Kingship

The fundamental fact of political life in twelfth - and thirteenth-century England was that government was in the hands of a monarch, crowned in a religious ceremony that set him apart from all others, conferring on him an aura of sanctity that derived from the anointing of Old Testament kings. Although the eleventh-century reform movement of the church had dented the king’s sacred character, some English royal clerks continued to promote proto-absolutist ideas of kingship. The coronation ceremony stressed both the king’s authority over his subjects as God’s agent and his responsibility as a Christian to give them good government, a view of kingship tracing back to St Augustine that stressed his responsibility to God for his subjects’ care as if he were their parent or guardian. Roman and canon law, studied by numbers of royal clerks, encouraged such a view of public authority; clerics in the king’s service recognized his responsibility for his subjects’ general welfare and concluded that the king could override the law in emergencies, imposing extraordinary levies on his subjects. The late twelfth-century Dialogue de Scaccario, authored by a long-time exchequer official, states that God entrusts the king with ‘the general care of his subjects’; it admitted that rulers sometimes act arbitrarily, but denied that their subjects had a right ‘to question or condemn their actions’.2 Although some royal servants promoted teachings of the monarch’s responsibility for his subjects, most found more persuasive the opportunities for enrichment presented to them and their families by his expanded power.

The diverse sources of medieval ideas about kingship sent mixed messages about the nature of royal power. The late twelfth-century lawbook Glanvill illustrates this; on one hand, its author cites the Roman law maxim, ‘What pleases the prince has the force of law’; yet on the other, he follows folk and feudal tradition in asserting that England’s laws were made ‘on the advice of the magnates’.3 Collections of old English laws and Anglo-Norman coronation charters circulating in the early thirteenth century nourished notions of the ruler’s subjection to law, and contemporaries could condemn their rulers as tyrants who ruled by their own will, not in accordance with the law. Although the doctrine of the law’s supremacy acknowledged that a king could do wrong, it provided no machinery for righting a tyrannical ruler’s wrongs against his subjects or for enforcing his submission to law. The lawbook Bracton, authored by a royal judge active in the 1220s and 1230s, noted a solution, proposing that the baronage curb a law-breaking monarch. A frequently cited passage states, ‘The king has a superior, namely God. Also the law by which he is made king. Also his curia, namely the earls and barons, because if he is without law, they ought to put the bridle on him’.4 The author had memories of both the baronial rebellion against King John and the first crisis of Henry Ill’s personal rule, 1232-4, two attempts to put the bridle of law on the monarch.

Contributing to notions of kingship among the English were ties of mutual rights and responsibilities between lord and vassal. England’s ‘feudal’ institutions were unique in Europe, however; for the kingdom had never experienced the so-called ‘feudal transformation’, when eleventh-century successors of Carolingian rulers in mainland Europe failed to enforce obligations of homage and fealty owed by local castellans, allowing them to defy central authority and seize control of the countryside. In contrast, England proved precocious in expanding royal power; the Anglo-Norman kings (1066-1154) and their Plantagenet successors preserved their Anglo-Saxon predecessors’ authority as public officials as well as late Roman and Frankish concepts of state power inherited from Norman dukes and Angevin counts. In both the late Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman periods, England was the sole European kingdom where public tribunals rendering conclusive and impartial judgements survived and where the king exercised effective coercive power to enforce the judgements of public courts. The post-Conquest English kings also expanded their magnates’ ties of homage and fealty into tenurial relationships, ‘territorializing’ obligations owed by them and imposing ever heavier military and financial burdens as ‘feudal’ conditions by which they held their baronies or fiefs. Paradoxically, it was their public authority that garnered the Norman and Angevin monarchs the resources required to enforce personal ‘feudal’ obligations on their baronage.

England’s precocious professionalization and bureaucratization of government were impelled by the king’s need to raise enormous sums of money for almost continuous warfare on the continent. War was a medieval monarch’s vocation, his route to fame; and the Anglo-Norman kings spent treasure from England on protecting the frontiers of their Norman duchy. Henry II (1154-89), once he attained the English crown, moved quickly to curb the power of earls and barons who had taken advantage of the confusion in his predecessor Stephen’s disputed reign (1135-54) to defy royal agents and consolidate control over their territories. Once firmly in power in England, Henry viewed it as a vast treasure trove to supply funds for his French conflicts. He and his sons Richard I (1189-99) and John (1199-1216) needed ever more resources to pay mercenaries defending the Norman borders against the Capetian kings and crushing rebellious nobles in Poitou and Gascony. Warfare in France did not end with John’s decisive defeats at the hands of Philip Augustus in 1214, for Henry III (1216-72) tried to recover the lost cross-Channel possessions. Although he deployed expeditions to Poitou in 1230 and 1242, military success eluded him. Because the English baronage failed to share his enthusiasm for such a struggle, it proved impossible for Henry III to raise amounts approaching the huge sums amassed by his father and uncle. Despite his failure to recover Normandy and Anjou or to counter Capetian penetration into Poitou, Henry remained lord of lands on the continent, for the English continued to hold Gascony for over two centuries.

Overseas conflicts proved expensive, and the king was obliged to lay heavy burdens on his subjects. Eventually, competition with Philip Augustus of France forced Richard and John to organize England as a ‘war economy’, imposing burdensome ‘feudal’ payments and services on the baronage, collected by zealous royal servants, giving their rule a ‘strong military colour’.5 As a result, they drew little distinction between their subjects and their enemies, demanding hostages from friends as well as from foes; and all in the kingdom, even great aristocrats, lived in fear of the royal wrath. Monarchs engaged in a gigantic shakedown of great landholders, arbitrarily seizing their barons’ land without judgement as disciplinary measures for failure to make payments or perform services. For victims of the king’s ill-will, the only recourse was to offer him a large ‘fine’ (in effect, a bribe) in the hope of regaining his goodwill.

The process of strengthening central authority had begun with Henry I (1100-35), if not earlier, and his reign marks the beginnings of ‘administrative kingship’, as specialized offices such as the exchequer, staffed with literate and numerate servants, separated from the royal household and from the king’s direct supervision.6 The great office of justiciar, manager of the king’s finances and royal justice, owes its origins to this period, although the title itself first appears in the reign of Henry II. When the Angevins were spending their time fighting in France, the justiciar combined the role of head of the administration with that of regent, formerly exercised by a member of the royal family during the king’s absences from England. Authority was divided, with the justiciar at home overseeing the exchequer, law courts, sheriffs and constables and the itinerant royal household abroad preoccupied with war and diplomacy. By Henry II’s reign, 1154-89, growth of administrative agencies binding the shires to the royal court, chancery clerks busy issuing royal writs and charters, an exchequer auditing sheriffs’ accounts and itinerant justices taking royal justice to the people constituted a true revolution in government. Henry II’s legal innovations were even threatening magnates’ traditional control over tenants on their honours. The shire courts became temporary royal tribunals when itinerant justices, sent from the curia regis (king’s court), visited them; and wider access to royal justice marked a strengthened ruler-subject relationship, exemplified by the common law’s protection of freemen’s property. Such strong governmental structures enabled the Angevin kings to rule in an authoritarian, if not absolutist, manner even when absent for long periods; this set twelfth-century England apart from other western European kingdoms, where monarchs lacked resources for controlling outlying provinces.

Although some barons became courtiers, currying favour with the king, many more barons remained in the counties and resented the patronage flowing to their colleagues frequenting the royal court. They resented even more courtiers whom the barons considered as baseborn or alien, winning royal reward at their expense, rising above their proper station and robbing them of their right to advise the king. Henry I, his grandson Henry II and their successors hired specialist administrators who had acquired the literacy and numeracy needed for their government’s effective functioning. They realized that obscure knights’ and clerks’ complete dependence on royal favour made them more reliable than great nobles whose castles and bands of knights allowed armed resistance, and royal officials saw advantage in helping to expand royal authority in order to keep favours flowing to themselves and their families. Also in the twelfth century, changes in warfare meant that traditional cavalry, an aristocratic monopoly, no longer dominated warfare, and paid infantrymen and siege engineers increasingly were needed. Infantry companies hired from the Low Countries and from Wales constituted the bulk of forces employed by the English kings to counter threats to their territories in France. As a result, alien mercenary captains sometimes replaced native-born aristocrats’ place at the king’s side. The monarch’s power, coupled with his demand for capable lieutenants regardless of origin, meant that politics in England was largely court politics, as scions of aristocratic families competed for royal patronage with newcomers to court. In one historian’s words, ‘The royal patronage machine was the single most important instrument for making or breaking individual fortunes in the medieval period’.7