England under the Angevin Kings, Volumes I and II

CHAPTER IV. – CHAPTER VI.

To understand what follows, we must go back a generation to the inheritance of Geoffrey Martel and the collapse of Angevin power in northern France after his death. The great count, dying in 1060, named his nephew Geoffrey the Bearded, son of his sister’s elder child by a count of Gâtinais. But the younger brother, Fulk Rechin, was not to be set aside. No sooner was Geoffrey Martel dead than Fulk disputed the will and claimed a great part of the inheritance, Maine chief among them.

The Cenomannians were quick to exploit the dispute. Fulk’s claim to Maine’s overlordship was hollow, for the province had long chafed under Angevin rule; from 1063 onward Geoffrey the Bearded alone appears in documents as titular lord, while actual power passed to the native line of counts. Under Hugh II and his son Herbert II, who succeeded in 1073, the Cenomannians repudiated all allegiance to Anjou, and the overlordship became a mere name. The young count, whose mother was Bertha of Blois of the Angevins’ hereditary rivals, found a natural ally in the duke of the Normans.

In 1073 Duke William entered Maine, accepted Herbert’s homage with his Norman bride, and by the Treaty of Blanchelande bound himself to maintain them in their fathers’ inheritance. The pacification was brief. No sooner had William departed than Fulk was again in arms; the long, doubtful struggle, ending with Fulk’s second siege of La Flèche in 1081, left Maine a constant battleground of Angevin, Norman, and native conflict. Here, after many vicissitudes, the strife was ended by marriage.

Some seventeen years before his son Geoffrey wed the Empress Matilda, Fulk Rechin took to wife Aremburg of Maine, heiress of the older line. Through her Anjou at length obtained a real hold on the upper province, and through her was born the son destined to unite all conflicting claims in a single hand, Geoffrey Plantagenet.

The years 1123 to 1141 mark one of the most turbulent periods in Anglo-Norman and Angevin history. In 1123 young Henry I of England fought rebels, the king of France, and the count of Anjou; by 1141 his daughter Matilda had lost the English crown to her cousin Stephen of Blois, civil war had ravaged England, and the two Angevin rivals had each been held prisoner in the other’s stronghold. The path from one extreme to the other was long and bloody.

In 1123 the Norman barons revolted under Waleran of Meulan and Almeric, hoping to place Henry’s nephew William the Clito on the ducal throne. Henry discovered their meeting at Croix-Saint-Leuffroy, marched on Pontaudemer, and took it after a six-week siege, working in the trenches himself. Almeric sacked Gisors; Henry took Evreux. On March 25, 1124, Ralf of Bayeux scattered the rebels at Bourgthéroulde and captured Waleran; Almeric made peace, leaving the Clito dependent on Angevin support.

Henry’s ally the Emperor Henry V turned homeward in August 1124 without striking a blow. Henry then persuaded the Pope to annul the Clito’s marriage to Sibyl of Anjou on grounds of consanguinity, though the kinship was no closer than between Henry’s own son and Sibyl’s sister. Fulk Rechin publicly burnt the papal letter, singed the envoys’ beards, and imprisoned them; an interdict forced him to submit. The couple parted and the Clito became a wanderer.

In May 1125 the Emperor died. His widow Matilda, Henry of England’s only surviving child, was summoned home reluctantly, having dwelt in Germany since childhood and held in high esteem. Certain Lombard and Lorraine princes, taking seriously the dying Emperor’s symbolic bequest of his sceptre, followed her demanding her return. Henry had other plans. At the midwinter assembly of 1126-1127 he made the barons and prelates swear to acknowledge his daughter as Lady of England and Normandy should he die without a lawful son.

King Louis of France took up the Clito’s cause, offering him compensation for the loss of Sibyl and Maine in the French Vexin and a bride, Jane of Montferrat. In March 1127 the childless count of Flanders was murdered at Bruges, and Louis adjudged his fief to the Clito, putting him in possession of most of the county within weeks. Henry chose to make peace with the count of Anjou rather than the king of France. Both recognized that Maine could only be settled by uniting all conflicting claims. Matilda crossed the sea shortly after Pentecost 1127 in the care of her half-brother Earl Robert of Gloucester and Count Brian of Britanny. Henry followed in August. At Whitsuntide 1128 he knighted Geoffrey Plantagenet at Rouen, and eight days later, on June 17, Geoffrey and Matilda were wedded by the bishop of Avranches in the cathedral of S. Julian at Le Mans.

The wedding was a triumph for Fulk. Norman lords viewed with rage what they saw as the degradation of the ducal house, while the crowd at Le Mans cursed the Angevin foe. In Angers rejoicing was universal, the bride escorted in procession with lighted tapers and waving banners to the hall of Fulk the Black. Fulk had laid the first plans for the edifice of statesmanship that now nearly reached its last and loftiest stage.

Before the next Whitsuntide Fulk and Anjou were to part forever. King Baldwin II of Jerusalem, childless and aging, offered his eldest daughter Melisenda and his crown to Fulk, who was in his prime and no stranger to Palestine, having dwelt there a year and sent yearly contributions to the Knights of the Temple. Fulk knew that the Angevin mission was accomplished when his son married the Lady-elect of Normandy and England. He sought papal and royal consent, took the cross from Archbishop Hildebert of Tours on the same Whit-Sunday Geoffrey was knighted at Rouen, and made his way to Fontevraud, where his eldest daughter, widow of William the Aetheling, had taken the veil. In the quiet of the cloisters father and children exchanged their last farewells.

The son Fulk left behind was the most favoured of the Angevin line. Geoffrey Plantagenet—named for his habit of adorning his cap with broom—was a fair, ruddy youth, tall and sinewy, with graceful manner and ready speech. Even in boyhood he was precociously sagacious, carrying the great battles and deeds of his people and foreign lands in memory. He shunned revelry, devoted himself to military exercises, and would not go to war without a learned teacher. His biographer tells how a discontented knight at Saint-Aignan wished he had “the neck of that red-head Geoffrey” between the hot iron plates used for wafer-cakes, and how Geoffrey forgave the man when caught harrying his lands. Four Poitevin knights won release by singing a rime in his praise. On Christmas Day at Le Mans a poorly-dressed clerk answered his flippant “Any news, sir clerkling?” with “Ay, my lord, the best of good news: Unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given!”—and Geoffrey secured him a prebend. In the forest of Loches he once lost his way while hunting, and rode back with a charcoal-burner mounted behind him, listening patiently to the peasant’s free criticism, rewarding him with freedom, money, and a reform of his household.