The evidence regarding the status of Hereford in the early 12th century is ambiguous. Local government can hardly be said to have begun in any recognisable form, yet some sort of communal identity seems to have existed. In the reign of Henry I (1100-1135) a leading local noble, Payne fitz John issued a writ addressed a writ to 'the reeve of Hereford, whoever he may be, and to all the burghers of Hereford, French and English'.

Widemarsh gate in the late 18th century. In 1582 Thomas Church, a dyer, was given permission to cut a doorway through the city wall near the gate in order to use the water in the town ditch.

The evidence regarding the status of Hereford in the early 12th century is ambiguous. Local government can hardly be said to have begun in any recognisable form, yet some sort of communal identity seems to have existed. In the reign of Henry I (1100-1135) a leading local noble, Payne fitz John issued a writ addressed a writ to 'the reeve of Hereford, whoever he may be, and to all the burghers of Hereford, French and English'.

When, after the death of Henry I, the succession was disputed between Stephen and Matilda, a civil war, known as 'The Anarchy' ensued during which it was said 'God and his angels slept'. The uncertainty about the succession cased by Henry's death had encouraged the Welsh to revolt and Payne fitz John was killed in battle against them. The Norman occupation of Wales came under threat and several castles fell.

Disaffected by Stephen's inability to support the marches, Geoffrey Talbot declared for Matilda. In early 1138 he garrisoned the castle at Hereford on her behalf. There were at the time no substantial defensive works around the town itself. King Stephen appeared in person and spent four or five weeks besieging the castle. During the siege the town 'below the bridge of the Wye' was burnt down - presumably the area around the castle. Geoffrey surrendered and was allowed to depart with his forces. As they left they burnt the suburb south of the river. Stephen's followers garrisoned the castle.

Widemarsh gate now. Thomas Church's doorway is in the centre of the photograph.

Henry II and Fair Rosamund 

When Matilda’s son, Henry II came to the throne of England on Stephen’s death, Hereford was on the fringes of an Angevin empire which stretched from the Pyrenees to the Scottish border.  Henry, or more accurately Henri, ‘Plantagenet’ (1154 – 89) was entirely French and spent two thirds of his reign in his French domains.  Paris was surrounded on three sides by his territories.  He created the post of Justiciar to run England in his absences.  On his death he was buried at Fontevrault Abbey in Anjou, where later his wife Eleanor and his third son Richard (the ‘Lionheart’) would join him.

 Henry best known connection with English affairs is his instigation of the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.  However, his association with Herefordshire was to provide troubadours with more romantic material. Clifford Castle in the west of the county was the birth-place of Rosamund Clifford.  Known as the ‘Fair’ Rosamond, she was considered the beauty of her age, and became the king’s mistress.

Hereford’s ‘University’  

In the mid 12th century the civilising influence of the Arabs was beginning to be felt in Western Europe.  In the mid 11th century many English scholars, those that could afford to, went to Paris to study (there was no communication problem as these students would already have spoken French as their first language and would have learnt Latin at an early age).  However, although Paris was pre-eminent in theology, for some the new scientific learning available in the territories of the Islamic rulers was more attractive.  A synthesis of Greek and Indian astronomy was made by fifth and sixth century Persians.  The Persian Empire fell to the armies of Islam in the 7th century.  In the 9th century Arab scholars in Baghdad were producing books of astronomy and mathematics which ultimate would reach Western Europe and inspire what is often called the ‘12th century renaissance’.  In Moorish Spain not only the Eastern sciences were available but also Greek Philosophy, “certain books, claiming to be by Aristotle, recently discovered and translated in Toledo” as Geraldus Cambrensis said.

Knowledge of Arab sciences had reached Hereford by the end of the 11th century.  Robert of Lorraine, Bishop from 1075 to 1096, was the author of works on the abacus (then newly introduced to England), astronomy and the calendar, but it was in the late 12th century that Hereford became one of the foremost schools (we would now call them universities) in England.

Grammar, logic, rhetoric, (the trivium) and arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy (the quadrivium) could be studied in the town.  Apart from these ‘liberal arts’, other subjects were canon and civil law, theology, astrology and geomancy.  (Geomancy was originally divination by casting a handful of soil upon a surface, later the study of patterns made by random dots made on a page.)  The Bishop of Hereford from 1186 to 1199, William de Vere, was a scholar who encouraged the new scientific knowledge coming from the Arabic world.  Roger Infans – Roger of Hereford - adapted Arabic astronomical tables for the meridian of Hereford in 1178 and among his other books was Iudicia Astronomie, a book on astrology.

Literature, if not actually taught, was certainly practised, and another Hereford scholar, Simon du Fresne, was a poet of distinction in both French and Latin.  A Latin poem of his is addressed to the Norman scholar and writer Geraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales).  These extolled the virtues of Hereford as a place of learning where Gerald would be welcome.  Gerald may not have actually taught at Hereford but was a canon of the cathedral between 1193 and 1202, wrote a Life of St Ethelbert, and certainly had many local associations.   Another figure active in Hereford at the time was Walter Map.  Walter was a Herefordshire man of Welsh descent.  He studied in Paris in the later 1150s and was not only a scholar but a poet of distinction and is possibly the originator of the sections of the Arthurian Romances dealing with Sir Lancelot.   Walter and Gerald were united in their dislike of the Cistercian order and penned lines attacking the monks of Dore Abbey.                         

Whether 12th century schools such as Hereford survived to become later medieval universities was often a matter of chance.  A few teachers with national, or even international reputations, would attract students – even one outstanding figure could do this.  The loss of these key members of a school might lead to its extinction.  The oldest Christian university in Europe, Bologna, was founded in 1088, when Robert of Lorraine was Bishop of Hereford.  Paris was founded in about 1150 and Oxford in 1167.  Salerno and Palenzia, founded in the 1170s and Reggio, 1188, are contemporary with Hereford’s flowering.  The Hereford school was probably in decline by the time Cambridge was founded in 1209.  Hereford did not survive as a place of higher education; nonetheless, for a while it was one of the foremost educational establishments in England.

The First City Charter  

In 1189 Henry II died and was succeeded by Richard I.  Richard immediately set of on the Third Crusade, which he led jointly with King Philippe Auguste of France and the Emperor Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’, although Barbarossa drowned on his way to the ‘Holy Land’ in June 1190.  Much over-romanticised in the west, the crusaders’ brutality is remembered by the Arabs in the use of the word ‘Crusader’ as a term of abuse for aggressive westerners to this day.  Slaughtering Jew and Muslim, soldier and civilian alike, they failed to re-take Jerusalem and spent much time quarrelling among themselves. 

No less French than his father, in the ten years Richard ‘Coeur de Lion’ was king of England he spent less than six months in the country.  He showed no interest in England whatsoever other than as a means to raise money for military expeditions.  He would sell, he said, the city of London, if he could find a buyer. 

One result of this need for money was the granting, for a price, of charters to English towns.  It is not clear to what extent this was a formalisation of a pre-existing state of affairs, but towns were willing to pay the price so that they had a clear legal status.

It was against this background that in 1190 Hereford obtained its charter and became a legally self-governing community with a bailiff (later mayor) chosen by the citizens. The King's Fee was now within the jurisdiction of this new corporate body but much of the town remained within the church's fee. This led, in Hereford as elsewhere, to conflicts between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, which lasted for centuries and occasionally led to physical violence.

King John

Richard died 6th April 1199, of wounds he received in a skirmish at Chalus in Aquitaine.  Whatever his failings may have been, he was a renowned general. His younger brother John was not, and this led to the loss of his possessions in France.  Roger de Lacy, constable of Chester, held out at the last built and greatest of the kings of England’s Norman castles, Château Gaillard, from Sept 1203 to March 8th 1204, when he was forced to surrender.  By midsummer 1204, of the vast and rich French lands that John’s father and brother had held, the Channel Islands were all that was left to him.

In 1201 Llewellyn ap Iorwerth (Llewellyn the Great), prince of Gwynedd swore an oath of allegiance to John.  This was rewarded in the standard manner in 1205 when he married John’s illegitimate daughter, Joan.  In 1210 John, nervous of Llewellyn’s apparent ambitions, invaded his son-in-law’s principality and took control of the territory east of the River Conwy.  In 1212, with John in conflict with the Pope and with his barons,   Llewellyn recaptured his lost lands and in 1215 seized Shrewsbury. 

He allied with the English barons in forcing John’s signature of Magna Carta in 1215 in which the Welsh land laws were specifically recognised and three legal systems were identified - English law, the Welsh law - that of Pura Wallia, and the law of the Marches - Marchia Wallie.

An imaginary bird's eye view of Hereford Castle

The war between King John and his barons led to a French army landing at Thanet in 1216. John retreated to the Welsh borders where he had allies and where Engelard of Cigone had spent large amounts of money on fortifications at Bristol and Hereford. After John's death the threat was alleviated by the defeat of the French and their English allies at the Battle of Lincoln in May 1217. John is buried in Worcester Cathedral.

Llewellyn the Great At Aberdyfi in 1216 the other Welsh princes paid homage to Llewellyn who was now effectively ruler of all of Wales that was not controlled by the Marcher Lords.  The Welsh border remained unstable during the reign of John's son Henry III.  Llewellyn's campaigns gained him further territory and a number of castles, including Carmarthen and Cardigan, and he threatened Brecon.  In 1218 the Treaty of Worcester confirmed him as being pre-eminent in Wales (John’s son Henry III was a minor), but the troubles were not brought to an end.  The Anglo-French, particularly William the Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, and the Justiciar Hubert de Burgh, brought Llewellyn under increased military pressure.  At the Battle of Ceri in 1228, Llewellyn gained total victory over de Burgh, and the wounded William de Broase the Younger was taken prisoner.  The Welsh, as Giraldus Cambrenis records, were a hospitable people, but when in 1230 William was found in Llewellyn's bed-chamber with 'King John's daughter, the princes wife' he had transgressed the bounds of permissible behaviour.  He was hanged.  In 1231 Llewellyn burned the towns of Baldwin's Castle, Radnor, Hay, and Brecon, 'and he destroyed the castles to the ground'.  Llewellyn remained a danger to his enemies in Wales and the March until his death in April 1240.

Llewellyn Ap Gruffydd In 1256 Llewellyn ap Gruffydd moved against English property in north Wales. During the next year he subdued most of the other Welsh princes and defeated an English force near Carmarthen. At an assembly of princes in 1258 he assumed the title of Prince of Wales. Against this continuing background of unrest the castle at Hereford was rebuilt. It became one of the largest in England, of a similar size to Windsor. The earthen rampart around the town was replaced by a stone wall and at this time the suburbs of Hereford appear to have reached their fullest medieval extent.

The Castle Pool - The only part of the moat of Hereford Castle remaining. The garden of the Castle House Hotel is on the northern edge of the pool and the Castle Green on the southern.