Anglo-Norman Kings

One sometimes hears that medieval kingship was a simple matter of inheritance--the king was succeeded by his eldest son, and that was that.  The kings of England totally undercut that model.  From the middle of the eleventh century to the early thirteenth century, a grand total of 1 king became king by simple father-to-oldest-son inheritance.

These kings are usually called Anglo-Norman, because they had been dukes of Normandy (in France) before becoming kings of England and held onto the duchy.

William the Conqueror of course became king of England in 1066 by conquest (his nickname is a clue...).  When he died, he was succeeded not by his oldest son, Robert Curthose, but by his second son, William II, also called William Rufus.  Robert Curthose became duke of Normandy.  When William Rufus died without children in 1100, he was succeeded by his youngest brother, Henry I.

Robert Curthose was in Jerusalem at the time, on the First Crusade.  He was distraught, thinking that he ought to succeed as king.  He came back to Europe, fought Henry for half a dozen years, lost, and ended up imprisoned for the rest of his life.  So much for brotherly love.

Henry I had no shortage of sons.  He had over a dozen.  There was no problem there, except for one crucial issue.  All but one of them was illegitimate.  His one legitimate son was lost at sea (a group of young men trying to cross the English Channel during rough weather, all probably DUI).  There was no way Henry could make one of his other sons king, even though several of them became bishops, and all of them had comfortable lives.  So he chose his daughter Mathilda to succeed.

Mathilda was supposed to be king, not queen.  She in fact usually called herself Empress, because she had been briefly married to the Holy Roman Emperor, though he had died without them having children.  She had married a second time, to Geoffrey, count of Anjou.  The county of Anjou is next to Normandy, and the Angevins had decided Normandy was rightfully theirs.

The great Anglo-Norman lords hated Mathilda, partly because she was a woman, partly because they hated Geoffrey of Anjou.  They quickly declared they hadn't really sworn to support Mathilda and went instead for her cousin Stephen, son of a daughter of William the Conqueror.  England now calls Stephen the rightful king, so Henry I was succeeded by his nephew.

Mathilda spent much of the next two decades fighting Stephen.  She never won, but at the end of his life, when he had no children to succeed (what's with these guys? low sperm count?), he agreed that Mathilda's son, Henry II, would become king after him.  So Stephen was succeeded by a first cousin once removed, a man who was already duke of Normandy and count of Anjou.  Henry also acquired Aquitaine, essentially the southwest quarter of France, through his marriage.

Henry II and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, had five sons.  (No low sperm count there!)  Though their oldest son, William, died very young, and the second, Young Henry, died as a young man while his father was still alive, the third son, Richard the Lionheart, was alive and ready to succeed when Henry II died in 1189.  This was the first time an English king was succeeded by his oldest surviving son since before the Conquest.

But Richard had no children, so he was succeeded by his younger brother, John.  When John died in 1216, his young son succeeded as Henry III, and (at least for a little while) there was a sense that this father-son inheritance should be the model.

Henry II and his five sons had not had a happy Dad-and-lad relationship.  Richard and Geoffrey (the fourth son) rebelled against their father.  They also did not get along with each other.  Geoffrey was killed in a tournament, and his young son, named Arthur, mysteriously vanished after visiting his Uncle John.  When Richard the Lionheart was preparing to go on the Third Crusade, he seems to have wanted to make John come with him, fearing that if John were left behind he would seize the English throne.

Although the King Arthur stories that developed in the twelfth century (which owe essentially nothing to the fifth century) cannot be seen as simple metaphor or roman-à-clef, there are similarities between the King Arthur of the stories and the real Anglo-Norman kings.  Arthur in the stories never had a legitimate son, like Henry I.  He was rebelled against by his son Mordred, like Henry II.  Mordred was the product of an incestuous union, Arthur's nephew as well as son, which made it worse--and evoked nephews in royal succession (at least none of the Anglo-Norman kings were thought to have had incestuous relations with their sisters).  The first people who heard the King Arthur stories saw parallels with their own line of kings.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

For more on Anglo-Norman kings and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see the ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon.

King Arthur

Everybody loves King Arthur stories.  The sword in the stone, the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot love triangle, the tragic betrayal by Mordred, who is Arthur's nephew and son, the Holy Grail even before Indiana Jones and Monty Python got hold of it.

Medieval audiences loved these stories just as much.  There was a thirteenth-century preacher who noticed his audience dozing off and woke them all up by saying, "Once upon a time there was a king named Arthur."  (Once they were alert, of course, he chided them for preferring a story to a good moral lesson.)

Curiously, loving King Arthur stories has made many modern readers want to find the "historical Arthur" and attach the stories to him.  There actually seems to have been a historical Arthur, but he doesn't match what people want to find out about him.  The real Arcturus was a Romanized Briton, not a king (Britain had no kings once it was conquered by the Romans) but probably a dux, a war leader.  Arcturus is a good Roman name.  He would have also been a good Christian.

He would have lived in the late fifth/early sixth centuries, at the time that imperial Rome was pulling its troops out of the west and focusing on war with Persia (see more here on the "fall" of the Roman Empire).  The Angles and Saxons, Germanic peoples, came across the North Sea once there were no more pesky Roman legions in Britain, conquered, and settled.  The historical Arcturus seems to have fought to keep them at bay for at least a few decades.

This was the beginning of the period called (misleadingly) the "Dark Ages" in Britain.  The Romanized, Christianized population fled to the margins, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, the areas that still think of themselves as Celtic rather than Anglo-Saxon.  They remembered in story the mythical adventures of Arthur, who had once withstood those nasty English, but whose final brave defense ended in glorious failure.  There is some thought that the dragon, now a Welsh symbol and later attached to Arthur (Pendragon and all that), came from the dragons on Roman military banners.

The idea of the glorious leader Arthur stayed alive over the centuries, but without any of the accompaniments now taken for granted.  Guinevere and Lancelot were first added in the twelfth century.  So was the Holy Grail.  Other aspects, like the sword in the stone, Mordred, the lady of Shallot, and Morgan Le Fay were added in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  What we think of as the "standard" Arthur story was put together by Thomas Malory at the end of the fifteenth century, trying to organize and combine all the different stories in circulation.

Like modern audiences, medieval audiences wanted to believe Arthur was real.  In the twelfth century, the rather obscure monastery of Glastonbury "discovered" that Arthur and Guinevere were buried at their monastery.  Pilgrims flocked from all over.  Glastonbury is on a hill (a "tor") in a rather marshy region, which, without too much difficulty, could be equated with the "island" of Avalon.  It all made sense.

All medieval authors retold stories of Arthur as stories about their own period, making the weaponry, the castles, and the manners at court match what their audiences knew--except of course much fancier and bigger.  Nonetheless, they usually set these stories "officially" in late Roman Britain, only a few generations after Joseph of Arimathea had (theoretically) brought Christianity to the island.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

The Holy Grail

These days, everybody knows what the Holy Grail was.  It was the cup the Jesus used during the Last Supper, right?  After all, that's what an Indiana Jones movie said it was, so it must be true.

Well, no.  The first time that a "grail" shows up in the records is in the stories of Chrétien de Troyes, who wrote what are now considered the first "Arthurian" stories in the 1180s.  In his Perceval, a story he never finished, young Perceval visits a mysterious castle where he sees a procession, a maiden carrying a "grail" and a boy carrying a bleeding lance.  At this point it isn't called a "holy" grail, although the Christian symbolism of the bleeding lance seems undeniable.

(The chalice pictured above is from eleventh-century Spain and is not the holy grail.)

In Chrétien's story, it turns out that the grail is a platter, carrying the wafer of communion (so it is at least sort of holy).  This wafer is all that the wounded Fisher King eats.  Young Perceval in the story is amazed at the sight but doesn't say anything, though it later turns out that he should have asked what it was, and that his asking would have healed the Fisher King, who is actually his uncle.

Okay, this seems somewhat obscure.  The fact that it is theoretically set in Britain, though Chrétien probably never left France, doesn't exactly clarify.  Shortly thereafter, the German writer Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote his own version, and now the grail is a miraculous stone.  Wolfram did finish his version, and his Parzival finally gets back to the grail castle, asks what is going on, heals the wounded king, and is reunited with his beloved wife.

Around this time the grail stories got drawn into Joseph of Arimathea stories.  A British writer said that Joseph, who is in the Bible as providing a tomb for Jesus after the Crucifixion, had come to Britain toward the end of his life, bringing the cup of the Last Supper, and converted the island to Christianity.

This did not settle things on the Continent, where the "Quest of the Holy Grail" stories have it a rather undefined object that flies around healing people if they deserve it.  The questers have adventures and repent of their sins until they are worthy to see the grail.  Here the Fisher King's daughter (unnamed) is the woman with whom Lancelot accidentally had a hot affair, resulting in the birth of Galahad.  (You had to be there.)

Some people have tried to connect the Holy Grail with some sort of ancient pagan Celtic stone, but the story is too confusing already without bringing in pagan details that all medieval grail authors would have rejected.  (See more here on the historical (?) Arthur.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2015