The Greatest Knight, by Elizabeth Chadwick. Book review

Edition reviewed, Time Warner, 2006, ISBN 0-7515-3660-1

Set in England and France in 1167-1194, The Greatest Knight tells the story of William Marshal and his involvement with the Plantagenet King Henry II, his queen Eleanor of Aquitaine and their brood of wayward sons. Most of the major characters are historical figures, while William’s mistress Clara is a fictional character created from an un-named woman briefly mentioned in the sources.

A younger son with few prospects of inheritance and little money, William earns a living by serving as a household knight. His prowess on the jousting field earns him fame and prizes, but the great turn in his fortune occurs when he saves Eleanor of Aquitaine from capture by enemy knights. Queen Eleanor herself ransoms William and rewards him with a place in the royal household as tutor to the princes Henry and Richard. William is now at the centre of the maelstrom surrounding the House of Plantagenet, as Henry II, Eleanor and their growing sons fight amongst themselves. Royal favour makes William rich beyond his dreams, but one false step in the fickle world of the court and he could lose it all for ever.

William Marshal is the central character and the reader sees much of the story through William’s eyes. He is a thoroughly sympathetic character, level-headed, down-to-earth and with a gift for getting on with people, who somehow manages to look out for his own interests and yet still stay a decent man. Other important characters are rounded individuals with their own personalities. Henry II’s eldest son Henry, known as The Young King after being crowned King of England in his father’s lifetime, is a spoilt brat when we first meet him riding William’s war-horse without permission and manages not to grow up at all throughout his career. William’s elder brother John seems to be unlucky in all things, growing more embittered as his failures contrast with William’s success, until he and William eventually end up on opposite sides of a civil war. John’s unhappy love life, and the troubled marriage of the Young King to the lonely Marguerite, form a counterpoint to William’s much more satisfactory romantic relationships, first with his (fictional) mistress Clara and later with his wife Isabelle de Clare. Isabelle was a great heiress and many years younger than William, and their marriage as portrayed in the novel rests on the twin foundations of expediency (Isabelle needed to marry to escape her restricted status as a ward of the Crown, William needed her lands) and mutual affection. Isabelle brings William not only financial security in the shape of her landed estates, but emotional security too. On several occasions William, who has led a peripatetic life around royal courts and the tourney circuit, refers to Isabelle as his “safe harbour”.

Loyalty forms a major theme in the story. A medieval knight swore fidelity to a lord, and also owed loyalty to his king – so what was he to do when his lord quarrelled with the king? If he joined the king he had broken his oath, but if he stayed with his lord he had rebelled against the king. William has to confront this dilemma several times, and struggles to emerge with both his life and honour intact.

The novel is rich in historical details such as the food, clothes, buildings and weapons of the time. Much of the story concentrates on the personal and political battles of the court, with some battlefield action scenes such as the attack in the first chapter and William’s rearguard action to defend Eleanor’s escape. A welcome feature is the occasional note of humour, with comic vignettes such as the incident in which William gets his head stuck in a jousting helm and has to have it (the helm, fortunately, not the head) removed by the local blacksmith.

As the novel covers nearly three decades, the story sometimes leaps ahead by months or years at a time, so you need to pay attention to the dates in the chapter headings. A useful Author’s Note explains the main sources for the novel, and notes where controversies remain and where fiction has filled in gaps in the history. Before reading this novel I knew two things about William Marshal. The first was the celebrated story of his father handing him over to King Stephen as a child hostage, promptly breaking the terms of the deal and then defying Stephen to hang young William by declaring, “I have the hammers and anvils to forge more and better sons!”. The second, I’m afraid to say, was the scurrilous ballad The Confessions of Queen Eleanor, which is most unlikely to have any basis in fact. So it was very helpful to have a note of the history behind the novel and suggestions for further reading.

Convincing and colourful portrayal of William Marshal, one of the unsung champions of the Middle Ages.

Lunar eclipses and the 'Dark Ages'

Did anyone else watch the lovely lunar eclipse last night? I gather it was visible across a lot of the world, including all of Europe and eastern parts of the Americas. The BBC has a handsome picture gallery here if you missed it.

Eclipses are strange and eerie phenomena, even with a rational explanation for their cause. It’s tempting to assume that past ages regarded eclipses with superstitious awe, explaining them as magic, or monsters eating the sun, or something similar. Particularly in post-Roman Europe, whose popular sobriquet “The Dark Ages” implies an image of savages huddled in mud huts burning cakes and waiting for some external agency – William the Conqueror, or the Renaissance, or whatever – to come along and turn the lights back on. As ever, the reality is more complicated and more interesting.

Bede, scholar and monk at the monastery at modern Jarrow in Northumbria, wrote a treatise in about 725 AD called On the Reckoning of Time. His main purpose was to set out, probably for the instruction of students, the correct methods of measuring time and constructing a Christian calendar. This was far from an academic exercise, as disputes over the dating of Easter provoked endless arguments in the early Christian church, on a few occasions leading to (or perhaps being used as an excuse for) outright schism. Bede’s book is most commonly cited now as the source for the names of the early English months and the consequent sidelight these throw on English paganism, but his treatise displays detailed and accurate knowledge of the motion of the sun and moon, the shape of the earth and the pattern of the tides, derived from other books and from his own observations. For example, Bede knew that the earth was spherical

It is not merely circular like a shield or spread out like a wheel, but resembles more a ball, being equally round in all directions
--Ch. 32

and explains that this spherical shape governed the difference in day length between summer and winter in the northern hemisphere. Bede’s source for this was Pliny’s Natural History, with a comment that it can be verified by observing the heavens from a village close to a large mountain. Just as the mountain will get in the way of seeing the sun and stars from the village, so, on a larger scale, the spherical shape of the earth gets in the way of seeing the sun from high latitudes in winter. Interestingly, this indicates that Bede, despite being a devout orthodox Christian, was happy to use learning from non-Christian sources (he comments elsewhere in the book that Pliny was a pagan), and that he considered empirical observation to be useful in testing statements found in books.

Bede also explained the tides as the waters of the ocean following the motion of the moon. Earlier sources thought that the high tide was caused by additional water pouring into the ocean and thus that the high tide occurred at the same time in all places. Bede, however, had information that the tide along the coasts of Britain rises in some places at the same time as it falls at others, and thus he argued that the idea of extra water pouring into the oceans was wrong. He did not know how the waters of the oceans could follow the moon around (there was a while to wait before gravity was discovered), but he could observe that they did and that this observation could be used to test a theory and prove it wrong (Ch. 29).

Bede knew that solar eclipses occurred when the moon came between the sun and the earth, and lunar eclipses when the moon passed through the earth’s shadow, and that as a result solar eclipses can only happen when the moon is new and lunar eclipses can only happen when the moon is full. He quotes Pliny’s Natural History as the source, with a rather rueful comment that Pliny was a pagan, and then backs it up with a Christian commentary from St Jerome arguing that the daytime darkness recorded in the Gospels at the time of the crucifixion could not have been a solar eclipse because the crucifixion occurred at Passover, held at full moon, and solar eclipses can only happen at new moon (Ch. 27).

So it’s fair to say that Bede would have understood last night’s eclipse as a natural phenomenon. It’s also fair to say that Bede was at the intellectual apex of his society – probably his nearest modern equivalent would be an Oxbridge professor or maybe a top-flight consultant – and his ideas may not have extended very far into the rest of society. Quite possibly much of the population did see eclipses as terrifying supernatural portents. But it's not justified to assume that everybody did.

Bede: The Reckoning of Time. Translated by Faith Wallis. Liverpool University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-85323-693-3