What he really did do was to reconstruct society on the essentially feudal theory that the land was a gift from the king, held on conditions of homage and military service. The duties which under the old system were national obligations resting on the individual as a citizen, he made into duties depending on the relation between the king as supreme landowner and the subject as tenant of the land. Military service and the paying of the feudal taxes—aids, reliefs, &c.—are incidents of the bargain between the crown and the grantee to whom land has been given. That grantee, the tenant-in-chief, has the right to demand from his sub-tenants, to whom he has given out fractions of his estate, the same dues that the king exacts from himself. As at least four-fifths of the land of England had fallen into the king’s hands between 1066 and 1074, and had been actually regranted to new owners—foreigners to whom the feudal system was the only conceivable organization of political existence—the change was not only easy but natural. The few surviving English landholders had to fall into line with the newcomers. England, in short, was reorganized into a state of the continental type, but one differing from France or Germany in that the crown had not lost so many of its regalities as abroad, and that even the greater earls had less power than the ordinary continental tenant-in-chief.
The English people became aware of this transformation in the “theory of the state” mainly through the fact that the new tenants-in-chief, bringing with them the ideas in which they had been reared, failed to comprehend the rather complicated status of the rural population on this side of the Channel. To the French or Norman knight all peasants on his manor seemed to be villeins, and he failed to understand the distinction between freemen who had personally commended themselves to his English predecessor but still owned their land, and the mass of ordinary servile tenants. There can be no doubt that the first effect of the Conquest was that the upper strata of the agricultural classes lost the comparative independence which they had hitherto enjoyed, and were in many cases depressed to the level of their inferiors. The number of freemen began to decrease, from the encroachments of the landowner, and continued to dwindle for many years: even in districts where Domesday Book shows them surviving in considerable numbers, it is clear that a generation or two later they had largely disappeared, and became merged in the villein class.
In this sense, therefore, England was turned into a feudal state by the results of the work of William the Conqueror. But it would be wrong to assert that all traces of the ancient social organization of the realm were sweptDomesday.away. The old Saxon customs were not forgotten, though they might in many cases be twisted to fit new surroundings. Indeed William and his successors not infrequently caused them to be collected and put on record. The famous Domesday Book (q.v.) of 1086 is in its essential nature an inquiry into the state of England at the moment of the Conquest, compiled in order that the king may have a full knowledge of the rights that he possesses as the heir of King Edward. Being primarily intended to facilitate the levy of taxation, it dwells more on the details of the actual wealth and resources of the country in 1066 and 1086, and less on the laws and customs that governed the distribution of that wealth, than could have been wished. But it is nevertheless a monument of the permanence of the old English institutions, even after the ownership of four-fifths of the soil has been changed. The king inquires into the state of things in 1066 because it is on that state of things that his rights of taxation depend. He does not claim to have rearranged the whole realm on a new basis, or to be levying his revenue on a new assessment made at his own pleasure. Nor is it in the sphere of taxation alone that William’s organization of the realm stands on the old English customs. In the military sphere, though his normal army is the feudal force composed of the tenants-in-chief and the knights whom they have enfeoffed, he retains the power to call out thefyrd, the old nationallevée en masse, without regard to whether its members are freemen or villeins of some lord. And in judicial matters the higher rights of royal justice remain intact, except in the few cases where special privileges have been granted to one or two palatine earls. The villein must sue in his lord’s manorial courts, but he is also subject to the royal courts of hundred and shire. The machinery of the local courts survives for the most part intact.
William’s dealings with the Church of England were no less important than his dealings with social organization. In the earlier years of his reign he set himself to get rid of the whole of the upper hierarchy, in order to replacePosition of the Church.them by Normans. In 1070 Archbishop Stigand was deposed as having been uncanonically chosen, and six or seven other bishops after him. All the vacancies, as well as those which kept occurring during the next few years, were immediately filled up with foreigners. By the time that Williamhad been ten years on the throne there were only three English bishops left. At his death there was only one—the saintly Wulfstan of Worcester. The same process was carried out with regard to abbacies, and indeed with all important places of ecclesiastical preferment. By 1080 the English Church was officered entirely by aliens. Just as with the lay landholders, the change ofpersonnelmade a vast difference, not so much in the legal position of the new-comers as in the way in which they regarded their office. The outlook of a Norman bishop was as unlike that of his English predecessor as that of a Norman baron. The English Church had got out of touch with the ideals and the spiritual movements of the other Western churches. In especial the great monastic revival which had started from the abbey of Cluny and spread all over France, Italy and Germany had hardly touched this island. The continental churchmen of the 11th century were brimming over with ascetic zeal and militant energy, while the majority of the English hierarchy were slack and easy-going. The typical faults of the dark ages, pluralism, simony, lax observation of the clerical rules, contented ignorance, worldliness in every aspect, were all too prevalent in England. There can be no doubt that the greater part of William’s nominees were better men than those who preceded them; his great archbishop, Lanfranc, though a busy statesman, was also an energetic reformer and a man of holy life. Osmund, Remigius and others of the first post-Conquest bishops have left a good name behind them. The condition of the church alike in the matter of spiritual zeal, of hard work and of learning was much improved. But there was a danger behind this revival; for the reformers of the 11th century, in their zeal for establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, were not content with raising the moral and intellectual standards prevailing in Christendom, but sought to bring the whole scheme of life under the church, by asserting the absolute supremacy of the spiritual over the temporal power, wherever the two came in contact or overlapped. The result, since the feudal and ecclesiastical systems had become closely interwoven, and the frontier between the religious and secular spheres must ever be vague and undefined, was the conflict between the spiritual and temporal powers which, for two centuries to come, was to tear Europe into warring factions (see the articlesChurch History;Papacy;Investiture). The Norman Conquest of England was contemporaneous with the supreme influence of the greatest exponent of the theory of ecclesiastical supremacy, the archdeacon Hildebrand, who in 1073 mounted the papal throne as Gregory VII. (q.v.). William, despite all his personal faults, was a sincerely pious man, but it could not be expected that he would acquiesce in these new developments of the religious reformation which he had done his best to forward. Hence we find a divided purpose in the policy which he pursued with regard to church affairs. He endeavoured to keep on the best terms with the papacy: he welcomed legates and frequently consulted the pope on purely spiritual matters. He even took the hazardous step of separating ecclesiastical courts and lay courts, giving the church leave to establish separate tribunals of her own, a right which she had never possessed in Saxon England. The spiritual jurisdiction of the bishop had hitherto been exercised in the ordinary national courts, with lay assessors frequently taking part in the proceedings, and mixing their dooms with the clergy’s canonical decisions. William in 1076 granted the church a completely independent set of courts, a step which his successors were to regret for many a generation.
At the same time, however, he was not blind to the possibilities of papal interference in domestic matters, and of the danger of conflict between the crown and the recently-strengthened clerical order. To guard against them he laid down three general rules: (1) that no one should be recognized as pope in England till he had himself taken cognizance of the papal election, and that no papal letters should be brought into the realm without his leave; (2) that no decisions of the English ecclesiastical synods should be held valid till he had examined and sanctioned them; (3) that none of his barons or ministers should be excommunicated unless he approved of such punishment being inflicted on them. These rules seem to argue a deeply rooted distrust of the possible encroachments of the papacy on the power of the state. The question of ecclesiastic patronage, which was to be the source of the first great quarrel between the crown and the church in the next generation, is not touched upon. William retained in his own hands the choice of bishops and abbots, and Alexander II. and Gregory VII. seem to have made no objection to his doing so, in spite of the claim that free election was the only canonical way of filling vacancies. The Conqueror was allowed for his lifetime to do as he pleased, since he was recognized as a true friend of the church. But the question was only deferred and not settled.
The political history of William’s later years is unimportant; his main energy was absorbed in the task of holding down and organizing his new kingdom. His rather precarious conquest of the county of Maine, his long quarrelsWilliam’s later reign.with Philip I. of France, who suborned against him his undutiful and rebellious eldest son Robert, his negotiation with Flanders and Germany, deserve no more than a mention. It is more necessary to point out that he reasserted on at least one occasion (when King Malcolm Canmore did him homage) the old suzerainty of the English kings over Scotland. He also began that encroachment on the borders of Wales which was to continue with small interruptions for the next two centuries. The advance was begun by his great vassals, the earls of Chester, Shrewsbury and Hereford, all of whom occupied new districts on the edge of the mountains of Powys and Gwynedd. William himself led an expedition as far as St Davids in 1081, and founded Cardiff Castle to mark the boundary of his realm north of the Bristol Channel.
Perhaps the most noteworthy event of the second portion of the Conqueror’s reign was a rebellion which, though it made no head and was easily suppressed, marks the commencement of that feudal danger which was to be the constant trouble of the English kings for the next three generations. Two of the greatest of his foreign magnates, Roger, earl of Hereford, and Ralph, earl of Norfolk, rose against him in 1075, with no better cause than personal grievances and ambitions. He put them down with ease; the one was imprisoned for life, the other driven into exile, while Waltheof, the last of the English earls, who had dabbled in a hesitating way in this plot, was executed. There was never any serious danger, but the fact that under the new régime baronial rebellion was possible, despite of all William’s advantages over other feudal kings, and despite of the fact that the rebels were hardly yet settled firmly into their new estates, had a sinister import for the future of England. With the new monarchy there had come into England the anarchic spirit of continental feudalism. If such a man as the Conqueror did not overawe it, what was to be expected in the reigns of his successors? William had introduced into his new realm alike the barons, with their personal ambition, and the clerics of the school of Hildebrand, with their intense jealousy for the rights of the church. The tale of the dealings of his descendants with these two classes of opponents constitutes the greater part of English history for a full century.
William died at Rouen on the 7th of September 1087; on his death-bed he expressed his wish that Normandy should pass to his elder son, Robert, in spite of all his rebellions, but gave his second son William (known by the nicknameWilliam Rufus.of Rufus) the crown of England, and sent him thither with commendatory letters to archbishop Lanfranc and his other ministers. There was at first no sign of opposition to the will of the late king, and William Rufus was crowned within three weeks of his father’s decease. But the results of the Conquest had made it hard to tear England and Normandy apart. Almost every baron in the duchy was now the possessor of a smaller or a greater grant of lands in the kingdom, and the possibility of serving two masters was as small in 1087 as at any other period of the world’s history. By dividing his two states between his sons the Conqueror undid his own work, and left to his subjects the certainty of civil war. For the brothers Robert and William were, and always had been, enemies, andevery intriguing baron had before him the tempting prospect of aggrandizing himself, by making his allegiance to one of the brothers serve as an excuse for betraying the other. Robert was thriftless, volatile and easy-going, a good knight but a most incompetent sovereign. These very facts commended him to the more turbulent section of the baronage; if he succeeded to the whole of the Conqueror’s heritage they would have every opportunity of enjoying freedom from all governance. William’s private character was detestable: he was cruel, lascivious, greedy of gain, a habitual breaker of oaths and promises, ungrateful and irreligious. But he was cunning, strong-handed and energetic; clearly the “Red King” would be an undesirable master to those who loved feudal anarchy. Hence every turbulent baron in England soon came to the conclusion that Robert was the sovereign whom his heart desired.
The greater part of the reign of William II. was taken up with his fight against the feudal danger. Before he had been six months on the throne he was attacked by a league comprising more than half the baronage, and headed by his uncles, bishop Odo of Bayeux and Robert of Mortain. They used the name of the duke of Normandy and had secured his promise to cross the Channel for their assistance. A less capable and unscrupulous king than Rufus might have been swept away, for the rising burst out simultaneously in nearly every corner of the realm. But he made head against it with the aid of mercenary bands, the loyal minority of the barons, and the shire-levies of his English subjects. When he summoned out the fyrd they came in great force to his aid, not so much because they trusted in the promises of good governance and reduced taxation which he made, but because they saw that a horde of greedy barons would be worse to serve than a single king, however hard and selfish he might be. With their assistance William fought down the rebels, expelled his uncle Odo and several other leaders from the realm, confiscated a certain amount of estates, and then pardoned the remainder of the rebels. Such mercy, as he was to discover, was misplaced. In 1095 the same body of barons made a second and a more formidable rising, headed by the earls of Shrewsbury, Eu and Northumberland. It was put down with the same decisive energy that William had shown in 1088, and this time he was merciless; he blinded and mutilated William of Eu, shut up Mowbray of Northumberland for life in a monastery, and hanged many men of lesser rank. Of the other rebels some were deprived of their English estates altogether, others restored to part of them after paying crushing fines. This second feudal rebellion was only a distraction to William from his war with his brother Robert, which continued intermittently all through the earlier years of his reign. It was raging from 1088 to 1091, and again from 1093 to 1096, when Robert tired of the losing game, pawned his duchy to his brother and went off on the First Crusade. Down to this moment William’s position had been somewhat precarious; with the Norman war generally on hand, feudal rebellion always imminent, and Scottish invasions occasionally to be repelled, he had no easy life. But he fought through his troubles, conquered Cumberland from the Scots (1092), in dealing with his domestic enemies used cunning where force failed, and generally got his will in the end. His rule was expensive, and he made himself hated by every class of his subjects, baronage, clergy and people alike, by his ingenious and oppressive taxation. His chosen instrument, a clerical lawyer named Ranulf Flambard (q.v.), whom he presently made bishop of Durham, was shameless in his methods of twisting feudal or national law to the detriment of the taxpayer. William supported him in every device, however unjust, with a cynical frankness which was the distinguishing trait of his character; for he loved to display openly all the vices and meannesses which most men take care to disguise. In dealing with the baronage Ranulf and his master extorted excessive and arbitrary “reliefs” whenever land passed in succession to heirs. When the church was a landholder their conduct was even more unwarrantable; every clerk installed in a new preferment was forced to pay a large sum down—which in that age was considered a clear case of simony by all conscientious men. But in addition the king kept all wealthy posts, such as bishoprics and abbacies, vacant for years at a time and appropriated the revenue meanwhile.
This policy, when pursued with regard to the archbishopric of Canterbury, brought on Rufus the most troublesome of his quarrels. When the wise primate Lanfranc, his father’s friend, died in 1089, he made no appointmentAnselm.till 1093, extracting meanwhile great plunder from the see. In a moment of sickness, when his conscience was for a space troubling him or his will was weak, he nominated the saintly Anselm (q.v.) to the archbishopric. When enthroned the new primate refused to make the enormous gift which the king expected from every recipient of preferment. Soon after he began to press for leave to hold a national synod, and when it was denied him, spoke out boldly on the personal vices as well as the immoral policy of the king. From this time William and Anselm became open enemies. They fought first upon the question of acknowledging Urban II. as pope—for the king, taking advantage of the fact that there was an antipope in existence, refused to allow that there was any certain and legitimate head of the Western church at the moment. Then, after William had reluctantly yielded on this point, the far more important question of lay investitures cropped up. The council of Clermont (Nov. 1095) had just issued its famous decree to the effect that bishops must be chosen by free election, and not invested with their spiritual insignia or enfeoffed with their estates by the hands of a secular prince. Anselm felt himself obliged to accept this decision, and refused to accept his own pallium from William when Urban sent it across the sea by the hands of a legate. The king replied by harrying him on charges of having failed in his feudal obligation to provide well-equipped knights for a Welsh expedition, and imposed ruinous fines on him. It was even said that his life was threatened, and he fled to Rome in 1097, not to return till his adversary was dead. There was much to be said for the theory of the king as to the relations between church and state; he was indeed only carrying on in a harsh form his father’s old policy. But the fact that he was a tyrant and an evil-liver, while Anselm was a saint, so much influenced public opinion that William was universally regarded as in the wrong, and the sympathy of the laity no less than the clergy was with the archbishop. For the remaining three years of his life the Red King was considered to be in a state of reprobation and at open strife with righteousness.
Yet so far as secular affairs went William seemed prosperous enough. Since his brother had pawned the duchy of Normandy to him, so that he reigned at Rouen no less than at London, the danger of rebellion was almost removed. His foreign policy was successful: he installed a nominee of his own, Edgar, the son of Malcolm Canmore, on the throne of Scotland (1097); he reconquered Maine, which his brother Robert had lost; he made successful war upon King Philip of France. His barons subdued much of South Wales, though his own expeditions into North Wales, which he had designed to conquer and annex, had a less fortunate ending. He dreamed, we are told, of attacking Ireland, even of crowning himself king at Paris. But on the 2nd of August 1100 he was suddenly cut off in the midst of his sins. While hunting with some of his godless companions in the New Forest, he was struck by an arrow, unskilfully shot by one of the party. The knight Walter Tyrrell, who was persistently accused of being the author of his master’s death, as persistently denied his responsibility for it; and whether the arrow was his or no, it was not alleged that malice guided it. William’s favourites had all to lose by his death.
The king’s death was unexpected: he was only in his fortieth year, and men’s minds had not even begun to ponder over the question of who would succeed him. The crown of England was left vacant for the boldest kinsman toSuccession of Henry I.snatch at, if he dared. William had two surviving brothers, beside several nephews. Robert’s claim seemed the more likely to succeed, for not only was he the elder, but England was full of barons who desired his accession, and had already taken up arms for him in 1087 or 1095. But he was far away—being at the moment on his return journey from Jerusalem—while on the spot was his brother Henry, an ambitiousprince, whose previous efforts to secure himself a territorial endowment had failed more from ill-luck than from want of enterprise or ability. Seeing his opportunity, Henry left his brother’s body unburied, rode straight off to Winchester with a handful of companions, and seized the royal treasure. This and his ready tongue were the main arguments by which he convinced the few magnates present, and persuaded them to back him, despite the protests of some supporters of Robert. There was hardly the semblance of an election, and the earl of Warwick and the chancellor William Giffard were almost the only persons of importance on the spot. But Henry, once hailed as king, rode hard for London and persuaded bishop Maurice to crown him without delay at Westminster, since the primate Anselm was absent beyond seas. He certainly lost no time: Rufus was shot on Thursday, the 2nd of August—his successor was crowned on Sunday the 5th of August! The realm heard almost by the same messengers that it had lost one king and that it had gained another.
Henry at once issued a proclamation and charter promising the redress of all the grievances with which his brother had afflicted his feudal tenants, the clergy and the whole nation. He would keep the ancient laws of King Edward, as amended by his father the Conqueror, and give all men good justice. These promises he observed more faithfully than Norman kings were wont to do; if the pledge was not redeemed in every detail, he yet kept England free from anarchy, abandoned the arbitrary and unjust taxation of his brother, and set up a government that worked by rule and order, not by the fits and starts of tyrannical caprice. He was a man of a cold and hard disposition, but full of practical wisdom, and conscious that his precarious claim to the crown must be secured by winning the confidence of his subjects. Almost the first and quite the wisest of his inspirations was to wed a princess of the old English line—Edith,1the niece of Edgar Ætheling, the child of his sister Margaret of Scotland and Malcolm Canmore. The match, though his Norman barons sneered at it, gave him the hearts of all his English subjects, who supported him with enthusiasm, and not merely (as had been the case with Rufus) because they saw that a strong king would oppress them less than a factious and turbulent baronage. Henry won much applause at the same time by filling up all the bishoprics and abbacies which his brother had kept so long vacant, by inviting the exiled Anselm to return to England, and by imprisoning William’s odious minister Ranulf Flambard. He had just time to create a favourable impression by his first proceedings, when his brother Robert, who had returned from Palestine and resumed possession of Normandy, landed at Portsmouth to claim the crown and to rouse his partisans among the English baronage. Henry bought him off, before the would-be rebels had time to join him, by promising him an annual tribute of 3000 marks and surrendering to him all his estates in Normandy (1101). His policy seemed tame and cautious, but was entirely justifiable, for within a few months of Robert’s departure the inevitable feudal rebellion broke out. If the duke and his army had been on the spot to support it, things might have gone hardly with the king. The rising was led by Robert of Belesme, earl of Shrewsbury, a petty tyrant of the most ruffianly type, the terror of the Welsh marches. He was backed by his kinsmen and many other barons, but proved unable to stand before the king, who was loyally supported by the English shire levies. After taking the strong castles of Arundel, Tickhill, Bridgnorth and Shrewsbury, Henry forced the rebels to submit. He confiscated their estates and drove them out of the realm; they fled for the most part to Normandy, to spur on duke Robert to make another bid for the English crown. From the broad lands which they forfeited Henry made haste to reward his own servants, new men who owed all to him and served him faithfully. From them he chose the sheriffs, castellans and councillors through whom he administered the realm during the rest of his long reign.
This minor official nobility was the strength of the crown, and was sharply divided in spirit and ambition from the older feudal aristocracy which descended from the original adventurers who had followed William the Conqueror. Yet the latter still remained strong enough to constitute a danger to the crown whenever it should fall to a king less wary and resolute than Henry himself.
Henry was by nature more of an administrator and organizer than of a fighting man. He was a competent soldier, but his wish was rather to be a strong king at home than a great conqueror abroad. Nevertheless he was driven by the logic of events to attack Normandy, for as long as his brother reigned there, and as long as many English barons retained great holdings on both sides of the Channel and were subjects of the duke as well as of the king, intrigues and plots never ceased. The Norman war ended in the battle of Tenchebrai (Sept. 28, 1106), where Duke Robert was taken prisoner. His brother shut him up in honourable confinement for the rest of his life, though otherwise he was not ill-treated. For the rest of his reign Henry was ruler of all the old dominions of the Conqueror, and none of his subjects could cloak disloyalty by the pretence of owing a divided allegiance to two masters. With this he was content, and made no great effort to extend his dominions farther; his desire was to reign as a true king in England and Normandy, rather than to build up a loosely compacted empire around them.
Throughout the time of Henry’s Norman war, he was engaged in a tiresome controversy with the primate on the question of lay investitures, the continuation of the struggle which had begun in his brother’s reign. Every English kingHenry’s difficulties with the church.for five generations had to face the danger from the church, no less than the danger from the barons. Anselm had come back from Rome confirmed in the theories for which he had contended with Rufus—nay, taught to extend them to a further extreme. He now maintained not only that it was a sin that kings should invest prelates with their spiritual insignia, the pallium, the staff, the ring, but claimed that no clerk ought to do homage to the king for the lands of his benefice, though he himself seven years before had not scrupled to make his oath to his earlier master. He now refused to swear allegiance to the new monarch, though he had recalled him and had restored him to the possession of his see. He also refused to consecrate Henry’s nominees to certain bishoprics and abbacies on the ground that they had not been chosen by free election by their chapters or their monks. The king was loath to take up the quarrel, for he highly respected the archbishop; yet he was still more loath to surrender the ancient claims and privileges of the crown. Anselm was equally reluctant to force matters to an open breach, yet would not shift from his position. There followed an interminable series of arguments, interrupted by truces, till at last Anselm, at the king’s suggestion, went to Rome to see if the pope could arrange somemodus vivendi. Paschal II. for some time refused to withdraw from his fixed theory of the relation of church and state, and Anselm, in despair, preferred to remain abroad rather than to press matters to the rupture that seemed the only logical issue of the controversy. But in 1107 the pope consented to a compromise, which satisfied the king, and yet was acceptable to the church. Bishops and abbots were for the future to be canonically elected by the clergy, and were no longer to receive the ring and staff from lay hands. But they were to do homage to the king for their lands, and since they thus acknowledged him as their temporal lord Henry was content. Moreover, he retained in practice, if not in theory, his power to nominate to the vacant offices; chapters and monasteries seldom dared to resist the pressure which the sovereign could bring to bear upon them in favour of the candidate whom he had selected. The arrangement was satisfactory, and served as the model for the similar compromise arrived at between Pope Calixtus II. and the emperor Henry V. fifteen years later.
From 1107 onward Henry was freed from both the dangers which had threatened him in his earlier years, and was free to develop his policy as he pleased. He had yet twenty-eight years to reign, for he survived to the age of sixty-seven, an ageunparalleled by any of his predecessors, and by all his successors till Edward I.
It is to Henry, aided by his great justiciar, Roger, bishop of Salisbury, that England owed the institution of the machinery of government by which it was to be ruled during the earlier middle ages. This may be described as a primitiveConstitutional machinery.kind of bureaucracy, which gradually developed into a much more complicated system of courts and offices. Around the sovereign was hisCuria Regisor body of councillors, of whom the most important were the justiciar, the chancellor and the treasurer, though the feudal officers, the constable and marshal, were also to be found there. The bulk of the council, however, was composed of knights and clerks selected by the king for their administrative or financial ability. The Curia, besides advising the king on ordinary matters of state, had two special functions. It sat, or certain members of it sat, under the presidency of the king or the justiciar, as the supreme court of justice of the realm. In this capacity it tried the suits of tenants-in-chief, and all appeals from the local courts. But Henry, not contented with this, adopted the custom of sending forth certain members of the Curia throughout the realm at intervals, to sit in the shire court, along with or in place of the sheriff, and to hear and judge all the cases of which the court had cognizance. From these itinerant commissioners (justices in eyre) descend the modern justices of assize. The sheriff, the original president of the shire court, was gradually extruded by them from all important business.
But there were other developments of the Curia. The justiciar, chancellor and treasurer sat with certain other members of the council as the court of exchequer, not only to receive and audit the accounts of the royal revenue, but to give legal decisions on all questions connected with finance. Twice in every year the sheriffs and other royal officials came up to the exchequer court, which originally sat at Winchester, with their bags of money and their sheaves of accounts. Their figures were subjected to a severe scrutiny, and the law was laid down on all points in which the interests of the sheriff and the king, or the sheriff and the taxpayer, came into conflict. In this way the exchequer grew into a law court of primary importance, instead of remaining merely a court of receipt. Though its members were originally the same men who sat in the Curia Regis, the character of the question to be tried settled the capacity in which they should sit, and two separate courts were evolved. (SeeExchequer.)
Under the superintendence of the Curia Regis and the exchequer, the sheriff still remained the king’s factotum in local affairs. He led the shire-levies, collected the royal revenues both feudal and non-feudal, and presided in the shire-court as judge, till in the course of years his functions in that sphere were gradually taken over by the itinerant justices. On his fidelity the king had to rely both for military aid in times of baronial revolt and for the collection of the money which formed the sinews of war. Hence the position was one of the highest importance, and Henry’s new nobility, the men of ability whom he selected and promoted, found their special occupation in holding the office of sheriff. It was they who had to see that the shire court, and in minor affairs the hundred court, did not allow cases to slip away into the jurisdiction of the feudal courts of the baronage.
Henry I. must count not merely as the father of the English bureaucracy, but as a fosterer of the municipal independence of the towns. He gave charters of a very liberal character to many places, and in especial to London, where the citizens were allowed to choose their own sheriff, and to deal directly with the exchequer in matters of revenue. He even farmed out to them the charge of the taxes of the whole shire of Middlesex, outside the city walls. Such a grant was exceptional—though Lincoln also seems to have been granted the privilege of dealing directly with the exchequer. But in many other smaller towns the first grants—the smaller beginnings of autonomy—may be traced back to this period (seeBorough).
Though Henry was an autocrat, and governed through bureaucratic officials who were entirely under his hand, yet a reign of law and order such as his was indirectly favourable to the growth of constitutional liberty. It was equally favourable to the growth of national unity: it was in his time that Norman and English began to melt together: intermarriage in all classes became common, and only thirty years after his death a contemporary writer could remark that it was hard for any man to call himself either Norman or English, so much had blood been intermingled.
It is unnecessary to go into the very uninteresting and unimportant history of Henry’s later years. A long war with France, prosecuted without much energy, led to no results, for the French king’s attempts to stir up rebellions in the name of William the Clito (q.v.), the son of Duke Robert, came to an end with that prince’s death in 1129. But the extension of the English borders in South Wales by the conquests of the lords marcher as far as Pembroke and Cardigan deserves a word of notice.
The question of the succession was the main thing which occupied the mind of the king and the whole nation in Henry’s later years. It had a real interest for every man in an age when any doubt as to the heir meant the outbreakHenry’s heir.of civil war such as had occurred at the death of the Conqueror and of Rufus. There was now a problem of some difficulty to be solved. Henry’s only son William had been drowned at sea in 1120. He had no other child born in wedlock save a daughter, Matilda, who married the emperor Henry V., but had no issue by him. On the emperor’s decease she wedded as her second husband Geoffrey of Anjou (1127), to whom during her father’s last years she bore two sons. But the succession of a woman to the crown was as unfamiliar to English as to Norman ideas, nor did it seem natural to either to place a young child on the throne. Moreover, Matilda’s husband Geoffrey was unpopular among the Normans; the Angevins had been the chief enemies of the duchy for several generations, and the idea that one of them might become its practical ruler was deeply resented. The old king, as was but natural, had determined that his daughter should be his successor; he made the great council do homage to her in 1126, and always kept her before the eyes of his people as his destined heir. But though he had forced or cajoled every leading man in England and Normandy to take his oath to serve her, he must have been conscious that there was a large chance that such pledges would be forgotten at his death. The prejudice against a female heir was strong, and there were too many turbulent magnates to whom the anarchy that would follow a disputed succession presented temptations which could not be resisted.
Henry died suddenly on the 25th of November 1135, while he was on a visit to his duchy of Normandy. The moment that his death was reported the futility of oaths became apparent. A majority of the Norman barons appealedMatilda, and Stephen.to Theobald, count of Blois, son of the Conqueror’s daughter Adela, to be their duke, and to save them from the yoke of the hated Angevin. His supporters and those of Matilda were soon at blows all along the frontier of Normandy. Meanwhile in England another pretender had appeared. Stephen, count of Boulogne, the younger brother of Theobald, had landed at Dover within a few days of Henry’s death, determined to make a snatch at the crown, though he had been one of the first who had taken the oath to his cousin a few years before. The citizens of London welcomed him, but he was not secure of his success till by a swift swoop on Winchester he obtained possession of the royal treasure—an all-important factor in a crisis, as Henry I. had shown in 1100. At Winchester he was acknowledged as king by the bishop, his own brother Henry of Blois, and by the great justiciar, Roger, bishop of Salisbury, and the archbishop, William of Corbeil. The allegiance of these prelates was bought by an unwise promise to grant all the demands of the church party, which his predecessor had denied, or conceded only in part. He would permit free election to all benefices, and free legislation by ecclesiastical synods, and would surrender any claims of the royal courts tohave jurisdiction over clerks or the property of clerks. It then remained necessary to buy the baronage, of which only a few members had as yet committed themselves to his side. It was done by grants of lands and privileges, the first instalment of a never-ending crop of ruinous concessions which Stephen continued to make from the day of his accession down to the day of his death.
The pretender was crowned at Westminster on the 22nd of December 1135—less than a month after his uncle’s death. No one yet openly withstood him, but he was well aware that his position was precarious, and that the claims of Matilda would be brought forward ere long by the section of the baronage which had not yet got from him all they desired. Meanwhile, however, he was encouraged to persevere by the fact that his brother Theobald had withdrawn his claim to the duchy of Normandy, and retired in his favour. For a space he was to be duke as well as king; but this meant merely that he would have two wars, not one, in hand ere long. Matilda’s adherents were already in the field in Normandy; in England their rising was only delayed for a few months.
Stephen, though he had shown some enterprise and capacity in his successful snatch at the crown, was a man far below his three predecessors on the throne in the matter of perseverance and foresight. He was a good fighter, a liberal giver, and a faithful friend, but he lacked wisdom, caution and the power to organize. Starting his career as a perjurer, it is curious that he was singularly slow to suspect perjury in others; he was the most systematically betrayed of all English kings, because he was the least suspicious, and the most ready to buy off and to forgive rebels. His troubles began in 1136, when sporadic rebellions, raised in the name of Matilda, began to appear; they grew steadily worse, though Stephen showed no lack of energy, posting about his realm with a band of mercenary knights whenever trouble broke out. But in 1138 the crisis came; the baronage had tried the capacity of their new master and found him wanting. The outbreak was now widespread and systematic—causedCivil war.not by the turbulence of a few wild spirits, but by the deliberate conspiracy of all who saw their advantage in anarchy. Matilda had a few genuine partisans, such as her half-brother Robert, earl of Gloucester, the illegitimate son of Henry I., but the large majority of those who took arms in her name were ready to sell their allegiance to either candidate in return for lands, or grants of rank or privilege. A long list of doubly and triply forsworn nobles, led by Geoffrey de Mandeville, Aubrey de Vere and Ralph of Chester, made the balance of war sway alternately from side to side, as they transferred themselves to the camp of the highest bidder. It is hard to trace any meaning in the civil war—it was not a contest between the principle of hereditary succession and the principle of elective kingship, as might be supposed. It was rather, if some explanation must be found for it, a strife between the kingly power and feudal anarchy. Unfortunately for England the kingly power was in the hands of an incapable holder, and feudal anarchy found a plausible mask by adopting the disguise of loyalty to the rightful heiress.
The civil war was not Stephen’s only trouble; foreign invasion was added. David I., king of Scotland, was the uncle of Matilda, and used her wrongs as the plea for thrice invading northern England, which he ravaged with great cruelty. His most formidable raid was checked by the Yorkshire shire levies, at the battle of the Standard (Aug. 22, 1138). Yet in the following year he had to be bought off by the grant of all Northumberland (save Newcastle and Bamborough) to his son Earl Henry. Carlisle and Cumberland were already in his hands. Some years later the Scottish prince also got possession of the great “Honour of Lancaster.” It was not Stephen’s fault that the boundary of England did not permanently recede from the Tweed and the Solway to the Tyne and the Ribble.
But the affairs of the North attracted little attention while the civil war was at its height in the South. In 1139 Stephen had wrought himself fatal damage by quarrelling with the ecclesiastical bureaucrats, the kinsmen and allies of Roger of Salisbury, who had been among his earliest adherents. Jealous of their power and their arrogance, and doubting their loyalty, he imprisoned them and confiscated their lands. This threw the whole church party on to the side of Matilda; even Henry, bishop of Winchester, the king’s own brother, disowned him and passed over to the other side. Moreover, the whole machinery of local government in the realm fell out of gear, when the experienced ministers who were wont to control it were removed from power.
Matilda had landed in England in the winter of 1139-1140; for a year her partisans made steady progress against the king, and on the 2nd of February 1141 Stephen was defeated and taken prisoner at the battle of Lincoln. All England, save the county of Kent and a few isolated castles elsewhere, submitted to Matilda. She was hailed as a sovereign by a great assembly at Winchester, over which Stephen’s own brother Bishop Henry presided (April 7, 1141) and entered London in triumph in June. It is doubtful whether she would have obtained complete possession of the realm if she had played her cards well, for there were too many powerful personages who were interested in the perpetuation of the civil war. But she certainly did her best to ruin her own chances by showing an unwise arrogance, and a determination to resume at once all the powers that her father had possessed. When she annulled all the royal acts of the last six years, declared charters forfeited and lands confiscated, and began to raise heavy and arbitrary taxes, she made the partisans of Stephen desperate, and estranged many of her own supporters. A sudden rising of the citizens drove her out of London, while she was making preparations for her coronation. The party of the imprisoned king rallied under the wise guidance of his wife Matilda of Boulogne and his brother Henry, and many other of the late deserters adhered to it. Their army drove the lately triumphant party out of Winchester, and captured its military chief, Robert, earl of Gloucester. So much was his loss felt that his sister exchanged him a few months later for King Stephen.
After this the war went on interminably, without complete advantage to either side, Stephen for the most part dominating the eastern and Matilda the western shires. It was the zenith of the power of the baronial anarchists, who moved from camp to camp with shameless rapidity, wresting from one or other of the two rival sovereigns some royal castle, or some dangerous grant of financial or judicial rights, at each change of allegiance. The kingdom was in the desperate state described in the last melancholy pages of theAnglo-Saxon Chronicle, when life and property were nowhere safe from the objectless ferocity of feudal tyrants—when “every shire was full of castles and every castle filled with devils and evil men,” and the people murmured that “Christ and his saints slept.”
Such was England’s fate till 1153, when Matilda had retired from the strife in favour of her son, Henry of Anjou, and Stephen was grown an old man, and had just lost his heir, Eustace, to whom he had desired to pass on the crown. Both parties were exhausted, both were sick of the incessant treachery of their more unscrupulous barons, and at last they came to the compromise of Wallingford (October 1153), by which it was agreed that Stephen should reign for the remainder of his life, but that on his death the crown should pass to Henry. Both sides promised to lay down their arms, to dismiss their mercenaries, and to acquiesce in the destruction of unlicensed castles, of which it is said, with no very great exaggeration, that there were at the moment over 1000 in the realm. Henry then returned to Normandy, of which his mother had been in possession since 1145, while Stephen turned his small remaining strength to the weary task of endeavouring to restore the foundations of law and order. But he had accomplished little when he died in October 1154. The task of reconstruction was to be left to Henry of Anjou: his predecessor was only remembered as an example of the evil that may be done by a weak man who has been reckless enough to seize a throne which he is incapable of defending. England has had many worse kings, but never one who wrought her more harm. If his successor had been like him, feudal anarchy might have become as permanent in England as in Poland.
Fortunately the young king to whom Stephen’s battered crown now fell was energetic and capable, if somewhat self-willed and hasty. He was inferior in caution and self-control to his grandfather Henry I., though heHenry II.resembled him in his love of strong and systematic governance. From the point of view of his English subjects his main achievement was that he restored in almost every detail the well-organized bureaucracy which his ancestor had created, and with it the law and order that had disappeared during Stephen’s unhappy reign. But there was this essential difference between the position of the two Henries, that the elder aspired to be no more than king of England and duke of Normandy, while the younger strove all his life for an imperial position in western Europe. Such an ambition was almost forced upon him by the consequences of his descent and his marriage. Besides his grandfather’s Anglo-Norman inheritance, he had received from his father Geoffrey the counties of Anjou and Touraine, and the predominance in the valley of the Lower Loire. But it was his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, two years before his accession to the English throne, which gave him the right to dream of greatness such as his Norman forbears had never enjoyed. This lady, the divorced wife of Louis VII. of France, brought to her second husband the whole of the lands from Poitou to the Pyrenees, the accumulated gains of many warlike ancestors. In wealth and fighting strength the duchy of Aquitaine was a full third of France. Added to Anjou and Normandy it made a realm far more important than England. Hence it came that Henry’s ambitions and interests were continental more than English. Unlike his grandfather he dwelt for the greater part of his time beyond seas. It must be remembered, too, that his youth had been spent abroad, and that England only came to him when he was already a grown man. The concerns of his island realm were a matter of high importance to him, but only formed a part of his cares. Essentially he was an Angevin, neither a Norman nor an Englishman, and his primary ambition was to make the house of Anjou supreme in France. Nor did this seem impossible; he owned a far broader and wealthier domain beyond the Channel than did his nominal suzerain King Louis VII., and—what was of more importance—he far excelled that prince both in vigour and in capacity.
On succeeding to the English crown, however, he came over at once to take possession of the realm, and abode there for over a year, displaying the most restless energy in setting to rights the governance of the realm. He expelled all Stephen’s mercenaries, took back into his hands the royal lands and castles which his predecessor had granted away, and destroyed hundreds of the “adulterine” castles which the barons and knights had built without leave during the years of the anarchy. Hardly a single magnate dared to oppose him—Bridgnorth, now a castle of the Mortimers, was the only place which he had to take by force. His next care was to restore the bureaucracy by which Henry I. had been wont to govern. He handed over the exchequer to Nigel, bishop of Ely, the nephew of the old justiciar Roger of Salisbury, and the heir of his traditions. His chancellor was a young clerk, Thomas Becket, who was recommended to him by archbishop Theobald as the most capable official in the realm. A short experience of his work convinced the king that his merits had not been exaggerated. He proved a zealous and capable minister, and such a strong exponent of the claims of the crown that no one could have foreseen the later developments by which he was to become their greatest enemy.
The machine of government was beginning to work in a satisfactory fashion, and the realm was already settling down into order, when Henry was called abroad by a rebellion raised in Anjou by his brother Geoffrey—the first of the innumerable dynastic troubles abroad which continued throughout his reign to distract his attention from his duties as an English king. He did not return for fifteen months; but when he did reappear it was to complete the work which he had begun in 1155, to extort from the greater barons the last of the royal fortresses which still remained in their hands, and to restore the northern boundaries of the realm. Malcolm IV., the young king of Scotland, was compelled to give up the earldoms of Northumberland and Cumberland, which his father Henry had received from Stephen. He received instead only the earldom of Huntingdon, too far from the border to be a dangerous possession, to which he had a hereditary right as descending from Earl Waltheof. He did homage to the king of England, and actually followed him with a great retinue on his next continental expedition. In the same year (1157) Henry made an expedition into North Wales, and forced its prince Owen to become his vassal, not without some fighting, in which the English army received several sharp checks at the commencement of the campaign.
Yet once more Henry’s stay on the English side of the Channel was but for a year. In 1158 he again departed to plunge into schemes of continental conquest. This time it was an attempt to annex the great county of Toulouse, and so to carry the borders of Aquitaine to the Mediterranean, which distracted him. Naturally Louis of France was unwilling to see his great vassal striding all across his realm, and did what he could to hinder him. Into the endless skirmishes and negotiations which followed the raising of the question of Toulouse it would be fruitless to enter. Henry did not achieve his purpose, indeed he seems to have failed to use his strength to its best advantage, and allowed himself to be bought off by a futile marriage treaty by which his eldest son was to marry the French king’s daughter (1160). This was to be but the first of many disappointments in this direction; there was apparently some fatal scruple, both in Henry’s own mind and in that of his continental subjects, as to pressing their suzerain too hard. But it must also be remembered that a feudal army was an inefficient weapon for long wars, and that the mercenaries, by whom alone it could be replaced, were both expensive and untrustworthy. Henry developed as far as he was able the system of “scutage” (q.v.) which his grandfather had apparently invented; by this the vassal compounded for his forty days’ personal service by paying money, with which the king could hire professional soldiers. But even with this help he could never keep a large enough army together.
Meanwhile England, though somewhat heavily taxed, was at least enjoying quiet and strong governance. There is every sign that Henry’s early years were a time of returning prosperity. But there was also much friction betweenQuarrel with the church.the crown and its subjects. The more turbulent part of the baronage, looking back to the boisterous times of Stephen with regret, was reserving itself for a favourable opportunity. The danger of feudal rebellion was not yet past, as was to be shown ten years later. The towns did not find Henry an easy master. He took away from London some of the exceptional privileges which his grandfather had granted, such as the free election of sheriffs of Middlesex, and the right of farming the shire at a fixed rent. He asserted his power to raise “tallages”—arbitrary taxation—from the citizens on occasion. Yet he left the foundations of municipal liberty untouched, and he was fairly liberal in granting charters which contained moderate privileges to smaller towns. His most difficult task, however, was to come to a settlement with the Church. The lavish grants of Stephen had made an end of the old authority which the Conqueror and Henry I. had exercised over the clergy. Their successor was well aware of the fact, and was resolved to put back the clock, so far as it was in his power. It was not, however, on the old problems of free election, of lay investiture, that his quarrel with the clerical body broke out, but on the comparatively new question of the conflicting claims of ecclesiastical and secular courts. The separate tribunals of the church, whose erection William I. had favoured, had been developing in power ever since, and had begun to encroach on the sphere of the courts of the state. This was more than ever the case since Stephen had formally granted them jurisdiction over all suits concerning clerics and clerical property. During the first few years of his reign Henry had already been in collision with the ecclesiastical authorities over several such cases; he had chafed at seeing two clerks accused of murder and blackmailing claimed by and acquitted in the church courts; andmost of all at the frequency of unlicensed appeals to Rome—a flagrant breach of one of the three rules laid down by William the Conqueror. Being comparatively at leisure after the pacification with France, he resolved to turn his whole attention to the arrangement of a newmodus vivendiwith the church. As a preliminary move he appointed his able chancellor Thomas Becket to the archbishopric of Canterbury, which fell vacant inBecket.1162. This was the greatest mistake of his reign. Becket was one of those men who, without being either hypocrites or consciously ambitious, live only to magnify their office. While chancellor he was the most zealous servant of the crown, and had seemed rather secular than clerical in his habits and his outlook on life. But no sooner had he been promoted to the archbishopric than he put away his former manners, became the most formal and austere of men, and set himself to be the champion of the church party in all its claims, reasonable or unreasonable, against the state. The king’s astonishment was even greater than his indignation when he saw the late chancellor setting himself to oppose him in all things. Their first quarrel was about a proposed change in some details of taxation, which seems to have had no specially ecclesiastical bearing at all. But Becket vehemently opposed it, and got so much support when the great council met at Woodstock that Henry withdrew his schemes. This was only a preliminary skirmish; the main battle opened in the following year, when the king, quite aware that he must for the future look on Thomas as his enemy, brought forward the famousConstitutions of Clarendon, of which the main purport was to assert the jurisdiction of the state over clerical offenders by a rather complicated procedure, while other clauses provided that appeals to Rome must not be made without the king’s leave, that suits about land or the presentation to benefices, in which clerics were concerned, should be tried before the royal courts, and that bishops should not quit the realm unless they had obtained permission to do so from the king (seeClarendon, Constitutions of). Somewhat to the king’s surprise, Becket yielded for a moment to his pressure, and declared his assent to the constitutions. But he had no sooner left the court than he proclaimed that he had grievously sinned in giving way, suspended himself from his archiepiscopal functions, and wrote to the pope to beg for pardon and absolution. He then made a clandestine attempt to escape from the realm, but was detected on the seashore and forced to return.
Incensed with Becket for his repudiation of his original submission, Henry proceeded to open a campaign of lawsuits against him, in order to force him to plead in secular courts. He also took the very mean step of declaring that he should call him to account for all the moneys that had passed through his hands when he was chancellor, though Becket had been given a quittance for them when he resigned the office more than two years before. The business came up at the council of Northampton (October 1164), when the archbishop was tried for refusing to recognize the jurisdiction of the king’s courts, and declared to have forfeited his movable goods. The sentence was passed by the lay members of the Curia Regis alone, the bishops having been forbidden to sit, and threatened with excommunication if they did so, by the accused primate. When Becket was visited by the justiciar who came to rehearse the judgment, he started to his feet, refused to listen to a word, declared his repudiation of all lay courts and left the hall. That same night he made a second attempt to escape from England and this time succeeded in getting off to Flanders. From thence he fled to the court of the pope, where he received less support than he had expected. Alexander III. privately approved of all that he had done, and regarded him as the champion of the Church, but he did not wish to quarrel with King Henry. He had lately been driven from Rome by the emperor Frederick I., who had installed an antipope in his place, and had been forced to retire to France. If he sided with Becket and thundered against his persecutor, there was small doubt that the king of England would adhere to the schism. Accordingly he endeavoured to temporize and to avoid a rupture, to the archbishop’s great disgust. But since he also declared the Constitutions of Clarendon uncanonical and invalid, Henry was equally offended, and opened negotiations with the emperor and the antipope. This conduct forced Alexander’s hand, and he gave Becket leave to excommunicate his enemies. The exile, who had taken refuge in a French abbey, placed the justiciar and six other of the king’s chief councillors under the ban of the Church, and intimated that he should add Henry himself to the list unless he showed speedy signs of repentance (April 1166).
Thus the quarrel had come to a head. Church and State were at open war. Henry soon found that Becket’s threats had more effect than he liked. Many of the English clergy were naturally on the side of the primate in a dispute which touched their loyalty to the Church and their class feeling. Several bishops declared to the king that, since his ministers had been duly excommunicated, they did not see how they could avoid regarding them as men placed outside the pale of Christendom. Fortunately the pope interfered for a moment to lighten the friction; being threatened with a new invasion by the emperor Frederick, he suspended the sentences and sent legates to patch up a peace. They failed, for neither the king nor the archbishop would give way. At this juncture Henry was desirous of getting his eldest son and namesake crowned as his colleague, the best mode that he could devise for avoiding the dangers of a disputed succession at his death. He induced the archbishop of York, assisted by the bishops of London and Salisbury, to perform the ceremony. This was a clear invasion of the ancient rights of the primate, and Becket took it more to heart than any other of his grievances.
Yet the next move in the struggle was a hollow reconciliation between the combatants—a most inexplicable act on both sides. The king offered to allow Becket to return from exile, and to restore him to his possessions, without exacting from him any promise of submission, or even a pledge that he would not reopen the dispute on his return. Apparently he had made a wrong interpretation of the primate’s mental attitude, and thought him desirous of a truce, if not ready for a compromise. He had wholly misjudged the situation; Becket made neither promises nor threats, but three weeks after he reached Canterbury publicly excommunicated the bishops of London and Salisbury for the part that they had taken in the coronation of the young king, and suspended from their functions the other prelates who had been present at the ceremony. He then proceeded to excommunicate a number of his minor lay enemies.
The news was carried overseas to Henry, who was then in Normandy. It roused one of the fits of wild rage to which he was not unfrequently liable; he burst out into ejaculations of wrath, and cursed “the cowardly idle servantsBecket’s murder.who suffered their master to be made the laughing-stock of a low-born priest.” Among those who stood about him were four knights, some of whom had personal grudges against Becket, and all of whom were reckless ruffians, who were eager to win their master’s favour by fair means or foul. They crossed the Channel with astonishing speed; two days after the king’s outburst they stood before Becket at Canterbury and threatened him with death unless he should remove the excommunications and submit to his master. The archbishop answered with words as scornful as their own, and took his way to the minster to attend vespers. The knights went out to seek their weapons, and when armed followed him into the north transept, where they fell upon him and brutally slew him with many sword-strokes (December 29, 1170). Thomas had been given time to fly, and his followers had endeavoured to persuade him to do so. It seems that he deliberately courted martyrdom, anxious apparently that his death should deal the king the bitterest blow that it was in his power to inflict (seeBecket).
Nothing could have put Henry in such an evil plight; the whole world held him responsible for the murder, and he was forced to buy pardon for it by surrendering many of the advantages over the Church which he hadIts results.hoped to gain by enforcing the Constitutions of Clarendon. Especially the immunity of clerical offenders from the jurisdiction of lay courts had to be conceded; for the rest of themiddle ages the clerk guilty of theft or assault, riot or murder, could plead his orders, and escape from the harsh justice of the king’s officers to the milder penalties of the bishop’s tribunal. “Benefit of clergy” became an intolerable anomaly, all the more so because the privilege was extended in practice not only to all persons actually in minor orders, but to all who claimed them; any criminal who could read had a fair chance of being reckoned a clerk. Another concession which Henry was forced to make was that the appeals to Rome of litigants in ecclesiastical suits should be freely permitted, provided that they made an oath that they were not contemplating any wrong to the English crown or the English church, a sufficiently easy condition. Such appeals became, and remained, innumerable and vexatious. Pope Alexander also extorted from the king a pledge that he would relinquish any customs prejudicial to the rights of the Church which had been introduced since his accession. To the pope this meant that the Constitutions of Clarendon were disavowed; to the king, who maintained that they were in the main a mere restatement of the customs of William I., it bore no such general interpretation. The points were fought out in detail, and not settled for many years. Practically it became the rule to regard suits regarding land, or presentations to benefices, as pertaining to the king’s court, while those regarding probate, marriage and divorce fell to the ecclesiastical tribunal. The question of election to bishoprics and abbacies went back to the stage which it had reached in the time of Henry I.; the choice was made in canonical form, by the chapters or the monasteries, but the king’s recommendation was a primary factor in that choice. When the electors disregarded it, as was sometimes the case, there was friction; a weak king was sometimes overruled; a strong one generally got his way in the end.
Becket’s death, then, gave a qualified triumph to the church party, and he was rightly regarded as the successful champion of his caste. Hence they held his death in grateful remembrance; the pope canonized him in 1173, and more churches were dedicated to him during the next two centuries than to any other English saint. In the eyes of most men his martyrdom had put the king so much in the wrong that the obstinacy and provocative conduct which had brought it about passed out of memory. His life of ostentatious austerity, and the courage with which he met his death, had caused all his faults to be forgotten. Henry himself felt so much the invidious position in which he was placed that even after making his submission to the pope’s legates at Avranches in 1172, he thought it necessary to do penance before Becket’s tomb in 1174, on which occasion he allowed himself to be publicly scourged by the monks of Canterbury, who inflicted on him three cuts apiece.
Between the outbreak of the king’s quarrel with Becket at the council of Woodstock and the compromise of Avranches no less than ten years had elapsed—the best years of Henry’s manhood. During this period his struggle with the Church had been but one of his distractions. His policy of imperial aggrandisement had been in progress. In 1163 he had completed the conquest of South Wales; the marcher lords were now in possession of the greater part of the land; the surviving Welsh princes did homage for the rest. In 1166 Henry got practical possession of the duchy of Brittany, the only remaining large district of western France which was not already in his hands. Conan, the last prince of the old Breton house, recognized him as his lord, and gave the hand of his heiress Constance to Geoffrey, the king’s third son. When the count died in 1171 Henry did not transfer the administration of the land to the young pair, who were still but children, but retained it for himself, and clung to it jealously long after his son came of age. Intermittent wars with France during these years were of small importance; Henry never pushed his suzerain to extremity. But the Angevin dominions were extended in a new direction, where no English king had yet made his power felt.
The distressful island of Ireland was at this moment enjoying the anarchy which had reigned therein since the dawn of history. Its state had grown even more unhappy than before since the Danish invasions of the 10th century, which had not welded the native kingdoms into unity by pressure from without—as had been the case in England—but had simply complicatedConquest of Ireland.affairs, by setting up two or three alien principalities on the coastline. As in England, the vikings had destroyed much of the old civilization; but they had neither succeeded in occupying the whole country nor had they been absorbed by the natives. The state of the island was much like that of England in the days of the Heptarchy: occasionally a “High King” succeeded in forcing his rivals into a precarious submission; more usually there was not even a pretence of a central authority in the island, and the annals of objectless tribal wars formed its sole history. King Henry’s eyes had been fixed on the faction-ridden land since the first years of his reign. As early as 1155 he had asked and obtained the approval of Pope Adrian IV., the only Englishman who ever sat upon the papal throne, for a scheme for the conquest of Ireland. The Holy See had always regarded with distaste the existence in the West of a nation who repudiated the Roman obedience, and lived in schismatical independence, under local ecclesiastical customs which dated back to the 5th century, and had never been brought into line with those of the rest of Christendom. Hence it was natural to sanction an invasion which might bring the Irish within the fold. But Henry made no endeavour for many years to utilize the papal grant of Ireland, which seems to have been made under the preposterous “Donation of Constantine,” the forged document which gave the bishop of Rome authority over all islands. It was conveniently forgotten that Ireland had never been in the Roman empire, and so had not even been Constantine’s to give away.
Not till 1168, thirteen years after the agreement with Pope Adrian, did the interference of the English king in Ireland actually begin. Even then he did not take the conquest in hand himself, but merely sanctioned a private adventure of some of his subjects. Dermot MacMorrough, king of Leinster, an unquiet Irish prince who for good reasons had been expelled by his neighbours, came to Henry’s court in Normandy, proffering his allegiance in return for restoration to his lost dominions. The quarrel with Becket, and the French war, were both distracting the English king at the moment. He could not spare attention for the matter, but gave Dermot leave to enlist auxiliaries among the turbulent barons of the South Welsh Marches. The Irish exile enlisted first the services of Maurice Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzstephen, two half-brothers, both noted fighting men, and afterwards those of Richard de Clare, earl of Pembroke, an ambitious and impecunious magnate of broken fortunes. The two barons were promised lands, the earl a greater bribe—the hand of Dermot’s only daughter Eva and the inheritance of the kingdom of Leinster. Fitzgerald and Fitzstephen crossed to Ireland in 1169 with a mere handful of followers. But they achieved victories of an almost incredible completeness over Dermot’s enemies. The undisciplined hordes of the king of Ossory and the Danes of Wexford could not stand before the Anglo-Norman tactics—the charge of the knights and the arrow-flight of the archers, skilfully combined by the adventurous invaders. Dermot was triumphant, and sent for more auxiliaries, aspiring to evict Roderic O’Connor of Connaught from the precarious throne of High King of Ireland. In 1170 the earl of Pembroke came over with a larger force, celebrated his marriage with Dermot’s daughter, and commenced a series of conquests. He took Waterford and Dublin from the Danes, and scattered the hosts of the native princes. Early in the next spring Dermot died, and Earl Richard, in virtue of his marriage, claimed the kingship of Leinster. He held his own, despite the assaults of a great army gathered by Roderic the High King, and of a viking fleet which came to help the conquered jarls of Waterford and Dublin. At this moment King Henry thought it necessary to interfere; if he let more time slip away, Earl Richard would become a powerful king and forget his English allegiance. Accordingly, with a large army at his back, he landed at Waterford in 1171 and marched on Dublin. Richard did him homage for Leinster, engaging to hold it as a palatine earldom, and not to claim the name or rights of a king. The other adventurersfollowed his example, as did, after an interval, most of the native Irish princes. Only Roderic of Connaught held aloof in his western solitudes, asserting his independence. The clergy, almost without a murmur, submitted themselves to the Roman Church.
Such was the first conquest of Ireland, a conquest too facile to be secure. Four years later it appeared to be completed by the submission of the king of Connaught, who did homage like the rest of the island chiefs. But their oaths were as easily broken as made, and the real subjection of the island was not to be completed for 400 years. What happened was that the Anglo-Norman invaders pushed gradually west, occupying the best of the land and holding it down by castles, but leaving the profitless bogs and mountains to the local princes. The king’s writ only ran in and about Dublin and a few other harbour fortresses. Inland, the intruding barons and the Irish chiefs fought perpetually, with varying fortunes. The conquest hardly touched central and western Ulster, and left half Connaught unsubdued: even in the immediate vicinity of Dublin the tribes of the Wicklow Hills were never properly tamed. The English conquest was incomplete; it failed to introduce either unity or strong governance. After a century and a half it began to recede rather than to advance. Many of the districts which had been overrun in the time of the Angevin kings were lost; many of the Anglo-Norman families intermarried with and became absorbed by the Irish; they grew as careless of their allegiance to the crown as any of the native chiefs. The “Lordship of Ireland” was never a reality till the times of the Tudors. But as long as Henry II. lived this could not have been foreseen. The first generation of the conquerors pushed their advance with such vigour that it seemed likely that they would complete the adventure. (SeeIreland:History.)
It was in 1173, the year after his return from Ireland and his submission to the papal legates at Avranches, that King Henry became involved in the first of a series of troubles which were to pursue him for the rest of his life—theRebellion of Henry’s sons.rebellions of his graceless sons. His wife Eleanor of Aquitaine had borne him many children. Henry, the eldest surviving son, had already been crowned in 1170 as his father’s colleague and successor; not only he, but Richard the second, and Geoffrey the third son, were now old enough to chafe against the restraints imposed upon them by an imperious and strong-willed father. The old king very naturally preferred to keep his dominions united under his own immediate government, but he had designated his eldest son as his successor in England and Normandy, while Richard was to have his mother’s heritage of Aquitaine, and Geoffrey’s wife’s dowry, the duchy of Brittany, was due to him, now that he had reached the verge of manhood. The princes were shamelessly eager to enter on their inheritance, the king was loath to understand that by conferring a titular sovereignty on his sons he had given them a sort of right to expect some share of real power. Their grudge against their father was sedulously fostered by their mother Eleanor, a clever and revengeful woman, who could never forgive her husband for keeping her in the background in political matters and insulting her by his frequent amours. Her old subjects in Aquitaine were secretly encouraged by her to follow her son Richard against his father, whom the barons of the south always regarded as an alien and an intruder. The Bretons were equally willing to rise in the name of Geoffrey and Constance against the guardian who was keeping their prince too long waiting for his inheritance. In England the younger Henry had built himself up a party among the more turbulent section of the baronage, who remembered with regret and longing the carnival of licence which their fathers had enjoyed under King Stephen. Secret agreements had also been made with the kings of France and Scotland, who were eager to take advantage of the troubles which were about to break out.