[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"$fofprm2nw7lcx":3,"$fy6oulildcg5h":12},{"slug":4,"title":5,"subtitle":6,"excerpt":7,"coverUrl":8,"publishedAt":9,"contentHtml":10,"substackUrl":11},"this-week-in-1174-1319-july-the-lion","This Week in 1174 (13–19 July): The Lion in the Mist","The week the king of Scots was captured in a Northumberland fog.","Longtime readers know I have written “on this day” pieces. While sometimes I will still write those, I’m going to concentrate on a different series… following a whole week rather than a single date, b","https:\u002F\u002Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\u002Fpublic\u002Fimages\u002F0a400cc3-63e5-4a12-b106-e3699bf2bca8_960x638.jpeg","2026-07-14T00:24:40.000Z","\u003Cp>\u003Cem>Longtime readers know I have written “on this day” pieces. While sometimes I will still write those, I’m going to concentrate on a different series… following a whole week rather than a single date, because history almost never happens in a day, and the good stuff is usually in the lead-up and the fallout. And it feels right to begin in Northumbria, the corner of England I love best, with my favorite castle at the heart of the story: a king of Scots ambushed in the fog outside Alnwick, and the humiliating treaty that followed him home.\u003C\u002Fem>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cblockquote>\u003Cfigure>\u003Ca href=\"https:\u002F\u002Fsubstackcdn.com\u002Fimage\u002Ffetch\u002F$s_!gF3w!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\u002Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3337450a-8b4a-48dd-a245-45099eaf0e44_330x215.jpeg\">\u003Cpicture>\u003Csource type=\"image\u002Fwebp\" srcset=\"https:\u002F\u002Fsubstackcdn.com\u002Fimage\u002Ffetch\u002F$s_!gF3w!,w_424,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\u002Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3337450a-8b4a-48dd-a245-45099eaf0e44_330x215.jpeg 424w, https:\u002F\u002Fsubstackcdn.com\u002Fimage\u002Ffetch\u002F$s_!gF3w!,w_848,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\u002Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3337450a-8b4a-48dd-a245-45099eaf0e44_330x215.jpeg 848w, https:\u002F\u002Fsubstackcdn.com\u002Fimage\u002Ffetch\u002F$s_!gF3w!,w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\u002Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3337450a-8b4a-48dd-a245-45099eaf0e44_330x215.jpeg 1272w, https:\u002F\u002Fsubstackcdn.com\u002Fimage\u002Ffetch\u002F$s_!gF3w!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\u002Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3337450a-8b4a-48dd-a245-45099eaf0e44_330x215.jpeg 1456w\">\u003C\u002Fsource>\u003Cimg src=\"https:\u002F\u002Fsubstackcdn.com\u002Fimage\u002Ffetch\u002F$s_!gF3w!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\u002Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3337450a-8b4a-48dd-a245-45099eaf0e44_330x215.jpeg\" alt=\"File:Alnwick Castle 02.jpg\" \u002F>\u003C\u002Fpicture>\u003C\u002Fa>\u003C\u002Ffigure>\u003Cp>Wikimedia Commons: Phil Thomas.  \u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Alnwick Castle, Northumberland, outside whose walls a king of Scots was taken in the fog.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003C\u002Fblockquote>\u003Chr \u002F>\u003Cp>On the morning of \u003Cstrong>13 July 1174\u003C\u002Fstrong>, in thick summer fog outside the walls of Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, a small band of English knights came out of the mist and did something that had never happened before and would never happen again: they captured a king of Scots on English soil.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Thanks for reading Meg Loves History! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>His name was William I, AKA William the Lion, and to understand how the King of Scotland ended up unhorsed and shackled in a Northumberland meadow, we have to back up and ask what he was doing there in the first place. The answer runs straight through one of the great family bloodbaths of the Middle Ages: the rebellion that nearly toppled the King of England, Henry II.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Ch2>First, who was Henry II?\u003C\u002Fh2>\u003Cp>Here’s what you need to know about Henry II at this point in time: he was the first king of the House of Plantagenet and, in his day, the most powerful ruler in western Europe, reigning from 1154 to 1189. He held not a tidy kingdom but a sprawling, stitched-together dominion that modern historians call the \u003Cstrong>Angevin Empire\u003C\u002Fstrong>. It was named for Anjou, his father’s home county in France. Through inheritance he held England, Normandy, and Anjou; through his marriage to the formidable \u003Cstrong>Eleanor of Aquitaine\u003C\u002Fstrong>, he added her vast duchy in southwestern France. His lands stretched from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>It was never a peaceful inheritance to hold. Much of the era’s conflict traces back to a single awkward fact: as ruler of Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine, the King of England technically owed feudal homage to the King of France for those French lands, which was an absurdity neither side could stomach for long. That tension, plus a family with too many ambitious sons and not enough thrones to go around, was the powder keg. In the summer of 1173, it exploded.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cblockquote>\u003Cfigure>\u003Ca href=\"https:\u002F\u002Fsubstackcdn.com\u002Fimage\u002Ffetch\u002F$s_!PZGC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\u002Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7e7b089e-9016-47bc-b7eb-880fdfe2c878_800x1200.jpeg\">\u003Cpicture>\u003Csource type=\"image\u002Fwebp\" srcset=\"https:\u002F\u002Fsubstackcdn.com\u002Fimage\u002Ffetch\u002F$s_!PZGC!,w_424,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\u002Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7e7b089e-9016-47bc-b7eb-880fdfe2c878_800x1200.jpeg 424w, https:\u002F\u002Fsubstackcdn.com\u002Fimage\u002Ffetch\u002F$s_!PZGC!,w_848,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\u002Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7e7b089e-9016-47bc-b7eb-880fdfe2c878_800x1200.jpeg 848w, https:\u002F\u002Fsubstackcdn.com\u002Fimage\u002Ffetch\u002F$s_!PZGC!,w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\u002Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7e7b089e-9016-47bc-b7eb-880fdfe2c878_800x1200.jpeg 1272w, https:\u002F\u002Fsubstackcdn.com\u002Fimage\u002Ffetch\u002F$s_!PZGC!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\u002Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7e7b089e-9016-47bc-b7eb-880fdfe2c878_800x1200.jpeg 1456w\">\u003C\u002Fsource>\u003Cimg src=\"https:\u002F\u002Fsubstackcdn.com\u002Fimage\u002Ffetch\u002F$s_!PZGC!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\u002Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7e7b089e-9016-47bc-b7eb-880fdfe2c878_800x1200.jpeg\" alt=\"Map of the Angevin Empire. Source: TheCollector\" \u002F>\u003C\u002Fpicture>\u003C\u002Fa>\u003C\u002Ffigure>\u003Cp>\u003Cstrong>\u003Ca href=\"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.thecollector.com\u002Fmaps-resources\u002Fangevin-empire-map\u002F\">Map of the Angevin Empire\u003C\u002Fa>\u003Cspan>: TheCollector\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fstrong>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003C\u002Fblockquote>\u003Cp>A word of caution about the above map, though, because it explains something you might otherwise trip over. If you see Wales, Ireland, and the Scottish border shaded in as Henry’s, take it with a grain of salt. Henry did not \u003Cem>rule\u003C\u002Fem> Wales. What he held was a claim to \u003Cstrong>overlordship\u003C\u002Fstrong>: in 1157 and again at the Council of Woodstock in 1163, he compelled the Welsh princes (chief among them Owain Gwynedd) to do homage and acknowledge him as their feudal superior. On paper, that made Wales his. In reality, the Welsh princes treated the homage as a truce to be broken the moment Henry looked weak. By 1165 they were in open revolt, having handed Henry a bloody defeat in the Welsh hills. He never truly mastered them; native Wales would not truly fall to an English king for another century, under Edward I.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>It is worth pausing on what “homage” actually meant, because it is the machinery under this whole story. To do homage was to kneel, place your hands between the hands of a greater lord, and become his “man” — that is literally what the word means, from the Latin \u003Cem>homo\u003C\u002Fem> — swearing to be faithful and to serve him, in return for holding your lands as his legitimate vassal. It bound one \u003Cem>\u003Cstrong>person\u003C\u002Fstrong>\u003C\u002Fem> to another over particular \u003Cem>\u003Cstrong>lands\u003C\u002Fstrong>\u003C\u002Fem>; it did not necessarily swallow one kingdom into another. And here is the thing that makes the medieval world suddenly make sense: Henry II sat on \u003Cem>both\u003C\u002Fem> sides of this ladder at once. The Welsh princes and the King of Scots knelt to him as their overlord. But for Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine, Henry in turn knelt to the King of France ... the most powerful ruler in Europe became a vassal himself, doing homage to the Capetian king in Paris.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>And everyone played the game exactly the same way. Henry treated his own homage to the French king as a formality to be ignored whenever he was strong enough… the King of England in no way took orders from Paris. His vassals treated their homage to \u003Cem>him\u003C\u002Fem> precisely the same way. So Henry’s empire \u003Cem>looked\u003C\u002Fem> solid and red on the map, but a great deal of it was stitched together with homage-oaths that everyone publicly revered and privately regarded as scraps of paper; they honored their vows while the overlord was strong, and they tore up the agreement the instant he was not. The King of Scots was about to make exactly that calculation. And, as we will see, he calculated wrong.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Ch2>The quarrel that lit the fire\u003C\u002Fh2>\u003Cp>That summer, the mightiest ruler in western Europe was fighting for his life against his own children.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Henry had four legitimate sons, and the eldest, confusingly also named Henry, had already been crowned in his father’s lifetime as a kind of king-in-waiting. History knows him as “the Young King.” He was eighteen, charming, celebrated across Christendom; however, he had no real power, no land of his own to rule, and a father who showed no sign of loosening his grip. What the Young King wanted was simple enough: not to wait for his inheritance, but to \u003Cem>rule\u003C\u002Fem> something real while his father still lived. (He would later pour that restless energy into the tournament circuit, becoming its most famous star, with the legendary knight William Marshal as his team leader; in 1173, with no such outlet yet, he poured it into rebellion instead.)\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>The final straw was a matter of castles. When Henry II arranged to hand three of them (meant to be part of the Young King’s inheritance) to his \u003Cem>youngest\u003C\u002Fem> (favorite) son, John, as a wedding settlement, the Young King’s simmering resentment boiled over. In March 1173 he fled to the court of his father-in-law, King Louis VII of France. His brothers Richard (the future Lionheart) and Geoffrey soon followed. Their mother, Eleanor, tried to join them and was caught and imprisoned by Henry, where she would remain, more or less, for the next sixteen years.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>What made this more than a family sulk was the alliance the Young King and Louis assembled around it. They bought support with promises, parceling out lands and revenues they did not yet control to anyone willing to take up arms against Henry II. And near the top of that list of promises sat the King of Scots.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Ch2>Why William wanted Northumbria\u003C\u002Fh2>\u003Cp>William the Lion had a personal grievance that made him an easy recruit.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>He had once been Earl of Northumbria himself. He inherited the title as a boy in 1152 but lost it in 1157, when the formidable young Henry II forced William’s brother, King Malcolm IV, to give up the northern counties. The earldom was English land, held from the English crown; but William’s family had a real claim to it, granted by treaty to his grandfather David I during England’s civil war, when the crown was too weak to refuse. A stronger king simply took it back. To William, losing that earldom was a personal wound, and winning it back became the obsession of his reign.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>So when the Young King came promising William the northern counties back in exchange for his help, the Lion took the bait. In effect, the young Henry was offering to give away pieces of his own future kingdom to win it. He was buying the crown by breaking the realm apart. In 1173 William invaded northern England and achieved nothing; the great northern castles held against him, and he withdrew over the border when a royal army marched north.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>That should have been a warning. It wasn’t.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Ch2>The 1174 campaign, and a fatal sprawl\u003C\u002Fh2>\u003Cp>In the summer of 1174 William came south again, this time with a larger army stiffened by a contingent of Flemish mercenaries. (The chroniclers claim eighty thousand men, which is almost certainly an exaggeration... medieval numbers usually are.) He avoided Newcastle this time, spent three fruitless days besieging Prudhoe. That castle was held by its lord, Odinel de Umfraville (remember him). Then William moved north to Alnwick.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>And here he made his mistake. Rather than keeping his army concentrated, William let it scatter across the Northumberland countryside in raiding parties, sealing off the approaches to Alnwick and plundering as they went. One column, under Duncan, Earl of Fife, fell on Warkworth and (horrifically) burned the church of St Lawrence with a great number of refugees sheltering inside. This was a seriously ugly campaign. It left the country around Alnwick full of angry, grieving people (remember them too).\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>With his forces spread thin, William the Lion was left dangerously exposed, guarded by only about sixty men of his personal retinue.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Ch2>The raid in the fog\u003C\u002Fh2>\u003Cp>Word of where William actually was reached the English at Newcastle. On the night of \u003Cstrong>11 July\u003C\u002Fstrong>, a party of mounted knights (the sources say around four hundred, led by Ranulf de Glanville, one of Henry II’s most capable and trusted men) rode north through the dark toward Alnwick. Among them rode local men with every reason to want the Scots gone; here were those angry, grieving people, and chief among them was Odinel de Umfraville, whose castle at Prudhoe had just held out against William’s siege. A king who torches a country cannot expect it to hide him.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>They very nearly failed. A thick fog came down and the raiding party got lost in it… lost enough that some reportedly feared they’d blundered into the whole Scottish army. But the mist that almost undid them became their great advantage. They emerged from it at dawn, close on William’s lightly guarded camp, with total surprise on their side.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>What the king did next is the detail I love best, because it tells you exactly what kind of man he was. Rather than flee, William the Lion is said to have spurred his horse straight at the English knights, shouting (according to the chroniclers, so maybe), \u003Cem>“Now we shall see which of us are good knights!”\u003C\u002Fem> It was reckless, and it was over quickly. His horse was killed under him. Pinned and surrounded, with his scattered army too far away to help, the King of Scots was taken prisoner.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>They led him away to Newcastle in a manner calculated to humiliate: his feet, the chronicles say, shackled beneath the belly of a horse, as though he were a common criminal rather than a crowned king. His leaderless army, learning their king was taken, simply melted back toward Scotland.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Ch2>The luckiest king in Christendom\u003C\u002Fh2>\u003Cp>Here the timing turns almost eerie, and Henry II knew how to use it.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Just the day before the capture, so \u003Cstrong>12 July 1174\u003C\u002Fstrong>, Henry had walked barefoot to the tomb of Thomas Becket at Canterbury and submitted to public penance for the archbishop’s murder, the scandal that had blackened his name across Europe for four years. He was, in that moment, a king on his knees, doing penance and fighting a war against his own family on multiple fronts.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>And then, the very next morning, news arrived that his enemies’ most powerful ally had been captured in a fog three hundred miles away. To a medieval mind the message was unmistakable: the saint had accepted Henry’s penance, and Heaven had declared for him. The rebellion, which had raged for eighteen months, effectively collapsed. William’s capture broke the northern front, and within weeks Henry’s faithless sons were suing for peace.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Ch2>A king’s ransom: the Treaty of Falaise\u003C\u002Fh2>\u003Cblockquote>\u003Cfigure>\u003Ca href=\"https:\u002F\u002Fsubstackcdn.com\u002Fimage\u002Ffetch\u002F$s_!kZ2M!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\u002Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F622b8dcb-924c-489c-ac72-ec442a2c2bf9_960x955.png\">\u003Cpicture>\u003Csource type=\"image\u002Fwebp\" srcset=\"https:\u002F\u002Fsubstackcdn.com\u002Fimage\u002Ffetch\u002F$s_!kZ2M!,w_424,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\u002Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F622b8dcb-924c-489c-ac72-ec442a2c2bf9_960x955.png 424w, https:\u002F\u002Fsubstackcdn.com\u002Fimage\u002Ffetch\u002F$s_!kZ2M!,w_848,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\u002Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F622b8dcb-924c-489c-ac72-ec442a2c2bf9_960x955.png 848w, https:\u002F\u002Fsubstackcdn.com\u002Fimage\u002Ffetch\u002F$s_!kZ2M!,w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\u002Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F622b8dcb-924c-489c-ac72-ec442a2c2bf9_960x955.png 1272w, https:\u002F\u002Fsubstackcdn.com\u002Fimage\u002Ffetch\u002F$s_!kZ2M!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\u002Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F622b8dcb-924c-489c-ac72-ec442a2c2bf9_960x955.png 1456w\">\u003C\u002Fsource>\u003Cimg src=\"https:\u002F\u002Fsubstackcdn.com\u002Fimage\u002Ffetch\u002F$s_!kZ2M!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\u002Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F622b8dcb-924c-489c-ac72-ec442a2c2bf9_960x955.png\" alt=\"File:William I, King of Scots (seal 01).png\" \u002F>\u003C\u002Fpicture>\u003C\u002Fa>\u003C\u002Ffigure>\u003Cp>\u003Cstrong>William the Lion’s seal, showing him as a knight on horseback.\u003C\u002Fstrong>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003C\u002Fblockquote>\u003Cp>William was taken from Newcastle to Northampton and then shipped across the Channel to Falaise in Normandy, where he sat as Henry’s prisoner while the war wound down. His freedom, when it came, cost him and his kingdom dearly.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>The \u003Cstrong>Treaty of Falaise\u003C\u002Fstrong>, agreed in December 1174 and ratified in a great public ceremony at York in August 1175, is the earliest Anglo-Scottish treaty whose full terms survive… and they are brutal. William had to become the “liege man” of Henry II for Scotland itself. This is worth taking the time to explain. Ordinary homage acknowledged a lord for a particular piece of land; \u003Cem>liege\u003C\u002Fem> homage was the binding, total kind: allegiance to that lord above all other men, for good. And earlier Scottish kings had indeed done homage to English kings, but only for the English estates they happened to hold, like the earldom of Northumbria. Never for the crown of Scotland itself. Now, on paper, William was Henry’s man, and Scotland was declared a fief held from England.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>It didn’t stop with the King of Scots either. His brother David (who was his heir) and his leading nobles had to do homage too; the Scottish Church was made subject to the English Church; and hostages were handed over, including David and the heirs of Scotland’s great earls. Hostage-taking sounds shocking to us, but it was routine in medieval diplomacy. Highborn sureties, generally well-treated, were held to guarantee good faith, and sometimes children were raised in enemy courts. The castles, however, were a harsher and more immediate blow. Five of them — Roxburgh, Berwick, Jedburgh, Edinburgh, and Stirling — were surrendered to English garrisons, paid for out of Scotland’s own revenue. These were the strongpoints that controlled the country; with English soldiers sitting in them, William could not so much as put down a rebellion in his own kingdom without England’s permission. Where the King of Scots had been supreme in his own land, England was now the ultimate authority.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William’s homecoming was bitter. He returned to a kingdom that did not thank him for the ruin he’d brought (his humiliation helped trigger a long revolt in Galloway), and for fifteen years he lived as Henry’s subordinate.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Ch2>The long shadow\u003C\u002Fh2>\u003Cp>The treaty itself did not last. In 1189, Henry II died, and his son Richard the Lionheart (impatient, crusade-bound, and far more interested in cash than in his father’s grip on Scotland) simply sold its independence back to William for 10,000 silver marks to help fund his journey to the Holy Land. On paper, Scotland was sovereign again.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>But the deeper lesson outlived the document. The sheer humiliation of Alnwick and Falaise — a king dragged off in fog and shackles, his kingdom mortgaged to buy him back — did what no ordinary defeat could. It broke the Scottish crown’s centuries-old habit of reaching south for Northumbria and Cumberland. William’s successors turned their ambitions north and west instead, into Galloway, Moray, and the far Highlands. And in 1237, his son’s successor, Alexander II, formally renounced the old claim to the northern English counties in the Treaty of York, fixing the border between the two kingdoms roughly where it still runs today, from the Solway to the Tweed.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>A king gambled everything on an old grievance, and was taken by surprise in a Northumberland fog. And a border we still recognize was drawn, in part, by that single morning’s work.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Chr \u002F>\u003Cp>\u003Cstrong>Sources\u003C\u002Fstrong>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cul>\u003Cli>\u003Cp>Battle of Alnwick and the Revolt of 1173–74: contemporary chroniclers Jordan Fantosme and Roger of Howden; modern overviews in the \u003Cem>Oxford Companion to British History\u003C\u002Fem> and the \u003Cem>Dictionary of National Biography\u003C\u002Fem> (William I; Ranulf de Glanville).\u003C\u002Fp>\u003C\u002Fli>\u003Cli>\u003Cp>Angevin context (Henry II’s empire and the Angevin–Capetian homage rivalry): Chester Ollivier, “England’s Medieval Angevin Empire Explained,” \u003Cem>TheCollector\u003C\u002Fem> (2025).\u003C\u002Fp>\u003C\u002Fli>\u003Cli>\u003Cp>Henry II’s Welsh overlordship (the 1157 campaign, the homages at the Council of Woodstock in 1163, the 1165 revolt): R. R. Davies, \u003Cem>Conquest, Coexistence and Change: Wales 1063–1415\u003C\u002Fem>; and Owain Gwynedd in the \u003Cem>Dictionary of Welsh Biography\u003C\u002Fem>.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003C\u002Fli>\u003Cli>\u003Cp>Treaty of Falaise: text and terms via the ratified York agreement of 1175.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003C\u002Fli>\u003Cli>\u003Cp>Map: “Map of France in 1180,” Wikimedia Commons (freely licensed, used with attribution).\u003C\u002Fp>\u003C\u002Fli>\u003C\u002Ful>\u003Cp>\u003Cem>A note on precision: the sources vary slightly on the exact date of the battle (most give 13 July, a few 12 or 14) and wildly on the numbers involved — the figures here are the usual scholarly estimates, and the “eighty thousand” of the Scottish host should be read as medieval hyperbole. The chronicle flourishes — William’s shout and his shackled ride to Newcastle — come from near-contemporary accounts and are too good, and too revealing, to leave out, though as always with chroniclers we take the theatrical touches with a grain of salt.\u003C\u002Fem>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cem>Thanks for reading Meg Loves History. This post is public, so feel free to share it.\u003C\u002Fem>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Thanks for reading Meg Loves History! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.\u003C\u002Fp>","https:\u002F\u002Fmegloveshistory.substack.com\u002Fp\u002Fthis-week-in-1174-1319-july-the-lion",{"persons":13,"places":14,"events":15,"institutions":16,"groups":17,"titles":18,"houses":19,"sources":20,"artifacts":21,"librarySections":22},2709,7446,1661,1781,1942,129,107,98,3,6596]