Medieval history documentary about the adventures, life, and times of William Marshal - an eminent English knight who fought in battles across Europe and survived court intrigue and exile.
The fascinating story of knighthood is told through the extraordinary life and times of William Marshal, whom many consider the world's greatest knight. Presenter Thomas Asbridge explores William's incredible life, taking us from Europe's medieval castles to the holy city of Jerusalem. This is a rip-roaring adventure story in the spirit of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table.
In a career that spanned half a century, this English soldier and statesman served some of Christendom's greatest leaders, from Eleanor of Aquitaine to Richard the Lionheart. Marshal fought in battles across Europe, survived court intrigue and exile, put his seal to the Magna Carta, and proved to be the best friend a king could have, remaining loyal to those he served through disaster and victory. Then, at the age of 70, despite all the odds, he saved England from a French invasion.
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The fascinating story of knighthood is told through the extraordinary life and times of William Marshal, whom many consider the world's greatest knight. Presenter Thomas Asbridge explores William's incredible life, taking us from Europe's medieval castles to the holy city of Jerusalem. This is a rip-roaring adventure story in the spirit of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table.
In a career that spanned half a century, this English soldier and statesman served some of Christendom's greatest leaders, from Eleanor of Aquitaine to Richard the Lionheart. Marshal fought in battles across Europe, survived court intrigue and exile, put his seal to the Magna Carta, and proved to be the best friend a king could have, remaining loyal to those he served through disaster and victory. Then, at the age of 70, despite all the odds, he saved England from a French invasion.
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TVTranscript
00:00Look closer at the heart of Britain's parliamentary democracy and you come upon a forgotten hero
00:12of our history.
00:17This is William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, what a household name to us.
00:23Once he was the most celebrated warrior of his day and now he stands here, behind the
00:29royal throne, just as he did in life.
00:33This is a man who fought at the side of four kings of England, who saved this nation from
00:38French conquest and preserved the English royal line.
00:44But he's commemorated here amongst men who stood up to the crown, the men who issued
00:50Magna Carta, our own Bill of Rights.
00:55Looking at these figures, it's hard to know whether they're supposed to be guarding the
00:59throne or keeping it in check.
01:02The real men behind these images were men of violence, men who held this country to
01:08right of conquest and yet it was they who demanded and issued the document that still
01:13guarantees our most fundamental freedoms.
01:17To me, the key to unravelling that conundrum lies in the remarkable life of William Marshall.
01:25A life that was rediscovered through a lost manuscript, the first biography of a medieval
01:31knight.
01:33It's an epic story of a man who rose through the ranks as a peerless warrior, tournament
01:40champion and paragon of chivalry.
01:43He died regent of England, leaving behind a simple memorial.
01:51William could have chosen to be remembered as a courtier, a politician, a great landholder.
01:57He was all of those things.
01:59But in the end, this effigy was designed to reflect the reputation he earned in life as
02:05the greatest knight in the world.
02:21In the heart of modern Manhattan you can find a priceless window onto the medieval world.
02:31Because here, in the vaults of the Morgan Library, a unique 800-year-old document survives.
02:41It tells us the story of William Marshall, a knight of the 12th and 13th centuries.
02:49And it puts flesh and blood on an obscure figure of history.
02:59This is the earliest biography of a real, live knight.
03:04It's estimated that perhaps there were 20 copies made, but of those only one has survived,
03:11and that's this very copy in front of us.
03:16The manuscript is really first heard of only at a Sotheby auction in 1861.
03:22There was no title, nothing from the outside of the book told us it was the life of William Marshall.
03:28It was actually commissioned by his son, who of course inherited all of his lands,
03:33and they wanted to make sure that their father was duly remembered.
03:45This Anglo-Norman French, it's actually rhymed verse.
03:48Well, they got a good French poet to do this.
03:51He was certainly very conscientious, because he interviewed many of those who were still alive that knew William Marshall.
03:58We know that he was probably over six feet tall, he had brown hair,
04:03he had a face that would have been worthy of a Roman emperor.
04:07I don't know if that's true or not, but it certainly makes good reading, but that's what the poet tells us.
04:15Look closely at this text, and an astonishing eyewitness story emerges.
04:21One man's journey through the medieval world.
04:25There was such a blow at him that he cut through his helmet, separating the coif from the horbuck and piercing the flesh.
04:31Bunches of bacon, wines, wheat, flour and...
04:33You shall not marry her anywhere else but here, and in this house your wedding will be so arrayed.
04:38The marshal leapt forward and clung by his hands to a strut supporting...
04:42What makes this manuscript so special for me, so priceless,
04:46is that it's this text that enables us to take William from just being another name in history
04:52and actually turns him into being a man.
04:56In these pages, he emerges as the great hero of the Central Middle Ages.
05:01And that means we can't take this text at face value.
05:04We have to ask questions.
05:06We have to ask what qualities does this text want us to believe William had?
05:10How does it set about creating him and shaping him as that perfect knight?
05:17The biography gives us a gripping romantic tale.
05:21But for me, it's only the starting point.
05:24To recover the truth of William Marshall's life, the life of a great medieval knight,
05:30we have to follow in his footsteps and look at all the evidence.
05:35And our journey begins back in England, in a forgotten corner of the West Country.
05:46William Marshall was born around 1147.
05:50Less than a century after the Norman conquest of England.
05:56His father was John, the Marshal of the King's Horses, a minor noble.
06:02And I've come to visit the remains of one of his fortifications.
06:07It may not look like much, but actually this is the most basic form of medieval castle.
06:13You can see a really rudimentary trench has been put here
06:17to try to stop attack, kind of moat.
06:20And then we've got a mound, a defensible position that could be used.
06:24Now, this is light years away from the great towering stone castles
06:28that you might imagine from the Middle Ages.
06:31But what's so exciting about this place for me
06:33is that this landscape is known as Hampstead Marshall.
06:36And it's right here that William Marshall took his first steps onto the pages of history.
06:43William was born into a time of civil war between King Stephen and Matilda,
06:49grandchildren of William the Conqueror.
06:52A period known as the Anarchy that lasted almost 20 years.
06:57Earthworks and wooden palisades went up across the country.
07:02Shaky defences for the few they could shelter.
07:06We know in 1152, somewhere in this landscape,
07:10probably in this very spot, John Marshall's men were attacked.
07:14They were besieged by King Stephen's army
07:17and his troops would have been spread out across this landscape.
07:22The biography paints a vivid picture.
07:25You should have seen the squires start to clamber with great daring
07:29over the ditches and up the embankments,
07:32and those within the walls defended themselves courageously and furiously.
07:36They hurled down slabs of stone, sharpened stakes
07:40and massive pieces of timber to knock them into the ground.
07:47Word was sent to John Marshall, who raced to the rescue of the men inside
07:52and begged for a truce from King Stephen.
07:55The king granted his request, but only in return for a hostage.
08:00So John produced his son.
08:03Not the eldest one, we're told, but the second one, William.
08:10William was just a little boy.
08:12He was four, maybe five years of age,
08:15and he now found himself a crown hostage in the midst of enemy troops.
08:20In a very real sense, I think his life was in danger.
08:24And then, shockingly, news arrived that his father
08:28had reneged on his side of the deal.
08:30He bluntly refused to surrender
08:32and declared that he no longer cared about the fate of his infant son.
08:36He's supposed to have said that he had the anvils and the hammers
08:40to forge an even better child.
08:44In the days that followed,
08:46King Stephen sought to use the young William's life as a bargaining chip.
08:50He was hoping to pressurise John into submission,
08:53and so he repeatedly paraded the boy in full view of the castle,
08:58threatening his life.
09:00At one point, William was dragged to the gallows to be hung.
09:04At another, he was placed in a catapult.
09:07They even contemplated using him as a human shield during a frontal assault.
09:12Unbelievably, throughout all of this, John remained unmoved.
09:20The bluff succeeded, and the king held on to William,
09:24though eventually he was released unharmed.
09:28As a young child, William had learned first-hand
09:32about the brutal realities of the medieval world,
09:35and that his own success, even survival, were by no means guaranteed.
09:43No-one could have guessed that the expendable younger son of John Marshall
09:47would go on to change the course of English history.
09:52And that's partly because William wasn't, in the way we'd think of it,
09:56an Englishman.
09:58By birth, he was a Norman,
10:01and it would be in Normandy that the young boy would turn into the knight.
10:08At the age of 13 or 14, William took to the seas
10:12to join the household of his mother's cousin,
10:15William de Tunkerville, the Chamberlain of Normandy.
10:19But for the young William Marshall,
10:21this wasn't so much a journey abroad as a journey back home.
10:29William's ancestors had made the crossing in the opposite direction
10:33with William the Conqueror.
10:35The events of 1066 were just one part
10:39of an extraordinary period of conquest and expansion,
10:43which saw a new elite warrior class
10:46claiming thrones across Europe and the Mediterranean.
10:51A class that William Marshall would come to epitomise.
10:59In the National Library in Paris,
11:02you can get an extraordinary glimpse of the first medieval knights,
11:07preserved forever in ivory.
11:15This is one of the oldest chess sets in Europe.
11:19Chess was a game invented in India,
11:22and this set was most likely crafted by an Arab working in southern Italy,
11:27and he seems to have adapted the game that he knew
11:30to depict the northern warriors who had conquered him.
11:34You can see that the person who's created this piece, a pawn,
11:39is trying to show that he's wearing a form of male armour,
11:43and he's got the classic Norman helmet
11:46with a central nosepiece, conical helmet.
11:50He's an infantryman.
11:52He's got a slightly haunted look about his eyes,
11:55as if to say, I'm the man on the front line.
11:58I'm going to be getting it first.
12:02And then, of course, there are the mounted warriors.
12:06The two pieces that fascinate me the most are the horsemen.
12:11They're some wonderful little details.
12:14You can see a beautiful stirrup,
12:18and one of the massive revolutions in technology
12:21that made so much difference in the 11th century
12:23was the creation of the stirrup.
12:25Suddenly, you didn't just have to hold onto the horse with your legs,
12:28you could actually control the horse and stay in the saddle.
12:33In Arab chess, this figure was just known as the horse,
12:37but under the influence of the Normans, it is changing into the knight.
12:42But this isn't quite yet the knight as we know it.
12:47This one at the front has the classic Norman kite shield,
12:52a shape that's so resonant from the Bayeux tapestry.
12:57This one, at least, is wearing what's pretty clear to be some form of helmet.
13:02The other one, maybe it's an attempt to show a helmet,
13:05maybe it's just some kind of hood.
13:09We have this idea that everyone in the 11th century
13:11would have known exactly what a knight was.
13:14But that's not true.
13:16It's precisely in this century,
13:18and in the decades leading up to William Marshall's birth and his life,
13:22that this class, this new warrior class, is emerging.
13:27And these chess pieces are some of the very first examples
13:31of an attempt to depict that new knightly group.
13:37We call them knights,
13:39but if you look at the writings of the time,
13:41they refer to them in Latin as milites, soldiers,
13:47in German or French as ritter or chevalier, horse riders,
13:54and in Anglo-Saxon as knicht, a retainer.
13:59This is what William had arrived in Normandy to become,
14:03a horseman, a soldier, and a faithful retainer.
14:10Welcome to Tancarville. This is the entrance to the castle.
14:15The place where William spent his first years in Normandy
14:19has since been swallowed by layers of later building
14:23and subsequently by the forces of nature.
14:40It's actually got quite a creepy atmosphere.
14:48I'm told that somewhere in the midst of this labyrinth
14:52is the core of the castle where William arrived around 1160.
15:01I'm not really sure how safe this floor is.
15:04The story goes that what we can see through this door
15:09is essentially the medieval part of this castle, this chateau.
15:14So I'm going to inch forward. Hopefully I won't plummet.
15:26Well, I think you can see that this is a much older part of the building.
15:31There may be signs that it might go back as far as the 12th century.
15:37The local legends around here suggest that this is where William Marshall might have slept.
15:42Guillaume Lamarachelle, he's a famous figure even here in Tancarville.
15:46And the reason is, is because this is where William came
15:50when he was 13, 14 years old, just a boy.
15:54He made the trip across the Channel, his first visit to Normandy,
15:58and he came here to learn how to be a knight.
16:02He spent six years in this place.
16:05We can be sure that he spent almost all of his days engaged in learning the arts of war,
16:11how to use a sword, how to ride a horse, how to wield a lance from horseback.
16:16His days wouldn't have been easy.
16:19But it's here in his biography that an image of William Marshall the man begins to emerge,
16:26or rather, William Marshall the teenager.
16:31The picture it paints is basically of an adolescent boy.
16:35We're told that William gained a reputation for liking to sleep,
16:39and worse still, that basically he was a greedy guts.
16:42He liked stuffing his face.
16:44It conjures a 12th-century locker-room atmosphere.
16:48All men together, the bullying, the banter.
16:52If you wanted to come somewhere to learn how to be a knight in the mid-12th century,
16:57you couldn't really choose a better place than this.
17:00I know it looks decrepit and neglected now,
17:03but when William was here, this was the place to come.
17:07Another contemporary described the lord of this place, the Lord of Tankerville,
17:12as the father of knights.
17:14He was so famed for the size of his knightly retinue
17:17and for the excellent education in military warfare that he gave them.
17:22William lived out his teens as a trainee or squire,
17:26until, in 1166, the armies of Flanders invaded,
17:31and anyone who could fight was needed in the defence of Normandy.
17:35So William was pressed into service at the age of 19.
17:39In a hasty battlefield ceremony, he knelt before his lord
17:43and was girded with the weapon that made him formerly a knight, a sword.
17:50The great symbol of knightly status,
17:53but also the essential practical tool for the bloody business of medieval warfare.
17:59And I've come to the Wallace Collection in London to meet Tobias Capwell
18:04and to see one of the finest medieval swords to survive in the world.
18:09So this is it, Wallace's fabulous sword collection.
18:12Yes, small but fabulous.
18:16Gosh!
18:19It's incredibly light.
18:22It literally feels like it's got a life of its own, like it's not there.
18:26I've never felt anything like that in my life.
18:29Gosh.
18:31It feels amazingly manoeuvrable as well.
18:35Yeah.
18:36You have to be a bit careful when we take swords out of cases
18:39because they do want to kill people.
18:42Could this have chopped through someone's arm?
18:45Yeah.
18:46Yeah, or head or leg.
18:48Ouch!
18:49Yeah, the effectiveness of these weapons is scary.
18:52So for me, one of the most evocative moments from William's life
18:56is that instance when he is created as a knight.
18:59But the most important part of that occasion for him,
19:02as it was for all other knights,
19:04is the moment when the sword is girded to his side.
19:07It's almost akin to the moment when the holy oil is loosed upon the head of a monarch.
19:12It's a moment of transformation.
19:14When they go from being one type of human being to another.
19:17The sword as a symbol of the elite warrior class
19:20goes way back, a long time before the Middle Ages.
19:24It's an ancient principle.
19:26And it's based on a couple of different factors.
19:29First of all, it's the expense.
19:32The materials to make a sword are very expensive
19:35and also hard to come by.
19:38Working the metal, getting the best balance of these important properties out of it
19:43is difficult and there are only a few craftsmen that can do it really well.
19:47If you make a small mistake and there's one little
19:50silicate inclusion in the wrong place,
19:53the sword will break the first time you hit somebody with it.
19:56But that's not what you want on the battlefield.
19:58But that's not really what you want.
20:00And finally, a weapon like this demands
20:04a very high level of martial skill.
20:07And being a martial artist requires luxury of time
20:11to be really good at it.
20:13You need to be fighting and practicing all of the time.
20:16And you had to be, essentially, a member of the aristocracy.
20:20You had to have the wealth to be able to afford something like this.
20:23That's what gives it its status.
20:25Or you need to be in the service of someone wealthy.
20:28The part of the culture of knighthood, even in this early period,
20:31is that good warriors who may not have an extremely elevated status
20:37can be brought into the household of someone
20:40and then elevate themselves in that way.
20:43And that's exactly what happens to William.
20:45Exactly.
20:48The simple reality of William's day was that if you wanted to serve
20:52as an elite warrior, you had to have the money
20:55to afford weapons, armour and horses.
20:58Of course, in times of war and conquest,
21:01there were spoils to be gained on the battlefield.
21:04The problem came at times of peace.
21:07To fill this void, a new idea evolved.
21:10A means both to hone your skill at arms
21:13and to accrue wealth.
21:16The tournament.
21:18And so much of what we know about this phenomenon
21:20comes from William's biography.
21:23Everywhere the news spread that between Saint-Étienne and Valens
21:27there would be a tournament in a fortnight's time.
21:32The field for William's first tournament was 30 miles wide.
21:37Put out of your mind the staged jousts of the later Middle Ages.
21:42These were battles with scores of participants
21:45that ranged over miles.
21:48The companies were now in sight of each other.
21:50Some sped along in disorderly fashion
21:52whilst others approached at a measured pace.
21:54The violence could be bloody and terrifying.
21:57There were so many blows that it was hard to count.
21:59Knights sought to pull him to the ground.
22:01Many a shield ran through and many a sword blow landed on helmets.
22:04But the aim was not to kill, but to capture your enemies
22:08and release them back in return for a payment in horses,
22:11weapons or hard cash.
22:15The five knights rode up and surrounded him,
22:17seizing his bridle and making every effort.
22:19Up came William the Marshal,
22:20fully armed, strong and of tall, handsome stature.
22:23Over the next 15 years,
22:25William became a famous tournament champion
22:28and later boasted to have captured 500 knights.
22:32His biographer tells us he fought only for honour.
22:36But he can't help revealing what else was at stake.
22:39Money.
22:41This text has a fascinatingly difficult relationship
22:45with that idea of materialism for William.
22:48It tells us here, for example, that he's been in a tournament,
22:51he's done, of course, he's done brilliantly, he's won everything,
22:54but it says very specifically, right at the top here,
23:01he had no thought whatsoever for gain.
23:04And it goes on to say that all he really cared about was honour.
23:08But if you go just a few folios forward,
23:11then we get a slightly different image.
23:13Rather wonderfully, the text actually reveals
23:16that William effectively employed his own accountant.
23:20He had a man who was named Wigain, the clerk of the kitchen,
23:24a man who kept a written list of every single knight
23:27that William defeated in a tournament during this period.
23:30More than 100.
23:32And on the basis of that list,
23:34William was able to see what ransoms were coming in.
23:37He was essentially able to check his cash flow.
23:40With so much at stake,
23:42it was in the interests of every knight for the fight to continue,
23:46but not for the risks to outweigh the rewards.
23:50There's a revealing anecdote at this point in their biography.
23:54He's attending a tournament,
23:56William shown as defeating a man called Philippe de Valouges.
24:00Philippe turned to William and gave him his pledge.
24:04And on the basis of that,
24:06William trusted him and decided to let him go.
24:10I think what we're seeing here are the very early stages
24:14of the codification of practice between knights,
24:17the idea of honour, of trust, of an interdependence.
24:22Really, these are the first signs of the code
24:25that we would think of as chivalry.
24:29William Marshall would come to define chivalry.
24:32The word literally meant good horsemanship
24:36and comprised all the physical virtues of the knight.
24:39But in a setting like the tournament,
24:42it was acquiring a new sense.
24:45A true chevalier was a man of honour
24:48whom other knights could rely on to play by the rules of the game.
24:52Knights were evolving rapidly in status and sophistication
24:56from the early mounted warriors.
24:58But William's rise through the ranks
25:01would come not through the chivalric combat of the tournament,
25:05but through his ability to display prowess
25:08in the real bloody business of war
25:12and to come to the notice of the great and the good.
25:17In 1168, William was travelling in the retinue of his uncle,
25:21the Earl of Salisbury,
25:23as they journeyed through France on a perilous mission,
25:26escorting a great lady between her castles.
25:30On the road, the party was suddenly ambushed.
25:34The Earl was killed instantly
25:36and William found himself fighting off over 60 attackers.
25:40He was wounded, captured and barely escaped with his life.
25:45But he'd bought enough time for his charge to escape to her castle.
25:50She didn't forget the man who had rescued her,
25:53but paid his ransom.
25:55And luckily for William, she happened to be Eleanor of Aquitaine,
26:01one of the most powerful women in the world.
26:04Eleanor was heiress to the Duchy of Aquitaine.
26:08She was married to Henry, Count of Anjou,
26:11who'd recently inherited the Kingdom of England.
26:15Between them, they ruled over a realm unrivaled in Europe,
26:19which brought Northmen like William
26:21into contact with the Mediterranean South.
26:25Aged only 21, William Marshall was drawn by Eleanor
26:29into the very heart of the most powerful
26:32and culturally vibrant court in Christendom.
26:38In Poitiers, Eleanor's great hall still survives,
26:42known evocatively as the Hall of Lost Footsteps.
26:56Lost to the vastness of the space...
27:02..and to the sensory overload that greeted a new arrival at court.
27:09PIANO PLAYS
27:15William would have been confronted by a barrage
27:18of different languages, voices, sounds.
27:26The court would have been packed with entertainers, musicians,
27:30poets, singers, troubadours.
27:34Another visitor to the court around this same time
27:37would have found how he developed a taste for the most exotic foods,
27:41in particular, roasted crane.
27:46This was a setting in which it was possible
27:49not just to operate during the day, but also at night.
27:53Royalty and the aristocracy could afford light and candles,
27:58an impossibility for peasants.
28:00And in that setting, in the darker hours,
28:03then we see a different side to the court.
28:08It was packed with the creatures of the night.
28:11There was a position that was officially described
28:14as the Marshal of the Whores.
28:17One especially notorious performer
28:20bore the rather wonderful appellation, Roland the Farter.
28:27William was a long way from the West Country now.
28:31This was the world of the poet, the troubadour,
28:34the real world that inspired the Arthurian romances.
28:38And Eleanor placed William at the heart of her Camelot,
28:42as mentor and companion at tournaments to the heir to the throne,
28:46crowned by his father as Henry the Young King.
28:54The young Henry was the most glamorous figure in Europe,
28:58a king who had no kingdom to rule,
29:01but he devoted himself to the ideal of chivalry.
29:04He spent his life at the tournament,
29:07lavishing money and patronage on his own round table of knights.
29:12William quickly rose to the head of this retinue,
29:15so much that his tournament prowess began to outshine that of the king.
29:23William was to learn that for a knight to get by,
29:26he would need to master another aspect of chivalry,
29:30courtesy, the knack of navigating the cutthroat world of the court.
29:38It seems that eventually William Starr rose so far
29:42within the entourage of the young king
29:45that some people, in the words of the biographer, became envious,
29:48they became jealous.
29:50A whispering campaign spread like wildfire amongst the members of the court,
29:55deprived of royal patronage by the marshals, all encompassing success,
30:00until one took the news to the young king himself.
30:05And the biography lays bare that moment in pretty stark terms.
30:10It tells us that it was said
30:13that William had been fornicating with the queen,
30:17or in even blunter terms, c'est, il le fait à la reine.
30:21He'd been doing it to the queen.
30:25William was accused of adultery with the young king's wife, Queen Margaret.
30:30And what made this charge so powerful
30:33was that it played into the paranoias of a court
30:36bred on tales of Sir Lancelot and Guinevere,
30:39the adultery of the great knight with his royal master's queen.
30:44Their attack was taken from the world of court poetry,
30:47but so was the marshal's chivalric response.
30:51He staunchly denied everything
30:54and publicly challenged his accusers,
30:57but none of them was ready to take him on in trial by combat.
31:01He had no choice but to go into exile,
31:04but he used the opportunity to spread his fame in tournament victories
31:08across northern Europe.
31:10And before long, the king realised he'd been deprived of his most able retainer.
31:15William returned with his reputation salvaged,
31:19while his enemies were exposed by their incautious boasts.
31:25It's an extraordinary romantic tale.
31:29But what should we make of the dramatic parallels
31:32between William's story and the Arthurian romances?
31:36Laura Ash, an expert on medieval literature, has her own theory.
31:40Interesting about that, though, is I think we often underestimate
31:43how much reality there is in the romances,
31:46because these romances really were written for people like William Marshall.
31:50And they actually do show you how to keep an eye on realities.
31:54I think that all of those stories of Lancelot and Buenavere
31:58or of Tristan and his heir,
32:00they make it very clear that this is something that happens.
32:04Because I think that the figure of Lancelot is really a metaphor,
32:08a metaphorical way of worrying about the fact
32:12that any king's best knight is going to be a better knight than the king.
32:16You know, we have a basic clash here.
32:18If you have a meritocratic system of prowess, of battles, tournaments,
32:23everyone knows who is the best knight.
32:25And then if you have a hereditary system of kingship,
32:28they're not going to be the same person.
32:30So, in some ways, I think the story, that recurring story
32:34of the adultery of the queen and the queen's champion
32:37is just a way of expressing that cultural anxiety.
32:40And the model, sort of, of the story,
32:44And the model for William is not going to be King Arthur,
32:47it's going to be Lancelot. Absolutely.
32:49And, of course, Lancelot is superior to Arthur,
32:52just in the way that William was superior to the young King Henry.
32:57William's life is a fascinating insight
33:00into the essential interdependency between a king and his knights.
33:04And the complexities of this relationship
33:07would dominate the rest of his career.
33:10And what he learned in the romantic court of the young king
33:13was that the emerging code of chivalry
33:16might help a knight to navigate his way through these difficulties.
33:22In 1183, the young king met a squalid end,
33:26dying of dysentery,
33:28and William fulfilled, on his behalf,
33:31his dying wish to go to Jerusalem.
33:34The marshal spent more than two years travelling to the Holy Land,
33:38arriving in the east just as tensions between the Crusaders
33:42and Saladin's Muslim armies were reaching boiling point.
33:46But frustratingly,
33:48we know nothing of William's contribution to this epic struggle.
33:53The biography does reveal one tantalising fact,
33:57in that he now vowed to join the famous order of Crusader knights,
34:01the Templars, before his death.
34:05He returned from the Holy Land in 1186.
34:09Through tournaments, courtly life, and his brush with the Crusades,
34:13William was starting to be seen as the embodiment of a chivalric ideal,
34:18something that would serve him well in years to come,
34:21as bigger challenges loomed.
34:24William now presented himself back at the court of King Henry II,
34:28and he moved definitively from the fantasy world of the tournament
34:33to the real battlefields and politics of Europe.
34:51It was in this period that William forged his reputation
34:55as one of the greatest knights in Europe.
34:59It's extraordinary to think that William spent the best part of 20 years
35:03nearly constantly on the move, crisscrossing this landscape.
35:09These were the lands of King Henry's birth,
35:12and he was constantly defending them against rival French rulers.
35:16William quickly became much more than just a soldier to Henry,
35:20a sign of the heights to which the best knights were rising.
35:26Men like William and other leading members of the royal household
35:30could serve as advisers, as elite warriors, and commanders in the field.
35:35But perhaps above all, they were prized for their trusted loyalty.
35:40This quality was one of the most essential aspects of chivalry.
35:44But as William had already learned,
35:46showing loyalty to a king was no simple matter.
35:50The problem came when the members of the dynasty you served
35:54began turning on one another.
35:56The question for William then was exactly where could your loyalties lie?
36:04The Angevin realm had long been riven by infighting.
36:07Henry II's offspring rebelled against his authority four times in 16 years.
36:13But the decisive threat was posed by his ultimate heir, Richard the Lionheart.
36:19This put William in an impossible position.
36:22Asked to fight against the man who would one day be his king.
36:26The moment of truth came in June 1189 at the town of Le Mans,
36:32where William was covering the ageing King Henry's retreat
36:36and found himself confronted by the heir to the throne.
36:40This would be a confrontation to savour.
36:43A clash between Richard the Lionheart,
36:46the man who would become England's finest warrior king,
36:50and William Marshall, the greatest knight of the Middle Ages.
36:54The two men charged towards one another at a gallop.
36:59William had his lance levelled.
37:01The question was whether he would dare to strike Richard directly,
37:05potentially killing the future king of England.
37:08At the last second, William adjusted his aim
37:12and drove the point of his lance into the body of Richard's horse.
37:15The beast fell to the ground dead.
37:18For the moment at least, Henry II's escape had been secured.
37:29But less than a month later, King Henry II was dead of an ulcer
37:34and the man whom William Marshall had bested
37:37was now proclaimed the new king.
37:40One of the most poignant and telling scenes of English royal history
37:47played itself out in the aftermath,
37:50in the nearby abbey where William buried his master.
37:54This is Henry II, King of England, ruler of the great Angevin Empire.
38:01But there's an irony that we find him here in his tomb effigy,
38:05laid out in resplendent, restful state,
38:09because in reality he suffered a pretty ignominious death.
38:14When William Marshall and the king's leading retainers found him,
38:18the royal chamber and the king's body had been ransacked by fleeing servants.
38:23The corpse was found semi-naked, sprawled on the floor with blood
38:28caked around his mouth and his nose.
38:32William and the other knights covered the king's body
38:36and then ever faithful, the Marshall escorted him here
38:40to the abbey at Fontevraux.
38:45It was a last act of fidelity to a king most thought best to abandon.
38:54With Henry's death, all thoughts now passed to the new king,
38:58his successor, Richard the Lionheart.
39:01For William Marshall, waiting here at Fontevraux,
39:04the days that followed were a period of great anxiety,
39:08given what had passed between them before.
39:10He had every expectation that the new king would strip him of his status.
39:15The biography paints an incredibly evocative picture.
39:22Richard arrived and looked down upon the body of his dead father.
39:29His face was said to have been an emotionless, unreadable mask.
39:34For all of those looking on, William Marshall included,
39:38there was not even the slightest hint of what the new king's next move might be.
39:53What he did was to call on William Marshall.
39:56Marshall, he said, the other day you intended to kill me.
40:01Boldly, William responded, it was never my intention to kill you.
40:06I am strong enough to aim my lance.
40:10What we're seeing is a game of politics, of power, of courtly life.
40:15So how did that game play out?
40:18Well, against all expectations,
40:20Richard the Lionheart chose not to punish William Marshall.
40:24Instead, he drew him into his own inner circle.
40:28It was simply inconceivable to throw someone with proven loyalty,
40:33like William Marshall, onto the scrapheap.
40:37The staunch fidelity William had shown in 1189
40:40proved enough to counteract his opposition to Richard's claim.
40:45There's no doubt that he backed the losing side
40:48when he supported Henry II to the end.
40:51But because of the chivalric knightly culture in which he lived,
40:55there was one thing that William could cling on to.
40:59In this time of turmoil and upheaval,
41:02he'd proven himself to be loyal to the last.
41:06And in the end, that would prove to be his salvation.
41:11It was a crucial lesson to William, which he never seems to have forgotten.
41:16The people might not forgive a man who changed sides,
41:20but a man who remained loyal could retain his honour and win reward.
41:28The reward for William's unstinting royal service
41:31came in the lands and castles of the King's Ward,
41:35Isabel, daughter of the Lord of Strigae.
41:40Strigae, known today as Chepstow,
41:43still commands the entrance to the Wye Valley in South Wales.
41:48For over a decade, its orphaned heiress awaited her adulthood
41:53and the fortunate husband who would inherit her land.
42:00Possession of this castle changed the lives of both William and Isabel.
42:06For Isabel, after years waiting in the wings as a prized heiress,
42:11this must have felt something akin to a return home to the land of her father.
42:18I think there's no doubt that it was William who experienced the most profound change.
42:24He'd spent decades fighting in other people's castles,
42:28living in other people's fortresses,
42:30and now he became Lord of his own castle.
42:34This was the realisation, the achievement of every knight's ambition
42:39to go from being a landless warrior to becoming a landed knight,
42:44a baron of the Kingdom of England.
42:48Now 42 years old, William had risen at an astonishing rate.
42:55The bestowal upon him of castles like Chepstow was transforming the Marshal
43:01from a figure defined by his loyalty to others
43:05to someone with his own interests and his own power base.
43:15And this building itself, the great hall of the main keep,
43:20the castle here at Chepstow,
43:23was the absolute epicentre of his authority.
43:28This is the place where he himself could hold court.
43:32Who might have come here?
43:34Well, first and foremost, it would have been his own family.
43:38Chief amongst them, his wife, Isabel.
43:41Chief amongst them, his wife, Isabel,
43:44who really was the reason he had possession of this castle.
43:48But beyond that, there was another essential group that would have met,
43:53that would have congregated, that would have been drawn to this space,
43:57and that was his knights, his own closest, most faithful retainers.
44:03Men like John of Early, Henry Hose, Geoffrey Fitzrobert.
44:08They came to this castle
44:10because they knew they could gain patronage and protection.
44:17William was himself now a father of knights,
44:21with men at his disposal to do his bidding.
44:24In addition to Stragoy, over the next decade,
44:28William gained possession of the earldoms of Leinster and Pembroke,
44:32the Wild West of medieval Europe.
44:36These men and these lands all added to his power,
44:40but they introduced to his life a new complication,
44:44obligations to his family and followers
44:47that could compete with his famous loyalty to his own master, the king.
44:55Of course, William, as Earl of Pembroke, was here to do the king's bidding,
44:59but I think his priorities lay elsewhere.
45:02This place gave him an incredible opportunity
45:05to carve out a semi-independent lordship,
45:08to be able to reward his faithful retainers,
45:11and perhaps above all, to be able to realise that greatest of knightly dreams,
45:16to be able to found his own dynasty.
45:20William set about finding lands and rewards for his knights,
45:24as generations of Norman conquerors had done before him.
45:28But his timing was inauspicious.
45:32The world was changing around him.
45:35Richard the Lionheart died fighting in France in 1199,
45:39and the Angevin Empire was quickly dismembered
45:42under the less effective rule of his younger brother, John.
45:46For the first time since 1066,
45:49knights like William were deprived of access to glories in France
45:54and confined to Britain.
45:57And the king, instead of handing out the proceeds of conquest,
46:01was taxing his knights and taking their lands,
46:05William included.
46:08And in this new era, the balance of power between a monarch and his knights
46:13would have to be resolved.
46:15In the year 1212,
46:17discontent with the increasingly unpopular king
46:20led to unrest across England.
46:23And before long, the realm was in the grip of a fully-fledged civil war.
46:29But by 1215, the rebel barons and the king
46:33had finally negotiated a new settlement for a new era.
46:38And that settlement survives in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
46:47So I feel immensely privileged, because it's no exaggeration to say
46:51that this box contains a document that changed English history.
46:56John was forced to agree to a series of concessions,
46:59enshrined in a text of profound significance.
47:06So this is Magna Carta, the Great Charter.
47:10We like to think of this document as being one of the cornerstones
47:13of our Western democracy,
47:15as a document that speaks about inalienable rights to liberty.
47:19And in some ways, that's true,
47:22because it does contain a critical clause.
47:30It goes on to talk about protection from imprisonment,
47:33from the seizure of property,
47:35and a right to an appeal to a panel of your peers,
47:39or recourse to law.
47:41There's a beautiful irony to this document,
47:44because the people who were at the heart of Magna Carta,
47:47the forging of this agreement,
47:49were knights.
47:51And we tend to think of that group as men who were warriors,
47:55who were bloodthirsty, rapacious warlords.
47:58And yet here we find them,
48:00right at the heart of a great charter of liberty.
48:04But in many ways, this document in 1215
48:07was actually about something much more specific.
48:10It was about the relationship between John and his leading nobles.
48:15The collapse of the Angevin Empire and John's rapacity
48:19had prompted knights,
48:21men who were accustomed to winning their status through warfare,
48:25to talk the language of law and governance.
48:29But it would be wrong to imagine
48:31that the drafting of this document
48:33ushered in a period of enduring peace.
48:38In 1215, what we really have is an agreement
48:41that's much more along the lines of a peace treaty.
48:45A series of conditions that are ironed out through negotiation
48:48between John and his nobles,
48:50with William Marshall right at the heart of those dealings,
48:53that are essentially there to produce a truce.
48:56And, in fact, that truce only lasts for a few months.
48:59Certainly by the end of that year, 1215,
49:02Magna Carta, as it then stood, was essentially a dead letter.
49:06The Magna Carta that survived to this day
49:09The Magna Carta that survived to influence English and world history
49:13was not published by King John,
49:15but was issued after his death the following year,
49:18and under another seal.
49:21This is a version of Magna Carta
49:23sealed by Rectoris Nostri et Regni Nostri.
49:27Our guardian and the guardian of our realm.
49:30And that man is named...
49:34..William Marshall.
49:37It's the clue to the last act of William's life,
49:41one that would stamp William's seal on our history forever,
49:45as the man who saved the kingdom.
49:52Back in 1213, William had been called out of semi-retirement.
49:57As John's barons left him one by one,
50:00he had summoned the man in the kingdom
50:03who was most famed for old-fashioned loyalty.
50:06The Marshall was now 69,
50:09an old man by the standards of his day,
50:12and carried huge respect on both sides.
50:15It was he who had helped to engineer the negotiations
50:18that led to Magna Carta.
50:21But for all William's efforts,
50:23John's power as a monarch could not be salvaged,
50:26and his kingdom was overrun by the rebels,
50:29this time with the help of Louis, Prince of France.
50:34Soon half the kingdom was in foreign hands,
50:38and William found himself once again burying a king.
50:44On 18 October 1216, the war still raging,
50:49John died, the broken king of a broken kingdom.
50:55The moment of King John's death in 1216,
50:59England was in utter turmoil, ripped apart by civil war.
51:04Two-thirds of the English aristocracy
51:07had turned their back on the Angevin royal dynasty.
51:11And with the arrival of an invasion force under the French Prince Louis,
51:15more than half of the realm had been lost,
51:18including the vital commercial centre of London.
51:23So who was the heir to this kingdom on its knees?
51:27Well, it was John's son, Henry,
51:30a boy of just nine years of age.
51:33His prospects could not have been bleaker.
51:39The child king was brought up from his sanctuary in Wiltshire,
51:44and all eyes turned to the Marshal,
51:47the most revered man in England,
51:50and the boy's only hope.
51:55William raced south to meet the young Henry on the road.
51:59The meeting that followed was deeply emotionally charged.
52:03The boy was so small and vulnerable
52:05that he actually had to be carried by one of his household knights.
52:09He approached the Marshal, pleading for his protection,
52:13saying,
52:14I give myself over to God and to you.
52:18William responded by pledging himself to serve Henry
52:22so long as he was able.
52:24At this moment, everyone wept, the Marshal included.
52:37The old man knelt before his nine-year-old sovereign.
52:41The fates of both were now inextricably linked.
52:46This was, I think, the most important decision of William Marshal's life.
52:52The moment at which he gambled everything,
52:55backing a boy who seemed doomed to failure.
52:59It was said that William promised that he would support Henry no matter what.
53:04Even if all the rest of the world deserted him,
53:07he would carry the young boy on his shoulders from land to land,
53:11begging for food and bread if he had to.
53:14By this choice, William put his family, his dynasty,
53:19the lands that he had gained, on the line.
53:22There was a very real possibility that his dynasty, that his future,
53:27would come to an end when Henry III failed as a king.
53:32William now accepted the honour,
53:35but also the burden of England's regency.
53:39So why did he take this risk?
53:43We can never know,
53:45but perhaps we can look for an answer in his conception of chivalry.
53:50He did not want to be shamed, he did not want to damage his reputation.
53:55He wanted to be seen to do the honourable, chivalric thing,
53:59the thing that a knight of his status should do.
54:03In the end, William may have made a calculated, self-serving decision
54:08to preserve his good name,
54:10or acted out of an authentic sense of loyalty to the crown.
54:15Whatever the case, William now found himself at the front line of a war
54:20that would determine the fate of England.
54:24In May 1217, William, at the age of 70,
54:29drew up his forces outside Lincoln,
54:32intent on striking a decisive blow against the rebels and the French.
54:39It was said that he delivered a rousing speech to his men,
54:42claiming that the invading French were bent upon total destruction.
54:47Fight with unbreakable resolve, he urged,
54:50for the sake of your loved ones, for our land,
54:54and to win the highest honour.
54:59This man, as much Norman as English,
55:03a man once defined by his class, not his nation,
55:07had now issued an emotional appeal grounded in English identity.
55:14And it was William's decision to place himself
55:17at the heart of the fighting here in Lincoln,
55:20despite his old age,
55:22that inspired the Royal Army to victory.
55:28If this battle had played out differently,
55:30we'd be looking at an England
55:32that would suddenly be part of the Kingdom of France.
55:35Our future as a nation would have been entirely different.
55:39And it's Lincoln that means that what we now think of as the Royal Line,
55:43the English Royal Line, survived as we know it.
55:47In the end, it was a knight who could achieve this success.
55:51All the romanticism, all the mythology that surrounds ideas of chivalry,
55:56it's still true to say that the greatest of knights,
55:59men like William Marshall, could shape history.
56:06William served as regent for a further two years
56:11before old age took him.
56:13But in that time, he sought to settle and stabilise England,
56:18the England of Magna Carta, reissued under his seal.
56:24William Marshall died in a different England
56:27to the one in which he'd been born.
56:30But it was a country that he had been instrumental in shaping.
56:35For centuries thereafter, England would be ruled by kings,
56:39supported but also checked by a warrior aristocracy.
56:44And the ideals they hammered out on the tournament field,
56:48in the politics of the court, in the blood of civil war,
56:52and ultimately in Magna Carta,
56:56formed the basis of the principles by which we are all now governed.
57:02And for me, this is the greatest revelation of William Marshall's life.
57:09He is, I think, emblematic of a period
57:12in which knights became more than mere agents of conquest.
57:16It was William and knights like him who stemmed the tide of royal tyranny,
57:22who promoted the rule of law.
57:24Of course, most did so in pursuit of their own interests,
57:28but nonetheless, they helped to create the country in which we now live.
57:58From W1A.