King Henry had little time to ponder on the differences between the ways of life in his widespread domains. The ‘nineteen years-long winter’ of his predecessor’s reign had left much of England in miserable disorder. The monks of Peterborough (who had stubbornly continued to keep their chronicle in Anglo-Saxon) give an appalling picture of conditions in the fenlands, terrorized by robber barons in impregnable castles.
When the castles were built, they filled them with devils and wicked men. Then, day and night, they took people they thought had any goods – men and women – and imprisoned them, torturing them with indescribable tortures to extort gold and silver; no martyrs were ever so cruelly tortured. They were hung up by the thumbs or by the head, with weights tied to their feet. Knotted ropes were fastened round their heads and twisted till they penetrated to the brain. They put them in prisons where there were adders and toads and killed them that way too.
The monks tell of boxes in which men were crushed with stones until their ribs, legs and arms were broken, of massive chains locked around a man’s neck and throat so that he could neither lie nor sit and was unable to sleep. The poor suffered no less than the rich, their oppressors killing ‘many thousands’ by starvation. Further, ‘when the wretched folk had no more to give, they robbed and burned all the villages, so that you could easily go a whole day’s journey and never find anyone occupying a village or cultivated land. Corn was dear, and meat and butter and cheese, because there was no one in the country. Many unhappy people died of starvation; some lived by begging, who had once been rich men; others fled the country.’
In the west, in the north, in many midland shires, in the Thames valley and in Kent it was as bad. Indeed, when Eleanor first came to England, she found a miserable land, ‘where men said that Christ and his saints slept.’
Source:
Seward, Desmond. “Queen of England.” Eleanor of Aquitaine. New York: Times , 1979. 80, 81. Print.
Further Reading:
King Henry II / Court-manteau (Henry Curtmantle) / Henry FitzEmpress / Henry Plantagenet
Raubritter (Robber Baron) / Robber Knight
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