House of Plantagenet: Becket's Murder, Magna Carta and Bankrupt Kings

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The Plantagenets ruled England from 1154 to 1485, yet their first kings barely spoke English and treated the kingdom as a source of money for France. The name comes from planta genista, the broom flower Geoffrey V of Anjou wore in his hat, adopted officially much later by Richard of York; historians call the early kings Angevins. Geoffrey's son with Empress Matilda, Henry II, took the crown in 1154 and, with Normandy, Anjou and the lands of his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, ruled territory reaching the Pyrenees, governed only by riding constantly from place to place. His quarrel over church courts with Archbishop Thomas Becket ended with knights killing Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, and Eleanor and their sons rebelled with French backing.

Richard the Lionheart spent about six months of his ten-year reign in England, and his ransom from the Holy Roman Emperor drained the country. John lost Normandy and Anjou, was crushed at Bouvines in 1214, and in 1215 sealed Magna Carta at Runnymede. In 1265 Simon de Montfort summoned two knights from every shire and two burgesses from every major town, a blueprint for the House of Commons. Under Edward III the Hundred Years' War and the Black Death of 1348 turned the ruling class toward English, and the 1362 Statute of Pleading required court proceedings in English. Richard II's overthrow in 1399 set up the Wars of the Roses, which ended at Bosworth in 1485 with Henry Tudor.

• Henry II had no name for his realm and wrote of everything subject to our rule, whatever it may be.
• After Becket's death Henry walked barefoot in a hair shirt and was whipped by monks.
• Richard said he would have sold London if he could find a buyer.
• Towton, fought in a blinding snowstorm, is called the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil.
• Henry VII married Elizabeth of York to join the Lancastrian and Yorkist branches.