But the beginning of the drama did not involve the Empress, but the Bishop of Sarisberie.
The first act took place at Oxford, where Stephen had summoned his magnates for a council meeting; and the spark that lit the fire was nothing more than a brawl at an inn between some of Bishop Roger’s men and a group of retainers in the service of the other magnates, that had arisen over an argument about their lodgings. Some said that it had been planned by the king. It was possible. Several men were wounded and one knight killed.
Whether he planned it or not, it was the excuse that Stephen had been looking for: Bishop Roger’s men had broken the king’s peace: he was responsible. Immediately he summoned not only Roger but his son the chancellor and his two nephews, the Bishops of Ely and Lincoln into his presence. They must make reparation for the brawl, he told them; and for the time being, they must surrender the keys of their castles to him as guarantees that they could be trusted.
It was one of his shrewder moves. The bishops were undefended, away from their strongholds: they were taken by surprise; but if they were loyal, they would deliver the keys at once.
They hesitated.
The king knew what he must do. He let them return to their lodgings. Then he sent his men to arrest them.
But as usual, Stephen failed to close the trap properly: Bishop Roger, his son, and the Bishop of Lincoln were captured; but Nigel, Bishop of Ely escaped.
“And he has gone to Devizes,” the excited messenger told Godefroi. “He’s holding the castle and the king’s on his way there now.”
This was it. The picture was only too clear. The towns that lay in a great ring around the high ground of Sarum: Marlborough, twenty-five miles to the north, then Devizes, Trowbridge, Malmesbury to the north west, Sherborne to the south west, and finally Sarisberie at the centre – market towns each with their own stout castles – would become the scene of operations. Thank the Lord he had sent his family to London. Anything could happen; but as for his own position, he was going to get as close to the centre as possible, to see which way the wind was blowing. He would have to act quickly.
Within an hour he was speaking to Nicholas.
“Fortify the manor, Masoun,” he told him. “I am going to Devizes.”
The king’s camp outside Devizes was, like so many of Stephen’s operations, a hastily constructed and rather disorganised affair. It did not take Godefroi long to find the two tents occupied by William of Sarisberie and his brother Patrick, and before he went in, one of the young squires brought him up to date with news.
“Bishop Roger’s in detention,” he waved towards a tent where two men were standing guard. “He hasn’t eaten since we left Oxford. And his son the Chancellor’s in chains.”
Godefroi whistled softly. This was an extraordinary reversal for the powerful upstart family.
“And in there?” He indicated the stout castle keep inside the town walls.
“The Bishop of Ely’s in there. And he’s got Matilda of Ramsbury there too.”
This was the striking dark mistress of Bishop Roger and mother of the Chancellor.
The knight laughed. “Quite a family affair. The king really means to break them then?”
The young man gave him a curious look.
“If he can. You’d better go in.”
The two brothers were standing together in the tent, deep in conversation. Several other knights crowded the place as well. When William saw Godefroi come in he looked surprised, then shot the knight a careful look of suspicion; but obviously deciding it was unlikely that the knight from Avonsford was intriguing with other parties, he came towards him with an outstretched hand. Like his brother he was a tall, spare figure with a long, fine face only marred by a brutal and slightly crooked nose.
“We didn’t send for you, Richard, but we’re glad you came,” he said easily. “You’ve heard the news?”
Godefroi nodded. William turned confidentially to one side.
“It looks as if the king may win this skirmish, if he sticks it out,” he murmured.
“Will he?”
William grimaced.
“God knows. He’s like the wind: always moving but constantly changing direction. He starts things well but never finishes them, you know. He’s just as likely to get bored and break the whole siege off.”
“If he does, what then?”
The magnate looked at Godefroi carefully.
“We’ll tell you what to do,” he said, and turned away.
Several times that day Godefroi saw the king. Stephen went about the camp bare-headed usually, accompanied by a group of magnates. Godefroi noticed that his curly hair was thinning. He seemed cheerful though. His general, William of Ypres, had stationed his men in front of the castle gates, and was prepared to settle down to a regular siege. But on the afternoon that Godefroi arrived, a messenger suddenly ran out of the king’s tent and galloped towards the town.
Even William of Sarisberie was surprised by the king’s message.
“He’s told them that unless they surrender, he’ll hang the Chancellor in front of the gates,” he explained to Richard. “As for Bishop Roger, the king says since he’s started to fast, he may as well continue it indefinitely. He’s getting nothing – not even water.”
But if King Stephen thought this would bring matters to a head, he under-estimated the Bishop of Ely.
“He says the king can hang and starve who he likes,” the squire at William’s tent told Godefroi excitedly, and William soon confirmed it.
“He’s called the king’s bluff,” he remarked coolly. “Now we shall see.”
The next morning they brought the stout, balding Chancellor out of his tent. His hands were bound and there was a noose round his neck. They put him on a horse and led him up to the castle walls before taking him back to the camp. But still there was no response from within.
In the afternoon they tried another tactic: they sent out Bishop Roger to talk to the rebels.
Godefroi watched him as six men-at-arms led him past: even under guard and after several days of starving, he was a frightening sight; his fast had done nothing to reduce his massive paunch; his heavy jowl shook as he walked. He stomped along looking neither to right nor left, and out of sheer force of habit, Godefroi shivered. The aura of power and menace he remembered had not left him.
But the conference that took place in front of the town between Bishop Roger and his nephew was a failure. Roger, with his practical eye, had seen at once that it would be better to surrender the castle and win back the easy-going king’s favour; the resistance was only making his cause weaker and might cost his son’s life. But Nigel of Ely was indifferent to his cousin’s death, or his uncle starving, and after a short while Roger returned to the castle.
The next day the test of wills went on. William of Sarisberie grew impatient.
“If the king’s going to hang the chancellor, then why doesn’t he do it?” he asked irritably.
It was his lack of ruthlessness that made Stephen such a poor leader; if the king would not carry out his threat then even a humble knight like Godefroi could see that there would never be order in the kingdom.
Another day passed.
And then, unexpectedly, Stephen won everything he wanted. A messenger came out of the town and offered surrender if Bishop Roger and his son were set free. Within minutes, terms were agreed and the king walked through the camp beaming.
But the magnates were less impressed.
“It wasn’t the Bishop of Ely who sent the messenger,” William told Godefroi. “It was Matilda of Ramsbury: she couldn’t bear to see her son hanged.” He grimaced with disgust. “The king’s been lucky. But if the empress invades, he won’t be able to frighten her so easily.”
For the time being however, Stephen was satisfied. He had the castles of Devizes, Malmesbury, Sherborne and Sarisberie: not only that, he had all the treasure and arms that Bishop Roger had amassed in them. The immediate crisis appeared to be over.
That night there was a feast, to which Godefroi was summoned by William, and the next morning the men began to break camp.
But there was one more surprise in store for the knight from Avonsford. Just as he was saddling his horse, an unexpected arrival made his way through the tents and packhorses. It was William atte Brigge.
His face was sullen but determined. He loped through the camp, only stopping to ask the way to the king. For the cantankerous tanner, hearing the king was so near, had come to seek royal justice in the case concerning the Shockley farm.
Such quests were not uncommon: the king’s court existed at whatever place the king was, and any free man had a right to royal justice. Before now litigants had followed the Norman monarchs all over the island, and even across the sea to Normandy to try to get their case heard.
As soon as Godefroi saw the tanner’s dark face he guessed why he was there; since he had just sent the farmer of Shockley to London with his wife, he could not help feeling responsible for him. With an oath, he hurried after him.
He need not have worried. When William atte Brigge reached the place where the king and a group of his nobles were standing, he blurted out his demands to the squire who was sent to ask him his business. He was a wronged man, dispossessed of his farm; he had come to the king for justice. His angry words tumbled out all together. He seemed to expect the king to hear the matter at once.
Stephen stared towards him in surprise, then smiled.
“Where do you come from?”
“From Wilton,” the tanner replied.
Stephen turned to a group beside him.
“We have a castle near there,” he cried.
There was a shout of laughter. William atte Brigge glowered in confusion.
“I’ll hear your case, tanner,” the king called out. “In my castle of Sarisberie.” And he waved him away.
It was enough for the tanner. The nobles might be laughing at him, but the king had promised to hear his case. Satisfied, he turned to go, and Godefroi, shaking his head not only at the fellow’s audacity but at the trouble it could cause his friend from Shockley, mounted his horse and headed back to Sarum.
His mind was not at rest on any count. Whatever the king’s temporary success might have been, as he rode over the high ground the voice of the magnate echoed in his head:
“We’ll tell you what to do.”
There was something else that was wrong; and as he waited on events during the coming months at Sarum, Richard de Godefroi became increasingly filled with a sense of desolation.
It was not only the threatening political anarchy of a war between Stephen and the empress, not only the treachery in the air over Sarum, nor even the fear that in the uncertain times he might lose his lands that troubled his spirit.
It was something more profound – a sense that not only England, but all Christendom was sick – and it had been brought home to him by the sight of the bishops at Devizes and their conduct. For though he was a level-headed realist, the knight of Avonsford still believed that the Church should be sacred. And how could it be so with three such bishops as these?
“I believe in Our Lord’s true Church,” he confessed to John of Shockley a few days later: “Yet I no longer know where to find it.”
In other times, he believed, it had been easier. No man could doubt the saintliness of Bishop Osmund. Few even questioned the authority of such great Church servants as the great Archbishop Lanfranc or the scholarly Anselm in previous reigns. Had not a former abbess of Wilton and member of the old Saxon royal house, Edith, already been made a saint? When Pope Leon announced the First Crusade, did anyone doubt that they were doing God’s will in going to fight the Saracen? This was the true Church: the Church that governed the spiritual life of all Europe just as, in times past, Rome had governed the temporal world with her armies; the Church that was the undisputed voice of moral authority; the Church that ordered monarchs themselves to observe days of peace; the Church that, even if it had faults, constantly renewed itself.
Bishops should be men of God – named by the king, certainly; holding their vast lands with his permission too; but they should be drawn from the monasteries or put forward by their congregations, as they once had been. That was the knight’s view. He was prepared to modify it in one respect. It had long been the practice of kings to reward their greatest servants with rich bishoprics which were, of course, only held for the servant’s lifetime, and which, being church lands, cost the king nothing to bestow. This was a compromise; but he saw no great harm in it if the king’s servants were worthy men. What he had seen now, however, was nothing more than three rascals from an upstart family, making a mockery of a sacred office. And even the king seemed to accept it. He felt nothing but a sense of disgust.
Church and state were both necessary; but they should be opposite sides of the same Christian coin, in harmony with each other.
But it was no longer so. In recent generations a new conflict had been born, a conflict between State power and religious authority,
regnum et sacerdotum
, that was to echo through the Middle Ages and far beyond. Who was superior on earth, the pope or a monarch? Who invested bishops with their spiritual authority and their estates – the Vicar of Rome or the king? Who chose abbots and bishops? If a priest committed a criminal act, should he be tried by the king’s court or the bishop’s? At its best, this quarrel was between the king and the universal church which was determined to maintain its spiritual independence. At its worst, it was an excuse for cynical power politics between the monarch and the Church with its huge estates. It was exactly the struggle for power that was to have a bloody outcome when Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered in the next reign.