The Knight in History (16 page)

Young Henry proceeded to Paris, where he was joined by his brothers Richard (Lionheart) and Geoffrey. A council of French barons pledged support to the Young King, some of the English magnates declared for him, and many of the lords of Aquitaine joined the uprising. Four of the Young King’s household knights deserted to his father, but William and the majority followed their master.
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The
History
says nothing of William’s part in the rebellion, which lasted a year and a half, ending in defeat. In the fall of 1174 Henry II signed separate treaties with his sons and with Louis reestablishing previous conditions; the Young King was given two Norman castles and 15,000 pounds. William took part in the peace council, was a witness to the treaty, and in the following spring accompanied the two Henrys to England.
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The next year the Young King and his household, who “preferred to wander rather than to sojourn,” set out for the continent in search of adventure, beginning for William twelve years of knight-errantry.
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Henry’s cousin, the count of Flanders, introduced him to the world of tournaments. In these William acted as bodyguard for the Young King and planned his tournament strategy. Observing Count Philip’s trick of biding his time until the other combatants had tired themselves, William had Henry let it be understood that he would not enter the lists, and when combat raged at its height, he and his men charged onto the field and won the day for their chosen side.
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In 1177 William entered into a partnership with a Flemish knight named Roger de Gaugi, with whom he traveled for two years from tournament to tournament. In one ten-month period the pair took prisoner 103 knights.
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William displayed other knightly talents besides fighting ability. At Joigny, south of Sens, while waiting for his opponents to arm, he entertained knights and ladies by singing while they danced. A young jongleur improvised on the spot a song with a refrain, “Marshal, give me a good horse.” As the first of his opponents cantered onto the field, William mounted without a word, unhorsed him, and presented the captured horse to the jongleur.
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In 1179 William rejoined the Young King’s household, continuing to fight in local tournaments and occasionally venturing to a larger, more distant contest. Henry sent William at the head of his knights to one near Anet, west of Paris, where they arrived late to find the party from Henry II’s Angevin territories on the point of defeat. William’s attack routed the knights of the king of France, some of whom fled on foot to the top of a mound surrounded by palisade and moat, tethering their horses to the pales. William dismounted, waded the moat, climbed the mound, and grasped the reins of “two fine horses,” but as he was leading them out of the moat, two young French knights galloped up and seized them. This was against the rules, but William was at the moment powerless to protest. Remounting his own horse he presently came upon a scene in which fifteen French knights were besieged in some farm buildings by a superior Angevin force. The defenders offered to surrender to William, who accepted, led them away, and released them, a piece of generosity that cannot have been popular with his own party, who lost the ransoms. The tournament over, William sought out the uncle of the young knight who had taken one of the two captured horses. The uncle ordered the horse restored. Someone suggested that William give the knight half the horse and that the two men throw dice for the other man’s half; William won. The second young knight was a member of a baron’s household; the baron instructed him to return the horse; again it was suggested that William give him half the horse, and William complied. William told the knight to estimate its value, and the young man, thinking that William carried no money and that he could get the horse cheaply, priced it at fourteen pounds, though it was worth more than forty. William produced seven pounds and made off with the horse.
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The last splendid tournament attended by William as a member of the Young King’s household was held at Lagny, east of Paris, in the fall of 1179, possibly to celebrate the coronation of Philip II of France. Henry’s household was expanded for the event to two hundred knights, including a number of “bannerets,” knights with half a dozen followers of their own.
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Among these William appears for the first time. Now in his thirties, still unmarried, still landless, still a “youth,” he had nevertheless achieved high status.

The following year William found himself an unwilling protagonist in a situation worthy of a troubadour
canso
or an Arthurian romance. Jealous members of the younger Henry’s household circulated a rumor that William was the lover of the Young King’s wife, Margaret of France. At Henry II’s Christmas court at Caen in 1182, William challenged his accusers to judicial combat. When the Young King, who was torn between suspicion and his need for William’s aid, forbade it, William sought and received a safe conduct out of Normandy.
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HOUSE IN MARTEL, ON THE DORDOGNE RIVER, WHERE THE YOUNG KING DIED AND WILLIAM MARSHAL PROMISED TO FULFIL HIS MASTER’S CRUSADING VOW BY VISITING THE HOLY LAND

The
History
asserts that William had lucrative offers for his services from three great lords. He refused all but a minor grant of land from the count of Flanders, put aside his armor and weapons, and went on pilgrimage to Cologne.
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In February 1183, the Young King and his brother Geoffrey launched a fresh rebellion against their father.
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This time Henry II gained the support of his redoubtable son Richard, and the younger Henry found himself besieged in the castle of Limoges. He sent for William.
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The
History
narrates a curious and revealing incident: en route to a rendezvous with two former companions-at-arms, William was resting by the roadside, when a man and a woman rode by, the woman complaining of weariness. William mounted his horse, overtook and questioned them. The man proved to be a monk, eloping with the lady. They had forty-eight pounds in cash, and the monk explained that he intended to lend the money and live on the interest. Usury shocked William more than elopement: “By the sword of God! I don’t care—that will not do!” He ordered his squire to seize the money, which he shared with his two friends.
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William joined the Young King near Périgueux and they proceeded to Martel, on the Dordogne, where Henry fell seriously ill. It soon became evident that he was dying. After receiving the last rites, he made a request to William: he had taken a Crusader’s vow but had never made the journey to the Holy Land. Giving William his Crusader’s cloak with the red cross on the shoulder, he begged him to take it to Jerusalem, to the Holy Sepulchre.
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Though the Young King’s short lifetime had been squandered in extravagant living and sterile rebellion, his contemporaries mourned. Count Philip of Flanders lamented, who would now patronize the “poor knight”? Who would give him “horses and arms and
deniers?
”
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The troubadour Bertran de Born, protégé of Eleanor of Aquitaine, composed a
planh
(lament) for “the death of the young English king,” a blow to the world of chivalry, the world of
pretz
and
jovens
, of excellence and youth, leaving the “courtly nobles and the jongleurs and the troubadours” weeping, since death, “that fell warrior,” had taken away the king “who made the most liberal hand seem stingy.” Bertran concluded with a plea that Christ pardon the Young King’s sins and, like a medieval lord welcoming a knightly guest to his castle hall,

Bid him go in with his honored companions

Where there is no grief or sadness.
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William faithfully carried out his promise to journey to the Holy Land. The
History
says that Henry II gave him “two fine horses” and a hundred Angevin pounds for his pilgrimage. After visiting England to bid goodbye to his friends and family, he went off to fight the infidels. The
History
records rather cryptically, “He remained two years in Syria. There he did as many deeds as any man could do, even in seven years. His exploits are still recounted in many places before honest men. I have not described them here because I was not a witness and I have not been able to find anyone who could tell me half. Departing the Holy Land, he took leave of King Guy and his men, and of the Templars and the Hospitalers.”
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On returning to France in 1187, William began a new chapter in his life by entering the service of Henry II, whom he met in Normandy.
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His days of knight-errantry were over. The king gave him a fief in Lancashire in return for vassal service in the form of counsel in Henry’s struggle with the French king Philip II and his own son Richard. So helpful was William’s counsel that it won him a reward that was the dream of every wandering knight: the promise of marriage to an heiress. The lady, Isabel de Clare, eighteen-year-old daughter of the earl of Pembroke, had inherited lands in Wales and Ireland that would make her husband one of the most powerful barons in England.
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In July 1189, before he could fulfill the promise, Henry died at the castle of Chinon, after concluding a humiliating treaty with Philip and Richard. Although William had fought against him, Richard recognized his loyalty and courage and welcomed his continuance in the royal service, confirming his father’s gift of Lady Isabel and her inheritance. The marriage took place in London in 1189.
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William was now in his early forties, and suddenly the lord of princely estates in three lands. These included the honor (large feudal estate of 2 tenant-in-chief of the king) of Striguil, with three demesne manors and some sixty knights’ fees (fiefs sufficient to support a knight, about 600 acres apiece), and the marcher (border) lordship of Striguil, a hundred square miles on the Wye estuary dominated by the castle of Chepstow; the county of Pembroke in southwestern Wales, with its castle; the lordship of Leinster in Ireland, comprising the modern counties of Kildare, Carlow, Kilkenny, Wexford, Queens, and a part of Kings; and half the barony of Longueville in Normandy, with the service of forty or fifty knights.
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In 1194 his elder brother John Marshal died, leaving William the family lands and the office of king’s marshal, which by this time, like the office of his superior, the royal constable, involved important military duties.
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In 1199 he became earl of Pembroke.
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William now passes from the orbit of this book, a knight who through his own prowess and royal favor gained the ranks of the upper nobility. He became King John’s most trusted counselor and captain, smoothing his succession to the throne and remaining loyal during the disorders of the English barons that led in 1215 to Magna Carta. It was William who was sent to London to tell the barons that “for the sake of peace and the welfare and honor of his realm” the king would grant the concessions they demanded, and who was a chief negotiator at Runnymede.
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Civil war broke out after Runnymede and the barons invited Prince Louis of France to be their king. Louis invaded England, and in 1216, in the midst of the fighting, John died, leaving William to serve as regent for the young Henry III. Under William’s command, loyalists defeated barons and invaders, and in 1217 William concluded a treaty with Louis granting amnesty to the barons.
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Shortly before he died (May 14, 1219), he joined the Templars. He was buried in the Temple church in London.
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William Marshal is a conspicuous example of the upwardly mobile knight of the twelfth century, a period that witnessed a general upward movement by the entire class. Exactly when knights came to be considered noble is controversial and regional history varied, but the general consensus is that in the course of the thirteenth century they came to be accepted everywhere as belonging in the ranks of the aristocracy.