King of the North Wind

The chroniclers recorded tales of torture and ransom to appropriate wealth, the fear engendered by Stephen’s Flemish mercenaries, and the lack of respect for church property. These sacred places were stripped of their valuables and graves were desecrated, often to build more castles upon. Some local lords even extorted money from villages in the form of a ‘protection’ tax, treating the chaos in those areas riven with fighting as a moneymaking opportunity.135

Oxfordshire experienced some of the bitterest fighting of the civil war, owing to Matilda’s presence after Londoners threw her out in 1141, and then her close proximity at Devizes. Both sides had held the county at various points during the war. Oxford, the county’s most important town, was the scene of an annual fair, and its central location made it a magnet for trade. It was a wealthy town, about the sixth richest in the kingdom.136 But Stephen partially burned and sacked it, and besieged the castle in an attempt to capture Matilda in 1142. Local people fled for their lives, leaving all their possessions behind. Matilda had eluded Stephen; but for the people of the town, the burning of Oxford and the loss of their possessions and income were catastrophic. Oxfordshire, one of the most agriculturally prosperous counties in England, suffered regular crop burnings and pillagings, with peasants conscripted into local armies and communities attacked, leaving widows and orphans unprotected. Oxford had still not completely recovered economically by 1155.

In many large towns, however, trade, markets and annual fairs tended to continue as usual, as did the inhabitants’ pleasures – their cockfighting, their wrestling matches, and their football matches where, if the town was large enough, members of the trades and the schools would align themselves into teams, cheered on by their friends and relatives.137

Chroniclers who recorded the woes of the civil war were for the most part from the areas affected by the fighting. If you lived in Essex, firmly in royal hands throughout the period, you would hardly have known that a war was happening at all.

Peasants continued to till their land and bring in the harvest, unimpeded by either army. Villagers went to church on Sundays and feast days, where they would stand for services presided over by a priest speaking Latin, which they did not understand. Churches were a riot of brilliant colour, from the lurid wall paintings depicting the horrors or joys of the Day of Judgement, to the effigies, tombs and carvings of saints decorated with the congregants’ favourite baubles and trinkets.

Community activities held in churches continued too – they were not just a place of prayer, baptism, weddings and funerals, but also the scene of festivals and plays. ‘Church-ales’ would be held here, effectively fundraisers for the church, which elicited money by selling ale.

Anarchy did not therefore exist in all areas, all of the time. Some form of government was exercised nearly everywhere – whether controlled by Stephen, Matilda, or the great magnates such as Ranulf of Chester, Robert’s son-in-law, who acted more or less independently. And each party of power minted coins and collected taxes.

***

Henry left England in January 1150. He would not return for three years, although Eustace continued to pursue him obsessively. Only one of them could be king.

He returned to Normandy to great acclaim, where his father officially pronounced him ‘duke’. As Henry’s star rose, Eustace’s declined. Although Henry was absent from England, he was now taken seriously as one of two contenders for the throne. Many believed he would be England’s next king, and as such his favour was frequently courted more than Stephen’s by the self-interested magnates whose lands straddled the English Channel.

In Normandy, Geoffrey finally captured Gerard Berlai, Louis’ friend and seneschal for the county of Poitou, in June 1150 after a year-long siege. Geoffrey, inspired by his reading of the Roman writer Vegetius, had bombarded Gerard’s seemingly impregnable double-walled castle with ‘Greek Fire’, a feared incendiary device of the ancient world.138

A desperate Eustace joined his brother-in-law Louis to attempt to annihilate Henry on the continent. Louis was pious. In 1147 he and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, had left their kingdom for two years for Jerusalem with the Second Crusade. Militarily it was a disaster, an utter humiliation for Louis. On his return he was dismayed not only at Henry’s and Geoffrey’s victories in Normandy, but also at the stupendous progress Henry had made during his absence in pursuing his claim to the English throne.

Louis feared such a powerful neighbour on his north-western border and joined Eustace to rout father and son. But the new duke and his father were untouchable; Normandy’s defences remained impregnable.

Louis, badgered by his adored advisor Abbot Suger, and then on Suger’s death in January 1151 by his new chief advisor, the cadaverous Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux, was persuaded to pragmatism. He abandoned Eustace’s cause and reluctantly invited Henry and Geoffrey to Paris, to accept Henry’s homage for Normandy. And so, in August Henry and Geoffrey brought their prisoner Gerard Berlai to Paris, that mosquito-infested, unpaved city of mud and marsh, to meet their pious and tedious overlord, the king of France. It would be Henry’s first encounter with Louis’ queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine.

No one was prepared for the upheaval that was to follow.

VI

The encounter did not begin well. The great hall of Louis’ old palace, squatting at the end of the tiny Île de la Cité in the middle of the River Seine, reverberated with screams of rage. Bernard of Clairvaux, Louis, his brother and advisors, and Count Geoffrey of Anjou all competed to be heard. The noise of their frenzy echoed around the chamber.

When they saw Gerard Berlai presented to them, shackled, Louis and Bernard were furious. They demanded Gerard’s immediate release, and the return of the Vexin, a small territory midway between the Norman city of Rouen and the Capetian city of Paris. Whoever controlled this borderland of castles and rivers, whether the Norman dukes or the kings of France, held the advantage. Louis wanted it; Henry and Geoffrey were not prepared to give it up.

Bernard of Clairvaux loathed and distrusted the House of Anjou. He believed they were rogue counts, descended from the devilish fairy Melusine. He had called Geoffrey ‘that hammer of good men, and destroyer of the peace and liberty of the Church’, and in 1147 he had induced Pope Eugenius III to excommunicate Geoffrey for his besiegement of Berlai.139 Furthermore, Geoffrey had been noticeably absent from the Second Crusade, when nearly every other French nobleman had responded to Bernard’s call to take the cross.140 When Henry and Geoffrey walked into the great hall of Louis’ palace with their prisoner, tempers flared.

Louis took Geoffrey’s imprisonment of Gerard as a personal offence; he was incensed.141 He ranted that he would only accept Henry’s homage for Normandy (the ceremony where Henry would become Louis’ man and hold Normandy only by right of Louis) and arrange for the lifting of Geoffrey’s excommunication, if they released Gerard immediately. He demanded that they also cede the Vexin. Geoffrey, equally maddened, stormed out of the meeting, ‘tormented by vapours of black bile’, followed by Henry.142 They would not give up the Vexin, and they would not release Gerard. Geoffrey, in ferocious temper, cared nothing for his excommunication.

But almost immediately Henry and Geoffrey came back and ceded to both of Louis’ demands. Louis kept his word and bypassed his brother-in-law; Henry paid homage for Normandy where he was officially pronounced ‘duke’. Eustace’s claims were denied, by both Louis and the pope, who refused Stephen’s request to guarantee Eustace’s succession.143 Geoffrey, though, still smarting, refused to ask Bernard to lift his excommunication. In a fit of prophetic vengeance, Bernard pronounced that Geoffrey would be dead within two weeks.

Unperturbed by the prophecy, Henry and Geoffrey ‘joyfully’ left Paris.144 Henry went to Lisieux to meet his Norman barons, while Geoffrey travelled on to his castle of Château-du-Loir in Sarthe, near his capital, Le Mans. The late summer weather was extremely hot and Geoffrey took an evening swim in the river. He caught a fever, and by 7 September he was dead. He was thirty-eight years old.

In August, Henry had been a young man with enormous expectations, but only one dukedom in his hand. One month on, his father’s untimely death made him lord of Anjou and Maine, as well as duke of Normandy. He now controlled a vast swathe of northern France.

But in Paris in high summer, why did Henry and Geoffrey, having stormed out of the talks with Louis, return and give him everything he wanted?

The likeliest reason is that the new young duke of Normandy had made a bargain with Eleanor, Louis’ queen. Within a few months of meeting Henry, Eleanor and Louis would divorce; in May 1152, she would secretly marry Henry in her capital, Poitiers.

VII

Henry was eighteen years old when he and Eleanor met in Paris in 1151 and made their bargain. He was tall with a stocky, muscled body and a compelling face. He was charismatic, athletic, clever, educated, empathetic and ambitious. He was already known as a skilful (and lucky) commander of armies. He possessed a restlessness, an unquiet energy that kept his body in perpetual motion. Henry could not sit still.

More stories have been invented about Eleanor of Aquitaine than any other medieval woman. Her life has been imagined by chroniclers, historians, playwrights, poets, romantic novelists and film-makers for over 800 years. She has been portrayed as a vixen, a sexual predator and deviant; as the poisoner of her husband’s mistress; as a desperately unhappy woman in a desperately unhappy marriage; as Shakespeare’s ‘canker’d grandam’; as a model of erudition, beauty and queenly virtue; as the leader of an army of bare-breasted crusader women; a feisty adventuress; a feminist prototype; an intellectual powerhouse and influential patron of the arts; and as the initiator of the famous troubadour courts of love. Although Eleanor undoubtedly grew up at Poitiers among the troubadours, and was the recipient of the unrequited passion of the poet Bernart de Ventadorn – who would follow her to England and Henry’s court, proclaiming, ‘When the cold wind blows from the direction of your country, it seems to me that I felt a breeze from paradise, for love of the lady’ – almost everything that has been written about Eleanor is either a half-truth, wrong, or ultimately unknowable.145

The real Eleanor is a chimera, as illusive and fleeting as quicksilver. Such is her fame, we desire to possess her, yet we know almost nothing about her. The historian Richard Barber notes that ‘to print out all of the records and chronicle entries about Eleanor would take less than a hundred pages’.146 The written record is notably small for one of the most famous figures in European history. And that written record for the most part relates to the last fifteen years of her life – she died in her early eighties. Eleanor’s earlier life remains in the shadows.

What, then, do we know of Eleanor? She was the daughter of William X of Aquitaine and Aénor of Châtellerault, and was born in about 1122 in or near Poitiers; some rumours put her birthplace at Château de Belin, near Bordeaux.147 If we take this as the year of her birth (the records are not exact), she was twenty-nine years old when the eighteen-year-old Henry rode into Paris.

Aquitaine was the largest and the richest of the duchies that owed nominal allegiance to the French crown, although its rulers refused to pay homage to the French kings.148 To the north its border was the River Loire, and to the south the mountains of the Pyrenees. It stretched west to east from the Atlantic to the Massif Central. The territory of its dukes, consisting of several different counties, dwarfed that of the French kings. They resided in their palace at Poitiers, closer to Paris than their southern border, and their subjects treated them as kings.149 Their palace, a Merovingian fortress, sat at the top of a hill encircled by the River Clain. They certainly behaved as kings, encouraging ties of friendship between themselves and their nobility, taking clerical advice to increase their religious authority, and even acquiring relics. Relics held a cult status in the medieval world, a tangible expression of the story of Christ and his promise. Eleanor’s ancestor Duke William V, or the Great, gained the gory prize of the head of John the Baptist for the church of Saint-Jean-d’Angély.150 This duke was apparently called ‘Augustus’ by the pope in recognition of his power.

During the tenth century, the counts of Poitou had expanded their lands and became so powerful that they exercised quasi-royal authority. The relatively weak Frankish kings to the north rarely ventured south, except on their way to shrines such as St James’s at Compostela, or to Rome.151 They were obliged to grant Aquitaine’s rulers the title ‘duke’ towards the end of the tenth century. These dukes expanded their power in the eleventh century, to incorporate all the territory Eleanor brought Louis as her marriage portion. They paid lip service only to their royal overlords. They were rich, their wealth buttressed by fertile vineyards, timber from the vast forests, fish, salt, and trade from Aquitaine’s sea ports, La Rochelle and Bordeaux, on the Atlantic coast.

Eleanor’s family was colourful. We assume that she would have been brought up with the tales of her strong ancestresses, wielding power in their own right – Agnes of Burgundy, her grandmother Philippa of Toulouse – or as regents or wives, and sharing in inheritance, unlike their sisters to the north, where primogeniture was slowly but inexorably becoming commonplace

She would also likely have known of her grandfather William IX, ‘the troubadour duke’, who had died soon after Eleanor’s birth, in 1126. This lotus-eating duke was famous for his poetry, his affairs, his defiance of the church, his crusading expeditions, his success as a warrior, and even of occasional friendship with Muslims allied to Christians. If Eleanor was born in 1122, and not 1124 as some historians contend, she may even have had memories of him. It was about his love life, however, that the most scurrilous stories of the troubadour duke were told. In 1094 he married Philippa, daughter of the count of Toulouse. This was Philippa’s second marriage; she was the widow of the king of Aragon. Philippa’s decision to marry William was political – she wanted him to pursue her claim to rule in Toulouse. And he did, fighting on her behalf, for over thirty years.152 William IX ultimately lost, although Eleanor would later take up her grandmother’s claim.

Philippa silently tolerated William’s numerous affairs. The most notorious was with the married viscountess of Châtellerault, called ‘Dangereuse’. She and Eleanor’s grandfather lived openly together at his palace at Poitiers, Dangereuse residing in the Maubergeon Tower there. We do not know what became of Philippa. She either retired to Fontevraud, that extraordinary foundation on the borders of Poitou and Anjou where the community of men and women lived under the direction of the abbess, or she outlived William quietly and anonymously, away from him and his mistress.153

Dangereuse was Eleanor’s maternal grandmother. Before she began her affair with the duke, she had a daughter, Aénor, with her husband the viscount of Châtellerault. The duke arranged for the marriage of his son, also William, to Aénor, probably at the instigation of his mistress while she still resided with her husband. Philippa’s feelings on the choice of bride for her son are unrecorded.

William was damned by churchmen for this affair; to live with a married woman, particularly while still married, was an affront to God. The bishop of Poitiers excommunicated him, and a monk from the Limousin explained away the duke’s disastrous expedition on crusade, suffering the death of most of his army at the hands of the Turks in Anatolia, as punishment for his adultery: ‘In truth he bore nothing of the name Christian; he was, as everyone knows, an ardent lover of women, and therefore unstable in all his actions.’154

Contemporaries were ambivalent in their attitudes towards him. Although to many churchmen he was damned, to some, this duke, the first of the troubadours, was worthy of praise for his wit and his wondrous (albeit often obscene) poetry. A thirteenth-century source described him as ‘one of the greatest courtiers of the world and one of the greatest deceivers of women … And he knew well how to compose and sing.’155

He died in 1126, although his influence was still felt in the reign of his son Duke William X. This duke was educated at the cathedral school in Poitiers. Yet although he encouraged the troubadours to frequent his court, he was not a poet like his father. He seems to have been rather in his father’s shadow, as the children of able and famous parents often are. His greatest military success was capturing the area around the seaport of La Rochelle. He fell victim to Bernard of Clairvaux’s wrath when he supported the contentious antipope, Anacletus II, in 1130. Anacletus’ ancestry was too much for Bernard to bear, for he had a Jewish great-grandfather, who had converted to Christianity in the middle of the eleventh century, and changed his name from Baruch to Benedict. Voltaire would call him ‘the Jewish Pope’. For this travesty, Duke William X’s lands were placed under papal interdict, and the sainted Bernard denounced him with his typical incandescent rancour.

Nevertheless, William X capitulated to Bernard’s demands that he give up support for Anacletus. In 1135, he agreed to go on pilgrimage to the shrine of St James at Compostela. He left Eleanor and her younger sister Petronilla in Bordeaux, at the castle of l’Ombrière.

We know nothing of Eleanor’s family life, or her early education. Her father had one brother, Raymond, who would seek his fortune as prince of Antioch. She also had five paternal aunts, but frustratingly we know practically nothing about them, or the extent of any interaction with, or influence over, Eleanor. One became abbess of the convent of Notre-Dame at Saintes, and another, Agnes, was married in 1134 to King Ramiro II of Aragon.

Eleanor’s mother, Aénor, for whom she was named (Eleanor means ‘another Aénor’ in Latin) died in 1130, when Eleanor was about eight years old. Her elder brother, Aigret, died in the same year.

Eleanor was close to Petronilla, who would stay with her, and to her mother’s family, particularly her uncle, Raoul de Faye. He would be extremely important to her later in her life.

The men in her family were well educated, with a good knowledge of Latin, but we know little about how the women were educated. We do know, however, that it was commonplace for tutors to be attached to courts, and there is no reason to suppose that Eleanor was not educated. She probably learned to read and she knew Latin. She was not born to rule and did not even appear in a document until July 1129.156 What is much better known is the fame of the cathedral schools of Poitiers and Saint-Hilaire, and the cultural sophistication of the court, with its songs of courtly love written and performed by both the nobility and poor poets.

Eleanor, on her brother’s death, became her father’s heir. William X was still young and intended to marry again in the hope of having more sons. Even in the more liberal south, female rule was problematic, and it was in his interests to shore up the succession with a male heir. In 1136, he had attempted to marry the widow of the lord of Cognac, but she was forced instead to marry the count of Angoulême. For this was a period where it was not uncommon for heiresses to be kidnapped and coerced into marriage for their inheritances.

Eleanor’s father would never return from his pilgrimage to Compostela. He died suddenly on Good Friday 1137, a scant two days away from his destination. He was thirty-eight years old. His death catapulted the fifteen-year-old Eleanor to the position of duchess of Aquitaine in her own right.

Before he left, although he had made no plans for her marriage, Duke William had entrusted his daughter, the richest heiress in Christendom, to the guardianship of his nominal overlord, Louis the Fat. On William’s death, Louis promptly denied any claim that could have been made by Eleanor’s paternal uncle, Raymond, far away in Antioch, and instead betrothed Eleanor to his son, also named Louis. Eleanor’s sister Petronilla had no share of their father’s inheritance. All was subsumed by the French crown; a Capetian king had never been so closely involved in the affairs of Aquitaine.157

Louis VI, although his size had earned him the soubriquet ‘the Fat’, was an impressive and able king. He was, according to a contemporary source, ‘huge in body, but no smaller in act and thought’.158 For such a wily ruler, the marriage of his son and heir to the heiress to the greatest duchy in France was an obvious and necessary step.

Louis was seventeen. He was his father’s second son, and like Eleanor it had not been intended that he rule. But in October 1131 his older brother Philip died when his horse fell over a ‘devilish’ pig in the rutted and unpaved streets of a Parisian suburb. A source describing the prince’s demise paints an uglier picture, of the young man chasing a squire for fun through Paris’s streets, when he fell and died.159 Young Louis reluctantly left the peace of the cloister, where he had been preparing for a career in the church, to learn statecraft. In October 1131, he was anointed king at Reims Cathedral in his father’s lifetime, a not uncommon practice of the Frankish kings.

Young Louis, his marriage arranged, promptly left Paris in the summer of 1137 and travelled south to Bordeaux with his mentor Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, where he and Eleanor were married on 25 July at Saint-André Cathedral. Eleanor was crowned alongside Louis, ‘with the diadem of the kingdom’.160 Eleanor gave Louis a wedding gift – a beautiful pear-shaped vase of rock crystal. At least one historian believes it may have been a christening gift to Eleanor from her grandfather, William IX,161 most probably gifted to him by the Muslim King Imad al-dawla of Saragossa in Spain.162 This vase is one of the few objects associated with Eleanor that survives today; it sits in the Louvre in Paris.

What do we know of Louis? His seal in 1137 shows a long-haired young man, but we know little else of his appearance.163 He had now spent six years, since the death of his elder brother, preparing for rule, yet the aura of piety never left him. Unusually, there was no contemporary gossip of Louis having a mistress. Much later, when he was married to his third wife, Adela of Champagne, it was suggested that a prostitute be sent to him, to hasten his recovery from an illness. The chronicler Gerald of Wales noted this religious man’s response: ‘If nothing else will cure me, let the Lord do his will by me, since it is better to die ill and chaste than to live as an adulterer.’164

Eleanor and Louis began their journey to Paris almost immediately after their marriage. They stopped at Poitiers on the way, where Louis was invested duke of Aquitaine. But Louis’ father, meanwhile, was on his deathbed. Louis the Fat died just days after his son’s marriage, on 1 August. Louis and Eleanor, France’s new king and queen, remained in Poitiers, where they received the news just after Louis’ ducal investiture, and were crowned on 8 August.

What did Louis, now king of France, inherit in the summer of 1137? The French kingdom had emerged out of the remnants of the mighty Carolingian Empire. In 751, Pepin the Short, the mayor of the palace in the service of the last Merovingian king Childeric III, seized the throne from his master. Pope Stephen II countenanced his appropriation of the throne in return for a donation of land in central Italy, known as ‘the Donation of Pepin’, to the papacy.§ Pepin was duly crowned king of the Franks; he was the first of the Carolingian kings.