Across the period c. 1150–1350, political life in medieval England was consistently framed as a sharply polarised conflict between vice and virtue. Political struggles between representatives of Church and state, efforts to reform or remake the procedures, bureaucracies and structures of the English monarchy, and to evolve legal and conciliar safeguards against unrestrained royal vis et voluntas, were interpreted as epic crusading battles, played out both on earth and in heaven. As the miracles attributed to Edmund of Bury, Thomas Becket, Simon de Montfort and Thomas of Lancaster declared, not even death could stop English heroes from striving for liberty from tyranny. Frequently influenced by the active intervention of God, the saints and, of course, the forces of darkness that sought to keep the English in a state of sin, subjection and slavery, political problems were magnified by their incorporation into larger spiritual trials, especially individual and collective battles to secure salvation and eternal life, for oneself and one's kin.

Stephen Jaeger has observed that ‘Medieval social criticism in general operates within a two-pronged discourse: one prong skewers the objects of attack on their gross abuses, the other fixes them into codes and norms. The first finds or invents inflated wrongs, the second fashions sublime ideals.’ This stark duality is evident when one surveys the medieval English polity c. 1150–1350 as imagined by its (overwhelmingly monastic or clerical) chroniclers, royal servants and schoolmen.

At the head of the imagined medieval English polity was the king: chosen by God to be his minister and avenging warrior, to ‘walk upon the asp and the basilisk’ and ‘trample underfoot the lion and the dragon’, as the visual imagery found on the English royal great seal from 1218 to 1340 asserted (figures 12, 35, 36). Crowned and anointed by the Church, he was to rule ‘according to the eternal laws of the whole universe, in association with the hierarchy of angels, as decreed by God's eternal wisdom’. Robert Grosseteste's words found a visible echo in the liturgical furnishings and decorative schemes of the English great church: its pulpitum set up with standing images of English kings, ranging from the Anglo-Saxon era to the Plantagenets and beyond (Plate III, figures 18, 19); its ceilings painted with images of holy kings, bishops and saints in harmonious union; and its ceremonies honouring the lives and miracles of English saints such as Becket.

From the writings of chroniclers at St Albans to the baronial polemic of the Song of Lewes, an administrative approach to the constraint of royal power was incorporated into the sacral vision of government shared across the English political elite between 1200 and 1270. Political reformers promoted specific, legal and contractual (with Magna Carta) and then institutional and conciliar (in the Paper Constitution and the Provisions of Oxford) constraints on royal power; or, as the Song of Lewes characterised it, a constraint of the king ‘that is not of slavery, but is the enlarging of kingly virtue’.

All of these policies were obsolete by 1300. The traumatic outcome of the Barons’ War discredited the idea of imposing councils on an unwilling monarch or attempting more stringent forms of constitutional restraint for the next half century. Magna Carta and its satellite documents retained their talismanic status as touchstones for English liberty and good government long past 1300. From the mid-fourteenth century, their confirmation became a ritual preliminary to parliamentary petitioning. Yet they were no longer seen as key to the resolution of contemporary political problems. There were no demands for the charters to be reissued or confirmed by the reigning monarch in the fourteenth century, in contrast to the eight occasions from 1215 to 1300 when this occurred. Clear statements of law setting out the scope and boundaries of royal power were no longer a central demand of political reformers. Instead, their attention focused on governmental malpractice. For Michael Prestwich, the 1311 Ordinances, another attempted baronial appropriation of government successfully repealed by Edward II in 1322, mark ‘the end of the historical chapter which opened with Magna Carta’.

New pressures impacted on these new political demands. The earlier part of the reigns of the three Edwards saw a dramatic escalation in the violence directed at the elite by an increasingly assertive crown, jealously guarding newly clarified legal rights and prerogatives. During a period extending from the grim death in 1295 of the English knight Thomas de Turbeville, convicted of spying on behalf of the French, to Edward III's summary judicial execution of Roger Mortimer in 1330, political life became murderously dangerous for the very greatest of the ‘men of rank and power’.

In the final decade of the twelfth century, a resentful careerist cleric, disappointed by his failure to obtain an English bishopric despite many years in royal service, began to draft a guidebook to good princely rule. De Principis Instructione (‘On the Instruction of Princes’) was composed of three books, the first containing ‘the doctrine and precepts as to the instruction of the prince’ and the second and third teaching ‘the reason of this rule by examples’. This, at least, is what Gerald of Wales tells us he intended to write. The completed text is an amalgam of didactic writing and keen diatribe against Angevin power, the majority of De Principis consisting of a splenetic homily on the reign of Henry II. Dedicated to Louis of France, it was circulated during the 1215–17 civil wars to drum up support for King John's replacement by the Capetian king.

In book three, chapter twenty-six, Gerald describes how a blank space in the King's Chamber at Winchester Castle was decorated at Henry's command with an image of four eaglets attacking their parent: ‘two on the two wings and the third on the breast, piercing their parent with their claws and beaks; and the fourth eaglet […] poised on its parent's neck, watching intently for a chance to peck out its eyes’. The king explains to his attendants how they symbolise his four sons ‘who will not hesitate to harry me even unto death’. Allusions have also been suggested to his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, in her guise as the ‘eagle of the broken covenant’ foretold in the prophecies of Merlin. Separate to the story's value as a literary device, George Henderson observes that the painting could have plausibly depicted the bestiary subjects of either Pelicanus (the pelican) or Epopus (the hoopoe).

According to the bestiary, after being viciously attacked by its offspring, the pelican defeats and kills its own children. It then pierces its side and sheds its blood on its dead young to revive them, a redemptive action clearly symbolic of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. Again echoing the Resurrection, the children of the aged hoopoe were thought to pluck its feathers and lick its eyes to rejuvenate their parent. The bestiary's moral lesson in filial piety was ingeniously subverted at Winchester once the image became a figure for Henry II and his rebellious sons.

This chapter explores one of the fiercest political conflicts in thirteenthcentury England, the Barons’ War of 1258–66. During the long era of Henry III's minority, the Anglo-Norman ruling elite became accustomed to government by council and consensus. Men as diverse as Stephen Langton, Ralph de Neville, Henry of Avranches and the leading citizens of London used the language and visual imagery of sacred struggle and holy example to articulate their new political assumptions and expectations: regarding the proper limits to the sovereign exercise of power, the essential role of counsellors and bureaucrats in the government of the realm, and the salvific and intercessory context into which all such activities could be placed.

When discussing Henry III's first great seal in the previous chapter, I noted the consonance of its image of kingship with Romans 13.4. The opening chapters of Romans 13 stress how ‘he that resisteth the power [of the prince] resisteth the ordinance of God […] For princes are not a terror to the good work, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power?’ Emphasising the role of the prince as a minister of God and avenger of evil, such verses may usefully sum up Henry III's personal ‘theory of monarchy’, insofar as he may ever have consciously calculated one. The king continued to aspire to an unrestrained exercise of his Christian lordship, even after his efforts between 1231 and 1234 to return to Angevin autocracy, encouraged by controversial ‘foreign’ advisers such as Peter des Roches, were successfully blocked. The king's vision of divinely ordained royal power was also embodied in his rebuilding of Westminster Abbey from 1245 to 1272, a project motivated at least in part by Henry's deep love for his spiritual patron and father-figure, Edward the Confessor.

During the era of the king's personal rule, the failings of Henry's government only strengthened the political and spiritual weight of Magna Carta. Alongside the high spiritual ideals for a peaceful and prosperous realm shared by the king and his reformist opponents, fluently articulated in the text and images of Matthew Paris's Estoire, there was the ongoing struggle for favour and profit at court. If there was anything worse than losing out on the riches and rewards available to the successful courtier, it was to see such glittering prizes fall to ‘foreigners’.

This chapter examines the political ideas shared by a new class of royal administrators in the later twelfth century. Usually secular clerics educated in the schools of Paris before being drawn into royal service or elite households, their understanding of power and politics was grounded in their theological training. These men stressed the primacy of Church over state, the importance of princely piety and reverence for God and the essential guiding role of the clergy in the commonwealth. Political conflict and participation in secular government were consistently envisaged in spiritual terms: ‘For there is no power but from God: and those that are ordained of God.’ Human sin and disobedience to the will of God, divine plans for vengeance and instances of heavenly intercession were all viewed as real and active influences on the policy of rulers, and on the peace and prosperity of realms. Political life, played out both on earth and in heaven, was understood as a polarised conflict between Christian vice and virtue. The epic quality of this clerical vision of political society could absorb deep political Augustinianism and justly held collective fears about unrestrained royal power.

Yet the men who articulated it were fascinated by the practical workings of royal government. What St Augustine dismissed as the business of brigands was recast as a truly significant and momentous earthly calling. Richard fitz Nigel viewed the procedures of the exchequer as ‘symbols of the strict accounting’ to take place at the Last Judgement, for example. The monk Nigel of Longchamps mocked bishops serving in the king's courts and exchequer, as if ‘ordained to the service of the fisc rather than to mysteries of God's church’. Aspirations regarding the moral character and activities of the ruler and his counsellors were high: John of Salisbury condemned the frivolities of courtiers because the prince was ‘a certain image on earth of the divine majesty’, exercising ‘sacred duties’. Peter of Blois considered it ‘holy to attend the lord king’ and stated that courtiers ‘often do good works of salvation’.

I will argue in this chapter that this sacralised understanding of power was also fundamentally visual in nature: a guiding framework of ideas inspired by, elaborated on and expressed through both material and rhetorical images.

In the previous chapter, I examined the role played by visual images in advancing and exploring the political ideas elaborated by a circle of Canterbury-connected clerical curiales. Visual images helped articulate Augustinian arguments for prayer and divine deliverance from tyranny. Visual images expressed and supported a distinctively clerical vision of secular power, grounded in biblical verse, sacred example and a search for transcendent moral or allegorical theological meaning. The competition for royal favour at court, the frivolities of courtiers, the procedures of the exchequer, or the lives and histories of the kings of England since the Norman Conquest were all positioned in the context of a much greater individual and collective struggle for Christian virtue, liberty, peace and salvation. Both literally and metaphorically, the hope was that fresh water, ripe fruits and blossoming flowers would replace thorns and stony ground.

Although circulated to a potentially wide audience through institutional seals, or imagery encountered in the context of pilgrimage to Canterbury and the cult of Thomas Becket, these themes of English political thought and debate developed within relatively restricted circles: the courtierclerics and bureaucrats working in royal service and for the archbishops of Canterbury, or monastic members of Christ Church priory viewing the cathedral's typological windows, Utrecht Psalter and Little Canterbury Psalter. In this chapter, I will explore evidence for the absorption of these ideas into the everyday language of medieval English politics, and their wider communication in more public forms of art. I will then examine how the arguments of Angevin curiales were transformed, especially during the civil wars of 1215–17. From the early thirteenth century onwards, political struggle was characterised in England as a form of holy warfare, and surrounded by active exhortations to crusade, rebellion and resistance. Secular as well as clerical political actors applied the evangelising and crusading discourses of a reformist Church militant to contemporary events. In the process, some of the basic visual tropes of English political thought discussed previously, the biblically inspired literary and pictorial rhetoric of trampled enemies, flourishing virtue and barren ‘thorny ones’, were reimagined in new and remarkable ways. Images remained a constant of English political expression, but the ideas that they helped communicate did not.

The English monk, historian and artist Matthew Paris composed and illustrated his Vie de Seint Auban (Dublin, Trinity College, MS 177) between 1230 and 1250. On folios 29v–50r, thirty tinted outline drawings with a colour wash in Matthew's own hand accompany his Anglo-Norman French verse account of the conversion and martyrdom of St Alban. A supposed fourthcentury Romano-British patrician, Alban was the patron saint of Matthew's Benedictine abbey in Hertfordshire.

Preceded by two unillustrated Latin vitae of St Alban, Matthew's Vie is followed by a further series of Latin texts. These consist of liturgical lessons for the feast of the invention and translation of St Alban's relics; a treatise on the invention and translation of St Alban's relics; copies of a series of spurious foundation charters purportedly issued to St Albans abbey by King Offa of Mercia and his son; and a series of treatises primarily concerned with the invention and miracles of the relics of Amphibalus, the Welsh missionary responsible for Alban's conversion. Matthew enlivened these texts with another twenty-four images, placed in the upper section of each folio and unfolding in the manner of a strip cartoon. All are accompanied by Anglo- Norman verse rubrics at the head of each page.

These later illustrations depict the journey to Britain made by the sixthcentury bishops St Lupus of Troye and St Germanus of Auxerre. The bishops are shown holding a council at Verulamium (the Roman town from which medieval and modern St Albans evolved), as part of their fight against the Pelagian heresy, and declaring their great respect and honour for Alban (fols. 51r–55r). This section includes a pictorial interpolation from the life of St Genevieve (fols. 52r–52v). In keeping with the textual contents below, it is followed by a visual account of the invention of Alban's relics, and the foundation and patronage of the abbey by King Offa of Mercia in the eighth century (fols. 55v–63r). Across the manuscript, the illustrations thus range from the era of apostolic and missionary early Christianity to an imagined ‘golden age’ of Anglo-Saxon Christian kingship.