Free The Plantagenets by Dan Jones

city: frantic with commerce and entertainment, jesters and jugglers, crime, filth, despair and humanity. The Canterbury cleric and biographer William Fitzstephen wrote a famously wide-eyed description of the city during the 1170s – notwithstanding the writer’s boundless enthusiasm, this would have been much the same then as Eleanor found it when she first settled in England:
[London] is fortunate in the wholesomeness of its climate, the devotion of its Christians, the strength of its fortifications, its well-situated location, the respectability of its citizens, and the propriety of their wives. Furthermore it takes great pleasure in its sports and is prolific in producing men of superior quality … there are also in London and in its suburbs thirteen conventual churches and one hundred and twenty-six lesser, parish churches … On the east side stands the royal fortress, of tremendous size and strength, whose walls and floors rise up from the deepest foundations – the mortar being mixed withanimal’s blood. On the west side are two heavily fortified castles. Running continuously around the north side is the city wall, high and wide, punctuated at intervals with turrets, and with seven double-gated entranceways …
Two miles from the city and linked to it by a populous suburb, there rises above the bank of that river the king’s palace, a structure without equal, with inner and outer fortifications … To the north there are tilled fields, pastures, and pleasant, level meadows with streams flowing through them, where watermill wheels turned by the current make a pleasing sound. Not far off spreads out a vast forest, its copses dense with foliage concealing wild animals – stags, does, boars, and wild bulls …
Every morning you can find [people] carrying on their various trades, those selling specific types of goods, and those who hire themselves out as labourers, each in their particular locations engaged in their tasks. Nor should I forget to mention that there is in London, on the river bank amidst the ships, the wine for sale, and the storerooms for wine, a public cookshop. On a daily basis there, depending on the season, can be found fried or boiled foods and dishes, fish large and small, meat – lower quality for the poor, finer cuts for the wealthy – game and fowl (large and small) … Those with a fancy for delicacies can obtain for themselves the meat of goose, guinea-hen or woodcock – finding what they’re after is no great chore, since all the delicacies are set out in front of them … Middlemen from every nation under heaven are pleased to bring to the city ships full of merchandise …
    It was a busy, lively, international city, and it must have kindled in Eleanor memories of Paris – the grandest city in northern Europe, with its own rivers, palaces and rolling meadows: the site of some of her first experiences of queenship. But something in London must have agreed with the queen, for during her first spell in England, Eleanor managed what she most manifestly had not when she was queen of France, and gave birth to a rapid succession of healthy children. In September 1155, as soon as she had recovered from youngHenry’s birth, Eleanor was pregnant again: a girl, Matilda, was delivered in June 1156, named for the empress who had struggled so long to secure the Plantagenets’ grand new realm.
    Matilda’s birth would have relieved some of the sadness Eleanor felt in June 1156, when William, her first son, died. The little boy was three years old. He was buried with dignity at the feet of his great-grandfather Henry I in Reading Abbey. It would have been a time of great grief for the family. But child mortality was a fact even of royal life in the Middle Ages, and the best insurance against it was a large brood of children. Without pause or delay, two more boys were born in England: Richard, at Oxford in September 1157; and Geoffrey, who was born almost exactly a year later.
    Henry, Matilda,