Ugolino of the Gherardesca and the ‘Enigma’ of Simon de Montfort

Summary

I am wary of English exceptionalism. For me it slips too easily into essentialism and into teleology. As far as the nobility is concerned, it encourages us to approach its politically active members as at least quasi-constitutionalists. This is, of course, quintessentially the case when it comes to Simon de Montfort. But not only him. Noble behaviour needs to be understood in accordance with thirteenth-century norms. If we can do this with the earl of Leicester, a better understanding of noble actions in general will surely follow. There has been a tendency in the past to see his actions as so extraordinary as to be historically transcendent. These days most professional historians tend to be more circum¬spect. Many do still regard him, however, as effectively sui generis. One can hardly pick up a modern book on Simon de Montfort without being confronted by the claim that he is in fact an ‘enigma’. The words may differ but the idea is the same. Thus, Margaret Wade Labarge wrote in 1962: ‘The paradoxes and contradictions of his character perplexed his contemporaries, as they have confused later generations of students’, and John Maddicott in 1994: ‘his participation … was by no means an unambivalent matter, for it was distorted by appetites, greeds and grievances which cast a shadow over his motives and which raise for any historian the most difficult questions about his ultimate ambitions’. More recent writers have tended to be of the same mind. Adrian Jobson wrote of a complex mixture of ‘idealism’ and ‘manipulation of the “machinery of reform” in furtherance of his private interests’, while according to Darren Baker in 2015, this ‘improbable mix of idealism and self-interest is what makes Simon de Montfort such an intriguing figure’. The apparent dichotomy between public and private interests lies at the heart of the matter. There are, however, other dimensions such as the foreign-born noble who urged strong action against aliens, and the man whose essentially secular ambitions had fanatically religious overtones.

But are these ‘contradictions’ overstated? And do they in fact rely over-much on modern rather than contemporary standards?