December 1st in medieval history

December 1st was not a lucky day for the following people. On this date in 1135, King Henry I died, a death that would set off nineteen wretched years for the English people, a time when they said “Christ and his saints slept.” Apparently the story that he died of “a surfeit of lampreys” may just be a legend; too bad, for I rather liked that one. He did, however, die after feasting upon lampreys, which his doctors had forbidden.
Also on December 1st, 1170, Thomas Becket returned to Canterbury after a six year exile in France. He wasted no time in infuriating his king again, and the clock began ticking toward his desired martyrdom on December 29th. Can I prove he sought martyrdom? No, but as a former lawyer, I think I could make a convincing case based on the evidence—his insistence upon excommunicating the Archbishop of York and the bishops of London and Salisbury, knowing full well that he’d be flinging a torch into the hayrick of Henry’s Angevin temper; his refusal to compromise; then his refusal to flee from the four knights who would slay him, even though his monks, aware that he was in great danger, pleaded with him to do so. Instead, he confronted and taunted the knights, and so gained immortality for himself and put Henry in an impossible position. I can’t say he anticipated being made a saint, but it may have crossed his mind, knowing how shocked Christendom would be by the murder of an archbishop in his own cathedral. I doubt that he’d have been pleased that Henry managed to wriggle out of the trap and his killers were subjected only to the penance of a pilgrimage. And since there is no evidence that Becket had an appreciation for irony, he probably would not have been amused that the reason his killers escaped punishment was because he’d refused to accept Henry’s attempt to reform the law with the Constitutions of Clarendon. As I had Henry say in Time and Chance, “The ultimate absurdity of this, Ranulf, is that their crime is one the Church would deny me the right to punish. Thomas insisted unto his final breath that only the Church could judge the offenses of men in holy orders and any crimes committed against them.” Since all the Angevins had a strong sense of irony, we can safely say that Henry took some grim amusement from that.
And on December 1st, 1235, Isabella, the daughter of King John and Isabelle d’Angouleme, sister of Henry III, died in childbirth at the age of twenty-seven; the baby died, too. She’d been wed six years earlier to Frederick II, the brilliant, controversial Holy Roman Emperor, and had given him two children. Frederick was said to be fond of his beautiful young English wife, but her brother Henry was not happy that she was kept so secluded, rarely appearing in public. We do not know how Isabella felt about any of this--the match with Frederick or his harem or the luxurious, isolated life she led as his empress. Women’s voices were rarely recorded throughout most of history.