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Hello everyone and welcome to the History of England, Episode 39 ruling the Angevin Empire.

Right, so fresh from the straws of the Adriatic, let me go back to Henry's second who we introduced in the last episode.

This week I thought we'd talk about how Henry went about ruling his empire.

There is of course a generally held, popular history of England, a kind of agreed summary of what happened and what was important and interesting.

In general, I'd also say it could be described as a kind of wiggish view of history, i.e. the idea that the history of England is an inevitable linear progression leading to where we are now.

And all the scholarship, all that fantastic history, TV and all that sort of thing that managed to change some of the details but a pretty much zip impact on that central folk history.

So are my warbling on about all of this.

Well all that brothers really just to say the Henry II in our folk history is generally thought of as a good king in Sephiracy's thought of at all and quite rightly so, that is a good king I mean.

But it strikes me that he would have scared the living day outside of me.

And as we talk about his empire, let us never forget that this guy was an absolute tyrant working for this bloke would have made working for Alan Sugar look like a cakewalk.

He was not much liked in his time actually and was apparently a very difficult man to know.

We are quite unusually blessed with sources for the period with people like Walter Maap and Peter Boire who knew Henry in his court directly.

I've reproduced Peter's description of Henry on the website, that would be the history of England.com website BW and it's well worth reading.

It's quite clear that Henry is an exemplary character but he was an absolute monarch well before any such phrase had been invented because quite frankly contemporaries would have wondered what other kind of monarch was there anyway.

But he was quite extraordinarily volatile, liable to blow up into rage at any time and such a rage could signal the end of your fortune, your career or possibly your life.

Actually this volatility was a crucial tool of kingship. As we noted a few weeks ago, medieval kingship is an intensely personal thing.

It's about managing an elite set of very powerful people, the barons, to be effective, you just need to keep them on the hop.

These barons also needed a constant reminder about who was the boss and that he knew exactly what they were thinking of doing.

There's a lovely anecdote from the period which illustrates it for me really well, I'm quite sure why but I'll try it on you soon as you can see.

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