The Greatest Knight: William the Marshal

Look closer at the heart of Britain's parliamentary democracy

and you come upon a forgotten hero of our history.

This is William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke,

not a household name to us,

but once he was the most celebrated warrior of his day.

And now he stands here,

behind the royal throne,

just as he did in life.

This is a man who fought at the side of four kings of England,

who saved this nation from French conquest,

and preserved the English royal line,

but he's commemorated here, amongst men who stood up to the crown.

The men who issued Magna Carta, our own bill of rights.

Looking at these figures,

it's hard to know whether they're supposed to be guarding the throne

or keeping it in check.

The real men behind these images were men of violence,

men who held this country through right of conquest

and yet, it was they who demanded and issued the document

that still guarantees our most fundamental freedoms.

To me, the key to unravelling that conundrum lies

in the remarkable life of William Marshal,

a life that was rediscovered through a lost manuscript,

the first biography of a medieval knight.

It's an epic story of a man who rose through the ranks,

as a peerless warrior, tournament champion

and paragon of chivalry.

He died regent of England

leaving behind a simple memorial.

William could have chosen to be remembered as a courtier,

a politician, a great landholder.

He was all of those things.

But in the end, this effigy was designed to reflect

the reputation he earned in life

as the greatest knight in the world.

In the heart of modern Manhattan,

you can find a priceless window onto the medieval world.

Because here, in the vaults of the Morgan Library,

a unique 800-year-old document survives.

It tells us the story of William Marshal,

a knight of the 12th and 13th centuries.

And it puts flesh and blood on an obscure figure of history.

This is the earliest biography of a real-life knight.

It's estimated that perhaps there were 20 copies made,

but of those only one has survived

and that's this very copy in front of us.

The manuscript was really first heard of

only at a Sotheby auction in 1861.

There was no title, nothing from the outside of the book told us

it was the life of William Marshal.

It was actually commissioned by his son, who of course, inherited

all of his lands and they wanted

to make sure that their father was duly remembered.

VOICE READS IN ANGLO-NORMAN FRENCH

It's Anglo-Norman French

and it's actually rhymed verse.

They got a good French poet to do this.

He was certainly very conscientious,

because he interviewed many of those who were still alive

that knew William Marshal.

We know that he was probably over 6ft tall, he had brown hair,

he had a face that would have been worthy of a Roman Emperor.

I don't know if that's true or not,

but it certainly makes good reading, but that's what the poet tells us.

Look closely at this text

and an astonishing eyewitness story emerges -

one man's journey through the medieval world.

"He dealt such a blow at him that it cut through his helmet,

"separating the coif from the hauberk and piercing the flesh..."

"..flitches of bacon, wines, wheat, flour and..."

"You shall not marry her anywhere else but here and in this house,

"your wedding will be so arranged..."

"The Marshal leapt forward

"and clung by his hands to a strut supporting..."

What makes this manuscript so special for me, so priceless,

is that it's this text that enables us to take William

from just being another name in history

and actually turns him into being a man.

In these pages, he emerges as the great hero

of the central Middle Ages,

and that means that we can't take this text at face value,

we have to ask questions, we have to ask what qualities

does this text want us to believe William had?

How does it set about creating him and shaping him

as that perfect knight?

The biography gives us a gripping romantic tale,

but for me, it's only the starting point.

To recover the truth of William Marshal's life,

the life of a great medieval knight,

we have to follow in his footsteps and look at all the evidence.

And our journey begins back in England,

in a forgotten corner of the West Country.

William Marshal was born around 1147,

less than a century after the Norman Conquest of England.

His father was John, the Marshal of the king's horses, a minor noble,

and I've come to visit the remains of one of his fortifications.

It may not look like much,

but actually, this is the most basic form of medieval castle.

You can see a really rudimentary trench has been put here

to try to stop attack, a kind of moat, and then we've got

a mound, a defensible position that could be used.

Now, this is light years away from the great towering stone castles

that you might imagine from the Middle Ages,

but what's so exciting about this place for me is that

this landscape is known as Hamstead Marshall and it's right here

that William Marshal took his first steps onto the pages of history.

William was born into a time of civil war

between King Stephen and Matilda,

grandchildren of William the Conqueror,

a period known as The Anarchy that lasted almost 20 years.

Earthworks and wooden palisades went up across the country,

shaky defences for the few they could shelter.

But we know that, in 1152, somewhere in this landscape,

probably in this very spot, John Marshal's men were attacked.

It was besieged by King Stephen's army

and his troops would have been spread out across this landscape.

The biography paints a vivid picture.

"You should have seen the squires start to clamber with great daring

"over the ditches and up the embankments.

"And those within the walls defended themselves

"courageously and furiously.

"They hurled down slabs of stone, sharpened stakes,

"and massive pieces of timber to knock them into the ground."

Word was sent to John Marshal,

who raced to the rescue of the men inside

and begged for a truce from King Stephen.

The king granted his request, but only in return for a hostage,

so John produced his son,

not the eldest one, we're told,

but the second one - William.

William was just a little boy,

perhaps four, maybe five years of age, and he now found himself

a crown hostage in the midst of enemy troops.

In a very real sense, I think his life was in danger,

and then, shockingly, news arrived that his father had reneged

on his side of the deal.

And he bluntly refused to surrender,

and declared that he no longer cared about the fate of his infant son.

He's supposed to have said that he had the anvils

and the hammers to forge an even better child.

In the days that followed, King Stephen sought to use

the young William's life as a bargaining chip.

He was hoping to pressurize John into submission

and so, he repeatedly paraded the boy in full view of the castle,

threatening his life.

At one point, William was dragged to the gallows to be hung,

at another, he was placed in a catapult.

They even contemplated using him as a human shield

during a frontal assault.

Unbelievably, throughout all of this, John remained unmoved.

The bluff succeeded and the King held on to William,

though, eventually, he was released unharmed.

As a young child, William had learned first-hand

about the brutal realities of the medieval world

and that his own success, even survival,

were by no means guaranteed.

No-one could have guessed

that the expendable younger son of John Marshal would go on

to change the course of English history.

And that's partly because William wasn't,

in the way we'd think of it, an Englishman.

By birth, he was a Norman,

and it would be in Normandy

that the young boy would turn into the knight.

At the age of 13 or 14,

William took to the seas to join the household of his mother's cousin,

William de Tancarville, the Chamberlain of Normandy.

But for the young William Marshal,

this wasn't so much a journey abroad as a journey back home.

William's ancestors had made the crossing in the opposite direction

with William the Conqueror.

The events of 1066 were just

one part of an extraordinary period

of conquest and expansion,

which saw a new elite warrior class

claiming thrones across Europe

and the Mediterranean.

A class that William Marshal

would come to epitomise.

In the National Library, in Paris,

you can get an extraordinary glimpse of the first medieval knights,

preserved forever in ivory.

This is one of the oldest chess sets in Europe.

Chess was a game invented in India

and this set was most likely crafted

by an Arab working in southern Italy.

And he seems to have adapted the game that he knew

to depict the northern warriors who had conquered him.

You can see that the person who's created this piece,

a pawn, is trying to show that he's wearing a form of

male armour, and he's got the classic Norman helmet,

with a central nose piece.

Conical helmet, he's an infantryman.

And he's got a slightly haunted look about his eyes, as if to say,

"I'm the man in the front line.

"I'm going to be getting it first."

And then, of course, there are the mounted warriors.

The two pieces that fascinate me the most are the horsemen.

There are some wonderful little details.

So we see a beautiful stirrup

and one of the massive revolutions

in technology that made so much

difference in the 11th century was the creation of the stirrup.

Suddenly, you didn't just have to hold on to the horse

with your legs, you could actually control the horse

and stay in the saddle.

In Arab chess, this figure was just known as 'the horse',

but under the influence of the Normans,

it is changing into the knight.

But this isn't quite yet the knight as we know it.

This one at the front has the classic Norman kite shield.

The shape that's so resonant from the Bayeux Tapestry.

This one at least is wearing

what's pretty clear to be some form of helmet.

The other one maybe it's an attempt to show a helmet,

maybe it's just some kind of hood.

We have this idea that every one in the 11th century would have

known exactly what a knight was.

But that's not true.

It's precisely in this century

and in the decades leading up to William Marshal's birth

and his life that this class, this new warrior class, is emerging

and these chess pieces are some of the very first examples

of an attempt to depict that new knightly group.

We call them knights, but if you look at the writings of the time,

they refer to them in Latin as 'milites' - soldiers.

In German or French as 'Ritter' or 'chevalier' - horse riders.

And in Anglo-Saxon as 'Cniht' -

a retainer.

This is what William had arrived in Normandy to become.

A horseman, a soldier, and a faithful retainer.

THEY SPEAK IN FRENCH

The place where William spent his first years

in Normandy has since been swallowed by layers of later building

and subsequently, by the forces of nature.

It's actually got quite a creepy atmosphere.

I'm told that somewhere in the midst of this labyrinth

is the core of the castle where William arrived around 1160.

I'm not really sure how safe this floor is.

The story goes that what we can see through this door

is essentially the medieval part of this, this castle, the chateau.

So I'm going to inch forward.

Hopefully, I won't plummet.

Well, I think you can see

that this is a much older part of the building,

maybe signs that it might go back as far as the 12th century.

The local legends around this suggest that this is where

William Marshal might have slept.

Guillaume le Marechal is a famous figure, even here, in Tancarville.

And the reason is, is because this is where William came

when he was 13, 14-years-old, just a boy.

He made the trip across the Channel, his first visit to Normandy

and he came here to learn how to be a knight.

He spent six years in this place

and we can be sure that he spent almost all of his days

engaged in learning the arts of war, how to use a sword,

how to ride a horse, how to wield a lance from horseback.

His days wouldn't have been easy.

But it's here, in his biography,

that an image of William Marshal, the man, begins to emerge,

or rather of William Marshal, the teenager.

The picture it paints is basically of an adolescent boy -

we're told that William gained a reputation for liking to sleep,

and worse still, that basically he was a greedy guts,

he liked stuffing his face.

It conjures a 12th-century locker room atmosphere -

all men together, the bullying, the banter.

If you wanted to come somewhere

to learn how to be a knight in the mid-12th century,

you couldn't really choose a better place than this.

I know it looks decrepit and neglected now,

but when William was here, THIS was the place to come.

Another contemporary described the Lord of this place,

the Lord of Tancarville, as the "father of knights".

He was so famed for the size of his knightly retinue

and for the excellent education in military warfare that he gave them.

William lived out his teens as a trainee or squire,

until, in 1166, the armies of Flanders invaded

and anyone who could fight was needed in the defence of Normandy,

so William was pressed into service at the age of 19.

In a hasty battlefield ceremony,

he knelt before his Lord and was girded with the weapon

that made him formally a knight -

a sword.

The great symbol of knightly status, but also the essential

practical tool for the bloody business of medieval warfare.

And I've come to the Wallace Collection, in London,

to meet Tobias Capwell, and to see one of the finest medieval swords

to survive in the world.

So this is it, Wallace's fabulous sword collection.

Yes! Small, but fabulous.

Gosh!

THOMAS CHUCKLES

It's incredibly light.

It literally feels like it's got a life of its own,

-like it's not there.

-Uh-huh.

I've never felt anything like that in my life.

Gosh, it feels amazingly manoeuvrable as well.

Yeah. You have to be a bit careful

when we take swords out of cases, cos they do want to kill people.

Could this have chopped through someone's arm?

Yeah, or head, or leg.

-Ouch.

-The effectiveness of these weapons is scary.

So for me, one of the most evocative moments from William's life

is that instance when he is created as a knight.

But the most important part of that occasion for him, as it was for all

other knights, is the moment when the sword is girded to his side.

It's almost akin to the moment

when the holy oil is loosed upon the head of a monarch.

It's a moment of transformation.

-When they go from being one type of human being to another.

-Yeah.

The sword as a symbol of the elite warrior class goes way back,

a long time before the Middle Ages.

It's an ancient principle

and it's based on a couple of different factors.

First of all, it's the expense.

The materials to make a sword are very expensive

and also hard to come by.

Working the metal, getting the best balance of these important

properties out of it is difficult

and there are only a few craftsmen that can do it really well.

If you make a small mistake

and there's one little, you know, silicate inclusion

in the wrong place,

the sword will break the first time you hit somebody with it.

But that's not what you want on the battlefield.

That's not really what you want.

And finally, a weapon like this demands, you know,

a very high level of martial skill

and being a martial artist requires luxury of time,

to be really good at it.

You need to be fighting and practising all of the time.

And you had to be, essentially, a member of the aristocracy,

you had to have the wealth to be able to afford something like this.

That's what gives it its status.

Or you need to be in the service of someone wealthy.

You know, part of the culture of knighthood,

even in this early period I think,

is that, you know, good warriors, who may not, you know,

have an extremely elevated status,

can be brought into the household of someone

and then, you know, elevate themselves in that way.

-And that's exactly what happens to William.

-Exactly.

The simple reality of William's day was that if you wanted to serve as an elite warrior,

you had to have the money to afford weapons, armour and horses.

Of course, in times of war and conquest,

there were spoils to be gained on the battlefield,

the problem came at times of peace.

To fill this void

a new idea evolved - a means both to hone your skill at arms

and to accrue wealth -

the tournament.

And so much of what we know about this phenomenon

comes from William's biography.

"Everywhere, the news spread that between Sainte-Jamme

"and Valennes, there would be a tournament in a fortnight's time."

The field for William's first tournament was 30 miles wide.

Put out of your mind the staged jousts of the later Middle Ages,

these were battles with scores of participants that ranged over miles.

"The companies were now in sight of each other..."

"..some sped along in disorderly fashion, whilst others approached at a measured pace..."

The violence could be bloody and terrifying.

"There were so many blows that it was hard to count..."

"..one of the knights sought to pull him to the..."

"..many a shield run through and many a sword blow landed on helmets."

But the aim was not to kill, but to capture your enemies

and release them back in return for a payment

in horses, weapons or hard cash.

"Five knights rode up and surrounded him,

"seizing his bridle and..."

"Up came William the Marshal,

"fully armed, strong, and of tall, handsome stature..."

Over the next 15 years, William became a famous tournament champion,

and later boasted to have captured 500 knights.

His biographer tells us he fought only for honour,

but he can't help revealing what else was at stake -

money.

This text has a fascinatingly difficult relationship

with that idea of materialism for William.

It tells us here, for example, that he's been in a tournament,

he's done, of course, he's done brilliantly, he's won everything.

But it says very specifically,

right at the top here.

HE READS IN ANGLO-NORMAN FRENCH

"He had no thought whatsoever for gain,"

and it goes on to say that all he really cared about was honour.

BUT if you go just a few folios forward,

then we get a slightly different image.

Rather wonderfully, the text actually reveals

that William effectively employed his own accountant.

He had a man who was named Wigain,

the clerk of the kitchen, a man who kept a written list of every single

knight that William defeated in a tournament during this period,

more than 100.

And on the basis of that list,

William was able to see what ransoms were coming in.

He was essentially able to check his cash flow.

With so much at stake, it was in the interests of every knight

for the fight to continue,

but not for the risks to outweigh the rewards.

There's a revealing anecdote at this point in the biography.

He's attending a tournament.

William's shown as defeating a man called Philippe de Volosges.

Philippe turned to William and gave him his pledge

and on the basis of that,

William trusted him and decided to let him go.

I think what we're seeing here are the very early stages

of the codification of practice between knights -

the idea of honour, of trust, of an interdependence.

Really, these are the first signs

of the code that we would think of as chivalry.

William Marshal would come to define chivalry.

The word literally meant 'good horsemanship',

and comprised all the physical virtues of the knight.

But in the setting like the tournament,

it was acquiring a new sense.

A true chevalier was a man of honour

whom other knights could rely on to play by the rules of the game.

Knights were evolving rapidly in status

and sophistication from the early mounted warriors.

But William's rise through the ranks would come

not through the chivalric combat of the tournament,

but through his ability to display prowess

in the real bloody business of war

and to come to the notice of the great and the good.

In 1168, William was travelling in the retinue of his uncle,

the Earl of Salisbury,

as they journeyed through France on a perilous mission,

escorting a great lady between her castles.

On the road, the party was suddenly ambushed...

The Earl was killed instantly,

and William found himself fighting off over 60 attackers.

He was wounded, captured, and barely escaped with his life.

But he bought enough time for his charge to escape to her castle.

She didn't forget the man who had rescued her,

but paid his ransom.

And luckily for William,

she happened to be Eleanor of Aquitaine,

one of the most powerful women in the world.

Eleanor was heiress to the Duchy of Aquitaine.

She was married to Henry, Count of Anjou,

who'd recently inherited the kingdom of England.

Between them, they ruled over a realm unrivalled in Europe,

which brought north men

like William into contact

with the Mediterranean south.

Aged only 21, William Marshal was drawn by Eleanor into the very heart

of the most powerful and culturally vibrant court in Christendom.

In Poitiers, Eleanor's great hall still survives,

known evocatively as the Hall Of Lost Footsteps.

Lost to the vastness of the space...

..and to the sensory overload that greeted a new arrival at court.

William would have been confronted by a barrage

of different languages, voices, sounds.

The court would have been packed with entertainers, musicians,

poets, singers, troubadours...

Another visitor to the court around this same time remarked

on how he developed a taste for the most exotic foods,

in particular, roasted crane.

This was a setting in which it was possible not just to operate

during the day, but also at night.

The royalty and the aristocracy could afford light and candles,

an impossibility for peasants,

and in that setting, in the darker hours,

then we see a different side to the court...

It was packed with the creatures of the night.

There was a position that was officially described

as the Marshal Of The Whores.

One especially notorious performer

bore the rather wonderful appellation Roland The Farter.

William was a long way from the West Country now.

This was the world of the poet, the troubadour,

the real world that inspired the Arthurian romances

and Eleanor placed William at the heart of her Camelot,

as mentor and companion at tournaments to the heir to the throne,

crowned by his father as Henry, The Young King.

The young Henry was the most glamorous figure in Europe,

a king who had no kingdom to rule,

but devoted himself to the ideal of chivalry.

He spent his life at the tournament,

lavishing money and patronage on his own round table of knights.

William quickly rose to the head of this retinue,

so much that his tournament prowess began to outshine that of the king.

William was to learn that for a knight to get by,

he would need to master another aspect of chivalry -

'courtesie',

the knack of navigating the cut-throat world of the court.

It seems that, eventually, William's star rose so far

within the entourage of the Young King that some people,

in the words of the biographer, became envious, they became jealous.

A whispering campaign spread like wildfire

amongst the members of the court,

deprived of royal patronage by the Marshal's all encompassing success,

until one took the news to the Young King himself.

And the biography lays bare that moment in pretty stark terms.

It tells us that it was said that William had been fornicating

with the Queen or, in even blunter terms,

"Il le fait a la reine."

He'd been doing it to the Queen.

William was accused of adultery

with the Young King's wife, Queen Margaret,

and what made this charge so powerful was that it played into

the paranoias of a court bred on tales of Sir Lancelot and Guinevere.

The adultery of the great knight with his royal master's queen.

Their attack was taken from the world of court poetry,

but so was the Marshal's chivalric response.

He staunchly denied everything and publicly challenged his accusers,

but none of them was ready to take him on in trial by combat.

He had no choice but to go into exile,

but he used the opportunity to spread his fame

in tournament victories across northern Europe.

And before long the King realised he'd been deprived

of his most able retainer.

William returned with his reputation salvaged,

while his enemies were exposed by their incautious boasts.

It's an extraordinary, romantic tale.

But what should we make of the dramatic parallels

between William's story and the Arthurian Romances?

Laura Ashe, an expert on medieval literature has her own theory.

Interesting about that though is I think

we often underestimate how much reality there is in the Romances,

because these Romances really were written

for people like William Marshall

and they actually do show you

how to keep an eye on reality.

I think that all of those stories of Lancelot and Guinevere

or of Tristan and Isolde, they make it very clear

that this is something that happens,

because I think the figure of Lancelot is really a metaphor,

you know, a metaphorical way of worrying about the fact

that any king's best knight is going to be a better knight than the king.

You know, we have a basic clash here

that if you have a meritocratic system of prowess of battles,

tournaments, everyone knows who is the best knight.

And then, if you have a hereditary system of kingship,

they're not going to be the same person,

so in some ways, I think the story, that recurring story of the adultery

of the queen and the queen's champion

is just a way of expressing that cultural anxiety.

And the model for William is not going to be King Arthur,

it's going to be Lancelot.

Absolutely, absolutely, and of course Lancelot is superior to Arthur,

just in the way that William was superior to the Young King Henry.

William's life is a fascinating insight into the essential

interdependency between a king and his knights

and the complexities of this relationship would dominate

the rest of his career.

And what he learned in the romantic court of the Young King,

was that the emerging code of chivalry

might help a knight to navigate his way through these difficulties.

In 1183 the Young King met a squalid end, dying of dysentery.

And William fulfilled on his behalf his dying wish - to go to Jerusalem.

The Marshal spent more than two years travelling to the Holy Land,

arriving in the East just as tensions between the crusaders

and Saladin's Muslim armies were reaching boiling point.

But frustratingly,

we know nothing of William's contribution to this epic struggle.

The biography does reveal one tantalising fact -

in that he now vowed to join the famous Order Of Crusader Knights,

the Templars, before his death.

He returned from the Holy Land in 1186.

Through tournaments, courtly life and his brush with the crusades,

William was starting to be seen

as the embodiment of the chivalric ideal.

Something that would serve him well in years to come,

as bigger challenges loomed.

William now presented himself back at the court of King Henry II.

And he moved definitively from the fantasy world of the tournament,

to the real battlefields and politics of Europe.

It was in this period that William forged his reputation as one

of the greatest knights in Europe.

It's extraordinary to think that William spent the best part

of 20 years nearly constantly on the move,

criss-crossing this landscape.

These were the lands of King Henry's birth

and he was constantly defending them against rival French rulers.

William quickly became much more than just a soldier to Henry -

a sign of the heights to which the best knights were rising.

Men like William and other leading members of the royal household could

serve as advisers, as elite warriors and commanders in the field,

but perhaps, above all, they were prized for their trusted loyalty.

This quality was one of the most essential aspects of chivalry,

but as William had already learned,

showing loyalty to a king was no simple matter.

The problem came when the members

of the dynasty you served began turning on one another.

The question for William then

was exactly where did your loyalties lie?

The Angevin realm had long been riven by infighting.

Henry II's offspring rebelled against his authority

four times in 16 years.

But the decisive threat was posed by his ultimate heir -

Richard the Lionheart.

This put William in an impossible position -

asked to fight against the man who would one day be his king.

The moment of truth came in June 1189 at the town of Le Mans,

where William was covering the ageing King Henry's retreat

and found himself confronted by the heir to the throne.

This will be a confrontation to savour.

A clash between Richard the Lionheart,

the man who will become England's finest warrior king,

and William Marshal, the greatest knight of the Middle Ages.

The two men charged towards one another at a gallop.

William had his lance levelled.

The question was whether he would dare to strike Richard directly,

potentially killing the future king of England.

At the last second, William adjusted his aim

and drove the point of his lance into the body of Richard's horse.

The beast fell to the ground, dead.

For the moment, at least, Henry II's escape had been secured.

But less than a month later, King Henry II was dead of an ulcer

and the man whom William Marshal had bested

was now proclaimed the new king.

One of the most poignant and telling scenes

of English royal history played itself out in the aftermath,

in the nearby abbey where William buried his master.

This is Henry II, King of England,

ruler of the great Angevin empire.

But there's an irony that we find in here in his tomb effigy,

laid out in resplendent and restful state,

because, in reality, he suffered a pretty ignominious death.

When William Marshal and the King's leading retainers found him

the royal chamber and the king's body had been ransacked

by fleeing servants.

The corpse was found semi naked

and sprawled on the floor with blood caked around his mouth and his nose.

William and the other knights covered the King's body and then,

ever faithful, the Marshal escorted him here to the Abbey of Fontevraud.

It was a last act of fidelity to a king most thought best to abandon.

With Henry's death, all thoughts now passed to the new king,

his successor, Richard the Lionheart.

For William Marshal, waiting here at Fontevraud,

the days that followed were a period of great anxiety.

Given what had passed between them before, he had every

expectation that the new king would strip him of his status.

The biography paints an incredibly evocative picture.

Richard arrived and looked down upon the body of his dead father.

His face was said to have been an emotionless, unreadable mask.

For all of those looking on, William Marshal included,

there was not even the slightest hint

of what the new king's next move might be.

What he did was to call on William Marshal.

"Marshal," he said, "The other day you intended to kill me."

Boldly, William responded,

"It was never my intention to kill you.

"I am strong enough to aim my lance."

What we're seeing is a game of politics, of power,

of courtly life, so how did that game play out?

Well, against all expectations,

Richard the Lionheart chose not to punish William Marshal.

Instead, he drew him into his own inner circle.

It was simply inconceivable to throw someone of proven loyalty

like William Marshal onto the scrapheap.

The staunch fidelity William had shown in 1189 proved enough

to counteract his opposition to Richard's claim.

There's no doubt that he'd backed the losing side

when he'd supported Henry II to the end,

but because of the chivalric, knightly culture in which he lived,

there was one thing that William could cling on to.

In this time of turmoil and upheaval,

he'd proven himself to be loyal to the last

and in the end, that would prove to be his salvation.

It was a crucial lesson to William,

which he never seems to have forgotten,

that people might not forgive a man who changed sides,

but a man who remained loyal could retain his honour and win reward.

The reward for William's unstinting royal service came in the lands and

castles of the king's ward, Isabel, daughter of the Lord of Striguil.

Striguil, known today as Chepstow,

still commands the entrance to the Wye Valley, in South Wales.

For over a decade, its orphaned heiress awaited her adulthood

and the fortunate husband, who would inherit her land.

Possession of this castle changed the lives

of both William and Isabel.

For Isabel, after years waiting in the wings as a prized heiress,

this must have felt something akin to a return home

to the land of her father.

But I think there's no doubt

that it was William who experienced the most profound change.

He'd spent decades fighting in other people's castles,

living in other people's fortresses

and now, he became the Lord of his own castle.

This was the realisation, the achievement of every knight's ambition -

to go from being a landless warrior,

to becoming a landed knight,

a baron of the Kingdom of England.

Now 42-years-old, William had risen at an astonishing rate.

The bestowal upon him of castles like Chepstow was transforming

the Marshal from a figure defined by his loyalty to others

to someone with his own interests and his own powerbase.

And this building itself, the great hall,

the main keep of the castle here, at Chepstow,

was the absolute epicentre of his authority.

This is the place where he himself could hold court.

So who might have come here?

Well, first and foremost

it would have been his own family,

chief amongst them, his wife Isabel,

who really was the reason he had possession of this castle.

But beyond that, there was another essential group

that would have met here, congregated,

that would have been drawn to this space,

and that was his knights, his own closest, most faithful retainers.

Men like John of Earley, Henry Hose, Geoffrey Fitzrobert.

They came to this castle,

because they knew they could gain patronage and protection.

William was himself now a father of knights,

with men at his disposal to do his bidding.

In addition to Striguil, over the next decade,

William gained possession of the Earldoms of Leinster and Pembroke,

the Wild West of medieval Europe.

These men and these lands, all added to his power,

but they introduced in life a new complication -

obligations to his family and followers

that could compete with his famous loyalty to his own master -

the King.

Of course William, as Earl of Pembroke, was here to do the King's bidding,

but I think his priorities lay elsewhere.

This place gave him an incredible opportunity to carve out

a semi independent lordship,

to be able to reward his faithful retainers,

and perhaps above all,

to be able to realise that greatest of knightly dreams -

to be able to found his own dynasty.

William set about finding lands and rewards for his knights,

as generations of Norman conquerors had done before him.

But his timing was inauspicious.

The world was changing around him.

Richard the Lionheart died fighting in France in 1199,

and the Angevin Empire was quickly dismembered

under the less effective rule of his younger brother John.

For the first time since 1066,

knights like William were deprived of access to glories in France,

and confined to Britain.

And the King, instead of handing out the proceeds of conquest,

was taxing his knights and taking their lands...

..William included.

And in this new era, the balance of power

between a monarch and his knights would have to be resolved.

In the year 1212,

discontent with the increasingly unpopular king

led to unrest across England and before long,

the realm was in the grip of a fully fledged civil war.

But by 1215, the rebel barons and the King

had finally negotiated a new settlement for a new era,

and that settlement survives in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

So I feel immensely privileged,

because it's no exaggeration to say that this box contains

a document that changed English history.

John was forced to agree to a series of concessions

enshrined in a text of profound significance.

So this is Magna Carta, the great charter.

We like to think of this document as being

one of the cornerstones of a Western democracy,

as a document that speaks about inalienable rights to liberty.

And in some ways that's true,

because it does contain the critical clause

"nullus liber homo" -

no free man -

and goes on to talk about protection from imprisonment,

from the seizure of property

and a right to an appeal to a panel of your peers

or recourse to law.

There's a beautiful irony to this document,

because the people who were at the heart of Magna Carta,

the forging of this agreement,

were knights, and we tend to think of that group as

men who were warriors, who were bloodthirsty, rapacious warlords,

and yet here we find them

right at the heart of a great charter of liberty.

But in many ways, this document in 1215 was actually about

something much more specific.

It was about the relationship between John and his leading nobles.

The collapse of the Angevin Empire and John's rapacity

had prompted knights, men who were

accustomed to winning their status through warfare,

to talk the language of law and governance.

But it would be wrong to imagine that the drafting of this document

ushered in a period of enduring peace.

In 1215, what we really have is an agreement that is much more

along the lines of a peace treaty,

a series of conditions that are ironed out

through negotiation between John and his nobles,

with William Marshal at the heart of those dealings,

that are essentially there to produce a truce,

and, in fact, that truce only lasts for a few months.

Certainly by the end of that year, 1215,

Magna Carta as it then stood was essentially a dead letter.

The Magna Carta that survived to influence English and world history

was not published by King John

but was issued after his death the following year,

and under another seal.

This is a version of Magna Carta,

sealed by "rectoris nostri et regni nostri" -

our guardian and the guardian of our realm,

and that man is named.

William Marshal.

It's the clue to the last act of William's life -

one that would stamp William's seal on our history for ever

as the man who saved the kingdom.

Back in 1213, William had been called out of semi retirement.

As John's barons left him one by one,

he had summoned the man in the kingdom

most famed for old-fashioned loyalty.

The Marshal was now 69,

an old man by the standards of his day,

and carried huge respect on both sides.

It was he who had helped engineer the negotiations

that led to Magna Carta,

but for all William's efforts,

John's power as a monarch could not be salvaged,

and his kingdom was overrun by the rebels,

this time with the help of Louis, Prince of France.

Soon, half the kingdom was in foreign hands,

and William found himself once again burying a king.

On 18th October 1216, the war still raging,

John died, the broken king of a broken kingdom.

At the moment of King John's death in 1216,

England was in utter turmoil,

ripped apart by civil war.

Two-thirds of the English aristocracy

had turned their back on the Angevin royal dynasty,

and with the arrival of an invasion force under the French Prince Louis,

more than half of the realm had been lost,

including the vital commercial centre of London.

So who was the heir to this kingdom on its knees?

Well, it was John's son, Henry,

a boy of just nine years of age.

His prospects could not have been bleaker.

The child King was brought up from his sanctuary in Wiltshire...

..and all eyes turned to the Marshal,

the most revered man in England

and the boy's only hope.

William raced south to meet the young Henry on the road.

The meeting that followed was deeply emotionally charged.

The boy was so small and vulnerable

that he actually had to be carried by one of his household knights.

He approached the Marshal, pleading for his protection,

saying, "I give myself over to God and to you."

William responded by pledging himself to serve Henry

so long as he was able.

At this moment everyone wept, the Marshal included.

The old man knelt before his nine-year-old sovereign,

the fates of both were now inextricably linked.

This was, I think,

the most important decision of William Marshal's life -

the moment at which he gambled everything,

backing a boy who seemed doomed to failure.

It was said that William promised that he would support Henry,

no matter what.

Even if all the rest of the world deserted him,

he would carry the young boy on his shoulders from land to land,

begging for food and bread if he had to.

By this choice, William put his family, his dynasty,

the lands that he'd gained on the line.

There was a very real possibility that his dynasty,

that his future would come to an end

when Henry III failed as a king.

William now accepted the honour,

but also the burden of England's regency.

So, why did he take this risk?

We can never know, but perhaps we can look for an answer

in his conception of chivalry.

He did not want to be shamed,

he did not want to damage his reputation.

He wanted to be seen to do the honourable, chivalric thing,

the thing that a knight of his status should do.

In the end, William may have made a calculated, self-serving decision

to preserve his good name,

or acted out of an authentic sense of loyalty to the Crown.

Whatever the case, William now found himself at the front line

of a war that would determine the fate of England.

In May 1217, William, at the age of 70,

drew up his forces outside Lincoln

intent on striking a decisive blow against the rebels and the French.

It was said that he delivered a rousing speech to his men,

claiming that the invading French were bent upon total destruction.

"Fight with unbreakable resolve," he urged,

"for the sake of your loved ones,

"for our land and to win the highest honour."

This man, as much Norman as English,

a man once defined by his class not his nation,

had now issued an emotional appeal grounded in English identity...

..and it was William's decision to place himself

at the heart of the fighting here in Lincoln,

despite his old age, that inspired the Royal army to victory.

If this battle had played out differently,

we'd be looking at an England that would suddenly be

part of the kingdom of France.

Our future as a nation would have been entirely different.

And it's Lincoln that means that what we now think of

as the Royal line, the English Royal line, survived as we know it.

In the end, it was a knight who could achieve this success.

For all the romanticism, all the mythology

that surrounds ideas of chivalry,

it's still true to say that the greatest of knights,

men like William Marshal, could shape history.

William served as regent for a further two years

before old age took him.

But in that time, he sought to settle and stabilise England,

the England of Magna Carta, reissued under his seal.

William Marshal died in a different England

to the one in which he'd been born,

but it was a country that HE had been instrumental in shaping.

For centuries thereafter,

England would be ruled by kings supported,

but also checked, by a warrior aristocracy

and the ideals they hammered out on the tournament field,

in the politics of the court,

in the blood of civil war

and ultimately in Magna Carta,

formed the basis of the principles by which we are all now governed.

And, for me,

this is the greatest revelation of William Marshal's life.

He is, I think, emblematic of a period

in which knights became more than mere agents of conquest.

It was William and knights like him

who stemmed the tide of Royal tyranny,

who promoted the rule of law.

Of course, most did so in pursuit of their own interests

but nonetheless,

they helped to create the country in which we now live.