The Great Turning Points of British History by Michael Wood Read Free Book Online

Normandy’ (the title that he gives himself in a charter of 1141). In 1153, with the clergy and the magnates acting together and mandating a peace process, this claim was accepted and in 1154, on Stephen’s death, he became Henry II, king of England. It would be a victory for statesmanship, a quality that had been lacking in 1141. Henry was carefully presented to the English not as an Angevin ruler but as a king in the line of the English succession that stretched back before the conquest of 1066. John of Salisbury, in his
Policraticus
, would insist that the new king ‘principally relied on fellow countrymen’; it was Stephen who was now represented as a ‘foreigner’.
    The final lesson of 1141 was that the crown of England was not a commodity but a trust, and that all of the nation were trustees. It is that realization that makes the year a turning point in English, and later British, history.
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    With this in mind, it is important to note that England was a wealthy country in the first half of the twelfth century, and its economy grew rapidly. It grew because new lands were taken in from the forest and the fen, and because the scale of the market grew. The east coast ports mushroomed – some of them, such as Grimsby and Boston, had not even been mentioned in Domesday Book. Enterprising landowners, their rent rolls fixed, sought to make a profit from trade. The great fairs of England, such as Winchester, which had grown to sixteen days by 1155, were money-spinners for their lords. The upland areas of the British Isles grew more slowly, though there were significant mineral deposits, including the silver mines of Carlisle, the profits of which went to the Scots during Stephen’s reign.
    In important respects, the ethos of the ruling class changed from one based on consumption to one based on profit. The professionalization of royal financial management was exemplified in the exchequer. The sheriffs accounted at Winchester twice a year, their returns collected in the first royal accounts, the ‘pipe rolls’, one of which survives for 1129–30. Another facet of the new professionalism was the growth of the Cistercian order. The monks were given partly cleared lands by their patrons; and their manors and granges were managed for profit.
    After 1106, Henry I, the Conqueror’s youngest and most able son, ruled both England and Normandy. ‘He always attempted to give peace to his subject peoples’, said Orderic Vitalis, ‘and strictly punished law-breakers.’ He projected his authority beyond his frontiers. In 1114, ‘the Welsh princes came to him and became his vassals’. In 1119, the French king, Louis VI, was defeated in battle at Brémule. Henry’s brother-in-law, David of Scots (king of Scots, 1124–53), and his nephews, Theobald, Count of Blois, and Stephen, Count of Mortain (king of England, 1135–54), attended his court.
    In the second quarter of the century what was becoming a family firm suffered a managerial crisis. The underlying cause was the uncertainty about, followed by a dispute over, the succession. Henry’s only legitimate son William, all were agreed, ‘would have obtained the kingdom as of right’. But he died in 1120 and Henry’s second marriage proved barren. The oaths that were sworn to his daughter, the Empress Matilda, for the first time on 1 January 1127 proved inadequate to secure her succession when Henry died, and served to weaken the new king, Stephen. There followed what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle described as ‘nineteen long winters’, during which ‘Christ and his saints were asleep’.
    Stephen made a series of concessions by which the imperium of Henry I shrank to something close to a provincial lordship. In 1136, Stephen ceded Carlisle to David, king of Scots, and subsequently he granted his son, Henry, the earldom of Northumbria. With civil war occupying English interests in the 1140s, the prospect of Scotland holding onto Northumbria was not out of the