Ruling An Empire: Staying Connected

While the Plantagenet dominions were small to middling as far as empires go, running the various shires, counties and countries that made up their territory was a chore.  How to keep connected without modern phones, faxes, computers and social media?  How to make sure the various seneschals, justiciars and other royal officials are doing their jobs when the King wasn't around?  The Plantagenets, like other royal families of the day, had their ways.

First, some basic medieval logistics.  Nobody who was anybody liked to stay in one house for too long.  Any noble who had more than a handful of manors at his disposal tended to move around.  This was for two reasons.  Medieval housekeeping consisted of moving everyone out and cleaning the place top to bottom, changing floor rushes, beating out wall hangings and tapestries, clearing chimneys and even the loos.  While this was going on at one manor house or castle, the royal or noble family would be elsewhere, dirtying up another house.  While tales about medieval sanitation and hygiene are probably exaggerated, they aren't far from the truth.  This was a dirty, smelly age without modern soaps and cleaning equipment.  There's only one way to do it.  The second reason for all this moving around had to do with the fact that royalty and nobility had more responsibility back then.  There weren't just weekly meetings with ministers or counsellors and presiding over ribbon cuttings and charities.  The King was the seat of justice as well as government.  All issues and all cases came to him, wherever he was.  All royal officials reported to him, wherever he was.  Likewise, nobles were tasked with keeping order on the local level.  All disputes came to them.  Kings and nobles may have had seneschals, bailiffs, sheriffs and such like to help them do their job, but the buck stopped with them, and that meant moving from place to place seeing that the work was done. 

Kings and nobles often made a happen of staying at certain places during certain times of year.  When a king is described as "keeping Christmas" at such and such town or castle, it was generally part of a yearly routine.  Large nobles also had their own routines, attendance at court and moving around their various domains.  This made for a very mobile ruling class.  When a King or great noble moved from one castle or manor to another, their entire court followed.  Lesser nobles, knights, functionaries, servants and men at arms.  Furniture, clothing, cooking implements, books, records, chapel furnishings, military equipment, sporting equipment, horses and hawks followed suit, trundled around in large wagons over rutty roads and tended by an army of servants.  Life at court wasn't all that glamorous.  While powerful nobles and necessary functionaries might be lucky to reside in whatever castle the King was, others had to make do with lodgings nearby, their own homes if they were lucky enough, billets with townsfolk, inns or even stables and the open air if they weren't.  Nobles didn't hang around court all year long.  Much of the time they were busy on their own estates, administering justice or dealing with other issues as they came up. 

To help with their numerous responsibilities, Kings and great nobles often depended on family members.  For this reason, as well as matters of personal security and logistics, royal families hardly lived together in the same castle.  The King might stay in one castle, the Queen in another, and their smaller children in another.  Older children were given their own households and spread out to other residences.  As boys grew into men and learned military skills, they were expected to help govern the larger areas of the kingdom or personal domain of their family.  Thus, if Henry II wanted a family conference, he would have to call Eleanor from whatever castle she happened to be in, Richard from the south of France, Geoffrey and John from elsewhere on the Continent.  Henry happened to prefer Angers or Chinon in the Loire Valley, which meant lengthy trips for the rest of the family.   As family, retainers and servants piled into the same castle or town and surrounding environs, the burdens on local farmers and merchants to provide for them all were crippling.  While for a lucky few a visit from a great royal or noble meant more money and more business, most people would never see any compensation for the food taken, the livestock pressed into service as burden animals, the property damaged and the like. 

Things got much worse when unrest flared in a shire or county or the King went to war with another ruler or great noble.  Then, the local lords called up the levies, which combined into larger forces under the command of the King, one of his grown sons, or more powerful lords, sometimes connected to the family by marriage or descent.  An army traveled on its stomach, often swarming the countryside through which it marched for food, fuel, animals or other needs.  Peace was rare, as nobles and kings were often quarreling with one another, so these invasion were more common then one might think.  And, as always, those at the bottom bore the brunt of all of it. 

Empire: Plantagenet Domain at its Height

When we say the Plantagenets had an empire, it's a relative term.  In comparison to Rome or even Napoleon Bonaparte, they may have been small potatoes.  But in their heyday (1154-1249), they were one of the more powerful monarchies in Europe.

The Plantagenets started out as counts of Anjou, a small county in the lower Loire Valley, France based on the town of Angers.  It's from this county that the early Plantagenets get their other common historical name, Angevins.  Geoffrey, Count of Anjou (1113-1151) and father of Henry II (1133-1189), had a claim to the English throne through his wife, known as Empress Matilda (1102-1167).  However, at the time, England was considered a backwater.  The territory that was worth anything lay on the European continent and there were only two ways to get that real estate in one's possession, marriage and conquest.  Henry II was capable of both, securing his claims to England and marrying the wealthiest heiress of her day, Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine (1122-1204) in her own right.  That brought a large swath of Southern and Coastal France into the Plantagenet dominions.  Though Eleanor was Duchess of Acquitaine, it was understood under the conventions of the time that her husband and sons would take the lion's share of ruling it for her, a bone of constant contention between Eleanor and her husband.

From here, Henry II steadily acquired yet more French countryside, including the valuable seaport of Calais, which the English managed to hold until the reign of Mary Tudor (1553-58).  Thus, at its height, the Angevin Empire stretched from the Pyrenees to the border of Scotland (and maybe into Scotland, from the standpoint of any right-thinking Plantagenet King, just ask Edward I, 1239-1307), as well as most of Ireland.  Though he'd been crowned in London in an elaborate ceremony, for the time and given Henry's low tolerance level of fuss, he spent little time in London.  The capitals of the empire were Henry's native Anger and Chinon in 1183, which is where the Lion in Winter shows the family at its reality-show finest, squabbling over who would rule what at Henry's death.  In those days, it wasn't a guarantee that the eldest child, who was Geoffrey (1158-1186) at this point, would get everything.  Eleanor wanted Richard (1157-1199) to have Aquitaine and neither parent was willing to give John (1166-1216) very much other than Ireland, maybe.

In the end, John inherited the lot after his elder brothers Henry (the Young King, 1155-1183), Geoffrey and Richard died.  Then, he lived up to his nickname of John Lackland.  The 1214 Battle of Bouvines brought the loss of Normandy and the Plantagenet home county of Anjou.  In the 1429 Treaty of Paris, John's son Henry III (1207-1272) would be forced to relinquish all title to Anjou, Poitou, Maine and Normandy.  Bits and pieces of territory fell away over the years.  And they never got it back, keeping only Calais and the area around that city known as the Pale, though they would spend an entire war known as the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) trying.  Finally, Calais was lost (1558) but in a peculiar twist of history, the Kings of England continued to title themselves King of England, Ireland and France, the Stuart (1603-1714) dynasty placing the most emphasis on this title.  It wasn't until the time of the French Revolution (1789-1799) that George III, otherwise not known for his grip on reality, finally recognized the obvious and quit claiming France.  An empire that had once contained the modern countries of Belgium, portions of France, Guernsey, Ireland, Jersey, and the United Kingdom was over at last, hundreds of years after it had really crumbled. 

Introduction to Great Lions' Hearts

Richard I (the Lionheart) said that his family was descended from the Devil, they were that temperamental and turbulent.  In fact, that's what most people know about the remarkable family that ruled an empire stretching from Ireland to the Pyrenees, at times claiming more French territory than the kings of France, at the same time demanding the Crown of Charlemagne and the Kingdom of Jerusalem.  Courtesy of films like Becket and the Lion in Winter, the Plantagenets come across as brutes who murdered family or friends when it suited them, who boozed and womanized and fought with abandon, and who traded kingdoms like playing cards.  And, that was just one side of them.  Plantagenet kings forged the beginnings of Britain's common law, patronized the arts, and earned their place in history through hard work.

The Plantagenets took their name from the common broom plant (Latin planta genista) adopted as a heraldric device by their ancestor Geoffrey, Count of Anjou (1113-1151), through whom they claimed England.  From humble beginning as Counts of Anjou and would-be claimants to the throne of England, they fought their way to the top rung of royalty through wars, marriage, diplomacy, money, whatever it took.  Members of the family included Henry II and Eleanor of Acquitaine, their sons Henry, Geoffrey, Richard and John, and John's descendants, Henrys III-VI, Edwards I-V, and Richards I-III.  Not to be forgotten were the in-laws, the long-suffering Alys of France and her brother Phillip II, Berengaria of Navarre, Eleanor of Castile, Anne of Bohemia, Margaret of Anjou and several others.  Like any large family with drama, there were extended cousins, including the Angevin Kings of Jerusalem and rulers of other European countries and Crusader states.  Then there were the artists, courtiers, soldiers and others who played their roles alongside and opposite these larger than life figures, from William Wallace and William le Marechal, to Thomas Becket to Simon de Montfort, Warwick the Kingmaker and Joan of Arc.

Finally, there was history, the Crusades, Magna Carta, the Wars of the Roses, the Hundred Years War, battles, weapons, laws, the arts and so much else that went into the backdrop of how this family lived, worked and went about the business of being legendary.  And, as with any prominent family, there's culture, from Shakespeare's plays, to Twentieth Century B-Movies and novels, poems and plays.  This blog will cover all the above, and so much more.  So hold onto your seats (or your devices), we're in for a wild ride.