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HENRY PLANTAGENET

THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE

THE GOVERNMENT OF ENGLAND

THE FIRST REFORMS

THE CONSTITUTIONS OF CLARENDON

THE ASSIZE OF CLARENDON

THE STRIFE WITH THE CHURCH

THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND

REVOLT OF THE BARONAGE

THE COURT OF HENRY

THE DEATH OF HENRY

HENRY PLANTAGENET

With the failure of Matilda's effort the whole burden of securing his future prospects fell upon Henry himself, then a boy of fifteen. Nor was he slow to accept the charge. A year later, in 1149, he placed himself in open opposition to Stephen as claimant to the English throne, by visiting the court of his great-uncle, David of Scotland, at Carlisle; he was knighted by the Scot king, and made a compact to yield up to David the land beyond the Tyne when he should himself have won the English throne. But he found England cold, indifferent, without courage; his most powerful friends were dead, and he returned to Normandy to wait for better days. Geoffrey was still carrying on the defence of the duchy against Stephen's son Eustace, and his ally, the King of France; and Henry joined his father's army till peace was made in 1151. In that year he was invested with his mother's heritage and became at eighteen Duke of Normandy; at nineteen his father's death made him Count of Anjou, Lorraine, and Maine.

The rise of this great power to the west was necessarily the absorbing political question of the day. It menaced every potentate in France; and before a month was out a ring of foes had gathered round the upstart Angevin ruler. The outraged King of France; Stephen, King of England, and Henry's rival in the Norman duchy; Stephen's nephew, the Count of Champagne, brother of the Count of Blois; the Count of Perche; and Henry's own brother, Geoffrey, were at once united by a common alarm; and their joint attack on Normandy a month after the marriage was but the first step in a comprehensive design of depriving the common enemy of the whole of his possessions. Henry met the danger with all the qualities which mark a great general and a great statesman. Cool, untroubled, impetuous, dashing from point to point of danger, so that horses sank and died on the road in his desperate marches, he was ready wherever a foe threatened, or a friend prayed help. Foreign armies were driven back, rebel nobles crushed, robber castles broken down; Normandy was secured and Anjou mastered before the year was out. The strife, however, had forced him for the first time into open war with Stephen, and at twenty Henry turned to add the English crown to his dominions.

Already the glory of success hung about him; his footsteps were guided by prophecies of Merlin; portents and wonders marked his way. When he landed on the English shores in January 1153, he turned into a church "to pray for a space, after the manner of soldiers," at the moment when the priest opened the office of the mass for that day with the words, "Behold there cometh the Lord, the Ruler, and the kingdom is in his hand." In his first battle at Malmesbury the wintry storm and driving rain which beat in the face of Stephen's troops showed on which side Heaven fought. As the king rode out to the next great fight at Wallingford, men noted fearfully that he fell three times from his horse. Terror spread among the barons, whose interests lay altogether in anarchy, as they saw the rapid increase of Henry's strength; and they sought by a mock compromise to paralyse the power of both Stephen and his rival. "Then arose the barons, or rather the betrayers of England, treating of concord, although they loved nothing better than discord; but they would not join battle, for they desired to exalt neither of the two, lest if the one were overcome the other should be free to govern them; they knew that so long as one was in awe of the other he could exercise no royal authority over them." Henry subdued his wrath to his political sagacity. He agreed to meet Stephen face to face at Wallingford; and there, with a branch of the Thames between them, they fixed upon terms of peace. Stephen's son Eustace, however, refused to lay down arms, and the war lingered on, Stephen being driven back to the eastern counties, while Henry held mid-England. In August, however, Eustace died suddenly, "by the favour of God," said lovers of peace; and Stephen, utterly broken in spirit, soon after yielded.

King of England, Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine, Count of Poitou, Duke of Aquitaine, suzerain lord of Britanny, Henry found himself at twenty-one ruler of dominions such as no king before him had ever dreamed of uniting. He was master of both sides of the English Channel, and by his alliance with his uncle, the Count of Flanders, he had command of the French coast from the Scheldt to the Pyrenees, while his claims on Toulouse would carry him to the shores of the Mediterranean. His subjects told with pride how "his empire reached from the Arctic Ocean to the Pyrenees;" there was no monarch save the Emperor himself who ruled over such vast domains. But even the Emperor did not gather under his sway a grouping of peoples so strangely divided in race, in tongue, in aims, in history. No common tie of custom or of sympathy united the unwieldy bundle of states bound together in a common subjection; the men of Aquitaine hated Anjou with as intense a bitterness as they hated France; Angevin and Norman had been parted for generations by traditional feuds; the Breton was at war with both; to all England was "another world"--strange in speech, in law, and in custom. And to all the subjects of his heterogeneous empire Henry himself was a mere foreigner. To Gascon or to Breton he was a man of hated race and alien speech, just as much as he was to Scot or Welshman; he seemed a stranger alike to Angevin and Norman, and to Englishmen he came as a ruler with foreign tastes and foreign aims as well as a foreign tongue.

We see in descriptions of the time the strange rough figure of the new king, "Henry Curtmantel," as he was nicknamed from the short Angevin cape which hung on his shoulders, and marked him out oddly as a foreigner amid the English and Norman knights, with their long fur-lined cloaks hanging to the ground. The square stout form, the bull-neck and broad shoulders, the powerful arms and coarse rough hands, the legs bowed from incessant riding, showed a frame fashioned to an extraordinary strength. His head was large and round; his hair red, close-cut for fear of baldness; his fiery face much freckled; his voice harsh and cracked. Those about him saw something "lion-like" in his face; his gray eyes, clear and soft in his peaceful moments, shone like fire when he was moved, and few men were brave enough to confront him when his face was lighted up by rising wrath, and when his eyes rolled and became bloodshot in a paroxysm of passion. His overpowering energy found an outlet in violent physical exertion. "With an immoderate love of hunting he led unquiet days," following the chase over waste and wood and mountain; and when he came home at night he was never seen to sit down save for supper, but wore out his court with walking or standing till after nightfall, even when his own feet and legs were covered with sores from incessant exertion. Bitter were the complaints of his courtiers that there was never any moment of rest for himself or his servants; in war time indeed, they grumbled, excessive toil was natural, but time of peace was ill-consumed in continual vigils and labours and in incessant travel--one day following another in merciless and intolerable journeyings. Henry had inherited the qualities of the Angevin race--its tenacity, its courage, its endurance, the sagacity that was without impatience, and the craft that was never at fault. With the ruddy face and unwieldy frame of the Normans other gifts had come to him; he had their sense of strong government and their wisdom; he was laborious, patient, industrious, politic. He never forgot a face he had once seen, nor anything that he heard which he deemed worthy of remembering; where he once loved he never turned to hate, and where he once hated he was never brought to love. Sparing in diet, wasting little care on his dress--perhaps the plainest in his court,--frugal, "so much as was lawful to a prince," he was lavish in matters of State or in public affairs. A great soldier and general, he was yet an earnest striver after peace, hating to refer to the doubtful decision of battle that which might be settled by any other means, and stirred always by a great pity, strange in such an age and in such a man, for lives poured out in war. "He was more tender to dead soldiers than to the living," says a chronicler querulously; "and found far more sorrow in the loss of those who were slain than comfort in the love of those who remained." His pitiful temper was early shown in his determination to put down the barbarous treatment of shipwrecked sailors. He abolished the traditions of the civil war by forbidding plunder, and by a resolute fidelity to his plighted word. In political craft he was matchless; in great perils none was gentler than he, but when the danger was past none was harsher; and common talk hinted that he was a willing breaker of his word, deeming that in the pressure of difficulty it was easier to repent of word than deed, and to render vain a saying than a fact. "His mother's teaching, as we have heard, was this: That he should delay all the business of all men; that whatever fell into his hands he should retain along while and enjoy the fruit of it, and keep suspended in hope those who aspired to it; confirming her sentences with this cruel parable, 'Glut a hawk with his quarry and he will hunt no more; show it him and then draw it back and you will ever keep him tractable and obedient.' She taught him also that he should be frequently in his chamber, rarely in public; that he should give nothing to any one upon any testimony but what he had seen and known; and many other evil things of the same kind. We, indeed," adds this good hater of Matilda, "confidently attributed to her teaching everything in which he displeased us."

A king of those days, indeed, was not shielded from criticism. He lived altogether in public, with scarcely a trace of etiquette or ceremony. When a bishop of Lincoln kept Henry waiting for dinner while he performed a service, the king's only remedy was to send messenger after messenger to urge him to hurry in pity to the royal hunger. The first-comer seems to have been able to go straight to his presence at any hour, whether in hall or chapel or sleeping-chamber; and the king was soundly rated by every one who had seen a vision, or desired a favour, or felt himself aggrieved in any way, with a rude plainness of speech which made sorely necessary his proverbial patience under such harangues. "Our king," says Walter Map, "whose power all the world fears, ... does not presume to be haughty, nor speak with a proud tongue, nor exalt himself over any man." The feudal barons of medieval times had, indeed, few of the qualities that made the courtiers of later days, and Henry, violent as he was, could bear much rough counsel and plain reproof. No flatterer found favour at his court. His special friends were men of learning or of saintly life. Eager and eloquent in talk, his curiosity was boundless. He is said to have known all languages from Gaul to the Jordan, though he only spoke French and Latin. Very discreet in all business of the kingdom, and a subtle finder out of legal puzzles, he had "knowledge of almost all histories, and experience of all things ready to his hand." Henry was, in fact, learned far beyond the learning of his day. "The king," wrote Peter of Blois to the Archbishop of Palermo, "has always in his hands bows and arrows, swords and hunting-spears, save when he is busy in council or over his books. For as often as he can get breathing-time amid his business cares, he occupies himself with private reading, or takes pains in working out some knotty question among his clerks. Your king is a good scholar, but ours is far better. I know the abilities and accomplishments of both. You know that the King of Sicily was my pupil for a year; you yourself taught him the element of verse-making and literary composition; from me he had further and deeper lessons, but as soon as I left the kingdom he threw away his books, and took to the easy-going ways of the court. But with the King of England there is school every day, constant conversation of the best scholars and discussion of questions."

Behind all this amazing activity, however, lay the dark and terrible side of Henry's character. All the violent contrasts and contradictions of the age, which make it so hard to grasp, were gathered up in his varied heritage; the half-savage nature which at that time we meet with again and again united with first-class intellectual gifts; the fierce defiance born of a time when every man had to look solely to his own right hand for security of life and limb and earthly regard--a defiance caught now and again in the grip of an overwhelming awe before the portents of the invisible world; the sudden mad outbreaks of irresponsible passion which still mark certain classes in our own day, but which then swept over a violent and undisciplined society. Even to his own time, used as it was to such strange contrasts, Henry was a puzzle. Men saw him diligently attend mass every day, and restlessly busy himself during the most solemn moments in scribbling, in drawing pictures, in talking to his courtiers, in settling the affairs of State; or heard how he refused confession till forced to it by terror in the last extremity of sickness, and then turned it into a surprising ceremony of apology and self-justification. At one time they saw him, conscience-smitten at the warning of some seer of visions, sitting up through the night amid a tumultuous crowd to avert the wrath of Heaven by hastily restoring rights and dues which he was said to have unjustly taken, and when the dawning light of day brought cooler counsel, swift to send the rest of his murmuring suitors empty away; at another bowing panic-stricken in his chapel before some sudden word of ominous prophecy; or as a pilgrim, barefoot, with staff in hand; or kneeling through the night before a shrine, with scourgings and fastings and tears. His steady sense of order, justice, and government, broken as it was by fits of violent passion, resumed its sway as soon as the storm was over; but the awful wrath which would suddenly break forth, when the king's face changed, and he rolled on the ground in a paroxysm of madness, seemed to have something of diabolic origin. A story was told of a demon ancestress of the Angevin princes: "From the devil they came, and to the devil they will go," said the grim fatalism of the day.

THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE

The new kingdom which Henry had added to his dominions in France might well seem to a man of less inexhaustible energy to make the task of government impossible. The imperial system of his dreams was as recklessly defiant of physical difficulties as it was heedless of all the sentiments of national tradition. In the two halves of his empire no common political interest and no common peril could arise; the histories of north and south were carried on apart, as completely as the histories of America and England when they were apparently united under one king, and were in fact utterly severed by the ocean which defined the limits of two worlds. England had little part or lot in the history of Europe. Foreign policy it had none; when its kings passed to Normandy, English chroniclers knew nothing of their doings or their wars. Some little trade was carried on with the nearest lands across the sea,--with Normandy, with Flanders, or with Scandinavia,--but the country was almost wholly agricultural. Feudal in its social structure, governed by tradition, with little movement of inner life or contact with the world about it, its people had remained jealous of strangers, and as yet distinguished from the nations of Europe by a strange immobility and want of sympathy with the intellectual and moral movements around them. Sometimes strangers visited its kings; sometimes English pilgrims made their way to Rome by a dangerous and troublesome journey. But even the connection with the Papacy was slight. A foreign legate had scarcely ever landed on its shores; hardly any appeals were carried to the Roman Curia; the Church managed its own business after a customary fashion which was in harmony with English traditions, which had grown up during centuries of undisturbed and separate life.

On the other side of the Channel Henry ruled over a straggling line of loosely compacted states equal in extent to almost half of the present France. His long line of ill-defended frontier brought him in contact with the lands of the Count of Flanders, one of the chief military powers of the day; with the kingdom of France, which, after two hundred years of insignificance, was beginning to assert its sway over the great feudal vassals, and preparing to build up a powerful monarchy; and with the Spanish kingdoms which were emerging from the first successful effort of the Christian states to throw back the power of the Moors. Normandy and Auvergne were separated only by a narrow belt of country from the Empire, which, under the greatest ruler and warrior of the age, Frederick Barbarossa, was extending its power over Burgundy, Provence, and Italy. His claims to the over-lordship of Toulouse gave Henry an interest in the affairs of the great Mediterranean power--the kingdom of Sicily; and his later attempts on the territories of the Count of Maurienne brought him into close connection with Italian politics. No ruler of his time was forced more directly than Henry into the range of such international politics as were possible in the then dim and inchoate state of European affairs. England, which in the mind of the Norman kings had taken the first place, fell into the second rank of interests with her Angevin rulers. Henry's thoughts and hopes and ambitions centred in his continental domains. Lord of Rouen, of Angers, of Bordeaux, master of the sea-coast from Flanders to the Pyrenees, he seemed to hold in his hand the feeble King of Paris and of Orleans, who was still without a son to inherit his dignities and lands. The balance of power, as of ability and military skill, lay on his side; and, long as the House of Anjou had been the bulwark of the French throne, it even seemed as if the time might come peaceably to mount it themselves. Looking from our own island at the work which Henry did, and seeing more clearly by the light of later events, we may almost forget the European ruler in the English king. But this was far from being the view of his own day. In the thirty-five years of his reign little more than thirteen years were spent in England and over twenty-one in France. Thrice only did he remain in the kingdom as much as two years at a time; for the most part his visits were but for a few months torn from the incessant tumult and toil of government abroad; and it was only after long years of battling against invincible forces that he at last recognized England as the main factor of his policy, and in great crises chose rather to act as an English king than as the creator of an empire.

Thomas was now thirty-eight; Theobald, Nigel, and Leicester were all old men, and the young king of twenty-two must have seemed a mere boy to his new counsellors. The Empress had been left in Normandy to avoid the revival of old quarrels. Hated in England for her proud contempt of the burgher, her scorn of the churchman, her insolence to her adherents, she won in Normandy a fairer fame, as "a woman of excellent disposition, kind to all, bountiful in almsgiving, the friend of religion, of honest life." The political activity of Queen Eleanor was brought to an abrupt close by her marriage. In Henry she found a master very different from Louis of France, and her enforced withdrawal from public affairs during her husband's life contrasts strangely, not only with her former career, but with the energy which, when the heavy yoke was taken off her neck, she displayed as an old woman of nearly seventy during the reign of her son. Henry, in fact, stood alone among his new people. No debt of gratitude, no ties of friendship, bound the king to the lords whose aims he had first learned to know at Wallingford. The great barons who thronged round him in his court had all been rebels; the younger among them had never known what order, government, or loyalty meant. The Church was hesitating and timorous. To the people he was an utter stranger, unable even to speak their tongue. But from the first Henry took his place as absolute master and leader. "A strict regard to justice was apparent in him, and at the very outset he bore the appearance of a great prince."

The king at once put in force the scheme of reform which had been drawn up the year before at Wallingford, and of which the provisions have comedown to us in phrases drawn from the two sources which were most familiar to the learned and the vulgar of that day,--the Bible, and the prophecies of Merlin, the seer of King Arthur. The nobles were to give up all illegal rights and estates which they had usurped. The castles built by the warring barons were to be destroyed. The king was to bring back husbandmen to the desolate fields, and to stock pastures and forests and hillsides with cattle and deer and sheep. The clergy were henceforth to live in quiet, not vexed by unaccustomed burdens. Sheriffs were to be restored to the counties, who should do justice without corruption, nor persecute any for malice; thieves and robbers were to be hanged; the armed forces were to be disbanded; the knights were to beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; the hired Flemish soldiers were to turn from the camp to the plough, from tents to workshops, there to render as servants the obedience they had once demanded as masters. The work which Stephen had failed to do was now swiftly accomplished. The Flemish mercenaries vanished "like phantoms," or "like wax before the fire," and their leader, William of Ypres, the lord of Kent, turned with weeping to a monastery in his own land. The feudal lords were forced to give up such castles and lands as they had wrongfully usurped; and the newly-created earls were deprived of titles which they had wrung from King or Empress in the civil wars.

The great nobles of both parties made a last effort at resistance. In the north the Count of Aumale ruled almost as king. He was of the House of Champagne, son of that Count Stephen who had once been set up as claimant to the English throne, and near kinsman both of Henry and of Stephen. He now refused to give up Scarborough Castle; behind him lay the armies of the Scot king, and if Aumale's rebellion were successful the whole north must be lost. A rising on the Welsh border marked the revival of the old danger of which Henry himself had had experience in the castle of his uncle, Robert of Gloucester, when the Empress and Robert, with his Welsh connections and alliances, had dominated the whole of the south-west. Hugh Mortimer, lord of Wigmore, Cleobury, and Bridgenorth, the most powerful lord on the Welsh border, and Roger, Earl of Hereford and lord of Gloucester, and connected by his mother with the royal house of Wales, prepared for war. Immediately after his crowning Henry hurried to the north, accompanied by Theobald, and forced Aumale to submission. The fear of him fell on the barons. Roger of Hereford submitted, and the earldom of Hereford and city of Gloucester were placed in Henry's hands. The whole force of the kingdom was called out against Hugh Mortimer, and Bridgenorth, fortified fifty years before by Robert of Belesme, was reduced in July. The next year William of Warenne, the son of Stephen, gave up all his castles in England and Normandy, and the power of the House of Blois in the realm was finally extinguished. Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, was deprived of his fortresses, and the eastern counties were thus secured as those of the north and west had been.

The triumph of the Angevin conqueror was now complete. The baronage lay crushed at his feet. The Church was silent. The royal authority had been pushed, at least in name, to the utmost limits of the island. The close of this first work of settlement was marked by a royal progress between September 1157 and January 1158 through the whole length of England from Malmesbury to Carlisle. It was the king's first visit to the northern shires which he had restored to the English crown; he visited and fortified the most important border castles, and then through the bitter winter months he journeyed to Yorkshire, the fastnesses of the Peak, Nottingham, and the midland and southern counties. The progress ended at Worcester on Easter Day, 1158. There the king and queen for the last time wore their crowns in solemn state before the people. A strange ceremony followed. In Worcester Cathedral stood the shrine of St. Wulfstan, the last of the English bishops, the saint who had preserved the glory of the old English Church in the days of the Confessor, and carried it on through the troubled time of the Conquest, to whose supernatural resources the Conqueror himself had been forced to yield, and who had since by ever-ready miracle defended his city of Worcester from danger. On this shrine the king and Queen now laid their crowns, with a solemn vow never again to wear them. To the people of the West such an act may perhaps have seemed a token that Henry came among them as heir of the English line of kings, and as defender of the English Church and people.

From England Henry was called away in August 1158, by the troubles of his dominions across the sea. The power of Anjou had been built up by centuries of tyranny, treason, and greed. Nantes had been robbed from Britanny, Tours had been wrested from Blois, the southern borderland from Poitou. A hundred years of feud with Maine could not lightly be forgotten. Normandy still cherished the ancient hatred of pirate and Frenchman. To the Breton, as to the Norman and the Gascon, the rule of Anjou was a foreign rule; and if they must have a foreign ruler, better the King of France than these upstart Counts. Henry held his various states too by wholly different titles, and to every one of them his right was more or less disputed. To add to the confusion, his barons in every province held under him according to different customs and laws of feudal tenure; and many of them, moreover, owed a double allegiance, and did homage for part of their estates to Henry and for part to the King of France. In the general uncertainty as to every question of succession, or title, or law, or constitution, or feudal relations, the authority which had been won by the sword could be kept only by sheer military force. The rebellious array of the feudal nobles, eager to spring to arms against the new imperial system, could count on the help of the great French vassals along the border, jealous of their own independence, and ever watching the Angevin policy with vigilant hostility. And behind these princes of France stood the French king, Henry's suzerain lord and his most determined and restless foe, from whom the Angevin count had already taken away his wife and half his dominions, a foe to whom, however, through all the perplexed and intermittent wars of thirty years, he was bound by the indissoluble tie of the feudal relation, which remained the dominant and authoritative fact of the political morality of that day. For twenty years to come the two kings, both of them hampered by overwhelming difficulties, strove to avoid war each after his own fashion: Henry by money lavishly spent, and by wary diplomacy; Louis more economically by a restless cunning, by incessant watching of his adversary's weak points, by dexterously using the arms of Henry's rebellious subjects rather than those of Frenchmen.

Henry's first care was to secure his ill-defined and ill-defended frontier, and to recover those border fortresses which had been wrested from Geoffrey by his enemies. In Normandy the Vexin, which was the true military frontier between him and France, and commanded the road to Paris, had been lost. In Anjou he had to win back the castles which had fallen to the House of Blois. His brother Geoffrey, Earl of Nantes, was dead, and he must secure his own succession to the earldom. Two rival claimants were disputing the lordship of Britanny, but Britanny must at all costs be brought into obedience to Henry. There were hostile forces in Angoumois, La Marche, Saintonge, and the Limousin, which had to be finally destroyed. And besides all this, it was necessary to enforce Eleanor's rights over Berri, and her disputed claims to supremacy over Toulouse and Auvergne. Every one of these projects was at once taken in hand. Henry's chancellor, Thomas Becket, was sent from England in 1158 at the head of a splendid embassy to the French court, and when Henry landed in France the success of this mission was declared. A marriage was arranged between his little son Henry, now three years old, and Louis' daughter Margaret, aged six months; and the Vexin was to be restored to Normandy as Margaret's dowry. The English king obtained from Louis the right to judge as lord of Anjou and seneschal of France between the claimants to Britanny; his first entry into that province was with full authority as the officer of France, and the whole army of Normandy was summoned to Avranches to enforce his judgment. Conan was made Duke of Britanny under Henry's lordship, and Nantes was given up into his hands. He secured by treaty with the House of Blois the fortresses which had fallen into their hands, and before the year was out he thus saw his inheritance in Anjou and Normandy, as he had before seen his inheritance in England, completely restored. In November he conducted the King of France on a magnificent progress through Normandy and Britanny, not now as a vassal requiring his help, but with all the pomp of an equal king.

At this moment, indeed, Henry stood only second to the Emperor among the princes of Christendom, and his aim seems to have been to rival in some sort the Empire of the West, and to reign as an over-king, with sub-kings of his various provinces, and England as one of them, around him. He was connected with all the great ruling houses. His eldest son was married to the daughter of the King of France; the baby Richard, eighteen months old, was betrothed during the war of Toulouse to a daughter of the King of Aragon. He was himself a distant kinsman of the Emperor. He was head of the house of the Norman kings in Sicily. He was nearest heir of the kings of Jerusalem. Through his wife he was head of the house of Antioch, and claimed to be head of the house of Tripoli. Already in these first years of his reign the glory of the English king had been acknowledged by ambassadors from the Emperor, from the King of Jerusalem, from Norway, from Sweden, from the Moorish kings of Valencia and Murcia, bearing the gifts of an Eastern world--gold, silk, horses, and camels. England was forced out of her old isolation; her interest in the world without was suddenly awakened. English scholars thronged the foreign universities; English chroniclers questioned travellers, scholars, ambassadors, as to what was passing abroad. The influence of English learning and English statecraft made itself felt all over Europe. Never, perhaps, in all the history of England was there a time when Englishmen played so great apart abroad. English statesmen and bishops were set over the conduct of affairs in Provence, in Sicily, in Gascony, in Britanny, in Normandy. English archbishops and bishops and abbots held some of the highest posts in France, in Anjou, in Flanders, in Portugal, in Italy, in Sicily. Henry himself welcomed trained men from Normandy or Sicily or wherever he could find them, to help in his work of administration; but in England foreigners were not greatly welcomed in any place of power, and his court was, with but one or two exceptions, made up of men who, of whatever descent they might be, looked on themselves as Englishmen, and bore the impress of English training. The mass of Englishmen meanwhile looked after their own affairs and cared nothing about foreign wars fought by Braban?on mercenaries, and paid for by foreign gold. But if they had nothing to win from all these wars, they were none the less at last drawn into the political alliances and sympathies of their master. Shut out as she was by her narrow strip of sea from any real concern in the military movements of the continental peoples, England was still dragged by the policy of her Angevin rulers into all the complications of European politics. The friendships and the hatreds of her king settled who were to be the allies and who the foes of England, and practically fixed the course of her foreign policy for seven hundred years. A traditional sympathy lingered on from Henry's days with Germany, Italy, Sicily, and Spain; but the connection with Anjou forced England into a hostility with France which had no real ground in English feeling or English interests; the national hatred took a deeper character when the feudal nobles clung to the support of the French king against the English sovereign and the English people, and "generation handed on to generation an enmity whose origin had long been forgotten." From the disastrous Crusade of 1191, "from the siege of Acre," to use the words of Dr. Stubbs, "and the battle of Arsouf to the siege of Sebastopol and the battles of the Crimea, English and French armies never met again except as enemies."

THE GOVERNMENT OF ENGLAND

The building up of his mighty empire was not the only task which filled the first years of Henry's reign. Side by side with this went on another work of peaceful internal administration which we can but dimly trace in the dearth of all written records, but which was ultimately to prove of far greater significance than the imperial schemes that in the eyes of his contemporaries took so much larger proportions and shone with so much brighter lustre.

The restoration of outward order had not been difficult, for the anarchy of Stephen's reign, terrible as it was, had only passed over the surface of the national life and had been vanquished by a single effort. But the new ruler of England had to begin his work of administration not only amid the temporary difficulties of a general disorganization, but amid the more permanent difficulties of a time of transition, when society was seeking to order itself anew in its passage from the medieval to the modern world; and his victory over the most obvious and aggressive forms of disorder was the least part of his task. Through all the time of anarchy powerful forces had been steadily at work with which the king had now to reckon. A new temper and new aspirations had been kindled by the troubles of the last years. The deposition of Stephen, the elections of Matilda and of Henry, had been so many formal declarations that the king ruled by virtue of a bargain made between him and his people, and that if he broke his contract he justly forfeited his authority. The routine of silent and submissive councils had been broken through, and the earliest signs of discussion and deliberation had discovered themselves, while the Church, exerting in its assemblies an authority which the late king had helplessly laid down, formed a new and effective centre of organized resistance to tyranny in the future Even the rising towns had seized the moment when the central administration was paralysed to extend their own privileges, and to acquire large powers of self-government which were to prove the fruitful sources of liberty for the whole people.

We see everywhere, in fact, signs of the great contest which in one form or another runs through the whole of the twelfth century, and gives its main interest in our eyes to the English history of the time,--the struggle between the iron organization of medieval feudalism and those nascent forces of modern civilization which were fated in the end to shatter and supersede it. In spite of the cry of lamentation which the chroniclers carry down to us over the misery of a land stricken by plague and famine and rapine, it is still plain that even through the terrible years of Stephen's reign England had its share in the universal movement by which the squalor and misery of the Middle Ages were giving place to a larger activity and a better order of things A class unknown before was fast growing into power,--the middle class of burghers and traders, who desired above all things order, and hated above all things the medieval enemy of order, the feudal lord. Merchant and cultivator and wool-grower found better work ready to their hand than fighting, and the appearance of mercenary soldiers marked everywhere the development of peaceful industries. Amid all the confusion of civil war the industrial activities of the country had developed with bewildering rapidity; while knights and barons led their foreign hirelings to mutual slaughter, monks and canons were raising their religious houses in all the waste places of the land, and silently laying the foundations of English enterprise and English commerce. To the great body of the Benedictines and the Cluniacs were added in the middle of the twelfth century the Cistercians, who founded their houses among the desolate moorlands of Yorkshire in solitary places which had known no inhabitants since the Conqueror's ravages, or among the swamps of Lincolnshire. A hundred and fifteen monasteries were built during the nineteen years of Stephen's reign, more than had been founded in the whole previous century; a hundred and thirteen were added to these during the reign of Henry. In half a century sixty-four religious houses were built in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire alone. Monastery and priory, in which the decorated Romanesque was giving way to the first-pointed architecture, towered above the wretched mud-hovels in which the whole of the population below the class of barons crowded; their churches were distinguished by the rare and novel luxury of glass windows, which, as they caught the red light of the setting sun, startled the peasant with omens of coming ill. Multitudes of men were busied in raising the vast pile of buildings which made up a religious house,--cloisters, dormitories, chapels, hospitals, granaries, barns, storehouses, whose foundations when all else is gone still show in the rugged surface of some modern field. Regular and secular clergy were alike spurred on in their work by jealous rivalry. Archbishop Roger of York was at the opening of Henry's reign building his beautiful church at Ripon, of whose rich decoration traces still remain, while he gave scant sympathy and encouragement to the Cistercian monks still busy with the austere mass of buildings which they had raised at Fountains almost within sight of the Ripon towers.

We may gain some faint idea of the amazing stir and industry which the founding of these monasteries implied by following in our modern farms and pasture lands the traces which may even now be seen of the toil of these great preachers of labour. The whole water supply of a countryside for miles round was gathered up by vast drainage works; stagnant pools were transformed into running waters closed in by embankments, which still serve as ditches for the modern farmer; swamps were reclaimed that are only now preserved for cultivation by maintaining the dykes and channels first cut by medieval monks; mills rose on the banks of the newly-created streams; roads were made by which the corn of surrounding villages might be carried to the central mill and the produce of the land brought to the central storehouse. The new settlers showed a measureless cunning and industry in reclaiming worthless soil; and so eager were they for land at last, that the Cistercians were even said to desecrate churchyards, and to encroach on the borders of royal forests. They grew famous for the breeding of horses according to the exacting taste of the day, learned in the various species of palfreys and sumpter horses and knight's chargers and horses for ambling or for trotting. They thanked Heaven for the "blessings of fatness and fleeces," as foreign weavers sought their wool and the gold of Flanders was poured into their treasure-houses. The same enterprise and energy which in modern days made England the first manufacturing country of the world was then, in fact, fast pressing her forward to the place which Australia now holds towards modern Europe,--the great wool-growing country, the centre from whence the raw material for commerce was supplied. In vain the Church by its canons steadily resisted the economic changes of a time when wealth began to gather again and capital found new uses, and bitterly as it declaimed against usury and mortgages, angry complaints still increased "that many people laying aside business practised usury almost openly."

Nor were the towns behindhand in activity. As yet, indeed, the little boroughs were for the most part busy in fighting for the most elementary of liberties--for freedom of trade within the town, for permission to hold a market, for leave to come and go freely to some great fair, for the right to buy and sell in some neighbouring borough, for liberty to carry out their own justice and regulate the affairs of their town. They were buying from the lord, in whose "demesne" they lay, permission to gather wood in the forest, right of common in its pasture, the commutation of their services in harvest-time for "reap-silver," and of their bondage to the lord's mill for "multure-penny." Or they were fighting a sturdy battle with the king's justices to preserve some ancient privilege, the right of the borough perhaps to "swear by itself,"--that is, to a jury of its own or its freedom from the general custom of "frank-pledge." As trade advanced commercial bodies grew up in the boroughs and formed themselves into gilds; and these gilds gradually drew into their own hands the government of the town, which in old days had been decided by the general voice of the whole body of its burghers--that is, of those who held land within its walls. The English borough began, in fact, to resemble the foreign "Commune." Gilds of bakers, of weavers, of mercers, of fullers, of butchers, goldsmiths, pepperers, clothiers, and pilgrims appeared in London, York, Gloucester, Nottingham, even in little boroughs such as that of St. Edmunds; while in distant Cornwall, Totnes, Lidford, and Bodmin set up their gilds. How Henry regarded the movement it is hard to say. The gilds had to pay, as everything had to pay, to the needy Treasury; but otherwise they were not interfered with, and went on steadily increasing in power and numbers.

Amid all the intellectual activity which surrounded the English students abroad it is, curious to note what they carried home with them across the Channel, and what they left simply untouched. The zeal for learning quickly showed itself in the growth of the Universities. As early as 1133 Robert Pulleyn was teaching Latin at Oxford. In 1149 Archbishop Theobald brought to it Master Vacarius, a famous Lombard lawyer, who lectured on the Civil law until he was expelled by Stephen, half fearful of the new teaching and half influenced by the pressure of the older and more conservative of the English bishops. There was much of the foreign movement, however, which found no place in England. Difference of tongue shut out Norman and Englishman from the influence of the new Proven?al poetry, and for a century to come England owed nothing to the finished art of the South. The strip of sea which kept aloof all European tumults shut out also the speculations in politics and government which were making their way abroad. Even the religious movement which overran one half of France under the Albigenses, or that which counted its followers and martyrs by multitudes in Flanders never crossed the Channel, in spite of the constant intercourse between the peoples; and missionaries from Germany during the reign of Henry only succeeded in converting one poor woman in England who immediately recanted. It was in other directions that the energies of the people found their exercise. If Englishmen were heedless of foreign philosophers, they were quick to notice that the fruit of the vine had failed, and forthwith the unheard-of novelty of taverns where beer and mead were sold sprang up in France, probably by the help of those English traders whose beer was the marvel of Frenchmen.

It was these new conditions of the national life which constituted the real problem of government--a problem far more slow and difficult to work out than the mere suppression of a turbulent baronage. In the rapid movement towards material prosperity, the energies of the people were in all directions breaking away from the channels and limits in which they had been so long confined. Rules which had been sufficient for the guidance of a simple society began to break down under the new fullness and complexity of the national life, and the simple decisions by which questions of property and public order had been solved in earlier times were no longer possible. Moreover, a new confusion and uncertainty had been brought into the law in the last hundred years by the effort to fuse together Norman and English custom. Norman landlord or Norman sheriff naturally knew little of English law or custom, and his tendency was always to enforce the feudal rules which he practised on his Norman estates. In course of time it came about that all questions of land-tenure and of the relations of classes were regulated by a kind of double system. The Englishman as well as the Norman became the "man" of his lord as in Norman law, and was bound by the duties which this involved. On the other hand, the Norman as well as the Englishman held his land subject to the customary burdens and rights recognized by English law. Both races were thus made equal before the law, and no legal distinction was recognized between conqueror and conquered. There was, however, every element of confusion and perplexity in the theory and administration of the law itself, in the variety of systems which were contending for the mastery, and in the inefficiency of the courts in which they were applied. English law had grown up out of Teutonic custom, into which Roman tradition had been slowly filtering through the Dark Ages Feudal law still bore traces of its double origin in the system of the Teutonic "comitatus" and of the Roman "beneficium." Forest law, which governed the vast extent of the king's domains, was bound neither by Norman forms nor by English traditions, but was framed absolutely at the king's will. Canon law had been developed out of customs and precedents which had served to regulate the first Christian communities, and which had been largely formed out of the civil law of Rome. There was a multitude of local customs which varied in every hundred and in every manor, and which were preserved by the jealousy that prevailed between one village and another, the strong sense of local life and jurisdiction, and the strict adherence to immemorial traditions.

These different codes of law were administered in various courts of divers origins. The tenant-in-chief of the king who was rich enough had his cause carried to the King's Court of barons, where he was tried by his peers. The poorer vassals, with the mass of the people, sought such justice as was to be had in the old English courts, the Shire Court held by the sheriff, and, where this survived, the Hundred Court summoned by the bailiff. The lowest orders of the peasant class, shut out from the royal courts, could only plead in questions of property in the manor courts of their lords. The governing bodies of the richer towns were winning the right to exercise absolute jurisdiction over the burghers within their own walls. The Forest courts were held by royal officers, who were themselves exempt from all jurisdiction save that of the king. And under one plea or another all men in the State were liable for certain causes to be brought under the jurisdiction of the newly established Church courts. This system of conflicting laws was an endless source of perplexity. The country was moreover divided into two nationalities, who imperfectly understood one another's customary rights; and it was further broken into various classes which stood in different relations to the law. Those who had sufficient property were not only deemed entirely trustworthy themselves, but were also considered answerable for the men under them; a second class of freeholders held property sufficient to serve as security for their own good behaviour, but not sufficient to make them pledges for others; there was a third and lower class without property, for whose good conduct the law required the pledge of some superior. In a state of things so complicated, so uncertain and so shifting, it is hard to understand how justice can ever have been secured; nor, indeed, could any general order have been preserved, save for the fact that these early courts of law, having all sprung out of the same conditions of primitive life, and being all more or less influenced and so brought to some common likeness by the Roman law, did not differ very materially in their view of the relations between the subjects of the State, and fundamentally administered the same justice. Until this time too there had been but little legal business to bring before the courts. There was practically no commerce; there was little sale of land; questions of property were defined within very narrow limits; a mass of contracts, bills of exchange, and all the complicated transactions which trade brings with it, were only beginning to be known. As soon, however, as industry developed, and the needs of a growing society made themselves felt, the imperfections of the old order became intolerable. The rude methods and savage punishments of the law grew more and more burdensome as the number of trials increased; and the popular courts were found to be fast breaking down under the weight of their own ignorance and inefficiency.

The most important of these was the Shire Court. It still retained its old constitution; it preserved some tradition of a tribunal where the king was not the sole fountain of justice, and the memory of a law which was not the "king's law." It administered the old customary English codes, and carried on its business by the old procedure. There came to it the lords of the manors with their stewards, the abbots and priors of the county with their officers, the legal men of the hundreds who were qualified by holding property or by social freedom, and from every township the parish priest, with the reeve and four men, the smiths, farmers, millers, carpenters, who had been chosen in the little community to represent their neighbours; and along with them stood the pledges, the witnesses, the finders of dead bodies, men suspected of crime. The court was, in fact, a great public meeting of the whole county; there was no rank or order which did not send some of its number to swell the confused crowd that stood round the sheriff. The criminal was generally put on his trial by accusation of an injured neighbour, who, accompanied by his friends, swore that he did not bring his charge for hatred, or for envy, or for unlawful lust of gain. The defendant claimed the testimony of his lord, and further proved his innocence by a simple or threefold compurgation--that is, by the oath of a certain number of freemen among his neighbours, whose property gave them the required value in the eye of the law, and who swore together as "compurgators" that they believed his oath of denial to be "clean and unperjured." The faith of the compurgator was measured by his landed property, and the value of the joint-oath which was required depended on a most intricate and baffling set of arithmetical calculations, and differed according to the kind of crime, the rank of the criminal, and the amount of property which was in dispute, besides other differences dependent on local customs. Witnesses might also be called from among neighbours who held property and were acquainted with the facts to which they would "dare" to swear. The final judgment was given by acclamation of the "suitors" of the court--that is, by the owners of property and the elected men of the hundreds or townships; in other words, by the public opinion of the neighbourhood. If the accused man were of bad character by common report, or if he could find no friends to swear in his behalf, "the oath burst," and there remained for him only the ordeal or trial by battle, which he might accept or refuse at his own peril. In the simple ordeal he dipped his hand in boiling water to the wrist, or carried a bar of redhot iron three paces. If in consequence of his lord's testimony being against him the triple ordeal was used, he had to plunge his arm in water up to the elbow, or to carry the iron for nine paces. If he were condemned to the ordeal by water, his death seems to have been certain, since sinking was the sign of innocence, and if the prisoner floated he was put to death as guilty. The other alternative, trial by battle, which had been introduced by the Normans, was extremely unpopular in England; it told hardly against men who were weak or untrained to arms, or against the man of humble birth, who was allowed against his armed opponent neither horse nor the arms of a knight, but simply a leathern jacket, a shield of leather or wood, and a stick without knots or points.

At the beginning of the reign of Henry II, the Shire courts seem to have been nearly as bad as they could be. Scarcely any attempt had been made, perhaps none had till now been greatly needed, to improve a system which had grown up in a dim and ruder past. The Norman kings, indeed, had introduced into England a new method of deciding doubtful questions of property by the "recognition" of sworn witness instead of by the English process of compurgation or ordeal. Twelve men, who must be freemen and hold property, were chosen from the neighbourhood, and as "jurors" were sworn to state truly what they knew about the question in dispute, and the matter was decided according to their witness or "recognition." If those who were summoned were unacquainted with the facts, they were dismissed and others called; if they knew the facts but differed in their statement, others were added to their number, till twelve at least were found whose testimony agreed together. These inquests on oath had been used by the Conqueror for fiscal purposes in the drawing up of Doomsday Book. From that time special "writs" from king or justice were occasionally granted, by which cases were withdrawn from the usual modes of trial in the local courts, and were decided by the method of recognition, which undoubtedly provided a far better chance of justice to the suitor, replacing as it did the rude appeal to the ordeal or to battle by the sworn testimony of the chosen representatives, the good men and true, of the neighbourhood. But the custom was not yet governed by any positive and inviolable rules, and the action of the King's Court in this respect was imperfectly developed, uncertain, and irregular.

It is scarcely possible, indeed, to estimate the difficulties in the way of justice when Henry came to the throne. The wretched freeholders summoned to the Shire Court from farm and cattle, from mill or anvil or carpenter's bench, knew well the terrors of the journey through marsh and fen and forest, the dangers of flood and torrent, and perhaps of outlawed thief or murderer, the privations and hardships of the way; and the heavy fines which occur in the king's rolls for non-attendance show how anxiously great numbers of the suitors avoided joining in the troublesome and thankless business of the court. When they reached the place of trial a strange medley of business awaited them as questions arose of criminal jurisdiction, of feudal tenure, of English "sac and soc," of Norman franchises and Saxon liberties, with procedure sometimes of the one people, sometimes of the other. The days dragged painfully on as, without any help from trained lawyers, the "suitors" sought to settle perplexed questions between opposing claims of national, provincial, ecclesiastical, and civic laws, or made arduous journeys to visit the scene of some murder or outrage, or sought for evidence on some difficult problem of fact. Evidence, indeed, was not easy to find when the question in dispute dated perhaps from some time before the civil war and the suppression of the sheriff's courts, for no written record was ever kept of the proceedings in court, and everything depended on the memory of witnesses. The difficulties of taking evidence by compurgation increased daily. A method which centuries before had been successfully applied to the local crimes of small and stationary communities bound together by the closest ties of kinship and of fellowship in possession of the soil, when every transaction was inevitably known to the whole village or township, became useless when new social and industrial conditions had destroyed the older and simpler modes of life. The procedure of the courts was antiquated and no longer guided by consistent principles. Their modes of trial were so cumbrous, formal, and inflexible that it was scarcely possible to avoid some minute technical mistake which might invalidate the final decision.

The business of the larger courts, too, was for the most part carried on in French under sheriff, or bailiff, or lord of the manor. The Norman nobles did not know Latin, they were but gradually learning English; the bulk of the lesser clergy perhaps spoke Latin, but did not know Norman; the poorer people spoke only English; the clerks who from this time began to note down the proceedings of the king's judges in Latin must often have been puzzled by dialects of English strange to him. When each side in a trial claimed its own customary law, and neither side understood the speech of the other, the president of the court had every temptation to be despotic and corrupt, and the interpreter between him and his suitors became an important person who had much influence in deciding what mode of procedure was to be followed. The sheriff, often holding a hereditary post and fearing therefore no check to his despotism, added to the burden of the unhappy freeholders by a custom of summoning at his own fancy special courts, and laying heavy fines on those who did not attend them. Even when the law was fairly administered there was a growing number of cases in which the rigid forms of the court actually inflicted injustice, as questions constantly arose which lay far outside the limits of the old customary law of the Germanic tribes, or of the scanty knowledge of Roman law which had penetrated into other codes. The men of that day looked too often with utter hopelessness to the administration of justice; there was no peril so great in all the dangers that surrounded their lives as the peril of the law; there was no oppression so cruel as the oppression wrought by the harsh and rigid forms of the courts. From such calamities the miserable and despairing victims could look for no help save from the miraculous aid of the saints; and society at that time, as indeed it has been known to do in later days, was for ever appealing from the iniquity of law to God,--to a God who protected murderers if they murdered Jews, and defended robbers if they plundered usurers, who was, indeed, above all law, and was supposed to distribute a violent and arbitrary justice, answering to the vulgar notion of an equity unknown on earth.

We catch a glimpse of a trial of the time in the story of a certain Ailward, whose neighbour had refused to pay a debt which he owed him. Ailward took the law into his own hands, and broke into the house of his debtor, who had gone to the tavern and had left his door fastened with the lock hanging down outside, and his children playing within. Ailward carried off as security for his debt the lock, a gimlet, and some tools, and a whetstone which hung from the roof. As he sauntered home, however, his furious neighbour overtook him, having heard from the children what had been done. He snatched the whetstone from Ailward's hand and dealt him a blow on the head with it, stabbed him in the arm with a knife, and then triumphantly carried him to the house which, he had robbed, and there bound him as "an open thief" with the stolen goods upon him. A crowd gathered round, and an evil fellow, one Fulk, the apparitor, an underling of the sheriff employed to summon criminals to the court, remarked that as a thief could not legally be mutilated unless he had taken to the value of a shilling, it would be well to add a few articles to the list of stolen goods. Perhaps Ailward had won ill-fame as a creditor, or even, it may be, a money-lender in the village, for his neighbours clearly bore him little goodwill. The crowd readily consented. A few odds and ends were gathered--a bundle of skins, gowns, linen, and an iron tool,--and were laid by Ailward's side; and the next day, with the bundle hung about his neck, he was taken before the sheriff and the knights, who were then holding a Shire Court. The matter was thought doubtful; judgment was delayed, and Ailward was made fast in Bedford jail for a month, till the next county court. There the luckless man sent for a priest of the neighbourhood, and confessing his sins from his youth up, he was bidden to hope in the prayers of the blessed Virgin and of all the saints against the awful terrors of the law, and received a rod to scourge himself five times daily; while through the gloom shone the glimmer of hope that having been baptized on the vigil of Pentecost, water could not drown him nor fire burn him if he were sent to the ordeal. At last the month went by and he was again carried to the Shire Court, now at Leighton Buzzard. In vain he demanded single combat with Fulk, or the ordeal by fire; Fulk, who had been bribed with an ox, insisted on the ordeal of water, so that he should by no means escape. Another month passed in the jail of Bedford before he was given up to be examined by the ordeal. Whether he underwent it or whether he pleaded guilty when the judges met is uncertain, but however this might be, "he received the melancholy sentence of condemnation; and being taken to the place of punishment, his eyes were pulled out and he was mutilated, and his members were buried in the earth in the presence of a multitude of persons."

Nor was there for the mass of the people any real help or security to be found in an appeal to the supreme tribunal of the realm where the king sat in council with his ministers. This still remained a tribunal of exceptional resort to which appeals were rare. There was one Richard Anesty, who, in these first years of Henry's reign, desired to prove in the King's Court his right to hold a certain property. For five years Richard, his brother, and a multitude of helpers, were incessantly busied in this arduous task. The court followed the king, and the king might be anywhere from York to the Garonne. The unhappy suitor might well have joined in a complaint once made by a secretary of Henry in search of his master: "Solomon saith there be three things difficult to be found out, and a fourth which may hardly be discovered: the way of an eagle in the air; the way of a ship in the sea; the way of a serpent on the ground; and the way of a man in his youth. I can add a fifth: the way of a king in England." The whole business now done by post had then to be carried on by laborious journeyings, in which we hear again and again that horses died on the road; if a writ were needed from king or queen, if the royal seal were required, or a certificate from a bishop, or a letter from an archbishop, special messengers posted across country; then the writ must be carried in the same way to York, Lincoln, or elsewhere to be examined by some famous lawyer, sometimes an Italian learned in the last legal fashions of the day; perhaps it was pronounced faulty, or it might be that the seal of justiciar or archbishop was refused on its return from the lawyer, and the same business had to begin all over again; twice messengers had to be sent to Rome, the journey each way taking at least forty days of incessant and dangerous travelling. When at last the appointed day for judgment by the justiciar came, friends, helpers, and witnesses had to be called together in the same laborious way, and transported at great cost to the place of trial, and there kept waiting till news was brought that the plea could not then be heard; and thus again and again the luckless suitor was summoned, each time to a different town in England. In every town he was forced by his necessities to borrow money from some Jew, who demanded about eighty-seven per cent for the loan; and when at last, as Richard was worn out with the delays of justiciars, Henry appeared on the scene, and, "thanks to our lord the king," the land was adjudged to the suitor, he had to raise fresh money to fee the lawyers, the bishop's staff, the officers of the King's Court, the king's physicians, the king and queen, besides the sums which must be given to his helpers and pleaders. The end of the story leaves him mournfully counting up a long list of Jewish creditors, who bid fair to exhaust the profits of his new possessions.

Such were in brief outline some of the difficulties which made order and justice hard to win. Society was helpless to protect itself: news spread slowly, the communication of thought was difficult, common action was impossible. Amid all the shifting and half understood problems of medieval times there was only one power to which men could look to protect them against lawlessness, and that was the power of the king. No external restraints were set upon his action; his will was without contradiction. The medieval world with fervent faith believed that he was the very spring and source of justice. In an age when all about him was changing, and when there was no organized machinery for the administration of law, the king had himself to be judge, lawgiver, soldier, financier, and administrator; the great highways and rivers of the kingdom were in "his peace;" the greater towns were in his demesne; he was guardian of the poor and defender of the trader; he was finance minister in a society where economic conditions were rapidly changing; here presented a developed system of law as opposed to the primitive customs of feud and private war; he was the only arbiter of questions that grew out of the new conflict of classes and interests; he alone could decree laws at his absolute will and pleasure, and could command the power to carry out his decrees; there was not even a professional lawyer who was not in his court and bound to his service.

It is hard to realise the amazing physical endurance and activity which was needed to do the work of a medieval king. Henry was never at rest. It was only by the most arduous labour, by travel, by readiness of access to all men, by inexhaustible patience in weighing complaint and criticism, that he learned how the law actually worked in the remotest corners of his land. He was scarcely ever a week in the same place; his life in England was spent in continual progresses from south to north, from east to west. The journeyings by rough trackways through "desert" and swamp and forest, through the bleak moorlands of the Pennine Hills, or the thickets and fens that choked the lower grounds, proved indeed a sore trial for the temper of his courtiers; and bitter were the complaints of the hardships that fell to the lot of the disorderly train that swept after the king, the army of secretaries and lawyers, the mail-clad knights and barons followed by their retainers, the archbishop and his household, bishops and abbots and judges and suitors, with the "actors, singers, dicers, confectioners, huxters, gamblers, buffoons, barbers, who diligently followed the court." Knights and barons and clerks, accustomed to the plenty and comfort of palace and castle, found themselves at the mercy of every freak of the king's marshals, who on the least excuse would roughly thrust them out into the night from the miserable hut in which they sought shelter and cut loose their horses' halters, and whose hearts were hardly softened by heavy bribes. They were often half-starved; if food was to be had at all, it was at the best stale fish, sour beer and wine, coarse black bread, and meat scarcely eatable, even with the rough appetite of travellers of that age. Matters were made ten times worse by Henry's mode of travelling. "If the king has proclaimed that he intends to stop late in any place, you may be sure that he will start very early in the morning, and with his sudden haste destroy every one's plans. It often happens that those who have let blood or taken medicine are obliged at the hazard of their lives to follow. You will see men running about like mad; urging forward their pack-horses, driving their waggons into one another, everything in confusion, as if hell had broken loose. Whereas, if the king has given out that he will start early in the morning, he will certainly change his mind, and you may be sure he will snore till noon. You will see the pack-horses drooping under their loads, waggons waiting, drivers nodding, tradesmen fretting, all grumbling at one another. Men hurry to ask the loose women and the liquor retailers who follow the court when the king will start; for these are the people who know most of the secrets of the court." Sometimes, on the other hand, when the din of the camp was silenced for a while in sleep, a sudden message from the royal lodging would again set all in commotion. A wild clatter of horsemen and footmen would fill the darkness. The stout pack-horses, probably borrowed from a neighbouring monastery to carry the heavy Rolls in which state business was chronicled, were hastily laden. Baggage of every kind was slung across the backs of horses, or stowed into cumbrous two-wheeled waggons made of rough planks, or of laths covered with twisted osiers, which had been seized from farmer or peasant for the king's journey. The forerunners pushed on in front to give notice of the king's arrival, and in the dim morning light the motley train of riders at last crowded along the narrow trackway, followed heavily by the waggons dragged by single file of horses, which too often foundered in the muddy hollows, or half-plunged into the torrents through rents and chasms in the low, narrow bridges that threatened at every instant to crumble away under the strain. But before the weary day's journey was over the king would suddenly change his mind, stop short of the town towards which all were toiling in hope of food and shelter, and turn aside to some spot in the woods where there was perhaps a solitary hut and food only for himself: "And I believe, if I dare to say so, that he took delight in our distresses," groans the poor secretary as he pictures the knights wandering by twos and threes in the thickets, separated in the darkness from their followers, and drawing their swords one against another in furious strife for the possession of some shelter for which pigs would scarcely have quarrelled. "Oh, Lord God Almighty," he ends, "turn and convert the heart of the king from this pestilent habit, that he may know himself to be but man, and that he may show a royal mercy and human compassion to those who are driven after him not by ambition but by necessity."

THE FIRST REFORMS

The Curia Regis was composed of the same great officers of the household as those who sat in the Exchequer, and of a few men chosen by the king for their legal learning; but in this court they were not known as "Barons" but as "Justices," and their head was the Chief Justice. The Curia Regis dealt with legal business, with all causes in which the king's interest was concerned, with appeals from the local courts, and from vassals who were too strong to submit to their arbitration, with pleas from wealthy barons who had bought the privilege of laying their suit before the king, besides all the perplexed questions which lay far beyond the powers of the customary courts, and in which the equitable judgment of the king himself was required. In theory its powers were great, but in practice little business was actually brought to it in the time of Henry I; the distance of the court from country places, and the expense of carrying a suit to it, would alone have proved an effectual hindrance to its usefulness, even if the rules by which it was guided had been much more complete and satisfactory than they actually were.

The routine of this system of administration, as well as the mass of business to be done, effectually interfered with arbitrary action on the king's part, and the regular and methodical work of the organized courts gave to the people a fair measure of protection against the tyranny or caprice of the sovereign. But the royal power which was given over to justices and barons did not pass out of the hands of the king. He was still in theory the fount of all authority and law, and could, whenever he chose, resume the powers that he had granted. His control was never relaxed; and in later days we find that while judges on circuit who gave unjust judgment were summoned before the Curia Regis at Westminster, the judges of the Curia Regis itself were called for trial before the king himself in his council.

Henry had, indeed, won a signal victory over feudalism. But feudalism had no roots on English soil; it was forced to borrow Braban?ons, and to work by means alien to the whole feudal tradition and system, and Henry had easily overthrown the baronage by the help of the Church. But in the process the ecclesiastical party had learned to know its strength, and the king had to meet a more formidable resistance to his will when, instead of a lawless baronage, he was confronted by the Church with its mighty organization, always vigilant and menacing. The clergy had from the first looked with a very jealous eye on his projects. A sharp quarrel as to the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts had early arisen between Henry and Archbishop Theobald, but the matter had been compromised for a time. Thomas had taken office pledged to defend ecclesiastical interests, and he was so far true to his pledge, that while he was chancellor he put an end to the abuse of keeping bishoprics and abbeys vacant. He had, however, as was said at the time, "put off the deacon" to put on the chancellor; and in an ecclesiastical trial which took place soon after Henry's crowning, he appears as an energetic exponent of the king's legal views. A dispute had raged for years as to the jurisdiction of the bishops of Chichester over the abbots of Battle. On Henry's accession Bishop Hilary of Chichester vigorously renewed the struggle, and a great trial was held in May 1157 to decide the matter. Hilary failing after much discussion to effect a compromise, emphatically and solemnly declared in words such as Henry was to hear a few years later from another mouth, that there were two powers, secular and spiritual, and that the secular authority could not interfere with the spiritual jurisdiction, or depose any bishop or ecclesiastic without leave from Rome. "True enough, he cannot be 'deposed,'" cried the young king, "but by a shove like this he may be clean thrust out!" and he suited the action to the words. A laugh ran round the assembly at the king's jest; but Hilary, taking no notice of the hint, went on to urge that no layman, not even the king, could by the law of Rome confer ecclesiastical dignity or exemptions without the Pope's leave and confirmation. "What next!" broke in Henry angrily, "you think with your practised cunning to set yourself up against the authority of my kingly prerogative granted me by God Himself! I command you by the allegiance you have sworn to keep within proper bounds language against my crown and dignity!" A general clamour rose against the prelate, and the chancellor, louder than the rest, talked of the bishop's oath of fealty to the king, and warned him to take heed to himself. Hilary, seeing himself thus beset, obsequiously declared that he had no wish to take aught from the kingly honour and dignity, which he had always bent every effort to magnify and increase; but Henry bluntly retorted that it was plain to all that his honour and dignity would be speedily removed far from him by the fair and deceitful talk of those who would annul his just prerogatives. The bishop could not find a single friend. Chancellor and justiciar and constable rivalled one another in taunts and sharp phrases. When he went on to urge the revision of the Conqueror's charter to Battle by the archbishop, and to appeal to ecclesiastical custom, Henry's wrath rose again. "A wonderful and marvellous thing truly is this we hear, that the charters, forsooth, of my kingly predecessors, confirmed by the prerogative of the Crown of England, and witnessed by the magnates, should be deemed beyond our powers by you, my lord bishop. God forbid, God forbid, that in my kingdom what is decreed by me at the instance of reason, and with the advice of my archbishops, bishops, and barons, should be liable to the censure of you and such as you!" He broke short discussion by declaring that the question belonged to him alone to settle. The chancellor, in a long argument, crushed the already humbled bishop, and raised the king's anger to its utmost pitch by drawing attention to the fact that Hilary had appealed to Rome to the contempt of the royal dignity. The king, his countenance changed with fury, turned passionately to the bishop, who tremblingly swore, while Archbishop Theobald crossed himself in amazement at the audacious perjury, that it was the abbot who had got the bull of which Thomas complained. Theobald entreated that the matter might be settled according to Canon law, but this the king promptly refused. Finally Hilary was forced to complete submission, and the archbishop prayed that he might be pardoned for any imprudent words he had used against the king's majesty. Henry was ever ready to yield everything in form when once he had got his own way. "Not only," he answered, "do I now give him the kiss of peace, but if his sins were a hundredfold, I would forgive them all for your prayers and for the love I bear him;" and bishop and abbot and justiciar, all by the king's orders, joined in the kiss of peace.

But no kiss of peace given at Henry's orders could turn away the rising wrath of the Church. A general feeling of danger was in the air, and both sides, in preparing for the inevitable future, chose the same man to fight their battle,--Thomas, the disciple and secretary of Theobald, Thomas, the minister of the king's reforms. The young king had turned with passionate affection to his brilliant chancellor. In hall, in church, in council-chamber, on horseback, he was never separated from his friend. Thomas, like his master, was always ready for hunting, or for hawking, or for a game of chess. He was willing, too, to save the king the cost and burden of entertainment and display. He was careful to magnify his office. He held a splendid court, where Henry's son and a train of young nobles were brought up to knightly accomplishments. He was dressed in scarlet and furs, and his clothes were woven with gold. His table was covered with gold and silver plate, and his servants had orders to buy the most costly provisions in the shops for cooked meat, which were then the glory of the city. His household was the talk of London. The king himself, curious to see how things went on, would sometimes come on horseback to watch the chancellor sitting at meat, or, bow in hand, would turn in on his way from hunting, and, vaulting over the table, would sit down and eat with him. Henry lavished gifts on him, so that according to one of his chroniclers, "when he might have had all the churches and castles of the kingdom if he chose since there was none to deny him, yet the greatness of his soul conquered his ambition; he magnanimously disdained to take the poorer benefices, and required only the great things--the provostship of Beverley, the deanery at Hastings, the Tower of London with the service of the soldiers belonging to it, the castle of Eye with 140 soldiers, and that of Berkhampstead." or was the king's favour misplaced, for Thomas was an excellent servant. Business was rapidly despatched by him; and Henry found himself relieved of the most irksome part of his work. The chancellor surrounded himself by able men, looking even as far as Gaul for poor Englishmen who were distinguished for their talent; fifty-two clerks were employed under him in the Chancery. As he grew more and more important to his master, unlimited powers were put in his hand. There are even entries in the Pipe Roll of pardons issued by him, the first instance of such a right ever used by any save king or queen. It was said that those who had the king's favour might count it as a vain thing, unless they had also the friendship of the chancellor. "The king's dominions, which reach from the Arctic Ocean to the Pyrenees, he put into your power, and in this alone was any man thought happy, that he should find favour in your eyes," runs a letter written afterwards to Thomas.

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