Lionheart Read online

  To the memory of

  Ehud Netzer,

  1936–2010

  Archaeologist extraordinaire

  and friend sorely missed

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks are due to four archaeologists and maritime historians who have been extraordinarily generous with their help in tracing the movements of a long-dead English king and gave permission for my use of their copyrighted material published in academic papers and books: Professor John H. Pryor of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Sydney, NSW; and Professor Emeritus Sarah Arenson and Dr Ruthy Gertwagen of the University of Haifa. The late Professor Emeritus Ehud Netzer of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Dvorah Netzer not only shared much knowledge with me, but also extended warm welcome and hospitality on my visits to Israel.

  Professor Friedrich Heer of the University of Vienna used Jacob Burckhardt’s light to illuminate some dark periods of history for me; my Gascon friends Nathalie and Eric Roulet opened my eyes and ears to Occitan as a living language; Eric Chaplain of Princi Neguer publishing house in Pau lent precious source material in that and other languages; fellow-author and horsewoman Ann Hyland gave valuable equestrian advice; Jennifer Weller, a wonderful artist, took time out to draw maps and seals; Tuvia Amit helped with details of Arsuf/Apollonia; La Société des Amis du Vieux Chinon authorised me to photograph the unique fresco in the Chapelle Ste-Radegonde; my former comrades-in-arms John Anderson and Colin Priston researched the massacre at York and Hodierna Nutrix, the mystery woman in King Richard’s life; the staffs of La Bibliothèque Nationale de France and its online resource Gallica, of the British Library and of the Bibliothèque Municipale de Bordeaux made available much source material; that doyen of literary translators, Miguel Castro Mata threw new light on the crusader fleets’ stopovers in Portugal; and my partner Atarah Ben-Tovim was an enthusiastic companion following Richard I’s travels on both sides of the Channel, in Sicily and the Levant.

  Lastly, although chronologically first, I acknowledge my debt to two great teachers, Latinist William McCulloch and George Trotman, an inspiring teacher of French and Spanish, both sometime of Simon Langton School for Boys, Canterbury. Together, they unleashed my passion for linguistics, without which this book, drawn from sources in eight medieval and modern languages, would not have been written.

  At The History Press, my thanks go to commissioning editor Mark Beynon, project editor Rebecca Newton, proofreader Emma Wiggin, designer Jemma Cox and cover designer Martin Latham.

  With so much expert support, it goes without saying that any errors are mine.

  Contents

  Title

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  PART 1: THE EDUCATION OF A PRINCE

  1 To Eleanor, a Son

  2 Duke to King, Duchess to Queen

  3 Court Whores and Confusion

  4 The 15-Year-Old Duke

  PART 2: A LIFE OF VIOLENCE

  5 Rebellion and Betrayal

  6 Death of a Prince

  7 Heir to the Empire

  8 The Hell of Hattin

  9 The Call of Destiny

  10 The Enemy Within

  PART 3: THE CRUSADER KING

  11 Death by the Sword, Death by Sickness, Death by Starvation

  12 Of Cogs and Cargo

  13 Sea-Sickness and Siege

  14 A Bride for Richard

  15 If it be God’s Will …

  16 Exit Philip Augustus

  17 Blood on the Sand, Blood in the Mud

  PART 4: RIDING TO A FALL

  18 The Cost of an Insult

  19 Richard and Robin Hood? Maybe

  20 Good King Richard

  21 Death in Agony

  22 Of a Siege, Sex and Saddles

  On the Trail of the Lionheart – Places to Visit

  Plates

  Also by Douglas Boyd

  Copyright

  Introduction

  In the twenty-first century, despite all the tools of enquiry at their disposal, western journalists creating ‘history as it happens’ overwhelmingly endorse hand-outs from the Pentagon and Downing Street, so that British and American wars are presented as democratic actions undertaken for humanitarian reasons and fought with due respect for human life and protection of non-combatants, even when the government hand-outs are known by many of those journalists to be patently false, and incontrovertible evidence of war crimes exists. Anyone believing differently need only watch John Pilger’s 2010 documentary The War You Don’t See, which includes shattering admissions of this practice by well-known journalists and elected politicians, government officials and service personnel admitting their morally and legally unacceptable actions in the Iraq War of 2003–11.

  History as a record of the past can also be misleading. Living two and a half millennia ago, Herodotus was later dubbed by Cicero ‘the father of history’ because he was the first person to attempt recording the past methodically. His investigation into the origins of the Greco–Persian wars gave us the word we use today: istoria, meaning ‘learning by enquiry’. That is the business of historians, of the present or the past.

  The first Roman historian to write in Latin was Cato the Elder in the second century BCE. To him, the point of recording the past was to prove the superiority of the Roman race and way of life, and his successors continued to present the Romans always as the good guys and all Rome’s wars as just. So, almost from the beginning, history was perverted from Herodotus’ open-minded spirit of enquiry by what we today call ‘spin’, varying from the ethnically biased Roman accounts to the nineteenth-century view of German historian Leopold von Ranke that history should demonstrate a divine plan, with the hand of God manifest in the deeds of men, even when this meant snipping the pieces of time’s jigsaw to fit. Ranke’s contemporary, the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, disagreed, holding that all events should be recorded, whether or not they seem to fit any divine or other plan. However, the teaching of history in Britain’s universities followed the Protestant school of Ranke, thanks largely to the great classical scholar Bishop William Stubbs of Oxford. This Christian spin on the teaching and study of history at British universities – and therefore British schools – lasted into the second half of the twentieth century.

  To Stubbs, King Richard I of England should have been seen as a heroic figure because he led the Third Crusade with the intention of reconquering Jerusalem from the Saracen. In fact, Stubbs’ opinion was that Richard was ‘… a bad ruler; his energy, or rather his restlessness, his love of war and his genius for it, effectively disqualified him from being a peaceful one; his utter want of political common sense from being a prudent one.’ Stubbs’ considered opinion was that Richard was ‘a man of blood, whose crimes were those of one whom long use of warfare had made too familiar with slaughter … and a vicious man’. 1

  Sir Steven Runciman, another respected historian of the crusades, summed up the two sides of Richard’s character: ‘He was a bad son, a bad husband and a bad king, but a gallant and splendid soldier.’2 Richard spent his entire adult life in warfare and consistently displayed supreme physical courage, but gallant and splendid are not adjectives one would use today.

  When writing of the past, it is a responsibility of historians to consult contemporary sources whenever possible, but also to weight them according to their authors’ relationship with the subjects of whom and the issues of which they wrote, and take into account the political and religious pressures on the chroniclers. In my biography of Richard the Lionheart’s mother – that extraordinary woman, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was the target of calumnies and slanders in her own lifetime and afterwards – it was vital to bear in mind that the contemporary sources in Latin were written by celibate and m
isogynistic monks. Even St Bernard of Clairvaux, the wise founder of the Cistercian Order, could not bear to look upon his own sister in her nun’s robes. In addition to their aversion to all women as the perceived cause of men’s lust, the chroniclers owed a political loyalty to either Eleanor’s French husband King Louis VII, whom she divorced, or England’s King Henry II, who locked her up for a decade and a half after she raised their sons in rebellion against him. The chroniclers were thus extremely unlikely to be objective about this major player on the European stage, and their comments on her must be assessed with that in mind.

  Similarly, when evaluating King Richard I it is necessary to examine closely the enduring legend of this ‘parfit gentil knight’ and noble Christian monarch who selflessly abandoned his kingdom in 1190 to risk all in performing his religious duty to liberate the Holy Land from the Saracen. In fact, the legend originated as a PR campaign orchestrated by Queen Eleanor to blackmail the citizens of the Plantagenet Empire into stumping up the enormous ransom demanded for his release from an imprisonment that was all of his own making and had nothing to do with religion.

  The motto of Hitler’s propaganda minister Josef Goebbels – that a big lie will succeed where a smaller one may be questioned – was already understood by Eleanor and used by her, for Richard was held prisoner not by the Saracen enemy in the Holy Land, but by the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, Henry VI Hohenstaufen. He had not been captured fighting heroically in battle, but while slinking homewards incognito at the end of his pointless crusade which cost tens of thousands of lives on both sides, leaving an undying legacy of hatred in the Muslim world, where malik Rik is still a name with which to frighten disobedient little boys. Although the Church protected the persons and property of crusaders during their absence from their homelands, even the pope did little to protect this English king from Hohenstaufen and his vassal Duke Leopold of Austria, one of many European fellow-crusaders humiliated and alienated by Richard’s arrogance during the abortive Third Crusade.

  As Bishop Stubbs knew well, Richard had spent his whole life shedding blood, not tactically and face-to-face with a more or less equally matched enemy, but strategically, by slaughtering defenceless peasant men, women and children, laying waste their fields and cutting down their orchards to bring starvation to the survivors, thus depriving a noble enemy of the support base for his unproductive way of life. It was, to use a modern expression, total war. Because of the enormous suffering thus inflicted on millions of innocent people, the Church pronounced the slaughter of farm animals and the destruction of agricultural implements in war to be a sin. Although professedly devout on occasion, Richard was not deterred by this interdiction.

  Edward Gibbon held that history was ‘little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind’. No other single life better illustrates that judgement than the life of King Richard I. This, then, is the story, warts and all, of a man born to parents of unsurpassed intelligence, wealth and achievements and whose birthright raised him to world-wide fame, yet who died in agony, ‘naked as he came into this world’.

  Douglas Boyd

  South West France, 2014

  NOTES

  1. Stubbs, W.,ed., Itinerarium peregrinorum et gesta regis ricardi, Rolls Series (1864), pp. 17, 21, 27.

  2. Quoted in S. Runciman, A History of the Crusades (Cambridge: CUP, 1954), Vol 3, p. 75.

  Part 1:

  The Education of a Prince

  1

  To Eleanor, a Son

  Millions of modern people believe that the relative positions of the constellations at the moment of their birth, as seen with the naked eye from this planet, affect their character and influence the entire course of their lives. It is therefore hardly surprising that astrology was considered a serious science in the twelfth century, several centuries before superstition was gradually replaced by scientific knowledge in the Enlightenment. In what then seemed a proof that astrology was an important and reliable science, during the night of 8 September 1157 two male infants were born in England, 40 miles apart.

  The royal palace known as ‘the King’s Houses’, later called Beaumont Palace and eventually demolished, stood near the site of Oxford’s Worcester College. A commemorative plaque on the north side of Beaumont Street records its existence and the fact that two kings of England were born there: Richard I and his younger brother John. The palace had been built by their great-grandfather Henry I outside the north gate of Oxford city because it was a comfortable ride from there to his hunting tower at Woodstock.

  In the nova aula or royal apartments of the palace on that night the most famous woman of her time gave birth to her third son by the man she had married as Count Henry of Anjou – and who, thanks in large part to her wealth and political acumen, had since become King Henry II of England. Her name was Eleanor of Aquitaine. In addition to being queen of England, she was also duchess of Normandy and Aquitaine and countess of Anjou and Poitou. Because infant mortality was rife at the time and long after, the newborn prince was speedily christened Richard, and would live to become England’s most enduringly famous king.

  On the same September night when he was born at Oxford, a woman previously unknown to history with the fashionable northern French name of Hodierna or Audierne1 also gave birth to a son, in St Albans. Hodierna’s son was given the name Alexander and grew up to be among the foremost philosopher-scientists of his time, Alexander of Neckham.2

  Noblewomen did not normally breast-feed their children; it was their custom to bind the breasts tightly after a birth so that they would not acquire the natural curves of peasant mothers. In 1157 it would certainly have been considered inappropriate for the queen of England to suckle her child, even had Eleanor not insisted on accompanying her husband on his ceaseless travels to impose his authority and his new laws throughout the Plantagenet Empire on both sides of the Channel. Possible candidates for the honour of nursing Eleanor’s newborn son included many women who had recently given birth, but Hodierna was chosen, probably on the advice of an astrologer to whom it seemed particularly auspicious that he should be raised on the milk of a woman who had delivered a child on the same night the new prince was born.

  Shortly after the birth, Eleanor left her newborn son with her servants in the comfort and safety of the palace and resumed her itinerant lifestyle that lasted until the court settled briefly at Lincoln for Christmas. Only then could her ladies’ servants unpack from travelling chests and leather sacks the finery in which their mistresses dressed for the festival. After this, Henry began a twelve-month tour of the kingdom that took in 3,000 miles of travel along roads that had not been repaired since the Romans left eight centuries before – a trip on which Eleanor accompanied him for much of the time.

  The queen’s itinerant lifestyle precluding prolonged childcare, Hodierna was installed in the King’s Houses, bringing her own son with her and breast-feeding both him and Eleanor’s newborn, with Prince Richard having the privilege of the right breast, thought to produce richer milk. Living in the royal apartments, Hodierna’s relationship with the other members of the household reflected her importance in that age of infant mortality. To be appointed wet-nurse to a prince was both a very high honour and a heavy responsibility: should the royal infant die a cot death, for example, she would be accused of over-lying him. Should he die of some childhood infection outside her control, there too she would be held to account.

  It was customary for infants to be breast-fed until two years old or possibly older, to avoid any possibility of tuberculosis from imbibing cow’s milk – a connection that was known even in this time of little understanding of infection. Thereafter, her duties for the young Prince Richard included all his toilet needs, dressing him and preparing all his food, even masticating meat and placing it in his mouth until he was able to chew for himself. Throughout his early years she would stay close to him, picking him up when he fell, comforting him and caring for him when and if he contracted childhood ailments. She
was, in short, the source of all that complex of affection and caring that today is labelled ‘maternal’.3 Throughout his life, Richard would visit and care for Hodierna as the woman for whom he felt most affection, in much the same way that many middle-class Englishmen in the twentieth century felt affection for the nannies who brought them up until they were sent away to boarding school. Thirty-three years after his birth at Oxford Richard allotted the annual rent of £7 10s from a house at Rowdon, between Chippenham and Bath, ‘to Hodierna nutrix’, meaning, Hodierna the wet-nurse.

  Hodierna and her charges lived in the most privileged stratum of Anglo-Norman society, in which 200 families related in easily traceable degree owned half the country. Beneath them toiled the native Anglo-Saxons, few of whom rose to greatness in the cruel occupation that was a slow genocide, with native males being displaced or killed and their more desirable females taken as concubines and wives by their new overlords. Traces of the racial/class divide of this time still exist in the bastard Germanic-Romance language that became modern English. For the live animals herded, tended, milked and slaughtered by the natives, we still use their Anglo-Saxon names like sheep, calf, cow and swine. For the meat on the table, which only the French-speaking overlords were allowed to eat, we use the French equivalents: mutton, veal, beef and pork. Not surprisingly, Prince Richard was to grow up regarding the English as a race of serfs who spoke a barbarous tongue he never learned and who existed only to serve their masters – in his case, once he came to power, as a source of finance.

  Eleanor was a remote mother, appearing at intervals and then departing for months at a time on her travels in England and on the continent. But such was her commanding presence and so tantalising her arrivals and departures that Richard was never able to outgrow his bond with her. To these two women, then, Hodierna who mothered him and Queen Eleanor who supervised his education and upbringing in the tradition of her native Aquitaine – of which she was determined he would one day be duke, if not king of England too – Richard remained close all his life. They and his sisters were, in fact, the only women in his life.