The Reign of King Stephen by David Crouch

Author:David Crouch [Crouch, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780582226586
Google: S6QhAQAAIAAJ
Publisher: Longman
Published: 2000-01-15T01:23:08+00:00

Chapter 11

The Failure of King Stephen

Just as the empress had attempted to erase the embarrassment of the retreat from Westminster in June by a great court at Oxford a month later, so now the newly released King Stephen attempted to cancel out his nine-month captivity by a stage-managed reaffirmation of his kingship. A Church council was rapidly summoned by the legate for 7 December 1141 at Westminster. Here the king appeared and assumed his place among his subjects as if there had been no period of captivity. They were still 'his men' as if they had not most of them - sworn loyalty to the empress the previous summer. But he did seek the Church's condemnation of those of his subjects who had turned against him and remained against him, despite the support of a bull of Pope Innocent on 1136. The legate also had his chance to vindicate the behaviour of himself and the Church in general over the previous year. He called for the excommunication of all Angevin supporters except for the empress herself.1 Once the king had reasserted before the bishops his legitimate right to rule, he needed to demonstrate it before the rest of the world. The obvious occasion would be the coming Christmas, and a large court was indeed assembled at Canterbury, appropriate as being in the heart of loyalist Kent which had served him so well the preceding year. On Christmas Day 1141, the king was solemnly crowned by the archbishop, and in a gesture as much symbolic as appropriate, Queen Mathilda also appeared in the church wearing a gold crown on her head.2

1 Annales de Wavereleia, 229; ΗΝ, 62-4.

2 GC i, 123-4.

But if the idea was that the king was to be seen by all renewed in his kingship, from the king's point of view as he looked down from his throne, the same old faces of compromised aristocrats surrounded him on every side. The Canterbury court has also left us with a further survival: yet another charter addressed to Earl Geoffrey de Mandeville. By this, the earl had confirmed to him by the king all the extraordinary grants and jurisdictions in Essex, Hertfordshire, Middlesex and London that he had extorted from the empress at Oxford the previous July. One of the few major concessions he did not secure this time was his exemption from forest law. However politic this confirmation was (and there is evidence in the charter that Queen Mathilda had promised him such a confirmation in writing, no doubt to secure him to her side at Winchester in July or August) the king could hardly fail to reflect on the dubious way that Mandeville had improved his position at his expense. Indeed, there was to be no new start in 1142.3

3 Regesta iii, no. 276. The intriguing clause '... Et preterea quicquid carta regine testatur ei dedi et concessi', which has so confused the chronology of the Mandeville grants, is most easily explained as a general reference back to the

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