The Project Gutenberg eBook of England under the Angevin Kings, Volume II

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: England under the Angevin Kings, Volume II

Author: Kate Norgate

Release date: June 19, 2022 [eBook #68347]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Macmillan and Co

Credits: MWS, Fay Dunn, State Library of Western Australia and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLAND UNDER THE ANGEVIN KINGS, VOLUME II ***

ENGLAND UNDER THE ANGEVIN KINGS

VOLUME II

Transcriber’s Note

The cover image was created by the transcriber, and is placed in the public domain.

Please see the note at the end of the book.

ENGLAND

UNDER

THE ANGEVIN KINGS


Publisher’s colophon

ENGLAND

UNDER

THE ANGEVIN KINGS

BY

KATE NORGATE

IN TWO VOLUMES—VOL. II.

WITH MAPS AND PLANS

London

MACMILLAN AND CO.

AND NEW YORK

1887

All rights reserved


CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
  PAGE
Archbishop Thomas, 1162–1164 1
Note A.—The Council of Woodstock 43
Note B.—The Council of Clarendon 44
CHAPTER II
Henry and Rome, 1164–1172 46
CHAPTER III
The Conquest of Ireland, 795–1172 82
CHAPTER IV
Henry and the Barons, 1166–1175 120
CHAPTER V
The Angevin Empire, 1175–1183 169
CHAPTER VI
The Last Years of Henry II., 1183–1189 229
CHAPTER VII
Richard and England, 1189–1194 273
CHAPTER VIIIii.vi
The Later Years of Richard, 1194–1199 332
CHAPTER IX
The Fall of the Angevins, 1199–1206 388
Note.—The Death of Arthur 429
CHAPTER X
The New England, 1170–1206 431

LIST OF MAPS

III. Ireland, A.D. 1172 To face page 82
IV. Map to Illustrate the Rebellion of 1173–1174 149
V. France and Burgundy c. 1180 185
VI. Europe c. 1180 189
VII. France and the Angevin Dominions, 1194 359

PLANS

VII. Les Andelys and Château-Gaillard To face page 375
VIII. Château-Gaillard 378

ii.1

CHAPTER I.
ARCHBISHOP THOMAS.
1162–1164.

Somewhat more than a year after the primate’s death, Thomas the chancellor returned to England. He came, as we have seen, at the king’s bidding, ostensibly for the purpose of securing the recognition of little Henry as heir to the crown. But this was not the sole nor even the chief object of his mission. On the eve of his departure—so the story was told by his friends in later days—Thomas had gone to take leave of the king at Falaise. Henry drew him aside: “You do not yet know to what you are going. I will have you to be archbishop of Canterbury.” The chancellor took, or tried to take, the words for a jest. “A saintly figure indeed,” he exclaimed with a smiling glance at his own gay attire, “you are choosing to sit in that holy seat and to head that venerable convent! No, no,” he added with sudden earnestness, “I warn you that if such a thing should be, our friendship would soon turn to bitter hate. I know your plans concerning the Church; you will assert claims which I as archbishop must needs oppose; and the breach once made, jealous hands would take care that it should never be healed again.” The words were prophetic; they sum up the whole history of the pontificate of Thomas Becket. Henry, however, in his turn passed them over as a mere jest, and at once proclaimed his intention to the chancellor’s fellow-envoys, one of whom was the justiciar, Richard de Lucy. “Richard,” said the king, ii.2“if I lay dead in my shroud, would you earnestly strive to secure my first-born on my throne?” “Indeed I would, my lord, with all my might.” “Then I charge you to strive no less earnestly to place my chancellor on the metropolitan chair of Canterbury.”[1]

Thomas was appalled. He could not be altogether taken by surprise; he knew what had been Theobald’s wishes and hopes; he knew that from the moment of Theobald’s death all eyes had turned instinctively upon himself with the belief that the future of the Church rested wholly in his all-powerful hands; he could not but suspect the king’s own intentions,[2] although the very suspicion would keep him silent, and all the more so because those intentions ran counter to his own desires. For twelve months he had known that the primacy was within his reach; he had counted the cost, and he had no mind to pay it. He was incapable of undertaking any office without throwing his whole energies into the fulfilment of its duties; his conception of the duties of the primate of all Britain would involve the sacrifice not only of those secular pursuits which he so keenly enjoyed, but also of that personal friendship and political co-operation with the king which seemed almost an indispensable part of the life of both; and neither sacrifice was he disposed to make. He had said as much to an English friend who had been the first to hint at his coming promotion,[3] and he repeated it now with passionate earnestness to Henry himself, but all in vain. The more he resisted, the more the king insisted—the very frankness of his warnings only strengthening Henry’s confidence in him; and when the legate Cardinal Henry of Pisa urged his acceptance as a sacred duty, Thomas at last gave way.[4]

The council in London was no sooner ended than Richard de Lucy and three of the bishops[5] hurried to Canterbury, byii.3 the king’s orders, to obtain from the cathedral chapter the election of a primate in accordance with his will. The monks of Christ Church were never very easy to manage; in the days of the elder King Henry they had firmly and successfully resisted the intrusion of a secular clerk into the monastic chair of S. Augustine; and a strong party among them now protested that to choose for pastor of the flock of Canterbury a man who was scarcely a clerk at all, who was wholly given to hawks and hounds and the worldly ways of the court, would be no better than setting a wolf to guard a sheepfold. But their scruples were silenced by the arguments of Richard de Lucy and by their dread of the royal wrath, and in the end Thomas was elected without a dissentient voice.[6] The election was repeated in the presence of a great council[7] held at Westminster on May 23,[8] and ratified by the bishops and clergy there assembled.[9] Only one voice was raised in protest; it was that of Gilbert Foliot,[10] who, alluding doubtless to the great scutage, declared that Thomas was utterly unfit for the primacy, because he had persecuted the Church of God.[11] The protest was answered by Henry of Winchester in words suggested by Gilbert’sii.4 own phrase: “My son,” said the ex-legate, addressing Thomas, “if thou hast been hitherto as Saul the persecutor, be thou henceforth as Paul the Apostle.”[12]

The election was confirmed by the great officers of state and the boy-king in his father’s name;[13] the consecration was fixed for the octave of Pentecost, and forthwith the bishops began to vie with each other for the honour of performing the ceremony. Roger of York, who till now had stood completely aloof, claimed it as a privilege due to the dignity of his see; but the primate-elect and the southern bishops declined to accept his services without a profession of canonical obedience to Canterbury, which he indignantly refused.[14] The bishop of London, on whom as dean of the province the duty according to ancient precedent should have devolved, was just dead;[15] Walter of Rochester momentarily put in a claim to supply his place,[16] but withdrew it in deference to Henry of Winchester, who had lately returned from Cluny, and whose royal blood, venerable character, and unique dignity as father of the whole English episcopate, marked him out beyond all question as the most fitting person to undertake the office.[17] By way of compensation, it was Walter who, on the Saturday in Whitsun-week, raised the newly-elected primate to the dignity of priesthood.[18]

Early next morning the consecration took place. Canterbury cathedral has been rebuilt from end to end since that day; it is only imagination which can picture the church of Lanfranc and Anselm and Theobald as it stood on that June morning, the scarce-risen sun gleaming faintly through its eastern windows upon the rich vestures of theii.5 fourteen bishops[19] and their attendant clergy and the dark robes of the monks who thronged the choir, while the nave was crowded with spectators, foremost among whom stood the group of ministers surrounding the little king.[20] From the vestry-door Thomas came forth, clad no longer in the brilliant attire at which he had been jesting a few weeks ago, but in the plain black cassock and white surplice of a clerk; through the lines of staring, wondering faces he passed into the choir, and there threw himself prostrate upon the altar-steps. Thence he was raised to go through a formality suggested by the prudence of his consecrator. To guard, as he hoped, against all risk of future difficulties which might arise from Thomas’s connexion with the court, Henry of Winchester led him down to the entrance of the choir, and in the name of the Church called upon the king’s representatives to deliver over the primate-elect fully and unreservedly to her holy service, freed from all secular obligations, actual or possible. A formal quit-claim was accordingly granted to Thomas by little Henry and the justiciars, in the king’s name;[21] after which the bishop of Winchester proceeded to consecrate him at once. A shout of applause rang through the church as the new primate of all Britain was led up to his patriarchal chair; but he mounted its steps with eyes downcast and full of tears.[22] To him the day was one of melancholy foreboding; yet he made its memory joyful in the Church for ever. He began his archiepiscopal career by ordaining a new festival to be kept every year on that day—the octave of Pentecost—in honour of the most Holy Trinity;[23] and in process of time the observance thus originatedii.6 spread from Canterbury throughout the whole of Christendom, which thus owes to an English archbishop the institution of Trinity Sunday.

“The king has wrought a miracle,” sneered the sarcastic bishop of Hereford, Gilbert Foliot; “out of a soldier and man of the world he has made an archbishop.”[24] The same royal power helped to smooth the new primate’s path a little further before him. He was not, like most of his predecessors, obliged to go in person to fetch his pallium from Rome; an embassy which he despatched immediately after his consecration obtained it for him without difficulty from Alexander III., who had just been driven by the Emperor’s hostility to seek a refuge in France, and was in no condition to venture upon any risk of thwarting King Henry’s favourite minister.[25] The next messenger whom Thomas sent over sea met with a less pleasant reception. He was charged to deliver up the great seal into the king’s hands with a request that Henry would provide himself with another chancellor, “as Thomas felt scarcely equal to the cares of one office, far less to those of two.”[26]

Henry was both surprised and vexed. It was customary for the chancellor to resign his office on promotion to a bishopric; but this sudden step on the part of Thomas was quite unexpected, and upset a cherished scheme of the king’s. He had planned to rival the Emperor by having an archbishop for his chancellor, as the archbishops of Mainz and Cöln were respectively arch-chancellors of Germany and Italy;[27] he had certainly never intended, in raising his favourite to the primacy, to deprive himself of such a valuable assistant in secular administration; his aim hadii.7 rather been to secure the services of Thomas in two departments instead of one.[28] To take away all ground of scandal, he had even procured a papal dispensation to sanction the union of the two offices in a single person.[29] Thomas, however, persisted in his resignation; and as there was no one whom Henry cared to put in his place, the chancellorship remained vacant, while the king brooded over his friend’s unexpected conduct and began to suspect that it was caused by weariness of his service.

Meanwhile Thomas had entered upon the second phase of his strangely varied career. He had “put off the deacon” for awhile; he was resolved now to “put off the old man” wholly and for ever. No sooner was he consecrated than he flung himself, body and soul, into his new life with an ardour more passionate, more absorbing, more exclusive than he had displayed in pursuit of the worldly tasks and pleasures of the court. On the morrow of his consecration, when some jongleurs came to him for the largesse which he had never been known to refuse, he gently but firmly dismissed them; he was no longer, he said, the chancellor whom they had known; his whole possessions were now a sacred trust, to be spent not on actors and jesters but in the service of the Church and the poor.[30] Theobald had doubled the amount of regular alms-givings established by his predecessors; Thomas immediately doubled those of Theobald.[31] To be diligent in providing for the sick and needy, to take care that no beggar should ever be sent empty away from his door,[32] was indeed nothing new in the son of the good dame Rohesia of Caen. The lavish hospitality of the chancellor’s household, too, was naturally transferred to that of the archbishop; but it took a different tone and colour. All and more than all the old grandeur and orderliness were there;ii.8 the palace still swarmed with men-at-arms, servants and retainers of all kinds, every one with his own appointed duty, whose fulfilment was still carefully watched by the master’s eyes; the bevy of high-born children had only increased, for by an ancient custom the second son of a baron could be claimed by the primate for his service—as the eldest by the king—until the age of knighthood; a claim which Thomas was not slow to enforce, and which the barons were delighted to admit. The train of clerks was of course more numerous than ever. The tables were still laden with delicate viands, served with the utmost perfection, and crowded with guests of all ranks; Thomas was still the most courteous and gracious of hosts. But the banquet wore a graver aspect than in the chancellor’s hall. The knights and other laymen occupied a table by themselves, where they talked and laughed as they listed; it was the clerks and religious who now sat nearest to Thomas. He himself was surrounded by a select group of clerks, his eruditi, his “learned men” as he called them: men versed in Scriptural and theological lore, his chosen companions in the study of Holy Writ into which he had plunged with characteristic energy; while instead of the minstrelsy which had been wont to accompany and inspire the gay talk at the chancellor’s table, there was only heard, according to ecclesiastical custom, the voice of the archbishop’s cross-bearer who sat close to his side reading from some holy book: the primate and his confidential companions meanwhile exchanging comments upon what was read, and discussing matters too deep and solemn to interest unlearned ears or to brook unlearned interruption.[33] Of the meal itself Thomas partook but sparingly;[34] its remainder was always given away;[35] and every day twenty-six poor men were brought into the hall and served with a dinner of the best, before Thomas would sit down to his own midday meal.[36]

ii.9

The amount of work which he had got through by that time must have been quite as great as in the busiest days of his chancellorship. The day’s occupations ostensibly began about the hour of tierce, when the archbishop came forth from his chamber and went either to hear or to celebrate mass,[37] while a breakfast was given at his expense to a hundred persons who were called his “poor prebendaries.”[38] After mass he proceeded to his audience-chamber and there chiefly remained till the hour of nones, occupied in hearing suits and administering justice.[39] Nones were followed by dinner,[40] after which the primate shut himself up in his own apartments with his eruditi[41] and spent the rest of the day with them in business or study, interrupted only by the religious duties of the canonical hours, and sometimes by a little needful repose,[42] for his night’s rest was of the briefest. At cock-crow he rose for prime; immediately afterwards there were brought in to him secretly, under cover of the darkness, thirteen poor persons whose feet he washed and to whom he ministered at table with the utmost devotion and humility,[43] clad only in a hair-shirt which from the day of his consecration he always wore beneath the gorgeous robes in which he appeared in public.[44] He then returned to his bed, but only for a very short time; long before any one else was astir he was again up and doing, in company with one specially favoured disciple—the one who tells the tale, Herbert of Bosham. In the calm silent hours of dawn, while twelve other poor persons received a secret meal and had their feet washed by the primate’s almoner in his stead, the two friends sat eagerly searching the Scriptures together, till the archbishop chose to be left alone[45] for meditation and confession,ii.10 scourging and prayer,[46] in which he remained absorbed until the hour of tierce called him forth to his duties in the world.[47]

He was feverishly anxious to lose no opportunity of making up for his long neglect of the Scriptural and theological studies befitting his sacred calling. He openly confessed his grievous inferiority in this respect to many of his own clerks, and put himself under their teaching with child-like simplicity and earnestness. The one whom he specially chose for monitor and guide, Herbert of Bosham, was a man in whom, despite his immeasurable inferiority, one can yet see something of a temper sufficiently akin to that of Thomas himself to account for their mutual attraction, and perhaps for some of their joint errors. As they rode from London to Canterbury on the morrow of the primate’s election he had drawn Herbert aside and laid upon him a special charge to watch with careful eyes over his conduct as archbishop, and tell him without stint or scruple whatever he saw amiss in it or heard criticized by others.[48] Herbert, though he worshipped his primate with a perfect hero-worship, never hesitated to fulfil this injunction to the letter as far as his lights would permit; but unluckily his zeal was even less tempered by discretion than that of Thomas himself. He was a far less safe guide in the practical affairs of life than in the intricate paths of abstract and mystical interpretation of Holy Writ in which he and Thomas delighted to roam together. Often, when no other quiet time could be found, the archbishop would turn his horse aside as they travelled along the road, beckon to his friend, draw out a book from its hiding-place in one of his wide sleeves, and plunge into an eager discussion of its contents as they ambled slowly on.[49] When at Canterbury, his greatest pleasure was to betake himself to the cloister and sit reading like a lowly monk in one of its quiet nooks.[50]

But the eruditi of Thomas, like the disciples of Theobald, were the confidants and the sharers of far more than hisii.11 literary and doctrinal studies. It was in those evening hours which he spent in their midst, secluded from all outside interruption, that the plans of Church reform and Church revival, sketched long ago by other hands in the Curia Theobaldi, assumed a shape which might perhaps have startled Theobald himself. As the weeks wore quickly away from Trinity to Ember-tide, the new primate set himself to grapple at once with the ecclesiastical abuses of the time in the persons of his first candidates for ordination. On his theory the remedy for these abuses lay in the hands of the bishops, and especially of the metropolitans, who fostered simony, worldliness and immorality among the clergy by the facility with which they admitted unqualified persons into high orders, thus filling the ranks of the priesthood with unworthy, ignorant and needy clerks, who either traded upon their sacred profession as a means to secular advancement, or disgraced it by the idle wanderings and unbecoming shifts to which the lack of fit employment drove them to resort for a living. He was determined that no favour or persuasion should ever induce him to ordain any man whom he did not know to be of saintly life and ample learning, and provided with a benefice sufficient to furnish him with occupation and maintenance; and he proclaimed and acted upon his determination with the zeal of one who, as he openly avowed, felt that he was himself the most glaring example of the evils resulting from a less stringent system of discipline.[51]

His next undertaking was one which almost every new-made prelate in any degree alive to the rights and duties of his office found it needful to begin as soon as possible: the recovery of the alienated property of his see. Gilbert Foliot, the model English bishop of the day, had no sooner been consecrated than he wrote to beg the Pope’s support in this important and troublesome matter.[52] It may well be that even fourteen years later the metropolitan see had not yet received full restitution for the spoliations of the anarchy. Thomas however set to work in the most sweeping fashion, boldly laying claim to every estate which he could find toii.12 have been granted away by his predecessors on grounds which did not satisfy his exalted ideas of ecclesiastical right, or on terms which he held detrimental to the interest and dignity of his church, and enforcing his claims without respect of persons; summarily turning out those who held the archiepiscopal manors in ferm,[53] disputing with the earl of Clare for jurisdiction over the castle and district of Tunbridge, and reclaiming, on the strength of a charter of the Conqueror, the custody of Rochester castle from the Crown itself. Such a course naturally stirred up for him a crowd of enemies, and increased the jealousy, suspicion and resentment which his new position and altered mode of life had already excited among the companions and rivals of his earlier days. The archbishop however was still, like the chancellor, protected against them by the shield of the royal favour; they could only work against him by working upon the mind of Henry. One by one they carried over sea their complaints of the wrongs which they had suffered, or with which they were threatened, at the primate’s hands;[54] they reported all his daily doings and interpreted them in the worst sense:—his strictness of life was superstition, his zeal for justice was cruelty, his care for his church avarice, his pontifical splendour pride, his vigour rashness and self-conceit:[55]—if the king did not look to it speedily, he would find his laws and constitutions set at naught, his regal dignity trodden under foot, and himself and his heirs reduced to mere cyphers dependent on the will and pleasure of the archbishop of Canterbury.[56]

At the close of the year Henry determined to go and see for himself the truth of these strange rumours.[57] The negotiations concerning the papal question had detained him on the continent throughout the summer; in the end bothii.13 he and Louis gave a cordial welcome to Alexander, and a general pacification was effected in a meeting of the two kings and the Pope which took place late in the autumn at Chouzy on the Loire. Compelled by contrary winds to keep Christmas at Cherbourg instead of in England as he had hoped,[58] the king landed at Southampton on S. Paul’s day.[59] Thomas, still accompanied by the little Henry, was waiting to receive him; the two friends met with demonstrations of the warmest affection, and travelled to London together in the old intimate association.[60] One subject of disagreement indeed there was; Thomas had actually been holding for six months the archdeaconry of Canterbury together with the archbishopric, and this Henry, after several vain remonstrances, now compelled him to resign.[61] They parted however in undisturbed harmony, the archbishop again taking his little pupil with him.[62]

The first joint work of king and primate was the translation of Gilbert Foliot from Hereford to London. Some of those who saw its consequences in after-days declared that Henry had devised the scheme for the special purpose of securing Gilbert’s aid against the primate;[63] but it is abundantly clear that no such thought had yet entered his mind, and that the suggestion of Gilbert’s promotion really came from Thomas himself.[64] Like every one else, he looked upon Gilbert as the greatest living light of the English Church; he expected to find in him his own most zealous and efficient fellow-worker in the task which lay before him as metropolitan, as well as his best helper in influencing the king for good. Gilbert was in fact the man who in the natural fitness of things had seemed marked out for the primacy;ii.14 failing that, it was almost a matter of necessity that he should be placed in the see which stood next in dignity, and where both king and primate could benefit by his assistance ever at hand, instead of having to seek out their most useful adviser in the troubled depths of the Welsh marches. The chapter of London, to whom during the pecuniary troubles and long illness of their late bishop Gilbert had been an invaluable friend and protector, were only too glad to elect him; and his world-wide reputation combined with the pleadings of Henry to obtain the Pope’s consent to his translation,[65] which was completed by his enthronement in S. Paul’s cathedral on April 28, 1163.[66]

The king spent the early summer in subduing South-Wales; the primate, in attending a council held by Pope Alexander at Tours.[67] From the day of his departure to that of his return Thomas’s journey was one long triumphal progress; Pope and cardinals welcomed him with such honours as had never been given to any former archbishop of Canterbury, hardly even to S. Anselm himself;[68] and the request which he made to the Pope for Anselm’s canonization[69] may indicate the effect which they produced on his mind—confirming his resolve to stand boldly upon his right of opposition to the secular power whenever it clashed with ecclesiastical theories of liberty and justice. The first opportunity for putting his resolve in practice arose upon a question of purely temporal administration at a council held by Henry at Woodstock on July 31, after his return from Wales. The Welsh princes came to swear fealty to Henry and his heir; Malcolm of Scotland came to confirmii.15 his alliance with the English Crown by doing homage in like manner to the little king.[70] Before the council broke up, however, Henry met the sharpest constitutional defeat which had befallen any English sovereign since the Norman conquest, and that at the hands of his own familiar friend.

The king had devised a new financial project for increasing his own revenue at the expense of the sheriffs. According to current practice, a sum of two shillings annually from every hide of land in the shire was paid to those officers for their services to the community in its administration and defence. This payment, although described as customary rather than legal,[71] and called the “sheriff’s aid,”[72] seems really to have been nothing else than the Danegeld, which still occasionally made its appearance in the treasury rolls, but in such small amount that it is evident the sheriffs, if they collected it in full, paid only a fixed composition to the Crown and kept the greater part as a remuneration for their own labours. Henry now, it seems, proposed to transfer the whole of these sums from the sheriff’s income to his own, and have it enrolled in full among the royal dues. Whether he intended to make compensation to the sheriffs from some other source, or whether he already saw the need of curbing their influence and checking their avarice, we know not; but the archbishop of Canterbury started up to resist the proposed change as an injustice both to the receivers and to the payers of the aid. He seems to have looked upon it as an attempt to re-establish the Danegeld with all the odiousness attaching to its shameful origin and its unfair incidence, and to have held it his constitutional duty as representative and champion of the whole people to lift up his voice against it in their behalf. “My lord king,” he said, ii.16“saving your good pleasure, we will not give you this money as revenue, for it is not yours. To your officers, who receive it as a matter of grace rather than of right, we will give it willingly so long as they do their duty; but on no other terms will we be made to pay it at all.”—“By God’s Eyes!” swore the astonished and angry king, “what right have you to contradict me? I am doing no wrong to any man of yours. I say the moneys shall be enrolled among my royal revenues.”—“Then by those same Eyes,” swore Thomas in return, “not a penny shall you have from my lands, or from any lands of the Church!”[73]

How the debate ended we are not told; but one thing we know: from that time forth the hated name of “Danegeld” appeared in the Pipe Rolls no more. It seems therefore that, for the first time in English history since the Norman conquest, the right of the nation’s representatives to oppose the financial demands of the Crown was asserted in the council of Woodstock, and asserted with such success that the king was obliged not merely to abandon his project, but to obliterate the last trace of the tradition on which it was founded. And it is well to remember, too, that the first stand made by Thomas of Canterbury against the royal will was made in behalf not of himself or his order but of his whole flock;—in the cause not of ecclesiastical privilege but of constitutional right. The king’s policy may have been really sounder and wiser than the primate’s; but the ground taken by Thomas at Woodstock entitles him none the less to a place in the line of patriot-archbishops of which Dunstan stands at the head.[74]

The next few weeks were occupied with litigation over the alienated lands of the metropolitan see. A crowd of claims put in by Thomas and left to await the king’s return now came up for settlement, the most important case being that of Earl Roger of Clare, whom Thomas had summoned to perform his homage for Tunbridge at Westminster on July 22. Roger answered that he held the entire fief by knight-service, to be rendered in the shape of money-payment,[75] of the king and not of the primate.[76] As Roger wasii.17 connected with the noblest families in England,[77] king and barons were strongly on his side.[78] To settle the question, Henry ordered a general inquisition to be made throughout England to ascertain where the service of each land-holder was lawfully due. The investigation was of course made by the royal justiciars; and when they came to the archiepiscopal estates, one at least of the most important fiefs in dispute was adjudged by them to the Crown alone.[79]

Meanwhile a dispute on a question of church patronage arose between the primate and a tenant-in-chief of the Crown, named William of Eynesford. Thomas excommunicated his opponent without observing the custom which required him to give notice to the king before inflicting spiritual penalties on one of his tenants-in-chief.[80] Henry indignantly bade him withdraw the sentence; Thomas refused, saying “it was not for the king to dictate who should be bound or who loosed.”[81] The answer was indisputable in itself; but it pointed directly to the fatal subject on which the inevitable quarrel must turn: the relations and limits between the two powers of the keys and the sword.

Almost from his accession Henry seems to have been in some degree contemplating and preparing for those great schemes of legal reform which were to be the lasting glory of his reign. His earliest efforts in this direction were merely tentative; the young king was at once too inexperienced and too hard pressed with urgent business of all kinds, at home and abroad, to have either capacity or opportunity for great experiments in legislation. Throughout the past nine years, however, the projects which floated before his mind’s eye had been gradually taking shape; and now that he was at last freed for a while from theii.18 entanglements of politics and war, the time had come when he might begin to devote himself to that branch of his kingly duties for which he probably had the strongest inclination, as he certainly had the highest natural genius. He had by this time gained enough insight into the nature and causes of existing abuses to venture upon dealing with them systematically and in detail, and he had determined to begin with a question which was allowed on all hands to be one of the utmost gravity: the repression of crime in the clergy.

The origin of this difficulty was in the separation—needful perhaps, but none the less disastrous in some of its consequences—made by William the Conqueror between the temporal and ecclesiastical courts of justice. In William’s intention the two sets of tribunals were to work side by side without mutual interference save when the secular power was called in to enforce the decisions of the spiritual judge. But in practice the scheme was soon found to involve a crowd of difficulties. The two jurisdictions were constantly coming into contact, and it was a perpetual question where to draw the line between them. The struggle for the investitures, the religious revival which followed it, the vast and rapid developement of the canon law, with the increase of knowledge brought to bear upon its interpretation through the revived study of the civil law of Rome, gave the clergy a new sense of corporate importance and strength, and a new position as a distinct order in the state; the breakdown of all secular administration under Stephen tended still further to exalt the influence of the canonical system which alone retained some vestige of legal authority, and to throw into the Church-courts a mass of business with which they had hitherto had only an indirect concern, but which they alone now seemed capable of treating. Their proceedings were conducted on the principles of the canon law, which admitted of none but spiritual penalties; they refused to allow any lay interference with the persons over whom they claimed sole jurisdiction; and as these comprised the whole clerical body in the widest possible sense, extending to allii.19 who had received the lowest orders of the Church or who had taken monastic vows, the result was to place a considerable part of the population altogether outside the ordinary law of the land, and beyond the reach of adequate punishment for the most heinous crimes. Such crimes were only too common, and were necessarily fostered by this system of clerical immunities; for a man capable of staining his holy orders with theft or murder was not likely to be restrained by the fear of losing them, which a clerical criminal knew to be the worst punishment in store for him; and moreover, it was but too easy for the doers of such deeds to shelter themselves under the protection of a privilege to which often they had no real title. The king’s justiciars declared that in the nine years since Henry’s accession more than a hundred murders, besides innumerable robberies and lesser offences, had gone unpunished because they were committed by clerks, or men who represented themselves to be such.[82] The scandal was acknowledged on all hands; the spiritual party in the Church grieved over it quite as loudly and deeply as the lay reformers; but they hoped to remedy it in their own way, by a searching reformation and a stringent enforcement of spiritual discipline within the ranks of the clergy themselves. The subject had first come under Henry’s direct notice in the summer of 1158, when he received at York a complaint from a citizen of Scarborough that a certain dean had extorted money from him by unjust means. The case was tried, in the king’s presence, before the archbishop of the province, two bishops, and John of Canterbury the treasurer of York. The dean failed in his defence; and as it was proved that he had extorted the money by a libel, an offence against which Henry had made a special decree, some of the barons present were sent to see that the law had its course. John of Canterbury, however, rose and gave it as the decision of the spiritual judges that the money should be restored to the citizen and the criminal delivered over to the mercy of his metropolitan; and despite the justiciar’s remonstrances, they refused to allow the kingii.20 any rights in the matter. Henry indignantly ordered an appeal to the archbishop of Canterbury; but he was called over sea before it could be heard,[83] and had never returned to England until now, when another archbishop sat in Theobald’s place.

That it was Thomas of London who sat there was far from being an indication that Henry had forgotten the incident. It was precisely because Henry in these last four years had thought over the question of the clerical immunities and determined how to deal with it that he had sought to place on S. Augustine’s chair a man after his own heart. He aimed at reducing the position of the clergy, like all other doubtful matters, to the standard of his grandfather’s time. He held that he had a right to whatever his ancestors had enjoyed; he saw therein nothing derogatory to either the Church or the primate, whom he rather intended to exalt by making him his own inseparable colleague in temporal administration and the supreme authority within the realm in purely spiritual matters—thus avoiding the appeals to Rome which had led to so much mischief, and securing for himself a representative to whom he could safely intrust the whole work of government in England as guardian of the little king,[84] while he himself would be free to devote his whole energies to the management of his continental affairs. He seems in fact to have hoped tacitly to repeal the severance of the temporal and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, and bring back the golden age of William and Lanfranc, if not that of Eadgar and Dunstan; and for this he, not unnaturally, counted unreservedly upon Thomas. By slow degrees he discovered his miscalculation. Thomas had given him one direct warning which had been unheeded; he had warned him again indirectly by resigning the chancellorship; now, when the king unfolded his plans, he did not at once contradict him; he merely answered all his arguments and persuasions with one set phrase:—“I will render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”[85]

ii.21

In July occurred a typical case which brought matters to a crisis. A clerk named Philip de Broi had been tried in the bishop of Lincoln’s court for murder, had cleared himself by a legal compurgation, and had been acquitted. The king, not satisfied, commanded or permitted the charge to be revived, and the accused to be summoned to take his trial at Dunstable before Simon Fitz-Peter, then acting as justice-in-eyre in Bedfordshire, where Philip dwelt. Philip indignantly refused to plead again in answer to a charge of which he had been acquitted, and overwhelmed the judge with abuse, of which Simon on his return to London made formal complaint to the king. Henry was furious, swore his wonted oath “by God’s Eyes” that an insult to his minister was an insult to himself, and ordered the culprit to be brought to justice for the contempt of court and the homicide both at once. The primate insisted that the trial should take place in his own court at Canterbury, and to this Henry was compelled unwillingly to consent. The charge of homicide was quickly disposed of; Philip had been acquitted in a Church court, and his present judges had no wish to reverse its decision. On the charge of insulting a royal officer they sentenced him to undergo a public scourging at the hands of the offended person, and to forfeit the whole of his income for the next two years, to be distributed in alms according to the king’s pleasure. Henry declared the punishment insufficient, and bitterly reproached the bishops with having perverted justice out of favour to their order.[86] They denied it; but a story which came up from the diocese of Salisbury[87] and another from that of Worcester[88] tended still further to shew the helplessness of the royal justice against the ecclesiastical courts under the protection of the primate; and the latter’s blundering attempts to satisfy the king only increased his irritation. Not only did Thomas venture beyond theii.22 limits of punishment prescribed by the canon law by causing a clerk who had been convicted of theft to be branded as well as degraded,[89] but he actually took upon himself to condemn another to banishment.[90] He hoped by these severe sentences to appease the king’s wrath;[91] Henry, on the contrary, resented them as an interference with his rights; what he wanted was not severe punishment in isolated cases, but the power to inflict it in the regular course of his own royal justice. At last he laid the whole question before a great council which met at Westminster on October 1.[92]

The king’s first proposition, that the bishops should confirm the old customs observed in his grandfather’s days,[93] opened a discussion which lasted far into the night. Henry himself proceeded to explain his meaning more fully; he required, first, that the bishops should be more strict in the pursuit of criminal clerks;[94] secondly, that all such clerks, when convicted and degraded, should be handed over to the secular arm for temporal punishment like laymen, according to the practice usual under Henry I.;[95] and finally, that the bishops should renounce their claim to inflict any temporal punishment whatever, such as exile or imprisonment in a monastery, which he declared to be an infringement of his regal rights over the territory of his whole realm and the persons of all his subjects.[96] The primate, after vainly begging for an adjournment till the morrow, retired to consult with his suffragans.[97] When he returned, it was to set forth his view of the “two swords”—the two jurisdictions, spiritual and temporal—in terms which put an end to all hope ofii.23 agreement with the king. He declared the ministers of the Heavenly King exempt from all subjection to the judgement of an earthly sovereign; the utmost that he would concede was that a clerk once degraded should thenceforth be treated as a layman and punished as such if he offended again.[98] Henry, apparently too much astonished to argue further, simply repeated his first question—“Would the bishops obey the royal customs?” “Aye, saving our order,” was the answer given by the primate in the name and with the consent of all.[99] When appealed to singly they all made the same answer.[100] Henry bade them withdraw the qualifying phrase, and accept the customs unconditionally; they, through the mouth of their primate, refused;[101] the king raged and swore, but all in vain. At last he strode suddenly out of the hall without taking leave of the assembly;[102] and when morning broke they found that he had quitted London.[103] Before the day was over, Thomas received a summons to surrender some honours which he had held as chancellor and still retained;[104] and soon afterwards the little Henry was taken out of his care.[105]

The king’s wrath presently cooled so far that he invited the primate to a conference at Northampton. They met on horseback in a field near the town; high words passed between them; the king again demanded, and the archbishop again refused, unconditional acceptance of the customs; andii.24 in this determination they parted.[106] A private negotiation with some of the other prelates—suggested, it was said, by the diplomatist-bishop of Lisieux—was more successful; Roger of York and Robert of Lincoln met the king at Gloucester and agreed to accept his customs with no other qualification than a promise on his part to exact nothing contrary to the rights of their order. Hilary of Chichester not only did the same but undertook to persuade the primate himself. In this of course he failed.[107] Some time before Christmas, however, there came to the archbishop three commissioners who professed to be sent by the Pope to bid him withdraw his opposition; Henry having, according to their story, assured the Pope that he had no designs against the clergy or the Church, and required nothing beyond a verbal assent for the saving of his regal dignity.[108] On the faith of their word Thomas met the king at Oxford,[109] and there promised to accept the customs and obey the king “loyally and in good faith.” Henry then demanded that as the archbishop had withstood him publicly, so his submission should be repeated publicly too, in an assembly of barons and clergy to be convened for that purpose.[110] This was more than Thomas had been led to expect; but he made no objection, and the Christmas season passed over in peace. Henry kept the feast at Berkhampstead,[111] one of the castles lately taken from the archbishop; Thomas at Canterbury, where he had just been consecrating the great English scholar Robert of Melun—one of the three Papal commissioners—to succeed Gilbert Foliot as bishop of Hereford.[112]

ii.25

On S. Hilary’s day the proposed council met at the royal hunting-seat of Clarendon near Salisbury.[113] Henry called upon the archbishop to fulfil the promise he had given at Oxford and publicly declare his assent to the customs. Thomas drew back. As he saw the mighty array of barons round the king—as he looked over the ranks of his own fellow-bishops—it flashed at last even upon his unsuspicious mind that all this anxiety to draw him into such a public repetition of a scene which he had thought to be final must cover something more than the supposed papal envoys had led him to expect, and that those “customs” which he had been assured were but a harmless word might yet become a terrible reality if he yielded another step. His hesitation threw the king into one of those paroxysms of Angevin fury which scared the English and Norman courtiers almost out of their senses. Thomas alone remained undaunted; the bishops stood “like a flock of sheep ready for slaughter,” and the king’s own ministers implored the primate to save them from the shame of having to lay violent hands upon him at their sovereign’s command. For two days he stood firm; on the third two knights of the Temple brought him a solemn assurance, on the honour of their order and the salvation of their souls, that his fears were groundless and that a verbal submission to the king’s will would end the quarrel and restore peace to the Church. He believed them; and though he still shrank from the formality, thus emptied of meaning, as little better than a lie, yet for the Church’s sake he gave way. He publicly promised to obey the king’s laws and customs loyally and in good faith, and made all the other bishops do likewise.[114]

The words were no sooner out of their mouths than Thomas learned how just his suspicions had been. A question was instantly raised—what were these customs? It was too late to discuss them that night; next morning theii.26 king bade the oldest and wisest of the barons go and make a recognition of the customs observed by his grandfather and bring up a written report of them for ratification by the council.[115] Nine days later[116] the report was presented. It comprised sixteen articles, known ever since as the Constitutions of Clarendon.[117] Some of them merely re-affirmed, in a more stringent and technical manner, the rules of William the Conqueror forbidding bishops and beneficed clerks to quit the realm or excommunicate the king’s tenants-in-chief without his leave, and the terms on which the temporal position of the bishops had been settled by the compromise between Henry I. and Anselm at the close of the struggle for the investitures. Another aimed at checking the abuse of appeals to Rome, by providing that no appeal should be carried further than the archbishop’s court without the assent of the king. The remainder dealt with the settlement of disputes concerning presentations and advowsons, which were transferred from the ecclesiastical courts to that of the king; the treatment of excommunicate persons; the limits of the right of sanctuary as regarding the goods of persons who had incurred forfeiture to the Crown; the ordination of villeins; the jurisdiction over clerks accused of crime; the protection of laymen cited before the Church courts against episcopal and archidiaconal injustice; and the method of procedure in suits concerning the tenure of Church lands.

The two articles last mentioned are especially remarkable. The former provided that if a layman was accused before a bishop on insufficient testimony, the sheriff should at the bishop’s request summon a jury of twelve lawful men of the neighbourhood to swear to the truth or falsehood of the charge.[118] The other clause decreed that when an estate was claimed by a clerk in frank-almoign and by a layman as a secular fief the question should be settled by the chiefii.27 justiciar in like manner on the recognition of twelve jurors.[119] The way in which these provisions are introduced implies that the principle contained in them was already well known in the country; it indicates that some steps had already been taken towards a general remodelling of legal procedure, intended to embrace all branches of judicial administration and bring them all into orderly and harmonious working. In this view the Constitutions of Clarendon were only part of a great scheme in whose complete developement they might have held an appropriate and useful place.[120] But the churchmen of the day, to whom they were thus suddenly presented as an isolated fragment, could hardly be expected to see in them anything but an engine of state tyranny for grinding down the Church. Almost every one of them assumed, in some way or other, the complete subordination of ecclesiastical to temporal authority; the right of lay jurisdiction over clerks was asserted in the most uncompromising terms; while the last clause of all, which forbade the ordination of villeins without the consent of their lords, stirred a nobler feeling than jealousy for mere class-privileges. Its real intention was probably not to hinder the enfranchisement of serfs, but simply to protect the landowners against the loss of services which, being attached to the soil, they had no means of replacing, and very possibly also to prevent the number of criminal clerks being further increased by the admission of villeins anxious to escape from the justice of their lords. But men who for ages had been trained to regard the Church as a divinely-appointed city of refuge for all the poor and needy, the oppressed and the enslaved, could only see the other side of the measure and feel their inmost hearts rise up in the cry of a contemporary poet—“Hath not God called us all, bond and free, to His service?”[121]

28

The discussion occupied six days;[122] as each clause was read out to the assembly, Thomas rose and set forth his reasons for opposing it.[123] When at last the end was reached, Henry called upon him and all the bishops to affix their seals to the constitutions. “Never,” burst out the primate—“never, while there is a breath left in my body!”[124] The king was obliged to content himself with the former verbal assent, gained on false pretences as it had been; a copy of the obnoxious document was handed to the primate, who took it, as he said, for a witness against its contrivers, and indignantly quitted the assembly.[125] In an agony of remorse for the credulity which had led him into such a trap he withdrew to Winchester and suspended himself from all priestly functions till he had received absolution from the Pope.[126]

ii.29

It was to the Pope that both parties looked for a settlement of their dispute; but Alexander, ill acquainted both with the merits of the case and with the characters of the disputants, and beset on all sides with political difficulties, could only strive in vain to hold the balance evenly between them. Meanwhile the political quarrel of king and primate was embittered by an incident in which Henry’s personal feelings were stirred. His brother William—the favourite young brother whom he had once planned to establish as sovereign in Ireland—had set his heart upon a marriage with the widowed countess of Warren; the archbishop had forbidden the match on the ground of affinity, and his prohibition had put an end to the scheme.[127] Baffled and indignant, William returned to Normandy and poured the story of his grievance into the sympathizing ears first of his mother and then, as it seems, of the brotherhood at Bec.[128] On January 29, 1164—one day before the dissolution of the council of Clarendon—he died at Rouen;[129] and a writer who was himself at that time a monk at Bec not only implies his own belief that the young man actually died of disappointment, but declares that Henry shared that belief, and thenceforth looked upon the primate by whom the disappointment had been caused as little less than the murderer of his brother.[130] The king’s exasperation was at any rate plain toii.30 all eyes; and as the summer drew on Thomas found himself gradually deserted. His best friend, John of Salisbury, had already been taken from his side, and was soon driven into exile by the jealousy of the king;[131] another friend, John of Canterbury, had been removed out of the country early in 1163 by the ingenious device of making him bishop of Poitiers.[132] The old dispute concerning the relations between Canterbury and York had broken out afresh with intensified bitterness between Roger of Pont-l’Evêque and the former comrade of whom he had long been jealous, and who had now once again been promoted over his head; the king, hoping to turn it to account for his own purposes, was intriguing at the Papal court in Roger’s behalf, and one of his confidential agents there was Thomas’s own archdeacon, Geoffrey Ridel.[133] The bishops as yet were passive; in theii.31 York controversy Gilbert Foliot strongly supported his own metropolitan;[134] but between him and Thomas there was already a question, amicable indeed at present but ominous nevertheless, as to whether or not the profession of obedience made to Theobald by the bishop of Hereford should be repeated by the same man as bishop of London to Theobald’s successor.[135]

Thomas himself fully expected to meet the fate of Anselm; throughout the winter his friends had been endeavouring to secure him a refuge in France;[136] and early in the summer of 1164, having been refused an interview with the king,[137] he made two attempts to escape secretly from Romney. The first time he was repelled by a contrary wind; the second time the sailors put back ostensibly for the same reason, but really because they had recognized their passenger and dreaded the royal wrath;[138] and a servant who went on the following night to shut the gates of the deserted palace at Canterbury found the primate, worn out with fatigue and disappointment, sitting alone in the darkness like a beggar upon his own door-step.[139] Despairing of escape, he made another effort to see the king at Woodstock. Henry dreaded nothing so much as the archbishop’s flight, for he felt that it would probably be followed by a Papal interdict on his dominions,[140] and would certainly give an immense advantage against him to Louis of France, who was at that very moment threatening war in Auvergne.[141] He therefore received Thomas courteously, though with somewhat less than the usual honours,[142] and made no allusionii.32 to the past except by a playful question “whether the archbishop did not think the realm was wide enough to contain them both?” Thomas saw, however, that the old cordiality was gone; his enemies saw it too, and, as his biographer says, “they came about him like bees.”[143] Foremost among them was John the king’s marshal, who had a suit in the archbishop’s court concerning the manor of Pageham.[144] It was provided by one of Henry’s new rules of legal procedure that if a suitor saw no chance of obtaining justice in the court of his own lord he might, by taking an oath to that effect and bringing two witnesses to do the same, transfer the suit to a higher court.[145] John by this method removed his case from the court of the archbishop to that of the king; and thither Thomas was cited to answer his claim on the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. When that day came the primate was too ill to move; he sent essoiners to excuse his absence in legal form, and also a written protest against the removal of the suit, on the ground that it had been obtained by perjury—John having taken the oath not upon the Gospel, but upon an old song-book which he had surreptitiously brought into court for the purpose.[146] Henry angrily refused to believe either Thomas or his essoiners,[147] and immediately issued orders for a great council to be held at Northampton.[148] It was customary to call the archbishops and the greater barons by a special writ addressed to each individually, while the lesser tenants-in-chief received a general summons through the sheriffs of the different counties. Roger of York was specially called in due form;[149] the metropolitan of all Britain, who ought to have been invitedii.33 first and most honourably of all, merely received through the sheriff of Kent a peremptory citation to be ready on the first day of the council with his defence against the claim of John the marshal.[150]

The council—an almost complete gathering of the tenants-in-chief, lay and spiritual, throughout the realm[151]—was summoned for Tuesday October 6.[152] The king however lingered hawking by the river-side till late at night,[153] and it was not till next morning after Mass that the archbishop could obtain an audience. He began by asking leave to go and consult the Pope on his dispute with Roger of York and divers other questions touching the interests of both Church and state; Henry angrily bade him be silent and retire to prepare his defence for his contempt of the royal summons in the matter of John the marshal.[154] The trial took place next day. John himself did not appear, being detained in the king’s service at the Michaelmas session of the Exchequerii.34 in London;[155] the charge of failure of justice was apparently withdrawn, but for the alleged contempt Thomas was sentenced to a fine of five hundred pounds.[156] Indignant as he was at the flagrant illegality of the trial, in which his own suffragans had been compelled to sit in judgement on their primate, Thomas was yet persuaded to submit, in the hope of avoiding further wrangling over what seemed now to have become a mere question of money.[157] But there were other questions to follow. Henry now demanded from the archbishop a sum of three hundred pounds, representing the revenue due from the honours of Eye and Berkhampstead for the time during which he had held them since his resignation of the chancellorship.[158] Thomas remarked that he had spent far more than that sum on the repair of the royal palaces, and protested against the unfairness of making such a demand without warning. Still, however, he disdained to resist for a matter of filthy lucre, and found sureties for the required amount.[159] Next morning Henry made a further demand for the repayment of a loan made to Thomas in his chancellor days.[160] In those days the two friends had virtually had but one purse as well as “one mind and one heart,” and Thomas was deeply wounded by this evident proof that their friendship was at an end. Once more he submitted; but this time it was no easy matter toii.35 find sureties;[161] and then, late on the Friday evening, there was reached the last and most overwhelming count in the long indictment thus gradually unrolled before the eyes of the astonished primate. He was called upon to render a complete statement of all the revenues of vacant sees, baronies and honours of which he had had the custody as chancellor—in short, of the whole accounts of the chancery during his tenure of office.[162]

At this crushing demand the archbishop’s courage gave way, and he threw himself at the king’s feet in despair. All the bishops did likewise, but in vain; Henry swore “by God’s Eyes” that he would have the accounts in full. He granted, however, a respite till the morrow,[163] and Thomas spent the next morning in consultation with his suffragans.[164] Gilbert of London advised unconditional surrender;[165] Henry of Winchester, who had already withstood the king to his face the night before,[166] strongly opposed this view,[167] and suggested that the matter should be compromised by an offer of two thousand marks. This the king rejected.[168] After long deliberation[169] it was decided—again at the suggestionii.36 of Bishop Henry—that Thomas should refuse to entertain the king’s demands on the ground of the release from all secular obligations granted to him at his consecration. This answer was carried by the bishops in a body to the king. He refused to accept it, declaring that the release had been given without his authority; and all that the bishops could wring from him was a further adjournment till the Monday morning.[170] In the middle of Sunday night the highly-strung nervous organization of Thomas broke down under the long cruel strain; the morning found him lying in helpless agony, and with great difficulty he obtained from the king another day’s delay.[171] Before it expired a warning reached him from the court that if he appeared there he must expect nothing short of imprisonment or death.[172] A like rumour spread through the council, and at dawn the bishops in a body implored their primate to give up the hopeless struggle and throw himself on the mercy of the king. He refused to betray his Church by accepting a sentence which he believed to be illegal as well as unjust, forbade the bishops to take any further part in his trial, gave them notice of an appeal to Rome if they should do so, and charged them on their canonical obedience to excommunicate at once whatever laymen should dare to sit in judgement upon him.[173] Against this last command the bishop of London instantly appealed.ii.37[174] All then returned to the court, except Henry of Winchester and Jocelyn of Salisbury, who lingered for a last word of pleading or of sympathy.[175] When they too were gone, Thomas went to the chapel of the monastery in which he was lodging—a small Benedictine house dedicated to S. Andrew, just outside the walls of Northampton—and with the utmost solemnity celebrated the mass of S. Stephen with its significant introit: “Princes have sat and spoken against me.” The mass ended, he mounted his horse, and escorted no longer by a brilliant train of clerks and knights, but by a crowd of poor folk full of sympathy and admiration, he rode straight to the castle where the council awaited him.[176]

At the gate he took his cross from the attendant who usually bore it, and went forward alone to the hall where the bishops and barons were assembled.[177] They fell back in amazement at the apparition of the tall solitary figure, robed in full pontificals, and carrying the crucifix like an uplifted banner prepared at once for defence and for defiance; friends and opponents were almost equally shocked, and it was not till he had passed through their midst and seated himself in a corner of the hall that the bishops recovered sufficiently to gather round him and intreat that he would give up his unbecoming burthen. Thomas refused; “he would not lay down his standard, he would not part with his shield.” “A fool you ever were, a fool I see you are still and will be to the end,” burst out Gilbert Foliot at last, as after a long argument he turned impatiently away.[178] The others followed him, and the primate was left with only two companions,ii.38 William Fitz-Stephen and his own especial friend, Herbert of Bosham.[179] The king had retired to an inner chamber and was there deliberating with his most intimate counsellors[180] when the story of the primate’s entrance reached his ears. He took it as an unpardonable insult, and caused Thomas to be proclaimed a traitor. Warnings and threats ran confusedly through the hall. The archbishop bent over the disciple sitting at his feet:—“For thee I fear—yet fear not thou; even now mayest thou share my crown.” The ardent encouragement with which Herbert answered him[181] provoked one of the king’s marshals to interfere and forbid that any one should speak to the “traitor.” William Fitz-Stephen, who had been vainly striving to put in a gentle word, caught his primate’s eyes and pointed to the crucifix, intrusting to its silent eloquence the lesson of patience and prayer which his lips were forbidden to utter. When he and Thomas, after long separation, met again in the land of exile, that speechless admonition seems to have been the first thing which recurred to the minds of both.[182]

In the chamber overhead, meanwhile, Henry had summoned the bishops to a conference.[183] On receiving from them an account of their morning’s interview with Thomas, he sent down to the latter his ultimatum, requiring him to withdraw his appeal to Rome and his commands to the bishops as contrary to the customs which he had sworn to observe, and to submit to the judgement of the king’s court on the chancery accounts. Seated, with eyes fixed on the cross, Thomas quietly but firmly refused. His refusal was reported to the king, who grew fiery-red with rage, caught eagerly at the barons’ proposal that the archbishop should be judged for contempt of his sovereign’s jurisdiction in appealing from it to another tribunal, and called upon theii.39 bishops to join in his condemnation.[184] York, London and Chichester proposed that they should cite him before the Pope instead, on the grounds of perjury at Clarendon and unjust demands on their obedience.[185] To this Henry consented; the appeal was uttered by Hilary of Chichester in the name of all, and in most insulting terms;[186] and the bishops sat down opposite their primate to await the sentence of the lay barons.[187]

What that sentence was no one outside the royal council-chamber ever really knew. It was one thing to determine it there and another to deliver it to its victim, sitting alone and unmoved with the sign of victory in his hand. With the utmost reluctance and hesitation the old justiciar, Earl Robert of Leicester, came to perform his odious task. At the word “judgement” Thomas started up, with uplifted crucifix and flashing eyes, forbade the speaker to proceed, and solemnly appealed to the protection of the court of Rome. The justiciar and his companions retired in silence.[188] “I too will go, for the hour is past,” said Thomas.[189] Cross in hand he strode past the speechless group of bishops into the outer hall; the courtiers followed him with a torrent of insults, which were taken up by the squires and serving-men outside; as he stumbled against a pile of faggots set ready for the fire, Ralf de Broc rushed upon him with aii.40 shout of “Traitor! traitor!”[190] The king’s half-brother, Count Hameline, echoed the cry;[191] but he shrank back at the primate’s retort—“Were I a knight instead of a priest, this hand should prove thee a liar!”[192] Amid a storm of abuse Thomas made his way into the court-yard and sprang upon his horse, taking up his faithful Herbert behind him.[193] The outer gate was locked, but a squire of the archbishop managed to find the keys.[194] Whether there was any real intention of stopping his egress it seems impossible to determine; the king and his counsellors were apparently too much puzzled to do anything but let matters take their course; Henry indeed sent down a herald to quell the disturbance and forbid all violence to the primate;[195] but the precaution came too late. Once outside the gates, Thomas had no need of such protection. From the mob of hooting enemies within he passed into the midst of a crowd of poor folk who pressed upon him with every demonstration of rapturous affection; in every street as he rode along the people came out to throw themselves at his feet and beg his blessing.

It was with these poor folk that he supped that night, for his own household, all save a chosen few, now hastened to take leave of him.[196] Through the bishops of Rochester, Hereford and Worcester he requested of the king a safe-conduct for his journey to Canterbury; the king declinedii.41 to answer till the morrow.[197] The primate’s suspicions were aroused. He caused his bed to be laid in the church, as if intending to spend the night in prayer.[198] At cock-crow the monks came and sang their matins in an under-tone for fear of disturbing their weary guest;[199] but his chamberlain was watching over an empty couch. At dead of night Thomas had made his escape with two canons of Sempringham and a faithful squire of his own, named Roger of Brai. A violent storm of rain helped to cover their flight,[200] and it was not till the middle of the next day that king and council discovered that the primate was gone.

“God’s blessing go with him!” murmured with a sigh of relief the aged Bishop Henry of Winchester. “We have not done with him yet!” cried the king. He at once issued orders that all the ports should be watched to prevent Thomas from leaving the country,[201] and that the temporalities of the metropolitan see should be left untouched pending an appeal to the Pope[202] which he despatched the archbishop of York and the bishops of London, Worcester, Exeter and Chichester to prosecute without delay.[203] They sailed from Dover on All Souls day;[204] that very night Thomas, after three weeks of adventurous wanderings, guarded with the most devoted vigilance by the brethren of Sempringham, embarked in a little boat from Sandwich; next day he landed in Flanders;[205] and afterii.42 another fortnight’s hiding he made his way safe to Soissons, where the king of France, disregarding an embassy sent by Henry to prevent him, welcomed him with open arms. He hurried on to Sens, where the Pope was now dwelling; the appellant bishops had preceded him, but Alexander was deaf to their arguments.[206] Thomas laid at the Pope’s feet his copy of the Constitutions of Clarendon; they were read, discussed and solemnly condemned in full consistory.[207] The exiled primate withdrew to a shelter which his friend Bishop John of Poitiers had secured for him in the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny in Burgundy.[208] On Christmas-eve, at Marlborough, Henry’s envoys reported to him the failure of their mission. On S. Stephen’s day Henry confiscated the whole possessions of the metropolitan see, of the primate himself and of all his clerks, and ordered all his kindred and dependents, clerical or lay, to be banished from the realm.[209]


ii.43

Note A.
THE COUNCIL OF WOODSTOCK.

The usual view of the council of Woodstock—a view founded on contemporary accounts and endorsed by Bishop Stubbs ( Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 462)—has been disputed on the authority of the Icelandic Thomas Saga. This Saga represents the subject of the quarrel as being, not a general levy of so much per hide throughout the country, but a special tax upon the Church lands—nothing else, in fact, than the “ungeld” which William Rufus had imposed on them to raise the money paid to Duke Robert for his temporary cession of Normandy, and which had been continued ever since. “We have read afore how King William levied a due on all churches in the land, in order to repay him all the costs at which his brother Robert did depart from the land. This money the king said he had disbursed for the freedom of Jewry, and therefore it behoved well the learned folk to repay it to their king. But because the king’s court hath a mouth that holdeth fast, this due continued from year to year. At first it was called Jerusalem tax, but afterwards Warfare-due, for the king to keep up an army for the common peace of the country. But at this time matters have gone so far, that this due was exacted, as a king’s tax, from every house” [“monastery,” editor’s note], “small and great, throughout England, under no other name than an ancient tax payable into the royal treasury without any reason being shown for it.” Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 139. Mr. Magnusson (ib. p. 138, note 7) thinks that this account “must be taken as representing the true history of” the tax in question. In his Preface (ib. vol. ii. pp. cvii–cviii) he argues that if the tax had been one upon the tax-payers in general, “evidently the primate had no right to interfere in such a matter, except so far as church lands were concerned;” and he concludes that the version in the Saga “gives a natural clue to the archbishop’s protest, which thus becomes a protest only on behalf of the Church.” This argument hardly takes sufficient account of the English primate’s constitutional position, which furnishes a perfectly “natural clue” to his protest, supposing that protest to have been made on behalf of the whole nation and not only of the Church:—or rather, to speak more accurately, in behalf of the Church in the true sense of that word—the sense which Theobald’s disciples were always striving to give to it—as representing the whole nation viewed in a spiritual aspect, and not only the clerical order. Mr. Magnusson adds: ii.44“We have no doubt that the source of the Icelandic Saga here is Robert of Cricklade, or ... Benedict of Peterborough, who has had a better information on the subject than the other authorities, which, it would seem, all have Garnier for a primary source; but he, a foreigner, might very well be supposed to have formed an erroneous view on a subject the history of which he did not know, except by hearsay evidence” (ib. pp. cviii, cix). It might be answered that the “hearsay evidence” on which Garnier founded his view must have been evidence which he heard in England, where he is known to have carefully collected the materials for his work (Garnier, ed. Hippeau, pp. 6, 205, 206), and that his view is entitled to just as much consideration as that of the Icelander, founded upon the evidence of Robert or Benedict;—that of the three writers who follow Garnier, two, William of Canterbury and Edward Grim, were English (William of Canterbury may have been Irish by birth, but he was English by education and domicile) and might therefore have been able to check any errors caused by the different nationality of their guide:—and that even if the case resolved itself into a question between the authority of Garnier and that of Benedict or Robert (which can hardly be admitted), they would be of at least equal weight, and the balance of intrinsic probability would be on Garnier’s side. For his story points directly to the Danegeld; and we have the indisputable witness of the Pipe Rolls that the Danegeld, in some shape or other, was levied at intervals throughout the Norman reigns and until the year 1163, when it vanished for ever. On the other hand, the Red King’s “ungeld” upon the Church lands, like all his other “ungelds,” certainly died with him; and nothing can well be more unlikely than that Henry II. in the very midst of his early reforms should have reintroduced, entirely without excuse and without necessity, one of the most obnoxious and unjust of the measures which had been expressly abolished in “the time of his grandfather King Henry.”


Note B.
THE COUNCIL OF CLARENDON.

There is some difficulty as to both the date and the duration of this council. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 176) gives the date of meeting as January 13; R. Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 312) as January 25; while the official copy of the Constitutions (Summa Causæ, Robertson, Becket, vol. iv. p. 208; Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 140) gives the closing day as January 30 (“quartâ die ante Purificationem S. Mariæ”). As to the duration of the council, we learn from Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii. p. 279) and Gerv. Cant.ii.45 (as above, p. 178) that there was an adjournment of at least one night; while Gilbert Foliot (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. Ep. ccxxv. pp. 527–529) says “Clarendonæ ... continuato triduo id solum actum est ut observandarum regni consuetudinum et dignitatum a nobis fieret absoluta promissio;” and that “die vero tertio,” after a most extraordinary scene, Thomas “antiquas regni consuetudines antiquorum memoriâ in commune propositas et scripto commendatas, de cætero domino nostro regi se fideliter observaturum in verbo veritatis absolute promittens, in vi nobis injunxit obedientiæ sponsione simili nos obligare.” This looks at first glance as if meant to describe the closing scene of the council, in which case its whole duration would be limited to three days. But it seems possible to find another interpretation which would enable us to reconcile all the discordant dates, by understanding Gilbert’s words as referring to the verbal discussion at the opening of the council, before the written Constitutions were produced at all. Gilbert does indeed expressly mention “customs committed to writing”; but this may very easily be a piece of confusion either accidental or intentional. On this supposition the chronology may be arranged as follows:—The council meets on January 13 (Gerv. Cant.). That day and the two following are spent in talking over the primate; towards evening of the third—which will be January 15—he yields, and the bishops with him (Gilb. Foliot). Then they begin to discuss what they have promised; the debate warms and lengthens; Thomas, worn out with his three days’ struggle and seeing the rocks ahead, begs for a respite till the morrow (Herb. Bosh.). On that morrow—i.e. January 16—Henry issues his commission to the “elders,” and the council remains in abeyance till they are ready with their report. None of our authorities tell us how long an interval elapsed between the issue of the royal commission and its report. Herbert, indeed, seems to imply that the discussion on the constitutions began one night and the written report was brought up next day. But this is only possible on the supposition that it had been prepared secretly beforehand, of which none of the other writers shew any suspicion. If the thing was not prepared beforehand, it must have taken some time to do; and even if it was, the king and the commissioners would surely, for the sake of appearances, make a few days’ delay to give a shew of reality to their investigations. Nine days is not too much to allow for preparation of the report. On January 25, then, it is brought up, and the real business of the council begins in earnest on the day named by R. Diceto. And if Thomas fought over every one of the sixteen constitutions in the way of which Herbert gives us a specimen, six days more may very well have been spent in the discussion, which would thus end, as the Summa Causæ says, on January 30.


ii.46

CHAPTER II.
HENRY AND ROME.
1164–1172.

With the archbishop’s flight into France the struggle between him and the king entered upon a new phase. Its intrinsic importance was almost entirely lost, and it became simply an element in the wider questions of general European politics. In England Thomas’s departure left Henry sole master of the field; the Constitutions of Clarendon were put in force without delay and without difficulty; a year later they were followed up by an Assize, significantly issued from the same place, which laid the foundations of the whole later English system of procedure in criminal causes; and thenceforth the work of legal and judicial reform went on almost without a break, totally unaffected by the strife which continued to rage between king and primate for the next five years. The social condition of the country was only indirectly affected by it. The causes which had ostensibly given rise to it—the principle involved in the acceptance or rejection of the Constitutions—did not appeal strongly to the national mind, and had already become obscured and subordinated to the personal aspect which the quarrel had assumed at Northampton. As in the case of Anselm, it was on this personal aspect alone that popular feeling really fastened; and in this point of view the advantage was strongly on the archbishop’s side. Thomas, whose natural gifts had already made him a sort of popular idol, was set by the high-handedii.47 proceedings of the council in the light of a victim of regal tyranny; and the sweeping and cruel proscriptions inflicted upon all who were in the remotest way connected with him tended still further to excite popular sympathy for his wrongs and turn it away from his persecutor. But the sympathy was for the individual, not for the cause. The principle of the clerical immunities had no hold upon the minds of the people or even of the clergy at large. Even among the archbishop’s own personal friends, almost the only men who clave to it with anything like the same ardour as himself were his two old comrades of the Curia Theobaldi, Bishop John of Poitiers and John of Salisbury; and even the devotion of John of Salisbury, which is one of the brightest jewels in Becket’s crown, was really the devotion of friend to friend, of Churchman to primate, of a generous, chivalrous soul to what seemed the oppressed and down-trodden side, rather than the devotion of a partizan to party principle. Herbert of Bosham, the primate’s shadow and second self, who clave to his side through good report and evil report and looked upon him as a hero and a martyr from first to last, was nevertheless the author of the famous verdict which all the searching criticism of later times has never yet been able to amend: “Both parties had a zeal for God; which zeal was according to knowledge, His judgement alone can determine.”[210]

Cool, dispassionate thinkers like Gilbert Foliot, on the other hand, while inclining towards the cause which Thomas had at heart, recoiled from his mode of upholding it as little less than suicidal. In Gilbert’s view it was Thomas who had betrayed those “rights of his order” which he proclaimed so loudly, by forsaking the attitude of passive resistance which the bishops had adopted at Westminster and in which they were practically unassailable, and staking everything upon the king’s good faith, without security, in the meeting at Oxford and the council at Clarendon:—it was Thomas who by his subsequent conduct—his rashii.48 attempts at flight, his rapid changes of front at Northampton in first admitting and then denying the royal jurisdiction, his final insult to the king in coming to the council cross in hand, and his undignified departure from the realm—had frustrated the efforts whereby wiser and cooler heads might have brought the king to a better mind and induced him to withdraw the Constitutions:—and it was not Thomas, but his suffragans, left to bear the brunt of a storm which they had neither deserved nor provoked, who were really in a fair way to become confessors and martyrs for a Church brought into jeopardy by its own primate.[211] Gilbert in fact saw clearly that the importance of the point at issue between king and archbishop was as nothing compared to the disastrous consequences which must result from their protracted strife. It threatened nothing less than ruin to the intellectual and religious revival which Theobald had fostered so carefully and so successfully. The best hopes of the movement were bound up with the alliance between Church and state which had been cemented at Henry’s accession; that alliance was now destroyed; instead of the Church’s most valuable fellow-worker, the king had been made her bitter foe; and the work of revival was left to be carried on—if it could be carried on at all—in the teeth of the royal opposition and without a leader, while the man who should have directed it was only a perpetual stumbling-block in the path of those who had to supply as best they could the place left deserted by his flight. It was upon Gilbert of London that this burthen chiefly fell; and it is in Gilbert’s position that we may find a key to the subsequent direction of the controversy, as far as England was concerned.

For full twenty years before Becket’s rise to the primacy Gilbert Foliot had been one of the most respected members of the reforming party in the English Church. While Thomas was a worldly young subdeacon in the household of Archbishop Theobald, while as chancellor he was outshining the king in luxurious splendour or riding in coat of mail at the head of his troops, Gilbert was setting the pattern of ecclesiastical discipline and furnishing the steadiest and mostii.49 valued assistance to the primate’s schemes of reform. Trained no less than Henry of Winchester in the old Cluniac traditions of ecclesiastical authority, his credit had never been shaken by rashness and inconsistency such as had marred Henry’s labours; and it would have been neither strange nor blameworthy if he had cherished a hope of carrying on Theobald’s work as Theobald’s successor. Gilbert, however, solemnly denied that he had ever sought after or desired the primacy;[212] and his conduct does not seem to furnish any just ground for assuming the falsehood of the denial. His opposition to the election of Thomas was thoroughly consistent with his position and known views; equally so was the support and co-operation which Thomas, as soon as he was fairly launched into his new course of action, anxiously sought to obtain from him, and which he for a while steadily gave. He had begun to find such co-operation difficult even before the question of the clerical immunities arose at the council of Westminster. On that question, in itself, the primate and the bishop of London were at one; but they differed completely in their way of treating it. To the impulsive, short-sighted, downright Thomas it was the one, sole, all-absorbing question of life and death; to the calm, far-seeing, cautious Gilbert it was a provoking hindrance—raised up partly by the primate’s own bad management—to the well-being of interests far too serious and too wide-reaching to be imperilled for a mere point of administrative detail. He took up his position definitely at the council of Northampton. The customs being once accepted, he held it the true Churchman’s duty to obey them, to make the best and not the worst of them, while desiring and labouring for their abrogation, but only by pacific means. A temporary submission was the least of two evils. It was infinitely safer to bend to the storm and trust to the influences of time and conciliation for turning the mind of the king, than to run the risk of driving him into irreconcileable hostility to the Church. For hostility to the Church meant something far worse now than in the days when William Rufus and Henry I. had set up their regalii.50 authority against primate and Pope. It meant a widening of the schism which was rending western Christendom in twain; it meant the accession of the whole Angevin dominions to the party of the Emperor and the anti-Pope, and the severance of all the ties between the English Church and her continental sisters which Theobald, Eugene and Adrian had laboured so diligently to secure.

The dread of this catastrophe explains also the attitude of the Pope. In the long dreary tale of negotiation and intrigue which has to be traced through the maze of the Becket correspondence, the most inconsistent and self-contradictory, the most undecided and undignified, the most unsatisfactory and disappointing part of all is that played by Alexander III. It is however only fair to remember that, in this and in all like cases, the Pope’s part was also the most difficult one. No crown in Christendom pressed so sorely on its wearer’s brow as the triple tiara:—“It may well look bright,” Adrian IV. had been wont to say to his friend John of Salisbury, “for it is a crown of fire!” Adrian indeed, though his short reign was one of marked vigour and prosperity, declared that if he had had any idea of the thorns with which S. Peter’s chair was filled, he would have begged his bread in England or remained buried in the cloisters of S. Rufus to the end of his days sooner than thrust himself into such a thicket of troubles.[213] For it was not only “the care of all the churches” that rested upon a medieval Pope, but the care of all the states as well. The court of Rome had grown into the final court of appeal for all Christendom; the Pope was expected to be the universal referee, arbitrator and peacemaker of Europe, to hold the balance between contending parties, to penetrate and disentangle the intricacies of political situations which baffled the skill of the most experienced diplomatists, to exercise a sort of equitable jurisdiction on a vast scale over the whole range of political as well as social life. Earlier and later pontiffs may have voluntarily brought this burthen upon themselves; most of the Popes of the twelfth century, at any rate, seem to have groaned under it as a weight tooii.51 heavy for any human strength to bear. Unprincipled as their policy often seemed, there was not a little justice in the view of John of Salisbury, that a position so exceptional could not be brought within the scope of ordinary rules of conduct, and that only those who had themselves felt its difficulties could be really competent to judge it at all.[214] Adrian’s energetic spirit was worn out by it in four years;[215] yet his position was easy compared to that of Alexander III. Alexander was a pontiff without a throne, the head of a Church in captivity and exile; dependent on the support of the most selfish and untrustworthy of living sovereigns; with Italy and Germany arrayed against him under the rule of a schismatic Emperor, and with the fidelity of the Angevin house hanging upon a thread which the least strain, the lightest touch, might break at any moment. Moreover Alexander was no Englishman like his predecessor. He had no inborn comprehension and no experience of the ways and tempers of the north; he had no bosom-friend, no John of Salisbury, to stand as interpreter between him and the Angevin king or the English primate; he understood neither of them, and he was almost equally afraid of both. His chief anxiety was to have as little as possible to do with them and their quarrel, and the fugitive archbishop was to him anything but a welcome guest.

It was of course impossible for the Pope to withhold his sympathy and his support from a prelate who came to him as a confessor for the privileges of the Church. But it was equally impossible for him to run the risk of driving Henry and his dominions into schism by espousing Thomas’s cause as decisively as Thomas himself desired. Placed thus in what Adrian had once declared to be the ordinary position of a Roman pontiff—“between hammer and anvil”—Alexander drifted into a policy of shifts and contradictions, tergiversations and double-dealings, which irritated Henry and which Thomas simply failed to comprehend. If Gilbertii.52 Foliot and Arnulf of Lisieux could have succeeded in their efforts to induce the contending parties to accept a compromise, the Pope would have been only too glad to sanction it. But it was useless to talk of compromise where Thomas Becket was concerned. To all the remoter consequences, the ultimate bearings of the quarrel, he was totally blind. For him there was but one question in the world, the one directly before him; it could have but two sides, right and wrong, between which all adjustment was impossible, and with which considerations of present expediency or future consequences had nothing to do. All Gilbert’s arguments for surrender, his solemn warnings of the peril of schism, his pleadings that it was better for the English Church to become for a while a sickly member of the ecclesiastical body than to be cut off from it altogether,[216] Thomas looked upon, at best, as proposals for doing evil that good might come. After his humiliating experience at Clarendon he seems to have felt that he was no match for Henry’s subtlety; his flight was evidently caused chiefly by dread of being again entrapped into a betrayal of what he held to be his duty; and once, in an agony of self-reproach and self-distrust, he laid his archiepiscopal ring at the Pope’s feet and prayed to be released from the burthen of an office for which he felt himself unworthy and unfit.[217] Strong as was the temptation to pacify Henry thus easily, Alexander felt that the Church could not allow such a sacrifice of her champion; and Thomas never again swerved from his determination to be satisfied with nothing short of complete surrender on the part of the king. For this one object he laboured, pleaded, argued, censured, during the next six years without ceasing; his own suffragans, the monastic orders, Pope, cardinals, the Empress Matilda, the king of France, none of them had a moment’s peace from his passionate endeavours to press them into a service whichii.53 he seemed to expect them all to regard as a matter of life and death not merely for England but for all Christendom. Doubtless it was a sad waste of energy and a sad perversion of enthusiasm; yet the enthusiasm contrasts pathetically, almost heroically, with the spirit in which it was met. There was something noble, if there was also something exasperatingly unpractical, in a man who, absorbed in his devotion to one mistaken idea, never even saw that he and his cause were becoming the pretexts and the tools of half the political intrigues of Europe, and whom the experience of a lifetime failed to teach that all the world was not as single-hearted as himself. Intellectually, a mind thus constituted must needs provoke and deserve the impatient scorn of a cool clear brain such as Gilbert Foliot’s; but its very intellectual weakness was the source of its true strength. It is this dogged adherence to one fixed idea, this simplicity of aim, which appeals to the average crowd of mankind far more strongly than the larger and more statesmanlike temper of men like Foliot, or like Henry himself. Whether or no the cause be worthy—whether or no the zeal be according to knowledge—it is the zealot, not the philosopher, who becomes the popular hero and martyr.

From the moment of Thomas’s arrival in France, then, little though he perceived it himself, the direct question at issue between him and the king became in every point of view save his own entirely subordinate to the indirect consequences of their quarrel; the ecclesiastical interest became secondary to the political, which involved matters of grave importance to all Europe. The one person to whom the archbishop’s flight was most thoroughly welcome was Louis of France. Louis and Henry were nominally at peace; but to Louis their alliance was simply a shield behind which he could plan without danger his schemes for undermining Henry’s power on the continent, and no better tool for this purpose could possibly have fallen into his hands than the fugitive archbishop of Canterbury. Thomas had indeed just enough perception of the state of affairs between the two kings—of which he must have acquired considerable experience in his chancellor days—to choose going to live on hisii.54 own resources at Pontigny rather than accept the hospitality of his sovereign’s enemy.[218] This arrangement probably delighted Louis, for it furnished him with a safe answer to Henry’s complaints and remonstrances about harbouring the “traitor”—Thomas was in sanctuary in a Cistercian abbey in Burgundy, and France was not harbouring him at all; while the welcome which Louis gave to the primate’s exiled friends and the sympathy which he displayed for their cause heightened his own reputation for devotion to the Church and served as a foil to set off more conspicuously the supposed hostility of Henry. To Louis in short the quarrel was something which might turn to his own advantage by helping to bring Henry into difficulties; and he used it accordingly with a skill peculiar to himself, making a great shew of disinterested zeal and friendly mediation, and all the while taking care that the breach should be kept open till its healing was required for his own interest.

With such an onlooker as this Henry knew that he must play his game with the utmost caution. He had been provoked by the personal opposition of his old friend into standing upon his regal dignity more stiffly than he would have thought it worth while to do so long as it remained unchallenged. On his side, too, there was a principle at stake, and he could not give it up unconditionally; but he might have been induced to accept a compromise, had not the obstinacy of Thomas forced him into a corresponding attitude of unbending determination. So keen was his sense of the danger attendant upon the fugitive archbishop’s presence in France that it led him to postpone once more the work which he had been planning in England and cross over to Normandy again early in 1165.[219] Lent was passed in fruitless attempts to bring about a triple conference between the two kings and the Pope; Henry refused to allow Thomas to be present; Thomas begged the Pope not to expose himself to Henry’s wiles without him who alone could help him to see through them; and Alexander, now busy with preparations for his return to Rome, was probablyii.55 not sorry to escape by declaring that for a temporal prince to dictate who should or who should not form part of the Pope’s suite was a claim which had never been heard of before and which he could not possibly admit.[220] Immediately after Easter he set out on his journey homewards.

The rival party saw their opportunity and seized it without delay. Their fortunes were now at a very low ebb; the antipope Victor had died in April; his chief supporter, Cardinal Guy of Crema, had succeeded him under the title of Paschal III.; but Italy had cast him off, and even in Germany the tide was turning against him. The Emperor, however, clung with unwavering determination to his original policy; and he at once saw in the English king’s quarrel with the Church a means of gaining for Paschal’s cause what would amply compensate for all that had been lost. Before Alexander was fairly out of the French kingdom an embassy from Germany came to Henry at Rouen, bringing proposals for an alliance to be secured by two marriages: one between the English princess Matilda, Henry’s eldest daughter, and the Emperor’s cousin Duke Henry of Saxony; the other between Henry’s second daughter and Frederic’s own little son. The chief ambassador was Reginald, archbishop-elect of Cöln, who from the time of Frederic’s accession—two years before that of Henry—had been his chancellor and confidential adviser, playing a part curiously like that of Thomas Becket, till in the very year of the English chancellor’s removal to Canterbury he was appointed to the see of Cöln. There the parallel with Thomas ended; for Reginald was the most extreme champion of the privileges not of the Church but of the Imperial Crown, and was even more closely identified with the schismatic party than Frederic himself. Henry sent him over to the queen, who had been left as regent in England, to receive from her a formal promise of her daughter’s hand to the duke of Saxony, in a great council convened at Westminster for that purpose. The old justiciar Earl Robert of Leicester refused the kissii.56 of peace to the schismatic and caused the altars at which he had celebrated to be thrown down,[221] thereby saving Henry from the fatal blunder of committing himself publicly to the cause of the anti-pope, and England from the dangers of open schism. But he could not prevent the king from sending two clerks to a council which met at Würzburg on Whit-Sunday to abjure Pope Alexander and acknowledge Paschal; and although the fact was strenuously denied, it seems impossible to doubt that they did take the oath at the Emperor’s hands in their master’s name;[222] indeed, Reginald of Cöln boasted that Henry had promised to make all the bishops in his dominions do the same.

A crisis seemed imminent, but Henry managed to avoid it. From the Emperor’s solicitations, from the Pope’s remonstrances, from all the pleadings of friends and all the intrigues of foes, he suddenly made his escape by flying back to England and plunging into a Welsh war which kept him all the summer safe out of their reach,[223] and furnished him with an excuse for postponing indefinitely the completion of his alliance with the schismatic party. Such an alliance would in fact have cost far more than it was worth. Alexander was once more safely seated upon S. Peter’s chair, and was urging Thomas to throw himself wholly on the protection of the king of France; Louis was in the highest state of triumph, rejoicing over the birth of his long-desired son; while the whole Angevin dominions, which Eleanor was governing in her husband’s absence, were full of suppressed disaffection and surrounded with threatening or intriguing foes.[224] In Lent 1166 therefore Henry hurried back to Normandyii.57 to hold a conference with Louis, and, if possible, to free his own hands for the work which lay before him.

The work was in truth a vast and complex one. At the age of thirty-three Henry was already planning out an elaborate scheme for the future of his children and the distribution of his territories, in which the election of his eldest son as joint-king in England was but the first and least difficult step. Normandy and Anjou, as well as England, had to be secured for little Henry; Aquitaine was if possible to be settled upon Richard as his mother’s heir; for Geoffrey Henry was bent upon acquiring the Breton duchy.[225] Conan IV., whom Henry had in 1158 established as duke of Britanny, had but one child, a daughter, whose hand, together with the reversion of her father’s territories, the king was anxious to secure for his son. This however required the assent not only of Conan but of Louis of France, and also of the Breton barons, who bitterly resented the Norman interference which had set Conan as ruler over them, and were inclined to resist to the uttermost an arrangement which would bring them still more directly under the Norman yoke; while Louis was but too ready to encourage them in their resistance. A campaign in the summer of 1166, however, another in August 1167, and a third in the following spring so far broke their opposition[226] that in Mayii.58 1169 Geoffrey was sent into Britanny to receive their homage as heir to the dukedom; three months later his father joined him,[227] and at Christmas they held their court together at Nantes,[228] whence they made a sort of triumphal progress through the duchy, receiving homage and fealty wherever they went.[229]

It had proved easier to subdue Britanny than to hold Aquitaine. The half independent princes of the south, so scornful of a king beyond the Loire, were at least equally scornful of a king from beyond the sea; in November 1166 Henry was obliged to summon them to a conference at Chinon,[230] and to relieve Eleanor of her task of government by sending her to keep Christmas in England,[231] while he himself took her place at Poitiers.[232] His foes seized their opportunity to revive the vexed question of Toulouse; a meeting with Raymond at Grandmont and an attempt to assert Henry’s ducal authority over the count of Auvergne led to a fresh rupture with Louis;[233] and in the spring of 1168 the discontented barons of Aquitaine, secure of the French king’s goodwill, broke into open revolt. In the midst of a negotiation with Louis, Henry hurried away to subdue them.[234] Scarcely had he turned northward again when Earl Patrick of Salisbury, whom he had appointed toii.59 assist Eleanor in the government of the duchy, was murdered by one of the rebel leaders;[235] and Eleanor was once more left to stand her ground alone in Poitou, while her husband was fighting the Bretons, staving off the ecclesiastical censures which threatened him, and vainly endeavouring to pacify Louis, who now openly shewed himself as the champion of all Henry’s disaffected vassals, Breton, Poitevin, Scottish and Welsh,[236] as well as of the exiled archbishop.

Henry meanwhile was endeavouring to strengthen his political position by alliances in more remote quarters; the marriage of his eldest daughter with the duke of Saxonyii.60 had taken place early in 1168;[237] two years before, the hand of one of her sisters had been half promised to the marquis of Montferrat for his son, in return for his good offices with the Pope;[238] and a project was now on foot for the marriage of Henry’s second daughter, Eleanor, with the king of Castille—a marriage which took place in 1169;[239] while the infant Jane, who was scarcely four years old, was betrothed to the boy-king William of Sicily.[240] For Richard his father was now endeavouring to gain the hand of Adela of France, the younger daughter of Louis and Constance, as a sort of security for the investiture of Aquitaine; while at the same time Henry was on the one hand making interest with the Emperor’s Italian foes, the rising commonwealths of Lombardy and the jurisconsults of Bologna;[241] and on the other, Frederic was endeavouring to regain his alliance by an embassy headed by his own cousin, Henry’s new-made son-in-law, the duke of Saxony.[242]

All this political, ecclesiastical and diplomatic coil Henry had to unravel almost single-handed. Of the group of counsellors who had stood around him in his early years, Arnulf of Lisieux on one side of the sea and Richard de Lucy on the other were almost the sole survivors. He had lost the services of his constable Henry of Essex under very painful circumstances a few months before that council at Woodstock which saw the beginning of his quarrel with Thomas. The constable was accused by Robert de Montfort of havingii.61 committed high treason six years before by purposely letting fall the standard and falsely proclaiming the king’s death at the battle of Consilt. Henry of Essex declared that he had dropped the standard in the paralysis of despair, really believing the king to be dead; and it is evident from the high commands which he held in the war of Toulouse and elsewhere that the king continued to treat him with undiminished confidence, and to regard him as one of his most valuable ministers and friends. The charge once made, however, could only be met by ordeal of battle. The encounter took place at Reading; Henry of Essex went down before his accuser’s lance; and all that his sovereign could do for him was to save his life by letting the monks of the neighbouring abbey carry his body off the field as if for burial, and when he proved to be still alive, suffering him to remain as a brother of the house, while his property was confiscated to the Crown and his services were lost to the state.[243] The king’s mother died in the autumn of 1167;[244] his old friend and adviser Earl Robert of Leicester passed away in 1168.[245] A desperate attempt was even made to part him from his wife, in order to get rid of his rights over Aquitaine;[246] while the man who had once been his most successful diplomatic agent and his unfailing helper against the wiles of all his enemies was now the most formidable tool in their hands.

It was for his children’s sake that Henry at last bent his pride to do what he had vowed never to do again. At Montmirail, on the feast of Epiphany 1169, he renewed hisii.62 homage to Louis, made full submission to him, and promised compensation to the Breton and Poitevin barons for their losses in the recent wars.[247] Next day young Henry did homage to the French king for the counties of Anjou and Maine,[248] and, as it seems, of Britanny, which his brother Geoffrey was to hold under him.[249] Richard did the like for Aquitaine, of which Louis granted him the investiture,[250] together with a promise of Adela’s hand.[251] Three weeks later young Henry, in his new capacity of count of Anjou, officiated in Paris as seneschal to the king of France;[252] he afterwards repeated his homage to Louis’s son and heir, and received that of his own brother Geoffrey for the duchy of Britanny.[253]

One thing alone was now lacking to the completion of Henry’s scheme: the crowning of his heir. There can be no doubt that when he sent Thomas and the child to England together—the one to be chosen king and the other to be made primate—he intended the coronation to take place as soon as he himself could rejoin them. Its performance, delayed by his own continued absence on the continent, had however been made impossible by his quarrel with Thomas. That the archbishop of Canterbury alone could lawfully crown a king of England was a constitutional as well as an ecclesiastical tradition so deeply rooted in the minds of Englishmen that nothing short of absolute necessity had induced Henry I. to set it aside in his own case; and still less could Henry II. venture to risk such an innovation in the case of his son.[254] Yet the prospect of a reconciliationii.63 with the primate seemed at this moment further off than ever.

Thomas’s first impulse on entering Pontigny had been to give himself up to a course of study, devotion and self-discipline more severe than anything which he had yet attempted. He secretly assumed the habit of the “white monks,”[255] and nearly ruined his delicate constitution by a rash endeavour to practise the rigorous abstinence enjoined by the rules of the order.[256] He grew more diligent than ever in prayer, meditation, and study of Holy Scripture.[257] But his restless, impetuous nature could not rise to the serene heights of more than worldly wisdom urged upon him by John of Salisbury, who truly insisted that such occupations alone were worthy of a true confessor.[258] In spite of John’s warnings and pleadings, he still kept all his friends—John himself included—ceaselessly at work in his behalf; and while he sought out in every church and convent in Gaul every rare and valuable book that he could hear of, to be copied for his cathedral library, he was also raking together for the same collection all the privileges, old or new, that could be disinterred from the Roman archives or extorted from the favour of the Pope.[259] Until Easter 1166 Alexander restrained him from any direct measures against the king;[260] then, unable to keep silence any longer, Thomas again took the matter into his own hands and wrote to Henry himself, earnestly imploring him to consider his ways and to grant his old friend a personal interview.[261] Henry was inexorable; Thomas wrote again, this time a torrent of mingled warnings, intreaties and remonstrances,[262] and with just as little effect. Then, towards the end of May, as theii.64 king was holding council with his barons at Chinon, a barefooted monk came to him with a third letter from the primate.[263] Once again Thomas expressed his longing for a personal meeting; once again he set forth the doctrine of the divine rights and duties of kings, and charged Henry, by the solemn memory of his coronation-vows, to restore to the English Church her privileges and her chief pastor. Only in the last sentence came a significant warning: “If not, then know of a surety that you shall feel the severity of Divine vengeance!”[264] And there was no doubt about its meaning; for the Empress Matilda had already transmitted to her son a threat sent to her by Thomas in plain words, that unless she could bring him to acknowledge his error, “shortly, yea, very shortly” the “sword of the Spirit” should be drawn against his dominions and even against himself.[265]

Harassed by disaster and revolt, provoked by the primate’s former letters, Henry, upon reading this one and hearing the messenger’s comment upon it—for Thomas had charged him to say a good deal more than he wrote[266]—might well feel that he was standing on the brink of a volcano. He turned desperately upon the bishops around him, half imploring, half commanding them to help him out of his strait, abusing them for a pack of traitors who would not trouble themselves to rid him of this one unmanageable foe, and exclaiming with a burst of tears that the archbishop was destroying him soul and body together; for he naturally expected nothing less than an interdict on his dominions and an anathema against himself, and both sanctioned by the Pope. When Henry was thus at his wits’ end, the only one among his continental advisers who was likely to have any counsel to offer him was Arnulf of Lisieux. Onceii.65 more Arnulf proved equal to the occasion; he suggested that the primate’s intended censures should be forestalled by an appeal to the Pope. The remedy was a desperate one, for, as John of Salisbury triumphantly remarked when he heard of it, the king was flying in the face of his own Constitutions and confirming that very right of appeal which he was so anxious to abolish, by thus having recourse to it for his own protection. But there was no other loophole of escape; so the appeal was made, a messenger was despatched to give notice of it in England, close the ports and cut off all communication with Thomas and with the Pope; while the bishops of Lisieux and Séez set out for Pontigny to bid the primate stay his hand till the octave of Easter next, which was fixed for the term of Henry’s appeal.[267]

They were too late. No sooner had the barefooted messenger returned with his tidings of the king’s irreconcileable wrath than Thomas hurried to Soissons on a pilgrimage to its three famous shrines:—those of the Blessed Virgin, who had been the object of his special reverence ever since he learned the Ave Maria at his mother’s knee; of S. Gregory the Great, the patron of the whole English Church and more particularly of Canterbury and its archbishops; and of S. Drausius, who was believed to have the power of rendering invincible any champion who spent a night in prayer before his relics. Before each of these shrines Thomas, like a warrior preparing for mortal combat, passed a night in solemn vigil, the last night being that of the festival of S. Drausius, and also of Ascension-day.[268] On the morrow he left Soissons;[269] on Whitsun-eve[270] he reachedii.66 Vézelay, a little town distant only a day’s journey from Pontigny, and made famous by its great abbey, which boasted of possessing the body of S. Mary Magdalene. Thomas found the place crowded with pilgrims assembled to keep the Whitsun feast on this venerated spot. He was invited by the abbot to celebrate High Mass and preach on the festival day;[271] his sermon ended, he solemnly anathematized the royal customs and all their upholders, and excommunicated by name seven persons whom he denounced as special enemies to the Church; the two first being Henry’s confidential envoys John of Oxford and Richard of Ilchester, who had been the medium of his communications with the Emperor; while a third, Jocelyn de Bailleul, was one of his chief advisers, and a fourth was no less a personage than the justiciar, Richard de Lucy.[272] Thomas had set out from Soissons in the full determination to excommunicate Henry himself at the same time; but on his way he learned that the king was dangerously ill; he therefore contented himself with a solemn warning publicly addressed to him by name, calling him to repentance for the last time, and in default, threatening him with immediate excommunication.[273]

The news of these proceedings reached Henry when, sick and anxious, he was trying to gather up strength and energy for a campaign against the Bretons. He instantly despatched another messenger to England, bidding Richard de Lucy call an assembly of the bishops and clergy and compel them to make a general appeal to the Pope against the authority and jurisdiction of their primate.[274] The meetingii.67 was held in London[275] at midsummer.[276] The appeal was made and sent to the Pope in the name of all the bishops and clergy of England; but it is tolerably clear that the main body were merely passive followers, more or less willing, of Gilbert of London and Jocelyn of Salisbury, the former of whom was almost certainly the writer of the letter which conveyed the appeal to the Pope, as well as of that which announced it to the primate.[277] The hand of Gilbert Foliot was indeed so plainly visible that Thomas’s reply was addressed with equal plainness to him personally.[278] The long and sarcastic letter with which he retorted[279] was answered in a yet more startling fashion at the opening of the next year. As Gilbert stood before the high altar of his cathedral church on the feast of its patron saint a paper was thrust into his hand; to his dismay it proved to be a papal brief granting to Archbishop Thomas a commission as legate for all England, and commanding the bishops to render him unqualified obedience and to resign within two months whatever confiscated church property had been placed in their charge by the king. In an agony of distress Gilbert, who himself had the custody of the Canterbury estates, sentii.68 this news to the king, imploring him to grant permission that the Pope’s mandate might be obeyed, at least till some method could be devised for escaping from a dilemma which now looked well-nigh hopeless.[280] Henry, absorbed in a struggle with the Bretons, had already been provoked into a vengeance as impolitic as it was mean. He threatened the Cistercian abbots assembled on Holy Cross day at the general chapter of their order that if Thomas were not immediately expelled from Pontigny, he would send all the White Monks in his dominions to share the primate’s exile.[281] When the abbot of Pontigny carried this message home, Thomas could only bid him farewell and betake himself to the sole protection left him—that of the king of France. He left Pontigny on S. Martin’s day[282] 1166, and took up his abode as the guest of Louis in the abbey of S. Columba at Sens.[283]

Henry saw his own blunder as soon as it was made, and endeavoured to neutralize its effects by despatching an embassy to the Pope, requesting that he would send a legatine commission to settle the controversy. One of his envoys was the excommunicate John of Oxford; to the horror of Thomas and the indignation of Louis, John cameii.69 back in triumph, boasting not only that he had been absolved by the Pope, but that two cardinals, William and Otto—the former of whom was a determined opponent of Thomas—were coming with full powers to sit in judgement on the case between primate and king and decide it without appeal.[284] The first half of the boast was true, but not the second; the cautious Pope instructed his envoys to do nothing more than arbitrate between the contending parties, if they could.[285] They did not reach Normandy till the autumn of 1167; Thomas came to meet them on the French border on November 18; he refused to enter upon any negotiations till the property of the metropolitan see was restored;[286] the legates carried their report to the king at Argentan, and were dismissed with an exclamation of disappointment and disgust—“I wish I may never set eyes upon a cardinal again!”[287] Five of the English bishops whom Henry had summoned to advise him renewed their appeal,[288] its original term having expired six months ago; and the legates insisting that Thomas should respect the appeal,[289] another year’s delay was gained.

At last, when the two kings made their treaty at Montmirail at Epiphany 1169, Thomas, who had come to the spot under the protection of Louis, suddenly entered the royal presence and fell at Henry’s feet, offering to place himself unreservedly in his hands. All parties thought the struggle was over, till the archbishop added once again the words which had so exasperated Henry at Oxford and at Clarendon: “Saving God’s honour and my order.” The king burst into a fury, and the meeting broke up in confusion.[290] Three months later, on Palm Sunday, from theii.70 high altar of Clairvaux, Thomas excommunicated ten of his opponents, first among whom was Gilbert Foliot.[291] Gilbert, who knew that the sentence had been hanging over him for more than a year, had appealed against it before it was uttered;[292] the king, too, was forewarned, and at every seaport guards were set to catch and punish with the utmost rigour any messenger from the primate. It was not till Ascension-day that a young layman named Berengar made his way up to the altar of Gilbert’s cathedral church in the middle of High Mass and thrust into the hand of the celebrant the archbishop’s letter proclaiming the excommunication of the bishop.[293] On that very day Thomas issued another string of excommunications.[294] Gilbert, driven to extremity, renewed his appeal two days later; and he added to it a formal refusal to acknowledge the jurisdiction of a metropolitan to whom he had made no profession, and a declaration—so at least it was reported in Gaul—of his intention to claim the metropolitical dignity for his own see, as an ancient right of which it had been unjustly defrauded by Canterbury.[295] A storm of indignant protest and vehement denunciation arose from the archbishop’s party; and the terrified Pope checked further proceedings by despatching another pair of envoys, who as usual failed to agree either with the king, with the archbishop, or even with each other, and after wasting the summer in misunderstandings and recriminations left the case justii.71 where they had found it.[296] By this time king and primate were both weary of their quarrel, and still more weary of mediation. In November they had another personal interview at Montmartre, and the archbishop’s unconditional restoration was all but decided.[297] Thomas, however, rashly attempted to hasten the completion of the settlement by a threat of interdict;[298] and the threat stung Henry into an act of far greater rashness. He had met Louis, as well as Thomas, at Montmartre, and had gained his immediate object of restraining the French king yet a little longer from direct hostilities; the settlement of Britanny was completed at Christmas, that of Aquitaine was so far secure that its conclusion might safely be left to Eleanor’s care; in March 1170 Henry went to England[299] with the fixed determination of seeing his eldest son crowned there before he left it again.

Three years before, he had wrung from the Pope—then blockaded in Rome by the Imperial troops, and in the last extremity of peril—a brief authorizing young Henry’s coronation by the archbishop of York, in default of the absent primate of all England.[300] In face of a mass of earlier and later rescripts from Alexander’s predecessors and Alexander himself, all strenuously confirming the exclusive privileges of Canterbury, Henry had never yet ventured to make use of this document; like Adrian’s bull for the conquest of Ireland, it had been kept in reserve for a future day; and that day had now come. In vain did Thomas proclaim his threatened interdict;[301] in vain did the Popeii.72 ratify it;[302] in vain did both alike issue prohibitions to all the English bishops against the act which they knew to be in contemplation.[303] The vigilance of the justiciars, quickened by a fresh set of stringent injunctions sent over by the king in the previous autumn,[304] made the delivery of letters from either primate or Pope so difficult that Thomas at last could intrust it to no one but a nun, Idonea, whom he solemnly charged with the duty of presenting to Roger of York the papal brief in which the coronation was forbidden.[305] The ceremony was fixed for Sunday, June 14. A week before that date young Henry, who with his girl-bride Margaret of France had been left at Caen under the care of his mother and Richard of Hommet the constable of Normandy, was summoned to join his father in England.[306] On S. Barnabas’s day the bishops and barons assembled at Westminster in obedience to the royal summons;[307] on Saturday, the 13th, the Pope’s letter was at last forced upon the archbishop of York;[308] but none the less did he on the following morning crown and anoint young Henry in Westminster abbey; while Gilbert of London, who had managed to extort conditional absolution in the Pope’s name from Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen,[309] once more stood openly by his side in the foremost rank of the English bishops.[310]

The elder king only waited to see the tenants-in-chief, with the king of Scots at their head, swear fealty to his new-made colleague ere he hurried back to Normandy toii.73 meet the fast-gathering storm.[311] Louis, incensed that his daughter’s husband should have been crowned without her, was already threatening war;[312] Thomas, seeing in the king’s action nothing but the climax of Canterbury’s wrongs, was overwhelming the Pope with complaints, reproaches, and intreaties for summary vengeance upon all who had taken part in the coronation; and the majority of the cardinals strongly supported his demands.[313] Henry saw that he must make peace at any price. Two days before the feast of S. Mary Magdalene he held a conference with Louis near Fréteval, on the borders of the Vendômois and the county of Chartres;[314] they were reconciled, and as they parted Henry said jestingly to the French king: “That rascal of yours, too, shall have his peace to-morrow; and a right good peace shall it be.”[315] At dawn on S. Mary Magalene’s day[316] he met Thomas in the “Traitor’s Meadow,”[317] close to Fréteval; they rode apart together, and remained in conference so long that the patience of their followers was all but exhausted, when at last Thomas was seen to dismount and throw himself at the king’s feet. Henry sprang from his horse, raised the archbishop from the ground, held his stirrup while he remounted, and rode back to tell his followers that peace was made, on terms which practically amounted to a complete mutual amnesty and a return to the state of affairs which had existed before the quarrel.[318]

ii.74

Henry had no sooner returned to Normandy than he fell sick almost to death; on his recovery he went on a pilgrimage to the shrine of our Lady at Rocamadour in the Quercy,[319] and it was not until October that Thomas again saw him at Tours, on his way to a conference with Count Theobald of Blois at Amboise.[320] A difficulty had arisen about the restitution of the confiscated Church property and the absolution of the persons whom Thomas had excommunicated, each party insisting that the other should make the first step in conciliation.[321] There was also a difficulty about the kiss of peace, which Thomas required as pledge of Henry’s sincerity, but which Henry seemed desirous of postponing indefinitely.[322] Nevertheless, a letter from Henry to his son, announcing the reconciliation and bidding the young king enforce the restoration of the archiepiscopal estates, was drawn up in Thomas’s presence at Amboise and sent over to England by the hands of two of his clerks,[323] who presented it at Westminster on October 5.[324] The restoration was, however, not effected until Martinmas, and then it comprised little more than empty garners and ruined houses.[325] Thomas saw the king once more, at Chaumont,ii.75[326] and Henry promised to meet him again at Rouen, thence to proceed with him to England in person.[327] Before the appointed time came, however, fresh complications had arisen with the king of France; Henry was obliged to give up all thought of going not only to England but even to Normandy, and delegated the archbishop of Rouen and the dean of Salisbury to escort Thomas in his stead.

The duty finally devolved solely upon the dean, who was no other than Thomas’s old opponent John of Oxford.[328] Naturally enough, the primate was deeply hurt at being thus sent back to his see under the protection of a man who, as he truly said, ought to have been thankful for the privilege of travelling in his suite.[329] Thomas, however, was in haste to be gone, although fully persuaded that he was going to his death. He seems indeed to have been weary of life; the tone of his letters and of his parting words to the friends whom he was leaving in France indicates not so much a morbid presentiment of his fate as a passionate longing for it. Yet it can hardly have been from him alone that the foreboding communicated itself to so many other minds. Warnings came to him from all quarters; one voice after another, from the king of France[330] down to the very pilot of the ship in which he took his passage, implored him not to go; Herbert of Bosham alone upheld his resolution to the end.[331]

We may put aside at once all the wild talk of the archbishop’s biographers about plots against his life in which the king had a share. Even if Henry’s sudden willingness for his return was really suggested by words said to have been uttered by one of his counsellors—“Why keep the archbishop out of England? It would be far better to keep him in it”—there is no need to assume that those words bore even in the speaker’s mind, far less in that of the king, the horrible meaning which they were afterwards supposed to have covered;[332] for they were true in the most literal sense.ii.76 The quarrel of king and primate would have mattered little had it been fought out on English ground; it was the archbishop’s exile which rendered him so dangerous. Thomas had dealt his most fatal blow at Henry by flying from him, and Henry, as he now perceived, had made his worst blunder in driving Thomas into France. Of the infinitely greater blunder involved in the archbishop’s murder—setting the criminal aspect of the deed altogether aside—it is enough to say that Henry was wholly incapable. The same may be said of Roger of York and Gilbert of London, although, like the king himself, they were urged by dread of the archbishop into making common cause with men of a very different stamp:—men who hated the primate with a far more intense personal hatred, and who were restrained by no considerations either of policy or of morality:—men such as Ralf de Broc, a ruffian adventurer who had served as the tool of Henry’s vengeance upon the archbishop’s kinsfolk, had resumed the custody of the archiepiscopal estates when it was resigned by Gilbert Foliot, had been for the last four years at once fattening upon the property of Thomas and smarting under his excommunication, and was ready to commit any crime rather than disgorge his ill-gotten gains.[333] It was known that Thomas had letters from the Pope suspending all those bishops who had taken part in the coronation of the young king, and replacing Gilbert of London, Jocelyn of Salisbury, and all whom Thomas had excommunicated under the sentences from which they had been irregularly released by some of the Papal envoys.[334] Gilbert, Jocelyn and Roger of York now hurried to Canterbury, intending to proceed toii.77 Normandy as soon as Thomas set foot in England; while Ralf de Broc, Reginald de Warren and Gervase of Cornhill the sheriff of Kent undertook to catch him at the moment of landing, ransack his baggage, search his person, and seize any Papal letters which he might bring with him. Thomas, however was warned; he sent the letters over before him, and the three prelates at Canterbury read their condemnation before their judge quitted Gaul.[335] Next day he sailed from Wissant, and on the morning of December 1 he landed at Sandwich.[336] His enemies were ready to receive him; but at the sight of John of Oxford they stopped short, and John in the king’s name forbade all interference with the primate.[337] Amid the rapturous greetings of the people who thronged to welcome their chief pastor, he rode on to Canterbury; there some of the royal officials came to him in the king’s name, demanding the absolution of the suspended and excommunicate bishops. Thomas at first answered that he could not annul a Papal sentence; but he afterwards offered to take the risk of doing so, if the culprits would abjure their errors in the form prescribed by the Church. Gilbert and Jocelyn were inclined to yield; but Roger refused, and they ended by despatching Geoffrey Ridel to enlist the sympathies of the young king in their behalf, while they themselves carried their protest to his father in Normandy.[338]

ii.78

The young king was preparing to hold his Christmas court at Winchester.[339] Thomas proposed to join it, but was stopped in London by a peremptory command to “go back and mind his own business at Canterbury.”[340] He obeyed under protest, and on Christmas-day again excommunicated the De Brocs and their fellow-robbers.[341] The elder king was keeping the feast at his hunting-seat of Bures near Bayeux.[342] There the three bishops threw themselves at his feet; Roger of York spoke in the name of all, and presented the Papal letters;[343] the courtiers burst into a confused storm of indignation, but not one had any counsel to offer. In his impatience and disappointment Henry uttered the fatal words which he was to rue all his life: “What a parcel of fools and dastards have I nourished in my house, that none of them can be found to avenge me of this one upstart clerk!”[344]

The words were hardly more than he had used at Chinon four years before, but they fell now upon other ears. Four knights—Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy, Reginald Fitz-Urse and Richard le Breton[345]—took them as a warrant for the primate’s death. That night—it was Christmas-eve[346]—they vowed to slay him, no matter how or where;[347] theyii.79 left the court in secret, crossed to England by different routes,[348] and met again at Saltwood, a castle which the archbishop had been vainly endeavouring to recover from the clutches of Ralf de Broc, and where Ralf himself was dwelling amid a crowd of his kinsfolk and dependents. There the final plot was laid.[349] How it was executed is a tale which has been told so often that its details may well be spared here. On the evening of December 29, after a scene in his own hall scarcely less disgraceful than the last scene in the king’s hall at Northampton, the primate of all England was butchered at the altar’s foot in his own cathedral church.[350]

The ill news travelled fast. It fell like a thunderbolt upon the Norman court still gathered round the king at Argentan,[351] whither the assembly had adjourned after the Christmas feast at Bures. Henry stood for a moment speechless with horror, then burst into a frenzy of despair, and shut himself up in his own rooms, refusing to eat or drink or to see any one.[352] In a few days more, as he anticipated, all Christendom was ringing with execration of the murder and clamouring for vengeance upon the king who was universally regarded as its instigator. The Pope ordered an interdict upon Henry’s continental dominions, excommunicated the murderers and all who had given or should henceforth give them aid, shelter or support, and was only restrained from pronouncing a like sentence upon the king himself by a promise that he would make compurgation andii.80 submit to penance.[353] Two cardinal-legates charged with the enforcement of these decrees were at once despatched to Normandy;[354] but when they arrived there, Henry was out of their reach. The death of Duke Conan in February had thrown Britanny completely into his hands; he only stayed to secure Geoffrey’s final establishment there as duke[355] before he called a council at Argentan and announced that he was going to Ireland.[356] He quitted Normandy just as the legates reached it,[357] leaving strict orders that the ports should be closed to all clerks and papal envoys, and that no one should dare to follow him without special permission.[358] Landing at Portsmouth in the first days of August,[359] he hurried to Winchester for a last interview with the dying Bishop Henry,[360] closed the English ports as he had closed those of Normandy,[361] then plunged once more into the depths of South Wales, and on October 16 sailed from Milford Haven for Waterford.[362]

The elements favoured his escape; for five months a persistent contrary wind hindered all communication toii.81 Ireland from any part of his dominions.[363] The bishops and the ministers were left to fight their own battles and make their own peace with the legates in Normandy until May 1172, when the king suddenly reappeared[364] to claim the papal absolution and offer in return not only his own spiritual obedience and that of his English and continental realms, but also that of Ireland, which he had secured for Rome as her share in the spoils of a conquest won with Adrian’s bull in his hand.[365] The bargain was soon struck. On Sunday May 21 Henry met the legates at Avranches, made his purgation for the primate’s death, promised the required expiation, and abjured his obnoxious “customs,” his eldest son joining in the abjuration.[366] To pacify Louis, young Henry and Margaret were sent over sea with the archbishop of Rouen and by him crowned together at Winchester on August 27;[367] and the Norman primate returned to join a great council of the Norman clergy assembled at Avranches to witness there, two days before Michaelmas, a public repetition of their sovereign’s purgation and his final absolution by the legates.[368]


ii.82

CHAPTER III.
THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND.
795–1172.

Map III.

IRELAND A. D. 1172.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

It is in the history of the settlements formed on the Irish coast by the northern pirates in the ninth century that we must seek for the origin of those relations between England and Ireland which led to an English invasion of the latter country in the reign of Henry II. The earliest intercourse between the two islands had been of a wholly peaceful character; but it had come utterly to an end when Bishop Colman of Lindisfarne sailed back to his old home at Iona after the synod of Whitby in 664. From the hour when her missionary work was done, Ireland sank more and more into the isolation which was a natural consequence of her geographical position, and from which she was only roused at the opening of the ninth century by the coming of the wikings. In the early days of the northmen’s attack upon the British isles it was the tradition of Ireland’s material prosperity and wealth, and the fame of the treasures stored in her religious houses, that chiefly tempted the “white strangers” from the Norwegian fiords across the unknown perils of the western sea; and the settlement of Thorgils in Ulster and those of his fellow-wikings along the eastern and southern coasts of Ireland formed a chief basis for the operations of the northmen upon Britain itself. The desperate fighting of the Irish succeeded in freeing Ulster after Thorgils’s death; but by the middle of the ninth century the wikings were firmly established at four points on the Irishii.83 coast, Dublin, Waterford, Cork and Limerick.[369] Under the leadership of Olaf the Fair, Dublin became the head of a confederacy which served as a starting-point and furnished a constant supply of forces for the Danish conquests in England;[370] and for a hundred years afterwards, throughout the struggle of the house of Ælfred for the recovery of the Danelaw, the support given by the Ostmen or wikings of Ireland to their brethren across the channel was at once the main strength of the Northumbrian Danes and the standing difficulty of the English kings.[371]

To Ireland itself the results of the wiking invasions were far more disastrous than either to Britain or to Gaul. Owing to the peculiar physical character of their country, to their geographical remoteness from the rest of Europe, and to the political and social isolation which was a consequence of these, the Irish people had never advanced beyond the primitive tribal mode of life which had once been common to the whole Aryan race, but which every European branch of that race, except the Irish, had long since outgrown. In the time of Ecgberht and of Charles the Great Ireland was still, as at the very dawn of history, peopled by a number of separate tribes or septs whose sole bond of internal cohesion was formed by community of blood;—whose social and political institutions had remained purely patriarchal in character, unaffected by local and external influences such as had helped to mould the life of England or of Gaul:—who had never yet coalesced into any definite territorial organization, far less risen into national unity under a national sovereign. The provincial kings of Ulster, Connaught, Leinster and Munster were merely the foremost chieftains among the various groups of tribes over whom they exercised an ever-shifting sway; while the supremacy of the Ard-Righ or chief monarch, to whom in theory was assigned the overlordship of the whole island, was practically little more than a sort of honorary pre-eminence attachedii.84 to certain chosen descendants of an early hero-king, Niall “of the Nine Hostages”; it carried with it little effective authority, and no territorial power; for the monarch’s traditional seat at Tara had long been a heap of ruins, and a tribal under-king had ousted him from the plain of Meath which in legal theory formed his royal domain.[372] Neither in the monarch himself nor in the provincial chieftains of a state thus constituted could there be found, when the storm-cloud from the north burst upon Ireland, a centre of unity even such as the peoples of Gaul found in their Karolingian sovereigns, far less such as the West-Franks found in the dukes of the French, or such as the English found in their kings of the house of Ecgberht. The stress of the northmen’s attack, which elsewhere gave a fresh impulse to the upgrowth of national life, crushed out all hope of its developement in Ireland. The learning and the civilization of ages perished when Columba’s Bangor, Bridget’s Kildare, Ciaran’s Clonmacnoise, Patrick’s own Armagh, shared the fate of Bæda’s Jarrow and Hild’s Streoneshealh, of Cuthbert’s Melrose and Aidan’s Lindisfarne; and in Ireland there was no Wessex and no Ælfred.

On the other hand, the concentration of the wiking forces upon Britain had given to the Irish an advantage which enabled them to check the spread of wiking settlements in their country; and the failure of all attempts to establish a Scandinavian dominion in Britain destroyed all chance of a Scandinavian conquest of Ireland. The Ostmen never even gained such a footing in Ireland as the followers of Hrolf gained in Frankland: their presence never received the sanction of any Ard-Righ; they were not a compact body occupying the whole of an extensive and well-defined territory, but a number of separate groups settled here and there along the coast, and holding their ground only by sheer hard fighting against a ring of implacable foes. The long struggle may be said to have ended in a defeat of both parties. The Irish kings of Munster succeeded in establishingii.85 a more or less effective overlordship over the Scandinavian communities of Limerick and Waterford; and in 989 Malachi II., supreme monarch of Ireland, reaped his reward for nine years of desperate fighting in the submission of the Ostmen of Dublin. The city was blockaded and starved into surrender, and a yearly tribute was promised to Malachi and his successors.[373] Six years later “the ring of Tomar and the sword of Carl”—two heathen relics probably of ancient heroes, which seem to have been treasured as sacred emblems of sovereignty by the Ostmen[374]—were carried off by Malachi as trophies of another victory;[375] and in 999 or 1000 a renewal of the strife ended in a rout of the Ostmen and a great slaughter of their leaders, and Dublin was sacked and burnt by the victorious Irish.[376]

Malachi’s triumph, however, was gained at the cost of a disruption of the monarchy. Malachi himself was displaced by a king of the rival house of Munster, his colleague in the sack of Dublin, the famous Brian Boroimhe;[377] Brian’s career of conquest ended in 1014 on the field of Clontarf, where he was slain in battle with the men of Leinster and the Ostmen;[378] and when Malachi, who now resumed his place, died in 1022,[379] the downfall of the Irish monarchy was complete.[380] The tradition which had so long linked it to the house of Niall had been shattered by Brian’s successes; andii.86 Brian had not lived to consolidate in his own house the forces which had begun to gather around himself. Thenceforth the Scandinavian colonies simply furnished an additional element to the strife of the Irish chieftains, and to the rivalry between the O’Briens of Munster and the O’Neills of Ulster for the possession of a shadowy supremacy, claimed by the one house as descendants of Brian Boroimhe and by the other as heirs of Malachi II. and of his great ancestor Niall.

The social and political system of Ireland was powerless either to expel or to absorb the foreign element thus introduced within its borders. Not only was such an union of the two peoples as had at last been effected in England simply impossible in Ireland; the Irish Danelaw was parted from its Celtic surroundings by barriers of race and speech, of law and custom and institutions, far more insuperable than those which parted the settlers in the “northman’s land” at the mouth of Seine from their West-Frankish neighbours. Even the Irish Church, which three hundred years before had won half England—one might add half Europe—to the Faith, had as yet failed to convert these pagans seated at her door. At the close of the tenth century the Ostmen were still for the most part heathens in fact if not in name, aliens from whatever culture or civilization might still remain in the nation around them. Meanwhile their relations with England had wholly altered in character. The final submission of the English Danelaw to Eadred carried with it the alliance of the Irish Danelaw; it seems that the Ostmen in their turn endeavoured to strengthen themselves against the attacks of the Irish princes by securing a good understanding with the English king, if not actually by putting themselves under his protection; for the fact that Eadgar coined money in Dublin[381] indicates that his authority must have been in some way or other acknowledged there. The years of the Ostmen’s struggle with Malachi and Brian Boroimhe were the years of England’s struggle with Swein and Cnut; but the two strifes seem to have been wholly unconnected; and throughout the long peace which lasted from Cnut’s final triumph until the coming of the Normans,ii.87 new ties sprang up between the Ostmen and the sister-isle. Owing to their position on the sea-coast and to the spirit of merchant enterprise which was, quite as much as the spirit of military enterprise, a part of the wiking-heritage of their inhabitants, the towns of the Irish Danelaw rose fast into importance as seats of a flourishing trade with northern Europe, and above all with England through its chief seaports in the west, Bristol and Chester. The traffic was chiefly in slaves, bought or kidnapped in England to be sold to the merchants of Dublin or Waterford, and by these again to their Irish neighbours or to traders from yet more distant lands.[382] Horrible as this traffic was, however, even while filling the Irish coast-towns with English slaves it helped to foster a more frequent intercourse and a closer relation between Ostmen and Englishmen; and the shelter and aid given to Harold and Leofwine in 1151 by Dermot Mac-Maelnambo,[383] a prince of the royal house of Leinster who had acquired the sovereignty over both Leinstermen and Danes, shews that the political alliance established in Eadgar’s day had been carefully renewed by Godwine.

To these commercial and political relations was added soon afterwards an ecclesiastical tie. The conversion of the Ostmen to Christianity, completed in the early years of the eleventh century, was probably due to intercourse with their Christianized brethren in England rather than to the influence of the Irish clergy, whose very speech was strange to them; and their adoption of their neighbours’ creed, instead of drawing together the hostile races, soon introduced a fresh element into their strife. About the year 1040 the Ostmen of Dublin set up a bishopric of their own. Their first bishop, Donatus, was probably Irish by consecration if not by birth.[384] But when he died, in 1074,[385] the Ostmen turnedii.88 instinctively towards the neighbouring island with which they had long been on peaceful terms, where the fruits of the warfare waged by generation after generation of wikings upon the shores of Britain were being reaped at last by Norman hands, where William of Normandy was entering upon the inheritance alike of Ælfred and of Cnut, and where Lanfranc was infusing a new spirit of discipline and activity into the Church of Odo and Dunstan. The last wiking-fleet that ever sailed from Dublin to attack the English coast—a fleet which Dermot Mac-Maelnambo, true to his alliance with their father, had furnished to the sons of Harold—had been beaten back six years before.[386] Since then Dermot himself was dead;[387] the Ostmen were once more free, subject to no ruler save one of their own choice and their own blood; with the consent of their king, Godred,[388] they chose a priest named Patrick to fill Donatus’s place, and sent him to be consecrated in England by the archbishop of Canterbury.[389] No scruples about infringing the rights of the Irish bishops were likely to make Lanfranc withhold his hand. At the very moment when the Ostmen’s request reached him, he had just been putting forth against the archbishop of York a claim to metropolitical jurisdiction over the whole of theii.89 British isles, founded on the words of S. Gregory committing “all the bishops of the Britains” to S. Augustine’s charge.[390] He therefore gladly welcomed an opportunity of securing for the authority of his see a footing in the neighbour-isle. He consecrated Patrick of Dublin and received his profession of obedience;[391] and for the next seventy-eight years the bishops of Dublin were suffragans not of Armagh but of Canterbury. When in 1096 the Ostmen of Waterford also chose for themselves a bishop, they too sought him beyond the sea; an Irishman, or more probably an Ostman by birth, a monk of Winchester by profession, Malchus by name, he was consecrated by S. Anselm and professed obedience to him as metropolitan.[392]

Through the medium of these Irish suffragans the archbishops of Canterbury endeavoured to gain a hold upon the Irish Church by cultivating the friendship of the different Irish princes who from time to time succeeded in winning from the Ostmen an acknowledgement of their overlordship. In the struggles of the provincial kings for the supreme monarchy of Ireland it was always the Ostmen who turned the scale; their submission was the real test of sovereignty. The power which had been wielded by Dermot Mac-Maelnambo passed after his death first to Terence or Turlogh O’Brien, king of Munster,[393] a grandson of Brian Boroimhe, and then to Terence’s son Murtogh.[394] Both were in correspondence with the successive English primates, Lanfranc and Anselm,[395] and both were recognized as protectors and patrons, in ecclesiastical matters at least, by the Ostmen,ii.90[396] whose adherence during these years enabled the O’Briens to hold their ground against the advancing power of Donnell O’Lochlainn, king of Aileach or western Ulster,[397] a representative of the old royal house of the O’Neills which had fallen with Malachi II. On Murtogh’s death in 1119[398] a new aspirant to the monarchy appeared in the person of the young king of Connaught, Terence or Turlogh O’Conor. A year before, Terence had won the submission of the Ostmen of Dublin;[399] in 1120 he celebrated the fair of Telltown,[400] a special prerogative of the Irish monarchs; and from the death of Donnell O’Lochlainn next year[401] Terence was undisputed monarch till 1127, when a joint rising of Ostmen and Leinstermen enabled both to throw off his yoke.[402] Meanwhile Murtogh O’Lochlainn, a grandson of Donnell, was again building up a formidable power in Ulster; at last, in 1150, all the provincial kings, including Terence, gave him hostages for peace;[403] and Terence’s throne seems to have been only saved by a sudden change in the policy of the Ostmen, whose independent action enabled them for a moment to hold the balance and act as arbitrators between northern and southern Ireland.[404] Four years later, however, they accepted Murtogh as their king,[405] and two years laterii.91 still he was left sole monarch by the death of Terence O’Conor.[406]

The anarchy of the Irish state was reflected in that of the Church. If Lanfranc, when he consecrated Patrick of Dublin, knew anything at all of the ecclesiastical condition of Ireland, he may well have thought that it stood in far greater need of his reforming care than England itself. The Irish Church had never felt the organizing hand of a Theodore; its diocesan and parochial system was quite undeveloped; it had in fact scarcely advanced beyond the primitive missionary stage. Six centuries after S. Patrick’s death, the Irish clergy were still nothing but a band of mission-priests scattered over the country or gathered together in vast monastic establishments like Bangor or Durrow or Clonmacnoise; the bishops were for the most part merely heads of ever-shifting mission-stations, to whose number there was no limit; destitute of political rank, they were almost equally destitute of ecclesiastical authority, and differed from the ordinary priesthood by little else than their power of ordination. At the head of the whole hierarchy stood, as successor and representative of S. Patrick, the archbishop of Armagh. But since the death of Archbishop Maelbrigid in 927 the see of Armagh had been in the hands of a family of local chieftains who occupied its estate, usurped its revenues, handed on its title from father to son, and were bishops only in name.[407] The inferior members of the ecclesiastical body could not escape the evil which paralyzed their head. The bishops and priests of the Irish Church furnished a long roll of names to the catalogue of saints; but they contributed little or nothing to the political developement of the nation, and scarcely more to its social developement. The growth of a class of lay-impropriators ousted them from the management and the revenues of their church-lands, reduced them to subsist almost wholly upon the fees which they received for the performance of their spiritual functions, stripped them of all political influence,ii.92 and left them dependent solely upon their spiritual powers and their personal holiness for whatever share of social influence they might still contrive to retain.[408] The Irish Church, in fact, while stedfastly adhering in doctrinal matters to the rest of the Latin Church, had fallen far behind it in discipline; to the monastic reforms of the tenth century, to the struggle for clerical celibacy and for freedom of investiture in the eleventh, she had remained an utter stranger. The long-continued stress of the northern invasions had cut off the lonely island in the west from all intercourse with the world at large, so completely that even the tie which bound her to Rome had sunk into a mere vague tradition of spiritual loyalty, and Rome herself knew nothing of the actual condition of a Church which had once been her most illustrious daughter.

But it was the northmen, too, who were now to become the means of knitting up again the ties which had been severed by their fathers’ swords. The state of things in Ireland, as reported to Canterbury from Dublin and Waterford, might well seem to reforming churchmen like Lanfranc and Anselm too grievous to be endured. Lanfranc had urged upon Terence O’Brien the removal of two of its worst scandals, the neglect of canonical restraints upon marriage and the existence of a crowd of titular bishops without fixed sees;[409] Anselm used all his influence with Murtogh O’Brien for the same end;[410] at last, finding his efforts unavailing, he seems to have laid his complaints before the Pope. The result was that, for the first time, a papal legate was appointed for Ireland. The person chosen was Gilbert, who some two or three years before Anselm’s death became the first bishop of the Ostmen of Limerick. Gilbert seems, like the first Donatus of Dublin, to have been himself an Irish prelate; he lost no time, however, in putting himself in communicationii.93 with Canterbury,[411] and displayed an almost exaggerated zeal for the Roman discipline and ritual.[412] In 1118 he presided over a synod held at Rathbreasil, where an attempt was made to map out the dioceses of Ireland on a definite plan.[413] Little, however, could be done till the metropolitan see was delivered from the usurpers who had so long held it in bondage; and it was not until 1134 that the evil tradition was broken by the election of S. Malachi.

Malachi was the wisest and most enlightened as well as the most saintly Irish prelate of his time; he had already been labouring for nearly ten years at the reform of the diocese of Connor; in that of Armagh itself he had earlier still, as vicar to Archbishop Celsus, laid the foundations of a similar work which he now took up again as primate.[414] After a successful pontificate of three years he again retired to the humbler position of a diocesan bishop at Down;[415] but he still continued to watch over the interests of the whole Irish Church; and in 1139 he went to Rome specially to lay its necessities before the Pope, and if possible to obtain from him the gift of a pallium for the archbishop of Armagh, and another for the bishop of Cashel as metropolitan of southern Ireland.[416] The pallium was now generally regarded as an indispensable note of metropolitical rank, but it had never been possessed by the successors of S. Patrick.[417] Innocent II. refused to grant it save at the request of the Irish clergy and people in council assembled; he sanctioned, however, the recognition of Cashel as metropolis of southern Ireland, and moreover he transferred to Malachi himself the legatine commission which Gilbert of Limerick had just resigned.[418] Gilbert seems to have died shortly afterwards: his successor in the see of Limerick went to Theobald ofii.94 Canterbury for consecration; but his profession of obedience was the last ever made by an Irish bishop to an English metropolitan.[419] In 1148 a synod held at Inispatrick by Archbishop Gelasius of Armagh, with Malachi as papal legate, decided upon sending Malachi himself to the Pope once more, charged with a formal request for the two palls, in the name of the whole Irish Church. Malachi died on the way, at Clairvaux;[420] but he left his commission in safe hands. Nine years before, when on his first journey to Rome he had passed through the “bright valley,” its abbot had recognized in him a kindred spirit.[421] From that moment S. Bernard’s care of all the churches extended itself even to the far-off Church of Ireland; and if it was not he who actually forwarded his dying friend’s petition to Eugene III., there can be little doubt that Eugene’s favourable reception of it was chiefly owing to his influence. The result was the mission of John Paparo as special legate to Ireland. Stephen’s refusal to let John pass through his dominions caused another year’s delay;[422] but at the close of 1151 John made his way through Scotland safe to his destination.[423] In March 1152 he held a synod at Kells, in which the diocesan and provincial system of the Irish Church was organized upon lines which remained unaltered till the sixteenth century. The episcopal sees were definitely fixed, and grouped under not two but four archbishoprics. The primacy of all Ireland, with metropolitical authority over Ulster and Meath, was assigned to Armagh; Tuam became the metropolis of Connaught, Cashel of Munster; while the rivalry of Armagh and Canterbury for the spiritual obedience of the Ostmen was settled by the grant of a fourth pallium, with metropolitical jurisdiction over the whole of Leinster, to Bishop Gregory of Dublin himself.[424]

ii.95

It is plain that Bernard and Eugene aimed at applying to Ireland’s troubles the same remedy which they were at that very time applying to those of England. They hoped to build up an united nation and a strong national government on the basis of a free and united national Church. But the foundation-stone of their work for Ireland was scarcely laid at Kells when both the wise master-builders were called away. On the other hand, their labours for England were crowned by the accession of the young Angevin king, whose restless temper, before he had been nine months on his throne, was already seeking for another sphere of activity still further beyond the sea; overwhelming the newly-crowned, English-born Pope with suggestions of work and offers of co-operation in every quarter of Christendom,[425] and proposing to begin at once with the reduction of Ireland to political, ecclesiastical and social order after the pattern of England and Normandy.[426] Adrian IV. would have needed a wisdom and a foresight greater than those of S. Bernard himself to enable him to resist the attractions of such an offer. The so-called “Donation of Constantine”—a donation which is now known to be forged, but whose genuineness no one in Adrian’s day had ever thought of doubting—vested the ultimate sovereignty of all islands in the Papacy.[427] The best and greatest Popes, from S. Gregory down to Adrian himself, seem to have interpreted this as making them in a special way responsible for the welfare of such outlying portions of Christendom, and bound to leave no means untried for providing them with a secure and orderly Christian government.[428] The action of Alexander II.ii.96 in sanctioning the Norman conquest of England was a logical outcome of this principle, applied, however unwisely or unjustly, to a particular case. But there was infinitely greater justification for applying the same principle, in the same manner, to the case of Ireland. Neither the labours of S. Malachi, nor the brief visit of John Paparo, nor the stringent decrees passed at the synod of Kells, could suffice to reform the inveterate evils of Ireland’s ecclesiastical system, the yet more inveterate evils of her political system, or the intellectual and moral decay which was the unavoidable consequence of both. On the Pope, according to the view of the time, lay the responsibility of bringing order out of this chaos—a chaos of whose very existence he had but just become fully conscious, and which no doubt looked to him far more hopeless than it really was. In such circumstances Henry’s proposal must have sounded to Adrian like an offer to relieve him of a great weight of care—to cut at one stroke a knot which he was powerless to untie—to clear a path for him through a jungle-growth of difficulties which he himself saw no way to penetrate or overcome. John of Salisbury set forth the plan at Rome, in Henry’s name, in the summer of 1155; he carried back a bull which satisfied all Henry’s demands. Adrian bade the king go forth to his conquest “for the enlargement of the Church’s borders, for the restraint of vice, the correction of morals and the planting of virtue, the increase of the Christian religion, and whatsoever may tend to God’s glory and the well-being of that land;”[429] and he sent with the bull a gold ring, adorned with an emerald of great price, as a symbol of investiture with the government of Ireland.[430]

ii.97

This strange crusade was postponed for the moment, as we have seen, in deference to objections made by the Empress Matilda.[431] Adrian’s bull and ring were stored up in the English chancery, and there, long after Adrian was dead, they still lay,[432] unused and, as it seemed, forgotten amid an ever-increasing throng of more urgent cares and labours which even Henry found to be quite as much as he was capable of sustaining. At last, however, the course of political events in Ireland itself took a turn which led almost irresistibly to a revival of his long-forsaken project. Two years before Henry’s accession Dermot Mac-Murrough, king of Leinster, had made a raid upon the district of Breffny in Connaught, on the borders of Ulster and Meath, and carried off Dervorgil, the wife of its chieftain Tighernan O’Ruark.[433] From that hour Tighernan’s vengeance never slept. During the next fourteen years, while Murtogh O’Lochlainn was striving for the mastery first against the veteran Terence O’Conor and after Terence’s death with his son Rory or Roderic, the swords of the men of Breffny were thrown alternately into either scale, as their chieftain saw a hope of securing the aid of either monarch to avenge him of his enemy.ii.98[434] In 1166 the crisis came. Murtogh drew upon himself the wrath of his people by blinding the king of Uladh, for whose safety he was pledged to the archbishop of Armagh; Ulster, Meath, Leinster and Dublin rose against him all at once; he was defeated and slain in a great battle at the Fews; the Ostmen of Dublin acknowledged Roderic as their king, and all the princes of southern Ireland followed their example. Dermot’s submission, however, was in vain; the first act of the new monarch was to banish him from the realm.[435] The Leinstermen forsook him at once, for their loyalty had long been alienated by his harsh government and evil deeds.[436] Left alone to the justice of Roderic and the vengeance of O’Ruark, he fled to Cork and thence took ship to Bristol. Here he found shelter for a while in the priory of S. Augustine, under the protection of its founder Robert Fitz-Harding;[437] at the close of the year he made his way to Normandy, and thence, with some difficulty, tracked Henry’s restless movements into the depths of Aquitaine,[438] where he at last laid his appeal for succour at the feet of the English king.

At the crisis of his struggles with Thomas of Canterbury, with Louis of France and with the rebel barons of Poitou, all that Henry could do was to accept Dermot’s offer ofii.99 homage and fealty,[439] promise to send him help as soon as possible,[440] and furnish him with a letter authorizing any loyal English, Norman, Welsh, Scottish or Angevin subjects who might be so disposed to join the standard of the Irish prince, as of a faithful vassal of their sovereign.[441] Another stay of some weeks in Bristol[442] convinced Dermot that his best chance of aid lay beyond the Severn. Wales was still in the main a Celtic land, ruled in primeval Celtic fashion by native princes under little more than nominal subjection to the king of England. The Norman conquest of Wales, so far as Wales could be said to have been conquered at all, had been effected not by the royal power but by the daring and prowess of individual adventurers who did, indeed, seek the royal sanction for their tenure of the lands which they had won, but who were scarcely more amenable to the royal authority than their Welsh neighbours, with whom they not unfrequently made common cause against it. It was Robert of Bellême’s connexion with Wales, through his border-earldom of Shrewsbury and his brother’s lordship of Pembroke, which had made him so formidable to Henry I.; it was Robert of Gloucester’s tenure of the great Welsh lordship of Glamorgan, even more than his English honours, which had enabled him to act as an independent potentate against Stephen. Another border-chieftain who played some part in the civil war was Gilbert de Clare, whose father had received a grant of Cardigan from Henry I. in 1107,[443] and upon whom Stephen in 1138 conferred the title of earl of Pembroke.[444] His son Richard appears under the same title among the witnesses to Stephen’s proclamation of the treaty of Wallingford in 1153;[445] the writers of the time, however,ii.100 usually describe him as earl of Striguil, a fortress which seems to have occupied the site whence the ruins of Chepstow castle now look down upon the Wye. His earldom of Pembroke, indeed, as one of Stephen’s fictitious creations, must have been forfeited on Henry’s accession; but the lord of Striguil was still a mighty man on the South-Welsh border when in the spring of 1167 he promised to bring all the forces which he could muster to aid in restoring Dermot, who in return offered him his daughter’s hand, together with the succession to his kingdom.[446] A promise of the town of Wexford and its adjoining territory won a like assurance of aid from two half-brothers in whose veins the blood of Norman adventurers was mingled with the ancient royal blood of South-Wales: Maurice Fitz-Gerald, a son of Gerald constable of Pembroke by his marriage with Nest, aunt of the reigning prince Rees Ap-Griffith, and Robert Fitz-Stephen, son of the same Nest by her second husband, Stephen constable of Cardigan.[447] Another Pembrokeshire knight, Richard Fitz-Godoberd, volunteered to accompany Dermot at once with a little band of Norman-Welsh followers.[448] With these Dermot returned to Ireland in August 1167;[449] he was defeated in a pitched battle with Roderic O’Conor and Tighernan O’Ruark;[450] but in his ownii.101 hereditary principality of Kinsellagh[451] he was safe; there throughout the winter he lay hid at Ferns,[452] and thence, when spring returned, he sent his bard Maurice Regan to claim from his Welsh allies the fulfilment of their promises.[453]

In the first days of May[454] Robert Fitz-Stephen landed at Bannow, between Wexford and Waterford, with thirty picked knights of his own immediate following, and a body of auxiliaries to the number of sixty men-at-arms and three hundred archers.[455] With him came three of his nephews, Meiler Fitz-Henry, Miles Fitz-David[456] and Robert de Barri;[457] and also a ruined knight called Hervey of Mountmorris, uncle of Richard de Clare.[458] Next day an independent adventurerii.102, Maurice de Prendergast, arrived from Milford with ten more knights and a band of archers.[459] Dermot himself came to meet them with some five hundred Irishmen. The united force marched upon Wexford, and took it in two days;[460] they then established their head-quarters at Ferns,[461] and thence made an expedition into Ossory, whose chieftain was specially hostile to Dermot. In spite of overwhelming odds, through all the difficulties of an unknown country full of woods and marshes, and traps laid against them by their skilful foes, the Norman-Welsh knights and archers made their way into the heart of Ossory; and a great battle ended in the rout of the Irish and the bringing of two hundred heads to Dermot’s feet in his camp on the banks of the Barrow.[462] A successful raid upon Offaly was followed by one upon Glendalough, and a third upon Ossory again,[463] till in the following year the state of affairs in Leinster had become threatening enough to drive all the Irish princes and the Ostmen of Dublin into a confederacy under Roderic O’Conor for the expulsion of the intruders.[464] Dermot pledged himself to acknowledge Roderic as monarch of Ireland, and was in his turn acknowledged by Roderic as king of Leinster on condition that he should dismiss his foreign allies.[465] The agreement was however scarcely made when Maurice Fitz-Gerald landed at Wexford with some hundred and forty men;[466] these at once joined Dermot in an expedition against Dublin, and harried the surrounding country till the citizens were reduced to promise obedience.[467] Early in the next year Dermot’s son-in-law Donellii.103 O’Brien, king of Limerick or Northern Munster, succeeded by the help of Robert Fitz-Stephen in throwing off the authority of Roderick O’Conor.[468] Encouraged by these successes, Dermot now began to aspire in his turn to the monarchy of all Ireland;[469] but his auxiliaries were numerically insufficient; and the one from whom he had expected most had as yet failed to appear at all.

The history of Richard of Striguil is far from clear. From the number of troops which eventually accompanied him to Ireland it is evident that he had been during these two years actively preparing for his expedition; and it may even be that the extent of his preparations had drawn upon him the suspicions of King Henry. We only know that, for some cause or other, he was now a ruined man; his lands were forfeited to the Crown;[470] and he seems to have lingered on, absorbed in a desperate effort to regain Henry’s favour, and clinging to his lost home with a feeling that if he once turned his back upon it, he would never be allowed to see it again. A letter from Dermot, telling of the successes of his party in Leinster and renewing his former offers, forced him into action.[471] He made a last appeal to the king, intreating either for restoration of his lands or for the royal license to go and repair his fortunes elsewhere. Henry ironically bade him go, and he went.[472] On S. Bartholomew’s eve, 1170, he landed at Waterford with twelveii.104 hundred men;[473] next day he was joined by Raymond “the Fat,” a young warrior whom he had sent over three months before[474] with ten knights and seventy archers, and who with this small force had contrived to beat back an assault of three thousand Irishmen of Decies and Ostmen of Waterford upon his camp of wattle and thatch, hastily thrown up on the rocky promontory of Dundonulf.[475] On August 25 Richard and Raymond attacked Waterford; three assaults in one day carried both town and citadel;[476] seven hundred citizens were slaughtered,[477] and the officers of the fortress, whose names tell of northern blood, were made prisoners.[478] A few days later Richard was married at Waterford to Dermot’s daughter Eva.[479] He then joined his father-in-law in a circuitous march across the hills and through Glendalough,[480] whereby they avoided a great host which Roderic had gathered at Clondalkin to intercept them, and arrived in safety on S. Matthew’s day beneath the walls of Dublin.[481] Dermot sent his bard to demandii.105 the instant surrender of the town, with thirty hostages for its fidelity. A dispute arose, probably between the Irish and Danish inhabitants, as to the selection of the hostages;[482] Archbishop Laurence was endeavouring to compose the difficulty,[483] and Hasculf Thorgils’ son, a chieftain of northern blood who commanded the citadel, had actually promised to surrender it on the morrow,[484] when a sudden attack made by Raymond the Fat on one side and by a knight called Miles Cogan on the other carried the town before the leaders of either party knew what had happened.[485] A second rush won the citadel; Hasculf escaped by sea and took refuge in the Orkneys;[486] Dublin was sacked,[487] and left throughout the winter under the command of Miles Cogan,[488] while Richard of Striguil was guarding Waterford against the men of Munster,[489] and Dermot, from his old head-quarters at Ferns,[490] was making raid after raid upon Meath and Breffny.[491]

In vain did the Irish clergy meet in synod at Armagh and strive to avert the wrath which seemed to have been revealed against their country by a solemn decree for the liberation of the English slaves with whom, even yet, the houses of the Irish chieftains were filled.[492] One sentence from an Irish record of the next year may serve to illustrate the condition of the country: ii.106“Seven predatory excursions were made by the Ui-Maine into Ormond from Palm Sunday till Low Sunday.”[493] It made but little difference when at Whitsuntide Dermot, “by whom a trembling sod was made of all Ireland,” died at Ferns “of an insufferable and unknown disease—without a will, without penance, without the Body of Christ, without unction, as his evil deeds deserved.”[494] At that very moment a wiking fleet gathered from all the lands where the old sea-rovers’ life still lingered—Norway, the Hebrides, Orkney, Man—appeared in Dublin bay under the command of Hasculf, the exiled leader of the Ostmen, and of a northern chief whose desperate valour won him the title of “John the Furious”—in the English speech of that day, John the Wode.[495] Something of the spirit of the old northern sagas breathes again in the story of this, the last wiking-fight ever fought upon the soil of the British isles. Bard and historian alike tell of the mighty strokes dealt by the battle-axes of John and his comrades,[496] and how they had almost hewed their way into Dublin once more, when a well-timed sally of the besieged caught them at unawares in the rear;[497]—how an Irish chief named Gillamocholmog, whom Miles Cogan had posted on a neighbouring hill, chivalrously bidding him watch the course of the battle and join the winning side, rushed down with his followers at the critical moment and helped to complete the rout of the Ostmen;[498]—how John the Wode fell by the hand of Miles Cogan;[499]—how Hasculf was taken prisoner by Miles’s brother Richard and brought back to be reserved for ransom, and how his hot wiking-blood spoke in words ofii.107 defiance which goaded his captors to strike off his head.[500] Fifteen hundred northmen fell upon the field; five hundred more were drowned in trying to regain their ships.[501] From the shores of Ireland, as from those of England, the last northern fleet was driven away by Norman swords.

The garrison of Dublin fought in truth even more desperately than their assailants; for they were fighting for their all. A remonstrance addressed by some of the Irish princes to the king of England against the aggressions of his subjects[502] can hardly have been needed to open Henry’s eyes to the danger gathering for him and his realm beyond the western sea. This little band of adventurers, almost all bound together by the closest ties of kindred,[503] were conquering Leinster neither for its native sovereign nor for their own, but were setting up a new feudal state independent of all royal control, under the leadership of a disgraced English baron. Such a state, if suffered to grow unhindered, would soon be far more dangerous to England than to Ireland, for it would be certain to play in every struggle of the feudal principle against the royal authority in England the part which the Ostmen had played of old in the struggles of the Danelaw. At the beginning of the year 1171 therefore Henry issued an edict prohibiting all further intermeddlingii.108 of his subjects in Ireland, and bidding those who were already there either return before Easter or consider themselves banished for life.[504] Not a man went back; Richard of Striguil sent Raymond over to Normandy with a written protest to the king, pleading that his conquests had been undertaken with the royal sanction and that he was ready to place them at the king’s disposal;[505] but the “Geraldines,” as the kindred of Maurice Fitz-Gerald called themselves, seem to have at once accepted their sentence of exile and resolved to hold by their swords alone the lands which those swords had won.[506]

The hostility of the Ostmen had apparently ended with Hasculf’s defeat; thenceforth they seem to have made common cause with the new-comers in whom they were perhaps already beginning to recognize the stirrings of kindred blood. But, on the other hand, the position of Earl Richard and his comrades had been seriously weakened by Dermot’s death. The king of Leinster’s devise of his kingdom to his son-in-law was, like the grants which he had made to the Geraldines and like his own homage to King Henry, void in Irish law. In Irish eyes his death removed the last shadow of excuse for the presence of the strangers on Irish soil; their allies rapidly fell away;[507] and by midsummer the whole country rose against them as one man. Roderic O’Conor mustered the forces of the north; Archbishop Laurence of Dublin, whose family occupied an influential position in Leinster, called up the tribes of the south; while a squadron of thirty ships was hired from Jarl Godred of Man.[508] The aim of the expedition was toii.109 blockade Dublin, whither Earl Richard had now returned, and where almost all the leaders of the invasion, except Robert Fitz-Stephen and Hervey of Mountmorris, were now gathered together. The whole Irish land-force amounted to sixty thousand men; half of these were under the immediate command of Roderic, encamped at Castle-Knock;[509] Mac-Dunlevy, the chieftain of Uladh, planted his banner on the old battle-field of Clontarf;[510] Donell O’Brien, the king of North Munster, posted himself at Kilmainham; and Murtogh Mac-Murrough, a brother of Dermot, whom Roderic had set up as king of Leinster in 1167, took up his position at Dalkey.[511] To these were added, for the northern division, the men of Breffny and of East Meath under Tighernan O’Ruark, those of Oiriel or southern Ulster under Murtogh O’Carroll,[512] and those of West Meath under Murtogh O’Melaghlin; while the archbishop’s call had brought up the whole strength of Leinster except the men of Wexford and Kinsellagh;[513] and even these, as the sequel proved, were preparing to fight the same battle on other ground.

For nearly two months[514] the English knights were thus blockaded in Dublin. Their sole hope of relief was in Robert Fitz-Stephen, who had been left in command at Wexford. They were all but starving when Donell Kavanagh, a half-brother of Eva Mac-Murrough and a devoted adherent of her husband, slipped into the city with tidings that Wexford had risen; Robert Fitz-Stephen was blockaded in the little fort of Carrick by the townsfolk and the men of Kinsellagh, to the number of three thousand; unless he could be succoured within three days, all would be over with him and his men.[515] Earl Richard at once calledii.110 a council of war. It comprised nearly all the leaders of the English and Welsh forces in Ireland:—Richard of Striguil himself; Maurice Fitz-Gerald with three of his gallant nephews, Meiler Fitz-Henry, Miles Fitz-David and Raymond the Fat; Miles Cogan, the captor of Dublin and its chief defender in the recent siege; Maurice de Prendergast,[516] who two years before had thrown up the adventure and gone home in disgust at the faithlessness of his allies,[517] but had returned, it seems, in Earl Richard’s train, and was yet to leave, alone of all the invading band, an honoured memory among the Irish people;[518] and some fourteen others.[519] They decided upon sending Maurice de Prendergast and Archbishop Laurence to Roderic with an offer of surrender on condition that Richard of Striguil should hold the kingdom of Leinster under Roderic as overlord. Roderic rejected the proposal with scorn; the knights might hold what the earlier pirates had held—Dublin, Waterford and Wexford; not another rood of Irish land should be granted to the earl and his company; and if they refused these terms, Dublin should be stormed on the morrow.[520] That afternoon the little garrison—scarce six hundred in all[521]—sallied forth and surprized Roderic’s camp while he and his men were bathing; Roderic himself escaped with great difficulty; fifteen hundred Irishmen were slain, many of them perishing in the water;ii.111 while at sunset the victors returned, after a long pursuit, with scarcely a man missing, and laden with provisions enough to supply all Dublin for a year.[522] The rest of the besieging army dispersed at once, and the very next morning Earl Richard was free to set out for the relief of Robert Fitz-Stephen.[523]

He was however already too late. Three thousand men of Wexford and Kinsellagh, finding that they could make no impression by fair means upon Robert Fitz-Stephen shut up in the fort of Carrick with five knights and a handful of archers, at length had recourse to fraud. Two bishops and some monks were made to stand under the walls of the fort and swear upon relics brought for the purpose that Dublin was taken, the earl and his comrades slain, and Roderic on the march to Wexford at the head of his victorious host. On a promise of liberty to escape to Wales[524] Robert in his despair surrendered, only to see his little band of humbler followers slaughtered to a man, and himself and his five knights cast into chains. The men of Wexford then fired their town and took refuge with their captives on the neighbouring island of Beg-Erin,[525] whence they sent word to Richard of Striguil that if he dared to approach them he should immediately receive the heads of his six friends.[526] Notwithstanding this disaster at Wexford, and the failure of a plot to entrap the chief of Ossory—a well-deserved failure, due to the loyalty of Maurice de Prendergast[527]—the invaders were rapidly gaining ground. The king of North Munster, who was married to Eva’s sister, again forsook Roderic and made alliance with his English brother-in-law;[528] an attempt made by Tighernan O’Ruark to renew the siege of Dublin ended in failure;[529] and at last Murtogh of Kinsellaghii.112 was reduced to make a surrender of his principality into Richard’s hands and accept a re-grant of it from him as overlord, while Donell Kavanagh was invested on like terms with the remaining portion of Leinster.[530]

The earl’s triumphs, however, met with an abrupt check from over sea. His uncle Hervey of Mountmorris, who had gone to plead his cause with the king after the failure of Raymond’s mission, returned to Waterford[531] with tidings that Henry himself was on his way to Ireland and required the self-styled earl of Leinster to go and speak with him without delay. Richard hurried over to Wales,[532] met Henry on the border,[533] and was forgiven on condition that he should surrender Dublin and the other coast towns absolutely into the king’s hands and do him homage and fealty for the rest of Leinster;[534] he then accompanied Henry into Pembrokeshire;[535] where the royal fleet was assembling in Milford Haven. It consisted of four hundred ships,[536] carrying a force of about four thousand men, of whom some five hundred were knights and the rest archers, mounted and unmounted.[537] The kingii.113 embarked on the evening of Saturday, October 16, and landed next day at Croch, eight miles from Waterford.[538] On the morrow, S. Luke’s day, he entered the town of Waterford;[539] there he was met by his seneschal William Fitz-Aldhelm, his constable Humfrey de Bohun, Hugh de Lacy, Robert Fitz-Bernard, and some other officers of his household whom he had sent over to prepare for his coming.[540] The Irish of the district and the Ostmen of the town, in the person of their chieftain Ragnald, made submission to him as their sovereign;[541] while Richard of Striguil formally surrendered the place into the king’s hands and did homage to him for the earldom of Leinster.[542] The men of Wexford now, according to an agreement which they had made with Henry while he was waiting for a wind at Pembroke,[543] brought their captive Robert Fitz-Stephen to his sovereign’s feet, to be by him dealt with as a rebel and a traitor. Henry loaded him with reproaches and imprisoned him afresh, but his anger was more assumed than real, and the captive wasii.114 soon released.[544] The submission of the English adventurers was followed by that of the Irish princes. Dermot MacCarthy, king of Cork or South Munster, was the first of them who came to Henry’s feet at Waterford, swore him fealty, gave hostages and promised tribute.[545] On November 1[546] Henry advanced to Lismore, and thence, two days later, to Cashel, where at the passage of the Suir he was met by the king of Limerick or of Northern Munster, Donell O’Brien, with offers of tribute and obedience. The lesser chieftains of southern Ireland followed the example of the two kings; in three weeks from his arrival all Munster was at his feet, and its coast-towns, Wexford, Waterford, Limerick and Cork, were all in the custody of his own officers.[547] At Martinmas he reached Dublin;[548] before Christmas he received hostages from all the princes of Leinster and Meath, from Tighernan O’Ruark of Breffny, from O’Carroll of Oiriel, and from the king of Uladh or eastern Ulster;[549] his new vassals built himii.115 a dwelling of wattle or wicker-work, after the manner of their country, outside the walls of Dublin, and there in their midst he held his Christmas court.[550]

Early in November two royal chaplains had been despatched to summon the Irish bishops to a council and claim their submission.[551] We hear not a word of Pope Adrian’s bull; but we can hardly doubt that its existence and its contents were in some way or other certified to the Irish prelates before, in response to the royal mandate, they met in council at Cashel in the first weeks of 1172.[552] The archbishop of Armagh absented himself on the plea of extreme age and infirmity;[553] all his episcopal brethren, however, made full submission to Henry, pledged themselves to conform in all things to the pattern of the English Church,[554] gave written promises to support the English king and his heirs as lawful sovereigns of Ireland,[555] and joined with himii.116 in sending to Rome a report of his proceedings and their own.[556]

In all Ireland the king of Connaught was now the only ruler, spiritual or temporal, who had not submitted to Henry.[557] Trusting to the inaccessible nature of his country,[558] Roderic had at first refused all dealings with the invader, declaring that he himself was the sole rightful monarch of Ireland.[559] It seems however that he afterwards came to a meeting with William Fitz-Aldhelm and Hugh de Lacy by the banks of the Shannon, on the frontier of Connaught and Meath, and there promised tribute and fealty like his fellow-kings.[560] The promise was however worthless until confirmed by his personal homage; and this Henry soon perceived was only to be extorted at the sword’s point. The impossibility of fighting to any advantage in the wet Irish winter compelled him to postpone the attempt until the spring;[561] and when spring came he found that his intended campaign must be abandoned altogether. From the day when he left Milford he had received not one word of tidings from any part of his dominions.[562] This total isolation, welcome at first as a relief from the load of caresii.117 which indeed he had purposely left behind him,[563] became at the end of nineteen weeks a source of almost unbearable anxiety. On March 1 he removed from Dublin to Wexford;[564] there for nearly a month he remained eagerly watching for a ship from England; none came until after Mid-Lent,[565] and then it was laden with such ill news that he could only take such hasty measures as were possible at the moment for maintaining his hold upon Ireland, and prepare to hurry out of it as soon as the wind would carry him.[566] Richard of Striguil was suffered to remain at Kildare[567] as earl of Leinster; the general direction of government and administration throughout the king’s Irish domains was intrusted to Hugh de Lacy,[568] who had already received a grant of Meath in fee,[569] and who was also left in command of the citadel of Dublin,[570] with a garrison of twenty knights, among whom were Maurice Fitz-Gerald[571] and Robert Fitz-Stephen.[572] The grants of territory made by Dermot to the half-brothers were of course annulled; Waterford and Wexford were both garrisoned and placed in charge of an officer appointed by the king;[573] and in each of these towns a fortress was either erected or repaired by his orders.[574]

A better mode of securing his authority in Dublin was probably suggested to him by the ravages which war andii.118 famine had made among its population. Eight years before he had taken the burghers of Bristol, so long the medium of trading intercourse between England and Ireland, under his especial patronage and protection.[575] He now granted to them the city of Dublin, to colonize and to hold of him and his heirs by the same free customs which they enjoyed in their own town of Bristol.[576] It is plain that Henry was already aiming at something far other than a mere military conquest of Ireland; and the long and varied list of English names, from all parts of the country, which is found in a roll of the Dublin citizens only a few years later,[577] shews how willingly his plans were taken up, not only at Bristol but throughout his realm, by the class to which he chiefly and rightly trusted for aid in their execution. Unluckily, they were scarcely formed when he was obliged to leave their developement to other hands; and the consequence was a half success which proved in the end to be far worse than total failure. On Easter night[578] he sailed from Wexford;[579] next day he landed at Portfinnan, hard by S. David’s;[580] before the octave was out he had hurried through Southii.119 Wales to Newport;[581] in a few days more he was at Portsmouth;[582] and before Rogation-tide he was once more in Normandy, ready to face the bursting of a storm whose consequences were to overshadow all his remaining years and to preclude all chance of his return to complete his conquest of Ireland.


ii.120

CHAPTER IV.
HENRY AND THE BARONS.
1166–1175.

For the last eight years Henry had been literally, throughout his English realm, over all persons and all causes supreme. From the hour of Thomas’s flight, not a hand, not a voice was lifted to oppose or to question his will; England lay passive before him; the time seemed to have come when he might work out at leisure and without fear of check his long-cherished plans of legal, judicial and administrative reform. In the execution of those plans, however, he was seriously hampered by the indirect consequences of the ecclesiastical quarrel. One of these was his own prolonged absence from England, which was made necessary by the hostility of France, and which compelled him to be content with setting his reforms in operation and then leave their working to other hands and other heads, without the power of superintending it and watching its effects with his own eyes, during nearly six years. He had now to learn that the enemy with whom he had been striving throughout those years was after all not the most serious obstacle in his way;—that the most threatening danger to his scheme of government still lay, as it had lain at his accession, in that temper of the baronage which it had been his first kingly task to bring under subjection. The victory which he had gained over Hugh Bigod in 1156 was real, but it was not final. The spirit of feudal insubordination was checked, not crushed; it was only waiting an opportunity to lift itsii.121 head once more; and with the strife that raged around S. Thomas of Canterbury the opportunity came.

Henry’s attitude towards the barons during these years had been of necessity a somewhat inconsistent one. He never lost sight of the main thread of policy which he had inherited from his grandfather: a policy which may be defined as the consolidation of kingly power in his own hands, through the repression of the feudal nobles and the raising of the people at large into a condition of greater security and prosperity, and of closer connexion with and dependence upon the Crown, as a check and counterpoise to the territorial influence of the feudataries. On the other hand, his quarrel with the primate had driven him to throw himself on the support of those very feudataries whom it was his true policy to repress, and had brought him into hostility with the ecclesiastical interest which ought to have been, and which actually had been until now, his surest and most powerful aid. If it was what we may perhaps venture to call the feudal side of the ecclesiastical movement—its introduction of a separate system of law and jurisdiction, traversing and impeding the course of his own uniform regal administration—which roused the suspicions of the king, it was its anti-feudal side, its championship of the universal rights and liberties of men in the highest and widest sense, that provoked the jealousy of the nobles. This was a point which Henry, blinded for the moment by his natural instinct of imperiousness, seems to have overlooked when at the council of Northampton he stooped to avail himself of the assistance of the barons to crush the primate. They doubtless saw what he failed to see, that he was crushing not so much his own rival as theirs. The cause of the Church was bound up with that of the people, and both alike were closely knit to that of the Crown. Sceptre and crozier once parted, the barons might strive with the former at an advantage such as they had never had while Lanfranc stood beside William and Anselm beside Henry I., such as they never could have had if Thomas had remained standing by the side of Henry II.[583]

ii.122

As yet, however, there was no token of the strife to come. In February 1166, two years after the publication of the Constitutions of Clarendon, Henry assembled another council at the same place and thence issued an ordinance[584] for carrying out a reform in the method of bringing to justice criminals in general, similar to that which he had in the Constitutions sought to apply to criminals of one particular class. By the Assize of Clarendon it was enacted that the king’s justices and the sheriffs should in every shire throughout the kingdom make inquiry concerning all crimes therein committed “since our lord the king was king.”[585] The method of their investigations was that of inquest by sworn recognitors chosen from among the “lawful men” of each hundred and township, and bound by oath to speak the truth according to their knowledge of the fact in question. This mode of legal inquiry had been introduced into England by William the Conqueror for fiscal purposes, such as the taking of the Domesday survey, and its employment for similar objects was continued by his successors. Henry II. had in the early years of his reign applied the same principle to the uses of civil litigation by an ordinance known as the “Great Assize,” whereby disputes concerning the possession of land might, if the litigants chose, be settled before the justices of the king’s court by the unanimous oath of twelve lawful knights chosen according to a prescribed form from among those dwelling in the district where the land lay, and therefore competent to swear to the truth or falsehood of the claim.[586] This proceeding seems toii.123 be assumed as already in use by the ninth Constitution of Clarendon, which ordains its application to disputes concerning Church lands.[587] The Assize of Clarendon aimed at bringing criminals to justice by the help of the same machinery. It decreed that in every hundred of every shire inquest should be made by means of twelve lawful men of the hundred and four from each township, who should be sworn to denounce every man known in their district as a robber, thief or murderer, or a harbourer of such; on their presentment the accused persons were to be arrested by the sheriff, and kept by him in safe custody till they could be brought before the itinerant justices, to undergo the ordeal of water and receive legal punishment according to its results.[588] The inquest was to be taken and the session of the justices held in full shire-court; no personal privileges of any kind were to exempt any qualified member of the court from his duty of attendance and of service on the jury of recognitors if required;[589] and no territorial franchise or private jurisdiction, whether of chartered town or feudal “honour,” was to shelter a criminal thus accused from the pursuit of the sheriffs on the authority of the justices.[590]

As was the case with most of Henry’s reforms, none of the methods of procedure adopted in this Assize were new inventions. Not only had the inquest by sworn recognitors been in use for civil purposes ever since the Norman conquest; it may even be that the germ of a jury of presentment in criminal cases, which in its modern shape appears for the first time in the Assize of Clarendon, is to be traced yet further back, to an ordinance of Æthelred II., whereby the twelve senior thegns in every wapentake were made to swear that they would “accuse no innocent man nor conceal any guilty one.”[591] The mission of itinerant justices—derived in principle from the early days of English kingship, when the sovereign himself perambulated his whole realm,ii.124 hearing and deciding whatever cause came before him as he passed along—had been employed by Henry I., and revived by Henry II. immediately after his accession. A visitation of the greater part of England had been made by two of the chief officers of the Curia Regis in the first year of his reign, and again in the second; another circuit seems to have been made in 1159 by William Fitz-John; and in 1163 Alan de Neville held pleas of the forest in Oxfordshire, while the justiciar himself, Richard de Lucy, made a journey into Cumberland to hold the pleas of the Crown there, for the first time since the district had passed into the hands of the king of Scots.[592] From the date of the Assize of Clarendon, however, these journeys became regular and general,[593] and the work of the judges employed on them became far more extensive and important.

The first visitation under the assize was at once begun by Richard de Lucy and Geoffrey de Mandeville, earl of Essex;[594] and the Pipe Roll of the year furnishes some indications of its immediate results. The sums credited to the treasury for the pleas of the Crown reach a far greater amount than in the earlier rolls, and its receipts are further swelled by the goods and chattels of criminals condemned under the assize,[595] which were explicitly declared forfeit to the king.[596] The clause binding all qualified persons to be ready to serve on the juries was strictly enforced; one attempt to evade it was punished with a fine of five marks.[597] Another clause, enjoining upon the sheriffs the construction and repair of gaols for the detention of criminals, was carried into effect with equal vigour.[598] The work of the two justiciars was apparently not completed till the summer of 1167.[599] In that year pleas of the forest were held throughout theii.125 country by Alan de Neville; and in 1168 seven barons of the Exchequer made a general visitation of the shires for the collection of an aid on the marriage of the king’s eldest daughter.[600] This last was primarily a fiscal journey; the aid itself was a strictly feudal impost, assessed at one mark on every knight’s fee.[601] It was however levied in a remarkable manner. The Domesday survey, which by a few modifications in practice had been made to serve as the rate-book of the whole kingdom for eighty years, was at last found inadequate for the present purpose. A royal writ was therefore addressed to all the tenants-in-chief, requiring from them an account of the knights’ fees which they held and the services due upon them, whether under the “old infeoffment” of the time of Henry I., or under the “new infeoffment” since the resettlement of the country by his grandson.[602] The answers were enrolled in what is known as the Black Book of the Exchequer[603] and the aid was levied in accordance with their contents. The whole process occupied a considerable time; the preparations seem to have begun shortly after Matilda’s betrothal, for we hear of the purchase of “a hutch for keeping the barons’ letters concerning their knights” as early as 1166,[604] yet the collection of the money was not finished till the summer of 1169,[605] a year and a half after her marriage. The labours of the barons employed in it were however not confined to this one end; as usual, their travels were turned to account for judicial purposes,[606] and the system begun by the assize of Clarendon was by no means suffered to fall into disuse.

ii.126

It was too soon as yet for the beneficial results of these measures to become evident to the people at large; but it was not too soon for them to excite the resentment of the barons. The stringency with which in the assize of Clarendon every claim of personal exemption or special jurisdiction was made to give way before the all-embracing authority of the king’s supreme justice shewed plainly that Henry still clave to the policy which had led him to insist upon the restoration of alienated lands and the surrender of unlicensed castles in England, to lose no opportunity of exercising his ducal right to seize and garrison the castles of his vassals in Normandy[607]—in a word, to check and thwart in every possible way the developement of the feudal principle. The assessment of the aid for his daughter’s marriage seems indeed at first glance to have been based on a principle wholly favourable to the barons, for it apparently left the determination of each landowner’s liabilities wholly in his own hands. But the commissioners who spent nearly two years in collecting the aid had ample power and ample opportunity to check any irregularities which might have occurred in the returns; and the impost undoubtedly pressed very heavily upon the feudal tenants as a body. Its proceeds seem, however, not to have come up to Henry’s expectations, and the unsatisfactory reports which reached him from England of the general results of his legal measures led him to suspect some failure in duty on the part of those who were charged with their execution.

A large share of responsibility rested with the sheriffs; and the sheriffs were still for the most part, as they had been in his grandfather’s days, the chief landowners in their respective shires, men of great local importance, and only too likely to have at once the will and the power to defeat the ends of the very measures which by their official position they were called upon to administer. Henry therefore on his return to England at Easter 1170 summarily deposed all sheriffs of counties and bailiffs of royal demesnes, pending an inquisition into all the details of their official conduct since his own departure over sea four years ago. The inquiryii.127 was intrusted not to any of the usual members of the King’s Court and Exchequer, but to a large body of commissioners specially chosen for the purpose from the higher ranks of both clergy and laity.[608] These were to take pledges of all the sheriffs and bailiffs that they would be ready to appear before the king and make redress on an appointed day; an oath was also to be exacted from all barons, knights and freemen in every shire that they would answer truthfully and without respect of persons to all questions put to them by the commissioners in the king’s name.[609]

The subject-matter of these inquiries, as laid down in the king’s instructions, embraced far more than the conduct of the sheriffs. Not only were the commissioners to examine into all particulars of the sums received by the sheriffs and bailiffs in the discharge of their functions, and the manner and grounds of their acquisition,[610] and into the disposal of all chattels and goods forfeited under the assize of Clarendon; they were also to ascertain whether the collection of the aid pour fille marier had been honestly conducted; they were at the same time to investigate the administration of the forests[611] and the condition of the royal demesnes;[612] to find out and report any persons who had failed to do homage to the king or his son;[613] and they were moreover to make inquisition into the proceedings of all the special courts of the various franchises, whether held by archbishop or bishop, abbot, earl or baron, as fully and minutely as into those of the ordinary hundreds.[614] Only two months were allowed to the commissioners for their work, which nothing but their great number can have enabled them to execute in the time. Unhappily, the report which they brought up to the king on S. Barnabas’s day is lost, and we have no record of itsii.128 results save in relation to one point: out of twenty-seven sheriffs, only seven were allowed to retain their offices. The rest, who were mostly local magnates owing their importance rather to their territorial and family influence than to their connexion with the court, were replaced by men of inferior rank, and of whom all but four were officials of the Exchequer.[615]

This significant proof of Henry’s determination to pursue his anti-feudal policy was followed up next year by the last step in that resumption of alienated demesnes which in England had been virtually completed thirteen years ago, but which had been enforced only by slower degrees on the other side of the channel. In 1171 Henry ordered a general inquisition into the extent and condition of the demesne lands and forests held by his grandfather in Normandy, and into the encroachments since made upon them by the barons; and we are told that the restitution which resulted from the inquiry almost doubled his ducal revenue.[616] The endurance of the barons was now almost at an end; and moreover, their opportunity had now come. From that same council at Westminster whence the decree had gone forth for the inquest of sheriffs, there had gone forth also the summons for the crowning of the young king; that other assembly which on S. Barnabas’s day saw the deposition of the delinquent officers saw also, three days later, the new and dangerously suggestive spectacle of two kings at once in the land. When, six months later still, the first consequences of that coronation appeared in the murder of S. Thomas, the barons could not but feel that their hour was at hand. His regal dignity no longer all his own, but voluntarily shared with another—his regal unction washed out in that stream of martyr’s blood which cut him off from the support of the Church—Henry seemed to be left alone and defenceless in the face of his foes. The year which he spent in conquering Ireland was a breathing-space for them as well as for him. They used it to adapt to their purposes the weapon which he had so lately forged for his own defence; they found aii.129 rallying-point and a pretext for their designs against him in the very son whom he had left to cover his retreat and supply his place at home.

The younger Henry had passed over to Normandy just before his father quitted it, in July 1171.[617] There he apparently stayed with his mother and her younger children till the opening of the next year, when he and his wife went to England, and there remained as titular king and queen until his father’s return from Ireland.[618] The youth’s kingship, however, was scarcely more than nominal; in his presence no less than in his absence, the real work of government in England was done by the justiciars; and his own personal interests lay chiefly beyond the sea. The influences which surrounded him there were those of his father’s open or secret foes:—of his wife’s father, King Louis of France, of his own mother, Queen Eleanor, her kindred and her people; and Eleanor had ceased to be a loyal vice-gerent for the husband who had by this time forfeited his claims to wifely affection from her. She seems to have taken for her political confidant her uncle, Ralf of Faye[619]—one of the many faithless barons of Poitou; and it is said to have been at her instigation that Ralf and an Angevin baron, Hugh of Ste.-Maure, profited by Henry’s absence in Ireland to whisper to her eldest son that a crown was worthless without the reality of kingly power, and that it was time for him to assert his claim to the substance of which his father had given him only the shadow.[620] Young Henry, now seventeen years old, listened but too readily to such suggestions; and it was a rumour of his undutiful temper, coupled significantly with a rumour of growing discontent among the barons, that called Henry back from Ireland[621] and made him carry his son with him to Normandy[622] in the spring of 1172. After the elder king’s reconciliation with the Church, however, andii.130 the second coronation of the younger one, the danger seemed to have subsided; and in November Henry, to complete the pacification, allowed his son to accompany his girl-wife on a visit to her father, the king of France.[623] When they returned,[624] the young king at once confronted his father with a demand to be put in possession of his heritage, or at least of some portion of it—England, Normandy, or Anjou—where he might dwell as an independent sovereign with his queen.[625] The father refused.[626] He had never intended to make his sons independent rulers of the territories allotted to them; Richard and Geoffrey indeed were too young for such an arrangement to be possible in their cases; and the object of the eldest son’s crowning had been simply to give him such an inchoate royalty as would enable his father to employ him as a colleague and representative in case of need, and to feel assured of his ultimate succession to the English throne. The king’s plans for the distribution of his territories and for the establishment of his children had succeeded well thus far. He had secured Britanny in Geoffrey’s name before he quitted Gaul in 1171; and a month after his return, on Trinity Sunday (June 10) 1172, Richard was enthroned as duke of Aquitaine according to ancient custom in the abbot’s chair in the church of S. Hilary at Poitiers.[627] One child, indeed, the youngest of all, was still what his father had called him at his birth—“John Lackland.”[628] Even for John, however, though he was scarcely five years old,[629] a politic marriage was already in view.

ii.131

One of the many branches of Henry’s continental policy was the cultivation of an alliance with those small but important states which lay on the border-land between Italy, Germany, and that old Aquitanic Gaul over which he claimed dominion in his wife’s name. The most important of these was the county of Maurienne, a name which in strictness represents only a small mountainous region encircled to east and south by the Graian and Cottian Alps, and to west and north by another chain of mountains bordering the outermost edges of two river-valleys, those of the Isère and the Arc, which again are severed from each other by a line of lesser heights running through the heart of the district. In the southern valley, that of the Arc, stood the capital of the county, S. Jean-de-Maurienne, the seat of a bishopric from the dedication of whose cathedral church the town itself took its name. In the northern valley, at the foot of the Little S. Bernard, some few miles above the source of the Isère, the counts of Maurienne were advocates of the abbey of S. Maurice, which long treasured the sacred symbol of the old Burgundian royalty, the spear of its patron saint. The power of the counts of Maurienne, however, was not bounded by the narrow circle of hills which stood like an impregnable rampart round about their native land. On the shore of the lake of Bourget they held Chambéry, guarding the pass of Les Echelles, through which southern Gaul communicated with the German lands around the lake of Geneva; the county of Geneva itself was almost surrounded by their territories, for on its western side their sway extended from Chambéry across the valley of the Rhône northward as far as Belley, while eastward they held the whole southern shore of the lake. To north-east of Maurienne, again, the great highway which led from Geneva and from the German lands beyond it into Italy, through the vale of Aosta by the passes of the Pennine Alps or up the valley of the Isère by S. Maurice under the foot of the Little S. Bernard, was inii.132 their hands; for Aosta itself and the whole land as far as Castiglione on the Dora Baltea belonged to them. Across the Graian Alps, their possession of the extreme outposts of the Italian border, Susa and Turin, gave them the title of “Marquises of Italy,”[630] and the command of the great highway between Italy and southern Gaul by the valley of the Durance and through the gap which parts the Cottian from the Maritime Alps beneath the foot of the Mont Genèvre; while yet further south, on either side of the Maritime Alps where they curve eastward towards the Gulf of Genoa, Chiusa, Rochetta and Aspromonte all formed part of their territories.[631] In one word, they held the keys of every pass between Italy and north-western Europe, from the Great S. Bernard to the Col di Tenda. Nominally subject to the Emperor in his character of king of Burgundy, they really possessed the control over his most direct lines of communication with his Imperial capital; while the intercourse of western Europe with Rome lay almost wholly at their mercy;[632] and far away at the opposite extremity of Aquitania the present count Humbert of Maurienne seems to have claimed, though he did not actually hold, one of the keys of another great mountain-barrier, in the Pyrenean county of Roussillon on the Spanish March.[633]

In 1171[634] Henry’s diplomatic relations with the Alpine princes bore fruit in a proposal from Humbert of Maurienne for the marriage of his eldest daughter with the king’s youngest son. Humbert himself had no son, and by the terms of the marriage-contract his territories, Alpine and Pyrenean, were to be settled upon his daughter and herii.133 future husband,[635] in return for five thousand marks of English silver.[636] The contract was signed and ratified before Christmas 1172,[637] and soon afterwards Henry summoned his eldest son to join him in a journey into Auvergne for a personal meeting with Humbert. They reached Montferrand before Candlemas, and were there met not only by Humbert and his daughter but also by the count of Vienne,[638] the count of Toulouse and the king of Aragon.[639] How high the English king’s influence had now risen in these southern lands may be judged by the fact that not only King Alfonso of Aragon, a son of his old ally Raymond-Berengar, but also his former enemy Raymond of Toulouse, could agree to choose him as arbiter in a quarrel between themselves.[640] Raymond in truth saw in Henry’s alliances with Aragon and Maurienne a death-blow to his own hopes of maintaining the independence of Toulouse. Hemmed in alike to south and east by close allies of the English king whose own duchy of Aquitaine surrounded almost the whole of its north-western border, the house of St.-Gilles felt that it was no longer possible to resist his claim to overlordship over its territories. Henry carried his guests back with him to Limoges; there he settled the dispute between Raymond and Alfonso; and there Raymond did homage to the two Henrys for Toulouse,[641] promising to do the like at Whitsuntide to Richard as duke of Aquitaine, and pledging himself to military service and yearly tribute.[642]

ii.134

The infant heiress of Maurienne was now placed under the care of her intended father-in-law;[643] Henry’s political schemes seemed to have all but reached their fulfilment, when suddenly Count Humbert asked what provision Henry intended to make for the little landless bridegroom to whom he himself was giving such a well-dowered bride.[644] That question stirred up a trouble which was never again to be laid wholly to rest till the child who was its as yet innocent cause had broken his father’s heart. Henry proposed to endow John with the castles and territories of Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau.[645] But the Angevin lands, with which the younger Henry had been formally invested, could not be dismembered without his consent; and this he angrily refused.[646] The mere request, however, kindled his smouldering discontent into a flame[647] which seems to have been fanned rather than quenched by the suggestions of Eleanor; yet so blind was the indulgent father that, if we may venture to believe the tale, nothing but a warning from Raymond of Toulouse opened his eyes to the danger which threatened him from the plots of his own wife and children. Then, by Raymond’s advice, he started off at once with a small escort, under pretence of a hunting-party,[648] and carried his son back towards Normandy with the utmost possible speed. They reached Chinon about Mid-Lent; thence young Henry slipped away secretly by night to Alençon; his father flew after him, but when he reached Alençon on the next evening the son was already at Argentan; and thence before cock-crow he fled again over the French border, to the court of his father-in-law King Louis.[649] Henry in vain sent messengersii.135 to recall him: “Your master is king no longer—here stands the king of the English!” was the reply of Louis to the envoys.[650]

Henry at once made a circuit of his Norman fortresses, especially those which lay along the French border, put them in a state of defence, and issued orders to all his castellans in Anjou, Britanny, Aquitaine and England, to do the like.[651] Before Lent had closed the old prophecy which Henry’s enemies were never weary of casting in his teeth was fulfilled: his own “lion-cubs” were all openly seeking to make him their prey.[652] Whether sent by their mother, with whom they had been left behind in Aquitaine, or secretly fetched by their eldest brother in person,[653] both Richard and Geoffrey now joined him at the French court.[654] Eleanor herself was caught trying to follow them disguised as a man, and was by her husband’s order placed in strict confinement.[655] Louis meanwhile openly espoused the cause of the rebels; in a great council at Paris he and his nobles publicly swore to help the young king and his brothers against theirii.136 father to the utmost of their power, while the three brothers on their part pledged themselves to be faithful to Louis, and to make no terms with their father save through his mediation and with his consent.[656] Young Henry at once began to purchase allies among the French feudataries and supporters among the English and Norman barons, by making grants of pensions and territories on both sides of the sea: grants for which the recipients did him homage and fealty,[657] and which he caused to be put in writing and sealed with a new seal made for him by order of Louis[658]—his own chancellor, Richard Barre, having loyally carried back the original one to the elder king who had first intrusted it to his keeping.[659]

Nearly three months passed away before war actually broke out; but when the outburst came, the list of those who were engaged in it shews that the whole Angevin empire had become a vast hotbed of treason; though, on the other hand, it shews also that the treason was almost entirely confined to one especial class. Its local distribution, too, is significant. The restless barons of Aquitaine, still smarting under their defeat of 1169, were but too eager, at the instigation of their duchess and their newly-crowned duke, to renew their struggle against the king. Foremost among them were, as before, the count of Angoulême,[660] the nobles of Saintonge, and Geoffrey of Lusignan, beside whom there stood this time his young brother Guy, now to begin in this ignoble strife a career destined to strange vicissitudes in far-off Palestine.[661] The heart of the old Angevin lands, Anjou itself, was in the main loyal; we find there the names of only five traitors; and three of these, Hugh, William and Jocelyn of Ste.-Maure, came of a rebellious house, andii.137 were only doing over again what their predecessors had done in the days of Geoffrey Plantagenet’s youth.[662] The same may be said of Henry’s native land, Maine; this too furnished only seven barons to the traitor’s cause; and five of these again are easily accounted for. It was almost matter of course that in any rising against an Angevin count the lord of Sablé should stand side by side with the lord of Ste.-Maure. Brachard of Lavardin had a fellow-feeling with undutiful sons, for he was himself at strife with his own father, Count John of Vendôme, a faithful ally of Henry II.; the same was probably the case of Brachard’s brother Guy.[663] Bernard of La Ferté represented a family whose position in their great castle on the Huisne, close to the Norman border, was almost as independent as that of their neighbours the lords of Bellême, just across the frontier. Hugh of Sillé bore a name which in an earlier stage of Cenomannian history—in the days of the “commune,” just a hundred years before—had been almost a by-word for feudal arrogance; and whether or not he inherited anything of his ancestor’s spirit, he had a personal cause for enmity to the king if, as is probable, he was akin to a certain Robert of Sillé, whose share in the southern revolt of 1169 was punished by Henry, in defiance of treaties, with an imprisonment so strict and cruel that it was speedily ended by death.[664]

Across the western border of Maine, in Geoffrey’s duchy, Ralf of Fougères was once more at the head of a band of discontented Breton nobles, chiefly, it seems, belonging to that old seed-plot of disturbance, the county of Nantes.ii.138[665] The true centre and focus of revolt, however, was as of old the duchy of Normandy. Almost all the great names which have been conspicuous in the earlier risings of the feudal baronage against the repressive policy of William and of Henry I. re-appear among the partizans of the young king. The house of Montfort on the Rille was represented by that Robert of Montfort[666] whose challenge to Henry of Essex ten years before had deprived the king of one of his most trusty servants. The other and more famous house of Montfort—the house of Almeric and of Bertrada—was also, now as ever, in opposition in the person of its head, Count Simon of Evreux.[667] He, like his fellow-traitor the count of Eu,[668] to whom, as after-events shewed, may be added the count of Aumale, represented one of those junior branches of the Norman ducal house which always resented most bitterly the determination of the dukes to concentrate all political power in their own hands. The counts of Ponthieu[669] and of Alençon[670] inherited the spirit as well as the territories of Robert of Bellême. Count Robert of Meulan[671] was the son of Waleran who in 1123 had rebelled against Henry I., and the head of the Norman branch of the great house of Beaumont, which for more than half a century had stood in the foremost rank of the baronage on both sides of the sea. The chief of the English Beaumonts was his cousin and namesake of Leicester, soon to prove himself an unworthy son of the faithful justiciar who had died in 1168; while the countess of Leicester, a woman of a spirit quite as determined and masculine as her husband’s, was the heiress of the proud old Norman house of Grandmesnil[672]—a granddaughter of that Ivo of Grandmesnil who had been banished by Henry I. for trying to bring into England the Norman practice of private warfare. Of the other English rebels, Hugh of Chester[673] was a son of the fickle Ralf, and had atii.139 stake besides his palatine earldom in England his hereditary viscounties of Bayeux and Avranches on the other side of the Channel. Hugh Bigod, the aged earl of Norfolk, untaught by his experiences of feudal anarchy in Stephen’s day and undeterred by his humiliation in 1157, was ready to break his faith again for a paltry bribe offered him by the young king.[674] Earl Robert of Ferrers, Hamo de Massey, Richard de Morville, and the whole remnant of the great race of Mowbray—Geoffrey of Coutances, Roger de Mowbray and his two sons—were all men whose grandfathers had “come over with the Conqueror,” and determined to fight to the uttermost for their share in the spoils of the conquest. All these men were, by training and sympathy, if not actually by their own personal and territorial interests, more Norman than English; and the same may probably be said of the rebels of the second rank, among whom, beside the purely Norman lords of Anneville and Lessay in the Cotentin, of St.-Hilaire on the Breton frontier, of Falaise, Dives, La Haye and Orbec in Calvados, of Tillières, Ivry and Gaillon along the French border, we find the names of Ralf of Chesney, Gerald Talbot, Jordan Ridel, Thomas de Muschamp, Saher de Quincy the younger, Simon of Marsh, Geoffrey Fitz-Hamon, and Jocelyn Crispin, besides one which in after-days was to gain far other renown—William the Marshal.[675]

ii.140

One other rebel there was who stood indeed on a different footing from all the rest, and whose defection had a wider political significance. The king of Scots—William the Lion, brother and successor of Malcolm IV.—had long been suspected of a secret alliance with France against his English cousin and overlord. The younger Henry now offered him the cession of all Northumberland as far as the Tyne for himself, and for his brother David confirmation in the earldom of Huntingdon,[676] with a grant of the earldom of Cambridge in addition, in return for the homage and services of both brothers:—offers which the king of Scots accepted.[677] Only three prelates, on either side of the sea, shewed any disposition to countenance the rebellion; in the south, William, the new-made archbishop of Bordeaux;[678] in the north, Arnulf of Lisieux[679] and Hugh of Durham. Arnulf’s influence at court had long been on the wane; all his diplomacy had failed, as far as his personal interest with King Henry was concerned; but he possessed the temporal as well as the spiritual lordship of his see; and the man’s true character now shewed itself at last, justifying all Henry’s suspicions, in an attempt to play the part of a great baron rather than of a bishop—to use hisii.141 diplomatic gifts in temporizing between the two parties, instead of seeking to make peace between them or to keep his straying flock in the path of loyalty as a true pastor should. He did but imitate on a smaller scale and under less favourable conditions the example set by Hugh of Puiset in his palatine bishopric of Durham, where he had been throughout his career simply a great temporal ruler, whose ecclesiastical character only served to render almost unassailable the independence of his political position. It was the pride of the feudal noble, not the personal sympathies of the churchman, that stirred up both Hugh and Arnulf to their intrigues against Henry. Personal sympathies indeed had as yet little share in drawing any of the barons to the side of the boy-king. What they saw in his claims was simply a pretext and a watchword which might serve them to unite against his father. Young Henry himself evidently relied chiefly on his foreign allies—his father-in-law, the counts of Flanders and Boulogne, and the count of Blois, the last of whom was bribed by a promise of an annual pension and the restitution of Château-Renaud and Amboise; while to Philip of Flanders was promised the earldom of Kent with a pension in English gold, and to Matthew of Boulogne the soke of Kirton-in-Lindsey and the Norman county of Mortain.[680]

The first hostile movement was made directly after Easter by a body of Flemings who crossed the Seine at Pacy; but they had no sooner touched Norman soil than they were driven back by the people of the town, and were nearly all drowned in attempting to recross the river.[681] Henry meanwhile, after spending Easter at Alençon,[682] had established his head-quarters at Rouen, where he remained till the end of June, apparently indifferent to the plots that were hatching around him, and entirely absorbed in the pleasures of the chase.[683] In reality however he was transacting a good dealii.142 of quiet business, filling up vacant sees in England;[684] appointing a new chancellor, Ralf of Varneville, to the office which had been in commission—that is, virtually, in the hands of Geoffrey Ridel—ever since S. Thomas had resigned it ten years before;[685] and writing to all his continental allies to enlist their sympathies and if possible their support in the coming struggle.[686] One of them at least, his future son-in-law William of Sicily, returned an answer full of hearty sympathy;[687] neither he nor his fellow-kings, however, had anything more substantial to give. The only support upon which Henry could really depend was that of a troop of twenty thousand Brabantine mercenaries, who served him indeed bravely and loyally, but by no means for nothing;[688] and if we may trust a writer who, although remote from the present scene of action, seems to have had a more intimate acquaintance than most of his fellow-historians with all matters connected with the Brabantines, Henry’s finances were already so exhausted that he was obliged to give the sword of state used at his coronation in pledge to these men as security for the wages which he was unable to pay them.[689] Yet he could trust no one else in Normandy; and as yet he scarcely knew his own resources in England.

Early in June Robert of Leicester and William of Tancarville, the high-chamberlain of Normandy, sought licenseii.143 from the justiciars in London to join the king at Rouen. Immediately on landing, however, they hastened not to Henry II., but to his son.[690] The justiciar himself, Richard de Lucy, was in such anxiety that he seems to have had some thoughts of going in person to consult with the king.[691] The consultation however was to be held not in Normandy but in England. In the last days of June or the first days of July, while the counts of Flanders and Boulogne were easily overcoming the mock resistance of Aumale and Driencourt, and Louis of France was laying siege to Verneuil,[692] Henry suddenly crossed the sea, made his way as far inland as Northampton, where he stayed four days, collected his treasure and his adherents, issued his instructions for action against the rebels, and was back again at Rouen so quickly that neither friends nor foes seem ever to have discovered his absence.[693]

ii.144

Hurried, however, as was the king’s visit to England, it did its work in bracing up the energies and determining the action of the vassals who were faithful to him there. In personal and territorial importance indeed these were very unequally matched with the rebels. The fidelity of the Welsh princes, David Ap-Owen and Rees Ap-Griffith,[694] could not balance the hostility of the King of Scots. Among the loyal English barons, the most conspicuous were a group of the king’s immediate kinsmen, none of whom however ranked high among the descendants of the ducal house of Normandy:—his half-brother Earl Hameline of Warren, his uncle Reginald of Cornwall, his cousin William of Gloucester;[695] besides Earl William of Arundel the husband of his grandfather’s widow Queen Adeliza, his son William, and his kinsman Richard of Aubigny. The earl of Essex, William de Mandeville, was a son of that Geoffrey de Mandeville who had accepted the earldom of Essex from both Stephen and Matilda, and who had been one of the worst evil-doers in the civil war; but the son was as loyal as the father was faithless; he seems indeed to have been a close personal friend of the king, and to have well deserved his friendship.[696] The loyalty of Earl Simon of Northampton may have been quickened by his rivalry with David of Scotland for the earldom of Huntingdon. That of William of Salisbury was an inheritance from his father, Earl Patrick, who had earned his title by his services to the Empress, and had fallen honourably at his post of governor of Aquitaine in the rising of 1168. The loyal barons of lesser degree are chiefly representatives of the class which half a century before had beenii.145 known as the “new men”—men who had risen by virtue of their services in the work of the administration, either under Henry himself or under his grandfather. Such were the justiciar Richard de Lucy and the constable Humfrey de Bohun; William de Vesci, son of Eustace Fitz-John, and like his father a mighty man in the north; his nephew John, constable of Chester;—the whole house of Stuteville, with Robert de Stuteville the sheriff of Yorkshire at its head;[697]—and Ralf de Glanville,[698] sheriff of Lancashire, custodian of the honour of Richmond,[699] and destined in a few years to wider fame as the worthy successor of Richard de Lucy. The Glanvilles, the Stutevilles and the de Vescis now wielded in Yorkshire as the king’s representatives the influence which had been usurped there by William of Aumale before his expulsion from Holderness; while in Northumberland a considerable share of the power formerly exercised by the rebellious house of Mowbray had passed to servants of the Crown such as Odelin de Umfraville[700] and Bernard de Bailleul,[701] whose name in its English form of Balliol became in after-times closely associated with that borne by two other loyal northern barons—Robert and Adam de Bruce.[702] To the same class of “new men” belonged Geoffrey Trussebut, Everard de Ros, Guy de Vere, Bertram de Verdon, Philip de Kime and his brother Simon.[703]

Some half-dozen of the king’s English adherents—William of Essex, William of Arundel, Robert de Stuteville and the elder Saher de Quincy, besides two who had lately come over from Ireland, Richard of Striguil and Hugh de Lacy—eitherii.146 returned with him to Rouen or had joined him there already,[704] thus helping to swell the little group of loyalists who surrounded him in Normandy. That group contained no Norman baron of the first rank, and consisted only of a few personal friends and ministers:—Richard of Hommet the constable of the duchy, with all his sons and brothers;[705] William de Courcy the seneschal;[706] Richard Fitz-Count, the king’s cousin;[707] Hugh de Beauchamp[708] and Henry of Neubourg,[709] sons of the loyal house of Beauchamp which in England looked to the earl of Warwick as its head; Richard de Vernon and Jordan Tesson;[710]—while two faithful members of the older Norman nobility, Hugh of Gournay and his son, had already fallen prisoners into the hands of the young king.[711] It was in truth Henry’s continental dominions which most needed his presence and that of all the forces which he could muster; for the two chief English rebels, the earls of Leicester and Chester, were both beyond the Channel, and their absence enabled the king’s representatives to strike the first blow before the revolt had time to break forth in England at all. On July 3 the town of Leicester was besieged by Richard de Lucy and Earl Reginald of Cornwall at the head of “the host of England.”[712] After a three weeks’ siege and a vast expenditure of money and labour,[713] the town was fired, and on July 28 it surrendered.[714] The castle stillii.147 held out, its garrison accepting a truce until Michaelmas; the gates and walls of the city were at once thrown down; the citizens were suffered to go out free on payment of a fine of three hundred marks;[715] but it was only by taking sanctuary in the great abbeys of S. Alban or S. Edmund that their leaders could feel secure against the vengeance of the king.[716]

Three days before the capture of Leicester, an arrow shot by one of Henry’s Brabantine cross-bowmen gave Matthew of Boulogne his death-wound, and thereby caused the break-up of the Flemish expedition against Normandy.[717] A fortnight later Henry set out at the head of all his available forces to the relief of Verneuil, which Hugh de Lacy and Hugh de Beauchamp were defending against the king of France. By a double treachery Louis, under cover of a truce, gained possession of the town, set it on fire, and retreated into his own domains before Henry could overtake him.[718] Henry marched back to Rouen, taking Gilbert of Tillières’s castle of Damville on the way,[719] and thence despatched his Brabantines to check the plundering operations which Hugh of Chester and Ralf of Fougères were carrying on unhindered throughout the border district which lay between Fougères and Avranches. The interception of an important convoy and the slaughter of its escort by the Brabantines drove the rebel leaders to retire into the fortressii.148 of Dol. Here they were blockaded by the Brabantines, backed by the populace of the district of Avranches,[720] who clearly had no sympathy with the treason of their viscount. The siege began on August 20; on the morrow Henry received tidings of it at Rouen; on the 23d he appeared in the midst of his soldiers; and on the 26th Dol and its garrison, with Ralf of Fougères and Hugh of Chester at their head, surrendered into his hands.[721] This blow crushed the Breton revolt; the rest of the duchy submitted at once.[722] Louis of France was so impressed by Henry’s success that he began to make overtures for negotiation, while Henry was holding his court in triumph at Le Mans. Shortly before Michaelmas a meeting took place near Gisors; Henry shewed the utmost anxiety to be reconciled with his sons, offering them literally the half of his realms in wealth and honours, and declaring his willingness virtually to strip himself of everything except his regal powers of government and justice.[723] That, however, was precisely the reservation against which the French king and the disaffected barons were both alike determined to fight as Henry himself had fought against S. Thomas’s reservation of the rights of his order. The terms were therefore refused, and the earl of Leicester in his baffled rage not only loaded his sovereign with abuse, but actually drew his sword to strike him. This outrage of course broke up the meeting.[724] Leicester hurried through Flanders, collecting troops as he went, to Wissant, whence he sailed for England on Michaelmas day.[725] Landing at Walton inii.149 Suffolk, he made his way to Hugh Bigod’s castle of Framlingham; here the two earls joined their forces; and they presently took and burned the castle of Haughley, which Ralf de Broc held against them for the king.[726]

Map IV.

REBELLION of 1173–1174.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

At the moment of Leicester’s arrival the representatives of the king were far away on the Scottish border. At the close of the summer William of Scotland had gathered his motley host of Lowland knights and wild Galloway Highlanders, marched unhindered through the territories of the see of Durham, and was just beginning to ravage Yorkshire after the manner of his forefathers when Richard de Lucy and Humfrey de Bohun hastily reassembled their forces and marched against him with such promptitude and vigour that he was compelled to retreat not merely into Lothian but into the safer shelter of the Celtic Scotland beyond it. The English host overran Lothian,[727] and had just given Berwick to the flames when tidings reached them of Earl Robert’s doings in Suffolk. The king of Scots was begging for a truce; the English leaders readily consented, that they might hurry back to their duties in the south.[728] Richard de Lucy returned to his post of viceroy, and the supreme military command was left to the constable Humfrey de Bohun, assisted by the earls of Cornwall and Gloucester and by Earl William of Arundel,[729] who had now come to give the help of his sword in England as he had already given it in Normandy. The constable and the three earls, with three hundred paid soldiers of the king, posted themselves at S. Edmund’s, ready to intercept Earl Robert on his way from Framlingham to join the garrisonii.150 of Leicester.[730] He made a circuit to the northward to avoid them, but in vain. They marched forth from S. Edmund’s beneath the banner of its patron saint, the famous East-Anglian king and martyr, overtook the earl in a marsh near the church of S. Geneviève at Fornham,[731] and in spite of overwhelming odds defeated him completely. His Flemish mercenaries, who had gone forth in their insolent pride singing “Hop, hop, Wilekin! England is mine and thine,”[732] were cut to pieces not so much by the royal troops as by the peasantry of the district, who flocked to the battle-field armed with forks and flails, with which they either despatched them at once or drove them to suffocation in the ditches.[733] His French and Norman knights were all made prisoners;[734] he himself took to flight, but was overtaken and captured;[735] and his wife, who had accompanied him throughout his enterprise, was made captive with him.[736] The victors followed up their success by posting bodies of troops at S. Edmund’s, Ipswich and Colchester, hoping that Hugh Bigod, thus confined within his own earldom, would be unable to provide for the large force of Flemish mercenaries still quartered in his various castles, and thatii.151 these would be starved into surrender. The approach of winter however disposed both parties for a compromise; a truce was arranged to last till the octave of Pentecost, Hugh consenting to dismiss his Flemings, who were furnished with a safe-conduct through Essex and Kent and with ships to transport them from Dover back to their own land.[737]

The earl and countess of Leicester were sent over to Normandy by the king’s orders, there to be shut up in company with Hugh of Chester in prison at Falaise.[738] Their capture filled the French king and the rebel princes with dismay, and none of them dared to venture upon any opposition against Henry when at Martinmas he led his Brabantines into Touraine, forced some of its rebellious barons into submission,[739] reinstated his ally Count John of Vendôme in his capital from which he had been expelled by his own son,[740] and returned to keep the Christmas feast at Caen.[741] An attack upon Séez, made at the opening of the new year by the young king and the counts of Blois, Perche and Alençon, was repulsed by the townsfolk,[742] and led only to a truce which lasted till the end of March.[743] The truce made by Richard de Lucy with the king of Scots was prolonged to the same date—the octave of Easter—by the diplomacy of Bishop Hugh of Durham, who took upon himself to purchase this delay, apparently without authority and for his own private ends, by a promise of three hundred marks of silver to be paid toii.152 the Scot king out of the lands of the Northumbrian barons.[744]

The issue proved that Hugh’s real object was simply to gain time for the organization of a general rising in the north; and in this object he succeeded. The old isolation of Yorkshire was not yet a thing of the past; and its few lines of communication with southern England were now all blocked, at some point or other, by some stronghold of rebellion. Earl Hugh’s Chester, Hamo de Massey’s Dunham[745] and Geoffrey of Coutances’ Stockport commanded the waters of the Dee and the Mersey. South of the Peak, in the upper valley of the Trent, the earl of Ferrers held Tutbury and Duffield; further to south-east, on the opposite border of Charnwood Forest, lay the earl of Leicester’s capital and his castles of Groby and Mount Sorrel.[746] By the time that the truce expired Roger de Mowbray had renewed the fortifications of Kinardferry in the Isle of Axholm,[747] thus linking this southern chain of castles with those which he already possessed at Kirkby Malzeard, or Malessart, and Thirsk;[748] and Bishop Hugh had done the like at Northallerton.[749] Further north stood the great stronghold of Durham; while all these again were backed, far to the north-westward, by a double belt of fortresses stretching from the mouths of the Forth and the Tweed to that of the Solway:—Lauder, held by Richard de Morville; Stirling, Edinburgh, Berwick, Jedburgh, Roxburgh, Annan and Lochmaben, all in the hands of the king of Scots.[750]

Between this northern belt of rebel strongholds, however, and the southern one which stretched from Chester to Axholm, there lay along the river-valleys of Cumberlandii.153 and Northumberland a cluster of royal castles. Nicolas de Stuteville held Liddell, on the river of the same name. Burgh[751] stood on the Solway Firth, nearly opposite Annan; the whole valley of the Eden was guarded by Carlisle, whose castellan was Richard de Vaux,[752] and Appleby, which like Burgh was held by Robert de Stuteville for the king.[753] The course of the Tyne was commanded by Wark, under Roger de Stuteville,[754] Prudhoe, under Odelin de Umfraville,[755] and by the great royal fortress of Newcastle, in charge of Roger Fitz-Richard;[756] further north, between the valleys of the Wansbeck and the Coquet, stood Harbottle, also held by Odelin, with Roger Fitz-Richard’s Warkworth[757] and William de Vesci’s Alnwick[758] at the mouths of the Coquet and the Alne. This chain of defences William of Scotland, when at the expiration of the truce he again marched into England, at once set himself to break. While his brother David went to join the rebel garrison of Leicester,[759] he himself began by laying siege to Wark. This fortress, held in the king’s name by Roger de Stuteville—apparently a brother of the sheriff of Yorkshire—occupied a strong position in the upper valley of the Tyne, on the site of an earlier fortress which under the name of Carham had played a considerable part in the Scottish wars of Stephen’s time, and had been finally taken and razed by William’s grandfather King David in 1138.[760] William himself had already in the preceding autumn besieged Wark without success;[761] he prospered no better this time, and presently removed his forces to Carlisle,[762] where he had also sustained a like repulseii.154 six months before.[763] Carlisle, as well as Wark, was in truth almost impregnable except by starvation; and William, while blockading it closely, detached a part of his host for a series of expeditions against the lesser fortresses, Liddell, Burgh, Appleby, Harbottle and Warkworth, all of which fell into his hands.[764] His brother’s arrival at Leicester, meanwhile, seemed to have revived the energies of its garrison; under the command of Earl Robert of Ferrers they sallied forth very early one morning, surprised and burned the town of Nottingham, made a great slaughter of its citizens, and went home laden with plunder and prisoners.[765]

Meanwhile the king’s representatives in the south were not idle. Knowing however that he was powerless to rescue the north, Richard de Lucy made an attempt to draw off in another direction the forces both of the Scot king and of his brother by laying siege to David’s castle of Huntingdon.[766] Huntingdon had been held ever since 1136 either by the reigning king of Scots or by one of his nearest kinsmen, in virtue of their descent from Waltheof, the last Old-English earl of Huntingdon and Northampton, through his daughter Matilda, the wife of King David. In each case, however, the fief seems to have been held not as an hereditary possession but by a special grant made to the individual holder for his life. The house of Northampton, sprung from an earlier marriage of the same Matilda, were thus enabled to maintain a claim upon it which had never been entirely barred, and which Earl Simon of Northampton now seized his opportunity to urge upon the king.[767] Henry answered that Simon might keep Huntingdon if he could win it;[768] thusii.155 securing for Richard de Lucy his support and co-operation in the siege, which began on May 8.[769] Three days before this, however, a severe blow had been dealt at the northern rebels. The king’s eldest son Geoffrey, who a year before had been appointed to the bishopric of Lincoln, gathered up the forces of Lincolnshire, led them into Axholm and laid siege to Kinardferry. Robert of Mowbray, who was commanding there, seeing his garrison threatened with the want of water, slipped out to seek aid of his friends at Leicester, but was surrounded and made prisoner by the country-folk at Clay.[770] On May 5 Kinardferry surrendered; after razing it, Geoffrey marched northward to York; here he was joined by the forces of the archbishop and of the shire; with this united host he took Mowbray’s castle of Malessart,[771] closely menaced that of Thirsk by erecting a rival fortification at Topcliff, and having intrusted the former to Archbishop Roger and the latter to William de Stuteville, marched back to Lincoln in triumph.[772] His victory was scarcely won when a new peril arose in East-Anglia. Three days after Pentecost some three hundred Flemish soldiers, forerunners of a great host with which Count Philip of Flanders had sworn to invade England at Midsummer on behalf of the young king, landed at the mouth of the Orwell.[773] Hugh Bigod, whose truce with the king’s officers, made when he dismissed his other Flemish troops in the preceding autumn, expired four days later, at once received them into his castles.[774] For a whole month, however, no further movement was made save by the garrison of Leicester, who after the close of Whitsun-week made a successful plundering raid upon the town of Northampton.[775] On June 18 Hugh Bigod and his Flemings marched upon Norwich, took it byii.156 assault, committed a vast slaughter of men and women, and finally sacked and fired the city.[776] They seem to have returned to Framlingham by way of Dunwich, which was still a flourishing seaport, of sufficient wealth to tempt their greed; but its stout fisher-folk met them with such a determined front that they were compelled to retire.[777]

Richard de Lucy was all this while busy with the siege of Huntingdon. Provoked apparently by a vigorous assault which he made upon it at midsummer,[778] the garrison set fire to the town; Richard then built a tower to block their egress from the castle, and left the completion of the siege to the earl of Northampton.[779] For himself it was time once more to lay down the knightly sword and resume that of justice. While the justiciar’s energies were absorbed in warfare with the barons, the burgher-nobles of the capital had caught from their feudal brethren the spirit of lawlessness and misrule, and London had become a vast den of thieves and murderers. Young men, sons and kinsmen of the noblest citizens, habitually went forth by night in parties of a hundred or more, broke into rich men’s houses and robbed them by force, and if they met any man walking in the streets alone, slew him at once. Peaceable citizens were driven in self-defence to meet violence with violence. One man, expecting an attack, gathered his armed servants around him in a concealed corner, surprised his assailants in the act of breaking into his house with crowbars, struck off with a blow of his sword the right hand of their leaderii.157 Andrew Bucquinte, and raised an alarm which put the rest to flight. Bucquinte was captured and delivered next morning to the justiciar; on a promise of safety for life and limb he gave up the names of his accomplices; some fled, some were caught, and among the latter was one of the noblest and richest citizens of London, John Oldman,[780] who vainly offered five hundred marks of silver to the Crown to purchase his escape from the gallows.[781] The revelation of such a state of things in the capital apparently drove Richard de Lucy and his colleagues almost to desperation. They had already sent messenger after messenger to intreat that the king would return; getting however no certain answer, they now determined that one of their number should go to Normandy in person to lay before him an authentic account of the desperate condition of his realm.[782]

Henry had spent the spring in a successful progress through Maine and Anjou to Poitiers, where he kept the Whitsun feast. He had just rescued Saintes from a band of rebels who had seized it in Richard’s name[783] when he was called northward again by a rumour of the Flemish count’s scheme for the invasion of England. By S. Barnabas’s day he was back again on the borders of Britanny and Anjou; he took and fortified Ancenis, and then, leaving Anjou to the charge of a faithful baron, Maurice of Craon,[784] went to meet the castellans of the Norman border in a council at Bonneville on Midsummer-day. Their deliberationsii.158 were interrupted by the appearance of Richard of Ilchester—now bishop-elect of Winchester—on his errand from England to recall the king.[785] Richard’s pleadings however were scarcely needed. Henry knew that his eldest son was at that very moment with the count of Flanders at Gravelines, only awaiting a favourable wind to set sail for the invasion of England,[786] and that, whatever might be the risk to his continental realms, he must hasten to save the island.[787] He at once took measures for the security of the Norman castles and for the transport of those prisoners and suspected persons whom he dared not venture to leave behind him—his queen,[788] the earl and countess of Leicester, the earl of Chester,[789] the young queen Margaret,[790] and the affianced brides of his three younger sons; besides the two children who were still with him, Jane and John.[791] The wind which thwarted the designs of his foes was equally unfavourable to him; it was not till July 7 that he himself embarked at Barfleur, and even then the peril of crossing seemed so great that the sailors were inclined to put back. Henry raised his eyes to heaven: “If I seek the peace of my realm—if the heavenly King wills that my return should restore its peace—He will bring me safe into port. If He has turned away His Face from me and determined to scourge my realm, may I never reach its shores!” By nightfall he was safe[792] at Southampton.[793]

ii.159

His first care was to bestow his prisoners and hostages in safe custody.[794] That done, he set off at once on a pilgrimage to the grave of his former friend and victim at Canterbury. Travelling with the utmost speed, and feeding only on bread and water, he reached Canterbury on July 12; before the church of S. Dunstan, outside the west gate, he dismounted, exchanged his kingly robes for the woollen gown of a pilgrim, and made his way with bare and bleeding feet along the rough-paved streets to the cathedral church. Here, surrounded by a group of bishops and abbots who seem to have come with him, as well as by the monks of the cathedral chapter and a crowd of wondering lay-folk, he threw himself in an agony of penitence and prayer on the martyr’s tomb, which still stood in the crypt where his body had been hastily buried by the terrified monks immediately after the murder. The bishop of London now came forward and spoke in the king’s name, solemnly protesting that he had never sought the primate’s death, and beseeching absolution from the assembled prelates for the rash words which had occasioned it. The absolution was given; the king then underwent a public scourging at the hands of the bishops and monks; he spent the whole night in prayer before the shrine; early on the morrow he heard mass and departed, leaving rich gifts in money and endowments, and rode back still fasting to London, which he reached on the following morning.[795] The next few days were spent in collecting forces, in addition to a large troop of Brabantines whom he had brought over with him,[796] and in despatching a part of these into Suffolk against Hugh Bigod;ii.160 Henry himself lingering another day or two to recover from his excitement and fatigue.[797]

In the middle of the night of July 17 a courier from the north came knocking wildly for admittance at the palace-gate. The porters remonstrated with him in vain; he bore, he said, good news which the king must hear that very night. He hurried to the door of the king’s chamber, and, despite the expostulations of the chamberlains, made his way to the bedside and woke the king from his sleep. “Who art thou?” demanded Henry. “A servant of your faithful Ralf de Glanville, and the bearer of good tidings from him to you.” “Is he well?” “He is well; and lo! he holds your enemy the king of Scots in chains at Richmond castle.” Not till he had seen Ralf’s own letters could Henry believe the tidings; then he burst into thanksgivings for the crowning triumph which had come to him, as he now learned, almost at the moment when his voluntary humiliation at Canterbury was completed.[798] The garrison of Carlisle had pledged themselves to surrender to the Scot king at Michaelmas if not previously relieved. In the interval William laid siege to Odelin de Umfraville’s castle of Prudhoe on the Tyne.[799] Here he was rejoined by Roger de Mowbray, who came to intreat the Scot king’s aid in the recovery of his lost castles.[800] Meanwhile, however, the king’s return had apparently brought with it the return of the sheriff of Yorkshire, Robert de Stuteville. Under his leadership and that of his son William the whole military forces of the shire, with those of William de Vesci, Ralf de Glanville, Bernard de Balliol and Odelin de Umfraville, and Archbishop Roger’s men under his constableii.161 Ralf de Tilly, gathered and marched northward to oppose the Scots.[801] They reached Newcastle on July 12[802]—the day of Henry’s penitential entry into Canterbury—but only to find that on the rumour of their approach William the Lion had retired from Prudhoe, and was gone to besiege Alnwick with his own picked followers, while the bulk of his host, under the earls of Fife and Angus and the English traitor Richard de Morville, dispersed over all Northumberland to burn, plunder and slay in the old barbarous Scottish fashion which seems hardly to have softened since the days of Malcolm Canmore.[803] The English leaders now held a council of war. Their forces consisted only of a few hundred knights, all wearied and spent with their long and hurried march, in which the foot had been unable to keep up with them at all. The more cautious argued that enough had been done in driving back the Scots thus far, and that it would be madness for a band of four hundred men to advance against a host of eighty thousand. Bolder spirits, however, urged that the justice of their cause must suffice to prevail against any odds; and it was decided to continue the march to Alnwick. They set out next morning before sunrise; the further they rode, the thicker grew the mist; some proposed to turn back. “Turn back who will,” cried Bernard de Balliol, “if no man will follow me, I will go on alone, rather than bear the stain of cowardice for ever!” Every one of them followed him; and when at last the mist cleared away, the first sight that met their eyes was the friendly castle of Alnwick. Close beside it lay the king of Scots, carelessly playing with a little band of some sixty knights. Never dreaming that the English host would dare to pursue him thus far, he had sent out all the rest of hisii.162 troops on a plundering expedition, and at the first appearance of the enemy he took them for his own followers returning with their spoils. When they unfurled their banners he saw at once that his fate was sealed. The Scottish Lion, however, proved worthy of his name, and his followers proved worthy of their leader. Seizing his arms and shouting, “Now it shall be seen who are true knights!” he rushed upon the English; his horse was killed, he himself was surrounded and made prisoner, and so were all his men.[804] Roger de Mowbray and Adam de Port, an English baron who had been outlawed two years before for an attempt on King Henry’s life, alone fled away into Scotland;[805] not one Scot tried to escape, and some even who were not on the spot, when they heard the noise of the fray, rode hastily up and almost forced themselves into the hands of their captors, deeming it a knightly duty to share their sovereign’s fate.[806]

The capture of William the Lion almost put an end to the rebellion. A body of Flemings summoned by Bishop Hugh of Durham landed the same day at Hartlepool; but at the tidings of the Scottish disaster, Hugh thought it safest to pay them their forty days’ wages and send them home again at once.[807] On the same day, too, the young king, weary of waiting for a wind at Gravelines, left the count of Flanders there alone and proceeded to Wissant with a body of troops whom he succeeded in despatching from thence into England, under the command of Ralf of La Haye, to the assistance of Hugh Bigod.[808] In London, meanwhile, the news brought by Ralf de Glanville’s courier raised to the highest pitch the spirits both of Henry and of his troops. On that very day he set out for Huntingdon,[809] whose titular earl hadii.163 already fled back to Scotland;[810] at Huntingdon Geoffrey of Lincoln came to meet him with a force of seven hundred knights;[811] and three days later the garrison surrendered at discretion.[812] The king then marched to S. Edmund’s; here he divided his host, sending half against Hugh Bigod’s castle of Bungay, while he himself led the other half to Framlingham, where Hugh was entrenched with five hundred knights and his Flemish men-at-arms. The number of these, however, had dwindled greatly; when the royal host encamped on July 24 at Sileham, close to Framlingham, Hugh felt himself unable to cope with it; and next morning he surrendered.[813] By the end of the month the whole struggle was over. One by one the king’s foes came to his feet as he held his court at Northampton. The king of Scots was brought, with his feet tied together under his horse’s body, from his prison[814] at Richmond.[815] On the last day of July Bishop Hugh of Durham came to give up his castles of Durham, Norham and Northallerton. On the same day the earl of Leicester’s three fortresses were surrendered by his constables;[816] and Thirsk was given up by Roger of Mowbray.[817] Earl Robert de Ferrers yielded up Tutbury and Duffield;[818] the earl of Gloucester and his son-in-law Richard de Clare, who were suspected of intriguing with the rebels, came to offer their services and their obedience to the king;[819] and aii.164 like offer came from far-off Galloway, whose native princes, Uhtred and Gilbert, long unwilling vassals of the king of Scots, had seized their opportunity to call home their men, drive out William’s bailiffs, destroy his castles and slaughter his garrisons, and now besought his victorious English cousin to become their protector and overlord.[820] In three weeks from Henry’s landing in England all the royal fortresses were again in his hands, and the country was once more at peace.[821]

When England was secured, it was comparatively a light matter to secure the rest. Louis of France was so dismayed at the sudden collapse of the rebellion in England—a collapse which necessarily entailed a like fate upon the rebellion in Normandy, since the leaders were the same men in both cases—that he at once recalled the young king and the count of Flanders from their project of invasion. As a last resource, all three concentrated their forces upon the siege of Rouen.[822] Its garrison held out gallantly until Henry had time to recross the sea with his Brabantines and a thousand Welshmen[823] who had already done good service under Rees Ap-Griffith at the siege of Tutbury.[824] On August 11, three days after landing, he entered Rouen;[825] a successful raid of his Welshmen upon some French convoys, followed by an equally successful sally of Henry himself against the besieging forces, sufficed to make Louis ask for a truce, under cover of which he fled with his whole host back into his own dominions.[826] Some three weeks later[827] he and Henry met inii.165 conference at Gisors and arranged a suspension of hostilities until Michaelmas on all sides, except between Henry and his son Richard, who was fighting independently against his father’s loyal subjects in Poitou.[828] Henry marched southward at once; Richard fled before him from place to place, leaving his conquests to fall back one by one into the hands of their rightful owner; at last he suddenly returned to throw himself at his father’s feet, and a few days before Michaelmas Henry concluded his war in Poitou[829] by entering Poitiers in triumph with Richard, penitent and forgiven, at his side.[830]

On the last day of September the two kings and all the princes met in conference between Tours and Amboise.[831] Henry’s three elder sons accepted the endowments which he offered them; in return, the young king gave his assent to a provision for John. A general amnesty was agreed upon; all prisoners on both sides, except the king of Scots, the earls of Leicester and Chester and Ralf of Fougères, were released at once; all the rebels returned to their allegiance, and were fully forgiven; Henry claimed nothing from any of them save the restoration of their castles to the condition in which they had been before the war, and the right of taking such hostages and other security as he might choose.[832] These terms of course did not apply to England; while, on the other hand, the king of Scots and his fellow-captives, whom Henry had brought back with him to Normandy and replaced in confinement at Falaise,[833] were excluded from them as prisoners of war. It was at Falaise, on October 11, that Henry and his sons embodied their agreement in a written document.[834] A few weeks later William of Scotland, withii.166 the formal assent of the bishops and barons of his realm, who had been allowed free access to him during his captivity, submitted to pay the price which Henry demanded for his ransom. The legal relations between the crowns of England and Scotland had been doubtful ever since the days of William the Conqueror and Malcolm Canmore, if not since the days of Eadward the Elder and Constantine; henceforth they were to be doubtful no longer. William the Lion became the liegeman of the English king and of his son for Scotland and for all his other lands, and agreed that their heirs should be entitled to a like homage and fealty from all future kings of Scots. The castles of Roxburgh, Jedburgh, Berwick, Edinburgh and Stirling were required by Henry as security; and as soon as the treaty had been ratified at Valognes[835] William was sent over sea in a sort of honourable custody to enforce their surrender and thereby complete his own release.[836]

By the terms of Henry’s treaty with France, all the English barons who held lands on both sides of the sea were to be at once re-instated in their continental possessions, except the castles over which the king resumed his ancient rights of garrison or of demolition. Their English estates however were wholly at his mercy; but he made a very gentle use of his power over them. He took in fact no personal vengeance at all; he exacted simply what was necessary for securing his own authority and the peaceii.167 of the realm—the instant departure of the Flemish mercenaries[837] and the demolition of unlicensed fortifications—and for defraying the expenses of the war. This was done by a tax levied partly on the royal demesnes, partly on the estates of the rebels throughout the country, on the basis of an assessment made for that purpose during the past summer by the sheriffs of the several counties, assisted by some officers of the Exchequer.[838] No ruinous sums were demanded; even Hugh Bigod escaped with a fine of a thousand marks, and lost none of the revenues of his earldom save for the time that he was actually in open rebellion; the third penny of Norfolk was reckoned as due to him again from the third day after his surrender, and its amount for two months was paid to him accordingly at Michaelmas.[839] Even the earls of Leicester and Chester seem to have been at once set free;[840] and in little more than two years they were restored to all their lands and honours, except their castles, which were either razed or retained in the king’s hands.[841]

This very clemency was in itself at once the strongest proof of the completeness of Henry’s victory and the surest means of retaining the hold which he had now gained over the barons. The struggle whose course we have been trying to follow has a special significance: it was the last struggle in English history in which the barons were arrayed against the united interests of the Crown and the people. That feudal pride which had revolted so often and so fiercely against the determination of William the Conqueror and Henry I. to enforce justice and order throughout their realm stooped at last to acknowledge its master in Henry II.ii.168 In the unbroken tranquillity, the uninterrupted developement of reform in law and administration, the unchecked growth of the material and social prosperity of England during the remaining fifteen years of his reign, Henry and his people reaped the first-fruits of the anti-feudal policy which he and his predecessors had so long and so steadily maintained. Its full harvest was to be reaped after he was gone, not by the sovereign, but by the barons themselves, to whom his strong hand had at last taught their true mission as leaders and champions of the English people against a king who had fallen away from the traditions alike of the Norman and of the Angevin Henry.


ii.169

CHAPTER V.
THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE.
1175–1183.

In the seven years which followed the suppression of the barons’ revolt Henry’s prosperity reached its height. The rising in which all his enemies had united for his destruction had ended in leaving him seated more firmly than ever upon the most securely-established throne in Europe. Within the four seas of Britain he was master as no king had ever been master before him. The English people had been with him from the first, and was learning year by year to identify its interests more closely with his; the Church, alienated for nearly ten years, was reconciled by his penance; feudalism was beaten at last, and for ever. The Welsh princes were his obedient and serviceable vassals; the Scot king had been humbled to accept a like position; a new subject-realm was growing up on the coast of Ireland. The great external peril which had dogged Henry’s footsteps through life, the hostility of France, was for a while paralyzed by his success. Other external foes he had none; the kings of Spain and of Sicily, the princes of the Western and even of the Eastern Empire, vied with each other in seeking the friendship, one might almost say the patronage, of the one sovereign in Europe who, safe on his sea-girt throne, could afford to be independent of them all. Within and without, on either side of the sea, all hindrances to the full and free developement of Henry’s policy for the government of his whole dominions were thus completely removed.

ii.170

In England itself the succeeding period was one of unbroken tranquillity and steady prosperous growth, social, intellectual, political, constitutional. Henry used his opportunity to make a longer stay in the island than he had ever made there before, save at the very beginning of his reign. He was there from May 1175 to August 1177; in the following July he returned, and stayed till April 1180; he came back again in July 1181, and remained till March 1182. Each of these visits was marked by some further step towards the completion of his judicial and administrative reforms. Almost as soon as he set foot in the country, indeed, he took up his work as if it had never been interrupted. The king and his eldest son went to England together on May 9, 1175;[842] on Rogation Sunday they publicly sealed their reconciliation with each other and with the Church in a great council which met at Westminster[843] under the presidence of a new archbishop of Canterbury, Richard, formerly prior of Dover, who after countless troubles and delays had been chosen just before the outbreak of the rebellion to fill S. Thomas’s place,[844] and had come back from Rome in triumph, with his pallium and a commission as legate for all England, just as Henry was returning to Normandy from his success against Hugh Bigod.[845] From the council the two kings and the primate went all together on a pilgrimage to the martyr’s tomb at Canterbury;[846] at Whitsuntide the kings held a court at Reading,[847] and on S. Peter’s day they met the Welsh princes in a great council at Gloucester.[848] Two days later the process, begun two years before, of filling up the vacant bishoprics and abbacies which had been accumulating during Thomas’s exile wasii.171 completed in another council at Woodstock.[849] Thence, too, was issued an edict for the better securing of order throughout the realm, and particularly around the person of the king; all his opponents in the late war were forbidden, on pain of arrest as traitors, to come to the court without special summons, and, under any circumstances, to come before sunrise or stay over night; and all wearing of arms, knife, bow and arrows, was forbidden on the English side of the Severn. These prohibitions however were only temporary;[850] and they were, with one exception, the only measure of general severity taken by Henry in consequence of the rebellion. That exception was a great forest-visitation, begun by Henry in person during the summer of 1175 and not completed by his ministers, it seems, till Michaelmas 1177, and from which scarcely a man throughout the kingdom, baron or villein, layman or priest, was altogether exempt. In vain did Richard de Lucy, as loyal to the people as to the king, shew Henry his own royal writ authorizing the justiciars to throw open the forests and give up the royal fish-ponds to public use during the war, and protest against the injustice of punishing the people at large for a trespass to which he had himself invited them in the king’s name and in accordance, as he had understood it, with the king’s expressed will. The license had probably been used to a far wider extent than Henry had intended; the general excitement had perhaps vented itself in some such outburst of wanton destructiveness as had occurred after the death of Henry I.; at any rate, the Norman and the Angevin blood in Henry II. was all alike stirred into wrath at sight of damage done to vert and venison; the transgressors were placed, in technical phrase, “at the king’s mercy,” and their fines constituted an important item in the Pipe Roll of 1176.[851]

ii.172

In the beginning of that year the king assembled a great council at Northampton,[852] and thence issued an Assize which forms another link in the series of legal enactments begun at Clarendon just ten years before. The first three clauses and the twelfth clause of the Assize of Northampton are substantially a re-issue of those articles of the Assize of Clarendon which regulated the presentment, detention and punishment of criminals and the treatment of strangers and vagabonds.[853] The experience of the past ten years had however led to some modifications in the details of the procedure. The recognition by twelve lawful men of every hundred and four of every township, to be followed by ordeal of water, was re-enacted; but the presentment was now to be made not to the sheriff, but direct to the king’s justices. The punishments, too, were more severe than before; the forger, robber, murderer or incendiary who under the former system would have suffered the loss of a foot was now to lose a hand as well, and to quit the realm within forty days.[854] The remaining articles dealt with quite other matters. The fourth declared the legal order of proceeding with regard to the estate of a deceased freeholder, in such a manner as to secure the rights of his heir and of his widow before the usual relief could be exacted by the lord; and it referred all disputes between the lord and the heir touching the latter’s right of inheritance to the decision of the king’s justices, on the recognition of twelve lawful men[855]—a process which, under the name of the assize of mort d’ancester, soon became a regular part of the business transacted before the justices-in-eyre. Some of the other clausesii.173 had a more political significance. They directed the justices to take an oath of homage and fealty to the king from every man in the realm, earl, baron, knight, freeholder or villein, before the octave of Whit-Sunday at latest, and to arrest as traitors all who refused it:[856]—to investigate and strictly enforce the demolition of the condemned castles;[857] to ascertain and report by whom, how and where the duty of castle-guard was owed to the king;[858] to inquire what persons had fled from justice and incurred the penalty of outlawry by failing to give themselves up at the appointed time, and to send in a list of all such persons to the Exchequer at Easter and Michaelmas for transmission to the king.[859] The tenth article was aimed at the bailiffs of the royal demesnes, requiring them to give an account of their stewardship before the Exchequer;[860] and two others defined the justices’ authority, as extending, in judicial matters, over all pleas of the Crown, both in criminal causes and in civil actions concerning half a knight’s fee or less; and in fiscal matters, over escheats, wardships, and lands and churches in royal demesne.[861]

The visitations of the justices by whom this assize was carried into effect were arranged upon a new plan, or rather upon a modified form of the plan which had been adopted two years before for the assessment of a tallage upon the royal demesnes, to meet the cost of the expected war. It was at that terrible crisis, when most men in Henry’s place would have had no thought to spare for anything save the military necessities and perils of the moment, that he had first devised and carried into effect the principle of judicial circuits which with some slight changes in detail has remained in force until our own day. This tallage was levied by nineteen barons of the Exchequer, distributed into six companies, each company undertaking the assessment throughout a certain district or group of shires.[862] Theii.174 abandonment of this scheme in the assizes of the two following years was probably necessitated by the disturbed state of the country. But at the council of Northampton the kingdom was again definitely mapped out into six divisions, to each of which three justices were sent.[863] In the report of their proceedings in the Pipe Roll of the year they are for the first time since the Assize of Clarendon[864] officially described by the title which they had long borne in common speech, “justitiæ itinerantes” (or “errantes”), justices-in-eyre; and it is from this time that the regular institution of itinerant judges is dated by modern legal historians.[865]

This first distribution of circuits however was soon altered. In the very next year the same eighteen officers made, in addition to their judicial circuits, a general visitation of the realm for fiscal purposes, in four companies instead of six;[866] and on Henry’s return to England in the summer of 1178 he made what at first glance looks like a sweeping change in the organization of the Curia Regis. “The king,” we are told, “made inquiry concerning his justices whom he had appointed in England, whether they treated the men of the realm with righteousness and moderation; and when he learned that the country and the people were sore oppressed by the great multitude of justices—for they were eighteen in number—by the counsel of the wise men of the realm he chose out five, two clerks and three laymen, who were all of his private household; and he decreed that those five should hear all the complaints of the realm, and do right, and that they should not depart from the king’s court, but abide there to hear the complaints of his men; so that if any question came up among them which they could not bring to an end, it should be presented to the king’s hearing and determined as might please him and the wise men of the realm.”[867] From the mention of the number eighteen it appears that the persons against whomii.175 were primarily directed both the complaint of the people and the action of the king were the justices-in-eyre of the last two years; and this is confirmed by the fact that of all these eighteen, only six were among the judges who went on circuit in 1178 and 1179, while from 1180 onwards only one of them reappears in that capacity, though many of them retained their functions in the Exchequer. In 1178 and 1179 moreover the circuits were reduced from six to two, each being served by four judges.[868] The enactment of 1178, however, evidently touched the central as well as the provincial judicature, and with more important results. It took the exercise of the highest judicial functions out of the hands of the large body of officers who made up the Curia Regis as constituted until that time, and restricted it to a small chosen committee. This was apparently the origin of a limited tribunal which, springing up thus within the Curia Regis, soon afterwards appropriated its name, and in later days grew into the Court of King’s Bench. At the same time the reservation of difficult cases for the hearing of the king in council points to the creation, or rather to the revival, of a yet higher court of justice, that of the king himself in council with his “wise men”—a phrase which, while on the one hand it carries us back to the very earliest form of the Curia Regis, on the other points onward to its later developements in the modern tribunals of equity or of appeal, the courts of Chancery and of the Privy Council in its judicial capacity.[869]

All these changes in the circuits and in the Curia Regis had however another motive. The chief obstacle to Henry’s judicial and legal reforms was the difficulty of getting them administered according to the intention of their author. It was to meet this difficulty that Henry, as a contemporary writer says, “while never changing his mind, was ever changing his ministers.”[870] He had employed men chosenii.176 from every available class of society in turn, and none of his experiments had altogether brought him satisfaction. Feudal nobles, court officials, confidential servants and friends, had all alike been tried and, sooner or later, found wanting.[871] There was only one who had never yet failed him in a service of twenty-five years’ duration—Richard de Lucy “the loyal”; but in the summer of 1179 Richard de Lucy, to his master’s great regret, resigned his office of justiciar and retired to end his days a few months later as a brother of an Augustinian house which he had founded at Lesnes in Kent to the honour of S. Thomas of Canterbury.[872] Henry in this extremity fell back once more upon a precedent of his grandfather’s time and determined to place the chief administration, for the moment at least, again in clerical hands. Instead of a single justiciar-bishop, however, he appointed three—the bishops of Winchester, Ely and Norwich;[873] all of whom, under their earlier appellations of Richard of Ilchester, Geoffrey Ridel and John of Oxford, had long ago acquired ample experience and shewn ample capacity for the work of secular administration.[874]

This arrangement was however only provisional. The number of judicial circuits was again raised to four, and to each of the three southern circuits was despatched one of the justiciar-bishops, with a royal clerk and three laymen to act as his subordinate assistants. The fourth circuit, which took in the whole district between the Trent and the Scottish border, was intrusted to six justices, of whom only two were clerks; one of these, Godfrey de Lucy the archdeacon of Richmond, a brother of the late chief justiciar, stood nominallyii.177 at the head of the commission; but there can be little doubt that its real head was one of his lay colleagues—Ralf de Glanville,[875] the faithful sheriff of Lancashire and castellan of Richmond to whom William the Lion had given up his sword at Alnwick in 1174;[876] and these six were appointed to form the committee for hearing the complaints of the people, apparently in succession to the five who had been selected in the previous year.[877] All four bodies of judges brought up a report of their proceedings to the king at Westminster on August 27,[878] and it seems to have been the most satisfactory which he had yet received. When he went over sea in the following April, he left Ralf de Glanville to represent him in England as chief justiciar.[879] Ralf’s business capacities proved to be at least as great, and his honesty as stainless, as those of his predecessor; and from that time forth the management of the entire legal and judicial administration was left in his hands. Circuits, variously distributed, continued to be made from year to year and for divers purposes by companies of judges, ranging in total numbers from three to twenty-two;[880] while the King’s Court and the Exchequer pursued their work on the lines already laid down, without further interruption, till the end of Henry’s reign.

The last of Henry’s great legal measures, with the exception of a Forest Assize issued in 1184, was an ordinance published in the autumn of 1181 and known as the Assize of Arms. Its object was to define more fully and exactly the military obligations of the people at large in the service of the king and the defence of the country;—in a word, to put once again upon a more definite footing the old institutionii.178 of the “fyrd,” which was the only effective counterpoise to the military power of the barons, and whose services in 1173 and 1174 had proved it to be well worthy of the royal consideration and encouragement. The Assize of 1181 declared the obligation of bearing arms at the king’s command to be binding upon every free layman in the realm. The character of the arms with which men of various ranks were required to provide themselves was defined according to a graduated scale, from the full equipment of the knight down to the mail-coat, steel-cap and spear of the burgher and the simple freeman.[881] The justices were directed to ascertain, through the “lawful men” of the hundreds and towns, what persons fell under each category, to enroll their names, read out the Assize in their presence, and make them swear to provide themselves with the proper accoutrements before S. Hilary’s day.[882] Every man’s arms were to be carefully kept and used solely for the royal service; they were not to be taken out of the country, or alienated in any way;[883] at their owner’s death they were to pass to his heir;[884] if any man possessed other arms than those required of him by the Assize, he was to dispose of them in such a manner that they might be used in the king’s service;[885] and all this was enforced by a stern threat of corporal punishment upon defaulters.[886]

The freemen who were armed under this Assize had little occasion to use their weapons so long as King Henry lived. Within the four seas of Britain there was almost unbroken peace till the end of his reign. The treaty with Scotland was ratified by the public homage of William the Lion to Henry and his son at York on August 10, 1175;[887] and thenceforth Henry’s sole trouble from that quarter was the necessity of arbitrating between William and his unrulyii.179 vassals in Galloway,[888] and of advising him in his ecclesiastical difficulties with the Roman see. The western border of England was less secure than the northern; yet even in Wales the authority of the English Crown had made a considerable advance since Henry’s accession. His first Welsh war, directed against the princes of North Wales in 1157, had little practical result. A second expedition marched in 1163 against Rees Ap-Griffith, prince of South Wales, and a lucky incident at the outset insured its success. Directly in the king’s line of march from Shrewsbury into South Wales, between Wenlock and Newport, there ran a streamlet called Pencarn—a mountain-torrent passable only at certain points. One of these was an ancient ford concerning which a prophecy attributed to the enchanter Merlin declared: “When ye shall see a strong man with a freckled face rush in upon the Britons, if he cross the ford of Pencarn, then know ye that the might of Cambria shall perish.” The Welsh guarded this ford with the utmost care to prevent Henry from crossing it; he, ignorant of the prophecy, sent his troops over by another passage, and was about to follow them himself, when a loud blast from their trumpets on the opposite bank caused his horse to rear so violently that he was obliged to turn away and seek a means of crossing elsewhere. He found it at the fatal spot, and as the Welsh saw him dash through the stream their hearts sank in despair.[889] He marched unopposed from one end of South Wales to the other, through Glamorgan and Carmarthen as far as Pencader;[890] here Rees made his submission;[891] and Rees himself, Owen of North Wales, and several other Welsh princes appeared and swore allegiance to King Henry and his heir in that famous council of Woodstock where the first quarrel arose between Henry and Thomas of Canterbury.[892]

ii.180

Next year Rees, provoked as he alleged by Henry’s non-fulfilment of his promises and also by the shelter given to the slayer of his nephew by Earl Roger of Clare, harried the whole border and roused all Wales to fling off the yoke of the “Frenchmen,” as the Welsh still called their Norman conquerors.[893] Henry was obliged to delay his vengeance till the following summer, when it furnished him with an excellent pretext for escaping from his ecclesiastical and political entanglements on the continent.[894] He set out from Oswestry[895] at the head of a vast army drawn from all parts of his dominions, both insular and continental, and reinforced by Flemish and Scottish allies.[896] All the princes of Wales were arrayed against him, and both parties intended the campaign to be decisive. But the wet climate of the Welsh hills proved a more dangerous foe than the mountaineers themselves; and after remaining for some time encamped at Berwen, Henry was compelled to beat an ignominious retreat, completely defeated by the ceaseless rain,[897] and venting his baffled wrath against the Welsh in a savage mutilation of their hostages.[898] For six years after this, as we have seen, he never had time to visit his island realm at all, and the daring “French” settlers in Wales or on its borders, such as the Geraldines or the De Clares, were free to fight their own battles and make their own alliances with the Welsh just as they chose; it was not till Henry in 1171 followed them to their more distant settlement in Ireland that he again entered South Wales. Then he used hisii.181 opportunity for a series of personal interviews with Rees,[899] which ended in a lasting agreement. Rees was left, in the phrase of his native chronicler, as the king’s “justice” over all South Wales.[900] How far he maintained, along the border or within his own territories, the peace and order whose preservation formed the main part of an English justiciar’s duty, may be doubted; but in the rebellion of 1174 he shewed his personal loyalty to the king by marching all the way into Staffordshire to besiege Tutbury for him, and some of his followers did equally good service in the suppression of the Norman revolt.[901] David of North Wales, too, if he did nothing to help the king, at least resisted the temptation of joining his enemies; and the war was no sooner fairly over than, anxious that some reflection of the glories of English royalty should be cast over his own house, he became an eager suitor for the hand of Henry’s half-sister Emma—a suit which Henry found it politic to grant.[902] A few months later, in June 1175, the king made an attempt to secure the tranquillity of the border by binding all the barons of the district in a sworn mutual alliance for its defence.[903] The attempt was not very successful; the border-warfare went on in much the same way as of old; but it was not till the summer of 1184 that it grew serious enough to call for Henry’s personal intervention, and then a march to Worcester sufficed to bring Rees of South Wales once more to his feet.[904]

It was the latest-won dependency of the English crown which during these years gave the most trouble to its wearer. If Henry found it hard to secure fit instruments for the work of government and administration in England, he found it harder still to secure them for the same work in Ireland. At the outbreak of the barons’ revolt he had at once guarded against all danger of the rebels finding support in Ireland by recalling the garrisons which he had left in theii.182 Irish coast-towns and summoning the chief men of the new vassal state, particularly Richard of Striguil and Hugh de Lacy, to join him personally in Normandy.[905] Richard served him well in the war as commandant of the important border-fortress of Gisors;[906] and it may have been as a reward for these services that he was sent back to Ireland as governor in Hugh’s stead[907] at the close of the year. For the next two years, while the king had his hands full in Normandy and England, matters in Ireland went much as they had gone before his visit there; the Norman-English settlers pursued their strifes and their alliances with their Irish neighbours or with each other, and granted out to their followers the lands which they won, entirely at their own pleasure.[908] But the lesson which Henry was meanwhile teaching their brethren in England was not thrown away upon them; and at the close of 1175 it was brought home to them in another way. Roderic O’Conor, moved as it seems by the fame of Henry’s successes, and also perhaps by two papal bulls—Adrian’s famous “Laudabiliter,” and another from the reigning Pope Alexander—which Henry had lately caused to be published at Waterford,[909] at last bent his stubborn independence to send three envoys to the English king with overtures for a treaty of peace. The treaty was signed at Windsor on October 6. Roderic submitted to become Henry’s liegeman, and to pay him a yearly tribute of one hide “pleasing to the merchants” for every ten head of cattle throughout Ireland; on these conditions he was confirmed in the government and administration of justice over the whole island, except Leinster, Meath and Waterford, and authorized to reckon upon the help of the royal constables in compelling the obedience of his vassals and collecting from them their share of the tribute.[910]

ii.183

This scheme might perhaps have answered at least as well as a similar plan had answered during a few years in South Wales, had it not been for the disturbed condition of the English settlement. The death of Richard of Striguil in 1176[911] left the command in the hands of his brother-in-law and constable, Raymond the Fat, who for some years had been not only the leader of his forces, but also his chief adviser and most indispensable agent in all matters political and military.[912] A jealous rival, however, had already brought Raymond into ill repute at court,[913] and the king’s seneschal William Fitz-Aldhelm was sent to supersede him.[914] William appears to have been a loyal servant of the king, but his tact and wisdom did not equal his loyalty. At the moment of landing his suspicions were aroused by the imposing display of armed followers with which Raymond came to meet him; the muttered words which he incautiously suffered to escape his lips—“I will soon put an end to all this!”—were enough to set all the Geraldines against him at once; and the impolitic haste and severity with which he acted upon his suspicions, without waiting to prove their justice,[915] drove the whole body of the earlier settlers into such a state of irritation that early in the next year Henry found it necessary to recall him.[916] Meanwhile the aggressive spirit of the English settlers had made Henry’s treaty with Roderic almost a dead letter. In defiance of the rights which that treaty reserved to the Irish monarch, they had profited by the mutual dissensions of the lesser native chieftains to extend their own power far beyond the limits therein laid down. A civil war in Munster had ended in its virtual subjugation by Raymond and his Geraldine kinsfolk;[917] a like pretext hadii.184 served for an invasion of Connaught itself by Miles Cogan;[918] John de Courcy was in full career of conquest in Ulster.[919] Henry could scarcely have put a stop to all this, even had he really wished to do so; and by this time he was probably more inclined to encourage any extension of English power in Ireland, for he had devised a new scheme for the government of that country.

The bride of John “Lackland,” Alice of Maurienne, had died within a year of her betrothal.[920] The marriage-contract indeed provided that in case of such an event her sister should take her place; but the connexion had begun too inauspiciously for either Henry or Humbert to have any desire of renewing it; and Henry now saw a possibility of more than repairing within his insular dominions the ill-luck which had befallen his plans of advancement on the continent for his favourite child. In the autumn of 1176 John was betrothed to his cousin Avice, the youngest of the three daughters of Earl William of Gloucester, and Avice was made heiress to the whole of the vast estates in the west of England and South Wales which her father had inherited from his parents, Earl Robert of Gloucester and Mabel of Glamorgan.[921] But a mere English earldom, however important, was not enough to satisfy Henry’s ambition for his darling. In his scheme Avice’s wealth was to furnish her bridegroom with the means of supporting a loftier dignity. He had now, it was said, obtained Pope Alexander’s leave to make king of Ireland whichever of his sons he might choose. On the strength of this permission he seems to have reverted to his original scheme of conquering the whole island.[922] In May 1177 he publicly announced his intention of bestowing the realm of Ireland upon his youngest son John,ii.185 and parcelled out the southern half of the country among a number of feudal tenants, who did homage for their new fiefs to him and John in a great council at Oxford.[923] As however John was too young to undertake the government in person, his father was again compelled to choose a viceroy. He fell back upon his earliest choice and re-appointed Hugh de Lacy;[924] and with the exception of a temporary disgrace in 1181,[925] it was Hugh who occupied this somewhat thankless office during the next seven years. With the internal history of Ireland during his administration and throughout the rest of Henry’s reign we are not called upon to deal here; for important as are its bearings upon the history of England, their importance did not become apparent till a much later time than that of the Angevin kings.

Map V.

FRANCE & BURGUNDY cir. 1180.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

It is during these years of prosperity and peace that we are able to get the clearest view of the scope and aims of Henry’s general scheme of home and foreign policy. That policy, when fully matured in its author’s mind, formed a consistent whole; it was however made up of two distinct parts, originating in the twofold position of Henry himself. His empire extended from the western shores of Ireland to the Cévennes, and from the northernmost point of the mainland of Britain to the Pyrenees. But this empire was composed of a number of separate members over which his authority differed greatly in character and degree. Theseii.186 members, again, fell into two well-marked groups. Over the one group Henry ruled as supreme head; no other sovereign had ever claimed to be his superior, none now claimed to be even his equal, within the British Isles. In the other group, however, he had at least a nominal superior in the king of France. It was impossible to deal with these two groups of states on one and the same principle; and Henry had never attempted to do so. The one group had its centre in England, the other in Anjou. As a necessary consequence, Henry’s policy had also two centres throughout his reign. The key to it as a whole lies in its blending of two characters united in one person, yet essentially distinct: the character of the king of England and supreme lord of the British Isles, and the character of the head of the house of Anjou. Henry himself evidently kept the two characters distinct in his own mind. His policy as king of England, however little it may have been consciously aimed at such a result—and we should surely be doing a great injustice to Henry’s sagacity if we doubted that it was so aimed, at least in some degree—certainly tended to make England a strong and independent national state, with its vassal states, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, standing around it as dependent allies. If he had ever for a moment dreamed of reducing his insular dominions to a mere subject-province of the empire which he was building up in Gaul, when he thought of intrusting their government to his boy-heir under the guardianship of Thomas, that dream had been broken at once and for ever by the quarrel which deprived the child of his guardian and the king of his friend. But, on the other hand, Henry certainly never at any time contemplated making his continental empire a mere dependency of the English crown. It was distinctly an Angevin empire, with its centre in the spot whence an Angevin count had been promised of old that the sway of his descendants should spread to the ends of the earth. Henry in short had another work to carry on besides that of Cnut and William and Henry I. He had to carry on also the work of Fulk the Black and Geoffrey Martel and Fulk V.; and although to us who know how speedy was to be its overthrow that work looks a comparativelyii.187 small matter, yet at the time it may well have seemed equally important with the other in the eyes both of Henry and of his contemporaries. While what may be called the English thread in the somewhat tangled skein of Henry’s life runs smoothly and uneventfully on from the year 1175 to the end, it is this Angevin thread which forms the clue to the political and personal, as distinguished from the social and constitutional, interest of all the remaining years of his reign. And from this interest, although its centre is at Angers, England is not excluded. For the whole continental relations of Henry were coloured by his position as an English king; and the whole foreign relations of England, from his day to our own, have been coloured by the fact that her second King Henry was also head of the Angevin house when that house was at the height of its continental power and glory.

The prophecy said to have been made to Fulk the Good was now literally fulfilled. The dominions of his posterity reached to the uttermost ends of the known world. In the far east, one grandson of Fulk V. ruled over the little strip of Holy Land which formed the boundary of Christendom against the outer darkness of unexplored heathendom. In the far west, another of Fulk’s grandsons was, formally at least, acknowledged overlord of the island beyond which, in the belief of those days, lay nothing but a sea without a shore. Scarcely less remarkable, however, was the fulfilment of the prediction in a narrower sense. The whole breadth of Europe and the whole length of the Mediterranean sea parted the western from the eastern branch of the Angevin house. But in Gaul itself, the Angevin dominion now stretched without a break from one end of the land to the other. The Good Count’s heir held in his own hands the whole Gaulish coast-line from the mouth of the Somme to that of the Bidassoa, and he could almost touch the Mediterranean Sea through his vassal the count of Toulouse. Step by step the lords of the little Angevin march had enlarged their borders till they enclosed more than two-thirds of the kingdom of France. Fulk Nerra and Geoffrey Martel had doubled their possessions by theii.188 conquest of Touraine to the south-east; Fulk V. had tripled them by the annexation of Maine to the northward; Geoffrey Plantagenet’s marriage with the heiress of Normandy had brought him to the shores of the English Channel. The whole series of annexations and conquests whereby his son expanded his continental dominions to the extent which they covered thirty years after Geoffrey’s death resulted simply from a continuation of the same policy which, a century and a half before, had laid the foundations of the Angevin empire. Count Henry Fitz-Empress stood in a figure, like Count Fulk the Black, upon the rock of Angers, looked around over his marchland and its borders, noted every point at which those borders might be strengthened, rounded off or enlarged, and set himself to the pursuit of Fulk Nerra’s work in Fulk Nerra’s own spirit. For such a survey indeed he needed a more wide-reaching vision than even that of the Black Falcon. The work had altered vastly in scale since it left the “great builder’s” hands; but it had not changed in character. Henry’s policy in Gaul was essentially the same as Fulk’s—a policy of consolidation, rather than of conquest. He clearly never dreamed, as a man of less cautious ambition might well have done in his place, of pitting the whole strength of his continental and insular dominions against that of the French Crown in a struggle for the mastery of Gaul; he seems never to have dreamed even of trying to free himself from his feudal obedience to a sovereign far inferior to him in territorial wealth and power; he never, so far as we can see, aspired to stand in any other relation to the French king than that which had been held by his forefathers. He aimed in fact simply at compacting and securing his own territories in Gaul, and maintaining the rank of the head of the Angevin house, as the most influential vassal of the Crown. If he ever saw, on a distant horizon, a vision of something greater than this, he kept his dream to himself and, like Fulk of old, left his successors to attempt its fulfilment.

Map VI.

MAP OF EUROPE cir. 1180.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

An ambition so moderate as this entailed no very complicated schemes of foreign diplomacy. As a matter of fact, Henry was at some time or other in his reign in diplomatic relations with every state and every ruler in Christendom,ii.189 from Portugal to Norway, and from the count of Montferrat to the Eastern and Western Emperors. But these relations sprang for the most part from his insular rather than from his continental position; or, more exactly, they arose from his position as a king of England, but a king far mightier than any who had gone before him. It was the knowledge that Henry had at his back all the forces of the island-crown which roused in Louis VII. such a restless jealousy of his power in Gaul; and it was the jealousy of Louis which drove Henry into a labyrinth of diplomacy and of war, neither of which was a natural result of Henry’s own policy. A very brief glance at Henry’s foreign relations will suffice to shew that they concerned England far more than Anjou. A considerable part of them arose directly out of his quarrel with the English primate. Such was the case with his German and Italian alliances, designed to counterbalance the French king’s league with the Pope. The alliances formed through the marriages of his daughters were all strictly alliances made by the English Crown. The immediate occasion of Matilda’s marriage with Henry of Saxony was her father’s quarrel with S. Thomas; in another point of view, this union was only a natural continuation of a policy which may be traced through the wedding of her grandmother with Henry V. and that of Gunhild with Henry III. back to the wedding of Æthelstan’s sister Eadgifu with Charles the Simple. The marriages of Eleanor and Jane were first planned during the same troubled time; in each case the definite proposal came from the bridegroom, and came in the shape of an humble suit to the king of England for his daughter’s hand; and in the case of all three sisters, the proposal was laid before a great council of the bishops and barons of England, and only accepted after formal deliberation upon it with them, as upon a matter which concerned the interests of England as a state.[926] When Jane went to be married to the king of Sicily in 1176, the detailsii.190 of her journey to her new home and of the honours which she received on her arrival there were recorded in England as matters of national interest and national pride.[927] When in the following year her sister Eleanor’s husband, Alfonso of Castille, submitted a quarrel between himself and his kinsman the king of Navarre to his father-in-law’s arbitration, the case was heard in an assembly of the English barons and wise men at Westminster.[928] Henry’s daughters in short were instruments of his regal, his national, his English policy; for the carrying out of his Angevin, his family policy, he looked to his sons.

The arrangement by which he endeavoured to make them carry it out is however not very easy to understand or to account for. He had long since abandoned his early scheme of devoting himself entirely to continental politics and making England over to the hands of his eldest son. That scheme, indeed, had been frustrated in the first instance by his quarrel with Thomas; although it seemed to have been revived in 1170, it was as a mere temporary expedient to meet a temporary need; and the revolt of 1173 put an end to it altogether, by proving clearly to Henry that he must never again venture to delegate his kingly power and authority to any one, even for a season. But, on the other hand, it is not easy at once to see why, during the years which followed, he persistently refused to give to his eldest son as much real, though subordinate, power on the continent as he was willing to give to the younger ones—why young Henry was not suffered to govern Anjou and Normandy as Richard was suffered to govern Aquitaine and Geoffrey to govern Britanny, so soon as they were old enough, under the control of their father as overlord. So far as we can venture to guess at the king’s motives, the most probable reason seems to be that he could not part with any share of authority over his ancestral dominions without parting at the same time with his ancestral dignities.ii.191 From a strictly Angevin or Cenomannian point of view, Aquitaine and Britanny were both simply appendages, diversely acquired, to the hereditary Angevin and Cenomannian dominions. Nay, from a strictly Norman point of view, England itself was but an addition to the heritage of the Norman ducal house. Henry might make over all these to his sons as under-fiefs to govern in subjection to him, and yet retain intact his position as head of the sovereign houses of Normandy and Anjou. But to place his mother’s duchy and his father’s counties in other hands—to reduce them to the rank of under-fiefs, keeping for himself no closer connexion with them than a mere general overlordship—would have been, in principle, to renounce his birthright; while in practice, it would probably have been equivalent to complete abdication, as far as his continental empire was concerned. Henry would have had as little chance of enforcing his claim to overlordship without a territorial basis on which to rest it, as a German Emperor without his hereditary duchy of Saxony or Franconia or Suabia, or a French king without his royal domain. In short, when Henry found it impossible to give England to his eldest son, he had nothing else to give him, unless he gave him all; and Henry Fitz-Empress was no more inclined than William the Conqueror had been to “take off his clothes before he was ready to go to bed.” All his schemes for the distribution of his territories, therefore, from 1175 onwards, were intended solely to insure a fair partition among his sons after his own death; his general aim being that young Henry should step into exactly his own position as king of England, duke of Normandy and count of Anjou, and overlord of Britanny, Aquitaine, and all other dependencies of the Angevin and Norman coronets or of the English crown.

None of the holders of these dependencies, however, had as yet entered into full enjoyment of their possessions. At the close of their first revolt, in 1175, the young king was but just entering his twentieth year; Richard was in his eighteenth and Geoffrey in his seventeenth year; and although the one had been titular duke of Aquitaine and the other titular duke of Britanny since 1169, the realii.192 government of both duchies, as well as that of Normandy and Anjou, had been until now in the hands of their father. For the purposes of our story there is only one part of these continental possessions of our Angevin king into whose internal concerns we need enter at any great length; a very slight sketch may suffice for the others. The part which lay nearest to England, and which politically was most closely connected with it—the duchy of Normandy—was also associated with it in many of Henry’s legal, constitutional and administrative reforms. A comparison of dates indeed would almost suggest that Henry, when contemplating a great legal or administrative experiment in England, usually tried it first in Normandy in order to test its working there upon a small scale before he ventured on applying it to his island realm. An edict issued at Falaise in the Christmas-tide of 1159–1160, ordaining “that no dean should accuse any man without the evidence of neighbours who bore a good character, and that in the treatment of all causes, the magistrates of the several districts at their monthly courts should determine nothing without the witness of the neighbours, should do injustice to no man and inflict nothing to the prejudice of any, should maintain the peace, and should punish all robbers summarily,”[929] seems to contain a foreshadowing at once of some of the Constitutions of Clarendon which created such excitement in England four years afterwards, and of the Assize which followed two years later still. A commission of inquiry into the administration of the Norman episcopal sees and viscounties in 1162[930] was a sort of forerunner of the great inquest into the conduct of the English sheriffs in 1170. This again was followed next year, as we have seen, by an inquiry into the state of the ducal forests and demesnes,[931] which has its English parallels in the great forest assize of 1176 and in an inquest into the condition of the royal demesnes ordered in the spring of 1177.[932] On the other hand, a roll of the Norman tenants-in-chivalryii.193 compiled in 1172 seems to have been modelled upon the English “Black Book” of 1168;[933] and when Henry determined to institute a thorough reform in the whole Norman administration, it was at the English exchequer-table that he found his instrument for the work. In 1176 William de Courcy, the seneschal of Normandy, died. In his stead the king appointed Richard of Ilchester. Richard, to judge by his surname, must have been an Englishman by birth; from the second year of Henry’s reign he was employed as a “writer” in the royal treasury;[934] about 1163 he was made archdeacon of Poitiers, but his archidiaconal functions sat as lightly upon him as upon a contemporary whose name is often associated with his, Geoffrey Ridel, archdeacon of Canterbury and vice-chancellor; and throughout the struggle with Archbishop Thomas he was one of the most active agents of Henry’s foreign diplomacy.[935] Unlike his colleagues Geoffrey Ridel and John of Oxford, he contrived, notwithstanding the ecclesiastical disgrace in which he became involved through his dealings with the schismatic Emperor and the antipope, to retain the general respect of all parties among his fellow-countrymen.[936] Throughout the same period, when not absent from England on some diplomatic mission, he frequently appears as an acting justice of the King’s Court and baron of the Exchequer.[937] He continued to fulfil the same duties after his elevation to the see of Winchester in 1174; and the estimation in which he was held is shewn by the fact that on his return from Normandy, where he was replaced at the end of two yearsii.194 by William Fitz-Ralf,[938] a special seat was assigned to him at the exchequer-table between the presiding justiciar and the treasurer, “that he might diligently examine what was written on the roll.”[939] He was evidently invested with far more authority in Normandy than that which usually appertained to a Norman seneschal—authority, in fact, more like that of an English justiciar; indeed, he is actually called justiciar, and not seneschal, by contemporary English writers.[940] His work in the duchy seems to have been moreover specially connected with finance;[941] and we may perhaps venture to see a trace of his hand in the organization of the Norman Court of Exchequer, which first comes distinctly to light in Henry’s latter years, its earliest extant roll being that of the year 1180.[942] The earlier stages of the legal and administrative organization of Normandy are, however, so lost in obscurity that neither constitutional lawyers in Henry’s day nor constitutional historians in our own have been able to determine the exact historical relation of the Norman system to that of England;[943] and the speedy severance of the political connexion between them makes the determination of the question, after all, of little practical moment.

Even more obscure than the internal history of Normandy under Henry II. is that of Anjou and of the two dependencies which may now be reckoned as one with it, Touraine and Maine. There is in his time throughout the whole of his dominions, with the marked exception of England, a dearth of historical records. Normandy cannot boast of a single historian such as those of the preceding generation, Orderic or William of Jumièges; the only Norman chronicle of any importance is that of Robert of Torigny, commonly known as “Robert de Monte,” from the Mont-St.-Michel of which he was abbot; and even his work is nothing more than a tolerably full and accurate chronicleii.195 of the old-fashioned type, arranged on the annalistic plan “according to the years of our Lord” which William of Malmesbury had condemned long ago. The Breton chronicles, always meagre, grow more meagre still as the years pass on; the same may be said of the chronicles of Tours; the “Acts of the bishops of Le Mans,” our sole native authority for the history of Maine, cease to record anything save purely ecclesiastical details. In Anjou itself the recent aggrandizement of the Angevin house stirred up in Henry’s early years a spirit of patriotic loyalty which led more than one of his subjects to collect the floating popular traditions of his race, as the ballads and tales of old England had been collected by Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury, and weave them into a narrative which passed for a history of the Angevin counts; and one of these writers supplemented his work with a special memoir of Henry’s father, Geoffrey duke of the Normans. But the reign of Henry himself found no historian in the Marchland; and indeed the half-blank pages of the few monastic chronicles which still dragged out a lingering existence in one or two of the great Angevin abbeys shew us that under Count Henry Fitz-Empress Anjou was once more, as of old under Count Fulk the Good, happy in having no history.

Yet it is there, and there alone, that we can catch a glimpse of one side of his character which, if we saw him only in England or in Normandy, we should hardly have discerned at all. Strange as it seems to us who know him in his northern realms only as the enterprising and somewhat unscrupulous politician, the stern and vigorous ruler, the hard-headed statesman, the uncompromising opponent of the Church’s claims, Henry is yet the one Angevin count who completely reproduced in his Marchland, as a living reality, the ideal which was represented there by the name of the good count-canon of Tours. Fulk the Black and Fulk the Fifth had both tried to reproduce it, each according to his lights, during those few years when the pressure of external politics and warfare left them free to devote their energies for a while to their country’s internal welfare. But Henry’s whole reign was, for his paternal dominions, a reignii.196 of peace. If we drew our ideas of him solely from the traces and traditions which he has left behind him there, we could never have guessed that he was a greater warrior than Fulk Nerra; we should rather have taken him for a quiet prince who, like Fulk the Good, “waged no wars.” These traces and traditions lie scattered over the soil of Anjou, Touraine and Maine as thickly as the traces and the traditions of the Black Count himself. Henry is in fact the only one of the later Angevin counts who made upon the imagination of his people an impression even approaching in vividness to that left by Fulk the Black, and of whose material works there remains anything which can be compared with those of the “great builder” of the preceding century. But the memory which Anjou has retained of Henry differs much in character from that which she has kept of Fulk; and it differs more widely still from that which Henry himself has left in his island-realm. In English popular tradition he appears simply as the hero of a foolish and discreditable romance, or as the man who first caused the murder of S. Thomas and then did penance at his grave; and material traces of him there are literally none, for of his English dwelling-places not one stone is left upon another, and not a single surviving monument of public utility, secular or ecclesiastical, is connected with his name. In the valley of the Loire it was far otherwise. There the two great Angevin builders share between them the credit of well-nigh all the more important monuments which give life to the medieval history of the land—except the military constructions, which belong to Fulk alone. It is not in donjons such as that of Loches or Montrichard, but in palaces and hospitals, bridges and embankments, that we see our Angevin king’s handiwork in his own home-lands. Almost every one of his many local capitals was adorned during his reign with a palace of regal dimensions and magnificence, reared by him in place of the lowlier “halls” which had served for the dwelling of the merely local rulers whom he succeeded. The rebuilding of the ducal palace at Rouen was begun in 1161;[944] that of Caen was nearlyii.197 finished in 1180; its hall, which still exists, is the traditional seat of the Norman Exchequer.[945] At Tours a round tower which still stands in the barrack-yard is the sole surviving fragment of a castle which Henry is said to have built. His favourite abode in Touraine, however, was not at Tours but at Chinon, where the little fortress above the Vienne which had been the last conquest of Fulk Nerra and the lifelong prison of Geoffrey the Bearded grew under Henry’s hands into a royal retreat of exquisite beauty and splendour—a gem, even now in its ruin, worthy of its setting in the lovely valley of the Vienne, with the background of good greenwood which to Henry was probably its greatest charm. Angers, again, almost put on a new face in the course of Henry’s lifetime. In the year before his birth it had been visited by a fire which reduced to almost total ruin its whole south-western quarter, including the palace of the counts,[946] of which nothing but the great hall seems to have remained. The work of reconstruction, begun no doubt by Geoffrey Plantagenet, was completed on a regal scale by his son, and before the close of Henry’s reign a visitor from England, Ralf de Diceto, could gaze in admiration at the “vast palace,” with its “newly-built apartments, adorned with splendour befitting a king,” which rose at the foot of the vine-clad hills above the purple stream of Mayenne.[947]

But the count-king did not build for himself alone. It was, above all, with works of public usefulness that he delighted to adorn his realms. His beneficence indeed took a different shape from that of his predecessors. Church-building and abbey-founding met with little sympathy from him; throughout his whole dominions, only six religious houses, in the strict sense, could claim him as their founder; and even one of these was as much military as religious, for it was a commandery of knights Templars.[948] But noii.198 sovereign was ever more munificent in providing for the sick and needy. Not only do the Norman Exchequer-rolls contain frequent mention of sums set apart out of the ducal revenues for the support of lazar-houses and hospitals in the chief towns of the several bailiwicks;[949] nineteen years before the completion of his own palace at Caen, he had founded an hospital for lepers outside the walls of the town;[950] and a park and hunting-lodge which he had made for himself in the same year, 1161, at Quévilly by Rouen[951] were shortly afterwards given up by him to a colony of monks from Grandmont in Aquitaine, to be converted under their care into another great asylum for victims of the same disease.[952] At his own native Le Mans, the great hall of an almshouseii.199 or hospital outside the north-eastern boundary of the city, said to have been reared by him for the reception of its poor and sick folk, is still to be seen, though long since perverted to other uses. At Angers, on the other hand, it is only within the last half-century that the sick and disabled poor have exchanged for a more modern dwelling the shelter provided for them by Henry Fitz-Empress. Some time in the quiet years which followed the barons’ revolt, Stephen,[953] the seneschal of Anjou, bought of the abbess and convent of our Lady of Charity at Angers a plot of ground which lay between their abbey and the river, and on which he designed to build an hospice for the poor. In the last days of 1180 or the first days of 1181 the count-king took under his own care the work which his seneschal had begun, granted to the new hospital a rich endowment in lands and revenues, exempted it from secular charges and imposts, and won from Pope Alexander a confirmation of its spiritual independence.[954] Four priests were appointed to minister to the spiritual needs of its inmates; the care of their bodies was undertaken at first, it seems, by some pious laymen bound by no special rule; some years later, however, the hospital became, like most other establishments of the kind, affiliated to the Order of S. Augustine.[955] The pretty little chapel—dedicated to S. John the Baptist, and still standing,—the cloisters and the domestic offices were all finished before Henry’s death;[956] while of the two great pillared halls which now form the chief architectural glory of the suburb, one, the smaller and simpler, is clearly of his building; and the other, more vast and beautiful, is in all probability the last legacy of his sons to the home which was soon to be theirs no longer.[957]

This Hospice of S. John formed a third with Fulk Nerra’s abbey of S. Nicolas and Hildegard’s nunnery of our Lady of Charity in the group of pious and charitable foundationsii.200 round which there gathered, on the meadows that bordered the right bank of the Mayenne, the suburb now known as Ronceray or La Doutre,—a suburb which even before the close of Henry’s reign had grown almost as populous as Angers itself, and was actually preferred to it as a residence by Ralf de Diceto.[958] Twice in Henry’s reign the bridge which linked it to the city was destroyed by fire;[959] the present “Grand-Pont” probably owes its erection to him. Fire was, however, by no means the most destructive element in the valleys of the Loire and its tributaries. “Well-nigh disappearing in summer, choked within their sandy beds,” these streams were all too apt, as Ralf de Diceto says of the Mayenne, to “rage and swell in winter like the sea;”[960] and the greatest and most lasting of all Henry’s material benefactions to Anjou was the embankment or “Levée”—a work which he seems characteristically to have planned and executed in the very midst of his struggle with the Church[961]—which stretches along Loire-side, from Ponts-de-Cé, just above the junction of the Mayenne and the Loire, some thirty miles eastward to Bourgueil. Further south, in the valley of the Vienne, the legend of the “Pont de l’Annonain” illustrates the curious but not altogether unaccountable confusion which grew up in popular imagination between the two great builders of Anjou. The “bridge,” a long viaduct which stretched from Chinon across river and meadow south-westward to the village of Rivière, was in reality built by Henry to secure a safe transit from Chinon into Poitou across the low ground on the south bank of the Vienne, which in rainy seasons was an all but impassable swamp. Later ages, however, connected it with a dim tradition, which still lingered in the district, of the wonderful night-ride across Loire and Vienne whereby Fulk Nerra had won Saumur, and in the belief of the peasantry the Pont de l’Annonainii.201 became a “devil’s bridge,” built in a single night by the Black Count’s familiar demon[962]—a demon who is but a popular personification of that spirit of dauntless enterprise and ceaseless activity which, alike in their material and in their political workmanship, was the secret of Henry’s success no less than of Fulk’s.

One portion, however, of Henry’s continental dominions has during these years a political and military history of its own, which is not without a bearing upon that of our own land. Geographically remote as it was from England, still more remote in the character of both country and people, Aquitaine yet concerns us more than any other part of Henry’s Gaulish possessions. For not only was it a chief source of the political complications which filled the closing years of his life; it was the only one of those possessions whose connexion with England survived the fall of the Angevin house. The heritages of Geoffrey and Matilda were lost by their grandson; the heritage of Eleanor remained, in part at least, in the hands of her descendants for more than two hundred years.

It was in truth a dower at once valuable and burdensome that Henry had received with his Aquitanian wife. She had made him master of a territory whose extent surpassed that of all his Norman and Angevin dominions put together, and was scarcely equalled by that of England—a territory containing every variety of soil and of natural characteristics, from the flat, rich pastures of Berry and the vineyards of Poitou and Saintonge to the rugged volcanic rocks and dark chestnut-woods of Auvergne, the salt marshes, sandy dunes, barren heaths and gloomy pine-forests of the Gascon coast, and the fertile valleys which open between the feet of the Pyrenees:—a territory whose population differed in blood and speech from their fellow-subjects north of Loire almost as widely as Normans and Angevins differed from Englishmen; while in temper and modes of thought and life they stood so apart from the northern world that in contradistinction to them Angevins and Normans and English might almost be counted, and indeed were almostii.202 ready to count themselves, as one people. It was a territory, too, whose political relations varied as much as its physical character, and were full of dangers which all Henry’s vigilance and wisdom were powerless to guard against or overcome. Setting aside, for the moment, the internal difficulties of Aquitaine, its whole eastern frontier, from the banks of the Cher to the Pyrenees, was more or less in dispute throughout his reign. The question of Toulouse, indeed, was settled in 1173; thenceforth the county of Toulouse, with its northern dependencies Rouergue and Alby, became a recognized underfief of the Poitevin duchy of Aquitaine, to which its western dependency, Quercy or the county of Cahors, had been already annexed after the war of 1160. The north-eastern portions of the older Aquitania, Berry and Auvergne, were sources of more lasting trouble. Berry had long ago been split into two unequal portions, of which the larger had remained subject to the dukes of Aquitaine, while the smaller northern division formed the viscounty of Bourges, and was an immediate fief of the French Crown. Naturally, the king was disposed to use every opportunity of thwarting the duke in the exercise of his authority over southern Berry; and Henry was equally desirous to lose no chance of re-asserting his ducal rights over Bourges.[963] The feudal position of Auvergne was a standing puzzle which king and duke, count, clergy and people, all in vain endeavoured to solve. During the struggle for supremacy in southern Gaul between the houses of Poitiers and Toulouse, Auvergne, after fluctuating for nearly a hundred years between the rival dukedoms, had virtually succeeded in freeing itself from the control of both, and in the reign of Louis VI. it seems to have been regarded as an immediate fief of the French Crown, to which however it proved a most unruly and troublesome possession. But the dukes of Aquitaine had never relinquished their claim to its overlordship; and when a quarrel broke out between two rival claimants of theii.203 county, it was naturally followed by a quarrel between Henry and Louis VII. as to their respective rights, as overlord and as lord paramount, to act as arbiters in the strife.[964] During five-and-twenty years it was a favourite device of Louis and of his successor, at every adverse crisis in Henry’s fortune, to despatch a body of troops into Auvergne to occupy that country and threaten Aquitaine through its eastern marches,[965] just as they habitually threatened Normandy through the marches of the Vexin.

Such a threat implied a far more serious danger in the south than in the north. The Aquitanian border was guarded by no such chain of strongly-fortified, stoutly-manned ducal castles as girt in the Norman duchy from Gisors to Tillières; and Henry’s hold over his wife’s dominions was very different from his grasp of the heritage of his mother. Twenty years of Angevin rule, which for political purposes had well-nigh bridged over the channel that parted England from Gaul, seem to have done nothing towards bridging over the gulf that parted Aquitaine from France and Anjou. If our Angevin king sometimes looks like a stranger amongst us, he was never anything but a stranger among the fellow-countrymen of his wife. Nowhere throughout his whole dominions was a spirit of revolt and insubordination so rife as among the nobles of Poitou and its dependencies; but it was a spirit utterly unlike the feudal pride of the Norman baronage. The endless strife of the Aquitanian nobles with their foreign duke and with each other sprang less from political motives than from a love of strife for its own sake; and their love of strife was only one phase of the passion for adventure and excitement which ran through every fibre of their nature and coloured every aspect of their social life. The men of the south lived in a world where the most delicate poetry and the fiercest savagery, the wildest moral and political disorder, and the most refined intellectual culture, mingled together in a confusion as picturesque as itii.204 was dangerous. The southern warrior was but half a knight if the sword was his only weapon—if he could not sing his battles as well as fight them. From raid and foray and siege he passed to the “Court of Love,” where the fairest and noblest women of the land, from the duchess herself downwards, presided over contests of subtle wit, skilful rime and melodious song, conducted under rules as stringent and with earnestness as deep as if life and death were at stake upon the issue; and in truth they sometimes were at stake, for song, love and war all mingled together in the troubadour’s life in an inextricable coil which the less subtle intellects of the north would have been powerless to unravel or comprehend. The sirvente or poetical satire with which he stung his enemies into fury or roused the slumbering valour of his friends often wrought more deadly mischief than sharp steel or blazing firebrand. The nature of the men of the south was like that of their country: it was made up of the most opposite characteristics—of the lightest fancies, the stormiest passions, the most versatile capabilities of body and mind, the most indolent love of ease and pleasure, the most restless and daring valour, the highest intellectual refinement and the lowest moral degradation. It was a nature which revolted instinctively from constraint in any direction,—whose impetuosity burst all control of law and order imposed from without upon its restless love of action and adventure, just as it overflowed all conventional bounds of thought and language with its exuberant play of feeling and imagination in speech or song.[966] We may see a type of it in the portrait, drawn by almost contemporary hands, of one who played an important part both in the social and in the political history of Aquitaine throughout the closing years of Henry II. and the reign of his successor. ii.205“Bertrand de Born was of the Limousin, lord of a castle in the diocese of Périgueux, by name Hautefort. He had at his command near a thousand men. And all his time he was at war with all his neighbours, with the count of Périgord, and the viscount of Limoges, and with his own brother Constantine—whom he would have liked to disinherit, had it not been for the king of England—and with Richard, while he was count of Poitou. He was a good knight, and a good warrior, and a good servant of ladies, and a good troubadour of sirventes; he never made but two songs, and the king of Aragon assigned the songs of Guiraut de Borneil as wives to his sirventes; and the man who sang them for him was named Papiol. And he was a pleasant, courteous man, wise and well-spoken, and knew how to deal with good and evil. And whenever he chose, he was master of King Henry and his sons; but he always wanted them to be at war among themselves, the father and the sons and the brothers one with another; and he always wanted the king of France and King Henry to be at war too. And if they made peace or a truce, he immediately set to work to unmake it with his sirventes, and to shew how they were all dishonoured in peace. And he gained much good by it, and much harm.”[967]

Until the dukedom of Aquitaine passed to a woman, as were the vassals, so was their sovereign. Eleanor’s grandfather the crusader-duke William VIII. and her father William IX. were simply the boldest knights, the gayest troubadours and the most reckless adventurers in their duchy. There can be no doubt that the submission of Aquitaine to Louis VII., so far as it ever did submit to him, was due to Eleanor’s influence; and it was the same influence which chiefly contributed to preserve its obedience to her second husband during those earlier years of their married life when, at home and abroad, all things had seemed destined to prosper in his hands. But at the first symptom of a turn in the tide of his fortunes, southern Gaul at one rose against its northern master. Eleanor’s tact and firmness, Henry’s wariness and vigour, were all taxed to the uttermost in holding it down throughout the years of his struggle with the Church; and when Eleanor herself turned against him in 1173, theii.206 chances of a good understanding between her subjects and her husband became very nearly desperate. Henry himself seems to have long ago perceived that a duke of Aquitaine, to be thoroughly sure of his ground, needed a different apprenticeship from that which might befit a king of England, a duke of Normandy or Britanny, or a count of Anjou. The very first step in his plans for the future of his children—a step taken several years before he seems even to have thought of crowning his eldest son—was the designation of the second as his mother’s destined colleague and ultimate heir. Richard had been trained up ever since he was two years old specially for the office of duke of Aquitaine. After long diplomacy, and at the cost of a betrothal which became the source of endless mischief and trouble, the French king’s sanction to the arrangement had been won; and on Trinity-Sunday 1172 Richard, in his mother’s presence, had been formally enthroned at Poitiers. He was probably intended to govern the duchy under her direction and advice; if so, however, the plan was frustrated by Eleanor’s own conduct and by the suspicions which it aroused in her husband. She was one of the very few captives whom at the restoration of peace in 1175 he still retained in confinement. Richard, on the other hand, had been like his brothers fully and freely forgiven; and while his father and eldest brother went to seal their reconciliation in England, he was sent into Poitou charged with authority to employ its forces at his own discretion, and to take upon himself the suppression of all disturbance and disorder in Aquitaine.[968]

What had been the precise nature of Richard’s training for his appointed work—what proportion of his seventeen years’ life had been actually spent in Aquitaine, what opportunities he had had of growing familiar with the people over whom he was now set to rule—we have no means of determining. By his own natural temper, however, he was probably of all Eleanor’s sons the one least fitted to gain the goodwill of the south. The “Cœur-de-lion” of tradition, indeed—the adventurous crusader, the mirror of knightly prowess and knightly courtesy, the lavish patron of verseii.207 and song, the ideal king of troubadours and knights-errant—looks at first glance like the very incarnation of the spirit of the south. But it was only in the intellectual part of his nature that his southern blood made itself felt; the real groundwork of his character was made of sterner stuff. The love of splendour and elegance, the delight in poetry and music,[969] the lavish generosity, the passion for adventure, which contrasted so vividly with his father’s practical businesslike temper, came to him without doubt from his mother. The moral deficiencies and evil tendencies of his nature he himself charged, somewhat too exclusively, upon the demon-blood of the Angevin counts.[970] But we need not look either to an ancestress so shadowy and so remote as the demon-countess, nor to a land so far distant from us as Poitou, for the source of Richard’s strongest characteristics both of body and of mind. In him alone among Henry’s sons can we see a likeness to the Norman forefathers of the Empress Matilda. His outward aspect, his lofty stature, his gigantic strength—held in check though it was by the constantly-recurring ague which “kept him, fearless, in a tremor as continual as the tremor of fear in which he kept the rest of the world”[971]—his blue eyes and golden hair, all proclaimed him a child of the north. And although he spent the chief part of his life elsewhere, the slender share of local and national sympathies which he possessed seems to have lain in the same direction. The “lion-heart” chose its own last earthly resting-place at Rouen, not at Poitiers;[972] and the intimate friend and comrade whose name is inseparably associated with his by a tradition which, whatever its historical value, is as famous as it is beautiful, was no Poitevin or Provençal troubadour, but a trouvère from northern France.[973] The influence of his northman-blood shewed itself more vividly still when on hisii.208 voyage to Palestine, having lived to be more than thirty years old without possessing a skiff that he could call his own, or—unless indeed in early childhood he had gone a cruise round his father’s island-realm—ever making a longer or more adventurous voyage than that from Southampton to Barfleur or Wissant, he suddenly developed not only a passionate love of the sea, but a consummate seamanship which he certainly had had no opportunity of acquiring in any way, and which can only have been born in him, as an inheritance from his wiking forefathers. When scarcely more than a boy in years, Richard was already one of the most serious and determined of men. His sternness to those who “withstood his will” matched that of the Conqueror himself; and Richard’s will, even at the age of seventeen, was no mere caprice, but a fixed determination which overrode all obstacles between itself and its object as unhesitatingly as the old wiking-keels overrode the billows of the northern sea. He went down into Aquitaine fully resolved that the country should be at once, and once for all, reduced to submission and order. He set himself “to bring the shapeless into shape, to reduce the irregular to rule, to cast down the things that were mighty and level those that were rugged; to restore the dukedom of Aquitaine to its ancient boundaries and its ancient government.”[974] He did the work with all his might, but he did it with a straightforward ruthlessness untempered by southern craft or Angevin caution and tact. He would not conciliate; he could not wait. “He thought nothing done while anything still remained to do; and he cared for no success that was not reached by a path cut by his own sword and stained with his opponent’s blood. Boiling over with zeal for order and justice, he sought to quell the audacity of this ungovernable people and to secure the safety of the innocent amid these workers of mischief by at once proceeding against the evil-doers with the utmost rigour which his ducal authority could enable him to exercise upon them.”[975] In a word, before Richard had been six months in their midst, the Aquitanians discovered that if their Angevin duke had chastisedii.209 them with whips, the son of their own duchess was minded to chastise them with scorpions.

He set off at once upon a furious campaign against the strongholds of the unruly barons. “No mountain-side however steep and rugged, no tower however lofty and impregnable, availed to check his advance, as skilful as it was daring, as steady and persevering as it was impetuous.”[976] By midsummer the castles of Poitou itself were mostly in his hands, and the young conqueror was busy with the siege of Castillonnes-sur-Agen, which surrendered to him in the middle of August.[977] Before the winter was over he was master of Périgueux, and had, in the phrase of a local writer, well-nigh “disinherited” the barons of Périgord, the Quercy and the Limousin. But in the spring their smouldering resentment was kindled into a blaze by the incitements of Bertrand de Born, whose brother Constantine, expelled by him from the castle of Hautefort which the two brothers had inherited in common, had appealed to Richard for succour; the signal for revolt, given by Bertrand in a vigorous sirvente, was answered by all the malcontents of the district,[978] and at the opposite end of Poitou by the count of Angoulême; and at Easter Richard found his position so difficult that he went to seek advice and reinforcements from his father in England.[979] Geoffrey of Britanny arrived at the same time on a like errand. Henry bade his eldest son go to the help of the younger ones; the young king complied,[980] somewhat unwillingly, and went to collect forces in France while Richard hurried back into Poitou. The peril was urgent; in his absence Count Vulgrin of Angoulême had invaded Poitou at the head of a host of Brabantines. The invaders were however met and defeated with great slaughter at Barbezieux by Richard’s constable Theobald Chabot and Bishop John of Poitiers.[981] By Whitsuntide Richard hadii.210 gathered a sufficient force of loyal Poitevins and stipendiaries from the neighbouring lands to march against Vulgrin and his Brabantines and defeat them in a battle near the border of the Angoumois and Saintonge. He then turned upon the viscount of Limoges, besieged and took his castle of Aixe, and thence advanced to Limoges itself, which he captured in like manner. At midsummer he was rejoined at Poitiers by his elder brother, and the two led their combined forces against Vulgrin of Angoulême.[982] A fortnight’s siege had however scarcely made them masters of Châteauneuf on the Charente when the young king—seduced, it was said, by some evil counsellor whom we may probably suspect to have been Bertrand de Born[983]—suddenly abandoned the campaign and withdrew again to France. Richard, undaunted by his brother’s desertion, pushed on to Moulin-Neuf and thence to Angoulême itself, where all the leaders of the rebellion were gathered together. A six days’ siege sufficed to make Vulgrin surrender himself, his fellow-rebels, his city and five of his castles to the mercy of the duke and the English king. Richard sent over all his prisoners to his father in England; Henry, however, sent them back again, and Richard put them in prison to await their sentence till the king should return to Gaul.[984]

Northern Aquitaine, or Guyenne, was now for the moment subdued. As soon as Christmas was over Richard proceeded to the reduction of Gascony. Dax, held against him by its viscount Peter and by the count of Bigorre, and Bayonne, defended by its viscount Ernald Bertram, submitted each after a ten days’ siege; S. Pierre-de-Cize, on the Spanish frontier, fell in one day; the Basques and Navarrese were compelled to promise peace; the plunderings habitually inflicted by the border-folk upon pilgrims to the shrine of S. James at Compostella were suppressed; and from his court at Poitiers on Candlemas-day Richard triumphantly reported to his father that he had pacified the whole country.[985] But the peace did not last long. Troubleii.211 was already threatening at the opposite end of the duchy. Ralf of Déols, the wealthiest baron in Berry, had lately died leaving as his heir an infant daughter. She was of course, according to feudal law, a ward of her overlord, King Henry; but her relatives seized both her and her estates, and refused to give up either.[986] Henry, probably feeling that the boy-duke of Aquitaine had already more than enough upon his hands, charged his eldest son with the settlement of this affair, bidding him take possession of all Ralf’s lands without delay, and significantly adding: “While I governed my realms alone, I lost none of my rightful possessions; it will be shame to us all if aught of them be lost now that we are several to rule them.” The young king took the hint, marched with all his Norman and Angevin forces into Berry, and laid siege to Châteauroux;[987] but he seems to have had no success;[988] and there was no chance of help from Richard, for not only was the Limousin again plunged in civil war,[989] but all southern Aquitaine was in danger of a like fate—an attempt of Count Raymond of Toulouse to exert his authority as overlord of Narbonne with greater stringency than its high-spirited viscountess Hermengard was disposed to endure having stirred up against him a league of all the princes of Septimania and the Spanish border, under the leadership of Hermengard herself and of Raymond’s hereditary rivals, the king of Aragon and his brothers.[990] The way in which Raymond prepared to meet their attack supplies a vivid illustration of southern character and manners. He sought an ally in Bertrand de Born, and he appealed to him in his character not of knight but of troubadour. He sent a messenger to Hautefort to state his cause and to ask Bertrand, not to fight for it, but simply to publish it to theii.212 world in a sirvente. Bertrand answered readily to the appeal; he was only too glad of any excuse for a sirvente which should “cause dints in a thousand shields, and rents in a thousand helms and hauberks.” “I would fain have the great barons ever wroth one with another!” is the characteristic exclamation with which he ends his war-song.[991]

The strife thus begun for the mastery in Septimania was continued at intervals between the houses of Toulouse and Aragon for many years to come. The overlord of Toulouse, however, seems to have taken no part in it as yet; and indeed, it had scarcely more than begun when Richard was summoned away to meet his father in Normandy. Three times in the course of that spring and summer had King Henry collected his host in England for the purpose of going over sea to the help of his sons; twice had he remanded it,[992] for the sake, as it seems, of continuing his legal and administrative work in England. By midsummer however the tidings from Gaul were such that he dared not further prolong his absence. Geoffrey wanted his help in Britanny; Richard wanted it almost as much in Aquitaine; the young king’s unaccountable lack of vigour in their support, and in the prosecution of the war in Berry, was justly raising suspicions of his loyalty to the family cause; and the treaty made with Louis of France at the close of the last war was proving, as such treaties too often did prove, only a source of fresh disputes. Henry summoned Louis to fulfil his part of the agreement by handing over the Vexin to the young king and the viscounty of Bourges to Richard, according to his promise, as the dowries of their brides;[993] Louis insisted that Henry should first complete his share of the engagement by allowing Adela, who had been in his custody ever since the treaty was signed, to be wedded to her promised bridegroom, Richard. At last, in July, he succeeded in bringing the matter to a crisis by extorting from a papal legate who had been sent to deal with a heresy that had arisen in southern Gaul a threat of laying all Henry’s dominions under interdict unless Richard and Adela wereii.213 married at once.[994] The English bishops appealed against the threat;[995] while Henry hurried over to Normandy,[996] met first his two elder sons,[997] then the legate,[998] then the French king,[999] and once again contrived to stave off the threatening peril. At Nonancourt, on September 25, the two kings made a treaty containing not one word of marriages or dowries, but consisting of an agreement to bury all their differences under the cross. They pledged themselves to go on crusade together, to submit to arbitration the questions in dispute between them about Auvergne and Berry, and to lay aside all their other quarrels at once and for ever.[1000] Such a treaty was in reality a mere temporary expedient; but it served Henry’s purpose by securing him against French interference while he marched against the rebels in Berry. As usual, he carried all before him; Châteauroux surrendered without a struggle; the lord of La Châtre, who had stolen the little heiress of Déols and was keeping her fast in his own castle, hurried to make his peace and give up his prize.[1001] Henry used his opportunity to advance into the Limousin and exert his authority in punishing its turbulent barons;[1002] soon after Martinmas he and Louis met at Graçay and made another ineffectual attempt to settle the vexed question of Auvergne;[1003] a month later he was again in Aquitaine,ii.214 purchasing the direct ownership of one of its under-fiefs, the county of La Marche, from the childless Count Adalbert who was purposing to end his days in Holy Land;[1004] and at Christmas he was back at Angers, where he kept the feast with his three elder sons amid such a gathering of knights as had never been seen at his court except at his own crowning or that of the young king.[1005]

For six months there was peace, and in July the king ventured to return to England.[1006] He knighted his son Geoffrey at Woodstock on August 6,[1007] and when the lad hurried over sea, eager to flesh his maiden sword and emulate the prowess of his brothers, he could find no more serious field in which to exercise his warlike energies than a succession of tournaments on the borders of France and Normandy.[1008] Richard however was again busy with more earnest fighting. The rivalry between the houses of Aragon and Toulouse had stirred up the petty chieftains of southern Gascony, whom the king of Aragon was seeking to enlist in his service; and Richard was obliged to undertake a campaign against the count of Bigorre in particular, which seems to have occupied him till the end of the year. The defiant attitude of the nobles of Saintonge and the Angoumois, and especially of a powerful baron, Geoffrey of Rancogne, called him back at Christmas to Saintes; as soon as the feast was over he laid siege to Geoffrey’s castle of Pons; after spending more than three months before the place, he left his constables to continue the blockade while he himself went to attack the other rebel castles. Five of them were taken andii.215 razed between Easter and Rogation-tide,[1009] and then Richard gathered up all his forces to assault Geoffrey of Rancogne’s mightiest stronghold, Taillebourg. It stood a few miles north of Saintes, on the crest of a lofty rock, three of whose sides were so steep as to defy any attempt to scale them, while the fourth was guarded by a triple ditch and rampart. Three lines of wall, built of hewn stone and strengthened with towers and battlements, encircled the keep, which was stored with provisions and arms offensive and defensive, and crowded with picked men-at-arms who laughed to scorn the rashness of the young duke in attempting to besiege a fortress which all his predecessors had looked upon as well-nigh unapproachable. But he cleared its approaches with a ruthless energy such as they little expected, cutting down vineyards, burning houses, levelling every obstacle before him, till he pitched his tents close to the castle walls under the eyes of the astonished townsfolk. A sally of the latter only resulted in making a way for Richard’s entrance into the town; three days later the castle surrendered, and Geoffrey himself with it.[1010] Ten days’ more fighting brought all the rebels to submission and reduced Vulgrin of Angoulême himself to give up his capital city and his castle of Montignac in Périgord;[1011] and at Whitsuntide Richard went to report his success with his own lips to his delighted father in England.[1012]

He returned shortly before Michaelmas,[1013] to witness the opening of a new phase in the relations between the Angevin house and the French Crown. Philip of France, the only son of Louis VII., was now fourteen years old, and his father was desirous to have him crowned king. Before the appointed day arrived, however, he fell sick almost to death.ii.216[1014] Louis, half wild with anxiety, dreamed that the martyr of Canterbury required him to visit his shrine as a condition of the boy’s recovery.[1015] He hurried across the Channel; Henry met him at Dover and conducted him to Canterbury, where they both spent three days in fasting and prayer before the shrine; and on the fourth day after his landing Louis re-entered his own country, to find that his prayers were answered.[1016] His brief visit was long remembered in England, where no king of France had ever been seen before,[1017] or was ever seen again save when John the Good was brought there as a prisoner in the days of Edward III. Scarcely, however, had Philip recovered when Louis himself was stricken down by paralysis.[1018] This calamity made him all the more anxious for his son’s coronation, which took place at Reims on All Saints’ day. The archbishop of the province—a brother of Queen Adela—performed the rite, assisted by nearly all the bishops of Gaul; all the great vassals of the kingdom were present, among them the young King Henry, who in his capacity of duke of Normandy carried the crown before his youthful overlord in the procession to and from the cathedral church, as Count Philip of Flanders carried the sword of state.[1019] Like the crowning of young Henry himself, the crowning of Philip Augustus proved to be a beginning of troubles. His father’s helpless condition left the boy-king to fall under the influence of whatever counsellor could first get at his ear. That one happened to be his godfather, Philip of Flanders; and the policy of Flanders was to get the boy entirely under his own control by setting him against all his father’s old friends,ii.217[1020] and even against his mother, whom he tried to rob of her dower-lands and persecuted to such a degree that she was compelled to leave his domains and fly to her brothers for the protection which her husband was powerless to give her.[1021] The united forces of Flanders and of the Crown—for the latter were now wholly at Philip’s command[1022]—were, however, more than a match for those of Champagne and Blois; and the house of Blois was driven to seek help of the only power which seemed capable of giving it—the power of their old rivals of Anjou.[1023]