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.