Plantagenets, Capetians and the deep medieval state

Everyone comes from somewhere else, and medieval royal dynasties are no exception. The Plantagenets were forerunners of the Welsh Penmynydd family, better known as the Tudors. Beginning with King Henry II’s accession in 1154, they came to an end with Richard III in 1485, but were originally from Anjou.

Across the Channel, their great dynastic rivals throughout the 12th and 13th centuries, the Capetians were descended from Saxons in eastern Germany. Coming to power under Hugh Capet in 987, its rulers only began to refer to themselves as kings of “France” (Francie) under Philip II from 1180.

Both dynasties intermarried as much as — and often because — they fought each other. The modern concept of national identity meant little to either of them. The Norman French-speaking Plantagenets were preoccupied with holding on to over half of modern-day France, more than all its English territorial possessions. Meanwhile, many Capetian kings spent their reigns focused on invading the “Holy Land”, like Louis IX who led the ill-fated seventh and eighth Crusades that caused his death in Tunis in 1270.

Like the two dynasties they describe, a pair of new books — Arise, England, a history of the Plantagenets by Caroline Burt and Richard Partington, and Justine Firnhaber-Baker’s account of the Capetians, House of Lilies — come together and speak to each other at key moments. Sometimes they are in agreement, often at odds with each other, but both shine new light on an often neglected and misunderstood period of European history diminished by that most unhelpful of phrases, “the Middle Ages”.

The past, in the words of novelist LP Hartley, “is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” But if Anglo-French medieval history that predates the more popular Tudor and Renaissance eras is so foreign to us, why does it matter? One answer is the sheer weight of history to which both dynasties bore witness.

The Plantagenets were responsible for Magna Carta (despite King John’s opposition), that placed the English monarch under the rule of law, the establishment of common law and with it justices of the peace, the beginnings of national taxation, a professional army, the creation of the two parliamentary houses, and even the term “Parliamentum”, itself taken from the Capetian parlements, where the elite met to talk (or “parler”) politics, and first used to describe a national assembly for debate in 1237. The dynasty also generated three civil wars, the deposition of two kings, the Black Death (1348) that killed nearly half the population and the Peasants’ Revolt (1381).

The Capetians (and to a lesser degree the Plantagenets) were in the vanguard of the Crusades, the birth of Gothic architecture, but also plunged the region into the Hundred Years’ War, instituted some of the most virulently antisemitic laws and pogroms in pre-modern Europe, first under Philip II, then Louis IX, who, in Firnhaber-Baker’s words, “so loathed the Jews . . . that he could not look at them”.

The assessments of both dynasties differ wildly in these two accounts, and are symptomatic of the problems of academics writing crossover books aimed at a non-academic audience. Where Burt and Partington have written a painstakingly dense, colourless doorstep of a book on the granular detail of the political, fiscal, legal and military innovations of the Plantagenet state, Firnhaber-Baker has gone full gothic technicolour.

Her prurient character sketches and breezy clichés come thick and fast. Robert II is “tender and his disposition kindly, but the times were less hospitable to lovers than to fighters.” King Louis VI “had run to fat”, men “with posher pedigrees” are set against “hard-working plebs”, and while queen regnants and consorts such as Eleanor of Aquitaine are discussed at length, so are their sexual appetites, agonising childbirth and physical attributes in increasingly distasteful and unnecessary speculation and digressions.

It is a shame, because when she mentions Capetian attempts to build a horizontal — as opposed to top-down — state, then the point of writing about this period comes alive. Philip II’s “Ordinance Testament” (1190) transformed administrative governance in collecting revenues in creating baillis (a rough approximation of our “bailiffs”), while Louis IX’s ‘Grande Ordonnance’ (1254) tackled corruption among local officials, setting up templates for the future French state.

Burt and Partington make a more compelling case that the Plantagenets were responsible for some of the most important constitutional features of the modern British state. The royal system of common law saw an increasingly professionalised governmental bureaucracy at Westminster and in the provinces. But it was also based on the principles of Magna Carta which reiterated consultation and negotiation between the king, his state and its subjects that led parliament to flex its muscles over taxation, rebellion and, far into the future under the Stuarts, civil conflict and regicide.

What we see here — more clearly with the Plantagenets — is how the modern European state came into shape centuries before the Tudors and Bourbon dynasties. Arguably geography — and the smaller, insular nature of the British Isles — enabled an effective state apparatus to take shape more easily in 14th-century Westminster. But both Plantagenet and Capetian states were bed-rocked on the political and economic need to sustain almost perpetual overseas wars and religious crusades, as well as a virulent theocratic opposition to Judaism and Islam.

At a moment when global neoliberalism rolls back the state and warfare yet again tears apart the Middle East and the fringes of Europe, we should look again at the deep roots of the European state. Buried deep within both these accounts of the medieval European past is a belief that without some consensus on the role and effectiveness of state apparatus binding together politics, law, economics and the place of religion, our future could be what Thomas Hobbes, the founder of modern political philosophy, described as “the war of all against all”.

Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State by Caroline Burt & Richard Partington Faber, £25, 640 pages

House of Lilies: The Dynasty that Made Medieval France by Justine Firnhaber-Baker Allen Lane, £30, 448 pages

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