Henry III by David Carpenter;

Author:David Carpenter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300238358
Publisher: Yale University Press

THE RELAXATIONS OF THE KING

Did Henry enjoy books, reading them, having them read, perusing their beautiful illustrations? Books (quite aside from bibles and service books) he certainly possessed. In 1237 new clasps were made for the cover of his ‘great book of Romances’.282 Later the stock of chivalric literature was increased by the activities of the queen. In 1252 she bought two books of romances and had another bound.283 After she had taken the cross with Henry in 1250, Henry obtained for her (from the Master of the Templars) ‘a great book’ in French about ‘the deeds of Antioch’, clearly a book telling the story of the siege of Antioch on the First Crusade.284 Just how steeped Eleanor was in the chivalric world is shown by the way a poem on the life of Christ, written by her chaplain, John of Howden, managed to include a whole list of classical, biblical, Arthurian and modern heroes.285

Henry himself commissioned both books and poems. From 1243 he paid a pension and gave numerous gifts of wine to the poet Henry of Avranches.286 In England, early in the reign, Avranches had written for various ecclesiastical patrons, most notably Peter des Roches, and possibly had been Henry’s tutor. He had then spent time at both the papal and the imperial courts. In 1244 it was his verses, reflecting on how blessed were those who believed without seeing, that Henry had inscribed on a ring destined for the casket holding the hand of the apostle Thomas, though how Henry thought the whole poem could be put on a ring is hard to imagine.287 Next year, Avranches was engaged on a more substantial work, writing the lives of both Edward the Confessor and Saint George, a commission Henry might have regretted had he known that George would supplant Edward as England’s national saint.288 Henry was also, of course, a patron of Matthew Paris. He commissioned Paris’s life of Edward the Confessor, commanded him to write an account of a great ceremony at Westminster Abbey in 1247, and gave him much other historical information. He would have got a shock had he seen the actual text of the Chronica Majora, with its bitter criticisms, and doubtless it was kept safely locked away on his visits to St Albans. It is possible the abbreviated version that Paris prepared in the early 1250s, known as the Historia Anglorum, was conceived as something that could be presented to Henry, but, if so, the changes were not nearly extensive enough to make that possible.289

A few surviving books give some impression of the nature and quality of what was found at court: the Rutland psalter with a king and a queen depicted at the start of psalm 101, the book of hours belonging to Henry and Eleanor’s daughter Beatrice, and the brilliantly illuminated Trinity apocalypse, just possibly owned by the queen herself. In its most famous image the central figure is a finely dressed woman striking with her sword at a grotesque seven-headed monster.

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