The Age of Chivalry (6 page)

As William the Conqueror's fourth son, Henry I was not expected to rule either in England or Normandy, and his scholarly education led to him being known as “Beauclerc.” But he was an acute strategist. Taking advantage of the fact that his brother Robert was away on crusade, in 1100 he seized the royal treasury at Winchester shortly after burying William Rufus there. Since the baronage had colluded with him in sidelining Robert, the king gratified them by issuing the Charter of Liberties, a document that both affirmed aristocratic freedoms and corrected William Rufus's abuses of power. The charter also recorded the king's formal grant of the laws of Edward the Confessor, as amended by William the Conqueror, to the English people. Very little new legislation was in fact issued either by William or his sons, and the Conqueror—a great admirer of Edward's laws—had applied them as the basis of English common law. Formal restoration of these laws proved to be quite compatible with the entrenchment of Norman royal authority, especially through the use of Henry's establishment of the exchequer, an institution specifically designed to combat tax fraud and corruption.

Henry's reign marked the high point of the Anglo-Norman dynasty's administrative machine. The Concordat of London (1107) represented a major papal concession to the English Crown's institutional control over the English Church, and Henry's reign witnessed an English assimilation of Norman authority. Unlike his father and brothers, Henry could speak English fluently. Marriage to his first wife linked him with the ancient nobility, since she was Edgar Atheling's niece. Nevertheless, Normandy remained important to him. Robert had first agreed to recognize his brother's right to rule in England, but hostilities then resumed. Although Robert was captured at the Battle of Tinchebrai (1106) and remained a prisoner for the last 28 years of his life, Henry's control of the duchy was not secure until the death in 1128 of Robert's son William Clito. Appropriating Normandy as a possession of the English Crown, Henry ruled the duchy through his title as England's king. Viceroys governed in his name there while he was in England, and when he was in Normandy the close-knit nobility administered his kingdom. These networks had been the very basis of Norman order in England, and though appearing so adamantine, they fractured after Henry's death. The English nobility rejected the claim of Henry's daughter Matilda and placed his nephew Stephen of Blois on the throne in 1135. Anarchy followed, and the Anglo-Norman order that had once seemed so entrenched looked set for dissolution.

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Statue of Henry I of England (r. 1100–1135), Canterbury Cathedral, England
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The development of Edward the Confessor's posthumous reputation shows how subsequent royal regimes tried to assimilate the Anglo-Saxon past and sought to ensure its continuity with their own authority
.

An anonymous author in
c
.1067 completed a
Life of King Edward
, commissioned by his widow Edith. The second part of that work describes events that demonstrate the king's holiness and his miracle-inducing prowess. It was this section that was then worked up by Osbert de Clare, a Benedictine monk at Westminster Abbey, in his more explicitly hagiographical
Life
of Edward, which was finished by the late 1130s.

Belief in kings' ability to heal the sick by their touch was widespread in medieval Europe, and episodes that illustrate Edward's powers in that regard are included by de Clare in his
Life
of Edward. As prior, and then abbot, of Westminster, de Clare was a well-connected figure and he spent some time in Rome lobbying for Edward's canonization. Saints were divided into two categories by the medieval Church: martyrs who had died for the faith and confessors who had witnessed to it. The king was formally canonized by the papacy in 1161, and thereby acquired his soubriquet. Edward's remains were then placed in a shrine at Westminster Abbey in a ceremony that took place in 1163 with Aelred (1110–67), abbot of the Cistercian monastery at Rievaulx in Yorkshire, preaching the sermon. Aelred wrote his own version of Edward's life, and his many other works include a
Genealogy of the Kings of the English
which was partly intended to show that Henry II (r. 1154–89) was a true descendant of Anglo-Saxon kings. Henry was a vigorous promoter of Edward's reputation, and by the late 12th century the Confessor was widely recognized as England's patron saint.

The Wilton Diptych
.

Henry III (r. 1216–72) was devoted to the cult of the Confessor, and he decided to honor his predecessor by replacing the original Romanesque structure of Westminster Abbey raised by Edward in the late 1040s with the Gothic building that survives today. He also ordered the construction of a magnificent shrine to replace the earlier one, and the Confessor's body was brought to its new place of rest in a solemn procession on October 13, 1269. Edward III (r. 1327–77), a very martial figure, decided that Edward should be replaced as England's patron saint by George, an obscure soldier saint of the third century who has been linked to the then Greek-speaking eastern region of Asia Minor. But the Confessor was central to the elevated role that Richard II (r. 1377–99) claimed for English kingship and which is illustrated in the Wilton Diptytch, commissioned to accompany the king on his travels. On the left the Confessor is joined by John the Baptist and Edmund, king and martyr, as they present the kneeling Richard to the Virgin and the infant Christ who, encircled by angels, are portrayed on the diptytch's right panel. By the side of the Savior and Virgin stands an angel holding a pennant bearing the Cross of St. George. The sense of the scene suggests that the king has presented England into the Virgin's care and protection, and the presence by Edward the Confessor's side of Edmund, the king of East Anglia killed by the invading Danes in 868, is highly suggestive. Edmund was much venerated by the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, and that popularity was used to support the post-Conquest regime's claim that it was offering continuity with the Anglo-Saxon past. On the back of the diptytch a heraldic shield incorporates two coats of arms side by side: that of the kings of England, and that of the Confessor—which was devised for him after his time, since armorial bearings were only invented in the mid-12th century. By such means the Confessor lived on.

From the 11th century onward urban centers concentrated in central and northern Italy, as well as in parts of France and southwest Germany, were starting to grow both in size and institutional importance. The markets and craft guilds located in these towns and cities were at the heart of Western Europe's economic development, and the new prosperity was reflected in rising population levels. An equally novel movement was evident among citizens who wished to assert greater control over their own destinies: like-minded individuals organized themselves into “communes,” groupings sustained by oaths of mutual defense
.

The 11th century saw the advent of communes in both rural and urban settings. For example, adjacent villages in northern France combined to form communes that guaranteed the security of local roads, and the later Swiss Confederation owed its origin to the communes established in the alpine valleys. But it was the ancient towns built by the Romans that provided the commune with its most characteristic setting with walled fortifications protecting the population from the world outside. The communes helped to give physical security to townspeople and their goods, and also helped safeguard the livelihoods of travelers who were frequently threatened with attacks by bandits—as well as by the assaults of dominant nobles who held themselves to be above the law. A desire for revenge therefore led the communes to launch retaliatory attacks on their enemies, but it was the more political and economic focus of their activity that encouraged greater urban independence.

The charters granted to towns by monarchs gave them the right to hold markets and to run their own civic and financial administration without being subjected to interference by local lords. European kings and emperors who wished to elevate their central authority therefore found the towns to be useful allies in a common cause: the attempt at taming the territorial nobility. England's powerful 12th-century monarchy was able
to impose its authority without relying on such local alliances, however, and the impact of the communal movement in England was therefore restricted to the work of the guilds that regulated craftsmen and merchants. France's Capetian monarchs came to enjoy a comparable institutional success. But the lack of an equivalent center of power in Germany and Italy meant that conurbations in these areas became increasingly autonomous. As a result, many towns devised their own, often tightly regulated, internal systems of government.

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A map, dated 1549, showing the Bavarian town of Nördlingen whose encircling medieval wall remains in place today
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The German towns of ancient Roman foundation were mostly in the Rhine and Danube river valleys, and many of these were episcopal sees. During the tenth century successive German emperors had delegated juridical and administrative powers to the bishops who therefore appointed officers in the towns' government. The great walls originally raised to surround these centers of population had in many cases survived, and this explains why the German term
burgh
or fortification was used to describe settlements
that were so clearly divided from the surrounding countryside. Legal offenses were more severely punished if they had been committed within this privileged area, and its inhabitants, including those who had fled to the
burgh
from rural areas, could only be prosecuted in the town's own courts. Such arrangements emphasized the ancient towns' special status, and the same provisions would also apply to the new towns established by the bishops and nobility on the lands they owned in the center of Germany.