Now and again I correspond with Professor David Crouch, senior lecturer in history at the University of Hull and expert bar none on the life and times of William Marshal, practitioner of chivalry, knight, baron, magnate and regent par excellence of the 12th and early 13th century.
Back in the 2004 when I was commissioned by my publishers to write two historical novels about the Marshal – The Greatest Knight and The Scarlet Lion – I set out to read everything I could about my subject. At the time I chose to write William Marshal’s story, it was because I needed something meaty and attention grabbing to build on the success of earlier works and keep the momentum going. I had come across William Marshal on various occasions while writing other works and had thought he might make a good subject for a novel or two. At that stage it went no further than that. But once I began reading the biographies and primary sources, I realised that what I had on my hands was not just material for a novel, but the extraordinary life story of a truly gifted and fascinating man who was going to become an abiding interest far beyond the scope of those contracted novels and change my life in many ways. I couldn’t have acquired the learning, knowledge and inspiration to write those novels without the dedicated scholarship and integrity of David Crouch, far and away the best of the modern biographers of William’s life and times. His work on the Marshal has been the gold standard ever since the publication of the first biography in 1996. The revised edition in 2002 added new and vital material, and now a third expanded edition has just been published to take advantage of new discoveries and material down to Professor Crouch’s intrepid delving.
Another book that came out recently, edited by Professor Crouch is the Camden Society (5th series vol 47) Acts and Letters of the Marshal Family: Marshals of England and Earls of Pembroke 1145-1248: Royal Historical Society, Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 1 107 13003 6. This work is an invaluable addition to our understanding of the Marshal family and to our awareness of 12th and 13th century baronial and high baronial life.
I run a group on Facebook for people interested in William Marshal and I asked them for questions they would like to ask Professor Crouch about the Marshal. I was inundated, so I took the ones I thought Professor Crouch would find the most interesting and that he might find time to answer and he has very kindly done so. This is a rare treat and I want to sincerely thank him for taking the time and the trouble to share his thoughts.
Question 1. How much of the Marshal’s legendary legacy -if any- has been exaggerated or was he completely the ‘real deal!’ Generally speaking, do you think that William deserves the positive reviews he receives or did he have a darker side that lacks publicity?
DC Reply:
He left quite a legacy. It’s not just his biography which tells us (not surprisingly) of his great reputation. He was remembered by the Marshal tenants assembled in Caversham some two decades later as ‘the noble man of holy memory … the Lord William Marshal, not just a good man but the finest of them all!’ Which is quite some endorsement. This veneration amongst those who knew him tends to indicate for me that he really was what his biographer said he was: a good father, a loyal friend and a steady and straightforward servant of his king. He fulfilled all the requirements for being a good lord in his day and age: a dependable and wise leader to his men and a terror to his enemies. He had all the advantages of a classic courtier, good looks (when a youth), charm and easy humour. I guess that makes him the ‘real deal’. His biography does gloss over some features of his character, which tells us its author was sensitive to criticism of him. I’m not just talking here of his long association with King John – which by the 1220s was not something anyone would boast about. He was a brutally effective soldier, and his sons’ generation, which had a more refined ideal of the warrior, found the massacres and pillage which characterised his warfare as something better kept quiet. The emerging chivalric ideal did not dwell on the unchristian aspects of warfare.
Question 2. I’d be interested to know whether there’s any evidence relating to or suggesting what the Marshal’s interactions with the Jews (whether overtly as we have for Ranulf of Chester or otherwise) within the extant source material not specifically relating to the Jews and whether there is any suggestion as to whether there is any evidence for Marshal’s stance on chapters 10 and 11 of Magna Carta at the time of the reissue in 1216 (and his reasons for that stance).
DC reply: I don’t know of any mention of a relationship between William and the Jews, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there were. He turned out to be quite adroit in his money dealings, but those we know of are all associated with the London patrician families: the Cornhills, Fitz Reiners and Aswys: he employed Thomas Aswy, a son of the London family, as his own agent in London. There is now the evidence that he went in for some money-lending of his own at the time of the Third Crusade, taking an estate as a pledge for a loan to an old friend who was heading off to the Holy Land (Acts and Letters, no. 27). As for Clauses 10-11 of the 1215 charter (about interest payable by underage heirs on loans from Jews to their fathers and the liability of widows). Neither made it into the 1216 version, which is intriguing. You can only speculate. Clause 11 asserted that debts had to be repaid, and not just debts to Jews but to others too, which you can interpret as King John making clear that he was willing to go along with the barons on moderating the worst elements of the debt market, but not so far as to endanger it: not surprisingly since he took over the debts owed to Jews and their accumulated interest. Omitting the clauses might be interpreted as reasserting the rights of the king as debt collecator, even if it meant removing the safeguards for wives and children of debtors.
Question 3. There is a charter by Henry II to John Marshal II, confirming his position as marshal, and also to confirm John Junior’s right to hold the lands that he should on both sides of the Narrow Sea. I would like to ask Professor Crouch if he knows what those lands were, especially the ones in Normandy/France.
DC reply: I have no idea, but the mention is certainly good evidence that the Marshals were a Norman family in origin, not a surviving English one, like William’s cousins the earls of Salisbury.
Question 4. How did the Marshal generally finance his mesnie i.e his expenditures, his general annual income as earl of Pembroke. Specifically was his mesnie just enfeoffed with lands or paid or both? I’d be interested in the logistics. How did his overall wealth compare with his contemporary earls? The earl of Chester was significantly wealthier but how about the others.
DC reply: The records are simply not there to say with any authority. Sidney Painter calculated that the honor of Striguil (Chepstow) was worth around £547 when Walter Marshal died. But that does not include the earl’s income from Pembroke and Leinster. In 1232 those lands afforded £400 to be paid to Eleanor Marshal, widow of William Marshal the Younger, which if reckoned as a dower third, meant the earl expected £1200 a year from them. As for how an earl paid his knights: by the Marshal’s day grants of lands to knights for their support were a rarity, though we know he did it on occasion (notably with his new lands in Ireland). He used grants of offices as rewards to his followers, which allowed them to take fees and ‘perquisites’ (the literal ‘perks’ of the job) and not tap the earl’s own finances directly. We know William granted robes at least twice a year to his men: which were lengths of very expensive luxury cloth they could either fashion into clothing or sell on. A lord also had to equip his retained men with the equipment for their role: armour and arms, shields and (most importantly) horses. Then there was bed and board. All in all, there were many ways knights could be rewarded, and most did not involve direct payments of salaries.
Question 5. Why was the Marshal so loyal to King John when they had had a troubled relationship and he could have refused John in his hour of need?
DC reply: Good question and not an easy one to answer. Loyalty was a highly prized quality in medieval society, and to be known as loyal and dependable was a good career characteristic. That would have been something that would have been drilled into the boy Marshal in his upbringing. A job description of around the year 1130 says : ‘Your lord is the man you should love and hold dear, you should increase his lands and improve his fiefs (Le Couronnement de Louis).’ Anything less is treason. William wasn’t the only such paragon. Earl Ranulf of Chester (whom he jostled aside for the Regency) also stuck by John despite bad treatment. Even so, many men of his class did abandon John. It’s interesting that their response was to blacken John as more of a monster than a man. It helped to wriggle out of the moral cost of their breach of loyalty. If John was more a monster than a man, then no one could reasonably be expected to be loyal to him.
Question 6. When did Hamstead Marshal become a Marshal family holding? There seems to be a gap in the sources from Hugolin the steersman owning it during Domesday and then no mention until John Fitzgilbert holding/using it some 50 or so years later. You made a specific reference to a court officer holding Hamstead Marshall at the time of William Rufus’s death in your book on the Normans and I would be interested to know who this court officer was.
DC reply: I speculate that William’s grandfather, Gilbert, made it into royal service in the reign of William Rufus. That’s principally on the basis of chronology. Gilbert was long dead in 1130 when his son had succeeded him, married and had several children. Gilbert had been fighting a lawsuit before his death with the two lesser marshals of England and Normandy, which looks like he was a newcomer into office duking it out with the older established families. It is however speculative, and you could easily argue otherwise and that Gilbert had made it big after 1100 .
Question 7. I would like to know something about the Marshal’s relationship with the papal legate Guala Bicchieri, who was sent to England in 1216 and spent 30 months there. They “granted” Magna Carta in 1216 and 1217, during Henry III’s minority, so they must have known each other quite well.
DC reply: I imagine they did know each other, and they seem to have worked together well in 1216. Nicholas Vincent’s book on Guala has all the facts (The Letters and Charters of Cardinal Guala Bicchieri, Papal Legate in England 1216-1218, Canterbury and York Society lxxxiii (1996)). The cardinal seems to have been a reasonable sort, and no friend to the Capetians. William obligingly solved the problem of Louis of France for him, so you can see they might well have got along well. As to how that good nature might have panned out politically, it may well have been William who talked Guala into setting aside Innocent III’s objections to Magna Carta, the master stroke of William’s public career.
Question 8. My question would be about Magna Carta. What role, if any, did John Marshal (3), who became Marshal of Ireland, have in introducing Magna Carta to Ireland?
DC reply: Difficult to say, though I doubt he objected. The prompt restoration of the liberties of Leinster and Meath by the Regency, and the publication of Magna Carta in Dublin were clearly down to his uncle: probably his first decisions in office in fact. In the same letter to the justiciar of Ireland he struck down King John’s most objectionable (to him) act, and with the other hand preserved the late king’s inheritance in extending English common law to Ireland. But William most likely would have considered that if Magna Carta had to be implemented to get baronial adherence to his Regency, then it had to apply as much to Ireland as to England. But then, why not apply it to Wales? (I have no answer to that)
Question 9. What don’t we know about the Marshal that you would most like to know?
DC reply: Ah, what I would like to know is probably not what other people would care much for. If only the Marshal household accounts had survived, not only that but the Marshal archive of correspondence, souvenirs and records which we know was being maintained in South Wales. If only the royal chancery had started systematically preserving the king’s inbox of correspondence before 1219 (many of his son’s letters to Henry III survive that way). And what about the records of the Irish government kept in the Irish Public Record Office in Dublin, blown up in the civil war of 1922? It’s the process of inevitable documentary loss that brings an ache to the historian’s soul.
Question 10. What I would like to ask Professor Crouch is in your opinion “What was the single most significant accomplishments of William Marshal and how does that affect us today?”
DC reply: Easy one. It was his decision in 1216 at Bristol that the only way to reconcile the rebels was to give them what they had wanted in 1215, a contract between king and political community. Louis of France simply did not get it. We know he got hold of a copy of Magna Carta (because it still exists in the Archives Nationales) but it never occurred to him that a Capetian Magna Carta for England would have given him the victory and a reason for the English rebels not to abandon him. When the Marshal preserved Magna Carta, he embedded in English political life what had in fact been its most striking feature in the previous century, the dialogue between king and political community which had informed the exercise of kingship under Stephen, Henry II and even Richard I. It was a dialogue King John had brutally suppressed. He paid the tyrant’s cost, but it was William Marshal who redeemed it, and set the English monarchy and its peoples on a new and very distinctive course. There was his greatness. The implications are still working out in this day and age, when the executive power is now wielded by a political class in a monarchical parliament, which has no more desire than King John had for an effective constraint on its power.
Bonus Question 11. What happened to Countess Isabel between the Marshal’s death and when she died in Dec? I read a lot of blog posts that speculate on where she might be buried. (such as speculation by Catherine Armstrong that her heart was taken to Ireland). Are there any historical records or family correspondence that inform us about her final months?
DC reply: There’s quite a bit of material on what happened to Isabel between 14 May 1219 and her own death on 11 March 1220, and it’s important stuff in relation to the rights of medieval widows. I’ve put it together for a publication on medieval law which may be a couple of years away, but in fact I’m giving a paper on the subject at the Leeds International Medieval Congress in July. If you’re really interested (and have a high boredom threshold for academic writing) send me an e-mail and I’ll depatch a copy (d.crouch@hull.ac.uk).
Professor David Crouch
Once again, a big thank you to David Crouch for being such a good sport and taking part in this question and answer session. I hope he’s rewarded by masses of book sales! I already own editions one and two, but three will be joining them on my shelf, that’s for certain.