164–5, 167–8, and cf. John of Salisbury on King Stephen (Policraticus, VI, c. 18, ed. C. C. I. Webb, 2 vols, Oxford 1909, II, 50–1) (exheredauit exclusit dominum …. ut ad curiam eius exinde nemo secure accederet). 125 Vincent, ‘Rank Insubordination’, 167–70. 126 Rigord, Histoire, 372–3, 390–1. 127 Rigord, Histoire, 268–9, and cf. Exodus 14. 128 A. Saltman, ‘John of Salisbury and the World of the Old Testament’, in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Wilks, 343–63, esp. 347–8. 129 Philippidos, I, lines 275–335, in Guillaume le Breton, ed. Delaborde, II, 18–20, and cf. Rigord, Histoire, 270–1. For Henry II as ‘King of London’, see Philippidos, III, line 311, in Guillaume le Breton, ed. Delaborde, II, 77. 123 124

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ordered keeping of the faith. Richard I, for example, throughout Rigord’s account, acts with military skill and daring, but ‘by hazard’ (ex improviso), a phrase that crops up repeatedly in Rigord’s descriptions of Richard but almost never of Philip, occurring indeed as part of the explanation of why Richard met his death outside Limoges, attacking a castle ex improviso, in search of buried treasure.130 As for oath breaking, this is something of which the Plantagenets were regularly convicted. Becket, in this telling, was betrayed by false promises of peace.131 On crusade in the 1190s, Philip quite understandably expected Richard to betray him, even to the extent of a conspiracy with the Assassins.132 Certainly, Richard had already broken his oaths over his marriage, over his terms of departure for the Holy Land, and over the division of treasure after Anglo-French conquests in Sicily or at Acre.133 It was fear of such oath-breaking and treachery that obliged Philip to take ship back to France. But only when Richard himself returned, after his captivity in Germany, did Philip contrive to attack him in Normandy. Rigord here attempts a complete reversal of historical truth, intended to portray Richard rather than Philip as oath-breaker, not dissimilar to Rigord’s insistence that it was Richard, not Philip, who was humiliated by tumbling into the ditch at Gisors.134 We find an even more ringing denunciation of Plantagenet oath-breaking in Ralph Niger’s obituary notice for Henry II. Like Rigord, Niger regularly refers to Henry not by name but as ‘the king under whom St Thomas was martyred’ (rex sub quo gloriosus martyr passus est).135 Henry II, according to Ralph’s obituary, was a lecher, a miser, and a deliberate sower of discord. He broke not just general but specific oaths. Thus, ‘keeping faith/fealty with no-one’ (Nulli fidem seruans), he ignored the oath (sacramentum) sworn on his father’s deathbed to share his fortune with his two younger brothers. He compelled bishops to swear oaths (iurare compellans) permitting double judgement and condemning their clergy to capital punishment (a reference this to the Constitutions of Clarendon). Bound by oath (iuratus) by the terms of his penance, after Becket’s death, to found three monasteries, Henry merely swapped religious from one house to another, introducing whores from Le Mans (the word is specific meretrices) to Amesbury.136 Here speaks the unadulterated voice of Niger, indeed of Paris. The Plantagenets have been weighed in the balance and are found wanting. This sort of thing reaches its apogee in Guillaume le Breton’s portrayal of John, betraying and then personally slaying Arthur in books 5 and 6 of the Philippidos. The flavour here is best recovered from the French translation by François Guizot, first published in 1825 at a time when France (and Guizot himself, as future Foreign Minister) were confronted by more than a few signs that perfide Albion was up to her old tricks.137 The murder, in Guillaume’s telling, took place by moonlight, on the banks of the Seine, after John had hidden himself for three days and nights in the Rigord, Histoire, 356–9, and for Richard on other occasions acting ex improviso, ibid., 330–1, 334–5, 352–3. 131 Philippidos, I, line 291, in Guillaume le Breton, ed. Delaborde, II, 19 (ficta … ad propria pace vocatus). 132 Rigord, Histoire, 306–7, 312–15. 133 Ibid., 288–93. 134 Ibid., 270–1, 316–19. 135 Ibid., 216–17, and cf. Ralph Niger, De re militari et triplici via peregrinationis Ierosolimitane (1187/88), ed. L. Schmugge, Berlin 1977, 6–7, 206. 136 Radulfi Nigri Chronica, ed. R. Anstruther, London 1851, 167–8. 137 La Philippide: poème, par Guillaume le Breton, in F. Guizot, Collection des mémoires rélatifs à l’histoire de France, 31 vols, Paris 1823–35, XXII (1825). 130



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shaded valley of Moulineux, down river from Rouen. On the fourth night, mounting a small barge and accompanied by a page, he crossed the river. At this point the river itself becomes an actor in the drama. The Seine rises and falls twice a day, nobody save God knows why or how. Yet: Toutes les fois que l’Océan s’élève pendant que la lune brille, la Seine, comme si elle voulait par une marche rétrograde, remonter jusqu’à sa source, est forcée de refluer aux mêmes heures, et ses flots s’élevant aussi, elle semble chassée en arrière par l’Océan; et ce qui est véritablement étonnant à nos yeux, c’est qu’un fleuve si grand, si large et si profond, qui coule en une telle masse, venant d’un pays si éloigné par un chemin incliné, soit ainsi forcé à des heures si fréquentes, et tandis que la mer s’élève, de marcher en sens contraire … On demande … par quelle puissance la bizarre amertume de l’eau de mer contraint ainsi l’eau douce à se retirer en arrière; ou bien l’eau salée est plus forte que le fleuve d’eau douce, ou bien l’eau douce, indignée contre cette eau trop amère, la détèste et refuse de s’unir aux onde déplaisantes de Thétis.138

It is here, on shipboard, that John murders the tearful and terrified Arthur, twice forcing his sword up to the hilt into Arthur’s bowels and brain, spilling his precious blood, and then three leagues up river, throwing his lifeless corpse into the river’s waters: Voilà bien une œuvre digne de ce Néron … Voila bien un nouveau Judas, le second de cet Hérode, qui … ne craignit pas de mettre à mort ses propres fils.139

What a story. What an ending, with the soft waters of the river Seine, repulsed by the bitter salts of Normandy and England, enfolding the body of the murdered boy martyr. Guizot does his best here, but really we need an Alfred de Musset or a Victor Hugo to render full justice in verse. What more is there to report? Perhaps one final thing. I spoke earlier of the crepuscularity of the present moment. There are those in England who believe that they are secretly admired by the French. That just as the French acknowledge the superiority of English shoe-makers, English race horses, and even, occasionally and reluctantly, the superior resources of the English language, sooner or later the French will regret the English decision once again, as in 1204, to set sail from Europe. ‘Come back!’, the French will cry, ‘All is forgiven: we are friends and neighbours, whatever our age-old rivalry.’ For such optimists, my message is a solemn one. France and Germany can now return to what Charlemagne did best, and England to the age of King Offa (builder, you will remember, of a very large dyke). The English as viewed from twelfth-century Paris were unwholesome: violent, demonic, greedy, materialistic, crude, above all never to be depended on, oathbreakers, unbound by even the most solemn of treaties and agreements, proclaiming 138 Philippidos, VI, lines 508–23, in Guillaume le Breton, ed. Delaborde, ii, 171–2, whence Philippide, trans. Guizot, 171–2: ‘Each time that the ocean rises with the moon, the Seine, as if wishing by a step backwards to return to its source, is obliged at these same times to flow back upon herself; and with her billows rising, she appears as if chased away by the ocean. And, what seems to us more remarkable still, such a river, so great and so deep, flowing along a downwards course in such abundance from so far away, is nonetheless obliged so frequently, whenever the sea rises, to flow back upon itself … Indeed, one wonders by what power the crude and more bitter seawater obliges the fresh water to rise; whether the salt water is more powerful than the fresh river, or whether the fresh water so indignantly hates the bitter that it refuses to mix with the insipid flow of Thetis’ (here translating from the French, but with one eye to the Latin). The classical reference is to the sea-nymph Thetis, mother of Achilles, herself a key figure in the Homeric legend of Troy. 139 Philippidos, VI, lines 567–77, in Guillaume le Breton, ed. Delaborde, II, 174, whence Philippide, trans. Guizot, 174: ‘Behold, a deed worthy of Nero! …Behold a new Judas, a second Herod who … put his own kinsmen to death’.

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their desire to liberate peoples who in reality they were determined to enslave and exploit. Do various of these accusations sound familiar? Are they not the same as those levelled against perfide Albion, after Copenhagen, after Waterloo, after Mers el-Kebir, even after Dunkirk? Do they not surface again in Michelet, in Thierry, in Taine?140 Are they not the same tropes that so undermined entente in 1914, in 1940, dare one say it in 2016? If we are to understand one another, we must first understand our prejudices. The 40th Battle Conference, held in Paris in 2017, offered an opportunity for the worlds of Parisian and Anglo-Norman scholarship to merge, and hence for the sweet waters of the Seine to blend with those, rather saltier, d’outre Manche. This, perhaps above all others, was the goal set by Allen Brown when he first established this conference and in due course this lecture series. May that spirit of concord long reign!

For Taine, see A. Cobban, ‘Hippolyte Taine, Historian of the French Revolution’, History, 54, 1968, 331–41. 140

The R. Allen Brown Memorial Lecture, 2016

AUDACITY AND AMBITION IN EARLY NORMAN ENGLAND AND THE BIG STUFF OF THE CONQUEST* C. P. Lewis This chapter is about the size of things in early Norman England. It deals in certain categories that were either new in 1066 or physically much larger after the Conquest than before: abbey and cathedral churches, earthwork castles and stone halls, bridges and watermills, pictorial embroideries and books. My remit is not a comprehensive audit of the material world but rather an attempt to identify the Big Stuff of the Conquest and establish its cultural meaning for the men and women who brought it into being. It might be appropriate at the outset to say a word or two about the genesis of this lecture. My starting point was Domesday Book, in particular grasping the significance of the commonplace observation that it is a very big book by contemporary standards.1 Although the dimensions of the folios do indeed seem exceptional, the implications of its size have never been thought through. Why was it designed to be so big? An invitation from Robin Fleming and Kit French to participate in a workshop about material culture provided an opportunity to think more deeply about the size of artefacts and buildings as an aspect of materiality in Norman England. Contributions to the workshop were to be co-written and co-presented by colleagues from different disciplines.2 Thus Carol Davidson Cragoe and I wrote a paper on the best known Big Stuff of the Conquest, its buildings.3 Beyond books and buildings, the present chapter sets out a preliminary survey of other things where there was a marked change in size after 1066. Bringing all this together in one place will, I hope, guide some new insights into the mentalities of the Normans in England, especially how their experience of conquest changed the way they felt about and shaped the material world. The central question throughout is this: Why was some stuff in early Norman England so big? There are also connections with the immaterial things of the Conquest. I am not the first to think that big ambitions and outsized audacity were characteristic of the inner group that ruled early Norman England. Raising some questions about that aspect of Norman identity is the second thrust of the chapter. Finally, I will set the materiality of Big Stuff alongside the mentality of big ideas in a brief consideration of two big events where both ideas and things were an issue, namely, the ability to conceive, plan, prepare, and execute two extraordinary enterprises: the invasion of England and the Domesday survey. Pretty much everything that follows is well known to anyone familiar with the *

I am immensely grateful to the conference director and the trustees of the Allen Brown Memorial Trust for the invitation to give this lecture, and to the many friends at the conference and elsewhere who have made comments and suggestions about the paper, in particular Stephen Baxter. 1 e.g. Michael Gullick, ‘The Great and Little Domesday Manuscripts’, in Domesday Book: Studies, [ed. Ann Williams and R. W. H. Erskine], London 1987, 93–112 at 97. 2 A Thing of the Past: Material Evidence and the Writing of England’s Past, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, June 2015. 3 Our paper was called ‘Building Big: The Aesthetics, Technology, and Ambition of Norman Building in England’.

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Norman Conquest: the trick is to approach it along less-travelled paths and try to experience again the Shock of the Big in early Norman England. It seems to me that four of the distinctive features of the Conquest provided necessary conditions for the new Norman interest in making very big things. First, 1066 was, objectively, a major and transformative event in the history of the Latin West, not so much for the fact of military conquest (after all, the English kingdom had been captured by Cnut of Denmark almost within living memory), but for the nearly complete displacement of the English ruling elite. In contemporary perceptions 1066 was surpassed only by the First Crusade, a feat of valour and prowess even more extraordinary in its implications and resonances. Liesbeth van Houts has traced how the Norman duke’s conquest of England was noticed in chronicles and histories across much of western Europe, from Bremen and Odense to Poitiers and Bamberg and Rome.4 The invasion of England was not just an intervention by one of several middling north-west European principalities in an island kingdom that lay ‘on the world’s western rim’,5 and the new king’s achievements drew literary praise from poets across north-western Europe.6 By the middle 1070s it was plain to observers that their world had changed shape permanently. Nowhere was the opening of new possibilities more of a shock to elite sensibilities than among the Normans themselves and their friends in England. Second, it is important that for Duke William and the Normans, 1066 was ideologically not an act of conquest but, rather, the taking up of a legitimate inheritance, albeit one that – as it turned out – could only be entered upon after a massive initial use of force, sustained and brutal campaigning over several years, the imposition of a military regime, draconian punishment of rebels, and widespread human, physical, and cultural destruction. Norman claims to legitimacy were present from the start. Even as the conquest was being mooted and planned, and as papal and other support was gathered, Harold’s perjury was already cited as the justification for removing him.7 The ‘official’ line that Harold’s rule was illegitimate was maintained throughout. The message – this is ours, this was always rightfully ours – was important in creating the conditions in which the slate could be wiped clean and reinscribed with cultural aspirations framed on a much bigger physical scale than before. Third, the conquest did not replicate Norman modes of government and Norman elite society in southern Britain,8 but created a new regime, a new inner ruling group, and a new landed society. After the battles of 1066, the later English rebellions, the dispersal of what remained of the English elite, and the abandonment of a short-lived experiment with a genuinely Anglo-Norman realm, almost nothing survived of English aristocratic and thegnly society and culture except what the Normans chose to appropriate and turn to their own uses.9 Fourth and most important was the remaking of social networks among the ruling elite. This is not the place to trace in close detail the shifting composition of Elisabeth van Houts, ‘The Norman Conquest through European Eyes’, EHR 110, 1995, 832–53. Frank Barlow’s translation of the phrase finibus occiduis in Carmen, line 21 (pp. 2–3). 6 Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Latin Poetry and the Anglo-Norman Court, 1066–1135: The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio’, JMH 15, 1989, 39–62; Thomas O’Donnell, ‘The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio and the Poetics of 1067’, ANS 39, 2016, 151–65. 7 George Garnett, Conquered England: Kingship, Succession, and Tenure, 1066–1166, Oxford 2007, 1–44. 8 Mark Hagger, Norman Rule in Normandy, 911–1144, Woodbridge 2017. 9 The two different societies are described but not compared in Ann Williams, The World Before Domesday: The English Aristocracy, 900–1066, London 2008; Judith A. Green, The Aristocracy of Norman England, Cambridge 1997. 4 5



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William’s inner circle of friends, officials, and allies over the whole of his adult life. Much more could be said about the topic than there is space for here,10 and there are insights to be had from the better documented social dynamics of other ruling inner groups even when the historical comparison seems far-fetched.11 William of Poitiers and Orderic Vitalis took stock of the conqueror’s companions at the time the expedition to England was being planned,12 but the group was never static, and much could be said about its shifting prosopography both before and after 1066. Its broad outlines look like this. William’s childhood protectors, men drawn from his father’s and grandfather’s generations in the ducal kindred, had left the scene before William reached maturity. The adolescent duke formed lasting connections with his younger half-brothers Odo and Robert and with three childhood friends of his and their own age, William fitzOsbern, Roger de Montgommery, and Roger de Beaumont, boys schooled together in adversity, hardship, brutality, and war. During the years of William’s early manhood, 1047–60, he and his companions defended Normandy through incessant military campaigns and, by defending it, defined it geographically. This was a time in which William began making consciously political choices of his own about his closest friends, looking for capable men of instinctive loyalty, mostly from his own generation but, in later years, occasionally among younger members of Normandy’s leading families. William repaid staunch loyalty in kind and was ferocious in his enmities. For clerical advice, he trusted only a few prelates from the wider pool of bishops and abbots. It may be significant for the psychological forces that bound the inner circle together that the two most prominent after Bishop Odo were from an older cohort, Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances and Archbishop Lanfranc.13 The circle of loyal friends widened as William became more secure in Normandy and had more rewards to give. He had some freedom in shaping the Norman elite: whom to favour, when to go easy on a rebel, calm the enmities between families, how to manage his own kinsmen and how to staff the ducal household. When he married Matilda, for example, he recalled from exile in Flanders the brothers Richard fitzGilbert and Baldwin de Meulles, sons of his old tutor Count Gilbert, and afterwards crucial members of the regime in England. The achievements of those years included the closer integration of Upper and Lower Normandy and the establishment of Caen as a western centre of ducal power; facing down any pretensions to independent spheres of action by other members of the ducal kin, such as William of Arques; integrating some of the key families along the marches of Normandy; and making alliances outside the duchy with important families in Eu, Ponthieu, Flanders, and Brittany.14 Alongside geopolitical consolidation was the creation of a denser social network within the duchy, binding the Normans together in a common enterprise made tangible by the spread of new monastic foundations by elite families.15 There is much in David Bates, William the Conqueror, London 2016. Sheila Fitzpatrick, On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics, Princeton NJ 2015, as reviewed by Yoram Gorlizki in London Review of Books, 11 Aug. 2016, 37–8. 12 Poitiers, 100–3; Orderic, II, 140–1. 13 Duke William was about 38 in 1066, Lanfranc about 56 (b. c.1010), and Geoffrey about 47 if he had reached the canonical age of 30 when he was made a bishop in 1049. For an alternative view that Geoffrey was about the duke’s age: John Le Patourel, ‘Geoffrey of Montbray, Bishop of Coutances, 1049–1093’, EHR 59, 1944, 129–61 at 133. 14 Pierre Bauduin, La première Normandie (Xe–XIe siècles): sur les frontières de la haute Normandie: identité et construction d’une principauté, 2nd edn, Caen 2006. 15 Cassandra Potts, Monastic Revival and Regional Identity in Early Normandy, Woodbridge 1997; Véronique Gazeau, Normannia monastica, 2 vols, Caen 2007. 10

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The conquest of England, in planning, execution, and aftermath, had a very significant effect on the composition and size of William’s circle of companions. It started with the recruitment of new allies beyond Normandy and newly significant supporters within. Some of the men given responsible military commands of the first importance at an early date in England, like Hugh d’Avranches, Henry de Ferrières, and Robert d’Ouilly, are difficult to trace in the affairs of the duchy before 1066 and may have made their reputations at Hastings itself, literally overnight as tales of the day’s exploits were first passed around the campfires, and as William learned about outstanding acts of leadership, bravery, and loyalty. Dozens of great estates in England were parcelled out to men of modest landed background in Normandy, exemplified by the Lacy brothers, Ilbert of Pontefract and Walter of Weobley.16 William and his friends had planned and prepared for an unprecedented expedition with the utmost care; had kept their nerve during anxious weeks on the coast of Normandy; and had fought hard over a bloody and exhausting day of extraordinary reversals. They had been fantastically lucky, and with hindsight explained their success above all by God’s unwavering support for their enterprise, manifested in any number of portents that seemed to have promised success in the days before the battle, preserved in oral stories that circulated vigorously from the outset, and in later years were gathered together at Battle and Waltham, and by Wace in Normandy:17 the ‘long-haired star’ that had appeared in the skies over England and Normandy in the last week of April;18 a bad omen disarmed by a well-judged word when the duke carelessly put his hauberk on backwards;19 a quick-witted shout by a knight when William slipped and fell on his hands and knees as he disembarked on the shore at Pevensey, ‘You’re holding England, duke … king next!’ (Tenes Angliam, comes, rex futurus).20 They believed in both the rightness of their cause and the power of good fortune given by God, but to be on the safe side, William at Hastings wore relics around his neck as amulets.21 After Hastings, the king’s inner group continued to shift around him during the long drawn out military emergency down to 1071, the distribution of spoils to the great barons of Normandy and William’s allies from other lands, and the slow transfer of bishoprics and most major abbeys into new hands. Tasks for another time are mapping out more precisely the changing social network of the conqueror’s companions, and approaching a better understanding of their group psychology by using insights from the social sciences. Architecture is the obvious place to start in a catalogue of the Big Stuff that the conqueror and his friends brought into being, because generations of scholarship on individual building projects have been so masterfully synthesized by Eric Fernie;22 only a sketch is needed here. The biggest Anglo-Saxon churches were by no means negligible as built structures, but they made an impression less through size than through the accretion over centuries of complex architectural spaces, the W. E. Wightman, The Lacy Family in England and Normandy, 1066–1194, Oxford 1966. Elisabeth van Houts, ‘The Memory of 1066 in Written and Oral Traditions’, ANS 19, 1996, 167–79; Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Wace as Historian’, in Family Trees and the Roots of Politics: The Prosopography of Britain and France from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, Woodbridge 1997, 103–32; F. H. M. Le Saux, A Companion to Wace, Cambridge 2005, 209–52. 18 Van Houts, ‘Norman Conquest through European Eyes’, 832 (with further reading indicated there), 847. 19 Poitiers, 124–5. 20 Malmesbury, Gesta regum, I, 450–1. 21 Poitiers, 124–5; van Houts, ‘Memory of 1066’, 167. 22 Eric Fernie, The Architecture of Norman England, Oxford 2000. George Garnett, The Norman Conquest: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford 2009, 91–121 (‘The Romanesque Rebuilding of England’), has many insights. 16

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accumulation of relics of saints old and new, and the glitter of rich surface decoration and ornament.23 The major Norman churches in England were conceived on a much bigger scale and when first complete presented very large unified spaces with stripped-down ornamentation. Size and magnificence, inextricably linked, were central to the motivation of Norman patrons in England. For William of Malmesbury, building big (ingentia … edifitia) was one of the defining features of the Norman character.24 The new bishops and abbots had been transplanted to their English dioceses and monasteries for good, unlike the secular magnates with cross-Channel estates, most of whom retained interests and loyalties in Normandy and probably shipped a good deal of their new wealth back across the Channel.25 Spending by the new clerical elite, and what it said about their ambitions and outlook, by contrast, started and ended in England. The Normans ‘rebuilt every Anglo-Saxon cathedral and large monastic church with a thoroughness and speed unmatched at any other time in the Middle Ages’.26 Complete replacement of the fabric of Anglo-Saxon churches had an ideological charge as a purging of the physical locations in which the old regime’s now despised senior clergy had operated. New buildings eradicated the English ecclesiastical past, and were linked to a way of thinking that found fuller expression in the early twelfth century, when the last years of native leadership of the English church were comprehensively rewritten as a time of decline and corruption.27 Thorough rebuilding went with such other features as Lanfranc’s rejection of the revered and traditional liturgical forms of Regularis Concordia in favour of a new liturgy derived from Continental Cluniac sources,28 the pruning of pre-Conquest necrologies at Canterbury and Durham,29 and the repurposing of English saints (though not their complete rejection). Plans to rebuild were made early, and on a very big scale, though inevitably they were rolled out over an extended period. The pattern for building big was present already in the shape of King Edward’s Westminster abbey, started before 1051 and itself drawing inspiration for both plan and stylistic features from the Norman ducal abbey church of Jumièges. Edward’s Westminster was intended to be vast, and to outdo anything in the Normandy where he had spent so many years in humiliating exile.30 As Fernie puts it, ‘Westminster greatly exceeds any earlier or contemporary building in Normandy, and [with one exception] any church since the fourth century’,31 its nave half as long again as Jumièges. Norman building in England after 1066 was emulative and competitive to an ever greater and self-reinforcing degree. For a while, every great church that was newly started was conceived on a more ample scale than the last. First there was a big church, then a bigger one, then Eric Fernie, The Architecture of the Anglo-Saxons, London 1983. Malmesbury, Gesta regum, I, 460–1. 25 John Le Patourel, Norman Barons, Bexhill-on-Sea 1966; John Le Patourel, The Norman Empire, Oxford 1976; David Crouch, ‘Normans and Anglo-Normans: A Divided Aristocracy?’, in England and Normandy in the Middle Ages, ed. David Bates and Anne Curry, London 1994, 51–67. 26 Fernie, Architecture of Norman England, 24. 27 Mary Frances Giandrea, Episcopal Culture in Late Anglo-Saxon England, Woodbridge 2007, 7–34. 28 The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc, ed. and trans. David Knowles and Christopher N. L. Brooke, Oxford 2002. 29 Robin Fleming, ‘History and Liturgy at Pre-Conquest Christ Church’, HSJ 6, 1994, 67–83; Robin Fleming, ‘Christ Church Canterbury’s Anglo-Norman Cartulary’, in Anglo-Norman Political Culture and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance: Proceedings of the Borchard Conference on Anglo-Norman History, 1995, ed. C. Warren Hollister, Woodbridge 1997, 83–155. 30 Simon Keynes, ‘The Æthelings in Normandy’, ANS 13, 1990, 173–205. 31 Fernie, Architecture of Norman England, 98. 23 24

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the biggest of all … but then others came and built larger still: the ginormous, the humungous, and the mega-whopper.32 A desire to be up-to-date, to embrace modernitas, was embedded in the Norman impulse to rebuild the great churches of England.33 We can trace something of the blending of novelty and gigantism in how Henry of Huntingdon and especially William of Malmesbury responded to the churches that, by their day, were standing complete and as intended. For both of them, New is Good, and Big is Beautiful. Bishop Maurice of London’s St Paul’s was an ‘enormous church’ (templum maximum).34 After the fire of 1067 at Canterbury, Lanfranc dug up the old foundations and ‘rebuilt everything bigger’ (suscitauit in ampliorem statum omnia);35 later, Prior Ernulf rebuilt the collapsed east end with such splendour (splendide) that nothing in England matched it;36 the new church at St Paul’s was both beautiful and capacious;37 Herbert Losinga put up tall buildings of great beauty and nobility at Norwich;38 under Baldwin at Bury, ‘everything was made new’ (omnia … innouata) and the new work was beautiful;39 at Durham, William de Saint-Calais began a new church ‘magnificently’(magnifice);40 Robert fitzHamon’s work at Tewkesbury was described with a verb, exaltauit, that makes the splendour of the buildings almost transcendental;41 even at impoverished Lichfield, Bishop Robert de Limésy was nonetheless the founder of large buildings (magnarum … edificationum inchoator).42 Just as tellingly, where no new building work was planned in the generation after 1066, bishops and abbots were castigated for their inactivity: Glastonbury was badly led so had not made progress in new building;43 at Exeter, old-fashioned Bishop Osbern, with his English friends and English sentiments, was ‘content with outmoded buildings’ (ueteribus contentus edifitiis).44 The significance of the Norman desire to rebuild the great churches of England is underlined by the fact that such rebuilding did not follow automatically in parallel situations when one early medieval society overwhelmed another: in Reconquest Iberia, for example, Christian kings had the principal city mosques reconsecrated as cathedrals but did not rebuild.45 The desire to make a grand statement in stone – and outdo colleagues, friends, and rivals who were busy with similar tasks – was also evident in secular society. The obvious place to start, reserving castles for later, is William Rufus’s Westminster Hall. The space conceived there, in a location intended to draw comparison with Edward’s adjacent abbey, was on the scale of even the largest churches that were in hand. Rufus’s hall was longer by some way than most of the new cathedral and

I here adopt the favoured superlatives of three friends who wish to remain anonymous. Fernie, Architecture of Norman England, 312. 34 Huntingdon, 400–1. 35 Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, I, 102–3. 36 Ibid. I, 220–1. 37 Ibid. I, 230–3. 38 Ibid. I, 242–3. 39 Ibid. I, 248–9. 40 Ibid. I, 414–15. 41 Ibid. I, 450–1. 42 Ibid. I, 470–1. 43 Ibid. I, 308–9. 44 Ibid. I, 316–17. 45 Justin E. A. Kroesen, ‘From Mosques to Cathedrals: Converting Sacred Space during the Spanish Reconquest’, Mediaevistik, 21, 2008, 113–37. 32 33



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abbey naves, matched only by Winchester, Bury, and Norwich,46 and providing a massive unaisled space 240 ft long by 68 ft wide, under a roof whose timbers are reckoned to have required as many as 1,760 trees. The evidence for understanding Rufus’s motivation is suggestive rather than definite, not least because the most plausible start date of around 1095 is only conjectural, making it difficult to be sure of the context in which work began, and what, if anything directly, put it into the king’s mind to build on so large a scale. It could have started earlier, since there was no court at Westminster (or none that we know of) after 1090,47 perhaps because clearance of the site for the new building had begun.48 The hall erected by the Conqueror in the enlarged royal palace at Winchester not long before may well have been of considerable size,49 and among Rufus’s motivations may have been the wish to outbuild his father. In any case, the most persuasive context for building on a massive scale at Westminster was not some particular trigger, let alone any practical need for such a large room, but outsized thinking. Frank Barlow made the imaginative suggestion that by building the biggest hall seen in Europe since Roman times Rufus wanted to surpass not only his contemporaries among western kings, but what he supposed was the courtly style of Charlemagne at Aachen, Arthur at Camelot, and Mark at Tintagel.50 Westminster Hall was also about ostentatious expenditure, and about outdoing anywhere his father had resided and any building that his father’s episcopal and monastic friends were constructing. It expressed the magnificence of Norman rule in England, notably by being more than twice the size of the almost contemporary great hall at Caen in Normandy,51 and it was designed to show that Rufus, too, could think and build big. Westminster Hall impressed contemporaries, though we hear from them only a generation later. Henry of Huntingdon knew of a story about what Rufus said on viewing the completed hall for the first time, at Whitsun 1099: ‘although some said that it was the right size and others that it was too large’ (cum alii satis magnam uel equo maiorem dicerent), ‘the king said it wasn’t big enough by half’ (dixit rex eam magnitudinis debite dimidia parte carere). William of Malmesbury explained that Rufus built ‘sparing no expense, to show off his lavish spending’ (non parcens expensis dum modo liberalitatis suae magnificentiam exhiberet), and for the building itself deployed a carefully chosen supersuperlative, permaximus.52 Building big was a redeeming character feature of Malmesbury’s Rufus, Westminster Hall his greatest achievement. A new building type in early Norman England was the great stone tower that appeared in some castles. Great towers in a fully developed form combining hall, chamber, and chapel in one structure had been built in Anjou, Maine, and Normandy Roland B. Harris and Daniel Miles with Thomas Hill, ‘Romanesque Westminster Hall and its Roof’, in Westminster II: The Art, Architecture and Archaeology of the Royal Palace, ed. Warwick Rodwell and Tim Tatton-Brown, BAA Conference Transactions 39 Part 2, Leeds 2015, 22–71. 47 ASC 1091. 48 Frank Barlow, William Rufus, London 1983, 302, citing R. W. Southern, ‘St Anselm and Gilbert Crispin, Abbot of Westminster’, Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies, 3, 1975, 78–115 at 87–8. 49 Martin Biddle and D. J. Keene, ‘Winchester in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, in Winchester in the Early Middle Ages: An Edition and Discussion of the Winton Domesday, ed. Martin Biddle, Winchester Studies 1, Oxford 1976, 241–448 at 292–6. 50 Barlow, William Rufus, 132. 51 Edward Impey and John McNeill, ‘The Great Hall of the Dukes of Normandy in the Castle at Caen’, in Castles and the Anglo-Norman World: Proceedings of a Conference held at Norwich Castle in 2012, ed. John A. Davies, Angela Riley, Jean-Marie Levesque, and Charlotte Lapiche, Oxford 2016, 101–32. 52 Huntingdon, 444–7; Malmesbury. Gesta regum, I, 566–7. 46

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since before the year 1000, and two of the Norman examples, at Ivry-la-Bataille and Avranches, were very large.53 In England, the immediate need after 1066 was for castles hastily thrown up in earth and timber, not slow building in stone and mortar. That applies equally to the king’s castles in the shire boroughs and to baronial castles. In some cases the sites taken for them, and the quantities of earth that had to be shifted, were exceptionally large, but the buildings themselves were nothing special. Most of the earliest great stone towers in England, like Chepstow, Canterbury, Rochester (in plan, though its height was exceptional), Castle Rising, and Castle Hedingham, are on the same scale as contemporary castles in Normandy such as Domfront and Falaise, and indeed as earlier examples of the same type, notably Fulk III of Anjou’s castle of the early eleventh century at Loches in the Loire valley. One example will suffice to make the point: the great tower of Rochester built soon after 1127 (74 ft by 73 ft) was broadly comparable in square footage if not in proportions to Loches (83 ft by 50½ ft).54 Early Norman England, in addition, boasted a handful of great towers that exceeded even the most impressive in Normandy. Norwich keep (110 ft by 93 ft) occupies about twice the ground plan of Loches or Rochester,55 while two great towers started early in William’s reign stand out for their sheer size, the White Tower in London and Colchester, both planted on the ground rather than constrained by having to perch on an earthwork motte. The White Tower (118 ft by 107 ft) occupies nearly three times the footprint of Loches and Rochester, and Colchester (151 ft by 110 ft) four times, outstripping even Ivry.56 The matching plans and massive size of the two English buildings link them in conception and probably architect, but we still need to ask why they were so big. Colchester, famously, is built over the foundations of a Roman temple, so that the great size of the castle followed from a deliberate decision to use the existing Roman footprint. Other Roman remains were appropriated for Norman castles for practical reasons: in boroughs like Winchester and Chichester, for example, to reduce the length of new walling or ditching that was needed. Small buildings just as much as large ones might appropriate Roman structures, as with the conscious placing of the small keep at Pevensey on Roman foundations, probably in Henry I’s time,57 or the ostentatious display of Roman tile salvaged from Caerwent in the façade of the king’s new hall at Chepstow.58 At Colchester, however, William Fernie, Architecture of Norman England, 50–3; Edward Impey, ‘The Ancestry of the White Tower’, in The White Tower, ed. Edward Impey, London 2008, 227–41. 54 John A. A. Goodall, ‘The Great Tower of Rochester Castle’, in Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology at Rochester, ed. Tim Ayers and Tim Tatton-Brown, BAA Conference Transactions 28, 2006, 265–99; Marc Morris, ‘Rochester Castle’, in Castles and the Anglo-Norman World, ed. Davies and others, 69–74. 55 T. A. Heslop, Norwich Castle Keep: Romanesque Architecture and Social Context, Norwich 1994; Elizabeth Popescu, ‘Norwich Castle’, in Castles and the Anglo-Norman World, ed. Davies and others, 3–29; Brian Ayers, ‘“…Traces of the Original Disposition of the Whole”: Excavated Evidence for the Construction of Norwich Castle Keep’, ibid. 31–42; T. A. Heslop, ‘The Shifting Structure of Norwich Castle Keep, 1096 to c.1230’, ibid. 43–53. 56 Roland B. Harris, ‘The Structural History of the White Tower, 1066–1200’, in White Tower, ed. Impey, 29–93; Roland B. Harris, ‘Recent Research on the White Tower: Reconstructing and Dating the Norman Building’, in Castles and the Anglo-Norman World, ed. Davies and others, 177–89; Peter Berridge, ‘Colchester Castle: “Some Tyme Stronge and Statelye, as the Ruynes Do Shewe”’, ibid. 55–68. 57 Tony Chapman, ‘Turris de Pevensel: Another View’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 151, 2013, 61–77. 58 Rick Turner, Chris Jones-Jenkins, and Stephen Priestley, ‘The Norman Great Tower’, in Chepstow Castle: Its History and Buildings, ed. Rick Turner and Andy Johnson, Logaston 2006, 23–42 at 39. 53



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I’s tower was even bigger than its Roman substructure, enveloping it to use the solid foundation as a base for its internal divisions not its external walls. As Fernie suggested, William’s great castle at Colchester embraced the classical Roman past of the English kingdom and made it part of the Norman present. As such, it drew breath from the same atmosphere in the king’s household where William of Poitiers was flattering the king as simultaneously the equal or superior of Agamemnon, Xerxes, and Caesar.59 At both Colchester and London the Normans may have believed they were making use of the British past as well as the Roman. Later tradition at Colchester asserted that the foundations were those of the palace of the former King Coel,60 and it may well be, as Fernie intriguingly suggested, that William I at Colchester thought he was outdoing Old King Cole.61 Perhaps at London he had King Lud in mind. Both names were mythologized and popularized as urban founders (and Lud as a great builder) by Geoffrey of Monmouth,62 but he did not invent King Coel and may not have invented King Lud, even though he was the first known to have set the name down in writing.63 London and Colchester were already linked in the story of St Helena as known by Henry of Huntingdon before Geoffrey borrowed the details.64 One further point remains to be made about the size of stone buildings in early Norman England. Twenty-odd major churches, a clutch of grand stone keeps, and William Rufus’s cavernous Westminster Hall together amounted to the most extensive group of very large buildings put up all in one go anywhere in the West since Roman times.65 It was an episode in the history of building when a step-change in scale happened suddenly, and was lasting. After the initial rush of gigantism, buildings in England continued to be planned on a vast scale, indeed, in the case of major churches, grew ever larger in subsequent decades and centuries. But those later developments should not be allowed to obscure what was new after the Normans arrived. The fact remains that something remarkable happened to the size of buildings all of a sudden and in the immediate wake of 1066. The new buildings set technical and logistical puzzles for their designers and builders, made heavy demands on the treasuries of their patrons, and sent the aesthetics of English architecture in new directions.66 I turn now to other big construction projects apart from stone buildings, more cautiously because the evidence is harder to interpret. Most castles of the early Norman period were not stone but earth and timber.67 There was a major programme of construcPoitiers, 110–13, 142–3, 168–75. P. J. Drury, ‘Aspects of the Origins and Development of Colchester Castle’, Archaeological Journal, 139, 1982, 302–419 at 399. 61 Fernie, Architecture of Norman England, 67. 62 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain: An Edition and Translation of De Gestis Britonum (Historia Regum Britanniae), ed. Michael D. Reeve, trans. Neil Wright, Woodbridge 2007, 30–1, 66–7 (Lud), 94–7 (Coel). 63 A. D. Mills, A Dictionary of London Place Names, Oxford 2001, 143. 64 Karen Jankulak, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Cardiff 2010, 34–7, 62; Huntingdon, pp. civ–cv, 60–3; J. S. P. Tatlock, The Legendary History of Britain: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and its Early Vernacular Versions, Berkeley CA 1950, 34. 65 The size of the building project as a whole put in an even longer context by J. C. Holt, ‘Colonial England, 1066–1215’, in J. C. Holt, Colonial England, 1066–1215, London 1997, 1–24 at 5–6. 66 Questions remain both about the practicalities and the implications of such bold architectural planning and execution, and in a related piece, Carol Cragoe and I are considering how the Normans built so big, discussing finance, logistics, aesthetics and technology, as well as motivation. 67 Robert Higham and Philip Barker, Timber Castles, London 1992, reprinted with new pagination Exeter 2004. 59 60

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tion, starting in the Hastings campaign and the military phase of the Norman occupation to 1071, then continuing as new lords built residences at their honorial centres. The motte and bailey was a second new building type, replicated in short order in scores of examples, such that the enterprise of castle-building as a whole was itself a big thing. Judging the original size of earth-and-timber castles is a perilous task. Ditches slump and mottes degrade, quite apart from centuries of deliberate remodelling and encroachment, so that systematic measurement is hugely problematic. Patient work could perhaps calculate the total amount of earth dug and moved at each castle for ditches, banks, and motte. For present purposes, an impression will have to suffice, using readily available data for the mottes alone as a proxy. Some individual earth-and-timber castles were very large, and very much larger than the norm. The ‘vast’ early castle west of St Paul’s in London, for example, may have covered an area measuring some 600 yards by 300 yards.68 Elsewhere, taking mottes alone, based on published plans and measurements, and using an on-line calculator for the volume of a truncated cone, it seems that the largest mottes contained over ten times as much earth as the mottes of typical baronial castles (Appendix 1). To give some examples, ordinary mottes include Abinger (80,000 cubic feet), Hen Domen (140,000), and Pontefract (180,000), but the biggest for which I have been able to obtain measurements comprised 1 million cubic feet and more, ostentatiously large mounds of earth piled up by teeming squads of labourers. Some of the mightiest were royal castles from the military phase of the Conquest, such as Cambridge and Baile Hill at York. Others were royal castles built in peaceful times, like Windsor and the second castle at Stafford (the one outside the borough). Among the very biggest earthwork constructions are also to be found the chief castles of some among the richest of the king’s barons and inner circle of associates, notably Richard fitzGilbert’s at Clare in Suffolk and Tonbridge in Kent, Earl Roger’s at Arundel in Sussex, Geoffrey de Mandeville’s at Pleshey in Essex, and Count Eustace of Boulogne’s at Anstey in Hertfordshire. On the whole, though again this is impressionistic, the biggest castles were built by the conqueror himself and by members of the innermost circle of his companions. The construction of outsized castles was both a collective enterprise of the great men who formed the Conqueror’s inner circle, and very likely a matter of anxious emulation and feverishly competitive rivalry among them. The large-scale engineering works in earth and stone that were required to build gargantuan castles and churches presupposed a certain level of technical expertise. Church towers of unprecedented girth and height did not always stay up,69 but in general the attempt at ever bigger buildings reinforced the skills and knowledge of practitioners at all levels from designers to labourers. For those reasons it very likely became progressively easier to build big as time went on and capacity was enlarged. At least as significant as the engineering skills deployed were the complicated logistics of a campaign of building (labour, provisions, shelter, building materials of many kinds), regardless of whether construction was sustained over a long period or completed in short order. Organizing the supply of materials and the management of a large workforce required skills of a high order, repeated in place after place in early Norman England. A better understanding of how to move and consolidate ever larger volumes of earth and how to design wider stone arches that would stay up seems to have been Edward Impey, ‘London’s Early Castles and the Context of their Creation’, in White Tower, ed. Impey, 13–26 at 22–3. 69 Garnett, Norman Conquest, 103–6. 68



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put to further practical use in two areas where the early years of Norman England may also have been characterized by building big: bridges and millworks. The concentration of expertise and multi-purposing of skills are seen best at Durham, where building in stone in the time of Bishop Ranulph Flambard (1099–1128) included the vaults of the cathedral, defensive walls around the city, and a new bridge over the Wear.70 Framwellgate bridge was one of the earliest arched bridges built in England, and David Harrison has pointed out that the design of its arches must have been connected with the contemporary vaults of the cathedral;71 the size of the bridge arch impressed the Durham monk who wrote a biographical account of Bishop Flambard. The late eleventh century may well have seen a proliferation of large stone bridges in England. By 1100, just before Flambard’s bridge was completed, there were already major bridges at London, Rochester, Chester, Nottingham, Stamford, Bristol, and Oxford, some of which spanned wide and difficult rivers, and all of which involved overcoming the technical problems of constructing the foundations for piers in the bed of a river in full flow. Some of that infrastructure was in place long before the Normans arrived, notably over the Medway at Rochester, where the Roman pier foundations had apparently survived, and where the technologies of maintaining the masonry piers and regularly renewing a timber superstructure of massive oak beams had been perfected by the Anglo-Saxons, along with the administrative capacity to organize finance and labour.72 London bridge had a similar timber superstructure.73 But some of the bridges are likely to have been new in Norman times, especially those newly built in stone like the long causeway across the marshy floodplain of the Thames at Oxford, known presumably from the first as Grandpont (‘the great bridge’), which was constructed by the castellan Robert d’Ouilly (d. 1090s).74 It is also clear from a variety of evidence that there were some very big new watermilling complexes in Norman England, a feature absent from existing accounts of mill ownership and technology.75 At Chester, the long weir (or causeway) which channels the flow of the river Dee to the mills is traditionally assigned to 1092,76 and must have required the same sort of technologies employed when bridge-

‘Continuation’ in Symeon of Durham, Libellus de exordio atque procursu istius, hoc est Dunhelmensis, ecclesie: Tract on the Origins and Progress of this the Church of Durham, ed. and trans. David Rollason, Oxford 2000, 266–323 at 274–7; VCH Durham, III, 1928, 1–190 at 11. 71 David Harrison, ‘Bridges, Past and Future: The Current State of Knowledge and Proposals for Future Research’, Medieval Settlement Research, 25, 2010, 32–9 at 33. 72 Nicholas P. Brooks, ‘Rochester Bridge, ad 43–1381’, in Traffic and Politics: The Construction and Management of Rochester Bridge, AD 43–1993, ed. Nigel Yates and James M. Gibson, Woodbridge 1994, 1–40. 73 Bruce Watson, Trevor Brigham, and Tony Dyson, London Bridge: 2000 Years of a River Crossing, Museum of London Archaeology Service Monograph 8, 2001, 52–60, 73–82. 74 Historia ecclesie Abbendonensis: The History of the Church of Abingdon, ed. and trans. John Hudson, 2 vols, Oxford 2002–7, II, 34–5; Brian Durham, ‘The Thames Crossing at Oxford: Archaeological Studies, 1979–82’, Oxoniensia, 49, 1984, 57–100; Margaret Gelling, The Place-Names of Oxfordshire, 2 vols, English Place-Name Society 23–24, 1953–4, I, 21. 75 e.g. Richard Holt, The Mills of Medieval England, Oxford 1988; Adam Lucas, Ecclesiastical Lordship, Seigneurial Power and the Commercialization of Milling in Medieval England, Farnham 2014. 76 A. T. Thacker, ‘Mills and Fisheries’, VCH Ches. V (2), 2005, 104–14 at 104; The Charters of the Anglo-Norman Earls of Chester, c.1071–1237, ed. Geoffrey Barraclough, Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 126, 1988, no. 3; Brian Atkin, ‘What’s Behind the Weir?’, The Past Uncovered: Free Quarterly Newsletter of Chester Archaeology, June 1996, 4; Niall MacFadyen, ‘Fieldwork 2015’, Chester Antiquary, 2015 issue 2. 70

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builders set the foundations of piers. Most of the largest milling complexes that can be identified in early post-Conquest sources involved diverting flows of water through earthworks rather than damming tidal rivers, and required expertise more akin to that of motte-and-bailey castle builders. Three examples come to mind. At York, new millworks were carefully planned in conjunction with the castle sited on the peninsula where the narrow river Foss flowed into the Ouse. The Foss was dammed, turning water into the castle ditches and flooding a large area of cultivated land upstream which belonged to the archbishop. The large pond provided power for the new mills located on the milldam just outside the castle bailey.77 At Cambridge, the milling site for the whole town was on the Cam at what was originally the southern boundary of the borough along the King’s Ditch. Rather complicated evidence suggests that the existing mills of Ely abbey and Count Alan stood on the main course of the Cam, and that Picot the sheriff built a new mill on common pasture stolen from the burgesses, which diverted some of the water power from the existing mills though a long channel.78 At Arundel, the Sussex headquarters of one of the wealthiest and most powerful Norman barons, Earl Roger, there was a large milling complex on the Swanbourne stream just north of the town, by some way the most valuable in Sussex, with the Arundel mill on the south side and the Offham mills on the north.79 Some aspects of the building projects mentioned here seem larger in conception than the edifices alone, and take us almost to large-scale town planning. At Durham, the fortified cathedral peninsula was a bigger idea than the sum of its parts – a big castle and a bigger cathedral – not least because the bishop was patron of both. At Lincoln, perhaps a third of the houses in the densely packed upper city were pulled down to make way for the castle, soon joined by a new cathedral in a distinctive and dominating quarter of the town.80 At Battle, it was the idea that was grandiose rather than the actual monastic building, a boldness of conception and fixity of purpose in King William’s insistence that the abbey had to occupy the very site where God helped him to avenge Harold’s perjury and where the Normans imperilled their souls by the slaughter of the English, regardless of the challenging topography and the lack of running water.81 At Salisbury – Old Sarum82 – a site ‘waterless and windswept; in winter without cover from the cold, in summer exposed to a sun reflected GDB 298a2 lines 28–30 (Yorks. C22); VCH Yorks.: City of York, 1961, 507–9; British Historic Towns Atlas, V: York: Introduction and Gazetteer, Oxford 2015, 34, 78 (Castle Mills), 81 (Foss, River), 84 (King’s Fishpond); for the topography, compare sheets H (York c.900–1066) and J (York c.1100). 78 GDB 189a1 lines 9–5 from end (Cambs. B11–12); IE 123; Regesta: William I, no. 126; discussions include Frederic William Maitland, Township and Borough, being the Ford Lectures delivered in the University of Oxford in the October Term of 1897, Cambridge 1898, 190–1; H. P. Stokes, ‘The Old Mills of Cambridge’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 14, 1909–10, 180–233 at 181–3; The West Fields of Cambridge, ed. Catherine P. Hall and J. R. Ravensdale, Cambridge Antiquarian Records Society 3, 1976 for 1974–5, 80–2. 79 GDB 23a1 Castrum Harundel (Suss. 11/2); 25a2 Offham (Suss. 11/92). 80 J. W. F. Hill, Medieval Lincoln, Cambridge 1948, 42–129, esp. 53–7, 82–6, 108–11. 81 The Chronicle of Battle Abbey, ed. and trans. Eleanor Searle, Oxford 1980, 36–7, 42–5; David Martin, Barbara Martin, and Christopher Whittick, Building Battle Town: An Architectural History, 1066–1750, Burgess Hill 2016, 1–7; Elizabeth M. Hallam, ‘Monasteries as “War Memorials”: Battle Abbey and La Victoire’, in The Church and War, ed. W. J. Sheils, Studies in Church History 20, Oxford 1983, 47–57. 82 VCH Wilts. VI, 1962, 51; Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England), Ancient and Historical Monuments in the City of Salisbury, I, London 1980, xxviii–xxxii, 1–24; Alex Langlands, ‘Placing the Burh in Searobyrg: Rethinking the Urban Topography of Early Medieval Salisbury’, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, 107, 2014, 91–105. 77



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in the glare of the chalk’,83 we see the result of a truly extraordinary decision to fill the ancient empty earthwork ramparts – used by the English only as a refuge in time of danger – with a citadel complex of castle and cathedral. Historians’ responses to Old Sarum have been dulled by its familiarity as a heritage attraction.84 It has affinities with Durham and Lincoln as a remodelling of inhabited space that sprang from big, bold, new thinking about shaping the built environment, but is an exceptional place unlike anything else in England. No wonder it was the place chosen to enact the highly symbolic ceremonies of Lammas 1086: the oaths of William’s men and the presentation of the Domesday writings to the king.85 We come now to some very different sorts of Big Stuff inextricably associated with the Normans. The Bayeux Tapestry was undoubtedly ‘a very large object’86 and its design and manufacture involved a considerable investment of time, as Elizabeth Carson Paston emphasized recently,87 but there is very little to compare it with in order to assess the meaning of its scale. On the whole it is unlikely that it was exceptional in size. There is just enough evidence to suggest that English needlework traditions included large-scale epic embroideries, seen in the imagination in Hrothgar’s hall in Beowulf, given in reality to the monks of Ely to commemorate Ealdorman Beorhtnoth, killed by the Danes at Maldon in 991,88 reworked in the medium of stone to depict the shared origins of England and Denmark in the monumental narrative frieze installed in the Old Minster, Winchester, to accompany the burials of the Danish royal house.89 Embroidery was emphatically not a Norman tradition, and the Bayeux Tapestry is best understood as the Normans adopting and repurposing a form of English material culture that was already outsized. Great Domesday Book, however, is central to my argument. It is curiously easy to lose sight of its extraordinary size. There was nothing special or technically difficult about preparing very large sheets of parchment. Edward the Confessor’s diplomas for Saint-Denis and Westminster issued in 1059 and 1060 were written on sheets of parchment larger than the pages of Great Domesday, while Æthelgifu’s late tenthcentury will was inscribed on a sheet almost as large as a Domesday bifolium.90 The Normans had recently developed a new type of document, the monastic pancarte, which told the story of a house’s endowment by listing all the gifts of property that it had received. Its ideological charge as a comprehensive statement of donors and estates depended on the visual impact of a mass of writing on a very large sheet of parchment. The biggest Norman pancartes, such as those for the abbeys of Jumièges and Saint-Étienne, Caen, were written on sheets ampler by some way than a Sir Francis Hill in VCH Wilts. VI, 52. John McNeill, Old Sarum, English Heritage Guidebook, London 2006. 85 J. C. Holt, ‘1086’, in Domesday Studies, ed. J. C. Holt, Woodbridge 1987, 41–64 at 41–5; geophysical survey in 2014 revealed a complex of large buildings in the outer bailey: reported briefly in SALON (Society of Antiquaries of London Online Newsletter), 332, 15 Dec. 2014, ‘Geophysics at Old Sarum’ (consulted 16 Dec. 2014). 86 Shirley Ann Brown and Michael W. Herren, ‘The Adelae Comitissae of Baudri of Bourgueil and the Bayeux Tapestry’, ANS 16, 1993, 55–73 at 69. 87 Elizabeth Carson Pastan, ‘The Material Context of the Bayeux Embroidery: Manufacture, Display, and Literary References’, in Elizabeth Carson Pastan and Stephen D. White, The Bayeux Tapestry and its Contexts: A Reassessment, Woodbridge 2014, 9–32 at 17–19. 88 C. R. Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art: A New Perspective, Manchester 1982, 133–9. 89 Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle, ‘Danish Royal Burials in Winchester: Cnut and his Family’, in Danes in Wessex: The Scandinavian Impact on Southern England, c.800–c.1100, ed. Ryan Lavelle and Simon Roffey, Oxford 2016, 212–49 at 212–17. 90 Facsimiles of Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. Simon Keynes, Anglo-Saxon Charters Supplementary Volume 1, Oxford 1991, nos. 15, 21, 22. 83 84

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bifolium of Domesday.91 As well as being physically imposing, the pancarte of a ducal abbey had deep symbolic resonances in the way it recorded and presented the entire history of monastic foundation and endowment. Nonetheless, such a text was inscribed on a single sheet of parchment, not in a massive book. Books in England were small (Appendix 2). In fact, in all the centuries of English history from the arrival of written culture with St Augustine down to 1086, no book bigger than Domesday had ever been made apart from a handful of large bibles at the beginnings of English Christian history. Other biblical texts prepared and used in England were rarely even two thirds the size of Domesday Book and often only one third, whether gospels, psalters, or the Old English Hexateuch. The three undamaged codices of vernacular poetry all had pages about two thirds the size of Great Domesday’s, and it is telling that Bishop Leofric’s inventory of the possessions of his cathedral called one of them, the Exeter Book, ‘big’ (mycel).92 None of the manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or the Old English laws was bigger than half the size of Domesday, and earlier recensions of material from the survey, Exon and Little Domesday Book, were also only half the size of Great Domesday. The step up from ordinary earlier books of all kinds to Great Domesday is as big as the leap in scale from all earlier English buildings to the new cathedral and abbey churches that were rising at the same time. In short, Great Domesday Book was consciously designed to look enormous by the standards of almost every other book known in England. It was, quite deliberately, to be as big as the biggest and most revered bibles. There are perhaps implications for resource management, since Great Domesday used almost 200 of the very largest parchment sheets that could be prepared. More significant are the implications for ideology, in what Domesday Book was supposed to do and to be. There is, in fact, one written artefact surviving from early Norman England that is even bigger than Domesday Book. The Domesday Monachorum of Christ Church, Canterbury, was written around 1100 on pages that were both taller and wider than Domesday, its bifolia twice as big as Domesday’s and more or less the same size as the biggest Norman pancartes. It is more elaborately presented than Great Domesday, too, with coloured initials, though calling Domesday Monachorum ‘a book’ is stretching a point, since it comprised a single quire of eight pages.93 Its date is not known for certain, though it is safe to see the Domesday of the monks and archbishop of Canterbury as a kind of emulation of the king’s Domesday, Archbishop Anselm telling William Rufus or Henry I that he can do Big Stuff too. The desire to put up bigger buildings than had ever been seen, and inscribe the results of the Domesday survey in a book of unprecedented size go naturally with the big personal ambitions and attainments that are evident on all sides in early Norman England. The Peterborough chronicler was immensely impressed – rather against his better judgement – by the geographical range of William’s achievements and the reach of his ambitions. He asserted that the heir of Normandy, who ruled Maine and England, had Wales in his power and Scotland subdued, would have conquered Ireland if he had lived just two years more.94 Ireland was wishful thinking, or at most a rumour. Other wild stories heard at court had both parties in the German civil war (emperor and archbishop of Cologne) seeking William’s Regesta: William I, nos. 49, 164. Patrick W. Conner, Anglo-Saxon Exeter: A Tenth-Century Cultural History, Woodbridge 1993, 232–3. 93 The Domesday Monachorum of Christ Church Canterbury, ed. David C. Douglas, London 1944, 3. 94 ASC 1087. 91 92



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military help in 1074;95 the bishop of Santiago de Compostella plotting to hand over the kingdom of Galicia to him;96 William fitzOsbern hoping to acquire the county of Flanders for himself;97 Bishop Odo scheming to buy the papacy;98 even a prophecy that King William would become emperor.99 It may well be that none of those whispers had any more substance than William of Poitiers’s idea that William could have taken Troy in a day,100 but the point is that they were all too believable. An equally revealing insight into the self-assuredness of the Norman elite after 1066, more telling because it did actually happen, is the way in which certain individuals were quite prepared to take on the lordship of impossibly scattered lands: Robert de Beaumont in the Vexin and Mercia,101 Roger the Poitevin, even more expansively, on the Loire and the Lune, some 800 miles apart.102 Last in the collection of Big Stuff assembled here is what might be called Big History. Historical writing in both Normandy and England on the eve of the Conquest was modest in scale and largely confined in Normandy to dynastic history in the Frankish tradition and in England to annalistic compilation and biographical histories written for queens.103 The latter, significantly, were commissioned from authors schooled on the Continent.104 The most immediate response to the fact of conquest at those English churches where any kind of historical writing continued was a narrowing down to purely local concerns, a defensive reaction to the stresses brought by the arrival of foreign abbots, the destruction of patronage networks, and the loss of estates. The genres in which views of the past were reassessed and reshaped were endowment histories (as cartularies or cartulary-chronicles) at Canterbury, Worcester, Abingdon, Ramsey, Peterborough, Waltham, Glastonbury, and Wells, continuations or rewritings of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle at Peterborough and Worcester, and the hagiography of local saints on all sides.105 Big History arrived a generation later, with Orderic Vitalis, Henry of Huntingdon, and William of Malmesbury, all born in England within a period of at most fifteen years (1075–90) to native-born mothers and newly arrived fathers, none from the highest ranks in the new society.106 All three men wanted to be the new Bede,107 and conceived history on the largest scale. Symeon of Durham, of Van Houts, ‘Norman Conquest through European Eyes’, 840; Bates, William the Conqueror, 371. Bates, William the Conqueror, 461. 97 Ibid. 340–1. 98 Ibid. 441–4. 99 Ibid. 417. 100 Poitiers, 142–3. 101 Bates, William the Conqueror, 438. 102 C. P. Lewis, ‘The King and Eye: A Study in Anglo-Norman Politics’, EHR 104, 1989, 569–89. 103 Leah Shopkow, History and Community: Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, Washington DC 1997; Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England c.550 to c.1307, London 1974, 29–91. 104 Pauline Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women’s Power in EleventhCentury England, Oxford 1997, 28–52. 105 Gransden, Historical Writing, 92–4, 105–51. 106 Overviews of the topic include Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Historical Writing’, in A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Elisabeth van Houts, Woodbridge 2003, 103–21; Geoffrey Martin and R. M. Thomson, ‘History and History Books’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, II: 1100–1400, ed. R. M. Thomson and Nigel J. Morgan, Cambridge 2007, 397–415. 107 R. H. C. Davis, ‘Bede after Bede’, in Studies in Medieval History presented to R. Allen Brown, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill, Christopher J. Holdsworth, and Janet L. Nelson, Woodbridge 1989, 103–16; Allen J. Frantzen, ‘The Englishness of Bede, from Then to Now’, in The Cambridge Companion to Bede, ed. Scott DeGregorio, Cambridge 2010, 229–42 at 231–2. 95 96

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a similar age and perhaps background, should on balance be excluded: his most accomplished work had strictly local horizons, while the larger Historia regum has been attractively characterized as ‘an attempt by Symeon to gather together material for a more ambitious work which was not completed’.108 A more plausible fourth member of the group is Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose birthdate fits within the same period if Julia Crick’s cautious ‘born within ten years of 1100’ is on the late side.109 His parentage might fit the same profile as the others. He, too, positioned his historical writing in relation to Bede, as a prequel.110 We could add a fifth historical writer in the person of Geoffrey Gaimar if only we knew anything at all about his birth and background.111 All wrote at length, but their magnitude is about something more than the number of words deployed, because of the scale of their ambitions as writers: Orderic, a house-history of a small out-of-the-way monastery on the southern fringes of Normandy that grew and grew and grew to become an encyclopaedic treatment of the Europe-wide achievements of, to paraphrase, ‘us, the Normans’;112 Henry of Huntingdon, historical work as just one component among encyclopaedic writings in other genres;113 William of Malmesbury, parallel histories of kings and bishops, carefully articulated one with the other;114 Geoffrey of Monmouth, conjuring from incredible sources and thin air the whole of Britain’s early history; Gaimar, retelling the English story at great length and in the company of its Trojan and British precursors in a wholly new genre of vernacular verse history.115 The magnitude of the conquest inspired the most talented, energetic, and ambitious of writers to re-envisage the ways in which England’s past could be imagined and written. The most able boys educated in the 1080s and 1090s who had a feeling for English history – and the intellectual drive and capabilities to realize their ambitions – were thinking about the history of England and the Normans in exceptional ways. Their ambitions as writers were also part of the Big Stuff of the Norman Conquest. Beyond big things, William’s reign was bookended by two big projects: the invasion of 1066 and the survey of England in 1086, and it is worth briefly considering their magnitude too. William, significantly, determined upon both projects only after intensive discussion in a major assembly of his chief men, at Lillebonne in 1066 and Gloucester over Christmastide 1085–6.116 The latter was preceded by an equally momentous gathering to plan responses to the threat of Danish invasion.117 Bernard Meehan, ‘Symeon of Durham (fl. c.1090–c.1128)’, ODNB, article 25556 (consulted 20 June 2016). 109 J. C. Crick, ‘Monmouth, Geoffrey of (d. 1154/5)’, ODNB, article 10530 (consulted 19 June 2016). 110 Frantzen, ‘Englishness of Bede’, 232–3 makes a similar point. 111 Ian Short, ‘Gaimar, Geffrei (fl. 1136–1137)’, ODNB, article 10281 (consulted 19 June 2016). 112 Marjorie Chibnall, The World of Orderic Vitalis, Oxford 1984, 169–220; Amanda Jane Hingst, The Written Word: Past and Place in the Work of Orderic Vitalis, Notre Dame IN 2009; Orderic Vitalis: Life, Works and Interpretations, ed. Charles C. Rozier, Daniel Roach, Giles E. M. Gasper, and Elisabeth van Houts, Woodbridge 2016. 113 Diana Greenway, ‘Introduction’, in Huntingdon, pp. lvii–cxvii; Diana Greenway, ‘Henry of Huntingdon as Poet: The De herbis Rediscovered’, Medium Aevum, 74, 2005, 329–32; Winston E. Black, ‘Henry of Huntingdon’s Lapidary Rediscovered and his Anglicanum ortus Reassembled’, Mediaeval Studies, 68, 2006, 43–87. 114 R. M. Thomson, William of Malmesbury, Woodbridge 1987; Discovering William of Malmesbury, ed. Rodney M. Thomson, Emily Dolmans, and Emily A. Winkler, Woodbridge 2017. 115 Peter Damian-Grint, The New Historians of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance: Inventing Vernacular Authority, Woodbridge 1999, 49–53 (Gaimar specifically), 1–67 (wider background). 116 Bates, William the Conqueror, 219, 462. 117 J. R. Maddicott, ‘Responses to the Threat of Invasion, 1085’, EHR 122, 2007, 986–97 at 986–8. 108



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The immensity of the undertaking in 1066 is clear from any consideration of its logistics. We could scale back considerably from the 14,000 men and 3,000 horses assigned to the expedition by Bernard Bachrach, and still marvel at the cartloads of food, drink, and fuel that were assembled, at the tents, kitchens, bread ovens, and forges that were erected, at the armour-carriers and cooks and grooms and farriers who were enlisted.118 The massive naval expedition of 1066 is all the more impressive because William and his friends had spent all their adult lives not undertaking large-scale amphibious expeditions but fighting in small armies on horseback with the resources of the Norman, Manceau, and Breton countryside immediately at hand. Good planning and mastery of logistics ensured that the outing to England (iter ad Angliam), as Henry of Huntingdon called it,119 would have every chance of success by transporting a large enough army and establishing it in Sussex securely enough and for long enough to make Harold come to terms or the English to desert him or, in the very last resort, win a pitched battle.120 Contemporary commentators and twelfth-century historians alike were well aware of the importance of careful military planning in 1066, though none of them dwelt on the matter of logistics and even the longest written account is sparing. William of Poitiers: ‘It would take too long to narrate in detail how under his prudent direction ships were built and equipped with arms, men, provisions, and the other things necessary for war, and how all Normandy eagerly bent to the task.’121 Poitiers, who had served the duke as a knight, knew, too, that the number of ships was vital and was aware that they had been equipped with great foresight.122 Rather than the narrative sources (intended in the first place for literate clerical audiences) it is the Bayeux Tapestry (for the unlettered too) that revels in the minutiae of military preparation: the felling of trees and planing of planks in scenes where ships’ carpenters use the proper tools (breast-augers, hammers, and side-axes), squires carrying their knights’ armour – hauberks slung on poles, helmets, spears, and swords arrayed in racks – barrels piled on straining waggons and skins of wine heaved over shoulders.123 The scenes in the Tapestry linger over the preparations, the designer taking as much pleasure in the logistics of expedition and campsite as in showing feats of seamanship or the heart-pounding tumult of battle. The logistics scenes took as much space on the wall (whatever wall that was) as, say, Harold’s capture by Count Guy of Ponthieu, and significantly more than Edward’s death or Harold’s coronation.124 They were important to the Normans, and early viewers of the Tapestry who had taken part in the preparations would have revelled in its accurate detail. The

Bernard S. Bachrach, ‘Some Observations on the Military Administration of the Norman Conquest’, ANS 8, 1985, 1–25; Bernard S. Bachrach, ‘On the Origins of William the Conqueror’s Horse Transports’, Technology and Culture, 26, 1985, 505–31; C. M. Gillmor, ‘Naval Logistics of the Cross-Channel Operation, 1066’, ANS 7, 1984, 106–31. 119 Huntingdon, 386–7; van Houts, ‘Memory of 1066’, 174. 120 Cf. Christopher Tyerman, How to Plan a Crusade: Reason and Religious War in the High Middle Ages, London 2015, esp. 179–292 (‘Finance’ and ‘Logistics’). 121 Poitiers, 102–3: Quam igitur prudenti ipsius dispositione naues fierent, armis, uiris, commeatu aliisque rebus quae bello sunt usui instruerentur, qualiter Normanniae studia feruerent, prolixium est per singula enarrare. 122 Ibid. 108–9. 123 The Bayeux Tapestry, ed. David M. Wilson, London 1985, scenes 34–9; Michael John Lewis, The Archaeological Authority of the Bayeux Tapestry, BAR British Series 404, Oxford 2005; the same material is presented more briefly in Michael J. Lewis, The Real World of the Bayeux Tapestry, Stroud 2008, 101–68. Neither discusses the Bayeux Tapestry’s representation of food and drink. 124 Bayeux Tapestry, scenes 7–9, 29–30, and 31–2 respectively. 118

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expedition to England was extraordinarily daring but not reckless, the risks managed by taking the utmost care in planning and preparation and by mobilizing all available resources, not least a truly enormous fleet.125 The other big project was the Domesday survey. All that can be done here is to stress the boldness of the idea and the size and complexity of the undertaking. Like the invasion, it was decided, as the Chronicle stresses, not by the king alone but after discussion and with the consensus of his advisers. The survey was accomplished by using existing institutions, procedures, officials, and documents to collate and verify information about manors, royal boroughs, and shires. It required an exceptional collective effort, co-ordinated and directed, and involving thousands of people. Probably where it stepped furthest beyond what had previously been possible was in the sheer amount of new written documentation generated as the results of the survey were shaped, step by step, into Domesday Book.126 The Domesday survey was undertaken at a time of crisis. Invasion threatened from Denmark. In 1085 a great army of knights and foot-soldiers from Normandy was billeted and provisioned on the land. Probably two successive great gelds of 72 pence on each hide of land were taken in 1084–5 and 1085–6, each involving the raising and the transport to Winchester of well over 2 million pennies. Farming was disrupted by bad weather and cattle plague. The ability in the midst of all that to conceive and complete such a venture as Domesday is astonishing, and not much less so even when placed in the context of the routines of English estate administration and local government. William’s personal interest in it is evident: from the way that the Chronicle describes the origins of the project, from the fact that he spent the spring and early summer of 1086 observing the progress of the survey in southern England, from the stage-managed oaths at Salisbury and the presentation of draft writings, and from the decision that the final text would be written in a book as big in format as any existing codex. Finally, I turn to the meaning of Big Stuff, Big Projects, and Big Ideas. Having pulled off the unlikely feat of conquering England, William and his friends must have thought they could do anything. The realization came not in a flash the morning after Hastings, but from 1071 onwards as a slower understanding settled that England was more completely in their hands than could ever have been intended or thought likely, and that they were masters not so much of the England that Edward had ruled and Harold had stolen, but of a new country. David Bates has drawn attention to the triumphalist language of two monastic diplomas drawn up in 1074 at a great assembly of the Norman elite in Normandy, when the duke-king was hailed as ‘undefeated’ (inuictus) and ‘glorious’ (gloriosus).127 Many individual fortunes had been transformed in the process, money and resources pouring into their coffers from new landed estates. Large fortunes made Big Stuff possible, as the richest few moved into and reshaped the cultural space that had been vacated through the destruction of the thegnly and ecclesiastical elites of the old regime. Some measures of that cultural displacement can be taken: Cnut’s great royal monument in the Old Minster at Winchester smashed to pieces and thrown out (but the Bayeux Tapestry taking its place, if not literally); the very site of so great an English victory as Brunanburh (937) on Wirral in north-western Mercia so thoroughly lost to memory that even as topographically acute an historian of the early twelfth century as John of Worcester Elisabeth M. C. van Houts, ‘The Ship List of William the Conqueror’, ANS 10, 1987, 159–83. Stephen Baxter, Julia Crick, C. P. Lewis, and Frank Thorn, Making Domesday: The Conqueror’s Survey in Context, Oxford forthcoming. 127 Bates, William the Conqueror, 369. 125 126



The Big Stuff of the Conquest

43

had no idea where to place it (but the site of William’s battle commemorated in a way intended to last for ever);128 the corpus of Old English poetry, secular and religious alike, abandoned, surviving by the merest chance in a handful of obscure and uncopied codices; and monastic books of memory perhaps not only discontinued but destroyed at all but the New Minster, Durham, and Thorney. Where the Normans replaced the cultural heritage, they very often did so with things of exceptional size. Economics was central to the ability to make such a move into Big Stuff. England was a rich country, where in 1066 a lot of wealth was retained by peasants, freemen, and petty lords close to the point at which surplus was made. A principal effect of the conquest was to insert into the tenurial structure Norman and other northern French lords – numbering a few thousand if we count every last knight, but not more than a couple of hundred if restricted to those who gained the most and really mattered as part of the ruling elite.129 They were inserted at the point where they creamed off much more of the surplus generated by farming. All this led, I have suggested, to gigantic churches, enormous stone towers, huge earthwork castles, and an absurd project to record every last manorial goat in a record of all England in a book as big as a bible. Ambition was already at the heart of who the Normans were in 1066: the outing to England could not have been conceived if that were not the case. William’s original friends – the boys who had saved Normandy from anarchy – had over the years recruited cohorts of new companions, a group further extended and reshaped in the planning and execution of the English expedition. The collective ethos of ambition and daring was the work of a tight-knit group around the duke-king, but one which was articulated such that the senior churchmen of the new regime could also readily buy into it, and find a means of expression in extraordinarily ambitious building projects. William of Malmesbury did not approve of ambition, or not without qualification: he thought that ambitio was a characteristic of modern bishops,130 a set about whom he had severe doubts in comparison with the virtuous bishops of old. He thought, for example, that Bishop Maurice of London’s vast and expensive building works at St Paul’s showed him to be ‘immoderate in his ideas’ (mentis immodicus).131 His attitude shows, nonetheless, that ambitio was recognized at the time as a motivation. Ambition was both collective and competitive, and emulation played an enormously important part in what happened, within the group of senior churchmen, among the great barons, across the divide between barons and churchmen, between the king and his men, and between the Conqueror’s generation and their sons. Longer and longer churches, the king’s two greatest stone towers at London and Colchester, Rufus’s Westminster Hall, Anselm’s Canterbury Domesday, were all in some measure about one-upmanship, subtle or not as the case may be. William of Malmesbury made a revealing throwaway remark in another context – when discussing differences of opinion between the English and Normans of his own day about the rupture between King Edward and Earl Godwine in 1051 – that ‘the Normans cannot endure an equal’ (Normanni nequeant pati parem). Emulation John of Worcester, II, 392–3; Ryan Lavelle, Alfred’s Wars: Sources and Interpretations of AngloSaxon Warfare in the Viking Age, Woodbridge 2010, 298–314 (‘Locating and remembering battlefields’); The Battle of Brunanburh: A Casebook, ed. Michael Livingston, Exeter 2011. 129 Stephen Baxter and C. P. Lewis, ‘Domesday Book and the Transformation of English Landed Society, 1066–1086’, ASE forthcoming. 130 Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, I, 234–5. 131 Ibid. I, 232–3. 128

44

C. P. Lewis

also fed into what we would now call ‘legacy’. William of Malmesbury again: ‘The Normans are very concerned about their reputation with posterity’ (sunt Normanni famae in futurum studiosissimi).132 Ambition is, however, a personal thing. As a way of expressing the motivation for creating Big Stuff, it perhaps best describes Big History and least effectively the collective projects of invasion and survey. ‘Daring’ or ‘audacity’ seem more promising, a semantic field covering, in any combination, boldness, resourcefulness, enterprise, adventurousness, physical and mental courage, and self-confidence. It is interesting that ‘audacity’ was a favourite word of Orderic Vitalis, for whom it was a conspicuous moral quality. The noun audacia appears 42 times in the Ecclesiastical History, its adverb audacter 51 times, the adjective audax 53 times.133 Not many moral qualities match it in Orderic’s usage: not bellicosity, generosity, humility, magnanimity, tenacity, or truthfulness, but only loyalty, honour, wisdom, valour, and manliness. A limited exploration of Orderic suggests that, for him, audacity was mostly military, mostly applied to individuals rather than groups, and was not exclusive to the Normans. It would be worth closer investigation. Orderic is only one writer, though as a perceptive outsider he knew the Normans rather well and was keen whenever he could to praise the best of their character. For him, audacity was one of their prime virtues. I have been trying to use the gigantism that can be found in some aspects of the material culture of early Norman England as a point of entry for approaching a history of Norman ambition and daring, and have set the vast churches and colossal earthwork castles of conquered England alongside other overweening projects and outsized artefacts of the Conquest generations – the invasion campaign, the Domesday survey, and Domesday Book – and in the context of the monstrous personal ambitions of the conquerors themselves – from monks and clerks who conceived new ways of writing history, though country knights who became wealthy barons to a bishop who was believed to aspire to be pope, and a duke who conquered a kingdom and thought he could subdue the entire archipelago. The shifts of English dynastic history earlier in the eleventh century had given the Normans a sense of entitlement to England, first articulated for them by the ducal chronicler Dudo of Saint-Quentin and reinforced by whatever happened in the way of specific promises in the 1050s and 1060s.134 Sense of entitlement was one thing; actually conquering England was quite something else. It seems to me that the circumstances of conquest loosened the ways in which a transplanted, remodelled, and enriched elite thought about and interacted with the world: norms of elite behaviour were rewritten, and one aspect – though not the only one – was a cultural confidence that they might make some parts of their material world bigger than ever before. Four final thoughts about the Big Stuff of the Conquest might therefore be appropriate. First, we have direct testimony that size in itself was thought aesthetically desirable only for certain churches and Westminster Hall; more important across the range of artefacts was the power that making big things expressed. In that respect, size impressed most when only a small number of things in a category were of great size. By 1150 many large books were being made, and by 1200 even the biggest churches were being further enlarged. The Shock of the Big was time-limited to a couple of generations. Second, the giant buildings and outsized projects that have attracted Malmesbury, Gesta regum, I, 356–7; Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, I, 238–9. Orderic, I, 246–386 (Index verborum) at 254–5. 134 Tom Licence, ‘Edward the Confessor and the Succession Question: A Fresh Look at the Sources’, ANS 39, 2016, 113–27 at 114–17. 132 133



The Big Stuff of the Conquest

45

my attention here really require reading alongside smaller stuff that was also new in England after 1066 and stemmed from the same impulses, like the invention of the double-sided equestrian seal to give visual form to King William’s new status as ruler of two dominions,135 or the adoption of the vocabulary of manerium (manor) and dominium (demesne) to express the essence of lords’ possession of their new lands.136 Third, it is plausible to suggest that the platform for all the Big Stuff of early Norman England was a Big Lie, the idea, which hardened into a certainty, that Harold had never truly been king. As a central ideological tenet it was big and bold enough to push audacity and ambition even further. Fourth and last, Big Stuff did not just happen. It had to be willed into existence. Big Ideas came first, but were nothing without the ability to bring them to fruition; they were followed by careful planning, impressively efficient logistics, and bold execution. One charismatic man, King William, stood at the centre of everything that happened. It mattered that he was an intimidatingly big man with ferocious appetites for ceaseless war, crude jokes, terrifying gestures, and extravagant acts of vengeance, piety, and even generosity. It mattered that he was deeply conscious of his own achievements and status and so insistent on personal magnificence as to attract the buffoonery of his jester’s cry ‘Behold, I see God!’137 The Big Stuff that happened in early Norman England was not the work of one man alone, but the cultural expression of a group, a group which cohered around its leader and which was constantly shifting around that central point, and a group which to some degree was itself willed into existence and kept in shape by King William.

Jean-François Nieus, ‘Early Aristocratic Seals: An Anglo-Norman Success Story’, ANS 38, 2015, 97–123 at 101–3. 136 C. P. Lewis, ‘The Invention of the Manor in Norman England’, ANS 34, 2011, 123–50. 137 Bates, William the Conqueror, 509, 523. 135

APPENDIX 1 Dimensions of selected mottes For selected early Norman earthwork castle mottes in England, the table gives the diameter of the base, the diameter of the top, and the height of the motte, in feet. All dimensions are necessarily approximate. Heights are from the bailey and/or the base of the ditch (the latter in square brackets). Heights given in curly brackets are calculated from the dimensions of the base and top on the assumption that the angle of slope of the motte is 45 degrees. The volumes were calculated with the Keisan Online Calculator for the volume of a truncated cone (keisan.casio.com/ exec/system/1223372110) by inputting figures (in feet) for the radius of the base, the radius of the top, and the height; they are rounded to the nearest 10,000 cubic feet. Other online calculators are available. Sources. Unless stated otherwise, dimensions are from VCH volumes, as stated in the text or measured from small-scale plans (marked by an asterisk) in the chapters called ‘Ancient Earthworks’: VCH Beds. I, 1904, 267–308; VCH Berks. I, 1906, 251–84; VCH Cambs. II, 1948, 1–47; VCH Devon, I, 1906, 573–630; VCH Dur. I, 1905, 343–63; VCH Essex, I, 1903, 275–314; VCH Herefs. I, 1908, 199–262; VCH Herts. II, 1908, 103–27; VCH Hunts. I, 1926, 281–313; VCH Kent, I, 1908, 389–455; VCH Lancs. II, 1908, 507–60; VCH Oxon. II, 1907, 303–49; VCH Salop. I, 1908, 351–413; VCH Som. II, 1911, 467–532; VCH Staffs. I, 1908, 331–79; VCH Suff. I, 1911, 583–631; VCH Surr. IV, 1912, 379–405; VCH Suss. I, 1905, 453–80; VCH Warws. I, 1904, 345–406; VCH Yorks. II, 1912, 1–71. Castle (DB holder) Abinger William fitzAnsculf Anstey Count Eustace Arkholme Roger the Poitevin? Arundel Earl Roger Barnstaple King William Bedford1 King William Berkhampstead Robert count of Mortain Bramber William de Briouze Brinklow Earl Aubrey Cambridge King William

Base (ft)

Top (ft)

Height (ft)

Volume (1000 cu. ft)

*100

30

22

80

VCH Surr. IV, 395

220

*100

32

670

VCH Herts. II, 112

110

45

20

100

VCH Lancs. II, 521–3

230

90

60

1,280

*160

40

60

530

VCH Devon, I, 613–14

160

*110

25

360

VCH Beds. I, 285

210

60

40

630

VCH Herts. II, 113–14, plan facing 168

*150

70

40

400

VCH Suss. I, 474–5

260

50

40 [60]

870 1,310

VCH Warws. I, 360–1

200

100

40

730

VCH Cambs. II, 23–4

Source

VCH Suss. I, 473–4



The Big Stuff of the Conquest

Castle Base (DB holder) (ft) Caus 180 Roger fitzCorbet Clare *220 Richard fitzGilbert Coldred2 *60 Ralph de Courbépine Dudley *160 William fitzAnsculf Durham *160 Bishop of Durham Ely 250 Abbot of Ely Eye 160 Robert Malet? Flitwick *160 William Lovet Great Canfield *85 Aubrey de Vere Halton 100 Roger the Poitevin? Hen Domen 131 Roger earl of Shrewsbury Holwell *100 Robert count of Mortain Hornby 120 Roger the Poitevin? Huntingdon 200 King William Lewes A3 *190 William de Warenne Lewes B, Brack *180 William de Warenne Lydham 100 Earl Roger Melling 100–125 Roger the Poitevin? Montacute4 *320 Robert count of Mortain Newton in Makerfield 105 Roger the Poitevin? Ongar *220 Count Eustace Oswestry *180–220 Warin the bald

47

Top (ft)

Height (ft)

Volume (1000 cu. ft)

Source

60

[55]

670

VCH Salop. I, 399–400

63

100

1,730

*25

*18

40

VCH Kent, I, 394

*80

43

500

VCH Staffs. I, 353–4

*80

47

550

VCH Dur. I, 354

50

40

810

VCH Cambs. II, 29–30

*60

45

460

VCH Suff. I, 595–6

102

4–5 [14]

60 190

VCH Beds. I, 286

35

35

170

VCH Essex, I, 290–1

35

12

50

VCH Lancs. II, 524–6

21

26

140

Higham and Barker, Timber Castles, 326

*50

50

230

VCH Devon, I, 620

60

15 [20]

100 130

VCH Lancs. II, 526–7

120

10

210

VCH Hunts. I, 288–90

*80

*70

1,060

*70

*50

650

40

19 [27]

80 110

VCH Salop. I, 397

40

20

100

VCH Lancs. II, 529–31

*150

{35}

1,580

VCH Som. II, 516–17

40

[17]

70

VCH Lancs. II, 531–2

86

40 [60]

780 1,170

VCH Essex, I, 296–7

63–96

36

590

VCH Suff. I, 594–5

VCH Salop. I, 386

C. P. Lewis

48 Castle (DB holder) Oxford5 King William Penwortham Roger the Poitevin? Pickering King William Pirton Ralph de Limésy Pleshey Geoffrey de Mandeville Pontefract Ilbert de Lacy Stafford King William Stebbing Ranulph Peverel Tamworth King William Tickhill Roger de Bully Toddington Ernulf de Hesdin Tonbridge Gilbert fitzRichard Totnes Judhael of Totnes Tutbury King William Wallingford King William Warwick King William Wembworthy Richard de Neville Windsor King William York, Baile Hill King William 1 2 3

Base (ft)

Top (ft)

Height (ft)

Volume (1000 cu. ft)

250

81

64

1,500

120

25

15

70

VCH Lancs. II, 533–6

130

76

43

370

VCH Yorks. II, 35–6

*130

*70

25

200

VCH Herts. II, 117–18

*240–90

*80– 150

*120

70

25–38 [50] 33 [60]

940 1,490 240 440

35

1,230

*200–300 150–90

Source VCH Oxon. IV, 297

VCH Essex, I, 297–9 VCH Yorks. II, 35–6 VCH Staffs. I, 355

*220

25–60

31 [38]

480 590

VCH Essex, I, 302–3

220

101

25

530

VCH Staffs. I, 355–6

*190

80

60–5 [75]

940 1,130

VCH Yorks. II, 39–40

*150

92

[18]

210

VCH Beds. I, 286–7

*250

58

38

800

VCH Kent, I, 424–5

*200

*100

{50}

920

VCH Devon, I, 621–2

*250

*80

65

1,510

VCH Staffs. I, 356–8

*160

*80

{50}

590

200

60

{70}

1,020

VCH Warws. I, 402–4

160

*50

26

250

VCH Devon, I, 621–2

270

*110

50

1,500

VCH Berks. I, 267–8

*250

70

30

670

VCH Berks. I, 265

VCH Yorks. II, 44

Bedford motte has been much reduced in height. VCH classified Coldred as Class B (Hill Forts etc.). Lewes’s two mottes, either end of the bailey, were probably re-shaped barrows. Dimensions from George T. Clark, ‘The Castle of Lewes’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 34, 1886, 57–68, elevations bound in before p. 57. 4 Montacute is an isolated conical hill, scarped to form a motte and bailey castle. 5 Oxford: the motte was heightened in the 13th century to accommodate a well chamber.

APPENDIX 2 Page sizes of selected books The table presents page sizes (in millimetres) of selected books made or used in England up to the twelfth century, culled from a few obvious compendia and arranged by genre and within genre roughly by period. Heights and widths are maxima, and the surface area of pages are indexed to the page-size of Great Domesday Book at 100. Sources. G = Richard Gameson, The Earliest Books of Canterbury Cathedral: Manuscripts and Fragments to c.1200, London 2008; K = N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon, Oxford 1957; W = David M. Wilson, AngloSaxon Art from the Seventh Century to the Norman Conquest, London 1984, with plate number. Other sources indicated by endnotes.

Genre

Ref.

MS

Domesday Domesday Domesday

* † ‡

Domesday

§

Height Width Period (mm.) (mm.)

Bible

W.15

Bible

W.12

Bible

W.14

Bible

W.27

Exon LDB GDB Domesday Monachorum St Augustine Gospels Book of Durrow Echternach Gospels Durham Gospels

Bible

¶

Middleton Bible

Bible

**

Bible

K.165

Bible

W.32

Bible

W.101

Bible

W.114

Bible

††

Bible Bible Bible

K.402 K.142 W.263

Bible

W.262

Codex Amiatinus Lindisfarne viiiin Gospels Lichfield Gospels viii1 Stockholm Codex viiimed Aureus Canterbury Bible viiimed MacDurnan ix Gospels York Gospels c.990 OE Hexateuch xi1 Bury Gospels xi1 Judith of Flanders ximed Gospels

Area (sq. mm.)

Index (GDB 100)

1086 1086 1086–7

280 270 365

165 180 255

46,200 48,600 93,075

50 52 100

c.1100

538

410

220,580

237

vii

245

180

44,100

47

vii2

245

145

35,525

38

vii

335

255

85,425

92

vii2 viiex/ viiiin viiiin

340

260

88,400

95

480

340

163,200

175

505

340

171,700

184

340

250

85,000

91

310

235

72,850

78

400

310

124,000

133

470

345

162,150

174

158

111

17,538

19

270 328 265

200 217 200

54,000 71,176 53,000

58 76 57

295

190

56,050

60

2

C. P. Lewis

50 Genre

Ref.

Bible

G.25

Psalter

W.220

Psalter

W.223

Psalter

W.233

Bible commentary Bible commentary Bible commentary

W.53 G.18 G.33

Liturgy

W.216

Liturgy

W.265

Liturgy

G.8

Liturgy

G.13

Liturgy

G.17

Letters

G.19

Liturgy Liturgy Liturgy Liturgy

G.28 G.29 G.31 G.32

Liturgy

G.34

Prayers Misc.

W.100 K.87

Misc.

K.155

Handbook Liber Vitae Liber Vitae Poetry Poetry

K.186 ‡‡ K.274 K.116 K.394

Poetry, Bible

K.334

Chronicle, Laws

K.39

MS

Height Width Period (mm.) (mm.)

Glossed St xii Matthew Æthelstan Psalter x2 Psalter x/xi (Arundel 155) Psalter x/xi (BN lat. 943) Cassiodorus on viiimed Psalms Augustine on xi/xii Psalms Gregory, xii Moralia in Job Benedictional x2 St Æthelwold Sacramentary of Robert of xi1 Jumièges Missal xi Homilectic xi Lectionary Augustine, xi/xii Sermons Ivo of Chartres, xii Epistolae Lectionary xii Lectionary xii Breviary xii Breviary xii Canticles for xii glossing Book of Cerne ix1 OE Pastoral Care x/xi OE Regularis ximed Concordia Tiberius A.iii ximed Durham LV c.840 New Minster LV 1031 Exeter Book x2 Vercelli Book x2 Junius 11 x/xi (Cædmon) Parker Chronicle ix/x–xi2 (A)

Area (sq. mm.)

Index (GDB 100)

260

182

47,320

51

130

95

12,350

13

290

205

59,450

64

310

200

62,000

67

420

295

123,900

133

363

260

94,380

101

355

245

86,975

93

290

225

65,250

70

340

220

74,800

80

300

198

59,400

64

350

225

78,750

85

350

260

91,000

98

280

182

50,960

55

380 385 193 280

275 280 145 180

104,500 107,800 27,985 50,400

112 116 30 54

326

225

73,350

79

230 296

180 196

41,400 58,016

44 62

245

155

37,975

41

240 205 254 320 310

177 142 121 225 205

42,480 29,110 30,734 72,000 63,550

46 31 33 77 68

323

196

63,308

68

287

206

59,122

64



The Big Stuff of the Conquest Genre

Ref.

Chronicle Chronicle Chronicle

K.188 K.192 K.148

Chronicle

K.346

History

K.351

History

K.32

Hagiography

W.203

Hagiography

G.21

Laws Laws etc. Laws Laws

K.141 K.49B K.163–4 K.65

Laws

G.16

Laws Laws

K.373A K.226

Laws

G.37

Glossary

K.36

Calendar

W.237

MS

51

Height Width Period (mm.) (mm.)

Area (sq. mm.)

Index (GDB 100)

228 285 210

158 190 146

36,024 54,150 30,660

39 58 33

240

165

39,600

43

250

162

40,500

44

347

214

74,258

80

290

190

55,100

59

170

114

19,380

21

240 280 165 187

160 162 105 115

38,400 45,360 17,325 21,505

41 49 19 23

248

160

39,680

43

225 270

150 189

33,750 51,030

36 55

355

240

85,200

92

320

245

78,400

84

260

217

56,420

61

ASC B x2 ASC D ximed Domitian viii xi/xii ASC E xii1 (Peterborough) OE Bede x1 (Bod. Tanner 10) OE Bede xi1 (CCCC 41) Life of Cuthbert x1 (CCC 183) Usuard, xii Martyrology Claudius A.iii x/xi–xi1 CCCC 201 ximed Nero A.i ximed CCCC 383 xi/xii Collection of xi/xii Canons Textus Roffensis xii1 Harley 55 xiimed Peter Lombard, xii Sentences Corpus Glossary viii/ix Calendar x/xi (Tib. B.v)

Measured by author. Measured by author from facsimile. Michael Gullick, ‘The Great and Little Domesday Manuscripts’, in Domesday Book: Studies, ed. Ann Williams and R. W. H. Erskine, London 1987, 93–112 at 97; note that the page sizes for GDB and LDB given in Alexander R. Rumble, ‘The Palaeography of the Domesday Manuscripts’, in Domesday Book: A Reassessment, ed. Peter Sawyer, London 1985, 28–49 at 38–9 and 44 seem to be wrong. § Measured by author. ¶ Francesca Tinti, ‘Si litterali memorie commendaretur: Memory and Cartularies in Eleventh-Century Worcester’, in Early Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald, ed. Stephen Baxter, Catherine Karkov, Janet L. Nelson, and David Pelteret, Farnham 2009, 475–97 at 480 note 24. ** Ibid. †† Montague Rhodes James and Claude Jenkins, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Lambeth Palace, Cambridge 1930–2, p. 843. ‡‡ The Durham Liber Vitae: London, British Library, MS Cotton Domitian A.VII, ed. David and Lynda Rollason, 3 vols, London 2007, I, 43. * † ‡

RESSOURCES ET CROISSANCE DANS LE MONDE ANGLO-NORMAND: SOURCES ET HYPOTHÈSES Mathieu Arnoux Resource has always been a missing element in medieval economic history. According to the implicitly Malthusian model, which underlies most of the current literature, narrative about growth and crisis does not need a chapter on natural resources: where there is economic and demographic growth there must be resources; when crisis happens, resources must be insufficient. Such an interpretation takes its roots in the theses of Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) and Jean-Baptist Say (1767–1832), two major economists of early industrial times. Instead, in pre-industrial economies environment is not considered an opportunity for individual profit or entrepreneurial purpose: the main issue is legitimate needs and livelihood. Any thorough analysis of medieval economics should start with people’s needs and the question of allowing them a means of subsistence, rather than with an assessment of potential benefits. The main challenge for the historian is to find useful evidence. For the Central Middle Ages, Fritz Curschman’s book Hungersnöte in Mittelalter (1901) provides a very useful collection of cases, which, for the eleventh and twelfth centuries, casts light on the process of some severe famines, most of them in Flanders and Rhineland cities. The Anglo-Norman realm seems to have suffered less shortage of livelihood than the German regions. The abundance of harvests around the Channel shores is not easy to describe, still less to explain. For England, an enormous amount of literature, about manorial economy and open field husbandry, suggests that royal power and seigniorial institutions, which shaped the agrarian landscape, were the organizers of the allocation of wealth and the arbiters of need. Despite its pervasive influence on English political evolution, Normandy was a very different case. Medieval historiography and charters indicate that local markets were the real centres of the economic and social system. The many settlements of tithes conflicts in the late twelfth century and many more grain annuity contracts for the thirteenth century provide evidence of a complex system, whose many components all mattered: the nature of the crops (wheat, rye, oats and barley), the social identity of the consumers, the market and credit organization, pricing and assessment of values. This paper argues that any resource system could be very different according to place, but that it was always the core of any social organization. La question des ressources reste un point obscur dans les recherches sur l’histoire économique du Moyen Âge.1 Le plus souvent, la constatation d’une phase de croissance économique et démographique suffit à laisser préjuger de l’existence des ressources mises en œuvre dans ce processus et l’observation d’une crise incite à

On trouvera dans cet article les hypothèses préalables et les premiers résultats d’une enquête en cours sur les systèmes de ressources dans le monde médiéval. D’où son aspect inachevé ou, pour mieux dire, expérimental. 1

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mettre en question leur insuffisance. Derrière ce raisonnement simple se dissimule l’application mécanique d’un argument bien connu, l’hypothèse malthusienne, qui lie croissance et décroissance au caractère limité des ressources disponibles. L’idée en est simple et a pour elle une apparence d’évidence: l’existence d’une ressource vitale permet la mise en place d’un processus de croissance; l’insuffisance ou la disparition de cette ressource en détermine l’arrêt.2 Ceux qui ont recours à ce raisonnement n’observent pas le plus souvent qu’il constitue en fait un modèle comportemental de type biologique, adapté à l’observation du cycle des espèces dans un écosystème clos, appartenant à ce que les biologistes appellent un équilibre proie-prédateur. Dans sa forme simple, il ne prévoit pas que les populations observées puissent changer leur rapport aux ressources, c’est-à-dire leur mode de consommation. La référence à Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), présente chez la plupart de ceux qui le mettent en œuvre, doit inciter à regarder de plus près la genèse de ce modèle, lié aux débats des économistes sur la révolution industrielle britannique. Le mot ‘ressource’, utilisé le plus souvent dans ce raisonnement pour désigner les richesses naturelles impliquées dans le processus de croissance comme dans les crises, renvoie au même contexte. Tant en français qu’en anglais, il a jusqu’au début du dix-neuvième siècle un sens tout à fait différent, comme en témoigne l’entrée que lui réserve le dictionnaire de Samuel Johnson, identique à celle des dictionnaires français pour le même vocable: Resource: [ressource, Fr.] Some new or unexpected means that offer; resort; expedient.3 Une ressource est donc quelque chose qui permet de se tirer d’un mauvais pas, et non l’ensemble de ce qui supporte une vie prévisible. En poursuivant l’enquête dans les lexiques et bases de données de l’ancien français (ressource/ressort), de l’anglo-normand (resource/resort) et du moyen anglais (resort) le sens du mot se précise, et en particulier sa fidélité à la racine latine resurgere, ‘ressusciter’ ou ‘resurgir’, qui s’exprime de manière frappante dans le sens ‘action de s’envoler’ (d’un oiseau de proie, en particulier).4 C’est un autre économiste, le Français Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832), qui est à l’origine du nouveau sens du mot, celui de richesse naturelle disponible. Le raisonnement s’inscrit dans les premières pages de son Traité d’économie politique, où son analyse des ‘agents naturels’ donne naissance à la notion de richesses virtuellement inépuisables et dépourvues de valeur monétaire, et donc de prix, dont la mise en œuvre permet la croissance de la richesse des hommes. Le mot ‘ressources’, absent de la première édition (1803), s’impose dans les éditions suivantes (1816–1826) et devient dès lors un concept-clé de la pensée économique. Ce changement de sens d’un mot communément employé n’apparaît pas aisément dans l’usage qui est en fait pas la suite: l’utilité du nouveau concept pour décrire les réalités contemporaines lui confère un aspect d’évidence. Mais il est porteur d’anachronisme quand il est utilisé pour analyser les situations anciennes. De fait, dans les sociétés préindustrielles en général, et dans celles du Moyen Âge en particulier, on ne trouve pas l’idée qu’existe dans la nature une richesse virtuellePrésentation claire et nuancée de cet instrument analytique dans J. Hatcher et M. Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages. The History and Theory of England’s Economic Development, Cambridge 2001; le livre de Gregory Clark, A Farewell to the Alms: a Brief Economic History of the World, Princeton 2009, montre comment un usage sans nuance de l’argument malthusien peut transformer un récit à prétention historique en pure idéologie. 3 Cette entrée restera inchangée depuis la première édition (1755) jusqu’à l’édition posthume de 1828. 4 Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’Ancienne Langue Française, 10 vols, Paris 1881–1902, VII, 106 : ‘En marches et en la riviere/en ces estangs et en ces sources/ La faisoit de si belles resources/Qu’ung falcon sans cloches, sauvaiges/Ne fist oncques tel vasselaige (Gacé de La Bigne, Deduiz)’ ; le terme a conservé ce sens dans le langage aéronautique. 2



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ment illimitée, disponible pour l’action productive ou entrepreneuriale des individus. La notion même d’une masse de biens répartis dans l’environnement des sociétés, qu’il convient de répartir en la valorisant ne saurait en aucun cas décrire l’organisation de ces sociétés, où les acteurs s’interrogent plutôt sur les besoins légitimes et utiles à satisfaire que sur les richesses à allouer. S’il convient de rechercher des mots d’ancien français pour exprimer ces notions, il faudrait alors parler de necessité, de besoin et de substance (nede, substaunce ou levelihede en moyen anglais). Si l’on veut restituer sa lisibilité à l’organisation des économies médiévales, il faut donc s’interroger sur les processus de légitimation des besoins des individus et sur les institutions et organisations créées pour assurer leur satisfaction par un usage légitime des richesses de la création. Dans cette perspective, le thème évangélique des ‘œuvres de miséricorde’, notion que l’ancien français regroupe sous la notion générale de merci (moyen anglais mercie), doit être considéré comme un programme économique minimal (nourrir les affamés, vêtir ceux qui sont nus, héberger les sans-abris) autant que comme une injonction spirituelle renvoyant à la notion de charité.5 Disettes et famines comme marqueurs de la nécessité S’il permet de construire un questionnaire plus cohérent avec les catégories médiévales, ce déplacement de notre enquête depuis la notion contemporaine de ressources vers celle ancienne de subsistance implique la recherche d’informations permettant d’éclairer de façon concrète un pan de l’existence social mieux éclairé le plus souvent par des écrit prescriptifs que par des sources narratives ou normatives. L’ouvrage classique de Fritz Curschmann sur les famines dans l’Europe du haut moyen âge (1900) offre un point de départ précieux, en particulier grâce aux annexes où l’historien a rassemblé une large part des mentions annalistiques, historiographiques ou hagiographiques relatives aux crises frumentaires européennes jusqu’au xiiie siècle.6 Pour l’essentiel, ces mentions se limitent à des expressions figées et limitées: fames valida (‘grave famine’) ou mortalitas maxima (‘très grande mortalité’) le plus souvent. L’enquête de Curschmann met pourtant en lumière l’existence pour les régions rhénanes et flamandes aux onzième et douzième siècles d’une série impressionnante de descriptions de crises frumentaires insérée dans des recueils d’actes abbatiaux ou épiscopaux et de vitae d’ecclésiastiques ou de princes. Dans chaque cas, la description d’une situation particulièrement désastreuse permet de mettre en évidence la capacité de l’homme d’église ou du puissant à servir le groupe de fidèles dont la protection lui a été dévolue. Très cohérents dans leur argumentation, ces textes, qui évoquent souvent des personnages apparentés, permettent d’esquisser une typologie des situations de crises. Si une météorologie inclémente constitue le plus souvent la cause immédiate, les récits du processus sont révélateurs d’une hiérarchie implicite des périls et des réactions qu’ils doivent susciter chez les gouvernants. Un premier niveau de gravité est constitué par l’insuffisance strictement locale des récoltes, qui appelle la distribution des réserves conservées dans les granges de l’institution. Quand ces ressources ne suffisent pas, il faut recourir aux moyens monétaires, qui sont mis en œuvre sur les marchés locaux ou régionaux pour acquérir des grains. Après épuisement des monnaies, les vases et objets précieux de l’institution sont vendus, ou plus probablement mis en gage. Dans les cas les plus graves, lorsque Les réflexions qui suivent prennent leur origine dans G. Todeschini, Les Marchands et le temple. Le cercle vertueux de la richesse dans l’Europe médiévale et moderne, Paris 2017. 6 F. Curschmann, Hungersnöte im Mittelalter. Ein Beitrag zur Deutschen Wirtschaftsgeschichte des 8 bis 13 Jahrhunderts, Leipzig 1900, 89 et suivantes. 5

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la récolte ne suffit pas, que les réserves sont épuisées et que les marchés font défaut, la question de l’alimentation se pose dans l’urgence et il faudra des qualités exceptionnelles à l’homme de Dieu pour faire face à la situation. Pour l’essentiel, les textes rassemblés par Curschmann concernent une aire limitée à la Flandre et aux régions rhénanes. Il s’agit d’un espace démographiquement et économiquement dynamique, caractérisé dès avant l’an mil par un fort mouvement d’urbanisation et par une implication forte des institutions religieuses dans le gouvernement des communautés. La fréquence relative des crises alimentaires graves durant cette période de croissance attire l’attention sur la complexité et l’instabilité, dans cette région, des relations entre villes et espaces ruraux. Le problème, nous disent les mêmes sources, n’est pas seulement économique et alimentaire, mais aussi politique et religieux : ce qui est en jeu durant les onzième et douzième siècles est à la fois la domination des pouvoirs urbains sur les espace ruraux et l’affirmation des parties les plus dynamiques des sociétés urbaines face aux dirigeants issus de l’aristocratie carolingienne. Dans une perspective plus large, ce mouvement de recomposition politique et économique concerne à la fois les régions rhénanes et flamandes et, à l’autre extrémité de l’Empire, celles de l’Italie centro-septentrionale. L’application du questionnaire de Curschmann aux sources anglo-normandes ne fait pas apparaître de textes qu’il aurait négligés et qui permettraient d’étendre ses hypothèses sur l’importance de la question frumentaire à l’extrémité occidentale du continent. Les récits de famines sont peu fréquents dans cet espace et ne peuvent se lire dans la même perspective. On en trouve un exemple paradoxal dans l’Inventio et miracula sancti Wulfranni, recueil écrit à Saint-Wandrille au milieu du xie siècle, dont un passage est relatif à une grande famine, survenue dans les années 1030, peut-être la même que celle à laquelle Raoul Glaber avait consacré un récit célèbre.7 À la différence du récit laissé par Raoul et de ceux rassemblés par Curschmann, qui frappent par leur précision et l’abondance des détails concrets et situés, le récit fait par un moine normand est rhétorique, imprécis et comme de seconde main. Tout se passe comme si, une génération plus tard à peine, l’événement n’avait pas laissé de souvenir direct dans le duché.8 De fait, une enquête plus approfondie sur les épisodes de famine évoqués dans les textes des historiens normands et anglo-normands, Guillaume de Jumièges, William de Malmesbury et Orderic Vital, montre que celle-ci ne résulte pas le plus souvent d’une insuffisance des récoltes par suite d’un dérèglement climatique. Elle apparaît le plus souvent comme dégât collatéral d’une conjoncture politique troublée : c’est le cas pour la croisade, chez Orderic Vital, ou pour les troubles de la succession de Guillaume le Conquérant chez William de Malmesbury. C’est bien évidemment le cas pour la dévastation du Yorkshire (the harrying of the North) en 1069, dont la plupart des récits soulignent qu’elle implique la responsabilité morale du roi Guillaume.9 Par ailleurs, les villes et leurs habitants ne sont pas des acteurs de premier plan dans ces récits et leur approvisionnement n’y constitue pas un enjeu majeur. Sources rhénanes-flamandes et anglo-normandes renvoient à un Raoul Glaber, Histoires, IV, c. 13, trad. M. Arnoux, Turnhout, 1995, 247; Rodulfus Glaber, Opera, éd. et trad. John France, Neithard Bulst et Paul Reynolds, OMT, Oxford 1989, 190–3. 8 Inventio and Miracula Sancti Vulfranni, éd. Dom J. Laporte, Rouen-Paris 1938, Mélanges publié par la Société de l’Histoire de Normandie, 14e série, 53–5; E. M. C. van Houts, ‘Historiography and Hagiography at Saint-Wandrille: the Inventio and Miracula Sancti Vulfranni’, ANS 12, 1990, 233–51. 9 Ce thème fait l’objet d’un article particulier en cours de rédaction; sur le Harrying of the North, cf. D. Bates, William the Conqueror, New Haven-London 2016, 313–21. 7



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processus différent d’urbanisation : les famines de Gand, Lièges ou Trêves trouvent leur origine dans une croissance urbaine précoce, mettant en tension les ressources agraires régionales. De ce point de vue, l’urbanisation plus lente, et moins massive à terme, qui caractérise le monde anglo-normand, permet une plus grande sureté d’approvisionnement des centres urbains. Dans cet espace équilibré, les crises graves résultent plutôt de disfonctionnement politiques. Sources et modèles économiques et de l’abondance Ce n’est donc pas dans les sources relatives aux crises de subsistance qu’il faut aller chercher des informations sur la question des ressources dans le monde anglonormand, qui paraît, au moins jusqu’à la fin du treizième siècle, jouir d’une bonne sécurité dans l’approvisionnement. De fait, pour le duché comme dans le royaume, la tradition littéraire loue la fertilité des champs et l’abondance des récoltes, qu’il s’agisse du prologue de l’Historia Anglorum d’Henri de Huntingdon ou des éloges faits à la Neustrie puis à la Normandie par Wace et Benoît de Sainte-Maure10. Ce topos est repris dans les descriptions de provinces que Barthélemy l’Anglais a insérées dans son encyclopédie des Propriétés des choses : en Angleterre « La terre y est tres bonne et able a porter divers fruictz » et « Normandie est un grant pays et habondant en bledz, en boys en prés et en bestes sauvaiges et privees ».11 La céréaliculture offre donc une voie d’accès au problème des ressources dont les blés constituent à l’évidence une part centrale et essentielle pour les deux rives de la Manche. Une exploration globale de ce thème, même superficielle, excèderait largement l’objet de cet article, et ne permettrait sans doute pas de répondre aux questions qu’il soulève. Elle impliquerait en particulier de s’interroger sur les liens que le modèle social des trois ordres, qui connut dans le monde anglo-normand son plus grand développement, entretient avec cette situation de suffisance, sinon d’abondance. Dans les lignes qui suivent, j’esquisserai une comparaison entre Normandie et l’Angleterre en me fondant sur la bibliographie consacrée au royaume, pour mettre en évidence le cas très différent offert par le duché. Il n’est peut-être pas nécessaire d’insister sur l’extraordinaire importance de la production céréalière dans la construction sociale, politique et économique de l’Angleterre, bien au-delà du Moyen Âge. Pour la période qui nous intéresse, les céréales sont au cœur de deux thèmes historiographiques essentiels, auxquels a été consacrée une littérature proprement gigantesque, la question de la seigneurie manoriale d’une part, celle de la géographie agraire et des paysages d’open-field d’autre part.12 Il convient ici d’insister à nouveau sur l’extrême originalité de la situation anglaise dans les deux cas, en particulier du point de vue des sources mise à disposition des historiens : il n’existe rien sur le continent, et en particulier en Normandie, Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, éd. D. Greenway, OMT, Oxford 1996, 1–2 ; M. Arnoux, Le temps des laboureurs. Travail, ordre social et croissance en Europe (xie–xive siècle), Paris 2012, 123–5. 11 Le proprietaire des choses, traduction par Jean Corbechon (1372) du De proprietatibus rerum, éd. Lyon 1495 (non paginée), XV, c. 106 (est autem gleba eius frugifera et pinguis campis, nemoribus et pratis insignis) et 14 (gleba optima et diuesis fructibus ualde apta; ibi oues lanigere in precipua abundantia); la notice consacrée à la Flandre (XV, c. 38) est très différente: ‘Flandre combien que elle soit petite quant au siege, toutesfoys est elle bonne terre et pleine de biens moultz singuliers car elle est pleine de pastures de beufs, de brebis et d’autres bestes’. 12 Reginald Lennard, Rural England, 1086–1135. A Study of Social and Agrarian Conditions, Oxford 1959; Bruce M. S. Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture 1250–1450, Cambridge 2000; Tom Williamson, Shaping Medieval Landscapes. Settlement, Society, Environment, Oxford 2003. 10

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qui ressemble, même de façon éloignée, aux séries de comptes manoriaux ou aux innombrables sites de villages désertés par suite de leur enclosures. Du point de vue de la compréhension des pratiques des acteurs, il n’existe rien de comparable aux multiples traités de husbandry des treizième et quatorzième siècles.13 Souvent considérés comme des éléments disjoints renvoyant chacun à des dynamiques différentes et à une chronologie particulière, ces divers éléments composent de notre point de vue un ensemble cohérent, auquel il est de surcroît possible d’approcher par une histoire intellectuelle. On ne souligne pas le plus souvent que l’extraordinaire (et rarissime) croquis de charrue inséré avec sa légende bilingue, vers 1280 dans le cartulaire du couvent des moniales cisterciennes de Nun Coton (Lincs.),14 renvoie à la fois à la tradition d’agronomie domaniale de Walter de Henley, mais aussi à la pratique universitaire des lexiques d’Adam du Petit-Pont et d’Alexandre de Garlande.15 Dans la même région, la rédaction par l’évêque de Lincoln Robert Grosseteste d’un traité de gestion domaniale, dont sont conservées plusieurs versions en langues latine ou anglo-normande, doit inciter à s’interroger sur les implications intellectuelles et religieuses d’activités agraires trop souvent envisagées d’un point de vue étroitement matériel et économique.16 Dans cette perspective, l’originalité anglaise est d’avoir enraciné traditions et pratiques politiques, religieuses, intellectuelles, sociales et économiques dans la céréaliculture, objet central dans le fonctionnement de la société anglaise. L’apparition, au terme de ce cycle de croissance et dans le contexte de la crise du quatorzième siècle, du personnage littéraire du ploughman, inconnu dans le reste de l’Europe, est un signe de cette centralité de la céréaliculture.17 Pour la période précédente, il est remarquable qu’Henri de Huntingdon, dont nous connaissons par son œuvre historique la sensibilité aux questions de ressources, n’ait pas retenu les céréales dans la liste des plantes décrites dans son Hortus Anglicanus : les grains, à la culture desquels les rustici consacrent leur existence, ne sont pas, comme les plantes médicinales, un objet de connaissance naturelle, mais bien plutôt un objet social et politique.18 En Normandie: dîmes, rentes, marchés. Face à cette construction institutionnelle de la ressource céréalière, dont l’essentiel se met en place au cours du douzième siècle, le duché de Normandie se trouve dans une situation singulière: l’aristocratie ducale et les institutions ecclésiastiques normandes tiennent une place essentielle dans la transformation du royaume, que ce soit par l’exercice sans partage de l’autorité politique et religieuse ou par l’introduction d’un bilinguisme aux conséquences importantes. Durant les douzième et treizième siècles, les manoirs appartenant à des seigneurs laïcs sont, pour une large part dans la main de seigneurs normands ou d’institutions religieuses du duché. Pour autant, il ne semble pas que les innovations découvertes ou introWalter of Henley and Other Treatises in Estate Management and Accounting, éd. D. Oschinsky, Oxford 1971. 14 Oxford Bodleian Library, MS Top. Lincs. d. 1, fol. 53. 15 Tony Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin in 13th-century England, Cambridge 1991. 16 Walter of Henley, 388–409: Reules ke le bon eveske de Nichole Robert Grosseteste fist a la comtesse de Nichole de garder et governer terres et hostel (‘Règles que le bon évêque de Lincoln Robert Grosseteste composa pour la comtesse de Lincoln pour le gouvernement de ses terres et de son hôtel’). 17 Arnoux, Le temps des laboureurs, 173–95. 18 Henry of Huntingdon, Hortus Anglicanus. A Verse Herbal of the Twelfth Century, éd. W. Black, Toronto 2012. 13



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duites en Angleterre aient fait l’objet d’expérimentation en terre normande : pas de seigneurie manoriale, pas de construction paysagère d’open-field, pas de littérature agronomique. Cette situation pose un double problème à l’historien : rendre compte de la dissymétrie de la construction anglo-normande mais aussi trouver les sources qui permettent de comparer les deux régions.19 Les sources du onzième siècle semblent indiquer une certaine maturité de l’économie de marché en Normandie. C’est en particulier le témoignage de Raoul le Glabre, relevant l’étonnante rigueur des pratiques de marché chez les Normands : ‘Parmi eux, passait pour voleur ou pillard quiconque, prétendant en affaire plus que le juste prix, ou trompant sur la qualité, s’enrichissait aux dépens d’autrui’.20 Le texte bien connu de Guillaume de Jumièges relatif à la grande révolte des paysans au début du règne de Richard ii peut aussi se lire en ce sens, en ce qui concerne les motivations des révoltés : ‘tous les paysans des différents comtés de la patrie normande, décidèrent, au cours d’innombrables conciliabules, de vivre selon leurs volonté, de sorte que tant pour l’usage modéré des forêts que pour la vente des eaux courantes, ils useraient de leurs propres règles sans que les droits anciens leur soient un obstacle.’21 Sans qu’on puisse en offrir une traduction très précise, on peut interpréter les expressions compendia silvarum et commercia aquarum comme désignant des évaluations économiques des richesses naturelles que sont les forêts et les eaux des rivières, sur lesquelles les paysans se trouvent en conflit avec le groupe seigneurial. Il est par ailleurs notable qu’aucune des expressions ne fasse directement allusion à de la nourriture, ce qui semble indiquer que l’alimentation n’est pas la source du conflit. Il est évidemment difficile d’aller plus loin pour le onzième siècle, en raison de la rareté des informations, mais les sources beaucoup plus abondantes et précises des deux siècles suivants permettent de mieux poser les problèmes. Deux pistes s’offrent pour mener cette enquête, la première relative aux dîmes, la deuxième relative aux rentes. Tous les historiens du duché savent la place considérable occupée dans les chartriers et cartulaires par les actes relatifs aux dîmes. Cette abondance d’information, qui commence au onzième siècle, m’avait conduit à accorder une signification sociale importante à cette institution, usuellement considérée comme exclusivement ecclésiastique.22 De ce point de vue, la ressource exceptionnelle par son ampleur que constitue les dîmes paroissiale doit être considérée comme l’un des enjeux des relations de concurrences ou de coopération qui unissent clercs et laïcs au sein des communautés paroissiales. Dans la perspective d’une enquête sur la question des ressources, les actes relatifs aux dîmes, et en particulier les multiples sentences et lettres décrétales réglant les conflits à leur sujet, offrent un observatoire exceptionnel sur les pratiques agraires. Plus que les actes relatifs aux restitutions de M. Arnoux, ‘Border, Trade Route or Market? The Channel and the Medieval European Economy from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century’, ANS, 36, 2014, 39–52; M. Arnoux, ‘Entre Paris et la Manche. Réflexions sur la place de la Normandie dans les espaces anglo-normands et français (xiie-xve siècles)’, dans Penser les mondes normands médiévaux, éd. D. Bates et P. Bauduin, Caen 2016, 493–502. 20 Nempe furi ac predoni apud illos comparabatur quicumque hominum in aliquo negotio plus iusto yel falsum quippiam uenundandum mentiens (Raoul Glaber, Histoires, I, c. 21, p. 75; Rodulfus Glaber, 36–7). 21 GND V, c. 2, II, 8–9: Rustici unanimes per diversos totius Normannicae patriae comitatus plurima agentes conventicula juxta suos libitus vivere decernebant, quatinus tam in silvarum compendiis quam in aquarum commerciis, nullo obsistente ante statuti juris obice legibus uterentur suis. Pour la phrase accentuée la traduction anglaise corrigée est: ‘moderated use of the forests as well as the sale of waterways’ au lieu de la traduction publiée : ‘in respects both of short cuts through the woods and of the traffic of the rivers’. 22 Arnoux, Le temps des laboureurs, 221–55. 19

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dîmes par leurs détenteurs laïcs, qui témoignent de l’application progressive des principes de la réforme grégorienne, ce sont les actes multiples mettant terme aux conflits né de la possession partagée des dîmes par les communautés paroissiales et les établissements réguliers qui mettent en lumières les caractères originaux des régimes agraires. Malgré leur précision, ces textes ne traitent pas des conditions concrètes de la production. En particulier, ils ne permettent jamais de décider du caractère biennal ou triennal des rotations, une distinction cruciale pour les agronomes anglais dans leur recherche de la façon optimale d’associer parcelles cultivées et instruments de labour. La description extraordinairement concrète qui est donnée des opérations de moisson dans une sentence des années 1198–1203 relative à la paroisse de Fontenay-le-Marmion, au sud de Caen, énumère les instruments nécessaires à la levée de leurs dîmes par les moines de l’abbaye cistercienne de Barbery et par le seigneur Robert d’Ouffières : trois charrettes attelées avec leurs équipage pour les moines et une pour Robert, ainsi qu’une cinquième charrette commune et un homme avec son cheval allant et venant parmi les champs moissonnés. Dans ce cas, les juges n’hésitent pas à fixer par écrit les moyens nécessaires à la bonne exécution des opérations légales liées à la récolte.23 Les juges sont aussi attentifs, presque toujours, à distinguer entre eux les grains récoltés et engrangés : froment, orge avoine. Ce souci de précision est significatif de la destination socialement différenciée des céréales, le froment revenant aux ecclésiastiques, curés, chanoines ou moines et le méteil, le seigle, l’avoine et l’orge étant destinés aux églises paroissiales. Les historiens de l’alimentation ont depuis longtemps montré que le prestige reconnu au froment tient à sa blancheur et non à ses qualités nutritives, équivalentes, voire inférieures à celles des autres céréales.24 La préférence donnée au froment par les ecclésiastiques renvoie probablement aussi à son usage exclusif pour l’eucharistie, un besoin essentiel pour la société chrétienne.25 L’importance de la distinction entre consommation des clercs et des laïcs dans la prise en compte des destinations ne s’oppose pas à une inscription précise des diverses espèces récoltées dans le cadre des contraintes et des incitations économiques. Dans le règlement en 1171–1179 du conflit entre les paroissiens de Louvigny sur les dîmes du fief de Guesberville, les juges délégués pontificaux reconnurent à l’abbaye la possession du revenu, mais attribuèrent à l’église paroissiale une rente annuelle, d’un sextier d’orge, réservant ainsi aux religieux la dîme de la récolte Harald Müller, Päpstliche Delegationgerichtsbarkeit in der Normandie (12 und frühes 13 Jahrhundert), Bonn Studien und Dokumente zur Gallia Pontificia, 4, Bonn 1997, II, no. 131, 252–3: Tota decima bladi de Fonteneto Marmion […] deferetur ante grangiam predictorum abbatis et monachorum [scil. de Barbereio] de Fontaneto et ibi erit diuisa, sicut prius diuideratur, in platea juxta monasterium, ita quod ad decimam colligendam abbas et monachi tres quadrigas cum hominibus et equis et aliis necessariis inuenient et prefatus Robertus unam cum necessariis et sextam partem quinte quadrige cum necessariis et unius hominis gradientis per campos super equum ad decimam colligendam et custodiendam pacifice inveniet (‘Toute la dîme du blé de Fontenay le Marmion sera portée devant la grange desdits abbé et moines à Fontenay et elle sera divisée comme auparavant, sur la place qui jouxte le monastère; et l’abbé et les moines devront trouver pour rassembler la dîme trois charrettes avec les hommes et tout ce qui sera nécessaire et ledit Robert, de sa bonne volonté, trouvera une autre charrette avec tout ce qui sera nécessaire, ainsi que le sixième, avec ce qui sera nécessaire, d’une cinquième charrette et d’un homme à cheval qui ira par les champs pour rassembler la dîme’). 24 M. Arnoux, ‘Manger ou cultiver: laboratores, oratores et bellatores entre production et consommation (xie - xiiie siècle)’, L’alimentazione nell’alto medioevo: pratiche, simboli, ideologie, Settimane di studio della fondazione Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 63, Spoleto 2016, 939–62. 25 Cf. les prescriptions très précises relatives à la fabrication des hosties dans le coutumier de Lanfranc : The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc, éd. D. Knowles et C. N. L. Brooke, OMT, Oxford 2002, 123–7. 23



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de froment. Un demi-siècle plus tard, en 1230, le conflit entre les moniales de Villers-Canivet et les paroissiens de Soumont sera réglé de la même façon, les juges nommés par l’évêque de Sées donnant aux moniales la possession de la dîme et tout le froment, tandis qu’une rente annuelle, considérable, de huit sextiers d’orge et quatre d’avoine est attribuée aux paroissiens. Dans ses attendus, le jugement fait état des arguments, purement économiques, de ceux-ci, qui lient la nécessité d’affermer la dîme à son instabilité et à son caractère imprévisible (quoniam perceptiones hujusmodi […] quasi volatiles erant et incerte), dommageable à la gestion de l’église paroissiale. Dans ce cas, comme dans le cas précédent, la sentence fait de la communauté régulière la fermière perpétuelle de la dîme, au prix d’une rente perpétuelle en céréale de printemps : la solution stabilise le revenu des paroissiens, en réservant aux religieux, plus solidement établis, le risque et les bénéfices d’une ressources irrégulière.26 Dans tous ces textes, la rigueur dans l’application des préceptes canoniques ne s’oppose donc pas à l’attention aux mécanismes économiques. Bien au contraire, dès la fin du douzième siècle, le règlement des conflits prévoit le recours à une expertise en termes marchands en cas de contestation. L’accord passé en 1181–4 entre l’abbaye de Saint-Évroult et les chanoines de Sainte-Barbe-en-Auge au sujet de l’ermitage de La Roche, précise ainsi: ‘Les moines sont tenus de payer chaque année perpétuellement à nous et à notre église un muid de blé à l’octave de la fête Saint-Michel à leur grange de Norrey, à la mesure légale de ladite ville, consistant en quatre sextiers de froment, quatre d’orge et quatre d’avoine, le grain de chaque espèce estimé au prix de vente commun’. De même, en 1192, le règlement du conflit entre les chanoine de Silly-en-Gouffern et les moines de Saint-Pierre-surDives à propos de la chapelle de Maimbeville et de ses dîmes, prévoit le versement d’une rente annuelle de trente sextiers en trois céréales, à percevoir dans la grange des chanoines à Saint-Lambert, précisant que les grains versés devront être ‘en blé de qualité légale estimé de prix commun, à la mesure commune et légitime de Saint-Lambert’.27 Ces précisions, qui paraissent indispensables aux rigoureux canonistes rédacteurs de ces actes, font des marchés locaux et des experts, paysans et marchands, qui y opèrent, les juges de la régularité de pratiques religieusement fondées. Elles attestent de la parfaite moralité, du point de vue de l’église, d’une évaluation monétaire des ressources alimentaire, dont la commercialisation apparaît ainsi spirituellement fondée. La centralité des institutions du marché apparaît dans cette région avec une rare évidence. La très grande diffusion des instruments de crédit fondés sur les échanges céréaliers en apporte une autre preuve. Dans un ouvrage novateur paru en 1900, l’historien du droit Paul Génestal avait montré l’ancienneté des formes de crédit pratiquées par les communautés monastiques normandes, en faisant l’hypothèse que ce flux massif de valeur monétaire en destination de la classe paysanne était la contrepartie de la quantité plus impressionnante encore de céréales que la collection des dîmes mettait à disposition des religieux, et des marchés M. Arnoux, ‘Remarques sur les fonctions économiques de la communauté paroissiale (Normandie, siècles)’, dans Liber largitorius. Etudes d’histoire médiévale offertes à Pierre Toubert par ses élèves, éd. D. Barthélemy et J.-M. Martin, Genève 2003, 426–30. 27 Müller, Päpstliche Delegationgerichtsbarkeit, II, no. 68, 173–4: Monachi teneantur inperpetuum nobis et ecclesie nostre annuatim solvere unum modium bladi in octavis Sancti Michaelis prioris apud Noerium in grangia sua ad legitimam eiusdem ville mensuram, ita uidelicet ut IIIIor sextarii sint frumenti, quatuor ordei, IIIIor avene, cuius bladi singule species communis uenditionis pretio debeant estimari, et no. 89, 196–7: in blado legali et pretio communi estimabili ad communem et legittimam mensuram Sancti Lamberti. 26

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urbains sur lesquels ces derniers étaient actifs. Il mettait en évidence le rôle joué par les canonistes pontificaux dans le contrôle et la modification progressive de pratiques économiques associant aussi bien clercs et laïcs que les laïcs entre eux.28 À partir des premières années du treizième siècle, l’apparition d’instruments de crédit stipulés à la fois en mesures de grain et en monnaie métallique apporte la preuve que les marchés céréaliers établis dans les campagnes sont assez abondants, équilibrés et prévisible pour que s’établisse une circulation de valeur monétaire gagée par l’arrivée annuelle des récoltes sur les marchés à l’automne. Un contrat de 1209 liant les religieuses de Saint-Amand de Rouen aux moines de BonneNouvelle autour d’un versement annuel considérable de quatre muids de froment à verser sur le marché aux grains du vendredi à Rouen est le premier indice du fonctionnement de ce système.29 À partir des années 1220, on voit des contrats de ce genre se répandre dans les campagnes, impliquant pour l’essentiel des communautés religieuses et des paysans, autour d’un marché unique. C’est le cas autour de Caen, où les moines de Savigny acquièrent ainsi par dizaines des rentes payables en froment, orge, ou avoine sur le marché de Thaon, tandis que ceux de Troarn font de même sur le marché de Touffréville, et ceux de Saint-Étienne de Fontenay sur les marchés de Fontenay, Cingal et Thury. Il s’agit d’un dossier appelé à s’étoffer, et qui fournira des informations de grande importance sur les modes de fonctionnement des marchés normands.30 Dans l’optique de notre recherche, ces multiples documents, mis en regard des sources flamandes et rhénanes (mais aussi italiennes) qui donnent une importance majeure aux institutions urbaines, ou des sources anglaises, qui placent au centre du dispositif économique les institutions seigneuriales enracinées dans les paysages agraires, suggèrent que les marchés ont en Normandie un rôle central dans l’organisation de l’accès aux richesses nécessaires. C’est par leur intermédiaire que peut se construire une notion de ressource qui soit fidèle au contenu des sources, et peut-être aussi aux pratiques des acteurs. Les systèmes de ressources qui peuvent être ainsi mis en évidence sont clairement différents selon les régions, mais rien ne permet d’affirmer que les possibilités offertes par l’environnement suffisent à expliquer ces variations régionales. Les sources médiévales, lorsqu’on les interroge dans cette perspective, attirent plutôt l’attention sur l’importance des institutions religieuses et des choix et politiques, aussi bien dans les dynamiques de convergences entre régions que dans l’émergence de caractères originaux.

R. Génestal, Le rôle des monastères comme établissements de crédit, étudié en Normandie du xie siècle à la fin du xiiie siècle, Paris 1901. 29 I. Theiller, ‘Prix du marché, marché du grain et crédit au début du xiiie siècle : autour d’un dossier rouennais’, Le Moyen Age, 2009, 252–76. 30 Je prépare une publication sur ce sujet. 28

The Marjorie Chibnall Memorial Essay, 2017

BECKET VULT: THE APPROPRIATION OF ST THOMAS BECKET’S IMAGE DURING THE CANTERBURY DISPUTE, 1184–1200* James Barnaby On the night of 25 November 1186, Andrew John, a monk of Christ Church Canterbury, had a vision.1 Saint Thomas Becket appeared before him, bade him rise from his bed and follow him into one of the towers adjacent to the choir. There, the blessed martyr showed Andrew John a large Catherine wheel, spitting blue flames. Archbishop Baldwin appeared and leant on three swords to test their strength. Having chosen a sword, he summoned Prior Honorius, the head of the monastic community. ‘I wish’ said Baldwin ‘to destroy this new work, [the recent renovations to Canterbury cathedral in honour of Becket] and for this purpose I have made this wheel, but without you I cannot move it’. The dismayed prior obeyed and summoned other monks to help him. Andrew John begged Becket to intervene. The saint drew his sword, inscribed with letters of gold, and Archbishop Baldwin vanished. Becket then gave the sword to Andrew John, showing him the inscription gladius beati Petri apostoli. He ordered the monk to present the sword to the prior, who should use it to destroy the Catherine wheel. Andrew John had this vision three times before he ventured to tell the prior. Honorius immediately understood its meaning. The Catherine wheel was Baldwin’s new church, and the sword (representing appeal to Rome) was the weapon with which the convent could defeat this evil plan. Behind all this lay the great ‘Canterbury dispute’: the outcome of a plan of Archbishop Baldwin’s to build a collegiate church for secular canons, to be dedicated to Thomas Becket. The aim was to provide a source of income for the clerks of the archbishop’s household, thereby decoupling the archbishops from their dependence upon a monastic cathedral chapter, in effect undoing six hundred years of the work of Augustine, Dunstan, and Lanfranc. The initial site selected for the new foundation lay at Hackington, just outside Canterbury, although in due course Lambeth was to emerge as an alternative. The monks of Christ Church believed that the archbishop’s plan would not only weaken their status as the cathedral chapter but, in short order, threatened to deprive them of the relics of their recently acquired but most beloved saint, Thomas Becket. In 1162, the monks had greeted Becket’s election with indifference, and his subsequent disputes with Henry II with outright scorn. Becket’s defence of the liberties of the English church was regarded by the monks as primarily to defend the privileges and jurisdictional rights of the secular clergy.2 Furthermore, Becket’s defence of I wish to thank Nicholas Vincent for his help in the writing of this paper. Any errors are my own. I also wish to thank the Trustees of the Allen Brown Memorial Trust, and the late Marjorie Chibnall, for providing me with the opportunity to present my research at the 40th Battle Conference. 1 Gervase of Canterbury, Chronica, in The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols, RS 73, 1879–80, I, 338–41. 2 R. W. Southern, The Monks of Canterbury and the Murder of Archbishop Becket, William Urry Memorial Lectures, 1, Canterbury 1985, 12. *

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the rights of Canterbury was mainly concerned with the rights of the archbishop rather than those of the monks.3 Although the monks could not openly disapprove of his advocacy, his defence promised them little save disgrace and hardship. When Becket went into exile, the monks were left to fend for themselves against the king’s agents, the de Brocs and other such ‘despoilers (raptores)’ of monastic property. Nor was Becket’s exile shared by the monks. The archbishop and his followers spent their time in France, for the most part under Cistercian protection at Pontigny, whilst the monks remained at Canterbury. Contact between the two groups was practically non-existent. Of the roughly six hundred letters preserved from the Becket dispute, none are from the convent and only three are addressed to the convent by the archbishop. All are hostile, complaining about the monks’ lack of support and against their dealings with individuals whom Becket had excommunicated.4 Neither side seems to have understood the other. In Richard Southern’s words, the monks saw ‘a former royal official now in disgrace for a cause which was not theirs’. Becket saw merely a group of rebellious monks who failed to help him in his cause.5 In particular, Becket opposed the convent’s decision to elect a new prior without his permission. Upon the death of Prior Wibert in September 1167, the convent applied to the king, rather than the archbishop, for licence to elect his successor.6 By right, Becket claimed, it was the archbishop, as conventual abbot, who should appoint any new prior. The fact that the monks chose to approach the king rather than Becket speaks volumes. Becket, so the monks seemed to suggest, was not their archbishop. All of this changed with Becket’s murder in 1170. Initially the monks were frightened by the violence committed in their cathedral. Preparing the body for burial, however, they discovered that under his episcopal robes, Becket wore the monastic habit as well as a hair shirt riddled with vermin.7 Then the miracles began to be reported, and pilgrims flocked to the site of his martyrdom. It was only now that the monks began to regard Becket as a martyr rather than a murdered troublemaker. Within a few months, Becket’s death had transformed the monastic community, and it ‘entered on a period of creative activity more brilliant and original than it had ever before experienced’.8 Becket was no longer the enemy of the convent. Instead he became their standard bearer, their champion, who had fought and died for the rights of Canterbury, including those of the convent. The miracles which he performed brought further glory to his cathedral, promoting it as a centre of international pilgrimage to rival Rome or even Jerusalem itself. Surely, Becket must have loved the convent. Certainly, the convent now loved him. The monks were given the opportunity to demonstrate this love in spectacular fashion, following the fire that engulfed the cathedral on 5 September 1174.9 After the fire, the east end of the cathedral needed to be rebuilt. The work was entrusted to the French architect, William of Sens, and was completed by William the Englishman H. Mayr-Harting, Religion, Politics and Society in Britain 1066–1272, Harlow 2011, 80–1. The Correspondence of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1162–1170, ed. A. Duggan, 2 vols, Oxford 2000, II, 911–21 (no. 209), 1092–7 (no. 254), 1238–41 (no. 292). 5 Southern, Monks of Canterbury, 12. 6 The Letters of John of Salisbury, ed. W. J. Millor, H. E. Butler and C. N. L. Brooke, 2 vols, London and Oxford 1955–1979 [hereafter JS Letters], II, 482–9 (no. 244). 7 Southern, Monks of Canterbury, 13; F. Barlow, Thomas Becket, London 1986, 75–6; JS Letters, 743–5 (no. 305). 8 Southern, Monks of Canterbury, 14. 9 Gervase, Chronica, I, 3–6; See P. Kidson, ‘Gervase, Becket and William of Sens’, Speculum 68, 1993, 969–91 at 969–77, for a discussion on whether the fire was arson. 3 4



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(after the Frenchman’s fall from scaffolding forced him to return to France).10 With William the Englishman, the building works took on a grander form. The chapel which was to house Becket’s shrine was no longer planned in conservative mode, as one faction of the monks apparently wanted, but in the most opulent modern French Gothic.11 Peter Kidson has argued that the change in architects marked the point at which the monks wholeheartedly committed themselves to Becket. More likely the change in architects, and the grandeur of the design, reflected a change in the priorate. On 10 July 1175, Prior Odo was elected abbot of Battle and resigned from his office as prior of Canterbury.12 Odo had been popular amongst the Canterbury monks, chosen by them as Becket’s successor as archbishop in 1173, an election then blocked by the king.13 However, Odo was not popular with Becket. The archbishop had refused to recognize Odo as prior since the monks had not sought archiepiscopal licence for election. Becket’s dissatisfaction with the convent can be seen in his letters to them. All three are addressed to the subprior, William.14 The animosity between Thomas and Odo continued after Becket’s return. Indeed, the archbishop began proceedings to have Odo deposed, until martyrdom intervened.15 Odo knew how difficult a man Becket had been and probably found it difficult to accept him as a saint, let alone a saint of such significance that the entire east end of the cathedral church should be remodelled as a setting for his shrine. It was therefore probably Odo, and his supporters, who placed curbs on the architectural plans. With Odo’s removal to Battle, however, Becket’s supporters were able to place one of their own into the priorate: Benedict of Peterborough. Benedict was a devotee of Becket, a witness to the murder, the first custodian of Becket’s tomb and author of one of the two great miracle collections, recording events at Becket’s shrine. With his promotion, the Becket faction came to power, proceeding with the rebuilding in a manner they considered suitable for their new saint. The plan for a new church at Hackington appears originally to have been Becket’s. According to Peter of Blois, Anselm had built a church dedicated to St Stephen at Hackington, and Becket’s plan was to renew this foundation (dedicated, let us note, to a protomartyr, who was later prominent in Becket’s self-image).16 It was not only Peter of Blois who made this claim. Archbishop Baldwin likewise stated that it was Becket’s desire to build a church for secular clerks, whilst Gervase of Canterbury, the local chronicler, relates an argument at Rome between the proctors of the archbishop and convent, in which it was declared that it had been Becket’s intention to build the church at Hackington.17 Kidson has suggested that Becket hired William of Sens to build this new church, before returning to England in 1170.18 Gervase, Chronica, I, 20–1. Kidson, ‘Gervase, Becket and William of Sens’, 989–90. 12 The Chronicle of Battle Abbey, ed. E. Searle, OMT, Oxford 1980, 282–97. 13 Gervase, Chronica, I, 243–4; Ralph de Diceto, Ymagines Historiarum, in Radulphi de Diceto Decani Lundoniensis Opera Historica, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols., RS 68, 1876, I, 369; The Letters and Charters of Gilbert Foliot, ed. Z. N. Brooke, A. Morey and C. N. L. Brooke, Cambridge 1967, 291–5 (no. 220). 14 Correspondence of Thomas Becket, 911–21 (no. 209), 1092–7 (no.254), 1238–41 (no. 292). 15 Barlow, Becket, 249. 16 Epistolae Cantuarienses, in Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols, RS 38, 1865 [hereafter Ep. Cant.], II, 556–7 (no. 571): ad instaurationem ecclesiae beati Stephani, quam sanctus Anselmus inceperat (‘to the renewal of the church of the blessed Stephen, which Saint Anselm had begun’). 17 Ibid., II, 8–9 (no. 8); Gervase, Chronica, I, 368–9. 18 Kidson, ‘Gervase, Becket and William of Sens’, 980–1. 10 11

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His argument fits convincingly with the actions of the monks during this period. After Becket’s death, the monks did all they could to appropriate his image to their convent. They collected the letters concerned with his dispute; they wrote ‘lives’ and miracle collections devoted to Becket; they created a centre of pilgrimage for his cult and, after 1174, they set about rebuilding the cathedral in his honour. It appears that the initial plan was to translate Becket’s body in 1186. In 1185, Alan of Tewkesbury, then prior of Canterbury, had written letters to King Henry II and Archbishop Baldwin outlining a timetable for the translation, and asking them to broadcast the news of the event as far as possible.19 It was probably this planned translation that caused the partial rewriting of William of Canterbury’s miracle collection. The translation did not take place due to the conflict between Baldwin and the convent; however, the monks continued to disseminate the collections. They were no longer there purely to advertise Becket’s translation; their role evolved to show that Becket was on the side of the convent. He was one of them.20 If Becket had hired William of Sens to build his new church, it was logical for the monks to hire him too. In doing so, they appropriated Becket’s plan for a church at Hackington to the rebuilding of their cathedral, thereby rendering the new foundation superfluous. If it was indeed the monks’ intention to negate the plans for Hackington, then they were sorely disappointed following the elevation of (the Cistercian) Baldwin of Forde to the archbishopric in 1184. Baldwin’s election was accomplished against the wishes of the (Benedictine) monks. They had wanted their old prior, Odo. However, they were overruled and the king’s choice was imposed upon them. Baldwin was one of those hardworking, pious men whom Henry II had always favoured. According to William of Newburgh, Henry complained about churchmen who embraced the world with both arms.21 Baldwin was certainly not one of those. A noted scholar and preacher, in 1170 he had entered the Cistercian monastery at Forde in Dorset. Rising quickly, he became abbot within only a few years. In 1180, he was promoted as bishop of Worcester, and just four years later was translated to Canterbury. There were reasons for the monks to be pleased with Baldwin. He was a monk, after all, albeit the wrong kind of monk. In the event, Baldwin’s Cistercian attitudes grated on the convent, especially his dislike of the flamboyant rebuilding of the cathedral and his demand for absolute obedience from his monks. Much as the monks had wished for a monastic archbishop, absolute obedience was something that they had never conceded, either to monk or to secular. Indeed, some of their graver disputes of the past century had been against monastic heads: Lanfranc, Anselm, and above all Theobald. For the monks, Baldwin’s plan to build a church at Hackington was a step too far. The monks launched their first appeal on 8 December 1186.22 On 17 December, Baldwin installed his canons at Hackington despite the appeal. He then proceeded Alani Prioris Cantuariensis postea abbatis Tewkesberiensis scripta quae extant, ed. J. A. Giles, Oxford 1846, 36–9 (nos. 3–4); Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. J. C. Robinson and J. B. Shepard, 7 vols, RS 67, 1875–1885, [hereafter MTB], VII, 580–2 (nos. 804–5). 20 Evidence for the setting of the collection in the 1180s can be seen from the horror of secular canons present in it. As Nicholas Vincent has argued, this horror does not fit quite as neatly into the circumstances of 1174 as it does into the circumstances of the 1180s and the dispute with Baldwin. N. Vincent, ‘William of Canterbury and Benedict of Peterborough: The Manuscripts, Date and Context of the Becket Miracle Collections’, in Hagiographie, idéologie et politique au Moyen Âge en Occident, ed. E. Bozóky, Turnhout 2012, 347–87 at 382–4. 21 William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, ed. R. Howlett, 4 vols, RS 82, 1884–1889, I, 280–1. 22 For a full account of the dispute see Stubbs’ introduction to the letters, Ep. Cant., II, xxxiii–cix. 19



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to suspend the prior and all the monks who had supported the appeal, confining the community to their precinct. Afterwards, he spent Christmas at Otford – a clear insult since it was customary for archbishops to reside at Canterbury during the festive season, when not in attendance on the king.23 Prior Honorius defied the archbishop and, with a small group of followers, set out for Rome.24 This first journey of the prior was to provoke a constant stream of representatives from both parties, travelling abroad to prosecute their supposed rights. The main destination of these journeys was the Roman curia, where the dispute was waged before the pope. However, the curia was not the only destination. Both sides conducted a letter campaign, enlisting the support of all who might aid their cause. The archbishops could count upon the support of the kings of England, most of the English clergy, several Roman cardinals and the king and queen of Sicily.25 For the monks, there was very little support from England so they had to look overseas. The king of France was favourable to their cause as were the French clergy, especially those who had been friends of Becket. The monks also had substantial support at the curia, being generally favoured by the popes.26 Many of the letters that the dispute provoked are preserved in Lambeth Palace Ms 415. This manuscript contains 557 items, compiled between 1201 and 1205 at Canterbury, by a monk named Reginald.27 The original title was Epistolae Reginaldi de Tempore Baldewini, although it also includes letters concerning the continuation of the dispute in the time of Hubert Walter. The letters are separated into three books, apparently drawn together from two or three separate compilations, here combined into a single manuscript. In Prior Henry of Eastry’s catalogue of the library at Canterbury, there are two separate entries: Epistolae de Tempore Baldewini maiores and minores. Despite the failure here to mention the letters from Hubert’s archiepiscopacy, it is quite possible that these were included in the minores collection, as the dispute with Hubert was a direct continuation of the dispute with Baldwin.28 The collection was published in 1865, by William Stubbs, whose principle interest lay in reconstructing the chronology and basic outline of the dispute; details subsequently revisited by David Knowles, Christopher Cheney and all successive historians of the late twelfth-century English church. Viewed, however, as literary and intellectual exercises rather than as dry records of law and polemic, the letters have fared less successfully. Lacking the sort of rich scriptural and patristic learning of the Becket correspondence, and indexed by Stubbs in such a way that names, places and dates take precedence over ideas or ‘subjects’, these are letters that have many surprises and new discoveries still to disclose. The dispute led to disturbances both on the continent and in England. At several points in the dispute, the conventual estates were confiscated either, as in 1187, to force the monks to come to terms or to punish them for their contumacy. Baldwin also employed other tactics: excommunications, the confinement of the monks to Gervase, Chronica, I, 344–6. Ep. Cant., II, 16 (nos. 19–20). 25 Ibid., II, 16–21 (nos. 21–4), 162 (no. 183). The main supporters of Baldwin in the curia were Henry of Marcy, Cardinal-bishop of Albano, and Pope Gregory VIII. Ibid., II, 135–6 (no. 160). 26 Friends of the monks in France included the bishops of Arras and Rheims and there is an extensive list of supporters in the curia including the future popes Celestine III and Innocent III. Ibid., II, xliv–xlv, 11 (no. 12), 13–14 (nos. 14–15), 26–7 (no. 29). 27 The only Reginald recorded as being a member of the community at the time was the subprior, who was to play a key role in the 1205 election dispute. J. Greatrex, Biographical Register of the English Cathedral Priories of the Province of Canterbury c.1066–1540, Oxford 1997, 262–3. 28 The Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover, ed. M. R. James, Cambridge 1903, 31.

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the convent, and replacing the convent’s officials with men of his own choosing. In January 1188, Baldwin effectively besieged the convent. The monks’ food stores were confiscated and all entrances to the convent were guarded. The cemetery gate, and later the main gates, however, were opened to allow pilgrims to visit the shrines in the cathedral, including Becket’s tomb, although the monks were prevented from leaving.29 This situation was to last for eighty-four weeks, during which the monks depended upon the local citizenry for food. Local charity was on such a vast scale that, according to Gervase, two hundred paupers per day were fed with the left overs. Even the Canterbury Jews contributed, providing food and prayers for the monks.30 There were regular attempts to settle the dispute at home rather than in Rome. Both Baldwin and Hubert Walter came up with proposals, all rejected by the monks. Similarly, the kings of England attempted to establish consensus. Henry II’s attempts, initially accepted, were all rejected by the convent.31 Richard I enjoyed greater success than his father. This came, however, only through a combination of threats and subterfuge. In the compromise enforced by Richard on 29 November 1189, the monks were compelled to accept Baldwin’s right to build a church wherever he wished and to appoint his own men to several of the more important monastic offices. Richard, in order to placate the monks, then had Baldwin remove his new prior, Roger Norreys, from the convent and cease building at Hackington. The next day, Baldwin restored the conventual estates, deposed the prior and began moving the building works from Hackington to Lambeth, where he was fully entitled to build a church.32 This should have ended the dispute. However, the monks were not happy. The king had dissembled on several points. When the monks obtained a private audience with John of Anagni, the papal legate – who had been kept out of the kingdom until after the imposition of the compromise – they discovered that Richard had told the legate that the church at Hackington was in fact to remain standing, to be served by clerks praying for the soul of Henry II.33 Upon learning how the monks had been coerced, the legate drew up a secret mandate, declaring that the compromise had been imposed upon the monks by force and was therefore void.34 The convent kept this mandate hidden, in the event it was needed in the future.35 The dispute remained dormant until, approximately a year into his archiepiscopacy, Hubert Walter decided to fulfil his predecessor’s wish to build a church for Becket. This time, it was to be sited at Lambeth with the consequent dispute following much the same lines as that between Baldwin and the monks. Hubert would offer a compromise that the monks would reject. The case was then taken to Rome by the monks and delayed by the usual bureaucracy. Eventually, the case was settled by arbitration in England. The arbiters pronounced in favour of the convent. Hubert could build a church at Lambeth, but it had to be staffed by Premonstratensian canons, and endowments were not to exceed £100 per annum. No consecrations Ep. Cant., II, 131–5 (nos. 156–9), 140–5 (nos. 166–7); Gervase, Chronica, I, 398–400. Gervase, Chronica, I, 405–6; Ep. Cant., II, 155–7 (no. 177–8), 159–60 (no. 181). 31 Ibid., II, 81 (no. 96), 89–92 (nos. 111–15), 93–6 (nos.120–1), 166–9 (no. 186), 221–2 (no. 240); Gervase, Chronica, I, 380–1, 409–18. 32 Ibid., I, 474–81; Howden, Chronica, III, 23–4; Howden, Gesta, II, 97–8; Diceto, Ymagines Historiarum, II, 72; Ep. Cant., II, 322–3 (no. 335). 33 Gervase, Chronica, I, 481–3. 34 Ep. Cant., II, 323 (no. 336). 35 Gervase, Chronica, I, 481–3. 29

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or ordinations were to be conducted in the church, nor was the archbishop allowed to build a church for secular canons without the consent of the Canterbury monks. The settlement was ratified by Innocent III on 30 June 1201.36 Throughout this dispute, Becket’s image had been a constant, yet constantly contested, theme. Both sides declared they were acting upon the will of the martyr, the monks claiming that the saint did not wish the collegiate church to be built, the archbishops insisting that he did. The letters give us a remarkable insight into how both parties appropriated Becket’s image to further their aims. The monks’ appeal against Baldwin’s plan began with Becket. The martyr appeared in several visions calling upon the monks to resist the archbishop’s plan. These visions were all recorded by Gervase in his Chronica and mentioned in various Canterbury letters. As we have noticed, Andrew John experienced the first such vision. When he had been brought to the tower, Andrew John asked the man what his name was. Becket replied, ‘I am Thomas your archbishop, who for and in this church suffered martyrdom’.37 According to Gervase, the Catherine wheel was interpreted by the prior as symbolic of the new church that Baldwin planned to build.38 Its depiction as a Catherine wheel is significant, since the wheel was a device of torture, or execution, to which the victim would be tied so that their bones might be shattered. This was the method by which the Emperor Maxentius had hoped to execute St Catherine. However, when Catherine touched the wheel it miraculously fragmented, beheading the emperor and several hundred bystanders instead.39 To the monks of Canterbury, the Catherine wheel represented the destruction of their convent. In its shadow, the monks viewed (and presented) themselves as righteous martyrs for the Christian faith. God, who protected Catherine from death upon the wheel, would surely protect them too.40 More important is the portrayal of Becket in this vision. When asked by Andrew John who he was, Becket replied that he was your (vester) archbishop. Here Becket was clearly made to align himself with the monks and the convent rather than with his successors as archbishop, or with the wider English church. Similarly, when speaking of his death, Becket was made to state that he died for and in this (hac) church. Again, Becket was being appropriated to Canterbury Cathedral and, particularly, to those who served the cathedral, the monastic chapter. At the end of this vision, Becket used a sword to destroy the Catherine wheel and frustrate Baldwin’s plans. This sword was then presented to Andrew John to be given to the prior, the writing upon its blade revealing the sword to be that of St Peter. The monks interpreted the sword as representing the process of appeal to Rome. Just as St Peter had attempted to protect Christ with his sword, so would the successors of Peter protect the monks with their spiritual weapons. Ep. Cant., II, 511–19 (nos. 547–53). C. R. Cheney, ‘The Settlement Between Archbishop Hubert and Christ Church Canterbury in 1200: A Study in Diplomatic’, in Mediaevalia Christiana, XIe-XIIe siècles: hommage à Raymonde Foreville, ed. C. E. Viola, Paris 1989, 136–51. 37 Gervase, Chronica, I, 339 ‘Ego sum’ ... ‘Thomas archiepiscopus vester, qui pro hac ecclesia et in hac ecclesia martyrium passus sum.’ 38 Ibid., I, 342. 39 D. H. Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, Oxford 1978, 5th edn 2011, 80–1; J. Jenkins and K. J. Lewis, ‘Introduction’ in St Katherine of Alexandria: Text and Context in Western Medieval Europe, ed. J. Jenkins and K. J. Lewis, Turnhout 2003, 1–18. 40 These devices were also seen on building sites. The monks had been living on such a site for years and it is probably no coincidence that it was this object, which was seen in the visions, both as a symbol of building and of martyrdom. This is further reinforced by the date of the vision, 25 November, St Catherine’s feast day. 36

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The importance of Andrew John’s vision is further reinforced by the fact that he saw it three times. The number three had a special power in medieval numerology, representing the Trinity and the three elements in man (body, reason, and spirit). The fact that the vision was repeated three times revealed that it was divinely inspired. It also, however, revealed the frailty of Andrew John. The monk was too afraid of what he had seen to tell the prior, and Becket had to return twice more to make Andrew John do as he was bidden.41 Even the monks are depicted as Christ’s true disciples. In the garden of Gethsemane, Christ upbraided Peter and the sons of Zebedee three times for falling asleep when he had asked them to remain awake whilst he prayed.42 In Andrew John’s vision, Becket took the place of Christ, and Andrew John the place of St Peter. This was not the first vision of Becket that the Canterbury monks had received. William of Canterbury experienced a vision of Becket, in which he was encouraged to write a collection of the saint’s miracles.43 Of greater interest in relation to the Canterbury dispute is William’s account of a vision received by Honorius, the future prior. According to this account, three days after the saint’s martyrdom, Honorius dreamed that, upon entering Canterbury cathedral, he was confronted by an angel with a drawn sword. The angel told Honorius that on the day of the archbishop’s murder, he had been appointed guardian of the church of Canterbury.44 This vision has several similarities to Andrew John’s. In both a drawn sword is used as a symbol for the protection of the church. In both Honorius is present and associated with the protection of Canterbury. As well as this, Becket is linked directly to Honorius in each vision, in Honorius’s through the appointment being made on the day of the martyrdom, and in Andrew John’s directly through Becket’s orders. In both cases, therefore, Honorius is being shown as Becket’s favourite and successor. Upon Honorius’s death in October 1187, Nigel Wireker even penned a few lines extolling the prior’s virtue and referring to him as another martyr for the cause.45 Andrew John’s vision was not the only one that the monks experienced regarding the Canterbury dispute. Another monk, this time unnamed (he is merely referred to as being a priest), had a vision of Baldwin attempting to cut off Becket’s head so that he could take it away. The monk warned Baldwin to desist, but the archbishop ignored him and tried to take the head. Thereupon, Baldwin’s mitre vanished and the monk, amazed, woke up and reported to his brethren what he had seen.46 In this vision, rather than Becket ordering the convent to resist, the monk saw what would happen to Baldwin if he followed through with his plan. By attempting to remove the head (Becket) from the rest of the body (Canterbury Cathedral), Baldwin would lose his mitre – the symbol of his office. In effect, Baldwin would lose both his right to be archbishop and God’s support. The use of the word amputare here is interesting. As well as meaning ‘to amputate’, the verb also means ‘to steal by cutting loose’. It is clear from this word that the monks believed that Baldwin’s attempt to remove Becket from Canterbury was tantamount to theft. Moreover, the head of Becket – Gervase, Chronica, I, 340–1. Matthew 26: 36–46. 43 MTB, I, 2–3. 44 Ibid., I, 145. 45 J. H. Mozley, ‘The Unprinted Poems of Nigel Wireker’, Speculum, 7, 1932, 402–3 (no.11): O preciose prior, o splendide martir Honori/ ad superos superi te rapuere chori./ Cum sociis prior alme tuis miserere/ ut tribuatur ei gratia summa Dei/. See also Vincent ‘William of Canterbury’, 385–6 for how Honorius’s travels abroad are likened to Becket’s exile. 46 Gervase, Chronica, I, 341–2. 41 42



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the seat of reason, and the very instrument of his martyrdom, injured in the head, with blood and brains scattered by the sword point of his attackers – was crucial to his survival after death, as both saint and miracle worker. This ‘corona’ of Becket, both bodily skull and spiritual high point, was crucial both in the flesh and bones of Becket’s relics, and in the newly built east end of Canterbury Cathedral. Here, posed dramatically like a head reclining on the shoulder of the choir and body of the cathedral nave, a series of chapels surrounded the ‘corona’ to which the martyr’s body was to be translated.47 Becket’s sanctity was also employed in another way by the monks. Relics were powerful items and the bestowal of a relic as a gift was a great honour for the recipient. Not surprisingly, the monks used relics of their beloved saint as a means of gaining support. In a letter to Frederick Barbarossa, the monks offered to send him relics in return for safe conduct through his lands.48 It is not exactly clear what relics were on offer, nor if they were ever sent. However, it is likely that they were more substantial than the ampullae of Becket water (theoretically infused with the martyr’s blood) that were available for any pilgrim to buy. In April 1190, the monastery of Saint-Bénigne at Dijon received four relics of Becket from a pair of Canterbury monks. These were a piece of leather from the saint’s bed, a piece of his monastic habit, a cloth stained with his blood and a cloth stained with the liquid in which his body was washed.49 Interestingly, these monks were travelling in the entourage of Archbishop Baldwin. William Azelin, one of the monks entrusted with these relics, had certainly been a supporter of Baldwin earlier in the Canterbury dispute.50 His role in 1190, suggests that either he was reconciled to the convent, or Richard’s imposed settlement had created a sufficient reconciliation for the archiepiscopal and monastic parties to travel together. The use of Becket’s habit as a secondary relic here is significant. It indicates that the monks were promoting the view of Becket as a monk of Canterbury, and therefore a monastic saint, through the exporting of relics directly related to monasticism, rather than just Becket the archbishop. It is likely that the relics given to Saint-Bénigne were like those on offer to Barbarossa. It is also probable that the German emperor was not the only ruler to be offered relics. It is likely that the monks gave something to the king of France, Philip Augustus. Philip supported the monks throughout the dispute and they probably offered Philip a token of their appreciation.51 The sheer number of late twelfth-century reliquaries, generally of Limoges work decorated with images of Becket and his martyrdom, many of them preserved in continental collections, stands as testimony to the stream of relics that must have flowed from Canterbury, the sole potential source for bodily remains of the saint.52 P. Binski, Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170–1300, New Haven, and London 2004, 11–12; M. Aurell, ‘Le Meurtre de Thomas Becket: Les Gestes d’un Martyr’, in Bischofsmord im Mittelalter, ed. N. Fryde and D. Reitz, Göttingen 2003, 187–210 at 204–10. 48 Ep. Cant., II, 10–11 (no. 11). 49 H. E. J. Cowdrey, ‘An Early Record at Dijon of the Export of Becket’s Relics’, Historical Research, 54, 1981, 251–3 at 253. 50 Ep. Cant., II, 311 (no. 326), 313 (no. 327). 51 The four extant letters to Philip thank him for his support and ask for his intercession in the dispute. Ibid., II, 10 (no.10), 86 (no. 104), 112–13 (no.141), 155–6 (no. 177). 52 S. Caudron, ‘Les chasses reliquaries de Thomas Becket émaillées à Limoges: Leur géographie historique’, Bulletin de la Société archéologique et historique du Limousin, 121, 1993, 55–82; R. Foreville, ‘La diffusion du culte de Thomas Becket dans la France de l’Ouest avant la fin du XIIe siècle’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 19, 1976, 347–69 at 360–5. The bishop of Poitiers, John Bellemains,

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The use of Becket in this respect by the monks of Canterbury supplies evidence of their appropriation of the saint and his miraculous powers. Through bestowing his relics, the convent claimed to be the rightful possessors of both the martyr and his cult. It was they who decided what happened with the saint’s remains. Just as importantly, combined with the second vision discussed above, we learn a great deal here of how the monks perceived themselves. When Baldwin attempted to move a piece of the martyr he lost his authority; when the monks did so they were promoting the greater glory of their house and their beloved saint. As well as appropriating Becket, the monks also laid claim to Becket’s friends. Many of them received letters from the monks seeking support in their conflict with Baldwin and Hubert. Some were powerful men. King Philip’s father, Louis VII, had supported Becket during his exile and the monks hoped his son would continue this tradition.53 Cardinal Gratian had acted as a papal commissioner during the Becket dispute, rebuking King Henry. After 1186, his support was sought by the monks.54 Other individuals were less prominent but could still lend prestige and a sense of righteousness to the monks’ cause. One such was Alexander Llewelyn, known as the Welshman. Alexander had been Becket’s cross-bearer, and a loyal follower throughout the martyr’s exile. In 1170, he had been sent to safety in France with Herbert of Bosham. The monks were sufficiently impressed with Alexander’s abilities and status to seek his support.55 They were perhaps less impressed by the support of another of Becket’s favourites, Herbert of Bosham. According to Gervase, Herbert maintained a ‘special love’ for Canterbury, offering the monks counsel in their time of need. This counsel, however, was not welcomed by the monks. During December 1187, things looked particularly grim for the convent, with news of the death of Pope Urban III, and the archbishop forbidding the monks from holding their customary courts. Under these conditions, Ralph of St Martin, a supporter of Baldwin, arrived at the convent and recommended that the monks throw themselves on the archbishop’s mercy. Herbert, who had apparently travelled to Christ Church from his comfortable exile at the Cistercian house of Ourscamp, counselled them likewise.56 Herbert’s significance to the convent is clear from the fact that Gervase devotes specific attention to his intervention. This appears to have been for two reasons. First, like Alexander Llewelyn, Herbert was one of Becket’s most loyal followers, and the prestige of such a man increased the prestige of the convent. Secondly, in this instance, Herbert wanted the monks to surrender. The failure of such a man to stand firm against the power of a tyrannical archbishop made the monks’ constancy and eventual success appear an even greater triumph. It was not just Becket’s supporters but also family members who supported the monks in their time of need. After Becket’s death, his sister, Roheise, moved to Canterbury with her two sons, John and Ralph. There she was granted a pension

certainly had relics by 1174 (ibid., 355). The presence of a collegiate church in Becket’s name at the Louvre (founded in 1180 by Robert de Dreux, brother of Louis VII) strengthens the likelihood that relics were sent to King Philip. A. Duggan, ‘The Cult of St Thomas Becket in the Thirteenth Century’, in St Thomas Cantilupe Bishop of Hereford: Essays in his Honour, ed. M. Jancey, Hereford 1982, 21–44 at 28. 53 Ep. Cant., II, 10 (no. 10), 86 (no. 104), 112–13 (no. 141), 155–6 (no. 177). 54 Barlow, Becket, 183, 187, 191–2, 197–8, 217; Ep. Cant., II, 45 (no. 56), 182–3 (no. 199), 375–6 (no. 419), 419 (no. 459), 419–20 (no. 460), 503 (no. 538). 55 Ibid., II, 32–3 (no. 38). 56 Ibid., II, 105–6 (no. 133), 112 (no. 140); Gervase, Chronica, I, 388–94.



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by Henry II.57 With the advocacy of Prior Alan, John was presented to the vicarage of St Mary Bothaw, London. Ralph appears to have been an early master of St Thomas’s Hospital at Eastbridge, and was a firm supporter of the monks.58 A papal mandate of 17 March 1188 ordered the prior of Faversham and Master Feramin, warden of the hospital of St James at Canterbury (and another former associate of Becket), to pronounce a sentence of excommunication upon all those who had committed violence against the convent. This list included many of the citizens and the local secular clergy.59 Upon hearing this mandate in April 1188, the citizens rioted. Supporters of the convent, including Ralph, were arrested and placed in the city gaol. Some felt that this was insufficient punishment and, during the night, unsuccessfully attempted to burn down the gaol with the prisoners inside.60 Meanwhile, virtually our only references to Ralph, Becket’s nephew, come from his support for the monks – a significant victory in the monastic campaign to be viewed as successors of Becket. Perhaps more important than his support for the monks was the fact that the citizens considered Ralph to be in league with the convent. Clearly Ralph’s views were well known amongst the citizens, who recognized that Becket himself, as well as his family, were intrinsically linked to the monks of Canterbury. It was not just the monks who appropriated Becket to their cause. Both Archbishop Baldwin and Hubert Walter attempted to do so, albeit with limited success. As archbishops of Canterbury, Baldwin and Hubert were arguably the true heirs of Becket. In general, Becket’s defence of the church was a defence of archiepiscopal rights and lands as well as the rights of the English Church, rather than a defence of the monastic community of Canterbury, with whom Becket’s relations had been strained beyond breaking point. Hubert Walter (and later Stephen Langton) adopted Becket’s martyrdom as an image incorporated within the archiepiscopal seal: virtually the first artistic commission that any incoming archbishop was required to command.61 Baldwin attempted to appropriate Becket by dedicating a new church in his honour. Although the plan for a new collegiate church originally appears to have been Becket’s, it was Baldwin who decided to dedicate it to his predecessor as well as its original saint, St Stephen. He did this because he considered it ‘exceedingly shameful (indignum nimis)’ that Becket did not have a church dedicated to him in England.62 Possibly he also wanted to complete a plan that the martyr had been unable to fulfil. Interestingly, Baldwin apparently forgot the existence of several other churches already dedicated to St Thomas, not least the Augustinian priory at Lesnes, near London, founded by Richard de Lucy in 1178. Nor was Lesnes the only one; the Premonstratensian abbey of Beauchief, Sheffield, was also dedicated to St Barlow, Becket, 262; J. C. Robertson, ‘On the Kindred of Archbishop Becket’, Archaeologia Cantania 10, 1876, 18–20; W. Urry, Canterbury Under the Angevin Kings, London 1967, 124, 182; W. Urry, Thomas Becket His Last Days, ed. P. Rowe, Stroud 1999, 162. 58 Urry, Canterbury, 199. 59 The monks helpfully published a list of names of those they called ‘the principalities and powers of the evil business’. They were Godfrey the baker, John the cook, William the watchman, Gilbert the clerk, Jun of Barton, and Thomas Croc. Ep. Cant., II, 202 (no. 219); Urry, Canterbury, 6, 110, 157, 159–60, 162–3, 167, 170, 173, 179, 183, 186. 60 Gervase, Chronica, I, 425–7; Ep. Cant., II, 206 (no. 224), 208–10 (no. 227). 61 BL, Harley Charter 75 A 14; The monks also added the scene of Becket’s martyrdom to their seal when it was redesigned in 1232, M. Späth, ‘Architectural Representation and Monastic Identity: The Medieval Seal Images of Christchurch, Canterbury’, in Image, Memory and Devotion: Liber Amicorum Paul Crossley, ed. Z. Opačić and A. Timmermann, Turnhout 2011, 255–63 at 257–60. 62 Ep. Cant., II, 8–9 (no. 8). 57

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Thomas, as was the slightly later priory at Woodspring, Somerset, founded in 1210 by William de Courtenay – grandson to Reginald fitz Urse (Becket’s murderer).63 The monks, who might have used Lesnes and its fellow memorials as ammunition against the archbishop’s plans, seem to have made no reference whatsoever to the other churches dedicated in Becket’s honour. Here we see what was perhaps a deliberate short-sightedness: a refusal to acknowledge that any location beyond Canterbury could claim to serve as a focus of Becket’s cult and commemoration. At Lesnes, as at Hackington, the monks may have feared that these new foundations would in some way lay claim to Becket’s relics, preserved in the cathedral crypt. This was never Baldwin’s intention. Although he disliked the opulent new east end of the cathedral, there is no evidence to suggest that Baldwin planned to remove Becket from Canterbury, just as he did not plan to alter the electoral body for future archbishops.64 Even so, for the paranoid, there were instances that could be cited in large number of churches being deprived of relics that they believed to be rightfully theirs, not only of the more ancient saints such as Nicholas at Myra/Bari or Mark at Alexandria/Venice, but in more recent times, of Dunstan (disputed between Canterbury and Glastonbury), Patrick (disputed between Glastonbury, Dublin and Downpatrick), or Birinus (disputed between Winchester and Dorchester).65 With Dunstan as a particular local concern, the monks of Canterbury may have been doubly determined to remain vigilant over the relics of St Thomas. It was harder for the archbishops than the monks to appropriate Becket as they did not have control of the martyr’s relics. The monks had the actual ownership both of the relics and the site of martyrdom. It was the monks who tended the shrine and recorded the miracles related to them by visiting pilgrims. Furthermore, it was the monks who distributed relics of the saint. It appears that they were cautious in allowing access to the relics. There is no mention in the sources of either Baldwin or Hubert Walter being allowed access to Becket’s remains, closely guarded in the monastic crypt. In December 1186, Baldwin confined the monks who opposed him to the convent and, again, more famously, in 1188, placed the entire community under house arrest. These activities, however, confined not just the monks but also their principal treasure of Becket’s relics. It is not clear if the archbishops sent relics as gifts to the curia. Stubbs, in his introduction to the Canterbury letters, states that in 1198, ‘Both parties now sent accredited messengers to Rome. Hubert in the simplicity of his heart, furnished his 63 Dugdale, Monasticon, VI, 456–7; A. W. Clapham, Lesnes Abbey in the Parish of Erith, Kent, London 1915, 1–37; A Monastic Community in Local Society: The Beauchief Abbey Cartulary, ed. D. Hey, L. Liddy and D. Luscombe, Cambridge 2011, 3; N. Vincent, ‘The Murderers of Thomas Becket’ in Bischofsmord im Mittelalter, ed. N. Fryde and D. Reitz, Göttingen 2003, 211–72 at 263. Churches dedicated to Becket were prevalent on the continent, especially in Normandy, which had a special claim as the homeland of the Becket family. R. Foreville, ‘Le culte de St Thomas Becket en Normandie’ in Thomas Becket: Actes du colloque internationale de Sédières, 19–24 Août 1973, ed. R. Foreville, Paris 1975, 135–52 at 137–45; R. Foreville, ‘Le culte de St Thomas Becket en France. Bilan de recherches’ in Thomas Becket: Actes du colloque internationale de Sédières, 19–24 Août 1973, ed. R. Foreville, Paris 1975, 163–88 at 174–82. 64 Gervase, Chronica, I, 324. 65 P. J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages, Princeton 1978, 107–26; A. Williams, ‘The Dangers of Invention: The Sack of Canterbury, 1011, and the “Theft” of Dunstan’s Relics’ in Cathedrals, Communities and Conflict in the Anglo-Norman World, ed. P. Dalton, C. Insley and L. J. Wilkinson, Woodbridge 2011, 27–39; M. T. Flanagan, ‘John de Courcy, the First Ulster Plantation and Irish Church Men’ in Britain and Ireland 900–1300: Insular Responses to Medieval European Change, ed. B. Smith, Cambridge 1999, 164, 154–78 at 175–6; N. Vincent, Peter Des Roches: An Alien in English Politics 1205–1238, Cambridge 1996, 244–7.



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with a load of the relics of SS. Albinus and Rufinus; not neglecting, however, to send a great treasure of ready money with them.’66 In a footnote to this, Stubbs states that Prior Honorius had previously taken some of these saints’ relics to Rome ‘to work upon the feelings of Pope Clement’.67 This, however, is a misreading. The sentence in the letter referred to is ‘When therefore, we had offered to the lord pope, through the prior and brothers, relics of the venerable martyrs Albinus and Rufinus (Cum itaque venerandas martyrum relliquias Albini et Rufini domino papae, per priorem et fratres porrexerimus)’.68 These two venerable martyrs, Albinus and Rufinus, were not in any sense saints. Rather they were the medieval personifications of silver (Albinus) and gold (Rufinus) employed for bribery. In the letter, Prior Honorius is not claiming to have carried holy relics to Rome, but bribes.69 There is, therefore, no evidence that the archbishops used relics as gifts in this dispute. However, there is also very little evidence of the archbishops’ actions. Of the 557 letters in the Lambeth manuscript, only 18 are from the archbishops. For their actions, we must rely on the obviously unfavourable reports of the monks and the odd snippets of information we can glean from the letters of other participants. What is perhaps most interesting here is the failure of the monks to gain access to this ‘other side’ of the story. In the 1160s, Becket and his agents had worked long and hard to obtain copies not just of their own self-justifying correspondence, but of the letters that passed between their enemies, most notably between Henry II, Frederick Barbarossa and other agents of the anti-pope.70 No such successful espionage seems to have been accomplished by the monks in the 1180s and 90s. The appropriation of Becket’s image was not unique. Royalty often appropriated saints. Henry III, for example, appropriated Edward the Confessor as his personal patron. In France, the Capetians went one step further. It was not just the cult which was appropriated but sanctity itself in the form of Louis IX both during life and death.71 Sometimes saints’ cults also shared many similarities. Thomas Becket and

Ep. Cant., II, xcix. Ibid., II, xcix n.1. 68 Ibid., II, 215 (no. 234). 69 Although there are saints named Albinus and Rufinus (such as St Albinus of Angers and St Rufinus of Assisi) none appear to be connected to Canterbury. It is also not clear why Stubbs states that Hubert took these relics at this juncture, for the letters concerning this part of the dispute make no mention of it. Gervase states merely that Hubert’s envoys took with them ‘no mean quantity of gifts’ (Gervase, Chronica, I, 550). 70 For example, on one occasion Becket asked Master Gratian to ensure the pope’s letters to the king were recorded for posterity in the papal registers. A. Duggan, ‘Thomas Becket’s Italian Network’ in Pope, Church and City: Essays in Honour of Brenda M. Bolton, ed. F. Andrews, C. Egger and C. M. Rousseau, Leiden 2004, 177–201 at 180. It was these friendship networks established by Becket during his exile and members of his household which allowed the collection of so many letters. A. Duggan, ‘John of Salisbury and Thomas Becket’ in The World of John of Salisbury, Studies in Church History 3, ed. M. Wilks, Oxford 1984, 427–38 at 428–9; J. Haseldine, ‘Thomas Becket: Martyr, Saint – and Friend?’ in Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-Harting, ed. R. Gameson and H. Leyser, Oxford 2001, 305–17. 71 For the appropriation of Becket by royalty see T. K. Keefe, ‘Shrine Time: King Henry II’s Visits to Thomas Becket’s Tomb’ HSJ, 11, 2003, 115–22; C. Bowie, ‘Matilda, Duchess of Saxony (1168–89) and the Cult of Thomas Becket: A Legacy of Appropriation’ in The Cult of St Thomas Becket in the Plantagenet World, c.1170-c.1220, ed. P. Webster and M.-P. Gelin, Woodbridge 2016, 113–32; J. M. Cerda, ‘Leonor Plantagenet and the Cult of Thomas Becket in Castile’ in The Cult of St Thomas Becket in the Plantagenet World, c.1170-c.1220, ed. P. Webster and M.-P. Gelin, Woodbridge 2016, 133–46. For Henry III, D. A. Carpenter, ‘King Henry III and Edward the Confessor: The Origins of the Cult’, EHR, 122, 2007, 865–91. For Louis IX, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, The Making of Saint Louis: Kingship, Sanctity, and Crusade in the Later Middle Ages, Ithaca 2008. 66 67

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Francis of Assisi had many things in common. Both came from mercantile backgrounds. They were also both canonized very quickly after their deaths.72 Numerous lives and miracle collections were written about each saint. Their creation, however, were for different reasons. For Becket, the collections were composed to support his canonization and each author had their own reasons for writing them. The first life of St Francis, on the other hand, was not written until after his canonization. The author, Thomas of Celano, had been commissioned to write it by Pope Gregory IX with the intention of providing readings for the celebration of Francis’s feast day.73 A common theme in the written lives of both saints is the portrayal of them as being Christ-like. Becket, like Christ, was martyred. Both had foreseen their deaths and both deaths were violent. Francis did not die violently; he did however bear the stigmata. Their sanctity was also not fully discovered until after death. The monks did not consider Becket to be a saint until, preparing his body for burial, they discovered his monastic undergarments. St Francis, likewise, kept his stigmata secret and it was not until his body was being prepared for burial that it became known.74 There is one further similarity which somewhat justifies the Canterbury monks’ opposition to Baldwin’s plans. Both saints had churches built for them at the centre of their cults. For Becket, this was a rebuilding of the eastern end of Canterbury cathedral. For Francis, it was the creation of a magnificent double-tiered basilica in Assisi. Importantly, this basilica is not the cathedral of Assisi. The cathedral of San Rufino is an impressive structure, the rebuilding of which was completed in the early thirteenth century, but, as Rosalind Brooke says, it ‘is not comparable to the Basilica: the site is less dramatic, the building smaller, the design less original’.75 Here then is the proof that the monks’ fears were perhaps justified. The new church outshone the older cathedral. The image of Thomas Becket was a powerful weapon for anyone who could harness and wield it. Both sides in the Canterbury dispute attempted to do so, but only the monks succeeded. Their success is not surprising. They were in a stronger position when it came to Becket, even despite the martyr’s dislike of them in life. It was the monks who cared for the relics and the shrine of the blessed martyr; they wrote many of the lives and the miracle collections as well as experiencing visions of him. More importantly, they were in the midst of creating an opulent memorial to his life and sacrifice for them (the embodiment of the English church). The rebuilding of the cathedral was accomplished with their resources, on their property, and in all senses literally around them as they prayed, ate, and slept. By contrast, the archbishops were effectively excluded from all of this by the convent. Becket was monastic property, not the archbishop’s. The monks did not perhaps consider it controversial for the archbishops to portray themselves as the heirs of Becket on their seals. Controversy only came when the archbishops attempted to create something far grander and longer lasting than any mere seal.

Becket died on 29 December 1170, and was canonized 21 February 1173. Francis died 3 October 1226, canonized 16 July 1228. 73 R. B. Brooke, The Image of St Francis: Responses to Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century, New York 2006, 39. 74 Ibid., 34–6, 47. 75 Ibid., 74. 72

LA BATAILLE DE BOUVINES RECONSIDERÉE Dominique Barthélemy The Battle of Bouvines is known in detail from the narratives of William le Breton but his reports are less objective than modern historians, let alone those in military studies, have generally thought them to be. William’s accounts are infused with Capetian propaganda in the way they put King Philip Augustus at the centre of the battle. Here, constructive criticism is offered of that line of argument relying in particular on the report by the so-called Anonymous of Béthune. It is suggested that the scale of the battle should be reduced and a discussion of what was at stake and what the battle’s impact was is set out along similar lines as has been done for other battles in the context of warfare and feudal relations. Bouvines appears at the juncture of two types of operations. A true chivalric battle engaged the right flank of the French and Count Ferran’s knights with its codes and scenes similar to those found in the Anglo-Norman world of Orderic Vitalis, such as the use of a knife, and not arrows, with which to kill horses, as in the games of the ‘poignées’. Further to the left, it was essential for the French to disperse the footsoldiers, who protected the mounted knights, and whose flight left the calvalry exposed. It is uncertain whether organised mercenaries took part in the battle of Bouvines. The defection by the duke of Louvain was an important reason for the defeat of Emperor Otto and the ‘men from Brabant’ who offered resistance to the last man standing – for which they were praised by many French commentators – and who were probably men who had come with the emperor. Orderic Vital n’a pas relaté la bataille de Bouvines. Pareil oubli s’explique vraisemblablement par le fait qu’il est mort près de soixante-dix ans auparavant. Mais c’est bien regrettable car du coup nous ignorons s’il aurait été frappé, comme à Brémule,1 par le petit nombre de morts et s’il aurait laissé entrevoir là une des ces batailles partielles dont l’histoire de la conflictualité féodale est émaillée, et qui ne sont que des fractures exceptionnelles, vite réduites, de la société chevaleresque et chrétienne. Il me semble toutefois, au terme d’un long et minutieux examen du dossier de Bouvines, dont je ne me dissimule pourtant pas les imperfections et les lacunes, avoir de bonnes raisons de penser qu’il aurait pu évoquer ou narrer cette bataille, si Dieu avait miraculeusement prolongé sa vie en récompense de l’excellence de son Histoire ecclésiastique, d’une manière moins dramatique que ne l’ont fait les historiens modernes. Jan Frans Verbruggen, en proposant le nombre de 169 morts nobles parmi les vaincus, a imposé l’idée d’un contraste tranché avec Brémule où il n’y en eut que trois, ce qui a poussé Matthew Strickland, admirable historien de la guerre et de la chevalerie dans le monde anglo-normand, à voir Bouvines comme Voir en dernier lieu l’étude de Matthew Strickland, ‘Henry I and the Battle of Brémule, 1119’, dans Normandy and its Neighbours, 950–1250. Essays for David Bates, éd. David Crouch and Kathleen Thompson, Turnhout 2011, 77–116. 1

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une bataille beaucoup plus intense et meurtrière que les autres, et à souligner de ce fait, à exagérer peut-être, la fragilité des codes chevaleresques du sparing enemies.2 Expert en military studies, John France propose une reconstitution de Bouvines3 qui me paraît beaucoup plus pertinente que tout ce qu’on avait fait avant lui, en remaniant judicieusement les vues de Verbruggen sans s’en éloigner trop,4 mais n’est-il pas encore trop assujetti au paradigme de la grande bataille à la manière moderne ? Ce qui fait à mon sens l’exceptionnalité de Bouvines, c’est la vigueur immédiate de la propagande capétienne, dont se fait l’écho le narrateur le plus développé : Guillaume le Breton, clerc de l’entourage royal. En tant que ‘témoin oculaire’, il est a priori soupçonnable d’avoir fabriqué dans ses Gesta en prose latine5 un Bouvines de son cru, comme le feront après lui tous les autres narrateurs, comme lui-même le fera à sa manière en biaisant les choses dans les vers latins de sa Philippide.6 En extrapolant à partir de lui, les livres modernes ont souvent proposé un schéma disposant deux armées face à face, avec des ‘ailes’ et un « centre » où se trouvaient le roi Philippe Auguste et l’empereur Otton de Brunswick, dans une bataille totale, selon le ‘modèle occidental de la guerre’, dans laquelle tous les combattants se seraient engagés sans réserve, tenus par une discipline militaire et commandés en fonction d’un plan d’ensemble. On croit aussi, dans les livres modernes, qu’en gagnant cette bataille le roi de France a gagné la guerre et consolidé ses conquêtes de 1204 et 1205 sur Jean Sans Terre et son grignotage du comté de Flandre, alors qu’en perdant à Bouvines, il aurait tout perdu : ses accroissements depuis 1180, son domaine patrimonial, la vie même. Les noirs desseins de la coalition n’ont-ils pas été révélés après coup par des prisonniers, comme le précise Guillaume le Breton dans les Gesta ?7 Si tel était bien le cas, alors Bouvines aurait marqué, par une brutale brutalisation, la fin, ou du moins le premier déclin des prudences, des codes, des atermoiements et des mitigations de la guerre féodale et chevaleresque, tels que les connaît et les décrit très bien Matthew Strickland. Ne vaut-il pas la peine, tout de même, d’y regarder de plus près ? Je ne suis pas le premier à avoir (dans un livre très récent) dédramatisé la bataille de Bouvines. Trois auteurs illustres, de Voltaire8 à Georges Duby9 en passant par Michelet,10 ont douté Matthew Strickland, War and Chivalry. The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066–1217, Cambridge 1996, 165, 334, où il tient Bouvines pour une bataille plus représentative des réalités habituelles que Brémule avec ses trois morts nobles. Dès lors, si Bouvines devait se rapprocher de Brémule par son bilan peu meurtrier, le décalage entre la norme chevaleresque et les réalités du terrain ne serait pas si grand. 3 J. France, ‘The Battle of Bouvines 27 July 1214’, dans The Medieval Way of War. Studies in Medieval Military History in Honor of Bernard S. Bachrach, éd. Gregory J. Halford, Farnham 2015, 251–71. Je remercie très vivement John France de m’avoir communiqué son article. 4 J. F. Verbruggen, The Art of Warfare in Western Europe during the Middle Ages from the Eighth Century to 1340, trad. S. Willard et R. W. Southern, Woodbridge 1977, 220–37. Le chiffrage des osts serait de 1300 ou 1500 chevaliers avec 7500 piétons pour ‘les impériaux’, 1200 chevaliers et 4000 à 5000 piétons pour les Français (226–8). Le problème est que nous ne savons pas du tout quelle proportion de ces effectifs a été effectivement engagée dans la bataille de Bouvines. 5 Guillaume le Breton, Gesta Philippi Augusti (Histoire de Philippe Auguste), Chronique, 178–203, dans Œuvres de Rigord et de Guillaume le Breton, éd. Henri-François Delaborde, 2 vols, Paris 1882–5, I, 260–97. 6 Guillaume le Breton, Philippide, du chant X, v. 378, au chant XII, v. 293, dans Œuvres de Rigord et de Guillaume le Breton, éd. Delaborde, II, 296–359. 7 Guillaume le Breton, Gesta, 194, 201, 202. 8 Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations et sur les principaux faits de l’histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à Louis XIII, c. 51, 2 vols, (Genève 1756) Paris 1990, I, 535–7. 9 Georges Duby, Le dimanche de Bouvines, Paris 1973. 10 Jules Michelet, Histoire de France, 18 vols, IV, 7 (1833), rééd. sous le titre Le Moyen Age, Paris 1981, 355. 2



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de son ampleur ou signalé qu’on la connaissait assez mal, mais peut-être n’ont-ils pas assez poussé l’examen des dossiers ni assez comparé la campagne de 1214 à celles des périodes et régions avoisinantes. Nous n’avons, de la bataille de Bouvines, que des récits incomplets et, à des degrés divers, partiaux. Celui des Gesta ne fait pas exception. Bien entendu, ce que nous pouvons apercevoir des biaisements du récit de bataille, souvent en fonction d’enjeux politiques et sociaux, fait partie intégrante de l’histoire. Cela prend dans mon livre de 2018 beaucoup plus de place que l’examen des faits.11 C’est cependant du déroulement même de la bataille que je voudrais traiter ici, sans prétendre aboutir en tout point à des conclusions indiscutables. Pour une critique des récits Les mentions de Bouvines sont en nombre au XIIIe siècle, tant en France qu’en Angleterre et dans l’empire, mais toutes ne sont pas développées en des narrations véritables (avec des péripéties) et la plupart de ces narrations sont brèves, inspirées par d’autres, très suspectes d’être en grande partie des affabulations. Il est bien difficile de voir davantage que cela, en Angleterre et en Allemagne, deux patries de grands vaincus (Otton de Brunswick et, indirectement mais indéniablement, Jean Sans Terre) qui se renvoient souvent de l’une à l’autre, à travers eux, la responsabilité de l’échec, ou encore en Italie, où Bouvines plaît aux guelfes sans trop déplaire aux gibelins, puisque c’est la défaite d’un empereur combattu par l’aïeul de Charles d’Anjou, quoique ennemi des Hohenstaufen, et même en France ou en Lorraine chaque fois qu’il est question du conseil préliminaire entre Philippe Auguste et ses fidèles barons.12 Et ce n’est pas seulement une question d’éloignement ou de délai : il faut prendre garde, en effet, à la propagande capétienne immédiate qui imprègne les récits français d’obédience capétienne et d’inspiration ecclésiastique, y compris ceux de Guillaume le Breton. Le thème dominant est à l’attestation par Dieu de la légitimité, et même de l’élection toute spéciale, du roi capétien rescapé avec son ost d’un péril majeur : un roi à terre, un ost en grande infériorité numérique ont été sauvés miraculeusement. Vient en contrepoint le motif, d’allure carnavalesque, de la punition expressive et plaisante des vassaux rebelles, Ferran de Flandre et Renaud de Boulogne, ainsi que d’autres coalisés qui ont été faits prisonniers à Bouvines et détenus ensuite dans les cités et les châteaux très précisément dont ils avaient pensé devenir seigneurs, en hommes qui auraient vendu la peau de l’ours lors d’un partage prématuré.13 Si Guillaume le Breton reste un peu sotto voce pour le thème dominant, il est en revanche le principal informateur sur le partage prématuré. Ajoutons qu’il n’est pas insensible aux petits récits flatteurs pour certains chevaliers  : ceux qu’il apprécie le plus ou qui ont le plus besoin d’exploits. Voyez tout ce que fait, sous sa plume, un Gaucher de Saint-Pol à la seule force de son bras ! On veut bien que c’ait été là un courageux et énergique guerrier, comme Pierre Tristan Guillaume des Barres ou Gérard la Truie, mais tout est-il exact dans les hauts faits que leur prête le chapelain Guillaume ? S’il était question de Brémule, nous aurions la mise en garde d’Orderic Vital pour nous méfier davantage !14 Voir mon étude sur La bataille de Bouvines (1214). Histoire et légendes, Paris 2018, dans laquelle on trouvera de plus amples développements sur tous les points abordés ici. 12 Tout cela fait l’objet de la deuxième partie de mon étude sur La bataille de Bouvines. 13 Guillaume le Breton, Gesta, 201, qui met ce motif en corrélation avec celui de l’oracle ambigu du démon de la comtesse Thérèse/Mathide (‘reine de Portugal’) concernant son neveu Ferran (202). 14 Le jour même, ont commencé à courir des mensonges et des impostures, Orderic, VI, 242.

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Mais ce qui a un peu endormi la méfiance de la postérité française, ou enflammé son imagination épique, c’est l’autre récit de Guillaume le Breton, sa Philippide. La bataille de Bouvines y est donnée en termes généraux comme une lutte à mort entre les peuples francs et saxons, français et allemands pour les lecteurs modernes : empereur et roi, comtes et barons s’y ruent à l’assaut sans la prudence qui transparaissait encore chez certains d’entre eux dans les Gesta, et sans les états d’âme que pourrait leur inspirer un massacre entre Chrétiens, en une période où la croisade devrait les unir tous, ou un régicide pour les rebelles. Une atmosphère de bataille grande et terrible peut aussi envelopper le lecteur de la chronique rimée du Tournaisien Philippe Mousket, tant sa narration de Bouvines est bruissante de cris de guerre  ; à quoi s’ajoute chez lui une apologie de l’oriflamme et une mention des morts enterrés à Cysoing qui manque ailleurs.15 Les historiens du XIXe siècle, dans leur critique des sources, ont formellement décrié la ‘licence poétique’ de la Philippide, son emphase, et ils ont préféré le témoignage des Gesta, en le tenant pour brut et sans apprêts. Mais leur préférence a renforcé ce ‘témoignage’ en lui épargnant toute mise en cause, et conservé le paradigme de la grande bataille entre des armées dont des sortes d’états-majors auraient fait le plan. Marquée dans le récit national français par l’intervention des communes, en faveur de la patrie en danger comme en 1793, la bataille de Bouvines devait avoir mis en branle des masses combattantes. Il a fallu attendre l’école méthodique pour voir l’évaluation du nombre des combattants passer sous la barre des 10 000 hommes de chaque côté, et poindre le soupçon qu’il avait dû n’y avoir que des combats sporadiques et sans ordre militaire d’ensemble. La découverte et la publication de nouvelles sources, spécialement de l’Histoire écrite par l’Anonyme de Béthune,16 de celle rédigée sur Guillaume le Maréchal17 et d’un fragment de celle dont le chevalier Michel de Harnes est probablement l’auteur,18 ont tendu à diminuer la part des piétons et offert des matériaux à la fabrication de Bouvines plus chevaleresques.19 Mais les lacunes et partialités de ces sources, la spécificité du point de vue de chacune d’elles ont été longtemps mal prises en compte : le public chevaleresque de ces trois Histoires se souciait-il tant que cela des piétons, ne préférait-il pas en entendre le moins parler possible, une fois décerné en passant un éloge à tel ou tel contingent spécifique, soissonnais ou brabançon ? La pluralité de nos sources et certaines divergences entre elles, et plus encore le fait qu’aucune n’apparaît comme complète et objective, ont pourtant de quoi nous faire douter, désormais, de la possibilité même d’une reconstruction, d’une vue rétrospective de Bouvines (ou d’autres batailles médiévales célèbres). Guillaume le Breton n’en a pas tout vu, et s’il témoigne de quelque chose, c’est d’une partie de ce qui s’en est dit le jour même ou dans les jours d’après, dans le camp des vainqueurs. Philippe Mousket, Chronique rimée, vers 21517–22226, dans Chronique de Philippe Mouskes, éd. Baron de Reiffenberg, 2 vols, Bruxelles 1838, II, 349–76 (récit de Bouvines) ; également MGH SS XXVI, 755–64. 16 Anonyme de Béthune, Chronique française des rois de France, éd. Léopold Delisle, RHF, XXIV, 766–70. 17 History of William Marshal, vers 14733–14820, éd. Anthony Holden et David Crouch, trad. Stuart Gregory, 3 vols, Londres 2004, II, 238–42. 18 Fragment de l’Histoire de Philippe Auguste, Roy de France, tiré d’un Cahier en parchemin de la Bibliothèque de l’église collégiale de Saint-Quentin, éd. Charles Petit-Dutaillis, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, 87, 1926, 110–23. 19 On a dès lors parfois sous-estimé, à l’exact inverse du XIXe siècle français, le rôle des communes urbaines, comme le signale Steven Isaac, ‘The Role of Towns in the Battle of Bouvines (1214)’, Journal of Military History 79, 2015, 317–44. 15



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Il est vrai qu’il procure de précieux éléments, et que les autres récits proches le confirment souvent, mais il n’a pas forcément raison contre eux, en cas de divergence : ainsi Michel de Harnes confirme-t-il que Philippe Auguste est tombé de cheval, mais dans son Histoire (et chez Philippe Mousket qui s’en inspire) il n’ a pas été désarçonné et assailli par des piétons ennemis assoiffés de son sang : c’est seulement au milieu des siens, lors d’une bousculade, qu’il est tombé,20 et l’Anonyme de Béthune, quoique moins précis, paraît bien l’entendre ainsi, lui aussi.21 Sans doute le roi aurait-il pu, même ainsi, se faire très mal, mais son courage et la faveur de Dieu, si l’on adopte cette version mitigée d’un épisode phare, en deviennent moins éclatants. Encore la confirmation d’une péripétie marquante par d’autres sources proches de l’événement n’est-elle pas en soi une authentification absolue. Ainsi l’altercation entre Renaud de Boulogne et Hugues de Boves, au conseil préalable des coalisés, est-elle relatée d’une manière à peu près comparable par toutes les sources qui en font état : Renaud préconisait la prudence, Hugues l’a accusé de dire cela par traîtrise, et Renaud a annoncé, en réponse, qu’il se battrait plus bravement que son accusateur. Cet épisode n’en conserve pas moins tous les traits d’une légende chevaleresque.22 L’altercation ne s’est donc pas nécessairement produite, mais dès lors que nous faisons le partage entre les faits certains et les faits douteux, il n’en est pas moins très important pour nous de savoir qu’une telle rumeur a couru, portée par des précédents et par la réputation chevaleresque énorme préalablement acquise par Renaud. Le halo de légendes dans lequel baigne la ‘mémoire’ même immédiate d’une bataille n’appartient pas moins à l’histoire que son déroulement, et il ne relève pas de la seule ‘histoire des mentalités’, tant il comporte d’enjeux politiques et sociaux. Le récit légendaire qui veut un Renaud courageux et franc a visé concrètement (et en vain) à atténuer la gravité de son cas. Celui qui représente un Philippe Auguste attaqué furieusement par des piétons teutons, jeté à terre en grand péril, rendu crédible tant la baraka du roi très chrétien et la fureur teutonne étaient déjà ancrées dans les esprits, ne peut qu’accroître le prestige capétien. L’un et l’autre de ces récits légendaires sont si bien explicables par les enjeux immédiats, que de les avoir rapporté n’affaiblit pas forcément le témoignage de Guillaume le Breton. Pour un peu je dirais que c’est l’inverse : voilà des affabulations qui sont bien en situation ! Et toutes les données fournies par le même Guillaume le Breton sur le déroulement factuel de la bataille n’en sont pas rendues suspectes pour autant : il suffit de garder présent à nos esprits le fait que son témoignage n’est ni complet, ni innocent, et de s’aviser que les historiens modernes ont parfois mis trop du leur entre les lignes de son texte des Gesta. Je ne suis pas convaincu par la méthode de Jan Frans Verbruggen pour calculer que la bataille de Bouvines a fait 129 morts parmi les chevaliers.23 En effet, il prend à la lettre le chiffre de 300 chevaliers adverses pris ou tués qui figure sur

‘Fragment’, 4, 114 : Pierre Tristan l’aide à remonter à cheval, mais n’a pas à le protéger des coups d’ennemis. Philippe Mousket, Chronique rimée, vers 21161–21170, sans mention de Pierre Tristan, la chute est expressément au milieu de ses propres troupes, et peu de combattants s’en aperçoivent. 21 RHF XXIV, 769. 22 Voir mon étude sur La bataille de Bouvines… IIe partie, chapitre 1, et Xavier Hélary, ‘Vous êtes du poil du loup ! Genèse du récit de défaite, de Mansourah (8 février 1250) à Courtrai (11 juillet 1302)’, dans Guerre et société au moyen âge, Byzance-Occident (VIIIè–XIIIè siècle), éd. Dominique Barthélemy et Jean-Claude Cheynet, Paris 2010, 185–200. 23 Verbruggen, The Art of Warfare, 236. 20

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l’inscription d’Arras,24 et il en soustrait les 131 captifs répertoriés dans les archives de Philippe Auguste, pour trouver 169 tués. Toutefois ce calcul fait problème : le chiffre de 300 n’est qu’une approximation, qu’on trouve aussi dans le poème de Vic, où il s’applique à l’ensemble des vaincus, sans dire ‘pris ou tués’, ce qui laisse place à tous ceux qui ont fui.25 Or Guillaume le Breton, comme la Relation de Marchiennes, fait état avant tout d’une débandade des adversaires nobles du roi de 26 France. L’Anonyme de Béthune ne cite aucun mort noble, Guillaume le Breton en mentionne deux, Eustache de Machelen parmi les Flamands, Étienne de Longchamp parmi les tenants de Philippe Auguste, en donnant le sentiment que ce sont des cas à part, puisqu’Eustache avait poussé des cris de mort contre les Français, qui ont poussé ces derniers à transgresser la norme à ses dépens, tandis qu’Étienne a été victime d’un coup de couteau remarquablement adroit.27 Guillaume le Breton peut dès lors esquisser dans la Philippide une comparaison pleine de pertinence entre les héros de l’antiquité, qui mouraient beaucoup en bataille, alors que les modernes, remarquablement cuirassés, risquent beaucoup moins la mort.28 Aucune source ne donne, de fait, l’impression qu’il y a beaucoup de funérailles à faire après la bataille ; la seule mention se trouve dans la chronique de Philippe Mousket29 . En revanche, à lire Jan Frans Verbruggen, la bataille de Bouvines paraît un bain de sang comparée à celle de Brémule. Comme si avaient cessé de jouer, le dimanche 27 juillet 1214 les trois facteurs qui, le mercredi 23 août 1119, avaient tendu à épargner la société chevaleresque : un puissant blindage des armures, un lien de sociabilité entre adversaires, et un zeste de sentiment chrétien.30 Pourtant Guillaume le Breton lui-même atteste la force des deux premiers facteurs, et il ne montre aucune exaltation de guerre sainte contre les ennemis de l’Église, qui anéantirait le scrupule chrétien (troisième facteur).31 Corrélativement, tout en admettant que la bataille de Bouvines s’est jouée essentiellement à ‘l’aile droite’ française, sur l’échec d’une attaque brusquée de la cavalerie flamande et hainuyère, je suis très gêné par l’ampleur et l’intensité qu’il persiste à mettre au centre, où manœuvreraient des masses. Rien ne me paraît s’opposer à ce que Bouvines ait été une bataille au tempo assez mesuré, dans laquelle les osts, et surtout celui de la coalition, ne se sont que partiellement engagés, à l’instar de bien d ‘autres dans les guerres féodales du temps. Et après cela, imitant l’ exemple de la célébration, par Henri Beau Clerc, de sa victoire de Brémule sur Louis VI,32 surenchérissant même probablement, Philippe Auguste a orchestré une importante opération de propagande. Citée infra, note 36. ‘Ein unbekanntes Gedicht zur Schlacht von Bouvines’, éd. Rudolf Hiestand, ‘Von Bouvines nach Segni. Zwei Texte zur Geschichte Philipps II. Augustus’, Francia 22, 1995, 62–3. 26 MGH SS XXVI, 390–1. 27 Guillaume le Breton, Gesta, 192 et 187. Le ‘Fragment de Saint-Quentin’, cité note 18, 9, 117–18, cite deux chevaliers morts du côté du roi (Étienne de Longchamp et Thomas de Montgobert), un seul du côté du comte de Flandre (Robert de Dici), omettant donc Eustache de Machelen, et un sergent français, Pierre Harpin. 28 Guillaume le Breton, Philippide, chant XI, vers 121–32. 29 Philippe Mousket, Chronique rimée, vers 22221–22222, 376 : les morts sont enterrés au monastère de Cysoing, tout proche de Bouvines. 30 Orderic, VI, 240. 31 La bataille est justifiée, côté français, dans un discours du roi sur la défense des libertés ecclésiastiques bafouées par l’empereur Otton (Gesta, 184) et dans la Philippide l’infraction du dimanche, jour du Seigneur, est excusée un instant par l’idée de guerre du Seigneur, défensive (chant X, vers 824–38), mais cela n’apparaît pas comme un facteur déterminant pour rendre les combattants, sur le terrain, plus durs. 32 Le retour du vainqueur et son entrée à Rouen dans la joie étaient signalés par The Warenne (Hyde) Chronicle, éd. Elisabeth M. C. Van Houts et Rosalind C. Love, Oxford 2013, 78. 24 25



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Rien ne dit qu’en cas de défaite il aurait tout perdu, et que les destinées du royaume de France en auraient été changées. Otton vainqueur aurait cru sans doute en avoir assez fait en retour des subventions de son oncle Jean Sans Terre, et il se serait probablement empressé de revenir en vainqueur à Cologne en exhibant quelques prisonniers français de marque. Quant aux comtes Ferran de Flandre et Renaud de Boulogne, quand bien même ils auraient pu, victorieux, chevaucher sur le domaine royal en pillards dans les jours d’août 1214, occuper des châteaux, faire leur jonction avec d’autres ennemis du roi, n’auraient dû tourner bride assez vite, comme font toujours en pareil cas, en ce temps, les osts d’invasion ? Le roi Philippe aurait pu lancer, comme Baudouin V de Hainaut en 1184, que de toute manière ses ennemis ne pouvaient pas emporter sa terre avec eux !33 Tout au plus auraient-ils retiré de la campagne des gains frontaliers (Aire et Saint-Omer, au mieux Arras et Tournai pour Ferran), en récupération sur les plus récents, les plus criants empiètements de Philippe Auguste. Du moment qu’il n’avait pas affaire à un prétendant rival qui lui contestait sa royauté même, ce dernier ne pouvait pas tout perdre en un jour ! Pouvait-il même perdre tant que cela ? Le réexamen par les historiens récents des défaites françaises de la guerre de cent ans, encore très féodale par certains côtés, donnerait à penser là-dessus. À Philippe Auguste – revenons à l’histoire authentique – la victoire de Bouvines très célébrée n’a d’ailleurs pas valu d’avantage si radical qu’on le dit dans les livres modernes. Si elle a été le dernier acte de la séquence des guerres du règne, c’est que juste après ont joué d’autres facteurs contre ses grands adversaires, qu’elle aura tout au plus aidé à jouer – car enfin, Jean était impopulaire en Angleterre et Otton contesté en Allemagne dès avant 1214. Bouvines n’a d’autre part permis à Philippe Auguste d’obtenir aucune assurance nouvelle sur ses conquêtes de 1204 et 1205 : Henri III ne les donnera à saint Louis qu’en 1259, non sans avoir tout de même fait peser une certaine menace en 1229 et 1242.34 Des guerres féodales, dont nous avons désormais repérer les codes et les mitigations, souvent masquées par des transfigurations, voire par des inventions hardies ; et nous pouvons et devons en rabattre sur le danger couru par ses protagonistes – mais tout autant sur la possibilité pour eux de gagner gros. La surestimation moderne des enjeux de la bataille a naturellement rendu difficile de revenir sur la surestimation de l’ampleur et de l’intensité de la « bataille » elle-même.35 Pour une reconstitution des combats L’inscription d’Arras et les Annales de Saint-Nicaise de Reims font un rapprochement, aux fins de célébration, entre Bouvines et la grande victoire remportée en 978 par un autre roi de France sur un autre Otton venu d’Allemagne.36 Leur source semble être l’Historia Francorum senonensis, qui a transfiguré en grande victoire un simple coup de main réussi sur l’arrière-garde de l’ost impérial, tandis que cet ost faisait retraite sans avoir été vaincu en bataille, et à l’occasion du passage de Gislebert de Mons, Chronique, c. 114, éd. Léon Vanderkindere, Bruxelles 1904, 174. David Carpenter, ‘The Meetings of Kings Henry III and Louis IX’, Thirteenth Century England X : Proceedings of the Durham Conference, 2003, Woodbridge 2005, 1–30. 35 En dernier lieu, John W. Baldwin et William Simons, ‘Bouvines, un tournant européen (1214–1314)’, Revue historique 671, 2014, 499–506. 36 Inscription d’une porte d’Arras, dans Histoire Littéraire de France, 45 vols, Paris 1733–2016 [hereafter HLF] XXIII, 1856, 433–6, à compléter par les explications de Léopold Delisle, qui adopte la restitution de Guesnon (1893), dans HLF XXXII, 1898, 230–1. Annales de Saint-Nicaise, MGH SS XIII, 85. 33 34

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l’Aisne.37 Or il se trouve qu’à Bouvines en 1214 c’est un peu l’inverse qui s’est produit : un coup de main manqué sur l’arrière-garde d’un ost royal français, à l’occasion du passage de la Marcq, tourne en petite bataille dont l’issue est favorable à la défense (française) et qu’on peut ensuite transfigurer. La célébration française de Bouvines ne dramatise-t-elle pas la résistance victorieuse à un type d’attaque assez classique ? Si la coalition avait une chance de gagner à Bouvines, c’était d’emblée par sa cavalerie, comme Richard Cœur de Lion à Courcelles en 1198. Là-dessus je suivrai assez volontiers John France. Mais il me semble même que le dessein initial de la coalition pouvait bien être de ne se battre qu’à cet endroit et contre la seule arrièregarde des Français du roi.38 Elle a commencé par bousculer celle-ci en effet, mettant en fuite les arbalétriers du roi de France.39 Mais elle a été surprise de voir arriver des renforts rapides, et même de trouver le roi devant elle, alors qu’elle pensait qu’il avait déjà franchi la rivière avec le gros de son ost, et tel est surpris qui croyait surprendre ! Elle escomptait une bataille partielle, comme Cassel (1071), Brémule (1119) ou Courcelles (1198)40 et la voilà obligée de livrer une bataille plus ample que prévu (mais pas nécessairement ‘totale’ pour autant). Du coup ses éléments avancés sont plus isolés et moins en ordre que les échelles françaises qui lui font face. Le texte de l’Anonyme de Béthune me paraît être d’une assez claire concision sur tout cela, tandis que Guillaume le Breton est moins panoramique et reste probablement un peu trop focalisé sur Frère Guérin, son patron, l’évêque élu de Senlis. De Bouvines, l’Anonyme de Béthune donne une interprétation typiquement chevaleresque. L’important pour lui est de pouvoir assurer que ‘les prud’hommes qui étaient là témoignèrent qu’ils n’avaient jamais vu d’aussi bon tornoiement, comme le fut pour une part (une piece) cette bataille’,41 et il ne parle plus dès lors que des ‘hauts hommes’ des deux camps. Lorsque l’avantage français se dessine, alors tout spectateur se doit de reconnaître en eux de nobles (gentils) barons. On sent aussi qu’il y a un prix du meilleur à décerner, et pour l’Anonyme de Béthune, il revient sans conteste à Mathieu de Montmorency. Guillaume le Breton cite ce dernier, lui aussi, mais fugitivement :42 il le met beaucoup moins en valeur. Cependant Mathieu de Montmorency gagne également la palme du meilleur de l’ost capétien dans le fragment que nous avons de l’Histoire de Michel de Harnes et, à sa suite, dans la chronique rimée de Philippe Mousket, ces deux auteurs décernant aussi une palme du meilleur dans le camp des vaincus : elle va pour eux à Baudouin Buridan.43 Le trait n’est pas unique, puisque la chronique de Gislebert de Mons signalait également les meilleurs des deux camps en 1194, dans une vraie petite bataille de guerre féodale.44 C’est surtout à l’ ‘aile droite’ française (à gauche, du point de vue de la coalition) que peuvent s’exhiber l’adresse et la vaillance de chevaliers qui ne se regardent qu’entre eux : des chevaliers du domaine royal français, de Champagne et, pour quelques-uns, de Bourgogne, y sont confrontés à des chevaliers de Flandre et du Hainaut, leurs partenaires de tournois francophones, lecteurs (ou auditeurs) comme 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Historia Francorum Senonensis, MGH SS IX, 367. Comme le dit la Chronique de Saint-Martin de Tours, MGH SS XXVI, 464. RHF XXIV, 768. Cela fait des armes du diable au service du roi très chrétien. Dans ces trois cas, les rois capétiens n’ont pas été vraiment engagés dans la bataille. RHF XXIV, 769. Guillaume le Breton, Gesta, 188 ‘Fragment’, 1 (111–12). Philippe Mousket, Chronique rimée, vers 22011–22024, 369. Gislebert de Mons, Chronique, c. 209, 294–5.



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eux de l’Histoire de Charlemagne du pseudo-Turpin. On est donc entre soi, une fois repoussés par les Flamands les sergents à cheval soissonnais.45 C’est là que le récit de Guillaume le Breton cite précisément des manières de type chevaleresque, fort propres à agrémenter les récits qui se feront devant les dames, même si elles coexistent avec de mauvais gestes.46 Les codes ne semblent ainsi ni mieux ni moins bien respectés que lors d’autres guerres entre chevaliers. Il n’y a là ni simple jeu, ni indifférence complète à l’enjeu de la bataille : on sent bien de part et d’autre le désir de la gagner, de l’inscrire au palmarès collectif d’une patrie, et l’émulation individuelle n’est pas générale, pas indifférenciée puisqu’elle reste contenue dans les limites de chaque baronnage (on est reconnu meilleur de France, ou meilleur de Flandre). Le principe est de risquer sa vie pour son seigneur et son peuple, mais tout est fait en pratique pour éviter de mourir ou de tuer pour cette cause. L’épopée la Philippide est un texte un peu bancal, puisqu’elle chante et glorifie une lutte à mort entre chevaliers qui n’a pratiquement pas fait de morts ! On n’est pas à la croisade où mourir et tuer pour la patrie chrétienne serait plus envisageable. Il y a donc à l’aile droite française une bataille générale, mais codée. C’est la dramatiser que de la décrire, comme le font en général les military studies, sous les sombres couleurs d’une bataille moderne, car il n’y a que très peu de morts d’hommes. Ce serait tout de même trop en émousser le fer que de l’assimiler à un tournoi classique, tant il y a de morts de chevaux (c’est l’hécatombe) et tant on fait usage du couteau, au lieu qu’en un tournoi proprement dit, on rompe des lances pour désarçonner l’adversaire, et qu’on s’empare du cheval en l’abîmant le moins possible. Tuer les chevaux adverses est une tactique attestée par Orderic Vital dans les échauffourées ou les batailles où le résultat prime sur le spectacle, et qui nous les fait distinguer des tournois véritables. Mais à Chaumont-en-Vexin comme à Brémule,47 c’est à coups de flèches qu’on a tué les chevaux, tandis qu’à Bouvines l’arme utilisée est certainement plutôt le couteau, qui a du mal, à moins d’un coup chanceux (comme celui, passant par la visière du casque, dont mourra Étienne de Longchamp), à percer les meilleure armure du chevalier, mais à défaut, frappe souvent à mort sa monture. C’est notamment ce qui arrive au destrier magnifique de l’empereur Otton. Les coalisés ‘se servaient’, note Guillaume le Breton, ‘d’une espèce d’arme étonnante et inconnue jusqu’à présent : ils avaient de longs couteaux minces et à trois tranchants qui coupaient également de chaque tranchant depuis la pointe jusqu’à la poignée et ils s’en servaient en guise d’épées’,48 et cela s’appelle fauchart ou faussart en langue vulgaire.49 Les combats de Bouvines devraient donc être rapprochés d’un type de combats pratiqué dans la même région, c’est à dire confins du Hainaut et de la Flandre, et appelé ‘poignées’. Il s’agit de tuer des chevaux, et de faire en fin de journée un bilan Dans le récit de Guillaume le Breton (Gesta, 187) les chevaliers de Flandre commencent par s’offusquer de se voir opposer de simples sergents ; on s’attendrait, après un pareil début, à ce que ces sergents leur fassent mordre la poussière ! En fait, les flamands les repoussent sans daigner les charger à la lance, tuent leurs chevaux, et n’en blessent mortellement que deux. Les sergents à cheval (se battant aussi bien à pied) s’attirent des éloges (également chez l’Anonyme de Béthune, RHF XXIV, 768) sans pour autant que les chevaliers adverses soient humiliés en punition de leur dédain. 46 Guillaume le Breton, Gesta, 186–90. 47 C’est en fléchant les chevaux que les défenseurs de Chaumont-en-Vexin (1098) ou les AngloNormands à Brémule (1119) ont démonté les chevaleries assaillantes, Orderic, X. c. 5, V, 218 et XII. c. 18, VI, 238. 48 Guillaume le Breton, Gesta, 192. 49 Ce terme est introduit dans le récit de Bouvines par Aubri de Trois-Fontaines, Chronique, MGH SS XXIII, 901, à propos du couteau qui a tué Étienne de Longchamp. 45

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chiffré des pertes que s’infligent mutuellement, par exemple, les osts du Hainaut et du Brabant. En 1184 dans un combat qui avait débuté à l’improviste entre Hainuyers et Brabançons, les premiers ont fait davantage de tort aux seconds, tuant et prenant des hommes et surtout tuant des chevaux, de sorte qu’ ‘on ne vit jamais de meilleur combat de ce type appelé en langue vulgaire poignées’, le comte de Hainaut ayant environ 80 chevaux tués et le duc de Brabant à peu près 340.50 En 1185, avantage aussi aux Hainuyers.51 Le mot de poignées apparaît aussi sous la plume de l’Anonyme de Béthune, désignant un bref combat livré à Courtrai, peu avant la bataille de Bouvines.52 Les cavaliers engagés à Bouvines sont donc entraînés à se baisser hardiment et au bon moment, comme à la quintaine lorsqu’ils esquivent le coup porté par un mannequin, mais ici pour frapper la tête ou l’encolure de la monture adverse. L’Anonyme de Béthune évoque ainsi un duel spectaculaire entre Arnoul d›Audenarde et un chevalier du roi de France (qui serait même le duc de Bourgogne) dans lequel Arnoul réussit un coup de maître en décervelant le cheval adverse au terme d’un coup à l’œil bien ajusté.53 Et est-ce un hasard si Mathieu de Montmorency est signalé pour son adresse à chevaucher en jouant du faussart, désarçonnant les chevaliers, mettant à mal leurs gens,54 lui qui a été formé et adoubé à la cour de Hainaut, auprès d’un comte qui était son oncle maternel ?55 D’autres chevaliers de l’ost royal, originaires des bordures du Hainaut, tel Gérard la Truie,56 semblent aussi user de cette arme, nouvelle seulement pour la maisonnée royale dont Guillaume le Breton est proche. Bien entendu les chevaliers flamands frappent aussi de la lance, et elle semble pouvoir tuer les chevaux,57 mais ne serait-ce pas au couteau, plutôt qu’à la lance qu’ils tuent les chevaux des sergents soissonnais,58 ou Hugues de Malaunay ?59 Dans tout ce que Guillaume le Breton appelle ‘l’aile droite’ française, et où le roi ne se trouve pas, dont il n’est pas informé du sort à tout moment, se déroule essentiellement une bataille de cavaliers. Et pour Guillaume le Breton, le héros de l’aile droite n’est pas Mathieu de Montmorency, mais Gaucher de Saint-Pol, qui entraîne sa troupe en des cavalcades ravageuses au milieu des ennemis, et qui ne mesure pas sa peine pour sauver l’un des siens de la capture. Il se rachète ainsi du conseil de fuite qu’il avait donné quelques heures plus tôt, et qui laissait prise au soupçon de double jeu. Ce n’est pourtant pas lui qui fait prisonnier le comte de Flandre, et Guillaume le Breton ne lui attribue même pas expressément une chevauchée décisive. C’est l’Anonyme de Béthune qui le donne à penser, en affirmant qu’à voir de loin Gaucher déborder la chevalerie flamande, le duc Henri de Brabant renonce à la bataille et se retire.60 Gislebert de Mons, c. 112, 16. Ibid, c. 155, 241. 52 RHF XIV, 756. 53 Ibid., 769 54 Anonyme de Béthune, RHF XXIV, 769. 55 Gislebert de Mons, Chronique, c. 37, 71. 56 En en frappant l’armure d’Otton, puis son cheval : Guillaume le Breton, Gesta, 192, et ‘Fragment’ 4, 114. Les Français ont aussi des couteaux pour éventrer hommes et chevaux dans les moments intenses : Gesta, 187 et 196. 57 Blessant Michel de Harnes et son cheval : Guillaume le Breton, Gesta, 188 ; menaçant Gaucher de Saint-Pol : ibid., 189 (qui suggère que les lances adverses auraient pu tuer son cheval). 58 Guillaume le Breton Gesta, 187. 59 Anonyme de Béthune, RHF, XXIV, 769. 60 Ibid. 50

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Il y a pire encore, pour la coalition, que l’hétérogénéité opérationnelle envisagée par John France. C’est que les vassaux lorrains de l’empereur Otton, présents non loin de lui, paraissent beaucoup moins déterminés à se battre que les chevaliers du comte Ferran, flamands et hennuyers. L’Anonyme de Béthune nous apprend que quinze jours plus tôt, Frère Guérin avait pu acheter en sous-main (à la faveur d’une négociation de trêve) la défection de Galeran de Limbourg et d’un gros contingent.61 Il ne reste dans l’ost impérial, jusqu’au dimanche 27 juillet, que son père le vieux duc Henri (âgé de 74 ans) avec peu d’hommes, et ce vieillard se retire en même temps qu’Henri de Louvain : il n’a pas vocation au sort glorieux de Jean de Luxembourg à Crécy (1346). Et l’on devine bien que le comte de Namur, fils de Pierre de Courtenay qui combat dans le camp capétien, a tout fait pour ne pas s’exposer à combattre son père. L’attitude prêtée par l’Anonyme de Béthune à Henri de Louvain n’a rien de surprenant : ce ne serait pas la première fois qu’un belligérant potentiel hésite à entrer dans une bataille et attend de voir comment les choses tournent. Les adeptes du wait and see sont légion dans l’histoire féodale, surtout s’ils ont des liens forts avec les deux parties, ce qui est tout à fait le cas ici, puisque Henri de Louvain est à la fois gendre de Philippe Auguste et beau-père d’Otton de Brunswick. L’importance de sa fuite n’a pourtant pas toujours assez frappé les historiens modernes, parce qu’ils s’en sont remis presque exclusivement au récit des Gesta, dans lequel Guillaume le Breton prend soin de ne pas la mentionner avant celle de l’empereur Otton. Il fait d’abord le récit palpitant du péril encouru par Philippe Auguste jeté à terre, et des affrontements rapides entre ses proches et l’empereur, comme s’il s’agissait du moment le plus crucial de la bataille de Bouvines. Otton est serré de près par les éléments avancés de la maisnie capétienne, protégé par son armure du couteau du chevalier Gérard la Truie, en butte aussi à Guillaume des Barres, et finalement couvert par des comtes et chevaliers allemands qui se sacrifient pour lui (ils sont pris), mais l’accent porte surtout, chez lui comme dans les autres narrations, sur la mort du destrier de tout premier ordre qu’il montait : perte cuisante pour lui, 62 signe tangible de sa défaite. Ainsi le lecteur de Guillaume le Breton garde le sentiment qu’Otton a fui ‘l’un des premiers’, que la victoire française est donc due à la maisonnée royale, et que les duc de Louvain et de Limbourg se sont retirés en voyant Otton surclassé.63 Pourtant, leur défection n’a-t-elle pas été plus précoce, et due au spectacle de la déconfiture de l’aile gauche de la coalition, comme le suggère l’Anonyme de Béthune ? Le duc Henri n’était pas sans arrière-pensées, il ne pouvait souhaiter vraiment une victoire flamande, et il communiquait pour sa part, à en croire la Philippide, avec Philippe Auguste.64 La question serait presque de savoir ce qui le retenait encore dans l’ost de la coalition, et nous avons certainement la réponse dans le fait que le comte Ferran de Flandre, qui s’était victorieusement opposé à lui quelques On l’apprend dans la chronique de l’Anonyme de Béthune, RHF, XXIV, 768. Guillaume le Breton, Gesta, 192. Philippe Auguste aurait-il évité de s’emparer de l’empereur, dont il n’aurait su que faire ? Xavier Hélary incline à le penser, et est frappé par la précision d’ensemble du résultat obtenu par le Capétien : ‘Ceux qui n’auraient pas dû y être : quelques combattants à la bataille de Bouvines’, dans Bouvines 1214–2014. Histoire et mémoire d’une bataille. Eine Schlacht zwischen Geschichte und Erinnerung, éd. Pierre Monnet, Bochum 2016, 19–27. 63 Guillaume le Breton, Gesta, 196. Les informations utiles sur ce duc sont regroupées par Sergio Boffa, ‘Le rôle équivoque joué par le duc de Brabant Henri Ier à la bataille de Bouvines (27 juillet 1214)’, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 59, 2016, 337–56, mais son effort pour défendre Henri du grief de trahison envers la coalition paraît excessif. 64 Guillaume le Breton, Philippide X, vers 671–86. 61 62

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mois plus tôt, détenait un de ses fils en otages. Il n’attendait donc que de voir la chevalerie de Flandre surclassée et Ferran pris, pour donner le signal de la débandade à l’ost impérial, envoyer peut-être une lettre d’excuses et de félicitations sans tarder à Philippe Auguste,65 et à coup sûr obtenir de lui rapidement qu’il contraigne Ferran à faire libérer l’enfant.66 Il faut imaginer, naturellement, qu’Henri de Louvain se trouvait placé assez près de l’empereur, dont il était vassal. Sa défection affaiblit nécessairement le dispositif de la coalition, déjà mal maîtrisé parce que trop hâtivement et trop partiellement mis en place. Est-elle pour autant la cause principale de la défaite des impériaux ? Nous savons mal comment se synchronisent, avec la bataille de ‘l’aile droite’, les combats du ‘centre’ et d’une ‘aile gauche’ à dire vrai peu distincte de lui. Traditionnellement, en suivant les Gesta, les reconstitutions modernes de Bouvines considèrent qu’au centre, dans la confrontation du roi et de l’empereur, s’est déroulée une bataille aussi ardente qu’à droite, et plus décisive. En cela elles s’appuient sur le plan de bataille prêté a posteriori à la coalition, selon lequel les principaux chefs, Otton, Ferran et Renaud auraient formé le dessein de converger sur le roi de France placé au centre afin de le tuer  ;67 mais cela ressemble un peu à une affabulation, comme tout ou l’essentiel de ce que Guillaume le Breton dit avoir appris après coup des prisonniers. Ni Georges Duby ni John France ne reconnaissent comme telle cette affabulation faite pour grossir le péril auquel le roi a échappé et pour aggraver le cas des deux vassaux rebelles. Quelles preuves avons-nous pourtant qu’il y ait eu, à l’ouest de ‘l’aile droite’ française, autre chose qu’une retraite rapide des troupes impériales ? John France suppose qu’au centre et face à l’aile gauche royale, la coalition a disposé de contingents importants de mercenaires et de milices urbaines.68 Je me demande tout de même s’il ne demeure pas, en cela, trop près du paradigme de l’immense bataille, avec discipline militaire et mort de masse. Nous avons de quoi présumer plutôt, en effet, que la milice de Gand n’est pas entrée dans la bataille,69 et prendre acte de ce que celle de Bruges n’a fait que s’en approcher, avant de se retirer rapidement.70 Le célèbre Guillaume le Maréchal, bien informé, considérait Bouvines comme une bataille où l’empereur Otton avait eu le tort d’entrer dès le dimanche 27 juillet : il n’a pas eu le quart des hommes dont il aurait disposé s’il avait attendu le lendemain,71 et ces troupes qui n’ont pas eu le temps d’arriver sont très probablement des piétons, vue leur lenteur. La coalition n’a peut-être pu engager là que ces ‘Brabançons et autres’, qui font à la fin un baroud d’honneur, mais que rien n’oblige à prendre pour des routiers, mercenaires professionnels. Ces piétons semblent être ceux qui avaient dès le matin marché devant des chevaliers qu’ils couvraient, indiquant à l’observateur l’intention de livrer bataille.72 D’autre part, il est peu de chevaliers de la coalition anticapétienne, à l’ouest de ‘l’aile droite’ française, auxquels on puisse reconnaître le mérite d’être entrés dans la bataille et de n’avoir pas fui : les quatre Allemands qui se dévouent, en se battant Aubri de Trois-Fontaines, MGH SS XXIII, 902. Layettes du trésor des chartes, 5 vols, éd. Alexandre Teulet et al., Paris 1863, no.1088, I, 407–8. 67 Guillaume le Breton, Gesta, 194. 68 France, ‘The Battle of Bouvines’, 269. 69 D’après Guillaume le Breton, Gesta, 199. 70 Continuation de Clairmarais à la Généalogie des comtes de Flandre, MGH SS IX, 333. 71 History of William Marshal, vers 14748 et 14794 (II, 238 et 240). Il serait donc numériquement inférieur ? 72 Guillaume le Breton, Gesta, 182. 65 66



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jusqu’à leur capture, pour couvrir la retraite de l’empereur Otton leur seigneur, et deux des trois agents de Jean Sans Terre, son frère William de Salisbury et Renaud de Dammartin, comte de Boulogne. Le troisième agent, Hugues de Boves, est parvenu à s’échapper, et on l’a couvert d’opprobre en racontant, véridique ou inventée, son altercation avec Renaud avant la bataille. Le duc de Brabant n’a pas brillé non plus par le courage, s’il a abandonné ses piétons brabançons. Mais la différence avec Hugues de Boves est qu’il n’a jamais brillé non plus par son ardeur à faire cette guerre – et qu’il est de plus haut rang ! À le bien relire, le ‘grand récit’ de Guillaume le Breton offre donc un contraste entre la bataille de l’aile droite, et les combats du centre et de la gauche. À l’aile droite le suspense est assez long, la victoire volant d’un camp à l’autre,73 et des ‘échelles’ sont lancées par leurs chefs dans des mouvements d’ensemble. Au centre et à la gauche opère aussi une échelle française en bon ordre, la milice de Thomas de Saint-Valery, mais l’attention se concentre sur la maisnie royale et quelquesunes de ses stars en des combats individuels, tandis que des chefs adverses se dérobent ou s’enfuient, de sorte qu’on finit par avoir affaire à des résistances résiduelles à l’avance de l’ost capétien, notamment celle de Renaud de Boulogne et celle des sergents du Brabant. Lors de ces résistances, les éléments offensifs de l’ost capétien, malgré leur très probable grande supériorité numérique, ont éprouvé des difficultés. Les piétons d’élite ont couvert le comte Renaud de Boulogne d’un mur de lances dressées,74impénétrables aux chevaliers de France, et ils ont tué les chevaux du champion Gérard la Truie75 et du comte Guillaume de Ponthieu, mettant ce dernier en danger selon la continuation de Clairmarais.76 Et ce beaufrère de Philippe Auguste n’a dû son salut qu’à l’irruption de ses communes, plus efficaces que ses chevaliers. Philippe Auguste tenait sans doute beaucoup à s’emparer du traître français, grand baron rebelle et cheville ouvrière de la coalition financée par Jean sans Terre : Renaud de Dammartin, natif du domaine royal, comte de Boulogne par mariage. C’est sa capture mouvementée, jalonnée de rebondissements palpitants, qui retient Guillaume le Breton : elle fait un morceau de bravoure dans la Philippide comme dans les Gesta. L’auteur met en valeur la vaillance de Renaud, toute française jusque dans sa trahison de la France. Le fait est tout de même qu’il se démène pour conserver la vie sauve, et qu’il y parvient, pensant encore qu’il a des chances de s’en sortir en s’évadant avec l’aide de complices (comme à Damme l’année précédente) ou en obtenant l’indulgence du roi pour l’avoir évité au cours des combats : il sera cruellement déçu et souffrira jusqu’à sa mort (au début de 1227) d’une dure captivité. Ce qu’il faudrait bien comprendre, c’est pourquoi Renaud de Boulogne n’est pas parvenu à s’enfuir comme l’empereur ou les ducs de Louvain et de Limbourg, comme aussi Hugues de Boves. Guillaume le Breton indique que l’empereur Otton l’avait fait surveiller, le soupçonnant de double jeu. Mais comment cette surveillance ne s’était-elle pas relâchée ? Il faut croire que les Français du roi, le reconnaissant bien à son blason, ne l’avaient pas lâché. Dans les reconstitutions militaires (donc anachroniques) de Bouvines par des historiens des XIXe et XXe siècles, Renaud est un combattant intraitable, à la tête d’un corps de professionnels de la guerre, ces durs Brabançons qui demeurent les derniers en ordre de bataille, et que Philippe Auguste ordonne à Thomas de Saint-Valery de 73 74 75 76

Guillaume le Breton, Gesta, 190. Comme à Steppes le 13 octobre précédent, MGH SS XXV, 183–4. ‘Fragment’, 7, 115. MGH SS IX, 333.

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détruire à l’aide de sa milice, pour finir le travail du jour. Le lien entre Renaud et les Brabançons n’est cependant pas expressément fait par les sources médiévales, et il peut tout aussi bien s’agir de la milice du Brabant, abandonnée sur le carreau par le duc Henri son seigneur. Formés en une sorte de hérisson ou de phalange, armés d’une lance qui ressemble déjà au terrible goedendag de Courtrai (1302) ces piétons émérites tiennent en échec la chevalerie française, et ne cèdent que devant une marée montante de sergents. Par où la bataille de Bouvines, à l’instar d’autres épisodes passés ou à venir, montre bien les limites de la supériorité des chevaliers : rien ne vaut une chanson de geste pour imprimer dans les esprits ladite supériorité, car dans le réel elle sera toujours moins évidente. Ces piétons sont probablement soldés comme bien d’autres combattants de Bouvines des deux camps, et en ce sens ils ont quelque chose de mercenaires, mais ils ne sont jamais tenus pour des routiers, obéissant à un chef précis, ni stigmatisés comme tels. Ils ne s’attirent que des éloges, que nous pouvons entendre comme des critiques indirectes de la chevalerie.77 Militairement, si j’ose encore employer cet adverbe, leur résistance finale est certainement, après la bataille des cavaleries à l’aile droite, le second temps fort de la journée de Bouvines, avec certainement des pertes en vies humaines, mais il n’est pas évident que ce soit un massacre. Guillaume le Breton les évalue à sept cents78 – mais une autre source les estime seulement à quatre cents,79 et ils ne périssent tout de même pas tous.80 De fait, si Guillaume le Breton peut saluer comme miraculeuse l’absence de morts dans les rangs de la milice de Thomas de Saint-Valery chargée de les détruire, cela ne s’expliquerait-il pas aussi par le fait qu’elle n’a pas eu tant que cela le feu sacré et qu’elle n’a pas tout à fait terminé sa mission ? Avec très peu de morts nobles, un peu plus de piétons mis hors de combat, Bouvines ne serait pas sans rappeler Brémule ou Tinchebray. La fin évoquerait plutôt celle de Bourgthéroulde avec plusieurs arrangements entre captifs et geôliers,81 tels les révèle l’Anonyme de Béthune.82 Et il me semble que tout s’éclaire si la campagne de 1214 n’est pas en-dehors des logiques de guerre féodale essentiellement redondante, circonspecte et roublarde que dégage si bien Matthew Strickland. Ma suggestion est donc de rapprocher Bouvines sans crainte des batailles anglo-normandes relatées par Orderic Vital, tant on y observe de ménagements entre adversaires et de réserves dans l’engagement de certaines des ‘forces en présence’. Peu d’impériaux s’en sont mêlés, et le roi de France n’a pas traité durement ceux qu’il a pris, ni William de Salisbury. Il a voulu humilier, en revanche, ses vassaux et sujets rebelles, dont toute une propagande aggrave le cas au point que Guillaume le Breton, dans les Gesta, éprouve encore un scrupule à l’avaliser. Corrélativement, cette propagande tend à majorer le rôle de Philippe Auguste à Bouvines et le danger qu’il y a couru, et Guillaume le Breton y contribue sans la même réserve.

‘Fragment’, 7, 115 (‘les bons sergents de Brabant’), et plus encore Continuation de Clairmarais, MGH SS IX, 333. 78 Guillaume le Breton, Gesta, 197. 79 Ils étaient 400, selon la Continuation de Clairmarais, MGH SS IX, 333. 80 ‘Il y en eut beaucoup de blessés, de morts et de pris’, selon le ‘Fragment, 7, 115 beaucoup mais non tous, et ceux qui furent mis hors de combat n’ont pas tous été tués. 81 Orderic, VI, 352. 82 RHF, XXIV, 769. 77

ABBOT PETER THE VENERABLE’S TWO MISSIONS TO ENGLAND (1130 AND 1155/1156)* Scott G. Bruce Peter the Venerable, the ninth abbot of Cluny, who ruled the great Burgundian monastery from 1122 until his death in 1156, understood the didactic potential of ghost stories. In a treatise on miracles written in the 1140s, he related several tales of hauntings that took place at Cluny to warn his audience about the punishments awaiting sinners in the afterlife and to promote the power of Cluniac prayer to relieve their suffering and to speed their souls to heaven.1 These kinds of stories were not subtle. Time and again, the spirits of the dead appeared to Cluniac monks to beseech their prayers to remedy the otherworldly pain that they had earned for a host of mundane sins: a nobleman’s love of plundering, a bishop’s fondness for laughter. The prayers of the community never failed these sinners, whose apparitions almost always returned to the abbey one last time to give the brethren thanks before departing for heaven. It should not surprise us, then, that the earliest account of Peter the Venerable’s life and miracles featured a ghost story. Composed in the late twelfth century by Rodulphus de Sully, the twelfth abbot of Cluny (1173–1176), this short vita survives in no medieval manuscripts; we owe its preservation to the industry of the Maurists, who copied it in the eighteenth century.2 The ghost story told by Rodulphus de Sully was unusual because the spectre in question was a king of England, none other than King Henry I (1100–35).3 According to this miracle, the ghost of the monarch appeared upon a black horse ‘as though alive (quasi vivus)’ to one of his own soldiers in England. He was accompanied by a great multitude of mounted knights. ‘Are you not my lord?’ asked the soldier in amazement, ‘Are you not dead?’ ‘Truly, I am dead,’ replied the spectre, ‘and my death would have been eternal, if Lord Peter, the abbot of Cluny, with his brethren had not come to I am very grateful to Liesbeth van Houts for the invitation to speak at the Institut d’Études Avancées in Paris and to the audience members for their helpful comments and suggestions. The following abbreviations are used in this paper: BC = Bibliotheca Cluniacensis, ed. Martin Marrier and André Duchesne, Paris 1614; repr. Mâcon, 1915; BHL = Bibliotheca hagiographica latina antiquae et mediae aetatis, 2 vols, Brussels 1898–1901; DM = Peter the Venerable, De miraculis libri duo, ed. Denise Bouthillier, Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaevalis 83, Turnhout 1988; and LPV = The Letters of Peter the Venerable, ed. Giles Constable, 2 vols, Cambridge MA 1967. 1 DM 1.9–11, 34–42; trans. Scott G. Bruce, in The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters, New York 2016, 100–7. 2 Rodulphus de Sully, Vita Petri Venerabilis abbatis Cluniacensis, in Veterum Scriptorum et Monumentorum Historicorum, Dogmaticorum, Moralium, Amplissima Collectio, ed. Edmond Martène and Ursin Durand, 9 vols, Paris 1724–1733, VI, 1187–1202 (ex MS Silviniacensis monasterii, now lost); repr. in PL 189, 15–28. 3 For what follows, see Rodulphus, Vita Petri Venerabilis 13, ed. Martène and Durand, VI, 1198; and PL 189, 25: Quem ut miles vidit, obstupuit, et magna voce clamare coepit: Nonne tu es dominus meus rex? Ego, inquit, sum. Nonne mortuus es? Vere, inquit, mortuus, et morti aeternae deputatus fuissem, nisi dominus Petrus abbas Cluniacensis cum suis subvenisset. *

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my aid.’ The ghost of Henry I ordered the soldier to make haste to Lewes priory, 4 a Cluniac dependency in Southover, East Sussex. He was told to relate the story of the ghost to the brethren who lived there, and bid them to send a letter to Abbot Peter at Cluny requesting prayers of intercession on his behalf. When Peter received the letter, he marshalled all of the resources of prayer at his disposal throughout all of his dependencies (per totum orbem in suis domibus) to help the soul of the dead king, who appeared once more, this time to the abbot and many others to thank them from securing his release from otherworldly punishment. This story of King Henry’s ghost took its place among a litany of lesser miracles that Rodulphus de Sully had allegedly ‘learned through the account of devout men or had seen himself (quod virorum religiosorum relatione didici, aut ipse vidi)’, none of which managed to convince anyone to recognize the ninth abbot of Cluny as a saint.5 Even so, with this miracle Peter’s hagiographer underscored an important aspect of the abbot’s career: his relationship to the Anglo-Norman monarchs who ruled during his abbacy, most notably Henry I (1100–35), but also Stephen (1135–54) and Henry II (1154–89). This chapter investigates the commerce between Cluny and the English crown through an examination of Peter the Venerable’s two visits to England, the first in 1130 and the second in 1155 or early 1156. During the central Middle Ages, it was not unusual for abbots of Cluny to travel widely throughout France and as far away as Spain and Italy to reform distant abbeys, to protect the interests of their farflung dependencies, and to serve as power-brokers for religious and secular powers. Before Peter’s abbacy, however, no Cluniac abbot had ever ventured to England. This study will attempt to provide a ‘cost analysis’ of these missions, that is, to explain the circumstances that led Peter to believe that it was worth both his time and his effort to travel so far afield in the interests of his community, to identify the English agents who fostered relationships with Cluny in this period, and to gauge what precisely the abbot of Cluny hoped to gain by undertaking these visits. In both instances, Peter must have been prompted to travel by some urgent need, because he did not travel well. He suffered from malaria and chronic bronchitis and, in the words of Giles Constable, ‘for most of his adult life he was in delicate, if not poor, health’.6 Even so, as we will see, the potential gains of these visits in terms of capital and influence clearly outweighed the risks, whether they were carried out with the blessing of the sitting king, as was the case in 1130, or in covert opposition to him, as was the case in 1155 or 1156. From William the Conqueror to Henry I The relationship between the abbey of Cluny and the English crown began during the reign of William the Conqueror (1066–1087). After the conquest, in the decade between 1066 and 1076, King William allegedly made overtures to Abbot Hugh the Great (1049–1109) to enlist the support of Cluny in establishing and overseeing

On the founding of Lewes priory, see n. 17, below. David Knowles, ‘Peter the Venerable’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 39, 1956, 132–45, at 145: ‘Peter was never officially canonized, and although his contemporary biographer retails incidents in his life that might be considered near-miracles, neither these, nor the record of his actions, nor the witness of his letters, ever convey to us the authentic touch of sanctity, the direct vision, the imperative call, the glimpse of a life that re-enacts in its own idiom the life of Christ.’ 6 LPV II, 247–51 (Appendix B), at 247. 4 5



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new monastic communities in England.7 The evidence for their interaction comes primarily from early twelfth-century sources related to the cult of Abbot Hugh, which were eager to portray the relationship in ways that favoured the saint.8 With a posture of humility that amazed his barons (satrapae), William requested the gift of confraternity (donum societatis) from the great Burgundian abbey and received in response a visit from a legate named Warmund, who was abbot of the Cluniac priory of Déols near Châteauroux in Berry and later archbishop of Vienne.9 Once this relationship had been confirmed (the terms of which are not explained), William sent a sumptuous gift to Abbot Hugh: an exquisite golden cope embroidered with electrum and pearls and fringed with tiny golden bells. His queen, Mathilda of Flanders, sent an equally ‘impressive chasuble (planetam dignissimam)’ as a complement to her husband’s gift.10 Another tradition preserved in the hagiography of Hugh the Great asserted that William the Conqueror wrote to the abbot of Cluny requesting six of his best monks to serve as his advisors and to receive appointments as his prelates (rectores) in post-conquest England. In return, the king offered to pay 100 pounds of silver annually for each of the monks in recognition of the cost of the loss of such worthy individuals to the monastic community.11 Although the king made the request ‘in the spirit of friendship and grace (sub titulo amicitiae et gratiae)’, Abbot Hugh was offended by the offer and made his anger plain in his response, which the hagiographer preserved verbatim in the narrative. First, the abbot flatly refused the king’s request on the grounds that he could not take part in a monetary transaction of this kind, which smacked of the sin of simony. Moreover, he was unwilling to send any of his monks ‘into perdition (in perditionem)’ at any cost, since he was responsible for the well-being of their souls. William was naturally not pleased with this reply, but his anger eventually gave way to an understanding of Hugh’s reasoning. It is important to note that King William and Abbot Hugh did not meet in person to propose, negotiate, and conclude these alliances. Instead, they commended their intentions to formal proxies and their precious gifts to trusted couriers. Indeed, there would have been little reason for the abbot of Cluny to venture into Normandy, where his monastery had no formal dependencies but plenty of informal influence from local prelates who had spent formative time at the great Burgundian abbey.12 For what follows, see Frank Barlow, ‘William I’s Relations with Cluny’, JEH 32, 1981, 131–41, repr. in idem, The Norman Conquest and Beyond, London 1983, 245–256; and Armin Kohnle, Abt Hugo von Cluny (1049–1109), Sigmaringen 1993, 191–3. 8 The Cluniacs produced no fewer than six accounts of the life and miracles of Abbot Hugh the Great in the early twelfth century. On their complex genealogy, see Frank Barlow, ‘The Canonization and Early Lives of Hugh I, Abbot of Cluny’, Analecta Bollandiana 98, 1980, 297–334, repr. in idem, The Norman Conquest and Beyond, 257–95; and Dominique Iogna-Prat, ‘Panorama de l’hagiographie abbatiale clunisienne (v. 940–v. 1140)’, in Manuscrits hagiographiques et travail des hagiographes, ed. Martin Heinzelmann, Sigmaringen 1992, 77–118, at 97–102, repr. in idem, Études clunisiennes, Paris 2002, 35–74, at 52–7. 9 For what follows, see Alia miraculorum quorundam S. Hugonis relatione MS. collectore monacho quodam, ut videtur Cluniacensi (BHL 4013), in BC, 447–62, at 453. On the career of Warmond, see D. N. Huyghebaert, ‘Un légat de Gregoire VII en France: Warmond de Vienne’, Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique 40, 1944–45, 187–200, at 188–90. 10 These royal gifts are also described in Gilo’s Vita sancti Hugonis abbatis 15 (BHL 4007), which was composed before Christmas 1121; see H. E. J. Cowdrey, ‘Two Studies in Cluniac History 1049–1126’, Studi Gregoriani 11, 1978, 5–298, at 64–5. 11 Alia miraculorum quorundam S. Hugonis, in BC, 453–4. 12 David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England: A History of its Development from the Times of St. Dunstan to the Fourth Lateran Council, 940–1216, 2nd edn Cambridge 1963, 83–8. 7

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Orderic Vitalis named two of them: Robert of Grandmesnil, later abbot of St Evroul, who spent time as a novice at Cluny and successfully sought Hugh’s permission to bring a monk named Bernefrid back with him to Normandy to instruct the brethren in Cluniac customs; and Mainerius, who had spent a year in training at Cluny before he became first the prior and then the abbot of St. Evroul.13 The only evidence that Hugh the Great ever visited Normandy appeared in the early twelfth-century vita of the hermit Anastasius composed by Walter of Doydes.14 According to this account, the abbot of Cluny was in the vicinity of Mont St Michel around 1067 while ‘travelling with many of his monks for the purpose of visiting monastic houses and exhorting the brethren who were serving God in many remote places.’15 There he heard news about a hermit living on an island in the English Channel. After several days of conversation, Anastasius agreed to accompany the abbot back to Cluny to ‘provide an example of excellent conduct to the rest of the monks.’16 Unfortunately, we have no other source to corroborate Hugh’s travels in Normandy. Pious English barons had better fortune than William the Conqueror in cultivating long-lasting relationships with the Cluniacs in the late eleventh century, but their efforts could also be hampered when they were unable to meet personally with the abbot. The establishment of Lewes priory in Southover, East Sussex, is a well documented example.17 The foundation chronicle for Lewes tells how Earl William I de Warenne and his wife Gundreda tarried at Cluny in 1076 when the conflict between Henry IV and Gregory VII prevented them from making their intended pilgrimage to Rome. They were allegedly so impressed by the conduct of the brethren that they decided to found a Cluniac priory on their estates in England. Unfortunately, Hugh the Great was absent during their stay, so William de Warenne waited until his return to England to send a letter to the abbot requesting two, three, or four monks for the proposed foundation.18 Hugh demurred at first. ‘This would be especially hard for us,’ he replied, ‘because of the distance of your foreign land and mostly because of the sea.’19 The earl would have to send to Cluny not only a copy of his grant of the church of St Pancras as proof of his intentions and the solvency of the fledging community, but also the king’s confirmation of it, before Hugh relented and dispatched three monks to Lewes with Lanzo as their first prior. The death of William the Conqueror in 1087 brought to the throne his son William II, also known as William Rufus (1087–1100). He will not detain us long. An able general, but by most monastic accounts a ruler lacking in personal virtue and Christian piety, William Rufus was primarily remembered by the Cluniacs for Orderic II, 74 and 96. On the careers of these prelates, see Véronique Gazeau, Normannia monastica, 2 vols, Caen 2007, II, 275–6 (Robert [de Grandmesnil]) and 278–80 (Mainier d’Échauffour). 14 For what follows, see Walter of Doydes, Vita sancti Anastasii, PL 149, 423–32, trans. Scott G. Bruce, in The Twelfth-Century Renaissance: A Reader, ed. Alex J. Novikoff, Toronto 2017, 32–40; see also Kohnle, Abt Hugo von Cluny, 191 and 301 (no. 79), where this encounter is dated c. 1067. 15 Walter, Vita sancti Anastasii 4, PL 149, 428: Venerabilis abbas, Hugo nomine, qui Cluniacensi monasterio eodem tempore praeerat, ad revisenda coenobia, exhortatione fratrum, qui per diversa loca et longe remota Deo deserviebant, cum multis fratribus exivit. 16 Ibid.: Et multum rogavit ut Cluniacum secum adiret, ubi et votum suum complere posset, et exemplum bonae conversationis caeteris fratribus daret. 17 Brian Golding, ‘The Coming of the Cluniacs’, ANS 3, 1980, 65–77; and Kohnle, Abt Hugo von Cluny, 193–6. 18 Hugh was travelling in Germany and Italy in the autumn and early winter of 1076 as a powerbroker in the conflict between the emperor and the pope. See Kohnle, Abt Hugo von Cluny, 308–9 (nos. 126–7). 19 Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Cluny, ed. Auguste Bernard and Alexandre Bruel, 6 vols, Paris 1876–1903, IV, 689–96 (no. 3561), at 690: Sed sanctus abbas prius valde nobis fuit durus ad audiendum peticionem nostram, propter longinquitatem aliene terre et maxime propter mare. 13



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his contempt for Archbishop Anselm, who weathered his exile from England at Lyon and Cluny, and for the fatal and fitting accident that killed the king unshriven at the age of forty while he was on a hunting expedition. According to an account composed by Eadmer and repeated by Cluniac authors, several days before the king’s death Abbot Hugh the Great revealed to Anselm in the presence of many startled witnesses that he had experienced a vision of the king being prosecuted before the throne of God, judged unfavourably, and cast into hell.20 The brethren of Cluny were not alone in their disdain for William Rufus; a chorus of monks and churchmen reported signs and portents that foretold in no uncertain terms the unhappy fate awaiting the impious king.21 The ascent of King Henry I (1100–1135) to the throne of England heralded a new season in the relationship between Cluny and the crown, a bountiful spring after a short, but harsh, winter.22 After Henry I’s death in 1135, twelfth-century authors remembered the king as a generous benefactor of the great Burgundian abbey. Writing at Bec in the 1140s, Robert of Torigni compiled a list of Henry’s many gifts to Cluny, including the financial burden of building ‘a major part’ of Cluny III, the reconstruction of the abbey’s massive Romanesque church initiated by Hugh the Great in 1088 and finally completed under Peter the Venerable in 1130.23 Likewise, in the late twelfth century Walter Map deployed his trademark hyperbole to praise the monarch for ‘completing from the foundations (perfecit a fundamentis)’ the new church at Cluny after the structure built by King Alfonso VI of León-Castile (1065–1109) had completely collapsed and for endowing the abbey handsomely ‘to keep the fabric in good condition (ad conseruandam operis indempnitatem).’24 But these fond recollections of the king’s generosity to Cluny have all the benefits of hindsight. Henry I’s support of the abbey began early in his career, to be sure, but as a trickle rather than a torrent. Throughout the first twenty years of his reign, we find the king confirming modest grants made by his barons to Cluny and its daughter houses on the continent as well as making his own gifts and confirming and augmenting the property and rights of the growing number of Cluniac dependencies both large and small in England.25 Henry’s most generous gesture, which made such an impression on his contemporaries and later chroniclers, did not take place until 10 May 1131. The setting was the king’s court in Rouen, where a host of northern abbots and churchmen had convened to throw their support behind Pope Innocent II, whose candidacy had been challenged in Rome by the antipope Anacletus II.26 Innocent II’s chief supporters in attendance Anselm’s exile began in October 1097; William Rufus died on 2 August 1100. For accounts of Hugh’s vision, see Eadmer, Vita sancti Anselmi 46–7, ed. R. W. Southern, London 1962, 123–4; and Gilo, Vita sancti Hugonis abbatis 15, ed. Cowdrey, in ‘Two Studies’, 65–6. 21 See the evidence marshalled in Frank Barlow, William Rufus, London 1983, 426–30. 22 For what follows, see Dietrich Lohrmann, ‘Pierre le Vénérable et Henri Ier, roi d’Angleterre’, in Pierre Abélard, Pierre le Vénérable: Les courants philosophiques, littéraires et artistiques en occident au milieu du XIIe siècle, Abbaye de Cluny, 2 au 9 juillet 1972, Paris 1975, 191–203; and C. Warren Hollister, Henry I, New Haven and London 2001, 412–57. 23 GND VIII, c. 32, vol. II, 254–5. On the significance of this gift as a consequence of Peter the Venerable’s first mission to Cluny, see the discussion below. 24 Walter Map, De nugis curialium dist. 5, c. 5, ed. and trans. M. R. James, in Walter Map, De nugis curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles, OMT, rev. ed. Oxford 1983, 436–9. Walter is probably referring to the rebuilding that took place after the collapse of the vaulting of the nave in 1125. 25 Hollister, Henry I, 415–18 provides a convenient summary of the evidence. 26 On the causes of the papal schism and its outcome, with attention to the insinuations circulated about Ancletus II’s alleged Jewish ancestry, see Mary Stroll, The Jewish Pope: Ideology and Politics in the Papal Schism of 1130, Leiden 1987. 20

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included monastic leaders such as Bernard of Clairvaux, Geoffrey of Chartres, Suger of Saint-Denis, and possibly Peter the Venerable, as well as leading prelates, including King Henry’s close friend and confidant, the powerful Archbishop Hugh of Rouen.27 Innocent had obtained recognition as the legitimate pope by the Holy Roman Emperor Lothar III the previous year, but it was nonetheless important to him to gain the support of the king of England as well. The Rouen convocation was by all accounts a success, for Henry I deigned to recognize Innocent II as the legitimate pope. But it was an especially memorable event for the Cluniacs in particular, for it was on this occasion that the English king offered their mother abbey in perpetuity an annual gift of one hundred marks of silver drawn from the income of farms in London and Lincoln.28 Henry was clear in his instructions that forever more ‘his officers shall annually bring the 100 marks with the rest of the rents to his exchequer and they shall there be delivered to the agent of the abbey.’29 Innocent II confirmed the king’s gift to Cluny in Rouen and upon his return to England the king reconfirmed the gift twice later that same year, first at Northampton and then at Woodstock.30 The timing of the king’s gift to Cluny, indeed, his tenacious interest in the great Burgundian abbey throughout his reign, has never been adequately explained. It is unclear whether Peter the Venerable actually attended the Rouen convocation in person, but he may not have felt the need to do so if he had already spent the time and energy to broker the royal gift to his abbey beforehand. We may be able to glimpse his agency in laying the groundwork for the king’s generosity in the months before the meeting in Rouen in the evidence for the abbot’s unprecedented visit to England only one year earlier, in the spring of 1130. Peter’s First Mission to England (1130) The abbots of Cluny travelled extensively in the tenth, eleventh, and early twelfth centuries as agents of monastic reform, as protectors of the interests of their communities in farflung locales, and as brokers of peace at the highest levels of medieval society. Peter the Venerable did so too. Despite his frequent bouts of poor health, he made several trips over the Alps into Italy and spent an entire year on a visit to Spain (1142–43).31 Unlike his predecessors, however, he also ventured into England on at least two occasions. His first visit took place in the spring or early summer of 1130.32 Cluniac sources from this period made no direct mention of this voyage, but Manuscript E of the Anglo-Saxon Peter was absent from Cluny at the time of the meeting in Rouen, but there is no direct evidence that he attended it. See LPV II, 259. 28 Regesta II, 248 (no. 1691); Hollister called it ‘one of the largest gifts of [the king’s] life,’ surpassed only by a comparable gift to Fontevrault (Henry I, 416 with n. 254). 29 Calendar of Documents Preserved in France, Illustrative of the History of Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 1: AD 918–1206, ed. J. Horace Round, London 1889, 507–8 (nos. 1387 and 1389); the quotation is a paraphrase of the charters by Hollister (Henry I, 417). 30 The pope’s confirmation: Regesta II, 248 (no. 1691), and Calendar of Documents Preserved in France, 508 (no. 1388); the king’s reconfirmations in England: Regesta II, 252 and 254 (nos. 1713 and 1721), and Calendar of Documents Preserved in France, 507 (no. 1386). 31 On Peter’s fragile health, see n. 6, above. The abbot’s itinerary has been reconstructed in LPV II, 256–69 (Appendix D), which is superior to the study by D. van den Eydne, ‘Les principaux voyages de Pierre le Vénérable’, Benedictina 15, 1968, 58–110. 32 Jean-Pierre Torrell and Denise Bouthillier, Pierre le Vénérable et sa vision du monde: Sa vie, son œuvre, l’homme et le demon, Leuven 1986, 54–6. 27



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Chronicle did.33 The so-called Peterborough Chronicle was copied after a fire in 1116 destroyed the abbey of Peterborough, including many of its precious manuscripts.34 Working from an exemplar written in Kent, a Peterborough scribe copied the chronicle until the year 1121. Over the next decade, he added updates of events important to his community until 1131. Twenty years later, a second scribe concluded the chronicle with news and events up to the year 1154. Peter the Venerable’s visit to Peterborough in 1130 warranted mention in the Peterborough Chronicle because it raised alarm among the local brethren, who feared that the abbot’s close friend and ally, Henry of Blois, abbot of Glastonbury and bishop of Winchester, was going to hand over control of their community to Cluny. The entry for 1130 reads as follows: After him [Henry] came the abbot of Cluny, named Peter, to England, by the king’s leave, and was received everywhere whithersoever he came with much worship. To Peterborough he came, and there Abbot Henry promised him that he would get him the monastery of Peterborough that it might be subject to Cluny. But it is said for a proverb, ‘The hedge abides that fields divide.’ May God Almighty frustrate evil counsels. Shortly after this the abbot of Cluny went home to his own country.35

The monks of Peterborough had every reason to be alarmed. They were already deeply dissatisfied with their current abbot, Henry of Angély (1128–1133), who was himself a Cluniac.36 As bishop of Soissons in the late eleventh century, this wayward character had been accused of simony and made amends by taking the monastic habit at Cluny. There Henry rose to the rank of prior. Owing to his kinship with the king of England and the count of Poitou, he became abbot of Saint-Jean d’Angély near Saintes (1104–31) and a papal legate to England (1123).37 A few years later in 1128, King Henry I appointed him as abbot of Peterborough. The abbey’s annalist did not mince words in his portrait of this predatory prelate, whose arrival was heralded by nocturnal appearances of the terrifying Wild Hunt and whose abbacy was likened to a drone fattened by the labour of his worker bees.38 Henry’s tenure only lasted until 1132, when the king stripped him of his office and banished him from the kingdom, but he was the sitting abbot at the time of Peter’s visit to Peterborough. Despite the negative posture of the Peterborough Chronicle toward the Cluniacs, it is possible to glean from it some important information about the nature of Peter

In a letter to Henry of Blois, Peter mentioned that he had tarried in England ‘the previous year’. See Epistola 49, LPV I, 148–50, at 150. Constable dated this letter to 1131 on the basis of the 1130 visit recorded in the Peterborough Chronicle (LPV II, 131 and 259). 34 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 636; with N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, Oxford 1957, 424–6 (no. 346); and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, Volume 7: MS. E, A Semi-Diplomatic Edition with Introduction and Indices, ed. Susan Irvine, Cambridge 2004, xiii–xvii. 35 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a. 1130, ed. Irvine, in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, 131–2; trans. Benjamin Thorpe, in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle According to the Several Original Authorities, 2 vols, London 1861, II, 227. A mid-twelfth-century Latin epitome of the Peterborough Chronicle reported Peter’s visit without the disdain of the chronicler. See The Chronicle of Hugh Candidus, A Monk of Peterborough, ed. W. T. Mellows, London 1949, 102. 36 For what follows, see Cecily Clark, ‘This Ecclesiastical Adventurer: Henry of Saint-Jean d’Angély’, EHR 84, 1969, 548–60. 37 Henry of Angély was the second cousin of King Henry I; see ibid., 554. 38 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a. 1127, ed. Irvine, in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, 129. On the Wild Hunt, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan, Chicago 1998, 93–122, esp. 109 on Peterborough. 33

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the Venerable’s first visit to England. First, the annalist tells us that Peter had obtained the king’s permission to come to England, which implies some kind of formal contact between the abbot and the royal court. Second, the notice that Peter was ‘received everywhere whithersoever he came with much worship’ indicates that his visit to England was not limited to Peterborough; his ambit was clearly wider, though how much wider it is impossible to say. Unfortunately, the myopic character of the Peterborough Chronicle with its narrow focus on the concerns of one local community of beleaguered monks provides no information to illuminate the question that interests us the most: the reason (or multiple reasons) for the abbot of Cluny’s visit to England in the first place.39 Several decades ago, David Knowles proposed that Peter’s mission to England in 1130 was in some way related to the ‘reform chapter’ of Cluniac priors that convened at the great Burgundian abbey on 13 March 1132.40 ‘It is not stated what his business was [in England],’ Knowles wrote, ‘but it is natural to suppose that it was some kind of survey preparatory to his summons to Cluny of all the priors of the order in 1132.’41 The Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis attended this meeting at Cluny and reported the vector of Peter’s program of reform: ‘He imposed new fasts on his subject monks and took away times for conversation and various supports of bodily infirmity, which the moderate mercy of reverend fathers had previously allowed them.’42 These new rules were met with considerable resistance by the assembled priors, who baulked as much at their novelty as at their severity, prompting the abbot of Cluny to abandon his most severe precepts out of consideration for the shortcomings of the brethren of his extended community. But if laying the groundwork for the Cluniac General Chapter was in fact Peter’s primary reason for travelling to England in 1130, then his trip was in vain, because there is no record that any representatives from Cluniac houses in England attended the meeting in Burgundy in 1132. Peter’s motive for travelling across the English Channel must have involved an issue so important that he was convinced that his personal presence was necessary to effect its resolution. Given his poor health, the abbot would not have risked leaving the pressing demands of his office to undertake an arduous voyage unless he felt that the possible outcome of the trip outweighed the risks attendant with it. The fact that he made this voyage only a year before King Henry I made one of the largest gifts of his reign to the abbey of Cluny in revenue rather than in land holdings cannot be ignored. The negotiation of this gift in person was very likely the primary purpose for the abbot’s voyage. But if Peter did make the journey to England to argue the case in person for the need and benefits of a perpetual fund for Cluny from the king, the question remains why he thought it was an auspicious time to do so and who, if anyone, helped him to broker the grant with the king. The answers to these question lie in the intensification of the relationship between members of Henry I’s immediate family and the abbey of Cluny in the years leading up to Peter’s visit. 39 Lohrmann’s hypothesis (‘Pierre le Vénérable et Henri Ier’, 197) that Peter was in England to bring not only Peterborough, but also Glastonbury and Reading, under Cluniac control need not detain us here. For a firm rebuttal, see Hollister, Henry I, 429–30. 40 On the relationship between this Cluniac chapter and the General Benedictine chapter that preceded it in 1131 and took place in the archdiocese of Reims, see Steven Vanderputten, ‘The First ‘General Chapter’ of Benedictine Abbots (1131) Reconsidered’, JEH 66, 2015, 715–34, at 722–8. 41 Knowles, The Monastic Order in England, 157. Other scholars have repeated his hypothesis. See, for example, Judith A. Green, Henry I, King of England and Duke of Normandy, Cambridge 2006, 208. 42 Orderic IV, 426–7: Ille uero subiectis auxit ieiunia, abstulit colloquia, et infirmi corporis qaedam subsidia quae illis moderata patrum hactenus permiserat reuerendorum clementia.



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King Henry I’s sister Adela and her son Henry of Blois both nurtured close relationships with Cluny during the abbacies of Peter’s predecessors Hugh the Great (1049–1109) and Pontius (1109–22). Upon assuming the abbacy in 1122, Peter the Venerable would have recognized that Adela and Henry were the members of the king’s immediate family most likely to influence his decision to endow Cluny with a perpetual fund. Adela was a formidable woman active in the highest level of Anglo-Norman politics.43 This daughter of William the Conqueror married Count Stephen of Blois and Chartres, with whom she had several children, including the future King Stephen and Henry of Blois. Her influence on her brother Henry I was strong. Early in his reign, she played a key role in reconciling the king with Archbishop Anselm, from whom he had been estranged.44 Her decision to enter the Cluniac nunnery of Marcigny in Burgundy around the year 1120 put her in close proximity to Peter the Venerable, both physically and spiritually.45 Their relationship was such that the abbot of Cluny addressed a letter of condolence to Adela in early 1136 after the death of her royal brother on 1 December 1135.46 Later, after her death in 1137, Peter cast Adela as a witness to a wonder in his treatise on miracles, calling her ‘lord Adela, sister of the king of England, once countess of Blois, now a humble handmaiden of Christ’.47 Adela’s son, Henry of Blois, exerted a comparable influence on King Henry I during the last decade of his reign, but his ties to Cluny were arguably even closer than those of his mother.48 Born around 1098, Henry spent his childhood as a monk at the great Burgundian abbey, an institution to which he remained fiercely loyal and generous throughout his life, even when his activities were far from monastic in tenor or substance.49 Little is known about his life until 1126, when his royal uncle promoted him from head of the modest Cluniac priory of Montecute in Somerset to the abbacy of Glastonbury, one of the richest monasteries in the realm. Three years later, the king nominated Henry of Blois to be the bishop of Winchester, but with the pope’s permission he retained his abbacy as well.50 He held both of these positions until his death in 1171. These appointments, which launched Henry to the highest levels of wealth and power in Anglo-Norman England, demonstrate clearly the trust placed in this young man by his uncle, who had no sons of his own to promote to positions of ecclesiastical and secular prominence. All evidence points to a close friendship between Henry of Blois and Peter the Venerable. Other than one frosty missive of 1131, when the abbot of Cluny chided Henry for not taking the abbey’s For an exhaustive evaluation of Adela’s life and influence, see Kimberly A. LoPrete, Adela of Blois: Countess and Lord (c.1067–1137), Dublin 2007. 44 Ibid., 174–7. 45 Ibid., 405–18. 46 Epistola 15, in LPV II, 22, and II, 103–5. 47 DM 1.26, 81. 48 The best modern study remains Lena Voss, Heinrich von Blois, Bishof von Winchester (1129–1171), Berlin 1932; for a recent assessment of Henry, see Edmund King, ‘Henry of Winchester: the Bishop, the City and the Wider World’, ANS 37, 2014, 1–24. 49 See the resignation of David Knowles on this issue expressed in ‘Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester 1129–71’, Winchester Cathedral Record 41, 1972, 28–36, at 33: ‘How far Henry was a monk at heart throughout his life is a matter beyond the ken of an historian.’ More recently, Neil Stratford was less equivocal: ‘Il est avant tout et toujours un moine de Cluny.’ See idem, ‘Un grand clunisien, Henri de Blois’, in Cluny 910–2010: Onze siècles de rayonnement, ed. Neil Stratford, Paris 2010, 238–44, at 242. 50 On these appointments, see John le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1066–1300: II. Monastic Cathedrals, ed. D. Greenway, London 1971, 85; and David Knowles, C. N. L. Brooke, and Vera C. M. London, The Heads of Religious Houses: England and Wales, 940–1216, Cambridge 1972, 51 and 121. 43

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side more aggressively in a quarrel with the brethren of La Charité-sur-Loire in their bid to cast off the yoke of their motherhouse, Peter expressed himself in the warmest possible terms to the Anglo-Norman prelate in letter after letter, at one point even asking Henry to consider being buried at Cluny.51 The influence of these high-ranking allies in the royal family may not have been enough on their own, however, to secure the generous royal gift that Peter the Venerable hoped to broker for the security of his abbey’s future. Some historians have associated King Henry I’s gift with a request from Cluny for cash ‘toward the cost of the great building work at Cluny’, but by the time of Peter’s visit to England in 1130, the lion’s share of this labour had already been completed.52 To be sure, the collapse of the vaulting in the nave of the massive church known as Cluny III in 1125 was a disappointing setback in a construction project begun by Abbot Hugh the Great in 1088, but the consecration of Cluny III in October 1130 suggests that the repairs were largely finished by the time Peter went to England. In fact, it may well have been the looming completion of that formidable undertaking, as well as other internal reforms undertaken by the new abbot in the aftermath of the divisive departure of his predecessor Pontius of Melgueil, that convinced the English king that Cluny under Peter’s proven stewardship was worth an investment of this magnitude in perpetuity. The timing was thus auspicious for Peter to make his bid for a royal gift. Henry I was in the south of England in the spring of 1130 when the abbot of Cluny was at Peterborough. The king spent Easter (30 March) in Woodstock, about 80 miles southwest of Peterborough, and he frequented several of his royal estates in Oxfordshire in April.53 He then moved on to Windsor, where Henry of Blois joined him.54 It seems plausible, then, that Peter met with the king either on his own in Oxfordshire or in Henry’s company at Windsor sometime in the late spring.55 By all accounts, Peter the Venerable’s gambit paid off when in the late winter of the following year King Henry announced his annual gift to Cluny at the convocation at Rouen, where it was immediately confirmed by Pope Innocent II. The king’s generosity was not forgotten by the Cluniacs. After Henry’s death in 1135, Peter consoled Adela of Blois with the promise that ‘[f]or the eternal salvation of the dead king we have established many things which the Cluniacs have never done for anyone before.’56 Nor did the passage of time tarnish the abbot’s admiration of Henry’s investment in Cluny’s future. Toward the end of his life, Peter praised the king’s generosity in the strongest possible terms: Among all the kings of the Latin west, who for the last three hundred years have testified their affection for the church of Cluny … Henry, king of the English and duke of Normandy, has surpassed all others in his gifts and has show more than an ordinary share of love and attachment to [Cluny].57

Epistola 49 (the frosty missive) and 60 (the proposal to bury Henry at Cluny), LPV I, 148–50 and 190–1. In the end, Henry chose to be buried at Winchester. 52 Green, Henry I, 210. 53 William Farrer, An Outline Itinerary of King Henry the First, Oxford 1920, 130–1 (esp. nos. 607 and 609). 54 Ibid., 131 (no. 610). 55 It is unclear when Peter came back to France. He had certainly returned by September 1130, when he greeted Pope Innocent II in St Gilles upon his arrival in France. See LPV II, 259. 56 Epistola 15, LPV I, 22 and II, 103–5: Pro regis defuncti aeterna salute tanta constituimus, quanta nunquam Cluniaci pro alio constituta sunt. 57 Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Cluny, V, 532–4 (no. 4183), at 532–3; trans. Hollister, Henry I, 413. 51



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Even Peter’s hagiographer, Rodulphus de Sully, had kind words to say about the king. This is most apparent not in the ending of the ghost story (with which we began), which cleaves closely to the conventions of the genre, but rather in its beginning, which emphasized the relationship between the king and the abbey with the following words: ‘Concerning the older King Henry of the English, it is known to many how many good things he brought to Cluny.’58 Rodulphus then took pains to stress that Henry was a man of character, despite the return of his restless soul. Unlike other sinners who appeared in monastic ghost stories, the king was not suffering in the afterlife because of his proclivity for particular sins, but simply ‘because the powerful suffer torments powerfully (quia potentes potenter tormenta patiuntur)’ due to the responsibilities attendant to their lofty station among the living.59 It was fitting thus that the king of England would turn for help in death to the abbey that he had endowed so generously in life. Peter’s Second Mission to England (1155/1156) After the passing of King Henry I in 1135, his nephew Henry of Blois became the most important advocate in England for the Cluniacs.60 Time and again, the letters of Peter the Venerable bear witness to this prelate’s agency in securing and maintaining financial support for his childhood home. It was Henry who brokered the abbey’s relationship with his brother, King Stephen (1135–54), and witnessed the new monarch’s replacement of Henry I’s annual gift of 100 marks in cash with a manor in Letcombe-Regis, which yielded a comparable amount.61 It was Henry who on several occasions sent thousands of silver marks to his brethren in Burgundy to help pay down the abbey’s mounting debts.62 Indeed, in a letter written in 1135, Peter expressed his relief and gratitude for Henry’s financial intervention, which allowed the monks of Cluny to buy back some liturgical vestments that were being held as collateral by Jews of Mâcon.63 And it was Henry who applied the financial acumen and administrative skills that he had honed in his reform of Glastonbury to a survey of Cluny’s patrimony and a reckoning of its worth and solvency.64 Henry of Blois successfully lobbied for Cluniac interests and redirected movable wealth to Burgundy throughout the tumultuous two decades of the Anarchy (1135– 1153), but the ‘precarious peace’ that the prelate helped to negotiate at Winchester Cathedral in the summer of 1153 would result in his three-year-long self-imposed Rodulphus, Vita Petri Venerabilis 13, ed. Martène and Durand, VI, 1198; and PL 189, 25: De rege Anglorum Henrico seniore multis notum est quanta bona Cluniaco contulerit. 59 Ibid. 60 Voss, Heinrich von Blois, 108–21; and Knowles, Monastic Order of England, 286–93, which focuses on Henry of Blois’ promotion of Cluniac monks to prominent positions in England. 61 Epistola 60, in LPV I, 190–1, and II, 138–9. Constable was inclined to see this grant as ‘positive evidence of [Stephen’s] bid for Cluniac support.’ (LPV II, 256). Steven also founded several abbeys that followed Cluniac observances, but were otherwise free from Cluniac control. The most important was Faversham in Kent (1148), which served as a mausoleum for Stephen, his wife, and his son: see Hollister, Henry I, 428 and 441. 62 Conveniently summarized by Voss, Heinrich von Blois, 114–15 and 118. 63 Epistola 56, in LPV I, 177. 64 Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Cluny, V, 475–882 (no. 4132). The classic study of Cluny’s economy based on Henry’s fiscal account is Georges Duby, ‘Le budget de l’abbaye de Cluny entre 1080 et 1155: Économie domaniale et économie monétaire’, Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 7, 1952, 155–71; repr. in idem, Hommes et structures du moyen âge: Recueil d’articles, Paris 1973, 61–82, but this topic demands fresh inquiry. On Henry’s reforms at Glastonbury, see N. E. Stacy, ‘Henry of Blois and the Lordship of Glastonbury’, EHR 114, 1999, 1–33. 58

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exile to the great Burgundian abbey in 1155. Like many other powerful lords of the twelfth century, Henry was an energetic sponsor of building projects, but to the surprise and dismay of his contemporaries, this abbot-cum-bishop built many fortifications.65 In its entry for the year 1138, the Winchester Chronicle listed no fewer than six castles that Henry built on the sites of manors owned by the cathedral at Wolvesey (Winchester), Taunton (Somerset), Downton (Wiltshire), Merdon and Bishop’s Waltham (Hampshire) and Farnham (Surrey).66 It was these fortifications, built to maintain the prelate’s security in the perilous political climate of the civil war, that cast suspicion upon Henry as a threat to royal authority once peace had been achieved. Indeed, in accordance with the Treaty of Winchester (1153), King Henry II (1154–89) set about consolidating his power in England and Normandy by confiscating and demolishing any privately owned castles that could be used to destabilize his new regime. Following a policy of fortress control that remained consistent throughout his reign, the king ‘seized castles as a legal pretext as well as in response to rebellions in his greater domains.’67 Several barons rose up in revolt against this policy, but they were all defeated and their fortifications impounded or destroyed. Faced with the new king’s aggressive posture vis-à-vis his own fortifications, Henry took the path of least resistance. Instead of actively contesting Henry II’s command to relinquish his castles, the prelate quietly gathered a large quantity of movable wealth and secretly fled to the abbey of Cluny. It was Henry’s act of subterfuge that brought the aged abbot of Cluny to England for a second and final time. A number of different sources attest to Abbot Peter the Venerable’s second voyage to England, including his own writings, which firmly situate the visit in 1155 or early the following year, in any case shortly before his death at Cluny on 25 December 1156.68 In a late addendum to his treatise on miracles, which Peter began writing in the mid-1140s, he related an account of a wonder performed by his tenth-century predecessor Maiolus. Peter had a particular fondness for stories about Maiolus, claiming that more legends were told about his virtues throughout all of Europe than about any other saint in Christendom besides the Virgin Mary.69 To this fund of miracles, Peter added the story of a dead boy at Souvigny, whom the holy abbot had miraculously restored to life, and remarked that at the time he was writing down this story, Maiolus himself had been dead for 162 years.70 Since the fourth abbot of Cluny had died in 994, Peter must have been writing this addendum in 1156. In the preceding chapter, written at the same time, the abbot explicitly stated that he had recently returned from his second trip to England, which thus most likely occurred in 1155 or early 1156.71 M. W. Thompson, ‘Recent Excavations in the Keep of Farnham Castle, Surrey’, Medieval Archaeology 4, 1960, 81–94; and Emma Mason, ‘The Purposeful Patronage of Henry of Blois’, Medieval History 3, 1993, 30–50, at 42–3. 66 Annales de Wintonia, s. a. 1138, ed. Henry Richard Luard, in Annales Monastici, Vol. 2: Annales Monasterii de Wintonia (A.D. 519–1277) and Annales Monasterii de Waverleia (A.D. 1–1291), London 1865, 51. 67 John D. Hosler, Henry II: A Medieval Soldier at War, 1147–1189, Leiden 2007, 171–93, esp. 185–7. 68 For what follows, see LPV II, 268; and Torrell and Bouthillier, Pierre le Vénérable et sa vision du monde, 57–9, esp. 57, n. 38, where the hypothesis of D. van den Eydne (‘Les principaux voyages de Pierre le Vénérable’, 89–94) that Peter took this trip to England in late 1148 is convincingly dismissed on the basis of the evidence cited below. 69 DM 2.32, 162. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., 164. 65



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A letter of Peter of Poitiers, a monk of Cluny who served for many years as Peter the Venerable’s trusted notary, also mentioned the abbot’s second voyage to England.72 It is well known that Peter the Venerable commissioned a Latin translation of the Qu’ran and other religious and historical Islamic texts during his sojourn in Spain in 1142/1143.73 The abbot’s outspoken aim was to create a ‘Christian arsenal (armarium Christianum)’ for European intellectuals who could use this newly translated knowledge to refute the claims of Mohammad and his followers. In 1143, Peter wrote to Bernard of Clairvaux, inviting him to undertake this task, but he received no answer. The project lay fallow until the aftermath of the disastrous Second Crusade (1045–1049) and the death of Bernard in 1153 prompted Peter to turn his attention to Islam once again. While the abbot of Cluny was abroad on his second trip to England, Peter of Poitiers set to work outlining a treatise against Islam for his master. In a remarkable letter sent from Cluny to England, Peter of Poitiers remarked with frustration that he had prepared a first draft of the treatise outline (capitula) and had sent it to England in the hands of a monk named John, who somehow lost it en route.74 This accident forced Peter of Poitiers to rewrite the outline from scratch, but it also provided him with the opportunity to make improvements to it before sending it again to England. This time, however, he made a second copy for himself. The Norman chronicler Robert of Torigni spoke most plainly about the purpose of Peter the Venerable’s second voyage to England. In the year 1155 of his continuation of Sigebert of Gembloux’s Universal Chronicle, Robert reported that King Henry II had decided not to invade Ireland at the request of his mother, the empress Mathilda. The only other noteworthy event of that year read as follows: ‘After he had covertly sent ahead his treasure to Cluny with the help of the abbot, Henry, bishop of Winchester, departed from England in secret without the permission of the king. For this reason, King Henry destroyed all of his castles.’75 What is most remarkable about this entry is not Henry’s desire for secrecy as he fled the country, but rather the personal role played by Peter the Venerable in smuggling the bishop’s movable wealth from Winchester to Cluny. Many religious communities and shrines housed portable wealth like gold, silver, and precious stones in the twelfth century and Cluny was no exception, but its movement from place to place entailed significant risk, especially from the threat of bandits or pirates.76 The sum of wealth that Henry snuck out of England must have been great indeed, if the abbot of Cluny felt the need to accompany it personally across the English Channel. It may have been the case that Peter travelled with a large enough retinue that Henry’s thesaurus would have been both well guarded and well concealed on the journey, but in the end there is no way to know. In any case, after many years of Henry’s On the identity and role of Peter of Poitiers, see LPV II, 331–43 (Appendix Q). For what follows, see Scott G. Bruce, Cluny and the Muslims of La Garde-Freinet: Hagiography and the Problem of Islam in Medieval Europe, Ithaca and London 2015, 70–99, with ample references to earlier literature. 74 Peter of Poitiers, Epistola 4, ed. Reinhold Glei, in Petrus Venerabilis, Schriften zum Islam, Altenberge 1985, 228–39; trans. Irven M. Resnick, in Peter the Venerable, Writings Against Islam, The Fathers of the Church: Medieval Continuation 16, Washington, D.C. 2016, 163–71. 75 Robert of Torigni, Chronica, s.a. 1155, ed. Richard Howlett, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, RS 82, 4 vols, London 1884–9, IV, 186. A new edition of Robert’s Chronica is in preparation by Professor Thomas Bisson. 76 For examples of cash donations to religious houses and their vulnerability to theft, see Emma Cownie, Religious Patronage in Anglo-Norman England, 1066–1135, Woodbridge 1998, 51–2, 75, and 77; and, more generally, Hollister, Henry I, 454–7. 72 73

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support, the abbot of Cluny finally had the chance to return the favour by offering the bishop (and his wealth) a safe haven in Burgundy during the early years of the reign of the new king of England. The exact timing of Peter the Venerable’s second visit to England is open to question, but given the covert nature of the transfer of Henry of Blois’ treasure to Cluny, it is most likely that it took place at a time when King Henry II was preoccupied with military campaigns, a frequent feature of the early years of his reign.77 The king held a great council at Wallingford on 10 April and then spent the summer of 1155 suppressing the rebellion of Hugh de Mortimer with sieges at Cleobury, Wigmore, and Northbridge.78 Henry II remained in England throughout the autumn and early winter, but in January he departed for Dover and from there to Picardy. He then spent the first six months of 1156 campaigning in Anjou against his brother Geoffrey, where he laid siege to castles at Mirebeau, Chinon, and Loudon. Peter’s own movements in this period are not as well documented as Henry’s. The abbot was in Soissons in June 1155, where he met with King Louis VII about a matter concerning the abbey of Vézelay, but he may have ventured to England later that summer.79 His whereabouts in the autumn and early winter are unknown. Upon his return from England, he tarried at the monastery of Reuil on the Marne before returning to Cluny, but it is impossible to date this visit with any precision.80 For his part, Henry of Blois would have been especially savvy about his departure from England. The summer of 1155 and the winter of 1156 would have been ideal times to move his treasure in secret from Winchester to Cluny, for on both occasions the king was preoccupied with military campaigns to consolidate his rule in England and France. Conclusion Peter the Venerable’s two trips to England in 1130 and 1155/1156 were similar in purpose, but different in character. In 1130, the time was auspicious for the abbot of Cluny to lobby King Henry I for a perpetual gift to his monastery, for several reasons. The ageing king had favoured the great Burgundian abbey and its English dependencies in the past. Peter had cultivated the friendship of two influential members of the royal family: Henry I’s sister Adela, by then a Cluniac nun of Marcigny, and his nephew Henry of Blois, a powerful prelate who had spent his childhood at Cluny. But in a world in which abbots communicated primarily by letters and proxies, Peter’s decision to embark for England speaks of his understanding that the negotiation of a large perpetual gift for his abbey required him to make his case in person before the king that Cluny was worth the investment. In the end, he was successful. By 1155, the political climate had changed. The abbey of Cluny had found an especially rare and excellent benefactor in Henry of Blois, whose bountiful gifts and loans did much to keep the great Burgundian monastery solvent in the 1130s and 1140s. When Henry decided to flee from England to Cluny with his movable wealth during the early years of the reign of King Henry II, Peter the Venerable decided once again to make the voyage across the English Channel. Unlike his first Hosler, Henry II. For what follows, see Robert William Eyton, Court, Household, and Itinerary of King Henry II, London 1878, 12–18. 79 LPV II, 268. 80 DM 2.33, 164. 77 78



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journey, undertaken with a king’s permission, this latter visit was by all accounts a covert expedition to shepherd the prelate’s treasure from Winchester to Cluny. Peter’s personal role in this adventure is open to question, but his intention was clear. His abbey would surely benefit from this portion of Henry of Blois’ wealth, but even more importantly, the abbot of Cluny was repaying a debt of friendship to one of his oldest and dearest allies, a generous prelate in need of a safe haven when the tide of royal politics had turned against him.

LA PRODUCTION MANUSCRITE ANGLO-NORMANDE ET LA BIBLE D’HERMAN DE VALENCIENNES: USAGE ET RÉCEPTION D’UN LIVRE VERNACULAIRE (xiie–xive SIÈCLES) Francis Gingras The biblical paraphrase appeared in French from the 1190s, notably with a poem by Herman de Valenciennes that his most recent editor entitled Romanz de Dieu et de sa mere. The rapid and important success of this text is palpable through the 37 manuscripts listed to date, including two that can be dated back to the late twelfth century, at the very time of the poem’s composition. The fact that half of these manuscripts are of Anglo-Norman origin also indicates that the popularity of this vernacular paraphrase seems particularly well established in the Anglo-Norman world. The tradition of biblical paraphrase in the vernacular, which, in Britain, was already an ancient tradition, as well as the existence, at least since the year 1000, of books consisting only of vernacular texts, probably helped to promote the manuscript transmission of this biblical paraphrase in the Anglo-Norman world. Furthermore, different elements (marginal commentaries in Latin, the presence of the text in monastic libraries, or in bilingual or even trilingual manuscripts) indicate that the poem of Herman de Valenciennes circulated as well in the clerical circles as in those of the small secular nobility. Despite the claims of its author who said he was addressing those who do not understand Latin, his text has reached a wide audience that was not limited to illiterati. Finally, by the nature of his work based on the Sacred Scriptures, Herman de Valenciennes presents throughout his text comments on the stakes of translation ‘in romance’. Here again, the reflections of Herman de Valenciennes found a particular resonance in the Anglo-Norman context where a true ‘culture of translation’ had developed. While on the continent the reception of his text fluctuated, especially regarding its generic status (romance, chanson), the reception of the Bible of Herman de Valenciennes and the Assumption Notre-Dame in the Anglo-Norman world was rather characterized by its precocity and its fidelity to the original text. Parmi les plus anciens manuscrits en langue française, la part des manuscrits anglonormands est considérable. Pour les manuscrits datables du xiie siècle, au moins les deux tiers des manuscrits conservés sont clairement d’origine anglo-normande.1 Une nouvelle culture du livre manuscrit se met ainsi en place dans un domaine linguistique particulier. Elle concerne d’abord, pour l’essentiel, la littérature dite de dévotion (psautiers et commentaires sur les psaumes, sermonnaires ou fragments de sermons) auxquels on peut ajouter les vies de saints et les miracles de la Vierge. L’ensemble couvre plus de la moitié des textes conservés. Du lot, ressortent 18 psautiers et 5 sermonnaires, ce qui contribue à définir cette nouvelle pratique du livre vernaculaire qui concerne surtout l’aire anglo-normande avant d’essaimer plus largement sur le continent. 1 Maria Careri, Christine Ruby, Ian Short, Livres et écritures en français et en occitan au Catalogue illustré, Roma 2011.

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C’est dans ce contexte qu’apparaissent des traductions et des paraphrases de la Bible dont une, attribuée à Herman de Valenciennes, connaîtra un succès remarquable jusqu’au xive siècle, à preuve les 37 témoins répertoriés à ce jour dont la moitié est d’origine anglo-normande et deux clairement datables du xiie siècle.2 À partir de cet exemple important d’appropriation des récits bibliques par un auteur vernaculaire, il est possible d’étudier le contexte singulier dans lequel se développe la pratique du livre manuscrit anglo-normand, la nature du travail de paraphrase et de traduction mené par Herman de Valenciennes à la fin du xiie siècle et, enfin, la diffusion de cet ouvrage qui contribuera à élargir la base sur laquelle l’Europe chrétienne s’est dotée d’une histoire commune. Le livre vernaculaire dans le monde anglo-normand avant 1200 S’il existe des gloses romanes et même quelques textes en proto-français dans une douzaine de manuscrits antérieurs à 1066, associés pour une large part à deux centres de productions, d’un côté l’abbaye carolingienne de Saint-Amand (près de Valenciennes) et de l’autre Saint-Martial de Limoges, aucun de ces textes vernaculaires ne constitue cependant un livre à lui seul, s’agissant de textes brefs copiés sur un feuillet vacant dans des livres latins. Pour le premier quart du xiie siècle, il faut encore se contenter de fragments, de gloses ou de textes ajoutés dans des livres latins. Les lieux de production de ces ouvrages, où le français est intégré après coup, se partagent alors entre le Midi de la France (dans les domaines occitans et francoprovençal, notamment Solignac) et le Nord-Ouest. L’abbaye de Fécamp commence peut-être à jouer un rôle et celle de Cirencester en Angleterre pourrait avoir produit la copie de la Panormia d’Yves de Chartres où figurent quelques gloses anglonormandes en marge d’un seul feuillet.3 Parmi les premières unités codicologiques indépendantes constituées de textes en ancien français figurent les neuf cahiers de quaternions qui donnent le texte de la Chanson de Roland en décasyllabes et qui ont été reliés (avant 1622) avec une copie latine du Timæus.4 Le caractère très singulier de la copie du Roland, qui se reflète notamment dans la mise en page et dans l’écriture irrégulière, le distingue des autres manuscrits contemporains. Sa circulation, sous forme de livret, reste assez unique pour cette période précoce et pour ce genre de texte. Le format, relativement petit, et la mise en page sur une seule colonne se trouvent encore pour les chansons de geste jusqu’au xiiie siècle. Le psautier monolingue d’Oxford est le plus ancien de toute une production de psautiers entièrement ou partiellement vernaculaires. Il aurait été copié à l’abbaye de Saint-Albans dans les années 1140–1150. À sa suite (et dépendant même le plus souvent directement de cette version) quatorze psautiers et quatre commentaires sur les psaumes sont copiés au xiie siècle, dont au moins treize sont clairement anglo-normands. Pour sept d’entre eux, il est même possible de trouver un lieu de production relativement précis, lié aux grandes abbayes bénédictines du Sud-est Une première édition de la Bible d’Herman de Valenciennes a été entreprise à Greifswald à la veille de la Première Guerre mondiale sous la direction d’Edmund Stengel, mais elle est restée incomplète (La Bible von Herman de Valenciennes, éd. E. Stengel et al., 4 vols parus, Greifswald 1913–1914). En 1975, paraissait la transcription d’un seul manuscrit (amputé d’une partie du récit de la Passion) par Ina Spiele, Li Romanz de Dieu et de sa mere, éd. Ina Spiele, Leyde 1975. Sauf indication contraire, c’est à cette édition que je renvoie. 3 Oxford, Jesus College, MS 26, fol. 170v. 4 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 23. 2



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de l’Angleterre. Outre Saint-Albans, déjà citée, les scriptoria de Canterbury, Peterborough, Winchester et Westminster ont produit des psautiers à traduction interlinéaire ou à versets alternés latin-français (dans ce cas, le latin occupant toujours le registre supérieur). La place prépondérante du monde anglo-normand dans cette première production significative de livres au moins partiellement en français s’explique par la situation linguistique particulière de l’Angleterre. Un des facteurs déterminants à cet égard me semble être la production de livres anglo-saxons attestée à date ancienne. Des gloses en vieil anglais sont ajoutées aux psaumes dès le ixe siècle5 et se multiplient encore après la Conquête, ce dont témoignent non seulement les fragments rescapés et aujourd’hui dispersés,6 mais encore de véritables psautiers glosés7 qu’on peut associer aux mêmes scriptoria que nous avons vus pour les psautiers anglonormands, notamment ceux de Canterbury, auquel on associe déjà le Vespasian Psalter,8 glosé en vieil anglais dès le début du ixe siècle,9 et celui de Winchester.10 On trouve encore un psautier bilingue, avec traduction en vieil anglais sur la colonne adjacente, copié vers 1060.11 On sait par ailleurs que l’évêque d’Exeter, Leofric (1050–1072), a fait copier des homélies et d’autres textes pastoraux12 qui peuvent être rapprochés du sermonnaire de Wulfstan, associé à Wulfstan II, évêque de Worcester de 1062 à 1095.13 À côté des psaumes, qui restent de loin le texte biblique le plus glosé en langue vernaculaire, on trouve aussi en Angleterre des extraits de l’Ecclésiaste copiés avec une glose anglaise au milieu du xie siècle.14 Beaucoup plus rares, les gloses évangéliques se trouvent néanmoins dans deux (des trente) manuscrits des Évangiles copiés en Angleterre à cette période. Elles sont ajoutées dans la deuxième moitié du xe siècle aux évangiles de Lindisfarne,15 dans ce cas par le provost de SaintCuthbert, en Northumbrie, et dans l’autre dans les Évangiles dits de Rushworth ou de MacRegol,16 produits en Irlande par deux scribes, Owun et Farmon, dont le dialecte a été associé à celui de la Mercie. En Grande Bretagne, la tradition de la paraphrase biblique en langue vernaculaire s’ancrait également dans une tradition très ancienne. Une paraphrase anglo-saxonne de la Genèse produite au ixe siècle, dont trois fragments nous sont parvenus,17 est ainsi adaptée en vieil anglais dès le début du xe siècle et jointe à une autre paraphrase de la Genèse au tournant des x et xie siècles, pour constituer la célèbre Genèse copiée dans le manuscrit Junius 11 de la bibliothèque Bodléienne, qu’on attribuait jadis au poète Caedmon.18 On retrouve à nouveau le monastère bénéDans les fragments du psautier de Blickling, New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS 776. Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 312, Haarlem, Stadsbibliotheek, MS 188, fol.  53 et Sonderhausen, Schlossmuseum, MS Br.  1. 7 London, BL, MS Stowe 2. 8 London, BL, MS Cotton Vespasian AI. 9 Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff. 1. 23 et London, BL, MS Royal 2.B.v. 10 London, BL, MS Cotton Vitellius E. xviii. 11 Paris, BnF, MS lat. 8824. 12 London, BL, MS Cotton Cleopatra B. xiii, fol. 1–58 et Lambeth Palace, MS 489. 13 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 113 et 114. 14 Londres, BL, MS Royal 7 C. iv, fol. 102r–106r. 15 Londres, BL, MS Cotton Nero D. iv. 16 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Auctarium D. 2. 19. 17 Vatican, MS Palatinus Latinus, 1447. 18 La Genèse du manuscrit Junius XI de la Bodléienne, éd. Colette Stéfanovitch, Publications de l’AMAES, Paris 1992. 5 6

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dictin de Winchester avec la traduction par Ælfric d’une partie de la Genèse au tournant des xe et xie siècles, complétée à la fin du siècle pour donner une traduction complète de l’Heptateuque.19 Outre les fragments des différents livres, une copie complète et richement illustrée de l’Hexateuque a été conservée à l’abbaye Saint-Augustin de Canterbury où elle est toujours consultée à la fin du xiie siècle, comme en témoignent les gloses marginales bilingues (latin et vieil anglais) dont le caractère relativement savant (avec notamment des références à Pierre Le Mangeur) indique que l’usage de la langue vernaculaire n’était pas limité aux laïcs illettrés. Canterbury joue encore un rôle dans la diffusion des traductions ouest-saxonnes des Évangiles. Produite dans la deuxième moitié du xe siècle, cette traduction est préservée dans six manuscrits et deux fragments. On la trouve à la fin du xie siècle aussi bien à Exeter, don de l’évêque Leofric,20 qu’à l’abbaye de Bath,21 mais c’est à Christ Church de Canterbury qu’elle continue à être copiée et utilisée jusqu’à la fin du xiie siècle.22 On le voit, la tradition du livre vernaculaire bénéficie d’une pratique déjà bien établie dans l’Angleterre anglo-saxonne au moins depuis l’an mil, peut-être même dès la fin du xe siècle, pour des codices uniquement constitués de textes vernaculaires. Cette tradition reste bien vivante jusqu’au xiie siècle et se concentre sur quelques scriptoria qui semblent particulièrement actifs, dont ceux de Winchester et de Canterbury. Ces éléments, auxquels il faut ajouter des traces de leur usage par des lecteurs manifestement lettrés, laisse entrevoir une pratique du livre vernaculaire qui est loin de se limiter à l’adaptation exceptionnelle des grands textes du canon et de la liturgie au bénéfice des illiterati. Ils témoignent au contraire d’une véritable réflexion sur la traduction des textes sacrés et sur le rôle qu’elle peut jouer dans l’exégèse biblique. À ce titre, la langue vernaculaire se voit reconnaître une valeur qui participe aussi de la culture savante. Après la Conquête, les mêmes milieux monastiques jouent un rôle dans la diffusion de traductions et de paraphrases des livres bibliques en anglo-normand. Dans la deuxième moitié du xiie siècle apparaît une traduction en prose rythmée des Quatre Livres des Rois et de leurs gloses, dont le plus ancien manuscrit a été copié en Angleterre vers 1170.23 À la même époque, sans doute entre 1160 et 1170, une traduction du Livre des Juges a été produite pour Othon de Saint-Omer et Richard de Hastings, maîtres du temple en Angleterre de 1153 à 1154 pour le premier, le second lui succédant en décembre 1154. Le seul fragment du xiie siècle de cette traduction ancienne qui nous soit parvenu contient des traits qui pourraient être anglonormands.24 À cela il faut encore ajouter des traductions faites à la demande de la noblesse, comme Adélaïde, épouse d’Osborn de Condet, qui, vers 1150, commande à Samson de Nanteuil une traduction versifiée des Proverbes et de leurs gloses pour l’instruction de son fils Roger.25 C’est donc dans le contexte particulier d’un milieu déjà coutumier des gloses, paraphrases et traductions vernaculaires de la Bible que se développent les premières adaptations anglo-normandes de certains livres bibliques dans la deuxième moitié Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 509. Cambridge, University Library, MS Ii. 2. 11 et Exeter Cathedral, MS 3501, fols 0, 1–7. 21 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS140. 22 London, BL, MSS Cotton Vespasian D.  xiv et Royal 1 A.  xiv; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 38. 23 Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS 54. 24 New Brunswick, Theological Seminary, Gardner A. Sage library. 25 London, BL, MS Harley 4388, fols 1ra–86va. Samson de Nanteuil, Les Proverbes de Salemon, éd. Claire Isoz, 3 vols, Anglo-Norman Text Society, London 1988–1994. 19 20



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du xiie siècle, avec le Psautier monolingue d’Oxford (c.1140) comme témoin le plus ancien de cette tradition. Une véritable pratique du livre religieux en langue vernaculaire se met alors en place, avec une vingtaine d’ouvrages édifiants unilingues ou bilingues produits en Angleterre avant 1200 (treize psautiers et deux recueils de commentaires sur les psaumes, deux vies de saint Thomas Becket – dont un manuscrit acéphale –, un recueil didactique comprenant une traduction du Livre des Proverbes, les vingt-et-un cahiers de la traduction amplifiée des Quatre Livres des Rois), sans compter les huit fragments hagiographiques ou liturgiques auxquels on peut clairement attribuer une origine anglo-normande. Ces statistiques ne reposent bien évidemment que sur les manuscrits conservés et répertoriés. Si on élargit le domaine de l’enquête pour inclure les catalogues médiévaux, on peut, à partir de la liste dressée par Madeleine Blaess,26 ajouter quelques manuscrits vernaculaires qui figuraient à date ancienne dans les catalogues des bibliothèques monastiques. Ainsi dans l’inventaire de la bibliothèque de l’abbaye cistercienne Notre-Dame de Flaxley (dans le Gloucestershire), dressé au début du xiiie siècle, figurent in gallice une vie de saint Godric et une vie de saint Thomas Becket, et dans celui établi en 1247 à l’abbaye bénédictine NotreDame de Glastonbury, un sermonnaire gallice scriptis.27 On trouve même, avant la fin du xiiie siècle, une traduction française des livres des Maccabées, des Juges et des Rois à l’abbaye Sainte-Radegonde de Bradsole dans le Kent.28Nous avons là d’autres preuves de la diffusion précoce et assez étendue des ouvrages religieux en langue vernaculaire dans les milieux monastiques insulaires. Le latin y conserve à l’évidence la place d’honneur, aussi bien par le nombre des manuscrits conservés que par celui des ouvrages répertoriés dans les catalogues médiévaux. L’Angleterre n’en offre pas moins un contexte particulier où la langue vernaculaire se voit précocement attribuer un rôle dans la diffusion par l’écrit des grands récits bibliques. Or c’est là que l’adaptation d’un chanoine de Valenciennes trouvera un écho considérable et donnera la première réécriture de l’histoire sainte en français à jouir d’une large diffusion. La Bible d’Herman de Valenciennes, lecture savante et populaire Le texte qu’on appelle Bible d’Herman de Valenciennes est une adaptation de la Bible en laisses d’alexandrins monorimes composée entre 1189 et 1195.29 Son auteur se présente au milieu de son texte dans un passage d’une rare précision généalogique que ne conservent cependant pas tous les manuscrits: Signor, por Deu vos pri a toz que m’escoutez : Je voeil que vos sachiez de quel terre sui nez. Je fui nez de Hainnaut et toz mes parrantez, A Valencienes fui batisiez et levez. Li bons quens Bauduïns, sachiez, i fu mandez Et o lui Yolans la contesse a ses lez. Et des autres barons i avoit il assez

Madeleine Blaess, ‘Les manuscrits dans les monastères anglais au Moyen Âge’, Romania 94, 1973, 321–58. 27 Ibid., 327 et 328. 28 Ibid., 328. 29 André de Mandach, ‘À quand remonte la Bible de Herman de Valenciennes ?’, Mémoires du Cercle archéologique et historique de Valenciennes 9, 1976, 53–69. 26

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Francis Gingras Et Dudars [Everars]30 li evesques fu cel jor confermez ; D’icel meïsme esvesque fui je puis coronnez. Mes pere ot non Robers, uns hom molt renomez Et Erambors, ma mere, granz fu ses parantez.31

Malgré ces précisions, la biographie d’Herman reste incertaine. On a pu identifier sa marraine avec Yolande, comtesse de Soissons, et son parrain avec Baudoin V, frère de Yolande et comte de Hainaut entre 1171 et 1195. L’évêque dont il est question serait Éverard d’Avesnes, évêque de Tournai et du Valenciennois de 1173 à 1191.32 On a pu également émettre l’hypothèse qu’Herman a écrit son texte directement en anglo-normand, peut-être dans le cadre de fonctions pastorales qu’il aurait exercée en Angleterre.33 Il existe néanmoins une variante (transmise par un manuscrit de la fin du xive siècle) qui dédie plutôt l’ouvrage à Philippe Auguste : Ci finist l’abregié de la Bible, appelé l’Ovide des Pères, lequel fist et compila Metheores Hermen, docteur profés en la saincte page de théologie, lequel il mist en ceste fourme pour et en accomplissement de Philippe Dieudonné, roy de France, ayoul du beneoist monseigneur saint Loys, qui glorieusement, saintement et dignement regna en France.34

Ce colophon semble toutefois ajouté a posteriori puisque Philippe Auguste y est présenté essentiellement comme l’aïeul de saint Louis. Une seule certitude : très tôt après la date supposée de sa composition, l’œuvre d’Herman de Valenciennes est copiée en Angleterre. La partie relatant des épisodes de l’Ancien et du Nouveau Testament est ainsi copiée dans un manuscrit du dernier quart du xiie siècle35 et l’Assomption de la Vierge dans un autre manuscrit de la même période, qui pourrait être de peu postérieur à 1177 (la traduction d’une bulle latine, datée du 28 avril 1177, du pape Alexandre III en faveur des Templiers, traduction inconnue par ailleurs, offre un indice en ce sens).36 Le plus ancien manuscrit de la Bible (Genève, MS Comites Latentes, 183), daté du dernier quart du xiie siècle, se présente comme un codex de petit format (191 × 115 mm) d’une écriture monastique bien détachée, mise en page sur une seule colonne de 34 lignes, avec des initiales détachées et des débuts de laisse marqués par des lettrines alternativement rouges et vertes. L’autre manuscrit de la fin du xiie siècle, qui ne donne que le récit de L’Assomption (Paris, BnF, MS nouv. acq. fr. 4503), est l’un des plus anciens recueils en langue vernaculaire. Il est, lui aussi de petit format (194 × 130), recourant à la scripta continua caractéristique des psautiers. Le recueil associe au texte d’Herman de Valenciennes la Vie de saint Variante : Deudrad, li bons eveskes (Genève, MS Comites Latentes 183, fol.  87v). éd. Spiele, v. 5608–5618. ‘Seigneurs, au nom de Dieu, je vous prie tous de m’écouter : / je veux que vous sachiez dans quelle terre je suis né. / Je suis né dans le Hainaut et, à l’instar de toute ma famille, / j’ai été baptisé et tenu sur les fons baptismaux à Valenciennes. / Le bon comte Baudouin, sachez-le, y avait été invité / avec la comtesse Yolande à ses côtés. / Il y avait également plusieurs hommes de qualité et, ce jour-là, l’évêque Éverard fut intronisé. / De ce même évêque, j’ai depuis reçu la tonsure. / Mon père avait nom Robert, un homme très réputé, / Et Érambourg, ma mère, venait d’une importante famille.’ 32 André de Mandach, ‘la Bible de Herman de Valenciennes’, 53–69. 33 André de Mandach et Ève-Marie Roth, ‘Le “Jeu des Trois Rois” de Herman de Valenciennes : trois cycles anglo-normands inédits du xiie siècle’, Vox Romanica 48, 1989, 85–107. 34 Besançon, BM, 550, fol. 97v. ‘Ici s’achève le résumé de la Bible, appelé l’Ovide des Pères, fait et compilé par Météore Hermen, docteur profès dans la sainte matière de théologie, qu’il mit ainsi en forme pour Philippe Dieudonné, roi de France, aïeul du bienheureux saint Louis qui glorieusement, saintement et dignement régna en France.’ 35 Genève, MS Comites Latentes 183. 36 Paris, BnF, MS nouv. acq. fr. 4503. 30 31



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Alexis, le Voyage de saint Brendan et la Vie de sainte Catherine d’Alexandrie composée par la nonne Clémence de Barking. En s’appuyant sur le fait que trois de ces textes (l’Assomption, le Voyage de saint Brendan et la Vie de saint Catherine) font référence à l’abbaye de Saint-Albans, et en rappelant le rôle qu’elle a joué à date ancienne (autour de Christine de Markyate) pour la transcription de textes vernaculaires, on peut, à la suite de Tim Hemming, supposer un lien avec cette abbaye bénédictine du sud de l’Angleterre.37 Deux autres manuscrits anglo-normands du xiiie siècle, présentent une mise en page semblable sur une seule colonne ou en longues lignes et, pour le plus ancien, un format là encore particulièrement petit.38 Ils ont aussi pour caractéristique de n’être constitués que de la Bible d’Herman de Valenciennes. Dans les autres manuscrits anglo-normands, la Bible d’Herrman de Valenciennes apparaît toujours avec d’autres textes, le plus souvent dans des recueils essentiellement didactico-religieux. Ainsi le texte d’Herman est précédé de quelques textes didactiques dans le manuscrit de Cambridge, Pembroke College Library, MS 46. Le codex, daté de 1280, s’ouvre avec la traduction des Distiques de Caton par Élie de Winchester (fols. 1 à 5v), suivi de proverbes en français (fols. 7 à 9v) puis du poème d’Herman, incomplet de la fin, mais dans une version très proche de celle du manuscrit de Genève. Une note au verso d’un feuillet de garde a permis d’associer ce codex à l’abbaye bénédictine de Bury Saint-Edmunds. C’est également une note dans la marge de queue au verso du folio 83 du manuscrit de la British Library, MS Egerton 2710, qui permet d’associer ce recueil religieux du xiiie siècle à l’abbaye bénédictine de Saint-Mary, King’s Mead, dans le Derby. Il contient, outre l’Assomption de Notre-Dame d’Herman de Valenciennes, le poème anglo-normand sur l’Ancien Testament, complété par le récit de la Passion d’après Herman de Valenciennes, suivi de la Vengeance Nostre Seigneur, des sermons (dont le Sermon du siecle de Guichart de Beaulieu) et des vies de saint en prose et en vers. Par son contenu, ce manuscrit a été rapproché d’un recueil insulaire du deuxième quart du xiiie siècle.39 Il a été associé, par François Avril et Patricia Stirnemann, à l’atelier de William de Brailes, enlumineur actif à Oxford entre 1230 et 1260.40 La place singulière qu’y occupe la Vie de sainte Marguerite (absente du manuscrit Egerton) et la chanson notée a posteriori sur le dernier feuillet (Margot, Margot, greif sunt ly mauf d’amer, tres duce Margot…, fol. 204r) peuvent constituer un indice supplémentaire pour localiser ce manuscrit à l’abbaye d’Eynsham, dans l’Oxfordshire, où se développe une dévotion à sainte Marguerite suite à une vision qu’aurait eu le jeune frère Edmund, le Vendredi saint de 1196, et dont le récit a été fait en latin par Adam d’Eynsham, abbé entre 1213 et 1228. On trouve aussi quelques abbayes cisterciennes associées à ces ouvrages religieux vernaculaires. C’est le cas notamment d’un manuscrit, également daté du deuxième quart du xiiie siècle, qui porte un ex-libris de l’abbaye Sainte-Marie de Kingswood : Liber monachorum Sancte Marie de Kingeswde per Ricardum priorem.41 Ce recueil se signale par ailleurs par son caractère essentiellement latin. L’Assomption de Notre-Dame y est en effet le seul texte en langue vernaculaire. Il La Vie de saint Alexis, éd. Tim D. Hemming, Exeter 1994. Chicago, University Library, MS 535 – le plus petit (150 ×110 mm) et le plus ancien – et Dublin, Trinity College, MS 253. 39 Paris, BnF, MS fr. 19152. 40 François Avril et Patricia Stirnemann, Manuscrits enluminés d›origine insulaire (viie–xxe siècle), Paris 1987, no. 107. 41 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Musaeo e 62, fol. 1v. 37 38

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occupe quatre feuillets (fols. 130–4) au milieu de textes de Richard de Saint-Victor, de saint Augustin et du pseudo-Méthode. Le lien entre le latin et le texte vernaculaire se donne à voir d’une autre manière à travers les commentaires marginaux laissés en latin dans la marge d’un manuscrit anglo-normand du xive siècle.42 Ce manuscrit donne l’Assomption d’Herman, précédée d’une Histoire anonyme de la vierge,43 et accompagnée de vies de saints, notamment celle de saint Edmond le Roi par Denis Piramus et celle de Thomas Becket par Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, ainsi que neuf vies de saintes (Luce, Marie-Madeleine, Marguerite, Marthe, Élisabeth de Hongrie, Christine, Julienne, Agnès et Agathe), toutes attribuées à Nicole Bozon. Des notes en latin viennent marquer le discours pour désigner des sections du textes dans l’histoire de la Vierge, des renvois au Nouveau Testament ou encore pour signaler une digression et ses sources (par exemple, fol. 58ra : digressio, Joseph et alii historiographi) ou, encore plus significatif, pour prendre certaines distances par rapport au texte. Ainsi quand le texte anglo-normand décrit la scène de la flagellation en précisant que les Juifs ont attaché le Christ à une colonne (Il pristrent nostre segnur mult felonessement, / Si li lïerent al pilier mult pautenerement, v. 1939– 1940), la main marginale précise, en latin, que ce détail relève de la tradition mais qu’il n’apparaît pas dans les Évangiles : opinio comunis quamvis non scribatur in evangilio (fol. 65rb). Le même type de remarque (à cet endroit, simplement opinio comunis, fol. 71ra) se trouve en marge de la légende de Longin qui transperce le Christ de sa lance et est guéri de sa demi-cécité par le sang et l’eau qui coulent des plaies du Sauveur : Kar un des chivalers si prist une lance E fist une hastivesce par sa mescreance, Au costé Nostre Segnur la bouta tant avant, Ke le sanc e l’euwe s’en issit meyntenant. Homme dist que cel chivaler si esteit monocle, Fu appelé Longins, si fu demy aveugle. Kant il aveit Jhesus tut dreit al quer feru, Si est par la lance le sanc aval coru. Sur la face Longins le sanc descendit, Il tert ses oylz demeyntenant, kant le sanc sentit. Le sanc Nostre Segnur ses deus oylz ovrit E par le seint sanc sa veüe recovrit Hom dist cel chivaler devynt prodhome aprés E fu en repentance tuz jours avant mes.44

Les commentaires marginaux signalent non seulement les interactions linguistiques entre latin et langue vernaculaire dans l’espace d’un livre didactico-religieux. London, BL, MS Cotton Domitian A. XI. Rudolf Becker, Das La Genesi de Nostre Dame Seinte Marie betitelte Gedicht des Britischen Museums der Handschrift Cotton Domitian XI, fol. 43b–80, Greifswald 1908. 44 La Genesi de Notre-Dame, ed. Becker, v. 2607–2620. ‘Alors un des chevaliers prit une lance / et, dans un emportement alimenté par son manque de foi, / il l’enfonça si profondément dans le côté de Notre Seigneur / que le sang et l’eau en jaillirent aussitôt. / On dit que ce chevalier qui était borgne / était appelé Longin et qu’il était à demi-aveugle. / Quant il eut frappé Jésus droit au cœur, / et que la lance eut fait couler le sang vers le sol, / le sang tomba jusque sur le visage de Longin. / Il se frotta les yeux dès qu’il sentit le sang. / Le sang de Notre Seigneur ouvrit ses deux yeux / et, grâce au Saint Sang, il recouvrit la vue. / On dit que ce chevalier devint ensuite un homme de bien / et qu’il s’en repentit dès lors tous les jours de sa vie.’ 42 43



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Leur nature même souligne que, bien que ces textes aient été écrits dans la langue commune, leurs lecteurs pouvaient tout à fait leur faire l’honneur d’annotations savantes sinon érudites. Dans ce codex du deuxième quart du xive siècle, nous sommes à l’évidence bien loin des supposés illettrés pour qui on aurait écrit en langue vernaculaire. La maîtrise linguistique des lecteurs d’un texte religieux en langue vernaculaire, comme ceux d’Herman de Valenciennes, est à l’œuvre dans des anthologies personnelles comme celle du manuscrit Harley 2253 où figure le récit de la Passion d’après la Bible de notre auteur. Ce manuscrit trilingue (latin, anglais et français), où se trouvent des vies de saint et des fabliaux anglo-normands, à côté de poèmes allitératifs et rimés en moyen anglais, est constitué par la réunion de deux unités codicologiques. La deuxième unité aurait été copiée entre 1340 et 1346 dans la région de Ludlow, vraisemblablement sous le patronage de Sir Laurence de Ludlow, seigneur du château de Stokesay.45 En la reliant avec l’unité où se trouve le texte d’Herman de Valenciennes, le scribe de Ludlow (dans les Midlands de l’ouest) y ajoute des titres à l’encre rouge et adjoint des cahiers où l’unité religieuse est plus nette que dans le reste du manuscrit à travers une série de textes que l’on trouve associés dans d’autres codices.46 La variété des langues et des textes fait cependant la preuve d’une certaine pratique du livre où le religieux et le profane peuvent parfaitement cohabiter et, surtout, qui ne repose pas sur l’infériorité des langues vernaculaires par rapport au latin.47 Un autre manuscrit trilingue, plus ancien puisqu’il aurait été compilé entre 1271 et 1283, donne la Bible d’Herman de Valenciennes parmi plus de cent textes qui concernent aussi bien la dévotion que le divertissement ou même les pratiques médicales et magiques. Il a été associé à Oswaldstow dans le Worcestershire.48 Le scribe-compilateur a été identifié avec Richard de Grimhill, représentant de la petite noblesse anglo-normande dans laquelle le manuscrit serait resté. Il s’agit, là encore, d’une anthologie personnelle où la diversité des intérêts (qui vont du religieux au pratique) et la variété des langues attestent une pratique du livre vernaculaire polyglotte où la connaissance du latin est loin d’être absente, sans que la langue de l’Église s’arroge pour autant le monopole du religieux. On pourrait encore ajouter une autre anthologie trilingue du même type,49 datée du début du xive siècle, qui donne à travers des textes aussi bien pratiques que religieux l’Assomption de Notre-Dame dans la version d’Herman. Les textes d’Herman de Valenciennes circulent ainsi aussi bien dans les milieux cléricaux que dans ceux de la petite noblesse laïque. Dans le monde anglo-normand, sa Bible fait le lien entre ces deux milieux quand vient le temps de converger sur une lecture des principaux épisodes de l’Ancien et du Nouveau Testament.

Carter Revard, ‘Scribe and Provenance’ dans Studies in the Harley Manuscript. The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253, éd. Susanna Fein, Kalamazoo 2000, 21–109. 46 Notamment dans les manuscrits de Paris, BnF, MS fr. 19525 et London, BL, MS Egerton 7210. 47 Sur le cas du manuscrit Harley 2253 et d’autres anthologies comparables, voir John Scahill, ‘Trilingualism in Early Middle English Miscellanies: Languages and Literature’, Yearbook of English Studies 33, 2003, 18–32. 48 Brian Miller, ‘The early history of Bodleian MS Digby 86’, Annuale medievale 4, 1963, 23–56. 49 Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg.1.1. 45

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Nature du texte d’Herman : un roman sans fiction et une chanson sans geste Le nombre des manuscrits bilingues ou trilingues, en plus de celui glosé en latin, montre que, dans l’Angleterre de la fin du xiiie siècle et jusqu’au milieu du xive siècle, l’usage livresque de la langue vernaculaire n’est pas réservé à ceux qui ne connaissent pas le latin. Pourtant, un passage de la Bible d’Herman de Valenciennes relaie ce qui constitue alors un véritable lieu commun de la littérature vernaculaire. Au moment de présenter ce qui motive son travail et juste avant les données biographiques citées précédemment, Herman de Valenciennes précise que son ouvrage a d’abord une fonction édifiante, notamment à l’attention de ceux qui ne comprennent pas le latin : De cest livre qu’est faiz des le commencement Sachiez que je nel faz por or ne por argent, Por amor Deu le faz, por amander la gent Et lise le romanz qui le latin n’entent.50

Ce public visé par l’auteur n’exclut pas pour autant une réception plus large et les données codicologiques tendent à prouver que ses textes ont bien eu un rayonnement qui dépassait le simple groupe des illiterati. Car même pour des lecteurs relativement éduqués, comme ceux des monastères, le travail auquel se livre Herman relève d’une pratique qui fait aussi partie de la culture savante et, tout particulièrement, des études bibliques : celle de la traduction. Herman de Valenciennes présente clairement son ouvrage dans ses termes au moins à deux occasions. Au moment de raconter la résurrection de Lazarre, il rappelle son statut de prêtre (v. 4725) et insiste sur sa connaissance de la source évangélique : Gel truis en l’evangile, la lettre enten et sai : La mort, la traïson de lui vous conterai De latin en roman la vos transposerai.51

Un peu plus loin, il précise encore sa source en renvoyant explicitement à l’Évangile de Jean : Ice que a dit l’aigle qui tant haut puet voler : Ce est Jehans, li doz, bien le vos doi nomer, […] Il fist tout en latin, ja l’orrez tramposer.52

Le même terme avait déjà été mis dans la bouche de la Vierge quand elle apparaît à Herman pour lui demander de mettre en livre sa vie et son Assomption : Fai la vie en .i. livre ensi com je fui nee, El temple domini com g’i fui presentee,

[…]

éd. Spiele, v. 5599–5602. ‘De ce livre que j’ai fait depuis l’origine, / sachez que je ne le fais ni pour de l’or ni pour de l’argent ; / je le fais pour l’amour de Dieu, pour corriger les gens / et pour que celui qui ne comprend pas le latin lise le texte en langue romane.’ 51 éd. Spiele, v. 4726–4729. ‘Je le trouve dans l’Évangile, j’en connais et comprends la lettre : je vous raconterai sa mort et sa trahison et vous les traduirai de latin en langue romane.’ Variantes : si le translaterai (éd. Eugen Kremers, Greifswald 1914, v. 4759) ; si vus translaterai (Genève, MS Comites Latentes 183, fol. 73v). 52 éd. Spiele, v. 4832–4833 et 4837. ‘Ce qu’a dit l’Aigle, qui peut voler si haut, / C’est Jean, le doux, je dois bien vous dire son nom […] il fit tout en latin, vous l’entendrez maintenant en traduction.’ Variantes : ja l’orrez translater (éd. E. Kremers, v. 4759 et Genève, MS Comites Latentes 183, fol. 75v°). 50



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Garde la moie mort n’i soit pas oubliee, De latin en romanz soit toute transposee !53

La traduction se présente ainsi comme une mission de la plus haute importance, une réponse à un appel sacré pour faire le lien entre les hommes et les mystères divins. En cela, le projet du traducteur en romanz rejoint parfaitement la définition de l’interprète que donnait Isidore de Séville dans ses Étymologies : Interpres, quod inter partes medius sit duarum linguarum, dum transferet. Sed et qui Deum [quem] interpretatur et hominum, quibus divina indicat mysteria, interpres vocatur quia inter eam quam transferet.54

Dans la culture chrétienne, le traducteur occupe une position singulière entre Dieu et les hommes. Son travail en est un de médiation du divin, mais aussi de décryptage à travers le transfert linguistique qui devient alors une forme d’exégèse. Cette valorisation de la traduction trouve un écho particulier dans l’Angleterre anglo-saxonne et tout particulièrement autour de Canterbury où se développe une véritable ‘culture de la traduction’, pour reprendre le titre d’un ouvrage de Robert Stanton.55 Dès le viie siècle, une véritable école de traduction s’organise à l’abbaye de Canterbury autour de l’archevêque Théodore et de l’abbé Hadrien.56 La valorisation de la traduction gagne encore en importance à partir du ixe siècle quand Alfred le Grand, roi du Wessex, impose la figure du roi traducteur. On lui doit notamment des traductions des Histoires d’Orose et de Bède le Vénérable et de la Consolation de Philosophie de Boèce. Puis vient au siècle suivant l’évêque Athelwold qui, dans le cadre de la réforme bénédictine, traduit la Règle de saint Benoît et, surtout, l’abbé Ælfric d’Eynsham, mort au début du xie siècle (vers 1010) qui s’engage dans la traduction de la Bible et dans la compilation d’Homélies vernaculaires à partir des textes des Pères de l’Église. Après Alfred le Grand et Ælfric d’Eynsham, ceux qui parlent la langue du Conquérant trouvent en Angleterre un contexte particulièrement favorable à la traduction en langue vernaculaire. Dès lors, il n’est pas surprenant que la plus ancienne adaptation en vers français de l’Ancien et du Nouveau Testament, celle d’Herman de Valenciennes, soit clairement associée au monde anglo-normand. S’il est délicat de trancher quant à la langue de l’original, il est cependant parfaitement évident, au vu de sa tradition manuscrite, que le succès de l’ouvrage est précoce dans le monde anglo-normand et qu’il y trouve encore des lecteurs jusqu’au xive siècle. Il semble bien qu’il y ait aussi d’abord été reçu, conformément à ce que souhaitait son auteur, comme une traduction à visée édifiante. En effet, dans sa Bible, Herman de Valenciennes précise la nature de son œuvre en insistant sur sa valeur de vérité, étrangère à toute fiction : Signor, or entendez ! Parole orrez senee, Ele est toute veraie si n’est pas controvee, Estraite est d’evangile et en romanz tornee. (éd. Spiele, v. 4581–4583)

Seinurs, ore escutez ! Parole orrez senee, Ele est tute verable, n’est pas cuntruvee Estraite est d’evangile e en rumanz tornee. (Genève, MS Comites Latentes 183, [fol. 71v)

éd. Spiele, v. 450–1 et 457–8. ‘Raconte ma vie dans un livre, la manière dont je suis née / comment j’ai été présentée au temple du Seigneur […] Assure-toi que ma mort ne soit pas oubliée, / que de latin en langue romane, elle soit entièrement traduite.’ Variante : tute seit testurnee (Genève, MS Comites Latentes 183, fol.7v). 54 Isidore de Séville, Etymologiæ, X, cxxiii. ‘Interprète parce que, tandis qu’il traduit, il est médiateur entre les parties que sont les deux langues. Mais on appelle aussi interprète celui qui interprète Dieu pour l’homme à qui il révèle les mystères divins, parce qu’il se trouve entre ce pour qui et ce qu’il traduit.’ Je traduis. 55 Robert Stanton, The Culture of Translation in Anglo-Saxon England, Cambridge 2002. 56 Michael Lapidge, ‘The School of Theodore and Hadrian’, Anglo-Saxon England 15, 1986, 45–72. 53

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Le mot controvee et ses dérivés relèvent clairement du champ lexical de la contrevérité, que ce soit sous la forme verbale, où il est associé au ‘mensonge’, au ‘barat’ ou à la ‘gile’,57 ou sous les formes substantivées controvaille58 et controveüre,59 où il est synonyme de ‘récit mensonger’. Le mot prend même une dimension juridique dans l’Angleterre du xiiie siècle quand les premiers statuts de Westminster (promulgués en 1275 sous le règne d’Édouard Ier) condamnent à la prison tous ceux qui com trouveurs introduisent la discorde et la méfiance entre le roi et son peuple en racontant fause nouvele ou contreveure.60 La Bible d’Herman a beau être dans une langue, le roman, qui devient de plus en plus clairement celle de la fiction, au point que le nom de la langue devient progressivement celui d’un genre que ses détracteurs caractérisent par sa vanité61 et par son caractère mensonger,62 elle se dissocie clairement de toute contreveure. À ce titre, une variante est particulièrement significative dans un vers où Herman parle de son texte en termes génériques. Dans le manuscrit le plus ancien (Genève, MS Comites Latentes 183, fol. 7r) on peut lire : Seinurs des ore dirrai dunt jo faz la chançun Pur quei jo l’ai estraite de mult halte raisun Jo la faz de celui ki est e Deu et huem.

Cette leçon, largement majoritaire et qui se trouve aussi dans des manuscrits continentaux,63 diverge cependant de celle que donne le manuscrit qu’a transcrit Ina Spiele (éd. Spiele, v. 399–400) : Signor, or entendez, .i. romanz vos dirom Qui est faiz et estraiz de molt haute raison : Je le faz de celui qui est et Diex et hom.64

Cette variante est révélatrice d’un écart dans la réception. Il semble bien que des manuscrit continentaux du xiiie siècle (le manuscrit lorrain transcrit par Spiele et un autre manuscrit continental de la même époque,65 où la leçon romanz se trouve au fol. 6v) ont recours à un terme qui a alors un sens générique de plus en plus affirmé à côté du sens général de texte en langue vernaculaire. Controver mençonge : Roman de Renart, br. VII, v. 5999 ; br. VIII, v. 7818 et v. 7400 ; controver barat : Ibid., br. X, v. 10287 ; controver la gil : De l’engin de femme (Disciplina Clericalis), v. 94. 58 Alexandre de Paris, Roman d’Alexandre, éd. E. C. Armstrong et alii, 6 vols, Princeton, Princeton 1937–1949, br. II, p. 74 ; br. III, p. 186. 59 Ovide moralisé, éd. Cornelius De Boer, 5 vols, Amsterdam 1915–1938, XII, v. 1610. 60 Pur ceo qe plusors unt sovent trové & conté com troveurs dont descord & manere de descord ad esté sovent entre le Rey e son pople, ou aukuns homes de son reaume, est defendu pur le damage qi ad esté e uncore purreit avenir, qe desorenavaunt nul ne seit si hardi de dire ne de contier nule fause novele ou controveure, dont nul descord ou manere de descord ou d’esclaundre puisse sourdre entre le Rey e son pople, ou les hautz houmes de son reaume : et ki le fera seit pris e detenuz en prison, jesqes a taunt q’il eit trové celuy en la Court dont la parole serra meü. The Statutes of the Realm, Londres 1810, I, 34. 61 Dame, de ce n’avez vos cure. / De mençonge, qui cuers oscure / Et corrunpent la clarté d’ame, / N’en aiez cure, douce dame ; / Laissiez Cliges et Perceval, / Qui les cuers perce et trait aval, / Et les romans de vanité. (Vie des Pères, Paris, BnF, MS fr. 1038, fol. 4rb–va, v. 33–5). ‘Madame, ne vous préoccupez pas de cela, chère Madame / Laissez Cligès et Perceval qui perce les cœurs et les tire vers le bas / et les récits en langue vernaculaire qui traitent de choses vaines.’ 62 S’avés oï aséz souvent / Les romans de diverses gent / Et des mençongez de ce monde, / E de la grant Table Roonde / Que li rois Artus maintenoit, / Ou point de verité n’avoit, / Qui vous venoient a talent. (Évangile de l’enfance, éd. Maureen Boulton, Toronto 1984, v. 13–19). 63 Par exemple, Paris, BnF MSS fr. 1444, fol. 8vb et fr. 24387, fol. 53ra. 64 Paris, BnF, MS fr. 20039. 65 Paris, BnF, MS fr. 25439. 57



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Malgré l’ambiguïté, ou souhaitant peut-être en bénéficier auprès d’un lectorat dont on déplore de plus en plus souvent qu’il préfère les romans aux histoires pieuses et aux sermons, deux des manuscrits qui transmettent cette leçon associent encore ailleurs le texte d’Herman et le roman. Dans un colophon, où le scribe se nomme, il intitule le texte qui s’achève li romans de Dieu et sa mere et des profetes et des apostres,66 mais aussi dans une faute de lecture à l’incipit (qui peut être la sienne, celle de sa source ou celle d’un rubriqueur) où il donne, avec la lettrine : Romens de sapïence / C’est la paor de Dieu, là où il faudrait lire Comens de sapience / C’est la paor de Dieu (fol. 1r). Le manuscrit de Paris, BnF MS fr. 25439 reproduit la même erreur à l’incipit (Romans de sapience c’est la paour de Deu, fol. 1r) et, bien que la section des œuvres d’Herman ne comporte pas d’explicit, tous les autres textes du recueil portent soit une rubrique soit une formule d’explicit qui les désigne comme roman : Romans commant li mort Nostre Seignor fut vaingié de ceux qui lou crucifiairent, précédant la Vengeance Nostre Seigneur (fol. 100r) et Romans de la Vie des Peres en rubrique à la Vie des Pères (fol. 138v), puis Romans de confession, au terme d’un poème anonyme sur la Confession (fol. 224v). Cet exemple montre bien comment, dans ce manuscrit du xiiie siècle, le terme roman conserve son sens ancien de ‘texte en langue vernaculaire’, dans un contexte où le roman tend à être déterminé par son contenu plaisant, ce dont témoigne l’apparition contemporaine des syntagmes roman d’amour (en 1276 dans le prologue d’une Vie de saint Richard par Pierre d’Abernon)67 et, toujours à la fin du xiiie siècle, dans le fabliau des Deus Bordeors Ribauz où l’un des jongleurs met de l’avant sa connaissance des romanz d’aventure.68 La leçon primitive, où Herman désigne son texte comme une chanson, a un sens générique plus affirmé. Qui plus est, s’il est déterminé par restriction, comme dans ‘chanson de geste’, le terme est aussi problématique par son association avec les narrations vaines et plaisantes des hauts faits des chevaliers. Un peu plus loin, Herman marque d’ailleurs la différence entre son propre texte et cet autre type de chanson en se défendant de ne rien raconter de fictif : Signor, or entendez, si oez ma raison ! Je ne vos di pas fable ne ne vos di chançon.69

Dans ce cas, il désigne son récit comme une « raison ». En anglo-normand, on trouvait déjà ce terme dans le prologue qui précède la Vie de saint Alexis dans le Psautier de Saint-Albans où elle est présentée comme amiable cançun et spiritel raisun.70 On retrouve le mot chez Philippe de Thaon pour désigner son Bestiaire dont le caractère savant était affirmé puisque sa traduction est bien en franceise raisun et néanmoins ‘un livre de grammaire’.71 Plus encore, dans son Comput (rédigé en 1113 ou en 1119) il présente son ouvrage comme une raison qui s’adresse explicitement aux prêtres (Philippe de Thaün / Ad fait une raison / Pur pruveires guarnir / De la lei maintenir).72 Loin des récits ni vrais ni vraisemblables que sont les fables, Paris, BnF, MS fr. 20039, fol. 123v. Pierre d’Abernon of Fetcham, La Vie seint Richard, evesque de Cycestre, éd. Delbert W. Russell, London 1995, v. 15. 68 Deus Bordeors Ribauz, dans Le jongleur par lui-même, éd. Willem Noomen, Louvain 2003, v. 82. 69 éd. Spiele, v. 2010–2011. ‘Seigneurs, écoutez maintenant et vous entendrez mon discours ! / Je ne vous raconte pas d’histoire ni ne vous conte une chanson.’ 70 Hildesheim, Dombibliothek, MS St Goderhard, Nr 1, p. 57. 71 Philippe de Thaon, Bestiaire, éd. Emmanuel Walberg, Lund 1900, v. 2 et 4. ‘Philippe de Thaon / a fait un discours / pour permettre aux prêtres / de maintenir la loi.’ 72 Philippe de Thaon, Comput (MS BL Cotton Nero A.V.), éd. Ian Short, London 1984, v. 1–4. 66 67

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comme de ces autres chansons qui entretiennent un rapport élastique à la vérité, le texte d’Herman se place du côté de la raison, c’est-à-dire de la parole véridique. Si Herman de Valenciennes assimile par endroits sa Bible à une chanson, il le fait à l’instar du copiste du Psautier de Saint-Albans qui présentait la Vie de saint Alexis comme étant à la fois cançon e spiritel raisun. Malgré certains liens avec l’univers épique, encore soulignés récemment par Maureen Boulton,73 la Bible d’Herman de Valenciennes n’est pas une chanson de geste. Elle est une ‘chanson spirituelle’ où, plus exactement encore, comme le précise Herman lui-même quelques vers après la première occurrence du terme pour désigner son texte, elle se définit par ce qu’elle n’est pas : ceste chanson n’est fete de nule legerie (Genève, MS Comites Latentes 183, fol. 7r). En cela, elle relève bien de la ‘translation’ puisqu’il s’agit essentiellement d’un déplacement, linguistique et formel, d’une matière qui n’a rien des histoires légères qui occupent les jongleurs. Herman le précise lui-même au moment d’entreprendre le récit de la Nativité dans une apostrophe à ses auditeurs qui, par son contenu, se distingue nettement de celle qu’aurait pu lancer un jouer de vièle : Signor or escoutez si orrez raison bele / Plus douce a escouter que harpe ne vïele.74 Ici encore, il est question de raison plus que de chanson. D’ailleurs, même du point de vue formel, avec ses laisses d’alexandrins monorimes, la Bible d’Herman de Valenciennes explore une structure métrique qui est alors loin d’être l’exclusivité de la chanson de geste. En réalité, avant l’extrême fin du xiie siècle, on ne trouve pas de chanson de geste qui adopte cette forme, si ce n’est un texte qui se situe à dessein aux marges d’une démarche historiographique, comme la Chanson d’Antioche. En revanche, on la trouve, dès 1160 dans certaines sections du Roman de Rou, et bien sûr, vers 1170, déjà chez Lambert le Tort, puis dans la version d’Alexandre de Bernay du Roman d’Alexandre. Tout au long du xiiie siècle, plusieurs vies de saint adopteront cette disposition métrique, comme la Vie de saint Alexis du manuscrit d’Oxford,75 mais aussi la Vie de saint Eustache par Benoît,76 celle de sainte Euphrosine,77 ou encore les deux versions anglo-normandes de la Vie de sainte Marguerite, l’une d’après le manuscrit de Cambridge, University Library, MS Ee. VI 11 (pp. 1–11) et l’autre d’après celui de York, Minster Library, MS XVI K. 13 (fols. 119v-128r).78 Au tournant des xiie et xiiie siècle, la laisse d’alexandrins monorimes semble donc relever davantage du domaine de l’histoire (historia) que de celui de la fiction (fabula). Le caractère véridique et savant revendiqué par le texte d’Herman se confirme également dans le fait que l’auteur désigne son texte, à au moins quatre occasions, comme un livre (.i. livre, v. 450; cest livre, v. 465; cest livre, v. 5599; cest livre, v. 5604), terme qu’il utilise également pour parler de sa source et de sa dimension historique : Bien savez que la Bible escristrent ancessor, / icist livres fu faiz dou tens ancïenor. À travers l’écriture d’un livre, le ‘translateur’ / ‘transpositeur’ Maureen Boulton, Sacred Fictions of Medieval France. Narrative Theology in the Lives of Christ and the Virgin (1150–1500), Cambridge 2015, 83–109. 74 éd. Spiele, v. 3398–3399. ‘Seigneurs, écoutez maintenant et vous entendrez un beau discours / plus doux à écouter que de la harpe ou de la vièle.’ 75 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canonici misc. 74. Voir Ch. E. Stebbins, ‘The Oxford Version of the Vie de saint Alexis : an Old French Poem of the Thirteenth Century’, Romania 92, 1971, 1–34. 76 Paul Meyer, ‘Fragment d’une vie de saint Eustache en alexandrins monorimes’, Romania, 36, 1907, 12–28. 77 Raymond T. Hill, ‘La Vie de sainte Euphrosine’, Romanic Review 10, 1919, 159–69 et 191–232 ; 12, 1921, 44–9. 78 La Vie de sainte Marguerite. An Anglo-Norman version of the 13th Century, éd. Frederic Spencer, Leipzig 1889. 73



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qu’est Herman s’inscrit dans la grande chaîne savante des anciens. La conclusion de l’Assomption Notre-Dame (qui vient aussi clore l’ensemble du texte d’Herman dans les cas où il est associé à la Bible) insiste lourdement sur le rapport entre écriture et lecture pour assurer la valeur pragmatique du livre : Cil qui liront de toi ice que fait avom, Qui liront cest escrit et qui l’escriveront, Cil qui lire nous sevent et lire le feront, Sire Diex, tu lor fai de lor pechiez pardon Et soient herbergié lassuz en ta maison ! Amen, ma douce dame, ton livre finerom.79

Les derniers vers soulignent ainsi, au risque de la répétition (quatre fois le verbe lire et deux fois le verbe écrire en trois vers), le lien entre les différents intermédiaires qui permettent au livre d’assumer sa mission édifiante. Plus qu’une chanson, même « spiritele », l’œuvre d’Herman est un livre, fait à la demande et en l’honneur de Notre-Dame, et qui a une valeur rédemptrice pour ceux qui s’engagent dans sa transmission, par l’écriture ou par la lecture, directe ou indirecte. À cet égard, la Bible d’Herman de Valenciennes est exemplaire de la culture du livre qui s’est développée dans le monde anglo-normand. Même si elle devait avoir été rédigée initialement sur le continent (ce qui reste sujet à débat), force est de constater que sa diffusion est d’abord et très largement anglo-normande. Dans ce milieu, où la culture du livre vernaculaire n’était pas étrangère à l’univers monastique, le livre d’Herman a trouvé un écho particulier et a été traité comme un ouvrage en lien direct avec les Saintes Écritures. La comparaison entre sa réception dans la tradition manuscrite anglo-normande et la tradition continentale montre bien la différence de traitement de ce texte dans les manuscrits insulaires dont plusieurs sont clairement associés à des monastères bénédictins clairement identifiables. La tradition manuscrite est aussi révélatrice, dans la facture même des manuscrits, de cette réception particulière d’Herman. Parmi les témoins anglo-normands, deux manuscrits font ainsi précéder le début du poème (qui relate en effet la Création du monde) d’une rubrique renvoyant à la Genèse : Ici cumence le livre de Genesis80 et Ci comenz Genesis quant Deus creat ciel e terre.81 On sait aussi que, outre l’Assomption Notre-Dame (qui porte ce titre dans quelques rubriques), le récit de la Passion a parfois été copié séparément, avec le titre La Passioun.82 Cette partie du texte, particulièrement mouvante dans la tradition manuscrite, offre une dernière illustration de la différence de réception de la Bible d’Herman de Valenciennes dans le monde anglo-normand et sur le continent. Le texte est relativement stable jusqu’à la Crucifixion (laisse 688 de l’édition Spiele), épisode au seuil duquel s’arrête le manuscrit de Genève, par une plainte du peuple de Jérusalem pour avoir acated et vendud Nostre Sanur (fol. 104). La mort de Judas marque ainsi la fin de la narration biblique par Herman, à laquelle vient s’ajouter, dans le manuscrit Harley 222 (après deux vers de transition) l’Assomption du même auteur. D’autres manuscrits anglo-normands vont ajouter de quatre à trenteneuf laisses pour suppléer ce manque et se rendre au récit de la Résurrection. Le récit indépendant de la Passion repose sur un résumé en cinq laisses d’environ Assomption Notre-Dame, v. 557–63.‘Ceux qui liront grâce à toi ce que nous avons fait ici, / Qui liront ce manuscrit et le recopieront / Ceux qui savent le lire et ceux qui se le feront lire, / Seigneur Dieu, pardonne-leur leurs péchés / Et accueillent-les là-haut dans ta maison !’ 80 Chicago, University Library, MS 535. 81 Dublin, Trinity College, MS 253. 82 Par exemple, dans le manuscrit de Londres, BL, MS Harley 2253. 79

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207 vers où la Crucifixion fait l’objet d’une narration sommaire, suivie d’allusions à la Résurrection, à l’Ascension et à la Pentecôte. Dans tous ces cas, malgré la mouvance, le récit demeure néanmoins toujours fidèle aux grandes lignes des récits évangéliques. Par contraste, la façon dont les manuscrits continentaux vont suppléer cette lacune du texte (ou de l’exemplaire) d’origine illustre bien une autre attitude à l’égard de la paraphrase d’Herman de Valenciennes qui converge avec l’assimilation, ne seraitce que par association, au roman que laissait déjà deviner quelques manuscrits. Significativement, l’un de ceux-là83 procède à une étonnante interpolation puisqu’il intègre à cet endroit un extrait d’un roman du Graal, le Joseph d’Arimathie en prose (correspondant au lignes 142–220 de l’édition O’Gorman).84 La rupture avec le texte d’Herman est patente, d’autant que l’on passe alors du vers à la prose. Comme l’a montré Bénédicte Milland-Bove,85 l’interpolateur ne se contente pas de copier servilement sa source profane : il l’adapte au contexte immédiat, ajustant notamment les déterminants en fonction de l’actualisation ou non des personnages dans le texte précédent et, surtout, en modifiant de manière assez significative la référence au Graal qui, dans le texte de Robert de Boron, est le vaisel Jesu, alors que le copiste qui l’intègre à la Bible d’Herman de Valenciennes se contente d’en faire .i. vaissiel, sans plus de précision. Sur le continent, la réception du texte d’Herman de Valenciennes est ainsi à quelques reprises l’occasion de réécritures significatives. Par exemple, le remanieur du manuscrit de Paris, BnF, MS fr. 2161 ajoute environ 800 couplets d’alexandrins au texte de la Passion, y intégrant aussi bien des développement autour de certains personnages (le diable, la femme de Pilate) que des interventions directes du narrateur, tant pour décrier la perfidie de ceux qui se moquent du Christ outragé que pour partager la douleur de la Vierge au pied de la croix. Un autre manuscrit du xiiie siècle, copié dans le sud du domaine picard,86 procède à une importante réécriture à partir du texte d’Herman, assumée par une signature, celle d’un certain Berangiers qui se place directement sous le patronage des quatre évangélistes, les seuls auteurs explicitement nommés, peu avant sa signature : De che ke je dirai trai je chuis a garant : Saint Mathiu le premier et l’autre saint Jehan Apriés saint Marc le tierc et le quart saint Lucan. Cist .iiii. l’ont escrite, ki pas n’i sont faillant, Et ceux wel je priier k’il m’en soient aidant.87

Après avoir invoqué l’aide de la Vierge, de « tous les amis Dieu » et celle du roi de maisté, il s’en remet ultimement à ces deux destinataires, Dieu et ses lecteurs : Que li roi de maisté me soient tout aidant Que ces vers mes laist faire issi a son commant Que miels m’en soit a l’ame et al cors en avant

Paris, BnF, MS fr. 20039. Robert de Boron, Joseph d’Arimathie, éd. Richard O’Gorman, Toronto 1995. 85 Bénédicte Milland-Bove, ‘Bible et romans : quelques contacts à la faveur d’interpolations’, dans Le Texte dans le texte. L’interpolation médiévale, éd. Annie Combes et Michelle Szkilnik, Paris 2013, 85–104. 86 Paris, BnF, MS fr. 1444. 87 Paris, BnF, MS fr. 1444, fol. 46vc. ‘De ce que je dirai, je présente comme garants / saint Matthieu, le premier, et ensuite saint Jean, / en troisième saint Marc et saint Luc le quatrième. / Ces quatre l’ont écrit, ceux-là qui ne se trompent pas / et ceux-là même que je veux prier pour qu’ils me viennent en aide.’ 83 84



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Et chuis qui volentiers i seront entendant Fache teus que lor doist le vie permanent Et deprient por moi, car mestier en ai grant. Berangiers ai non, s’il est ki le demant.88

Son rapport très libre à sa source fait paradoxalement l’objet d’une dévotion appuyée à l’auteur de la Bible qu’il promeut même au rang de saint : Ce vus dist sains Hermans, se vous le volez croire.89

Dans les deux autres occurrence de la référence à Herman, quelques vers plus loin dans la Bible, le nom apparaît toutefois sans le titre de saint : Jamais n’en ert si bons certes ce dist Hermans, fol. 9rb ; Nés sui de Valencienes, Herman m’apielcon, fol. 18vd). Ce jeu de signatures est révélateur du rapport paradoxal qu’un auteur du continent entretien avec Herman, le respect pour le vieil auteur n’entravant en aucune manière remaniements et réécritures. À ce titre, on peut encore citer le manuscrit de l’Arsenal, 3516, où le compilateur n’hésite pas à entrelacer des extraits de la Bible d’Herman de Valenciennes et d’autres correspondant au texte de la Bible anonyme du manuscrit de Paris, BnF fr. 763,90 sans craindre de faire alterner au sein d’un même épisode les passages en alexandrins rimés et les couplets d’octosyllabes. Un autre exemple de la mouvance qui touche le texte d’Herman jusque dans sa forme dans sa réception continentale se trouve dans la mise en prose qu’en propose le manuscrit de Paris, BnF, fr. 6447. Ces exemples, auxquels on pourrait encore ajouter la compilation du manuscrit de Paris, BnF, nouv. acq. fr. 10036 où la Bible d’Herman de Valenciennes est farcie d’interpolations empruntées à une Estoire de Joseph en hexasyllabes et au Roman de Fanuel en octosyllabes, montrent assez la souplesse avec laquelle ce texte est reçu sur le continent. Il témoigne aussi de son indéniable popularité jusqu’à l’orée du xive siècle, date du manuscrit de Besançon, BM 550. Par contraste, la réception de la Bible d’Herman de Valenciennes et de l’Assomption Notre-Dame dans le monde anglo-normand se signale par sa précocité et par sa fidélité au texte d’origine (qui pourrait, du reste, fort bien être anglo-normand). L’abondance des manuscrits qui y ont été copiés (la moitié des trente-sept témoins connus à ce jour) et leur précocité (deux manuscrits du xiie siècle) sont révélateurs du rôle de précurseur qu’a joué l’espace Plantagenêt dans le développement d’une pratique du livre en langue vernaculaire. Le rôle des abbayes bénédictines d’Angleterre et la nature de leur manuscrits (dont certains font l’honneur de gloses marginales latines à des textes anglonormands) montrent bien qu’il ne s’agit pas là seulement d’écrire en ‘langue vulgaire’ pour un public illettré. L’anglo-normand est au contraire très rapidement une langue d’écriture et de traduction respectable qui cohabite avec le latin dans les milieux savants, certes avec un statut minoritaire, mais sans que cela ne la limite au domaine du profane et du divertissement ou même de la seule édification de fidèles incultes. Cette langue participe en fait du grand mouvement exégétique qui entoure l’étude de la Bible au xiie siècle. La paraphrase et la traduction en langue vernaculaire Ibid. ‘Que le roi de majesté m’apporte son aide / pour qu’on me laisse faire ici ces vers à sa demande / Que le meilleur m’en vienne à l’âme et au corps par la suite / Et à ceux qui accepteront de les entendre. / Fais ainsi que leur soit donnée la vie éternelle / et qu’ils prient pour moi, car j’en ai grand besoin. / Je m’appelle Béranger, s’il en est qui se le demande.’ 89 Paris, BnF, MS fr. 1444, fol. 8vc. ‘C’est ce que vous dit saint Herman, si vous voulez le croire.’ 90 Bible anonyme du manuscrit de Paris, BnF fr. 763, éd. Julia C. Szirmai, Amsterdam 1985. 88

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sont même des moyens d’appréhension du texte sacré qui s’adressent aussi à ceux qui lisent et qui écrivent, comme le dit en toutes lettres Herman de Valenciennes. Ceux-là y trouvent une façon de s’inscrire dans la grande chaîne de la transmission des Saintes Écritures. Le statut sociolinguistique de l’anglo-normand après la Conquête et le rapport particulier à la traduction vernaculaire, développé de longue date dans l’Angleterre anglo-saxonne, expliquent la part rapide que s’y taille le livre vernaculaire. Le nombre et la valeur de ces ouvrages, dont plusieurs témoins de la deuxième moitié du xiie siècle ont été rescapés, ont créé un contexte favorable pour que soit accueilli un chanoine du Nord de la France (ou, à tout le moins, ses textes) dès les premières années du règne de Richard Cœur-de-Lion, au point que sa Bible soit d’abord anglo-normande. Cet exemple est, à mon sens, emblématique du développement de ce qui deviendra la ‘littérature française’. Il se fait dans un contexte particulier où une variété du français est une langue de pouvoir, puisque c’est la langue du Conquérant, mais aussi dans un échange continuel de textes et d’auteurs avec le continent. La Chanson de Roland et de sa ‘Douce France’ est ainsi d’abord celle du Roland d’Oxford, comme la Bible de notre chanoine du Valenciennois est d’abord celle des manuscrits anglo-normands. Toute île soit-elle, l’Angleterre n’est pas coupée du continent et le mouvement des échanges entre les deux rives de la Manche sont si bénéfiques qu’on leur doit la plus ancienne paraphrase en français de l’Ancien et du Nouveau Testament et le plus ancien monument d’une littérature qu’on dira un jour ‘nationale’. L’héritage littéraire anglo-normand, considérable des deux côtés de la Manche, montre éloquemment que, dès lors qu’il est question de livres, nul n’est une île, et les passeurs de science sont rarement purs, transgressant d’artificielles frontières entre savant et populaire, profane et sacrée. Ils sont en cela de dignes héritiers de celui que les Anglais ont appelé Bâtard et les Normands Conquérant.

RALPH NIGER AND THE BOOKS OF KINGS Frédérique Lachaud The commentary by Ralph Niger on the Books of Samuel and Kings survives in a single copy kept in the library of Lincoln Cathedral. In this work, Niger sets about providing a complex literal gloss on these historical books of the Bible, as well as using allegorical, tropological (or moral), and anagogical (referring to superior things) interpretations.1 The exposition of all possible literal meanings, with a view to etymology, and the lack of any systematic arrangement account for the unusual length of this commentary, which fills two volumes (MSS 25 and 26) of 188 and 174 folios respectively, the text being written in two columns of sixty lines each.2 The way Ralph Niger stacks up different layers of interpretation may baffle the reader, even when taking into account the rules of the genre, and his approach is often obscured by ambiguity. A number of indications, however, show that he conceived his commentary as dominated by tropological interpretation. In his universal chronicle, having just written about the prophetic writings of Joachim of Fiore and of Geoffrey of Auxerre, former abbot of Clairvaux, on the Apocalypse, he refers to this earlier work as Moralia Regum, among other works of his, including an epithome of the Old Testament, as well as commentaries on Chronicles and Ezra.3 In a general address to the Roman cardinals placed at the beginning of MS 25, he explains that since the varieties of governments find their origin in the morality of men, he has chosen from the start to study the moralia of kings, whose authority and example provide instruction for all others, as a community and as individuals. A few lines further down, he states that since the movements of the soul spring from morals, and since the rights of governments proceed from the movements of princes, he considers it a useful endeavour, in order to distinguish the one from the other, to discuss the moralia regum, for there is no doubt that governments (regiminum moderamina) are formed according to them.4 In both cases, Niger refers to the moral actions of kings. In the following sections of the commentary, however, moralia is used in wider contexts. For instance, in Book II, on 1 Sam 7, 5, Niger explains that

For the general principles of scholastic exegesis cf. G. R. Evans, The Language and Logic of the Bible: The Earlier Middle Ages, Cambridge 1984 and Gilbert Dahan, L’Exégèse chrétienne de la Bible en Occident médiéval, XIIe–XIVe siècle, Paris 1999. 2 The manuscripts are described in Rodney M. Thomson, Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Lincoln Cathedral Chapter Library, Cambridge 1989, 19–20; the dimensions are 435 × 280 mm for MS 25 and 440 × 285 mm for MS 26. 3 Radulfus Niger, Chronica. Eine englische Weltchronik des 12. Jarhunderts, ed. Hanna Krause, Frankfurt am Main 1985, 287; cf. Radulfus Niger. De Re Militari et Triplici Via Peregrinationis Ierosolomitane (1187–88). Einleitung und Edition, ed. Ludwig Schmugge, Berlin-New York 1977, 11–14 for the identification of these works. 4 Moralia Regum [hereafter MR], Lincoln Cathedral MS 25, fol. 2ra. 1

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having left the house of Sacred Scripture, Samuel taught moralia by the example of his life.5 The life and work of Ralph Niger As indicated in Niger’s universal chronicle, the Moralia Regum is part of an extensive production, where biblical commentaries hold a significant place, alongside two chronicles where he offers strong criticism of English kingship – in a way that sometimes recalls Books II and III of the De Principis Instructione of Gerald of Wales – and a number of treatises, including the De Re Militari (on crusade), and the Philippicus (on the interpretations of Hebrew words).6 A thirteenth-century catalogue of the library of Lincoln cathedral included a set of seven volumes of his work, of which six are still extant, and these may have come into the ownership of the cathedral on Niger’s death.7 Of the life and career of Ralph Niger, however, relatively little is known.8 Three letters of John of Salisbury dated 1166 and 1168 call him magister and Niger himself not only refers to his time in the schools, but also praises scholars whose aim is to serve the Church.9 On the assumption that he moved from England to Paris in his late teens or early twenties, a date of about 1140 or slightly later has been suggested for his birth. In the Moralia Regum, however, he mentions some episodes dating from ‘the times of my father’ (exempla habemus temporibus patris mei): the persecution that Albert bishop of Mainz suffered at the hands of his spiritual son the emperor, as well as the struggle between Henry IV and his son Henry V, who married Matilda, the mother of the present king.10 Although the chronology of events in this passage is somewhat confused, this would indicate the first two decades of the twelfth century for his father’s prime, and perhaps suggest an earlier date for the birth of Ralph Niger. Furthermore, a recent study by Marco Meschini on the De Re Militari has pointed out that Niger refers to his personal experience in combat and tournament.11 This may have been acquired in the household of the young King Henry, but an alternative would have him turning to clerical life in adulthood, after a youth dedicated to military endeavours. In any case, in the mid-1160s Niger must have been prominent enough to engineer an encounter between Thomas Becket and Conrad of Wittelsbach, archbishop-elect MR, II, c. 14, MS 25, fol. 29va. Further on, moralia refers to the moral interpretation of Scripture, such as in MR, V, c. 53, MS 25, fol. 81rb. On this term, cf. Philippe Buc, L’Ambiguïté du Livre. Prince, pouvoir et peuple dans les commentaires de la Bible au Moyen Âge, Paris 1994, 368. 6 Radulfi Nigri Chronica. The Chronicles of Ralph Niger, ed. Robert Anstruther, London 1851; Radulfus Niger, Chronica, ed. Krause; Daniel Staub, ‘Radulfus Nigers “Philippicus”’ Diss. Universität Zürich 1993. 7 Septem uolumina Magistri Radulfi Nigri. The catalogue may have been written c.1200: Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Lincoln Cathedral Chapter Library, ed. Reginald Maxwell Woolley, Oxford 1927, viii. 8 G. B. Flahiff, ‘Ralph Niger. An introduction to his life and works’, Mediaeval Studies 2, 1940, 104–24; De Re militari, ed. Schmugge, 3–10; Anne J. Duggan, ‘Niger, Ralph (b. c.1140, d. in or before 1199 ?), theologian and chronicler’, ODNB, article/20192 [accessed 18 March 2013]. 9 The Letters of John of Salisbury, 2 vols, II, The Later Letters (1163–1180), ed. W. J. Millor and C. N. L. Brooke, Oxford 1979, letters 181, 182 (summer 1166?) and 277 (c.May 1168). Niger mentions his time in the schools in MR, I, c. 1, MS 25, fol. 6va–b and praises scholars who study liberal arts in order to find what is useful for the Church (MR, XXII, 24, MS 26, fol. 155vb). 10 MR, X, c. 41, MS 25, fols. 166vb–167ra. 11 Marco Meschini, ‘Penser la croisade après la chute de Jérusalem (1187). Le De re militari et triplici via peregrinationis iesorolimitane de Radulfus Niger’, in Les Projets de croisade. Géostratégie et diplomatie européenne du XIVe au XVIIe siècle, dir. Jacques Paviot, Toulouse 2014, 31–59, at 56, referring to the prologue of the De re militari (De re militari, ed. Schmugge, 92–3). 5



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of Mainz. Niger, however, was not part of Becket’s circle at the time: he was then studying law and theology, probably under Gerard Pucelle whom he mentions as his master in the Moralia Regum.12 In letter 182, John of Salisbury compliments him on his studies ‘in a chatterbox and windbag city (in urbe garrula et uentosa)’. This may be a reference to Paris, Poitiers or even Cologne, where Gerard Pucelle moved in 1166,13 but in this letter John also commends him for refusing to have anything to do with Richard, archdeacon of Poitiers, who was excommunicated by Becket on 12 June 1166, and this may suggest that in 1166 Ralph was studying in Poitiers.14 In the event Richard was absolved and carried on in the service of Henry II before becoming bishop of Ilchester in 1173, and Niger may have served in his entourage before being retained directly by Henry II.15 He eventually entered the service of the Young King, whom he praises in the Moralia Regum as being ‘the most beautiful of the men of our age and dedicated to arms’ (pulcerimus hominum eui nostri et armis strenuus), the glory of the youth.16 Another cleric in the service of the Young King was Gervase of Tilbury, who mentions Niger as the author of a commentary on Aristotle,17 which in any case Niger himself did not think worth listing among his works later in life. Niger was at Limoges early 1173 when Henry left the court of his father for that of the king of France.18 One may surmise that he belonged to the group of clerics who devised the famous letter of the Young King to Pope Alexander III in that year. And it is probably his implication in the revolt of the king’s sons (rather than in the Becket conflict) which explains his disgrace and his long exile in France, which only ended after the death of Henry II. Niger’s views on the Plantagenet family are expressed in some passages of the Moralia Regum. In II, 15, when commenting on the old age of Samuel and on his sons being made judges, he comments on the name Abia (one of Samuel’s sons), as meaning ‘lord’ or ‘father’. This leads him to reflect on the fact that ‘lord’ and ‘father’ are antinomous and dissonant: one tends towards piety and the other towards security. It is hardly the case that somebody is adequately both father and lord, exercising equally the ‘imperium’ and paternity, and such an attempt would disturb the state of government. The one who wants to be lord has to reject the role

Other pupils of Gerard Pucelle were Lucas, later bishop of Esztergom, and Bertram of Metz: Charles Donahue, ‘Gerard Pucelle as a canon lawyer: life and the Battle Abbey Case’, in Grundlagen des Rechts: Festschrift für Peter Landau zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. R. H. Helmholz, Paul Mikat, Jorg Müller, and Michael Stolleis, Paderborn 2000, 333–48 at 333–4. 13 This is suggested by Mia Münster-Swendsen, ‘How to prevent a war with a theologico-legal treatise: the intellectual strategies of Sigebert of Gembloux and Ralph Niger’, in Liber Amicorum Ditlev Tamm: Law, History and Culture, ed. Per Andersen, Pia Letto-Vanamo, Kjell Åke Modéer and Helle Vogt, Copenhagen 2011, 199–216 at 205–6. 14 The Letters of John of Salisbury, II, 206. In the same letter John of Salisbury seems to condemn the use of ‘elaborate statements or imaginative phraseology’ (allegationum ornatu et fantasmatibus dictionum) by Ralph Niger. 15 Schmugge, introduction to De Re Militari, 5, referring to MR, XIX, c. 3, MS 26, fol. 100vb (not MS 25, as indicated in the footnote). 16 MR, X, c. 41, MS 25, fol. 167ra. 17 Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia. Recreation for an Emperor, ed. and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns, Oxford 2002, 186. It has been suggested that this would be a mistake for Ralph of Flaix (ibid., note 25 and studies quoted there), but there is no reason to doubt the identification of Ralph Niger by Gervase of Tilbury. The passage from the Otia where this reference appears deals with some Indian tribes where the custom is to sacrifice fathers. 18 MR, XVII, c. 23, MS 26, fol. 77rb (mentioned in the introduction to the De Re Militari by Schmugge, 6). 12

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of a father, and vice versa. Indeed there is no point in attempting to be both father and lord, something Niger illustrates with the case of Henry II and his sons: In our day we have seen the king, under whom the blessed Thomas martyr of the English died, obtain homage from his sons. Nor did the fact that he was both lord and father make his domination stronger or more secure, or his sons more devoted. Then it was of little use for the natural rights to be submitted to the civil ones.19

At the end of his life Niger may have held a canonry in Lincoln cathedral (at a time when Walter Map and Gerald of Wales were also in the service of the church of Lincoln).20 This does not necessarily imply he was a resident there,21 since he is also mentioned in August 1199 as the former owner of a house in London, situated between the house of Gerard of Antioch and that of William filius Sabel. This suggests that he was dead before that date but also that he had some connection with John as count of Mortain, who had given him that house.22 Previous studies on the Moralia Regum Niger’s biblical commentaries seem to belong to his period of exile, as well as the De Re Militari (1187–8). For Ludwig Schmugge, these works were compiled for a wide audience.23 The genre of the commentary, however, suggests a clerical and probably a student audience, although Niger may have been writing with a monastic readership in mind. The length and repetitive aspect of the Moralia Regum may account for the lack of an edition, but a number of studies have largely made use of it, on different topics. Firstly on Roman and Canon Law: the studies of Hermann Kantorowicz, Beryl Smalley and Ludwig Schmugge, and more recently Ennio Cortese, have illuminated the position of Ralph Niger on Roman law, and have stressed his sophistication and legal culture. Niger places the ius commune above customary law, and laments the weakening of the validity of both Roman and canon law in England to the profit of the Common law: for him this is the result of the insolence of legal practicioners, a view he extends to other kingdoms.24 Niger is also an early source for knowledge of the role of Master Pepo in the creation of the law school of Bologna.25 He clearly praises Roman law, and values it above all kinds of customary

MR, II, c. 15, MS 25, fol. 29vb: Vidimus diebus nostris regem sub quo passus est beatus Thomas martir Anglorum a filiis suis homagia trahere; nec tamen factus est pater dominio fortior aut securior neque filii deuotiores parumque demum profuit naturalia iura subiecisse ciuilibus. 20 Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1066–1300, 9 vols, III, Lincoln, ed. Diana E. Greenway, London 1977, 136. 21 For the decline of Lincoln as a centre for the study of canon law, see in particular Frans van Liere, ‘The study of canon law and the eclipse of the Lincoln schools, 1175–1225’, in History of Universities 18, ed. M. Feingold, Oxford 2003, 1–13. 22 Rotuli Chartarum, I, i, ed. T. D. Hardy, London 1837, 22 (mentioned in Flahiff, ‘Ralph Niger. An introduction to his life and works’, 113). 23 Introduction to the De Re Militari, 7. 24 Ludwig Schmugge, ‘Rechtsprobleme im Werk des Radulphus Niger. Ein Beitrag zur Verbindung von Theologie und Jurisprudenz im 12. Jarhundert’, in Proceedings of the IVth International Conference of Medieval Canon Law, ed. Stefan Kuttner, Vatican City 1976, 495–509, at 497, quotes MR, X, c. 26 and XI, 6 on this point. Cf. in particular the end of XI, c. 6 (MS 25, fol. 171vb), which refers to a royal edict in England forbidding the use of any law other that the customs of the land. 25 Hermann Kantorowicz and Beryl Smalley, ‘An English theologian’s view of Roman law: Pepo, Irnerius, Ralph Niger’, Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies 1, 1941, 237–52; Schmugge, ‘Rechtsprobleme im Werk des Radulphus Niger’; Ludwig Schmugge, ‘“Codicis Iustiniani et Institutionum baiulus”. Eine neue Quelle zu Magister Pepo von Bologna’, in Ius Commune. Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Europäische Rechtsgeschichte Frankfurt am Main, VI, ed. Helmut Coing, Frankfurt am Main 1977, 1–9; Ennio Cortese, 19



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law, but he is also concerned about its potential excesses, in particular when it is placed in the hands of greedy and corrupt judges and officials. This recalls the way John of Salisbury praises Roman law in the Policraticus, and although there are no direct quotations from John of Salisbury’s great treatise, the inspiration is similar. (A number of references to the bishop of Chartres in the Moralia Regum as well as in the letters of John of Salisbury also suggest that the two men knew each other personally.) As Schmugge has shown, however, for Niger, Mosaic Law is the root of all law.26 Although more research is required in order to understand how Niger fits into the theologico-legal tradition of the French and Anglo-Norman schools and how his own work may reflect current treatises on civil and canon law, one feels that his view of law may echo some discussions in the French schools of law, where the influence of theology was dominant, and more precisely the work of Gerard Pucelle.27 The parallels with Stephen Langton’s lectures on the Old Testament also deserve further treatment.28 The second topic that has attracted most comments is the position of Ralph Niger on crusade and heresy. In a forthcoming article on Peter of Tarentaise, Nicholas Vincent points out that Niger’s Moralia Regum is probably one of the first texts to use the term ‘Cathar’.29 But it is generally the De Re Militari of Ralph Niger, and not the Moralia Regum, that has been used by historians such as G. B. Flahiff, Benjamin Z. Kedar and more recently Marco Meschini, Alfredo Cocci, Mia Münster-Swendsen and Martin Aurell to understand the position of Niger on heresy and crusade.30 The discrepancy between his condemnation of violence and forced baptism in the De Re Militari (especially Book III c. 89 and c. 90 in the edition by Schmugge),31 and what seems to be praise of armed struggle against the unfaithful in his chronicles written a few years later, has been stressed, and Benjamin Z. Kedar in particular has called for a systematic comparison between the De Re Militari and the biblical commentaries of Ralph Niger in order to solve this apparent contradiction.32 Illuminating passages on this issue from the Moralia Regum, Books XVII, c. 19 and XX, c. 25 have been edited by Ludwig Schmugge and these strongly condemn the killing of non-Christians.33 A clear statement on this matter is also found in XVII, c. 10, on 1 Kings 12, 21–24, where Shemaiah the man of God tells King Rehoboam of Judah not to go to war against his kindred the people of Israel. Niger ends his commentary of this passage by stating that: ‘Théologie, droit canonique et droit romain. Aux origines du droit savant (XIe-XIIe s.)’, Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 146ème année, no. 1, 2002, 57–74, at 62–4. 26 Schmugge, ‘Rechtsprobleme im Werk des Radulphus Niger’, 496. 27 Donahue, ‘Gerard Pucelle as a canon lawyer’, 339–40 for his teaching. 28 As pointed out by Kantorowicz and Smalley, ‘An English theologian’s view of Roman l’, 245 and 247. 29 Nicholas Vincent, ‘Peter Archbishop of Tarentaise: An Alpine Saint in Plantagenet Politics’ (forthcoming). I wish to thank Nicholas Vincent for sending me his text in advance of publication. 30 G. B. Flahiff, ‘“Deus non vult”: a critic of the third crusade’, Medieval Studies 9, 1947, 162–88; Benjamin Z. Kedar, Crusade and Mission: European Approaches towards the Muslims, Princeton 1984, ch. 3; MünsterSwendsen, ‘How to prevent a war with a theologico-legal treatise’, passim; Martin Aurell, Des Chrétiens contre les croisades, Paris 2013, ch. 7; Meschini, ‘Penser la croisade après la chute de Jérusalem’, 31–60. 31 De Re Militari, ed. Schmugge, 196. 32 Kedar, Crusade and Mission, 110–1; Alfredo Cocci, ‘Prigionia dei peccati e liberazione di Gerusalemme nel De re militari (1188–1189) di Radulphus Niger (c.1140–1198/99)’, in La liberazione dei ‘captivi’ tra Cristianità e Islam: oltre la Crociata e il Ĝihād: tollerana e servizio umanitario. Atti del Congresso interdisciplinare di studi storici (Roma, 16–19 settembre 1998), ed. Giulio Cipollone, Vatican City, 2000, 513–24, at 521 stresses the transformation in Niger’s attitude in the few years between the De Re Militari and the date of the compilation of the chronicles, in connection with political events. 33 Schmugge, ‘Rechtsprobleme im Werk des Radulphus Niger’, 499–500.

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Pagans are men, like the Jews, and one should kill neither the ones nor the others if they refuse to believe. They ought to be contained beyond the borders of Christendom and if they use force they ought to be repelled by force. If they have occupied what belonged to us they ought to be thrown out. If this cannot be achieved otherwise than by the armed hand, this is the work of princes. [...] One should not kill those who refuse to accept the yoke of faith, but instead one should pray so that they are visited by God. Therefore man comes back into the house of his conscience and having closed the door of his small chamber he prays the Father for himself and for those who err. God alone may prove and test the minds and hearts. This doctrine holds the faithful back from killing and restrains the violence of armed struggle.34

Other studies have focused on the attacks of Niger against Henry II: these are particularly prominent in his chronicles, but the Moralia Regum also contains strong criticism of the Angevin king.35 The prologue of the Moralia mentions the author’s exile and the fact that he lives in fear because of the long arms of the king.36 Although the letters that John of Salisbury addressed to Niger suggest the latter adopted a fluctuating position during the conflict between Henry II and Becket, the martyrdom of the archbishop clearly made a deep impression on him. Thomas martyr Anglorum is mentioned repeatedly in the Moralia Regum, and when referring to Henry II in this work Niger only uses the expression ‘the king under whom the blessed Thomas martyr of the English died (sub quo passus est Beatus Thomas martyr Anglorum)’.37 In Book XVII, c. 4, he mentions the martyrdom in connection with the struggle of Becket to prevent confusion between ecclesiastical and lay justice.38 In fact, large tracts of the Moralia Regum deal with the issue of the relationship between temporal power and ecclesiastical authority and they deserve fuller treatment, as well as the place of Becket in Niger’s work. Many other aspects of power however are dealt with in the Moralia Regum. Philippe Buc, in his book L’Ambiguïté du livre, published in 1994, as well as in a number of articles, has stressed the originality of Niger’s ideas regarding temporal power in this work, in particular his conception of the origins and contractual dimension of kingship.39 He has also highlighted Niger’s pessimistic view of power and history – marked by the idea of a decline of the regnum and sacerdotium as well as of their recurring association in the exploitation of the people – and in particular the criticism of the Carolingian dynasty in the Moralia Regum.40 MR, XVII, c. 10 (MS 26, fol. 70va–vb): Homines enim sunt pagani sicut et Iudei neutri occidendi licet credere noluerint. A finibus uero christianorum arcendi sunt et si uim intulerint ui repellendi sunt. Si occupauerunt que nostra fuerunt eiciendi sunt. Quod si preter uim armatam id fieri non possit opus est officio principum. [...] Non sunt occidendi qui fidei iugum suscipere nolunt, sed potius orandum est pro eis ut a deo uisitentur. Vnde reuertatur homo in domum conscientie sue et clauso hostio cubuculi sui oret ad patrem pro se et pro errantibus. Solius enim dei est probare et reprobare renes et corda. Hec utique doctrina manus fidelium a cede continet et inhibet uiolentiam uis armate. 35 Ludwig Schmugge, ‘Thomas Becket und König Heinrichs II in der Sicht des Radulfus Niger’, Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 32, 1976, 572–9. 36 MS 25, fol. 2va–b. 37 For instance in MR, II, c. 15 (MS 25, fol. 29vb), in MR, IX, c. 17 (MS 25, fol. 145ra) and MR XI, c. 8 (MS 25, fol. 173ra). 38 MR, XVII, c. 4 (MS 26, fol. 69rb). 39 Buc, L’Ambiguïté du Livre, 368 sq. 40 Philippe Buc, ‘Exégèse et pensée politique: Radulphus Niger (vers 1190) et Nicolas de Lyre (vers 1330)’, in Représentation, pouvoir et royauté à la fin du Moyen Âge. Actes du colloque organisé par l’Université du Maine les 25 et 26 mars 1994, ed. Joël Blanchard, Paris 1995, 145–64.

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Finally, the etymological work of Ralph Niger and especially the question of his knowledge of Hebrew has attracted some attention. In this context, the Moralia Regum has occasionally been called on to illustrate the interest of Niger in the Hebrew language, although Niger does not appear to have had direct access to Hebrew texts, making use of intermediaries such as the Philip who gave his name to his treatise on Hebrew words.41 Past research has highlighted the diversity and wealth of ideas in the Moralia Regum, and even a cursory reading suggests that it may provide information on a variety of topics. A comprehensive survey of this particular text is certainly overdue, and indeed the same could be said in respect of all of Ralph Niger’s commentaries. In what follows, I shall stress a few general features of the Moralia Regum and endeavour to highlight the views of its author on power. The composition of the Moralia Regum The text of the Moralia Regum is written in a legible hand of the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, on two columns. It is about 673 000 words long, while the original work may have been about 700 000 words long, since several sections have disappeared, in particular most of Book XII – including c. 28, on the pope (De summo pontifice), c. 29, on the secular princes (De principibus seculi), c. 35, on the numbering of the people out of the wrath of God (De numeratione populi ex furore domini) and about two thirds of Book XXIV. At the beginning of volume 25 (fol. 1ra–1va) three letters are copied, which indicate that Ralph Niger sought the approbation of ecclesiastical authorities for his Biblical commentaries.42 The first is by Pope Clement III (7 February 1191), asking for a commission of readers to examine Niger’s work, including the Moralia Regum, and it is immediately followed by a letter of Pope Celestine III (24 April 1191), in similar terms. Niger then inserts a few lines to explain that his books were divided into several sections in order to be checked by the Archbishop of Sens, Gui of Noyers, and by the archbishop of Rheims, William White Hands. Gui of Noyers examined the second part of the Moralia Regum and submitted the first to a master Peter ‘anglicus’, a canon.43 The books were returned without any complaint having been raised about their content, writes Niger. The last document is a copy of a letter addressed by Gui of Noyers to the pope, approving the contents of Niger’s work. Although these liminal pieces suggest 1191 as a date for their composition, the text which follows (fol. 2ra–2vb), with the rubric Dominis Cardinalibus Ecclesie Romane – an address to the cardinals of the Roman Church – hints at an earlier date for the compilation of the Moralia Regum, since it is clear that Niger was still in France Avrom Saltman, ‘Supplementary notes on the works of Ralph Niger’, in Bar-Ilan Studies in History, Ramat-Gan1978, 103–13; Raphael Loewe, ‘The medieval Christian Hebraists of England – Herbert of Bosham and earlier scholars’, The Jewish Historical Society of England Transactions 17, 1953, 225–49. 42 MS 25, fol. 1ra–1va. They are edited in Walther Holtzmann, Papsturkunden in England, Berlin 1935, II, 453–5, nos 258 and 259. See G. B. Flahiff, ‘Ecclesiastical censorship of books in the twelfth century’, Mediaeval Studies 4, 1942, 1–22; Thomson, Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Lincoln Cathedral Chapter Library, 19. 43 The epitome of the Old Testament and the commentary on Ezra were examined by the abbot of SaintMarien of Auxerre, a Premonstratensian house.This has been identified as Milon of Trainel, d. 1202: Martin Preiss, Die politische Tätigkeit und Stellung der Cisterzienser im Schisma von 1159–1177, Berlin 1934, 261 (and ibid. for the edition of this passage from fol. 2v of MS 25). The digest on Numbers was examined by the abbot of Dilo, another Premonstratensian house situated in Burgundy. The text of these works is now preserved in manuscripts 15, 23, 24 and 27 of Lincoln Cathedral Library. Preiss suggests the name of Leodegar of Dilo for this abbot (mentioned in 1195). 41

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at the time. Furthermore, he obviously drew heavily on the Moralia Regum for his De Re Militari: this has been dated from late 1187 or early 1188, probably before Philip Augustus took the cross on 21 January 1188 and in any case before he left on crusade in July 1190. Last, for Martin Preiss, the passage where Niger addresses himself directly to Conrad of Wittelsbach must have been written in the early summer of 1182, when Conrad was still archbishop of Salzburg but was staying at the Curia. This would suggest 1182 at the latest for the completion of the Moralia Regum. One should note however that in the manuscript the words et sancte Maguntine sedis archiepiscopo et Iuuauensis ecclesie custodi (‘and archbishop of the saintly seat of Mainz and keeper of the church of Salzburg’) have been struck through,44 suggesting that if an original letter dating c.1182 was copied into the prologue, Conrad of Wittelsbach was not archbishop of Mainz and bishop of Salzburg anymore at the time of the completion of the manuscript as it stands. The word uacat also encloses the section from Tibi uero dilecto Conrado until studia profuere, which corresponds to the text addressed in particular to Conrad. If a further copy of the text was intended, the address to Conrad was to be deleted. At the opening of the second volume of the Moralia Regum, Ralph Niger states the reasons that have led him to divide this commentary into two volumes.45 Volume one (MS 25) contains Books I to XII of the Moralia Regum, and volume two (MS 26) Books XIII to XXIV, in fact reproducing the division between the Books of Samuel and the Books of Kings, but Niger explains that his decision to divide the work into two volumes only reflects his concern for convenience, and that one should read these four books of the Bible as a continuous text.46 In the address to the cardinals, he stresses the novelty of his endeavour: he claims that he has never seen a continuous exposition of the Books of Kings as a whole and that he has MS 25, fol. 2va–b. MS 26, fol. 1ra: Prologus de libri diuisione. [space left bank for a decorated intial] et Malachim Hebrei diuidunt nominibus et titulis et uoluminibus. Ecclesia uero propter hystorie continuationem de successionibus regum Israel et Iuda usque ad Sezechiam ultimum totam seriem successionis regiminum appellat una nuncupatione libri regum. Vnde et ego sub unius nominis et tituli nuncupatione totius historie seriem deputaui. Veruntamen expositionis eius uolumen diuidi licere estimaui quatinus licet unus sit liber diuisus tamen in partes facilius baiuletur. Tali enim diuisione licentia non adimitur ei qui uoluerit tanquam unius hystorie et uno uolumine unam expositionem contexere quominus diuisa prius coniungat uel etiam pluralius diuidat dum tamen hystorie continentiam non scindat. ‘Prologue about the division of the book. The Hebrews divide [Samuel] and Malachim into names and titles and volumes. But because of the continuity of the history of the successions of the kings of Israel and Judah until the last king, Zedekiah, the Church calls the complete series of the succession of governments by a single name, the Books of Kings. So I myself classified the series of the whole history under the appellation of one name and title. I considered however that it was proper to divide the volume of its description, so that while being one, the book would still be divided into parts in order to be carried more easily. Indeed the liberty of such a division does not deprive the reader who would want somehow to assemble a single description of the single history and into a single volume so that he joins what was first divided, or [on the contrary] divides it further, as long however that he does not cut up the continuity of the history.’ 46 MS 26, fol. 4ra: L. XIII. Prologus incipit. Hunc quem dicimus regum in duos libros diuidunt. Priorem appellantes Samuelem et alterum Malachim separatos ab inuicem tam nomine quam uolumine utrumque tamen in duas thomos distinguentes. Hos autem sub una nominatione et in uno uolumine congeminas illas distinctiones Samuelis et Malachim unum librum regum appellamus quia de regibus et regiminibus agitur in Samuele sicut et in Malachim et maxime quia eorum materia legitimo progressu continuata tanquam unius operis insinuat continuationem. ‘The prologue starts. [The book] we call Kings they divide into two books, calling the first one Samuel and the other Malachim, separate from each other by the name as by the volume, distinguishing each however into two tomes. We call these combined distinctions of Samuel and Malachim the single Book of Kings, under one name and in one volume: since kings and governments are dealt with in Samuel as in Malachim, and especially since the matter being continued by a proper movement somehow conveys the continuity of a single work.’ 44 45



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never heard that such a work has ever been done by the ancients. Indeed, he does not consider as satisfactory sermons or homelies that cut the history into rags and favour discontinuity over a continuous text.47 The 24 books of the Moralia Regum correspond to large sections of the biblical text,48 often covering several episodes. The books are further divided into chapters – Book V, which is one of the longest, is divided into 55 chapters – and Niger calls upon the authority of John of Salisbury and Gerard Pucelle for the fact that he has chosen a larger number of chapters than what is found in Jerome.49 The adequacy between the titles of the chapters in the body of the text and in the table of contents placed at the beginning of each volume is imperfect, perhaps suggesting that these were meant for another version of the text or more simply that they may have been compiled without much regard for precision.50 The commentary itself follows the order of the Books of Samuel and the Books of Kings, and short quotations of the Bible inserted at the end of some individual prologues are clearly meant to guide the reader. Here and there some chapters are dedicated to general reflections. For instance, in Book I, two chapters bear on the subject of divine grace following the commentary on the offering of Samuel. In Book II, after the chapter on the Philistines and the Ark, one finds a chapter on the persecution of the primitive Church by Jews and pagans. Most books in the Moralia Regum are introduced by a prologue, which is meant to give a transition between two books, reminding the reader of the main thrust of the previous book and announcing what comes next. Sometimes the prologue is written in the body of the text (this is the case with the general prologue at the beginning of Book I, as well as with the prologues of Books V, VII, IX, X, XII, XIII, XIV, XVI, XVIII, XX, XXII). Some prologues however seem to have been inserted in the margins as an afterthought (for instance, in Book III, the prologue was added at the bottom of fol. 33rb, or again in Book XXI); others are written on slips of parchment inserted between folios, the text being written on either one or two columns (Books IV, VI, VIII, XI, XV, XVII, XIX, XXIII). Decorated initials are found exclusively on the inserted slips of parchment, although reserved spaces MS 25, fol. 2rb: Et merito quia continuam omnino aliam expositionem librorum regum nec uidi neque ab aliquo ueterum factam esse audiui. Intercisos enim sermones uel omelias uelud in panniculos historiam scindentes et nullius continuationis seriem preferentes sufficere non estimaui. 48 The sections of the Moralia Regum are the following. Book 1: from 1 Sam 1; Book 2: from 1 Sam 4, 1; Book 3: from 1 Sam 9, 1; Book 4: from 1 Sam 13, 1; Book 5: from 1 Sam 17, 1; Book VII: from 2 Sam 1, 1; Book 8: from 2 Sam 5, 4; Book 9: from 2 Sam 10, 15; Book 10: from 2 Sam 13, 1; Book 11: from 2 Sam 17, 22; Book 12: from 2 Sam 21, 15; Book 13: from 1 Kings 1, 1; Book 14: from 1 Kings 6, 1; Book 15: from 1 Kings 6, 1 and 1 Kings 6, 5 (from ch. 3); Book 16: from 1 Kings 9, 1; Book 17: from 1 Kings 12, 1; Book 18: from 1 Kings 15, 33; Book 19: from 1 Kings 19, 9; Book 20: from 2 Kings 1, 1; Book 21: from 2 Kings 6, 24; Book 22: from 2 Kings 9, 1; Book 23: from 2 Kings 13, 14; Book 24: from 2 Kings 17 (?) to the end of 2 Kings. 49 MS 26, fol. 1ra: Capitula quoque numerosius supposui quam ea beatus Jeronimus dispertierit propter expositionis latitudinem et distinctionum utilitatem. Huius uero audacie mee incentores habui uenerabilem Iohannem Carnotensem episcopum et magistrum meum Gerardum puellam dictum qui hoc mihi non minus licere quam expedire persuarerunt. ‘Likewise I placed the chapters in a higher number than what is found in the division of the blessed Jerome because of the width of the description and of the usefulness of the distinctions. In fact I had for initiators of this audacity of mine John bishop of Chartres and my master Gerard called Pucelle who persuaded me that this was not only allowed but expedient.’ 50 For instance, in Book I, c. 1 has the title De Helcana et Anna et Fennena in the table of contents at the beginning of MS 25 and De Elchana et uxoribus eius (‘Of Helcana and his wives’) in the text; c. 7 is entitled De origine gratie et ortu intelligentie (‘Of the origin of grace and of the beginning of intelligence’) in the text but De origine gratie et ortu spiritualis intelligentie (‘Of the origin of grace and of the beginning of spiritual intelligence’) in the table of contents. 47

Fig. 1  Lincoln, Cathedral MS 25 fol. 33r

Fig. 2  Lincoln, Cathedral MS 25 fol. 46ar (slip inserted between fols 46v and 47r)

Fig. 3   Lincoln, Cathedral MS 25 fol. 81*r (slip inserted between fols 81v and 82r)



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show that such a decoration was intended throughout the book. The way some of the prologues were added in the margins or written separately suggests that the work as we have it may have been revised or completed by Niger himself. The purpose of the Moralia Regum Ralph Niger’s commentary on the Books of Kings takes place in a significant tradition, and he probably made use of earlier commentaries – in particular that of Hraban Maur and the ordinary gloss – but his borrowings are rarely explicit (although he occasionally quotes Jerome for the interpretation of Hebrew names):51 he only states that the reader may go back to the work of the Fathers for a fuller exposition.52 His borrowings from legal sources are not explicit either, although they may sometimes be identified, as in Book IX, c. 16, where he mentions the fact that secular laws may imitate sacred canons, a reference to the Decretum.53 Niger’s work is original, however, not only by its extraordinary length but also by the place given to recent history. The term hodie (‘today’) or the expression diebus nostris (‘in our days’) often introduce a section on recent events but also more general reflections on the current situation. This is not only a deliberate use of a device meant to enhance the value of biblical history as an example for contemporary conduct, it is also at the very heart of Niger’s thought, as is made clear in the address to the cardinals placed at the beginning of MS 25 and in the prologue of the first book.54 In the address, he explains that out of a pious concern he has collected the moralia of kings and that he has striven to adapt them to what appears in Samuel and Malachim. The morality of the people and that of kings are intertwined, so that changes in the morality of the people lead to changes in the way governments (regiminum moderamina) are controlled. The rights of governments are limited, however, by the will of princes: the reason for this is that public authority is handed over to princes ‘by the agreement and will of the community and of individuals (ex condicto et uoto uniuersitatis et singulorum)’. The present history is therefore that of the succession and qualities of men in government, and this concerns both the regnum and the sacerdotium.55 But it is clear, writes Niger, that this history is also a prophecy and that it is in harmony (concurrere) with the universality of things until the last Judgment.56 The history of Kings corresponds to the prophecies of Isaiah, Ezechiel, Jeremias and Daniel and it is concordant with them. ‘And the mysteries of Scripture seem to me’, says Niger, ‘to be consonant with things I have heard and seen in the courts of kings and prelates.’57

For instance MR, XXII, c. 31, MS 26, fol. 158va. Niger is content to refer to other works in a general way and sends the reader back to the original writings (for instance MR, I, c. 1, fol. 6va–b). 53 MR, IX, c. 16, MS 25, fol. 143vb: quamquam sacratissime leges canones immitari non dedignentur (‘however sacred the laws do not shun from imitating the canons’) a reference to the Decretum, Secunda Pars, causa II, quaestio III, c. VII: Cum enim leges seculi precipue in matrimoniis sacros canones sequi non dedignentur (‘When indeed the secular laws do not shun from imitating the sacred canons in particular in matters of marriage’). 54 MS 25, fol. 2ra–2vb. 55 MS 25, fol. 2ra. 56 MS 25, fol. 2 rb–va. 57 MS 25, fol. 2va: ad ea que in curiis regum et prelatorum audieram et uideram consonare michi uiderentur... 51

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Indeed I have seen the mutations of religions and governments, the persecutions of prelates and princes, their insolence and weaknesses, the abuses and negligence of officers, and finally the countless conditions of private persons: all those things, because they match (conueniunt) the examples by the mysteries of this prophecy, inasmuch as I could, I strove to adapt to the elucidation of this exposition.58

In the Introitus in Librum Regum, placed at the beginning of Book I, Niger states again and at length the reasons for considering the four books of Kings as a continuous text. After the Book of Judges, he writes, the Old Testament carries on with the Books of Samuel and Kings – with the interpolation of the book of Ruth. For ‘with the withdrawal of judges, their authority passed to the power of kings, because of the demand of the people who wanted a king and because of the ministry of the prophet Samuel who on the order of God anointed Saul.’59 He further elaborates on this: the negligence of judges and priests and the insolence of officers to God increased to the point that the respect for the law and sacrifices being gone, ambition and the violence of insults proceeded at an equal pace in public. The rigour of justice being relaxed, the action of judges became weaker when it came to punishing the sins of subjects, and the desire of priests becoming stronger, the people were diverted from the path of morals and deserved to be committed to the human judgment of a king rather than to divine government. Niger stresses that since these things were partly completed and partly begun in the time of Samuel and his ministry, the history of Samuel’s time was composed for the instruction of the present age, as well as for the prophecy of future events. It was also under the instruction of some prophetic spirit that David, Nathan the prophet or Solomon depicted the events of their time; as for the other acts of prophets and kings, these were collected sometimes by kings, sometimes by prophets, until the last king of Judah. For Niger, ‘we believe that we have collected all these things into a single volume.’60 He then asserts that his intention is to write down the prophecy of Jeremiah and of Ezra as a prophecy from the present day to the end of the world so that one may understand the transformations of religion, governments and times. The subject of his commentary is therefore the letter and the history of the Books of Kings: in the allegorical sense, he writes, it is the state of religion and of governments until the end of times, according to tropology, it is the instruction of morals, and according to anagogy it announces knowledge of eternal things.61 The didactic dimension of Niger’s endeavour is stressed over and over again: ‘The usefulness of this work is the instruction of the present life, so that the merits of the actions contained in the history being considered, we follow what is useful and allowed and we repel what is forbidden.’62 The consequences of the insolence of the sons of Eli, of the ingratitude and disobedience of Saul, encourage men in government to be prudent, while the patience, the prudence and the penitence of David show that moderation and humility are always to be MS 25, fol. 2va: Quippe mutationes religionum et regiminum, persecutiones prelatorum et principum et insolentias et eneruationes eorum excessus et negligentias officialium et demum innumeras conditiones priuatorum uidi que omnia quia misteriis huius prophetie ad exempla conueniunt prout potui huius expositionis elucidationi coaptare studui. 59 MS 25, fol. 5ra. 60 Hec autem in unum uolumen conpegisse credimus. MS 25, fol. 5ra–5vb. 61 MS 25, fol. 5rb. 62 MS 25, fol. 5va: Utilitas enim huius operis est eruditio presentis uite ut consideratis meritis gestorum que in historia continentur utilia et licita sequamur et inhibita declinemus. 58



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observed, in such a way, however, that authority is not diminished and that respect remains intact. Solomon’s wisdom, the youthful advice given to Roboam, or the abuses committed by Jeroboam, as well as the actions of other kings, demonstrate that their vices are to be avoided and their virtues imitated. The careful imitator gives his whole attention to these examples so that he may govern himself and others well. To him, ‘the lives of previous kings are like a mirror (speculum) in which he reflects constantly about what ought to be done and what ought to be avoided.’63 All this accounts for the division of the history of the Kings into four sections:64 (1) The reign of Saul, or the synagogue: with the birth of Christ this passed to the mystical and real David. (2) The reign of David: this expresses the kingdom of Christ. In persecutions suffered by David, the labours of the primitive Church are considered. (3) The reign of Solomon: this is the peaceful state of the Church enlarged by the freedom acquired by the profession of the Christian faith on the whole earth. (4) The reigns of the following kings until the last one, Zedekiah: these signify the state of the Church in different times, whether it progresses or declines in matters of religion, and the government of kings until the judgement which will arrive at the end of times. Niger ends his prologue by reminding the reader that this history is prophetical: it is this definition and the desire to match the events told in the Books of Kings and his own experience of courts and government which explains why he constantly goes back and forth between Scripture and historical events, recent or not.65 Niger defends a continuous reading of the Books of Samuel and Kings, in order to stress the passage from the government of judges to that of kings: his interpretation of the Old Testament is also for him a guide for the understanding of the events of his time, while in return these shed a strong light on the deep meaning of the events told in the Bible. Nevertheless, Niger is cautious to stress that his ambition is simply to show the significance of the history contained in the Book of Kings for the understanding of the progress of the human community, according to the variations of governments, whether temporal or ecclesiastical. And if the present seems to accomplish some prophecy, this is because of the similarities that exist in the human community in different places, which may be explained simultaneously.66 Niger’s conception of prophecy is not significantly different from that of other authors of the twelfth century.67 As for his caution, this may tentatively be explained in the light of the early circulation of some of the ideas of Joachim

MS 25, fol. 5va: preteritorum regum uitam sibi speculum faciat in quo quid fieri aut uitari conueniat iugiter consideret. 64 Cf. Buc, ‘Exégèse et pensée politique’, 151. 65 MS 25, fol. 5vb: Posset itaque ex predictis uideri liber hunc scriptis propheticis annumerandum quoniam ipsa historia prophetica est; uerum satius est beato Ieronimo consentire eumque agiographis connumerare (‘Accordingly from what has been said this book may be ranged among prophetical writings since the history itself is prophetical; but at the same time it is preferable to agree with the blessed Jerome and to range it among hagiographical writings’). 66 MR, XXII, c. 9, MS 26, fol. 148ra; also MR, XXII, c. 8 for his conception of prophecy, where he states that everything that has been foretold has been accomplished, which is a testimony of the magnificence of divine providence (MS 26, fol. 147va). 67 Cf. Marjorie Reeves, ‘The originality and influence of Joachim of Fiore’, Traditio, 36, 1980, 269–316 and Julia Eva Wannenmacher, ‘The spiny path of salvation. Linear and cyclical structures of history in Joachim of Fiore’, in Von Platon bis Fukuyama. Biologistische und zyklische Konzepte in der Geschichtsphilosophie der Antike und des Abendlandes, ed. David Engels, Brussels 2015, 136–59. 63

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of Fiore:68 it may be significant that in his chronicle, Niger is critical of Joachim of Fiore’s commentary on the Apocalypse.69 Book IX on 2 Sam 11 and 12 One may illustrate Ralph Niger’s reading of the Books of Kings with the example of his commentary on 2 Sam 11 and 12: the meeting between David and Bathsheba, the death of Uriah, and the punishment of David are the main episodes in these sections of the second Book of Samuel.70 The Glossa ordinaria compiles a number of commentaries (Jerome, Gregory the Great, Isidore, Hraban Maur) on these; André of Saint-Victor gives explanations on several literal points, for instance the state of Bathsheba when she was bathing.71 While there is no explicit use of any of these earlier commentaries by Ralph Niger, his own work clearly fits into this tradition, but again it is worth highlighting its unusual length (it fills the whole of Book IX of the Moralia Regum, from fol. 134v to fol. 149r, the text being divided into 18 chapters). In the prologue of Book IX, Niger stresses the existence of two separate jurisdictions, that of the Church and that of princes, the first being superior in dignity to the second.72 Who dares confuse what God has thus separated is guilty of both adultery and homicide.73 The first two chapters concern Joab who, on the order of David, placed Uriah at the forefront of the hardest fighting (2 Sam 11, 15). In chapter 1, entitled De missione Joab ad uastandum Amon et ad obsidendum Rabath (‘Of Joab being sent to waste Ammon and besiege Rabbah’), Niger explains that wars were fought against the Ammonites in the spring and he offers an historical, moral and spiritual interpretation of this, with reflections on the war against vices. Spring is the season when sexual desire awakens; the town of Rabbah (the city of waters) represents the birth of lust, which needs to be restrained before it flows freely. If one wants to govern oneself, this struggle has to take place in one’s youth, and carnal suggestions and desires which then surge most strongly need to be fought in the hardest way. Sensuality is Rabbah, that is to say the collection of voluptuous sensations that the army of David has to fight. This army is the coercion exerted by the mandates of the Old and New Testaments. Meanwhile, David remains in Jerusalem: he is similar to Christ who illuminates the faithful soul and guards it against the concupiscence which resides in it. The destruction of the Moabites represents the death of carnal desire.74 In chapter 2 of Book IX, entitled De curopalatibus et uicariis et negligentia principum et prelatorum (‘Of the curopalates and representatives, and of the negligence of princes and prelates’) Niger provides a purely political analysis of On the passage of Niger’s chronicle where he deals with Joachim of Fiore’s work, see Christoph Egger, ‘A pope without successor: Ralph of Coggeshall, Ralph Niger, Robert of Auxerre and the early reception of Joachim of Fiore’s ideas in England’, in Joachim of Fiore and the Influence of Inspiration, ed. Julia Eva Wannemacher, Farnham 2013, 145–79. On the criticism of Joachim of Fiore by Parisian scholars, see Robert E. Lerner, ‘Joachim and the scholastics’, in Gioacchino da Fiore tra Bernardo di Clairvaux e Innocenzo III. Atti del 5° Congresso internazionale di studi Gioachimitti, San Giovani in Fiore, 16–21 settembre 1999, ed. Roberto Rusconi, Rome 2001, 251–64. 69 Egger, ‘A pope without a successor...’, 161. 70 MS 25, fols. 134ra–149va. 71 Andrew of St Victor, Expositio Historica in Librum Regum, ed. F. A. van Liere, Turnhout 1996, 77. 72 MS 25, fols 134vb–135ra. 73 MS 25, fol. 135ra. 74 MS 25, fol. 135ra–b. 68



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2 Sam 11, 1,75 and it may be worthwhile to follow the meanders of his demonstration in order to get an idea of the way he puts his argument together. Firstly he states that beforehand David had never acted using an intermediary – with the recent exception of the war against the Moabites – but that he had always led his armies in person. The reason for this change was that this was not a fight aiming at victory: instead the expedition was meant to bring devastation to a country and to besiege a city. He then turns to the times of Theodosius the Great. By his victories, this emperor was another David: having put an end to pagan cults, he made the Church triumphant in the whole of the Roman world. But neither Theodosius nor any previous emperor had ever delegated their power. After the death of Theodosius, however, the administration of the palace was handed over to men who displaced the emperor from the actual running of government: emperors were then able to indulge in the pleasures of voluptuousness. Under Arcadius and Honorius, the procurators of the palace received plenitude of power (accepta plenitudine potestatis), displacing the Caesars and the Augustus: this led to the suffering of men and ‘to the prejudice of the legitimate power of princes (in preiudicium legitime potestatis principum)’, which God allowed so that the sins of the people would be punished. These procurators wanted to serve both the emperor and their own desires, while one cannot serve two masters at once (Matt 6, 24; Luke 16, 13–15). Until then, emperors had praetors, procurators and so on, but these were in charge ‘of part of the care [of government only, they did] not [have] plenitude of imperial power (in partem sollicitudinis et non in plenitudine imperatorie potestatis)’, and they accounted for their administration. It is quite striking to find in a purely temporal context the vocabulary of the plenitude of power, which was about to become a key notion in the ideological armoury of the papacy under Innocent III: this may reflect the readings of Ralph Niger in Roman law,76 as well as the fact that by then this notion was not entirely grounded in canon law. In this chapter delegation of power also appears as a main cause for the degeneracy of political governments: in the histories and annals of ancient authors, there are countless examples of the enormous crimes committed by such procurators as well as of their tyrannical actions. But princes are partly responsible for this, since it is not in their habit to choose the best men to accomplish their orders. On the contrary, they tend to select those about whom they know that they will follow the prince’s will instead of what is useful to the people, ambition rather than honesty, tyranny rather than justice or equity: Joab killed Abner by deceit, Uriah by committing a crime, Absalom in anger and Amasa out of ambition. If one considers the history of imperial power as a whole, procurators of the palace are clearly responsible for the degeneracy of the discipline of civil law and of the authority of the emperors, and this state of affairs lasted until God transferred the imperium to the kings of France. From chapter 3 to chapter 11 of Book IX, Niger reverts to a general commentary using several levels of interpretation.77 His reflections are multifarious and one may simply mention by way of illustration what he states in chapter 12, entitled De fornicatione ecclesie cum philosophis gentium (‘Of the fornication of the MS 25, fols 135rb–136ra. On the later borrowing of the concept of plenitudo potestatis from canon law by imperial lawyers, see Hans-Joachim Schmidt, ‘The papal and imperial concept of plenitudo potestatis: the influence of Pope Innocent III on Emperor Frederick II’, in Pope Innocent III and his World, ed. John C. Moore, Aldershot 1999, 305–14. 77 MS 25, fols 136ra–140va. 75 76

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Church with the philosophers of the Pagans’). Just as among the Jews there were several sects, he writes, there were various Pagan sects, such as the Stoics, the Academicians, the Aristotelians, the Platonicians, the Epicureans and others. Led by reason, they understood that there was only one God, but they chose to retain their superstitions, just as some wanted to follow Christ as well as the legalia of the Jews, such as circumcision. The first Church preached to philosophers, and their pure life as well as the fact that they imitated truth led her to have intercourse with them, but the sons born of such unions did not abandon the mistake of philosophical enquiry. The son born from following philosophical curiosity is not meant to live, just as the son born from the adultery of David and Bathsheba was not meant to survive.78 From chapter 13, Niger reverts to a political interpretation of 2 Sam 11 and 12. It would be too long here to go over the different aspects of his commentary, and one may just highlight a few points in order to illustrate the significance of the Moralia Regum as a source for political culture in the late twelfth century. In chapter 13, entitled De abusione potestatis legitime (‘Of the abuse of legitimate power’)79 Niger stresses the fact that the prince ought to understand that the gift he has received from God is meant to be used for security and justice. If he acts badly in the execution of his power and defiles this gift, he offends God himself. It is here that he places an anecdote concerning King Stephen: We have indeed heard that Stephen King of the English, since he had the gift to heal the disease which is healed by the royal touch and a benediction, by the contact of his hand healed a dog he loved and who was suffering from that disease. This was definitely usurpation, since he used this gift in the animal world, a gift he had received as a remedy for a creature of reason. After this he lost this grace for the rest of his life. This example shows that the prince or prelate may abuse the grace of God by applying it to something else than he ought to, even if this grace is efficacious where it is applied in an illicit way.80

In chapter 14, entitled De fornicatione rationis cum sensualitate (‘Of the fornication of reason with sensuality’),81 Niger adds a number of elements that concern the offices within the Church, in particular the imposition of active office on contemplative men, an issue that seems to concern him highly and that he takes up again in the following chapter.82 He is also critical of the prelate who talks nicely about religion, while he leads his flock only in order to be provided with milk and wool: he is like the physician who speaks beautifully of his art but cannot heal his patients, or the knight who does not go to war but is eloquent about his prowess. Chapter 17 is the longest in Book IX and entitled De transgressionibus MS 25, fols 140va–141rb. MS 25, fol. 141rb–va. 80 MS 25, fol. 141rb: Ex facto audiuimus quod Stephanus rex Anglorum cum haberet gratiam sanandi morbum qui a tactu regie manus et benedictione aboletur, canem quem diligebat eodem morbo laborantem sue manus contactu curauit. Ea uero usurpatione quoniam in mundo animali exibuit graciam quam ad remedium rationabilis creature acceperat eam postmodum omni tempore uite sue perdidit. Hoc itaque exemplo patet quod gratia dei abuti potest princeps uel prelatus applicando eam ad aliud quam debeat adeo ut etiam effectum habeat in eo ad quod illicite applicatur. It is difficult to know whether Ralph Niger shows here some sense of humour. In c. 3, commenting on the ablutions of Bathsheba, he wonders whether her menstrual flow may have been stopped by the royal touch or because she became pregnant (MS 25, fol. 136vb). On this cf. Philippe Buc, ‘David’s adultery with Bathsheba and the healing power of the Capetian kings’, Viator 24, 1993, 101–20. 81 MS 25, fols 141va–142vb. 82 MS 25, fols 142va–143rb. 78 79



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ecclesie prosperantis et principatuum (‘Of the transgressions of the Church in its times of success and of the principates’), it deals with the separation of the law of the Church and of secular law implemented by Constantine.83 Within the limits of ecclesiastical law, the ius commune has no jurisdiction, nor power. The ecclesiastical law is cut away from Roman law, having its own and single tribunal for the morals and life of clerics and for causes which are heavenly and spiritual, and other mysteries. This law however may benefit from the discipline of the ius commune: in fact both laws may benefit from each other, and one sees that the secular laws do not shun away from imitating the sacred canons. Ecclesiastical law is like a husband to the Church, while civil law is like a husband to the res publica, both having offspring with their wives. Or again: imperial power and the Church are like the house of King David and the house of Bathsheba, they are facing each other. And the bad princely power is like the prince who stays at home, inventing new ways of doing things, while his officers oppress the people. There are many more reflections on the same lines, until finally on fol. 145ra Ralph Niger mentions the struggle of Thomas Becket against the evil customs of Henry II: as Schmugge stressed in his 1976 article on Ralph Niger and Henry II, Becket is here compared to Uriah, whom David entices to sleep at home. At first Henry urges him to agree to the constitutions of Clarendon; faced with the refusal of Becket, he makes him drunk with flatteries and threats and Becket gives way, also following the advice of some pseudo-bishops. But come the evening he realizes his mistake and by penitence suspends himself from the duty of the altar, until Alexander III absolves him of the obligation of his oath, an account that recalls a similar passage in the life of Becket by William Fitz Stephen.84 After a seven-year exile, the peace being simulated, a letter was sent to the Joab of the English, for [Thomas] to be placed and abandoned at the heart of the battle until he would be killed in the war; and then he was slain by the unjust in front of the altar at the heart of his church.85

Still today, Niger states, it is the custom of the prince who cannot obtain what he wants to take away by frequent harassment and various vexations the possessions of others. And people are treated not according to the sacred laws and constitutions but following some detestable letters, probably a reference to royal writs.86 Niger then reverts to ancient times and lists the exactions and iniquities of bad princes and their representatives. The condition of the Church has been either better or worse, according to the succession of good and bad prelates and emperors.87 A long historical digression evokes the fate of the Church in the centuries after the division of the empire, and the transfer of religion from East to West following the invasions of the Saracens.88 The Franks accepted the faith but then had to fight against all sorts of enemies, the Alamans, the Poitevins and Gascons ‘and many other Saracens’.89 The attacks of the unfaithful, however, did less

MS 25, fols 143vb–147vb. Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, 7 vols, ed. J. C. Robertson, London 1877, III, 49. 85 MS 25, fol. 145ra: Demum uero pace simulata: missa est epistula ad Ioab Anglorum ut oppositu fortissimo prelio pro derelicto haberetur quatinus percussus interiret in bello et ita demum occisus est ab iniquis coram altari in ecclesie sue gremio. 86 MS 25, fol. 145ra. 87 MS 25, fol. 145va. 88 MS 25, fols 145vb–146ra. 89 MS 25, fol. 146va. 83 84

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harm to the Church than ‘the curial and palatine dogs (canes aulici et palatini)’, who took away the privileges that churches had obtained from former kings. In other words, David was punished because he had presumed, and Bathsheba (the Church) because she had consented. Things went thus from bad to worse (fol. 147rb) until Pippin, the procurator of Childeric III, wrote to Pope Zacharias to obtain his approval for the deposition of the rex inutilis. At the end of Book IX, in chapter 18 De missione Nathan ad Dauid (‘Of the sending of Nathan to David’), Niger follows the fate of the Church under Charles the Great and his sons (fol. 147vb). Charles the Bald attempted to repair the wrongs the Church had suffered under his grandfather, and his descendants adopted a similar policy, but with uneven success, similar to the child Bathsheba had conceived in adultery (fol. 148ra–b).90 The last chapter of Book IX (De uocatione Dauid ad expugnandum Rabath, ‘Of the order of David to reduce Rabbath’) explores later history: it was with Henry the Fowler, the son of the duke of Saxony that Solomon was born again. But secular wisdom led to error since this was not used for the sake of the Christian faith.91 Ralph Niger’s political thought Becket’s martyrdom sent shockwaves through the political culture of the time, and the Becket conflict holds a significant place in Niger’s commentary. He deals at length with the issue of the relationship between the two powers, as well as the sufferings of the Church, and repeatedly targets his criticism at Henry II, as Schmugge has shown.92 In chapter 4 of Book XVII,93 for instance, there is a clear parallel between Henry II and Rehoboam, who promised the people a harsher government than they had had in the past. It is the same with Henry II: not only has he followed the bad customs of his predecessors, he has even introduced some new customs, which are far worse than past ones. Thomas suffered countless torments and a seven-year exile, and in the end he died in his struggle to abolish evil customs, both old and new. The prince, like Rehoboam, is childish in so far as he seeks impure counsellors and goes from one sin to the other. Although he implies that Henry was at least indirectly responsible for the murder of Becket, and although he states that his sufferings at the hands of his sons was divine retribution for his actions, Niger seems to suggest that the king has been saved by his penitence and that evil counsellors may partly be blamed for his troubles.94 In

For an analysis of the criticism of the Carolingians by Ralph Niger, cf. Buc, ‘Exégèse et pensée politique’. 91 MS 25, fol. 149va. 92 On this see in particular Schmugge, ‘Thomas Becket und König Heinrichs II. in der Sicht des Radulfus Niger’. 93 MS 26, fol. 69rb–69va. 94 MR, X, c. 41, MS 25, fol. 167ra: Assumpto igitur habitu et professione penitentis tandem pacem cum filiis firmauit, que demum firma fuit cum deus eam firmauit. In hac perturbatione et apud patrem et apud filium et Cusi et Achitofel plurimos uidi. Vnde presentium expositionem facilius uideam, fuerunt enim cum utroque consiliarii contrarii et amici falsi. ‘Having donned the habit and profession of the penitent at last he made peace with [his] sons, which was firm only when God made it fast. In this trouble and around the father and around the son I saw many Achitophels and Cushites. So that I may make the present easier to understand, indeed with both there were contrary counsellors and false friends.’ His gloss on the passage of 2 Sam where Achitophel advises Absalom to compromise his father’s concubines in order to be able to claim the throne seems also to suggest that evil counsellors were responsible for the events of 1173: MR, X, c. 43. 90



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fact it is often the abuse and the corruption of power that lead to bad kingship. To some extent the exactions of Henry II in matters of justice are the consequence of the greed and the corruption of judicial officers (XXII, chapter 32).95 Furthermore, Niger’s criticism of Henry II often leads him to more general statements about the abuse of power, whether temporal or ecclesiastical. In XVII, chapter 4, he states that the prince who is full of his power and who oppresses his people runs the risk of finding himself in a situation far worse than that of his predecessors, since he turns the people away from his domination, which by his fault is diminished.96 And it is perhaps the case that the severity of ecclesiastical justice turns many away from the faith.97 What Niger then writes about the entourage of kings98 echoes the traditional attacks on curial life that are to be found by John of Salisbury or Peter of Blois. Flatterers are the only ones to counsel the kings of our time. These kings are not old, but rather young and childish, and their counsellors advise them only in order to answer their will and pleasure. These kings reject utterly the man of mature age who does not tend towards what may be pleasing to the mind of the prince, whether just or unjust. And the common vice of most princes and prelates is that they do not like nor favour anybody who dares to oppose them out of concern for equity or justice. Some princes follow justice and listen willingly to good advice, but if they come across something bad they do not oppose it, even if they are warned about it and, as if blinded, they refuse to see their own injustice. Some princes also are so tied by the advice of a favourite that, having listened to all the others, the old as well as the children, they always revert to what was suggested by the one who has their ear. They would blush to touch some shameful thing, but by delegation they drink this to the dregs and confuse what is allowed and what is not, following now necessity, now pleasure. Others are even more skilled and deceitful: they listen to many counsellors, but they only admit into their confidence those whose mind or will they have prepared, so that the advice they receive reflects exclusively their own judgment, and this to the point that nobody presumes to give them counsel without first knowing their mind. Some princes however have governed well, and the wheat may not be separated easily from the chaff (XXII, chapter 16).99 While Athaliah is an illustration of the degeneracy of power (XXII, chapter 19) – which leads Niger to mention the episode of a female pope, who is said to have reigned for eight years while the pontifical throne was vacant100 – Jehoash was a good king, whose government is described at length in XX, chapter 21 (fol. 154rb). But even he was good only as long as he was supported by the priest Jehoiada (XXII, chapter 21). As for the killing of Jehoram by Jehu (XXII, chapter 16), this reprehensible action was the accomplishment of the prophecy of Elijah: but evil should not be practised in order to arrive at some good. Indeed one sees some usurpers who transform evil into good: but this usually happens after one or two generations, and even then there is no possible confusion between the government which is good only for the prince or the people, and that which places God above all things (XXII, chapter 32). See supra note 24. MS 26, fol. 69rb. 97 The criticism of the bad government of the Church is recurrent, such as in MR, XXII, c. 21, fol. 154rb. 98 MR, XVII, c. 6, MS 26, fol. 69va. 99 MS 26, fol. 151rb–va. 100 MR, XXII, c. 21, MS 26, fol. 154 rb: Notandum quod in ecclesia romana sedit pro summo pontifice mulier annis VIII quo tempore sedes uacasse dicitur. 95 96

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On several occasions Niger also hints at the significance of the good distribution of tasks within Christian society. In particular he deals with the issue of the confusion of temporal and ecclesiastical justice in a way that echoes what John of Salisbury writes about officium and alienum in the Policraticus.101 Some princes or prelates go so far as to take on the offices of others: the prince judges clerics and the prelate the people, and we have often seen, writes Niger, a prince judging ecclesiastical causes turning to knights for advice when it came to judgment. On the other hand, when giving some public judgment, the prince consulted only clerics, having banished any layperson from his counsel. In a similar way some prelates judge ecclesiastical matters by a judgment of lay persons, or lay matters with clerics. All these imitate Rehoboam and diminish the people. Whatever abandons the established order cannot end well. The study and edition of the full text of the Moralia Regum may help renew our comprehension of a number of political themes in the decades after the martyrdom of Becket. In particular one would need to identify the historical sources Niger made use of, and get a better understanding of his place in the legal and theological learning of his time. Pending a general study of Niger’s commentary, one may tentatively suggest that while it was expressed in a figurative language, his view of power was in fact relatively well-balanced and moderate. His perception of government was anchored in his personal experience of the courts, and although he seems to lament the fact that the good of the prince and of the people often comes before the love of God, when dealing with princes and prelates it is the abuse of power he criticizes, like John of Salisbury, whose interest in Roman law he also shared.

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FROM CAPTIVITY TO LIBERATION: THE IDEOLOGY AND PRACTICE OF FRANCHISE IN CRUSADING FRANCE* Anne E. Lester In the spring of 1202, between 25 March and 14 April, Hugh of Candavène, Count of St-Pol, oversaw four separate, yet parallel, grants of franchise to four towns within his domains.1 In 1194, Hugh had become a direct vassal of the king of France, who endowed him with several fiefs in the territories between St-Pol and the royal domain in recognition of his faithful service (propter servicium).2 In the region of the Somme, where Hugh’s new fiefs clustered, grants of franchise were not uncommon. From the beginning of the twelfth century semi-independent communes came to play an increasingly prominent, if often controversial, role in public debate and political life. As Charles Petit-Dutaillis, Robert Fossier, Susan Reynolds, Chris Wickham and others have shown, communes – that is, independent urban communities governed by a small group of échevins or prud’hommes and enjoying specific defined and delineated freedoms, customs, usages and regulations – developed differently at different moments in northern and southern Europe.3 Notoriously, during the twelfth century, as was the case in Laon, Beauvais, and Reims, grants of urban franchises could be revoked as often as they were confirmed, making the creation of a commune or an enfranchised ville potentially controversial. The grants contained the kernel of possible critique and dissent; the commune could be a site of resistance to, as much as respect for, local lordship.4 * I began research for this paper during my time as a Derek Brewer Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University. I am grateful to Liesbeth Van Houts and Julie Barrau for their sponsorship and feedback. Daniel Power, Thomas Bisson, Scott Bruce, and Robert Berkhofer also offered helpful comments, questions, and counsel. 1 See L. Carolus-Barré, ‘La date des chartes communales de Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise, Lucheux et Pernes, et le départ de Hugues IV Candavène pour la IVe Croisade (1202)’, Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 129, 1971, 398–408. The county of St-Pol, like the smaller counties of Boulogne, Guînes, and Hesdin, together formed part of what Jean-François Nieus has called the vital ‘external zone’ of southern Flanders. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, these counties oscillated between periods of autonomous rule and forced dependence. On the county and the counts of St-Pol, see the works of J.-F. Nieus, especially Les chartes des comtes de Saint-Pol (XIe-XIIIe siècles), Turnhout, 2008 (here at 29). 2 H. Fr. Delaborde, Recueil des actes de Philippe Auguste, 6 vols, Paris 1916–, I, 562, no. 470; Nieus, Les chartes, 34–5, nos. 101–2; J. W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages, Berkeley 1986, 80–2 for the context of the Flemish-Franco realignment. 3 See C. Petit-Dutaillis, Les communes françaises: caractères et évolution des origines au XVIIIe siècle, Paris 1947, [in English] The French Communes in the Middle Ages, trans. J. Vickers, New York 1978; R. Fossier, Chartes de coutume en Picardie (XIe-XIIIe siècle), Paris 1974; R. Fossier, Hommes et villages d’Occident au Moyen Âge, Paris 2012; Documents sur les relations de la royauté avec les villes en France de 1180 à 1314, ed. A. Giry, Paris 1885; A. Luchaire, Les communes françaises à l’époque des Capétiens directs, Paris 1890; S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300, 2nd edn, Oxford 1997; and C. Wickham, Community and Clientele in Twelfth-Century Tuscany: The Origins of the Rural Commune in the Plain of Lucca, Oxford 1989. 4 On the controversial status and challenges posed by communes, see J. Malegam, The Sleep of the Behemoth: Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1000–1200, Ithaca, NY 2013, 230–63.

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By 1202, Hugh had been a vowed crusader for two years.5 As a seasoned crusader who had taken part in the Third Crusade and returned to the west in 1192, he emerged as one of the leaders of the Fourth Crusade. That spring he began the process of making a final tournée of his domains as he departed for the east. In the last days of March, Hugh and his wife, Countess Yolande, enfranchised the burghers of St-Pol-sur-Ternoise and their heirs and granted them a commune to exist in perpetuity (in perpetuum) according to the laws and customs of the commune of St-Quentin, which Hugh had established a decade earlier.6 Thus, St-Pol was given rights of self-governance in exchange for modest annual payments in kind and in recognition of his grant and his lordship. In the days that followed, Hugh made peace with the abbot of St-Vaast in Arras and drew up a charter of franchise and co-lordship in agreement with the abbot for the burghers of the ville of Etrée-surCanche (modern: Estrée-[Wamin]), this time according to the laws and customs of St-Pol.7 He identifies himself as ‘Count of Saint-Pol, signed with the cross and very soon about to leave on the journey to Jerusalem’ (ego comes Hugo Sancti Pauli, crucesignatus et Jherosolimitanum iter arrepturus in proximo).8 Both the abbot and the count retained certain banalities and feudal dues, but the men and women of Estrée were freed to govern themselves. A portion of the dues owed to the count he then gave to his knight, Gérard d’Estrée, as a fief. Finally, the monks agreed to pray for Hugh and Yolande in perpetuity on the anniversary of their deaths. At the end of March, perhaps while still in his chapel in Lucheux, with the agreement of his wife, his son-in-law, Gautier de Châtillon, and his daughters, Elisabeth de Châtillon and Eustachie, Hugh granted the burghers of Lucheux and their heirs a commune according to the uses and customs of St-Pol, excepting certain local dues and customs, primarily payments in cash and kind, which he enumerated precisely, as will be discussed below.9 Travelling southeast, the count and his family passed through Encre (modern: Albert), which had received communal status in 1178, but Hugh augmented those franchises with new and less cumbersome customs

For the notorious depiction of the commune of Laon, see J. Rubenstein, Guibert of Nogent: Portrait of a Medieval Mind, New York 2002; and for the dynamics in Bruges, see J. Rider, God’s Scribe: The Historiographical Art of Galbert of Bruges, Washington, DC 2001. 5 On his role as a crusader, see the short entry in J. Longnon, Les compagnons de Villehardouin: Recherches sur les croisés de la quatrième croisade, Geneva 1978, 195–7. 6 Carolus-Barré, ‘La date des chartes’, 398–9. For the full text of the charter see Nieus, Les chartes, no. 119, 201–2 (March 1202); and G. Espinas, Recueil de documents relatifs à l’histoire du droit municipal en France des origines à la Révolution, 3 vols, Paris 1934–45, III, 659–60, no. 836. The original did not survive; Espinas worked from a seventeenth-century copy which reproduced a series of vidimus from 1381 and 1434 or 1435. On the commune of St-Quentin, see M. A. Triou, ‘Les origines de la commune de St-Quentin et ses vicissitudes’, Les Chartes et le movement communal, colloque regional, Saint-Quentin 1980, 3–10; A. Giry, ‘Étude sur les origines de la Commune de Saint-Quentin’, in Le Livre Rouge de l’Hôtel de Ville de Saint-Quentin, ed. H. Martin and E. Lemaire, Saint-Quentin 1888, v–vi; and E. Shortell, ‘Dismembering Saint Quentin: Gothic Architecture and the Display of Relics’, Gesta 36, 1997, 32–47. 7 Carolus-Barré, ‘La date des chartes’, 403–4; and Nieus, Les chartes, no. 120, 202–6 (March 1202); and Espinas, Recueil de documents, Paris 1938, II, 490–500. The count’s act was preserved in the AD Pas-de-Calais, H 1495, until it was destroyed in 1915. 8 The verb used here, arrepo, arrepere, literally means to ‘creep, or to go slowly, to crawl, or crawl towards’, which nicely captures the pace and deliberate movement of a lord’s final tournée of his domains. 9 Carolus-Barré, ‘La date des chartes’, 399–400; Nieus, Les chartes, no. 125, 210–12 (1 March–13 April 1202). See also R. Dubois, ‘La charte de coutumes de Lucheux (Somme), 1201’, Revue historique de droit français et étranger 3, 1924, 307–17.



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regulating the recovery of debts.10 From there, he progressed through Santerre and into the Beauvaisis, and in April of 1202 he granted communal rights to the small ville of Pontpoint. In return, the commune placed Hugh’s arms on the reverse of their seal, an acknowledgement of his lordship and largesse.11 From Pontpoint, Hugh made his way south, passing through the great abbey of Cîteaux, which he endowed with annual renders of wheat and grapes to be used for anniversary masses in his honour.12 The new grants of franchise considered here, particularly those that cluster between 1200 and 1204, offer a useful case-study for understanding how crusaders’ religious commitments and penitential mindset shaped other aspects of their social relationships in the west.13 By analyzing the language and instances of franchise grants we gain a sense of how a developing crusade ideology – a way of thinking that captured the commitments and resources of a majority of Anglo-Norman and French barons and knights by 1200 – informed their behaviour in the west, before departure, and transformed certain aspects of social life, community, and lordship in their absence and upon their return. This line of inquiry aligns well with that of other historians who have recently analyzed ‘the ways in which the crusade’s ideological construct and institutional mechanisms were applied’ more broadly to social interactions and political negotiations at the local level.14 In doing so, this analysis also bridges two historiographical trends that have not often intersected: that of crusader studies and the study of communal franchise. The examples brought to light here, mostly from Picardy and the region between Flanders and the Île-de-France, suggest that these two topics were in fact more deeply entwined than scholars have understood.15 The cascade of franchises that Hugh of St-Pol put in place in the spring of 1202 demonstrated not only his authority as a baron – able to grant liberties and to restrict them too – but also defined his interests as a crusade leader, informed by an ideology of penitence and liberation. In short, they speak to an ever more sophisCarolus-Barré, ‘La date des chartes’, 401–2; H. Daussy and M. Devauchelle, ‘La charte de commune de la ville d’Encre (Albert)’, Mémoires de l’Académie d’Amiens 37, 1890, 72–3; and J. Estienne, Chartes de l’hôpital et de la ville d’Albert (Encre), 1175–1466, Amiens 1942, 16. The count was in Albert with his wife, Yolande, for at the same time he also offered a donation to the nunnery of Clarentinum (Avesnes-lès-Bapaume), see Nieus, Les chartes, no. 137, 220–1. 11 Carolus-Barré, ‘La date des chartes’, 406–7; also L. Carolus-Barré, ‘La charte communale de Pontpoint octroyée par Hugues IV Candavène, comte de Saint-Pol’, Le Moyen âge, 66, 1960, 527–59; and Nieus, Les chartes, no. 127, 213 (1 March–13 April 1202). 12 Nieus, Les chartes, no. 138, 221–2 (April 1202), no. 139, 222 (April 1202), and no. 140, 222–3 (April 1202), all of which he drew up while at Cîteaux. Yolande approved the same, although she no longer seems to be in the company of her husband, staying behind in their lordship. She would come to hold Encre as dower lands after Hugh’s death on crusade and would thenceforth hold the title Countess of St-Pol and dame d’Encre: see Nieus, Les chartes, no. 158, 234 (August, 1209). 13 Giles Constable has already made clear that the ways in which crusaders financed their expeditions had an impact on the social world of the west. See G. Constable, ‘The Financing of the Crusades’, in G. Constable, Crusaders and Crusading in the Twelfth Century, Farnham 2008, 117–41 at 140. How a crusade ideology can be traced is certainly more difficult and interpretative. Changes in the liturgy, which permeated the devotional worlds of the men and women I discuss here, surely had an impact. On this, see M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology, Ithaca NY 2017. 14 Björn Weiler has applied the same framing concept to the broader context of the ‘systematic transnational’ framework: see, B. Weiler, ‘The Negotium Terrae Sanctae in the Political Discourse of Latin Christendom, 1215–1311’, The International History Review 25, 2003, 1–36, at 4. 15 For an exception, see Paul Hyams, ‘A Three-Cornered Dynamic of Redemption in the “Long” Thirteenth Century: Villein Manumissions and the Theology of the Incarnation’ (R. Allen Brown Memorial Lecture, 2011), ANS 26, 2013, 1–15. 10

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ticated crusade ideology forming in the west.16 Hugh’s grants of franchise offer a useful entry point for a deeper analysis of the effects of crusading and a crusade mentality as it was manifest in the years after the loss of Jerusalem (2 October 1187) and the failure of the Third Crusade of 1189–92. The rhetoric of ‘liberation’ that began the crusade movement was rooted in the eleventh-century reform currents. Libertas, especially following the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, resounded in the crusade liturgy and in a growing literary tradition that retold stories of the First Crusade and aided in the advent of crusader vernacular literature.17 But libertas also found application in the local landscape in grants of liberties given to men and women in small villes and larger towns and cities throughout the Anglo-NormanFrench context.18 To examine these convergences, I begin by analyzing the rituals of departure, which had become increasingly well-scripted by the turn of the thirteenth century. The performance of departure provided the setting in which those signed with the cross could put into practice the penitential vows they had taken. Scholars have long recognized that charitable donations to hospitals, monasteries and nunneries were part of this process, but grants of franchise to small villes and urban communities have not been considered in this light.19 Using the departures of the Fourth Crusade as my focal point, I will briefly show that Hugh’s grants were part of a broader phenomenon of franchise that many Anglo-Norman and French lords engaged in before leaving for the east in 1202. By that point, crusading families were well aware of the risks and debts involved in the undertaking and were beginning to plan carefully to mitigate them. Moreover, as I shall argue, in the period after the Fall of Acre in 1190, chroniclers, writers, and clerics began to call attention to images of captivity, slavery, ransom and liberation, ideas that shaped the crusaders’ mentalité and may have provided an additional ideological overlay informing the grants of communal franchise that ensued. Crusader ideology and the rituals of departure Louis Carolus-Barré was the first scholar, to my knowledge, to note that Hugh of St-Pol’s charters of franchise were an integral part of the count’s preparations for the Fourth Crusade and followed the route he took as he departed his lands for the east. Hugh’s preparations align nicely with a set of behaviours and conventions that, by 1200, had developed into a well-scripted rite of departure.20 Informed in part by liturgical ritual, penitential rites, and the needs and desires for making peace, such rounds See Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons. Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, esp. ch. 3 and 4; and C. Symes, ‘Popular Literacies and the First Historians of the First Crusade’, P & P 235, 2017, 38–67. 18 R. Fossier shows very clearly that grants of franchise spike in the years between 1190 and 1230, during the height of the crusading commitment on the part of the lords of Picardy. See Fossier, Chartes de coutume, 105. 19 See for example, A. E. Lester, ‘A Shared Imitation: Cistercian Convents and Crusader Families in Thirteenth-Century Champagne’, JMH 35, 2009, 353–70; and D. Power, ‘The Preparations of Count John I of Sées for the Third Crusade’, in Crusading and Warfare in the Middle Ages: Realities and Representations. Essays in Honour of John France, ed. S. John and N. Morton, Aldershot 2014, 143–66. 20 W. C. Jordan, ‘The Rituals of War: Departure for Crusade in Thirteenth-Century France’, in The Book of Kings: Art, War, and the Morgan Library’s Medieval Picture Bible, ed. W. Noel and D. Weiss, London 2002, 99–105; W. C. Jordan, ‘Crusader Prologues: Preparing for War in the Gothic Age’, The Christian Culture Lecture, Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, IN 2009, 1–20; M. C. Gaposchkin, ‘From Pilgrimage to Crusade: The Liturgy of Departure, 1095–1300’, Speculum 88, 2013, 44–91; J. RileySmith, ‘Toward an Understanding of the Fourth Crusade as an Institution’, in Urbs Capta: The Fourth Crusade and its Consequences/La IVe Croisade et ses conséquences, ed. A. Laiou, Paris 2005, 71–87. 16 17



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allowed crusaders to engage with their communities before departing their patrimony. Although different from region to region, rituals of departure came to span the Channel and lords from England, France, and Flanders engaged in such exercises in parallel. Crusade participation began with ‘taking the cross’: taking a vow (votum crucis), a solemn and public oath to go on crusade. As Cecilia Gaposchkin has shown, the crusade vow developed out of the penitential rites for pilgrimage. Crusaders were, first and foremost, pilgrims and they took vows that emphasized their own personal contrition and penance.21 From the start of the movement in 1095 onward, those who took the vow went east – ideally – with the ambition of following Christ, literally seeking to walk where he walked. But behind the vow was also the promise of transforming the self, taking on a Christ-like bearing that was further emphasized by taking up the symbol of the cross: sewing a cloth cross onto one’s clothing. These rituals were rarely standardized, however, as Gaposchkin notes: ‘the vow generally occurred well before departing on crusade, and was often described as taking up (assumens, baiulens) the cross in language inspired by Matthew 16.24: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” It was the vow that made the crusader, and thus it was at this point that his status changed, and he incurred the spiritual and temporal benefits ensured by the Church.’22 After taking the vow, as William Jordan describes, ‘[crusaders] were encouraged, although not always in this order, to undergo the sacrament of confession; to put themselves under the protection of a saint or saints …; to make sure their weapons received the appropriate blessings; and finally, to make testamentary arrangements for their heirs, including charity for the poor or sick or other deserving categories of people’.23 As a further sign of their status, at some point in the liturgical rite or in a separate ceremony crusaders were also given a staff and purse or scrip (capsella), objects that marked them as pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. Ceremonies for taking the vow often added solemn rites for blessing the cloth cross, or other sacred objects – crosses, portable altars, standards (vexilli), staffs and purses or scrips – that crusaders might carry with them.24 By 1200 these rites and their attendant material symbols were both a mark of one’s penitential commitment and also a sign of military and chivalric ambition.25 During Advent of 1199, a great contingent of lords and knights from northern France, many of whom were related by blood or bound by ties of lordship, had gathered at Écry (in the Aisne) for a great tournament.26 There, on 28 November 1199 Gaposchkin, ‘From Pilgrimage to Crusade’, 46–7. Gaposchkin, ‘From Pilgrimage to Crusade’, 47; J. A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader, Madison 1969. 23 Jordan, ‘Crusader Prologues’, 1 and J. Riley-Smith, ‘The State of Mind of Crusaders to the East, 1095–1300’, in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, ed. J. Riley-Smith, Oxford 1995, 66–90. 24 Gaposchkin, ‘From Pilgrimage to Crusade’, 51–63. 25 That such rites appear in literary texts is a good indication of this: see J. Baldwin, Aristocratic Life in Medieval France: The Romances of Jean Renart and Gerbert de Montreuil, 1190–1230, Baltimore 2000; see also N. Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps: The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages, Ithaca NY 2012, 55–89 and N. Paul, ‘In Search of the Marshall’s Lost Crusade: The Persistence of Memory, the Problems of History and the Painful Birth of Crusading Romance’, JMH 40, 2014, 292–310. 26 Geoffrey of Villehardouin, The Conquest of Constantinople, c. 1–3, in Joinville and Villehardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades, trans. C. Smith, New York 2008, 5. A portrait of these events is nicely presented in J. Phillips, The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople, New York 2004, 1–25, 39–55. On crusader preaching at the time, see J. Bird, ‘The Victorines, Peter the Chanter’s Circle, and the Crusade: Two Unpublished Crusade Appeals in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS Latin 14470’, Medieval Sermon Studies 48, 2004, 5–28; and A. Jones, ‘Fulk of Neuilly, Innocent III, and the Preaching of the Fourth Crusade’, Comitatus 41, 2010, 119–48. 21 22

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Thibaut, count of Champagne (at the age of 22) and Louis, count of Blois (at the age of 27) took the cross, joined by Simon de Montfort and Renaut of Montmirail. Other barons followed suit, including Garnier, bishop of Troyes, Count Walter of Brienne, Geoffrey of Joinville (seneschal of Champagne) and his brother Robert, Eustace of Conflans and his brother Guy of Plessis, Henry of Arzillières, Geoffrey of Villehardouin (marshal of Champagne), Milon le Bréban, Guy of Chappes and his nephew Clerembaut, Renaut of Dampierre and others from Champagne. And among the barons from the Île-de-France were Nivelon of Chérizy, bishop of Soissons, Matthew of Montmorency and his nephew Guy, castellan of Coucy, William of Aulnay, Robert Mauvoisin, Dreux of Cressonsacq, Bernard of Moreuil, and Enguerrand of Boves and his brother Robert.27 At the start of Lent – another penitential period – on Ash Wednesday (23 February 1200), Baldwin, count of Flanders and Hainaut ‘took the cross [in the church of St-Donatian] in Bruges with his wife, Countess Marie, the sister of Count Thibaut of Champagne’.28 Soon thereafter the count’s younger brothers, Henry and Eustace, took the cross with their nephew Thierry, the son of Count Philip of Flanders, who had died in Acre in 1191.29 William and Conan of Béthune also took the vow, as did John of Nesle, castellan of Bruges, Renier of Trit and his son Renier, Matthew of Walincourt, James of Avesnes, Baldwin of Beauvoir, Hugh of Beaumetz, and many others from the nearby counties. It was among these men that Hugh of St-Pol also took the cross with his nephew Peter of Amiens, as well as Eustace of Canteleux, Nicholas of Mailly, Anseau of Cayeux and Walter of Nesle with his brother Peter. Count Geoffrey of Perche with his brother Stephen also took the cross, along with Routrou of Montfort, Aimery of Villeray, Geoffrey of Beaumont, and, as Villehardouin states, ‘many others whose names I do not know’.30 In short, a vast number of the northern French barons and their knights and retainers took the cross between November 1199 and the Easter of 1200. Moreover, lords seemed to understand the recruitment potential of combining the spectacle of tournaments with the sombre spiritual atmosphere occasioned by the holy days of Advent and Lent. Shortly after taking the cross, Baldwin of Flanders convened a grand tournament at Andenne, near Namur, intending to incite more of his vassals to take the cross.31 The kinds of camaraderie and military display that were part of a tournament also provided an ideal setting to bind a lord and his men, or better still several neighbouring and even competing lords together in a holy undertaking.32 It also offered a good moment to ease tensions and address grievances harboured by vassals, neighbours and relatives, to engage in the kinds of penitential peace-making that all crusaders were instructed to undertake before departure.33 27 Villehardouin, The Conquest of Constantinople, c.  4–7, pp. 5–6. For the careers of these individuals, see Longnon, Les compagnons. 28 Villehardouin, The Conquest of Constantinople, c. 8, p. 6. 29 See Paul, To Follow in their Footsteps, 200–3. 30 Villehardouin, The Conquest of Constantinople, c. 8–9, pp. 6–7. 31 See Longnon, Les compagnons, 137. 32 The melding of these two pursuits led Hugh of St-Pol to describe the Fourth Crusade itself as ‘the Lord’s tournament’: in Contemporary Sources for the Fourth Crusade, ed. A. J. Andrea with B. E. Whalen, Leiden 2000, 201; see also. N. Hodgson, ‘Honour, Shame and the Fourth Crusade’, JMH 39, 2013, 220–39. 33 On the importance of peace, W. C. Jordan, ‘A Border Policy? Louis IX and the Spanish Connection’, in Authority and Spectacle in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of Teofilo F. Ruiz, ed. Yuen-Gen Liang and Jarbel Rodriguez, Abingdon 2017, 21–32.



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The content of the crusade vows offered at Écry and in Bruges have not come down to us, nor do we know precisely which blessings the knights received in any of these settings. Pontificals from northern France and England dating to the late twelfth and early thirteenth century preserve blessings addressed to those who assumed the cross, and for the scrip and staff ceremonies. One such prayer reads: ‘Bless this cross, and grant, through the invocation of your most holy name, that whoever should wear this sign upon himself… might be worthy to overcome the attack of the enemy, visible and invisible.’34 A slightly later blessing for those signed with the cross (signaculum crucis) found in manuscripts from Paris and Cambrai, implores God to ‘kindly inspire, in courage, your knights present here, who are to be born again for your military service, and give them the security (pignus) and pledge (arras) as eternal blessedness that you will be their protection when they are in danger, their counsel in what they must do, their refreshment (refrigerium) in the face of temptations.’35 It is possible that a version of this prayer was read over the crusaders assembled in the winter and spring of 1200. The prayer emphasizes the work of both the symbols the crusader carries and the transformative qualities of the vow, its obligations and its rewards. Vows, and blessing such as these, made Hugh and his contemporaries into crusaders and as such they were obliged to act with a penitential state of mind. Such a mindset was the foundation of a crusade ideology, a way of thinking that framed behaviours of lordship, community, responsibility, and devotion through a lens focused on Jerusalem and the actions and re-enactments of Christ. Thus, having been transformed through a series of public rituals and liturgical rites, the next steps in departing entailed providing for one’s salvation after death, and making peace with neighbours, kin, and community. Often grafted onto such spiritual aims were the practical needs of financing the journey east. Beyond the liturgical texts, much of what we know about departure comes from charter evidence and the occasional testamentary bequest. Many of the barons on the campaign in 1202 offered gifts to local monastic houses, especially to those where they had familial connections. Many offered donations to hospitals, leprosaria, maisons-Dieu and Domi-Dei, gifts that had a particular penitential flavour as they were intended to touch and provide for those most acutely in need. Barons of especially high status sometimes founded new hospitals as particularly impressive acts of charity that served to remake the local landscape. Still others, as I have shown elsewhere, opted to found nunneries, providing for their daughters and other female relatives in their absence.36 The spiritual benefits of such gifts further enhanced, and were enhanced by, a crusader’s penitential status, making the imprint of the ideology palpable through their domains. voluisti benedicere dignare hanc crucem et presta per invocationem tui sanctissimi nominis, ut quicumque hoc signaculum super se habuerit; tue pietatis protectione munitus hostium visibilium et invisibilium inpugnationes superare valeat, in H. A. Wilson, The Pontifical of Magdalen College: With an Appendix of Extracts from Other English Mss. of the Twelfth Century, London 1910, 206–9 (as cited in Gaposchkin, ‘From Pilgrimage to Crusade,’ 67). 35 spiritus benigne inspira presentes milites tuos ad tuam militiam procreandos et da eis pignus et arras beatitudinis eterne ut sis eis in periculis tutamentum, in agendis consilium, in temptationibus refrigerium cited from Cambrai BM MS 223 and Paris Arsenal MS 332 by L. Pick, ‘Signaculum caritatis et fortitudinis: Blessing the Crusader’s Cross in France’, Revue bénédictine 105 (1995), 381–416, at 414; see also Gaposchkin, ‘From Pilgrimage to Crusade,’ 68. 36 Lester ‘A Shared Imitation’. Longnon, Les compagnons also notes many of these departing donations throughout. 34

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Occasionally, charters of departure, or those drawn up just before a knight or lord began his journey, also preserve records of reconciliation or peace-making and the righteous resolution of previous disagreements. Such compromises could take the form of gifts and exchanges and often occurred as a crusader began the physical process of leaving his domains, or undertaking a final tournée of his lands, hearing cases in dispute, exercising the banal rights of justice, and redressing grievances for wrongs committed by his officials. Close reading of the charter evidence, as in the case of Hugh of St-Pol, shows the routes many of the participants took in 1202 as they moved from residential castles to local monastic houses, villages and towns in their domains, and on toward Paris, Soissons, Troyes, Clairvaux and Cîteaux before following the Rhône corridor south to Italy and then on to Venice, the intended meeting place from which they would take ship for the east.37 Together the rituals of departure defined how, in William Chester Jordan’s words, ‘one made oneself sufficiently holy to serve in a holy war’.38 Ideally, the cultivation of a crusading mindset transformed the very exercise of lordship and the dynamics of the community. Such acts, especially when recorded on parchment, copied into cartularies, or retained in communal archives, also re-inscribed an image of ‘good’ lordship, offering an example to others that could be recorded and called upon when bad customs surfaced again, as they could in the absence of a lord and his men.39 Although not often considered in this context, the franchises granted between 1200 and 1202 reflect yet another effect of the crusade ideology that informed preparations for Holy War. Let us turn to the acts themselves. Grants of franchise in crusading France: liberty, peace, and lordship Acts of franchise have a long history in the Anglo-Norman-Flemish-French context. Beginning at the end of the eleventh century and quickening in pace by the first decades of the twelfth, grants of franchise appear most commonly in three forms: as grants upon the creation of a new town or settlement, known as villeneuve; as grants to individuals, little different from singular acts of manumission; and as formal grants of franchise or partial franchise to previously established urban communities.40 The dynamics of villeneuves are perhaps the most well known. Lords, often working in concert with local bishops or monastic houses, removed restrictions and obligations typically entailed to serfs, and granted them liberties as inducements to take part in the labours of reclamation (assarting) that transformed previously wild or uncultivated land into usable fields and settlements.41 Charters for new franchised towns (villeneuves and villes franchises) grew more common over the course of the twelfth century, and clauses were added that defined with greater precision the freedoms and protections the king, count, or lord offered in exchange for loyalty, military See Longnon, Les compagnons, although his findings can be supplemented with additional details, something I address is my forthcoming book, Fragments of Devotion. 38 Jordan, ‘Crusader Prologues’, 1 and Riley-Smith, ‘The State of Mind of Crusaders’. 39 On the importance of transcribing good and bad lordship, see T. Bisson, Tormented Voices: Power, Crisis, and Humanity in Rural Catalonia, 1140–1200, Cambridge, MA 1998. 40 There is a vast bibliography on this subject, generally, however, above n.3. 41 On the developments of communal charters during the High Middle Ages, see I. Neuschwander, F. Charpentier, N. Dargaisse, François Guistiniani, S. Olive, and R. Seené, ‘Aspects des villes du pays de Somme, XIIe–XVIIIe siècle’, Revue archéologique de Picardie 16, 1999, 41–51. 37



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service and fixed payments.42 It was not so much that these towns were free, but that their inhabitants enjoyed fewer constraints over their movement and personal choices – in marriage, for example – and on the alienation of movable and immovable goods upon death, otherwise known under the law as mainmort (Fr. / mortmain En.). These burdens were all markers of encumbered status, a lack of freedom.43 Most grants lifted some of these, though rarely all. Many enfranchised towns were still required to use the lord’s presses, mills and ovens, and remained obligated to a form of the taille in kind or in cash on an annual or bi-annual basis.44 Beginning in the twelfth century one also encounters records of franchise granted to individuals and families. Such grants frequently reflected personal bonds and connections: a baron might enfranchise a particularly loyal or close domestic serf, a childhood nurse, for example, or a family on an estate, the implication being that they had earned their franchise through loyal service.45 Over a century ago Constance H. M. Archibald compiled and analyzed the franchises granted, piecemeal, to the serfs of Ste-Geneviève.46 Grants of personal franchise could be given with no obligations, but often they involved a lump-sum payment or annual sum in exchange for manumission, that is, franchise from the most onerous of the servile burdens. As William Chester Jordan has shown, serfs would pay a great deal to absolve themselves of such burdens.47 Moreover, the psychological dimensions of franchise – although rarely if ever mentioned in the sources – must have been significant, as I’ll address briefly below.48 Over the course of the thirteenth century grants of manumission in return for fixed payments increased as the pressures on monastic houses grew to meet the demands of royal taxation associated with successive crusade expeditions.49 The records of older Benedictine houses like St-Denis, Ste-Geneviève and St-Pierre-le-Vif, clearly reflect this trend. Finally, grants of communal franchise, that is, grants offered to pre-existing towns and villes, such as those I began with, grew more common over the course of the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Much like the charters given to villeneuves, communal franchises defined quite precisely which restrictions townsmen and townswomen or burghers were freed from and which persisted. Such charters See, for examples, Fossier, Chartes de coutume; and, Documents sur les relations, ed. Giry; see also C. Higounet, Défrichements et villeneuves du bassin parisien (XIe –XIVe siècles), Paris 1990. 43 For a discussion of some of these burdens during this time, see W. C. Jordan, From Servitude to Freedom: Manumission in the Sénonais in the Thirteenth Century, Philadelphia 1986, 19–34. 44 This is very clear in all of the charters I cite above, and noted in Jordan, From Servitude to Freedom, 33–4. 45 See for example, the grant of freedom that Hélissende of Chappes extended to a woman named Sibilla, who was the serf of her daughter, Isabelle: Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Saint-Loup de Troyes, Collection des principaux cartulaires du diocèse de Troyes, ed. C. Lalore, 7 vols, Paris 1875–90, I, 234, no. 187 (c.1217). Similarly, in 1190–1200, William of Staunton freed a man ‘who will go for me to the holy land Jerusalem (qui pro me ibit in sanctum terram Ierusalem)’: in F. M. Stenton, ‘Early Manumissions at Staunton, Nottinghamshire’, EHR 26, 1911, 93–7, at 95. 46 C. Archibald, ‘The Serfs of Sainte-Geneviève’, EHR 25, 1910, 1–25. 47 Jordan, From Servitude to Freedom. 48 This is also a point that Jordan makes throughout, emphasizing both a lord’s true pious and Christian intentions, as well as the psychological freedom and emotional component attendant with manumitted status. See Jordan, From Servitude to Freedom, 33–4 and 91–6; see also Hyams, ‘A Three-Cornered Dynamic’. 49 Jordan, From Servitude to Freedom; and A. E. Lester, Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women’s Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne, Ithaca NY 2011, 171–209, also discusses the impact of the constricting economy on monastic houses in northern France. 42

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also defined the payments offered in exchange for franchise and, as we saw with the count of St-Pol’s grants, they often evolved a genealogy of franchise, whereby the charter for one town took as its model that of another. Within a particular lordship it would not have been uncommon for urban communities to follow the same, or an increasingly uniform, set of uses and customs.50 The survival of sources and more recent interests in urban life, grants of liberty, social solidarities, and the emergence of a bourgeois class have defined the general scholarship on communal franchises, and franchise more broadly. Grants of communal franchise from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries rarely if ever survive in urban or municipal collections. Franchise charters were quintessential documents of practice and thus were referenced, invoked often as proofs in disputes, and as procedural documents, or in calculating annual payments. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century vidimus copies, which formed the basis for later scholarly editions, suggest the charters’ longevity and continued relevance.51 From time to time, individual charters of franchise have come to light piecemeal in singular publications and editions whenever new texts have been identified.52 More often, grants of franchise were preserved among monastic and episcopal collections, or when they became part of an aristocratic archive.53 While grants of franchise have often been studied for a particular place, the scholarship thus far has rarely looked at such franchises as a phenomenon reflective of a particular moment or of a context other than that of urban history, for example the moment of departure in 1202 in the context of the crusades. More recently, communal franchises have received attention from scholars interested in tracing concepts of personal liberties and the impulse for self-governance.54 In this context, an analysis of the rise of a burgher class has dominated most readings of these texts, for they have much to say about communal solidarities, mercantile regulations and the ‘business’ and domestic life of townsmen and women.55 Yet, such readings leave aside the broader dynamics of lordship and flatten the local relationships that aristocrats cultivated with the people within their domains. Grants of franchise were part of what Jean-François Nieus has called ‘controlled alienation’ (aliénation contrôlée), one of many strategies lords employed to cope with mounting debts and fiscal obligations attendant on participation in aristocratic cultural life, the most cumbersome of which entailed taking the cross and travelling east.56 Both Petit-Detaillis and Robert Fossier have made this clear, see above, n.3. Augustin Thierry began the project of compiling and editing these texts in the early nineteenth century. On the history of these editions, see C.-E. Perrin, ‘Les chartes de franchises de la France. – État des recherches: Le Dauphiné et la Savoie’, Revue historique, 231, 1964, 27–54. 52 For example, B. Bédos[-Rezak], ‘Innovation ou adaptation, conflit ou conjonction d’intérêts? La charte de franchises de Montmorency’, Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes, 137, 1979, 5–17. 53 See for example, Littere Baronum: The Earliest Cartulary of the Counts of Champagne, ed. T. Evergates, Toronto 2003, 83, no. 43 (October 1200); G. Robert, ‘La ville neuve de La Neuville-au-Pont’, Travaux de l’Académie nationale de Reims 144, 1929–30, 112–85. 54 See for example the survey of the literature and general trends noted in B. Lyon, ‘Medieval Real Estate Developments and Freedom’, The American Historical Review 63, 1957, 47–61. 55 As Bédos-Rezak (‘Innovation ou adaptation’, 7) states, such charters ‘nous met au cœur des transformations socio-économiques qui caractérisent la fin du XIIe et le début du XIIIe siècle, et des solutions apportées par les contemporains.’ 56 See J.-F. Nieus, ‘Les ‘communaux’ villageois, une invention du XIIIe siècle? L’exemple du Brabant à travers les chartes ducales’, in Autour du ‘village’. Établissements humains, finages et communautés rurales entre Seine et Rhin (IVe-XIIIe siècles). Actes du colloque international de Louvain-la-Neuve, 16–17 mai 2003, ed. J.-M. Yante and A.-M. Bultot-Verleysen, Louvain-la-Neuve 2010, 445–74, at 467. 50

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There is no doubt that the pressure to raise money to campaign in the east lay behind many such grants. But other benefits accrued to lords in drawing up franchise agreements. Most scholars note that an acute concern for raising money for crusade expeditions began with the Third Crusade. The Saladin Tithe (decima Salahdini) collected in England and France in 1188 found complement in other regional fundraising campaigns as well.57 It was in this context that the lords of Montmorency, Thibaut, Hervé and Mathieu executed the will of their elder brother, Bouchard V of Montmorency, who died in 1189. Upon his death, and as a final act of lordship, he granted a charter of franchise to the men of the comital town. The act was not at the request of the men of the castle, but in Brigitte Bédos-Rezak’s words, à l’initiative seigneuriale.58 It was intended to benefit the growth of the market located next to the castle of Montmorency and formed part of the cultivation of seigneurial power, which was as concerned with demographic growth as it was with economic success. The charter served both parties: it defended the rights and authority of the counts against local administrators, it protected and fostered the revenues accruing from the market, and it upheld aspects of the seigneurial ban in the face of specific economic exigencies. Moreover, it did so at a pivotal moment in the lordship: when Bouchard had died and as Mathieu was about to leave for crusade in 1190. Fixing the rents and payments coming from the townsmen of Montmorency was in the interests of all parties involved and prefaced the grants that would follow as lords prepared for the next expedition in 1204. Indeed, ten years later, in 1200, after taking the crusade vow, Jacques d’Avesnes, lord of Landrecies, with the assent and counsel of Adeline his mother, and Walter d’Avesnes and Nicholas de Etroeungt, his brothers, as well as his other friends and vassals (et aliorum amicorum atque hominum meorum), gave to the town of Landrecies an elaborate charter of liberties and franchises, similar in detail to that of Montmorency.59 Jacques was the son and namesake of his father, a famed crusader who died on the Third Crusade in 1191.60 The charter for Landrecies records the annual payments and taxes that the lords of Avesnes would regularly collect and enshrines the customs, usages and laws of the town which his uncle, Nicholas d’Avesnes, previously established. It too inscribed seigneurial power at a moment before departure, but also created the conditions in which the growing market town could thrive in an orderly, self-governed manner. The rights and traditional obligations that Jacques alienated would, it was believed, foster a more open and better-regulated market in which townsmen and peasants could move more freely, arbitrate their own disputes, and regulate the urban economy in Jacques’s absence. The long charter – over seven single-spaced pages in the edition – opens and closes with eloquent statements about the good peace and liberties (bonum pacis et libertatis, secundum formam subscriptam) that the charter enshrines.61 See C. Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 1095–1588, Chicago 1988, 74–80 and 83–5. Bédos-Rezak, ‘Innovation ou adaptation’, 6. 59 F. de Reiffenberg, Monuments pour servir à l’histoire des provinces de Namur, de Hainaut et de Luxembourg, 8 vols, Brussels 1844–74, I, 330–7 and Longnon, Les compagnons, 153. 60 For an earlier set of franchises that had been granted in 1189 and 1190 to other towns in the domains, see G. Sivéry, ‘Les chartes de commune de Buironfosse et du Nouvion-en-Thiérache, filiales de la charte de Prisches’, Revue du Nord 261–2, 1984, 463–9. 61 Reiffenberg, Monuments, 330 and 337. On such clauses, see O. Guyotjeannin, ‘Vivre libre dans une seigneurie juste: note sur les préambules des chartes de franchises’, in Campagnes médiévales: l’homme et son espace. Études offertes à Robert Fossier, ed. E. Mornet, Paris 1995, 375–87. 57

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Further south, in March and April of 1202, Hugh of St-Pol undertook his grants of four franchises, each building upon the other as he made his way to Cîteaux. Like the preceding charters, these franchises confirmed and restated older customs and usages, enshrined the fixed payments in kind and in cash to be collected by Hugh and his heirs, and employed the rhetoric of libertas. More so than the charters of Montmorency and Landrecies, the charters for St-Pol, Estrée, Lucheux, and Pontpoint retained clauses specific to the feudal obligations owed to a lord. Hugh kept back the right to collect payments toward the knighting of his first-born son, the marriage of his eldest daughter and towards costs of his ransom, should he be taken captive in war. These details offer further insight into the careful control exercised in alienating the traditional preserves of seigneurial power. In the same year, ‘while about to depart across the sea’ (quando ivi ultra mare), Guy of Chappes, lord of Jully, freed all of the men of Jully from the restriction of mainmort (hominibus meis de Julleio, manum mortuam libere absolutam).62 This was a circumscribed franchise, but welcome nonetheless. Of all the burdens of serfdom, mainmort was one of the most onerous and the one that most visibly announced one’s lack of freedom. A well-connected member of the aristocracy of Champagne, Guy was son of Clarembaud II, lord of Chappes and vicomte of Troyes. Guy had, as a young man, taken part in the Third Crusade in 1190 and campaigned with Henry II, Count of Champagne. He stayed in Syria to witness Henry’s marriage to Isabelle of Jerusalem in 1192. He took the cross again in 1199 with Thibaut III, and returned to the west in 1205.63 Enguerrand of Boves, like the other lords mentioned here, also granted partial franchises as he departed. In 1202, he produced a cluster of documents that reflect what I have called a crusade ideology. He made restitution to the priory of Lihons honouring an agreement made by his brother, Robert.64 In May of the same year he gave rights to a tithe to the monks of Saint-Leu in exchange for 30 lbs. parisis ‘as aid for his pilgrimage to the Holy Land and to support his preparations ’ (ad subsidium peregrinationis sue et Sante Terre, ad cujus obsequinum se preparabat).65 In the same month as he ‘began his journey toward Jerusalem, for the second time’ (me in precinctu itineris mei versus Hiersolimam, secunda vice existente), he freed the men and women of Gentelles from the burdens of corvée and other payments. This last grant is preserved in the cartulary of Corbie, for the lands at Gentelles had been a gift to the abbey from Thierry, son of Renard of Corbie, a donation, we can assume, that Enguerrand had overseen.66 The statements embedded in his charters make it clear that Enguerrand not only sought to raise funds for his expedition, but to depart in the manner befitting a penitent and peace-making lord who was returning to the theatre of Holy War: differences must be settled, agreements honoured, and freedoms granted for the sake of a sanctified journey. Grants of franchise were particularly useful acts before departing on crusade. At the most practical they generated needed income, sometimes as a one-time See E. Petit, Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne de la race capétienne, 9 vols, Paris 1885–1905, III, 385–6, no. 1052; Longnon, Les compagnons, 57. 63 See Longnon, Les compagnon, 57–8. 64 Longnon, Les compagnons, 123. 65 Longnon, Les compagnons, 123 and V. Leblond, Notes pour le nobiliaire du Beauvaisis, 3 vols, Beauvais 1913, I, 110 (from a charter in AD de l’Oise, S. Leu H 2436 (1202)). 66 Longnon, Les compagnons, 123; BnF, MS. lat. 17761, fol. 78 (Cartulaire Nehemais de Corbie). 62



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payment at the moment of the grant, but more often in the form of regular annual payments, creating in effect a rent that reflected the lord’s investment in urban and economic growth tied to the success of smaller but vital market towns. Franchises also generated an atmosphere of peace and goodwill, something we should not dismiss too hastily. Leave-taking was a highly precarious decision. Part of maintaining one’s lordship while physically absent depended on a sense of goodwill for one’s lord and their administration, and a perception that power was not exercised coercively, but with the benefit of the people in mind. Charters of franchise, particularly those that enshrined customs and laws, were generated to rectify discord, amend abuses, and generate a sense of reconciliation. They served to keep the peace in a lord’s absence.67 Controlled alienations of piecemeal franchises also, ideally, preserved the memory of a departed crusader in a positive light. When offered during the final tournée of a crusader’s domains, franchises created a moment to enact lordship and to engage in a public display of power. And this type of power mattered, for the power to grant freedoms is surely as significant, if not more so, than the power to limit and to repress.68 To depart one’s lands in a state of peace, concord and sanctified goodwill was reinforced by offering liberties, however meagre and controlled, to those one left behind. Later crusaders took advantage of these grants for they were often confirmed and reconfirmed over successive generations, augmenting, as needed, additional franchises or modifying aspects of custom, inscribing and re-inscribing the practice of good lordship shaped by a crusade ideology. Captivity and ‘Libertas’ after 1187 If, as I have argued, the preparations for crusade shaped how lords comported themselves in the months before their departure, it remains to ask if the idea of liberty did not also have an ideological component that can be resuscitated from our sources?69 How did the broader conception of liberty and freedom play a role in framing grants of franchise, if at all? What was at work that can further account for the clustering of grants of franchise before departure? We can arrive at a sense of this by triangulating both previous crusade experiences with the literature, liturgy and rhetoric circulating in the west by the dawn of the thirteenth century. A thorough treatment of this question relies on a deeper study of the chronicle material and literary context than space will allow, but let me make a few preliminary observations. Notions of libertas and franchise may have come into the aristocratic consciousness in part through a renewed interest in classical texts. Beginning in the mid twelfth century, episcopal and secular courts along the Flemish-Anglo-NormanFrench arc began to patronize the compilation and copying of ancient histories and florilegia, compiling ancient anecdotes, sayings, and examples. As Patricia Stirnemann has shown, and Theodore Evergates has recently elaborated, Nicholas of Montiéramey was at the helm of what has been called a ‘history project,’ which involved copying texts that would form the core of Count Henry of Champagne’s See especially Guyotjeannin, ‘Vivre libre’. On the broad conceptualizing framework of franchise and its meaning, see J. R. Freeman and D. Snidal, ‘Diffusion, Development and Democratization: Enfranchisement in Western Europe’, Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 15, 1982, 299–329. 69 For a similar line of thought, see R. W. Kaeuper, War, Justice, and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle Ages, Oxford 1988. 67 68

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personal library.70 The earliest texts there included copies of Simon Aurae Capra’s Ylias, ‘a 430-line Latin verse condensation of the Aeneia, a text,’ as Evergates explains, ‘that [he] completed before leaving St-Ayoul [in Provins] in 1155 to join the canons of St-Victor of Paris’.71 The copy of the Ylias that Henry possess was a shorter version, relating only the history of Troy. Later, while at St-Victor, Simon expanded the text to include the travels of Aeneas, drawing from Ovid and a fourth-century compendium on the Excidium Troie. Count Henry also possessed a copy of Quintus Curtius Rufus’s History of Alexander of Macedon, a ‘Latin account of Alexander’s life, imagined speeches, and romanticized incidents’; and several other historical volumes containing ‘Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities (Antiquitates Judaicae, Jewish history from its origins to 66 A.D.) and The Jewish War (Bellum Judaicum, on the revolt of 66)’.72 Nicholas also presented his patron with his Florilegium Angelicum, ‘an anthology of maxims and aphorisms drawn from classical authors but edited and revised in a concise and elegant style’.73 And other more modern works of history filled his shelves, including a world history (Freculf’s Historia), a history of the kings of France (Hugh of Fleury’s Historia Francorum), and a copy of Baudri of Bourgeuil’s History of the First Crusade. These historical works were compiled and copied around 1160 and represent a growing learned network that connected secular patrons, monastic houses, and the older libraries of the great episcopal centres stretching from Cluny to Clairvaux to Troyes to Bayeux to Canterbury.74 Similar texts peppered the libraries of Paris, especially that of St Victor, but also those of Beauvais and, of course, of the counts of Flanders.75 That aristocrats, starting in the latter half of the twelfth century, were exposed to classical ideas, examples and aphorisms is clear. How these texts may have shaped their understanding of libertas and franchise and consequently their exercise of power, may be worth pursuing. Count Henry, or his advisors, seem to have had some frame of reference that suggests that classical concepts and images influenced his ideology. In 1152, after one of his officials seized one of the bishop’s men in the suburbs of Troyes, Henry went before the chapter to recognize his misstep, and agreed to pay a fine in recognition of his breach of a privilege of franchise that his ancestors had granted the cathedral canons, which rendered the men and women of the suburb of St-Denis free from his jurisdiction and taxes. In a dramatic gesture of lordship and ‘controlled alienation’ Henry ‘presented his cap to the chapter’s archdeacon and treasurer … as a sign (memoria) that he recognized the ancient liberty and immunity of that suburb’. Echoing the liberty caps of antiquity, ‘Henry’s cap [Evergates notes] became a kind of secular relic that remain[ed] in the treasury for six hundred years.’76 70 T. Evergates, Henry the Liberal, Count of Champagne, 1127–1181, Philadelphia 2016, 86–99 and P. Stirnemann, ‘Private Libraries Privately Made’, in Medieval Manuscripts, Their Makers and Users. Special Issue of Viator in honour of Richard and Mary Rouse, Turnout 2011, 185–98. On vernacular manuscripts produced within this milieu, see Gabrielle Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France, Berkeley 1993. 71 Evergates, Henry the Liberal, 94. 72 Evergates, Henry the Liberal, 97–8. 73 Evergates, Henry the Liberal, 96. 74 Nicholas Paul addresses the impact of Classical histories on the creation of dynastic and commemorative chronicles, Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps, 55–89. 75 See Spiegel, Romancing; and Baldwin, Aristocratic Life. 76 Evergates, Henry the Liberal, 37. The capellus of Count Henry is listed in the 1319/20 inventory of the ‘large treasury’, see Inventaires des principales églises de Troyes, ed. C. Lalore, 2 vols, Troyes 1893, II, 7, no. 43.



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A concern with liberty, franchise and its opposite, slavery and captivity, also played a prominent role in the many vernacular histories and quasi-histories produced in the same courts described above. The counts of Flanders and the noble courts of Picardy were particularly innovative, commissioning histories in the vernacular that combined an interest in the Trojan past and the issues and lineages of their present moment.77 These same counts also emerge as the first patrons of vernacular romances that drew from contemporary concerns, but set them in fictive landscapes, affording a distance through which to explore more conceptual ideas like slavery and franchise. Chrétien de Troyes’s conte, Cligès, written under the patronage of the count of Flanders, relates the complex romance between the hero Cligès, who is the son of a Byzantine prince, Alexander and King Arthur’s niece, Soredamor, and Fénice, the Byzantine empress. The two fall in love, Cligès comes to the Byzantine throne after his usurping uncle dies, and he and Fénice find marital happiness. The narrative has an eerie ring of events yet to pass, and we can only wonder how its telling set the mental stage for those who would go on in 1204 to take part in the sack of the Greek capital. But Cligès is also concerned with ideas of slavery and freedom. Towards the end of the story, Cligès orders his serf, Jehan, an architect and master builder to create a marvellous underground safe-house where Cligès and Fénice live together. Jehan is a craftsman. He is a man, presumably, who would have lived in a town or city, but Cligès has dominion over him: ‘You are my slave and I am your lord, for I can sell you or give you away or seize your person and property as mine. But if I can entrust you with a matter I am concerned with, you and your future heirs will be free always.’ (Tu es mes sers, je sui tes sire, / Car je te puis doner ou vandre, / Et ton cors et ton avoir prandre, / Come la chose qui est moie. / Mes s’an toi fier me pooie ? D’un mien afeire a coi je pans, / A toz jorz mes seroie frans, / Et li oir qui de toi seront).78 Embedded in the romance is a grant of franchise, detailed and exemplary for all who listened to the tale. Once the building was complete, Cligès exclaims, ‘Jehan, my friend, I franchise you and your heirs, I am completely yours, I swear it. ’ (Jehan amis, / Vos et trestoz voz oirs franchis, / Et sui vostres trestot sanz bole.)79 Grants of liberty and freedom, by 1200, were not idyll images or classical tropes, but had a new and very real potency. All of the barons mentioned above, Jacques d’Avesnes, Hugh of St-Pol, Guy of Chappes, and Enguerrand of Boves, had taken part in the Third Crusade and returned home. But they were the lucky ones. They knew and were related to many men who did not return, who were killed in the siege of Acre or before, or who had been taken captive. Indeed, 1187, with the losses at Hattin, especially the loss of the great relic of the True Cross, and then the fall of Jerusalem, represented an ideological reorientation with respect to crusading. Those losses, and the ‘captivity’ of the True Cross, reflected the lack of penitential preparation on the part of crusading armies and required the renewed efforts of all of Christendom to make things right again. After 1187 the pope and his successors instituted a new period of penitential fasting and See E. Morrison, ‘Linking Ancient Troy and Medieval France: Illuminations of an Early Copy of the Roman de Troie’, in Medieval Manuscripts, 77–102; and Spiegel, Romancing the Past. 78 Chrétien de Troyes, Oeuvres completes, ed. and trans. D. Poirion et al. Paris, 1994, Cligès vss. 5476–83 (quoted in S. Kinoshita, ‘Chrétien de Troyes’s “Cligès” in the Medieval Mediterranean’, Arthuriana 18, 2008, 48–61, at 55). 79 Chrétien de Troyes, Oeuvres completes, Cligès vss. 5625–27; Kinoshita, ‘Chrétien de Troyes’s “Cligès”,’ 55. 77

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prayer.80 They ordered all clerics to offer prayers regularly throughout the year for the liberation of the Holy Land and for the release of Christian prisoners held in Muslim captivity.81 New hymns, sequences and laments were composed and inserted into local liturgies – sung at weekly intervals – to beg God for forgiveness and for the ‘liberation’ of the Holy Land and its sacred relic. Might we see a reverberation of those experiences and ideas – anxieties and fears – in the grants of communal franchise by 1202? Megan Cassidy-Welch, Cecilia Gaposchkin and William Chester Jordan have argued that Louis IX’s time in Muslim captivity (one month: 6 April to 6 May 1250), which ended his first crusade expedition in the spring of 1250, made a profound impression on the 82 king. Moreover, the captivity of those serving in his army, whom he endeavoured to free before he left the east, wore on his conscience. When Louis returned to France four years later, he returned chastened and more penitent than ever; and this mindset influenced how he governed the realm. ‘Even kings’ could be taken captive and would need the beneficent prayers and funds of their people to set them free; to pay the ransom of a king. According to Jordan, the fact that Louis suffered in captivity made him, in a sense, more of an ‘everyman’ and drew him closer to his people, for this was an experience he shared with many others of far lower status.83 A similar perception may have percolated the minds of those barons who returned – devastated by all accounts – following the Third Crusade. Could the experience of captivity and redemption have also affected how they thought about their authority over their men and women in the burgeoning villes and market towns of northern France?84 Perhaps. The sense that they were closely linked in their fates surfaces in the longer franchise charters. A few of the franchise grants that I have mentioned above retained specific feudal obligations. Because the grants were made to townsmen it would have been absurd to ask for council or military service. Rather, the obligations that remained, that is, in addition to fixed payments, required the towns to offer payments at certain salient moments in the lord’s life: in support of the knighting of his first born son, for marrying his eldest daughter, and toward the costs of his ransom should he be taken captive in war (si ego vel heres meus filium meum militem fecero, vel filiam meam maritavero, vel captus et redemptus de guerris fuero, communa sexaginta libras mihi vel heredi meo dabit).85 The latter was not unheard of. Giles Constable noted ‘three charters of the counts of Nevers in 1165, 1171, and 1185 [that] refer to the duty of the abbey of St-Stephen to contribute money when the count married his Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, 162–6, 192–225; C. T. Maier, ‘Crisis, Liturgy and the Crusade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, JEH 48, 1997, 628–57. 81 Maier, ‘Crisis, Liturgy and the Crusade’, 632; see also, A. Linder, ‘Jews and Judaism in the Eyes of Christian Thinkers of the Middle Ages: The Destruction of Jerusalem in Medieval Christian Liturgy’, in From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought, ed. J. Cohen, Wiesbaden 1996, 113–23; and A. Linder, Raising Arms: Liturgy in the Struggle to Liberate Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages, Turnhout 2003. 82 M. Cassidy-Welch, Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination, c.1150–1400, Basingstoke 2011, 107–23; M. C. Gaposchkin, ‘The Captivity of Louis IX’, Quaestiones Medii Aevi novae 18, 2013, 85–114 and W. C. Jordan, ‘Etiam reges, Even Kings’, Speculum 90, 2015, 613–34. 83 Jordan, ‘Etiam reges’, 622. 84 See M. Cassidy-Welch, ‘Before Trauma: The Crusades, Medieval Memory and Violence’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 31, 2017, 619–27. 85 Nieus, Les chartes, 211 (no. 125, for Lucheux). The charter for the villa of Estrée reads slightly differently: Debent etiam homines predicte ville comitem Sancti Pauli iuvare in captione corporis sui de manifesta et nominata Guerra et ad faciendum militem filium suum primogenitum et ad maritandam filiam suam primogenitam. Nieus, Les chartres, 205 (no. 120). 80



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daughter, went to Jerusalem, or needed ransoming’.86 The saving clauses in the franchise charters mark the beginning of explicitly involving the bourgeois laity in the crusader endeavour and its possible consequences. The ransom clause further suggests that in 1202 the possibility of captivity pressed on the minds of these men as they departed for the east. Reading franchise in context Reframing how we might read the charters of franchise that cluster between the years 1200 and 1202, offers, I hope, a deeper sense of the dynamics of lordship in crusading France. Seeing the grants not only as a moment in the development of urban liberties and aspirations toward self-government, but also as part of the finely calibrated negotiation of power and controlled alienation that most aristocratic lords engaged, will, I hope, expand how we think about the nature of social change. Indeed, franchise, ironically perhaps, offered a wonderful instance in which a lord could display the power to give and to grant. In this way, it reflected a crusading ideology at work in the world. The perfect penitent crusader was to go east as a liberator, and to depart his lands in a spirit of peace, reconciliation and good will. Hugh of St-Pol and those around him tried to put that into action and in doing so changed many of the lives they left behind.87

86 G. Constable, ‘Medieval Charters as a Source for the History of the Crusades’, in G. Constable, Crusaders and Crusading in the Twelfth Century, Farnham 2008, 93–116 at 109, n.72; and Les chartes de Saint-Étienne de Nevers, ed. R. de Lespinasse, Nevers 1907, 39, 42, 45, nos. 9, 12, 16. Likewise, the monks of La Trinité de Vendôme were required to pay the count 3000 shilling ‘the first time he journeyed to Jerusalem’, and for a ransom, see Cartulaire de l’abbaye de la Trinité de Vendôme, ed. C. Métais, 5 vols, Paris 1893–1904, II, 445, no. 578 (1185). 87 Constable, ‘Financing the Crusades’, 140. A coda to this story could be written, for the franchised towns discussed here will come to form a significant part of the financial apparatus that would fund crusading efforts undertaken by the Capetians in the final decades of the thirteenth century. On that important topic, see: W. C. Jordan, ‘Communal Administration in France, 1257–1270: Problems Discovered and Solutions Imposed’, 292–313; L. Carolus-Barré, ‘Une ordonnance inédite de Philippe le Hardi sur les villes de commune (1277)’, Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 93, 1949, 102–10; Luchaire, Les communes françaises, 179–90.

‘DAUGHTER OF FULK, GLORY OF BRITTANY’: COUNTESS ERMENGARDE OF BRITTANY (c.1070–1147) Amy Livingstone Contemporaries held Countess Ermengarde of Brittany in high regard. Whether in poems or letters, the clergy were full of praise for her. Marbode, bishop of Rennes (1035–1123), stated that ‘Fame reports that no woman surpasses you/ Powerful in eloquence, shrewd in counsel.’1 Robert Arbrissel (1045–1116) wrote to her: ‘Do not be too concerned about changing place and habit. Have God in your heart whether you are in the city or in the court, in an ivory bed or in precious clothes, in the army, in judgment, or at a banquet. Love, and God will be with you.’2 And Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) addressed her: ‘To his beloved daughter in Christ, Ermengarde, once highest countess, now humble handmaid of Christ. Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux, pious affection of holy love. If only I could open my mind to you just like this letter!’3 In spite of the respect shown to Ermengarde by her contemporaries, modern scholarship has all but effaced Ermengarde’s activities and, when she is discussed at all, she is often reduced to a handmaiden to Robert of Arbrissel or Bernard of Clairvaux. Indeed, scholars have variously referred to her as a social reject or a woman who could not know her own mind.4 In contrast to the deafening silence or outright chauvinism, Arlette LeBigre recognized Ermengarde’s political acuity and called her ‘the only political male’ to lead twelfth-century Brittany.5 Although a considerable improvement, this description, too, is problematic as it genders power as male, thus not recognizing that Ermengarde, as a woman, could have power. Fama refert de te quod non sit femina prae te/Pollens eloquio, callida consilio. This was a poem written to Ermengarde as a letter around 1096. For a translation of the entire poem, see Epistolae, https://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/240.html. For Marbode’s letter, see: PL 171, poem 23, cols 1659–60; also partially quoted in Jules de Pétigny, ‘Lettre inédite de Robert de Arbrissel à comtesse Ermengard’, Bibliothèque de l’École de Chartes 15,1884, 209–35 at 213. 2 Non sis nimis sollicita de mutatione loci et habitus. In corde Deum habe, sive in civitate, sive in aula, sive in lecto eburneo, sive in veste preciosa, vel in exercito, vel in judicio, sive in convivio fueris. Dilige, et Deus tecum erit. Robert of Arbrissel, ‘Letter to Countess Ermengarde’, https://epistolae.ccnmtl. columbia.edu/letter/241.html; see also de Pétigny, ‘Lettre inédite ’, 209–235 at 225–235. A. Bourdeaut, ‘Ermengarde, comtesse de Bretagne: entre Robert d’Arbrissel et Saint Bernard, foundation de l’abbaye de Buzay’, Bulletin de la société archéologique et historique de Nantes et de la Loire inférieure, 75, 1935, 173–97. This letter was written between c.1106 and 1109. 3 Dilectae in Christo filiae suae Ermengardi, quondam eximiae comitissae, nunc humili Christi ancillae, Bernardus, abbas Claraevallis: pium sanctae dilectionis affectum. Utinam sicut chartam nunc praesentem, ita et meam tibi mentum expandere possem! A letter of Bernard of Clairvaux, Epistolae, https://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/244.html, written c.1131. 4 Jacques Dalarun, Robert of Arbrissel: Sex, Sin and Salvation in the Middle Ages, trans. Bruce L. Venarde, Washington DC 2006, 71; de Pétigny, ‘Lettre inédite’, 209–235 at 215–216. 5 ‘Elle fut le seul ‘homme politique’ à la tête du comté de Bretagne’. Arlette Lebigre, ‘Les debuts de l’abbaye cistercienne de Buzay en pays de Rais, 1144–1250’, Revue d’histoire de droit français et étranger 45, 1967, 451–482 at 456, n. 27. 1

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Ermengarde was born around 1070, probably in Angers, to Ermengarde of Beaugency and Count Fulk IV le Réchin of Anjou (1043–1109).6 In 1093, Ermengarde left Anjou to marry Count Alan IV of Brittany (c.1060–1119). Three years later, in 1096, she was left in charge of the county and her two young sons when Alan went on crusade. Upon his return in 1101, the couple ruled Brittany together until 1103×1105 when Ermengarde left to join the community of religious women at Fontevraud. But she returned to Brittany by 1106 and picked up her life as countess. In 1112, Count Alan IV retired to the monastery of Redon and Ermengarde ruled the county with their son Conan III (c.1094–1148), and this she continued to do until her death in 1147. In the years between around 1130 and 1134 Ermengarde first became a Cistercian nun then left the religious life (again) to travel to the Holy Land to visit her half-brother, King Fulk I (formerly Count Fulk V of Anjou). In 1134 the countess returned to Brittany, where she would remain until she died in 1147. The quote that provides the title for this article, ‘Daughter of Fulk, glory of Brittany (Filia Fulconis, decus Armoricae regionis)’, comes from a poem written as a letter to Ermengarde by Bishop Marbode of Rennes around 1096. In this couplet, Marbode captured the unique position that Ermengarde, in particular, and noblewomen, in general, held as members of two influential kin groups. While some have argued that marriage severed a woman’s ties to her natal kin, recent scholarship has demonstrated that aristocratic daughters, wives, sisters, and mothers were successful in cultivating and maintaining relationships with two potentially opposing affinities.7 In other words, their gender gave them unique opportunities and space for influence.8 Her strong ties to her natal family in Anjou made Ermengarde the ‘daughter of Fulk’, but through her marriage to Count Alan IV and her leadership of the county, she also became the ‘glory of Brittany’. These two identities were inextricably linked, for, as I will argue, being the daughter of Fulk helped Ermengarde to become the glory of Brittany. To interrogate these intersections, I will focus on three periods of Ermengarde’s life: when she ruled the county during Alan’s absence on crusade from 1096 to 1101; her partnership with Alan in ruling Brittany from 1106 until his retirement in 1112; and her involvement with the Cistercians from 1120 to 1144. Ermengarde emerges not as an appendage to a prominent male or as a woman unsure of her own mind, but rather as a politically active, astute, influential, and powerful medieval ruler.

By the time Ermengarde was six, her mother was dead, and her father remarried shortly after. Chronica de Gestis Consulum Andegavorum, in Chroniques des Comtes d’Anjou et des Seigneurs d’Amboise, ed. Louis Halphen and René Poupardin, Paris 1913, 65. By May 1076, Fulk IV had married Orengarde. Their marriage lasted until 1080, when Orengarde became a nun. They had one son together, Geoffrey Martel IV, Olivier Guillot, Le comte d’Anjou et son entourage au XIème siècle, 2 vols, Paris 1972, II, 198, no. 313 and II, 202 no. 321. 7 Theodore Evergates, The Aristocracy in the County of Champagne, 1100–1300, Philadelphia 2007; Amy Livingstone, Out of Love for My Kin, Aristocratic Families in the Lands of the Loire, 1000–1200, Ithaca NY 2011; Kimberly A. LoPrete, Adela of Blois, Countess and Lord, Dublin 2007; Jonathan Lyon, ‘The Letters of Princess Sophia of Hungary, a Nun at Admont’, in Writing Medieval Women’s Lives, ed. Charlotte Newman Goldy and Amy Livingstone, New York 2012, 51–68. 8 Sharon Farmer, ‘‘’Persuasive Voices”: Clerical Images of Medieval Women’, Speculum 61, 1986, 517–43; Lois Huneycutt, ‘Intercession and the High Medieval Queen: The Esther Topos’, in The Power of the Weak, ed. Jennifer Carpenter and Sally Beth MacLean, Urbana and Chicago 1995, 126–46. 6



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Daughter of Fulk: Crusade As was the case for many other crusaders and their families, Alan’s departure on crusade was cause for concern. Brittany had long been embroiled in conflicts with its neighbours, but also experienced internal strife, for the lords did not always recognize the authority of the counts.9 Indeed, its instability was commented upon by many clergy. For instance, Baudri of Bourgueil, who became the bishop of Dol, referred to politics in Brittany as a ‘den of scorpions’.10 But by the time of his departure for the Holy Land, Alan had done much to establish the dominance of the comital house of Rennes and brought the Breton aristocracy under his aegis. Indeed a charter from 1092 refers to him as ‘consul of all of Brittany’.11 Through his two marriages – first to Constance of Normandy and then Ermengarde – Alan had also made peace with his sometimes acquisitive neighbours.12 Leaving his wife, a young, probably pregnant, new arrival, in charge of the county, however, was certainly a risk. But Ermengarde had two formidable arrows in her quiver: she was able to call upon her Angevin relatives as well as her Breton affines to help ensure her successful rule. The proximity to her father during her developing years provided a foundation for the close relationship between Ermengarde and the rather cantankerous Fulk IV le Réchin, as it does not seem that Ermengarde was sent away to be fostered as a young girl. Fulk is well known for his unfortunate proclivities – such as imprisoning his brother and perhaps plotting to murder his son – as well as his rather serious problem with bunions.13 Orderic Vitalis described Fulk as ‘a man with many reprehensible, even scandalous, habits, [who] gave way to many pestilential vices’.14 But Fulk’s relationship with his daughter shows another side to the lecher and libertine whom Orderic castigated. In spite of his personal failings, Fulk IV did foster a rich intellectual life in Angers. He himself wrote a history of the counts of Anjou and ensured that his children were highly educated.15 Ermengarde may have been taught at the nearby abbey of Ronceray, which was home 9 André Chédeville and Noël-Yves Tonnerre, La Bretagne féodale, XIe–XIIe siècle, Rennes 1987, and Patrick Galliou and Michael Jones, The Bretons, Oxford 1991, provide examples of this narrative. For a slightly different perspective, see Joëlle Quaghebeur, La Cornouaille du IXe au XIIe siècle: Mémoire, pouvoirs, noblesse, Rennes 2002. 10 Baudri of Bourgueil, First Life of Robert of Arbrissel in Robert of Arbrissel. A Medieval Religious Life, ed. and trans. Bruce L. Venarde, Washington DC 2003, 8. The tendency to depict Brittany as a wild land is present even in modern scholarship, see de Pétigny who describes Brittany as ‘alors un pays presque sauvage’ (De Pétigny, ‘Lettre inédite’, 215). 11 ‘Totius Brittanie consule’. Cartulaire de Morbihan, ed. M. Louis Rosenweig, 3 vols, Vannes 1895, I, 42–3, no. 167. 12 Constance was a daughter of William the Conqueror and Matilda of Flanders. 13 Nicholas L. Paul, ‘Origo Consulum: Rumours of Murder, a Crisis of Lordship, and the Legendary Origins of the Counts of Anjou’, French History 29, 2015, 140–60. 14 Orderic, IV, 187: Hic in multis reprehensibilis et infamis erat multisque uitiorum pestibus obsecundabat. 15 Nicholas L. Paul, ‘The Chronicle of Fulk le Réchin: A Reassessment’, HSJ 18, 2006, 19–35. Martin Aurell has also suggested a higher degree of literacy among the medieval aristocracy, Le chevalier lettré: Savoir et conduit de l’aristocratie aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, Paris 2006, 21–39. For the cultural vitality of Angers and Anjou, see Le haut moyen âge en Anjou, ed. Daniel Prigent and Noël-Yves Tonnere, Rennes 2010; Anjou: Medieval Art, Architecture, and Archeology, ed. John McNeill and Daniel Prigent, Leeds 2003; and Jean-Michel Matz and Noël-Yves Tonnere, L’Anjou des princes, Paris 2017, 132–75. Basit Hammad Qureshi suggests in his dissertation, that Ermengarde may have been the force behind the Chronica de Gestis Consulum Andegavorum, see ‘Crusade, Crisis, and Statecraft in Latin Christendom: The Case of Fulk V of Anjou (1090–1143)’, PhD Dissertation, The University of Minnesota 2017, 138–44. Kathryn Dutton has examined how three generations of Angevin comital sons were raised, ‘Ad Erudiendum Tradidit: The Upbringing of Angevin Comital Children’, ANS 32, 2010, 24–39.

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to many literate women who could have provided a fine education for the young countess.16 Evidence that Ermengarde was well educated is apparent in the letters that Marbode and Robert of Arbrissel later wrote to her: they included biblical and classical references which they expected she would understand and thus be able to take their advice fully to heart.17 Fulk IV was also a patron of some of the most important ecclesiastical houses in the area of the Loire, among them Marmoutier.18 Ermengarde’s status as daughter of Fulk placed her in the centre of the discussions about the church and efforts at reform circulating in the region at the end of the eleventh century. Indeed, JeanHervé Foulon has remarked that the Loire became the foremost region to nurture the Gregorian Reform Movement.19 The countess’ relationship with her father, but also eventually with her half-brother Fulk V, provided her with support, connected her to some of the important intellectual, religious and spiritual developments blossoming in medieval France, and gave her some very influential friends both when she ruled the county in Alan’s absence and when she governed with her husband and son. In June of 1096 Ermengarde could be found at her father’s court in Anjou as Alan was preparing to join other crusaders to travel east.20 Count Fulk IV made a substantial gift to the cathedral of Angers. Ermengarde acted in the donation with her father, as did her two half-brothers. The performative effect of this donation was significant for Ermengarde.21 Her status as daughter of Fulk, but also half-sister to Geoffrey IV Martel (c.1075–1106) and Fulk V (1093–1143), was affirmed in a public setting in front of many clergy and prominent lords. Association with Count Fulk and her halfbrothers would have reminded neighbours and native Bretons alike of Ermengarde’s connection to these men and that they – or their clients – were capable of providing support or aid if she needed it.22 Just how critical Ermengarde’s association with Anjou was to her and her position in Brittany is apparent in a charter issued by her son Conan III recalling events of his childhood from around 1100×1101 when his father was on crusade. Conan

Belle Tuten, ‘Who was Lady Constance of Angers?: Nuns as Poets and Correspondents at the Monastery of Roncery d’Angers in the Early Twelfth Century’, Medieval Perspectives 19, 2004, 255–68. Dalarun (Sex, Sin and Salvation, 94) also thinks Ermengarde was raised in Angers by her father. 17 The close relationship that the adult Ermengarde had with clergy who were present or educated in Angers suggests she might have met them as a young woman. 18 Moreover, many of the abbots and clergy in Angevin ecclesiastical houses were educated at the abbey of Marmoutier. Guillot, Le comte d’Anjou et son entourage, I, 162. 19 Jean-Hervé Foulon, ‘Les relations entre la Papauté réformatrice et les pays de la Loire jusqu’à la fondation de Fontevraud’, in Robert d’Arbrissel et la vie religieuse dans l’ouest de la France: Actes du colloque de Fontevraud, 13–16 décembre 2001, ed. Jacques Dalarun, Turnhout 2004, 25–56; see also, Matz and Tonnerre, L’Anjou des princes, 113–16. 20 Cartulaire noir de la cathédrale d’Angers, ed. Charles Urseau, Paris 1903, 127–31, no. 65. The charter itself contains reference to the departure of many good Christians on crusade. It is likely that Ermengarde and Alan first heard about the Crusade when Pope Urban II travelled through France preaching the crusade and stopped at Angers. 21 For the performative aspects of charters and donations, see Geoffrey Koziol, The Politics of Memory and Identity in Carolingian Royal Diplomas, Turnhout 2012, 17–62. 22 In addition to activating her connections with her natal family, Ermengarde also sought to have an Angevin ally closer to home by working to have Marbode made bishop of Rennes. For a discussion of Ermengarde’s role in Marbode’s elevation, see my ‘“You will dwell with barbarous and uneducated men” Countess Ermengarde and Political Culture in Twelfth-Century Brittany’, History: The Journal of the Historical Association 102, December 2017, 858–73, as does Melissa Lurio, ‘An Educated Bishop in an Age of Reform: Marbode of Rennes, 1096–1123’, PhD dissertation, Boston University 2004, 44–9, 111, 322–8. 16



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remembered that as a young boy, he became mortally ill.23 To seek the intercession of St Nicholas, who was developing a reputation for his intercessions on behalf of children, Ermengarde packed up her two small sons, their tutor, and various of Conan’s barons, and travelled to Angers. Once they arrived at the church, after a journey of several days, Conan ‘poured out prayers upon the altar of the saint’ and then the boy literally offered a part of himself as a gift to Nicholas by placing a lock of his hair on the altar.24 Young Conan and his mother also arranged that the monks would receive a more practical gift of two mill traces for their use and support. Conan’s illness was a crisis point for Ermengarde and her young family. His death, in addition to being a personal tragedy for the countess, could have serious and immediate consequences for her ability to maintain order, and also long-term ramifications for comital succession. We can imagine just how difficult it must have been for Ermengarde to have travelled with two young sons, one of whom was perilously sick, on a journey of about eighty miles, or approximately three days of travel by horse.25 Ermengarde must have been deeply worried indeed to have risked such a journey. At this crucial moment, she chose to return home in a desperate – and perhaps last – attempt to secure her son’s (and county’s) health. Here she was acting very much as a daughter of Anjou, for her choice of St Nicholas was a conscious attempt to associate herself and her children with her Angevin ancestors: for the church of St Nicholas had been founded by Fulk Nerra (987–1040), the count of Anjou responsible for establishing the family as a regional power. Early in the eleventh century, Fulk Nerra had undertaken a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.26 While at sea off the coast of Myra, Fulk and his company had encountered a violent storm. Fulk believed he had been saved by St Nicholas and had vowed to build a monastery in his name back in Anjou.27 When her child became gravely ill, Ermengarde chose none other than the saint who had rescued her illustrious ancestor. By taking Conan to the shrine of St Nicholas, located in the community built and supported by her natal Angevin family, Ermengarde was casting Conan as the new Fulk Nerra; someone who was deserving, as well as in need, of St Nicholas’ intercession. Indeed, the countess herself had acted with her natal kin in donating a

Dating the births of the comital children is tricky, but it seems that both Conan and Geoffrey were born before Alan went on crusade. It is possible that Ermengarde was pregnant with their sister, Havoise, when Alan left. Given that Havoise was betrothed to Baldwin IV of Flanders by 1111 and that she needed to be twelve to provide her canonical consent to the marriage, she was probably born during her father’s absence. 24 The charter contains two benefactions. One made when Conan was quite young – perhaps five or six years of age – and a later confirmation of the gift by his father Count Alan IV of Brittany. This charter does not survive in the original. However it was copied by Gui-Alexis Lobineau, Histoire de Bretagne: Composée sur les titres et les auteurs originaux, 2 vols, Paris 1707, II, cols 265–6 and Dom Pierre Hyacinthe Morice, Mémoires pour servir de preuves à l’histoire ecclésiastique et civile de Bretagne, 3 vols, Paris 1742, I, cols 528–9. For a modern transcription and analysis, see Hubert Guillotel: Actes des ducs de Bretagne (944–1148), ed. Philippe Charon, Philippe Guigon, Cyprien Henry, Michael Jones, Katharine Keats-Rohan, and Jean-Claude Meuret, Rennes 2014, 415–16, no. 112: Cumque orationem fudisset ad Dominum ante altare sancti Nicholai. 25 They could have possibly been at Nantes and journeyed from there. In this case the voyage could have been done partially by river, which would have been a trip of about a day and a half. Ermengarde may also have had her young daughter, Havoise, with her. 26 Fragmentum Historiae Andegavensis, in Chroniques des Comtes d’Anjou et des Seigneurs d’Amboise, ed. Louis Halphen and René Poupardin, Paris 1913, 234. 27 Bernard Bachrach, Fulk Nerra: The Neo-Roman Consul, 987–1040, Berkeley 1993, 165. For analysis of this community, see Yvonne Mailfert, ‘Foundation du monastère bénédictin de Saint-Nicolas d’Angers’, Bibliothèque de l’École de Chartes 92, 1931, 43–61. 23

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priory to this very monastery in the months before the departure of the crusaders.28 Significantly, Fulk Nerra had chosen a monk from Marmoutier as the first abbot of St Nicholas. Her predecessor’s choice would have resonated with Ermengarde as she too supported the reform efforts of that monastery. Ermengarde was appealing to a saint who had long protected her family, particularly the men. St Nicholas had intervened successfully for her great-grandfather Fulk Nerra, so she hoped he would do the same for young Conan. Ermengarde’s choice of St Nicholas had additional, more recent resonances with illustrious Angevin ancestors. During Pope Urban II’s recent visit in 1096, he had overseen the rededication of St Nicholas. The body of Count Geoffrey II Martel, Ermengarde’s great uncle and arguably the last illustrious ruler of Anjou, was also translated to the nave of St Nicholas.29 Recalling the time of Geoffrey II Martel, who reigned peacefully over Anjou before the tumult of civil war and dissension among his heirs, would have recalled a time of political stability. Associating Conan with this ancestor would also associate him – and through him the county of Brittany – with this political steadiness. By bringing her sick child here and having him offer a part of himself to this saint, Ermengarde was recalling two previous counts of Anjou who had effectively ruled the county. In this way she called to memory some of her most prestigious and powerful Angevin ancestors and united herself and Conan with them. She was also strategic in bringing both of her sons on this journey and having them both take part in the donation. For if Conan died, his brother Geoffrey would be next in succession. Furthermore, having the Breton barons accompany the young boys also meant they would be present to support her and her sons if the worst came to pass. The offering of Conan’s lock of hair and the shearing of locks associated with it sent a message to another, slightly different audience. Pauline Stafford asserts that ‘male hairstyles were part of the language of Gregorian revival’.30 By cutting Conan’s hair, in a public place, in front of clergy and secular elites, Ermengarde and her sons signalled their support of the reform movement. This action would gain them clerical allies, but perhaps also the intercession of some pious and dedicated reformed clerics. Cutting of hair was also associated in the minds of the Gregorian reformers with moral rejuvenation. While it is not clear how a child of five or six would need to have his morals rejuvenated, his dire physical state indicates that his health and body were in need of restoration. At this precarious moment for Brittany, Ermengarde activated association with her most venerated ancestors, who had successfully ruled the county of Anjou, while at the same time gaining the support of influential clergy. Fortunately, whether due to the intervention of august ancestors or other more mundane factors, Conan did recover from his brush with death. As she controlled the county ‘with a firm hand’ while Alan was in the east,31 Ermengarde also relied upon her Breton in-laws, specifically, Alan’s uncle, Abbot Bernard of St Croix of Quimperlé, her brother-in-law Matthias, count of Nantes, and her sister-in-law Abbess Adèle of St Georges in Rennes. A potential threat to Ermengarde’s control of the county was the families residing in the western portions Ermengarde herself had acted with her father in donating property to St Nicholas in August 1096, see Guillot, Le comte d’Anjou et son entourage, II, 245–6, nos. 397 and 398. 29 Fragmentum, ed. Halphen and Poupardin, 238. 30 Pauline Stafford, ‘The Meanings of Hair in the Anglo-Norman World: Masculinity, Reform and National Identity’, in Saints, Scholars and Politicians: Gender as a Tool in Medieval Studies, ed. Mathilde van Dijk and Renée Nip, Turnhout 2005,160. 31 Chédeville and Tonnerre, La Bretagne féodale, 67: ‘Son épouse Ermengarde exerça d’un main ferme le gourvernement ducal’. 28



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of Brittany who had traditionally been allegiant to the rival house of Cornouaille. As abbot of St Croix, the necropolis and favoured community of the Cornouaille and their supporters, Bernard was well-positioned to observe and advise about western Brittany. Matthias, who received the county of Nantes as his patrimony upon the death of his and Alan’s father, was firmly connected to the Breton nobility in general, but strategically placed in the eastern portions of Brittany to help defend the county’s border. Finally, Abbess Adèle was stationed in Rennes, the heart of the Rennois patrimony and the preferred comital residence of both Alan and Ermengarde. The convent of St Georges had members of some of the most powerful and prestigious Breton noble families among both its patrons and residents.32 As head of this community, Adèle had a web of connections and networks that aided her sister-in-law. To ensure the stability of Brittany during Alan’s absence, Ermengarde used her status as a daughter of Anjou both to secure critical allies and dramatically remind people of those powerful allies. She also had a constellation of Breton kin at the ready to help manage the complex political loyalties that characterized medieval Brittany. Ermengarde’s gender and her membership of two different kin groups worked to her advantage in structuring a support system both within and outside of Brittany. Glory of Brittany: Ermengarde’s Partnership with Alan Ermengarde continued to nurture established alliances, as well as building new ones, as she partnered with both Alan and their son Conan in ruling Brittany. Upon Alan’s return, he and Ermengarde governed the county until he turned his back on the world in 1112 to become a monk at Redon. From 1093, the date of Ermengarde and Alan’s marriage, until his retirement to Redon, Count Alan issued eight notices in which he dispensed comital justice or intervention. Ermengarde acted with Alan in seven of the eight. Two acts from May 1108 in particular illustrate Ermengarde’s influence and authority in helping to rule the county. The abbey of Redon and Count Alan had been involved in a dispute concerning ‘unjust customs’ (injustam consuetudinem) he was levying against the monks as a result of his construction of the castle of Blain. The abbot of Redon had already appealed to Alan to abandon these claims, but to no avail. He petitioned the count for a second time and, during the course of the negotiations, it became evident that the count had noticed a particularly impressive horse in the abbot’s possession. The abbot took note and approached Countess Ermengarde for her advice. She endorsed giving the horse to the count, who then readily approved the agreement the monks had crafted and abandoned his right to these customs. Ermengarde was in the thick of these negotiations, and took an active role in brokering a settlement as she had done on other occasions.33 Indeed, the resolution was agreed upon in the cemetery of the church of Redon, ‘at the court of many nobles’, indicating that the comital vassals had been called together to hear this dispute.34

Étienne Mathieu, ‘La naissance des prieurés de l’abbaye feminine Saint-Georges de Rennes (1024– 1047)’, Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’ouest 113, 2006, 93–104. 33 For additional information on Ermengarde, see Amy Livingstone, ‘Extraordinairement ordinaire: Ermengarde de Bretagne, femmes de l’aristocratie et pouvoir en France au Moyen Age, v. 1090–1135’, Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’ouest 21, 2014, 7–24; Livingstone, ‘You will dwell with barbarous and uneducated men’, 858–73. 34 Factum est hoc in cimiterio Sancti Salvatoris, coram multis nobilibus, see Guillotel: Actes des ducs de Bretagne, ed. Charon et al., 412–14, no. 111. The abbot had received several horses from Harscoet of St Père as part of getting rid of these unjust customs.

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Medieval leaders, from lords to counts, needed to be seen as legitimate, Christian rulers.35 Acting with local clergy in approving and supporting the reform or maintenance of the church was one way to demonstrate this and became an essential part of ruling. Ermengarde worked closely with Bishop Marbode of Rennes to reform houses, garner support, recognize the rights of various ecclesiastical constituencies, and confirm the bishop’s acts. Just before travelling to Redon to resolve the dispute with the monks there, Ermengarde and Alan were at the bishop’s court in Rennes. There they approved and signed a charter that clarified the relationship between the bishop and those houses of St Serge of Anjou that were located in his diocese. The comital couple were the only secular leaders present and were in esteemed ecclesiastical company indeed, for the archbishop of Dol, the bishop of Angers, the bishop of Alet, the abbots of St Florent-de-Saumur, St Melanie of Rennes, and Beaulieu-les-Loches – as well as monks and canons from a variety of other religious houses – were also present.36 Count Alan depended on Ermengarde for her influence and her ties to the church, for the countess maintained relationships with many of the important ecclesiastical foundations in Angers and the Loire. Indeed, the act referred to above concerned the possessions of an Angevin abbey within the county of Brittany. Ermengarde’s associations with venerated Benedictine houses, like those in Angers proper and Marmoutier, gave Brittany a direct connection to the ideas of reform circulating in the region.37 Ermengarde herself would come to be an ardent supporter of this reform movement – about which she may have learned from her connections to Marmoutier, her presence at local church councils, or from Pope Urban II’s visit to western France. Vincent Launay argues that it was Ermengarde who was responsible for creating a milieu where new forms of monasticism could thrive.38 Although Alan’s predecessors had patronized Marmoutier, before his marriage to Ermengarde Alan had been remiss in his support of this monastery. The first time Alan made a gift to this monastery was shortly after his return from crusade. The count would go on to make several more before he retired in 1112 and Ermengarde partnered him in every one.39 Scrutiny of her participation in the Breton comital David Crouch, The Birth of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France, 900–1300, Harlow 2005, 71–86. 36 Guillotel: Actes des ducs de Bretagne, ed. Charon et al., 410–11, no. 110. 37 Ermengarde’s interest in reform was not the only vector through which the ideas of reform entered Brittany or through which the Breton church was reformed. The church in Brittany was often depicted as being in a state of disrepair by medieval clergy, most of whom came from outside the county. The same goes for modern scholars. More recently, however, historians have demonstrated that the Breton church engaged in reform and revitalization on its own throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries; see Hubert Guillotel, ‘Combour: Proto-histoire d’une seigneurie et mise en œuvre de la réforme grégorienne’, in Family Trees and the Roots of Politics, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, Woodbridge 1997, 269–90, and ‘La pratique du cens episcopal dans l’évêche de Nantes’, Le Moyen Age 80, 1984, 5–49; Florian Mazel, ‘Seigneurs, moines et chanoines: pouvoir local et enjeux ecclésiaux à l’époque grégorienne (milieu XIe–milieu XIIe siècle)’, Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’ouest 113, 2006, 105–35; Daniel Pichot, ‘Les prieurés Bretons de Marmoutier (XIe–XIIe siècle)’, Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’ouest 113, 2006, 153–76; Regan Eby, ‘Aristocratic Sociability and Monastic Patronage in Eleventh and Early Twelfth-Century Brittany’, PhD dissertation, Boston College 2015. Nor was Ermengarde the first countess who could be described as ‘the glory of Brittany’; for her strong ties to the religious houses of the Loire, see Amy Livingstone, ‘Pious Women in a “Den of Scorpions”: The Piety and Patronage of the Countesses of Brittany, c.1050–1150’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 43, 2017, 45–61. 38 Vincent Launay, ‘La politique monastique des ducs de Bretagne: l’exemple de l’abbaye de Saint-Sulpice, XIIe–XIIIe siècles’, Britannia Monastica 16, 2012, 67–5. 39 Guillotel: Actes des ducs de Bretagne, ed. Charon et al., 396–399, nos. 104 and 105; 406–10, no. 109, and 422–5, no. 115. 35



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acts suggests that Ermengarde remained in the regions around Rennes and Nantes and seems never to have travelled to the northern or western parts of Brittany. Yet Ermengarde’s reach transcended the geographical limits of her travels. Between 1105 and 1110 the viscount of Josselin asked the monks of Marmoutier for the relics of St Flavin to be transferred to their priory at Josselin. The priory had been founded by the viscount’s father in the mid eleventh century, but the family had not continued to patronize either the priory or the mother house of Marmoutier. It was only when Ermengarde became countess that the viscount re-established his family’s connection and support of Marmoutier.40 Ermengarde’s Angevin allegiances benefitted Brittany and her affinal family in a number of ways. The comital houses of Brittany and Anjou supported each other politically. Alan, for example, fought at the battle of Candé alongside Ermengarde’s half-brother Geoffrey IV Martel who was mortally wounded there.41 Ermengarde also intervened to help Anjou. When her step-mother, Bertrade, fled Anjou to marry King Philip I, leaving behind her infant son Fulk V, Ermengarde may have brought her young half-brother to Brittany to raise with her own children.42 Ermengarde also acted as peacemaker between her difficult father and her half-brothers, smoothing over their relationship in the troubled years from approximately 1103 to 1105 when succession to Anjou was in dispute. In this period, Fulk IV and all three of his children (Ermengarde, Geoffrey IV Martel, and Fulk V) acted together to make a donation to Fontevraud.43 This was a rare example of family unity at time when father and sons were literally at war with one another and came at the time of Ermengarde’s most intense involvement with Fontevraud – if not her actual residence there.44 Based on the charter and epistolary evidence, Ermengarde was living at Fontevraud for a period of a year to eighteen months between 1103 and late 1105. By 1106, Ermengarde was back in Brittany participating in comital business. At some point between 1103 and 1105, the comital couple faced a marital crisis, which led Ermengarde to take residence at Fontevraud. We learn this from Robert of Arbrissel’s letter to Ermengarde, where he implies that she moved away from Brittany to Fontevraud because she was concerned that she and Alan were related within the prohibited degrees of kinship. Jacques Dalarun argues that Robert referred to Ermengarde being unable to provide proof that her marriage was consanguineous at a church council in his letter to her.45 This seems a reasonable interpretation. I have not found a record of any council held to discuss this matter, but it seems likely that some sort of meeting took place – although perhaps only attended by local clergy and the comital family. Ermengarde’s association with

The charters recording the translation were dated by the reign of Count Alan and with Count Alan himself likely in attendance. Cartulaire de Morbihan, 56, no. 185; 42–3, no. 167. 41 Chédeville and Tonnerre, La Bretagne féodale, 68. 42 Qureshi, ‘Crusade, Crisis and Statecraft in Latin Christendom’, 32, 103, 196 and appendix D. 43 Grand Cartulaire de Fontevraud, ed. Jean-Marc Bienvenu, Robert Favreau, and Georges Pon, Poitiers 2000, 157–8, no. 166. While it is difficult to date this act precisely, and various editors offer a range of dates, it was probably granted during Ermengarde’s peak interaction with Fontevraud, that is between about 1103 and 1105×1106. Guillot dates it between 1100 and 1106: Le comte d’Anjou et son entourage, II, 269–70, no. C 433. A date of 1100 to 1104 seems a little early. The authors of the edition of Fontevraud charters prefer 1109×1112, but Fulk IV and Geoffrey III would have both been dead at this point. So the most reasonable range of dates for this gift would be c.1103×1106. 44 Although Lobineau puts her return as early as 1105, 1106 is more consistent with the evidence and her presence can be confirmed in charters from 1106 but not earlier. See Lobineau, Histoire de Bretagne, II, col. 264–5. 45 Dalarun, Sex, Sin, Salvation, 96–7. 40

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reformers and centers of reform, like Marmoutier, would have acquainted her with the church’s increased prohibitions for what they deemed incestuous marriages. But these ideas had made their way into Brittany as well, for in 1101 Count Alan IV presided over a gift made by one of his vassals for his wife who had become a nun rather than stay married because they were related within the forbidden degrees of kinship.46 Given that Alan and Ermengarde shared a common ancestor (Ermengarde, daughter of Geoffrey Grisgonnelle, who married Count Conan I of Brittany), her concerns were not misplaced. Nor was she simply searching for an excuse to end her marriage so that she could go to be with Robert, as Dalarun suggests.47 Ermengarde’s concern about her marriage mixed with her abiding interest in new forms of religious expression and caused her to leave Alan to take up residence at Fontevraud. While it is clear that Ermengarde lived at Fontevraud, her specific status is difficult to discern: was she simply living there as a lay sister or did she in fact take vows?48 Whatever her condition, she ended up leaving Fontevraud and returned to her life as countess by 1106.49 In this pious benefaction to Fontevraud, the Angevin men came together in support of the woman whom all three held in high regard, and father and sons were united – at least momentarily. If the charter is dated closer to 1103 when hostilities first broke out between Geoffrey IV and his father, the donation provided a brief moment of peace for this family. If this gift was granted around 1105×1106, it came at a critical time when tensions were receding between father and son and created an opportunity to refresh bonds of family solidarity, as well as signalling that solidarity to a wider audience. In either scenario, Ermengarde’s agency in encouraging gifts to the religious community she held dear allowed for her brothers and father to come together in common cause after much intra-familial tension and fighting. Ermengarde, as a daughter of Fulk IV and a daughter of Fontevraud, cultivated relationships that would be important to her throughout her life. Although she had left Fontevraud by 1106, she remained in contact with both Robert and the nuns who lived there.50 We know that Robert wrote at least one letter to Ermengarde. But he and Ermengarde may also have encountered each other at church councils or during his time as a travelling preacher. As noted above, Ermengarde was successful in getting her father and half-brothers to support Fontevraud, and her Breton family followed suit. Her husband, son, grandson and great-grandson all made gifts to this community.51 Further indication of Ermengarde’s dedication to Fontevraudian religious life is apparent in her patronage of the abbey of St Sulpice-la-Forêt, located in Indeed, this instance of a couple separating due to consanguinity may have planted the seed with Ermengarde that her own marriage violated kinship laws, see Morice, Mémoires pour servir de preuves à l’histoire, I, col. 504. 47 Dalarun, Sex, Sin and Salvation, 67. 48 Lobineau asserted that she was in fact a nun and cites the necrology of Fontevraud which lists Ermengarde as a ‘monacha’ or nun (Histoire de Bretagne, I, col. 124). The necrology of St Maurice of Angers also lists Ermengarde as a nun: Charles du Fresne du Cange et al., Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, Niort 1883–1887, http://ducange.enc.sorbonne.fr/conversa. 49 For discussion of her return to the world, see William Schenk, ‘Ermengarde of Anjou’s Decision to Reenter the World’, in Shaping Courtliness in Medieval France, ed. D. O’Sullivan and L. Shepard, Cambridge 2013, 202–12. 50 Guillotel, Actes des ducs, ed. Charon et al., 433–5, no. 121. 51 Indeed, Ermengarde’s niece Matilda (Fulk V and Aremburge of Maine’s daughter) became one of Fontevraud’s abbesses. She had been engaged to William Atheling who died in the White Ship tragedy of 1120. Shortly afterward, she decided to become a nun. Conan III would make a gift to Fontevraud (for his mother and with her consent) and mentions that his cousin was a nun there. Guillotel, Actes des ducs, ed. 464–6, no. 135. Morice, Mémoires pour servir de preuves à l’histoire, I, col. 617. 46



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the heart of the Rennois patrimony. This community was founded by a companion and fellow hermit of Robert of Arbrissel and was a double house, modelled after Fontevraud.52 ‘On the counsel of lord Ermengarde’, her immediate family made two donations to this community.53 But her interest in Fontevraud and new forms of religious experience further connected her to her half-brother, Fulk V. Daughter of Fulk, Glory of Brittany: Ermengarde, Fulk V, and the Cistercians In 1129, Ermengarde travelled to Angers where she participated in a charter with her half-brother, Count Fulk V of Anjou, concerning the abbey of Ronceray. At this point in her life, Ermengarde had been a widow for ten years and her son Conan III was the count of Brittany, although Ermengarde continued to take an active role in governing the county and advising Conan. The Ronceray charter records that just before he left to become king of Jerusalem, Fulk V reached out to his half-sister, the venerable countess Ermengarde and asked her to come to Anjou. There she and Fulk made a gift to honour their father, but Ermengarde also persuaded her brother and nephew to make other gifts to the nuns.54 This charter reveals much about Ermengarde’s relationship with her half-brother, Fulk V. The individual actions of each sibling reflect a particularly close relationship between them. Fulk invited Ermengarde to come and see him before he moved east; she promptly left Brittany to travel to Anjou. Given their attachment as adults, it is tempting to assume that Fulk did in fact spend part of his childhood in Brittany, which would have provided the emotional foundation for their relationship.55 Earlier episodes in Fulk’s life indicate that the Angevin count respected and listened to his half-sister. Sometime around 1118, Countess Ermengarde received a letter from Abbot Geoffrey of Vendôme, chiding her for neglecting her father’s tomb at St Trinité’s priory of L’Évière. Geoffrey complained that Fulk IV had not left the monks sufficient support to keep up the tomb, so he was appealing to her sense of filial duty to ensure that her father was appropriately commemorated.56 Although Ermengarde herself did not make a gift to St Trinité on her father’s behalf, in 1119 Fulk V and his wife Aremburge did arrange a benefaction for the souls of both of their fathers and designated support for a monk to sing the mass each day for their souls. Moreover, they made the gift ‘into the hand of Abbot Geoffrey’ and specified that the donated prebend be directly under his jurisdiction as opposed to that of the brothers of the chapel who had not been tending the tomb to the Abbot’s standards, an indication that they were aware of Abbot Geoffrey’s complaint to Ermengarde.57 Ermengarde was in Nantes in 1118, and she probably travelled the short distance to Angers to speak to her brother about the state of their father’s tomb. It is clear that Ermengarde was involved in resolving this issue since she and Fulk V together Launay, ‘La politique monastique des ducs de Bretagne’, 67–70. Guillotel, Actes des ducs, ed. Charon et al., ‘consilio donne Ermengardis’, 507–9 at 507, no 156: and 451–2, no. 129; ‘suadente matre mea Ermengardi comitissa’, 498–501, at 499, no. 153. 54 Cartularium monasterii Beatae Mariae Caritatis Andegavensis, ed. Paul A. Marchegay, 3 vols, Angers 1854, I, 171–2, no. 296. 55 Sister and brother also shared a dedication to Robert of Arbrissel and the community of Fontevraud. Fulk V has been cast as one of the most influential patrons of Fontevraud with Ermengarde reduced to a bit player. Yet, it was through his sister that Fulk was first exposed to Fontevraud – a seed planted by Ermengarde that was further nurtured by Fulk’s mother, Bertrade. Robert of Arbrissel, xxvi. 56 A letter of Abbot Geoffrey of Vendôme, http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/243.html 57 ‘Concedimus in manu scilicet Goffridi Vindocinensis abbatis’, see Cartulaire de l’abbaye cardinal de la Trinité de Vendôme, ed. Charles Métais, 5 vols, Paris 1893–1904, II, 208–9, no. 434. 52 53

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signed a charter from St Aubin of Angers confirming this gift.58 Geoffrey himself remarked about Ermengarde in his letter to her, ‘your devotion so often opens the doors of many churches’; this is evidence that because of her piety Ermengarde held considerable sway – both with the clergy, but also her family members.59 But as Ermengarde influenced Fulk, so, too, did brother influence sister. Jonathan Lyon’s book, Princely Brothers and Sisters, has demonstrated that enduring strength of sibling relationships and often the family relationship that extended over the course of a lifetime.60 This was certainly true for Fulk V and Ermengarde. As Fulk and his wife Aremburge were early patrons of the Cistercians, Ermengarde’s own spiritual development was shaped by her brother’s commitment to the Cistercian order. In 1121, the couple founded the Cistercian monastery at Louroux in Anjou.61 Indeed, Ermengarde’s sister-in-law was such a strong proponent of the Cistercians, and particularly this house, that she chose to be buried there. From 1120 to 1129, the siblings were together on at least three more occasions before Fulk’s departure for Jerusalem. In 1128, both Ermengarde and her son Conan made the journey to Le Mans to attend the marriage of Fulk V’s son Count Geoffrey le Bel – her nephew and his cousin respectively – to the ‘Empress’ Matilda, daughter of Henry I of England.62 A few months later, Ermengarde would again see her half-brother as she came to Anjou to join Fulk on his ‘farewell’ tour of his lands before he left to become king of Jerusalem. They would also see each other at Fontevraud as Fulk V reaffirmed what the Angevin comital family had granted to the nuns to ensure that none of these gifts would be challenged once Fulk was in the Holy Land.63 Ermengarde’s interest in the Cistercians peaked shortly after Fulk left for Jerusalem as she became a Cistercian nun at the Burgundian abbey of Larrey. St Bernard was present at her confirmation and veiled her himself. Bernard also corresponded with her twice between 1130 and 1132. His letters hold some tantalizing information about their friendship, and also about Ermengarde’s relationship with Fulk V. The first letter suggests that Ermengarde was in need of reassurance because Bernard was absent trying to rectify the papal schism. Bernard assured her that he missed her, regretted being so far away from her and affirmed their friendship. The second letter indicates that Ermengarde had difficulty adjusting to life as a nun in that Bernard says he is glad that Ermengarde has found peace. But in this missive Bernard also writes that he recognizes the hardship that being deprived of ‘brother, son and fatherland’ was for Ermengarde.64 The order here is compelling, given that Bernard lists Ermengarde’s separation from her brother Fulk V as first among her deprivations. This reference suggests that the deep and abiding relationship that Ermengarde enjoyed with Fulk V, which is apparent in their own interactions, was Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Saint-Aubin d’Angers, ed. Le Comte Bertrand de Broussillon, 3 vols, Paris 1903, II, 33–4, no. 426. 59 Insuper etiam multarum ecclesiarum januas saepissime aperiat tuae devotionis oblation. http:// epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/243.html. 60 Jonathan Lyon, Princely Brothers and Sisters: The Sibling Bond in German Politics, 1100–1250, Ithaca NY 2013. 61 See Paul Marchegay, ‘Chartes angevins des onzième et douzième siècles’, Bibliothèque de l’École de Chartes 36, 1875, 435–8. 62 Guillotel: Actes des ducs, ed. Charon et al., 420–3, no. 134 and the Chronica de Gestis Consulum Andegavorum, 69. 63 Paris, Archives nationales, L 1018 no. 1. Conan also made a donation to Fontevraud on behalf of his parents and cousin Matilda, who had become a nun there, which Ermengarde witnessed and encouraged. Guillotel: Actes des ducs, ed. 424–5, no. 135. 64 Fratris, filii patriaeque destituta solatio. Epistolae, http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/245.html. 58



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understood by their contemporaries. The second letter similarly foreshadows Ermengarde’s eventual departure from the Cistercian life around 1131×1132.65 Instead of returning to Brittany, however, she opted to travel to the Holy Land to visit her brother – further evidence of their bond.66 The friendship evident in the letters between Bernard and the countess would be tested, however, upon Ermengarde’s return to Brittany around 1134.67 Charters from the Cistercian abbey of Buzay record that Count Conan III of Brittany and his mother Ermengarde had provided the resources for establishing a community of Cistercian monks close to Nantes at Buzay. Ermengarde had ‘requested and counselled’ that Conan endow properties and resources to create this monastic community.68 Unfortunately, Conan did not follow through on providing the promised lands and resources. Around 1140, the venerable abbot of Clairvaux himself came to Brittany and discovered that the brothers of Buzay were living in a sorry state. Bernard was understandably angered and ordered the monks back to Burgundy. At this point Ermengarde activated her long-standing relationship with Bernard. Using the influence and capital – both real and political – that she had accrued, she went to work reconciling Conan with Bernard and the Cistercians. The countess persuaded Conan to follow through not only on what he had promised originally, but also to give even more to the monks. Simultaneously, she reassured Bernard and kept the monks of Buzay from returning to Burgundy. Conclusion As this discussion of Ermengarde began with her reputation among her contemporaries, it is only appropriate to end it the same way. Abbot Geoffrey of Vendôme offered this praise of Ermengarde: ‘In your earthly rule as I have heard, exercising the laws of justice and making peace in the country, you do good to many.’69 Countess Ermengarde provided leadership for over half a century in Brittany. The peace she helped maintain, the justice that she ensured was rendered, the ecclesiastical reform she encouraged and the religious foundations she created or supported – all of these actions made her the glory of Brittany. But Ermengarde would not have attained such a reputation if she had not first been the daughter of Fulk IV and Anjou. Her gender and her membership of two powerful families gave her the space in which to rule, influence, judge, intervene, and persuade. Her connections to Angevin ecclesiastical foundations and clergy aided her in ruling Brittany and gaining respect. Family ties to her father and her brothers were also critical. As the married countess of Brittany, Ermengarde could

65 The Letters of St Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. Bruno Scott James, intro. Beverly Mayne Kienzle, 2nd edn, Kalamazoo 1998, 345, letter 272. 66 During her time there, she sponsored the building of a church at Jacob’s Well just outside of Nablus and the installation of a male ecclesiastical community there, see Lobineau, Histoire de Bretagne, II, col. 295. 67 For Bernard’s letters, see also Epistolae, https://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/244.html and http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/245.html. 68 Sciat me hoc fecisse rogatu et intercessione Ermengardis carissima matris mea, see Lobineau, Histoire de Bretagne, II, cols 294–6. André Dufief, Les Cisterciens en Bretagne aux XII et XIII siècles, Rennes 1997, 75–81. 69 In terreno regimine, ut audivi, exercens jura justitiae, et patriae faciens pacem. Epistolae, https:// epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/243.html, see also Geoffrey de Vendôme: Oeuvres, ed. and trans. Geneviève Giordanengo, Paris 1996, 212–14.

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activate the family, spiritual, and political networks she cultivated as daughter of Fulk, sister of Fulk, wife of Alan, and friend of Robert, Marbode and Bernard. Ermengarde, however, was not the daughter of Fulk IV in one important way. Unlike her father, whose misshapen body was seen as analogue to his suspicious character, moral corruption, and weak political rule, Ermengarde is described by Bishop Marbode as a shining beacon of beauty. In contrast to Orderic Vitalis’ deformed Fulk, Marbode’s Ermengarde was beautiful, modest, handsome, shining, brilliant, young, eloquent and shrewd, with a ‘look, flashing with light which wounds those who see it, and golden hair’, whom – in the bishop’s estimation – no woman could surpass; a sharp distinction, indeed.70 For the Middle Ages, a fit body was testament to a leader’s ability to lead; to their strength and virtue. Ermengarde’s beauty, intelligence, eloquence, piety, and strength combined to make her the glory of Brittany.

Orderic, IV, 186–7; ‘Luce micans acies, quae vulnerat aspicientes/Et flavus crinis…’; Marbode, poem, Epistolae, https://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/240.html. 70

THE IDEA OF ‘EMPIRE’ AS HEGEMONIC POWER UNDER THE NORMAN AND PLANTAGENET KINGS (1066–1204)* Fanny Madeline In 1066, when William duke of Normandy conquered England, he became the head of a political unit, described by some historians as an ‘empire’. Since John Le Patourel in the 1970s, John Gillingham in the 1980s, Martin Aurell in the 2000s, and most recently David Bates,1 arguments have been given to explain why this set of territories gathered under one ruler could be correctly described with the concept of empire, as used by historians of other periods.2 In this historiographical trend, the term empire must be seen as a means to look at the social and political dynamics at a global level, without being blinded by the national-colonial or the RomanoGermanic definitions of empire, as if they were the only legitimate or monopolistic languages of empire. For some, these unhelpfully dominant definitions of empire preclude the use of the term to describe the complex realities of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. For them, anachronism denies the term any heuristic strength in analysing the past.3 Medievalists who have argued against the use of ‘empire’ to describe what the Normans and Plantagenets controlled have also claimed that the kings in question did not use the word imperium to describe their own possessions, or assume an imperial title, because they did not understand their power as being imperial.4 Accordingly, this ‘anti-imperial’ approach has avoided systematically examining the imperial characteristics of Norman and Plantagenet power; rather, it has either underestimated or consciously ignored markers of empire. For many years, however, new insights into the imperial ideologies of medieval kings, and also into the question of imagined communities, have begun to overturn these

I would like to address warm thanks to Prof. Stephen Church and Dr. Colin Veach who not only corrected my English but also commented on this paper and made thoughtful suggestions to improve it. I also wish to thank those who attended the Battle Conference in Paris and Pr. Lachaud’s seminar in 2017, where a first draft of this paper was presented, for all their comments and thought-provoking questions. 1 John Le Patourel, The Norman Empire, Oxford 1976 and his Feudal Empire. Norman and Plantagenet, London 1984; John Gillingham, Angevin Empire, 2nd edn, London 2001; Martin Aurell, The Plantagenet Empire 1154–1124, trans. David Crouch, London 2007; David Bates, Normans and Empire, Oxford 2013. 2 Debates about how to define an empire are long lasting. After attempts made in the 1960s, ‘new imperial history’, developed in the 1990s, brought useful postcolonial and anthropological tools to break with the national and structural frames in which definitions of empire were embedded, see for instance Dane Kennedy, ‘The Imperial History Wars’, Journal of British Studies 54, 2015, 5–22. 3 This question of anachronism has often been discussed: see Nicole Loraux, ‘Éloge de l’anachronisme en histoire’, Espaces Temps, Les voies traversières de Nicole Loraux. Une helléniste à la croisée des sciences sociales, 87–88, 2005, 127–139; Peter Von Moos, ‘Das Öffentliche und das Private im Mittelalter. Für einen kontrollierten Anachronismus’, in Das Öffentliche und Private in der Vormoderne, ed. Peter Von Moos and Gert Melville, Cologne 1998, 3–83. 4 Lewis Warren, Henry II, Los Angeles 1967, 220–1; C. Warren Hollister, ‘Normandy, France and the Anglo-Norman Regnum’, in Monarchy, Magnates and Institutions in the Anglo-Norman World, London 1986, 17–57 at 56: ‘“Angevin Empire” is nothing more than a convenient invention of modern historians’. *

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misconceptions.5 Recently for instance, Hugh Thomas showed that despite the fact that the Angevin empire had no name, it was an effective mental construct in the framing of Ralph of Diceto’s chronicles.6 For Thomas, though, this mental construct failed to link the political communities of the empire, which remained, for the time it survived, mainly a family matter. Another obstacle lies in historians’ anachronistic desire to impose limited definitions on a medieval concept of empire that conveyed, and still conveys, many meanings that had evolved with varying political and ideological contexts over centuries.7 As Robert Foltz showed in the 1950s, the ideal of empire in the eleventh and twelfth centuries cannot be reduced to the Frankish and Ottonian renovatio imperii romanorum,8 because it does not take into account the polysemy and the multifarious uses of this word that have existed since Roman times.9 From Rome’s origins, and under the Republic, for instance, imperium could connote both a power and a territory, each with a sacral dimension.10 The term gained a more exclusivelyterritorial meaning under the Roman Empire, referring to the potentially universal geographical extension over which the emperors ruled.11 Imperium thus designated at the same time, or alternatively, an authority and a territory. By the Middle Ages, different meanings of empire had thus prevailed, and others had become more outdated.12 Among the languages of imperium available to writers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, one of the most common was the meaning given by Isidore of Seville. Looking at the Assyrians and Romans, which followed each other, Isidore wrote that they are empires because ‘other reigns and other kings are considered mere appendices of these two’.13 This is also the understanding of imperium that we find in Bede, when he describes the attempts of Anglo-Saxon Kings to unify Britain, and among medieval writers more generally when they express in biblical terms the power of non-Roman kings.14 As such, when the Almohads invaded Spain at the end Among recent works reassessing imperial representations see Benjamin Pohl, ‘Translatio imperii Constantini ad Normannos: Constantine the Great as a possible model for the depiction of Rollo in Dudo of St Quentin’s Historia Normannorum’, Millenium Yearbook on the Culture and History of the First Millennium 9, 2012, 297–339 and Wendy M. Hoofnagle, The Continuity of the Conquest. Charlemagne and the Anglo-Norman Imperialism, Philadelphia 2016. 6 Hugh Thomas, ‘La Normandie, l’Anjou et l’Angleterre dans l’œuvre de Raoul de Dicet’, in 911–2011. Penser les mondes normands médiévaux, ed. Pierre Bauduin and David Bates, Caen 2016, 357–70. 7 See Fanny Madeline, ‘L’empire et son espace: héritages, organisation, pratiques’, Hypothèses 11, 2008, 213–25. 8 See for instance Hans W. Goetz, ‘Kaiser, Kaisertum’, in Lexikon des Mittelalters, 10 vols, V, HieraMittel bis Lukanien, Stuttgart 1991, 851–3. 9 Susan Reynolds, ‘Empires: a problem in comparative history’, BIHR 79, 2006, 151–65. 10 André Magdelain, ‘L’inauguration de l’urbs et l’imperium’, in Jus imperium Auctoritas, Études de droit romain, Rome 2015, 209–28 at 209: in Roman law, ‘le pomerium représente la frontière qui sépare l’imperium domi de l’imperium militiae’. 11 Robert Foltz, L’idée d’empire en Occident, du Ve au XIVe siècle, Paris 1953, 13–14; Richard Koebner, Empire, Cambridge 1961, 1–17. 12 For an approach to ‘empires’ with the methodology of the intellectual Cambridge School of Languages see James Muldoon, Empire and Order: the Concept of Empire 800–1800, Basingstoke 1999 and Anthony Padgen, Lords of All the World. Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, 1500– 1800, New Haven 1995. 13 The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, IX, iii, 3, trans. and ed. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J.A. Beach and Oliver Berghof, Cambridge 2006, 200: Regna cetera ceterique reges velut adpendices istorum habentur. 14 Stephen Fanning, ‘Bede, Imperium and the Bretwaldas’, Speculum 66 1991, 1–23; P. David King, ‘Barbarian Kingdoms’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c.350–1450, ed. John H. Burns, Cambridge 2008 [1988], 123–153 at 145. 5



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of the twelfth century, their leader, Abu Yakub (or Boyac), was called by Roger of Howden the imperator Africanorum.15 For Janet Nelson, such a language of empire as hegemonic power was above all a way to describe the hierarchy of the political order between the sixth and eighth centuries, without conveying a specific theoretical ideal or a reference to the Roman legacy.16 For Warren Brown, that is the way Charlemagne, for example, understood his imperium, as being the king of the Franks and the Lombards. This conception evolved under his son Louis the Pious, who inherited the whole legacy and incorporated the sacral dimension of his kingship to his imperium.17 During the tenth and eleventh centuries, imperium came to describe a higher authority exerting a pre-eminence over other principes, who were either to pay a tribute or submit as vassals.18 This conception was still prevailing in western Europe when the Ottonian reform of renovatio imperii romanorum brought a new competing use of imperium.19 Henceforth, there was a language of empire that was not just to mean a hegemonic power but that also conveyed an idea of supremacy, including universal pretentions and no one above except God. My inquiry starts from this point and focuses on the occurrences and uses of the word imperium in the texts written under the Norman and Plantagenet kings. Whereas we cannot often find the word imperium used in administrative documents, we do find it used quite commonly in historical narratives, and mostly in a British context.20 What was meant in using this word needs to be clarified to understand better how men, writing about kings, saw the world and how their views could have shaped their actions. My hypothesis is that the political dynamic of the conquest of England in 1066 opened a space for the display of hybrid representations of empire, combining the idea of hegemonic power with the display of Roman and Carolingian symbolical or material references.21 That display came in time to support a political project not only of hegemony but also of supremacy. I shall first analyse the uses of imperium in official titles and the expressions of the imperial style of the Norman and Plantagenet Kings. From this perspective, and to have a better understanding of the specificity of the Normans and Plantagenets, comparisons with contemporary rulers will be made. Then, the symbolical appropriations of the word and idea of imperium will

Howden, Chronica, III, 302. Foltz, L’idée d’empire, 22; Janet T. Nelson, ‘Kingship and Empire’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, ed. J. H. Burns, Cambridge 1988, 211–50 at 230. 17 Warren Brown, ‘The idea of Empire in Carolingian Bavaria’, in Representation of Power in Medieval Germany 800–1500, ed. Björn Weiler and Simon MacLean, Turnhout 2006, 37–56. 18 King, ‘Barbarian Kingdoms’, 142 refers to Heinz Löwe, Von Cassiodor zu Dante, Ausgewählte Aufsätze zur Geschichtsschreibung und politischen Ideenwelt des Mittelalters, Berlin 1973, 45. King follows this evolution against Carl Erdmann, Forschung zur politischen Ideenwelt des Frühmittelalters, Berlin 1951, 16–17 and Foltz, L’idée d’empire, 15. Foltz sees this idea already in Isidore of Seville’s work. 19 The Ottonian imperial program should not be seen as something static and coherent. On the contrary, it was very malleable, multifaceted and constantly reassessed and modified, see David A. Warner, ‘The representation of Empire: Otto I at Ravenna’, in Representations of Power in Medieval Germany 800–1500, 121–40. John W. Bernhardt, ‘Concepts and Practices of Empire in Ottonian Germany (950– 1024)’, ibid., 141–63. 20 Manfred Vorholzer, Kaisertum, imperial Königtum und Souveränität in der englishen Geschichtsschreibung. Ein Beitrag zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Formel rex imperator in regno suo, Inaugurale Dissertation der Philosophischen Fakultät der Friedrich Alexander Universität zur Erlangen, Nürnberg 1962. 21 See Amaury Chauou, L’idéologie Plantagenêt. Royauté arthurienne et monarchie politique dans l’espace Plantagenêt (XIIe-XIIIe siècles), Rennes 2001, 171–202, who follows Foltz, L’idée d’empire, 54. 15 16

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be explored through the place of conquest, military triumph and charisma as roots of imperial legitimacy for the Plantagenet Kings. After 1066, William I explicitly associated his power with an imperial hegemony, that is a political formation composed of at least two regna. This included Normandy, even if it was stricto sensu only a duchy, and Maine, even if this principality did not originate from a Carolingian public honour. However, the Recueil des actes des ducs de Normandie contains eight instances of regnum applied to Normandy, (and also one to Aquitaine) from 968 onwards.22 The most interesting is the preamble of an act of Robert I (dated 1030) which talks of his temporal realm (temporale regnum), of which he is the ‘dux et rector’ and which he rules.23 It echoes the Isidorean definition according to which anyone ruling (regere) effectively might claim to exert power over a regnum.24 To Warren Hollister, whether William was ruling Normandy as a king or as a duke was left an open question by his contemporaries, and this ambiguity was used by propagandists.25 As David Bates showed, there are many texts, like the Collectio Lanfranci, for example, which were well known in Normandy before 1066, indicating that even before his coronation William was already seen as ruling over many regna et gentes, in continuity with, and on the model of, Charlemagne.26 For instance, an anonymous poem on William’s death says some revealing things about the association made between his rise to a royal title and to imperial honours: Rex Anglorum et dux Normanniae/ Cenomannis Dominus patriae (...) Rex de Duce se fecit postea/ Dignissimum Romana laurea (…) Postquam suo junxit imperio/ Vos [gens Anglorum] tractavit regni judicio.27

Allusion to Roman laurels here can also be placed in the context of the struggle between pope and German emperor, each one fighting to secure their position. In the Lent synod of Rome of 1080, Gregory VII, who had excommunicated the Salian Henry IV for the second time, displayed his conception of the relationship between regnum and sacerdotium and his claim for papal authority over every type of political unit in Latin Christendom, having it in his power ‘to take away from and grant to each one according to his merits empires, kingdoms principalities, duchies, marches, counties, and possessions of all men’.28 Seeking an alliance with England, a few days later (on April 24 and May 8) Gregory VII sent letters to William of Colin Veach, Lordship on Four Realms, The Lacy Family, 1166–1241, Manchester 2015, 14–18, discusses this aspect. 23 RADN, no. 61. 24 The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, 199–206. 25 Hollister, ‘Normandy, France and the Anglo-Norman Regnum’, 206–207. 26 Bates, Normans and Empire, 82–3. On comparisons of the Norman conquest see also Nicholas Vincent, ‘More tales of the Conquest’, in Normandy and its Neighbours, 900–1250: Essays for David Bates, ed. David Crouch and Kathleen Thompson, Turnhout 2001, 271–301. 27 ‘King of the English and duke of Normandy/ Lord of the land of Maine (…)/ He rose from duke to king / most deserving the Roman laurels (…)/ After joining you [the English] to his empire/ he governed you with his royal justice’. Scriptores Rerum Gestarum Willelmi Conquestoris, ed. J. A. Giles, London 1845, 73–4. 28 The Register of Pope Gregory VII 1073–1085. An English Translation, VII, 14a, ed. H. E. J. Cowdrey, Oxford 2002, 340–44; Registrum Gregorii VII, MGH Epp. Sel. 2, 2 vols, Berlin 1920–3, II, 487:  in terra imperia regna principatus ducatus marchias comitatus et omnium possessiones pro meritis tollere unicuique et concedere. See also H. E. J. Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085, Oxford 1998 and Simon John, ‘The Papacy and the Establishment of the Kingdoms of Jerusalem, Sicily and Portugal: Twelfth-Century Papal Political Thought on Incipient Kingship’, JEH 68, 2017, 223–59. 22



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England, his eldest son and his wife, urging a familial reconciliation and consolidating the Norman dynasty as a royal line blessed by God.29 Such a confirmation of the Conqueror’s royal dignity was essential to guarantee his regality, and went with praises of William as gemma principium, excellentissimi fili or even carissimum et unicum filium sanctae Romanae ecclesiae – yet does it mean he was most worthy of Roman laurels?30 Gregory VII also sent a request which was ‘not set down in this letter’ but by ‘messengers to be said to you by word of mouth’.31 We know that Gregory VII required the King to pledge him fealty thanks to William’s letter in which he politely but firmly declined the pope’s demand.32 Against the Gelasian position of Gregory VII, William asserted this own conception of his royal power, by which pope and king should be supreme in their own fields: that is, he intended to stay the head of the English Church. Such supremacy in his own realm was actually a conception of imperium that was also claimed by the Byzantine emperors as well as Norman Kings of Sicily.33 Indeed, William seemed to have given more weight to the insular conception of his ‘imperial’ power than to the Roman conception, as the dating clauses of several chancery acta testify.34 This is especially apparent in the acta written just after 1066, as for example this grant to Jumièges Abbey of Hayling Island, where William is given the title of ‘Lord of the Normans, and in fact basileus by hereditary right of the nation of the English’, and goes on to say, ‘I agree in the empire of my realm all my defeated adversaries…’.35 The use here of the term basileus to express his imperial power was intended to link William’s authority to the AngloSaxon legacy. Such an imperial dating had its very roots in Anglo-Saxon chancery practices, and we should also see imperial references in the twelfth century in this continuum. Between Alfred and Harold II Godwinson, we can find either basileus or imperator as a title for English kings in no less than 191 charters, that is about a quarter of the documentation.36 Whereas imperator is less common, the period of their maximal use was around 980 and the imperial title was never lost. Under Edward the Confessor, seals also display such title as the usual practice.37 Historians long asserted these titles could only be found in suspicious documents and interpreted basileus in its old Greek meaning – that is ‘king’ – rather than placing it within its medieval context where it mostly designated the Byzantine Cowdrey, Gregory VII, 462–67. Registrum Gregori VII, i.I.31; ii.VII.23. 31 The Register of Pope Gregory VII, 353–4, VII.23. 32 Zacharia N. Brooke, ‘Pope Gregory VII’s Demand of Fealty from William the Conqueror’, EHR 26:102, 1911, 225–38; Catherine Morton, ‘Pope Alexander II and the Norman Conquest’, Latomus 34:2, 1975, 362–82. 33 Gilbert Dagron, ‘Empires royaux, royautés impériales. Lectures croisées sur Byzance et la France médiévale’, in Summa. Festschriften für Dieter Simon zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. R. M. Kiesow, R. Ogorek, S. Simiti, Frankfurt 2005, 81–97; Annelise Nef, ‘Imaginaire imperial, empire et oecuménisme religieux: quelques reflexions depuis la Sicile des Hauteville’, Cahiers de recherches Médiévales et Humanistes 24, 2012, 227–49; Francesco Calasso, ‘Origine italiana della formula “rex in regno suo est imperator”’, Rivista di Storia del Diritto Italiano 3, 1930, 213–59. 34 Regesta: William I, 271–86, no.59: the long version of the foundation of the Holy Trinity of Caen: Willelmo rege in Anglia feliciter regnante, XIIIIm anno eius imperii ; also no. 164: XIII anno imperii Guillelmi Anglorum regis ; no. 175; no. 303: anno dominice incarnationis millesimo LXXmo quinto etiam adepti imperii prenomitati gloriosi regis Wilellmi anno IIII to. 35 Regesta: William I, 525. 36 Arnaud Lestremau, ‘Basileus Anglorum. La prétention impériale dans les titulatures royales à la fin de la période anglo-saxonne’, Médiévales (forthcoming). 37 Frank Barlow, Edward the Confessor, London 1997, 135–7. 29 30

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emperor.38 Clear references to Constantinople are, however, strengthened by the also general use of the title primicerius, common in Byzantium and in the Codex Theodosianus.39 Although primicerius was often interpreted as a means to express the power of the English kings without reference to words of Roman and Latin domination,40 Patrick Wormald has suggested that, on the contrary, the title was a way to nurture an imperial attitude with explicit references to Roman history and that of Constantinople.41 The amphigoric title of the foundation charter of Selby Abbey, attributed to William I but actually a forgery of the second half of the twelfth century, also evokes William’s empire but in words that would have been inappropriate for eleventhcentury men. Rather, they more accord to twelfth-century minds: William, you the strongest and most powerful king of all these realms governed on earth by those who hold the royal sceptres, that is the greatest empire of the Land of the English...42

Such a term to describe the power of William would sit well in the context of the reign of Henry II, yet Henry’s chancery did not in fact describe his collection of territories running from Scotland to the Pyrenean mountains as an imperium. This can be explained by the fact that if this term was actually available to describe such a political configuration, it was also linked to a claim of territorial supremacy, that is, if we turn back to the ancient definition, a territory ruled with sacred power and consequently over which there is no superior authority. Yet, such sovereignty was contested on the continent, where Henry II had to recognize the King of France’s suzerainty, as a legacy from the ancient but unforgotten imperium francorum.43 In the 1150s, as Barbarossa was formulating his imperial rights at the Diet of Roncaglia, other imperial claims were still viable or even revitalized in the Western kingdoms.44 In 1152, a charter of Eleanor of Aquitaine confirming the grants of Louis VII to Fontevraud abbey describes her new husband Henry, who is not yet King of England, in the Carolingian style, as the one who ‘governs the empire of the Poitevins and the Angevins’.45 This is a very rare diplomatic formula from the Aquitanian Henry Loyn, ‘The imperial style of the 10th-century Anglo-Saxon kings’, History 40, 1955, 111–15. See also Barbara Yorke, ‘The Vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon Overlordship’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 2, 1981, 171–200 and George Molyneaux, ‘Why were some tenth-century English kings presented as rulers of Britain?’, TRHS 6th ser. 21, 2011, 59–91 at 63. 39 Eric John, Orbis Britanniae and Other studies, Leicester 1966, 50–1. It is even a heading in the Codex: see Codex Theodosianus, L. I, cap. 33 (Theodor Mommsen et al., Code Théodosien. I-XV, Code justinien, constitutions sirmondiennes, Paris 2008); Patrick Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, I, Legislation and its Limits, Oxford 2001, 36–39 and 282. Its use is common in the 950s and primicerius is predominantly used under Eadred and Edgar, with 57 occurrences (8% of their production). 40 It is an old interpretation proposed by Edward Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England, 8 vols, Oxford 1867, I, 133–47 and 548–65 and William Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England, 2 vols, Oxford 1874, I, 177. 41 Wormald, The Making of English Law, 444–45: ‘“Basileus” should surely be seen not as a characteristic hermeneutic Grecism, but as the known title of the heirs of Roe on Bosphorus.’ 42 Regesta: William I, 818–21, no. 272: Wilellmus fortissimus immo potentissimus rex omnium regum illorum a quibus eo tempore (s)ceptra regalis sub divo gubernabantur, maximum imperium Angliçe terrę regens... 43 Karl F. Werner, ‘Das vormittelalterliche Imperium im politischen bewusstsein Frankreichs (11–12 Jahrhundert)’, Historische Zeitschrift 200, 1965, 1–60. 44 Rahewinus Frisingensis, Gesta Friderici I. imperatoris, ed. G. Waitz and V. von Simson, MGH, SS 46, 1912, 162–351 at 236 sqq. 45 BNF MS latin 5480 fol. 486 (copies of the cartulary of Fontevraud by Roger de Gaignères), published 38



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chancery, but it accords with the formulation of an 1155 charter in which Louis VII claims imperium for himself. This Capetian charter was written in the context of Louis VII’s Spanish trip, when he went to deal with Alfonso VII, King of Castile and Leon (1126–1157), after having received his daughter Constance in marriage. No doubt Louis must have been impressed by Alfonso VII’s title, imperator totius Hispaniae.46 On his way back to Paris, Louis granted a charter in Azac to the church of Maguelonne, where he is entitled Ludovicus, Dei ordinante providentia Francorum imperator Augustus.47 Achille Luchaire, noticing the irregular form of this act, suggested that it was written by Languedocian lawyers rather than royal chancery clerks. If correct, this would explain why this formula never appears again, not even in the copy of the very same charter made by the royal chancery clerks in Paris, in 1156, where Louis is no more than Dei providentia rex Francorum.48 Such occurrences of the word imperium must then be understood in the context of competition between Henry, Louis and Alfonso. Louis had just renounced his right to the regnum of Aquitaine as a result of the annulment of his marriage to the regina pictavorum – as Eleanor was called in a Poitevin chronicle.49 With his divorce, Louis also lost the chance to make anew the long-sought dream of an imperium francorum, that would have included ‘Franks, Burgundians and Aquitanians’ as the twelfth-century ordines of royal crowning make clear.50 This suggests that the uses of imperium in Eleanor’s and Louis VII’s charters did not actually refer to the same thing: whereas Henry’s imperium had a clear Isidorian meaning, Louis’ imperium was more referring to a rhetoric of the Carolingian past rather than to the realpolitik of current affairs. Among Henry II’s acta, except in Grandmontine forgeries, the word imperium never appears to describe either his authority or his territories.51 Given this context, it is perhaps odd that William the Conqueror and his successors never made a concerted attempt to change their titles to an imperial one, as the kings of Leon and Castile did at the same time.52 Several issues must be in Calendar of Documents Preserved in France 918–1206, ‘Anjou: Part 1’, ed. J. Horace Round, London 1899, 372–94, considered by Leopold Delisle as ‘very curious’, see Recueil des actes d’Henri II roi d’Angleterre et duc de Normandie concernant les provinces françaises et les affaires de France, ed. Léopold Delisle and Élie Berger, Paris 1916–1920, I, 31–32, XXIV, no. 22. One of Charlemagne’s titles was Imperator Augustus Romanum gubernans Imperium. 46 On the Castilian case see Hélène Sirantoine, Imperator Hispaniae. Les idéologies impériales dans le royaume de León (IXe-XIIe siècles), Madrid 2012. This title was known by the Plantagenets and informally acknowledged as Robert of Torigni testifies in describing the marriage between Henry II and Eleanor’s daughter, also named Eleanor, with Amfurso imperatore (…) Huius imperatoris illa pars Hispaniae quae Castella vocatur regnum est. Robert de Torigni, Chroniques suivies de divers opuscules historiques, ed. Léopold Delisle, 2 vols, Rouen 1872, II, 22. 47 Layettes du Trésor des Chartes de l’année 755 à l’année 1223, ed. Alexandre Teulet and Joseph Delaborde, 2 vols, Paris 1862, I, 75–77, no. 141. Achille Luchaire, Études sur les actes de Louis VII. Histoire des institutions monarchiques de la France sous les premiers Capétiens, Paris 1885, 25–6. 48 Layettes du Trésor des Chartes, I, 77, no. 143. 49 Ex fragmentis a chronicorum Comitum Pictaviae, Ducum Aquitaniae, in Recueil des Historiens des Gaules et de la France, ed. Dom Bouquet and Leopold Delisle, 24 vols, Paris 1877, XII, 411. 50 Elisabeth A. R. Brown, ‘“Franks, Burgundians, and Aquitanians” and the Royal Coronation Ceremony in France’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 82, 1992, i–xii and 1–189. 51 Acta of the Plantagenets, ed. Nicholas Vincent et al., Oxford (forthcoming). Nicholas Vincent, ‘Regional variations in the Charters of King Henry II (1154–89)’, in Charters and charter scholarship in Britain and Ireland, London 2005, 70–119. On Grandmont’s forgeries see Leopold Delisle, ‘Examen de treize chartes de l’Ordre de Grandmont’, Mémoires de la société des antiquaires de Normandie 20, 1953–55, 171–221. Formulas such as merum et mixtum imperium are taken from the thirteenth-century Roman law lexicon. 52 Sirantoine, Imperator Hispaniae.

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raised to clear up this problem, focusing on legacy, legitimacy and consequences of such an appropriation. Unlike the King of France, who had Charlemagne, or the King of Castile-Leon, who had the legacy of the Visigothic Kingdom of Hispania, the Norman and Plantagenet dominions did not have any precursor-model upon which a claim to imperial sovereignty could rest. Of what could they have been ‘emperor’? David Bates has underlined the fact that the only occurrence of the word normananglus is in the Warenne chronicle, which was written in the second half of the twelfth century precisely to explain the unity of these two peoples one century after the conquest.53 But this idea of a unified people did not really match with the plurality of peoples and territories which seems to have been central to the concept of imperium in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. For instance, Alfonso VI (1065–1109) gave up the idea of one Hispania to assume a new title of imperator totius Hispaniae. The title was also taken by Alfonso VII, because it was, according to Helene Sirantoine, a more accurate description of the fragmented reality of the Hispanic kingdoms which he sought to rule through relations of vassalage.54 Moreover, once unified under a common gens, there would be no empire to rule over anymore, only a regnum. That is exactly what happened in England: in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the term Angli (or Angelcynn) came to identify all of the peoples over whom the king of Wessex ruled.55 Such an historical evolution was clear for twelfth-century men such as the anonymous writer known as the London Collector. He wrote that it was during the victorious reign of Ine of Wessex that ‘a single folk and a single people had been created throughout the whole kingdom of Britain. As a result everyone substituted the name “kingdom of the English” for what had hitherto been called “the kingdom of Britain”.’56 Yet, the Norman and Plantagenet political construct was something totally unidentified, overlapping the geo-historical units of Britain and France, although it was acknowledged or rather proclaimed (by the London Collector) that ‘imperium would be a more appropriate word de iure than kingdom (regnum) for such an assemblage of power’.57 Yet, lawfully, it was still the popes who had the legitimate authority to say what was or was not an empire. In 1080, Gregory VII had insisted on the unity of royal family and clear rules of succession to confirm the royal dignity to William over England and Normandy, as a single unit ruled by a long-lasting dynasty.58 However, 53 The Warenne (Hyde) Chronicle, ed. Elisabeth M. C. van Houts and Rosalind Love, Oxford 2013, lxiii–lxviii and Bates, Normans and Empire, 179, n. 85. 54 Sirantoine, Imperator Hispaniae, 285, 344–6. 55 Susan Reynolds, ‘What Do We Mean by “Anglo-Saxon” and “Anglo-Saxons”?’, The Journal of British Studies 24, 1985, 395–414 at 405; Sarah Foot, ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before the Norman Conquest’, TRHS, 6th ser., 6, 1996, 25–49; Nicholas Brooks, ‘Canterbury, Rome and English identity’, in Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West, ed. Donald Bullough and Julia M. H. Smith, Leiden 2000, 221–47. 56 effecti fuerunt gens una et populus unus per universum regnum Britannie….Deinde universi vocaverunt regnum Anglorum, quod ante vocatum fuit regnum Britannie. Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. Felix Liebermann, 3 vols, Halle 1903–16, I, 659. See also Rees R. Davies, The First English Empire, Oxford 2000, 16–17 and John Gillingham, ‘Expectations of Empire: some Twelfth- and Early Thirteenth-century English Views of What Their Kings Could Do’, in The English Isles: Cultural Transmission and Political onflict in Britain and Ireland, 1100–1500, ed. Sean Duffy and Susan Foran, Dublin 2013, 56–67. 57 Felix Liebermann, Über die Leges Anglorum, saeculo xiii ineunte Londoniis collectae, Halle 1884, 5–7: de iure potius appellari debet excellentia corone imperium quam regnum, see Davies, The First English Empire, 16–17. 58 Cowdrey, Gregory VII, 462–67.



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matters of succession still remained problematic throughout the period, leading to civil wars between William’s three sons, in 1135 after Henry I’s death, in 1173–74 and in 1199 between John and Arthur.59 While in the course of the eleventh century the old Frankish practice of dividing territories among heirs was progressively abandoned to promote the patrilinear model of male primogeniture, division still remained an option in reality.60 In Normandy, for instance, the custom of parage arose, giving preference to the eldest son, but also granting holdings to the younger sons.61 Working on the division of William I’s empire between his two sons, Barbara English has shown that the Conqueror also looked at the possibility of excluding William Rufus from his succession, for the benefit of Robert, who would then have inherited his father’s whole empire.62 Against the pope’s wish to create a unified Anglo-Norman regnum, Lanfranc eventually executed King William’s final disposition about succession.63 William complied with the succession rule of division, and his ‘empire’ was divided between two sons. The same rule prevailed after Alfonso VII’s death in 1157, after which the imperial title stopped being claimed by Castilian Kings.64 This case shows the fragility of these discursive and ideological constructs faced by the political and legal realities of the time. After Henry I’s reign, during which England and Normandy were reunited, the question of their division was again at stake. Despite the attempt of Norman barons to give the Duchy to Stephen’s older brother, Theobald of Blois, Stephen finally managed to keep Normandy and England united.65 Only the conquest of Normandy by the count of Anjou in the 1140s forced them apart once more. To prevent such disorders, Henry II decided to organize his own succession by mixing the Norman custom of parage, in which the second son was given lands the mother had brought into the family, and the Capetian tradition of crowning the heir to the kingdom while the father was still alive.66 This division was made with the agreement of the King of France, who received homage for Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine, in 1169 at Montmirail. Nevertheless, Henry II had spent much energy in retaining and extending his empire, so he sought to maintain its underlying unity through feudal relationships, by asking his younger sons to pay homage to their elder brother.67 This is essentially what the Capetians wished to do with their own ‘apanages’, and Andrew Lewis has shown that this created a kind of stability of

John Gillingham, ‘At the Deathbeds of the Kings of England, 1066–1216’, in Herrscher- und Fürstentestamente im Westeuropaïschen Mittelalter, ed. Brigitte Kasten, Cologne 2008, 509–30; Stephen Church, ‘Succession and Interregnum in the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Ireland in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’ (forthcoming). 60 James C. Holt, ‘Feudal Society and the Family in Early Medieval England: II. Notion of Patrimony’, TRHS, 5th ser. 33, 1983, 193–220 at 211–13; Jane Martindale, ‘Succession and Politics in the Romanspeaking World c.1000–1400’, in England and its Neighbours, 1066–1485: Essays in Honour of Pierre Chaplais, ed. Michael Jones and Malcolm Vale, London 1989, 19–41. 61 Eleanor Searle describes parage as ‘a kind of partible inheritance under the chairmanship of one son’, see Searle, Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, Los Angeles 1988, 143. 62 Barbara English, ‘William I and the Anglo-Norman Succession’, BIHR 64:155, 1991, 221–36. 63 Cowdrey, Gregory VII, 462; Eadmer, HN, 25. 64 Sirantoine, Imperator Hispaniae, 376–79. 65 Torigni, Chroniques, I, 200. 66 Andrew Lewis, Royal Succession in Capetian France. Studies on Familial order and the State, Boston 1981, 30–1, 162–3; Ralph V. Turner, ‘The problem of Survival for the Angevin “Empire”: Henry II, his Sons’ Vision versus Late Twelfth-century Realities’, American Historical Review 100, 1995, 75–96, n.17. 67 Turner, ‘The Problem of Survival for the Angevin “Empire”’; Le Patourel, Feudal Empire, ix, 2. 59

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possession and power through a policy of rotation of lands inside the royal family.68 Should we talk then, as Lewis Warren has suggested, of a familial federation rather than an empire? Strikingly, after this partition, whether Henry II’s sons were associated with or without ‘possession’,69 they were called ‘King of England, duke of Normandy and count of Anjou’ (Henry), ‘duke of Aquitaine’ (Richard), and ‘Count of Brittany’ (Geoffrey), while throughout his life Henry II kept the same title Rex Anglorum, dux Normannorum et Aquitanorum, Comes Andegavorum, as an indivisible whole, as – we might say – a kind of ‘imperial title’. This unity and the will to keep it as a whole in playing on rules of succession were also a concern of King Richard when he signed a convention with Philip Augustus in Messina in 1191, in which a clause stipulated that ‘if the king of the English had two male heirs or more, (he wants and grants that) the first-born hold in fief from [the King of France] all what he must hold from [him] this side of the Channel, and the others hold from [the King of France] in fief as three barons would have done either the lordship of Normandy, or those of Anjou and Maine, or the lordship of Aquitaine and Poitou’.70 It is within this context that we should understand praises of the Plantagenet hegemony over numerous lands that we find in letters and poems of their court, as an expression of their imperial power, in its hegemonic meaning.71 In a sirventes, admonishing the Young King, the troubadour Bertran de Born conveys this ideal: It is not in sleeping he got the Cumberland neither he’ll be king of the English or conquer Ireland nor he holds Angers, Montsoreau or Cande nor he got from the Poitevins the Tower Mirande neither he’ll be duke of the Norman land nor count palatine of Bordeaux or of the Gascons beyond the Landa or even lord of Bazas.72

Such an inventory can also be found in Chretien de Troyes, as if he were drawing a territorial crest: There were many counts and kings Normans, Bretons, Scots and Irish There were very rich barons Of England and Cornwall Lewis, Royal Succession, 161–71. John Le Patourel, ‘Angevin Succession and the Angevin Empire’, in Feudal Empire. Norman and Plantagenet, London 1984, ix. John Smith, ‘Henry II’s Heir: the Acta and Seal of Henry the Young King, 1170–83’, EHR 116, 2001, 297–326. 70 Et si rex Anglorum haberet duos heredes masculos aut plures, voluit et concessit quod ut major natu teneat in capite a nobis totum id quoddebet tenere ad nobis citra mare Anglie, et alius unam ex baroniis tribus tenebit a nobis in capite videlicet dominium Normannie, aut dominium Andegavie et Cenommanie, aut dominium Aquithanie et Pictavie. Recueil des Actes de Philippe Auguste, ed. H.-François Delaborde, 2 vols, Paris 1916, I, 464–65, no. 376; Thomas Rymer, Foedera, Conventiones Literae et Acta Publica, London 1816, I, 22, 6. 71 The Letters of Osbert of Clare Prior of Westminster, ed. Edward W. Williamson, Oxford 1929, 130: Dux illustris Normannorum et comes Andegavorum,/ Pictavorum dominator, Turonorum propugnator,/ cuius nutu vibrant enses populi Cenomannenses,/ Anglorumque plebs turbata, gratulatur pace data,/ Tibi coetus caeli plaudit, te victorem Deus audit. 72 Ja per dormir non er de Coberlanda/reis dels Engles, ni conquerra Yrlanda,/ ni tenr’Angieus ni Monsaurel ni Canda/ ni de Peiteus non aura la Miranda,/ ni sera ducs de la terra normanda,/ ni com palatz / ni de Bordels ni del Gascos par Landa,/ seigner ni de Basatz. Bertrand de Born, ‘D’un sirventes nom cal far loignor ganda’, in Gérard Gouiran, L’amour et la guerre. L’œuvre de Bertran de Born, Aixen-Provence 1985, 2 vols, I, 203–10, See also ibid., 244–45. 68 69



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From Wales to Anjou Maine and Poitou There were no knights of high rank Or noble and well-born ladies Among the best and most gracious Who did not go to the court of Nantes Where the King had called them.73

Again, in Bernard de Ventadour’s song Ges de chantar no.m pren talans, this accumulation is associated with a potentially worldwide power Like in Touraine and Poitou In Anjou and Normandy I wish, because he deserves it, He had the world in his power.74

This idea of a potentially universal power applied to Henry II was such a commonplace when praising him that we can also find it on his epitaph at Fontevraud. The first words – a tomb now suffices him for whom the world was not enough (Sufficit hic tumulus cui non suffecerat orbis)75 – were taken from Alexander the Great’s epitaph invented by Walter of Chatillon, in his Alexandreis, written in the early 1180s, and which swiftly spread.76 Like Alexander, who never bore the title imperator, Henry II claimed the same ‘imperial’ power for himself, that is a power over the world as dominus mundi, de facto, whether or not it had fitted with the definition of imperium in law.77 The text of his epitaph highlights the absence of a specific word (multiplicique modo) to express such a domination associated with empire. REX HENRICUS ERAM, MIHI PLURIMA REGNA SUBEGI MULTIPLICIQUE MODO DUXQUE COMESQUE FUI CUI SATIS AD VOTUM NON ESSENT OMNIA TERRAE CLIMATA TERRA MODO SUFFICIT OCTO PEDUM […].78

Besides Alexander’s universalism, such descriptions can also be interpreted as echoes of the Song of Roland. When dying, Roland remembers his conquests on behalf of Charlemagne, and as such the wide scope of his empire. I I I I

conquered conquered conquered conquered

for for for for

him Anjou and Brittany, him Poitou and Maine, him free Normandy, him Provence and Aquitaine

Chrétien de Troyes, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Daniel Poiron, Paris 1994, 162 (Erec et Enide) and Carleton W. Carroll, ‘Quelques observations sur les reflets de la cour d’Henri II dans l’œuvre de Chretien de Troyes’, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 37, 1994, 33–9. 74 The Songs of Bernart de Ventadorn, ed. Stephen G. Nichols and John A. Galm, Chapel Hill 1962, 97–9, song 21: Si com a Toren’ e Peitau/ e Anjau et Normandia,/ volgra car li convenria,/ argues tot le mon en poder. 75 Ralph of Diceto, Ymagines Historiarum, Opera Historica, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols, London 1876, II, 65. 76 The Alexandreis of Walter of Chatillon. A Twelfth Century Epic, xiv, lines 10.448–50, ed. and trans. D. Townsend, Philadelphia 1996, (lines 10.357–9 of the translation). 77 This definition of emperor as dominus mundi was developed by Barbarossa’s lawyers, distinguishing the domination de jure and de facto, see Walter Ullmann, ‘The medieval idea of Sovereignty’, EHR 64, 1949, 1–33 and Muldoon, Empire and Order, 87–100. 78 ‘I was King Henry, I subjected many Kingdoms/ I ruled in many ways, as duke and as count/For whom all the regions of the world weren’t enough for his wish/ a world of only eight feet is now sufficient’, see Robert Favreau, ‘L’épitaphe d’Henri II Plantagenêt à Fontevraud’, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 50, 2007, 3–10. Diceto, Ymagines Historiarum, II, 65. 73

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In light of all of the imperial imagery surrounding the Norman and Plantagenet kings, why would William the Conqueror have needed to claim the title of ‘emperor’? Actually, the choice to appropriate such a title against the pope’s will, as the King of Castile and Leon did, was certainly never seriously considered. Firstly, because it might have created an unfruitful diplomatic crisis with the pope and the German Emperor without increasing his real power. Domination of several peoples and territories was already commonly considered to be an empire in its insular and traditional meaning of hegemonic power. For the Plantagenets, the imperial title was simply impossible. They were vassals of the King of France and could not pretend to any kind of supremacy over all their lands, even if they actually ruled them as sovereigns. However, if Henry II could never seriously pretend to the imperial dignity, he used other means to express his imperial ambition. Obviously, Henry II was conscious that imperial honours brought a greater authority, associated with sacrality and glorious ascendency. Any ties with these honours were thus used for increasing his symbolical power. In choosing to be called Fitzempress or filius imperatricis,80 he was claiming an imperial status through his maternal legacy. When returning to England in 1125 after her husband Emperor Henry V’s death, Matilda brought with her most of the imperial treasure, including her crown which was then used for the crowning of Henry II at Westminster in 1154.81 Stephen of Rouen describes this crown in his Draco normannicus, picturing it as so heavy that it had two silver rings on the sides to hold it.82 It was made in two pieces and had a large jewel and a golden cross above the forehead of the bearer. Howden also described this crown at the coronation of Richard I in 1189.83 Chanson de Roland, ed. Leon Gautier, Tours 1872, 184–187, v. 2322–34: Avec elle je lui conquis l’Anjou et la Bretagne/ Je lui conquis le Poitou et le Maine/ Je lui conquis la libre Normandie/ Je lui conquis Provence et Aquitaine/ La Lombardie et toute la Romagne/ Je lui conquis la Bavière et les Flandres/Et la Bulgarie et la Pologne/Constantinople qui lui rendit hommage/Et la Saxe qui se soumit à son bon plaisir/Je lui conquis Écosse, Galles, Irlande/ Et l’Angleterre, son domaine privé/ En ai-je assez conquis de pays et de terres,/ Que tient Charles à la barbe chenue ! 80 Benedict of Peterborough, The Chronicle of the Reigns of Henry II and Richard I, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols, London 1867, II, 3, 29, 45, 96, 101, 106, 162. The attempt to impose such a sobriquet on filius Andegavensis comiti used in the Gesta Stephani was an ideological challenge at the beginning of the reign. 81 Marjorie Chibnall, ‘Matilda (1102–1167)’, ODNB, 18338. 82 Corona in primis solida ex auro et lapidibus pretiosis, qua filius imperatricis, Henricus rex postea coronatus extitit, tanti ponderis ut duabus virgis argenteis hinc inde sustentetur, cum imperator vel rex ea coronatur, Stephen of Rouen, Draco Normannicus, in Chronicles of the reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard, ed. Richard Howlett, London 1884, 758 (in additamenta: Matilda’s gift to Le Bec-Hellouin). 83 M. R. Holmes, ‘The Crowns of England’, Archaeologia 36, 1937, 73–90. In Howden the crown is a coronam auream magnam et ponderosam, lapidibus pretiosis undique decoratam, and as such during the ceremony, duo comites sustinebant propter ponderositatem ipsius. Howden, Chronica, III, 10–1. In June 1195, Richard received a new ‘great golden and very precious crown’ from the German emperor, Henry VI, in token of mutual friendship and with the mandate to invade Capetian lands to submit the king of France to the German imperium. Howden, Chronica, III, 300. 79



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To Wace, writing in the 1150s, the highest dignity, that of emperor crowned in Rome, was an honour that reflected on Matilda’s son, as the most powerful king of his time. Henry, son of Henry through Matilda his daughter Empress of Rome, nothing is higher He was a very powerful king, none of his neighbours can make it higher, nor wants to assault him.84

The use of the sobriquet as a place to express imperial ambition was then copied by the Capetians. Philip II is thus called Augustus by Rigord, a surname the Dionysian monk justifies thus: ‘He expanded his realm, like the Caesars expanded, by their military conquests, their empire.’85 Philip also had an imperial spread eagle’s wings carved on the royal counter seal.86 The symbolic recovery of imperial honours could be justified, then, when it was assumed following conquests and military victories. Many occurrences of the term imperium in chronicles of the reign of Henry II are often associated with the narrative of his conquests in the British Isles. Most of the time imperium is translated in the sense of a military leadership, but since Rome the glorious commander bearing the imperium militia had their victories under the augur of Jupiter. The sacral dimension of the imperium has been explored by Richard Koebner in his history of the concept of empire. His book opens with the story that takes place in Rome in 184 BC, when Scipio the African was accused of being corrupt. In his defence, he recalled the memory of his victories to save the Roman imperium (imperii vestri). The crowd, which had been at first hostile, was immediately transformed and he escaped dishonour thanks to the force and fascination that the word imperium exerted on people.87 This emotion-provoking dimension of imperium, born in the Roman forum, was part of the charisma of conquerors. For Gerald of Wales, imperial dignity should also be embodied by men of good moral and physical stature. In comparing Henry the Young King and Richard in his Topography of Ireland, he explains that both had strong personalities, ‘both also had a great stature, a bit more than average, and a body worthy of the empire (et formae dignae imperio)’.88 For Gerald, therefore, imperium had a physical presence in the body of the ruler. Gerald, like other writers of the twelfth century, was drawing from Suetonius’s Lives of Caesars to frame his portraits. Such a narrative pattern aimed not only to underline the glory of English Kings in equating their lives with those of Caesars, but was also used to give more credibility to the narrative.89 The Young King most Wace, Le roman de Rou, 7, v. 136–9, ed. Anthony Holden, Paris 1970: Henri fu fiz Henri, fiz sa fille Mahaut/ empereïz de Romme, ne pout estre plus haut./ Cil fu roiz moult puissant, n’out voisin tant plus haut/ Que il ne li feïst, s’il veusist, prendre (a)saut. 85 Rigord, Histoire de Philippe Auguste, ed. Elisabeth Carpentier et al., Paris 2006, 118–19. Raymonde Foreville, ‘L’image de Philippe Auguste dans les sources contemporaine’, in La France de Philippe Auguste. Le temps des mutations, ed. Robert-H. Bautier, Paris 1982, 115–32. 86 Robert-H. Bautier, ‘Les actes de la chancellerie royale française sous les règnes de Louis VII (1137– 1180) et Philippe Auguste (1180–1223)’, in Typologie der Königsurkunden, ed. J. Bistřický, Olmütz 1998, 111. online: http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/cid/cid1992/. 87 Koebner, Empire, 1 quotes from Gellius, Noctes Atticaes, IV, 18. 88 Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica et Expugnatio Hibernica, Dist III, c. li, in Opera, ed. James F. Dimock, 8 vols, London 1867, V,198. 89 Mary Schütt, ‘The Literary Form of William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum’, EHR 46, 1931, 255–60; Joan Blacker, The Faces of Time. Portrayal of the Past in Old French and Latin Historical Narrative of the Anglo-Norman ‘Regnum’, Austin 1994, 58, 63. The formal feature of Suetonius’s lives is his organization by themes rather than by chronological order: genus, initia imperii, res internae,or res externae, mores. 84

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notably was praised with imperial words, having at the same time ‘the genius of Caesar, the virtues of Hector, the strength of Achilles, the morality of Augustus and the eloquence of Paris’.90 The description of the power of the English kings within the lexical field of the word imperium shows that those who used the word drew on the classical repertory of the ancient empires, Greek or Roman, and used imperial models as references of governmental virtues. Such portraits inserted at the end of the Topographia Hibernica put the spotlight on the relationship between these imperial virtues and the conquest of Ireland, through which imperium as a sacral military authority was enabling blessed victory. How far did this conquest give symbolical legitimation for imperial claims to Henry II, who had mostly inherited or acquired his territories by marriage? After the unsuccessful campaign against Toulouse in 1159 and despite the abdication of the count of Brittany in 1166, the conquest of Ireland was the first made outside the Roman World. It is worthwhile to take into account the view on his political construct conveyed in La geste des Engleis en Yrlande, an anonymous poem probably of Normano-Welsh origins, written at the end of the twelfth century, and long known as The Song of Dermot and the Earl. There we can also find the word ‘empire’. The song tells how King Dermot MacMurrough came to meet Henry II and told him: Here I am, to claim, good lord In front of the barons of your empire I shall be your liege man Every day of the rest of my life.91

From the margin, from outside the heartland, Henry II’s territories were obviously an ‘empire’. That is, they conformed to a historical phenomenon of expansion, bearing or not an ideal of civilisation – here the feudal relationships. Irish princes may have cast on Henry II the figure of High King, as Gerald of Wales suggests when he praised Henry II as a ‘victorious King over kings and princes’92 whose superior and sacral authority conveyed by military conquest (imperium) appeared ‘a flashing light’ toward which Irish petty kings were blindly rushing.93 However, Henry thought to rule Ireland not as a high king but as a king appointed by the pope.94 In the treaty of Windsor, in 1175, the English domination of Ireland was associated with the payment of a tribute by the King of Connacht, whose superiority over the other Irish kings was confirmed by Henry, even if he wasn’t explicitly called ‘high king’.95 As early as 1155, Henry had sought to ask Pope Adrian IV for a crown Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione, Dist.II, c. ix, in Opera, VIII, ed. George F. Warner, London 1964, 174: Omnis honoris honos decoret, decus urbis et orbis/ Militiae splendor, gloria, lumen, apex./ Julius ingenio, virtutibus Hector, Achilles /Viribus, Augustus moribus, ore Paris. Bertrand de Born also wrote of the Young King that he would have been the ‘king of the gallant and the emperor of the valiant (Reis dels cortes et dels pros emperaire)’, in Gouiran, L’amour et la guerre, I, 240. 91 The Song of Dermot and the Earl: an old French poem from the Carew manuscript no. 596 in the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth Palace, Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition, 1994, v. 284–88: A vus me venc clamer, bel sire/Veans les baruns de tun empire/Ti liges home devendrai/Tut jors mé que viverai. 92 Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica, 190: in reges et principes victos rex et victor exercueris. 93 Ibid.: qualiter fulguranti adventus vestri lumine attoniti, occidentales reguli, tanquam ad lucubram avunculae, ad vestrum statim imperium convolaverint. 94 Stephen Church, ‘Political Discourses at the Court of Henry II and the Making of the New Kingdom of Ireland: The Evidence of John’s Title dominus Hibernie’, History 102: 353, 2017, 808–23. 95 Rex Hiberniae was a title recognized by Rome but disputed by the princes of Ireland. Edmund Curtis, A History of Medieval Ireland, 1086–1513, London 2013, 8–12; Sean Duffy, ‘Henry II and England’s insular Neighbours’ in Henry II: New Interpretations, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Nicholas Vincent, Woodbridge 2007, 129–153; Howden, Chronica, II, 84–5. 90



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for Ireland as he prepared to conquer the island to grant to his brother, William.96 Indeed, Ireland had long been considered a kingdom, and was frequently referred as regnum Hyberniae in contemporary sources.97 His mother Matilda’s opposition discouraged Henry II from embarking on his project until the opportunistic invasion of 1171 gave him the chance to achieve it. By 1177, Henry II considered appointing his youngest son John ‘king of Ireland’, and obtained from Alexander III a golden ring for his investiture even if the papal privilege Quoniam ea was actually a fake. Henry II also secured a crown fashioned in the shape of peacock feathers from the pope. According to Nicholas Vincent, this detail is not without importance because a peacock crown for Ireland would have been a peculiarly appropriate recognition of English victory, echoing not only the rhetoric of conquest but specifically the very text, the Donation of Constantine, upon which the papacy, and hence the kings of England had fashioned their claims to sovereignty.98 Although Pope Urban III thus finally accepted John’s crowning in 1185, the ceremony never happened and the English kings did not claim the title of Rex Hiberniae before 1542, even if they had ruled Ireland as kings since at least 1175.99 In contrast to Ireland, Scotland already had a king recognized by Rome. After having lost the war in 1174, the Scottish King William the Lion and all his barons had to pledge homage to Henry II in York in 1175, making Scotland a vassal kingdom of Henry II.100 We can find the word imperium used in this context, to express different realities. One of these occurrences is in Jordan Fantosme’s record of the war between the English and the Scots in 1173 and 1174, when Roger of Stuteville, constable of Wark castle, assaulted by the Scottish armies, had to negotiate to surrender the castle. His use of imperium appears in the middle of a biblical metaphor: And will say to my lord neither must he sing nor laugh: ‘If Jesus does not take care of the people of his empire He will not see them, for they will be all delivered by martyrdom’.101

The biblical reference gives, here, a particular meaning to empire, not as a territorial power, but as the community of all the Christians, that is people who have faith in their lord. This definition, then, joins the conception of empire as universal power exerted on men and space alike. Such a polysemy should not be seen as something problematic; on the contrary, it was the strength of this political concept Torigni, Chroniques, I, 296; Anne J. Duggan, ‘Totius christianitatis caput. The pope and the princes’, in Adrian IV the English Pope (1154–1159), Studies and Texts, ed. Brenda Bolton and Anne J. Duggan, London 2003, 105–56. 97 For regnum Hiberniae see also GND, VII, c. 41, vol. II, 180–1; Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica, III, c. xvi, 161. 98 Nicholas Vincent, ‘English Lordship in Ireland: 1200–1550’, in The Cambridge History of Ireland, I, 600–1500, ed. Brendan Smith, Cambridge 2018, 216–17. 99 On the diversion of the crown sent by Urban III see Howden, Chronica, II, 306–7 where he gives a slightly different version of his Gesta; see also John F. O’Doherty, ‘Rome and the Anglo-Norman Invasion of Ireland’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record 42, 1993, 131–45. 100 Since 1114 and the marriage of David I to the heiress of Huntingdonshire, kings of Scotland were paying homage only for their English honour. Torigni, Chroniques, I, 305; Howden, Chronica, II, 82: coram rege Scottiae et David frater suo, et universo populo, episcopi et comites et barones et milites de terrae regis Scotiae juraverunt domino regi Angliae, et Henrico filio suo, et haeredibus eorum, fidelitatem contra omnes hominem sicut ligiis dominis suis. 101 Jordan Fantosme, Chronicle of the War between the English and the Scots in 1173 and 1174, v. 514–516, ed. Francisque Michel, London 1840, 24–25: E dirrai à mum seigneur mar deit chanter ne rire/ Si Jesus n’en prent cunrei, la gent de son empire/ Ne’s verra dès qu’il serrunt tuz livrez à martire. 96

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that included at the same time the idea of superior authority, territorial hegemony and a power able to create community – political community. Another use of imperium in this context is the description by Howden of the insertion of Galloway into the Kingdom of England. The Gallovidian princes, Uchtred, Fergus and Gilbert, had rebelled against Henry II and in consequence ‘despite their numerous prayers and gifts, he removed them from the domination of the King of Scotland and subjugated them to his empire’.102 The contrast made between dominium and imperium underlines the difference between the two natures of power: imperium is not just another lordship, it can be understood as a superior power issued from the military victory, but here also in its territorial meaning, that is, sovereignty. These princes became barons of his empire, integrating a kind of imperial community, more imagined than really homogeneous, as the events of the early thirteenth century will show.103 It has been noted that the word imperium occurs mostly in the discursive context of the expansion of the English domination in the British Isles with the creation, which Rees Davies called ‘the first English empire’.104 In this empire, power relationships were formulated in feudal terms, giving great autonomy to local authorities in Scotland, Wales and Ireland.105 The integration of Welsh territories (Pura Wallia and not Welsh marches) in this feudal empire was also regulated by treaties and homages paid by Lord Rhys to Henry II at Gloucester in 1175 and Geddington in 1177.106 Hence, English hegemony was replacing the idea of an overkingship that had been part of Welsh political culture since the tenth and eleventh centuries.107 The conquest of the Welsh Marches, on the other hand, integrated territories into the English empire by a process of settlement of knights and castles.108 The use of castles to establish a territorial power called imperium is a process by which the Normans were said to have seized England, in the Gesta Stephani for instance: After the Normans, by making war, had subjugated the English, they put lands under the yoke of their empire by building innumerable castles.109

But, most strikingly, the word imperium almost never occurs when it comes to describe the power of the Plantagenets over their continental lands. For instance, Roger of Howden, when relating Henry II’s campaign in Poitou in 1174, talks about Howden, Chronica, II, 63: Regi vero Angliae patri plurimum supplicaverunt et dona plurima obtulerunt, ut ispe eos a dominio regis Scotiae eriperet, et suo subjugaret imperio. 103 One of the main reasons given by historians for the collapse of the empire in 1203–1214 is the disunity of the fragmented political society, see James C. Holt, ‘The End of the Anglo-Norman Realm’, Proc. Brit. Acad., 61, 1975, 223–65 and Nicholas Vincent, ‘King Henry II and the Poitevins’, in La cour Plantagenêt, ed. Martin Aurell, Poitiers 2000, 103–35. 104 Davies, The First English Empire, 16–17. 105 Rees R. Davies, ‘Keeping the native order: the English king and the “Celtic” rulers, 1066–1216’, Peritia. Journal of the Medieval Academy of Ireland 10, 1996, 212–24. 106 Howden, Chronica, II, 133. 107 Rees R. Davies, The Age of Conquest. Wales 1063–1415, Oxford 1991, 290–1; Nicholas J. Higham, ‘Medieval “overlordship” in Wales: the Earliest Evidence’, The Welsh History Review, 16: 2, 1992, 145–59; Wendy Davies, ‘Celtic Kingship in the Early Middle Ages’, in Kings and Kingship in Medieval Europe, ed. Anne J. Duggan, London 1993, 101–24. 108 Norman J. G. Pounds, The Medieval Castle in England and Wales. A Social and Political History, Cambridge 1994; Castles in Wales and the Marches: Essays in Honour of D. J. Cathcart King, ed. John R. Kenyon and Richard Avent, Cardiff 1987. 109 Gesta Stephani, ed. Kenneth R. Potter, with new introduction and notes by R. H. C. Davis, Oxford 1976, 9: Postquam autem Normanni, bello comisso, Anglos sibi subjugarunt, hanc etiam suo imperio terram adjacentem cum castellis innumeris annuere. 102



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domination (dominio suo subjugavit),110 whereas Ralph of Diceto, relating the same campaign but in England a few months later says, ‘all the castles of England and of all the Marches of his empire were placed under the old King’s ward’.111 Was sovereignty thus only a British matter? Indeed, it seems that the King of France’s claim of feudal superiority over all the lands that had belonged to the former imperium Francorum prevented any other claim of sovereignty over them. English writers, such as Henry of Huntingdon, had recognized this claim when asserting Eustace, King Stephen’s son, ‘was made the French King’s man for Normandy, which belongs to the French overlordship (Francorum adiacet imperio)’.112 Even John, wishing to define his power in such a term, could not but say that he had only a quasi-imperium given the homage he did to the King of France.113 While it was not possible to talk about the imperial power of the English King in France, such an idea was common in England long before the Norman Conquest. As previously shown, imperial conceptions of royal power existed in the British Isles, in the continuity of the ancient tradition of the Bredwalda, that is, the title given by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to the kings who had established their supremacy over their neighbours before the unification of the tenth Century.114 The twelfth-century uses were most certainly designed to underline the continuity with of these former conceptions. The relevance of these representations can be seen, for example, in the genealogy written by Aelred de Rievaulx in 1153–54, in which he recalls that ‘Egbert, who by his great probity, brought together under his empire the lands of England up to Humber, that were until then divided between several kings. That is why he was called the first king of all the English.’115 The first page of Ralph of Coggeshall’s English Chronicle, written about 1201, opens on the Norman conquest described as the fair fall of Harold ‘who had unjustly taken the empire of England (qui imperium Angliae injuste usurpaverat)’.116 By this word he was probably willing to underline the singularity of the former imperial conceptions of the British imperium, from which issued the unification of the old kingdoms of Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria, that ever kept its independence from the Carolingian domination. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, thinking of Britain in terms of an ‘English imperium’ was commonly held as Rees Davis pointed out.117 The conceptual building that Davies qualified as ‘a typically English solution to British problem’ also tended to weaken the language of imperium, because it sought Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta, I, 71: Interim rex Angliae profectus, fuerat cum exercitu suo in Pictaviam et multas munitions et castella in ea cepit et in dominio suo subjugavit. 111 Diceto, Ymagines Historiarum, I, 414: Universa castella per Angliam et per marchiam totam ad imperium Regis patris deputata sunt custodiae. 112 Huntingdon, 708–9. 113 A King John charter in 1202 mentioned in Rymer, Foedera, I, 41–42; noted in Ralph V. Turner, ‘King John’s Concept of Royal Authority’, History of Political Thought 17, 1996, 1157–78. 114 Patrick Wormald, ‘Bede, the Bretwalda and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum’, in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society. Studies presented to J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, ed. Patrick Wormald, Donald A. Bullough and R. Collins, Oxford 1983, 99–129; Fanning, ‘Bede, Imperium and Bredwaldas’. 115 Ailred de Rievaulx, Genealogia regum Angliae, et regis Scotia, in PL, 195, cols 716–718: suo subjugaret imperio. Colin Veach kindly also pointed out to me the testimony of the Lincolnshire writer, Geofrey Gaimar, who wrote in 1138 that King Edgar ‘held the land as an emperor … He alone ruled over all the kings, and over the Scots and the Welsh. Never since Arthur had any king such power’, Geffrei Gaimar, L’Estoire des Engleis, History of the English, lines 3561–7, ed. and trans. Ian Short, Oxford 2009. 116 Radulf de Coggeshall, Chronicon Anglicanum, ed. Joseph Stevenson, London 1875, 1. 117 de iure potius appellari debet excellentia corone imperium quam regnum in Über die Leges Anglorum saeculo XII, Ineunte Londoniis Collectae, ed. Felix Liebermann, Halle 1894, 17; Davies, The First English Empire, 16–17. 110

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to fight against the lingering British/Welsh idea of a monarchy over all Britain by eliminating any reference to Britain and replacing it with England.118 Hence, claims for hegemony over the whole of Britain changed in the course of the thirteenth century, when lawyers tended to give a more legal content to this idea of imperial Kingship, in defining the ‘feudal’ rights of the English King over Welsh and Scottish business. When the imperium Britanici was resurrected in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was employed with a completely different meaning.119 The idea that only insular lands among the Plantagenet ones could be named as an empire suggests that the use of this word was much more complex than simply to describe a geopolitical order. This word conveyed also an historical dimension associated with the memory of the ancient past through the legendary figures of the Caesars or Alexander, or through the legacy of the Bretwaldas.120 That is why, beyond charters and chronicles, historical figures must also be analysed to understand how imperial conceptions were shaped and figure in historical narratives and vernacular literature, but that is another chapter. I would like to finish by summarizing the three moments when the languages of empire surfaced and intertwined. First, in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, when the Frankish legacy of the Norman met the insular one of the Anglo-Saxon and when the conception of a trans-channel government over two regna challenged the contest between popes and German emperors. The second was in the mid 1150s, after the formation of Henry II’s empire, in the context of a claim of a dominium mundi expressed in Roncaglia, the circulation of Ulpian’s ideas of imperium as absolutism and the experiments of imperial title by other European Kings.121 And finally, the rise from the mid 1170s, when Henry II had to redefine his authority over all his territories after the Great Rebellion and the organization of his succession, of a reshaped idea of an Imperium Britannicum to support the anglicization of the Isles in the thirteenth century. In each of these periods vocabulary of empire was activated to help contemporaries to think about the world abstractly and politically, and to describe the nature of power as it was exerted de facto if not de jure. In this discrepancy between practice and right lay the reasons why neither William nor his successors ever attempted to take the imperial title. Imperium remained throughout the period a political fiction. The fact that it has accumulated more and different meanings since the Middle Ages should not cause us to discard it as a conceptual term or prevent us from studying its historicity.122

Huntingdon, 12–13, see Davies, The First English Empire, 48–9; William of Newburgh, Historian rerum Anglicarum, ed. Richard Howlett, 4 vols, London 1884–5, I, 132; Gervase of Canterbury, Historical Works, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols, London 1879–80, II, 21; Gillingham, ‘Expectations of Empire’, 56–67. 119 Davies, The First English Empire, 52. 120 Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica, III, c. li, p. 198. 121 Yves Sassier, Royauté et idéologie au Moyen Âge: Bas-empire, monde Franc, France (IVe-XIIe siècle), Paris 2012, 320–36. 122 Alejandro Colás, Empire, Cambridge 2007, and Jane Burbank and Frederic Cooper, Empires in World History, Princeton, 2011 are attempts to study shapes of empire in history, and their place in political imagination.

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CHILD KINGSHIP AND NOTIONS OF (IM)MATURITY IN NORTH-WESTERN EUROPE, 1050–1262* Emily Joan Ward When Rigord (d. c.1207) recalled the contemporary reception of Philip II ‘Augustus’ (1165–1223) sometime after his succession to the French throne as a fourteen-yearold boy in 1179, the monk of Saint-Denis claimed that ‘the knights of all of France, the citizens, and other townspeople, seeing the marvellous works of the king being done in their own time…regarded the king as an adolescent of innately good character and…praised God who gave such a powerful ruler to men’.1 Such panegyric praise for the young king’s potestas in the early 1180s was unadulterated hyperbole from a writer presenting his narrative to Philip several years later, after the Treaty of Boves in 1185 and almost certainly following Philip’s return from the Holy Land in 1191 or 1192.2 Nevertheless, we can contrast Rigord’s description of Philip’s maturity and ability to rule alone as adolescens with Matthew Paris’s account, some eighty years later, of the rule of Alexander III, king of Scots (1241–1286), when he, like Philip, was in his mid-to-late teens. Writing of events in 1257, several years after Alexander’s succession as a seven-year-old boy in July 1249, Matthew claimed that the king ‘from whose adolescence the greatest benefit was hoped for the kingdom of Scotland – misgoverned too unbecomingly … and to prevent his breaking out in worse ways they [the inhabitants and natives of Scotland] placed the king himself and the queen under custody again’.3 Rigord and Matthew’s accounts of two adolescent kings both acknowledge the relationship between notions of male maturity and royal power, but they also provide indications of important continuities and changes in contemporary understanding of a boy king’s progression to adulthood over the central Middle Ages. For both Rigord and Matthew, a ruler’s adolescentia corresponded with his late teens, suggesting stability in the acceptance of established stages of the male life cycle between kingdoms and over time. Despite this comparable notion of the concept of adolesI am grateful to Liesbeth van Houts and John Gillingham for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Emmanuel College and the Institute of Historical Research provided funding to support my attendance at the 40th Battle Conference in Paris, allowing me to benefit from discussions with and remarks from the conference attendees. This paper draws on research undertaken for my doctoral thesis: ‘Child Kingship in England, Scotland, France, and Germany, c.1050–c.1250’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge 2017. 1 Rigord, Histoire de Philippe Auguste, ed. Elisabeth Charpentier, Georges Pon, and Yves Chauvin, Paris 2006, 154: Videntes autem milites tocius Francie et cives et alii burgenses opera regis miraculosa que tempore ipsorum, Deo ordinante, fiebant, regem bone indolis adolescentem contemplantes et opera ipsius admirantes, benedixerunt Deum qui talem potestatem dedit hominibus. 2 For the dating and purpose of the Gesta Philippi, see Rigord, Histoire, 60–85. 3 Matthew Paris, Chronica Maiora, ed. Henry Richard Luard, 7 vols, RS 57, 1872–84, V, 656: rex Scotiae A[lexander], de cuius adolescentia fructus sperabatur regno quamplurimum profuturus, [cum] indecenter nimis deliraret…ne ad deteriora prorumperet, ipsum regem et reginam sub custodia reponentes. Translation amended from Scottish Annals from English Chroniclers A.D. 500–1286, ed. Alan O. Anderson, Stamford 1991, 376. *

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cence, however, those around Philip and Alexander held different views regarding provisions for the boy kings and their kingdoms as they negotiated their transition to adulthood. Matthew Paris’s passage introduces an explicitly legal context to Alexander’s maturity; Alexander and his wife Margaret (1240–1275) needed to be placed sub custodia for the good of the kingdom. This is not the sole indicator of a more legally defined notion of maturity by the mid thirteenth century. I will argue throughout this paper that we can identify a shift over the central Middle Ages from vague notions of maturity to more legally defined ones, which clearly shaped ideas of child rulership. The longue durée of the impact of childhood on kingship, and of developments in child rulership, has received little attention. The fact that modern scholarship still tends to approach kingship from the isolated perspective of one kingdom exacerbates the discrepancies in historians’ approaches to minority reigns and in the attention devoted to different child kings.4 This is particularly true for the study of Scottish kingship, which is rarely placed into a wider European context.5 For Germany, despite the rich historiography on child kingship in the earlier Middle Ages, the eleventh-century boy king Henry IV (1050–1106) receives only fleeting attention.6 Henry is viewed as the end of a Frankish-Germanic ‘experiment’ in child kingship, his contemporary context ignored. Elsewhere, whilst the minorities of some boy kings receive scrupulous attention, their experience is rarely viewed comparatively alongside that of other child rulers.7 For other kings, their later adult reputation influences and dominates perceptions of the period when they were a child.8 A national framework restricts what little comparative research exists on child rulerSeveral historians have stressed the problems posed by an emphasis on exceptionalism and the assumption of fundamental differences in kingship between realms: Timothy Reuter, ‘Modern Mentalities and Medieval Polities. Inaugural Lecture at University of Southampton, 1995’, in Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, ed. Janet L. Nelson, Cambridge 2006, 3–18; Björn Weiler, Kingship, Rebellion and Political Culture: England and Germany, c.1215–c.1250, Basingstoke 2007; Nicholas Vincent, ‘Twelfth and Thirteenth-Century Kingship: An Essay in Anglo-French Misunderstanding’, in Les idées passent-elles la Manche? Savoirs, représentations, pratiques (France-Angleterre, Xe–XXe siècles), ed. Jean-Philippe Genêt and Francois-Joseph Ruggiu, Paris 2007, 21–36. 5 Some recent scholarship is beginning to counteract the marginalisation of Scotland from a wider European perspective: Melissa Pollock, The Lion, the Lily, and the Leopard: The Crown and Nobility of Scotland, France, and England, and the Struggle for Power (1100–1204), Turnhout 2015. Anglo-Scottish comparisons have a far longer tradition: Judith A. Green, ‘Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1066–1174’, in England and Her Neighbours, 1066–1453, ed. Michael Jones and Malcolm Vale, London 1989, 53–72; G. W. S. Barrow, Scotland and its Neighbours in the Middle Ages, London 1992; A. A. M. Duncan, ‘John King of England and the Kings of Scots’, in King John: New Interpretations, ed. Stephen Church, Woodbridge 1999, 247–71; David Carpenter, ‘Scottish Royal Government in the Thirteenth Century from an English Perspective’, in New Perspectives on Medieval Scotland, 1093–1286, ed. Matthew Hammond, Woodbridge 2013, 117–59. 6 Theo Kölzer, ‘Das Königtum Minderjähriger im fränkisch-deutschen Mittelalter. Eine Skizze’, Historische Zeitschrift 251, 1990, 291–323; Thilo Offergeld, Reges pueri: das Königtum Minderjähriger im frühen Mittelalter, Hannover 2001, where Offergeld briefly considers Henry IV at 785–97. 7 Uniquely for a child king, Henry III of England’s minority has been the specific focus of two monographs: Kate Norgate, The Minority of Henry the Third, London 1912; David Carpenter, The Minority of Henry III, London 1990. Carpenter, 123 only cites Frederick II as a directly contemporary comparison for Henry. 8 The tendency of modern historians to see Louis IX of France as either ‘Saint King’ or ‘Crusading King’ relegates the first decade of his reign to a lesser place in the historiography: William Chester Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership, Princeton 1979; Jean Richard, Saint Louis, roi d’une France féodale, soutien de la Terre sainte, Paris 1983, ed. Simon Lloyd and trans. Jean Birrell as Saint Louis: Crusader King of France, Cambridge 1992. Even Jacques Le Goff treats the first two decades of Louis’s life sparsely, largely focusing on contextual discussion: Saint Louis, Paris 1996, 31–127. 4



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ship, particularly discouraging any attempts at comparison between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.9 Even Thomas Vogtherr and Christian Hillen, who, exceptionally among modern scholars, compare instances of child kingship across several kingdoms, do so in a relatively short time period, focusing on the early decades of the thirteenth century.10 Devoid of the context of earlier centuries, their approach provides initial remarks of comparison and contrast but little understanding of how wider developments in rulership across the central Middle Ages affected child kingship. Yet, the problem of an underage king produced similar approaches across traditional political boundaries. Wider societal, cultural, and legal changes similarly affected conceptions of child rulership throughout north-western Europe. I will focus here on three key themes: the framework and background to a child king’s (im)maturity; increasing legal influences; and knighthood as a rite of passage to adulthood. Analysis of these areas shows that, whilst some ideas regarding a boy king’s (im)maturity remained constant between the mid eleventh and the mid thirteenth centuries, this was also a period of important change which brought legal clarification to a child ruler’s progression to maturity and shifted contemporary notions of male maturity at a royal level. Framework and background to a child king’s (im)maturity Immaturity did not preclude a boy’s introduction to or involvement in kingship. Kings prepared their sons for rule from infancy using a variety of strategies which could additionally demonstrate the ruler’s intentions for royal succession publicly. In some cases, however, the heir’s immaturity affected the schemes of association the king used. Henry I of France (d. 1060) deliberately waited until his son, Philip I (1052–1108), had reached the age of seven before associating the boy with royal rule by crowning him at Reims.11 In the declaration that Philip read, accepted and signed on 23 May 1059, he swore to uphold his coronation promises quantum potuero (‘as far as I am able’).12 Even in the ritual liturgy of coronation, contemporary notions of maturity influenced representations of a king’s abilities. Other strategies of association, especially magnates swearing oaths of fidelity to the king’s eldest son, were far less dependent on paternal sensitivity to immaturity and more responsive to the current political situation. Nonetheless, the young age at which infant sons began to be included in networks of lordship and kingship attracted attention from contemporary authors. Lampert of Hersfeld, writing in the 1070s, accentuated Henry IV’s unbaptized status (adhuc caticuminus) when his father arranged for the German princes to promise under oath their fidelity to the six-week-old child on Christmas F. Olivier-Martin, Les régences et la majorité des rois sous les Capétiens directs et les premiers Valois (1060–1375), Paris 1931; André Poulet, ‘Capetian Women and the Regency: The Genesis of a Vocation’, in Medieval Queenship, ed. John Carmi Parsons, Stroud 1994, 93–116; The Royal Minorities of Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Charles Beem, New York 2008. 10 Thomas Vogtherr, ‘“Weh dir, Land, dessen König ein Kind ist.” Minderjährige Könige um 1200 im europäischen Vergleich’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 37, 2003, 291–314; Christian Hillen, ‘The Minority Governments of Henry III, Henry (VII) and Louis IX Compared’, Thirteenth Century England 11, 2007, 46–60. 11 Pope Alexander III encouraged Louis VII of France (1120–1180) to crown his son Philip (later Philip II) at the same age: Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de France [henceforth RHF], ed. Bouquet et al., 24 vols, 1840–1904, XV, 925–6. For discussion of the significance of age seven: Matthew Strickland, Henry the Young King, New Haven 2016, 41. 12 Ordines coronationis Franciae: Texts and Ordines for the Coronation of Frankish and French Kings and Queens in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard A. Jackson, 2 vols, Philadelphia 1995–2000, I, 228. 9

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Day 1050.13 Similarly, in England, when Gervase of Canterbury described the fealty sworn at Marlborough in September 1209 to King John (d. 1216) and his son Henry, later to become Henry III (1207–1272), he juxtaposed the age of the men swearing the oath, all fifteen or older, with the age of ‘the king’s heir’ (regis haeredi), a three-year-old parvulus.14 Monastic historians largely regarded an infant’s association in royal rule as something out of the ordinary. Similarly, at a boy king’s succession, authors made explicit references to the new king’s age, or used phrases which emphasized his childhood.15 Kings struck by illness, and thus by the immediate inevitability of their death and the realisation that they would be leaving a child to succeed, often made further provisions to secure stability and arrange affairs in the kingdom as far as possible before their death.16 Their intention to ease the child’s transition to rulership was similar despite the different forms such arrangements took. Yet, even as rulers informed plans for the future care of king and kingdom, they never attempted to impose ideas regarding their young successor’s progression to maturity. In England, John’s deathbed decisions in 1216 to leave his heir and kingdom under papal protection and to call on the support of magnates, prelates, and military captains in his testament certainly influenced the personnel around Henry III when he succeeded, but John’s arrangements made no reference to his son’s childhood.17 Records of decisions regarding how to manage a child’s immaturity are absent even as kings came to rely increasingly on written deathbed testaments or testaments de croisade, which brought greater legal clarity to their intentions for succession or the distribution of territories and wealth.18 Details regarding how government would work in practice under a boy king, or stipulations for when the child would attain his majority, are lacking. Philip II’s ordinance issued in 1190, before he departed France for the Holy Land, is the exception which proves the rule. The purpose of this document was, first and foremost, to set out arrangements for absentee kingship. But it gave due consideration to the possibility that Philip could die whilst abroad. In the case of his death, Philip ordered the protection of half the royal treasury for the needs of his young son Louis, then aged three, ‘until he reaches an age at which he

Lampert of Hersfeld, Annales, in Lamperti monachi Hersfeldensis opera, ed. Oswald Holder-Egger, MGH SS rer. Germ. 38, Hannover 1894, 1–304 at 63. Henry’s baptism took place in Cologne over Easter 1051. 14 Gervase of Canterbury, Gesta Regum, in The Historical Works, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols, RS 73, 1879–80, II, 104; see also John R. Maddicott, ‘The Oath of Marlborough, 1209: Fear, Government and Popular Allegiance in the Reign of King John’, EHR 126, 2011, 281–318 at 281–2, 284. 15 Select examples include: Les miracles de Saint Benoît…, ed. E. de Certain, Paris 1858, 314; Frutolf of Michelsberg, Chronica, in Frutolfs und Ekkehards Chroniken und die anonyme Kaiserchronik, ed. Franz-Josef Schmale and Irene Schmale-Ott, Darmstadt 1972, 48–121 at 72; William of Newburgh, The History of English Affairs, ed. P.G. Walsh and M. J. Kennedy, 2 vols, Warminster 1998 and Oxford 2007, I, 100–1. 16 Before his death, Emperor Henry III secured the fidelity of magnates who had rebelled earlier in his reign to his son, Henry IV: Berthold of Reichenau, Chronicon, in Die Chroniken Bertholds von Reichenau und Bernolds von Konstanz, ed. I. S. Robinson, MGH SS rer. Germ. N. S. 14, Hannover 2003, 161–381 at 180–1. David I, king of Scots, renewed and corrected his testament from his deathbed: Aelred of Rievaulx, Eulogium Davidis regis Scotorum, in Vitae antiquae sanctorum…, ed. John Pinkerton, London 1789, 451. 17 The Letters and Charters of Cardinal Guala Bicchieri, Papal Legate in England, 1216–1218, ed. Nicholas Vincent, Woodbridge 1996, 105–6; S. D. Church, ‘King John’s Testament and the Last Days of his Reign’, EHR 125, 2010, 505–28. 18 Le Goff, Saint Louis, 76–7, 82; Andrew W. Lewis, Royal Succession in Capetian France: Studies on Familial Order and the State, London 1981, 81–2, 104, 161–4. 13



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can rule the kingdom with God’s counsel and his own capacity (sensus)’.19 Philip’s expression of the connection between his son’s progression to maturity and ability to rule was flexible and left deliberately vague. Paternal reservation in specifying notions of maturity was undoubtedly in part to protect sons from restrictions to their power after succession. More cynically, however, imprecision also benefited fathers since it moderated the heir’s expectations of any delegation of royal authority at a specific age of maturity once the king returned from abroad. A consistent framework which placed decisions regarding the child king’s progression to adulthood under the full command of his guardians and counsellors underpinned ideas of a ruler’s maturity across this period. Near-contemporary authors corroborated this oversight by frequently connecting the boy king’s ability to rule to the moment he abandoned or removed himself from his guardians’ influence. When Henry IV came of age, ‘the king was emancipated from the bishop [Archbishop Anno of Cologne (1056–1075)]’.20 Nearly two centuries later in England, Roger of Wendover, compiling his chronicle contemporaneously with Henry III’s minority, linked the king’s declaration of legitimate age in January 1227 to his freedom from those previously responsible for his custody.21 Contemporary perceptions of male maturity naturally provided common influences which inspired the actions of viceregal guardians. But these notions of maturity were not static. Legal changes over the central Middle Ages affected perceptions of male maturity and increasingly impacted upon a child king’s progression from boyhood to adulthood. Increasing Legal Influences The altered representation of immaturity in royal documents is the first indication of the changing legal context to a king’s maturity. Eleventh-century records of royal transactions did not always hide the king’s pueritia (childhood). In fact, sometimes these documents directly acknowledged his immaturity and tender age. The eleven-year-old Henry IV noted in one diploma that good examples of rule from his father, grandfather, and other predecessors would ‘instruct the years of our childhood’.22 Two years later, Henry was given the title ‘child king’ in the invocation clause to another act (puer gratia dei Romanorum rex augustus): a remarkable, and seemingly unique, break with contemporary diplomatic practice.23 Acts from the early years of Philip I’s reign similarly mentioned his childhood. According to Recueil des actes de Philippe Auguste, roi de France, ed. H.-François Delaborde et al., 6 vols, Paris 1916-, I, no. 345, p. 419: donec ad etatem veniat in qua consilio Dei et sensu suo possit regere regnum. The original of this text is lost but Rigord reproduced it in his Gesta Philippi; for the amended translation, see Sources for the History of Medieval Europe from the Mid-Eighth to the Mid-Thirteenth Century, ed. Brian Pullan, Oxford 1966, 254–7 at 256. 20 Brunos Buch vom Sachsenkrieg, ed. Hans-Eberhard Lohmann, MGH Deutsches Mittelalter, Leipzig 1937, 14: Igitur rex ab episcopo manumissus, cum sui iuris esse coepisset. See also Lampert of Hersfeld, Libellus de institutione Hersfeldensis Ecclesiae, in Lamperti opera, 341–54 at 353. 21 Rogeri de Wendover liber qui dicitur flores historiarum, ed. Henry G. Hewlett, 3 vols, RS 84, 1886–9, II, 318; F. M. Powicke, ‘The Chancery During the Minority of Henry III’, EHR 23, 1908, 220–35 at 220–1. Likewise, for Philip I of France, see Les miracles de Saint Benoît, 314 and Malmesbury, Gesta regum, I, 336. 22 Diplomata regum et imperatorum Germaniae. Die Urkunden Heinrichs IV, ed. Dietrich von Gladiss and Alfred Gawlik, 3 vols, MGH DD reg. imp. Germ. 6, 1941–78, I, no. 88, p. 114: pueritie nostre annos informare. See also no. 115, p. 152. 23 Urkunden Heinrichs IV, I, no. 127, p. 166; ‘Part I: 1056 (1050) – 1065’, ed. Tilman Struve, in Regesta Imperii III. Salisches Haus 1024–1125. Die Regesten des Kaiserreichs unter Heinrich IV. 1056 (1050) – 1106, ed. J. F. Böhmer, Cologne 1984, no. 331. 19

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a property exchange dated to the first half of 1061, when Philip was nine years old, it was because the king was still in his infancy, admodum parvulus, that he had received the kingdom together with his mother.24 In stark contrast to these earlier cases, indications of the king’s age in terms of the biological state of pueritia and explicit references to the initial stages of the male life cycle had vanished from royal documents by the early thirteenth century.25 Increasing standardisation in royal chanceries was partly responsible for this change, since greater consistency left less room for elucidatory narrative in the eleventh-century style. More importantly, however, royal scribes began to introduce a more explicitly legal context to representations of a child king’s immaturity. This is seen most obviously in England during Henry III’s minority. Patent letters standardized the terminus for a magnate’s custody of lands and castles, or for letters of protection, safe conducts, and notes of pardon, with reference to the king’s coming of age (usque ad etatem nostram/domini regis).26 Variations of this phrase appeared in the fine rolls until December 1225, when Henry was eighteen years old, and in the patent rolls until October 1226, the month Henry turned nineteen.27 Whilst the nature of early thirteenth-century English royal documents means that these legal ideas of maturity appear prolific throughout Henry’s minority, it has been less widely appreciated that similar ideas appeared in France early in the reign of Louis IX (1214–1270). Shortly after Louis VIII’s death in 1226, a letter from Walter Cornut, archbishop of Sens, and the bishops of Chartres and Beauvais, expressed Blanche of Castile’s guardianship of the king, kingdom, and her other children as lasting ‘until they reached a legitimate (or lawful) age’.28 By implication, this legal conception of maturity bound the king as it did his siblings. Likewise, records of homage sworn to Louis in February 1228, just before his fourteenth birthday, and June 1230, when he was sixteen, included promises from magnates that they would keep faith with Blanche and observe her guardianship of her son until he reached a lawful age.29 The explicit anticipation of a king’s age of majority shows the overt influence of new legal notions of maturity. Clearer separation between notions of the king’s personal maturity and his attainment of an age of legal majority further demonstrates the increasing legal influence on child kingship which extended the king’s transition to adulthood. Maturity was never a fixed concept, but, in the eleventh century, a king’s personal rule had been barely distinguishable from his exit from childhood. Both occurred around the same time, in the year leading up to a boy king’s fifteenth birthday, in line with contemporary customary notions of aristocratic male maturity. The age of fourteen was

Recueil des actes de Philippe Ier, roi de France (1059–1108), ed. M. Prou, Paris 1908, no. 13, p. 40. See also no. 17, p. 50: rege adhuc puero Philippo. And no. 27, p. 80: in diebus puericie mee. 25 The only exception I have found comes from 1206, early in Frederick II’s reign. Diplomata regum et imperatorum Germaniae, Diplomata Friderici II: 1198–1212, ed. Walter Koch, Klaus Höflinger, and Joachim Spiegel, 2 vols, MGH DD reg. imp. Germ. 14, 2002, I, no. 59, p. 120: ab annis nostris teneris. 26 Patent Rolls of the Reign of Henry III Preserved in the Public Record Office, A. D. 1216–1225, London 1901, for various examples from November 1217. See also Patent Rolls, 1225–1232, London 1903, 65, for its last appearance. 27 First appearance in November 1218, the month Henry received a new seal: membrane 11, 3 Henry III, Henry III Fine Rolls Project, http://www.finerollshenry3.org.uk/content/fimages/C60_11/m11.html . Last appearance on 14 December 1225: membrane 8, 10 Henry III, http:// www.finerollshenry3.org.uk/content/fimages/C60_24/m08.html . 28 Layettes du trésor des chartes, ed. A. Teulet etc., 5 vols, Paris 1863–1909, II, no. 1828, p. 102: donec ad etatem legitimam pervenirent. See Le Goff, Saint Louis, 93. 29 Layettes, II, nos. 1962, 1963, 2060. 24



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socially and culturally ingrained as the end of male childhood and bore significant legal connotations since it marked the end of tutelage under Roman law.30 Early medieval law codes like the Lex Ribuaria bestowed legal significance on the entire fifteenth year, at the end of which boys whose fathers had died were seen to be of age.31 In Germany, notions of Henry IV’s maturity and personal rule pivoted on his knighting ceremony the Easter after his fourteenth birthday.32 In Philip I’s case, a few months after he turned fourteen in May 1066, he referred to a time when he had been under the count of Flanders’ tutelage as if this provision had now ended.33 The cultural significance of customary markers of male maturity could also work in favour of young kings who succeeded on the cusp of adolescence, such as Philip II. Rigord took great care in describing the king’s age at his inauguration in November 1179. After emphasizing that Philip had turned fourteen the previous August, Rigord clarified that this meant that ‘Philip had entered his fifteenth year’ and, again, that ‘Philip had been anointed as king in the fifteenth year of his life’.34 Rigord intended his somewhat excessive repetition to underline an important political point. Whilst modern historians usually date Philip’s entry into adulthood to the onset of his father’s illness earlier in 1179, before his coronation, Philip’s contemporaries were less certain.35 Robert of Auxerre, writing at the request of Milo de Trainel (d. 1202), abbot of St Marianus, considered Philip still to be a boy, puer, at his coronation.36 The king’s youth attracted adverse commentary even after Louis VII’s death.37 Rigord’s repetitive emphasis on Philip’s age thus deliberately emphasized the king’s maturity, and his ability to rule alone from the moment he was crowned. In contrast, child kings at the start of the thirteenth century experienced a more protracted transition to maturity between their early teens and early twenties; what we might today call an ‘extended adolescence’ or even ‘emerging adulthood’.38 The end to custodial arrangements for a boy king’s care, as well as assertions of his independent royal power, could now come several years before a more patently defined age of legal maturity. During Henry III’s minority, his entry into the fifteenth year of life still held some significance, primarily in the eyes of the pope.39 Shortly before Henry turned fourteen on 1 October 1221, Honorius III recalled the legate Pandulph from England and did not replace him. Overt provision for the king’s custody ended around the same time as the two men involved most prominently in watching over the body of the king – first Peter, bishop of Winchester, and then Philip de Albini

J. A. Crook, Law and Life of Rome, Ithaca 1984, 113–17. Lex Ribuaria, ed. Franz Beyerle and Rudolf Buchner, MGH LL nat. Germ. 3.2, Hannover 1954, 130. 32 See below, 207. 33 Actes de Philippe Ier, no. 27, p. 80. See also no. 28, p. 85. Prou dates Philip’s exit from Baldwin’s tutelage to a three-month period between 1 October and 31 December 1066 (at 83–4 n. 1). 34 Rigord, Histoire, 128: Cujus etas fuerat annorum XIIII in festivitate Timothei et Simphoriani preterita. Et tunc inceperat volvi annus XV, ita quod in anno quinto decimo sue etatis in regem est inunctus in festo scilicet Omnium sanctorum. 35 Olivier-Martin, Régences, 30. 36 Robert of Auxerre, Chronologia, ed. Oswald Holder-Egger, MGH SS 26, Hannover 1882, 219–76 at 242. 37 Aubri of Trois-Fontaines, citing the chronicle of Guy de Bazoches d. c. 1203 (Chronica a monacho Novi-monasterii Hoiensis interpolata, ed. P. Scheffer-Boichorst, MGH SS 23, Hannover 1874, 631–950 at 856). 38 Debating Emerging Adulthood: Stage or Process?, ed. Jeffrey Jensen Arnett et al., New York 2011. 39 Carpenter, Minority, 240–1, 243, 254–6, 268–70. For the first two years of his reign, Henry granted confirmations or concessions to last until the end of his fourteenth year: Patent Rolls, 1216–1225, select examples at 1, 26, 64, 72, 100, 132. 30 31

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– both departed from the kingdom.40 Documentary indications of the king’s progression to personal rule did not come until December 1223. From this date, rather than his guardians attesting for him, the king attested actions by himself (teste me ipso or per ipsum dominum regem).41 Henry suggestively used his Great Seal to authenticate 1225 Magna Carta.42 The declining legal significance of the age of fourteen engendered ambiguity among those recording the king’s progression to adulthood. Near-contemporary chroniclers inconsistently recognized the king to have reached legitimus etas in 1223, 1224, and 1227.43 The court position was much clearer since English chancery documents only placed Henry’s achievement of full legal maturity the winter following his nineteenth birthday.44 Yet, David Carpenter has shown how, even then, some beneficiaries of royal charters did not consider the king to have come of age, waiting for Henry to reach twenty-one before seeking charter renewals.45 Modern scholars such as Christian Hillen and Frank Wiswall have interpreted thirteenth-century notions of a child king’s maturity as ‘purely political’, in response to contemporary circumstances in each kingdom.46 Whilst it is undeniable that the king’s coming of age could be used as a political tool for different factions to gain what they wanted, we should not downplay the shared legal influences behind the changing perceptions and realities of a boy king’s maturity. Notions of noble and aristocratic maturity were still the models to which the king’s guardians turned by the thirteenth century, but these ideas were themselves changing in north-western Europe from the latter half of the twelfth century. Precisely at a time when legal definitions of maturity began to appear far more prominently in written law, there was a move away from the previous association of majority with age fourteen or the fifteenth year. Instead, Glanvill’s treatise in the late 1180s introduced the notion that ‘full age’ (plenus etas) for a knight’s heir was twenty-one in England.47 Influenced by Glanvill, the same conception of maturity appeared in the fourteenth-century Scottish legal treatise Regiam majestatem.48 Customary ideas of twenty or twenty-one as the age of male majority may have long held sway in western France, but these notions of maturity do not survive in writing before the thirteenth century.49 Towards the end of his reign, Philip II actively enforced twenty-one as the terminus to wardship cases which reached him 40 Memoriale fratris Walteri de Coventria, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols, RS 58, 1872–3, II, 259–60. See also Nicholas Vincent, Peter des Roches: An Alien in English Politics, 1205–1238, Cambridge 1996, 198–201, 205–7; Carpenter, Minority, 239–62. 41 Although Henry attested some orders before January 1217 teste me ipso, this clause then disappeared from usage until 1223: Patent Rolls, 1216–1225, 417; Rotuli litterarum clausarum, ed. T. D. Hardy, 2 vols, London 1833–44, I, 578; Powicke, ‘The Chancery’, 221–5. 42 Magna Carta, ed. David Carpenter, London 2015, 412, 420. 43 ‘Dunstable Annals’, in Annales monastici, ed. Henry Richard Luard, 5 vols, RS 36, 1864–9, III, 83; ‘Osney Annals’, in Annales monastici, IV, 64; Roger of Wendover, Flores, II, 318. 44 Henry referred to a time when he was of minor age as if it were in the past in December 1226: Patent Rolls, 1225–1232, 98, 100. 45 Carpenter, Minority, 124. 46 Hillen, ‘The Minority Governments’, 57; Christian Hillen and Frank Wiswall, ‘The Minority of Henry III in the Context of Europe’, in The Royal Minorities, ed. Beem, 17–66 at 32, 45. 47 Tractatus de legibus...The Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Realm of England Commonly Called Glanvill, ed. G. D. G. Hall, Oxford 1993, book VII, ch. 9, p. 82. 48 A. A. M. Duncan, ‘Regiam Majestatem: A Reconsideration’, Juridical Review 6, 1961, 199–217; Glanvill, lx–lxi. 49 For contrasting notions of male maturity between eastern and western France: H. d’Arbois de Jubainville, Recherches sur la minorité et ses effets dans le droit féodal français, Paris 1852, 63–73; P. Guilhiermoz, Essai sur l’origine de la noblesse en France, Paris 1902, 402 n. 21.



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from across France.50 Only a few weeks after Henry III succeeded to the English throne in 1216, a new issue of Magna Carta incorporated an amendment to chapter three which now specified twenty-one as the terminus for aristocratic immaturity.51 Less than two decades later, the Sachsenspiegel, one of the earliest customals in the German language, recorded the same age as the marker of male legal majority.52 The circulation and enforcement of new legalistic ideas of male maturity impacted on situations of child kingship across north-western Europe. Henry III’s minority provides the most unambiguous example of new legal influences on notions of a child king’s maturity, but we should not assume that the English circumstances were unique simply because of the wealth of record evidence. Trends towards extending a king’s adolescence, as well as a new legal significance to the king’s twenty-first year, similarly appear in thirteenth-century France and Scotland. Letters from Hugh X of Lusignan (d. 1249) in May 1230 testify that the French princes still saw Louis IX and the kingdom as being in Blanche’s hands (in manu sua).53 From this date, hints of Louis’s transition from childhood to adulthood arrive. Lindy Grant has shown how notions of Louis’s progression to maturity led to Blanche’s diminished visibility at her son’s side. Chroniclers stopped referring to Blanche accompanying the king on military campaigns, and papal letters addressed Louis alone rather than with his mother.54 Louis himself recognized twenty-one to be a suitable legal marker for his maturity when he granted a privilege to the count of Champagne in April 1228 (or 1229) to last until the completion of his [Louis’s] twenty-first year in 1234.55 Louis’s marriage to Margaret of Provence in May 1234, shortly after his twentieth birthday, cemented the significance of the king’s twentyfirst year in demonstrations of his adulthood. Once again, precedents set for his younger brothers may have dictated the reality of Louis’s coming of age. Blanche of Castile influenced decisions that her son John, once betrothed to Yolande, the duke of Brittany’s daughter, should not marry her before his twenty-first year.56 The similar timing of Louis’s own wedding implies that it was at least partly through his mother’s influence and adherence to contemporary legal ideas that the king’s adolescence extended into his early twenties. In Scotland, Alexander III’s progression to maturity was undoubtedly influenced by the English king’s involvement, and Henry III emphasized the significance of twenty-one as Alexander’s age of legal majority.57 When, under Henry’s influence, Alexander outlined new arrangements for his guardianship council in September 1255, the king of Scots dated the terminus of ‘the government of our realm, and the guardianship of our body, and of that of

Theodore Evergates, ‘Aristocratic Women in the County of Champagne’, in Aristocratic Women in Medieval France, ed. Evergates, Philadelphia 1999, 74–110 at 83; John W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages, Berkeley 1986, 197. 51 The Statutes of the Realm: From Original Records and Authentic Manuscripts, 11 vols, London 1810, I, 14. Translated in English Historical Documents, Volume III, 1189–1327, ed. Harry Rothwell, London 1975, 327. 52 The Saxon Mirror: A ‘Saxonspiegel’ of the Fourteenth Century, ed. Maria Dobozy, Philadephia 1999, 81, 153. 53 Layettes, II, no. 2052, p. 176. 54 Lindy Grant, Blanche of Castile, Queen of France, New Haven 2016, 102–5. 55 Layettes, II, no. 1995, p. 153: donec vicesimum primum etatis sue compleverit annum. Louis issued an ordinance in 1246 which similarly placed the age of aristocratic majority at twenty-one: d’Arbois de Jubainville, Recherches, 67. 56 Layettes, II, no. 1922, pp. 119–21 (similarly nos. 2057, 2059); Grant, Blanche, 156–7. 57 Henry granted offers of protection to advisors he sent to Scotland with the caveat that they would last until Alexander completed his twenty-first year: Patent Rolls, 1247–1258, London 1908, 421. 50

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our queen’ to his twenty-first birthday on the feast of Saint Cuthbert’s translation [4 September] 1262.58 The Scottish magnates did not accept these ideas unequivocally; several of them refused to attach their seals to the document.59 But the men who benefited from the assertion of their places in Alexander’s council consented to the expression of the king’s maturity in these formal legal terms. Alexander’s later attempt in 1259 to negotiate for the document’s recall provides further evidence that its contents were crucial to perceptions of his adulthood and kingship and held real legal significance for the young king.60 Further evidence for the separation of the king’s personal maturity from notions of legal majority can be found in Alexander’s reign. Extant documentary evidence suggests a distinction between the terminus for the custodial arrangements for the king’s body and the conclusion to the care of the kingdom. In November 1258, Henry III addressed Alexander’s councillors as ‘you who at that time had assumed cura of the kingdom of the Scotland’.61 Nothing was said of the council’s custody of Alexander and Margaret, in contrast to the earlier letter in 1255, suggesting that the royal couple had now reached an age of maturity at which custody of their bodies was deemed unnecessary. If Matthew Paris was correct in stating that the king and queen had again been placed sub custodia in 1257, the decision to end official custody of the royal couple may still have been a relatively recent development by November 1258. Royal documents show that Alexander’s assertion of his maturity continued to be imperative as his twenty-first birthday approached. Possibly inspired by examples from the English royal chancery, Alexander began to attest letters himself with the clause teste me ipso, first using this attestation in correspondence to Henry III in 1260.62 An earlier letter to Henry in 1257 had shown no such evidence of Alexander’s agency, carrying instead the attestation of Patrick, earl of Dunbar.63 Much like Henry himself, and like Louis IX, Alexander’s transition to adulthood was a process of preparation, assertion, and negotiation for a young king who, although clearly past childhood, had not yet reached full majority in a contemporary legal context and depended on the adults around him to recognise his entry into manhood. That legal notions came to affect kingship more generally over the twelfth century and into the thirteenth is not a novel observation.64 What, then, is the specific importance of changing and increasing legal influences on child kingship? These changes fit with other trends towards greater definition and even regulation of royal authority when a child was king, such as the increasing formalisation of conciliar involvement or changes to royal sealing practices. Increasing application of legal influences in situations of child kingship show a more widespread belief that contemporary

Anglo-Scottish Relations 1174–1328: Some Selected Documents, ed. E. L. G. Stones, London 1965, 64–5: gubernacionem regni nostri et custodiam corporis nostri et regine sponse nostre deputati. 59 The Chronicle of Melrose Abbey, a Stratigraphic Edition, ed. Dauvit Broun and Julian Harrison, Woodbridge 2007, MS Faustina B. IX, fol. 58r. This edition contains a facsimile of the MS on CD-ROM. All references henceforth will be to the folios of the MS. 60 Matthew Paris, Chronica Maiora, V, 739–40. 61 Anglo-Scottish Relations, 70: Cum in vos curam regni Scocie assumpseritis. 62 The Acts of Alexander III King of Scots, 1249–1286, ed. Cynthia J. Neville and Grant G. Simpson, Regesta regum Scottorum 4 pt. 1, Edinburgh 2012, no. 29, p. 79. Original in London, The National Archives, SC 1/5/31. 63 Acts of Alexander III, no. 24, p. 75. 64 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, 2nd edn, Princeton 1997, especially ‘Chapter Four’ [first edition published 1957]. 58



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notions of noble and aristocratic maturity bound kings too.65 These ideas could be led from within the king’s court, as in England. In other cases, external influences, such as the aristocracy in France and the English king in Scotland, seem to have played more of a role. Nevertheless, the child king’s guardian(s) – in Louis’s case his mother and, in Alexander’s case, his guardianship council – also played their part in accepting new ideas regarding a king’s maturity. One further consequence of the shift to more legally defined notions of maturity by the thirteenth century can be seen in changes to the significance of a boy king’s knighting. Knighthood: A rite of passage? Modern scholarship has frequently approached knighting as a marker of male maturity, military capability, and status, both for the sons of kings and in a wider noble context.66 Although the changing relationship between child kingship and knighting has not been brought into this picture, Max Lieberman recently put forward a strong case for viewing some eleventh-century knightings as rites of passage to adulthood.67 His argument endorses an examination of whether this continued to be so, especially considering the changing legal context to maturity over the central Middle Ages. In fact, the early thirteenth century saw a new development which altered the rite of passage conveyed by knighting. Immaturity was no longer incompatible with the acceptance of arms if the individual was a boy about to be crowned king. Knighting took place after a child’s coronation and several years into his reign in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Henry IV turned fourteen in November 1064 and his acceptance of arms (lit: girded with a sword: gladium cinxit) at the Easter court at Worms in 1065 undoubtedly marked his progression to maturity and power.68 From a martial perspective, Henry’s arming was a recognition of his military capability and his successful leadership of his first campaign into Hungary two years before. The ceremony introduced a new momentum to Henry’s kingship, evidenced by the fact that he issued more documents this year than during any other of his reign.69 Political changes ran parallel to Henry’s ritual acceptance of arms, and it was only after this event that his mother, Agnes of Poitou, left the kingdom to travel to Rome.70 In France, despite the scarcity of references to Philip’s knighting, we know he was armed before 1070 during a time of political change attached to the king reclaiming

For representations of the immaturity of aristocratic boys in England using ‘usque ad etatem’: Patent Rolls, 1216–1225, 243; Patent Rolls, 1225–1232, 8, 11, 66. For the aristocratic significance of twenty-one in France: Layettes, II, nos. 2059, 2128, 2447. For ad etatem in an aristocratic context without an age attached: ibid., nos. 2064, 2084, 2145, 2180, 2432, 2475. For the age of fifteen in regard to the heir of the count of Nevers: ibid., no. 2142. 66 Medieval knighthood and its origins, ceremonies and rituals, liturgies, interrelationship with notions of nobility, association with set standards of conduct, and the secular and ecclesiastical influences on its development have all been the subject of much historiographical attention. Influential texts include: Maurice Keen, Chivalry, London 1984 (at 66–7 for knighting and maturity); Jean Flori, L’essor de la chevalerie XIe – XIIe siècles, Geneva 1986. 67 Max Lieberman, ‘A New Approach to the Knighting Ritual’, Speculum 90, 2015, 391–423 at 401, 412–13, 423. 68 Annales Weissenburgenses, ed. Oswald Holder-Egger, MGH SS rer. Germ. 38, Hannover 1894, 9–57 at 53; Lampert of Hersfeld, Annales, 93; Flori, L’essor, 56–8. 69 Urkunden Heinrichs IV, xx–xxi. 70 Tilman Struve, ‘Die Romreise der Kaiserin Agnes’, Historisches Jahrbuch 105, 1985, 1–29 at 10–12, who dates the visit to Rome to May 1065 at the earliest. See also Mechthild Black-Veldtrup, Kaiserin Agnes (1043–1077): quellenkritische Studien, Cologne 1995, 34–5, 93–4. 65

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the administration of his kingdom, much as in Germany.71 In twelfth-century Scotland, knighting was relatively newly associated with ideas of rulership but, like the eleventh-century kings, Malcolm IV did not receive arms until many years after his inauguration, having already participated in military affairs.72 In contrast, the thirteenth century saw the comprehensive removal of a child king’s knighting from any association with maturity. According to two French sources, the nine-year-old Henry III of England ‘was made a knight’ (fu fais chevalier) swiftly after John’s death and before his coronation at Gloucester.73 A decade later, the twelve-year-old Louis IX of France received his ‘promotion as a knight’ (promotus in militem) at Soissons as he travelled to Reims for his inauguration in November 1226. Writing almost contemporaneously, William of Andres (d. after 1234) was the only author to document the ceremony.74 In both cases, those around the young royal heirs made a conscious but novel decision that knighting should be part of the child’s preparation for kingship and precede their coronation, despite their immature age. In Scotland, Alexander III’s acceptance of arms from the English king as a ten-year-old boy, on the eve of his marriage to Henry III’s daughter Margaret in 1251, again fitted into a particularly Scottish tradition in which the sons of the kings of Scots received arms from the English ruler.75 Although the ceremony did not take place prior to his inauguration, Alexander’s knighting conformed to the new notion that, in cases of child kingship, immaturity was now compatible with knighthood. Thirteenth-century child kingship catalysed discussions concerning the order in which kingship and knighthood occurred. William Marshal’s biographer, writing fifty years after the knighting of Henry the Young King (1155–1183), claimed that he needed to justify to men of reason ‘how and why it was that he [Henry] was king first and knight later’.76 Since the usual quid pro quo was for an adult male who was already knighted to succeed as king, the expected order of ceremonies was naturally knighting first, then inauguration.77 What motive could the biographer have had for drawing his audience’s attention to the anomalous nature of the Young King’s knighting? The answer to this question perhaps lies in the author’s account of a more contemporaneous ceremony: Henry III’s knighting in 1216. The biographer explicitly justified William Marshal’s knighting of Henry III with reference to his earlier involvement in girding the Young King.78 By insinuating that Actes de Philippe Ier, xxxiv, where Prou argues for a likely dating during the king’s fifteenth year. Geoffrey of Vigeois, Chronica, in RHF, XII, 421–51 at 439; A Scottish Chronicle Known as the Chronicle of Holyrood, ed. M. O. and A. O. Anderson, Edinburgh 1938, 132–3; Chronicle of Melrose, fol. 19v. See also David Crouch, The Image of Aristocracy in Britain, 1000–1300, London 1992, 116–17. 73 Histoire des ducs de Normandie et des rois d’Angleterre, ed. Francis Michel, Paris 1840, 181. See also History of William Marshal, ed. A. J. Holden, 3 vols, London 2002–6, II, 266–9. Curiously, no record of Henry’s knighting is found in any English sources. 74 Chronica Andrensis, ed. Johann Heller, MGH SS 24, Hannover 1879, 684–773 at 766. See Le Nain de Tillemont, Vie de Saint Louis: roi de France, 2 vols, Paris 1847–51, I, 431; Le Goff, Saint Louis, 96–8. 75 Chronicon de Lanercost, ed. Joseph Stevenson, Edinburgh 1839, 57; Chronicle of Melrose, fol. 56r. Henry I of England knighted David after 1103; Henry II (himself knighted by David) knighted Malcolm IV and his younger brother, William, in 1159; John knighted Alexander II (aged 13) in 1212, see G. W. S. Barrow, The Kingdom of the Scots: Government, Church and Society from the Eleventh to the Fourteenth Centuries, 2nd edn, Edinburgh 2003, 255. 76 History of William Marshal, I, 108–9: Coment e par quele achaison / Il fu reis einz que chevalers. For the disputed dating of the Young King’s knighting: Strickland, Henry the Young King, 82–4, 154–5. 77 As had been the case when Henry II knighted his son John, aged 17, in March 1185; when Philip Augustus knighted his son Louis VIII, aged 21, at Compiègne in May 1209; and when John knighted Alexander II (see above, n. 75). 78 History of William Marshal, II, 266. 71 72



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the Young King’s knighting had been unconventional, and implying that only the order in which the ceremonies occurred mattered, the biographer juxtaposed Henry III’s knighting as the entirely orthodox ceremony. Of course, this was far from the case. As we have seen, Henry III’s knighting was an unequivocally novel shift from earlier ideas. Those around the boy did not prioritize knighthood’s customary attachment to male maturity, as in all earlier cases of child kingship. This was not the only thirteenth-century occasion where the order of knighthood and coronation attracted heated discussion. Scottish magnates debated this very subject prior to Alexander III’s inauguration in July 1249, according to the author of Gesta annalia I.79 The arguments of Walter Comyn, earl of Menteith, who claimed that ‘he had seen a consecrated king who was not yet a knight, and he had also often heard of kings consecrated, who were not knights’, may have swayed the assembled magnates to prioritize raising Alexander as king, leaving his knighting until two years later.80 Several reasons can be proposed for why increased deliberation over the order of knighting and coronation came early in the thirteenth century and led to a turning point in which immaturity was no longer a barrier to knighthood. Changes to practices of associative coronation had a considerable effect. When boy kings such as Henry IV and Philip I were crowned during their fathers’ reigns, there was no expectation that knighting should precede coronation. Alexander Cartellieri’s theory that Philip II’s knighting took place at Pentecost in 1180 introduces the possibility that, even by the later twelfth century, knighting was not yet perceived to be the precursor to a boy’s associative coronation.81 Although Cartellieri’s dating is based only on conjecture, his suggestion receives some support from the circumstances in which Frederick Barbarossa (d. 1190) knighted his sons in 1184. Aged eighteen and born the same year as Philip II, Barbarossa’s eldest son, Henry, was already associate king when his father knighted him.82 The order of knighting and coronation thus gained new relevance when crowning a child as sole ruler in northwestern Europe. As a result, knighting child kings-to-be in the thirteenth century carried an additional symbolic meaning emphasizing a boy’s ‘readiness to perform the functions and duties of his office’.83 More specifically, for Henry III and Louis IX, whose fathers died on military campaigns, knighting symbolized their readiness to inherit their fathers’ mantles as military leaders and, furthermore, to act as crusading kings.84 79 Gesta annalia I has been shown to be based on a work from the 1280s: Dauvit Broun, ‘A New Look at the Gesta annalia Attributed to John of Fordun’, in Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance Scotland, ed. Barbara E. Crawford, Edinburgh 1999, 9–30 especially 13–17. 80 ‘Gesta annalia’, in Johannis de Fordun chronica gentis Scotorum, ed. William F. Skene, Edinburgh 1871, 293: se vidisse regem consecratum non tamen militem, sed et saepius audisse reges consecratos, qui non fuerunt milites. Translation follows A. A. M. Duncan, The Kingship of the Scots, 842–1292: Succession and Independence, Edinburgh 2002, 132, who suggests an alternative to Skene’s translation. 81 Alexander Cartellieri, ‘L’avènement de Philippe Auguste (1179–1180)’, Revue Historique 54, 1894, 1–33 at 14. 82 Richard Mortimer, ‘Knights and Knighthood in Germany in the Central Middle Ages’, in The Ideals and Practices of Medieval Knighthood, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey, Woodbridge 1986, 86–103 at 99; John B. Freed, Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth, New Haven 2016, 446, 448. 83 Björn Weiler, ‘Knighting, Homage, and the Meaning of Ritual: The Kings of England and their Neighbors in the Thirteenth Century’, Viator 37, 2006, 275–99 at 279. 84 Henry took the cross a few days after his 1216 coronation: Chronicon Petroburgense, ed. Thomas Stapleton, London 1849, 7; Carpenter, Minority, 13. Louis’s succession unavoidably involved him in the ongoing crusade in the Languedoc until the Treaty of Meaux-Paris (1229): Layettes, II, no. 1992; Le Goff, Saint Louis, 81–2.

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The changing nature of knighthood between the mid eleventh and mid thirteenth centuries – in particular its changing legal significance – is naturally highly significant for shifting notions of a child king’s maturity.85 In an aristocratic context, a boy’s knighting could initiate a legal change with three-fold significance: asserting legal majority, denoting the end of arrangements for tenurial guardianship, and marking the point from which he could legally use his seal. As aristocratic notions of maturity evolved, so too did the relationship between knighthood, legal majority, and guardianship. Another novel amendment to 1216 Magna Carta announced that if a ward ‘is made a knight while still under age, the land nevertheless shall remain in his lord’s wardship for the full term’.86 This public legal recognition that a child’s knighting no longer ended the arrangements for the care of his inheritance would surely have evoked the very recent circumstances of Henry III’s own knighting. When the legate Guala and William Marshal attached their seals to the charter, they must have been keenly aware that they were endorsing their own continued involvement in royal rule. Similar notions regarding maturity, knighting, and wardship could have been familiar at the French court by the time Louis IX succeeded, since two copies of 1216 Magna Carta made it into the French royal archives.87 Hence, Louis’s knighting before his coronation does not mark the king’s legal émancipation, as Natalis de Wailly and, more recently, Jean Richard, have both suggested.88 The argument that Louis’s knighting served a similar legal purpose to aristocratic cases, demonstrating that the king was legally no longer a minor and that neither he nor his kingdom were under guardianship henceforth, does not hold up in a comparative context.89 Elsewhere in north-western Europe, the changed circumstances of knighting dissolved the ceremony’s former association with a boy king’s maturity – legal or otherwise – and only served to strengthen an individual’s position as guardian.90 William Marshal’s involvement in knighting Henry III helped him consolidate his position as rector regis et regni.91 Contemporary awareness of an intimate connection between knighting a child king and one magnate’s dominance in governance was also at the root of opposition to Alexander III’s knighting since the justiciar, Alan Durward, wished to gird the boy with arms himself.92 Nearcontemporary examples in other kingdoms undermine the proposition that Louis IX’s knighting had the exceptional effect of emancipating him from guardianship. More significantly, the surviving evidence in France does not support such a proposition. Since Louis’s knighting took place as his mother, Blanche of Castile, escorted him to Reims, it is not presumptuous to assume that the ceremony, and

For changes in knighthood attached to the first half of the thirteenth century: Flori, L’essor, 12, 23, for changes to knighthood’s legal weighting, and 337–42, for changes more generally. 86 Statutes, I, 14: Ita ta(men) q(uod) si ip(s)e dum infra etatem fu(er)it [fiat] miles, nich(il)omin(us) t(er) ra remaneat i(n) custodia Domini sui usq(ue) ad t(er)minu(m) p(re)d(ict)um. Translation from English Historical Documents, 1189–1327, 327. This clause remained the same in 1217 and 1225 Magna Carta. 87 Carpenter, Magna Carta, 411; Layettes, I, no. 1194. 88 Natalis de Wailly, ‘Mémoire sur la date et le lieu de naissance de saint Louis’, Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 27, 1866, 105–27 at 108; Jean Richard, ‘L’adoubement de Saint Louis’, Journal des Savants 1, 1988, 207–17 at 210–11, 215–16. 89 Richard, ‘L’adoubement’, 210. 90 For a contrast with Iberian practice, where kings avoided involving lay or ecclesiastical magnates in knighting them: Duncan, Kingship, 132 n. 21. 91 Histoire des ducs, 181, where William Marshal’s confirmation as guardian follows Henry’s knighting. See also David Crouch, William Marshal, 3rd edn, London 2016, 160; Weiler, ‘Knighting, Homage, and Ritual’, 281. 92 Broun, ‘Gesta annalia’, 293. 85



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the personnel involved in knighting her son, had received her blessing. Louis VIII left his eldest son and the kingdom explicitly under Blanche’s ballum sive tutela (guardianship and tutelage).93 The queen’s presence with her son in oaths of fidelity, peace treaties, and military campaigns further demonstrates that it was in terms of legal guardianship that she and her contemporaries conceived her role at Louis’s side.94 Rather than seeing Louis’s knighting at an age of immaturity as Blanche deliberately demeaning her claim to guardianship of king and kingdom, as Richard suggested, Blanche’s management of her son’s passage to knighthood only helped to reinforce her guardianship role alongside him.95 Although child kingship was a variation on the more conventional theme of adult rulership, understanding instances when a child was king can reveal greater similarity in concepts of royal rule across north-western Europe in the central Middle Ages. Boy kings presented similar challenges regardless of geographical location, and contemporary notions of maturity affected the arrangements made for rule in all cases. Perceptions of a king’s (im)maturity and approaches to facilitate his progression to adulthood are often comparable. We have seen that paternal influence had little real impact, leaving decisions regarding how to manage the boy king’s transition to maturity, and the rites of passage associated with adolescence and adulthood, in the hands of his guardians. Furthermore, important legal developments across the central Middle Ages shaped the interactions between childhood and kingship and shifted notions of a king’s progression to maturity by the thirteenth century. That these developments did not affect one kingdom alone emphasizes sustained similarities in notions of a ruler’s progression to maturity. The altered timing and significance of a boy king’s knighting displays this legal shift most noticeably. Lieberman suggested that we should ‘make allowance for a process, however gradual and imperceptible, by which being declared a knight no longer necessarily meant being declared an adult male at the same time’.96 In respect to cases of child kingship, this process was neither gradual nor imperceptible. Change came in the early decades of the thirteenth century, when knighting a boy at a definite age of immaturity, often before coronation, removed the ceremony from any legal statement that he had reached an age of majority. Evolving legalistic ideas eroded knighthood’s significance as a rite of passage to adulthood in cases of child kingship. Instead, other legal notions of maturity now received greater emphasis when a child was king. Contemporaries looked ahead to the king reaching a specific legal age (ad etatem). Guardians and counsellors extended his progression to maturity, attaching new importance to the attainment of twenty-one, and unmistakeably separating the biological notion of the king’s maturity from an age of legal majority. Carpenter established that Henry III’s minority saw the assertion in England of the principle that monarchy was subject to the law.97 Changing notions of maturity allow us to see the assertion of a similar principle in situations of child kingship elsewhere in north-western Europe in the first half of the thirteenth century, even if this was not proclaimed from the royal court in the exact linear documentary fashion that it was in England.

93 94 95 96 97

Layettes, II, no. 1828, p. 102. See above, 202. See Grant, Blanche, especially chapters four and twelve. Richard, ‘L’adoubement’, 214–17. Lieberman, ‘A New Approach’, 421. Carpenter, Minority, 404.

A MICRO-ECONOMY OF SALVATION: FURTHER THOUGHTS ON THE ‘ANNUARY’ OF ROBERT OF TORIGNI Thomas N. Bisson This note is intended to supplement a previous article on the ‘annuary’, presented at Norwich in 2010, and published in ANS 33.1 Returning to Normandy after many years devoted to the study of other regions in the twelfth century, I had noticed that the forty-nine records (or acta) that occupy folios 112v to 117r (see Fig. 1) in Avranches MS 210 have a collective identity;2 that they represent a deliberate departure by their author, Robert of Torigni, from the cartulary preceding. Moreover, they bear witness to the new abbot’s recognition that accountability in a monastic lordship entailed something other (something more) than a collection of proofs of patrimonial right; it required a record of hands-on engagement with fiscal management in the localities. I argued that, when taken together, these acta, as written, amounted to an experimental fiscal accountability altogether comparable with those undertaken by Robert’s contemporaries Suger in Saint-Denis and Bertran de Castellet in Catalonia.3 Upon further study of the manuscripts of Le Mont Saint-Michel, I find much of this confirmed, if not quite all. It no longer seems possible to attribute the great romanesque cartulary in MS 210 to Robert of Torigni. That the cartulary pre-dates his abbacy is a major discovery that we owe entirely to Katharine Keats-Rohan, in persuasive codicological research.4 My own research since 2010 not only confirms her finding, but is pointing ever more strongly to Abbot Bernard (1131–49) as the originator-patron of this incomparable witness to life in Le Mont Saint-Michel before 1150. To my knowledge, moreover, no new work on manuscript illumination and decoration seems contrary to this finding. François Avril, in his work of fifty years ago, allowed for the possibility of a single artist working in Le Bec as well as in Le Mont Saint-Michel before 1154.5 As for Abbot Robert’s acta, my appellation ‘annuary’ lies mute in deafening silence. So I hasten to add that I make no defence of the term, except to plead convenience and pertinence. A better term would be welcome indeed; what matters ‘The “Annuary” of Robert of Torigni (1155–1159)’ , ANS 33, 2010, 61–73. Bibliothèque municipale d’Avranches, MS 210, folios 112v–117r, presently accessible in Cartulaire du Mont Saint-Michel. Facsimilé du manuscrit 210 de la Bibliothèque municipale d’Avranches, Le Mont Saint-Michel 2005, hereafter CMSM. 3 On accountability in the twelfth century, see Thomas N. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship,and the Origin of European Government, revised editions, Princeton 2014 [2009], 316–49; and trans. Béatrice Bonne, Paris 2014, 253–74. 4 The Cartulary of Mont-Saint-Michel, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, Donington 2006, 10; also KeatsRohan, ‘Bibliothèque municipale d’Avranches, 210: cartulary of Mont-Saint-Michel,’ ANS 21, 1997, 95–112. 5 François Avril, ‘La décoration des manuscrits au Mont Saint-Michel (xie–xiie siècles)’ , Millénaire monastique du Mont Saint-Michel, 5 vols, Paris 1966–93, II, 234; cf. Patricia Stirnemann, ‘Two Twelfth-century Bibliophiles and Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum’ , Viator 24, 1993, 123. 1 2

Fig. 1  Avranches MS 210 fol. 112v

Fig. 2  Avranches MS 210 fol. 114r

Fig. 3  Avranches MS 210 fol. 115r



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is our recognition that these multiple records stem from a single impulse. Each one opens with the words eodem anno, and this is what induced me to associate the acta with Robert’s other historical writings. The same point was not lost on previous editors of Robert of Torigni: both Delisle and Howlett included the acta in their editions, although neither one provided a study of them. This means that the best edition of them to date is that by Coraline Coutant in her thèse de maîtrise for the École des Chartes. Her work, although unprinted, stands as an exemplary chartiste edition, in which the acta are analyzed and indexed together with all else that follows Abbot Bernard’s great decorated cartulary in Avranches MS 210.6 This brings me to my own new findings. They are presented below in four points, of which the fourth will illustrate my present title. To begin with, one further confirmation: the forty-nine pieces are assuredly the work of Robert of Torigni. He either inscribed them himself on blank folios as far as no. 36 (fol. 115r, bottom; Fig. 3), leaving it to another scribe to carry on (as annuary) to no. 49 (fols. 116v–117r); or else dictated to a first scribe (fols. 112v–115r, see Figs 1, 3). Here, two sub-points are required: (a) the palaeographers who studied MS 210 some thirty-five years ago opined firmly that the acta as far as no. 36 (fol 115r , Fig. 3) are in Robert of Torigni’s script.7 They may be right, although I am less sure of this than they were. If they are correct, then it is certain that Robert of Torigni wrote in different scripts. For the prevailing writing in the annuary looks quite different from the marks identified as Robert’s script by Benjamin Pohl.8 (b) Abbot Robert’s intervention in the annuary becomes conspicuous in no. 28. In this item he records a triumphant recent event – a happening perhaps only a few days before this writing – as recorded in original privileges lately secured from the lord-king. Upon return from England, the abbatial entourage had suffered the imposition of tolls on their horses by royal agents at Southampton. Then, finding the king well disposed at Mortain, Abbot Robert secured his privilege of remedy, apparently on the condition that Robert compose it himself. For that is what Robert’s text shows (fol. 114r, Fig. 2). It says that ‘Abbot Robert made his [the king’s] charter, of which we have here subjoined a copy for the greater proof of the thing.’ I see no reason to read the Latin impersonally as a slip for ‘Roberto abbati.’9 If not with his own pen, Robert is too near to this record of his doings to have misrepresented this event. Moreover, in what follows, he himself or his scribe visibly imitated the script of his copy of the king’s privilege (fols 114rv, see Fig. 2). Robert of Torigni could hardly be closer to to this writing in his annuary.10 Second, in spite of their placement by years, it is difficult to find sequential order in these acta as we have them. Sometimes they can be read as travelogue: a journey to montois lordships in 1156 seems recorded in items 16 to 20. A more 6 ‘Le cartulaire du Mont-Saint-Michel et ses additions (xiie – xive siècles). Édition critique et étude’, ed. Coraline Coutant, 2 vols, École nationale des Chartes. Thèse pour le diplôme d’archiviste paléographe, 2009. A new edition of the Annuary will appear in The Chronography of Robert of Torigni, ed. Thomas N. Bisson, 2 vols, OMT, Oxford forthcoming II, no. 8. 7 I refer to Monique-Cécile Garand, Geneviève Grand, and Denis Muzerelle in vol. 7 of Catalogue des manuscrits en écriture latine portant des indications de date, de lieu ou de copiste, ed. Charles Samaran and Robert Marichal, 7 vols, Paris 1959–84, VII, 77. 8 Benjamin Pohl, ‘Abbas qui et scriptor? The handwriting of Robert of Torigni and his scribal activity as abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel (1154–1186) ’, Traditio 69, 2014, 45–86. 9 CMSM fol. 114r:… et exinde fecit Robert[us] abbas cartam suam. cuius transcriptum ad maiorem euidentiam rei hic subiecimus. 10 See The Letters and Charters of Henry II, King of England, ed. Nicholas Vincent, 8 vols, Oxford forthcoming, nos. 1859–1860; also Bisson, Chronography of Robert of Torigni, II, forthcoming.

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extended trip to domains in England in 1156–57 (fols 112v, 114r, Figs 1, 2) is problematic, unless we place Robert’s days in the priory in Devon in early winter 1157. Nevertheless, what we have here is exactly the mode of imprecise dating by years that prevails in Robert of Torigni’s continuation-chronicle. This issue notwithstanding, it does look as if the annuary was compiled in (mostly) and from 1157. It was probably initiated upon return from England in spring 1157, working from accumulated written summations dating from Robert’s arrival at the Mount in 1154, then extended to 1159 for a few more items, mostly in a second hand (cf. fols 115r, Fig. 3, and 115v). Robert’s close attention to this writing may have ended with the item next to be mentioned. Third, with respect to discernible sequence in the acta, it looks as if item 36, the very last one in the original hand (fol. 115r bottom, Fig. 3) was indeed climactic. In brief and lucid summation, it recounts how Abbot Robert arranged for a dedication of St Mary’s church in Genêts, securing its endowment in specified nearby lands and renders. Listed first among the witnesses is Bishop Herbert of Avranches, followed by Abbot Robert himself, then by, amongst others, Robert’s nephew Durand. Roland, the prévôt of Torigni, who is frequently mentioned in other acta, was a donor. This item, datable to late spring 1157, appears to record a triumphant occasion. Three years into his term at Le Mont Saint-Michel, Robert of Torigni has secured his domains, including those in his patrimonial concentrations near Pontorson, Genêts, Saint-Pair, Domjean, and Verson; he has visited the priories in the Channel Islands and in England. Amongst diverse agenda, the acta record settlements of disputes (some traceable back to Abbot Bernard’s time), abbatial rights to high justice and advowsons in churches. With barely one or two exceptions, the acta record outcomes favourable to the lordship of Le Mont SaintMichel. The dedication in spring 1157 glows with Abbot Robert’s success in that external role at the Mount. Fourth, it remains to notice one quite distinct concern in the acta. No fewer than twelve of the forty-nine summations record settlements and donations by men seeking admission to monastic status in Le Mont Saint-Michel. Abbot Robert bargains for the monks’ consent in ways that display his energy in visiting domains, in acquainting himself with the montois patrimony. At Domjean (fol. 114v), to cite but one instance, where one Richard had already given twenty acres when his son Richard became a monk, the elder Richard gave all his remaining land, amounting to a whole vavassor’s fief, when he himself took vows in 1157. Knowing otherwise, as we do, that some twenty monks joined the congregation during the abbacy of Robert of Torigny,11 the annuary of 1157–59 can be viewed as a reliable source. Rights of lordship in the lesser aristocracy from which came Abbot Robert himself, were a saleable commodity, even in spiritual currency. In closing, let me underscore the peculiar originality of the annuary. I do not mean to extol it as careful writing. On the contrary, unlike the laboriously copied charters that precede it, the annuary reads as a swiftly fluent summation of occasions – of settlements, deals, judgments, and (yes) sales – for the convenience of abbatial review. It shows off an accountability of great lordship more nearly affective than official; something top-down, and mildly self-serving; yet something distinct from the fiscal control of local agents. My analogy with new impulses in France and Barcelona holds, I believe, but I would no longer maintain that fiscal management

Jean Huynes, Histoire générale de l’abbaye du Mont St-Michel au Péril de la Mer, ed. Eugène de Robillard de Beaurepaire, 2 vols, Rouen 1872–3 [s. xvii]), I, 175. 11



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in the localities was foremost. It is stunning to find that, as in the annuary, so also in other records, including his chronicle, Robert of Torigni sometimes forgets that his local agents are prévôts, not prefects. Roland of Genêts, who is a constant presence in the annuary, is simply a loyal servant who shares in the patrimonial revenues of Le Mont Saint-Michel. When we catch a glimpse of written accountability for domains in one item (no. 43, fol. 116r), it looks like an old prescriptive accountancy of lordship in which obligations only are in writing, not settlements of balance. The annuary, even when it sometimes names witnesses, looks like Abbot Robert’s congenial device for making things work. Moreover, it is a temporary device. Why it was discontinued in 1159 we can only guess. A good guess might be that it required more constant collaboration and vigilance than Abbot Robert had time to give. And what is not guesswork is that, whereas the new record marked a deliberate, perhaps programmatic break with Bernard’s cartulary – see fols 112rv – Robert of Torigni fully intended that his new entries be continuous with the cartulary, which (after all) contained the great foundational texts of archangelic mythology at the Mount. It was surely Robert himself who articulated the annuary in the margins (the Lord’s year by year), perhaps first in his own hand (fol. 112v, plate 1); and carried forward this compartmentalizing by years in MS 210 as far as 1168 (fol. 122rv). Indeed, just here several charters of great importance to Le Mont Saint-Michel, including the lord-king’s confirmation of one of them ‘in the army at Fougères’ (July 1166), were entered in the manuscript with finely decorated initials. This is surely proof that Abbot Robert returned to and persisted with the very cartulary he had first renounced. And this proof seems confirmed when on fol. 123v, Robert of Torigni himself notes, characteristically, that a charter copied below for a land in Lombardy (of all places) belongs, not here, but ‘in the end of the book, with the charters of that land’.12

CMSM, fol. 123v: Hec carta est de quadam terra Langobardie. et deberet esse in fine libri cum cartis illius terre.

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