King Henry I of England, known to later generations as Henry Beauclerc, the Lion Of Justice, succeeded his flamboyant brother William II under deeply suspicious circumstances. However, over the thirty eight years of his reign he created the Chancellor of the Exchequer and presided over the beginnings of the Common Law justice system and the rise of the Roman Church’s power in England. A deeply pious man, much respected by clerics of the time, he also holds the record for siring the greatest number of illegitimate children of any English monarch.

Henry I (1069 – 1135) was the youngest of the four sons of William the Conqueror, also known as William the Bastard because he was the illegitimate son of the Duke of Normandy and a tanner’s daughter. William inherited the Dukedom of Normandy, which at the time covered about a third of modern day France and then famously conquered England in 1066.

After the Conqueror’s death, the oldest son, known as Robert Curthose because of his short legs, was given the Dukedom of Normandy. The second son had been supposed to inherit England, but died when a stag in the New Forest misunderstood the rules and killed him while he was out hunting, so the third son, William Rufus (because of his red face) became the King of England. Henry was given 5,000 pounds in silver and told to figure his future out for himself.

Mostly he did this by playing his brothers off against each other and instigating squabbles between their barons. This was made easier by the utter subjugation of the Saxon population of England, who were still sullen about having the lands they had rightfully stolen from the native Celts taken from them by the Norman conquerors. The Norman barons, who had so gleefully joined the Conqueror’s invasion of England, naturally refused to give up their lands in Normandy and after his death found themselves serving two bickering masters.

After a few years of merrily slaughtering each others’ peasants and occasionally throwing each other in prison, Robert Curthose, the Duke of Normandy, grew weary of all the pointless warfare, pawned Normandy to William Rufus for 10,000 marks and set off to join the pointless warfare of the First Crusade.

Deprived of his brother’s company, William Rufus spent his remaining years brawling with Church officials, throwing splendidly debauched parties and encouraging young men to have stupid hair and even stupider shoes. It’s hard to know which of those things irritated the clergy more, but in an era when history was written by the clerics, it left his reputation in tatters.

Meanwhile Henry, with typical little brother peevishness, had waited until news of Duke Robert’s imminent return from the crusades before taking King William Rufus out to hunt in the New Forest, where an entirely accidental arrow through the chest took him from the throne. Henry, after taking a few minutes to overcome his shock at his brother’s tragic (and entirely accidental) death, jumped back on his horse and raced off to take possession of the treasury and declare himself the new King of England. When his brother the Duke arrived back in Normandy a month later Henry pounced on him and put in him a Welsh prison for the rest of his life. Sibling rivalry in the Middle Ages didn’t have much truck with subtleties.

Despite a tricky start, Henry’s kingship was actually one of the more successful in the somewhat erratic history of the English monarchy. Because he was never supposed to inherit any land, Henry had been expected to find a career in the church, so he was considerably better educated than was the norm for rulers at the time; but he was not the most gentle or compassionate of men.

Early in his reign, during a stand-off with one of his barons, he threatened to blind and mutilate the two hostages he’d taken, who also happened to be his own 9 and 12 year old granddaughters. When the baron refused to back down, Henry ordered the girls’ eyes put out and their noses slit. Calling a bluff in Norman politics was a tricky business.

Having established himself as a man with whom it was not wise to fuck and because he had reunited Normandy and England under one ruler, he largely put an end to baronial shenanigans. As a peace offering to the nation for his slightly dubious accession, he issued the Charter of Liberties, the first document codifying the rights of the church and nobles and limiting royal powers over taxation, church appointments and inheritance of land. Peasants, of course weren’t included in the peace offering because, well, why would you bother?

The Charter of Liberties was closer to what we would know as election promises than actual legislation and most of the provisions were treated as non-core promises. 100 years later however, it was the basis of the Magna Carta and it was the beginning of centralised government in England.

One of the many complaints the Barons had at Henry’s accession was that things weren’t as good as they were in the good old days, before all the young men got stupid hair. William promised to restore the laws of the much loved (well, 100 years after his death he was much loved) Edward the Confessor and did this by sowing the seeds of the English civil service and codifying local and royal law into what became known as Common Law — commonly applied law rather than arbitrary feudal laws.

The legal system before Henry’s time, such as it was, consisted of feudal officials passing judgement on crimes or civil disputes, based partly on local traditions, but mostly just on what they felt like doing at the time; or there was the King’s justice, where people could appeal directly to the King and hope for a more impartial result.

The perpetual internecine wars in Normandy kept the King out of England much of the time, so he appointed King’s Justices to hear judgement requests he was unable to attend to himself. These quickly became more popular because Henry appointed so many Justices that people realised that their cases could be heard much sooner by the King’s Justice than by a local official.

After a while the Justices started travelling around the country to hear cases, rather than forcing everyone with a complaint to travel to London. This had far more to do with gathering fines and protecting royal prerogatives than any noble desire to promote justice out in the boondocks, but the effect was that the feudal courts’ power slowly flowed away from the barons and towards the King. Because this erosion was offset by thirty-eight years of peace and concurrent economic expansion, no-one really cared enough to put a stop to it.

Another complaint by the people who actually had money (and who cares about complaints from people who don’t have money), was the King’s habit of issuing fines whenever he happened to feel a bit irritable or in need of more stupid shoes. The Charter of Liberties had remitted all outstanding fines at the time of Henry’s coronation and limited the King’s ability to create more, which sounds all very nice and freedom loving, but what it actually did was allow Henry to centralise England’s finances. In the name of Being Accountable and Equitable Taxation for the Rich, he created the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Twice a year all the sheriffs (shire-reeves, officials from each shire in England) were called to London to do their accounts. The King’s officers would bring their abacus and sit at a large table marked out with squares (so it looked like a chessboard – hence the word exchequer) where the sheriffs would lay out their accounts. The sheriffs would give the king’s officers an account of the money they could provide from their region, which was recorded by making cuts on a stick. The stick was then split in two so both the king and the sheriff had a record of the commitment and thus the tally stick was born. The king could also exchange tally sticks for real money or goods, like a form of medieval letter of credit.

This system lasted until 1834 when parliament replaced them with actual accounting and burned 700 years worth of tally sticks and accidently the House of Parliament as well, which just goes to show that housework is never a good idea. Also at this time the slow introduction of the more efficient Arabic number system replaced roman numerals as the sheriffs aligned their accounting practices with the exchequer.

Of course there was nothing to stop the sheriffs raising more money than they had committed to, but sheriff positions were bought and sold, so if a sheriff did not commit to enough revenue the King would charge him with treason and sell the position to the highest bidder. If he tried to raise too much money the peasants would all either die of starvation or have a merry riot and burn him at a stake. The invisible hand of the market wore an iron glove in the middle ages.

The Roman Church was only just starting to consolidate its power. Before Henry’s reign it had been pretty much ignored by most of the European kings, but after Pope Gregory got all kickass in the 11th century, the Roman Church started mattering almost as much as it thought it should. Henry was the first English King forced to concede power over the clergy in England to the Roman Pope and his appointed representatives. The concession was minor and, in the grand tradition of political concessions, had little real effect beyond the public acknowledgement, but it was the start of a battle that lasted over 500 years and culminated in Henry VIII’s petulant dummy spit over the Church’s pig-headed refusal to assist in settling his marital difficulties.

In yet another example of things staying the same the more they change, the early church had its share of problematic public relations. In 1102 a papal legate named John came to England to attend a synod. He issued a thunderous warning from the pulpit of the mortal sin clerics committed when they “rise from the side of a harlot to make the body of Christ” (conduct a mass). That night he was found in bed with a prostitute and had to flee England because there is nothing scarier than having a mob of angry priests and an unpaid hooker chasing you in a murderous rampage.

Its status as almost the only source of literacy in the Middle Ages gave the church enormous power, particularly when it came to matters of inheritance. Royal gifts of land and money to establish new abbeys and monasteries were a vital source of Church wealth and they were repaid with favourable papal responses to requests for mediation or annulment of inconvenient marriages.

Before Henry’s accession to the throne he had wanted to marry Edith, the daughter of the King of Scotland and a descendent of the old Saxon Kings. His brother, the then King of England (who, as you recall, died entirely by accident) refused permission because he didn’t want to give the still cranky Saxons any reason to favour Henry over him. Edith was placed in a nunnery to keep her heritage and chastity out of trouble.

After his brother’s (entirely accidental) death Henry won the brief but nasty brief box-on with the nuns over who actually owned Edith and took her to wife. They had two children: Matilda, who was married to the Holy Roman Emperor as soon as she reached the marriageable age of 12 years and William, who, along with the eldest sons of many English and Norman nobility died when the White Ship (the medieval version of the Titanic) hit a rock and sank on its maiden voyage across the English channel.

Church law prevented illegitimate children inheriting land unless they had a really big army, so none of Henry’s twenty bastards could take the throne. Stuck for an alternative, Henry finally forced the outraged barons to accept his widowed daughter Matilda as his heir.

After his death (caused by a surfeit of lamprey eels — a delicacy at the time) the mostly Norman barons agreed that no woman could possibly be given any kind of authority over them and installed Henry’s nephew, Stephen of Blois as the new King. Twenty years of vicious civil war ensued and almost all Henry’s innovations of law, politics and economics were destroyed, until his grandson Henry II took the throne, dusted off the incipient civil service and legal system and handed them back even brighter and shinier than they were when he found them.

Hundreds of thousands of people were executed, imprisoned, slaughtered and taxed into oblivion in the 600 years after Henry I, as the English sorted out their governmental, judicial and taxation systems and the separation of Church and State. Henry’s descendants were in the thick of the fight the whole way through, but it had its germination with him and his father. He’d be enraged and horrified at how it all turned out, but, now that it’s over, we have much to thank him for.

—

Next month in the Tribune, you may or may not (depending on how many people thought this one is boring as batshit) find the story of Henry II, who, when he wasn’t marrying the King of France’s ex-wife, shagging laundry maids or causing the death of the Archbishop of Canterbury, continued Henry I’s work of establishing the system of Common Law and centralised government.

Jane Shaw is the Editor of The King’s Tribune and a huge history nerd. Follow her on Twitter @JaneTribune

+ 30

+ 0