April Queen (25 page)

Her tapestry of the Conquest at Bayeux shows Norman knights clean-shaven with short hair while English warriors had longer hair and sported moustaches. Nearly a century later, facial hair was still a sign of uncouth Englishness. Men wore their hair shoulder-length. Women’s hair was longer, uncovered before marriage and bound or concealed by a veil or wimple afterwards. Among the fashion-conscious and the flatterers, Henry’s short cloaks now ousted the ankle-length cloaks that had been popular under Stephen. Fur being a mark of luxury, sable and ermine were reserved for the very rich while nuns showed poverty by keeping warm with cat- and lamb-skin. Bathing was not an English habit. After John’s coronation in 1199 his bath attendant William Aquarius was called to wait upon his master once every three weeks, which was considered excessive indulgence by his unwashed, silk- and fur-clad courtiers.

In Eleanor’s London, God and Mammon were neighbours. Walter Map found it a haunt of pimps and whores, while his fellow courtier William fitz Stephen judged it a noble city. It boasted 126 parish churches and thirteen monastic houses built of stone among streets of shops displaying native produce and luxury imported goods,
like silk, brocades and spices from the East, exquisitely worked enamels from Limoges, wine from the Rhine Valley. Trades and crafts tended to cluster, hence Bread Street, Milk Street, Ironmonger Lane and the like. So closely built were the shops and houses, wood-framed with lath and plaster infill, that fire was an ever-present urban danger. One had destroyed St Paul’s Cathedral and a large area around it only seventeen years before Eleanor’s arrival. Not until the next century would London’s building regulations forbid thatched roofs to make houses more fire-resistant.

Paris counted only 25 acres within the walls, but London Wall enclosed 326 acres. There were seven double gates leading north, east and west. At the eastern or downriver end of the Roman wall stood William I’s Tower of London. Two other fortresses, Baynard’s Castle and Montfichet Castle, housed the garrison. To the south, the river wall was in disrepair and London Bridge was a ramshackle wooden structure that served also as a toll-point and barrier to possible invasion fleets. Replacing this in stone with a drawbridge to permit the passage of tall-masted ships was not begun by Henry until 1176, and took three decades to complete.

The left-bank waterfront was a thriving mercantile area where, among the taverns and pot-houses, there was at least one take-out restaurant catering at any hour of the day or night to the hunger of those wanting to eat at home but with no servants to cook for them. It was here that Eleanor invested in a wharf known as Queenshythe, whose construction had been financed by Henry I’s consort Matilda, whose other philanthropic works included the city’s first public lavatories and bath house. Less generously, Eleanor developed Queenshythe as the centre for importing wines from Poitou and Gascony, including those from her own estates. ‘Vintry’, as the area was called, was also the site of the king’s bonded warehouses, where all wine entering the country was assessed for duty.

While making their money in the city, some richer Londoners preferred to live outside the walls, in garden suburbs around Clerken Well and St Clement’s Well, where cleaner water was available. Beyond these lay fields, pasture and woodland. As coal was not worked in any quantity, wood and charcoal were the principal fuels for heating and cooking. Unusually in England, where monarchy guarded its hunting with vindictive ferocity, London’s citizens had the right to hunt with hawk and hound in Middlesex, Hertfordshire, the Chilterns and into Kent as far as the River Cray.

Every week on the smooth field that came to be called Smithfield, a livestock market was held, with the spectacle of horses being put
through their paces by prospective buyers providing an impromptu entertainment for the public, even the poorest of whom knew enough abut horses to express an opinion. At weekends and on feast-days amateur jousts were held, with borrowed or improvised body armour and padded lances. More or less organised entertainments included a form of football played in the streets on Shrove Tuesday and cockfights for gambling. The baiting of bulls, bears and boars by starved and goaded dogs was a regular winter entertainment.
⁴
When the marsh fields or Moorfields north of the city froze over, young men with animal shin bones tied to their shoes used iron-spiked sticks to propel themselves across the ice in a cross between skating and Nordic skiing.

The bustling metropolis on the Thames made even Paris seem provincial, except in learning, and Poitiers and Bordeaux very small indeed. To Eleanor’s ears the language of the natives was a grotesque and guttural babble, but learning it was unnecessary because those Anglo-Saxons with whom she came into contact, as servants and tradesmen, could all speak enough French to get by.

The manner of occupation was not colonial, as under the Romans, who had used the existing aristocracy to rule subject races. Virtually the whole of England was directly in Norman hands. Stemming from the original idea of a war-leader sharing out the booty with the warriors of his band, the king theoretically owned all land but bought the loyalty of his vassals by making them tenants-in-chief of huge estates. In return, they owed him taxes and knight service commensurate with their holdings, and support in council when required. The range of wealth among tenants-in-chief was enormous, with the count of Mortain one hundred times richer than Robert of Aumale. Even the term ‘baron’ is vague. Not all held land directly from the king; many were vavassours. The earl of Gloucester regularly addressed his charters to ‘all my barons’.
⁵

Roughly half of England was held by the barons, the rest being divided between Crown and Church. At the time of the Domesday tax census in 1086 William I had directly possessed more than 18 per cent of the land in the kingdom, reckoned by value. In four shires he had retained over 30 per cent of all the land, and more than 20 per cent in another eight. The Crown had been extracting both goods in kind and rents from every part of the kingdom and the royal presence this implied overall had been a part of the force of government, unlike the situation in France and Germany, where there were whole regions in which the king or emperor directly owned nothing at all.
⁶

In addition, it was feudal practice for the Crown to hold in trust the estates of sees whose bishops had died until their successors were elected and also any estates whose heirs were under-age or unmarried women. The original principle was that kings alone could protect the integrity of the estates, which would otherwise be annexed by predatory neighbours. Inevitably, kings extended the period of custody in order to continue enjoying the revenues for as long as possible, and then in the case of lay estates conferred them on favourites by arranged marriages.

The audited royal income in 1130 – the sole year of Henry I’s reign for which the Pipe Rolls survived – was £24,500. More than 40 per cent of this came from the royal domains in produce and rents, and the rest was made up from feudal dues, taxes and justice fees. Henry’s immediate problem as king was that, after the years of civil war, Crown revenues amounted to only a third of that sum, without allowing for inflation.
⁷
His most urgent need was therefore for an efficient and trustworthy chancellor with a brain as quick and an appetite for work as relentless as his own.

As churchman and politician, Archbishop Theobald had done everything to ensure a peaceful succession. Aware that the gratitude of kings was short-lived, he now offered a solution to Henry’s problem that seemed to guarantee the Church’s long-term reward for the parts it was playing,
⁸
and brought to that first English Christmas of Eleanor’s at Bermondsey an ambitious Londoner in his early thirties. Thomas Becket was four years older than the queen and therefore almost old enough to be Henry’s father. Did Eleanor’s instinct for people warn her how dangerous his introduction at court would be for her? Since he did everything to ingratiate himself to the royal household from the outset, it can only be because he received no encouragement from the queen that there was never the slightest evidence of friendship between them.

Tall, bright-eyed, well-built and dark-haired, with the pallor of a schoolman but no scholarly hunger for the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, Becket was no longer the eager student whose path had crossed hers in the schools of Paris. Having developed the smooth manners of a courtier during twelve years at the archbishop’s court,
⁹
he was in every way a product of the century, belonging to neither the knightly classes nor the feudal peasantry. Apart from a susceptibility to stress-related illness, he had a tendency to stutter which he sometimes exploited to give himself time to think.

His surname was a toponym, the family coming from the village of Bequet in Normandy, although Thomas preferred to refer to himself as Thomas of London, which sounded classier. Born in Cheapside,
the son of a prosperous merchant who was also a port-reeve or deputy mayor, he was educated by the Augustinians at Merton Priory and at a grammar school before going to Paris. His début in the adult world was either as a trainee sheriff or as an accountant with a London banker by name of Osbert Huitdeniers.
¹⁰

Having travelled to Rome with Archbishop Theobald, who sent him to study canon law at Auxerre and Bologna and entrusted him with diplomatic missions both in England and abroad, Becket was equally at ease in a royal court or the Roman curia. Appointed provost of Beverley and archdeacon of Canterbury in 1154, he was comfortably wealthy by the time the archbishop brought him to the king’s notice and enjoyed a high reputation for integrity and sobriety, which Henry’s suspicious nature must have tested more than once.

Becket rapidly fulfilled the mission with which Theobald had entrusted him. As a good courtier, he spared no effort in becoming the boon companion for the king’s leisure time, sharing his pleasures with horses, hawks and hounds at any time of the day and working long into the night with Henry or amusing him in a game of chess or with learned conversation.
¹¹
The only activity he did not share was the king’s incessant womanising.

As a first test of his managerial skills, Henry entrusted to him the rebuilding, restoration and furbishing of Westminster Palace, to make a more fitting setting for the royal court than was afforded by Bermondsey, surrounded by swampy flatland. Immediately, Becket set several hundred skilled artisans and labourers to work round the clock at Westminster in a din so loud that no one could be heard at less than a shout.
¹²

Eleanor gave birth at Bermondsey on 28 February to a second son, named after his absent father. Henry was in the north, straightening out some recalcitrant barons who thought that distance from London meant they could ignore the new king and his laws. On return, he honoured the newborn by naming him heir to the county of Anjou.
¹³
On 10 April 1155, to avoid any ambiguity about the succession, he borrowed a constitutional device of the Capetian kings and formally declared Prince William his successor as king of England; in the event that the boy predeceased his father, Prince Henry would succeed.

By Whitsuntide, the palace of Westminster was ready for occupation. On moving in, Eleanor found that in addition to her own two sons, her household was to include Henry’s bastard Geoffrey by his Saxon mistress Ykenai. What she thought about this arrangement is unknown but she was on good terms with her own illegitimate half-brothers and Henry I had also raised bastards in his household.

With Becket named chancellor, the king appointed as his chief justiciar for the realm the experienced Richard de Lucé or Lucy, who had been a county justiciar under Stephen. Robert de Beaumont, second earl of Leicester, was to serve jointly with him. Eleanor did her best not to be displaced by these competitors for Henry’s ear.
¹⁴
Charters given at this time show her name as witness, alongside those of Becket and Lucy.

Henry had been aware that events would soon force him to return to France. Before that happened, it was imperative to do for the administration of justice what Becket was doing for the Exchequer. That required extensive travel throughout the southern parts of the realm,
¹⁵
putting barons and bishops back in their places by ordering the destruction of adulterine castles and forcing the payment of overdue taxes. He also revived Henry I’s system of travelling judges, to replace the idiosyncratic justice of his vassals by the royal justice applied uniformly throughout the realm.

First Seal of Henry II.

Dating from 1135 when Stephen of Blois ascended to the throne, the organisation of the king’s household
¹⁶
listed more than one hundred permanent royal servants, plus huntsmen, falconers and the rest. But Henry’s court on its travels was often twice as large.
¹⁷
If not all the royal servants were present at any one time, the numbers were swollen by the knights and men-at-arms of the royal escort, plus a haggle of vassals manoeuvring for power with their attendant knights and households and a bevy of hangers-on, ambassadors, visiting prelates and merchants intent on catching the eye of potentially the richest clients in the kingdom.