Read Kings and Castles Online

Authors: Marc Morris

Kings and Castles (4 page)

BOOK: Kings and Castles
11.88Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
 

7. The King’s
Companions

 

Roger
Bigod
, earl of Norfolk and marshal of England, was by all accounts a very
bellicose and irascible chap, and so knew a golden opportunity to settle an old
score when he saw one. In 1245, while travelling through France on
diplomatic business, he was rudely detained by Arnaud, count of
Guisnes
. This minor French aristocrat failed to show the
earl the respect he felt was his due and extorted money from him and his men in
exchange for their continued safe passage. When, therefore, some four years
later, Arnaud showed up on this side of the Channel,
Bigod
had no hesitation in ordering his immediate seizure. This led to the whole
business coming before King Henry III (1216–72), enabling the earl to justify
his retaliation: if an upstart French count was free to sell the roads and the
air to travellers,
Bigod
reasoned, then so was he. ‘I
am an earl’, he barked, ‘just as he is!’

To modern ears this defence sounds puzzling: ‘earl’ is
(almost self-evidently) an English word, and was used as a title from the
eleventh century by those who governed large regions of Anglo-Saxon England in
the king’s name. How, then, could it be applied to the count of
Guisnes
? The problem is that the sense of
Bigod’s
retort has been lost in translation. The above
episode comes down to us thanks to the reporting of Matthew Paris, a gossipy
monk of St Albans who was frequently at Henry
III’s
court. Paris
wrote his account in Latin and, in Latin, ‘earl’ and ‘count’ are denoted by the
same word – comes. Similarly,
Bigod
, while he
probably understood English and knew that most of his fellow countrymen
referred to him as an ‘earl’, was a high-ranking member of an aristocratic
elite that still habitually spoke French. Thus the word he would have used to
describe himself would have been
cuens
or
conte
: again, the same word used to describe a French
count.

At a purely linguistic level,
therefore,
Bigod
was right – he and the count of
Guisnes
did have exactly the same title. On another level,
however, he was quite wrong, as he must have known well. The powers of a
continental comes (a count) were very different to those of an English comes
(an earl). The count of
Guisnes
was only small fry,
but there were French counts in the thirteenth century who were virtually
independent rulers of their own provinces – for example, the counts of Anjou, Toulouse and Flanders. Such men could make their own laws, mint coins
in their own name, and answered in only a vague and occasional way to the king
of France.
By contrast, English earls like
Bigod
were altogether
less impressive creatures, being merely the greatest subjects of the English
king.

The equation of English earls with
French counts began, unsurprisingly, with the Norman Conquest. It was also, as
we shall see, precisely at this point that the powers enjoyed by earls were
dramatically curtailed. Prior to 1066, earls exercised real authority in their
regions, albeit delegated from the king: they presided over the provincial courts,
handing down judgements of life and death; they assisted in the collection of
fines and taxes, in return for which they received a third of the profits from
both; and, in times of war, it fell to them to lead the armies. Earls were
essentially the same as ealdormen, who first occur in the seventh century, and
who exercised the same kind of wide powers from the early tenth century. The
preference for the shorter title was a semantic shift caused by the
less-celebrated take-over of England
by the Danes in 1016. King Cnut (1016–35) preferred to call his English
provincial governors jarls like their contemporary Scandinavian counterparts.
There was precious little difference, however, in the kind of powers they
exercised. If anything, ealdormen/earls were becoming more powerful in the
eleventh century. The greatest among them governed regions that corresponded to
the former kingdoms that had combined to form the English state: Northumbria, East
Anglia, Mercia
and Wessex.
Thus, hardly anyone blinked when, at the start of 1066, the earl of Wessex, Harold
Godwineson
, decided that he would be the best person to
succeed the recently deceased Edward the Confessor and had himself crowned
king.

William the Conqueror (1066–87), who
took a rather different view on the succession, also viewed the balance of
power between the Crown and the earls with a fresh and critical eye. After a
few years trying to govern England
along conventional English lines, only to be rewarded with one rebellion after
another, he set about a radical restructuring of power. The size of surviving
earldoms was much reduced and, when new earls were created, as was the case in
Herefordshire, Shropshire and Cheshire, their
territorial responsibilities were confined to a single shire – or ‘county’ as
the Normans
began to call these units, for it was at this point that the English earl was
equated with the French count. This, too, signalled a demotion: previously, the
English word ‘earl’ had been translated into Latin as dux (duke). Duke was
William’s own title as ruler of Normandy
– he was not about to start sharing it.

The policy of keeping earls firmly in their place was
followed by William’s sons. Under William Rufus (1087–1100) and Henry I (1100–35)
the number of earldoms was kept down to single figures, and the formal powers
that earls had enjoyed before the Conquest began to ebb away. Earls no longer
aided in the collection of tax and were seen less and less in the county
courts. If they raised and led armies, they did so in their capacity as the
king’s sworn men, obliged to aid him as a condition of their landholding,
rather than because of any public duties attached to their titles.
Increasingly, ‘earl’ was regarded as only an honorary designation.

It was just at the point, however, when the position of the
earls seemed to be almost entirely empty, that England acquired a king who took
the deliberate decision to increase their number and devolve huge, unheard-of
amounts of authority directly into their hands. King Stephen (1135–54) clearly
felt that this was the best way to deal with the tricky state of affairs that
obtained at the start of his reign, namely an aristocracy chafing at the bit
for greater rewards, and a rival for power in the shape of his cousin, Matilda.
His aim seems to have been to have an earl for every county: by the end of his
reign only five counties had no earl, and the overall number of earls had
trebled. But what seemed a straightforward and inexpensive way to appease his
greatest subjects and outdo his opponents quickly spun out of control.
Governmental powers that were given to one earl – say
,
the right to hold a royal castle, or to control the king’s sheriff – came to be
expected by the others. Such expectations were difficult to contain, moreover,
for this was not an insular aristocracy, but a cross-channel one. A man called
comes in England was naturally likely to compare himself with a
similarly-styled cousin or brother on the continent and think, as Roger
Bigod
did a century later, ‘I am an earl, just as he is’.
Why, therefore, should English earls not hold their own courts? Why settle for
a third of judicial profits when you could have the lot? Come to
that,
why not mint your own coins, with your own face on,
rather than the king’s? By the end of Stephen’s reign, several English earls
had done just that.

Stephen soon repented of his policy and tried to throw it
into reverse. It took the greater skill and firmer purpose of his successor,
however, to restore the primacy of the Crown and ensure that England did not become – as, for example, Germany had – a confederation of independent
princes rather than a united
kingdom. Nevertheless, Henry II (1135–54)
faced a formidable task in this, the nature of which is well illustrated by the
example of Hugh
Bigod
, great-grandfather of Roger,
and no less bellicose than his descendant. Hugh was one of the new earls of
Stephen’s reign, and it is quite clear from his actions that he intended to
make East Anglia his own. Along the River
Waveney, which divides Norfolk from Suffolk, he seized a string of manors, and built a new castle at
Bungay
to control them. Further afield, he set his sights
on controlling the royal castles and county towns at Norwich
and Ipswich. His
comital
title (that is, his earldom) had been given to him by Matilda, Henry
II’s
mother, and for this reason he may have expected some
degree of latitude from her son. But Hugh and others like him who had done very
well for themselves during Stephen’s reign suffered a rude awakening during the
reign of his successor. Henry II not only wrested control of royal castles from
those who had usurped it; he also in some instances compelled the destruction
of fortresses built by the earls themselves. After Hugh
Bigod
and some other old die-hards attempted to reassert their independence in 1173–74,
the earl was compelled by Henry to hand over his main castle at
Framlingham
, and watch as the king had it torn down.

Because of his success in dealing with the separatist
tendencies of the English earls, Henry II is regarded as one of the great
heroes of England’s
‘constitutional’ history. During his reign no new earldoms were created and
many existing ones were allowed to lapse on the death of their holders. Hugh
Bigod’s
son, for example – another Roger – was not allowed
to style himself ‘earl of Norfolk’,
in spite of his record of loyal service to the Crown. It was only thanks to the
generosity – and dire financial need – of Richard I (1189–99) that the
Bigod
family were able to buy back their lost title. Other
changes initiated by Henry, especially his expansion of royal justice,
increased the power of the Crown to the extent that, while the king himself
might be challenged, his position was never again called into question.

By the thirteenth century, therefore, there was no power that
automatically went with being an earl: certainly
nobody
claiming independence from royal control by virtue of his title. This is not to
say that earls were not powerful men – they were. Their power, however, was
based on purely material measures: how much land they had, how much money they
raked in, and how many men they could afford to keep in their service as a
consequence. Most earls had land and money in abundance, and were therefore
politically important. But the few exceptions prove the point that simply being
an earl did not in itself grant much of an advantage. The earl of Oxford, for example, had
little in the way of land and resources; his wealth was only a fraction of that
enjoyed by his fellow earls, and he was less well-off than a good many barons.
As a result, he was politically inconsequent – his title counted for
next-to-nothing. Of the public powers that had once belonged to the earl in
Anglo-Saxon times, only a single vestige remained in the thirteenth century.
This was the so called ‘third penny’, once taken as a third share of the
profits of royal justice, but now commuted to a fixed sum, and not a
particularly large one at that.

All of which is to say that the more thoughtful earls of
thirteenth-century England, if they ever took a moment to reflect on the nature
of the title they enjoyed, must have been left wondering precisely what the
point of it was. To be an earl was clearly to be special: in the first half of
the thirteenth century there were never more than twenty individuals who could style
themselves as such at any one time, and in the second half their numbers rarely
rose above ten. ‘Earl’ was, moreover, a unique distinction: there were no other
competing ranks of nobility – no dukes or marquises of the kind found on the
continent, and introduced to England in the fourteenth century. English society
at this time was quite open to ambitious social climbers, and those with
sufficient drive and ambition could rise through a variety of means: a career
in royal service, distinguished conduct on the tournament field or in battle,
the acquisition of lands by purchase. Such men could get themselves knighted,
but they could not buy or fight their way to an earldom. Only the king, it was
accepted, could create an earldom from scratch and, after Stephen’s reign,
kings were understandably reluctant to do so. The only way to obtain an earldom
was to inherit one or marry into one, and in both cases the king might still
withhold the title (as nearly happened in the case of the
Bigod
family, and as did happen in the case of William
Longespée
and John
fitz
Geoffrey, who succeeded to their
fathers’ lands but not to their titles). When an individual was admitted to the
rank of earl, it involved a special public ceremony, in which he was ‘belted’
by the king with a sword. The restricted numbers, the ceremonial investment: it
all suggested that contemporaries still saw the rank of earl as significant,
yet if they had any specific theories about the rights and duties that went
with the title they have not survived.

 
Doubtless many earls
conceived their role rather vaguely as being leaders of local society and the
king’s natural advisers. For most of the time, it is important to remember,
kings and their magnates got along with the routine business of government. We
might expect, therefore, that theories about the nature of ‘
comital

power would develop more rapidly at times of political crisis, when this normal
working relationship broke down. Again, however, this does not seem to have
happened. There were three great crises in the thirteenth century – in 1215,
1258 and 1297 – and in each case earls were at the forefront of opposition to
the Crown. Yet, in the propaganda and the programmes for reform they generated,
nothing specific is said about the role of earls. ‘Community’ and ‘common
counsel’ – these were the buzzwords of thirteenth-century political debate. Nor
was this mere rhetoric to disguise the schemes of great aristocrats: the demand
for greater political involvement of the wider community led to the firmer
establishment of parliament, and parliament involved more than just earls and
barons.

BOOK: Kings and Castles
11.88Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

WidowsWickedWish by Lynne Barron
Her Heart's Desire by Lisa Watson
Versailles by Kathryn Davis
Nocturne by Helen Humphreys
Call Me by Gillian Jones
Devil Take Me by Anna J. Evans
Seduction by Madame B