Question 1
Evaluate the interpretations in both of the two passages and explain which you think is more
convincing about Henry I’s personality.
Passage A
Although the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other clerical sources saw Henry’s reign as a time of peace and order compared with the civil wars which followed, Henry seemed to many of his contemporaries to be avaricious* and cruel. Most chroniclers comment on the gruesome penalties which he used to instil fear. Thus he blinded the Count of Mortain, who had fought against him at Tinchebrai, and thieves were likewise blinded and castrated. In 1125 all the moneyers (minters of coin) in England were sentenced to have their right hands cut off and be castrated. Although such penalties were characteristic of the Middle Ages, Henry’s application of them must have been unusually severe to have merited comment. He was believed to live in fear. Abbot Suger of St Denis reports that Henry was so frightened of plots that he frequently changed the position of his bed and had his sword and shield hung near to hand. Henry’s fears are strikingly depicted in drawings in John of Worcester’s chronicle, where his nightmare of a rebellion by all three orders of society (peasants, knights and clergy) is described. Each order complains of oppressive taxation and towers above the bedside of the sleeping king.
The positive side of Henry’s fearful severity was the reputation he acquired as a maintainer of law and order. He was the ‘Lion of Justice’, as John of Salisbury and others called him. Nevertheless even this is double-edged. Henry was identified as the ‘Lion of Justice’ because he fought the French and extracted money from his subjects.
* avaricious = greedy
Adapted from M.T. Clanchy, England and its Rulers 1066–1272, published in 1998.
Passage B
Contemporary reports of Henry’s few harsh reprisals for treason (including false coinage) persuaded many modern writers that Henry was brutal and ruthless, when in fact most reports of such firm action were in praise of the King. Death and mutilation were standard punishments in medieval Europe but Henry I generally avoided the former, and his use of mutilation was rare. When contemporaries reported that Henry caused men to fear him, what the monastic writers meant was that the king called to justice royal officials who exceeded their authority, that he kept nobles from breaking the peace. The maintenance of peace was not an easy task but in the King’s absences from England – equal to more than half the reign – no revolt ever broke out. Had Henry forced his barons into obedience by extortion and repression, as we have been told, a time bomb might have exploded and long before the death of the King. Instead, Henry’s contemporaries praised his honourable and generous treatment of the magnates. ‘Adding to their wealth and estates’ wrote Orderic, and ‘placating them in this way, Henry won their loyalty.’ To see Henry’s rule as a reign of terror is thus to miss the point: a substantial number of magnates supported Henry’s peace and profited from his lordship. Henry based his success on the shaping of a royalist baronage, bound to him not by fear so much as by gratitude for past and present favours and hope of future ones.
Adapted from C. Warren Hollister, Henry I, published in 2003.
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Answer
