Origins
The Plantagenet dynasty originated with the marriage of Matilda — the daughter of King Henry I of England (and granddaughter of William the Conqueror) — to Geoffrey of Anjou in 1128. Matilda was Henry I’s designated heir; her cousin Stephen of Blois seized the English throne after Henry I’s death in 1135 and reigned through the civil war known as the Anarchy (1135–1153). The compromise that ended the war recognized Stephen as king for life but designated Matilda’s son Henry of Anjou as his successor. Henry took the throne as Henry II on Stephen’s death in 1154.
The dynastic name Plantagenet derives from the broom plant — planta genista in Latin — that Geoffrey of Anjou wore as a personal emblem. The name was not used by the dynasty itself during the medieval period (Plantagenet kings called themselves “of Anjou” or simply by their personal name); it was adopted as a retrospective dynastic label by Richard, Duke of York in the 1450s and entered standard historical usage thereafter.
The Angevin Empire
Henry II (reigned 1154–1189) inherited from his mother the Anglo-Norman kingdom of England, from his father the duchy of Anjou and the counties of Maine and Touraine, and from his 1152 marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine (the most eligible heiress in 12th-century Europe, recently divorced from Louis VII of France) the duchy of Aquitaine and the county of Poitou. The combined territorial holdings — the Angevin Empire — covered approximately half of modern France in addition to England and the Welsh marches.
Henry II was an unusually able administrator. The judicial reforms of his reign — the systematic use of royal travelling justices, the development of the common-law jury system, the standardization of writs — produced the foundational institutional structure of English common law. He also produced the most famous political crisis of the medieval English church, the conflict with Thomas Becket that led to Becket’s murder at Canterbury Cathedral in December 1170.
Loss of the continental empire
The Angevin Empire began to fragment under Henry II’s sons. Richard I (Richard the Lionheart, reigned 1189–1199) spent most of his ten-year reign on the Third Crusade and in subsequent French campaigns. John (reigned 1199–1216) lost most of the continental holdings to King Philip II of France between 1202 and 1206 — Normandy, Anjou, Maine, and Touraine were permanently incorporated into the French crown.
The territorial losses produced the fiscal pressures that drove the baronial revolt of 1215 and the sealing of Magna Carta. John’s death in 1216 left the nine-year-old Henry III as king under regents who reissued the charter and gradually stabilized the political situation.
The 13th and early 14th centuries
The middle Plantagenet period was dominated by the development of constitutional institutions and by the renewed conflicts with France, Wales, and Scotland.
Henry III (reigned 1216–1272) presided over the development of Parliament — initially as an irregular royal council, then (after the baronial reforms of Simon de Montfort in the 1260s) as a more institutionalized assembly. Edward I (reigned 1272–1307) completed the conquest of Wales (1277–1283), unsuccessfully attempted the conquest of Scotland (the Wars of Scottish Independence began under him with William Wallace and continued under Robert the Bruce), and refined the parliamentary system.
The reign of Edward II (1307–1327) produced the constitutional crisis treated in our story on his deposition and disputed death at Berkeley Castle; his queen Isabella of France and her lover Roger Mortimer effectively governed England between 1326 and 1330. Edward III (reigned 1327–1377) overthrew Mortimer in a 1330 coup and initiated the Hundred Years’ War in 1337 with his claim to the French throne through his mother.
The Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of the Roses
The 14th- and 15th-century Plantagenets were dominated by two wars. The Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) against the French monarchy passed through several phases of English military success (Crécy 1346, Poitiers 1356, Agincourt 1415) and French recovery (especially under Joan of Arc, 1429–1431, and Charles VII’s military reforms of the 1440s). It ended with the expulsion of the English from continental France apart from Calais.
The Wars of the Roses (1455–1487) were the dynastic civil wars between the two surviving Plantagenet branches — the House of Lancaster (descended from Edward III’s third son John of Gaunt) and the House of York (descended from Edward III’s fourth son Edmund of Langley). The wars produced multiple changes of dynasty and a substantial proportion of casualties among the English noble class. They ended in two stages: at Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485, where the Yorkist king Richard III was killed in battle by the Lancastrian-Welsh adventurer Henry Tudor; and at Stoke Field on 16 June 1487, where the last Yorkist pretender Lambert Simnel was defeated.
Successors
Henry Tudor took the throne as Henry VII, the first king of the Tudor dynasty that would rule England until 1603. The Plantagenet bloodline survived only through female lines (Henry VIII’s mother Elizabeth of York was the daughter of Edward IV); the male Plantagenet line had been progressively extinguished through the Wars of the Roses and the Tudor executions of surviving Yorkist claimants.
The 331 years of Plantagenet rule produced the constitutional, legal, parliamentary, and administrative foundations of the English state, several of the foundational documents of European political tradition (Magna Carta, the modern parliament), and a long literary tradition of historical drama. Shakespeare’s history plays — the two tetralogies covering Richard II through Richard III — are the major secular monument to the Plantagenet period in English cultural memory.