The Stephen-Mathilda wars

 Twelfth-century English royal history usually goes from the sons of William the Conqueror, to Henry II with Eleanor of Aquitaine and Becket, to Richard the Lionheart (who is good) and King John (who is bad).  Rarely do history buffs focus on the Stephen-Mathilda wars of 1135-1154, almost twenty years of upheaval, civil war, and betrayal, dense with family politics and strong women.

Never heard of it, you say?  Well, you're about to.

The issue was whether the son of a daughter or the daughter of a son was the most appropriate heir.  Stephen and Mathilda were first cousins, grandchildren of William the Conqueror.  The Conqueror's second and third sons, William Rufus and Henry I, had succeeded him as kings of England (the oldest son, Robert, was duke of Normandy until Henry I defeated his older brother in battle and took Normandy).  Meanwhile the Conqueror's daughter Adela married Stephen, Count of Blois (Blois is on the Loire, in France).  So far so good?

The problem arose when Henry I died without legitimate sons in 1135.  He had had a son, named William like Henry's father and brother, but Young William had died in 1120 in the White Ship debacle, when he and his friends were sailing between France and England, probably DUI, and crashed and sank.  So Henry ended up naming his daughter Mathilda as future King of England and got all his barons to agree to it.

They may have had their fingers crossed behind their backs, because they all hated Mathilda (also sometimes known as Maud in England).  She had earlier been married to the German emperor, Heinrich V, and continued to call herself Empress even after he died and she returned to England.  This was bad enough, but then she married Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou, the county right next to Normandy.  The Anglo-Norman barons who had promised to support Mathilda as King of England had serious reservations about Geoffrey Plantagenet.

So they turned instead to her cousin Stephen, son of Adela and Stephen of Blois (see above, I hope you're taking notes).  Young Stephen thought becoming King of England was a swell plan, and the wars were on.  The barons loved the Stephen-Mathilda wars.  They changed sides multiple times, getting rewards and grants and promises every time they did.  But even they thought things were getting a little too chaotic after a while.

(Interestingly, in official lists of Kings of England, Stephen is always listed rather than Mathilda.  Personally I disagree, but I'm not making official lists.)

As both Stephen and Mathilda got older, the question arose as to who would succeed either one.  Stephen thought his oldest son, Eustace, ought to be king after him.  But no one liked this plan (which is why you've heard even less about King Eustace than about the Stephen-Mathilda wars, as Eustace was never crowned).  Stephen had married Mathilda, countess of Boulogne, in France (another Mathilda! it seems like about half the women at the time were named Mathilda), and the French did not want Boulogne, an important port, attached to the English crown.  For that matter, neither did the pope.

As it turned out, Eustace died before his father, and when King Stephen was dying in 1154 he decided to make amends with his cousins.  At this point both Empress Mathilda and Geoffrey Plantagenet had died, leaving a son, Henry, count of Anjou.  Stephen officially named Henry his heir as King of England, and young Henry Plantagenet succeeded as Henry II (1154-1189).  He was father of both Richard the Lionheart and King John.

Interestingly, although we tend to assume that a king's oldest son will succeed as king, Richard the Lionheart, sixth of the Anglo-Norman kings, is the first example of the oldest surviving son succeeding (and he'd actually had a couple of older brothers who predeceased their father).  Starting with the Conqueror, who succeeded by conquest, the succession went next to a second son, then to a younger brother, then to a nephew (Stephen), then to a first cousin once removed (Henry II), and finally to the oldest surviving son.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023
For more on medieval political history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Wealthy Judges

 There is concern right now in the US about justices taking generous gifts or having sources of income that seem questionable.  This is nothing new.  Judges in the late Middle Ages could get wealthy too in ways that might not seem entirely ethical.

English judges, appointed by the crown, had a variety of sources of income available to them, enough that they might make a couple hundred pounds a year, at a time when five pounds a year was considered a good salary for a low-status person.  So where did it all come from?

First and probably most essentially, they received an official salary.  They also received an annual allowance to pay for their official robes, which could be very elaborate.  This seems appropriate.  But it could get complicated.  the crown would issue them what was basically a check, a royal order ("writ") to the chancery to pay the judge a certain amount of money when the check was presented.  These checks were not always cashed right away; for one thing, sometimes there wasn't much money in the treasury.  It appears that some judges would present their check and get paid, then come back with the same check six months later and get paid again.  The chancery was supposed to keep the check and mark it as cancelled, but it didn't always work that way.

Then there were writs and fines.  In civil cases, whenever someone filed a case against someone, the judge would issue a writ, and the complaintant would pay the judge for it.  In criminal cases, when someone was found guilty and had to pay a fine, part of the fine went to the judge.  Those arguing a case before a judge would also pay for his meals.

Then there were gifts.  There were no rules against judges receiving gifts, and wealthy neighbors might want to be friends with a judge even if they had no legal cases before him at the moment.  These not surprisingly could become actual bribes, when the wealthy would assure that a judge saw a case in a particular way.  Even the king would frequently make gifts to favored judges.  Gifts might be money, food, oak trees, deer, precious stones, and all sorts of other good things.

But the single biggest source of revenue for judges was from the church.  The late medieval church in England was wealthy and paid its bishops and abbots well.  All judges made sure to be appointed to high office in the church.  Until well into the fourteenth century all judges were ordained priests, so they could certainly hold church office.  (Look even today at a judge's robes.  They look a whole lot like a priest's vestments, don't they.  There's a reason for that.)

And all judges were pluralists.  That meant they held multiple church offices, such as being a bishop, plus an abbot, plus the dean of an important urban church, for example.  How could they serve all these while being judges? you ask.  Well, obviously they couldn't, especially not serve all the different churches from which they derived income.  So they appointed vicars.  A vicar (a representative, same root as vice as in vice president) might make a few pounds a year.  English parish priests are still termed vicars.

In the second half of the fourteenth century, judges began being regularly appointed without being priests, due in part to England's quarrels with the papacy.  Judges now probably made no more than half as much as their predecessors had earlier.

What did the judges do with all their money? While priests, they couldn't have family, though there might be a few young people around the place....  Essentially judges paid for their entourage, for houses, food, travel, and general display, plus of course paying the vicars.  Some judges bought up land which passed to family members (brothers and nephews) on their death.  Once judges were no longer priests, they did have families to support and to whom they could leave their wealth.  Some judges set up accounts at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge from which faculty and students could take out loans (at interest, of course).

Prof. Ryan Rowberry of Georgia State has been doing a great deal of excellent archival work figuring out how late medieval judges were paid.  The above is based on his findings.

It's interesting to note that historical fiction set in the Middle Ages usually involves big political events and family drama, while medieval-themed fantasy often focuses on heroes trying to defeat the enemy, heavily influenced by medieval epics.  Nobody writes either historical fiction or fantasy about judges being pluralists and getting bribes.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on law and justice during the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Indie Book Covers

 There's an old saying, "You can't judge a book from its cover."  It means that glancing at something's exterior won't necessarily tell you all the complicated and interesting things within, and many an excellent book (among other things for which the book is a metaphor) may have a nondescript exterior.

But this saying does not apply to indie book publishing.  In a bookstore full of traditionally published books, someone may wander around, be intrigued by a title or a cover, or go to their favorite part of the store and see (for example) a new book on the US Civil War they haven't seen before, and pick it up.  Some of the titles they see will jog a memory of seeing that book reviewed favorably by (for example) the New York Times, or seeing it on a best-seller list.  The cover image isn't all that important.

This is why you will often see these days a traditionally published book that doesn't even have a cover image, just the title in interesting script on a solid cover background, or at most maybe a tree or an abstract shape.

Things are different for indie books.  There is no physical bookstore where someone may wander, looking at a finite number of books, selected by the staff as worthy of buying and reading.  Instead one is on an on-line bookstore, along with literally millions and millions of other books (including traditionally published ones), knowing perfectly well that a lot of the books are not worth buying.  (The advantage of indie publishing is anyone can publish. The disadvantage of indie publishing....)

So the cover becomes very important.  A well done cover serves a lot of purposes.  If interesting and intriguing, it can catch the potential buyer's eye.  If professionally done, it is a marker that the author cared enough about her book to try to do everything right, including (one hopes), story, editing, and formatting.  The style and content of the cover tell the genre:  a passionate-looking couple for romance, rockets or planets for science fiction, a pastoral scene with a church for a book of religious musings, and so on.

The cover's whole purpose in life is to make the potential reader look at the book's description and read the first few pages, then, one hopes, push the Buy button.  The cover is not strictly an illustration of any particular scene in the book, but it should convey something of the flavor of the book.

For example, A Bad Spell in Yurt, my first published novel, has a great cover by Tom Kidd.  It indicates without a doubt that this is fantasy, but the wizard hero's rueful expression, pile of books, and lack of swords indicates that this is not epic fantasy and has a good touch of humor (the title helps).

 

Tom Kidd read the whole book before he started painting the cover, but often the artists whom indie authors get to do their covers will just take suggestions from the author as to what the cover might show, in a simpler illustration.  Dane of EBook Launch did a very nice cover for me of The Starlight Raven without actually reading the book.  A young woman suggests the book is for and about teens (which it is), and in the front there's a raven with stars in its feathers.

In other cases, I've bought covers from graphic artists who put interesting covers together from stock photos, then I added my own title and author name to this "pre-made" cover.  Such was the case with Shadow of the Wanderers.  This one, the potential reader should be able to tell at once, is epic fantasy with a strong Norse component.

 

And sometimes I've used my own photographs. A picture of a staircase in the ruined castle of Fleckenstein, in Alsace, is on the cover of my (non-fiction) Positively Medieval.  I like it because it is very clearly authentically medieval, old and worn by many feet over the centuries, and because it seems to draw the reader into the book.

Self-publishing is free, but the serious indie author has got to assume that she'll be paying for a good cover at some point.  Without that almost subliminal hint that the right cover can give the potential reader, the book may never be bought and read.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023