Excerpt from Dissertation or Thesis complete:
Henry of Huntingdon
Kings are weak: this can be the impression one particular gets by reading the twelfth 100 years English vem som st?r Henry of Huntingdon, especially in his amazing summary of the troubled rule of Full Stephen – for which, Diana Greenway tells us, Henry’s can be “the simply complete contemporary account”[footnoteRef: 0]. Stephen’s reign was a time of low-level civil warfare – which will would previous for over 10 years – and ultimately would raise significant questions regarding the legitimacy of the English monarchy. The portion of his chronicle that presents Stephen’s reign, Henry makes it crystal clear that Stephen’s own accession to the throne, the ongoing issue of his legitimacy although he reigned over, and the strange circumstances which usually lead to Stephen’s being forced to acknowledge his female cousin’s son, Henry of Anjou, as his heir. But for Henry of Huntingdon, Sophie stands a great emblem with the overall some weakness of kings in this time period, and an examination of Henry’s account of Stephen’s reign will show us a monarchy that is in transition, and is also much sluggish than the well-liked cliche of kingship views. By the 5th year of Stephen’s rule, Henry of Huntingdon tells us, “the big store of treasure had by now disappeared; there was simply no peace in the realm, but through murder, using, and pillage everything had been destroyed, just about everywhere the sound of war, with lamentation and terror”[footnoteRef: 1]. Sophie offers for Henry an ideal example of a monarch’s failures to maintain order and peacefulness. [0: Henry of Huntingdon. The History of the British People 1000-1154. Translated with an introduction simply by Diana Greenway. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. ) xxi. ] [1: Ibid., 74-5. ]
Even though monarchy was long set up in The uk and legendary histories list British nobles even throughout the Roman period, Henry of Huntingdon was writing by a period in time when the monarchy had not for ages been centralized in England, which was divided into smaller kingdoms (Wessex, Mercia) that eventually were unified under a single English crown. Even after this unification, though, right now there still been around a separate Scottish monarchy (which would in the end prove to be the first level of difficulty for Full Stephen). In any case, the fact continues to be that Henry is producing at a moment when the English monarchy experienced only recently been unified and centralized, and its rules and laws hadn’t yet automatically been codified. In the case of the laws of succession to the throne, Ruler Stephen’s rule comes at an especially difficult time. The state establishment of primogeniture – that official set of rules and traditions concerning gift of money which likes the claim with the oldest legit male inheritor – hadn’t yet took place in Henry of Huntingdon’s time: although desire was given to the oldest son to a certain level, other associates of the noble family might be offered the throne beneath certain circumstances, based on the evaluation of courtiers and magnates.
