THE KNIGHT

The intersecting histories of William Marshal,
Richard the Lionheart, King John, and Stephen Langton reveal in brilliant and mesmerizing detail the luminous ideals and gritty realities that contributed to Magna Carta and the lives we live today. There was never a dull moment on the road to Runnymede, and the greatest of these knights and anti-knights was not a knight at all.

With a Horse
Part 1

One cool, misty morning, I rode through a forest. I had borrowed a horse, and we jiggled over the roots of trees on the narrow forest path. The horse put me up in the air, with a higher view than the one I usually had, and different sensations. I felt the earth through his body and the warmth and strength of his body with my legs. I was attentive to to the forest and to him – to the low-hanging branches that might scrape my face or knock me out of my seat and to his unexpected moves, though he seemed a steady character. Because he spent most of his life outdoors in the fields, he did not have the nervousness and anger of horses who stand all day confined to a stall, and he seemed happy to be with me. His name – I kid you not – was Lancelot.

As sunlight began to stream through the mist and the trees, the country had never seemed more alive than when I saw it with him. We left the woods and started up a steep hill. He began cantering. I had just adjusted to the lovely rolling excitement of his canter when we reached a meadow high above the river, where the grass was green and long, and Lancelot increased his speed. We were galloping straight toward a low rail fence. In another moment he met the fence, and with an easy exhilarating jump sailed me over. As he slowed to a trot and entered the trees on the other side, I laughed out loud.

Swinging off him several hours later, pulling up the stirrups and loosening his girth, I walked with him back to the yard. I was tired. The muscles of my thighs ached. Once seated so high, I now stood with my head below his. While he drank and ate – his food had arrived, there was no stopping him – I brushed him down and picked his shoes clean, a servant to him who had been my servant. In 13th century England this would have been the task of a squire, not a knight, but it is worth remembering that almost every knight began as a squire and that in Old English the word knight originally meant servant.

I give you my impressions of riding, which some of you will know far better than I, because I think that the experience of riding gave Brits an experience of mobility and freedom that spurred their love of liberty. King John sealed Magna Carta, the foundation of freedom in Britain and America, in the presence of a host of knights and bishops on horseback in a meadow. When he threw off the mask of compliance, they fought to defend it on horseback just a few months later.

In Magna Carta, King John addresses his most important bishops and barons by name, and the very first baron he names is William Marshal. Like all the barons and the King himself, William Marshal was also a knight. His turbulent career illuminates John and Magna Carta, and sheds light on modern concepts such as just law, the Geneva conventions, and the role of a prime minister or president.

Marshal's first experience with a King of England occurred when he was a small boy of five or six and his father sent him to the King as a hostage.

Tournaments, chivalry and assassinations Part 2

When William Marshal's father sent him to Stephen, King of England, as a hostage in 1152, Stephen was besieging John Marshal’s castle, and Marshal needed a truce. Reckless of his little son, he used the truce to re-arm. The King warned him that his son would die, but the elder Marshal’s notorious answer was that he didn’t care about his son since he “still had the anvils and hammers to produce finer ones”. In fact John Marshal had no finer son than William, but he never understood this.

What the child felt I do not know. He survived partly because Stephen could not bear to kill him, partly because it would not have been politic. His mother sent him to be fostered with her cousin, the chamberlain of Normandy.

William learned to wrestle and ride and to fight with a spear and a sword on foot and on horseback. It is doubtful he learned to read. He was a big guy, and he ate when he wasn't sleeping and slept when he wasn't eating, which sounds typical of a teenager. At the age of fifteen or sixteen, he became a squire in service to a knight. His duties included dressing the knight in the morning, serving all of the knight’s meals, caring for the knight’s horse, and cleaning his armour and weapons.

At this time armour was not a suit of plate armour but a coat of chainmail and a helmet. The chainmail was created with an exacting skill that warns against underestimating the people of the 12th century. They had, after all, built the Tower of London a hundred years earlier. In London, Edward Rutherfurd explains how a long, thin iron bar was heated in the forge to soften it, and then its end was worked through a steel draw plate with a hole in the middle, dragged repeatedly through the plate and then through a plate with a smaller hole until the rod was stripped and stretched thin. The wire that resulted was wrapped around a metal spindle and cut to form iron rings with open ends. The rings were then pushed through a tapering hole in a steel block to force one of the ends to neatly overlap the other, were softened in the brazier and then, while hot, put in a mould and given two taps with a hammer to flatten the overlapping ends. Using piercing tongs, a tiny hole was punched through the flattened ends. The result was that the links rarely varied by more than twelve-thousandths of one inch.

After cooling in oil, the rings were laid out geometrically and riveted together to create a coat with a slit front and back for riding, elbow-length sleeves, and a hood that could be pushed back onto the shoulders. The rings on the outside were rough, but the inner rings, which rested against a leather undercoat, were "smooth as cloth". Then the soft iron coat was placed in crushed charcoal in an iron box that went into the forge. When the iron coat emerged, it had become steel. A chainmail coat was something of a luxury, and this would be a problem for William, who was very poor.

His father died when he was nineteen or twenty, and William, who was the fourth son, received no land and no money. He had nothing to support himself with except his body and his skill with a sword, but as a brief frontier war flared, he “found himself in the rare position. . .of commencing his career in a pitched battle” (Oxford DNB).

“Get back, William, don't be such a hothead, let the knights through!” his master shouted, as he proceeded to distinguish himself in the skirmish. Unfortunately he lost his horse in the cut and thrust of a street fight in the suburbs of Neufchâtel, and failed to take advantage of the opportunity to seize the ransoms that would have retrieved the situation. This was ironically pointed out to him by the earl of Essex, who, at the victory banquet, asked him loudly for various items of saddlery and harness, which he could not produce—but of which he could have had his pick, had he fought professionally, rather than boyishly, in the manner of a knight of the romance” (DNB).

William was now in the unfortunate situation of having to sell his clothes in order to buy a horse. However, he rode off with his lance to a jousting tournament, determined to make some money, very much as a golf champion today might head off with his clubs to play a tournament in hopes of winning a purse.

As you know, tournaments were mock battles, fought before an audience of knights and ladies. The knight fought both as a single champion and on a team, and was expected to follow the rules and to act chivalrously. To make sure knights did, umpires watched for dishonest play. Really it was very like a sporting event, only with the participants weighed down by 40 to 60 pounds of chainmail, a shield, a lance and a heavy sword. It began with individual jousting followed by the charge of two lines of knights who at the sound of a bugle would gallop toward each other with levelled lances. Those who remained on horseback would "turn" and the event would turn into a mêlée as knights fought to unhorse each other and take ransoms over a field of several square miles. William was terrific, and “threw himself into the tournament circuit for over a year”.

With the money he made unhorsing knights he took service with his mother’s brother, Earl Patrick of Salisbury, only to see the Earl assassinated near Poitou. William was trapped against a hedge, wounded in the thigh by a slash from behind, and captured. Suffering from his wound, he was “half-starved by his uncourtly captors”.

By now William was already a knight, made so in a public ceremony after he had fasted and prayed the night in a chapel before his sword, which was laid on the altar. In the morning he had bathed and dressed and confessed, and after his night meditation and his bath had come before his lord dressed in only a tunic with his sword strung around his neck. He had told him why he wished to be a knight and had promised to follow the code of chivalry which called on him to defend the weak, to be courteous to all women, to be loyal to his king, serve God at all times, and give mercy to a vanquished enemy. If he captured a knight he would treat him with respect as a guest until his ransom was paid; if wounded, it was expected the knight would be cared for and his injuries treated.

Having sworn to be a chivalrous knight, William knelt. His lord tapped him lightly on each shoulder with a sword, or, as often happened in that period, hit him with a sword and knocked him over in a reminder to be humble. Then everyone enjoyed a huge feast with music and dancing.

The chivalric code was a rare and remarkable code of conduct for any century, including the 21st. That it was not always followed does not diminish it. One of its sources is easy to identify. That is the Christian idea that we should treat others as we wish to be treated. This supremely practical rule had been grasped by the knights, and became something quite beautiful and inspiring when honoured in the breach.

The code's onus against “unchivalrous” assassinations and “uncourtly” treatment of prisoners existed because if such things became common, society would descend into chaos. Everyone would abuse everyone else in a desperate effort to protect or advance their own interests, and in the confusion and unpredictable violence, no one would be safe and no one would prosper. You can have little doubt that this unhappy syndrome remains common in the world today. Trust is a hallmark of a successful society, and there was a united feeling that those who abused the code of chivalry deserved punishment in order that everyone else would have the confidence to trust each other and cooperate. Though it has been largely forgotten by historians, lack of chivalry would be one of the more severe charges against King John.

Though chivalry appears to be romantic and out-of-date, it is a clear forerunner of the Geneva Conventions: the First Geneva Convention "for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field”; the Third Geneva Convention "relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War”; and the Fourth Geneva Convention "relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War".

Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry II’s Queen, ransomed William from captivity, and took him into her retinue. Her biography reports that William had helped to rescue her when his uncle was assassinated and before he was captured. On his release, he spent at least a year in her court, which was famous for attracting troubadors and advocating the theories of courtly love. These do not seem to have made much of an impression on William, nor, it has to be said, on the iron-willed Eleanor.

When he was 24, Eleanor sent William to England, to serve her eldest son, young Henry, as his tutor in arms. It is possible she was already forming her treacherous plans. In 1174, when he was 27, William was Henry's knight companion when he fled his father's court. The Young King, as he was called, was angry that his father had given lands he considered his to John. The Queen supported her son's rebellion against Henry II. Henry's contributions to equity and justice in English courts were large, but he was an exasperating father.

In the whirlwind years that followed, the rebellion of the tall, blonde extravagantly generous and inconsistent Henry was put down. The young Henry allied with his father against the French King then fell out with his brother Richard and his father. By then he had quarreled with William Marshal, and had dismissed him. In 1183, the Young King fell ill with dysentery. He begged his father to forgive him, and pleaded with him to visit him, but Henry, suspecting a trap, did not come.

William Marshal arrived in time to promise his dying lord that he would take his cloak on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He was gone two years.

The Young King's death would prove momentous for English history. The succession passed to Richard the Lionheart. When he returned from the Holy Land in 1186, William entered Henry II’s household, and served as his Marshal.

After battling the King of France, Henry II found himself under attack by his remaining sons. He escaped from Le Mans on 12 June 1189, and William Marshal commanded the party that acted as his rearguard to protect the Old King's flight to Angers. “In the course of the action he encountered Richard, the king's son, who was leading the pursuit. Richard was alone and unsupported, having ridden lightly armed ahead of his troops. He is said to have begged the Marshal to spare him, as to kill him would be dishonourable. The Marshal shouted, ‘Indeed I won't, let the Devil kill you, I shall not be the one to do it’, and shifted his lance to kill Richard's horse beneath him” (DNB).

This is an unpleasant episode for those who love horses, but it was the right decision. Marshal rode off to defend his King, leaving Richard stranded. Within the month Henry II was dead, and Richard asked William to be his right-hand man.

William Marshal was now 42. In 1189 he finally married. His wife Isabel was the eighteen-year old daughter of the late earl of Clare. William became the loving father of sons, and in a fairytale-like twist, inherited his father's title and all his lands from his elder brother. Richard had gone on crusade to win Jerusalem back from Moslems who refused to allow pilgrims access. In service to the absent king, William Marshal fought to protect Richard from John at Nottingham, a story much loved by Robin Hood fans. It was not long before he would be facing John in all his hostile arrogance alone.

Fighting to hold the centre
Part 3

Rather unfairly charged with being an absentee King of England, Richard ruled a kingdom that included rebellious duchies in France and hostile neighbours. Before he left England on Crusade in December, 1189, he restored estates to men whom his father Henry II had disinherited; appointed new justiciars who would serve him under the watchful eyes of William Marshal; named new sheriffs; confirmed old grants and made new ones. Those who kept their lands or received new offices paid fines (fees) for them. This was standard practice for a new king, but Richard's pace in reorganizing his government was breathtaking.

Richard intuitively recognized that without the central force of a king, lesser powers would battle for primacy and destroy the kingdom. William Marshal understood this as well, and was bound by his oath to his King to support him. When Richard was away on Crusade, and John tried to seize his crown, Marshal foiled John’s treachery with the help of crusader and justiciar Hubert Walter.

The idea of a powerful executive will prove to be important in the development of the British and American constitutions. In America a strong executive was created as a check on the other two branches of government (which, in turn, checked the executive). John Adams noted this idea was British. In Britain, increasing checks have been placed on the monarchy, which once served as the executive, until today, the monarch's executive power has been whittled away.

Constitutionally the Sovereign remains in covenant with the people to defend their laws and liberties, is head of the Armed Forces and can refuse his or her Assent to Acts of Parliament. But perhaps fearing a constitutional crisis, the Sovereign does not refuse Assent. Instead the Prime Minister, who is completely identified with his party in Parliament, has seized executive power, and there is very little power to check this increasingly rampaging Minister or Parliament. For details, see Your Own Choice.

Richard and William Marshal had different worries than we do, but not so very different. In addition to the concept of a stable, accountable executive power, Richard was well aware of his image. The Oxford DNB reports that he consciously associated himself with the world of romance, riding out of Vézelay carrying a sword that was supposedly King Arthur’s Excalibur. But Richard was also businesslike. When he required additional transport on his way to the Holy Land, he didn’t hesitate to exchange Arthur's mythical sword for nineteen ships.

Richard conducted a brilliant military campaign in the Holy Land, and defeated the forces of Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt. But he could not persuade the European nobles leading troops with him that the key to freeing and controlling Jerusalem was Egypt, the source of Saladin's power.

As you have observed, the code of chivalry was a forerunner of the Geneva Conventions as it called for the humane treatment of women and knightly prisoners. The principle worked when captured knights acted according to the code and abided by their word of honour not to return to the fray and resume fighting. If they did, the law of tit for tat would rapidly operate and they would learn what it meant to break their word.

This chivalric code only went so far. The Crusaders captured 3,000 Muslims in battle at Acre, but Saladin reneged on his promise to ransom them. The Crusaders were aware that Saladin had beheaded more than a thousand captured Crusaders in previous encounters, including Raynald de Chatillon. They faced the fact that they did not share the same cultural mores, and that if they released the foreign soldiers, it was likely they would have to fight them again. A more immediate problem was that their food supplies were very low, and they were facing starvation. As a result, the Crusaders killed these prisoners.

In contrast, British and American forces fighting today in Iraq will immediately treat the medical wounds of captured Muslim fighters even though they do not strictly fall under the Geneva Conventions since they are not the uniformed soldiers of a hostile nation. After healing them, they frequently release them. Their actions rise out of observing the Geneva Conventions and perhaps out of the concept of chivalry. Nevertheless modern warfare is far more destructive than anything seen during the Crusades.

“Considered as an administrative, political, and military exercise,” writes the DNB, Richard’s crusade was “an astonishing success”. He retook the coast from Tyre to Jaffa so it was once again in Christian hands, and Christian pilgrims were allowed access to Jerusalem. Richard was successful because his men knew he never asked more of them than he asked of himself. When, against advice, he went to the rescue of a foraging party in difficulties, he said, “I sent those men there. If they die without me, may I never again be called a king” (DNB).

Today many people abhor Richard’s feeling that he was called by religious obligation to rescue the Holy Land. They consider any fighting or killing done by any Christian to be wrong and to directly contradict Christ’s injunction to “love your enemies”. Like the Christian knights, we have a different idea.

While we believe we are called to try to love even those who hate us, we also believe that if we had to we would kill a person to stop him from killing a child or a woman or a man or one of us. “Turning one’s cheek” to receive a second smack is entirely different from dying without defending ourselves or another person. The Ten Commandments that Christ quoted do not say, “Do not kill”. They say, “Do not murder”.

We may be wrong about our belief in the sanctity of self-defence. However, the idea is firmly embedded in the Anglosphere's justice system, and the possibility of self-defence helps to curb evil. The knights, of course, were not always acting in self-defence, but before I assume that they were rude creatures, less advanced than I because living centuries ago, it's salutary to observe that in addition to noticing the difference between killing and murder, Christian knights believed that each man possessed an eternal soul. They avoided killing when they could since it was neither chivalrous nor practical, but they also saw life as a scene, precious, and infinitely important for your experience of eternity, but only a part of the whole show. They understood there was a difference between saving your life and losing your soul. This may strike the 'advanced' as absurd, but it is also imaginative, and gives to life a richness more materialistic ideas lack.

Literature reflects the interests of people, and in the 1190s, the decade of Richard’s reign, Robert de Boron’s legend of the Holy Grail appeared. Shining, mysterious, and absent, the Holy Grail or Sangreal was the Chalice that had supposedly caught Christ's blood on the Cross. It symbolized the radiant and holy divine presence that seemed to lie just beyond a knight’s reach. The quest for the Grail gave knights what we ourselves desire – a sense of spiritual adventure, purpose and grace in the midst of the mundane and the dangerous. Success on the quest required that a knight live up to an ideal that encompassed the ideal of a just knight. In subtle ways Sangreal became part of the social milieu in the decades before Magna Carta, and contributed to the knights' interest in justice.

However, a glance at William Marshal’s life in the 1190s suggests less the knight on quest and more the venture capitalist, albeit one with a sword. Engaged in the management of men and estates, Marshal negotiated treaties, travelled hundreds of miles by horseback, and defended his property and his king. He continued to play an active part in battle. In 1198, at the siege of Milly-sur-Thérain, near Beauvais, he “climbed a scaling-ladder and defended a section of wall: at that time he was over fifty years of age, but age was not enough to stop him flattening the constable of Milly as he met him on the wall walk. But he did need to sit down on the man's unconscious body, to catch his breath” (DNB). Note that Marshal did not kill him.

In 1199 Richard Coeur de Lion was shot in the shoulder while reconnoitering a castle. His wound turned gangrenous, and Richard sent a message to William Marshal, who was acting as a ducal justice nearby. The message told Marshal that Richard was in danger, and to secure the city of Rouen.

Before he died of gangrene, Richard forgave the archer who had shot him, and named John as his heir. William Marshal held Rouen. Hearing of the king's death three days later while on the point of going to bed, "he crossed the city in the night to discuss the succession with Archbishop Hubert Walter” (DNB).

Marshal told Walter, who was now Archbishop of Canterbury, that he supported John for the succession, rather than the king's young nephew, Arthur of Brittany, “since the son is indisputably closer in the line of inheritance than the nephew is”. Marshal thought John would be a strong king, and may have believed he could influence him. Hubert Walter warned him that “you will never come to regret anything you did as much as what you're doing now” (DNB).

William Marshal wanted a strong king to uphold justice and prevent factionalism and chaos. He could not imagine how weak John's greedy and unjust rule would be, or how it would affect him and his much-loved sons. Nor could he imagine that out of the darkness of John's reign would be born Magna Carta, a light to Western civilization.

The Anti-Knight
Part 4

Discussing the future after Richard I’s death, William Marshal and Archbishop Hubert Walter, Richard I’s justiciar, decided to support the claim of Richard’s brother John to the throne of England because the only alternative was 12-year-old Arthur of Brittany, the son of Geoffrey, a deceased brother of Richard and John. Marshal and Walter wanted a candidate strong enough to keep the powerful barons in check and maintain the rule of law. Equally important, John had grown up in England, while Arthur was a stranger, and despite his blood ties, almost a foreigner.

Marshal’s DNB biographer says that when Marshal said he would support John’s claim, Walter warned him, “You will never come to regret anything you did as much as what you're doing now”. In contrast, and underscoring the uncertainty of so much history, Walter’s DNB biographer declares that Walter never said any such thing.

But it is certainly likely that Walter had doubts about John. He had known him since John was a teenager and a student living in the house of Walter’s uncle Ranulf de Glanville. He may have read an unpleasant account of John in Ireland which had been written by Gerald of Wales in the late 1180s. He and William Marshal had fought John in 1194 to prevent him from treacherously wresting the crown from his captive brother Richard. Nevertheless in 1199 they made the fateful decision to support John, and returned to England to persuade the barons to agree.

The details of John’s early life should have given anyone pause, though that could be hindsight. Still, some of the known facts of his early life suggest a seductive psychopath – or a lesson in how not to bring up a child.

John was the youngest son of Eleanor and Henry II, and charmed his father, who spoiled him. Henry is believed to have given John the nickname ‘Lackland’. Any teenage boy would have hated the humiliation of that name. Henry tried to make it up to him by giving John cities and duchies that belonged to his brother Henry and revenues that belonged to other men.

“After the death of Reginald, earl of Cornwall, Henry II reserved the earl's estates to John's use; this disinherited the earl's daughters and their husbands, including the vicomte of Limoges, who then rebelled. . .In 1176, after the death of William, earl of Gloucester, John was betrothed to Isabella of Gloucester on terms that disinherited her sisters and their husbands” (DNB). These were astonishing injustices by one of England’s most brilliant and judicially active kings, and it would haunt John later, though it cannot be said that he had any qualms at profiting from what was not his. It might even be said that he had learned while young a lesson that would not stand him in good stead, namely that what he wanted he could take.

In August 1184, when he was 17, John embarked on his first military action. Henry II wanted Richard, now his eldest surviving son, to transfer the duchy of Aquitaine to John. Richard, who had been defending the duchy for years, refused. In a memorable example of royal family dysfunction, John—with his father's support and helped by his brother Geoffrey—attacked Richard. The attack failed, and Henry, having set his sons at war, negotiated the truce.

In 1185, Henry knighted John, and sent him with a large force to Ireland. Having learned injustice at his father’s knee, John made huge land grants to his own followers and friends in complete disregard of Irish rights, and the kings of Thomond, Desmond, and Connacht took up arms against him (DNB).

The number of great British historians is large. One of them, Gerald of Wales, knew both Henry and John and “left vivid portraits of these unpredictable, energetic, and self-willed rulers”. Gerald bravely wrote a detailed account of the Irish expedition that describes the arrogance and mismanagement of John. His version was confirmed by Roger of Howden, who laconically observed that John's avarice and reluctance to pay his troops led to their deserting to the Irish. In John's case it seemed the die was already cast. The themes of his future reign were set.

With the death of his brother Geoffrey, John moved up the ladder of advancement. The belief that Henry loved his youngest son best led to rumours that the king planned to disinherit Richard. In 1189 Richard revolted (and confronted William Marshal, who was defending Henry II on the road to Angers). John threw his lot with his brother and betrayed his father. According to contemporaries, his treachery precipitated Henry’s death.

Although the Archbishop of Canterbury forbade it on the grounds of consanguinity, John married Isabella of Gloucester who brought him a large inheritance. (The Church’s insistence that cousins not marry was crucial to the success of Western civilization as it nullified family and tribal allegiances, which so often lead to nepotism, clannishness in the worst sense of the word, and corruption.) John was unfazed by the Church’s position as it allowed him to view his marriage as voidable when it suited him. This, to put it mildly, was not a chivalrous attitude.

Despite finding John's dealing with the Welsh prince Rhys ap Gruffudd unsatisfactory, in December 1189 Richard gave John four more counties, partly to increase his revenues and partly to appease him since just before Richard headed off on Crusade he named Geoffrey’s young son Arthur as his heir. Richard made John swear to stay out of England for three years, but John was back in England within 12 months, seizing castles, organizing a coalition against Richard’s justiciar and presenting himself as the champion of English law and liberties. On October 7, 1191, a torchlight procession welcomed John into London, and the next day he granted the citizens a commune.

John’s lust for power and land do not strike us as all that different from many other men. In his deviousness, and his willingness to cloak himself in the ideals of freedom, one cannot help but see some modern parallels.

In 1193 John upped the ante. He decided to betray his brother and England by joining in a conspiracy with the young French King, Philip Augustus. He agreed to marry Philip’s sister, though he was already married, and hired Welsh mercenaries to fight for him while Philip prepared to invade England. William Marshal and the barons crushed his rebellion, and Hubert Walter, who had discovered where Richard was being held captive, returned from Europe to negotiate a truce.

The next five years can be swiftly described. John received a message from Philip: ‘the Devil is loosed’ and fled to France on the reasonable assumption that Richard, now free from captivity, would be wroth with him. Richard was not yet free, however, and in France, John tried to bribe Richard’s captor to hold him longer or sell Richard to him. In England, in disgust, Hubert Walter and the council of barons excommunicated and formally disseised John, and reinstated the sieges of his castles. All of his lands were declared forfeit.

Richard arrived in Normandy, and John fell at his feet, and begged his forgiveness. Richard had faults, but generosity and a readiness to forgive were not among them, and he forgave John. For the next five years, John stayed out of the limelight, and was successful in a few minor military commands.

Though he has certainly not been a parfait knight, it was only after Richard died and John was crowned King that he became the anti-knight. He abandoned his wife. He entered into a drunken rage and murdered his nephew. He shamed captive knights with his sickening mistreatment. He seized the just inheritance of other men and women. He received the ignominious sobriquet “Softsword”. That's the story we’ll pick up in Riding into the Rough and On the Road to Runnymede .

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