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not the first time the Realm had been crippled by feuding warlords. In 1120, after Henry I’s only legitimate son William Atheling drowned crossing the Channel (along with 200 other aristocrats, all of them inebriated), the country had been plunged into 19 years of warfare between followers of Henry’s daughter Matilda and nephew Stephen. It was a war that Matilda – betrothed to the German emperor Heinrich V when he was 32 and she 11, and having grown up effectively running Germany while her husband was away – had lost the chance to win by her haughtiness and arrogance.
    But after Stephen’s eldest son died in 1153 and, weary with ‘the Anarchy’ as it was called, he had agreed to pass the throne to Matilda’s son by second husband Geoffrey of Anjou, the young Henry, who had previously invaded the country with a group of friends when just 13.
    Geoffrey, whose descendents came to be called Plantagenets after the planta genista broach he wore, was from a line considered by some to be descended from Satan himself. His great-grandfather, Fulk III the Black, a notorious rapist and pervert of ‘fiendish cruelty’, had his first wife burned at the stake in her wedding dress on discovery of her adultery with a goatherd. xii When St Bernard of Clairvaux saw the future Henry II he is said to have uttered ‘from the devil they came, and to the devil they will return’. The first of the Angevin kings was extremely fidgety, had a harsh, cracked voice and a red face that went even redder when he was angry (which was often). On one occasion ‘the king, flying into his usual temper, flung his cap from his head, pulled off his belt, threw off his cloak and clothes, grabbed the silken coverlet off the couch, and sitting as it might be on some dung heap started chewing pieces of straw’.
    Henry’s reign was dominated by conflict, first with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, and later with his four surviving sons by his wife, the older, risqué Eleanor of Aquitaine, a divorcée previously wed to the King of France, Louis VII.
    Henry was a charismatic and clever ruler who led a kingdom on the rise, centred on a capital city the population of which had grown to 25,000. He was one of few medieval kings to read, spoke a number of languages and innovated the use of trial by jury rather than battle or torture, establishing in 1166 a public prosecution service and a central court of justice at Westminster. The jury system he introduced was a great innovation; in Saxon times defendants would have to walk over nine red hot ploughshares (the knife of a plough), or they could endure trial by blacksmith, by which a suspect had to hold two hot irons and walk nine paces, and then have his hands bandaged. After a week, if his wounds were healing, he was innocent and so freed, but if they had gone septic he would be found guilty and hanged. (Although if the wounds had become infected, he’d probably die in agony soon anyway.) Defendants could also plump for trial by drowning or boiling; the only exemptions were priests, who could choose ‘trial by morsel’, which involved eating a certain amount of food in a given time – understandably a rather more popular option. Just as in Westeros, justice had been extracted through blood money, Wergild in old English (‘man money’ – the word were still survives in werewolf) the value of a man’s life, and the amount his family had to be compensated if he was killed or injured, ranging from 1,200 shillings for the most noble down to just 50 for the lowest rank of slave. (Slavery had been abolished by William the Conqueror.)
    The Normans had introduced trial by battle, so that knights fought with swords and lances, peasants used staves with iron heads, while women and priests could appoint a champion. One recorded case of trial by battle from 1221, in Gloucester, ended with the loser being castrated and his testicles thrown to a group of boys, who cheerfully had a kick about with them.