Disunited kingdoms
ROBERT BLACKMORE assesses a top-down account of medieval England and France’s intertwined history
In the High Middle Ages – as, indeed, for much of history – political power was personal. It may be an oversimplification to view a monarch by his famed temperament – to see Richard I “the Lionheart” of England (reigned 1189‒99) as bellicose, his brother John (r1199‒1216) as capricious, or Louis IX of France (r1226‒70) as pious. Yet these qualities did, largely, characterise their reigns. Wielding power was also a personal undertaking. To be a successful king required maintaining strong relationships with a realm’s interrelated elites, from the leading nobility and senior clergy to a monarch’s own family.
Since the Norman Conquest, these aspects of medieval power tied England and France together. Kings of England personally held land on the continent for which they were subordinate to France’s rulers; likewise, aristocratic families had holdings on both sides of the Channel. This was a complicated business, especially once Henry II, who came to the English throne in 1154, added to his lands in France. As well as the duchy of Normandy, he came to hold the counties of Anjou, Maine and Touraine, the duchy of Brittany, and also – significantly ‒ the duchy of Aquitaine via his marriage to Eleanor, which brought with it Gascony, Poitou and Auvergne. Most of this would be lost by his successors.
In Two Houses, Two Kingdoms, Catherine Hanley offers a solid retelling of two centuries of the intertwined history of the Capetian and Norman-Plantagenet royal houses. The whistle-stop account begins at Christmas 1100, early in the reign of Henry I in England and when Philip I sat on the throne of France, and keeps up a blistering pace through the generations until the end of the 13th century, and the rivalry of Edward I of England and Philip IV of France. The 1308 wedding of the latter’s daughter Isabella to Edward II forms the interesting epilogue to the book, since their turbulent marriage – resulting in an invasion of England in 1326 and the king’s abdication the following year – presaged the ultimate deterioration of Anglo-French relations. The Hundred Years’ War followed and, in 1340, their son Edward III would assume the title of king of France himself.
This is unashamedly top-down narrative history. Hanley states at the first that it is “a book about people”, namely “kings and queens”, their “siblings, children and cousins”. Therefore, readers should not expect much mention of the social and economic changes both kingdoms underwent across the period, nor how events were experienced by ordinary people. This is clearly not its purpose. Instead, Hanley offers a thorough insight into how medieval power politics operated largely outside of institutional constraints, which ‒ though developing ‒ were as yet still limited.
The book is elegantly but forcefully written – essential when covering such a long time period so comprehensively. Hanley also avoids a habitual bugbear of reviewers by providing numerous maps to orientate readers, and, more importantly, plentiful tables outlining the key royal and noble figures and their interrelationships.
The latter is especially prudent, since, as Hanley herself notes, it is “unfortunate, for the purposes of clarity and possibly even sanity, that every single French king we will meet is called either Philip or Louis”. Nobody would disagree with that.