Battle: Alnwick I, 1174

We think of battles as involving tens of thousands of men, and lasting hours or even days.  Most Medieval battles involved dozens or hundreds of men, and could be over in under an hour.  A case in point is Alnwick, a battle fought on July 13, 1174 by William the Lion of Scotland, and men of his personal bodyguard, against a larger force of English knights under Ranulf de Glanville.

William I of Scotland, aka the Lion, was taking advantage of a personal quarrel between Henry II and his sons to reassert age-old Scottish claims to the English counties of Cumbria and Northumbria.  In addition to being King of Scots, William was also Earl of Northumbria, though he'd given that title up to Henry II in 1157.  William was constantly having regrets about doing so, and thinking of ways to get the title, and the two counties, back under Scottish control.  While Henry II was no joke on a battlefield, he was in Normandy dealing with his fractious children.  This was the time to make a move.  William had previously marched into Northumbria in 1173, advancing on Newcastle and Prudhoe Castle.  Finding both to be heavily defended, he had retreated.  In 1174, he tried again, augmenting his army with Flemish mercenaries. 

He divided his army into three groups.  While the Earl of Fife was busy attacking Warkworth, William besieged Alnwick Castle.  He allowed his force to become spread out, meaning that most of his knights and the Flemish mercs were elsewhere when Ranulf de Glanville and a party of 400 knights showed up outside the castle.  De Glanville's men arrived at Alnwick shortly after dawn on July 13, 1174, in a heavy fog.  William was in camp, surrounded by his personal bodyguard of about 60 men.  De Glanville saw his opportunity and raided the camp.  William scrambled to raise a defense and, in the process, his horse was killed underneath him and he was captured.  Most of his men then surrendered.

William was held prisoner in Newcastle, then moved to Falaise in Normandy to face Henry II personally.  Lucky for him, Henry had his hands full with his sons, the aftermath of the Becket controversy, and rebellious lords in England.  He let William go after giving up, not only Northumbria and Cumbria, but also Berwick Castle and even Edinburgh Castle.  William was allowed to go free.  While traveling back home through Newcastle he was nearly killed again by an English mob.  The message was clear.  They didn't appreciate Scottish invasions.  William recovered Berwick in 1189, when Richard the Lionheart needed ready cash to fund his crusade.  And, though Scots would breach the border several more times, they gave up on Northumbria and Cumbria, now Northumberland and Cumberland, William's descendant Alexander II reaffirming that these two pieces of real estate belonged to the English per treaty in 1237.  Thus the outcome of Alnwick I was to effectively establish the English/Scottish border as it exists today.

 

War: The Revolt of 1173

All families have drama.  Novels, plays and movies make it seem as though the Plantagenets invented family drama centuries before soap operas and reality television.  The difference between a regular family and a royal family was that divisiveness within the family could quickly be exploited by other royal families and other countries, a la Game of Thrones.  And, the issues, power, land and inheritance.  In Medieval times, inheritance within a family wasn't so cut and dried.  Father-to-son passage of royal authority wasn't a given.  Each son had to scrape for themselves, proving their right to inherit and edging out the others, who fought for the scraps or died trying. 

Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine were the ultimate power couple of their age.  Henry was heir to England and Normandy, as well as Angers and other counties in France.  Eleanor brought Aquitaine and Poitou, basically most of what is now southern France to the table.  They had four adult sons, Henry, Richard, Geoffrey and John.  How to divvy up all this land and give each son a piece of the pie and prevent him warring with the others was a never-ending problem.  Henry, Jr., was married to a French princess and Geoffrey to a woman who was Duchess of Britany in her own right.  And, there was always France and Scotland to think about.  Both would take advantage of any apparent weakness in the Plantagenet family.

Young Henry was 18 years old in 1173, good-looking, a tournament hero and with just enough brains and ambition to be dangerous.  Having been crowned junior king in 1170, he wanted the authority and power to go with that.  No Plantagenet stood for being junior in anything, even to his old man.  Henry II wasn't about to give up any power to someone he still considered a young whippersnapper who needed to learn his place the hard way.  Then Henry II decided to give some land within Henry's inheritance to John and the lid blew off.  Junior went to his father-in-law, the King of France, who was always looking for a pretext to star a war with his old rival Henry II.  Richard and Geoffrey soon followed, and Geoffrey brought along his wife Constance, who had control of her own lands in Brittany. 

Eleanor of Aquitaine threw in her lot with her sons.  For all the ink that has been spilled on the romance between her and Henry II, the reality was that the old sparks had died.  Eleanor was aware that real power lay with her boys and it was her duty as a mother of lions to stand with them.  In particular, she was eager to protect her eventual heir, Richard, who stood to lose everything if Junior and Louis of France pushed matters too far.  Henry II intercepted Eleanor in Normandy and she was sent back to England.  She would spend the next 19 years as a prisoner shuttled from one castle to another in England. 

The war began in 1173 when two other independent realms, Flanders and Boulogne, invaded Normandy in a joint operation with France and knights loyal to Henry, Junior, including William Marshal.  William the Lion, King of Scotland, invaded the north of England.  Henry II defeated the invaders in Normandy and turned on Scotland.  Henry II proved he still had his military ability and drove William back, penetrating deep into Scotland.  William the Lion would regret coming into this family quarrel.  Then, Henry's own nobles in England got into the act.   The Earls of Norfolk and Leicester, backed with Flemish mercenaries, marched on London, taking advantage of Henry II being occupied in Normandy.  Henry's army in Scotland backtracked to deal with them and gained another victory.  One of Henry II's loyal barons reached the art of understatement by telling Henry that 1173, was "a bad year to be your enemy."

But William of Scotland wasn't through yet.  As the war persisted in Normandy, his brother David, Earl of Huntingdon led a coalition of disaffected English lords.  The rebels burned Nottingham and Norwich.  The barons were upset over their usual grievances, royal authority in general, and the murder of Thomas Becket in particular.  To win support in England, Henry II had to turn from military strategy to optics and diplomacy.  He did public penance for the killing of Thomas Becket and defeated the Scots at Alnwick, capturing William the Lion.  His sons knew that the game was up, and with Louis' assistance, brokered a peace that saved their inheritance, and their necks for the time being.

Henry knew how to hit the barons where it would really hurt and ordered several castles demolished.  If a noble lord didn't have a fortified base to gather an army and retreat to, he would be less likely to take on the king.  William of Scotland had to surrender control of his fortresses at Berwick and Edinburgh, thus laying the seeds for continued English intervention in Scotland.  It would be a matter of time before Henry's brood (and the Scots or French) got restless again.