Kings

 After last weekend's "No Kings" rallies, it seems appropriate to blog about kings.

Kings have been the default for most societies, once a group of people gets above a certain size. Greece and Rome, seen by American founding fathers as inspiring democracy and a republican form of government, had kings before Athens decided on democracy (unlike the other Greek city-states) and Rome decided to become a republic (and remember Rome later became ruled by emperors).  The ancient Mesopotamian city-states all had kings, and the pharaohs in Egypt were kings under a different name.

Medieval Europe took kings for granted. As new people settled in the old Roman Empire, whether Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Visigoths, or whatever, they were under the rule of kings.  A lot of these kingdoms were very small, but the idea of a single ruler being in charge of a territory seemed self-evident. Scandinavia had never been under Roman rule, but they too were ruled by kings.

Christianity also took kings for granted. After all, the Old Testament had been full of the doings of Hebrew kings, going back to Saul, David, and Solomon. Churches depicted these kings on their facades, as in the example of the royal head below, which was on the front of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris from the twelfth century until knocked off in the French Revolution (a new "improved" head replaced it in the nineteenth century).

 God and Jesus were often referred to as kings.  With the heavenly hierarchy organized with one central person in charge (or actually three persons united in one, let's not get distracted here), it made sense that earth too should have kings.

Kings have usually been hereditary, but there were always exceptions.  We might think of a king's oldest son as automatically being the royal heir, but it didn't have to be that way. William the Conqueror of England's oldest son, Robert, became duke of Normandy, and his second son, William II, king of England.  (Since the Conqueror had been duke of Normandy himself originally, that was the true family property, suitable for an oldest son.)

William the Conqueror himself, of course, as his nickname suggests, really became king by conquest, not by heredity, though he had a family connection to the last Anglo-Saxon kings.  In the Merovingian era, kings had routinely tried to conquer their brothers' or cousins' kingdoms. All early medieval kings were wary of marrying off their daughters to men who might see this connection as a justification for going for the throne themselves. And Charlemagne's own father became king by announcing he was a better man for the position than the current (Merovingian) king,whom he unceremoniously dumped into a monastery.

Medieval kings were never absolute. They were supposed to act with the advice of a council, which became formalized in England around the end of the thirteenth century with the establishment of Parliament.  Other countries set up similar bodies, representatives of the country as a whole (in practice the wealthy and powerful) to advise on important matters.  Even before Parliament, King John of England was reined in by Magna Carta (1215) when he seemed to be acting too much like a tyrant.

Kings of course would have liked to be absolute.  James I of England (James VI of Scotland) first spelled out the theoretical justification of divine-right monarchy.  But this was post-medieval, and his son, Charles I (seventeenth century) was beheaded when Parliament decided he was acting too much like a tyrant.  By the time his son was restored to the throne, England had decided it was going to continue to have kings, but that Parliament would have the final say on important matters (as they do now, when their kings have become essentially powerless).

In France the Estates General was much weaker during this time, and you get kings like Louis XIV declaring that he himself embodied France. ("L'état, c'est moi!") Kings and princes and dukes ruled small states in what is now Germany and Italy, their ambition to be absolute rulers checked primarily by the small size of their territory.

The American colonies were very unusual in deciding to become a country without a king.  George Washington in fact was offered a chance to be king and turned it down.  The colonies had had governors but, with a king over them in England, they'd never had kings on-site, so doing without kings was not too big a leap.  Towns and villages had been run locally ("town hall meetings"), so citizen participation seemed obvious.

Today few kings are.still in power worldwide. Those called king (or queen) have symbolic and ceremonial power for the most part but cannot dictate policy.  Presidents, elected men and women, may on occasion be seen eyeing the power that kings had in the post-medieval period and wishing some for themselves.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026 

For more on medieval government, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback

 

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.

Westminster Abbey

 Modern England (and for that matter the whole UK), unlike most of the rest of Europe, considers itself to be a continuation of medieval England.  King Charles III is a descendant of William the Conqueror, and for that matter of the Saxon royal line pre-1066.  No French Revolution here!  (Okay, so we don't need to talk about the English civil war of the seventeenth century, when the monarch was beheaded and replaced by Cromwell as Protector.  They eventually restored the monarchy with the dead king's son.)

England's medieval roots are always fully on display for great ceremonies, such as the upcoming royal coronation of King Charles at Westminster Abbey.  Charles is already king, having been since his mother's death in September 2022, but a new king needs an elaborate ceremony, a performative act.  He is king of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, and northern Ireland.  The Scots will tell you that Scotland took over England rather than vice versa, because James VI was already king of Scotland when he became James I of England in 1603, but we don't need to talk about that now.

Westminster is its own city, surrounded by London but not officially part of it.  It was called Westminster because it was the area surrounding a church (what the word "minster" means) located west of what was then the city of London.  London has grown enormously over the centuries, but the central bit is still called The City.

There was an abbey founded at Westminster in the tenth century, and in the eleventh century Edward the Confessor, next to last of the Saxon kings of England (last if you don't count Harold, defeated by William the Conqueror) paid for a new church to be built for the monks.  He'd already built a royal palace right next door.  He was buried at Westminster abbey when he died in 1066, the first of a great many kings to be buried there.  (It's not happened for the last two centuries, however; Queen Elizabeth II was buried out at Windsor, even though her funeral was at Westminster—as was her wedding to Prince Philip in 1947.)  William the Conqueror chose Westminster for his own coronation ceremony in 1066, doubtless to assert continuity with Saxon kings, and chose Christmas Day, most likely to assert some sort of continuity with Charlemagne (crowned Roman Emperor on Christmas Day 800).

The monastery flourished over the following centuries.  In the thirteenth centuries, as great Gothic cathedrals, like Notre Dame in Paris, were being built all over, the decision was made to tear down the Romanesque eleventh-century church, which now seemed hopelessly old-fashioned, and rebuild in the high Gothic style.  The church as it now stands was more or less completed in the fifteenth century; Gothic takes a long time to build.

 Down in the basement there are still some remains of the eleventh-century church, and there is a door tourists can visit and take pictures of, supposedly the oldest door in England, supposedly from the tenth-century original abbey.

Now of course the church has gone through a lot since the thirteenth century.  The big central window on the west end (seen above) dates from the eighteenth century.  So do the towers on either side.  (In the picture above you can see the stone of the towers is a lighter color.)  The organ was installed in the twentieth century.  And of course it is no longer a monastery.  In the sixteenth century you'll recall England became Protestant ("Church of England") under Henry VIII, and Catholic monasteries were shut down.  Briefly the abbey church was designated a cathedral, although it is not one now.  (Instead Westminster cathedral is a separate church, the seat of a Catholic bishop, head of English Catholicism.)  Although the monks are long gone, the abbey church still has a school for choir boys.

Westminster palace, built much later in its current form to replace Edward the Confessor's palace, is now the home of England's Parliament.

The April/May 2023 issue of Smithsonian magazine has a good article about Westminster.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Getting rid of a monarch

In the US this week an ultimately unsuccessful effort was made to convict and remove the president. It thus seems like a good time to talk about getting rid of a medieval monarch.  After all, you can't just drag a king (or a president for that matter) to the curb on Blue Box day (or Major Appliance Disposal day).

As I have discussed earlier, medieval kings were not absolute rulers (that developed only in the post-medieval period with kings like Louis XIV of France).  But they were still hard to get rid of if those around them didn't like what they were doing.  One possibility was always assassination, as Julius Caesar had been murdered by his sometime-friends in 44 BC, because they were hoping (erroneously) that with him gone, Rome would go back to being a Republic rather than being ruled by emperors.

Once Europe became Christian, the option of murdering people, even kings thought to be on the wrong path, seemed less viable.  Other ways were often sought.  The most famous example is probably the replacement of the Merovingian dynasty on the Frankish throne by Pippin "the Short," father of Charlemagne, in 751.  The official story was that Pippin, the mayor of the palace for the last Merovingian king (sort of like chief of staff or secretary of state), who had actually been running the kingdom, asked the pope if it was right for an incompetent to have the name of king, and the pope said no (25th amendment!).  Pippin deposed the king and had himself elected by the Franks, anointed and crowned by the bishops, and blessed by the pope.

(This official story appears for the first time 40 years later and seems dubious.  I'll discuss it properly another time.)

Deposing incompetents continued.  Among Charlemagne's descendants, Charles the Simple was deposed and locked up when he didn't seem to be doing his job protecting France from the Vikings.  In England in 1066, Harold Godwinson was declared king, but Duke William of Normandy claimed that Harold was an oath-breaker, that he (William) had been promised the English throne, and he took the throne by force.  This didn't count (maybe) as assassination because Harold was an oath-breaker and died in battle.

Sometimes kings were just threatened with deposition.  In England in 1215, the great barons forced King John to sign the Magna Carta, a document spelling out the rights of the great lords and churches of England, if he didn't want to be deposed.  John grumbled and complained and tried to get out of it, but he died the next year (natural causes), which certainly solved the barons' immediate problem.

At the end of the fourteenth century in England, King Richard II again seriously displeased the barons, who thought he was acting as if he were above the law.  The final straw was when he seized the duchy of Lancaster, held by his first cousin Henry.  Henry raised an armed rebellion and captured Richard.  Parliament, coming into its own in the late Middle Ages, declared that Richard had broken England's laws and forced him to abdicate in 1399.  Henry became King Henry IV, claiming his right to the throne by inheritance, by conquest, and by act of Parliament.

Parliament entered the picture again in 1461, when Henry IV's grandson Henry VI, who came to the throne as a baby and had serious mental health issues as an adult.  During his periods of incompetence, England was ruled by various relatives, with Parliament's support, but this was complicated by the relatives' fights with each other and Henry's efforts to regain control.  We're here plunging into the War of the Roses, which I won't discuss here, but Henry was finally conquered and deposed in 1461, with the combination of conquest and Parliamentary support leading to the reign of his third cousin, Richard III.  The same set of circumstances that had led to Henry IV becoming king led, two generations later, to his grandson Henry VI being kicked off the throne (but at least left alive).

In late medieval France meanwhile, during the Hundred Years' War, during the phase when the English were winning, they were able to get the "dauphin," the heir to the French throne, declared illegitimate, by having his mother attest that the boy's father was someone other than the late king.  This got him out of the way, but only until Joan of Arc's angel voices told her he really was legitimate the whole time and got him crowned as Charles VII (see more on Joan here).

You will note that medieval people rarely just tossed (or killed) a king.  There was always an effort to justify, usually on the basis of abuse of power by the king, sometimes on the basis of his legitimacy.  Getting the great lords on board was usually Step One.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval kings, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in print!

The Norman Conquest

I hope no one reading this blog thinks of history as "memorizing dates."  But there are still a few dates that everyone ought to know.  One of those is 1066, the date of the Norman Conquest of England.  It had major political, social, and cultural ramifications for England (and subsequently for the US.)

Between the seventh century and the eleventh, England was a Christian territory, with some scholars very well educated in Latin.  But its primary language was Anglo-Saxon, not the Old French of the territory right across the Channel.  England did not have the knights, the castles, or the fiefs that developed on the Continent in the first half of the eleventh century.

In 1066 King Edward of England died childless.  He was nicknamed "the Confessor" for his holy way of life--a confessor is a sort of second-class saint.  Several people were convinced they were Edward's rightful heir, including Harold Godwinson, an Anglo-Saxon lord, and William, duke of Normandy in France.

(Vikings had settled in Normandy--named for them--at the beginning of the tenth century and had in the subsequent generations become French, if lively French.)

Indeed, William claimed that Harold Godwinson had promised that he would be the next English king, after William had rescued him from shipwreck.  Harold remembered the whole event quite differently.  William is nicknamed "the Conqueror," so you can tell how this is going to turn out.

When Edward died, Harold Godwinson was elected king by the witangemot, the Anglo-Saxon general assembly of nobles. But no sooner was he crowned than he heard that England was being invaded--from Scandinavia.  A third claimant from there, Harald Hardrada, had allied with Harold Godwinson's brother and decided that he was rightful king of England.

Harold Godwinson met Harald Hardrada in a great battle and won.  Unfortunately for Anglo-Saxon purists, this great battle is now nearly forgotten, for no sooner had the English won than they learned that William had sailed from Normandy.  The exhausted English army met the Normans near Hastings and held their own remarkably well, in spite of just having marched on foot all the way down from Yorkshire, and in spite of having to face mounted knights.

But Harold Godwinson was killed, and many of the English lords with him.  William then declared his own men a witangemot, they elected him (who could have predicted?), and he was crowned king.

England under the so-called Anglo-Norman kings was immediately transformed.  Knights and castles were established on Continental models.  William declared the men who had accompanied him were now dukes and counts (earls) and insisted they hold from him in fief, the first time a king had been involved in fief-holding.  As English bishops died, they were replaced with French ones.

This was the beginning of the creation of the language we now call English, which has both Germanic elements (from Anglo-Saxon) and French/Latinate ones (from Norman French).  Modern English indeed has as many words as modern German and modern French combined.  In Anglo-Norman England, there were two distinct languages, one for the conquerors and one for the conquered.  In modern English, built on both these languages, a pig running around is a swine, a Germanic word, until it reaches the table and becomes pork, a French word--an Anglo-Saxon peasant raised swine, but a Norman lord ate pork.

Even now, the Germanic/Anglo-Saxon term is the simplest and pithiest, the French the more elegant.  You can say things in English in two ways.  It is possible to express a concept in English in a dual manner.  (See what I mean?)

© C. Dale Brittain 2015
For more on medieval political and social history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.