The years 1108-10 were significant in ways other than administrative. There had been years of peace between the Capetian and Norman dynasties since the death of the Conqueror. This had a good deal to do with the difficulties which King Philip was experiencing with the Church, his magnates and his own family. After several successes in harassing and humiliating William the Conqueror, King Philip had been able to rest content with the long separation between England and Normandy and turn his mind to other problems. Towards the end of his life, as the power of Henry I was all too obviously increasing, Philip began to realise that the Anglo-Norman realm was again a threat. His estranged son and heir, Louis, took refuge with Henry’s court in England at Christmas 1100 and stayed for some months before returning, loaded with gifts, to France. It may be that it was Henry’s support which persuaded Philip to give Louis control of the county of the Vexin as an advance on his patrimonial inheritance. This thwarted Henry’s chances of playing off the son against the father, and put Louis in the front line of Norman aggression. Philip tried to keep the moral edge over his powerful neighbour. Between 1103 and 1105 Philip corresponded with Anselm of Canterbury, attempting to capitalise on Henry’s difficulties with the Church by offering the exiled archbishop his support. But Philip was entirely unable to exploit the war between King Henry and Duke Robert in 1106.
Philip of France died in 1108. For several years already his son and heir, Louis, had been engaged in reducing the power of the disorderly magnates of the lie de France. By 1109 Louis VI was in a stronger position than his father had been, and could look to see how he might deal with the Anglo-Norman threat. There was plenty of evidence that Henry was seeking to reinvigorate his dynasty’s influence around the fringes of Normandy. He had lost Maine to the power of Anjou with the death of Count Elias, but Henry saw opportunities upriver towards Paris, where the count of Meulan exerted great influence, and further south too, where his nephew Theobald was now powerful as count of Blois-Chartres. Open conflict began because Henry succeeded in regaining control of the border fortress of Gisors that his brother had raised to strengthen the frontier. Louis assembled an enormous host and devastated Count Robert of Meulan’s lands, as a warning to the count’s master. A confrontation between the two kings at Gisors led to Louis challenging Henry to a personal fight to decide who had true claim to the castle. Certain members of the French army, with an eye to the increasing weight of the king of England, suggested that they fight on a nearby rickety bridge, to give their king an advantage. A personal challenge was the usual way for a French prince to try to put an enemy at a moral disadvantage: the Conqueror had tried the trick on Harold before Hastings, although the subtlety had been lost on the English. Henry is said to have compared Louis’s challenge to being kicked in the shins by a child, and scornfully rejected it, saying he would have his fight with Louis when they met in the field. As it happened, no battle occurred in the spring of 1109, despite menacing manoeuvres between the two great armies, and a truce was concluded. Henry felt confident enough to return to England at the end of May. It was a classic instance of the economical and subtle way that medieval French rulers played out their confrontations with menace, feint and propaganda. The violence was done to the fields, houses and vineyards of the Seine valley.
The confrontation at Gisors inaugurated an extended period of rivalry between Louis and Henry, which involved both kings in some of their most dangerous moments. It would not be until 1124 that long-term peace was re-established. Louis, with the instinct of his dynasty for finding weaknesses in the Norman camp, was very soon given the chance of supporting William (called ‘Clito’ or ‘the Young’), the son of the imprisoned Duke Robert II. King Henry had wisely entrusted the boy in 1106 to a neutral guardian. Count Elias of Arques, at his castle of St-Saens, between Dieppe and Rouen. Until he was nearly ten years Of age, the boy had a peaceful aristocratic upbringing in upper Normandy. But as tension between the king and Louis of France increased Henry decided that it was too dangerous to leave the boy on the loose, and sent a ducal officer to take him into custody - most probably on his abrupt return to Normandy in August 1110. Henry miscalculated: Count Elias was affronted that the arrest had been attempted at St-Saens in his absence. His people hustled the boy away and brought him to Elias, who took him across the frontier and into exile. William Clito was to find aid and support in many places where King Henry was feared and his power resented, and it was not long before Louis VI found it politically advantageous to support his claims on Normandy. What was more worrying for Henry was the popularity of the boy’s claims with internal dissidents in the duchy. It was very easy for them to throw a virtuous cloak over their rebellion by claiming to be supporting the rightful claims of William Clito.
One of the first to offer aid and comfort to William Clito was Henry’s deadly enemy, Robert de Belleme. Robert had remained powerful on the southern frontiers of the duchy, where the growth of Angevin power in Maine also challenged King Henry. It became the king’s objective to strengthen his frontier here by building new castles and alliances. Henry was keen to remove Robert altogether. In the autumn of 1112 the king put together charges against him and formally summoned him to appear to answer them. Robert, rather surprisingly, came to meet the king at Bonneville-sur-Touques, where he was arrested and sentenced to imprisonment for life. It may be at that time that Robert thought that he was untouchable as an envoy for the coalition of the Henry’s enemies. He had many years in various prisons to repent of that error. His Norman lands were forfeit, and his lordship of Belleme was eventually handed over to Robert’s enemy and King Henry’s ally. Count Rotrou of Perche. The sudden lurch in the balance of power towards Henry persuaded Count Fulk of Anjou to seek peace in 1113, and the king was willing to compromise so far as to allow the Angevins to occupy Maine, providing his overlordship was acknowledged. King Louis too realised that Henry had outflanked him and sought a truce at Gisors in March 1113. Henry had demonstrated to Louis’s discomfort that his resources and the network of his allies and kinsmen had created a line of buffer states around the fringes of Normandy that was going to be difficult for him to penetrate. What Louis had plainly feared and anticipated as early as 1108 was now a reality. The Capetians were being remorselessly marginalised in north-western France, and pressed back into the Parisian heartland of the upper Seine. It was not until 1116 that Louis was able to put together the makings of a counter-strategy, which had less to do with invasion, and more to do with internal subversion within Normandy.
On 1 May 1118 Queen Mathilda died at Westminster, and just over a month later Count Robert of Meulan died, probably also somewhere in England. King Henry was in Normandy at the time, containing renewed aggression from Louis VI in the Seine valley. He therefore missed the queen’s elaborate funeral, more elaborate than any previously seen in England, with tens of thousands of masses said for her soul and 67,820 poor fed at royal expense within eight days of her death. The deaths had a direct impact on Henry’s fortunes. His late queen and his late friend had been established and valued counsellors. The queen had embodied the loyalty of the English to Henry, a point emphasised by the fact that their son William was known by the English style of ‘atheling’. The clerk who wrote the so-called Chronicle of Hyde Abbey directly related Henry’s subsequent political problems to the fact that Mathilda was no longer in the world to pray for his kingdom.Is More pragmatically. Count Robert had provided an invaluable military obstacle to Louis VI in the French Vexin, where the castle and county of Meulan blocked communication up and down the Seine and closed the principal bridges at Meulan and Mantes. Their deaths coincided with a period of turbulence in Henry’s fortunes, and it was to be several years before he was again in control of events.
Another death in April 1118 was that of Henry’s cousin. Count William of Evreux. This event sparked major trouble because Count William’s nearest male heir was his nephew, Amaury de Montfort, a loyal baron of Louis VI with castles and lordships south of Meulan and along the Norman border. Naturally, the succession of this compromised Frenchman was blocked by King Henry. Unfortunately for Henry, he forgot that a royal mandate was not always enough to command the obedience of the Normans, and the knights of the county of Evreux rebelled in Amaury’s favour. He had already seriously antagonised the nobility of Normandy by abruptly arresting the count of Eu and Hugh de Gournay, Who had come peacefully to his court because he had information that they were intriguing with the count of Flanders. This harsh act motivated many recruits to join Amaury de Montfort’s rebellion, including the count of Aumale, the count of Eu’s neighbour.
Quite suddenly, in the autumn of 1118, King Henry’s border strategy collapsed. King Louis found to his delight that, with Meulan neutralised and Amaury de Montfort fighting for control of the county of Evreux, the whole March of Normandy had become unstable. All the dissidents - who included Henry’s son-in-law Eustace de Breteuil - embraced the rival cause of William Clito as a way of escaping Henry’s remorseless rule. Count Baldwin VII of Flanders also mobilised against Henry and in favour of the western Norman rebels and William Clito. With the help of the counts of Aumale and Eu, Henry’s own cousins, he marched an army deep into Normandy, as far as Dieppe. On the southern frontier, Count Fulk of Anjou marched north through Maine in July and seized Norman outposts. By the beginning of autumn, Henry had lost control of large parts of his duchy. His enemies were threatening Rouen from the east, and the border region towards France had been lost. Then, to cap the disasters, at the end of November, the town of Alen<;on rose in revolt and opened its gates to the army of Fulk of Anjou.
Louis VI had not immediately joined in the assault on Normandy, although his younger brothers Philip and Floras and other French knights had enlisted in Amaury de Montfort’s invasion force. King Louis was distracted by inopportune internal troubles of his own in the Ile-de-France, and he may well have thought that with luck the duchy would collapse into the hands of William Clito with no need for him to intervene. But King Henry’s doggedness, the support of Theobald of Blois and the loyalty of the magnates of the west and centre of the duchy allowed him to survive the winter of 1118-19. Henry was also able to drive a wedge between his enemies. He bought off Fulk of Anjou by arranging a marriage between his son and heir and Fulk’s daughter (a girl of about twelve) in June 1119, and by agreeing to his demands to restore the son of Robert de Belleme to his southern Norman lands. Count Baldwin of Flanders was incapacitated by a head wound in a tournament at Eu and chose to withdraw to convalesce in the county of Ponthieu, but died of an illness contracted at Abbeville. Henry also secured numerous reinforcements of English and Breton mercenary knights, and deployed them in an elaborate and sustained campaign of siege warfare against the dissident magnates of the border. When Louis finally did move a French army into the Vexin in August 1119, the rebel strength was beginning to soak away into the sand, and his intervention seems to have been an attempt to restart the bandwagon.
While King Henry was preoccupied with the reduction of the castle and fortress of Evreux, Louis put pressure on the line of strongpoints William Rufus had erected along the River Epte, and punched a hole through. This breakthrough brought Henry and the Anglo-Norman army to the valley of the River Andelle, the last defensible line before an enemy came to the walls of Rouen. On 20 August Henry took the Roman road out towards Gisors, but, as he was watching his troops foraging food from the fields of the Vexin, pickets reported that they could see the standards and glittering helmets of another army which was moving further south parallel to them: Louis was making his bid to breach the line of the Andelle and open the way to take Rouen. The armies wheeled and came face-to-face on an open plain called Bremule where the Roman road to Rouen crossed west of a village called Ecouis. It is a measure of the desperation of both kings at this point that they so readily listened to advisers in each of their armies who urged them to take the chance of battle. The Hyde account actually says that Henry was bullied into fighting by his barons. The armies were about equal in strength, around five hundred knights. William Clito, now in his eighteenth year, was with Louis riding against his uncle. The Anglo-Norman army chose to dismount, and the king took his stand in the front line with his guard and an English lord, Edward of Salisbury, as his banner-bearer. As at Tinchebray, he kept a mounted squadron in reserve. The French launched a fierce charge against the Anglo-Norman line, but it was undisciplined and badly supported. Despite breaking through the first ranks, it was held by the disciplined shield wall of the household guards. Although there were some desperate attempts at rallying, the battle rapidly ended as the wings of the Anglo-Norman line began to encircle the French. Realising that they would be trapped, many ran. The victory was not without its dangers for King Henry. The leading enemy company of William Crispin, a baron of the Vexin, made a very determined attack. Crispin was able to push himself as far through the ranks as King Henry, and struck the king two hard blows on the head.
Before being thrown down and captured. Nothing can better illustrate the fact that kings in the twelfth century put their lives as well as fortunes on the line when they risked battle under a banner that told everyone precisely where they were.
Bremule was a catastrophe for French arms. Louis’s army was probably scattered in less than an hour. As was usual when most of the troops were knights in full armour, there were few fatalities (sources agree on only three) but many were taken captive. King Louis was separated from his guards in the flight from the field. There seems to have been an assault by the Anglo-Norman mounted reserve troops on his company, which was honourably covering the French retreat; it was overwhelmed and the royal standard captured. In the retreat Louis lost his horse and ended up on foot in a wood somewhere north of Les Andelys. He had to talk a sympathetic passing peasant into guiding him back to his camp on the Seine. William Clito also escaped on foot. In a noble but inexpensive gesture. King Henry and his son, William atheling, returned their captured horses to Louis and Clito the next day. Only one Anglo-Norman was taken prisoner, a young knight who got quite carried away and pursued the French so hard that he rode right into their camp at Les Andelys. Louis had no choice but to abandon his invasion of Normandy and return to Paris. Things got worse when on 17 September 1119 he attempted a counter-stroke against the border town of Breteuil in order to salvage some prestige. The resistance of the town and the approach of King Henry forced another embarrassing withdrawal across the border, which was followed by the abrupt collapse of the Norman rebellion on the southern frontier.
In the wake of these reverses, the sweet breath of peace suddenly pervaded the air of northern France. Henry must have been happy to have survived some very dangerous moments, and keen to let the wheel of fortune come to rest. Louis, in contrast, must have been disappointed in his Franco-Norman allies, and the fact that Henry had been able to outmanoeuvre him even when he was at his weakest. The more astute of the former rebels found ways to make their peace. Richer de L’Aigle and the men of Breteuil found friends and relatives who would intercede with the king, who was happy to see them desert William Clito. By the end of October, Amaury de Montfort too was looking for peace through the good offices of Count Theobald of Blois, the king’s nephew. Count
Stephen of Aumale, left alone against the king, swiftly capitulated. Everybody was treated with politic generosity; Henry did not want to leave soil in which for future support for William Clito would grow.
In October a great opportunity to put triumphant pinnacles on the edifice of peace-making presented itself when Pope Calixtus II arrived in north-eastern France and held a council at Reims at which the English episcopate was much in evidence. Also present were William Clito with King Louis, who took the opportunity to charge Henry with the violent dispossession of Duke Robert. When the archbishop of Rouen and bishop of Evreux attempted to intervene, they were shouted down. The pope, however, was not there to take sides. He planned to bring about a settlement that would add to the credit of his visit, and he could hardly do so by condemning Henry, whose assistance he needed against the antipope, Gregory VIII. At the conclusion of the council of Reims, Pope Calixtus ventured further north than any previous pontiff and came to the very borders of Normandy at war-stricken Gisors for a meeting with Henry. It was a very great occasion, with the pope and his cardinals lodging at the French fortress of Chaumont-en-Vexin, 6 km from Gisors. Henry greeted the pope with deep reverence, when they met at a country church on the road between Gisors and Chaumont, and prostrated himself at Calixtus’s feet. In return he was welcomed warmly by the pope as a kinsman, for both men were great-grandchildren of Richard II of Normandy. Calixtus, before his election, had been Guy, archbishop of Vienne, a member of the dynasty of the counts of Burgundy which had allied with the Norman dynasty a century before. The claims of William Clito were discussed. Henry presented his case to rule Normandy on the basis of the incapacity of his elder brother, and declared himself surprised that William Clito had fled his power and had ignored his repeated invitations to return, especially as he had offered the young man three counties to support him in England. Calixtus doubtless realised that he had done as much as he could, and ended the interview by urging Henry to make peace with Louis. A witness to the interview reports that Henry concluded the subject by saying with a degree of ambiguity: T am sorry about the quarrel, I want peace; nor have I any reason to avoid willingly doing whatever the duke of Normandy owes to the king of France.’ '<>
The peace between Henry and Louis was ratified by the performance of homage for Normandy to Louis by William atheling at some time Early in 1120. William had now passed the age of majority (if it was calculated as sixteen). The rest of the year was a time of reconstruction and discreet triumph, as Henry re-established his grip on the shattered Norman aristocracy. There is little apparent sign that he was preparing to weed out the unreliable magnates in the duchy, in the way that he had done in England in 1101-3. Had he planned such a purge, the events at the end of 1120 would have halted it. On 25 November, Henry embarked for a late autumn crossing to England from the port of Barfleur in the Cotentin. Just after sunset, on a peaceful and calm evening without a moon, the royal fleet rowed out of the harbour and into the dark of the Channel night, expecting to catch the turning tide and the land breeze and be taken away from the shore and so land in England the next morning. The great royal esnecca called the ‘White Ship’ followed on later, with the younger elements of the court on board in partying mood. William atheling, his half-siblings, Richard and Mathilda of Perche, and several other magnates were having a fine time, urging the master to race the king’s ships across the Channel, while offering the crew handsome rations of wine. But the darkness, their late start and the receding tide led to tragedy. As the White Ship cleared the rocky coast and turned north towards Southampton the master misjudged the state of the tide and the space needed to clear the reef called the Raz de Barfleur. A tidal rock submerged and invisible just beneath the placid surface stove in the bottom of the ship. The ship capsized, turning out its passengers and crew into the sea. Only one man survived the cold November sea and the long, frosty night under the stars by clinging to a spar, to be picked up by a fishing boat at dawn. Although the wreck was salvaged the next day at low tide and the king’s treasure recovered, no bodies were found in or near the boat.
The unexpected death of William atheling was a personal and national catastrophe. The young man had established himself at least in England as the most desirable heir to his father. Writers accepted that he reintroduced through his mother the lineage of Alfred the Great into the Norman royal dynasty, and therefore blunted any criticism of his right to the throne as opposed to that of his cousin, William Clito. The award to William of the title of ‘atheling’ seems to have been very much a decision which rose from the people, and tells us how much the lesser English aristocracy pinned their hopes on him. For his father, his birth
Had resolved many dynastic and personal issues, and gave him his best weapon against William Clito’s claims. The shock of the sudden bereavement, as much as its implications, struck the king down for many days. The fact that the boy’s body was never recovered (although a few bodies
- notably that of the young Earl Richard of Chester - were later found thrown up on the shores of the Bay of the Seine) meant there could be no burial or tomb. This would doubtless have prolonged the king’s mental agonies, and the contemporary Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says as much. If the loss of his heir was not enough, one of Henry’s elder natural sons, Richard (born in Oxfordshire before he was king) had died too. Richard had already been deployed in Normandy as a commander and potential magnate: he had been awarded in marriage the heiress to the great honor of Breteuil. Richard and his sister Mathilda seem to have befriended their legitimate half-brother, so a large part of Henry’s affective family went down with the White Ship.
The northern French princes were as aware of the consequences of the dynastic disaster as was King Henry. The fortunes of William Clito rose accordingly. Many now were clearly calculating that Henry would eventually have to accept his nephew’s right to the Anglo-Norman realm. The count of Anjou had married his daughter Mathilda to William atheling in June 1119, but the boy’s death had now cancelled that alliance. Henry hung on to the girl in England, not so much perhaps from affection but out of a plan that he might one day marry her to an obliging magnate and seek to control the county of Maine - her dowry
- through her. Count Fulk of Anjou returned from Jerusalem early in 1121 and demanded the girl back, well aware of Henry’s strategy, and was profoundly annoyed when the king refused. It was probably this that pushed Fulk into a new pro-Clito alliance in northern France. The king’s magnates and counsellors pondered the choices. Finding the king still set against the idea of Clito’s succession, they persuaded him that the best option was remarriage with the hope of further legitimate sons. The king consented to this scheme early in January 1121, and within a month a bride had already been found in the young Adeliza, daughter of Godfrey, count of Louvain and duke of Brabant. The king, now around fifty-three years of age, married his teenage bride at Windsor on 2 February 1121.
The new queen seems to have been a confident and politically alert Young woman. This was not surprising as Flanders and northern France at the time would have provided her with a number of role models of politically powerful women. Adeliza proved to have a good understanding of the way that her predecessor had developed the role of queen, and adopted her literary and charitable causes. Henry’s usual generosity left her very wealthy, with free control over the revenues of Rutland, Shropshire and a large district of London, with possession of the city of Chichester and the castle and lordship of Arundel, so she was well able to exert herself politically. She financed a distinguished household chapel and a number of her chaplains were promoted high in the church; her chaplain Simon, who had accompanied her from Brabant, was nominated bishop of Worcester in 1125. An interesting development in her relationship with Henry was her appearance with him at Woodstock in 1123. Despite appearing often with her husband when he was in England, the late Queen Mathilda seems never to have ventured to - or been permitted to — enter that particular resort. Queen Adeliza was there frequently, It seems likely that the catastrophe of 1120 had provoked a change in the ageing king’s domestic habits, and he no longer felt the need to support an alternative household and family to which to retreat. The Woodstock menage was dismantled and his new and attractive wife was allowed to take her seat in the domestic heart of his life where the serious and demure Mathilda seems never to have reigned. Henry’s children from the English concubines of his youth and young manhood were in any case now grown up and mostly independent, so Woodstock was free to be reinvented as a royal palace. His menage of concubines and children was replaced with a menagerie of exotic animals, including a porcupine he had somehow acquired. This does not mean that Henry had yet given up extramarital sex. He had a few short-lived later affairs, including a notable one with Isabel, the teenage daughter of his late friend, Robert of Meulan, which produced a daughter. It may be that, like many ageing and powerful men of our own day, he was irresistibly attracted to nubile girls and found some at court willing to take advantage of his weakness, or pushed by their families to cooperate with the king’s lust.
The problem for Henry and Adeliza was that no children followed on from their marriage. The fact that the young queen discussed this misfortune with a sympathetic correspondent. Bishop Hildebert de
Lavardin of Le Mans, tells us that she felt that it had affected her relationship with the king. Since she went on to have several sons and daughters with her second husband, the fault may not have been hers. Continuing good relations between Henry and Adeliza, despite their childlessness, indicates that the king did not blame her but another agency, physical or supernatural. Every year that passed with no child being born from the union strengthened the party of William Clito. By the end of 1122, a party was already re-forming to promote his claim to Normandy. It focused on a surprising new entrant into the high political game. When Robert, the great count of Meulan, had died in 1118, he had left as heirs identical twin sons. The elder of these was named Waleran, after the eleventh-century founder of the French county he inherited. The younger was called Robert and took his father’s English county of Leicester. Waleran in 1122 was of age although only barely eighteen; he had been knighted by the king in 1120. He ruled the largest part of central Normandy and his father’s lands in the Vexin and Paris. For some reason - which may have to do with a baffled ambition to be as important at court as his famous father had been - Waleran opened secret communications with William Clito. Orderic Vitalis blamed Amaury de Montfort for turning Waleran’s head, but this may be unfair; in the descriptions of events, it is the young Waleran who always appears to be taking the initiative.
Waleran deployed his wealth and influence, and the marriages of his younger sisters, to put himself at the head a formidable party of Anglo-French barons. By September 1123, he was ready to move and a final meeting had been convened at his castle of La Croix St-Leuffroy to agree the details. Unfortunately for the plotters, the king’s agents had long been in on the conspiracy. Henry knew exactly what was going on and had been in the duchy watching the plot develop since June. As the meeting at La Croix St-Leuffroy broke up, the king rode south with a powerful force of his military household which he had assembled at Rouen. The king took the conspirators by surprise. He arrived at the central Norman castle of Montfort-sur-Risle and demanded its surrender. Hugh, its lord, barely escaped to ride off and warn Waleran and his other allies. Waleran’s plans were now badly dislocated. The fighting had begun before the French mercenaries he had earlier hired had arrived. King Henry had grabbed the initiative and the rebels were caught Completely out of field. Some of Waleran’s Norman tenants refused to join him; a particular blow being the defection to the king of the lord of Harcourt, his principal baron. Waleran carried on regardless, although one after another of the rebel castles fell, including his own chief fortress of Pont Audemer in December 1123.
The rebels were only able to recapture the initiative when the king sent his household and the Breton mercenaries he had hired for the campaign into winter quarters in strong points and siege works around the surviving rebel centres. The king himself marched reinforcements to Gisors, which had come under threat from the French. Amaury de Montfort had once again incited the barons of the French Vexin to make an attempt on Gisors, and came close to succeeding before the king’s approach drove him off. Amaury’s energy in all this was remarkable. He had been busy too at the court of Anjou and had persuaded Count Fulk to agree to a marriage between Sibyl, another of his daughters, and William Clito. Once again the county of Maine was deployed as a marriage-portion. The threat to King Henry of placing Clito in charge of it was unmistakable. The strategic vision evident in all this, and the military resources available to the Norman rebels from the Capetian realm, more than reveals that Louis VI was promoting Amaury’s manoeuvres. King Henry could hardly have missed that deduction, and moved some pieces of his own to intimidate Louis in turn. He motivated his son-in-law. Emperor Henry V, to march with a great host south as far as Metz from his imperial estates in the Low Countries. The reason the emperor was so keen to help was that, if Henry had no further sons, he was the husband of the next heir. He had married the king’s only other legitimate child, Mathilda, so he too was in direct rivalry with William Clito.
The Norman revolt flared up again in March 1124, when Waleran and Amaury decided on a raid from his headquarters of Beaumont-le-Roger to take the pressure off Waleran’s beseiged castle at Vatteville on the Seine. Although the raid was a success, the rebel force found its return south to Beaumont hampered by a company of the royal guard which had anticipated its movements and blocked their road across fields near the small town of Bourgtheroulde south of Rouen. The royal troops numbered three hundred disciplined professionals under their commander, an otherwise obscure constable called Odo Borleng, and a few loyal
Norman barons who were riding with them. Waleran’s force of local knights and French adventurers was somewhat larger, and with the advantage in numbers he decided that the risk of battle was worthwhile. Amaury de Montfort, who knew all too well the capabilities of King Henry’s household, advised against this, but Waleran was young, had read too much heroic history and heard too many songs of valour to care for pragmatism. The royal force had dismounted and deployed bowmen - it made an irritatingly plebeian target for a young mounted nobleman with high ideals of knighthood and little judgement. Waleran rallied his own tenants for a charge across the fields but they were predictably mowed down as the royal archers brought down their horses under them. Waleran fell with the others and was seized by the king’s chamberlain, William de Tancarville, along with several other rebel leaders. Amaury had hung back, then, seeing his rebellion swept away by a shower of arrows, he rode off with several knights in pursuit. Fortunately for him, he was apprehended by one of the more aristocratic members of the royal familia, William de Grandcourt, son of the count of Eu. Rather than take Amaury prisoner, he chose instead to assist so noble and high a count to escape, and rode off with him to France. When King Henry at Caen heard the news of his household’s victory, he was so taken aback at his luck that he said he wouldn’t believe it till he saw the evidence with his own eyes.
The capture of Waleran of Meulan more or less ended the rebellion in Normandy, for the king had only to order the intimidated young man to command his fortresses to surrender and the fighting was over. Henry made a few fearsome executions and mutilations of captured rebels, put Waleran and his friends in prison, and the last serious challenge to his rule over Normandy was done with. It may be that Henry did not quite realise at the time that his victory was quite so final, but 1124 was to be the last attempt of his Norman aristocracy to replace him. Thereafter the only question would be who was to succeed him, a question on which there remained many opinions.
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