The Empress Matilda

"This is a wonderful piece of authoritative medieval history. Marjorie Chibnall is a historian I admire enormously. The book isn’t aimed at telling a rollicking good story, but it is careful in its judgement and superbly scholarly. What it opened up for me was all the possibilities of the 12th-century world. I came to this as a late-medieval historian, because the area that I worked on first of all was the 15th century. I taught all the way back to the Norman Conquest, but I hadn’t actually written about the 12th century before. I think we often imagine that historical developments are more linear than they really are. So we imagine that the further we go back in history, the more restricted the role of women is likely to have been. When I looked at this book, I realised that wasn’t the case. It really opened up for me all the unpredictability and possibilities of the post-Conquest world. Exactly. In the century or so after 1066 there weren’t clear precedents about how things should be done in this newly Normanised England. And there weren’t enveloping institutions that had their own established ways of doing things. And this meant that women actually had much more room for political manoeuvre because everything was up for grabs. So this very scholarly and deeply researched book helped open that up for me. It’s difficult to paint a very personal picture of her. What we don’t have is anything personal that comes directly from her, other than the most formal and legal documents. But in the 12th century there were extraordinary chroniclers – so you do get a powerful sense of Matilda as a formidable woman. She left England at the age of eight to marry Henry V, the Holy Roman Emperor, and was brought up in Germany as the consort of this most powerful king. She had a formidable political education, which meant that when her husband died relatively young and she came back to England as a widowed empress, she really knew her stuff, and had a real sense of her own majesty. This puts a very interesting slant on the fact that she was then, by her opponents in England, labelled insufferably haughty, arrogant and proud. But the people who were accusing her of being domineering would never have said that about a powerful king, such as her father [Henry I] had been. Even though there were no rules to say she couldn’t inherit her father’s throne, once she got to the brink of power there was a sense that it wasn’t acceptable. And that’s the interesting thing I wanted to tease out – and this book provides the foundations for anyone wanting to do that. It also helped me focus on the different things that I wanted to do in writing for a rather different audience. For example, when Matilda was married to the Holy Roman Emperor they travelled from Germany to Italy in February 1116 – and there’s a single sentence in Marjorie Chibnall’s book where she remarks that they took an army over an Alpine pass in February."