The Evidence

Hello. My name is Dr Hugh Dougherty. I'm a lecturer in mediaeval history

at the School of History at the University of East Anglia.

And today I will be talking to you about the reign of Henry,

the second who reigned from December 11 54

to July 11 89.

I would like to start by thinking about the evidence

for the reign of having a second.

Because the nature of this evidence has to

some extent shaped in many different ways our understanding

of the rain and indeed of the personality of the King

and that the politics of his court.

So this is why this, I mean, that in the first part of the rain for the 1st 20 years,

we have a dearth of really good chronicles.

We are reliant on a collection of animals and

sources composed and compiled later in the rain,

or indeed, after the rain.

This is important because to some extent, in the 1st 15 years of the reign,

Henry is king is a rather obscure figure.

Uh, it's very hard to know his his political aspirations, the nature of his regime,

his the quality of his rule,

what we do have our firstly charters issued by the King's Chancery,

and we have more than 3000 charters.

But

it remains the case

that they have never really been collected and published until now.

One of my colleagues is, in fact, uh, editing has collected

and is editing the charters of here in a second.

This will give a brilliant insight into, uh, the early part of Henry's reign.

The the the personnel of his court, his patronage, his movements, his his material,

friendships with monastic communities with, uh, leading laymen and women

and indeed, more widely, with the church.

We also have financial accounts that are called pipe rolls.

These record the sums owed by the sheriff's in each shire.

And the Shire is a unit of organisation

inherited

from pre conquest England

that was essential to the management

running an exploitation of the English Kingdom.

Having the second is, of course, more than just a King of the English.

But beyond

the channel

in Normandy,

in Hangzhou, in Aquitaine,

to some extent in Brittany

and on the edges of his French domains, are evidence constitute largely

and at times exclusively

the king's charters.

The work of collecting and editing the child has

was begun by the great French historian Leopold Delisle,

and it has taken

more than

100 and 40 years for historians to collect this evidence and to edit properly.

And my colleague Nick Vincent has been doing exactly that.

Now, in the second half of the rain,

we have a We have a large amount of excellent chronicle evidence.

This chronicle evidence, however,

was largely composed after Henry the second's death.

And this is important.

Why? Because

in July 11 87

2 years before the king's own death,

the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem was destroyed

in modern northern Israel.

The Kingdom of Jerusalem army was destroyed

by sodden and Jerusalem falls shortly afterwards.

This was a terrible event for the West,

and in many ways many chroniclers writing about Henry a second after

his reign treat him very unfavourably because he was so reluctant,

unlike his son Richard, the first to lead a major crusading expedition.

So there is in the very rich chronicle evidence composed after the king's death.

There is a very negative agenda

and and here in the second does not come out very well out of this agenda.

The financial accounts. The charters could only take us so far.

They give us an insight into the apparatus of the government,

machinery and administration

and the king's patronage. But there's so much more we would like to go to to know.

And in fact, Henry's refusal

to take a crusading vow at first does a great damage to his

longer reputation. Richard the first, by contrast, is held in

much higher regard than the King himself.