Luscombe D., Riley-Smith J. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 4: c. 1024-c. 1198, Part 2

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The kingdom of the Franks: the seigneuries 541

provosts’ (grands pr

ots) appeared, who took charge of several provostships.

Urban growth was evident in Dijon with the building of a new, extended town

wall. In 1185 the commune obtained a charter on the model of that of Meaux

and Soissons. A mayor and elected prudhommes exercised justice in the name

of the duke, who succeeded in recovering the policing of the highways.

the great territorial concentrations

Powerful and compact, the principalities we have just considered were like

that of the Capetians. In this respect they were distinct from the great terri-

torial concentrations, a phenomenon both typical of the twelfth century and

nevertheless exceptional.

The ﬁrst unsuccessful attempt at a vast territorial agglomeration was the

Anglo-Norman-Blois-Champagne empire. Through his mother, Theobald II

of Blois was the oldest of Henry I (‘Beauclerk’) of England’s nephews, to

whom he should have succeeded in 1135. The Norman aristocracy had received

him as heir to the throne when they learnt that, on the other side of the

Channel, the great lords of England had rallied to his brother Stephen and

proclaimed him king at Westminster. In order to preserve their interests in

the English kingdom, the Normans abandoned their candidate. The law of

primogeniture was ﬂouted. Theobald withdrew, letting his brother reign in

his stead, but he gave him no help when the Empress Matilda, daughter of

Henry I, and her husband, Geoffrey, count of Anjou, succeeded in vindicating

the rights of their young son, Henry II Plantagenet, who succeeded Stephen

in 1154.

Another instance of the failure to build up a large, looser territorial princi-

pality was the union of Aquitaine and the royal principality in the person of

Eleanor and Louis VII. The annulment of the marriage celebrated at Bordeaux

in 1137 made the duchess Eleanor free once more and in 1152 she was married

again, to Henry II Plantagenet. Thus was born what historians have called

‘the Angevin empire’. This empire encompassed the patrimonial holdings of

the counts of Anjou (Anjou, Touraine, Maine), augmented, by right of con-

quest, with Normandy in 1144, with Aquitaine and Gascony through marriage

in 1152 and, through Henry’s accession to the throne, with England in 1154.

This agglomeration of territories remained fragile. Henry II himself provided

for its division between his sons in 1169–70. Crowned king at Westminster in

1170 and at Winchester in 1172, the oldest, Henry ﬁtz Henry was to reign over

England, Anjou and Normandy; the second, Richard, was to inherit from his

mother Aquitaine, under the direct suzerainty of the king of France; the third,

Geoffrey, was to be, by marriage, duke of Brittany, under Norman suzerainty;

and the last, John ‘Lackland’, was to remain just that – landless. The death of

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542 michel bur

Henry ﬁtz Henry made Richard the heir to the whole empire and holder of

the two peerages of Normandy and Aquitaine.

Normandy

In this vast empire Normandy was the keystone. Henry I ‘Beauclerk’, who

had recovered it in 1106, endeavoured to revive the Consuetudines et justicie

attributed to his father. He presented himself as the holder of public authority,

the guarantor of peace, master of forests and rivers, highways and roads, having

monopoly of the coinage and fortiﬁcations. Throughout the duchy, he dele-

gated juges enqu

eteurs to investigate misdeeds. Their ‘assises’ suspended private

jurisdictions. Barons and freemen had to appear there. Anyone who wanted

could place himself under the prince’s protection. The authority thus restored

blossomed after 1135 in legislation independent of the traditional conciliar

framework.

Local administration was provided by twenty-two vicomtes, ﬂexible and re-

vocable appointments, remunerated out of ducal revenues. Their role declined

towards the middle of the twelfth century with the institution by the Planta-

genets of the baillis, whose scope did not coincide with the former divisions.

There were twenty-eight in 1172 and they commanded the vassals in the feudal

host. Elsewhere enfeoffed sergeanties evolved who supervised forests, markets

and prisons. On a higher level, the increasingly specialized ducal court was

presided over by the justiciar in the absence of the king-duke. From 1176 on-

wards, this great ofﬁcer became a kind of universal agent in administrative

and judicial matters. An embryonic budget was worked out in the second half

of the twelfth century. Receipts were centralized at the exchequer at Caen.

Expenditure could only be initiated by ducal writ. All these operations were

recorded on rolls of parchment, of which the oldest extant go back to 1180.

In Normandy, the feudal hierarchy tended henceforth to incorporate the

commoners. It bound to the duke the barons who were his tenants-in-chief,

the titular vassals of a knight’s fee and the vavasseurs, with reservation of fealty

to the dominus Normanniae imposed on all, including rear-vassals. Enqu

etes

such as that of 1172 ﬁxed the level of services, aids and relief due to the suzerain

who was always the guardian of orphans. In 1181 by the Assise of Arms, from

ulgated in England and then probably applied on the continent, it was decided

that everyone with movables worth 100 livres angevines should have the equip-

ment of a knight; with movables worth 40, 30 or 25 a haubergeon (i.e. coat of

mail), lance, sword or a bow and arrows. Henry II sometimes replaced military

service by the payment of a levy (l’

ecuage), exacted by the baillis, which allowed

him to recruit mercenaries and pay knights. Of course, every castle could revert

to the prince on simple requisition.

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The kingdom of the Franks: the seigneuries 543

From the end of the eleventh century a royal style of government became

more pronounced in the duchy. The name of the king of France began to be

omitted from the dating clauses of charters from 1087 onwards. After 1176, the

king of England issued general ordinances in Normandy which applied to all

his dominions.

Aquitaine

In contrast with this solid territorial core, springing up on the ruins of the

former Neustria, the huge duchy of Aquitaine, enlarged since the second half

of the eleventh century with the addition of Gascony, was always trying to

strain in all directions. In c. 1100,William IX sought by right of his wife to

seize the comt

e of Toulouse and its feudal dependencies. He narrowly failed

in 1119.Inhis turn Henry II Plantagenet ﬁxed his sights on the shores of the

Mediterranean in 1159.Hehad some success in 1167 and, in 1170,heclaimed all

the territories within the ecclesiastical province of Bourges. The background

to this dream of hegemony was the memory of the ninth- and tenth-century

regnum Aquitaniae encompassing, among other lands, Berry, the Auvergne, the

Velay, the Albigeois and the Toulousain–agood ﬁfteen comt

es in all.

Capable of magniﬁcent feats in order to achieve expansion, the dukes had

poor control over a vaguely deﬁned area, subject to anarchic forces. The col-

lapse of Carolingian structures had given way to a whole system of relations,

more or less binding, based on temporary convenientiae.Ducal suzerainty was

inconsistent, clientage many-layered and unstable, castellanies virtually inde-

pendent. All this was further aggravated by ecclesiastical privileges and a rapid

decline in the public peace.

The duke could only count on his own resources, which came to him essen-

tially from Poitou and Gascony, where provosts administered his domains and

castellans (often hereditary) defended his castles. Thanks to his wealth, he was

in a position to build fortresses, pay wages to mercenaries and reward loyalty.

Thus he began to restore his pre-eminence, ﬁrst in the Charente region. Turn-

ing succession disputes to his own advantage, he ruined several powerful lords

(the house of Chˆatelaillon) and marked his victory with the foundation of La

Rochelle. He was always conscious of his own position in the feudal hierarchy.

Suger recounts the famous episode in which the duke intervened between Louis

VI and the count of Auvergne, promising to make the latter appear before the

royal court on condition that he was acknowledged as the duke’s vassal. This

policy bore fruit from before 1137.Atthat date, William X delivered, unop-

posed, with his daughter Eleanor, an indivisible duchy to the king, Louis VII.

Louis immediately furthered his predecessors’ policy towards greater admin-

istrative centralization and a more robust structuring of feudal ties. The ducal

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544 michel bur

court was organized on the French model, with the principal ofﬁce devolved

to the seneschal who, in 1147, had the entire duchy under his authority, both

Aquitaine proper and Gascony. The Second Crusade gave Geoffrey of Rancon

the position of a vice-regent.

Under Henry II, Eleanor’s second husband, the Anglo-Norman model was

imposed. From 1156 several seneschals were set over the eleven ducal provost-

ships. There were six in 1174 to collect taxes, render justice and command the

army. In fact periods of rebellion required better control of the population.

Under Richard, the great seneschal reappeared, but the presence of the duke at

Poitiers – a duke with the ring of St Valery on his ﬁnger as a sign of his wedding

to his duchy – prevented him from acquiring his former stature. Finally, from

1180 to 1216, the region was divided into two s

echauss

ees:onthe one hand

Poitou, on the other Gascony and P

erigord; a prophetic division, for Philip

Augustus was soon to seize the ﬁrst, leaving the second – the future Guyenne –

to the Plantagenets.

Elsewhere in the duchy the quickening pace of feudalization resulted in the

formation of a true territorial principality. The prince encroached on the affairs

of his vassals when there was a disputed succession, relying with increasing insis-

tence upon the force of the law. He demanded homage and, in order to obtain

it, conﬁscated – provisionally at least – Limoges in 1139 and Angoulˆeme in 1181.

This attitude provoked six revolts in twenty-one years, especially between 1173

and 1183.Incapable of coordinating their efforts – the Gascons knew nothing

of the Aquitanians and vice versa – the rebels ﬁnally failed. Their castles were

razed or lost their allodial status, becoming ﬁefs. Broken, the nobles themselves

drew the ties that bound them more tightly by making appeals to the suzerain.

The latter beneﬁted from these circumstances to impose liege homage in a

region which did not know it. When Philip Augustus conquered Poitou, the

intermediate (ducal) level which separated him from his rear-vassals collapsed.

Henceforth, the count of La Marche and the vicomtes of Thouars or Limoges

would become the direct vassals of the king.

Toulouse and the Mediterranean coast

An aggregate of territories acquired at the end of the eleventh century by Ray-

mond of St-Gilles, the principality of Toulouse (consisting of the Toulousain,

Quercy and Rouergue), embraced a vast dependency originating in the break-

up of the former march of Gothia. The vicomt

es of Albi and Carcassonne were

attached to the Toulousain and Quercy, those of Narbonne, B

eziers and the

evaudan to the Rouergue. Moreover, in 1125 the comital domain was enlarged

by the marquisate of Provence, between the Is

ere and the Durance, with its

extension into the Velay. Established on both sides of the frontier, the count

of Toulouse could intervene in the empire at his pleasure.

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The kingdom of the Franks: the seigneuries 545

As has just been observed, the domanial core of this principality was clearly

off-centre, west of the dependencies along the Mediterranean coast and the

lands closely bordering it: an unbalanced situation which we have already seen

elsewhere, in Champagne and in Flanders. Some great families, comparable

to the vicomtes of Poitou or the counts of Angoulˆeme, held the vicomt

es of the

Languedoc, the most powerful of them being the Trencavels of Albi, Carcas-

sonne and B

eziers. In a region which was witnessing the rebirth of Roman

customary law in written form, where the allod was an impediment to enfeoff-

ments, where fevdal obligations proceeded from oaths without homage, and

where castles, even held as ﬁefs, were not liable to be surrendered to a lord, the

prince was powerless before a prosperous aristocracy who possessed minting,

judicial and economic rights. The most common coins were those struck by

the count of Melgueil, the direct vassal of the pope since 1085.

The ecclesiastical lordships, strengthened by the Gregorian reform, were

another outpost of resistance: at Narbonne power was divided between the

vicomte and the archbishop; the vicomt

e or comt

e was transferred to the bishops

at Albi, Lod

eve and Mende with the support of Louis VII in c. 1160.Adegree

of weakness in Raymond of Toulouse’s ediﬁce was accentuated still further by

the fact that the counts were very involved in the crusades.

Their successes should also be stressed. They had succeeded in imposing

primogeniture as the rule for succession, whereas the Trencavels continued

to divide their goods between their sons. The comital court eventually had a

monopoly of judicial appeals, with the chancellor operating like the president

of a law court at the end of the twelfth century. At local level, domanial ad-

ministration was entrusted to bayles and justice to provosts (viguiers). Finally,

the count – who had founded the ville neuve of Montauban in 1144 and feared

the independence of the urban communes – was able to tame the burgeoisie of

Toulouse. He granted the city a consulate in 1152 and connected the burghers

more closely with the administration of the city in 1189. The counts’ achieve-

ment was positive, although the threats they faced included the proximity of

Barcelona and the development of the Cathar heresy.

Catalonia

Master of Barcelona and Gerona, then through default of heirs of Cerdanya

and the Besal

u, and lastly of Roussillon in 1172, the count of Barcelona held all

the comt

es that constituted the new ecclesiastical province of Tarragona restored

by the pope at the beginning of the twelfth century, apart from the Ampurias

and Haut-Pallars. It was then (in 1178,tobeexact) that the term ‘Catalonia’ ap-

peared in documents to designate a territory undergoing religious, customary

and monetary uniﬁcation. To this old Catalonia was gradually added a new

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546 michel bur

one, resulting from the Reconquista of the lower valley of the Ebro, with Tortosa

falling in 1148 and L

erida in 1149. The military government necessitated by the

war against the Muslims facilitated the consolidation and extension of feu-

dal bonds and the appearance (under the name of solidantia)ofliege homage

to the prince. The important achievement of classifying the archives by lin-

eage and castle which was undertaken by the dean of Barcelona Cathedral,

Ram

on of Caldes, resulted in the drawing-up of the Liber feodorum major

in 1194.

Running alongside this attempt at feudal organization was a strengthening

of administrative systems, with judicial viguiers and domanial bayles at local

level, as in the Toulousain, and, in the central administration, a court that was

still rudimentary and incapable of drawing up a budget, but where great ofﬁcers

like the seneschal gradually gave way to a more competent personnel of knights

and secular clergy, some of whom constituted the secret council. These men

were always concerned to base their activities on written authority. In c. 1150

they compiled the Usages of Barcelona, erroneously attributing them to Ram

Berenguer I, the founder of Catalan power in c. 1060,toestablish more se-

curely, as we have seen, the regalian prerogative in the comt

e in matters of

public peace, fortiﬁcation, coinage and criminal justice, to detach sovereignty

from suzerainty and force the recalcitrant barons to submit to princely ordi-

nances.

This development should be linked to the count of Barcelona’s marriage to

the heiress of the crown of Arag

on and in 1152 the birth of Alfonso I, who was

to be simultaneously count and king. Ofﬁcial acknowledgement of the term

‘Catalonia’ to signify the young prince’s patrimonial possessions followed, and

in 1180 the decision of the council of Tarragona to suppress in documents

all reference to the regnal years of the king of France. It was thus debatable

whether or not the territories recently conquered from the Muslims were held

from the Capetian king at all.

In the face of this afﬁrmation of the sovereignty of the count-kings, the

barons attempted resistance by invoking the Carolingian origin of their auton-

omy. It took Alfonso I and his son Pedro II twenty-ﬁve years to subdue them.

The ordinances of Fondarella were issued in 1173. The former diocesan peace

was transformed into the king’s peace, which the viguiers, with the bishops,

were to enforce. Similarly, a new tax was introduced, the bovatage,tosupport

the war against the Muslims. The discontent of the aristocracy was so great

that in 1205 Pedro II had to accept the terms of a great charter restoring ancient

customs. More fortunate than John ‘Lackland’ of England slightly later, he was

not forced to promulgate it. He ducked and dived skilfully on other issues.

Against the barons he placed the representatives of towns summoned to sit in

the plenary courts. Above all, outside the limits of his territories, he followed

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The kingdom of the Franks: the seigneuries 547

a brilliant and risky policy of expansion northwards, towards the former ec-

clesiastical province of Narbonne (from which the province of Tarragona had

been sliced off ), a region that spoke the same language and where it was easy

to extend his feudal domination at the expense of the count of Toulouse.

With this policy the counts could lend a helping hand to the younger

members of their family who occupied Lower Provence in the empire and

who also claimed rights of suzerainty over the G

evaudan, Millau and half of

the Carlad

es. Independently of this support, the count endeavoured in 1150 to

secure the fealty of the Trencavels for Carcassonne, the Raz

es and the Lauragais

but, in 1163, the count of Toulouse reversed the situation with Carcassonne,

Narbonne and Montpellier once again submitting to his authority. His Catalan

rival retaliated in B

earn in 1170,Bigorre in 1175,B

eziers in 1179; moreover, Pedro

II married the Montpellier heiress. Although the count of Toulouse took the

initiative in 1197 at N

ımes, the comt

es of Comminges and Foix slipped in 1213

to the side of Barcelona.

In this competitive climate, Catharism made continual advances. The pro-

gressively impoverished lower aristocracy refused to hand over the tithes the

church demanded and turned towards heresy. The crusaders led by Simon of

Montfort attacked the dissidents. On 12 September 1213,atMuret, they anni-

hilated the troops of Pedro II, who had decided to aid the Toulousains in order

to preserve the territorial status quo.Soon afterwards the barons of the north

imposed the law of the king of France upon the south.

cultural and political life: the world of

the princely imagination

There is one last principality to consider, that of the Capetians. Neither its

size nor its resources differentiated it from the others until the beginning of

the thirteenth century, but its prince was also the suzerain of all the lords of

the kingdom and virtual sovereign over all its inhabitants. The subject need

not detain us here, since it is treated elsewhere. It would also have been illu-

minating to have analysed an instance of micro-lordship. The same structures

would have been observed functioning at local level, the same characters would

have been involved, diminished in proportion to their resources but proud of

their real or fabled ancestors (a Danish adventurer for the Guines, for instance)

or, thanks to several clerics in their entourage, artfully provided, like guy of

Bazoches with the same genealogy as the count of Champagne and linked

through the female line to Charlemagne and even Clovis. Grafted on to royal

stock, the minor lords portrayed the nobility as a great society of cousins.

Unfortunately, there is no scope to pursue this subject here.

548 michel bur

In twelfth-century France, the rise of the principalities followed, accompa-

nied or even preceded that of the royal domain. The twelfth century was a

period of equilibrium between king and princes. Everywhere more land was

cultivated and there was more settlement, towns grew, commerce accelerated,

production increased and building renewed the environment in which people

lived. Everywhere, too, the princes provided themselves with a better admin-

istration in order to beneﬁt from demographic and economic growth. A court

culture which had been born in the Occitanian lands gained ground north-

wards and ﬂourished between the Loire and the Meuse. Courtly poetry, chanson

de geste and Breton romance were appreciated at Poitiers and Troyes even more

than at Paris: Chr

etien of Troyes was the prot

eofMarie of Champagne and

Philip of Flanders. What is more, some princes sought in history and legend

arguments which could be used for augmenting their prestige or consolidating

their rule. As a consequence of the Reditus ad stirpem Caroli,the Capetians

purloined to their advantage the memory of Charlemagne, hitherto preserved

by the counts of Boulogne and Hainault. Henry II Plantagenet asked Wace

and Benedict of Ste-Maure to glorify his mother’s Norman ancestors while,

in reaction to the Normans, Duchess Constance of Brittany called her son

Arthur to associate him with the Bretons. As for the count-king of Catalonia,

he scored an anti-Frankish point with his Gesta comitum Barcinonum.

It was thus a many-faceted society, often divided against itself, but one in

which the members shared in the same world of the imagination. Charlemagne

was always accompanied by the twelve peers and Arthur by his knights. The

Round Table, which abolished hierarchies, represented the political ideal of the

twelfth-century aristocracy. In this perspective the role of king, primus inter

pares,istoinspire prowess and put it at the service of right. None the less, all the

would-be Percevals and Gawains would have been mistaken if they believed that

King Arthur would remain imprisoned for long in this enchanted circle. At the

beginning of the thirteenth century, the peers of France, doubtless inﬂuenced

by events in Germany, attempted to create a kind of Reichf

urstenstand, but the

endeavour was unsuccessful and from 1216 onwards their college had to open

itself to ofﬁcers of the Palais. In 1226 Louis VIII rejected without hesitation the

countess of Flanders’s request to be judged exclusively by her peers. Without

anyone really realizing it, the victory of Bouvines (1214) had put an end to the

aristocracy’s egalitarian dream.

chapter 18

ENGLAND AND THE ANGEVIN

DOMINIONS, 1137–1204

Thomas K. Keefe

on aNovember night in 1138, Count Geoffrey of Anjou and his men spent

part of the evening feasting in the burghal houses of the Norman coastal town

of Touques. The experience, no doubt, was exhilarating. This was the ﬁrst

occasion since King Stephen’s leaving the duchy a year earlier that the count

had managed on his own to occupy a major town beyond his wife’s properties

along the Maine–Norman border. But the revelry was premature. The castellan

at nearby Bonneville, having been left alone, secretly dispersed ‘poor boys and

common women’ throughout all quarters of the town in a plan to burn the

Angevins out. Forty-six ﬁres were set in all. The amount of smoke and ﬂames

made it impossible for either side to engage in combat. Geoffrey and some of

his men found refuge in a local cemetery where they waited out the horriﬁc

night.

Few who waited with him could then have imagined that within six

years their lord would become master of Normandy, or that his son, Henry of

Anjou, yet a child, would someday reunite the kingdom of England with the

duchy of Normandy, joining them in a larger Angevin dominion.

The way to the future lay not with the count’s further campaigns in the

duchy, which ended with the Bonneville-sur-Touques debacle, but with the

strategic thinking and enterprise of Robert, earl of Gloucester, perhaps the most

powerful, certainly the ablest, member of the Anglo-Norman landowning aris-

tocracy. His stature, experience and involvement in the ﬁght of his half-sister,

the empress Matilda, countess of Anjou, and her husband for Normandy and

England gave the Angevin cause more than hope – it gave it a chance.

The tangible assets Earl Robert brought to the Angevins were the city and

stronghold of Bristol in England, the county of Glamorgan in Wales, numer-

ous other castles and properties in the south-west and elsewhere in England,

together with Bayeux and Caen in Normandy, and a network of loyal Anglo-

Norman and Welsh allies and vassals. One glaring weakness of King Henry

Orderic Vitalis, Historia aecclesiastica, vi,pp.526–8.

549