THE GIFT OF ittVt..... .A>..,fa^..LA)lAAfer. A. .\r).vi.o X. c,. ..(.ifi .(.i:^j ■4 D^TE.plJL 29 2006 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924024572236 _ . Cornell University Library DA 195.F85 V.5 History of the Norman Conquest of Engian 3 1924 024 572 236 HISTORY OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. UonJjon HENKY FKOWDE OXFOHD trisriVERSITT PBESS -WAIlBHOlCrSE 7 PATEENOSTER ROW THE HISTORY OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST OF ENGLAND, ITS CAUSES AND ITS BESULTS. BY EDWAED A. FKEEMAN, M.A., Hon. D.C.L. & LL.D. LATE FELLOW OF TEINITT COLLEGtE, Knight Commander of the €freek Order of the Saviour, Corresponding Member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of Saint Petersburg, of the Royal Society of Sciences of GUttingen, and of the Historical Society of Massachusetts. VOLUME V. THE EFFECTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. airaXofieff av el [xrj ainaKofieQa, Plutarch, Themistohlis, AT THE CLARENDON PRESS. M.DCCC.LXXVI. [All rights reserved] P E E F A C E. X HAVE at last completed this work. The nature of this fifth volume has caused it to take a far longer time in its composition than any of those that have gone before it. My plan demanded that I should now deal in a single chapter with a time half as long again as the time to which I had before given three volumes. But the shorter amount of space certainly does not represent a smaller amount of work. It wiU be at once seen that, in the nar- rative part of this volume, even in the fuller accounts of William Rufus, Henry the First, and Stephen, I do not profess to tell the tale in fuU, as I have done with the reigns of Eadward, Harold, and William the Conqueror. As the subject of this volume is the Effects of the Norman Conquest, I have written the history of those reigns from that special point of view. My object has been to enlarge on everything that throws light on the effects of the Conquest, especially on everything that throws light on the relations between Normans and English in England. Other matters I have cut comparatively short. I had, as I have said in a note to the twenty- fourth Chapter, already written the twenty-third Chapter when the first volume of Professor Stubbs' vi PEEFACE. Constitutional History appeared. I had therefore the invaluable assistance of that work during the composition of all the rest of this volume, and during the revision of the earlier Chapters. The second volvime has been available only lor the last Chapter and for parts of the Appendix. The appearance of the Professor's book, the greatest monument of English historical scholarship, relieved me from the hardest part of my task. Much that I had meant to say, much that it had never occurred to me to say, I found said already as no man but the master of English history could have said it. I thus found that, in a great part of the twenty-fourth Chapter, I had really nothing to do but to act as commentator to Professor Stubbs' text, and to bring out into special prominence whatever bore more directly on my own immediate subject. I was thus able to give more attention to subjects like language and archi- tecture which entered but very slightly into the Professor's scheme. But I greatly regret that mere physical necessity has driven me to leave out or to cut short many points which I had meant to treat in the Appendix, and even to strike out a good deal that I had actually written. In choosing what to keep and what to cast aside, I have been guided by the rule which I gave before. I have made every- thing else give way to the full treatment of all that bore on the relations between Normans and English. In the Chapter on language I would ask such of my readers as may be finished philologers to look at it, if they can, from the point of view of one with whom political history is a primary study, and philo- logy one studied only as it illustrates the political PEEFACE. vii history. No man can study political history worthily without learning a good deal about language ; no man can study language worthily without learning a good deal about political history. Still the man with whom a subject is primary and the man with whom it is secondary look at it in quite different ways. With me the study of language is part of the study of history. A treatment of language which woiild be very inadequate for the purpose of a professed philologer may be all that is needed for my purpose. I only hope that professed philologers wiU find that what I have ventured to say on their subject is accurate as far as it goes. In the arclritectural Chapter I have been dealing with a subject which has been a favourite one of mine all my life, and which I have always tried to set in its trvie light as a branch of the study of history. I do not wonder that many are tempted to look with contempt on architectural research, when it is carried on, as it often is, as a mere matter of duU detail, without any animating prin- ciple. Many of our architectural inquirers have carried on their researches in ignorance of the first laws of historical criticism and of the most obvious facts in the history of the world. But deal worthily with the history of architecture, and it is worthy to take its place alongside of the history of law and of language. I have here tried to challenge for it that position, and I shall be well pleased either if I can persuade those who are versed in the legal or the hn- guistic side of my period to look at the architectural side along with them, or if I can persuade more im- mediate students of architecture that their studies vlii PKEFACE. are vain without something more than a superficial knowledge of the history of the times when buildings were raised and of the men who raised them. With regard to one main subject of this volume, the great record of Domesday, I trust that I have done something to set forth its boundless import- ance in the history of the time, and indeed in the history of times both before and since. For myself the Survey has a fascination which cannot be put into words. Nowhere else do we seem brought so near to the time as in its small notices of endless men, English and Norman, known and unknown. But when I look at Domesday itself, I feel how many there are among the subjects opened by it which I have not touched at all, and how imperfectly I have dealt with the subjects which I have touched. The stores of knowledge in Domes- day are boundless ; but their thorotigh investigation must be kept for a critical edition of the Survey itself. Such an edition cannot be the sole work of any one man, because no one man can have the needful local knowledge in all parts of England. It must be the work of many men working in concert in their several districts. But it would need one guiding and superintending mind, and that the mind of a historian of the liighest order. When I look at the work of more than ten years, now completed, with a few omissions, according to its original design, I may say that, allowing for im- provements in detail which are always suggesting themselves, I am satisfied with the three central volumes as a record of the reigns which are dealt with in them. But this present volume, and also PREFACE. ix the first, I look on as in some sort provisional. Many periods, many points, contained in them, I should be well pleased, if life and strength are granted me, to work out in further detail. To fill up those two volumes, so as to teU the whole story of England from the landing of Hengest to the Great Charter, is what may hardly be thought of by one who is no longer young and who has much other work before him. But some parts of it may not be beyond my power. I at least trust that I may be able, in some shape or other, to deal more fully than I could do in this volume with the im- portant reign of WiUiam Rufus, a time than which none is richer alike in picturesque incident, in illustrations of personal character, and in a consti- tutional importance which is none the less weighty because it lies in a manner behind the scenes. But, even should I never carry out this or any other scheme, I venture to hope that, writing as I have done, far from either the advantages or the distractions of a capital or an University, writing in my own home among my own books, I have yet been able to do somewhat for the truth of history. I would even believe that what I have viTitten may have gained something by being written in the heart of the realm of Ine and Alfred, on soil where every step calls up some memory of the great struggle which made Britain England. The Teutonic settlement in this island becomes more of a living thing to one who finds that the boundary of the land which Ceawlin won from the Briton abides, after thirteen hundred years, the boundary of his own parish and his own X PEEFACE. fields. At all events, in bringing my work to an end, I can say in all honesty that I have laboured for truth, that I have never vs^ilfully kept back any scrap of evidence, whether telling for or against my own conclusions, that I have given every reader of mine the means of coming, if he thinks good, to conclusions different from my own. The Index to the whole five volumes, according to the first edition, will appear as soon as a work which involves some labour can be got through. A large part of it is already done. SoiiEELEAzE, "Wells, March 24th, 1876. CONTENTS. CHAPTEE XXII. Two unique sources of English history, the CJhronioles and Domesday . , ■ . . Fiscal objects of Domesday; its connexion with the Danegeld of 1083 • . . . Other objects of the Survey ; Domesday the begin- ning of modern statistics . Domesday the picture of the Conquest Its different stages and forms Differences in different districts General fairness of the Survey Legal iictions of Domesday; history of the Conquest as gathered from the Survey Notes of time ; evasive mention of Harold's reign Legal fictions as to the confiscation ; the antecessm' use of the word vis The Survey a record of the confiscation ; the redemp tion of lands .... Nature of William's grants ; first stage of confiscation and regrant .... 1067 — 1068 Confiscations after William's first absence Forms of the grant ; the King's writ and seal Illegal occupations .... Cases of commendation Questions as to the antecessor ; witness of the shire and hundred .... Cases of outlawry .... Estates left to widows Gifts as alms .... Formal legality of Domesday No legal distinction between French and English Incidental and personal details PAGE 5-6 6—8 8 9 — 10 10 — II II— 15 15—17 17 — 20 23- -24 25- -26 . , 26- -27 27- -28 28- -30 30 30- -31 31- -33 32 34- -37 CONTENTS. Notices of Wiggod, Eadnoth, Hereward, ^thelsige, William Malet . ■ • • ' Notices of the reign of Eadwaid ; classes of men ; the towns . . • • * ' Geographical notices ; different treatment of different districts ..••'' Entries of waste . . ■ • ' Miscellaneous notices . ■ • ■ Personal impress of William ; all land his grant Mode of taking the Survey ; oaths of the French and English of the district . . • • General fairness of the Commissioners ; conservative spirit of the Survey . . • • Effects of William's legal formula; analogy with Henry the Eighth . • • ■ CHAPTEE XXIII. THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. 1087— 1 154. Nature and effect of William's Conquest ; comparison between him and other conquerors Comparison between William and Theodoric The Norman Conquests of England and of Sicily Comparison between William and Charles of Anjou Effects of the Conquest on national unity Its effects on feudal ideas Northern and Southern England 1066 — 1154 The Norman period of English history; naturaliza tion of Norman settlers 1087 — 1135 Eeign of William's sons ... 1 1 35 — 1 1 64 Reign of Stephen .... 1 154 — 1272 The Angevin reigns ; fusion of races Plan of the Narrative ... PAGE 38—39 39 40—41 42 42—44 45—47 47—48 48—50 50—52 63—56 56-61 61 — 62 62—63 64—65 64 65 66 66 67 67 68 § I. Reign of William Rafiis. 10S7 — 1 100. Analogies between the Norman and Angevin dy- nasties ..... Analogy between William Eufus and Richard the First ...... Character of the reign of Rufus ; relations with France, Wales, and Scotland; enlargement of the Englisli kingdom .... Personal character of Rufus ; his vices and impiety . His filial duty and sense of honour . His soldiers and favourites 68—69 6 J— 70 70—71 71—73 73—74 75 CONTENTS. xiii ^•O- PAOR Sept. 26, 1087 No opposition to his succession ; his coronation , 75—76 Easter, 1088. Revolt of the Norman nobles ; loyalty of the English 76—77 The King's appeals and promises to the English . 77 Campaign of 1088; the Norman fleet driven back fi'om Pevensey . . , . . jg Trial and exile of Bishop William of Durham . 79 Character of the war ; the last war between Normans and English ..... 79 — 80 Euf us leader of the English ; his oppression and breach of promises . . . . . 80— ?i May 24, 1089 Death of Lanfrauc . . . . . 81 Foreign ware of Rufus; his designs on Normandy, Maine, and Aquitaine . . . . 81 Anarchy of Normandy under Robert . . 82 Henry buys the C6tentin and Avranchin . . 83 1090 Castles in Normandy betrayed to Rufus ; faithful- ness of Helias of Saint Saen . . . 83 — 84 Revolt at Rouen suppressed by Henry ; death of Conan ...... 84 — 85 Beginning of warfare between England and France ; Philip helps Robert, but is bribed by Rufus . 85 — 86 Feb. 1 09 1 William in Normandy ; treaty of Caen . . 86 — 87 Settlement of the succession; growth of the doc- trines of legitimacy and hereditary right . . 87 — 90 February — War of WUliam and Robert against Henry ; Henry March, 1091 obtains Domfront . . . . 90—91 1093 Fresh disputes stirred up by AViUiam of Eu ; cam- 1094 paign of 1094 ..... 91 September, The Crusades ; Robert pledges Normandy to Rufus i°96 and goes to the East .... 91 — 95 Englishmen serve under Robert ... 93 After 1097 Crusade of Eadgar and Robert son of God wine . 94 Ralph of Wader and Odo join the Crasade ; death of Odo ...... 94 Relations between England, Normandy, and France ; wars with France ; the war deemed in France an English war .... 95 — 98 noo Designs of Rufus on France and Aquitaine ; his ne- gotiations with Duke William ... 99 Analogies with the Hundred Tears' War . . 99 — loi 1097 Beginning of the war with France; treatment of prisoners ...... loi — 102 Sept. 27, 1098 Truce with France .... 102 1088 — 1090 Discontent of Maine under Robert . . . 103 1090 — 1098 Second reign of Hugh; first reign of Helias . 103 1095 Pope Urban at Le Mans .... 103 1096 Quarrel between Helias and William Rufus . . 103 xiv CONTENTS. A.D. 1097 — 1125 Hildebei-t Bishop of Le Mans 1098 Captivity of Helias and taldng of Le Mans . 1099 Le Mans recovered by Helias and again talien by Eufus ,....• iioo — mo Second reign of Helias . . . . Dealings with Scotland, Wales, and Cumberland; balance of success and defeat Julys, 1088 Eevolt of Gruffydd ap Cynan ; death of Eobfert of Rhuddlan ...... Progi-ess of conquest in South ^A^ales ; occupation of Brecknock, Glamorgan, Pembroke, and Cardigan 1094 — 1095 Revolt in South Wales ; campaign of Eufus ; build- ing of castles ..... 1094 — 1098 War in North Wales ; loss and recovery of Anglesey 1098 Invasion of Magnus of Norway ; Harold son of King Harold ; death of Earl Hugh of Shrewsbury Eelations "with Scotland ; English supremacy enforced May, 1091 Eadgar goes to Scotland; Malcolm invades England August, 1091 William inarches against Scotland; mediation of Eadgar and Eobert ; renewal of Malcolm's homage 1092 History of Carlisle ; Dolfin driven out; Cumberland annexed to England and Carlisle restored August 24, Disputes between William and Malcolm ; Malcolm 1093 at Gloucester .... November 14, Malcolm's last invasion of England and death at 1093 Alnwick ..... First reign of Donald in Scotland 1093 — 1094 William grants the Scottish Crown to Duncan; his reign and death .... 1094 — 1097 Second reign of Donald 1097 — 1 107 Eeign of Eadgar; effects of his accession; Scotland Anglicized ; action of the TEtheling E097 — 1099 Buildings of Eufus ; Westminster Hall Enforcement of the forest laws ; severity of punish- ment ..•.,. Eufus maintains the royal authority over the barons 109s Revolt, defeat, and imprisonment of Eobert of Mowbray ...... 1096 Conspiracy of William of Eu ; his defeat in wager of battle and his punishment Growth of feudal ideas under Eufus ; their bearing on ecclesiastical controversies Dispute between Anselm and Eufus ; difference between their position and that of earlier Kings and Bishops The royal supremacy under the Conqueror ; its abuse by Eufus . . _ _ PAGE 104 104—105 105 — 106 106 106 — 108 108 109 — III III — 112 112— 113 113— 114 J14 115— 117 117 — 119 119 — 120 120 121 121 — 122 122 122 — 123 124 124—125 135 125—127 127 — 128 128 — 129 129—130 130 CONTENTS. Influence of Eandolf Flambard ; feudal theory of ecclesiastical benefices ; inferences of Flambard . 131 — 134 Degradation of the priesthood under Rufus ; promo- tion of the King's clerks .... 134 — 136 1093 — 1109 Primacy of Ansehn ..... 136 Effect of Lanfranc's death on the character of Eufas . 1 36 Lent, 1093 Sickness of Rufus at Gloucester; Anselm appointed Archbishop; he accepts the see from the King . 136 — 138 Dispute about the acknowledgement of Urban . 138 — 139 December 4, Consecration of Anselm; dispute with Thomas of 1093 York 139 Feb. 1094 Dispute at Hastings . . . . 139 — 140 Mar. 11,1095 Council at Rockingham ; nothing decided . . 140 — 141 1095 Legation of Walter of Albano ; Rufus acknowledges Urban ..... 141 June 10, 1095 Anselm receives the pallium . . . . 141 1095 — 1096 Interval of peace ; consecration of Irish Bishops . 142 October 15, Fresh disputes; Gemots of 1096 — 1097; Anselm '°97 takes leave of the King . . . 142 — 143 October, 1098 Anselm at Bari ; Urban refuses to accept his resigna- tion ...... 144 April, 1099 Decree of the Lateran Council against lay investi- ture and homage ... . 144 Beginning of appeals to Rome; effects of the Con- queror's policy ..... 145 — 146 Aug. 2, iioo Last year of Rufus ; his death and burial . . 147 — 148 § 2. Reign of Henry the First, IIOO— 1135. Character of the reign of Henry; silent drawing together of English and Normans . . 148 — 150 Sentiment of country supplants sentiment of race . 150 — 151 Henry's absences from England ; his bestowal of benefices on foreigners ; influence of Robert of Meulau . . . . . . 151 New meaning of the word Englishman; common interest of all natives of England ; position of England as a power . . ■ . 152 Peace of Henry's English reign ; his relations with Scotland and Wales; his character as drawn by the Chronicler .... 152—153 Points of likeness between the reigns of Rufus and Henry ..... I53— 154 Personal character of Henry ; his continued literary tastes ...... 154—156 Seeming contradictions in his character . . 156 — 157 His strict administration ofjustice . . . I67 — 160 CONTENTS. Predominance of Wessex under the two Williams Henry's progresses through all parts of the kingdom Fiscal exactions of Henry His enforcement of the forest laws . His faults held to be outweighed by his merits Historical results of his reign ; fusion of Normans and English ; strengthening of law and of the royal power ..••-• Aug. 3, I loo Henry elected King ; he appoints "William Giffard to the see of Winchester .... August 5 His coronation and charter . He imprisons Randolf Flambard and recalls Anselm November 1 1 He marries Eadgyth of Scotland; objections to the marriage ; her name changed to Matilda ; mockery of the Norman courtiers iioi Conspiracy in favour of Robert; loyalty of the English ; zeal of Ansehn . Aug. I, IIOI Robert lands at Portsmouth; treaty between him and Henry ..... Last open struggle between Normans and English establishment of the power of Henry 1 102 Revolt and banishment of Robert of Belesme II 04 Banishment and confiscation of William of Mortain 1 105 — 1 106 Henry's Norman campaigns . Sept. 2 8, II 06 Battle of Tinchebrai ; Eadgar taken and released 1 106 — -1134 Imprisonment of Robert Normandy conquered by England Reign of Henry in England and Normandy ; peace in England, warfare in Normandy . William son of Robert ; his cause taken up by France Alliance between England and the Empire . Accession of Lewis the Fat ; character of his reign War of Gisors .... Treaties of Henry with Robert of Flanders . Enmity of Flanders and Anjou ; adventures of William Clito .... Imprisomnent of Robert of Belesme . Henry's alliance with Henry the Fifth ; betrothal, marriage, and coronation of Adeliza or Matilda Exaction of an aid for the marriage . Relations between the two Henries . The Normans do homage to the ^theling William . 120 Second war with France and Flanders Death of Baldwin of Flanders ; accession of Charles the Good ...... Deaths of Queen Matilda and Robert of Meulan Battle of Noyon ; growth of the chivalrous spirit 1 109 nil — 1113 1 103 — nil 1112 mo — 1 114 i"5 II 16 — II 1119 II78 1119 PAGE 160 160 — 162 162 — 163 163—164 164—165 165 — 166 166 — 167 167—168, 168 168—170 170 — 171 171 — 172 172—173 i?3 173—174 174 '74 175 175—176 176—177 177—178 178 178— iSo 180-183 180— 181 182 183—184 1S5 185—186 186 187 187 187 188—190 CONTENTS. xvii A.D. Oct. 20, ing Council of Rheims ; dealings of Lewis witli Pope Calixtus ...... 1 1 19 — 1 1 20 Interview between Calixtus and Henry; peace with France ...... Mar. 19, 1 n6 Dying out of the Conqueror's male line ; the ^thel- ing William ; homage done to him in England 1 1 19 — II 20 William's homage to Lewis and marriage No coronation in the King's lifetime 11 20 The ^theUng drowned in the White Ship . 11 21 Henry marries Adeliza of Lowen 1121 — 1123 New disputes with Anjou ; rebellion of Waleran of Meulan ...... 1124 — 1125 Expedition of the Emperor against France; his death 1 1 24 Defeat of the rebels at Bourgtheroulde ; treatment of the prisoners .... 1 1 25 Peace with France .... Henry's plans for the succession of his daughter novelty of female succession 1126 — 1127 Return of Matilda ; her succession sworn to ; rivalry of Stephen and Kobert 1127 — 1131 Marriage of Geof&ey and Matilda; their disputes her succession confirmed . March, 1133 Birth of Henry the Second . Feb. 3, 1134 Imprisonment and death of Duke Robert Jan. 1 1 27 Lewis takes up the cause of William Clito . 1127 — 1128 Murder of Charles of Flanders ; reign and death of William Clito ; succession of Theodoric II 29 Pardon of Waleran of Meulan 1097 — 1 1 53 Peace with Scotland ; reigns of Eadgar, Alexander, and David ..... 1 1 1 1 Affairs of Wales ; Flemish settlement in Pembroke shire ..... 1092 1 1 15 Norman Bishops of Llandaff, Saint David's, and Bangor ... 1 106 — 1 1 16 Relations between Normans and Welsh; career of Owen son of Cadwgan iioi — 1 1 12 Story of Jorwerth son of Bleddyn 1 1 1 1 Settlement of Cardiganshire 1 1 14 — 1121 Heniy's Welsh expeditions and their result . Relations of Henry with Ireland and Orkney 1 11 2 Peace of England under Henry; he strengthen Carlisle . . . . • Struggles with the new Papal theories Henry's Bishops .... Dispute between Henry and Anselm ; its character 1 1 00 Return of Anselm ; he refuses to do homage and to consecrate the King's Bishops . . • VOL. V. b PAGE igo — 191 igi — 192 192 193 194 194—195 ig6 ig6 — ig7 197 197—198 igg 199 — 201 201 — 203 203—205 206 206 — 208 206 206 — 207 207 208 — 209 209 209 — 210 210 — 211 211 — 21 2 2 1 2 212 — 213 213—214 214—215 215 — 216 216 — 218 218 — 219 220 XVlll CONTENTS. A.D. II02 Synod of Westminster ; its decrees against the married clergy The slave-trade denounced 1098 — 1 102 Deposition of Abbots ; Godric of Peterborough Disputes as to the consecration of Bishops . 1103 — 1106 Anselm leaves England and returns . 1 107 Compromise between Henry and Paschal; consecra' tion of Bishops .... 1 1 09 Last days of Anselm; his dispute with Thomas of York ..... Anselm 's buildings ; his canonization 1109 New bishopricks ; foundation of the see of Ely 1133 — 1156 Foundation of the see of Carlisle; jEthelwidf first Bishop . . . . • 1128 Introduction of the Cistercian Order into England Cistercian monasteries 1109 — 1 1 14 Vacancy of the see of Canterbury 1114 — 1122 Ealph Archbishop of Canterbury; disputes with the Popes ..... 1119 — 1120 Consecration, banishment, and restoration of Thurstan of York . ... 1123 — 1136 William of Corbeil, Archbishop of Canterbury Councils and Legation of John of Crema 1 107. — 1 1 20 Ecclesiastical affairs of Scotland; Turgot and Eadmer chosen Bishops of Saint Andrews 1133 — 1135 Henry's last visit to Normandy , Dec. I, 1135 His death and burial . . . . . 221 — 223 223 224 225 226 227 227 — 228 228 228 — 230 230 231- -233 233 23+ 234- -235 235- -237 237- -239 239- -240 240- -242 § 3. The Reign of Stephen. 1135— 1154. Nineteen years of anarchy ; fusion of Normans and English goes on . . . . . 242 — 243 Birth and maixiage of Stephen, Count of Boulogne and Mortain ..... 243 — 245 Dec. 22, 1 1 35 Stephen chosen King; his coronation and charter; homage of Earl Robert .... 245 — 246 1 1 36 Stephen's election confirmed by Pope Innocent ; his second charter ..... 246 — 248 Case of Stephen's election ; its analogy with that of Harold ...... 248 — 252 Position of David, Theobald, and Eobert . . 249 — 250 Character of Stephen .... 252 253 Wretchedness of the time ; use of mercenaries . 253 — 256 "35 — "39 Three periods of Stephen's reign; first of compara- tive quiet . . . , , ^ 2(;6 CONTENTS. xix ^■^- PAGE 1124 — 1153 Eeign of David in Scotland ; suppression of the revolt in Moray ...... 256—257 1136 — 1139 David's first invasion of England; cession of Cum berland and Northumberland; historical bearing of the grants ..... 258—264 1137 Renewed disputes with Scotland ; truces . . 263 Aug. 22, 1 1 38 David's second invasion of England; Battle of the Standard; witness to the fusion of races . 263 — 267 Mixture of nations in the Scottish army . . 267 — 268 Cruelties of the Scots ; protest of Bruce and Balliol ; they defy David ..... 268 — 271 State of Wales ; the Flemish settlements . . 271 — 272 1 1 36 — 1 1 37 Revolt of the Welsh ; Robert son of Harold ; castles built by the Welsh .... 272 — 274 Dec. 1 1 35 Norman feeling for Theobald ; Stephen acknowledged in Normandy; invasion of Geoffrey . . 274 — 275 1 1 35 — 1 1 37 First war with Geoffrey; interference of William of Aquitaine ; Eustace does homage to Lewis ; truce with Geoffrey ..... 275 — 276 April — Aug. Death of William of Aquitaine; marriage of Lewis "37 and Eleanor; Lewis succeeds to the French crown ; results of the marriage . . .2 76 — 2 78 1138— 1 145 Alliance between Geoffrey and Robert; Geoffrey's gradual conquest of Normandy . . , 278 279 1 1 50 Henry Duke of the Normans . . . 2 79 1135 — 1137 Comparative peace in England ; isolated revolts . 279 1 1 36 Siege and recovery of Exeter ; extreme application of feudal theories ..... 279 — 280 1 1 37 Alleged conspiracy against the Normans in England 281 — 282 May, 1 1 38 Robert of Gloucester defies Stephen; Bristol the centre of warfare . . . . . 283 Horrors of the anarchy ; Independence of the lords of the castles ..... 283 — 287 Roger Bishop of Salisbury ; his family and castles . 287 June 24 — The Bishops of Salisbury and Lincoln seized by Dec. 4, 1 1 39 Stephen ; their imprisonment and release; death of Roger ...... 288 — 291 1 1 39 — 1 161 Theobald Archbishop of Canterbury . . . 289 Aug. 29, 1 1 39 Legation of Henry Bishop of Winchester ; the King arraigned before the Bishops . . . 289 — 290 Sept. 30, 1 1 39 Landing of Matilda ; generosity of Stephen ; leaders in the civil war ..... 291 — 293 Sept. 8, 1 140 Nottingham burned by Robert . . . 293 May — No- Stephen's Court in the Tower; Bishop Henry's at- vember, 1140 tempts at mediation .... 293—294 1 140 — 1 141 Stephen at Lincoln; the castle seized by the Earls; return of Stephen ..... 295 — 296 CONTENTS. 1141 1141 Feb. 3, 1141 Battle of Lincoln ; speeches before the battle Exploits of Stephen ; his imprisonment ; sack of Lincoln ..•••• Hervey the Breton besieged at the Devizes . Feb. 16— Bishop Henry joins Matilda ; her reception at Win- April 7, 11 41 Chester and election . . . • Matilda in London ; her haughtiness to the citizens ; action of Queen Matilda ; the Empress flies to Oxford ...••■ Bishop Henry changes sides ; his synod at Westmin- ster ...-.• Burning of Winchester ; imprisonment of Earl Kobert ; he is exchanged for the King ; escape of the Empress from Oxford .... 1 142 — 1 144 Local warfare ; want of authority on both sides 1 1 44 — 1147 Stephen at Lincoln ; his Christmas feast and repulse of Earl Eandolf .... 1147 — 1148 The Empress leaves England ; death of Earl Robert II 47 Taldng of Lisbon .... Stephen on bad terms with the clergy ; growth of appeals to Eome .... 1140—1181 Succession of Archbishops of York ; Saint William; Henry Murdac, Roger II 54 Thomas of London Archdeacon of Canterbury 1 153 — 1195 Hugh of Puiset Bishop of Durham . Comparative quiet of the North ; growth of the Cis tercians ..... 1133 — 1149 Beginning of Universities ; first lectures at Oxford 1149 — 1154 Third period of Stephen's reign ; appearance of Henry of Anjou; his position and analogy witli Charles the Fifth ..... 1 142 — 1146 Henry's education in England 1 149 He is knighted by David of Scotland; his rivalry with Eustace .... Death of Geoffrey ; marriage of Henry and Eleanor War witli Lewis and Eustace in Normandy . Attempt to procure the coronation of Eustace ; action of Thomas of London Conference between Stephen and Henry II 5 2 — 1153 Deaths of Eustace, David^ and others N0V.6, 1153- Agreement between Stephen and Henry; Henry' Jan. 13, 1 1 54 succession guaranteed, and homage done to him Oct. 25, 1 154 Death of Stephen .... Deo. 20, 1154 Coronation of Henry; character and results of his reign ; end of the Norman period . 1152 1153 PAGE 296 — 300 300—302 302—303 303—305 305—309 309-310 309—310 311 311— 312 312 3'3 313—314 315 316 316 317 318—320 320—322 322—323 323—324 324—325 325 325—326 326 327 328—329 330 3,30—332 CONTENTS. xxi CHAPTEK XXIV. THE POIilTICAL EESDLTS OP THE NORMAN CONQUEST. ^■°- PAGE The English spirit brought out and strengthened by the Conquest ; nnbi-oken continuity of English history ; comparison with Germany and Denmarli 333 — 336 Comparison of the Norman Conquest with other conquests and revolutions ; its special character . 336 — 340 § I. Effects of the Norman Conquest on the External Edations of England. Early isolation of England ; eflfeets of its insular position ...... 340 — ,141 Effects of the Danish wars and of the Empire of Cnut 341 — 342 England brought nearer to the Romance nations by the Conquest ; earlier tendencies in the same direction ...... 342 — 343 Beginning of English warfare on the Continent ; effects of the French wars ; alliance with Germany 343 — 346 New European position of England under Henry the First ...... 346 Her position under Henry t^e Second ; analogies with Charles the Fifth and the House of Savoy ; his relations to Scotland and Ireland . . 346 — 348 Effects of the reign of Richard . . . 348 Effects of the loss of Normandy and retention of Aquitaine ...... 349 — 350 Comparison between England and Sweden . 351 Ecclesiastical effects of the Conquest ; papal encroach- ments; question of investitures . 352 — 353 Action of the Legates ; appeals to Rome . . 353 — 355 English share in the Crusades ; small share of the Scandinavian nations in them . 355 — 357 Rarity of foreign marriages among the Old-English Kings ; foreign and English marriages after the Conquest ...... 357—359 General increase of intercourse with the Continent ; trade with Germany and Gaul ; Norman settlers in London ...... Zf,^ — 361 Interchange of foreign and English scholars and churchmen ; Pope Hadrian the Fourth , Saint Hugh ...... 361—363 § J. The Effects of the Norman Conquest on the Kinrjly Puicei: William steps into the place of the elder Kings; effects of his position in strengthening the kingly power ...... 364 — 366 CONTENTS. Supposed introduction of the Feudal System by WiUiam ; his legislation anti-feudal ; he makes the old institutions serve his purposes . . 366 — 367 Different meanings of the word " feudalism ;" political feudalism checked by "William, but the feudal tenure of land promoted .... 367—37° The King's Thegns become tenants-in-chief . . 370 Beginning of knight-service on Church lands . 370—372 Feudal incidents implied in the charter of Henry theFirat; reliefs, wardship, and marriage . 373 — 376 Systematic establishment of the feudal tenures by Randolf Flambard ..... 376 — 378 Logical deductions of Flambard ; dealings with eccle- siastical benefices ..... 378 — 381 One aide of feudalism adopted ; the King's old and new powers, and old and new revenues . . 381 — 384 Relations of the King to the English ; common in- terest of King and people ; the kingly power strengihened from all quarters . . . 384— 386 Preservation of old institutions through WiUiam's despotism ; unbroken continuance of the ancient assemblies ...... Growth of the hereditary principle ; hindrances to any definite law of succession Hereditary succession becomes the rule, but the right of election never given up . Events after the Conquest favourable to parliamen- tary rights ; comparison with France General results of the Conquest on English king- ship ; its twofold character ; analogy with Rome . "391 — 392 Position of the King towards the two races ; change under the Angevins; union of both races against the King ...... 392—394 Freedom preserved through despotism ; effects of William's personal character . . . 394 — 395 § 3. Legislation of the Nwman Kings. Little direct change in the law ; no substitution of Norman for English law .... 395 — 397 Modification of English law by Norman influences . 397 — 398 Real and legendary legislation of WiUiam ; tem- porary ordinances ; abolition of capital punish- ment 398—401 The alleged laws of William and Henry ; not for- geries, but private collections ; their witness to the retention of English law . . . .qj .,-,, 386- -387 387- -389 389- -390 390- -391 CONTENTS. Legislation of Henry the Second ; beginning of mo- dern English law ; return to the old laws . . 403 404 § 4. Administration under the Norman Kings. Administrative and social changes ; outward effects of the Conquest most seen when its immediate results had passed away .... 404 — 406 Continuity of English assemblies ; constitution and worliing of the ancient assemblies ; no formal change made by William .... 406 — 408 Effect of the practice of summons ; origin of Lords and Commons ; the summons the essence of peerage ..... 40S — 410 The Witan and the Landsittende men continued in the Lords and the Itnights of the shire ; survival of personal action in the London citizens . . 408 — 411 Gradual change in the character of the Assemblies ; change in the nomenclature . . . 411 — 413 The Assembly gradually becomes a Norman body ; gradual change back again . . . 413 — 415 Origin of the ecclesiastical ConToeation ; origin of the Three Estates ; twofold position of the Lords Spiiitual ...... 415 — 416 No formal change in the powers of the Assembly; constitutional language of the Kings . . 417 — 418 Action of King and Witan in ecclesiastical matters- 418 Practical change in the working of the Assembly ; its English and Norman aspects , . . 419 Paramount influence of the King; his authority strengthened by frequent Assemblies . 420 Action of ecclesiastical synods in Stephen's reign . 420 Judicial powers of the Assembly ; cases of Odo and William of Eu; its jurisdiction in ecclesiastical cases ...... 420 — 422 Effect of the practice of summons ; growth of the inner Council ..... 422 — 423 The Citriffi JJe^M continues the TJieningmannagemCt 423 Effect of the Curia Regis on the centralization of justice; origin of the Law Courts, the Privy Conncil, and the Cabinet ; the old rights brought back in a new shape .... 424 — 416 Increased importance of the great ofBoers of state and household ; lessening of the strictly official importance of Earls and Bishops . . . 426 — 427 Special innovation with regard to these offices ; analogies with the Frankish kingdoms , . 427 — 428 CONTENTS. Working of hereditary offices . • • 428—429 Secondary offices ; history of the offices of Chamber- lain and Constable . . . • ■ 4^9—430 The Justiciar ; various uses of the title ; the office under Flambard, Koger of Salisbury, and Eandolf ofGlanville ..... 430—432 The Chancellor ; growth of his office ; other uses of the name ...... 43 ^ — 434 The Treasurer ..... 434 The older offices die away and the secondary offices survive ..... 434 The Exchequer ; origin of the name ; not borrowed from Normandy ; action of Bishop Roger and his family ...... 435—4.17 Purchase of offices ..... 437 — 438 The Sheriff ; fiscal duties of his office . . 438 — 439 Danegeld ; other sources of revenue ; witness of the Pipe Rolls ...... 439 — 441 Weakening of the local courts and strengthening of the King's courts ..... 441 — 442 Judicial action of the old Kings ; pleas of the Crown ; murder and Englishry . . . 442 — 444 Royal interference with the popular courts ; cases before the Conquest ; the King's officers supplant the ancient presidents .... 444 — 447 The old Assemblies kept up ; penalties for non- attendance ..... 447 Itinerant Justices under Henry the First and Henry the Second ..... 448 The King becomes the fountain of justice ; gradual return to the old institutions . . . 448 — 451 Trial by Jury ; popular theories as to its origin ; not brought in from Normandy . . . 451 — 455 Early approaches to Jury Trial ; the Recognitors . 4; 2 Gradual gi-owth of the system : greatest change under Henry the Second . . . 453 Jurors change from witnesses to judges . . 454 The Forest Laws ; nature of the forests . . 455 456 Legislation of Cnut and the Henries . . . 456 — 457 Popular element in the forest courts ; preservation of English law throughout Noiman despotism ; legislation as to animals " ferse naturae " . . 458 — 460 § 5. Local and Social Effects of the Conquest. " Feudalization of Europe ;'■ origin of manors; theories of lawyers ...... 460—461 CONTENTS. A.D. PAGE Growth of tiie King and the lord . . . ^62 Grants of immunities ; sac and soc . . . 461 — 462 The village community changed into the parish and manor ...... 462 Illustration from the Celtic clans ; the chief turns into the landlord . . . . . 46 2 Encroachments on the primitive system before and after the Conquest .... 462 — 463 Nature of commendation .... 463 — 464 Traces of the older system; courts-leet and courts- baron; the old and the new county ooiurt . 464 — 465 English origin of the English towns; differences between English and continental towns ; the boroughs follow the analogy of the shire and the hundred ...... 465 — 466 English towns at the time of the Conquest ; London and Lincoln ..... 466 — 467 1 130 — I 247 Charters to London ; relation of Middlesex to London 467 — 468 Growth of the privileges and importance of London ; the commune and the Mayor . . . 468 — 470 Older and newer towns ; the immemorial customs imitated in the later charters . . . 47° — 47^ Effect of the Conquest on the growth of the towns ; growth of corporate privileges . 47 ^ — 473 Contrast between English and continental municipal history; no special burgher class in England . 473 — 475 Social effects of the Conquest ; no broad lines be- tween Norman and English . . 475 Other classes thrust down by the Conquest, but the slaves rise ..... 476 Slaves and churls confounded in the class of vill,ains ; growth of villainage . . . 476 — 479 No place for actual slavery in feudal ideas ; abolition of slavery in England and elsewhere . . 479 — 481 Growth of the chivalrous spirit ; counteracting in- fluences in England .... 481 — 484 Forms of conferring knighthood ; different meanings of the word chivalry .... 484 — 485 Intro luction of coat-armour .... 485 — 486 The Court of Chivalry; the Constable and the Marshal 486—487 The ordeal gives way to the wager of battle ; intro- duction of tournaments .... 487 4°9 Growth of the doctrine of primogeniture ; it hinders the growth of nobility . . • • 489—491 CONTENTS. § 6. Ecclesiastical Effects of tJie Norman Conquest. Increased connexion with Kome through the Con- quest; papal encroachments; long struggle and final emancipation of England . . . 49' — 494 Internal ecclesiastical effects of the Conquest ; ex- emption of Churchmen from temporal jurisdic- tion ; comparison with the Eastern Church and Empire . . . • 494—495 Introduction of foreign prelates ; secularization of the Bishops; feudahzation of ecclesiastical rela- tions ...... 495—497 Changed relations of the Bishops to their own churches ; growing independence of the Chapters ; cases of monks in cathedral churches . . 497 — 500 Effects of the Conquest in favour of the regulars ; growth of new orders .... 500 History of tithe ; of advowsons ; appropriation of tithe to chapters and monasteries . . . 500 — 503 General results of the Conquest; its indirect benefits 503 — 505 CHAPTEK XXy. THB EITECTS OF THE NOEMAN OONQnEST ON LANGUAGE AND LITEEATOKE. No purpose on William's part to root out the EngUsh tongue; origin of the error . . . 506 — 507 Gradual change in language caused by the Conquest ; strengthening of tendencies already at work ; loss of inflexions; infusion of Romance words . 507 — 509 Effect of confusion in nomenclature ; origin and history of the English language . . . 509 — 510 Different dialects of English . . . . 511 Changes in language before and after the Conquest . 512 — 513 § I. Effects of the Conquest on the English Language. Influx of foreign words in all languages ; displace- ment of native words Earliest Latin infusion in English British infusion vSecond Latin infusion, chiefly ecclesiastical Danish influence French infusion under Eadward Effects of the Conquest; distinct French infusion beginning of displacement of English words 514 515-517 517 517—518 519 519—520 520—521 CONTENTS. Lobs of inflexions ... Check put on decay by the use of writing ; history of Greek and Latin .... Elder standard of English destroyed by the Con- quest ; comparison of English and Welsh . Corruption of the language itself ; comparison with other Teutonic tongues .... Use of French and English side by side ; use of Latin ; use of English under the Angevins Rare notices of language ; slow introduction of French as an official language ; its use a sign of the fiision of races ..... 1258 English proclamation of Henry the Third ; its import- ance in the history of English Fashionable use of French First signs of speculation on the subject of languages 1363 Final triumph of English; survivals of the use of French ...... Influence of French on English ; infusion of Romance words . ..... Corruption of grammatical forms ; comparisons with French and High-Dutch .... Diflerent dialects of English ; standard English the speech of Eastern Mercia .... Infusion of foreign words a sign of the fusion of races ; the process in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries . ... Displacement of native words ; loss of the power of coining words . . . . Evil results of the Conquest on language ; power of English in the eleventh century Analogies between English and French ; Teutonic infusion in French answers to the Romance infusion in English ...... Teutonic words brought back in a French shape Analogies between the Frankish Conquest of Gaul and the Norman Conquest of England Latin the tongue of Gaul; smaUness of the Celtic element in French .... Points of unlikeness between the two Conquests One period of Teutonic infusion in French ; several periods of Romance infusion in EngUsh Teutonic words in Latin .... Different relations between Latin and French and between Old-English and modem English PAGE 522 522 523 524- -525 5^6 -528 5 28— 530 530—53^ 532—536 533—535 536—537 537—538 539—540 541—544 545—546 546—547 547—549 549—553 549 550—551 5.50 551—556 551-553 554—556 dii CONTENTS. § 2. Ejects of the Conquest on Persotial and Local Nomenclature. A.D. , PAGE Old-English personal nomenclature; its Teutonic and insular character ; comparison with other countries ...... 55" — 55° English names borne by the sons of Danes and of Eadvvard's Normans .... 559 — 560 Introduction of Norman and saintly names ; Norman names borne by the sons of English fathers . 560 — 561 Disuse of English names; their partial survival . 561 — 563 Introduction of hereditary surnames ; distinction be- tween surnames and gentile names ; origin of sur- names . . . 563 — 565 Personal surnames in England ; definition of here- ditary surnames ..... 5^4 — 5^5 Introduction of surnames in Normandy j history of local surnames .... 565 — 567 Patronymic and metronymic surnames . 567 — 569 Surnames formed from nicknames and offices . 569 — 570 Pretended hereditary surnames before the Conquest . 570 — 571 Effects of the Conquest on local nomenclature ; British and Danish names in England . . 57' Few English names displaced, but Erench names given to new places ..... 572 — 573 Norman surnames of places . . . 573 Local nomenclature of South Wales, Ireland, and Cumberland ..... 57,3 — 575 I 3. Effects of the Norman Conquest on English Literature. Lack of English literature in the eleventh century; little encouragement of learning under EadwarJ . 575 — =,77 Influx of learned men under William . 577 Latin historians ; misceUaueous Latin writings 57? — 579 Growth of the Romance tongues; character of the Old French ..... 579 — 580 French riming chroniclers ; witness of Gaimar to the fusion ...... 580 — 582 French prose ; miscellaneous French writings . 5S3 The song of Roland and the Carolingian legends . 582 — 583 The Ai'thurian legends ; their worthlessness ; con- trast with Homer ..... 583 — 5S4 1340? English prose ; the Ayenbite of Inwyt . . 585 — 586 Enghsh heroic songs; their language unlike that of prose ; contrast between them and the French riming chronicles ..... 586 — 588 Introduction of rime ; French influence . 589—59° CONTENTS. Denationalization of English literature; contrast of Orderio and Lajamon . . . jgo TJnnational character and influence of Lajamon's P0«™ 591—592 English metrical chronicles ; Robert of Gloucester . 592 Satiric, panegyric, and devotional writings . 593 — 594 English influence on French . . 594 — 595 Position of Chaucer . . . . 595 — 596 Evil eifects of the Conquest on national speech and consciousness ..... 556 — 597 CHAPTER XXVI. THE EFFECTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST ON ART. Art in the eleventh century means architecture ; position of the subordinate arts . . . 598 — 599 Architectural importance of the eleventh century; the style mainly to be studied in churches . ^59 Historical position of the Eomanesque style ; its co-ordinate rank with Grecian and Gothic . 600 — 601 Primitive Eomanesque of Western Europe ; growth of local styles . . . . .601 — 602 1050 — iioo Primitive style keeps on in Germany, but in England gives way to Norman . . . 602 — 603 Growth of Romanesque; a developement of Eoman 603 — 604 Beginning of consistent architecture at Spalato ; buildings of Eome, Eavenna, Lucca, and Pisa . 605 Basilican and domical types of churches ; fusion of the two ...... 606 — 607 "Vulgar errors about English architecture before the Conquest ... . . 607—608 Introduction of stone building . . . 608 — 609 Primitive buildings in England . . 609 — 612 Eoman character of the style : ground-plan and in- teriors of the churches .... 612 — 614 The Primitive towers ; their Italian origin ; the Irish round towers History of Romanesque in Italy and Germany History of Eomanesque in Gaul A quitanian and Angevin styles Origin of Norman Eomanesque ; examples in Nor- mandy ...'•• Distinction between Primitive and Norman Eo- miinesque ..«••• Connexion between Norman and Lomlard archi- tecture ....■• 614- -6t6 617 617 618- -620 620- -621 622- -623 623- -625 CONTENTS. Noi-nian style brought into England by Eadward ; increase in the size of churches; the English churches destroyed because too small . . 625—627 Norman architecture in England affected by the Primitive style ..... 627—629 1093— 1 1 28 Durham the perfection of Northern Romanesque . 629—632 1055 — 1065 Introduction of the Norman style in small buildings; Kirkdale . . ... 632—633 The Primitive style retained alongside of the Nor- man; Lincoln; Janow ; Oxford . . . 633 — 636 Influence on the architecture of Scotland ; Dunferm- line and Saint Andrews .... 636 — 638 Architectur.al improvements of Roger of Salisbury ; style of Henry the Second's reign . . . 638 — 639 Introduction of the pointed arch ; the form brought from the East, but developes an appropriate system of detail . . . ... . 639 — 641 Stages of the Transition from Romanesque to Gothic ; imperfect Gothic of Italy .... 640 E186 — 1200 Growth of Gothic detail; work of Saint Hugh at Lincoln . .... 640 — 641 Character of the Transition . . . . 641 No special ecclesiastical style ; rarity of Romanesque civil buildings; halls .... 642 — 644 Effect of the Conquest on domestic architecture ; stone houses ..... 644 — 646 Effect of the Conquest on military architecture ; the Norman castles ..... 646 — 647 Castles on English mounds .... 647 — 649 Change in warfare ; sieges instead of pitched battles 649 — 650 Importance of the Conquest as a turning-point . 650—651 CHAPTER XXVII. THE ANSEVIN KEIGNS. SI54 — 1307 Sketch of the Angevin period . . . 652 — 660 Position of England within the British islands ; two English kingdoms, each with Celtic dependencies . 652 — 653 Tendencies to fusion ; working of the French and Scottish wars . . . . gj^ — 655 Legislation of the Angevin Kings ; no distinction be- tween English and Normans ; language of Giraldus and other scholars .... 655 6k6 Working of the Norman and Angevin periods ; character of the thirteenth century ; its effect on England ...... 656—658 CONTENTS. Henry the Second and Edward the First Analogies between Henry the First and Henry the Second .... Three periods of Henry the Second's reign ; his character as a lawgiver .... 1 1 54 — 1 164 First period; the restoration of order 1154 — "62 Chancellorship of Thomas of London . . 1162 His appointment as Archbishop; Henry's mistake in the appointment ; artificial position of Thomas Objects of Henry and Thomas ; comparison of their quarrel with that of Henry the First and Ansehn ...... 1 1 70 Second quarrel between Heniy and Thomas ; corona- tion of young Henry Death of Thomas; lax use of the word "martyr" Position of Thomas with regard to the fusion of races his English spirit .... Good side of the ecclesiastical exemptions 1 1 70 — 1 189 Third period of Henry's reign; character of Queen Eleanor ...... 1 1 73 — 1 1 75 Rebellions and wars of Henry's later days ; revolt of the Earls ; capture and homage of William of Scotland ..... 1169 — 1 1 71 Conquest of Ireland . . , . . 1 1 89 Continental wars ; loss of Le Mans ; death of Henry Legislation of Henry ; the action of the Witan goes on ; he legislates for an united nation 1 1 54 — 1 1 57 Establishment of his power . 1 159 War of Toulouse and scutage Developement of the Jury Thomas withstands the Danegeld 1 1 64 The Constitutions of Clarendon renew the laws of Henry the First ; Henry's schemes premature Ordination of villains 1166 — 1176 Henry's later legislation ; the Assize of Clarendon the Inquest of Sheriffs; the Assize of North hampton . . . . • Advance of the system of recognitions ; destruction of castles ; penalties of heresy 1 18 1 The Assize of Arms ; the use of mercenaries ; re- organization of the Fyrd .... 1 1 84 The Assize of the Forest .... 1 1 88 The Saladin T.the . . . . England kept distinct from Henry's foreign dominions General character of Henry's reign ; his European '■ position; marriages of his daughters; his Italian policy . . . . • PAGE 658 658—659 659 — 660 660 660 — 661 661—663 663—665 665 666 666—669 669 670—671 671 672 672—674 674 674 675 675 675-678 678 678—681 679—680 682 682—683 683—684 684—686 xxxii CONTENTS. A.D. PAOE Sept. 3, 1 189 Accession of Richard the First ; un-English character of his reign ; constitutional advance under his ministers ....•• 686—687 Position of Arthur of Britanny . . . 68 i ilgo — 1192 Richard's Crusade .... 688 Release of William of Scotland from his special obligations . .... 689 1 1 89 — 1 1 97 Chancellorship of William Longchamp . . 689 Overthrow of the Chancellor ; action of Earl John . 689—690 1190 1 193 Captivity of Richard; his homage to the Emperor and ransom . ... 690 — 691 Mar. 30, 1 194 Council at Nottingham .... 691 April 17 Richard's coronation at Winchester . . . 691 May 12 He leaves England for ever . . . 692 1193 — iigS Justiciarship of Archbishop Hubert . . . 692 1 196 Sedition of William Fitz-Osbert . . . 693 Developement of the representative principle ; Richard's extortions; his charters to boroughs . 692 — 693 1 1 98 Geoffrey Fitz-Peter Justiciar; origin of Justices of the Peace and Knights of the Shire . . 694 — 695 Dec. 7, 1197 Coimcil at Oxford; Saint Hugh withstands the King's demand for money . . . 695 — 696 1 198 Hubert removed from the justiciarship . . 696 April 8, 1 199 Death of Richard ; he bequeaths the crown to John 696 — 697 Arthur acknowledged in Anjou . . . 697 May 22, 1199 Speech of Archbishop Hubert; lawfulness of John's accession ...... 697 — 698 Character of John; advantage to England of his crimes . .... 699 — 700 1202 — 1204 Overthrow and fate of Arthur; conquest and for- feiture of Normandy .... 701 — 702 The separation of Normandy the formal undoing of the Conquest ..... 703 Fusion of races strengthened by John's love of foreigners ...... 7*^3 — 7°4 1205 — 1 21 2 Deaths of Archbishop Hubert and Geoflrey Fitz- Peter ...... 704 1 200 John's divorce and second marriage . . . 7°4 1213 — 1214 Administration of Peter des Ruches . . . 7°5 X207 — 1213 The dispute with Innocent ; John's homage ; English resistance to Rome .... 705 — 7°^ 1214 John's successes on the continent ; battle of Bouvines 7°6 1207 — 1228 Primacy of Stephen Langton ; eiiects of his appoint- ment by Innocent ..... 707 1 213 The English refuse to fight for John . . 707 1 2 13 Return of the Archbishop ; John's promises ; Council at Saint Paul's ..... 708 — 709 CONTENTS. A.D. 1214 1215 I216 1216 — I2J2 I217 1215 — 122I 1216-^1223 I216 — I219 I 2 19— 1243 1234 1227 1236 1245— 1247 1234 1240 1235— 1253 1237 1266 1258 1264 1265 The Barons at Saint Eadmundsbury ; action of the Northern men and the Londoners The Great Cliarter; the first act of the restored English nation ..... Clauses of the Charter ; protection given to all classes ; advance of parliamentary representation ; power of the purse ; right of resistance asserted . Omission of the constitutional clauses in the confir- mation ...... Advance of municipal rights ; position of the Mayor of London . . . . . Rebellion of John ; the Charter annulled, and the barons excommunicated by Innocent Election of Lewis ; his claims ; English feeling turns against him ; death of John Reign of Henry the Third Battle of Lincoln Dominion of the Legates Confirmation of the Charter William Earl Marshal Guardian Cai-eer of Hubert of Burgh . Revolt and death of Richard Earl Marshal Henry's personal reign begins His marriage ; evil influence of his wife and mother Resistance to the foreigners under Earl Richard of Cornwall ..... Parliaments of Henry the Third ; demands for th' parliamentary appointments of the great officers advance of representation . Letters from England to the Popes . TTnion of races and classes ; patriotism of the clergy Edmund Rich, Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln Walter of Cantelupe, Bishop of Winchester . Falling away of Earl Richard Simon of Montfort ; his marriage, career, and work The Provisions of Oxford The Barons' War ; battles of Lewes and Evesham popular canonization of Simon Edward the successor of Simon Reign of Edward the First; his character, legislar tion, and conquests Edward the first English King of the new line PAGE 709' — 710 711— 712 712 — 716 714 715 716 716 — 719 719 719 719 — 720 720 — 721 721 721 721 721 721 — 722 722 722—723 724 724- 726- -725 725 725 725 726 -729 727 728 728 — 729 729—732 730—732 VOL. V. CONTENTS. APPENDIX. Note A. Domesday . . • ■ B. Notes of Time in Domesday C. Unjust Seizures of Land D. The Condition of Worcestershire under William E. The use of the words "Franci" and "Angli" Domesday F. The " Antecessores " of Domesday G. Leases and Sales in Domesday H. The use of the word vis in Domesday I. The King's Writ and Seal . K. Notices of Outlawry in Domesday L. Notices of Wives and Daughters in Domesday M. Grants of Alms in Domesday N. Castles and Destruction in Towns O. The Condition of Kent, Sussex, and Surrey P. The King's Reeves . Q. Jews in England R. Robert the son of G odwine . S. The Conquest of Glamorgan T. The Appropriation of Ecclesiastical Revenues by William Rufus U. The Death of William Rufus W. The Fusion of Normans and English X. The Character of Henry the First . Y. Henry the First's Appeal to the English Z. The Imprisonment of Duke Robert AA. The Treaties between Henry the First and Robert of Flanders .... BE. Robert Earl of Gloucester . CC. The Flemish Settlements in South Wales . DD. The Claim of Stephen to the Crown EE. The alleged Danish Invasion in Stephen's time FF. The Treaty between Stephen and Henry GG. English Trade with Germany HH. Military Tenures .... II. Reliefs ..... KK. The Alleged Laws of William and Henry the First LL. Ordeal and Wager of Battle MM. Assemblies under the Norman Kings NN. The King's Court . 00, The Great Officers of State and Household PAGE 733 740 747 769 766 769 778 785 787 798 801 804 806 810 811 818 819 820 822 823 825 839 845 850 851 854 856 860 862 863 864 867 868 873 876 CONTENTS. XXXV Note ^ pp. The Exchequer ^ . 880 QQ. Dauegeld ..... 883 RR. Trial by Jury .... 884 ss. Notices of Commendation in Domesday 885 TT. The Towns ..... 887 TJU. Classes in Domesday 888 WW. The Use of English .... 889 XX Norman and English Names 893 YY. The Churches of Jarrow and Monkwearmouth 897 ZZ. William with the Long Beard 899 c a ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS. p. 23, 1. 4, for "during William's first visit" read "after William's first return." p. 26, note 3. This extract is not quite correct. The " Anglicus" who held the land at the time of the Survey was n diff'erent person from the "liber homo" who commended himself to Geoffrey. See p. 886. p. 54, note, for "Ralph of Diss'' it is safer to keep the Latin form " de Diceto." I am not clear what place is meant. p. 91, margin, for "French disputes" read "fresh disputes." p. 94, note 2. See p. 820. p. 108, margin, for " of Cynan" read " ap Cynan." p. 117. The Introduction to the Pipe-Rolls of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Durham, published by the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (Newcastle, 1847), contains a good sketch of the. history of Cumberland, avoid- ing the usual errors. p. 118, note 2, dele " who is not copied by Simeon." I was misled by the omission of the passage in Mr. Hinde's edition. p. 120, dele note 3 for the same reason. p. 123, 1. 17, for " by either" read " either by." p. 124, raargiu, for "several" read "general." p. 124, 1. 7. Compare the complaints of Lactantius, or whoever was the writer of the treatise De Mortibus Persecutorum, against the architectural works of Diocletian, u. 7- p. 138, note, for " ecclesia'' read "ecclesi^.'' p. 139, 1. 8, for "position" read possession.'' p. 181, note, for "leger" read "leger." p. 2,07, margin, for " William of Clito" read " WiEiam Clito." p. ■208, 1. 8, for " a kingly offiee " read " the kingly office." p. 243, note. Yet the " Normannorum rabiosas proditiones" may be taken of doings of Normans in Normandy. It was there that opposition to Stephen began. Seep. 275. p. 245, 1. 15. On the share of London in tiie election of Stephen, see Mr. J. R. Green, Old London, 261. p. 250, 1. 13. For a third side of Earl Robert's character, see Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium. p. 266, note, for " arms" read " arm." p. 267, heading, for "of" read "to." p. 281, note 3. See Note W., p. 827, xxxviii ADDITIONS AND COKKECTIONS. p. 288, note 5, for "locum" read " boum." p. 291, note 4, for "brozt" read " brojt," and for " zut" read " 5ut." p. 293, note 2, for " progeniam" read " progeniem." P- 3°3^ beading, for "eakls" read "chuels." p. 314, note 3, for " infranduit" read " infrenduit." p. 317, note I, for " desertationem" read " decertationem." P- 343' 1- Si for " descent from" read " kindred witb." p. 351, 1. 2, for "same kind" read " same in kind." p. 379, 1. II from bottom. Tbe pbrase of the Cbronicler quoted in p. 134, note I, bas an evident reference to the relief as practised in tbe days of Eufus. The ancient beriot in no way made tbe lord tbe heir of his man ; the relief in some sort did. p. 3S2, margin, for " sovereign tenant" read " sovereign's tenant." p. 412, note I. We get tbe pbrase "de consilio sapientum" as late as 1291, when Edward the First is asserting his rights over Scotland. Annales Eegni Scotite, Eisbanger, 240. p. 421, 1. 9. This was written and printed before tbe last strange device of paid peers was heard of. p. 426, 1. II, for " help determine'' read "help to determine." ^. 427, note I, for " quamlibet" read " quemlibet." p. 428, note 2, for "Eechsinstitute" read " Eechtsinstitute." p. 456, note 2, for " 284 " read " ii. 84.'' p. 460, 1. 9 from bottom. In some parts of England tbe word " lordship " is commonly used for " manor," and, as an English word, I have often used it by preference ; but it is rather an English translation of " manor" tban " manor" a French translation of it. p. 469, 1. 9 from bottom. See J. E. Green, Old London, 278. p. 481, 1. 5, for " is a difficulty " read " are difficulties." p. 485, 1. 12, for "relationship'' read "relation." p. 503, 1. II. This process must also have been made easier through the practice of laymen farming tithes, which appears as early as Domesday, p. 304. At Ottingham in Yorkshire, " ibi ecclesia et presbyter est ; quidam miles locat earn et reddit x. solidos." p. 520, 1. 13 from bottom. I should not have said "William Eufus builds the Tower.'' See vol. iii. p. 355, iv. pp. 19, 369, and p. 643 of this volume. What Eufus built was a wall round the Tower, " Jjone weall Jie hi worhton unbutan fone Tur." p. 527, note 2, for " Welshmen " read " Welshman." P- 53^' '• I4i for "Leicester" read " Leircbestre." P- 55 7> lote 1. The expression here is singular. It sounds as if legal fictions went so far that land held by Harold was held to be "in dominio regis [Willelmi]." P' 5^3) '■ 8, for "goodly'' read " godly.'' p. 621, 1. 2 from bottom, for " ornaments" read "ornament." p. 624, note, for "belonged" read "belong." p. 638, 1. I. I have i-eferred to Sitten in a earlier page ; but I ought to have more distinctly mentioned the very Primitive— in all but the square shape ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS. xxxix of the tower, the very Irish— character, of the little church of All Saints on the slope of Valeria. p. 640, margin, for " forms" read " form.'' p. 641, margin, for "relation" read "retention." p. 668, margin, for "individually" read " indirectly."' p. 670, note 4. Gospatrio the son of Orm often appears in the Cumberland Pipe-Rolls. See below, p. 896. p. 674, note I, for " superstitione" read " superstitio." p. 683, 1. 5, for "liabilities'- read " liability." p. 685, note I, for "fera" read "fere." p. 698, 1. 6 from bottom, for "gave" read "give." p. 730, note. He is also " Edwardus Tertius " in several places of the Annales AngliiE et ScotiEe in the Rishanger volume, 371 et seqq. P- 734. 1- 7- In Giraldus de Instructione Principum, 167, it is "Rotulus "Wintonise." p. 738, 1. 9 from bottom. Cf. the case of challenging the jurors at p. 875. p. 739, 1. 14, for " to" read " with." p. 740, 1. 12 from bottom, for "phases" read "phrases." p. 746, 1. 18. Oh Eamwine, see p. 24. p. 756, 1. 6, for "regia" read "regis." p. 758, 1. 14 from bottom, for " Capras" read " Capra." p. 766, 1. 2 from bottom, for " to " read " from." p. 771,1. 15, read "Eo quod Bondi tenuerit. Willelmi vero antecessor tenuit, Radulfus de Limesi." p. 781, 1. 16 from bottom, dele " E." p. 808, 1. 20. There is no distinct mention of Berkeley castle itself in Domesday, though there is of a smaller castle within the vast lordship of Berkeley. " In Nesse [Sharpness ?] sunt v. hidse pertinentea ad Berchelai, quas W. comes misit extra ad faciendum unimi castellulum. Habet Kogerus [de Berchdai]." p. 811, 1. 22, for "vicecomite" read " vicecomitis." p. 819, 1. 15, for "at" read "of." p. 821, 1. 8, for "Gestyn" read " Jestyn." p. 823, 1. 5, for "to have been" read "not to have been." p. 854, Note CC. There is nothing to alter in this account of the Flemings in Pembrokeshire ; but there is some reason to think that they were not abso- lutely the first Teutonic settlers in the district. Though Tenby is not (see P" 575) ^ Danish iy, there are some Scandinavian names in the district, not merely the names of the islands, but on the mainland. This was pointed out by the Bishop of Saint David's at the Caermarthen meeting of the Cambrian Archaeological Association in 1875. And he added that two at least, Hasgard and Freystrop, would hardly fail to have been given by heathen settlers. If any such Scandinavian settlements had lasted down to the time of Henry the First, the ground would have been thereby in a manner prepared for his more systematic Teutonic colonization. p. 855, 1. 10 from bottom, for "barbaria" read "barbaric." p. 860, 1. 18, for " equo" read "aequo." xl ADDITIONS AND COKKECTIONS. p. 860, 1. 7 from bottom. The position of tiiis writer reminds one of that of Thietmar of Merseburg at an earlier time. See vol. i. pp. 382, 384. p. 885, Note SS. I ought here to have mentioned some of the cases in which a man does not commend himself, but is commended by somebody else (cf the case of the kingdom in vol. iii. p. 13). See p. 812 for the man who was commended to an English reeve to be fed and clothed. Here the advantage was on the side of the person commended; in a,nother case (Domesday, 163), where the commendation is to a Norman reeve, the advantage seems to be the other way. Of two brothers at Cromhall in Gloucestershire who " cum terra sua se poterant vertere quo volebant," it is said, "Hos W. comes [William Fitz-Osbem] commendavit prasposito de Berchelai, ut eorum haberet servitium, sicut dicit Eogerus [de Berchelai]." p. 889, Note WW. I omitted to say anything about the English writs spoken of in p. 529. It should be noticed that English is often used, even when the persons addressed are Normans. There is one belonging to the Chapter of Wells addressed by the Conqueror to William of Curcelles (Roger of Curcelles was n, great land-owner in Somerset.; see Domesday, p. 93). The Christ Church writs in the Monasticon, i. 1 1 1, referred to by Professor Stubbs (Const. Hist. i. 443), are one of the Conqueror, one of Henry the First, and one of Henry the Second. The first two are on behalf of Lanfranc and Ansehu severally. That of Henry the Second is accompanied by a Latin form which alone has the names of the witnesses, among whom are Thomas the Chancellor and Henry of Essex, which fixes it to the first years of his reign. In the Latin Henry gives himself his fuU titles, as Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and Count of Anjou, but in the English he is simply " furh Godes gefu .dSnglelandes king." Here too the three times of lawful rule are clearly marked out. The Archbishop and his monks are to have all rights which they had " en Ed- wardes kinges daege, and on WUlelmes kinges mines furfur ealdefader, and on Henrices kinges mines ealdefader." p. 896, 1. 10. Or it might be parallel to William Leuric in p. 894, THE HISTOEY NORMAN CONQUEST OF ENGLAND, TOL. T. S i CHAPTEE XXII. DOMESDAY.^ AMONG the sources from which we draw our Two knowledge of the times which form the subject ^^^ea of of the present History, there are two which stand alone. English England, alone among Western nations, alone among nations of either Romance or Teutonic speech, can point to an unbroken history of seven hundred years of the The national being recorded in the living speech of the land. We alone can read, in our own tongue in which we were bom, the tale both of our lasting conquests and of our momentary overthrow. We can read how we ourselves settled among strangers whom we drove out from the land in which we now dwell, and how con- querors came to settle among us who were but our dis- guised kinsmen. The English Chronicle stands alone among the sources of history, holding a place among the written remains of Teutonic prose second only to the Bible of Ulfilas. And, side by side with this precious relic of our own tongue and nation, we may place the hardly less precious fruit of the wisdom of our Conqueror. If the English Chronicle stands alone, Domesday Book Domesdat. stands alone also. No other land can show such a picture of a nation at one of the great turning-points of its history. For the great Survey is in truth a picture of its unique value. 1 The authority for this Chapter is the Survey itself, on which see more in Appendix A. B 2 4 DOMESDAY. CHAP. XXII. the natioiij and nothing less. It is a picture of the nation Its objects all the more because there certainly was no intention of not wholly making it one. There is no need to depreciate the ^°^^' Survey and its author by speaking of it as a mere vulgar instrument of extortion. ^ No doubt fiscal motives en- tered largely into the counsels of William when he sought to know how this land was set and by what men.^ I Its con- have already said that there is an evident connexion nexion , n i t^ i with the between the making of the Survey and the great Danegeld ofT<^^ which had been laid on two years before, when Cnut of Denmark was threatening invasion.^ One great object throughout the Survey clearly is to see that the tax was paid, and also that it was fairly paid. The reports which are made show at once a wish to hinder the King from being defrauded of his right, and a wish to hinder the subject from being made to pay more than his fair proportion of the general tax. The payment or non- payment of the geld is a matter which appears in every page of the Survey; and it is perhaps not too much to say that tl-.e formal immediate cause of taking the Survey was to secure its full and fair assessment. But, as the Survey ' Thierry (ii. 91) begins his account of Domesday by describing, seem- ingly from the false Ingulf, William and his Normans as mutually charging one another with avarice and injustice. He then goes on ; " Afin d'asseoir sur une base fixe ses demaudes de contributions ou de services d' argent, pour parler le language du sitcle, Guillaume fit faire une grande enqu^te teri-itoriale, et dresser un registre universel de toutes les mutations de pro- priete operees en Angleterre par la conquete." And presently, " Ce travail, dans lequel des historiens modernes ont cru voir la marque du gims ad- ministratif, fut le simple resultat de la position speciale du roi normand comme chef d'une armc'e conqu(5rante, et de la necessiti; d'etablir un ordre quelconque dans le chaos de la conquete." He goes on to compare the Domesday of Greece made by the Latin conquerors in the thirteenth century, most likely in imitation of AMlliam. I do not know that there is in all this any direct misstatement of facts, but the whole is coloured in Thierry's usual fashion. " See the extract from the Chronicles in vol. iv. p. 691. ■= See vol. iv. pp. 685, 691, and vol. ii. p. 5^4. I shall have to speak of this Danegeld again. See also Appendix A. OBJECTS OF THE SURVEY. 5 has other uses, so also it had other purposes. Domesday chap. xxii. might be primarily a rate-hook ; but it was, even in its Other objects of own age, meant to be something more than a mere rate- the Survey. book. For William's objects it was needful to know. Its military not only the taxable wealth of the country, but its ° ^^ ^' military strength. After so many confiscations and grants and transfers of land of all kinds, it was needful to know by whom the land was at last really held and by what right each actual owner held it. It must not be forgotten that the doctrine which the dreams of lawyers have tried to raise into an eternal truth, the doctrine that all land is held by a grant of the Crown, was in William's days a doctrine at once true and practical. Every man, French or English, in William's kingdom. Need of save only the official holders of ecclesiastical property, f^to'the'^^ held his land as a direct personal gift of the reigning King's King.'- William might well think it part of his kingly land, duty to find out whether his will had really been carried out in all cases, whether every man, French or English, was in actual possession of the estates which the King had designed for him. Such an inquiry might in many cases be of real political importance. William wished to reward his followers; but he did not wish so to re- ward them as to make them dangerous to his own power. It became him to know exactly what the possessions were which he had granted to Earl Hugh or Earl Roger. Nor less did it become him to know whether smaller grantees of either nation had ever been kept out of their lawful holdings by the wrong-doing of men in power or of the agents of men in power. All these things it was both the duty and the interest of William to search out. And in such a mind as his we may surely suppose the exist- ence of views still more enlarged. Domesday is the Domesday first known statistical document of modern Europe; it ^ing of ™" ■ See vol. iv. p. 23, and Appendix A. DOMESDAY, CHAP. xxir. modem statistics. William's probable views. Domesday the terrier ofWU- liam's estate. Domesday the picture of England at the turning- point of its history. was the first survey of the kind which had been made since the days of the elder Eoman Empire. Modern science may perhaps smile at its rudeness and imperfection. In a wider view both of history and of human nature, we shall rather be inclined to admire its success, and to wonder that so much information of so many kinds could have been got together in a first attempt. And surely we may believe that, in commanding such a survey of his kingdom to be drawn up, William had at least some glimmerings of the many purposes for which such surveys have been found useful. We need not credit William, we need not credit any modern Government, with carrying on such inquiries out of a zeal either purely benevolent or purely scientific. But we may believe that William could see in some measure, what experience enables a modern Government to see more clearly, that the general business of the countryj whether legislative, administrative, or fiscal, can be better carried on if the rulers have a thorough knowledge of the land and the people over whom they are called to rule. In William's case his kingdom really was a vast estate, parcelled out among holders who were strictly his own grantees and tenants. Of such an estate it was as obvious a piece of prudence to draw up a gigantic terrier as it was to draw up the smaller terrier of a smaller estate. One great object doubtless was to know the extent and value of the estate. But William, we may be sure, was clear- sighted enough to remember that, if he was a landlord, he was not a mere landlord but a King. As an historical monument, the value of the Domesday Survey cannot be overrated. I have already given, in earlier chapters of this History, many incidental instances of the light which it throws upon every branch of inquiry which can present itself to a student of these times. It is a map and a picture of England at a moment of which a ITS HISTORICAL WITNESS. 7 map and a picture is unusually precious. As I said at the chap. xxii. beginning, the Norman Conquest is the great turning- point of English history, Domesday gives us the map and picture of England at the exact moment of that turning-point. It was drawn up immediately after a great revolution, and it was specially designed to show the exact amount of change which that revolution had wrought. It sets things before us as they stood in the Its refer- days of King William ; but it also takes care to set thrdays of them before us as they had stood in the days of King Eadwani. Eadward. And, in setting things before us as they stood in the days of King William, it sets them before us as they stood at the moment when the causes of change had already been introduced, but when those causes had not as yet had any great time to work. The Amount of England which is mapped and pictured in Domesday is -witnessed an England which already has a foreign King, and in ^ Domes- which all the highest ofEces and greatest estates have already passed into the hands of foreigners. But it is an England in which the laws, the offices, the classes of society, still stand in outward form as they had stood before foreigners had made their way into England. The outward framework of law and government still keeps its ancient shape ; but events have taken place, and the Survey contains the record of those events, by which that framework was to be gradually and silently, but inevitably, modified. Domesday, which tells us by whom Domesday every scrap of land was held in the later days of William, ^^"^m's and also by whom it had been held in the days of Eadward, opnfisoa- •' tions. is, above all things, a record of the great Confiscation. And the great Confiscation, alike in what it was and what it was not, in its peculiar character as a transfer of English lands to strangers, but a transfer made according to the outward forms of English law, was, above all things, that which made the effects of the Norman Conquest neither DOMESDAY. CHAP. XXII, Formulae of the entries. Different stages of the Survey Its fuller and its more abridged form. more nor less than what they were.^ As the record of the settlement — the outwardly legal settlement — of William and his followers in the conquered country, the great Survey contains within it the essence of all earlier and all later English history. For our present purpose then we shall look at Domesday as the record of the immediate result of William's Con- quest, the record of the settlement of himself and his followers in the land, and of the confiscation and grant of all the temporal lands of England to grantees, mainly to foreign grantees, of the foreign King. It is a terrier of a gigantic manor, setting out the lands held in demesne by the lord and the lands held by his tenants under him. This one great object of the Survey is kept steadily in sight throughout. Whatever else the record contains, it always contains the name of the holder at the time when the Survey was made, and the name of the holder in the days of King Eadward, or, according to another phrase, - " on the day when King Eadward was alive and dead."^ There is indeed a wide difference in the character of the Survey in different parts of the kingdom, and there is no doubt that we have the Survey itself in two different stages of its progress. The Survey seems to have been first made in very great detail, and then, in some cases at least, to have been abridged by leaving out entries which were held to be of only temporary value. In the greater part of the kingdom we have the Survey only in its second and shorter form. But in the eastern shires we have the earlier and fuller form only, while in the western shires both are preserved.^ But at both these stages it would seem that great scope was given for varieties • See vol. iv. p. 54. '' On this and other notes of time in Domesday, see Appendix B. ^ On the two volumes of the Exchequer Domesday, the Exeter Domesday, and the Inquisitio Eliensis, see Appendix A. DIFFEKENT STAGES OP THE SURVEY. 9 of treatment, according to the personal tastes or fancies chap. xxii. of the officials employed in different districts. It is plain P^^®'''""'^ . , . between that, though certain questions were necessarily to be asked the Survey J , . , . „ , of diflferent and. answered m. every case, yet no very uniiorm scheme districts. or scale was insisted on. The Commissioners employed in some districts seem to have been satisfied with setting down the necessary information, the names and figures ab- solutely required, in the driest shape possible. Others were of a more lively and curious turn, and they seem to have gladly seized the opportunity of setting down every story that they could hear about the present or former inhabit- ants of the district. It was the duty of the Commissioners to report by what right every man, French or English, held his land, and specially to report whenever any man, French or English, held any land wrongfully to the damage either of the King or of a fellow-subject.^ It Incidental is manifest that in the course of these inquiries a vast preserved. amount of personal history, and even of personal gossip, would be brought to the knowledge of the Commissioners ; and in some districts they, happily for us, have preserved a large part of what thus came to their knowledge. No more' precious source of information can be conceived. It is really wonderful how full and vivid a picture we can thus get of the local and personal life of some districts. I have already spoken of Berkshire as one of the districts for which the materials of this kind are fullest, and I took that shire as a kind of typical example of the working of the srreat Confiscation. Essex and the two East- Anglian shires. Character for which we have only the fuller form of the Survey, are ^ast- also specially rich in this way, and it is from the record of ^nglian I J -J ^ shires m this part of England, from the notices thus casually and the Second carelessly thrown out, that I have been able to draw some most important pieces of knowledge for the main ' On the " Occupatioues " and "luvasiones" recorded in Domesday, see Appendix C. 10 DOMESDAY. CHAP. XXII. purposes of this History.^ But the earlier and fuller record ol*'^ of the Western shires is far from being equally attractive Western Survey in with its Eastern fellow. The Exeter Domesday^ the Domesday ; fuller record of the Survey of the Western shires, is much richer in mere statistics than the abridged form, but it of York- contains hardly anything more of personal detail. The the North, li^^^ may be said of Yorkshire, where page after page is full of the driest names and figures without a glimmer of human life.^ The lands north of Yorkshire, the patrimony of Saint Cuthberht and Northumberland in the narrower sense, are, as is well known, left out altogether. The lack of personal detail in these three districts is specially to be lamented^ as there are no parts of England of whose in- habitants we should be well pleased to learn everything than of the lands which sent forth the men who fought at Exeter and Montacute, at York and Durliam. On the other hand, there are other districts which are specially rich Cambridge- in incidental information of various kinds. Thus the Hunting- Survey in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire is spe- donshu:e. cially valuable for the details which it preserves as to Worcester- tenures and other legal points.^ That of Worcestershire too is full of notices of various kinds, more particularly as to the state of the great ecclesiastical foundations of that shire.* And Worcestershire and Cambridgeshire alike set before us in a lively shape that constant subject of complaint, both before and after the Conquest, the wrong- General doings of the King's ofRcers.' And it is no more than fairness of . . the Com- justice to say that the Survey seems on the whole to have been made in a spirit of thorough fairness. The ' See vol. iv. pp. 32-47. ^ This however is partly because both in Yorkshire and Lincohishire the " Clamores " are put together at the end. But, even allowing for this, the Yorkshire Domesday is very dull compared with that of Berksliire. ' For examples of these, see Appendix A. ' On the state of Worcestershire under William, see Appendix D, ° See vol. iv. pp. 174, 223. missioners. TTS GENERAL PAIENESS. 11 Commissioners do not seem to have been respecters ofcHAP.xxii. persons. The wrong-doings done by — often perhaps only in the name of — the highest persons in the land and those nearest to the King are impartially recorded alongside of the like wrong-doings of smaller men.^ In one case we even find King William himself reported among those who held lands which ought to be in the possession of others.^ Nor do these reports of wrong-doing show any inclination on the part of the Commissioners to misrepresent matters in favour of Normans or to the prejudice of Englishmen. They of course assume the received law of the Conquest, that the land of every man, French or English, was a gift from William. But there is no sign of any endeavour to make out a ease for one class of William^s grantees against another. If there is a disposition to unfairness anywhere to be seen, it takes the form of warring against the dead. I have marked more than once what struck me as a dispo- Seeming sition to make the worst of any recorded action of Harold,^ against ** and I think that I may say the same of the Berkshire p "^-'"^flf'^ Godric also.* Sheriff. This last feature brings us at once to those legal fictions Legal of William^s reign of which I have already said somewhat, Domesday. and of which Domesday is the great store-house.® It History of would be a curious and instructive process if we could see quest as what notion of the Conquest of England would be formed p*li<*^^oiiiesday. to remember, went on in Williams's reign as it did before and after. At the same time, it must also be borne in mind that such names as brigands and murderers are not uncommonly used by established Governments to describe those who are in revolt against their authority, and also that it is almost certain that many of the dispossessed ' See Appendix K., and vol. iv. pp. 740, 750. ^ Domesday, ii. 48. "Hanc terram tenuit iste libere, et, quando Eex renit in hano terram, utlagavit, et E. aceepit terram suam ; postea habuit S." Tor Brixi's title of Cild, see i. 6, 66, 35. 30 DOMESDAY. CHAP. xxii. Englishmen would take to unlawful courses. When there- Dealings fQ].g ^g fjjj(j a,n outlaw mentioned in Domesday whose with the . . . lands of outlawry was the punishment of robbery^ it is possible that he may have been a common thief; it is also possible that what King William's Commissioners spoke of as robbery may have been in the eyes of the outlaw a lawful military operation against a foreign enemy. '^ We can dis- cern moreover a certain tendency on the part of William's followers to pounce upon the lands of such outlawed personSj sometimes^ it would seem^ without waiting for the proper formalities of the writ and seal.^ Estates left There are some curious cases in the Survey which widows. show the way in which a part of the confiscated estate was sometimes allowed to be held by the wife or widow of the former owner. Of this we have seen a notable case in the scornful provision made for the widow of the Sheriff Godric.'' There are a good many other cases in which we find widows or wives holding Possible small parts of the estates of their husbands.* It is of the possible that in some of these cases the land may imfrnin.^- ^^^^ ^^^^ ^^® wife's morning-gift, or the land which gift- she herself held before marriage. It would be quite in accordance with William^s spirit of formal justice to shelter the wife from the penalties following on the supposed guilt of her husband. But it is plain that a possession of this sort would be specially precarious, and the Survey helps us to several cases of the unlawful dispossession of other women who had retained parts of the lands of their husbands, besides the case of the Entries of widow of the Berkshire Sheriff. And the mention of the alms in Domesday. Widows at once leads us to another class of entries, namely ' See in Appendix K. the entry of the Essex man, " qui propter latrooi- nium interfectus fuit." ^ See the story of Lisois, vol. iv. p. 286. ' See vol. iv. p. 37. * On the entries in Domesday about wives, widows, and daughters, see Appendix L. CASES OF ALMS. 31 those in wliicli land is said to be given in alms, most com- chap. xxn. monly by William himself, but sometimes by other donors. The receivers are sometimes priests or ecclesiastical bodies, sometimes women, sometimes men ; in some cases, men whom some infirmity made natural objects of charity. But, even among these cases of alms, there are several in which it seems that the grant was simply the restoration of property which had been held by the grantee or his father. In some of the cases where To ,...T,T , n ■ • 1 • Churches. ecclesiastical bodies are spoken oi as receiving alms, in- cluding some of the greatest churches in England and Normandy, it is plain that what is meant cannot be alms in the sense for which we are now seeking. It can only mean that the grant was made according to some specially favourable tenure, like that of frankal- moign as opposed to knight-service. In a good many To Priests. cases those who received laud as alms are priests, though the land seems to be held by them in their personal character, and not as an ecclesiastical benefice. And in some cases the almsman was not an Englishman, To other but a stranger whose place among the invaders must, one P®''""'^^- would think, have been somewhat lowly. In one case we find such a foreign almsman of the King himself, and in another ease, what we should less have looked for, the almsgiver was his rapacious brother Robert of Mortain.^ I have brought together these various instances from Domesday, and I have tried, however roughly, to classify them, as illustrations of the spirit and manner in which Wil- liam carried out that great confiscation of landed property which, though it was far from turning every Englishman out of house and home, did really transfer the greater part of the land of England to foreign owners. We are throughout FormaUy struck with the deep spirit of formal legality which of^t''i,e'''^^' ■ All these instances will be found in Appendix M. 32 DOMESDAY. CHAP. XXII whole system of confisca- tion and recant. No legal distinction between EngKsh- men and Normans. breathes through the whole, a spirit eminently charac- teristic of William himself, and with which he seems to have largely succeeded in inspiring those who acted in his name. He had a theory of his own rights, a theory which utterly upsets all our notions of real justice and fair dealing, but which laid down certain rules, by the letter of which he held himself and his fellow-invaders to be bound. While dispossessing every English land-owner who was either rich enough or patriotic enough to be dangerous, he would strictly keep his hands from all irregular oppres- sion. It is plain that, in all this vast system of confiscation, there was no avowed difference made between Englishmen and foreigners. It was clearly William's object, not only to reward and to punish, but to carry out a politic scheme of putting the greater part of the lands of his new king- dom into the hands of his own countrymen. But no such purpose appears on the face of any legal document. King William punished, by the usual punishment of confiscation of lands, those men, English or French, who rebelled against him. He rewarded in the usual way, by grants of land, those men, French or English, who did him good service. If the general result of his reign was to enrich Frenchmen at the cost of Englishmen, that result was, in the eye of the law, a mere accident, the natural consequence of the never-ceasing' revolts of the English. Men of each nation held their lands by the same warrant; the man, French or English, who could show the writ and seal of King William was a lawful owner ; the man, French or English, who had no such writ or seal to show was, in the eye of the law, an intruder. The Englishman who bought back or received again as alms his former lands, or some fragment of them, was secured by the King's writ and seal against all unauthorized spoilers. The Norman who received the forfeited lands of an Englishman stepped exactly into the place of his antecessor, and was authorized to claim all that RELATIONS BETWEEN NORMANS AND ENGLISHMEN. 33 had belonged to him in the days of King Eadward, but chap. xxii. nothing more. Nothing, as far as the law went, hindered an Englishman from bringing a suit to recover lands which were unjustly held by a Norman; and, whenever the will of William and his Commissioners could really be carried into effect, thoi-e was nothing to hinder such a suit from being successful, i But that even the power of Breaches William was unable to hinder many breaches of his own °^ '^^ ^^^' laws is in no way wonderful. Nor is it wonderful that, in many eases where we need not suspect actual fraud or violence, complicated tenures were often misunderstood, and lands were seized by men to whom William's laws did not assign them. But all cases of this sort seem to be Fair deal- fairly entered in the Survey. The Commissioners evidently Sfm^t^" go on the principle that Kmg William wishes to know all ^'"i^e™. the wrong that is done in his land, that he may redress it. Acts of wrong done by his son, by his brothers, even by himself, are entered alongside of the doings of meaner men. In one place the Conqueror seems even to stop and listen to a word of rebuke from the mouth of his own Commissioners.^ It is plain that both William and those who acted under him at least professed to be guided by some rule quite distinct from his arbitrary will. What the worth of William's formal rightfulness was in Spirit of the eyes of the conquered we know from their own mouths, throucnh™ " The more man spake of right law, the more man did ?"* ^^^ . inquiry. unlaw." ^ Still this reverence for the letter of the law, though it might be a law of his own devising, at once distinguishes William from those baser tyrants who know no law but their own momentary caprice. The same spirit of formalism runs through all things, great and ' Domesday, 48 6. " jSIldredus frater Od8e calumniatur unam virgatam terras de hoc manerio [Compton in Hampshire], et dicit se earn tenuiase die qua Kex E. fuit vItus et mortuus, et disaisitus fuit postquam Bex W. mare tranaiit, et ipse dirationavit coram regina. Inde est testis ejus Hugo de Port et homines de toto hundredo." ' See above, p. 11. ^ See vol. iv. p. 621. , VOL. V. D 34 DOMESDAY. CHAP. xxn. small. Once grant the gigantic fiction wMcli teld that all lay property in England was legally forfeited to a foreign invader, and it was only consistent to call it a deed of wrong and violence if a son dared to step into the lands of his father without seeking their restoration under the writ and seal of the Conqueror. Both fictions are of a piece with the formulae which would put out of sight the fact that Harold had ever reigned, which would have us believe that William's first landing at Pevensey was as much the coming of a King into his own kingdom as when he came back with the English warriors who had served him in the harrying of Maine. In these ways the seemingly dry entries of Domesday win to themselves an absorbing interest. They set before us the details of the great Conquest. They give us the clearest insight into the personal character of the Conqueror. And, what is of no less value to history, they teach us the origin of many of those subtleties of a foreign jurisprudence with which pro- fessional lawyers have so thickly overlaid the free and simple laws of England's native Kings. But Domesday Incidental does yet more. Unwittingly, it is true, but in a way personal which is all the more instructive because it is unwitting, details m ^^gg ^j^g Great Survey set before us the whole Hfe of the tne buTvey. *^ age. It sets before us a thousand local and personal details for which we might have looked in vain in the pages of any chronicler, however full and life-like his story. Those two among the many sources to which we have to go for our knowledge which are most unlike in their own nature, have for us something in common. The formal record of the great confiscation lets us behind the scenes, in the same way in which a romance or a private correspond- ence, a local history or a personal biography, lets us behind Compari- the scenes. The same is true in a great measure of some the classes of charters. Nothing can have less in common Charters, ^^^j^ ^j^g ^g^.gg i^^^^ phraseology of Domesday than the PERSONAL NOTICES IN THE SURVEY. 35 pompous and swelling talk which disfigures most of the ohap. xxir. Latin documents which were put forth in the name of our ancient Kings. But the straightforward and business-like writs which did not think it scorn to speak to Englishmen in the English tongue — writs which went on under King William in the same form and spirit in which they had been put forth under King Eadward — have much in common with the equally straightforward and business- like entries in Domesday. A name strikes us in the Biogra- Chronicles, recorded there as an incidental feature of such together* and such an event. Its bearer held such an office, or he S'"™ *^^ was killed in such a battle. Or again^ we trace his name and the as signing charter after charter, and by the comparison of his signatures at various times we may put together a kind of skeleton biography; we may find out at least the ap- proximate date of his first appearance in public life and of his appointment to the several honours to which he rose. But, had we only such entries as these, he would remain little more than a name. We gain our personal knowledge of him as we trace out the various notices of him which are scattered up and down the Survey. There we can trace the extent of his estates, the tenures by which they were heldj the lords to whom he owed service, and the men who owed service to him. In many cases we get the details of family Family history; we see the brothers dividing the estate of their Domesday father ;'^ we see the provision made for the members of a family who entered religion, perhaps for the head of the family himself, if he thought good to end his days in a cloister.^ Of one man the sudden death is • Take, for instance, Ditton in Surrey, part of the lands held of Bishop Odo by the Wadard of the Tapestry (see vol. iii. p. 571), of which the entry ia (Domesday, 32), " Levegar tenuit de Heraldo et serviebat ei ; sed quo voluisset cum terra ire potuisset. Quando obiit, hano terram tribus suis filiia dispertiyit T. K. E." And again, 35 6, of another lordship in the same shire, "Duo fratres tenuerunt T. E. E. vmus quisque habuit domum suam, et tamen manserunt in una curia." ' Cf. ii. 104, There are several cases of this sort in the Survey. Thus D 2 36 DOMESDAY. CHAP. xxu. recorded ; ' in another place we read of the widow who forfeited her lands by the crime of marrying again within the year of grief.^ The great Survey leads us to the bed- side of the dying man to hear his verbal disposition of his goods ; ^ it lets us into the most kindly relations of family life ; it tells us what lands were received in marriage with the wife ; * it tells us how the married priest^ with his wife's eonsentj commended himself to the Church for the lands of her dower,^ and what lands were granted out in marriage with the daughter.^ In one case at least the dignity of in 98, among the lands of Serlo of Burci in Somerset, the church of Saint Eadward at Shaftesbm'y held the lordship of Kilmington (Chehuetone) of him " pro fili^ ejus quEe ibi est." Of grants of this kind for the maintenance of the grantor himself there is a case in 239, "where the abbey of Mahnes- bury holds three hides of land in Warwickshire, on which it is noted, "Uluuinus monachus tenuit, et ipse dedit ecclesice quando factus est mona- chus." Another more curious case is found in ii. 363 h, where we read of some lands in Suffolk belonging to the abbey of Saint Eadmund, "Huj'us terram Rex aooepit de abbate et dedit Guernoni de Peiz; postea licentia regis deveniens monachus reddidit terram." ' Domesday, ii. 196. "Habuit Almarus terram istiua An ant et socii fuerunt, et subita morte fuit mortuus.*' ^ Domesday, ii. 199. A certain Godwine held lands of the East- Anglian Bishoprick. He seems to have died, " et postquam Kex W. venit in hanc terram, invasit Ahnarus episcopus (see vol. iv, p. 335) pro forisfectura, quia mulier quae tenuit nupsit intra annum post mortem viri." " I have quoted the remarkable entry of the nuncupative will of Wulfwig at the beginning of Appendix G. ' Of this take an English and a Norman case. In p. 36 there is an entry among the lands of Geoffrey of Mandeville in Surrey; " habet quidam faber regis dimidiam hidam, quam T. E. E. accepit cum uxore sua, sed nun- quam inde servitium fecit." On the other hand, in 218 is a long list of the lands of Azelina, the wife of Ralph TaiUebois, many of which are said to be held "de maritagio/' and of one part of which we read, "hanc terram clamat Hugo de Belcamp super AzeKnam, dicens earn habere injuste nee ejus dotem unquam fuisse." '' Domesday, ii. 431 5. "Brantestuna tenuit ^dmundus presbyter com- mendatus sanct» j35theldredse T. R. E., et terram quam cepit cum uxore ejus de Brantestuna et Cloptuna misit in ecclesia, concedente muliere, tali conventione quod non potuit vendere nee dare de ecclesia." But at the time of the Survey the lauds of Eadmund had passed to William of Arquea. ' Domesday, 36. " Hanc terram dedit ei Goisfridus de Mannevil cum fiilia sua." ILLUSTRATIONS OP TENURES AND BEQUESTS. 37 tlie Commissioners relaxed so far as to make a legral docu- chap.xxit. ment speak the language of romance, and to record some- thing which reads very like the ins and outs of a love- match.^ It sets before us the ever fluctuating relations between the spiritual and temporal owners of land. We see the constant gifts of the laity to the Church, and we see the ways, almost as constant, by which the Church was de- frauded of property to which it had a legal right. We see how the wealthy sinner strives to buy spiritual profits by gifts which were to be made at the cost, not of himself, but of his heirs ; ^ and we see how an heir once in possession was often unwilling to give back to their legal owner the lands in which his father had only a temporary right. ^ We trace. Details of as we can trace by no other means, how here and there an cation and English landowner kept his lands and increased them by grant pre- <^ i^ <> served m the Conqueror's favour ; how a crowd of others kept their Domesday estates or some fragment of them by way perhaps of alms ; but how the mass of the men, great and small, who had held the lands of England in the days of her freedom, whether dead or alive, whether outlawed or within the King's peace, became, as far as land and its rights were concerned, mere things of the past, whose names were remembered only because the extent of their lands and of their rights formed the measure of the rights of the strangers who ' Domesday, ii. 232. " Quidam- liber homo in Pinkenham tenuit idem XXX. acras terras, et postquam rex venit in istam patriam, tenuit istam terram comes K[adulfus] S[talra]. Unus homo Wihenoc amavit quamdam fceminam in ilia terr^ et duxit earn, et poatea tenuit iUe istam terram ad foedum ■W[ilienoo] sine dono regis et sine liberatione et successoribus suia.'' There is a good deal about this Wihenoc and his invasiones, but he does not appear as a land-owner at the time of the Survey. His forfeiture however must have happened somewhat late in William's reign. * Take for instance Domesday, ii. 204 6. " Parvam Meltunam tenuit Eduinus T. R. E. de Sancto Benedicto, et ita quod earn abbati concesserat post mortem suam." ^ I have collected a, nimiber of cases of this kind in the beginning of Appendix G. 38 DOMESDAY. Details given in the Survey of men ofEadnoth and others ; CHAP. XXII. stepped into their places. It brings us nearer to those days and to the men who lived in them, when we can, as it were, see the Norman intruder and his English antecessor face to face, when we can trace the personal fate of the men who followed William and of the men who fought against him. We read in the Chronicles of the gallant exploit by which Tokig the son of Wiggod saved the life of William at who are Gerberoi. We wish to know more of the Englishman who mentioned ^jj^g o's^sie his own life for his Norman sovereign. We in tlie ^ . .p Chronicles ; turn to the great Survey^ and we find the history, \i not of the man himself, yet of his house and kindred and neigh- bourSj recorded in this and that piece of incidental detail, till we feel as if the whole Thegnhood of Berkshire in the days of King Eadward and of King William were among the men of our own personal knowledge. Names like Eadnoth and Bondig and Esegar and the Kentish ^thelnoth, which in history flit before our eyes like shadows, become clothed with truer life as we trace out the extent and fate of their lands, as we ever and anon light on some incidental notice which sets before us the men them- selves and their doings. It is the Survey which enables us to grasp the small kernel of truth round which the great legend of Hereward has gathered, and which enables us to put together our scattered notices of a life in which truth was stranger than fiction, the life of ^thelsige of Ramsey. Prom the hill of Lincoln we look down on the towers of Coleswegen, but it is from the Survey alone that we learn their date and their builder ; without its aid we could never have fixed a landmark so precious alike in the local history of his own city and in the history of English, and even of European, art. And it is with a higher interest still that we pick out here and there the few names of the men who fought around Harold at Stamfordbridge and at Senlac, and whose memory, save for the great inquisition of the foreign King, would have passed away for ever. And, to turn from of Here- ward; ofiEthel- Ofthe two great battles. ILLTJSTEATIONS OF THE CHRONICLES. 39 our eountrymen to that one man among our conquerors chap. xxii. who can claim the sympathy of Englishmen, when we have Of William seen the corpse of Harold borne to its first unhallowed resting-place by the care of his Norman computer, we are well pleased when the Survey enables us to trace that com- pater's later fate, from the day when he became the prisoner of the Danes at York till the day when he died fighting against Hereward in the fens of Ely.^ But it is not only in the persona;! and biographical Notices of notices which are scattered up and down its columns of things that the great Survey sets the history of the age before ^^^ us. No other source of knowledge sets before us the whole state of the country in the same speaking way. One happy feature in the character of the Survey, the orders given to the Commissioners to enter the state of things under King Eadward as well as under King William, could hardly have found a place in the inquiry if King William had not given himself out as in all things the lawful successor of King Ead- ward. It is then to this daring legal fiction that we owe the living picture which the Survey made after the Conquest gives us of the days before the Conquest. It Notices of is this legal fiction which makes the Survey our chief ^^^f ° authority as to the various classes of men and as to the tenures of land in England during the last days of the West-Saxon dynasty. From the same source comes our of the fuUest knowledge of the state of the Old-English towns, °^™^ ' their constitution, their rights and properties, the duties which were laid upon them in peace and war. And Domesday sets before us, in a few dry entries here and there, the havoc which had been made in many an English town, whether in the course of warfare or through the oppression of the days of peace. There is something specially striking in the calm statistics which recofd the • See vol. iv. pp. 269, 473. 40 DOMESDAY. CHAP. XXII. overthrow of so many dwellings of Englishmen, and above all when that overthrow was wrought to make way for the building of the castles which were in English eyes the special homes of wrong and badges of bondage.^ To of the local Domesday also we owe a knowledge more minute than divisions. ^^ ^^^^^ j^^^^ g,^^ |.^,^j^ ^^^ ^^jjgj. gQ^j-ce of the local divisions of England, of her shires, hundreds, and manors. Perma- We see how nearly the great divisions of our own times E^ltsh still follow those which William found in the land, so geography. ^-^^^^ within England proper — in marked contrast to most other parts of Europe — the map which represents the divisions of our own times represents in the main the divisions in the time of the Conqueror. More minute research will indeed often bring to light differences be- tween the Domesday boundaries of shires, hundreds, and manors, and the boundaries of the same divisions in our own time. These minute variations and their causes are matters for the local historian of each particular district, rather than for the general historian of the whole land. But the existence of such minute variations in boundaries that have remained essentially the same is of itself a speaking witness to their permanence.^ Domesday teaches us, better than any other witness of those times can teach us, that the England of the eleventh century and the England of the nineteenth are one and the same thing. Rutland alone, in the very heart of the land, remains an insoluble problem. ^ The western frontier of the four ' See Appendix N. ^ Tlie changes of boundaries of this kind between the map of England according to Domesday and the map of England as it stands now are very considerable in point of number. But they belong so wholly to the local antiquities of each particular district that I have not attempted to go into them. The changes in the border shires, those on the marches of Wales and of the lands attached to Scotland, are another matter. They are part of the general history of the country. ^ See vol. i. p. 49 ; vol. iv. p. 197. The Eutland of Domesday does not appear as an independent shire, but as an appendage, not of any of the ILLUSTEATIONS OF GEOGRAPHY. 41 shires bordering on Wales has gone back, simply because chap. xxh. the dominion of England has srone forward. The forma- Offhe ° '^ western tion of new shires later than Domesday in the land be- frontier, tween Mersey and Solway is less a part of the internal history of England than the last chapter in the long and varied history of that border land, call it Strathclyde, Case of Cumberland, or what we will, in which all the races giy^g oj. which have any share in the present population of our J^™^*"^' island may claim an interest.^ And Domesday is not only Evidence our best guide to the geography of its own times, it not ^jg^gygut only teaches us names and boundaries, but it teaches us, in treatment •^ . . . . . of different a way in which no other witness can, the widely different districts. fate which befell different districts of England in the days of the Conquest. It is from Domesday alone that we Extreme learn how sweeping a confiscation it was which fell on confiscation the lands through which the Conqueror's army first ™ Kent, '^ 1 .; burrey, and marched, how Kent, Sussex, and Surrey became, above Sussex. all other shires, the prey of the spoiler, and how Kent, the land whose warriors had gathered closest around the Standard of the Fighting Man, met its glorious punishment in the doom which decreed that no English tenant-in- chief might hold a rood of Kentish soil.^ It is Domesday alone which enables us to contrast this sweeping con- fiscation in the south-eastern shires with the milder fate shires whicli join it, but of Nottinghamshire, from which it lies quite apart. But, small as the shire still is, its Domesday boundaries are still narrower. A great part of the present Rutland was then reckoned to Northampton- shire. I may add, as bearing on the mention of this shire in my first volume, that to talk about " EutlandsAJre " is as unknown on the spot as to talk about " Cumberlandshire " is anywhere. ' See vol. i. p. 634, ed. 2. Besides the omission of the Bemician shires, the modem Northumberland and the modem Bishoprick of Durham, Domesday knows nothing of the shires of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancaster. (See vol. iv. p. 490.) Part of the modem Cumberland and Westmoreland belongs to Yorkshire, so much namely as came within the diocese of York. The rest of Cumberland and Westmoreland was still a Scottish holding till the colonization of Carlisle by William Rufus. ' See vol. iv. p. 34, and Appendix 0. 42 DOMESDAY. CHAP. XXII. which fell upon Wiltshire and Nottingham/ and above all with the good luck which enabled so many of the chief men of Lincoln, city and shire, to keep under the Norman rule some share of what they had held in Entries of better times.2 No amount of rhetoric brings home to ^*^ ^' us the harrying of the North like the awful entries of " waste " which follow the eye in page after page of the Yorkshire Survey.^ And almost more speaking still is the conspicuous absence of that still more northern land in which Walcher and Robert of Comines had met their fate.* If Domesday stood by itself as our only record of those times, its dry entries, its legal fictions^ the hard conventional point of view from which it looks at everything, would give us a very meagre and distorted notion of the facts of the history. But the recorded history of those times, even those precious entries where the heart of England speaks in the patriotic voice of the Peterborough Chronicler, would lose half their value, many parts of the tale would be dark and perplexing indeed, if we had not the Norman Survey as its commentary. Incidental Yet this is not all that Domesday does for us. Its most Domesday, incidental notices are sometimes the most precious. We Js^otice of have seen that it is to an incidental, an almost acci- demption dental, notice in the Survey that we owe our knowledge of lands, ^f ^j^g great fact of the general redemption of lands.' MisceUa- And there is a special interest also in those incidental notices. notices of another kind which set before us no great fact of national history, but which light up the picture with some little piece of local detail. We seem to be brought nearer to those times when the Commissioners stop to notice a new church, a new and goodly house, or a fertile vineyard ; " when they tell us of the hall of Earl ' On Wiltshire, see vol. iv. p. 42 ; and on Nottinghamsliire, p. 197. ' See vol. iv. p. 214. ^ See vol. iv. p. 292. * See vol. iv. pp. 237, 673. ^ See above, p. 20, and vol. iv. p. 25. " See the entries under the lands of Eadward of Salisbury, Domesday MISCELLANEOUS NOTICES. 43 Waltheof,^ or of the new fishery that had been made by Earl chap. xxu. Harold.^ And we feel the like when they^ as they do far more commonly, stop to point out how the halls of English- men had perished,^ how the worth of land had gone down bince the days of King Eadwardj or how it had been either laid waste through the accidents of war and revolution or wantonly turned into a wilderness for the savage sports of the intervals of peace.'' We feel at home as we read of the miU which, for lack of water in the hot season, could be worked in the winter only ; ^ of the other mill, set up since King Eadward's days, whose working endangered the ships in Dover harbour ; ® of the new tolls which had not been levied in King Eadward's days, which the new lords of the soil had set up, but of which the Commissioners clearly did not approve ; or of the market set up by the Norman 69 ; " Ibi xl. acne prati et xx. acrse pasturae et 1. acrse silvae minutae et eoclesia nova et domus optima et vinea bona.'' The place is Wilcot in Wilt- shire. ' Domesday, 320. "In Hallun .... habuit Wallef comes aulam .... Hanc terram habet Rogerius [de Busli] de Judita comitissa." ^ Domesday, 30 6, *' Hanc piscariam habuit Heraldus comes in Morte- laga T. E. E., et Stigandus archiepiscopus habuit diu T. E. W., et tamen dicunt quod Heraldus vi construxit earn T. E. E. in terra de Chingestune et in terra S. PauU." ^ Domesday, 41. "Leuuinus et Uluuardus tenuerant in paragio de episoopo et non potuerunt ire quohbet; quisque habuit aulam. Quando Germanus reoepit, non nisi una aula fuit." So 62. "Duse haUse fuerunt, modo una." * See vol. iv. p. 492. Eor the devastations of Earl Hugh, of. 1866; " In his wastis terris excreverunt silvae in quibus isdem Osbemus venationem exeroet et inde habet quod capere potest nil aliud." Of. also the entries on the next page. But there seems to be a distinction between Osbem who only wUfuUy l William 8 of the Conqueror by submissions which could hardly fail to English have been unworthy. When men saw Thurkill of Warwick, Wiggod of Wallingford, and Eadward of Salisbury glutted with the spoils of Englishmen truer and braver than them- selves, it must have been a sight even more bitter than to see the exaltation of men who were at least foreign enemies and not home-bred traitors. But the facts which the Survey so clearly teaches us, that some Englishmen contrived, by whatever means, to hold their own among the conquerors, and that the conquerors themselves had in a manner to become Englishmen and to hold all that they had accord- ing to the ancient laws of England, though they might Good effect make the bondage bitterer for the moment, were in the fictions in end the means of wiping out the bondage and all that ^^^ ^'^^• came of it. The strongly legal turn of William's own mind, his strict regard for at least a formal justice, had Fusion of no small share in forwarding the work of making Normans ^nd Eng- and Englishmen one. And they had no small share too ^'^'L^Tu' in fixing the way in which that work should be carried them. out. They ruled that it should be done, not by changing EngHshmen into Normans, but by changing Normans into Englishmen. No time indeed is so bitter for the moment as Analogy the time when wrong puts on the garb of right, when the wmfam forms ef law and justice are changed into instruments of ^^g;^**|^^ oppression. So it was in the eleventh century ; so it was in the sixteenth. In the eleventh century, as in the sixteenth, England bowed to the yoke of a despot who knew how to do his worst deeds under the form of law. In both cases it might seem that the substance was gone for ever, and that the shadow would soon dwindle away after it. It might seem that flesh and spirit had wholly passed away, and that the dry bones could never live again. But so it was not to be. In each case a day came when form E 2 52 DOMESDAY. CHAP. xxii. and substance were again joined together, when the dry Tte bones stood up again, quickened once more into flesh and England blood, and with the breath of life in their nostrils. To the S're^™'^ legal tyranny of William in one age, to the legal tyranny ened by Qf Jjenrv in another, we owe that the unbroken life of their •' despotism. Enghsh law and English freedom has never been wholly snapped asunder. Truly the more both William and Henry spake of law the more they did unlaw j but, because they still had law in their mouths, they paved the way for those who had law not only in their mouths but Effect in their hearts. To the strict formalism of William's eleventh government of which the legal fictions of Domesday are t'^tlT ^^® mouth-piece, to the caprice which made Henry love centuries ever to have Judges and Juries and Parliaments and Synods on the thirteenth as the accomplices of his foulest deeds, we owe it that teenth^'^'^" *^® heroes of the thirteenth century and the heroes of the seventeenth could withstand the despotism of their weaker successors in the name of the yet living law of England. It was because William in one age and Henry in another had preserved the form in trampling on the substance, that Fitzwalter in one age and Hampden iu the other could draw their swords, not for what was new, but for what was old, not for cunning theories, but for ancestral rights, for those ancient laws and liberties of England whose memory still lived to be again clothed with their ancient life and strength in happier times. CHAPTEK XXIII. THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND.^ IO87-II54. BY this time we have learned the true nature of the great William's work of William both in Normandy and in England, goes on and we have traced out his life and rule in both lands j /, death. from his cradle at Falaise to his grave at Caen. But it is eminently characteristic of William that the history of his deeds does not end with the history of his own life, but that, in a sense almost peculiar to himself, his work ' During the sixty-seven years contained in this Chapter we lose some of our authorities and gain others. The Peterborough Chronicle goes on during the whole time, and gives us the history of "William Eufus and Henry the First in detail. The reign of Stephen is confused and fragmentary, and the Chronicle fails us altogether at the coming of Henry the Second". "We are thus left for more than a hundred years without any writer in our own tongue. Florence fails us in 1 1 1 7 ; but a valuable contemporary continuation carries us to 1141, when it too becomes fragmentary. The enlarged version of Florence by Simeon of Durham goes on to 1129. Orderic, now a strictly contemporary writer,, leaves off at 1141. "WiUiam of Malmesbury, now also strictly contemporary, carries on his Gesta Begum to the death of Henry ; his three boots of Historiar Novella carry on the history to 1 151. Henry of Huntingdon, who is contemporary at least for the reigns of Henry and Stephen, ends with the accession of Henry the Second. Thus, on the whole, the authorities with which we are already familiar lead us nearly to the end of our period, some of them increasing in value as they go on. "We get also some new helps. For the reign of Eufus and for the early part of the reign of Henry, we have the precious writings of Eadmer, the English-bom biographer of Anselm, both his formal Life of the saint and his far more 54 THE N"OEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND, OH. XXIII. lived after him. Other conquerors, conquerors, many of Compari- them, On a wider field than William, have affected the son of . . , -- J WiUiam Course of all later history m a way that neither iNor- conquCTors. ^^^^ ^'^^ English vanity can venture to maintain that William has done. He cannot, in a view of universal history, claim to have left his impress on all time like Alexander, Csesar, Constantine, and Charles. His work, after all, was bounded by a single island and a small Specially portion of the neighbouring mainland. But, within that chara^er of comparatively narrow range, William wrought a work William's ij^jiich, in One sense indeed, has been far more abiding ■work. than theirs. Of each of those Lords of the World we may say that the influence of his work has been eternal, but that his work itself has fallen in pieces. But within valuable Historia Nova. These are the forerunners of those vast stores of writings of the same kind which distinguish the reign of Henry the Second. In the later part of our period, the anonymous writer of the Gesta Stephani gives US a detailed account of the early part of Stephen's reign, but becomes fragmentary and breaks off in its latter part. This writer in the interest of Stephen must be compared throughout with William of Malmesbury, who writes in the interest of his own patron Earl Robert. The reign of Stephen is also recorded by the two northern writers Richard and John of Hexham, and we have a, separate tract by jEthelred of Rievaux on the Battle of the Standard. The Latin elegiac poem bearing the strange name of "Draco Normannicus," published in the Appendix to the works of Cardinal Mai (Rome, 1871), contains much less than might have been looked for. For the latter days of Stephen, the historians of Henry the Second's time, as Ralph of Diss, Roger of Howden, and Gervase of Canterbury, begin to be of use. Among continental writers, light is thrown on the foreign events of Henry the First's reign by Abbot Suger's Life of Lewis the Sixth, and the Norman side of Stephen's time is best told in the con- tinuation of Sigebert by Robert de Monte. As in earlier times, we often get incidental help from local and miscellaneous writers, and the oreat series of our public records begins during this period with the single Pipe- roll of the thirty -first year of Henry the First. Among modern writers the only general narrative of much consequence is Sir Francis Palgrave's fourth volume ; for the time of Auselm we have also the Life of him by Dean Church. Since this chapter was first written, we have gained the greatest help of all. The first volume of Professor Stubbs' Constitutional Histoiy has thrown a flood of light on this, as on all other periods coming within its range. COKSEEVATIVE EFFECTS OP THE CONQUEST. 55 William's island world, in the Empire where he could be oh. xxm. at once King and Csesar, not only has the influence of his work been eternal, but his work itself still abides. His work has been more lasting, because it has been in Conserva- some sort less brilliant. Almost alone among conquerors, *7wil-'''' he conquered, neither to destroy nor to found, but to lia™'^ Conquest. continue. The monarchy of England, in the shape which it has taken ever since William's day, has been William's work. But it has been his work, it has received from him a new life and a lasting character, because he was content, not to wipe out, but carefully to preserve, the old laws and constitution, the very titles and formulae, of the realm which he claimed as his lawful heritage. The legal fictions of Domesday, the formula of the antecessor, the calm assumption of Eadward as the imme- diate antecessor of William, bear witness to something more than the spirit in which the actual details of the Conquest were carried out. They set forth in truth the Its bearing great lesson of the continuity of English history ; they tinuity of " teach us, as if from the mouth of William himself, that J."?''^^ ' _ _ history. it is not with the coming of William that the history or the law of England began. But they set forth too the harder lesson, the paradox as it may seem, that it is mainly owing to the coming of William that we owe our unbroken con- nexion with Alfred, Ecgberht, and Cerdie. It is owing to the momentary overthrow, to the seeming momentary destruction, of our old kingship, our old freedom, our old national heing, that we have been able, more truly than any other European nation, to keep them all as an unbroken possession for eight centuries after they had seemed to perish. Strange as it may seem, the Norman The old Conquest has, in its results, been the best preserver ofg^gjLd the older life of England. When we compare our P>-eserved history with that of nations which never underwent the Norman like foreign conquest, with our kinsfolk in Germany ™'^"''^ ' 56 THE NORMAtN KINGS IN ENGLAND. Compari- conquest, we have been enabled to keep on a political son with _,^ , Germany being far more unbroken than they have. We have not only, cH.xxiii. and Scandinavia, we see that, through that very foreign Compari- son with Germany dki^?!^" 1^3,d, like Germany, to reconstruct our national being, after being split in pieces for ages. We have not hadj like the Scandinavian kingdoms^ to set up our freedom again as something new, or at least restored, after a longer or shorter interval of acknowledged despotism. That this difFerence we owe to the Norman Conquest, that, owing it to the Norman Conquest, we owe it mainly to the personal action of the Norman Con- queror, is the thesis which I shall strive to make good The in the remaining chapters of this my last volume. In Conquest o^® point alone can I see that the coming of the Nor- destructive jjj^j^ jjgg done US lasting harm. One direct, though m the case _ ° ' o of language not immediate, result of the Norman Conquest, which Germany and Scandinavia have escaped, has been the lasting corruption on English lips of the common mother- tongue. Compari- At the very beginning of this work ' I pointed out the iTam^s Con^ peculiar character of William's Conquest, as compared quest with ^j^ij ^}^Q conquests of times before and after it. I said Theodoric then that it carried with it a less amount of change than Charles of the national settlements in the days of the Wandering Anjou. Q^ ^Yie Nations, a greater amount of change than the mere political conquests of later days. It may not be amiss to compare it, both in its nature and in its results, with two other famous conquests, one of the earlier, the other of the later time. William the Great himself need not blush to be ranked in the same class with Theodoric, and between William and Charles of Anjou, between the Conqueror of England and the Conqueror of Sicily, there ' See vol. i. p. 3. COMPARISON BETWEEN WILLIAM AND THEODOEIO. 67 are not a few direct points of likeness. The reign of ch. xxm. Theodoric in Italy, like the reign of William in England, Legal . fictions of was a reign or legal notions. The theory according to the reign of which William lawfully succeeded to the crown of his ''^^^°'^°"''- cousin Eadward was a fiction not more transparent than connnission the theory according to which the King of the East-Goths ^Meror. entered Italy by an Imperial commission, as a Roman Patrician sent to win back a lost province of the Empire from the grasp of the Tyrant Odoacer.^ The nature of Contrast the two fictions was opposite. It was as needful for the ^,■^^Q igg^i position of Theodoric that he should not give himself out ^^^f^ ^^ as King of the Italians ^ as it was needful for the position cases. of William that he should give himself out as King of the English. But it was on a legal fiction, on a system of decorous formulae which veiled the fact that they were in truth Kings by the edge of the sword, that the power of Theodoric and the power of William alike rested. And it is not too much to say that it was the different nature of the legal fiction in the two cases which led to the diSerence in character and duration between the dominion founded by Theodoric and the dominion founded by William. The Self- legal fiction under which Theodoric set forth was one nature of which carried with it the destruction of his dynasty. The Theodoric s ■' _•' position. Imperial commission by which alone the Gothic King claimed to reign in Italy might be withdrawn by the authority which had granted it. The Imperial claims were not likely to be heard of as long as the Gothic monarchy was strong, but they were sure to be put ' Some passages on this head will be found collected in the British Quar- terly Review for October, 1872, p. 325. See especially the description of Theodoric's mission given by the anonymous writer at the end of Ammianus (717 ed. Gronovius). The story is told in the same spirit by Jordanes, 57. ^ This title seems to be purposely avoided, even when Jordanes comes as near to it as " Gothorum Romanorumque regnator." See the article in the British Quarterly Keview already quoted, p. 325. 58 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. XXIII. forward, and very vigorously and effectively they were put forward, as soon as the Gothic monarchy became weak. Inherent But the legal fiction by which William claimed the Eng- WWs^ lish Crown contained in it no such elements of destruction . position, j^ ^j^g Qj^g which, in its own nature, could not fail to grow stronger and stronger. William gave himself out, neither as a foreign conqueror nor as the representative of an absent over-lord, but as the rightful successor of the Kings who had gone before him. As he and his dynasty became settled in the land, as the immediate effects of the foreign Conquest wore away, the fiction ceased to be a fiction. The King by the edge of the sword came in truth to be, what he claimed to be, King according to the law of England. And the different natures of the legal fictions by which Theodoric claimed to reign in Italy and William to reign in England affected their position and the duration of their dominion The old in another way. Each came professing, and each came, we acTOjdTn ^^y believe, really purposing, to rule according to the laws both cases, of the land in which he found himself In the case of the Goth, the question between Roman and Gothic law could hardly arise ; Ataulf had found out before him that it was only by the laws of Home that the world oould be governed.^ But besides this, the Patrician, the lieutenant of the Emperor, could not fail, from the very nature of his position, to rule over Romans according to Roman law. So William, as lawful King of the English, could not fail, from the very nature of his position, at least to profess to Compari- rule England according to English law. But both Theod- tween the °^'^^ ^^'^ William brought with them what might seem Goths in to be a great hindrance to peaceful and lawful government, Italy and . '^ _ ^ . the Nor- in the shape of a foreign army, by the help of which each Eno-iand. ^^'°'^ ^^® Conquest. It is in the treatment of their followers that the difference between the position of Theodoric and ' Such is the declaration which Orosius, just at the close of his History, puts into the mouth of Ataulf. See Comparative Politics, 329, 495. THE GOTHS AND THE NORMANS. 59 that of William comes out most strongly. The Italians ch. xxm. could hardly look on the Goths as enemies. They had won no victory over any Italian army, nor was any Italian dispossessed of his lands in order to enrich them. The victories won by the barbarian host of Theodoric were won wholly over the barbarian host of Odoacer. The lands which Odoacer had already distributed No fresh 1 • p 11 T 1 1 p n „ confiscation among his followers stood ready to reward the toUowers oi made by Theodoricwithout any further disturbance of Roman owners.^ ®° ''"°' The man who was at once Roman Patrician and Gothic Isolation of i-i . *^® Goths King kept his Roman and his Gothic subjects separate ; ;„ itaiy. they lived apart, each nation according to its own law, and the common ruler of both stood ready in case of need to do equal justice between them. In Theodoric's view, repose and dignity fell to the lot of the Roman, while the toils of government and warfare fell to the lot of the Goth. The Roman had but to enjoy his own in peace, while the Goth stood by as his armed defender. The splendour and dignity of government still remained in the hands of the Roman Consul; it was only the toils of the ruler which the Gothic King took for his own share. ^ While the great King himself lived, we may believe that such a picture as this was more than a dream, more than a theory. But when his strong hand was taken away, all was Overthrow changed. The Goths had no root in the land ; they were Gothic but a foreign army encamped on Italian soil. Presently P"^^^^- they were felt to be, not only a foreign army but an hostile army, and they were cut off in warfare with other foreign armies whom the abiding magic of a name caused Italy to look on as countrymen and deliverers. The fol- lowers of William, on the other hand, had won their victory over Englishmen. It was only at the cost of Englishmen that the share which they had borne in con- » Prokopios, Bell. Goth. i. i. '^ Cassiodorus, vl. i ; vii. 3. 60 THE NOEMAN KINGS IJf ENGLAND. OH. xxni. The Nor- mans in England not isolated ; consequent perma- nency of their settle- ment. Personal comparison of Theod- oric and William. Opposite results of their reigns. quering England could be rewarded. Hence, while tte reign of Theodoric was a reign of peace and happiness, the reign of William was a reign of grief and oppression, a reign of robbery and slaughter. But for the very reason that the beginnings of the Norman rule in England were so much darker than the beginnings of the Gothic rule in Italy, the Norman rule in England took root and ceased to be a Norman rule, while the Gothic rule in Italy was stamped out almost within the memory of those who had seen its beginnings. The Goths, standing apart as a foreign army for the defence of Italy, never became Romans. The Normans, dividing among themselves the lands of Eng- land to be held according to English law, became English- men with wonderful speed. We might stop, not without advantage, to compare the personal characters of the great Goth and the great Norman. The death of Waltheof may be set against the deaths of Boetius and Symmachus ; but if the early days of William form a bright con- trast to the turbulent youth of Theodoric and to the treacherous slaughter of Odoacer by his own hand,^ the Italian reign of Theodoric, the reign of a true father of his people, has nothing like the harrying of North- humberland and the more wanton desolation of Hamp- shire. But it is of more moment to mark what came in each ease of the policy into which the peculiar position of either conqueror led him. The paternal rule of Theodoric, his careful isolation of his Gothic followers, gave Italy one generation of happiness, to be followed by the overthrow of his dynasty, by the extirpation of his nation, by the long desolation of Italy at the hands of the Goth, the Frank, and the motley armies of the Eastern Rome. The oppressions and spoliations of William's reign, the division of the lands of England among his foreign followers, not only preserved ^ On the early life of Theodoric and the death of Odoacer, see the article in the British Quarterly Review already quoted, p. 325. THE CONQUESTS OF ENGLAND AND SICILY. 61 his Crown to his descendants for ever, but it proved in the ch. xxiii. end the means of preserving the freedom and the national life of England. The well nigh despotic power which William handed on to his successors woke up again the spirit which a milder rule might have lulled to sleep. And, when the day of uprising came, the ancient sons of the soil found worthy comrades and leaders in the descendants of the men among whom William had parted out the lands of their forefathers, comrades whose hearts were now found to be as truly English as their own. The Italian and Sicilian conquests made by Norman ad- Compari- venturers in William's own day have been more than once tween the incidentally referred to in the course of our History. In ^"i™"!! •' •' Conquest them too we may see the force of a legal fiction. The in England captive Leo the Ninth, or one of his successors, was made to confirm the past and future conquests of his captors, and to grant out both Apulia and the as yet untouched land of Sicily as fiefs of the Holy See.^ The only question is whether so impudent a pretext as this has any right to the name even of a legal fiction. The formal right of the Effects of Emperor Zeno to send a Patrician to rule Italy in his investiture. name could not be denied. Eadward had no right to dispose of the kingdom of England, but he had a right to a voice in its disposal, and to claim the Crown of England by virtue of his alleged bequest was at least less monstrous than to claim the dominions of the Eastern Emperor by virtue of a grant from the Bishop of the Old Eome. Still there can be no doubt that the papal grant did much to advance and strengthen the power of the Normans in Italy, and that it did much to enable their conquests to take the form of an united and regular kingdom. Still the grant of Leo did but give a shadow of legal sanction to a process of conquest which had already ' See Geoffi-ey Malaterra, i. 14 (Muratori, v. 553) ; William of Apulia, ii, 400 (Pertz, ix. 262). 62 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxin. begun. Both Theodoric and William, on the other hand, announced to the world their purposes, and the justification of those purposes, before they set forth on their several Its analogy expeditions. Andj like the claim of Theodoric, but unlike Imperial the claim of William, the papal investiture of the Norman ^f Th^^d"*^ in Italy carried with it the destruction of the power which one. it had once strengthened. The nominal over-lordship of Leo became a terrible reality in the hands of those Pontiffs of the thirteenth century who professed to dispose of the vassal crown at their will, and who sent crusading armies Compari- to enforce their grants. In some points then the Angevin tween the Conquest of Apulia and Sicily has more likeness to Wil- Angevm Jiam's Couquest of England than to their earlier conquest of Sicily by William's own countrymen. William set forth as a Xomian Crusader before the true Crusades had begun. Charles ofEngUnd °^ Anjou set forth as a Crusader, when Crusades had already begun to be turned away from their true object. In each case the spiritual power backed up the ambition of the temporal prince, but the immediate relations of the spiritual and temporal powers were reversed in the two cases. William claimed the English Crown, and the far- seeing policy of Hildebrand saw that to support his claim by a papal sanction would one day turn to the advantage of the See of Rome. Urban the Fourth and Clement the Fourth had their own reasons for compassing the overthrow of Manfred. They needed the arm of a temporal prince to carry out their purposes, and what Edmund of Lancaster could not do for them they found that Charles of Anjou Compari- could do. In the two conquerors themselves there are, as tween Wil- ^ ^^^^ already said, strong points of likeness. In both we Charitfof ^^® *^® ^^'^^ "'°^ ^^^^' *^® ^^™e unbending sternness in Anjou. carrying out a purpose which we may beHeve that each had taught himself to look on as righteous. In both we may see the strong influence of a formal religion, a religion which in neither case was without its fruit in the WILLIAM AND CHARLES OF ANJOU. 63 personal virtues of the Bian, little as it did in either ease oh. xxm. to soften the hardness of the ruler. Yet by the side of Charles William might pass for gentle. York and Le Charles's Mans were lost and won again, but their recovery was not MarseiMe?* marked by such cold-blooded slaughter as marked the hour when the entry of Charles put an end to the second day of Massaliot freedom.^ Conradin and Frederick of Beheading Austria were foes more to be dreaded than Eadgar radin. and Eadwine, but their beheading at Charles's bidding stands out in contrast with the conduct of the Con- querorj who never sent men to the scafTold for with- standing him in open battle. The general government of Charles seems to have been more oppressive than that of WiUiam, and the immediate cause of the Sicilian revolt shows that Charles was less zealous than William to put down a class of outrages of which neither was guilty in his own person. He had his reward in seeing with his own eyes half the kingdom which he had conquered rent away from him and his house. The Compari- differences between the later histories of England and dynasties of the Two Sicilies belong perhaps to causes over ^J??*^*^ ^^ which neither Charles nor William had any control, and by Southern Italians, Normans and Frenchmen settled in Southern Italy, had not the same means for keeping up a vigorous national life as Englishmen and Anglicized Normans. Yet William and Charles were alike in this. Each was able, by help of a legal fiction, by help of a papal blessing, to leave behind him a lasting dynasty in the. land which he conquered. The dynasty founded by Charles was at least more long-lived than the dynasty founded by Theodorie. The dynasty founded by William abides among us still. The distinctive feature then of William's Conquest is Gradual that its results have been^ above those of all other con- effects of ' See vol. iv. p. 549. 64 THE NOEMAN KINGS IK ENGLAND. OH. xxin. the Con- quest. Harmoniz- ing of opposite tendencies at work before the Conquest. Tendency to national unity; to Feudal Impulse given to military tenui-es, but checked by the law that every man should quests, lasting and unbroken. William's entiy was made by force, but its effects have been wrought silently and peacefully. In many respects the result of William's Con- quest was merely to strengthen and hasten tendencies which were already at work in England. In some cases its effect was to harmonize and to reconcile tenden- cies which in their own nature were conflicting. Thus, before Wilham came, England was making swift steps in the direction of closer national unity, and thereby of greater authority in the common centres of unity, in the common King of the whole English people, in the common Witenagemot of the whole English land. On the other hand, England was also tending towards those feudal notions and relations which in other lands did so much to break up all national unity and to weaken the power of all common central institutions. Here were two conflicting tendencies. Had they been left to their own developement, without any compressing force from without, they might have wrought the same result in England which they did in France. We might have seen, as in France, the kingdom split up into a number of practically independent principalities, to be joined together in aftertimes, one by one, in the hands of a despotic King. We might have seen, as in France, the holders of military fiefs, great and small, grow into an exclusive nobility, in one age defying the Crown in the exercise of its lawful authority, in another age sinking into the abject hangers-on of a despot's court. From all this William saved us. His great distribution of lands, to be held of himself as lord, gave the greatest im- pulse to feudal ideas of every kind.^ But he took care that the King should never be sunk in the lord ; he took care that his own vassals and the vassals of his vassals should be his subjects as well. The oath which all men took in the I shall speak more fully of this in the next Chapter. STRENGTHENING OF NATIONAL UNITY. 65 great Gemot of Salisbury ' saved us from the worst evils oh. xxm. of feudalism as they showed themselves in other lands. ^ ^^f King s William carried out the work of the West-Saxon Kings to man. its full accomplishment. He made England truly one, and Tlie unity he settled, for many ages at least, the great question kingdom between Southern and Northern England, between the byWiUiam. West-Saxon and the Dane. It would be truOj though it He decides might sound paradoxical, to say that the Norman Conquest question made England Saxon. The harrying of Northumberland ^'ZTf®'^ finished the work which Ecgberht had begun, and which and the West- Saxon conquerors of the tenth century, Eadward England. and ^thelstan and Eadmund, had carried on. William, William the descendant of Scandinavian sea-kings, the destroyer of cesser of the last of West-Saxon heroes, showed himself as the true *® West- ' baxon successor of the West-Saxon dynasty which he claimed to Kings. represent. When the King wore his crown at Winchester, Gloucester, and Westminster^ it was emphatically the crown of Cerdic, of Ceawlin, and of JSlfred that he wore.^ From his day no man doubted that England was a realm which none could tear asunder. And from his day no man doubted where the headship of that realm lay, and that York was doomed to bow to Winchester and London. It Modem is only quite lately that the balance has been in some Northern measure restored. The great commercial and political de- ^^igland. velopement of modern days has given back to Northern England an importance which it had not held since the Bretwaldas of the seventh century and the Danish Kings and Earls of the tenth. ' See vol. iv. p. 695. ° Willia.m of Malmesbury (Gest. Pont. 209), after remarking on the diffi- culty of understanding the speech of the North of England, adds, " Quod propter viciniam barbararum gentium, et propter remotionem regmn, quon- dam Anglorum modo Normannorum, contigit, qui magis ad austrum quam ad aquilonem diyersati noscuntur." So Florence (i 091) incidentally assumes Wessex as the natural dwelling-place of "William Eufus ; " Post hsec rex de Northymbria per Meroiam in West-Saxoniam rediit." There had been no special mention of Wessex before. VOL. V. F 66 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN E.VOLAND. cH. XXIII. In future Chapters of this volume it will be my business to trace out the lasting effects of William's Conquest on our laws and constitution, our social and religious history, William as our language and our architecture. But, besides the effect a d^sty^ which William's Conquest had on all these things, we must remember that William founded a dynasty. And as every later King has sprung of William's blood, that dynasty in The one sense has gone on to our own time. Still there is one NormL period of our history which is emphatically the time of the period of j,^|g Qf "William's immediate family. It is in strictness the English _ _ '' history; Norman period of English history, the time when we were ruled by Kings who were strictly Norman by birth, descent. Contrasted or adoption. It was a time when the rule of the King of the Angevin English was not wholly insular^ as it had been before and period. ^g j^ ^^^ ^Q Ijg again, and when it was not as yet that wide dominion, insular and continental, of which England and Normandy formed but two parts out of many. It was a time when England and Normandy formed the whole dominion of their common King and Duke, and when, though his diplomacy might reach much further, his warfare was mainly waged either to keep rivals out of his own dominions, or to preserve the doubtful allegiance of the border-lands of Immediate Scotland, Wales, and Maine. And, more than this, it was results of. ■ t ,-, the Con- durmg this period that the immediate results of the Con- quest, quest, as distinguished from its more far-reaching results in NaturaU- after times, were firmly established. It was during- this zation of . ° the time that the Norman conquerors and settlers t«ok firm settl^T^ Toot on English soil, and learned to feel that England, and not Normandy, was their real home. It was during this time that the few direct changes which the Conquest wrought in our political and social institutions were The fully established. This period takes in the reigns of the Kings ; three Kings who immediately followed William. Of these WiUiam's pons the first two were William's own sons, the second of them 1087-1135. was his English-born son. The third, Stephen of Blois, CHARACTER OF THE NORMAK REIGNS. 67 tlie son of William's daughter, was not in strictness a ch. xxin. member of William's house. But he had practically ^*^1'¥°„ ^ ^ J. ./ practically become one of Williams's house by adoption. Brought up Norman, at the court of his uncle, bound to him by the close and endearing tie of a sister's son, carefully seeking the good will of the inhabitants of England of both races, Stephen was in truth as much Norman^ as much English, as if he had come of the male line of the Conqueror. He was cer- tainly more Norman, more English, than the Kings who came immediately after him. The difficulty is that it was Character only for a few years that Stephen can be said to have ^eim reigned at all ; the greater part of his nominal reign must ii35-i'54- be looked upon as a time of anarchy, parting off the period represented by Henry the First from the period which begins with Henry the Second. With the accession of the Foreign Angevin dynasty a new state of things begins. England of the and Normandy were for a short time merely members of a :^ngevin vast dominion which seemed likely to grow into a common kingdom of Gaul and Britain. The final result of this Separation state of things was that England and Normandy parted mandy and asunder, that Normandy became part of the French king- England, dom, while England again became the island Empire, holding for some ages a greater or less part of Gaul as a dependency of England beyond the sea. Within the land the dominion Fusion of of strangers — strangers often no less to Normandy than to England. England — had the effect of making all the nativesof England, of whatever blood or speech, feel and act as countrymen. The time during which the effects of the Norman Conquest may be looked upon as visibly working thus divides itself into two easily marked periods. The first takes in the reigns First of William Rufus, Henry the First, and Stephen, so far as logj.ijj^ we can say that there was any reign of Stephen at all. The second period takes in the reigns of the Angevin Second Kings, from the accession of Henry the Second till England \^^^_j2i2. once more thoroughly became England under Edward the T 2, 68 THE KOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. XXIII. First. The former of these periods I purpose to deal with a the present Chapter, ia the form of a consecutive narra- Plan of the present narratiTe. tive. But it will not be a narrative entering into the same detail as that in which I have told the reigns of Eadward^ Harold, and William. It will be one that will deal specially with those events which illustrate the effects of the Conquest, and the relations of Normans and Englishmen to one another. It will answer to the nar- rative of the reigns of the Danish Kings which I gave in my first volume. The second period will, from the point of view of this History, need nothing beyond a mere sketch, such as the opening Chapter of my story, in which I pass lightly over the five centuries of Eng- lish history between Hengest and Eadgar. And as, between those two Chapters, I placed what I had to say for my present purpose about the earliest institutions of England, so, between my slight narrative of the Norman reigns after William and my slighter sketch of the Angevin Kings down to Edward, I place the Chapters which are designed to treat, in the form of disquisition rather than of narrative, of the work that was going on between the Conquest of William and the accession of Henry, the effects in short of the Norman Conquest. I go on then now to take up the thread of my narrative where I dropped it, on the day when the second William left the death-bed of the first to take possession of the Crown of the con- quered island. § 1. Reign of JFilliam Rufus. 1087 — I 100. In the two periods of English history with which I have to deal in the present volume, a remarkable analogy may be seen between the successive stages of each. Each between the Nor- man and Angevin dynasties, dynasty, Norman and Angevin, begins with a mighty ANALOGIES BETWEEN THE NORMAN AND ANGEVIN EEIGNS. 69 founder. If tlie Conqueror stands alone, or is approaelied oh. xxni. among his own descendants by the great Edward only, a place next after theirs among the later rulers of England may safely be given to Henry of Anjou. William and Between Henry each began a great work, and each handed on his queror and work to his successor before the final effects of his work Henry the Second ; had as yet had time fully to show themselves. There is between thus an analogy between the position of the second King of ^ ^ "'"nd each dynasty, between William the Red and Richard the Richard T . . . „ . tlie First. Lion-Hearted. There is in truth a good deal of likeness between the two men. In each case a man of great natural gifts, of strongly-marked character, but whose powers are not directed to any one great and statesman- like object, follows a statesman of the highest order. In both reigns England itself seems to fall out of sight, as compared with schemes of continental policyj continental enterprise, and continental conquest. To the long and important reign of Henry the First there is nothing which exactly answers in the Angevin period. In some points it is a continuation of the reign of Rufus ; in other points it has a character wholly its own. But the anarchy of Two 1 i? T 1 J periods of Stephen s time answers to the longer anarchy or J ohn and anarchy ; Henry the Third. Only it marks the silent advance which had been made between the two periods that the earlier anarchy sprang out of a struggle between two competitors for the Crown, while the later anarchy sprang out of a struggle between the Crown and the nation. At last, in two periods „,- iii of restored both cases alike, light comes out of darkness and order out order. of chaos. In the one the power of the Crown is again restored by the statesmanship of the great Heniy ; in the other the power of the Assembly of the nation is again restored in a new form by the statesmanship of the greater Edward. I have said that the reigns both of William Rufus and Compaxi- . , son 01 the of Richard the Lion-Hearted have a specially un-Enghsn reigns of THE NOEMAN KINGS IK ENULAKD. OH. XXIII. WiUiam RufuB and Kichard the First. Character of the reign of William Rufus. Rufus specially King of England. Beginning of the rivaiiy between England and France. Import- ance of Welsh and look. But, if we look below the surface, we sliall see that this is far more true of the reig-u of Richard than of the reign of Rufus. Richard has strangely become a national hero, because his crusading exploits were held to shed glory- on the land in which he chanced to be born and from which he drew his highest title. Thus the reign of Richard was really more un-English than it seems in popular belief. But the reign of William Rufus was really less un-English than it seems at first sight. Outwardly indeed it was a reign specially un-English, more so than the reign which went before it or the reign which followed it. It was indeed to English loyalty and valour that William Rufus owed his throne; yet, after his first delusive appeal to English loyalty, there was nothing in his days which at all answers to the studied English revival which marked the reign of his English-born brother. The old race of Englishmen was dying out ; the new race of Englishmen had hardly as yet begun to show itself. Still, if William Rufus utterly belied his claim to the ancient title of King of the English, few Kings were better entitled to the new title which was just beginning to creep in, the title of King of England. His personal policy was indeed mainly continental ; his chief object throughout his reign was to win and enlarge a dominion on the mainland. But he carried on his continental policy in something more than the local spirit of a mere Norman Duke. His own age looked on him as one who threatened the kingdom of France in the character of a King of England. Richard altogether neglected his island kingdom, and gave up that fuller superiority which his father had won over his Scot- tish vassal. William^ on the other hand, never neglected to consolidate and to extend his authority in the island realm, the possession of which gave him such increased strength for his continental undertakings. In no reign between those of the two great Edwards are the relations of the CHARACTER OF THE REIGN OF RUPUS. 71 Imperial Crown to its Welsh and Scottish dependencies of oh. xxm. greater importance than they are in the reig-n of the Scottish affairs. second Norman King. And William Rufus is one of the jjj^ g^, few Kings since the days of the West-Saxon conquerors l^gement who, like Harold and Edward the First, enlarged the EngUah actual English kingdom by the incorporation of lands which had hitherto stood in a relation of merely external vassalage. To have annexed Normandy and Maine, to have made his over-lord at Paris tremble lest his whole realm should share the same fate — these things were but momentary triumphs. But the conquest of South Wales, the incorporation of Cumberland, the restoration of Carlisle as a border city and fortress, all these were lasting ad- ditions to the strength of the English kingdom. They mark the reign of William Rufus as a time when, if Englishmen were bowed down under a cruel yoke, England at least was mighty under a King who knew how to use her might. With the personal character of William Rufus we are Personal less concerned than with the political character of his ^f uufug. reign. But the character of the man was one which had no small effect on the character of his reign. No man ever had a more distinct personality of his own. The impression Number of which he made on the minds of his contemporaries is borne jotes about witness to by a store of personal anecdotes larger perhaps ^™- than is to be found of any King before or after him. We His can see the Red King,i in his figure a caricature of his appearance father, short in stature, with projecting stomach, ruddy ^'^'^ '^'*'''*''- face, and restless eye. We can hear him, in his merriment or in his anger, casting about his impious jests and shame- less mockery of his own crimes, or else in his fierce wrath stammering out his defiance of God and man. His bodily ' He is "Rex Bufus," "Li reis Eos," in a marlced way, the nickname being systematically used, almost as if it were a real name. See Will. Mahns. iv. 306; Ord. Vit. 672 D, 682 E; Waoe, 14499-14503. 72 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. Compari- son with his father. Vices of E iifus. His impiety. Kufus never ex- communi- cated. strength, his love of the chase, his military skill and daring, we may add his real gifts as a ruler whenever he chose to put them forth, all come from his father. But all that ennobles the character of the elder William is lacking in the younger. William the Great ever kept a real feeling of religion, a real respect for law, however easy he might find it to turn law and religion to his own ends. But William the Red knew no law but his own will. Instead of the austere personal virtues of the Conqueror, William Rufus was given up to every kind of riotous living, even to forms of vice which are sheltered by their own foulness.^ Instead of the more than ceremonial re- ligion of his father, he was a mocker and a blasphemer, not so much, it would seem, a speculative unbeliever as one who took a strange pleasure in dealing with his Maker as with a personal enemy .^ The man who gathered together Jewish Rabbis and Christian Bishops, and offered to embrace the creed of the best disputants,^ the man who undertook to convert back again the Hebrew youth who had forsaken the Synagogue for the Church,* may not have intellectually cast aside the faith which he never cast aside formally, but he had bidden farewell to the commonest decencies of his time and office. Strange to say, the King who surpassed all his fellows in vice and blasphemy was never cut off from the communion of the Church. And occasional ap- pearances at ecclesiastical ceremonies, occasional grants to ' On this matter I can do no more than refer to the words of Saint Anselm in Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 24, to the remarkable passages in WilKam of Malmes- bm-y, iv. 314, 316 (especially the various readings in Sir T. D. Hardy's note), V. 393, 412, and to several places in Orderio, 672 B, 680 A, 682 B, 763 C, 781 0, D. The passages must be compared together for their fuU force to be taken in. Cf. also Stubbs, Itinerarium, xxi. Cf. Giraldus, Yita Galfridi, ii. 19 (vol. iv. p. 423, Brewer). '* I refer to the words put into his mouth by Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 54. Cf. 47. " WiU. Malms, iv. 317. ' Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 46, 47. These passages have a further importance as connected with the appearance of Jews in England. See Appendix Q. PERSONAL CHARACTER OF RUFUS. 73 ecclesiastical foundations, show that the open blasphemer oh. xxiii. had still not separated himself by any formal act from the fellowship of Christian men. Yet it is clear that in the character of William Rufus His dutiful there was a side which, at any rate in his ov/n age, was his father, not wholly repulsive. He had at least the virtues of a son. Dutiful in all things as long as his father lived,^ he cherished his memory with all reverence when he was gone. This feeling comes out in more than one shape. The few chm'ches towards which Rufas appears, not as a spoiler but as a benefactor, are those which owed their foundation to his father.^ And in his wars he makes it a kind of point of honour to keep or win whatever had been a possession of his father.^ But the phrase which I Chivalrous have just used, the fact that we can speak of a point of ^f jjufug honour, opens to us that side of the Red King's character which is in every way the most instructive. William Rufus, like Richard the Lion-Hearted, is one of the heroes of chivalry. His reign indeed marks a great developement. Growth of a developement which we can hardly doubt that his personal ideas in his character greatly helped, of all those ideas which, for want '™®- of a better name, we may speak of as chivalrous. For His sense William Rufus the law of God and the law of right were ^„™',j.*'^''' words which had no meaning ; but he fully understood and obeyed the law of honour. The virtues of the Christian man, the virtues of the ruler ruling according to law, the virtues of the subject obeying according to law, were of no account in his eyes. But the virtues of the knight, the gentleman, and the soldier he could both honour in others and practise in his own person. Like other chivalrous Kings, he thought but lightly of the coronation oath ' See vol. iv. p. 709. ^ The chief of these were Battle Abbey and Saint Stephen's at Caen, the foundations of his father. The Waltham writer (De Inventione, 22) raises a wail over Wiiliam's robberies from Waltham to enrich Caen. 3 Ord. Vit. 769 B, C. 74 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxm. which bound him to his people^ of the promises which he made them in his own time of need, or of the treaties by which he bound himself to other princes.^ He did not scruple to purchase the help of men who were bound by every tie of allegiance to the cause of his enemies ; but his engagements in actual war time, the engagements which bound him personally as a soldier and a knight, were always strictly kept. As the King sworn to do justice and mercy, he did not shrink from visiting innocent men with barbarous punishments ;^ but when he acted as the knight in arms, the life and limb of the prisoner of war was safe in his hands, and, when he granted a truce to a besieged place, his word remained unbroken. ^ What he practised himself he looked for from others. He refused to hearken to the suggestion that knights to whom he had granted their freedom on parole might possiblj' betray the faith His " mag- which they had plighted.* We hear much of his magna- and "libe- nimity and his liberality^ ; but his magnanimity '' has little in rality. common with any true greatness of soul. It was rather an overbearing personal arrogance,^ which made him too proud to hurt those whom he deemed personally beneath him, and which thus often led him into acts which had at least the outward look of generosity. * The liberality of Rufus ' See the complaints of the English Chronicler of Eufus' breach of his promises to his subjects in loSS and of his breach of the treaty with Robert in 1091. The phrase is nearly the same in both cases. ^ Take for instance the punishment of William of Eu and his companions in 1096. ^ See the story of the siege of Chateau-sur-Loir, Ord. Vit. 775 C, D. * Ord. Vit, 772 D. " Absit a me ut credam quod probus miles violet fideni suam.'' ^ See the story in WUliam of Mabnesbury, iv. 309. ° The meaning of the word " magnanimitas " in the language of the time is illustrated by the words of Suger in his Life of Lewis the Fat (c. 19), where he calls a certain Count Odo " tumultuosus, mira3 magnanimitatis, caput sceleratorum.'' ' Will, Neub. i. 2. "Homo typo immauissimae superbije turgidus." ° See in WiU. Mahns. iv. 320; Ord, Vit. 773 C ; Wace, 15100 et seq.; Palgrave, iv. 640. CHIVALRY OF WILLIAM RUPTJS. 75 gathered around him the choicest soldiers of all lands ; but ch. xxm. the means for this bounty was found in sacrilege and His . mercenary oppression, in keeping churches void of pastors and in soldiers ; wringing tax upon tax from every class of his subjects. ^ His hand was heavy on the robber and on the murderer, save their liCGncc when they could either purchase their safety by a bribe,^ or when they belonged to his own personal following. When we read of the court of Rufus, of the effeminate His , dress and manners and the base vices of the young nobles who surrounded him,^ and yet when we remember that these same men were the first in every feat of arms in the battle or the siege, we seem to be carried on over a space of five hundred years. "We seem to have suddenly analogy of 1 I. 1 ,-, Henry the leaped from the grave and decorous court oi the Conqueror Third of to the presence of the minions of the last Valois. The man so highly gifted, but whose gifts were thus He obtains T m 1 1 /-I *^® Crown fearfully abused, ohtamed without difficulty the Crown without which his father's dying voice had bequeathed to him. He °PP°^' '°"- was accepted joyfully by the English, and, at least without any open opposition, by the Normans in England. A change of masters is commonly acceptable to subjects; the reign of a new King is always fertile in hopes and promises ; and the worst features of the character of Rufus had as yet had but little opportunity of showing themselves.* There was no available English competitor; the English-born Henry was not at hand ; and, as a ruler though not as a mauj William was at all times to be preferred to Robert. The choice of William too would again separate England and Normandy, and such a separation, even under the son 1 See WiU. Mahns. iv. 314, 333 ; Ord. Vit. 680 A, 763 C. Cf. Eadraer, Hist. Nov. 94; Chron. Petrib. iioo. 2 Cf. Ord. Yit. 669 A, 680 A, with WiU. Malms, iv. 314; Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 94. ' See Will. Malms, iv. 314 ; Ord. Vit. 682. ^ * See Eadmer, 13, 14. WiUiam of Mahnesbury (iv. 312) doubtless ex- aggerates. 76 THE NOKMAN KINGS m ENGLAND. CH. xxiir. of her Conqueror, might seem like the beginning- of a new wiUiam day of freedom for England. The new King was crowned crowned by . -r r i i i i i • -ii j_ Lanfrano. by the primate Laniranc/ and he began to reign without ^6^*1087'''^ a hand or a voice being raised against him. But, after the Easter of the next year, William learned that it was only the English part of his subjects who had accepted Revolt him in good faith. A revolt broke out, which was shared Norman in by the chief men of Norman birth throughout England. E°iter -^^ ^^^ head was Bishop Odo of Bayeux, who, released from 1088. his prison and restored to his earldom of Kent, was dis- of^l^^^ satisfied at finding that the chief place in the councils of the new King was held, not by himself, but by his brother prelate William of Durham.^ Odo set forth the advantages which the Norman settlers in England would find by still having one prince to reign over both England and Nor- mandy. He told them how much better it suited their interests to be ruled by the careless Robert than by the General re- stern and active William. The chief Normans in England, Norman Odo's owu brother Robert of Cornwall, Earl Roger of nobles m Montgomery and his fierce son Robert of Belesme, Hugh the Bigod and Hugh of Grantmesnil, the younger Count Eustace of Boulogne, Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances and his nephew Robert of Mowbray, all rose in rebellion to transfer the Crown of England from William to his brother the The Bishop Duke of the Normans.' And, in the South at least, men of Durham joins the believed, to their wonder and horror, that the Bishop of Durham himself joined in the revolt, a deed which the English Chronicler does not scruple to liken to the deed of Judas. At Durham however men looked on William of Saint Carilef as an innocent victim of the wrong-doing of ' Chron. Petrib. 1087; Flor. Wig. 1087 ; "Will. Malms, iv. 305 ; Ord. Vit. 663 C. * Will. Malms, iv. 306. On William of Saint Carilef, see vol. iv. p. 677. ' WiUiam of Newburgh (i. 2) speaks the language of a somewhat later time, when he says, "Quibusdam optimatum Roberto propensiorem, tam- quam justo hasredi et perperam exhseredato, favorem prsestantibus." EEVOLT OF THE J^ORMANS. 77 his royal namesake.^ On the other hand, Lanfranc and the oh. xxm. other Bishops, a few Norman nobles, among' them Earl Huffh Loyalty nf til** of Chester and William of Warren, and the great mass of English. the English people, remained faithful to the new King. The rebels strengthened their castles ; each man in his own district harried the land, especially the domains of the King and the Archbishop ; and they sent to Duke Robert, praying him to send help and to come himself to take the Crown to which the common voice of the Normans in England had called him. In this danger the son of the Conqueror owed his Crown His ap- to the zeal and valour of the conquered. Twice in the proi^ses course of the war did Rufus put forth written proclama^ ij" ^'j.® tions, calling the sons of the soil to his standard, and people, lavishing all the promises which Kings are wont to lavish at moments when the help of the people is needful to them. The days of King Eadward were to come back ; all wrong was to be undone ; no more unrighteous taxes were to be raised j each man was again, as in the days of Cnut, to have his free right of hunting on his own land.^ By the second proclamation the shameful name of nithing The name was to be the doom of every man, French or English, who failed to obey the summons of his lord the King.^ The ' The accounts in the Chronicle, Plorence, and "WiUiani of Malmesbury should be compared with the long Durham version in the Monasticon, i. 244. Cf. Palgrave, iv. 31, 32. ' On these promises see Stubbs, Constitutional History, i. 296. ^ I have mentioned this nithing proclamation in vol. ii. p. 104, so far as it illustrated the use of the word nixing. It comes out in the Chronicle in 1088, and in WiUiam of Malmesbury, iv. 306. But it is the English Chronicler alone who brings out the fact that it was addressed to all inhabitants of the land alike, both French and English ; "Se cyng . . . sende ofer eall Engla- lande, and bead fset aelc man fe w£ere unniSing sceolde cuman to him, Fren- cisce, Englisce, of porte and of uppelande.'' Walter of Hemingburgh (i. 21) gives the appeal a specially popular turn ; " Convocavit Anglos, et ostendit eis seditionem Normannorum, rogavitque ut ipsum, quem de voluntate patris in regem creaverant, sibi, tanquam caput et regem, tuerentur, promittens eis quod meliorem legem quam sibi vellent eligere concederet eis imposterum et 3criptiu:a firmaret." 78 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. Exploits of the English. Repulse of the rebels from Ilchester and Wor- cester. War in Kent and Sussex. Siege of Kochester. The Nor- man fleet driven back from Pevensey. English pressed around him; they promised, and they gave him, their faithful service. Fortresses held by Nor- man garrisons were taken ; fortresses besieged by Normans were defended ; a new Norman invasion was beaten back from the South-Saxon shore by King William at the head of his faithful English. The fierce Eobert of Mowbray was driven from their walls by the burghers of Il- chester.^ The Norman lords of the Welsh march, Roger of Lacy, Bernard of Newmarch, Ralph of Mortimer — some add the greater Roger himself — at the head of a host of Normans, Englishmen^ and Britons, were overthrown before the walls of Worcester, smitten, as men then deemed, by the curse of the English Bishop who defended the King's cause within the city.^ But the main stress of the war fell on the Kentish and South-Saxon lands. Here Odo held the castle of Rochester against the King ; here Robert of Mortain held the castle which had arisen within a corner of the Roman walls of Anderida. First at Pevenseyj then at Rochester, had the Bishop of Bayeux to surrender to the English host, and^ at his second surrender^ he had to march out amid the jeers and curses of the vic- torious army, who called on their King for halters to hang the traitor.^ But more striking still was the turning about of things during the earlier siege of Pevensey. Duke Robert at last sent a fleet to help in an enterprise which he affected to deem too easy to need his personal presence. On the spot where the Norman followers of the first Wil- liam had first landed on the soil of England, the English followers of the second William struck down or drove back ' The siege of Ilchester — Givelceastra — strange place it now seems for a Biege — is described only by Florence, 1088. ' For the siege of Worcester, see the Chronicle, 1088 ; WiU. Malms. Gest. Reg. iv. 306 ; Gest. Pont. 285. It is told much more fuUy by Florence, in whose account of the deeds of his own Bishop and of his own feUow-citizens the small beginnings of a legendary element may be seen creeping in. ° This scene is vividly described by Orderic, 668, 669 ; Palgrave, iv. 45. THE EEBELLION PUT DOWN BY THE ENGLISH. 79 into the sea tlie new Norman invaders of England.^ Odo oh. xxm. and many of his fellow rebels had to leave England with the loss of their English lands and honours. Bishop Wil- Suppres- liam of Durham, after a trial in the King's Court which reb^lHon in reads like a forestalling of the struggles of Anselm and *^® North. Thomas, surrendered his castle and went beyond sea.^ By the help of the English whom he had called to his standard, William King of the English was now safe upon his throne. This rebellion and its suppression are among the most Prominent striking events of the time. Nothing since the corona- ^e ed^- tion of the Conqueror brings out the action of the ^^^" English people in so strong a light. One thing almost alone we wish to know, namely how far the vigorous action on the part of the English to which all our au- thorities bear witness was a common action throughout the whole land. We should gladly know how far distant parts of the kingdom agreed in obeying the summons which bade every man who was not a nithing to hasten to the King's standard. We would gladly know whether Mercian or Northumbrian contingents showed themselves before Pevensey and Eochester, or whether they stayed to do what they might for the defence of other parts of the kingdom. One thing at least is certain ; the son and suc- cessor of the Conqueror kept his Crown through the help of English loyalty and English valour, when the greater part of the Norman lords and their Norman followers had turned against him. The campaign of 1088 was as The last much a war of Englishmen against Normans as the tween Eng- campaign of 1066; and it was the last campaign of^^^'^"'' Englishmen against Normans. From henceforth we have ' This national exploit is told with great glee by the Chronicler, and with some further details by William of Malmesbury, who talks about "nostri," iv. 306. * See above, p. 77. 80 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. xxiii. civil wars, in which men of either race might be arrayed on either side ; but we never again see an armed struggle between the two races. "We do not again hear an ap- peal to Englishmen, as Englishmen, to do battle against the Norman. The next time that Englishmen are called on to do battle against strangers on their own soil, the meanings of words have changed. The descendants of the Norman settlers have now become Englishmen, and they join along with other Englishmen in withstanding new crowds of adventurers from lands which they have now learned to look upon as foreign. The campaign of Ro- chester and Pevensey, waged in the cause and at the bidding of our second Norman King, was in truth the last effort of the old and undefiled Teutonic England. As compared with every other effort since the great overthrow on Senlac, it shows, as everything else in these ages shows, William that all that Englishmen needed was a leader. In leader of William Rufus, strange as it sounds to say it, they had theEng-- found a leader such as they had never found since the fall of Harold, a leader than whom, simply as a militaiy leader, no better could be found. Throughout this cam- paign, looking at it simply as a campaign, a worthy chief was commanding worthy followers. That William Rufus was a great captain there is no room to doubt from the unanimous witness of the writers of his time. He was a King too, the head of the established government of the land, and, in fighting for him, men had all the ad- vantages on their side which they had lacked when they were fighting against his father at Exeter and Ely.^ Englishmen had now again a King of their own making, a King who, stranger as he was, owed his Crown to them, a King who, if he could not be as ^Elfred or as Harold, might at least be as Cnut. That so it was not, that the loyalty and valour of Englishmen were utterly thrown ' See vol. iv. p. 5. EUFUS BELIES HIS PROMISES. 81 away, was not the fault of the new King's position, it oh. xxiii. was not the fault of his intellectual or his military- capacity ; it was the inherent fault of his moral nature. It was not in him to be as Cnut ; it was not in him to be even as his own father. The promises which he made His breach to win English support were forgotten as soon as English promises. support was no longer needed. In the sad and pithy words of the Chronicler, ' It stood no while.' It is not clear that Rufus deliberately oppressed Englishmen as Englishmen, more than he oppressed other classes of his subjects. His reign is rather a reign of general Hisgeneral wrong-doing towards men of all ranks and races, the <,£ ^U races mercenary soldier, of whatever race, alone excepted. ai"i classes. But, under the circumstances of the time, the oppression of William could not fail to press most heavily on men of English birth, and the agents of his misdeeds could not fail to be mainly chosen from among the ranks of strangers. In the year after the rebellion was put down, William was Death of released from another check upon his actions by the death jj ^ .^ ' of the Primate Lanfranc. It is said that differences had ''°^9- already begun to spring up between him and the King.^ In the next year we come to the beginning of a series of Beginning events which brought England into relations with the main- foreign land of Europe which were wholly unlike any in which ^^^» °f the island kingdom had found itself before. A King of England — for if Rufus had forfeited his right to be looked on as King of the people, he was in the fullest sense King of the land — uses the strength, and, above all, the wealth, of England to win for himself a continental dominion. The great object of Rufus was to win for himself his Hia de- ■, • , 1 • r J i_ ' signs on father's duchy, and to add to it once more his tather s Normandy, ' See Eadmer, 14. VOL. V. G 82 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. XXIII. conquest of Maine. In his later years his dreams of Maine.and conquest seem to have stretched more widely still. He Aqvutame. '■ • i? a -i ■ i is said to have bargained for the possession ot Aquitame, a possession which would have enabled the lord of Nor- mandy and Maine to hem in the hostile land of Anjou on both sides. It is even said that he dreamed of dis- placing his over-lord on the throne of Paris, and of thus uniting all Gaul and Britain into one Empire.^ Such schemes may not have been too wild for a man who was at once so puffed up with pride and so conscious of real strength as the Red King. But the more distant and daring parts of his schemes never got beyond the stage of dreams. The dealings of Rufus with Aquitaine never got beyond an alliance with its Duke. His schemes for the conquest of France never got beyond desultory border warfare. But Normandy and Maine he did win by the combined strength of gold and steel, and he died in full, though only recent, possession both of his father's in- heritance and of his father's greatest continental conquest. Anarchy of A more scrupulous prince than "VVilliam Rufus might un(kr*'^ ^ liave held that the help which Robert had given to the Robert. rebels in England formed a just casus belli against him. And Normandy was just now in a state which, to a prince like WilUam Rufus, must have seemed absolutely to invite invasion. Things had come about as William the Great had foretold on his death-bed. As soon as his controlling hand was gone, Normandy fell back into the state of anarchy into which it had fallen in the days of his childhood. Under Robert the land was again given up ' The dealings of William Bufus with William of Aquitaine come out in Orderic, 780 B, C. His object is said to be " ut usque ad Garumnam fluvium imperii siii fines dilitaret." It must be remembered that the Aquitania of these timea lay north of the Garonne, while the Aquitania of Ctesar lay south. ' Suger, Vit. Lud. 1; Duchesne, iv. 383, "Dioebatur equidera vulgo regem ilium superbum et impetuosum aspirare ad reguum Fraacorum,'' DEALINGS OF EUFUS WITH NORMANDT. 83 to disorders of every kind, among which the private wars oh. xxiii. of the great nobles hold the first place.^ The treasures of the Conqueror were quickly squandered by his weak and prodigal son, and Robert was soon glad to make over to his youngest brother Henry the whole western part of the Duchy. With three thousand pounds out of the Henry five which his father had left him,^ the ^theling bought cstentji. the Cotentin and the Avranchin. The relations between the three brothers were shifting;^ Henry was deprived of his dominions^ and was even imprisoned by Eobert ; but he was again invested with his fief, and, at the time when war broke out between William and Robert, Henry was not only in possession of his principality, but was acting vigorously on behalf of Eobert. Of William's two William's weapons, the wealth of England and the arms of the money. mercenaries whom that wealth enabled him to hire, he began his work with the less dangerous. William's schemes were almost carried out for him before he had himself crossed the sea, and before a blow had been struck in his cause. A crowd of nobles on the eastern side of Castles in Normandy, won by his gifts and promises, received his betrayed to garrisons into their castles, and acknowledg'ed him as "''• o ' ° 1090. their lord for their lands in Normandy. It is plain that some of the arguments by which men in England had ' These private wars fill a larger space in the history of Orderic than -the wars Between WiUiam and Eobert. See for instance 684-693, in the middle of which (691 A, B) comes the moral comment; "Ecce quibns cerumnis superba profligatur Normannia, quse nimis olim yicta gloriabatur Anglia, et naturalibus regui filiis trucidatis sive fugatis, usurpabat eorum possessiones et imperia. Ecce massam divitiarum quas aliis rapuit, eisque poRens ad suam pemiciem insolenter tumuit, nraio non ad delectamentum sui sed potius ad tormentum miserabiliter distrahit." Appropriate scriptural and classical illustrations foUow. ^ For the different versions of the sale of the Cfitentin to Henry, see Orderic, 665 C ; Will. Mabns. v. 392 ; Wace, 14500 et seqq. I have mainly followed Orderic. " Will. Neub. i. 2. " Henricus frater junior, laudabUem prseferens in- dolem, duris et infidis fratribus militabat." G 2 84 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. William obtains Saint Valery. Heliaa of Saint Saen faithful to Robert. Movement at Kouen under Conan on behalf of WiUiam. been led to revolt against William on behalf of Robert could now be turned the other way. So far as it was for their interest to have one lord rather than twOj that object could now be gained only by putting William in possession of Normandy; there was not the faintest chance of putting Robert in possession of England. Among those who in this way came over to the cause of William, we find the names, already so familiar to us, of Ralph of Mortemer, Ralph of Toesny, the aged Walter Giffard, and the King's cousin Stephen, lord alike of Holderness and of Aumale.i Stephen's castle of Aumale was the first fortress on actual Norman ground to pass into the allegiance of William. But his agents had already received the surrender of the castle of Saint Valery, in the Ponthevin fief of Normandy.^ William thusj in his absence, began the conquest of Normandy from the spot from whence his father had set forth in his own person to the conquest of England. Before long nearly all Normandy on the right bank of the Seine had come into the hands of Rufus. One district alone remained faithful. Helias of Saint Saen, who had married a daughter who had been born to Robert in his wanderings, defended the castle of Arques, the scene of one of the Conqueror's earlier ex- ploits,^ and the whole land of Caux, with a desperate fidelity which he went on to show in after years both to Robert and to his son. At last the movement reached the capital. The citizens of Rouen, if they had not actually thought of founding a commune like the citizens of Le Mans, were at least a rich and powerful body, under a demagogue or tyrant — for he had wealth to hire ' Chron. Petrib. 1090 ; Ord. Vit. 681 A. ' Saint Valery is not mentioned by Orderic, but it comes first in the liat in the Chronicle, which is followed by Florence and William of Mahnesbury (iv. 307). ' See vol. iii. p. 127. SUCCESSES OF EUFUS IN NOEMANDY. 85 mercenaries of his own — Conan by name.^ The burghers ch.xxiit. now embraced the cause of William. They deemed perhaps that the more distant master would be the safer, and we must remember too that the state of lawlessness which might have charms in the eyes of turbulent nobles could have none in the eyes of the citizens of a great city. Rouen then rose for the Red King. Henry came The revolt to the rescue of the feeble Duke ; a fight took place and^Conan within the cityj the citizens, vanquished within their P"**" own walls, were handed over to the mercies of the Henry, nobles on Robert's side, and Conan himself was hurled by the hands of Henry from the highest tower of the castle of Rouen, after a manner which reminds us of the fate of Eadrie.^ But all this comparatively petty strife, strife which Beginning seems hardly to touch the interests of England, leads bew*eu^^ us to another stage in our national history — it might ^i^glaiid not be too much to say, to another stage in the France, history of Europe. It is not clear whether it was before or after the suppression of the sedition at Rouen that the successes of William's arms drove his brother to a step the like of which had not been heard of in Normandy since the early days of the reign of their father. It is now that we come to the first stage of the long warfare between England and France. We cannot give that name to the intervention of English Kings in earlier times to defend the rights of the Karling at Laon against his turbulent vassal at Paris. Nor can we give that name to the warfare in which a Duke of the Normans, whom his sword had also made King of the English, waged against his lord at Paris for the possession ' The story of Conan is told by Orderic (689, 690) and by William of Malmeabury (v. 392). ^ He is thrown " ex propuguaculo " according to William of Malmesbury, "per fiuestrem terris" acording to Orderic. Cf. vol. i, p. 647. THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND, Philip helps Kobert. yhilip bribed by William. WiUiam crosses to Normandy. February, 1091. Submission of the Norman nobles at Eu. Treaty between William of the border-land of Normandy and France. We have reached another state of things when we see, for the first time, Paris and Eouen leagued together against Winchester. Dake Robert, pressed by his brother's arms, craved his lord the King of the French to come to his help. As Henry came to help the elder WiUiam at Val-es-dunes, so Philip came with a great host to help Robert against the younger William before the walls of some castle whose name is not told us, but within which the King of England's men were. The fortress was delivered by the arms which the Red King so well knew how to use. What followed is best told in the pithy words of the Chronicler ; " The King William of England sent to Philip King of the French ; and he for his love or for his miekle treasure forlet so his man the Earl Robert and his land, and went again to France, and let it to them so be."^ Robert, forsaken by his over-lord, was thus left to his own resources, such as those resources were in a land where the private wars of his nobles never ceased for a moment, though two kingdoms were thus stirred on behalf of the two competitors for the duchy. Early in the next year William crossed the sea, rather to take possession of his conquest than actually to push his arms any further. At the head of a host gathered, not only from Normandy and England, but from France, Britanny, and Flanders, he took up his head-quarters in the castle of Eu. Most of the nobles of Normandy flocked to welcome him ; resistance on the part of Robert was hopeless ; he was glad to save part of his dominions by the surrender of another part which he had no hope of winning back. A treaty between the brothers was agreed on at Caen under the mediation of the ' Chron. Petrib. 1090. Compare the amusing description given by WiUiam of Mahnesbury, iv. 307. TREATY BETWEEN THE BROTHERS. 87 King of the French.^ By its terms William was to keep oh. xxm. the castles and towns were he had been received, forminc a ^'"^ Robert . . ' "at Caen. territory which hemmed m the Norman capital both to the cessions to east and to the south.^ On the other hand, William en- William. gaged to win back for Robert whatever possessions of their father were not by the treaty especially assigned to himself. This clause would take in, not only all the lands granted to HenrVj but also the county of Maine, which, we shall soon see, was again in revolt. It was stipula- further stipulated that, on the death of either prince ^jj^^'^f^'J" without lawful issue, the whole of his dominions should "'O" '° England pass to his surviving brother. The partisans of William and Nor- in Normandy were to suffer no harm, and those who had ^ , , .•^ ... Roberts suffered banishment or confiscation for their share in the partisans rebellion against William in England were to be restored, restored. Odo was, either formally or practically, shut out from the benefit of the treaty. But William of Saint Carilef came back, to begin the rebuilding of the minster of Saint Cuthberht,^ and to appear again, with all his old influence, as the chief adviser of the Bed King and the chief opponent of the holy Anselm. The article in the treaty which regulated the succession Question to the Crown is worth notice from a constitutional point of ° „^ ■ ^ succession ; view on more Sfrounds than one. The rights of the Witan attempt to ,,,,.,? bar the of England, none the less legally valid because they were right of now practically exercised by men of Norman birth, were signed away by a clause which cut them off from their free right of choice on the death of the reigning King. That Exclusion clause too specially shut out the one member of the ° ™'^' reigning family who by the law of England had a claim to ^ Compare Ordericwith the Continuator of William of Jumifges, viii. 3. ^ The terms are nowhere so clearly stated as in the Chronicle, 1091. The Chronicler alone mentions Cherbourg (Kiseresburh) among the places to be ceded, but in his mention of Fecamp he is confirmed by the Continuator of William of Jumifeges. ' See Tol, iv. p. 677. 88 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxm. any special preference at the hands of the electors.^ It is hardly worth while to discuss the ingratitude of Eobert towards a brother who had saved his capital for him. It is enouo'h to mark that at this time William and Robert were leagued against Henry. William's object was to secure himself against all competitors for the Crown, Provision whether in his own family or elsewhere. For, while he EaXi. thus annulled both the present and the future rights of his brother Henry, he also called on Robert to refuse all further shelter to the iEtheling Eadgar, now his intimate friend and counsellor, and to confiscate the lands which he The had granted to him in Normandy.^ It is needless to say settle the that all these provisions came to nothing. Both Henry succession ^^^ EadsTar appear at a later time in the full favour and fruitless. ° ■'^■'■ confidence of Rufus^ and it was to Henry and not to Robert that his Crown passed at his death. In short, this attempt to regulate the succession before the vacancy came to as little as every other earlier attempt of the same kind Growth of had come.^ But the agreement none the less points to the of property g'^owth of Certain political ideas which were at this time 'ft-*^** d struggling into being. Every agreement of this kind therefore of goes on the supposition that a kingdom is not an office to hereditary ^ succession, be bestowed by the nation accordmg to its free choice, but a property to pass according to the will of the last holder, or according to the accidents of hereditary succession. The kingship of England, the highest office in the kingdom of England, was made the subject of bargain and treaty, as if it had been a house or a field. This doctrine, the doc- trine which was in the end utterly to supplant the elder Teutonic notion of the kingly office, was implied in Cnut's promise to secure the Crown of England to the children of Emma.* It was implied in William's claim to succeed his kinsman Eadward, whether by virtue of a bequest or by ' See vol. iv. p. 791. ' Chron. Petrib. 1091. = See vol. i. p. 533. » See vol. i. p. 454. GROWTH OF HEEEDITAEY CLAIMS. 89 virtue of nearness of kin. It was implied now in an agree- oh. xxiii. ment which took for granted that a possible son of Rufus would of right succeed to his Crown, and which, in failure of such son, guaranteed the succession of Robert, to the prejudice of the right of the nation to choose Henry, Eadgar, or whom it would. But we may mark further Increased that a new consideration is brought in, which was unheard of Jeoiti- of when William the Bastard put forth his claim to the mate" birth, succession of his childless cousin. His sons, both of them unmarried, display an unlooked-for respect for legitimate birth, and they carefully shut out all pretenders who might be open to the same reproach as their own father. The practical object of the clause doubtless was to cut off Exclusion all pretensions on the part of the sons who had been already "^^g" ® born to Robert.^ It would thus greatly increase William's chance of succeeding to Normandy. Still the provision none the less marks the growth of the new ideas. If the rule of men is to be dealt with as a property, which goes, like other property^ according to some definite line of succession, that definite line of succession can hardly fail to be strictly confined to kinsmen of legitimate birth. No order of succession estabUshed beforehand can afford to follow any standard except that which is imphed in the rule, " Pater est quem nuptiae demonstrant.'" But when an oflSce is bestowed by election, Dunois or Monmouth, Harold Hare- foot or William the Great, may have as good a chance as their legitimate brothers or cousins. Their fitness for office may be greater, and in early times the senti- ment which required kingly descent in a King would care little whether that descent was strictly according to the rules of either Canon or Civil Law. The strong opposi- Cases of tion made to William the Bastard in Normandy, as com- jj^^ ^^^^^.^ pared with the slight opposition made to Harold Harefoot g^^.^^^^J"''^ in England, marks a characteristic difference in feeling ' See vol. iv. p. 645. 90 THE NOEMAN KmGS IN ENGLAND. CH. XXIII. between the two countries. William was objected to directly on the ground of his illegitimate birth ; against Harold it was simply whispered that the supposed son of Cnut and iElfgifu was not really the son of either of his alleged parents.^ That is to say, the whole range of ideas of which strictness as to legitimacy of birth forms part had made further advances in Normandy than it had in Eng- land. The present stipulation marks a further advance. It marks a farther step in the process by which an office bestowed by the will of the people^ restrained only by a feeling of reverence for one kingly stock, was changed into a possession to be dealt with like the rest of a man's lands and goods. The right and duty of being a judge in peace and a captain in war over the people of England was now bartered and bargained away, as if it had been nothing more precious than the soil covered by the castles of Eu and Aumale or than the castles by which their soil was covered. War of The immediate consequence of those provisions of the and Robert treaty by which the possessions of tienry were to pass to ag-amst j^^g 'bj.others was a war waged against him by the Kinar Henry. t> o j o Siege of ^''^^ the Duke. A struggle so unequal was chiefly memor- ^™' „ able for the siege which Henry stood in the great monastic Mount. fortress, Saint Michael in Peril of the Sea.^ And the —March, siege itself is chiefly memorable for two familiar and ^°5^/ characteristic anecdotes of the two brothers. It was now -William that Rufus, according to the well-known tale, took into Eobert ^^^ service the daring soldier who had unhorsed him.^ The tale is still better known how Robert allowed the besieged to supply themselves with water, how Rufus mocked at such untimely tenderness^ and how Robert asked whether he was to let his brother die of thirst.* The ' See vol. i. p. 453. ^ This siege is described in Will. Gem. viii. 3 ; Ord. Vit. 697 A ; Will. Malms, iv. 308 ; Wace (whose whole acoomit is fuU of confusions and trana- positions), 14700 et seqq. ' Tliis story is told by WiUiaro of Malmesbury, Iv. 309. ' Will. Malms, iv. 310 ; Wace, 14798. SECOND NOEMAN CAMPAIGK. 91 upshot of the war was that Heniy was driven forth landless, ch. xxm. but that he was presently called on to accept the lordship ^^^^Z ^\ of Domfront as its protector against the fierce Robert of Belesme.^ Domfront became a specially cherished pos- session of Henry for the rest of his days, and, during the later transactions between William and Robert, we find its new lord in favour with Rufus, and enlarging his dominions, partly by his own eflfortSj partly by his brother's grant. For more than three years there was peace between French William and Robert, between England and Normandy, gtin-ed up Presently strife was again stirred up between the brothers, "y Wilham chiefly, we are told, through the plots of Count William io93- of Eu.^ We hear of a challenge sent by Robert to Wil- Campaign of 1094. liam,^ and of another campaign of William in Normandy, in which his success was, to say the least, much less decided than in the former one. King Philip again appears as the ally of Robert, to be again persuaded by English gold to forsake his ally.* But this was not till Philip and Robert had won some successes against the invader.^ The war lingered on, and the internal disturbances in Normandy went on alongside of it, till at last the strife of the brothers was ended by one of the great events in the world's history, by the side of which the affairs of Nor- mandy and England seem but as trifles. The voice was Beginning heard which bade Christian men go forth and win the Crusades. remission of their sins by the redemption of the Holy '°96- Land from its infidel oppressors. Urban spake at Cler- mont, and those who heard him said with one voice that " God willed it." ^ In the words of our own Chronicler, I See WiU. Gem. yiii. 3 ; Ord. Vit. 698 0, 706 C, 788 B ; Wace, 14767. ' The action of William of Eu cornea from Florence, 1093. 5 Ctron. Petrib. 1094. * lb. ' lb. Hardly a word of this second invasion is to be found in Orderic, William of Malmesbury, or Wace. « On the Council of Clermont, see Bemold, 1095, Pertz, v. 463 ; Orderio, 719 G ; and, far more fuUy, Wilham of Mahnesbury, iv. 345-348. 92 THE NOEMAIT KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH.xxin. "This year eke to Easter was there very much stirring through all this nation and many other nations, through Urban that was hight Pope, though he nothing had of the settle at Rome. And went unnumbered folk with wives and children, to that that they would win upon the No share heathen nations." ^ The only class of men who had no Crusade share in the great pilgrimage were the Kings of the West. theKin'^ The Emperor Henry was still the excommunicated enemy of the Church, and, while Christendom was stirred at the voice of Urban, Wibert — Clement on the lips of his own followers— still held the strongest fortress and the two most revered sanctuaries of Rome.^ The Cirsar of the West was not likely to go and risk himself in the East, at the bidding of a Pontiff whom he disowned and who had stirred up his own son to rebellion against him.^ Philij:) of Paris had no mind for distant enterprises, and he too, like the Emperor, lay under the censures of the Church. His crime was a moral one, an adulterous marriage with the wife of Count Eulk of Anjou, the famous Rechin, the historian of his house.* And William of England, who, for the craft of the soldier and the ruler, might have been a worthy leader of the hosts of Christen- dom, thought only of making his own profit out of an enthusiasm which, to his mocking soul, must have seemed The first like madness.^ The days when Emperors and Kings led 1096. Crusades were yet to come ; the first and greatest of these armed pilgrimages marched, so far as it marched under any regular command at all, under the command of princes of the second order. A crowd of names famous in Norman ' Chron. Petrib. 1096. The not very reverential description of Urban may be compared with the expressions quoted in vol. iv. p. 437. ^ See Bemold, Pertz, v. 455, 457 ; Mihuan, iii. 215. ^ Bernold, v. 456, 461, 463. * lb. 461. ° Will. Neub. i. 2. " Duni in oriente a nostris proceribus fortiter atque feliciter ageretur, idem Eex, propellentibus eum ad interitum malis suis, condignum effrsenatse superbiae finem incurrit." THE FIEST CEUSADE. 93 and English history stand forth on the list of pilgrims. oH.sxni. Highest among them was the Norman Duke himself. Buke Robert, wearied out with the hopeless task of wielding the ^"ngthe rod of his father in his native duchy, went forth to win pilgrimage. himself a higher fame among the foremost in the cham- pions of the Cross. Under him marched, not only his own English- continental subjects and neighbours, but such Englishmen underhlm. as were stirred up to take a part in the distant enterprise.^ And, stranger still, Enghshmen serving in those distant His recep- lands under the banner of the Eastern Csesar, Englishmen w«an-*''^ who had fled from their own island to escape the voke of f ''''^^.f *. i .; Laodikeia. his father, men who had fought at Dyrrhachion/ perhaps even at Senlac and at Stamfordbridge, could, when they met so far from the scene of their old strife, hail the son of their Conqueror as their natural friend and ally.* ' Ord. Vit. 741 !*• "Eodbertua Dux Normannormn cum xv. raUlibus Cenomannorum, Andegavorum, Britonum, et Anglorum." ' See Tol. iT. p. 629. " This fact comes out in a very remarkable passage of Ealph of Caen, which I might not have lighted on if it had not been referred to by Lappenberg (Norman Kings, 282). The Crusaders are before Aniiooh, when Kalph tells us (Gesta Tancredi, o. 58 ; ap. Muratori, v. 305), " Abseesserant iuterea ex castria exosi teedio eomiteg, Blesensis in CyUciam, Loodiciam Normannus : Blesensis Tharsum ob remedium egestatis, Normannus ad Anglos spe domination is, Angli ea tempestate Laodiciam tenebant, missi ab Imperatore tutela, cujus fines vagus populabatur exercitus, ipsam quoque cum violentia irrumpere tentantes. In hac formidine Angli assertorem vocant praesoriptum comitem, consilium fidele ac prudens. Fidei fuit fidelem domino suo virum, cui se manciparent, adsoiscere ; jugo Normannico se sub- traxerant, denuo subdunt ; hoc prudentise ; gentis ilhus fidem experti, et munera facile redeunt unde exierant." It seems more likely that these English at Laodikeia were, as this account calls them, Warangians in the Im- perial service than that a special English fleet had made its way to Antioch, and that its crews had gone thence to Laodikeia. This is the account of Kaymond of Agiles (Gesta Dei per Francos, 173); "Angli, audito nomine ultionis Domini nostri Jesu Christi, in eos qui terram nativitatis Domini et Apostolorum ejus indigne occupaverant, ingressi mare Anghcum, etcircinata Hispania, transfretantes per mare Oceanum, atque sic Mediterraneum mare sulcantes, portum Antiochiae atque civitatem Laodiciae, antequam exercitua noster per terram iUuc veniret, laboriose obtinueruut." On the meaning of this passage, see Lappenberg, Norman Kings, 284. 94 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. XXIII. Eadgar joins the Crusade. After 1097, Exploits and mar- tyrdom of Kobert the eon of Godwine. Kalph of Wader joins the Crusade ; and Bishop Odo. And Robert was presently joined on his march ^ by his bosom friend and counsellor, the last male of the house of . Cerdic. Eadgar now set forth on the longest of the many journeys which bore him from Hungary to England, from England to Apulia, and from Apulia to Scotland. And with him marched a follower of English birth, whose ex- ploits and whose glorious end make us long to have a fuller knowledge of him. This was Robert the son of Godwine, whose father's name appears in the great Survey as a tenant of the .^theling. We are told that Godwine himself saved the fame, perhaps the life, of his lord in a judicial combat in the days of the Red King, and that his son Robert became renowned for his exploits under Eadgar's leadership in the wars of Scotland. He now followed the ^theling to the Crusade ; he saved the life of King Baldwin in a sally from beleaguered Rama, and, himself the captive of the infidels, rather than deny his Redeemer, he bore the doom of Eadmund and Sebastian in the market-place of Babylon.^ After such a hero as this, one almost blushes to record the names of other men famous in our story who went on the same errand. Two such there were, foremost among the enemies of England, one of them her own apostate son. Ralph of Wader, traitor alike to England and to her Conqueror, went forth to do some deed in his later days which should wipe out the memory of his earlier treasons.^ And in the same band set forth on his last journey the man who had been so long the scourge of England, now cast down from his Kentish earldom to the more peaceful duties of his bishop- rick of Bayeux. Along with Eadgar and Robert, Odo the brother of the Conqueror set forth on the great march for Jerusalem, to leave his bones at Palermo.* ' Eobert set out in 1096 ; as Eadgar was engaged in Scotland in 1097, he could not have been one of Robert's original followers. '' See Appendix R. Babylon of course is Bagdad. ^ See vol. iv. p. 591. • See vol. ii. p. 212. NOEMANDY PLEDGED TO RUFUS. 95 Robert, with all his faults, was, as we have seen more ch. xxiii. than once, far from being incapable of generous feeling. We may be sure that few men in the crusading host went forth in fuller and truer singleness of purpose. To Rufus, to Henry also, the great movement which stirred all Christendom was but a means for promoting their own personal interests. Others might go to the ends of the earth to win fame in this world and salvation in the next ; they stayed at home to reap what profit they could out of their neighbours' madness. Duke Robert was ready to Robert pledge to his brother what was left of his duchy for the Normandy sum of ten thousand marks.^ The bargain was a good one o° Y'^'u ™' ° ° oeptember for the Red King. Robert might never come back from ^°9^- his distant warfare ; if he did, the wit of Rufus would be able to devise some excuse for refusing to give up what he had actually in possession. By laying a heavy tax on his England subjects in England of every rank, a tax which called forth payment the bitterest complaints, the King raised the money. The °^ ''^^ land was bowed down by his exactions, and, as often happened, hunger came in their wake.^ But Rufns gained his purpose; in September he crossed the sea; he made peace with his brother, he paid the money in fuUj and took possession of so much of the duchy as was not already in his hands. The acquisition of Normandy by William Rufus becomes Beginning an event of European importance when we look on it as the between beginning of the long wars between England and France. England Those wars were the natural consequence of the union of France. England and Normandy under a single sovereign. Between England and France, as long as a distinct and practically independent Nonnandy lay between them, there could be few grounds of quarrel. Winchester and Paris could have ' T. "Wykee (1095) oddly enough makes him pledge the duchy to Henry. ' Chron. Petrib. 1096 ; cf. vol. iv. p. 698. 96 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxiii. but small dealings with one another for good or for evil, as long as Kouen blocked the way from the one to the Eelations other. The only dealings of any importance between the England, two Countries had been when the Duke of Paris sent to seek ^dlWe' ^°^ ^ -^^^g" ^^ England, and when the English King stepped in to defend the rights of the nephew whom he had allowed to cross the sea.^ Between France and Normandy there was a natural rivalry by land ; between England and Nor- mandy there might easily be a rivalry by sea ; but between France and Englandj as political geography then stood^ there could be no rivalry at all. But such a rivalry was sure to begin as soon as the duchy which lay between them was joined under one ruler with either the insular or the con- tinental kingdom. At different times the long rivalry took both these forms ; first the union of Normandy with Eng- landj then the union of Normandy with France, made France and England lasting enemies. As soon as the Duke of the Normans became King of the English, England was, without any interest of her own, from the force of mere dynastic causes^ dragged into the long-standing quarrel between the King of Paris and the mighty vassal who shut him out from the mouth of the Seine. During the Con- queror's reign over England, the quarrel with France became of importance only for one moment at its very end ; and the separation of England and Normandy at his death brought things back for a while to their former state. But, when England and Normandy were again united under Rufus, wars between France and the joint sovereign of England and Normandy again began. The second reign of Robert once more made things as they were; but, from the final conquest of the duchy by Henry the First, wars between England and France fill the chief place in our military history down to very late times indeed. And • See vol. i. pp. 224, 228. WARS BETWEEN ENGLAND AND PRANCE. 97 under Henry we see for the first time, what has been seen oh, xxnr. in so many later struggles down to the days of our fathers, the banding together of continental and insular Teutons, the Saxon of Germany, the Saxon of Britain, and in the first stage we may add, the Saxon of Normandy, against the common enemy of their common race. And, though these wars were waged for Norman interests under Norman Kings, they soon grew into national English wars. The border struggle which, in the days of Rufus, began between the new master of Normandy and the Parisian King, puts on in the records of the time, both French and Norman, the character of a war between France and England. We sometimes seem to be reading the language of the Hundred Years' War. Not only are the combatants constantly spoken of as French and English — an opposition of words which in England has such a different meaning — but the chief French historian of the time thinks it needful formally to lay down the doctrine that for the French to rule over the English and for the English to rule over the French is alike unjust.^ Nor is this merely that confused way of speaking by which all the subjects of a prince are ofben called by the national name of that part of them from whom their common sovereign draws his highest title. From the point of view of a French writer the war really Aspect of was an English war. The native English indeed, as a I'rench nation, could have no real interest in helping William ®y^*- Eufus to make conquests beyond sea. They could gain the EngUai nothing by bringing other lands under the yoke of the 'owardstte foreign oppressor who had so cruelly belied the promises by which he had won their own loyal service. The French • Ordeiic (766) several times speaks of tte forces of Eufus as "Angli," and of Eufus himself as "Anglicus Eex." (To be sure he had, yet more strangely, in 655 D spoken of the Conqueror as "Angligena Eex.") Suger, in his Life of Lewis the Fat (Duchesne, iv. 283), speaks throughout in the same way, and he puts forth the formal position, " nee fas nee naturale est, Francos Anglisj imo Anglos Francis, subjici." VOL. T. H 98 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. OH. xxur. war seems to have drawn to itself but little notice in England ; the national writers, who have much to tell us about the wars in Normandy, something about the war of Maine^ are silent as to the war on the French border. Employ- Yet, as the war was certainly waged with English trea- Englis^h sures,! we may be sure that, in the days of the second troops and William no less than in the days of the first,^ the valour and treasures. . . . „ . the blood of English troops were spent in winning foreign dominion for their foreign masters. And when men are once under arms, the military instinct so thoroughly absorbs every other, that we may be sure that Englishmen fought for William Rufus with hardly less zeal before the fortresses of the Vexin than they had fought for him before The war Pevcnsey and Rochester. But, besides this, the war was, an ^EmtlSh ^^ French eyes, more truly an English war on other grounds, war. rpjjg pj-inee who came against France was no longer a Duke of the Normans who had conquered England^ but a King of the English who had used the strength and wealth of England partly to conquer, partly to purchase, Normandy. That he himself and his chief followers were of Norman birth made little difference in such a view. That the ob- ject of Rufus was certainly not to extend the power and the renown of England as England, but simply to bring under his own personal power whatever he could lay hold of any- where, mattered as little. Politically, the war was an English war ; it was a war in which England as a power, though its resources might be in the hands of strangers, began to win for itself an European position which it had never held before. It was the second time that England under a foreign ruler had become the centre of a wide- spreading system of foreign conquest. It had been so ' Both Orderic and Suger harp on this point. Rufus (Suger, iv. 283) is " opulentus et Anglorum thesaurorum profusor, mirabilisque militum mercator et solidator." ''■ See vol. iv. p. 557. SCHEMES OF RUFtJS. 99 under Cnut ; it was again beginning to be so under Rufus. oh. xxm. But under Cnut the policy and the warfare of which Compa- '■ •' nson and England was the centre was confined wholly to the North, contrast In Southern Europe Cnut appears in true history ^ only as William a peaceful pilgrim. The Dane made England the centre of ^^^^^^""^ schemes which were natural to the. Dane ; the Norman made her the centre of schemes which were no less natural to the Norman. The schemes of Rufus perhaps stretched Designs of as far in their own direction as those of Cnut. Cnut had Gaul in made himself the head of all the nations of Scandinavian S®''®''*!- speech ; Rufus was striving to make himself the head of all the nations of the Latin speech of Gaul. At Paris, as He aims at 1 11 ii-ii 1-1- ^^^ Crown we have already seen, men believed that his object was, of France. not merely to extend the borders of Normandy at the expense of France, but to add the French kingdom itself to his dominions. He sought to reign in the island of the Seine as he reigned in the island of the Thames, and to receive the unction of Rheims as he had received the unction of Westminster.^ It is more certain that he aimed to hem the French kingdom in from the south as well as from the north. The last scheme of his busy His nego- tiations reign was his negotiation for receiving the duchy of with Wil- Aquitaine from its crusading Duke by the same means ^^taine by which he had already in the like ease won for himself ^'°°- the duchy of Normandy.^ It is in truth in the Hundred Years' War that we must ' See the legends in vol. i. p. 504. ' See above, p. 82. The same notion also comes out in a wild form in Geofirey Gaimar's confused story of WUliam'a conquest of Maine, where he is made to carry his scheme further still; " Par tote France les barons Tuit si veisin li sont clinant ; Le dotoieut come una leons. Et s'il p^ust auques r^guer, Tresq'a Peiters ne remist bier A Eome alast pur chalenger Qu'il ne fist vers li encliner. L'ancieu droit de eel pais Pur sa nobility si grant, Que i avoit Brenne et Belins." See above, p. 82. (Chroniques Anglo-Normandes, i. 39.) H 3 Years War. 100 THE NOEMAN" KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. xsiii. seek for the parallel to the French war of Rufas. There Analogy ^ere plenty of straargles in intermediate times between with the i: J ° ^,. „ ^ -o . xi i Hundred Kings of England and Kings of France. i3ut the early Angevins were cut off from any true parallel with the times before and after them by the mere extent of their possessions beyond the sea. It can hardly be said that Henry the Second and Richard the First, reigning from the Channel to the Pyrenees, were Kings of England in the first place. They were rather great French princes whose insular kingdom was^, in all but formal rank, some- thing secondary. But A¥illiam Rufus and Edward the Third were strictly Kings of England, whose power was in the first place English, but who held a continental possession, Normandy in the one case, Aquitaine in the other, which led to their using the power of England for continental purposes. But in all these cases the effects of success on the part of the King of England would have been much the same. Had William Bufus succeeded in the design which the French historian attributes to him^ things would doubt- less have turned out much the same as if Edward the Third or Henry the Fifth had succeeded in the same design. In any one of the three eases, the conquest of France by English arms could hardly have failed to lead, at all events for a while, to the political subjection of the conquering state to the conquered. But such a state of things would have been far more likely to last in the eleventh century than it was in the fourteenth or the fifteenth. In the four- teenth and fifteenth centuries a national English spirit had again .arisen, which would not have endured a moment of conscious inferiority to a foreign state. Suger's alternative would have come into play; and, if the choice had been whether England should be ruled from Paris or France from Westminster^ no Englishman would have accepted the former horn of the dilemma. But in the days of Rufus, English national feeling was for a moment crushed. COMPAEISON WITH THE HUNDRED YBABs' WAR. 101 Englishmen had for years learned to submit to the rule ch. xxm. of a French-speakins' prince, whose orders came as often Possible ^ ° -^ subjection from Eouen as from AA'inehester. If his orders came of England from Paris instead of from Rouen, it could make but little difference to those to whom Paris and Rouen were alike strange. A conquest of France by William the Red would have been a far heavier blow to the independence, the greatness, the national life, of England than the Conquest of England itself by William the Great. The war itself, the first war in which an English King, Character 1 1-1 PI- ■ T of ^^^ 'Wat as he seemed in the eyes ot his enemies, went about to with conquer France, was not waged on a scale at all answering jgq^*^^' to the greatness of the interests at stake. The French Appear- historian dwells on it chiefly as the earliest scene of the xl^wis the prowess of his own hero, Lewis the son of Philip, the first ^'^ "^ ^ Phihp, of the Parisian Kings who bore the softened form of the old Frankish name, and who is distinguished from his many later namesakes by the nickname of the Fat. It is Robert of a war which supplies no remarkable incidents, personal or joins political ; unless we reckon as such that the famous Robert ^^''^''™- of Meulan, the Achitophel of his time, the son of old Roger of Beaumont, who had himself commanded a French con- tingent at Senlac,' and who held lands alike in France, Normandy, and England, found it to his interest to let his allegiance follow his great estate in his adopted country. He surrendered his French castles to the Bed King,^ and became one of his most special counsellors. We may notice Treatment too the distinction which the French historian draws on the two between the fate of the prisoners of war on the two sides, ^ ' a distinction characteristic of a warfare in which one side fought with steel only and the other side with both steel and gold. English prisoners — it is hard not to fall into the way in which our authorities speak — were speedily ' See vol. iii. p. 488 ; iv. p. 192. * Ord. Vit, 766 B. 102 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. OB. xxin. ransomed, while the French who fell into English hands had to linger in prison till they could bring themselves to enter the service of their captors.' Yet the war, a war of border fortresses and sieges, brought little gain to Rufus. Several French towns and castles stoutly held out, and his arms suffered a severe check before Chaumont. In the last stage of the war William of England and Normandy was helped by his new ally William of Aquitaine, who Truce with had not yet gone to the holy wars. Yet both Williams September gained so little advantage that Rufus was glad to conclude 27. 1098- a truce with France.^ In less than two years his death turned the truce into a peace, and the design of conquering France by the arms or the gold of England slept till the fourteenth century. Wars with But among the continental wars of Rufus that which ^^'^^' has by far the deepest interest in itself is one in which he had to deal with an enemy lower in rank and power than the King of the French or the Duke of the Normans. When Rufus engaged to win back for his brother Robert all those parts of their father's dominions which the treaty did not make over for himself,^ he engaged by implication to win back the revolted city and county of Maine.* On ' So says Suger (Duchesne, iv. 283); "Anglise oaptos ad redemptionem celerem militaris stipendii acceleravit airxietas, rrancorum vero longa diuturni carceris maceravit prolixitas : nee ullo modo evinculari potuerunt, donee, auscepta ejusdem Eegis Angliae militia, hominis obligati regmmi et Eegem impugnare et turbare jurejurando firmaverunt." ' See all this latter stage of the war in Orderic, 766, 767. ' See above, p. 87. * The history of the Cenomannian war has to be put together from several detached narratives in Orderic, 673, 67^, 681-684, 768-776, 784, 785, from the Lives of Bishops HoweU and Hildebert in the third volume of Ma- biUon'a Vetera Analecta, from one or two notices in the letters of Hildebert, and from the account in Wace, 14824-15153, which is fuU of confusions and anachi'onisms. The story in Orderic and in the Biographer of the Bishops is essentially the same, though there are some contradictions in points of detail. But the two narratives are naturally written from wholly WAE WITH MAIITE. 103 the first accession of Robert, Le Mans had unwillingly oh. xxiir. submitted to his rule, and the two chief men of the state, Maine dis- ' contented Geoffrey of Mayenne and Helias of La Fleche, had both under acknowledged him. But the allegiance of both city and 1088— county was very doubtful. Revolt is said to have been staved ^°^°' off for a year by the intervention of Count Fulk of Anjou, who claimed to be the superior lord of Maine. ^ But, three Eevolt and years after the death of the Conqueror^ discontent broke tjun of forth. The first step was again to send to the Marquess Hugh. r a 1 1090. Azo, and again to invite his son Hugh, who was now of an age fitter to rule. The Italian prince came and reigned for a whilcj but he soon disgusted men of all kinds, not only Bishop Howel who remained firm in his loyalty to Robert,^ but all who found that the idle and frivolous youth, who had nothing but his descent to recommend him, was utterly unfit to be the chief of a high-spirited people threatened by dangerous enemies.* Before long Hugh was Hugh sells glad to sell his claims to his kinsman Helias^ and to go ^g Helias. back to his own land. Helias now reigned for a while in First reign peace, to the great gain of all classes of his subjects, j^gg The land flourished under his just and vigorous rule, and '°9^- in his days Le Mans was honoured by a visit from Pope p^pg Urban.* No serious attempt on Maine was made by either 1^''^^!^ *° Robert or William till, after a reign of six years, Helias 1095. was seized by the same religious enthusiasm as Duke Robert. Rufus was now lord of Normandy; his claims on Helias Maine had not been pressed, but Helias deemed it dangerous j^oi^the^ to set forth on the Crusade without obtaining some as- {Jj^^'^^gj surance of peace from his powerful neighbour. Such with Wil- -n f p 1 mi liamBufus. assurances Helias asked for and Rufus refused, ihe two 1096. princes parted after a mutual challenge. William would not give up his right to an inch of territory which had different points of view, and they do not always pick out the same incidents to enlarge on. 1 Ord. Vit. 681. ' Ord. Vit. 683 D ; Vet. An. 291. - Ord. Vit. 684 A ; Vet. An. 399. * Vet. An. 300. 104 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CB. XXIII. been held by his father ; Helias dared him to incur the sin of fighting against a crusader.^ The King let the Count go, with terrible threats of warfare; but for a time they re- mained unfulfilled. But presently Robert of Belesme, the immediate neighbour of Maine, began to stir up strife, and the anger of Rufus was further kindled on an ecclesiastical Hildebert point. On the death of Howel, the see of Le Mans was Le Mans, filled by the famous Hildebert, without either the Count or 1097-1125. ^j^g Chapter consulting the Duke of the Normans as to the War begun election. War now broke out, a war waged in the cold of Belesme. 0^ winter, a war waged by Robert of Belesme, who refused January, ^j^g ransom of his prisoners that he might have the pleasure Helias of letting them die of cold and hunger.^ Presently, in an taken unlucky ambush, the Count himself fell into his hands, and prisoner. ^ ' ' May, 1098. now Rufus steps upon the scene in person. Even Robert of Belesme did not dare to let such a captive as Helias linger to death in his dungeons^, and the Count of Maine was handed over to the keeping of the more chivalrous Count Fulk King. Le Mans, left without a head^ received its over-lord ■ Count Fulk within its walls. And now Rufus himself invaded Maine. The land was harried with the usual cruelty, but it was now, at Ballon, that Rufus refused to listen to the suggestion of his own followers, that the Angevin knights who were taken prisoners in the fortress might possibly break their parole. ^ And now the King Helias eon- himself drew near to the city. Count Fulk and the citizens, treaty. Bishop Hildebert and the captive Helias, were all glad to conclude a treaty by which Le Mans was surrendered to Rufus, and Helias and all the other prisoners were to be set William free. William entered the city in triumph, and, on his Te Mans, return to Rouen, the prisoner whom he was bound to set Scene be-^ free was brought before him. Helias proposed to enter the tween Wil- t^- j • 1 . ,. , -, . ■, Uam and ^^'^g s service, keeping his rank and title of Count, and he Helias. uttered a hope that his services might one day win for him ' Ord. Vit. 769 B, C. = Ord. Vit. 770 B, C. = See above, p. 74. HELIAS OF MAINE. 105 his actual restoration to his county. Rufus was inclined oh.xxiii. to consent, but his counsellors, Robert of Meulan the chief among them, persuaded him to refuse the offer. Helias then spoke out boldly. He would gladly have entered the King's seryice ; but, as his oifer was refused, he would do all that in him lay to win back his dominions. Many tyrants would have sent him back to his dungeon or have handed him over to death or blinding ; but Rufus remembered that his word was plighted to the prisoner, and — in the spirit of Caesar, so his admirers said — he let his captive go, stammering out the words of contemptuous defiance, that Helias might go and do all that he could against him.i What Helias could do was shown before long. The Helias next year, when William was in England, Helias appeared Le Mans. before the city, and the citizens gladly received him May-June, '' o J 1099. within their walls. But the Norman garrisons held out in the castles ; fighting went on throughout the city, and Le Mans, like York,^ was burned by the fiery missiles hurled down on the houses by the defenders of the besieged fortress.^ And now comes another of the characteristic William tales of the Red King, another of the tales on the strength recover the of which it was said that the soul of Csesar had passed "''y^ into his body. He was hunting in the New Forest when the news came that the city of Le Mans was again in the hands of its own Count. The tale runs that Rufus rode to the shore with all speed, that he crossed the sea in the first old and crazy vessel that he could find, comforting himself and the shipmen with the doctrine that he had never heard of a King being drowned.* He lands at ' See above, p. 74. ' See vol. iv. p. i6y. 5 Ord. Vit. 774 D ; Vet. An. 307. ' This story appears in Orderio, 'J 'J 5-^, but the oliaracteristic saying comes from William of Malmesbury, iv. 320, and in another shape from Wace, 14968. Eadmer (Hist. Nov. 54) also alludes to the story. 106 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. Le Mans surrenders to William. Helias recovers Maine. His later reign. IIOO-IIIO. Later History of Maine. Tolques ; he appears as his own messenger to the crowd who are waiting for news from England ; he mounts the first horse he can find, and before long his siimmons to the war has gone forth and he is again leading his host against Le Mans. Helias fled before his approach ; the city was again surrendered, and it remained in William's possession for the rest of his days, though his warfare against some of the fortresses of the county was less successful.^ On the death of E-ufus, Helias won back his dominions without much trouble, and held them in peace for the rest of his days.^ He kept on good terms with his neighbours on both sides. He was the friend and ally of King Henry of England,^ and his still closer connexion with his over-lord to the south in the end united the pos- sessions of all three in a single hand. The marriage of his daughter to the younger Fulk of Anjou, the King of Jerusalem, carried on his blood and his dominions to Geoffrey of Anjou and to his son Henry, under whom Anjou and Maine became parts of the same vast dominion as Normandy and England. And every later sovereign of England could trace up his descent to Helias of Maine by the same spindle-side by which alone any of them could trace up his descent to William or Cerdic. Effects of the reign of Rufus The continental wars of Rufns set before us the first beginnings of national warfare between England and France. Such warfare was a new sphere of action for a King of the English ; but his entering on it in no way relieved him or cut him off" from the older sphere of action which the Norman Kings of England inherited from their West-Saxon predecessors. The never-ending wars on the ' Ord.Vit. 775, 776. ^ Ord. Vit. 784, 785. The death of Helias is recorded by Orderic, 839 D, and in our own Chronicle, mo. =■ Ord.Vit. 818-823. THE VASSAL STATES. 107 Welsh borders still went on, and Scotland, a kingdom ch. xxiii.. which was now fast gaining power and consistency, oiFered a large scope to the energies of the new dynasty. And at no time was warfare carried on more ceaselessly, and with greater results, in all these quarters than it was during the reign of William Eufus. The vassalage of Scotland was on Soot- renewed, and the dependent kingdom again, as in the days ' of Eadward, received a King from the Southern over-lord. Conquests were made at the expense of the Southern Wales, Britons greater than any that had been made since the early days of English conquest. And while the Southern and Cum- Britons were thus cut short, the last trace of the old British state in the North, the last trace of an independent dominion in Strathclyde or Cumberland, was finally wiped out. William Rufus, in short, not only made England for the first time a power beyond sea, but enlarged the borders of the English realm within its own island. If London or Winchester had had a jiomcerium to enlarge, no prince could have more worthily claimed the honour and duty of enlarging it. On the side of Wales the advance of the power of Eng- Apparent land during the reign of Rufus is to be traced mainly cesses • in its results. The details, so far as they can be recovered at all, are to be sought for in the chronicles of the Britons, which at first sight read like a record of English ill luck rather than of English conquest. In more than one year we find entries of expeditions made by the King in person, the immediate result of which seems to have been loss rather than gain.^ Yet, if the final conquest of South Wales dates from Henry the rirst,^ if the final conquest of North Wales was not brought about till the > See the entries in the Chronicles, 1095, 1096, 1097. Cf. WiUiam of Malmeshury, iv. 311. 2 Giraldus, De Jure et Statu, iii. 152, Brewer. Cf.pp.174, i75,and con- trast the description quoted in vol. ii. p. 471. 108 THE NOEMAN KIXGS IK" ENGLAND. CH. XXIII. how counter- balanced. Revolt of Gruffydd of Cynan ; death of Kobert of Rhuddlan. July 3, 1088. daj^s of the great Edward, it is certain that the reign of Rufus did much towards paving the way for those future successes. New lands were won, and lands which had already been won were secured by castles. An invasion which apx^ears in the Chronicles simply as the occasion of the loss of many men and horses, while the Welsh found a safe shelter in their woods and mountains, ^ was not unsuccessful in the long run, if the opportunity was taken to plant a fortress on some well-chosen spot to hold a further lot of British soil in bondage. The first mention of Welsh warfare during the reign of Rufus stands somewhat isolated from the general course of operations in that quarter. This was the fate of the INIarquess Robert of Rhuddlan, of whose exploits against the Northern Cymry we have already heard so much.^ The confusions of the early days of Rufus emboldened the Welsh prince Gruffydd^ to make inroads by land and sea into the neighbourhood of the fortress from which Robert took his surname. The Marquess himself, coming back from the siege of Rochester to defend his own possessions, was overtaken near the sea-shore by a party of sea-rovers under Gruffydd in person, and he paid his life as the forfeit of his over-daring.* Our narrative however is purely personal, and it gives us no account of any lasting results of the inroad on either side. The beginning of something like a consecutive narrative is to be found a few years later in the more southern parts of the British territory. ' Chron. Petrib. 1095, 1096. Of Flor. Wig. 1094, 1095, and the entry in the Abingdon Chronicle, 1056. See vol. ii. p. 398. ^ See vol. iv. p. 490. ^ This Gruffydd is commonly taken to be Gruifydd ap Cynan, who ap- pears in the Annales Cambrise in 1079 (1081), the year of the Conqueror's pilgrimage to Saint David's. We have heard of another Gruffydd, son of Meredydd, in vol. iv. p. 679. ' The story is told by Orderio at great length and with much picturesque detail, 669-671. Orderic wrote the epitaph of Robert over his tomb at Saint EvToul. WARS IN WALES. 109 It must be remembered tbat Gwent had been long before oH.xxiir. added to the English realm by Harold." that its possession I'rogress of ° J ■> r conquest m had been further secured by the victories of William Fitz- South Osbern,^ that the central frontier had been secured by the foundation of Earl Roger's castle of Montgomery,^ that the conquest of Morganwg had been at least begun, and the conquered territory secured by the foundation of the castle of Cardiff.* In this way South Wales had been either subdued or awed to a degree which had en- abled the Conqueror to make a pilgrimage, either warlike or peaceful, to the shrine of Saint David.' The lands which now lay open to further conquest were those of Brecknock, Caermarthen, the peninsula of Gower/ the larger peninsular land of Dyfed, the modern Pembroke- shirCj and the still more distant land of Cardigan. The first great campaign against this region took place in the sixth year of the reign of Rufus, the year famous in ecclesiastical history for the beginning of the primacy of Anselm. The South Welsh King, Rhys ap Tewdwr, was, Rhys of as the chronicles of both nations tell us, killed by the Miied at French of Brecheiniog ; and after his time the Britons gatte""'^'*^ had no kings, but only princes.' This marks the occu- io93- pation of Brecknock by the famous Bernard of Newmareh.' Newmarch He secured his possession by a marriage with a wife chosen ^°^ Ijl^ from among the conquered, but in whose veins ran some of the noblest blood of England. He married Nest, the daughter of the elder Nest the daughter of Gruffydd and Ealdgyth, the grand-daughter of ^Ifgar, the step-daughter ' See Appendix SS. in the second edition of my second volume. ^ See vol. iv. p. 503. ' lb. p. 502. ' lb. 680. = lb. ' Gower is vrithin the modem county of Glamorgan ; but that this is a later arrangement is shown by its being in the diocese of Saint David's. It therefore naturally belongs to the coimtry of which we are now speaking. ' See the Brut y Tywysogion, 1091, and Florence, 1093 ; but cf. 11 16, and Giraldua, It. Kamb. i. 12 (vi. 89, Dimook). ' See vol. iii. p. 132. 110 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. XXIII. of King Harold. 1 Of the occupatiou of Morgan wg the ^™1"®^*°^ historian hardly ventures to speak. He finds a tale so Glamorgan. ■' -^ neatly put together in all its parts, a tale which has so deeply impressed itself on local belief, and which has so thoroughly left its mark on the local associations of every corner of the district^ that it is a bold step to show how Establish- slight is the historical evidence on which it rests. But all + f Eobert that we Can say with safety is that it must have been Fitzhamon. ^^^^^^ ^j^j^ ^-^^g ^j^^|. Boi^g^t Fitzhamon, of the blood of the rebel of Val-es-dunes, received those possessions in the con- quered land which have made his name and the name of his successors the great centre of local history or legend.^ The rest of the warfare of this year is to be traced in the British Chronicles only, but its course clearly points to an earlier occupation of Morganwg. As usual, a Welsh Settlement prince is found giving help to the invaders. Rhys is broke and hardly slain at Brecknock before one of his old enemies, Cardigan- Cadwgan ap Bleddyn, is heard of as harrying Dyfed ; and directly after we read how the French for the first time came into Dyfed and Ceredigion, how they kept the land ever after^ how they built castles^ and from that time held the whole land of the Britons.^ Among these castles one of the foremost was the great fortress of Pem- broke, at first only a rude structure of wood, but which in its later form remains one of the noblest examples of the earlier military architecture of the thirteenth century.* From this time we may date the Norman or Enghsh conquest of South Wales. The Britons were neither ' Gir. Cam. It. Kamb. i. 2 (vi. 28, Dimook). Nest seems not to have copied the virtues of her ancestress Godgifu. See vol. ii. p. 630. ' On the occupation of Morganwg, see Appendix S. ° Ann. Oamb. 1091 (1093). * Giraldua (It. Kamb. i. 11 ; vi. 89, Dimock) describes the humble be- ginnings of Pembroke at some length. But as the castle is mentioned in the Brut under 1092 (1094), he is, as Mr. Dimock says in his note, mistaken in placing them in the reign of Henry. SETTLEMENT OP SOUTH WALES. Ill exterminated nor enslaved. While the conquerors and oh.xxiii. their followers, a mixed multitude of French, English, and <3iaracter Flemings, occupied the towns and castles, Welsh princes Conquest still kept up a precarious reign in the less fertile parts Wales, of the country, living on such terms of friendship or enmity with the invaders as might suit the convenience of the moment. The local nomenclature of modern Gla- morgan, -w-ith its strongly-marked British, English, and French elements, is the best commentary on this state of things.'^ From this time revolts were common, and were often for a while successful ; still they were revolts ; the yoke of the conqueror could never again be wholly thrown off. In South Wales, as everywhere else, the Norman put the finishing stroke to the work which the West-Saxon had begun. Whether William Rufus had any personal share in this Eevolt in expedition may be doubted.^ But his absence in Nor- waies. mandy during the next year is given as the occasion of a ^°94- general insurrection of the West, North, and South, in which the Normans were driven out of all their castles in South Wales, except Pembroke and Rhyd-y-gors.^ This last castle is specially mentioned as having been built by the King's orders, which shows that the conquest which was going on was not the mere enterprise of individual ' I 6aid something on this matter in an opening address to the Historical Section of the Archseologioal Institute at CardiflF in 1861, printed in the Archaeological Journal, vol. xxviii. p. 1 84. ^ Mr. Floyd, in his paper on the Norman Conquest of South Wales in the Archaeological Journal, vol. xxviii. p. 298, connects this expedition with the story told by Giraldus (It. Kamb. ii. 1 ; vol. vi. p. 109, Dimock) of a visit paid by William Rufus to Saint David's, and of a threatened conquest of Ireland. In both tales one is inclined to suspect that the name of the younger William has supplanted that of his father. See vol. iv. pp. 526, 680. ' Ann. Camb. 1092 (1094). "Ricors" or Rhyd-y-gors, according to Mr. Floyd, was in Caermarthenshire. The Brut, 1094 (1096), distinctly says that this castle was founded by W0iam the son of Baldwin, "by order of the King of England." 112 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. xxiii. chieftains, but was a regular warfare carried on in the name Campaign of the Kinff and kingdom. It is not however till the next tn North yeai" ttat William certainly appears in person on the Welsh i'^^f'f- border. He then marched with the whole force of the October, 1095- realm as far as Snowdon,^ and two years later he made another expedition, in which, as in the former, he is Building described as suifering- much immediate loss.^ But when castes. ^^^^ ^^^^ ^j^^^ ^^ j^^g return he strengthened the border with castles, we may see that the campaign was far from unsuccessful in the long run.^ The Welsh history of this reign ends, as it began, with a picturesque narrative of the death of one of the great lords of the North- Welsh march. It is plain that warfare in that region had turned less to the advantage of the English or Norman side than it had in the south. War in Robert of Rhuddlan was gone : but the two great border North & •> & Wales. Earls of Chester and Shrewsbury were kept constantly on the alert by the incursions of the Britons within their The Welsh earldoms.* The date of the conquest of Anglesey is not Anglesey, very clear ; it may have formed part of the undefined '"S"*- territory held by the Marquess Robert.^ If so, it had been won back by the natives, and it was held for some years in defiance of Earls and King. Both the Earls Hugh Earl bore the same name. Hugh of Avranches still reigned bui-y. ^t Chester, and the earldom of Shrewsbury had passed to another Hugh, the son of Roger and Mabel. They ' This expedition and its HI success are recorded by all our authorities, English and Welsh ; but it is the English Chronicle only which tells us the extent of the march. ' Chrou. Petrib. 1097; Flor. Wig. 1097; Ann. Camb. 1097; Brut, 1095 (1097). The Welsh wiiters enlarge on the piety of their countrymen. ' Chrou. Petrib. 1097. ' See the Chronicles, Welsh and English, through all these years. Our own Chronicle in 1095 records the destruction of the castle of Montgomery (see vol. iv. p. 502) by the Welsh. ° See vol. iv. p. 490, note 3. That there was a castle in the island before 1094 appears from Florence under that year. EXPEDITION OF MAGNUS. 113 recovered Anglesey by bribing some pirates from Ireland oh. xxiii. — doubtless from the Scandinavian ports — whom the Welsh '^^'^ -^^'''^ '- recover chiefs Cadwgan ap Bleddyn and Gruffydd ap Cynan — the Anglesey. slayer of Robert of Rhuddlan — had engaged to help in the defence of the island.' Presently the Norman Earls had to strive against an enemy of the same race, who steps suddenly on the stage as if our history had rolled back for a generation. We seem to be carried back again to the Invasion of days of Stamfordbridge and Senlac^ when we read how Norway. King Magnus Barefoot of Norway, after conquests along the shores of Ireland, Scotland, the Western Isles^ and Man^ at last drew near with his Wiking fleet to the southern INIevania. And we seem to be still more wholly Presence of carried back to times which we are beginning to forget, of King when we hear that he had with him in his fleet Harold ^^°^^- the son of Harold King of the English.^ Of his twin- , brother Wulf we had a glimpse for one minute, when the dying Conqueror set him free from his long captivity.' And so the last Harold flits before us, like the bird that took shelter in the hall of Eadwine. We know not how he found his way to the fleet of Magnus ; we know not what of good or of ill befell him after he had taken this momentary glimpse of a land which had such good cause to remember his father's name. The one recorded result Death of of the voyage of Magnus was the death of Hugh of ofshrews- Shrewsbury, pierced in the eye, as though paying the ^^ wergeli for England's fallen King, by an arrow, shot, so men saidj by the hand of the Norwegian King himself.* ' Ann. Camb. 1098. This Cadwgan appears in the English Chronicle, 1097, as chief of the " ealdras " whom the Welsh chose on their revolt. * See vol. iv, p. 756. " See vol. iv. p. 710. ' The story of the invasion of Magnus and the death of Earl Hugh is told at length by Orderic, 767, 768, and by Snorro (Johnstone, 230-237 ; Laing, iii. 129-133). It is recorded also in the Welsh Chronicles, Ann. Camb. 1098, Brut 1096, where the invader is strangely called "Magnus Eex Germanise " (see vol. ii. p. 396), "Magnus brenhin Germania.'' In our own Chronicles, VOL. V. I 114 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. xxHi. His earldom passed to liis savage brother Robert of Belesme^ who had inherited his mother's name and his mother's con- tinental possessions.' Magnus sailed away to Scotland, leaving no trace of his presence on British or English ground.^ And with him his shadowy comrade, the last of the house of Godwine of whom English history has preserved even the name, fades away like a dream from our eyes. Relations If the last scene of the Welsh warfare of this reign land.^'^'*" brings us thus unexpectedly across one who, under a happier star, might have been an Englisli ^Etheling and an English King, the affairs of the other great dependency of the English Empire bring us yet more directly face to face with the surviving descendants of the elder line of English kingship. Scotland fills a large place in the history of this reign, and it is plain that the affairs of the vassal kingdom were of no small moment in the Assertion eyes of the Southern over-lord. And at no time, before Eno-Ush 01' after, did English supremacy show itself more prae- sup.emacy. -tJcally in the course of events in the great Northern de- pendency. William B-ufus, like his father, like Eadward and Cnut, has the Scottish King to his man ; and, as in the days of Eadward and of his mightier namesake in later times, Scotland had to receive her King from the Action of lord to whom he paid his homage. And now the Jitheling M^aieL Eadgar, who has ever anon flitted across our story, for IC98, we read simply, " Hugo eorl wear's ofslagen innan Anglesege fram ut- wikingan." Florence adds some details of the cruelties practised by Hugh of Shrewsbury in Anglesey. There is also a notice in William of Mahnesbury (iv. 329), from which alone we learn the presence of Harold the son of Harold. See also Giraldus, It. Kamb. ii. 7 ; vol. vi. p. 129. ' Chron. Petrib. 1098 ; Ord. Vit. 768 C. ^ Unless we reckon the fact that a citizen of Lincoln kept his treasure. Ord. Yit. 8 1 3 C. The Brut sums up the whole story with the comment, " So the French reduced all, both great and small, to be Saxons." But it goes on to record further revolts and the return of Cadwgan and Gruffydd from Ireland. WARS WITH SCOTLAND. 115 a short time plays a leading part, and we get our ch. xxm. most distinct glimpses of his sister, the holy Queen of Scots, and of the other members of the house which her marriage had brought iuto close relation with the affairs of England. The beginning of disputes with Scotland seems to have sprung out of the clause in the treaty between William and Robert which required the Duke to withdraw all countenance from the JEtheling.^ Eadgar, as at other Eadgar times, found shelter at the court of his brother-in-law, gcotiand and his appearance there was presently followed by an Malcolm invasion of England on the part of Malcolm. While Er^iand. Rufus was still in Normandy, the King of Scots for the ^^^' ^"^^'^ fourth time entered northern England, advanced as far as Chester-le- Street, and again wrought the usual ravages.^ He was driven back by the King's lieutenants,^ Robert of Mowbray being doubtless among them ; but Rufus deemed that his own presence was needed. As soon as WiUiam his continental affairs allowed him, he set out for Scotland ™^i^t* with a land force — his ships set out also, but perished by Scotland. the way — bringing his brother Duke Robert with him. 1091. Robert had himself once led a force into those parts ; * Presence •^ of Duke but his appearance now can hardly fail to have some Robert, reference to the presence of his banished friend Eadgar on the Scottish side. King and Duke marched as far as the Scots' Water, the Firth of Forth,^ and the King * See above, p. 88. ^ Tlie invasion is recorded in the Chronicle and Florence (1091), who is copied by Simeon, who also mentions the invasion in his list of Malcolm's invasions under 1093. Orderio (701 A) shrouds the actual invasion under the words " Melcoma Rex Sootorum contra Regem Anglorum rebellavit, de- bitumque servitium ei denegavit." ' Chron. Petrib. 1091. " pa gode msen Je fis land bewiston him fyrde ongean ssendou and hine gecyrdon." Mark the use of the phrase " good men." ' See vol. iv. p. 675. " Ord. Vit. 701 A. "Usque ad magnimi flumen, quod Scotte Watra I a 115 THE NOEMAK KINGS IN ENGLAND. Mediation of Robert and Eadgar. Malcolm said to have offered homage to Robert for Lothian only. Later parallels. of Scots crossed the estuary to meet them in Lothian, thereby, as the English Chronicler pointedly remarks, crossing from Scotland into England.^ The Duke and the JEtheling played the part of mediators between the two Kings. ^ In one version Malcolm is made to profess that the earldom of Lothian had been granted to him, first by Eadward and then by the elder William. To Robert, as the eldest son of William, he had done homage for that earldom, and that homage he was ready to renew. But to the reigning King of the English he owed nothing.^ If this account of a private discourse between Robert and Malcolm be at all trustworthy, we find the King of Scots taking up much the same line of argument which was afterwards taken up by many of his successor^. He owed homage, not for the kingdom of Scotland, but for his possessions in England. Lothian was still ac- knowledged to be English; for Lothian then he would do homage. So in after times, when the distinction between Scotland and Lothian had been forgotten, Kings of Scots refused to do homage for Scotland, or for Lothian as a part of Scotland, but were ready to be the King of England's men for Northumberland, Huntingdon, or dicitur." See Mr. Earle's note. Parallel Chronicles, 348. Orderic's account is very confused, but he must have got this phrase from some trustworthy source. ^ Chron. Petrib. 1091. "He for mid his fyrde ut of Scotlande into LoSene on Englaland." See Mr. Earle's note, p. 355. Florence oddly translates "Lo?Sene" by "in provincia Loidis," which has been mistaken for the Loidis of Baeda. ^ Walter of Hemingburgh (i. 23) brings in Eadgar in a strange fashion ; "Robertus comes advocavit ad se quendam militem, Edgarum nomine, quern Rex de Normannia expulerat et tunc Regi Malcolmo militabat." ^ All this comes irom Orderic, 701 B. See vol. iv. p. 784. After the words there quoted he is made to say, " Deinde Guillehnus Rex quod ante- cessor ejus milii dederat concessit, et me tibi primogenito suo commendavit. Unde quod tibi promisi conservabo, sed fratri tuo nihil promisi et nihil debeo." Was this commendation to Robert, if it was ever made at all, made in 1072, or in loSo ? HOMAGK OF MALCOLM. 117 anytliing else which they held, or claimed to hold, within oh. xxm. the narrower boundaries of England as understood in their day. If Malcolm ever really used such an argument, it was doubtless only as a piece of diplomatic fencing. The negotiation ended in a renewal of the submission of Renewal of Abernethy, which assuredly was not a submission for jiomage. Lothian only. All things were to be put on the same ^°9^- footing as they had been under William the Great. The King of Scots again became the man of the King of the English, and the King of the English promised to his vassal all lands, honours, and payments which had been his in the time of the elder William. ^ The Kings parted as friends, but the Chronicler again pointedly notices that it stood but for a little while.^ Eadgar also was taken Eadgar into William's favour, and went back with Robert to to WiUiam. Normandy.* The next year William took a step which could hardly Annexa- iiave been pleasing to his new vassal, and which was Northern doubtless meant as a measure of defence against him. ^^^ '^" It was now that he enlarged the kingdom of England, a different process from receiving the external homage of princes beyond its borders. The modern county of Camberland had as yet no being. Its southern part appears in Domesday as part of Yorkshire ; its northern part^ with its capital Carlisle or rather its site^ was no ' The Chronicler ( 1 09 1 ) says, ' ' Se cyng W. him behet on lande and on eaUon })inge fees J)e he under hia faeder aer hsefde.'' Florence is more definite ; with him the clause runs, " TJt Malcolmo xii. villas, quas in Anglia sub patre illius habuerat, WiUelmus redderet." On aU this see Palgrave, English Common- wealth, i. pp. 481, 607 ; ii. p. occxxxii. ; England and Normandy, iv. p. 348 ; Robertson, Scotland under her Early Kings, i. 142 ; ii. 401. Are the "xii. vfllae " the mansions which the Kings of Scotland held for their entertainment on their journey to the court of England ? See vol. i. p. 616, and Lappen- berg, Norman Kings, 233. It is singular that Simeon altogether leaves out the negotiation between William and Malcolm. ' Cf. above, pp. 74, note i, and 81. ^ The Chronicle alone mentions the return of Eadgar with Robert. ns THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxiii. part of England. Strathclyde beyond the Solway, if not absolutely incorporated with the Scottish kingdom, was at least held without dispute by the Scottish Kings, or by Cailisle their sons to whom they granted it as an apanage. But district between the parts of the old British kingdom which ^Iff^^ had thus passed severally to England and to Scotland, this small fragment, whose extent may be fixed by the boundaries of the old diocese of Carlisle, still remained a separate principality. It was now held by a lord of the noblest Northumbrian blood, Dolfin the son of the famous Earl Gospatrie,' and it is hardly possible that he can have held it in any other character than as the Destluc- man of the Scottish King. The ancient capital Carlisle Carlisle by ^^^ ^een destroyed by the Danes in the wars of iEIfred's the Danes, ^^j ^^^ j^ remained, whether altogether forsaken or not, at any rate without fortifications of the Norman type.^ On what provocation we are not told, the Red King now marched into this district, the only corner of Britain where a man of English birth still kept any shadow of Dulfin sovereignty. Dolfin was driven out, and "William, like ^^ij™^ ™^5^ iEthelflffid at Ch ester, -^ made Carlisle again a city, de- restored, fended, in the usual fashion, with walls and a castle.* Cumberland now became an English earldom,® and its ^ See vol. iv. p. 524, and Mr. Hinde's note on Simeon, p. 92. It can hardly be any other Dolfin, though the name is not uncommon. The country had been in possession of Malcolm in 1070 (see vol. iv. p. 507), when Simeon says (p. 87), "Erat eo tempore Cumbreland sub Eegis Malcolmi dominio;" adding, "non jure possessa, sed violenter subjugata." '' Florence, who does not copy the Chronicle, and who is not copied by Simeon, says, " Hiec civitas, ut illis in partibus alias noimullffi, a Danis paganis ante cc. annos diruta, et usque ad id tempus mansit deserta." He does not mention Dolfin, whom we get from the Chronicle. Orderic (917 B) calls it "Carduilum validissimum oppidum, quod Julius Caesar, ut dicunt, condidit." ' See vol. iv. p. 313. * Chron. Petrib. 1093. It is odd that William of Malmesbury (Gest. Pont. 20S) speaks of Carhsle as still half ruined in his time. * The old mistake about an earldom of Cumberland in the time of the RESTOEATION OF CARLISLE. Hg restored capital became in the next reign the seat of a oh. xxhi. newly-founded bislioprick. The land which was now added Coloniza- to England would seem to have been almost as desolate Cumber- as the city; for colonists from the south, English and ^'^"'i &<"" Flemish, were sent to occupy and till it.' This is a fact which should not be forgotten in discussing the puzzling ethnology of Cumberland and the neighbouring shires. We are not directly told whether Malcolm felt any Dispute grudge at this extension of the power of England in his ^^^^^ own neighbourhood, and in some sort at his own cost. ^^^ ^al- But a new quarrel broke out before long. Malcolm, like °° ""' Duke Robert, began before long to complain of breaches of treaty on the part of William. The King of Scots was accordingly invited or summoned to the presence of his over-lord; and he came, after the delivery of hostages, under the guidance of the former mediator, the Jitheling Eadgar. He was brought to the place of Malcolm at meeting at Gloucester with mickle worship ; but, when ^^^ugf f ' he came there, William not only refused to give him '°93- any satisfaction about the points in debate, but refused to see him at all.^ It is added that William called on Malcolm to do right — a phrase of somewhat doubtful Conqueror, which misled even Sir Francis Palgrave (English Common- wealth, i. 449), and which was locally believed in 1873, was pointed out by Lappenberg (iSTorman Kings, 234) ; see also Mr. Hinde's paper on the Early History of Cumberland, in the Archteological Journal (1859), vol. xvi. p. 227. ' The Chronicler (1092) says that WiUiam " sy33an hider sutS gewsende and mycele mffinige cyrlisces folces mid wifan and mid orfe, jjyder saende, Jiser to wunigenne Jjast land to tilianne." So Henry of Huntingdon (213b); " Ex australibus Anglic partibus illuc habitatores transmiait." Florence leaves out the passage, but I cannot help connecting this colonization with the "Flan- drenses qui Northymbriam incolebant," of whom he speaks in 1 1 1 1 . " North- hymbria " with him takes in Cumberland. I know of no better authority than the so-called Bromton (X Scriptt. 1003) for making Henry himself first settle these Flemings somewhere in the North. ^ This is the account of the Chronicler, who says nothing about Carlisle and nothing about homage, but who clearly implies that WiUiam had in some way broken his promise to Malcolm. 120 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. xxm. meaning — in the King-'s court, according to the judgement of the barons of England, while Malcolm maintained that he was bound to do right only on the borders of the two kingdoms, according to the judgement of the barons of both.' The exact point at issue is not very clear; but we may be pretty sure that William and Malcolm con- strued the obligations of homage in two different ways. Malcolm's In any case Malcolm went away angry, and at once vationof took lus revenge by a fifth invasion of England. He England, marched as far as Alnwick, and was there slain, some say atAln'^^ck. by treachery, at all events by an ambush or sudden attack, November ^^ ^j^g ^ ^f Robert of Mowbray and his followers.^ 14, 1093. •■• •' With him died his eldest son Eadward, and a pathetic tale is told of the way in which the holy Queen received the tidings of the death of her husband and her son, and how she presently followed them to the grave. -^ The sympathies of our English and Norman writers lie wholly with Margaret, and to some extent with Malcolm ; his own subjects at the time were of another mind. The innovations of Margaret, which seemed such blessed * This comes from Florence. I do not profess to know exactly what is here meant by the legal phrase " rectitudinem facere." According to one view, it means to do homage ; according to another, it means to make amends for some alleged breach of the treaty. In either case it would be the act of an inferior to a superior. See Palgrave, English Commonwealth, ii. cccxxxiv. ; England and Normandy, iv. 356 ; Robertson, Scotland \mder her Early Kings, i. 144; Lappenberg, Norman Kings, 235. ' This invasion stands as the fifth and last in Simeon's list. See also the C3ironicle and Florence; Orderic, 701 C ; Will. Malms, iv. 311. The Chronicler uses the word " beswikene ; '' WOliam of Malmesbury speaks of " fraus ; " while Orderic has a distinct tale of treachery. In Fordun, v. 20 (see in Eobertson, i. 147, and Mr. Hinde's note to Simeon, 261), may be seen the legend which grew out of such phrases. Orderic, at Saint Evroul, bewails the death of Malcolm. Simeon, nearer to the spot, rejoices in the judgement on the man who so often harried England. He is followed by William of Newburgh, and in a later age by T. Wykes. ' The account of the pious death of Margaret is found in all om- authori- ties except Simeon, who leaves out the passage in which Florence sets forth the merits of the wife of the arch-enemy. DONALD KING OF SCOTS. 121 reforms in the eyes of writers at Peterborough, Worcester, ch. xxm. and Saint Evroul, clashed against all Celtic national feeling. Discontent may well have slumbered during the reign Discontent of the great warrior who so often harried England, but, ™ith'tiie'^' as soon as he was dead, the real feeling of the Scottish innovations ' ^ of Mal- people burst forth. The English Chronicler takes for colm'a granted that the slain Eadward, if he had livedo would have succeeded his father.^ But he tells us distinctly, Donald using the same constitutional language which he would ^^^^ have used in describing the election of an English King, that the Scots chose Donald, the brother of Malcolm, to the vacant kingdom.^ The first act of the new King marks the spirit in which he was chosen. He drove out all the English and French who had been received at the court of Malcolm.^ Many of these, we may believe, had fled from England to escape Norman oppression ; but, in the eyes of a King of the English of whatever race, the driving out of any of his subjects could not fail to seem a national wrong. The new King of Scots too, we may be sure, was not anxious to renew his brother's homage to the English over-lord. A candidate for the The Scot- Scottish crown was ready at William's court in the person granted by of Duncan, the son of Malcolm and Ino'ebiorg', who had ^'^i*™ *° ' GO' Duncan. been given by his father as a hostage after the homage 1093-4- at Abernethy.* He had been set free by William the Great on his death-bed,* and he was now in the service of William the Red, and seemingly high in his favour. As ' Chron. Petrib. 1093. "Mid him wsss eac Eadward his sune ofslagen, se sefter him cyng beon sceolde gif he hit gelifode." ' lb. " And pa. Scottas pa, Dufenal to cynge gecuron, Melcolmes broSer." So Florence. In Fordun (v. 21) we get the Scottish legitimist version. ^ Chron. Petrib. 1093. * See vol. iv. p. 517, where I carelessly wrote Donald for Duncan. Wil- liam of Malmesbury (v. 400) takes care to speak of Duncan as " Malcolml filius nothus," which involves the whole question about Ingebiorg. * See vol. iv. p. 711. 122 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. XXIII. Eadward liad sent Malcolm to win the Scottish crown from Macbeth, so William Rufus now sent Malcolm's son to win the same crown from his uncle Donald. For the crown that he was to win he did homage in such terms as the King of the English thought good,' and set forth at the head of a host, English and Norman. Eeigu of With their help he drove out Donald ; but presently the 1094!^°' Scots rose again, massacred his followers, but allowed him to reign on condition that he brought into the land Second no foreigners, English or French.^ Presently another Doiald. revolution restored Donald, and Duncan was slain, as his 1094-1097. namesake had been at the hands of Macbeth. =* At last, later in the reign of Rufus, a more successful attempt was made to place an English vassal on the Scottish Eeign of crown. That crown was now bestowed by the over-lord 1097-1107. on Eadgar, the son of IMalcolm and Margaret. His uncle and namesake the iEtheling was sent, like Siward in Eadward's days, to place him by force on his other uncle's throne. The two Eadgars were victorious. The son of Margaret won his father's crown ; he received it as a vassal of England,* and held it till his death ten years later. Donald, so at least Scottish belief ran^ spent the rest of his life in captivity and blindness." ' Chron. Petrib. 1093. "He to )5am cynge com and swiloe getrywSa dyde swa se cyng aet him habban wolde." The words of Florence are equally strong ; " Ut ei regnum sui patris concederet petiit, et impetravit, illique fidelitatem juravit." So William of Mahnesbury, v. 400. ' Chron. Petrib. 1093. ^ The language of the Chronicler, 1094, is here very marked ; " Dises geares eac ])a Scottas heora cyng Dunecan besyredon and ofslogan, and heom syS'San eft o^re sySe his ftpderan Dufenal to cynge genamon, jjurh pes lare and totihtinge he wearS to deatSe beswicen." * The Chronicler (1097) is distinct on this head ; " Ferde Eadgar aejieling mid fyrde Jjurh ]7^s cynges fultum into Scotlande, and ])et land mid stranglicura feohte gewann, and Jione cyng Dufenal ut adrsefde, and his m^g Eadgar se wassMelcolmes sunu cynges and Margarite l^sere cwenan ; he fieer on Jjses cynges WiUehnes heldan to cynge gesette, and sy'S'San ongean into Engleland for." ° Fordun, v. 25. THE TWO EADGAES IN SCOTLAND. 123 Tlie accession of Eadgar fixed tlie future history of oh. xxm. Scotland. The true Scots, the race of the Kenneths and ^^""^^ °^ the acces- the Duncans, had had their last chance under Donald, sion of From that day down to Killiecrankie and CuUoden, they '^ ^^' might make themselves unpleasant and even dangerous neighbours to the men of the Teutonic South and the Teutonized East ; but they had no chance of again be- coming masters. Under the sons of Margaret Scotland The became an English kingdom. It might be politically element distinct from the Southern England ; it might even look P™c>unt ^ ' ^ m Scotland. on the Southern England with the bitterest hate; but it was an English state none the less. Among the three elements of the Northern kingdom^ Gaelic Scotland, British Strathclyde, and English Lothian, the English element henceforth had the predominance. And the land became from henceforth more open than ever to all comers who were English by either birth or by settlement. Duncan had been called on to drive out all French and English immi- grants. Under Eadgar and his successors, French and English immigrants grew and throve, till in the end a Balliol, a Bruce, and a Stewart, men bearing the names of Norman villages or of English offices, found their way to the Scottish throne itself. It was a strange part of the Share of strange destiny of the elder Eadgar that, incnpable as ;„„ j^ jj^g he appears in English history, mocked as he so often revolution. was with vain hopes of the English Crown in his own person, he should, as lieutenant of a Norman King, as guardian of a Scottish King, win, not for England as a state or king-dom, but for the English blood and speech, one of the greatest and most lasting of its conquests. Of the internal government of William Rufus, after he Internal . , . govem- was firmly established on his throne by the suppression ment of of Odo's rebellion, our most detailed notices relate to ^''^"^' 124 THE NOEMAN XmGS IJS'' ENGLAND. CH. xxm. ecclesiastical matters, to his famous dispute with Anselm. Several What we hear of him in secular matters comes to little of^ppre^*' more than one long outcry against the reign of " unright," "*'^"- one wail over broken promises, grievous exactions of money, and wrong-doings of every kind.^ One ground of complaint carries us to the days of the Pharaohs and ArcMteo- tlie Tarquins.^ The native Chronicler tells us, with the of Eulutr'' bitterness of a Hebrew toiling under Egyptian task- BuUding masters, how great was the burthen of the King's great minster works of architecture and engineering, the wall with icT'^'-ioq wli'ch he compassed his father's Tower of London, the bridge which spanned the Thames, the new Hall of Westminster in which he lived to keep the last two AVhitsun festivals of his reign. ^ Of the many anecdotes of the Red King nearly all set him before us either in his impious or in his chivalrous character; none perhaps are directly designed to set forth either the faults or the Enforce- merits of his civil government. Yet one tale whose main foresUaws! o^^ject is to show his impiety, shows us by the way how strictly the forest-laws were enforced, and also how Englishmen who still kept their ancient wealth, or some portion of it, were special sufferers by them. Fifty such men, charged with some offence against the Conqueror's hunting -code, proved their innocence by the ordeal. Rufus blasphemed against the God who thus gave judge- ment against him, but he does not seem to have gone so far as to set that judgement aside.* One thing is plain, ^ See the language of the Chronicler in his portrait of William under the year iioo. We get more details from Eadmer. ^ Livy, i. 69. ^ The wail of the Chronicler goes up under the year 1097. Under 1099 he records the keeping of the feast of Pentecost for the iii-st time in the new haU. Cf.Wm. Malms, iv. 321. ' See the story in Eadmer, Hist. Nov. p. 48, Selden. The alleged offenders are described as " quinquaginta circiter viri, quibus adhuc illis diebus, ex antiqua Anglorum ingenuitate, divitiarum quaedam vestigia INTERNAL GOVERNMENT OF RUFUS. 125 that such crimes, real or imaginary, as it suited Rufus ch. xxm. to punish! were punished more severely than they had Severity 1 • 1 1 - 1 1 /> of punish- been punished m the days of his father. The code ofments William the Great allow^ mutilation, but forbade death. "^^^^^ William the Red did not shrink from inflicting both on Normans of high rank, and even on men of his own kindred.^ How men of the conquered race were likely to fare it is not hard to guess. It is plain however that, whatever was the oppression of William's government, and whatever was the amount of licence allowed to his followers, he at least, like his father but unlike his elder brother, firmly maintained the general peace of his dominions. In Normandy his rule at once Tie autho- put an end to the anarchy of the days of Robert, and crovm over with his death and Robert's return anarchy besran once }^^ S^eat . . barons more.' And in England, if he could wink at crime in maintained detail whenever it suited either his own purpose or his own caprice, he at least knew how to keep his turbulent barons in order. While the internal history of Normandy under Robert is one long record of private warfare, the internal history of England under Rufus gives us, after the suppression of the first rebellion, one revolt and one real Revolt of or alleged conspiracy, both of which the power of the Mowbray, Crown was able to put down without much trouble. ^°^^' arridere videbantur." But it would seem from the words of William of Malmesbury, iv. 319, that this severity extended equally to men of all ranks and races ; " Non pauperum tenuitas, non opulentum copia tuebatur ; ve- nationes, quas rex primo indulserat, adeo prohibuit ut capitale esset sup- pHcium prendisse cervum." ' Will. Malms, iv. 314. "Cujuscunque conditionis homuneulus, cujus- cunque criminis reus, statim ut de lucro regis appeU^saet, audiebatur ; ab ipsis latronis faucibus resolvebatur laqueus, si promisisset regale com- modum.'' ' The difference between William Rufus and his father in this respect is well marked in the words put by William of Malmesbury, iv. 306, into the mouths of the rebels in 10S8 ; " Nihil actum morte patris, si quos iUe vinxerit iste trucidet." ' Ord.Vit. 765 C, 784 B. 126 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. XXIII. The first, indeed the only revolt of this part of William's reign, was headed by Robert of Mowbray, who had suc- ceeded his uncle Bishop GeofTrey in the earldom of North- humberland.^ Pie is described as the head of a party who were dissatisfied with the King on account of his strict Conspiracy enforcement of the forest-laws.^ The object of the con- Stephen of spirators is said to have been to depose and slay William, Albemarle, and to give the Crown to his cousin Count Stephen of Albe- marle, the son of the Conqueror's sister Adelaide by her third husband, Odo of Champagne.' But the immediate cause of the outbreak is said to have been one decidedly credit- Robert able to the Red King. Earl Robert had plundered some appear Norwegian merchant ships ; he refused to appear in the before the j^j^g's Court to answer for the crime, and the King made Pentecost, good the losses of the sufferers at his own cost.* Again summoned to appear before the King and his Witan/ the proud Earl refused, except on the delivery of hostages and a safe-conduct. We seem to be thus strangely hearing the words of Godwine and Harold" from the mouth of a Norman oppressor and criminal. A campaign in the North followed, a campaign which consisted chiefly in the be- sieging of castles, and which was interrupted by one of the revolts of the Welsh.' The Earl was taken prisoner. His ■ See vol. iv. p. 676. ''■ See above, p. 1 24, note 4. ^ Florence alone (1095) records the movement on behalf of Stephen. I am now convinced, according to Mr. Stapleton's later view (Rot. Norm. ii. xxxi.), that Stephen was the son of a whole sister of the Conqueror. See vol. ii. p. 587 ; iv. p. 799. ' This comes from Orderic, 703 C, but his chronology 13 wrong. " Chron. Petrib. 1095. "To Pentecosten wees se cyng on Windlesoran, and ealle his witan mid him.'' " See vol. ii. pp. 150, 580. ' The sieges of Tynemouth and Bamborough are recorded in the Chronicle and Florence, 1095, by Orderic, 703-704, while the result is given by Wil- liam of Mahnesbury, iv. 319. Henry of Huntingdon, Script, p. Bed. 214, describes the campaign in the same way as the others, and adds that Robert was puffed up to revolt by his success against Malcolm. EEVOLT OF ROBERT OP MOWBRAY. 127 newly-married wife, Matilda, daughter of Richer of I'Aigle ch. xxiii. and niece of Earl Hno-h of Chester, held the stronghold ofP®^'^?*™'^ _ ° impnson- Bamborough against the King/ and yielded only when her ment of husband was brought before the walls, with a threat that Mowbray. his eyes should be put out if the castle were not surren- ^^^^i^g^gj. dered.^ The castle was surrendered and his eyes were ""as, 1095. spared ; but the remaining thirty years of his life were spent in a dungeon, and he was held to be so truly as good as dead that his wife was allowed by a special papal dispen- sation to marry again.' The overthrow of Robert of Mowbraj^ was followed by Conspiracy the confiscation and banishment of some of his fellow- ^^ g^ conspirators. The next year sets before us a striking ^°9^- example of the working of one of the changes which the Conqueror had made in English jurisprudence. The wager of battle was now the established means of deciding doubt- ful charges between Norman and Norman, perhaps also between Englishmen who adopted Norman manners or aspired to courtly favour.** The King's kinsman, Count His defeat William of Eu, who had served him so well in his Norman combat, wars, was now appealed of treason by Geoffrey of Baynard Januaryi4, before the assembled Witan at Salisbury.^ The Count of Eu, worsted in the judicial combat, was blinded and foully mutilated. A pathetic tale is told, how, by a stretch of severity unknown to the days of the great William, the ' Ord. Vit. 703 C, 704 B. Compare the Countess Emma at Norwich, vol. iv. p. 583. ^ This is mentioned by the Chronicler and Florence, but not by Orderic or Henry of Huntingdon. ' See Orderic, 704 B, for the marriage and its consequences. ' See vol. iv. p. 624. The story of the duel between Ordgar and Godwine (see Appendix E.) is a case of judicial combat between Englishmen. ' Chron. Petrib. 1096. "And on Octab Epyphafl was se cyng and eaUe his witan on Searbyrig. psr beteah Gosfrei Bainard WiUelm of Ou >es cynges maeg, Jjset he heafde gebeon on pea cynges swicdome, and hit him ongefeaht, and hine on orreste ofercom." We here get the technicalities of Norman jurisprudence in our own tongue. William of Malmesbury makes the Count of Eu give the challenge. 128 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. OH. XXIII. Count's kinsman, William of Alderi, was hanged, protesting Punish- ]^is innocence to the last.^ Other chief men were imprisoned himself or otherwise punished, among them Odo Count of Cham- adheienta. pagne and lord of Holderness,^ whose share, or alleged share, in the conspiracy seems to confirm the statement that the malecontents designed to raise his son to the Crown. The Red King was troubled by no more revolts in England or in Normandy, unless we are to look on his own mys- terious death as a more successful renewal of the schemes of Robert of Mowbray and William of Eu. It is not easy to think of William Rufus in the character of a lawgiver, nor do the annals of his reign contain any notices of direct legislation, at all events on secular Develope- matters. Yet there can be no doubt that it was during Feudal this reign that many of the changes in law and custom 1^-?.?,^ ™'^®'' which could not fail sooner or later to follow on the Eufus. forcible entry of the elder William began to show them- selves more clearly. The race of feudal lawyers is now beginning to creep into light, in the person of Randolf Flambard and the other cunning clerks of the King's chapel. It was under them, and under their chivalrous master, that a whole jurisprudence of feudal ideas — the word feudal is bad in every way, but I know no better — which had hitherto lain in the germ began to show them- selves in a more distinct shape. Of these, as concerns general legislation, I trust to speak in my next Chapter, when I come to deal more fully with the effects of the Ecclesias- Norman Conquest on English law and polity. I have now ticalcontro- , , , versies of to look at them as they bear on those ecclesiastical con- his reign. ' The punishment of the two Williams is found in most of our au- thorities. William of Malmesbury is fullest on the story of WiUiam of Alderi. See also the Hyde Writer, 301, who brings in Arnulf of Hesdin as proving his iimocence by his champion. ^ "Eoda eorl of Campaine" is his style in the Chronicle. ECCLESIASTICAL CONTEOVEESIES. 129 troversies which, more than any other events of his reign, oh. xxnr. drew the eyes of the world in general on the Red King and his doings. As if to refute the ignorant calumny that mo- nastic and other ecclesiastical writers could think of nothing but the affairs of the Church, these ecclesiastical disputes fill a remarkably small space in all the contemporary writers of general history. They assert the righteousness of Little Anselm and the unrighteousness of Rufus ; but they pass Anselm by the details of the quarrel, or are content to refer their 1^ vig readers to the special biographer of the Archbishop.^ The Nature of dispute between Anselm and William Rufus was, in 0116^^®^^^^"*® point of view, a dispute between right and wrong, between Ansebn . .11 1 and Rufus. the righteous man and the unrighteous, between the man who was ready to sacrifice all for what he held to be his duty, and the man into whose mind the idea of duty never entered. But the particular form which the quarrel took Its parti- was one which could hardly have been taken by any impossible quarrel between prince and prelate in the days when Eng- y^^^^''^'®'^ land was still ruled by her native Kings. It was, in more ways than one, a direct result of that new policy in eccle- siastical matters which had been brought in by the Con- queror. A dispute between Church and State could hardly have arisen in those earlier days of England when the Church and the nation were, in the strictest sense, two aspects of the same body. But the Conqueror, by separating the ecclesiastical and temporal jurisdictions,^ had taught men that Church and State were two distinct bodies, which, being distinct, might possibly be hostile. Again, the insular freedom of the island Church passed away when the Crown of England became the prize of the armed missionary of Rome, and when the bishoprieks and • See the references to Eadmer in Orderic, 839 A, B, and William of Malmesbury, iv. 332. The space given to Anselm in the Chronicle is sin- gularly small. Florence enlarges a little more, but only a little, " See vol. iv. p. 439. VOL. V. K 130 THE KOKMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxni. abbeys of England were filled with prelates of foreign birth. Some glimmerings of what might come if English prelates ceased to be Englishmen had been seen ages before, in the days of the Romanized Wilfrith. It had been seen in later times when the Norman Robert had refused, at the papal bidding, to consecrate a Bishop lawfully named to Difference his see by the King and Witan of England. ^ Ansel m, the the position j^^t and holy, the friend of every living creature, could win 1^^^"^^^ the love of the English people by his justice and holiness, his Englisli and could rebuke the tyrant on his throne in the character sors. of either priest or prophet. But, as the native of a foreign land, brought up in devotion to the fullest claims of a foreign Bishop, he could never be the leader of the English Difference people, like Dunstan or Stigand. Let us add too tha.t, WiUilm though England had had evil Kings before William the Rufus and j5,e(J ghe had never had a King in whom evil had so dis- earlier ^ Kings. tinetly stood forth as something antagonistic to good, ^thelved and the sons of Cnut had been weak and wicked ; but they had not declared themselves the personal enemies of their Maker. In all these various ways it followed that under William Rufus disputes arose between the ecclesiastical and temporal powers, such as never had been heard of, and never could have been heard of, in Results of earlier times. And add to all this, that the few changes the changes . tt i j*ji i -ii underWil- "^ avowed law and practice, the many changes m the ham the g-pirit of administration, which had come in under Wil- Conqueror. ^ Lam the Great were beginning to bear their natural fruits under William the Red. Where the feudal lawyer was so busily at work, the refinements of his new science could not fail soon to involve the national Church as well as the national State of England in its subtle meshes. Ecclesias- We have seen that William the Conqueror had always tical supre- . . niaoyof steadily maintained that supremacy over the Church under™™" within his kingdom which had been handed down to him ■ See vol. ii. p. 122. ECCLESIASTICAL SUPREMACY OP THE CROWN'. 131 from the Kings who were before him. No Pope could be oh. xxm. acknowledffed in England against his wUl :^ and Bishops yi^a,m ^ _ ° ° ^ the Con- and Abbots received the staif from the royal hands, while queror. Hildebrand himself dared not to denounce the ancient custom of England as sacrilege or usurpation. But, with all the greediness which is spoken of as one of the worst points of the character of the elder William, it is certain that he did not make a gain of those ecclesiastical powers which, on the whole, he used for good. He did not sell vacant benefices for money, nor did he eke out his revenues by keeping them vacant that he might receive the profits. But we have already seen that the supremacy of the Crown as exercised by the Norman Kings was, though not greater in extent, yet something different in character, from the same supremacy as it had been exercised by their English predecessors. Under William Rufus the bad side of the Its abuse change showed itself. The new division between the j^ufus. temporal and ecclesiastical jurisdictions made the King no longer seem the highest member of the national Church ; it gave him rather the look of an external friend or an external enemy. It was in this latter character that William Rufus showed himself. The most charitable construction of his acts cannot represent him as being simply anxious to maintain the due supremacy of the temporal power. Nor did he simply, like many kings before and after him, lay his hands on the temporal goods of the Church. Lay hands on them he did, and that in a new form which the subtle logic of the clerks of his chapel easily taught him. Among them the fore- Rise and most was Randolf Flambard or Passeflambard, of whom we EandoT/ " have already heard in the days both of Eadward and of ^l™^'^'*''*^- William,^ and who now rose, as was the fashion of the time, from the post of royal chaplain to the highest ofiices ' See vol. iv. p. 438. ' See vol. iv. p. 5 2 1 . K a 132 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. XXIII. temporal and spiritual. He became Justiciar,' and was in the end raised to the see of Durham. It is he who seems to have been the first to draw a natural inference from those feudal principles which were now creeping in, and which he well knew how to turn to the advantage of Feudal his master. The new ideas taught men no longer to look eocSas- on an ecclesiastical office and the temporal possessions at- tioalbene- |3a^(,j]^ed to it simply as an office endowed with lands, lands heldj like other lands, according to law, and liable to such services as the law might lay upon them. The estates of a bishop or abbot came now to be looked on as a fief, a benefice,^ held personally of the King by the tenure of military service. According to the reasoning of the feudal law, whenever anything hindered the due performance of the duties charged on the fief, the fief fell back for the time into the hands of the lord. From this principle sprang the feudal doctrines about wardship and marriage, and from Profits of this principle sprang also the doctrine that the revenues payable to of a vacant bishoprick or abbey ought to go to the King the Kmg. (jm-f^g the vacancy. During the vacancy there was no one to perform the duties which were charged upon the fief; the lord therefore took the fief for the time into his own hands. It is easy to see into what abuses this practice might grow in the hands of an unscrupulous King. We have seen that hitherto the way of appointing English bishops and abbots had been somewhat uncertain.-' Some- ' The different passages which describe the offices held by Flambard will be found in the Chronicle, 1099 ; Florence, 1099, ' '°° ! Orderic, 786 C ; \^'illiam pf Malmesbury, iv. 314, and Gest. Pont. 274 ; Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 20; Henry of Huntingdon, Script, p. Bed. 2 16 A. Most of them are col- lected by Lappenberg, Norman Kings, 226. See also Stubbs, Constitutional History, i. 298, 347, 348. It seems plain that he was Justiciar " Oddly enough, in modern use the word benefice has come to be used only of ecclesiastical benefices. The distinction between the etymological and the technical sense of the word is brought out by Hadrian the Fourth in his letter to the Emperor Frederick in Eadevic of Freising, iii. 22. ^ See Appendix T. vol. ii. 2nd ed. DEVICES OF EANDOLF FLAMBAED. 133 times the King, with or without the advice of his Witan, oh. xxin. had directly appointed to the vacant office. Sometimes he had approved the choice of the convent or chapter. But in no case could an English prelate be put in pos- session of his office and of the temporal possessions attached to it without the consent of the King at some stage or other of the process. We are told that the unscrupulous Eandolf intellect of Eandolf Flambard suggested to his master an suggests unprincipled use of this power, by which bishopricks and *^^ oocupa- abbeys were kept vacant as long as it suited the interests vacant sees of the royal coffers to keep theta vacant.^ The fief had Crowu. fallen back to the lord^ and the lord let its revenues out to This prac- farm, till some caprice or some immediate necessity led him logical to grant it out afresh. A further opening was thus ™^<=''«"<'« ^ r o trom leuclal made for the crime which had stirred the soul of Hilde- ideas. brand to wrath, but from which the hands of the Conqueror pr^^^lence' had been honourably clean. We have heard now and °^ simony, then in earlier times of English bishopricks and abbeys being bought and sold, sometimes by the Kings themselves, sometimes by the greedy courtiers around them.^ Under Rufus the practice became systematic. He could seldom be brought to fill up a vacant office, except as the price of a sum paid down which made it worth his while to give up the profits of the vacancy. He thus began an abuse which went on long after his time, and a faint survival of which still lingers in our law. Whatever may be thought as to the secular position of the prelates of those days, and however logically the rule might be derived from feudal principles, there can be no doubt as to the bad working of a law which made it the interest of the King to keep the high offices of the Church as long as possible without holders. What the system came to in the days of Rufus himself is set forth in the emphatic words of the ' See Stubbs, Constitutional History, i. 298. ^ See vol. i. pp. 563, 588 ; ii. p. 67. 134 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND, OH. XXIII. Chronicler ; " In his days, ilk right fell and ilk unright for Descnp- Qq^j g^^^j ^^^ world up arose. God's churches he brought tion o* the '^ Chronicler, low, and the bishopricks and abbacies whose elders fell on his days, all he either sold with fee or in his own hand held and set to gavel, for that he would be the heir of ilk maUj ordained and lay. And so on the day that he fell, he had in his own hand the archbishoprick of Canterbury and the bishopriek of Winchester and that of Salisbury, and eleven abbacies all set to gavel." ' Randolf Flambard himself was an example in his own person of the working of the custom which he had brought in. His services were at last rewarded by the great Bernician bishopriek ; but it was not till the church of Saint Cuthberht had stood for three years without a pastor, after the second reign of William of Saint Carilef had been brought to an end by his death.^ _DegTada- This manner of dealing with the high offices of the priesthood Church seems to have led, as it could hardly fail to lead^ Rufus ^° ^ general degradation of the clerical order throughout his kingdom. In an age when education and intellectual pursuits of all kinds were mainly confined to the clergy, the effect of such a way of dealing with ecclesiastical things was, not the substitution of laymen for clerks in places of wealth and power, but the throwing of such places into the hands of a class of clerks who were, in a moral point of view, among the worst of their order. A man could no longer hope to obtain a bishopriek or an abbey by practising the virtues which became a Bishop or Abbot. But, by practising all kinds of secular callings, ' Cliron. Petrib. iioo. The words of the Chronicler about the King wishing to be heir to every man, laynian as well as clerk, seem pointed at the new-fangled feudal notions with regard to secular as well as ecclesiastical property. '' The Chronicler records the death of William of Saint CarOef on January i, 1096, but Eandolf Flambard did not receive the bishopriek till Pentecost, 1099. THE KINGS CLEEKS. 135 by becoming a farmer of the royal lands or of the Church ch. xxm. lands that were in the royal hands, by undertaking causes ^"'^l'^*':^ in the King's courts, and by holding any secular office, for secular 11 • .1 T7-- I • 1 .... services. great or small, in the Kings service, he might m the end scrape together wealth enough to buy the rank and authority of a Bishop or Abbot.^ In all times and places where the disposal of ecclesiastical offices rests with the Sovereign, those churchmen who are immediately engaged in the Sovereign's service cannot fail to have a start in the race for preferment. It was so under Cnut, under Eadward, and under the Conqueror. And under the The clerks Conqueror we see the first beginnings of that class of clerks chancery. of the King's chapel or chancery ^ who had so large a share in the administration of the kingdom, and who even under the Conqueror had often been rewarded with bishopricks.^ Under William Rufus the Chancery became Their a nursery of clever and unscrupulous churchmen. They under showed themselves congenial spirits with the King, per- "'"™^ ' haps in his private vices,* certainly in his public exactions ; and they seem to have almost forgotten their clerical their p^-o- character till the day came when the wealth which they bishop- had amassed proved enough to raise them to some of"''''^" the great places of the Church, in the way in which ^ It is immediately after his comparison of the conduct of William Eufus with that of his father that William of Mahuesbury (iv. 314) gives his curious description of the general degradation of the clergy at this time ; "Nullus dives nisi nunmiularius, nuUus clericus nisi causidicus, nullus pres- byter nisi (ut verbo parum Latino utar) firmarius." * On these clerks of the chapel and chancery, whose position illustrates the way in which the word clerlt has got its different meanings in modem use, see Palgrave, iv. 55. * See vol. iv. pp. 393, 690. ' Besides the scandals which William of Malmesbury in his first version of the G-esta Pontificum (274) told of Eandolf Flambard himself, but which in his second edition he thought it prudent to strike out, his first edition also, but not his second (313), contains stories of the like kind against Robert Bloet, Bishop of Lincoln, "qui nihil unquam pensi feoerit, quominus omnia libidinis et infamis et reus esset." 136 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. XXIII. men did raise themselves to them in the days of William Rufus. Primacy of It was in the midst of a state of things like this that io93*-ii'o9. tl^e holy Anselm, whom we have already seen as a visitor to our shores and as a defender of the fair fame of one of England's worthiest sons/ came to dwell among us as the successor of the Enghsh martyr for whom he had spoken up against foreign gainsayers. In speaking of this memorable man, I will follow the example of our native Chroniclers, and dwell only on those parts of his career which throw light on the effects of the Conquest and the general working of the Norman rule in England. Death of We are told that, as long as Lanfranc lived, his in- May 24, fluence kept the vices and misgovernment of Rufus under '° 9- some degree of restraint.^ When both his father and his Ita effect tutor were gone, they burst forth in full force. Among on the character his other misdeeds, he kept the metropolitan see vacant for four years. Among the anecdotes of his impiety, some set forth the mockery with which he answered the entreaties of the chief men of his kingdom when they prayed him that he would no longer leave the English Sickness of Qjiui-e]^ without a chief shepherd. ^ At last a sickness Kufus at . '■ Gloucester, which seemed to be unto death overtook him while ^^' ^ ' holding his court at Gloucester. In the agonies of a temporary repentance, he promised reformation of his evil ways, promises which were speedily forgotten as soon as he was restored to health.* But, during the short ^ See vol. iv. p. 443. ^ The influence of Lanfranc over Rufus is stated very strongly by William of Malmesbury, iv. 3 1 2, but it is implied also in the picture given by Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 14. ^ See the account in Eadmer, p. 364. Compare Church, Anselm, 176. • This comes out strongly in the Chronicle, 1093 ; "And on his broke he Gode fela behsesa behet, his agen Uf on riht to laedene and Codes oyrcean griiSian and friSian, and niefre ma eft wi'5 feo gesyllan, and ealle rihte lage on ANSELM APPOINTED ARCHBISHOP. 13 7 season of his penitence he had been led to do one oh. sxin. act which could hardly he undone. The Abbot of Bee was now in England, called thither at the earnest prayer of Earl Hugh of Chester, whose ailments of body and mind needed the presence of the faithful guardian of his soul's health. 1 We are told that the common ex- Anselm pectation of all men looked on Anselm as the man who Arc^™ ^ should fill the vacant archbishoprick, and one of the effects bishop. of the King's short day of good intentions was to invest Anselm, sorely against his will, with the insignia of the archiepiscopal ofiice.^ But it should be noted that Anselm's unwillingness was simply an unwillingness to accept the office under any form. We hear not a word of any scruples He accepts on his part against becoming a Bishop, if he was to become fi-om the a Bishop, after the manner which the law of England "^' prescribed. Anselm received the archbishoprick from William the Red, as Stigand had received it from Ead- ward, as Lanfranc bad received it from William the Great. He received the staff from the King's hand ; he became the King's man ; ^ and he uttered no protest against the writ in which William King of England — the new-fangled title was now coming in — announced to all his faithful subjects, French and English, that he had given the arch- bishoprick of Canterbury and all that belonged to it to Archbishop Anselm.* The scruples which Anselm felt his feode to habbene . . . ac feet he sy S'Sau stbrasd, fa him gebotad waes and eaUe fa gode laga forlaet be he us aer behet." ' See Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 14 ; Vit. Ans. ii. i. See vol. iv. p. 493. ^ The story is told in all its vividness by Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 16-18. See C!hurch, Anselm, 1 79. ^ Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 20. "lUe igitur, more et exemplo praedecessoris sui inductus, pro usu terrae, homo regis factus est, et, sicut Lanfrancus suo tempore fuerat, de toto archiepiscopatu saisiri jussus est." Eadmer, writing by the light of later papal decisions, feels a scruple which Anselm did not feel at the time. • See the writ in Rymer, i. 5 ; " WiUiehnus Rex Angliae, episcopis, comi- tibus, vicecomitibus, ceterisque fidelibus suis, Francis et Anglis, salutem." 138 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. xxni. on these matters in later times all came of his closer in- tercourse with Eome; they were scruples which were as The rights yet unknown either at Bee or at Canterbury. Nor do monks of we find Anselm expressing the slightest scruple as to ChSch not receiving the archbishoprick by the gift of the King spoken of. only, without any reference to the elective rights of the monks of Christ Church or of any other ecclesiastical body. The reluctance of Anselm to accept the office arises only from his personal unwillingness, and from the ties, spiritual and temporal, which bound him in various ways to the Duke of the Normans, to the Archbishop of Rouen, and to his own monks of Bec.^ Of any conscien- tious dislike to the way in which the archbishoprick was conferred, repugnant as that way was to all the doctrines for which Hildebrand and his successors had been striving, we hear in the present stage of Anselm's history not a word. Tlie consecration of Anselm did not take place till eight months after his first investiture with the pastoral \A'illiam's stafi" by the sick bed of the Red King. Meanwhile and dispute William, now restored to health, had found grounds of T'*, dispute with the Primate-elect of his own choosing. Some of these had to do with the possessions of the see, which, while they were still in his grasp, the King was by no means eager to give up.- This was a common and vulgar ' ground of quarrel ; another had reference to the general state of the Church and to the customs of England as Question established by the laws of the Conqueror. The see of knowledge- Rome was still, as in the days of Hildebrand, disputed ment of between two rival Pontiff's. Victor had succeeded G-regorj^, Urban. and Urban had succeeded Victor ; but Wibert or Clement He goes on to grant the archbishoprick and its possessions, much as Cnut or Eadward would have done, including rights " super tot theines quot Ecclesia Christi concessit Edwardus Rex cognatus meus." ' See Eadnier, Hist. Nov. 1 9 ; Church, 1 84, ' See Eadmer, Hibt. Nov. 20. FIRST DTSPUTE BETWEEN EUFUS AND ANSELM. 139 still lived, and was still deemed the lawful Pontiff by the ch.xxiii. Imperial party. By the laws of the Conqueror it rested with the King to acknowledge which Pope he would. Rufus had not yet acknowledged either ; and in truth, to judge from the words of English writers, it would seem that the English nation for the most part neither knew nor cared much about the controversy.^ With Anselm the case was different ; the rightful position of the Apostolic See seemed of far greater moment in continental than in insular eyes, and the Abbot of Bee, along with the rest of the Norman Church, had bound himself to Urban by ties which the Archbishop of Canterbury could not throw off. The consecration at last took place with- Consecra- out any settlement of this question ; but it woke up Anselm. once more another controversv, which to Englishmen ^''^®™°^'" perhaps seemed of greater moment. The consecrator was Thomas of York. He objected to the formula which Dispute spoke of the Kentish Archbishop as Metropolitan of all Thomns of Britain, and Anselm was consecrated as Primate of all "^ ' Britain, but as Metropolitan, it would seem, only of his own province.^ The year of Anselm 's appointment was a year chiefly Events of concerned with the affairs of Scotland, the year of the 1093. death of Malcolm and Margaret, and of the momentary revival of the true Scottish nationality under Donald. The next year was the year of William's second expedition to Normandy. A fresh dispute arose because the proud Dispute at King despised the Archbishop's gifts towards the cost of February, 1094. ' Eadmer, p. 32. "Erant Eomse in iUis diebus, sicut praediximus, duo pontifices, qui a diversis apostolici nuncupabantur ; sed quis eorum canonice, quis seeus, fuerit institutus, ab Anglis usque id temporis ignoraba- tur." Compare above, p. 92, and vol. iv. p. 437. So before, p. 25 ; "Erant quippe iUo tempore duo, ut in Anglia ferebatiir, qui dicebantur Eomaui pontifices, a se invicem disoordantes." ^ The distinction in Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 21, is whether the Church of Canterbury is "totius Britanniee metropolitana," or only " totius Britan- niae primas." 140 THE NOEMAIT KINGS IN ENGLAND. Council at Eocking- ham. March II, IOQ5. the war,! and because of the outspoken rebuke which Atiselm gave the King for the disorders of his public and private life. This was a rebuke which Rufus said that Lanfranc would not have dared to make to his father ;2 but it was a rebuke which his father in his worst days had assuredly never needed. Then came the scene at Eockingham, the forerunner of the more famous scene which, seventy years later, was to take place between another King and another Primate within the bounds of the same shire.^ The question again turned on the acknowledgement of Urban. Anselm had still to go to the Pope for his pallium, but from what Pope was he to seek it? No scene was ever more vividly painted than the story of the great gathering at Rockingham is painted by Anselm's biographer. We get living pictures of the Red King^s most trusty advisers, both clerical and lay, of Bishop William of Durham and of Count Robert of Meulan, who had both found it to their advantage to serve with zeal, if not with servility, the King to whom they had once been enemies.* But incidents during the meeting showed that the general feeling of the laity, high and low, was on Anselm's side, while the servile Bishops of William's court were seeking' his overthrow.' There was nothing as yet in the position taken up by ' Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 24. ^ lb. ''Nee antecessor tuus auderet ullatenus patri meo talia di- cere." ^ The scene at Eockingham is described by Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 26 et seqq. * Bishop William is the chief speaker at Rockingham, where Eadmer describes him (28) as " homo lingute volubilitate facetus quam pura sapientia preeditus." Earl Eobert comes out more prominently in a later gathering ; but I presume that he is the person intended by Eadmer (30) as " Eobertus quidam ipsi regi valde familiaris." " See in Eadmer (29) the incident of the "miles unus de multitu- dine prodens," by which Anselm "intellexit animum populi in sua secum sententia esse," In pp. 29, 30 follows the striking contrast of the Barons and the Bishops. ANSELM AT ROCKINGHAM. 141 Anselm which could give any reasonable offence to the oh. xxm. great barons, whose position was in some measure inde- pendent of the King; and to smaller men, whether of Norman or English birth, the Archbishopj both officially and yet more personally, would seem to be their only possible protector against royal tyranny. In the end, the Nothing council broke up without coming to any real decision E^ockLg- on the questions at issue. A truce, as it was called, was ^'*™- patched up, and such submission as Anselm made was made with a reservation of his duty to Pope Urban. ^ In the course of the year- — the year of the rebellion of William ac- Robert of Mowbray — William of his own accord settled xjrban. ^ one question in Anselm's favour. He fully acknowledged Urban,^ and received his Legate, Walter Bishop of Albano, Legation of who came as the bearer of the pallium for Anselm, and Albano. as the collector of the arrears of Romeseot or Peter-pence, '°95- which seems not to have been paid since the accession of Ilufus.3 An attempt on the King's part to bring about the deposition of Anselm by papal authority — so easy is it for men anxious to gratify a personal grudge to cut away the ground from beneath their own feet— failed utterly.* So did an attempt to make Anselm receive his pallium from the King's hands. ^ The Primate received Anselm ra- the special badge of his archiepiscopal rank in all due paiuum form,^ and he was held for a season to have been restored "^^^^ '°' 1095. to the King's full favour. 1 Eadmer, 31. "Salva semper apud me debita reverentia et obedientia domini Urbani sedis apostoliose praesulis." , " lb. 32- ^ Walter's mission is recorded by the Chronicler (1095), who gives him a good English title, which further helps him to a rime ; " Eac on fis ylcau geare togeanes Eastron com Jises papan sande hider to lande, {laet wees Waltear bisceop, swiSe god lifes man, of Albin ]>ssie ceastre." He adds, "and man sytSSan Jraat Romgesceot be him sende, swa man manegan gearan seror ne dyde." * Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 32. ' lb. ° lb. 34, and the Chronicle, 1095. 142 THE NOEMAN" KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. XXIII. But good and evil could not long abide together in even outward agreement, least of all when good and evil were embodied in forms which must have been so specially- provoking to one another as those of Anselm and William Interval of Rufus. For two years there was no open breach ; Anselm, t'ween Wil- though forbidden to hold a synod — another fruit of the Con- liam and ^^eror's separation of the ecclesiastical powers — discharged 1095- 1096. his metropolitan duties, and, in his character of Patriarch Consecra- ^f ^;^j ^j^g lands beyond the sea,' he consecrated more than tion of -^ . . Irish one Bishop for the eastern cities of Ireland.^ At last, in the year of the last Welsh war in which the King Bishops. Beginning took a personal share, the final quarrel broke out. Rufus, dispi^tes ; on his return from Wales, complained that the men whom Ansebn's ^^^ Archbishop had sent to the royal army were utterly in the unfit for service.^ Anselm was summoned to appear and ioy6. do right in the King's Court.* In return he craved for Gemots of leave to go to the Pope at Rome. At successive meet- Ansekn ' ings of the Witan, his request was refused, but the charge to eo to^'' against himself was not pressed.' A new ground of Rome. argument was thus opened for the King and his counsellors. It was against the customs of England for the Archbishop to go out of the kingdom without the King's leave.^ Two points come out strongly in the contemporary bio- Anselm graphcr's vivid report of this assembly. We get a picture of the Bishops, such as Bishops were in the days of Rufus, drawn by one of themselves. They were men of the ' Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 30. "Primas est, non modo istius regni, sed et Scotise et Hibemise necne adjacentimn insularmn." ^ See vol. iv. p. 529. ' Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 37. • lb. " Rectitudinem facere." The phrase which we find elsewhere applied to the King of Scots. Cf. its use the other way in Orderic, 857 D. ° Eadmer describes the successive meetings, ending with the final one at Winchester; Hist. Nov. 37-41. It cannot be said that anything was really settled at any of them. ' Eadmer, ii. p. 39. ANSELM AT WINCHESTEE. 143 world, loving the world and its cares, busy in making on.xxiir. provision for their kinsfolk ; they could not attain to the holiness of Anselm.^ But we also see in Anselm Distino- himself the beginning of those casuistical distinctions, tyA^elZ the beginning of that system of appealing to a foreign power, which comes out still more strongly in the life of his successor Thomas. He has promised to observe the customs of the realm, but only so far as they are conformable to the law of God.^ Nor will he swear or promise that he will forbear to appeal to the see of Eome from any charge which may be brought against him.^ No one can doubt the single-mindedness of Anselm ; but the kind of position which he now took up fully explains the change of mind in the lay nobles who had stood by him at Rockingham, but turned against him at Winchester. They would defend Anselm when he was attacked on unjust and frivolous charges ; but they would listen to nothing which called in question the customs of the realm, or which tended to bring in a foreign jurisdiction. In the end Anselm triumphed ; he was allowed to go, and that without pledging himself to any line of conduct after he had gone. And though he was followed by Anselm insults up to the last moment, he did not go without ^ ^^ ^^^^ taking a touching farewell, in which the godless King, ?^°?; moved perhaps for a moment, did not refuse the blessing 1097. of the saint.* " He took leave of the King," says ' Eadmer, 39. ' lb. The distinction drawn by Anselm is that he would observe "secundum Deum" such customs as were "per rectitudinem et secundum Deum." In the mouth of a less scrupulous person than Anselm this might mean anything, but it is something quite different firom the " salvo ordine meo " of Thomas. ^ lb. 39, 40. Anselm's objection to the oath is, "Hoc enim jurare, beatumPetrum est abjurare ; qui autem beatum Petrum abjurat, Christum, qui eum super Ecclesiam suam principem fecit, indubitanter abjurat." * This impressive scene is described by Eadmer (41) with almost more than his usual vividness. It comes out well in the narrative of Sir Francis Palgrave, iv. 219. 144 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. XXIII. the Chronicler, " though it to the King unwilling were, as men deemed, and over sea he fared, because it thought him that man in this nation did little after right and Anselm's after his dight."! He went to be received in other lands iToThlr as the Pope of another world,^ as saint and confessor, lands. His theological skill was held to have successfully defended the i^K^-*^ the one theological dogma which the West has striven jMatBari. ^Q force on the changeless East.^' His cravings to be 1098. ' allowed to lay aside his thankless office were refused by XJrban ^ Pontiff who knew better than to give up an inch of hinders him from ground to the enemy.* But no real help was given, or the m^ST- could be given. No excommunication was hurled against bishoprick. ^j^g ^y^,^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^ ^j^g g^-j^^ jj^^ gg(j_ Bu^3 an ex- theLateran Communication was denounced against all who should do Apro'i^ooQ as Anselm himself had done, against all churchmen who against lay should accept investiture of ecclesiastical benefices from investiture 1 i 1 i 1 j 1, and lay hands, against all churchmen who should become the omage. ^^^ ^^ ^ temporal lord, and should put their pure hands between the polluted hands of an earthly sovereign.^ In short, the Bishop of Rome took upon him to denounce the laws of England and of Normandy as accursed. A foreign prelate dared to decree, that what no man had scrupled to do in the days of King Eadward and in the days of King William could no longer be done without drawing on the doer the wrath of Heaven and of Heaven's supposed vicegerent. ' 1097. "ForSam him fiuhte fast man on fiisne feodan lytel^fter rihte and tefter his dyhte dyde." By losing the word "dyhte" — the kindred verb is not quite dead — "we lose the rime of the older English. ' Eadmer, Vit. Ans. ii. 42. See vol. i. p. 146. ^ On the Council of Bari, see Hist. Nov. 49. There is a special treatise of Anselm, "de Processione S. SpiritCls." * Hist. Nov. 48. '•' The astounding language of this decree will be found in the Historia Novorum, p. 53. In the texts both of Selden and Migne I venture to correct "Angeloi-um" for •' Anglorum.'' The notion of our "angelica facies'' seems to foUow us everywhere. INCBEASED INFLUENCE OF ROME. 145 Thus, for the first time in English history, the highest oh. xxiii. subject of the English realm carried, in fact, if not in Beginning e 1 p 1 • • , ,. . 01 appeals lorm, an appeal irom his own sovereign to a foreign to Rome. power.i For the first time, an Englishman by adoption, if not by birth, sat by without a protest, while a foreign priest took upon him to annul the laws of England. And yet who can dare to blame Anselm for doing what, Explana- in any earlier reign, no less than in our own day, would AMelm's have seemed the blackest of treasons ? Under the rule of ^^duct. William the Red, law had become unlaw, and in appealing from him to the apostolic throne, Anselm might deem that he was appealing from mere force and fraud to the only shadow of right that was gtill left on earth .^ In appealing to Eome, in the person of Urban, he at least appealed to something higher than the personal will of a profligate and capricious tyrant. For in those days of England's bondage, the laws of England, the decrees of her Witan, the utterances of her Earls and Bishops, had sunk to be only the mouth-pieces of the arbitrary will of her foreign oppressor. All this could never have Increased been under the worst of England's native Kings. With nome the° a foreign King on her throne, with foreign Bishops at ''''*'^^ her altars, the appeal to a foreign power no longer seemed tte Con- QUGror s something out of the very order of nature. And all this policy, shows too how utterly even the greatest of men may fail in their schemes, when they forge weapons which they themselves can wield, but which in other hands may be turned against their wielders. When the Con- queror placed the two swords in separate hands, he made it possible that those swords should clash against each other. When, even before the English Crown was his, he called on the Roman Pontifi" to judge between him ' I reserve the possible case of William of Saint Carilef (see above, p. 79) ; and in any case his appeal was not of the same importance as that of Anselm. " See Church's Life of Anselm, p. 223. VOL. V. L 146 THE NOKMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxTii. and its lawful holder, he taught men to look to a power beyond the sea as a ruler and a judge in the affairs of England. He taught men to argue that, if the Eoman Pontiff could rightly be called to judge between two claimants of the English Crown, he might also be rightly called upon to judge between the wearer of that Crown and his own subjects. The Conqueror had called on the Uoman Bishop to set aside the law of England, to annul that act of the English people which had given their Crown to Harold and not to William. It might well be deemed that the Eoman Bishop might be more rightly called on to set aside other portions of the law of Eng- land, when that law had been turned into unlaw, when right seemed embodied in the power which spoke from beyond the sea, and when the brute force of unright seemed embodied in the foreign master to whom the powers, but not the spirit, of the ancient Kings of the Island realm had passed. Last three In dealing with the events of this wonderful reign, less William ^s a direct narrative than as a commentary on the results Bufus. q£' ^jjg „g|. jjjQre wonderful reign that went before it, I 1097-1100. ■' => ' have grouped the facts rather according to the con- nexion of subjects than according to the strict order of time. But the departure of Anselm from England has again brought us near to the end. Of the thirteen years of the reign of the Red King, ten had passed when he bent his head for the last time to receive the blessing of the holy Primate. In the three years still to come, while Anselm dwelt as an honoured exile at Lyons, at Rome, at Bari, while William spent on his wars or his pleasures the vast revenues of the mother church of England, events of which I have already spoken crowded fast on one another. Scotland received her King from the English over-lord ; the Norwegian invader, and with him the son DEATH OF WILLIAM EUFU8. 147 of Harold of England, showed himself for a moment off ch. xxm. the coast of Britain ; Helias of Maine was driven from the city which he had again made his own by the untiring energy of the Red King. And now the end was come. The last year of William Rufus was peaceful ; we hear Last year nothinff of wars or revolts, but only of lawful s'athering's ^ . . Gemots of on the three spots where the Kings and the Witan ofiogg-iioo. England were wont to come together.i The Red King was at the height of his power and his pride. He was lord from Scotland to Maine ; the truce secured him against his own lord at Paris ; he had nothing to disturb the safe enjoyment of his own will; there was no enemy to dread, no troublesome monitor to rebuke or to warn. But warnings, so men deemed, were not wanting. Strange sights and sounds showed themselves to men's eyes and ears ;^ strange warnings came to the doomed King himself; if Anselm was gone, less renowned prophets of evil arose to play the part of Micaiah.^ All warnings were vain. As Death of VVt 1 1 1 q XYi all the world has heard, the Red King died, by what hand s^aias. no man knew,* in the spot which his father's cruelty had ^"S"^* ^> ^ •' IIOO. made a wilderness, glutting his own cruelty to the last moment of his life by the savage sports which seek for pleasure in the infliction of wanton suffering. Cut off His burial without shrift, without repentance,^ he found a tomb within popular the Old Minster of Winchester, but the voice of clergy excommu- ''•' nication. and people, like the voice of one man, pronounced, by a common impulse, the sentence which Rome had feared to ' The Chronicler records the Christmas 6em6t at Gloucester, that of Easter at "Winchester, that of Pentecost at Westminster; directly after Pentecost the signs and wonders begin. " We get the signs and wonders in the Chronicle and Florence, iioo ; in Henry of Huntingdon, in William of Mahnesbury, iv. 332, 333 ; but most fully in Orderic, 'jSi. ^ See the warning of the monk of Gloucester in Orderic, 782 A. * See Appendix V. ° " Buten behreowsunge and aelcere dsedbote," says the Chionioler. So Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 54. 148 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. OH. x.\m. pronounce. As Waltheof and Simon and Thomas of Lan- caster received the honours of a popular canonization, so William Rufus received the more unique brand of a popular excommunication. No bell was tolled, no prayer was said, no alms were given, for the soul of the one baptized and anointed ruler whose eternal damnation was taken for granted by all men as a thing about which there could be His tomb, no doubt.^ Yet, by the strange irony of fate, while the tomb of his father, while the tombs of Harold and Wal- theof, have been swept away, we may still see in the choir of the Old Minster 2 the stone, marked by no legend or ornament or image, which men laid, whether in awe or in gladness — it could not be in sorrow — over the un- hallowed corpse of a King who had been so highly gifted, but who had, in a way that few men ever have done, chosen of fixed purpose to turn his mighty gifts into instruments of evil. § 3. The Reign of Henry the First. iioo— 1135. Character We enter now on a long and busy reign, on a time ofHei^^wlifin changes which the Norman Conquest brought with the First, j^ ^gj-g b^giiy ^t work, but when their work was mainly done in silence. England was now fast settling down Silent under the new state of things. We now begin to see together of '^^^ ^1'^* working of those causes which, before a century and Nor- ^^'^ passed, had drawn together all the natives of the mans. soil without thought of older differences of speech and race. The King who now came to the Crown came ' Compare the account in WiUiam of Malmesbury, iv. 333, with the more outspoken tale of Orderic, 783, 783. The few who lamented Rufus were " stipeudiarii milites et nebulones ac vulgaria scorta." ^ So it was when I was last there ; I hear that the Red King has since received the unlooked-for honours of a translation. EEIGN OF HENRY THE FIRST. 149 to it with the hearty good will of the English people, oa.xxiii. All hope of a restoration of the native dynasty had passed away. In truth the new dynasty had in some English sort become more native than the old one. Henry, the Henry, youngest son of the Conqueror, was, by an exercise of that feeling which always sees the best in every man of royal birth, looked on as an Englishman. He alone of the children of the Conqueror could claim to be an English ^theling, born on English soil, the son of a crowned King and his Lady. Such an one might seem to have higher Eelative claims, he might even seem to be more truly English, than Henry and the last surviving male of the house of Cerdic, who was ^^S^''- not the son of a crowned King and who was not born on English soil. And, though Eadgar'had under the reign of Rufus shown himself in a higher light than he had shown himself under the reign of the Conqueror, yet it was plain that he had a greater gift of winning crowns for others than for himself. Eadgar too, the constant friend and follower of the Norman Robert, might almost seem to have passed into a Norman, while Henry, at least at the beginning of his reign, took every pains to hold himself up in the eyes of England as an Englishman. If Henry's anything was wanting to satisfy the national sentiment, it was doubtless supplied by his marriage with a wife who by the spindle-side came of the Old-English stock. The His laws. first act of his reign was another renewal of the laws of Eadward, and there is no reason to believe that this pro- mise, so far as it meant anything at all, was seriously broken. The so-called Laws of Henry the First are not to be looked on as real statutes put forth by his authority; but they are a witness to the law as it stood in his time, and, as such, they set before us a law which, in its main features, is still purely English. And in the glimpses His admi- which we get of Henry's administration of the law, alike "^ "^^ '°"' in its good and in its bad side, in the general peace and 150 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. xxiii. safety which he established, and in the notices of occasional No sign of iiardship which peep out, we see little to make us think oppression ^ r 3. ' of English- that there was much oppression directly inflicted on such. Englishmen as Englishmen. We read a tale of bitter Tale of wrong in which we incidentally see that the sufferer was Basset and a man of Old-English descent and speaking the English Brihtstan. <;Qjjgyg_ B^j; tjjgrg is nothing to show that a man of Norman descent might not have suffered as deeply at the same hands, and it is plain that the English sufferer met with Norman sympathizers.^ In fact the distinction between men of Norman and men of English birth was now fast dying out, and another distinction was taking Sentiment its place. We are often apt to look on distinctions of pplants I'^ce and speech as having more weight than they really have^ and to forget how easily the feeling of birth in the same land takes their place. This tendency is one Modem which we constantly see in our own days. The wrongs of Ireland^ the crimes of the Saxon, are constantly set forth by men whose names proclaim that their fore- fathers crossed into Ireland, perhaps with StrongboWj perhaps with Cromwell. They are set forth by men who do not understand a word of the ancient tongue of the island of which they make themselves the champions, and who are driven to set forth the tale of Saxon oppression in the Saxon speech. So too, in a more harmless shape, the descendants of Norman and English settlers within the Welsh border, men bearing Norman or English names and unable to speak a word of the old British tongue, both identify themselves and are identified by others with the ' I refer to the story which is told incidentally by Orderic (628-631), in a letter from Hervey, the iirst Bishop of Ely. It describes the unjust treat- ment which one Brihtstan met with at the hands of the Justiciary Ralph Basset in 1 1 1 6, and how he was delivered by the joint agency of a heavenly and an earthly patroness, Saint iEthelthryth and Queen Matilda. See Appendix W. Of Ralph Basset we shall hear again in Orderic (905 D), where he has another Christian name. sui sentiment of race, examples. FUSION OF NORMANS AND ENGLISH. 151 land and the people among whom their fathers came, per- ch. xxm. haps as oppressors, anyhow as strangers. So too in the days with which we have to deal, the Norman settled on English ground, holding his estate by English law, not uncommonly the sou of an English mother, soon came to look on himself and to be looked on by others as English rather than as Norman. That this change was fast taking place in the reign of Henry the First we have distinct proof. The reign of the English-born King was, after all, not an UnEng- English reign. It was in some respects even less English Henry's than the reign of his brother. Henry, at least in his '^^^S^- . His con- later years, was more constantly absent from England than gtant ab- Rufus had been. For some years before his death he lived EngLnd™ mainly on the Continent, engaged in planning and carrying out a wide-spread scheme of foreign policy. We hear too Bestowal of the complaint that, in the bestowal of the great offices foreigners, in his gift, Englishmen were shut out as systenaatically as they could have been under his father or brother. An English writer complains that nothing could induce King Henry to bestow any great ecclesiastical preferment on an Englishman. This, we are told, was largely owing to the Influence influence of his great friend and counsellor Count Robert ^f Meulan. of Meulan, who had led the French charge at Senlac' and who is said to have had no love for Englishmen.^ But, if we look into the matter, we shall see that these New mean- words are to be taken in quite another sense from what ^„j.d Eng- they would have borne, if it had been said a generation li^hman. earlier that Bishop Odo or Earl William Fitz-Osbern did not love Englishmen. The complaint after all is not to be taken quite literally, for some men of English descent in the strictest sense did rise to high places under Henry. And, so far as it is true, we must understand by English- men natives of England of whatever race, the sons and arandsons of those who fought under William at Senlac, > See above, p. loi. ' See Appendix W. 152 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxrii. no less than the sons and grandsons of those who fought under Harold. In a long list of men promoted to high ecclesiastical office under Henry, we find that nearly all are Normans in the local as well as the national sense. Sometimes indeed natives of other parts of Gaul were transferred from monasteries beyond the sea to the rule Common of the great churches of England. The Norman was aU 'natives HOW beginning to be what the Poitevin and the Savoyard of England. ^gj.g g^ hundred years later ; and men born in the land, of both races alike, began to be jealous of him. Both the good and the bad side of Henry's rule in England touched all natives of England alike ; and all natives of England must have grudged to see that their King loved Normandy better than England, that he chose Nor- mandy as his dwelling-place oftener than England, that he promoted natives of Normandy rather than natives of Position of England to high offices on both sides of the sea. At the a power, same time the fame of England, as a power, was fast growing in foreign lands. The feelings and the manner of speech which had begun under Rufus went on with increased force under Henry. The French wars of Henry were, like the wars of his brother, waged, not for Eng- lish but for Norman interests. Still in French eyes they were English wars; they were largely carried on with English troops, and, in the successes of the King of Eng- land, the name of England and her people were magnified Chief among the men of other lands. In short, great as is the Henry's indirect importance of this reign in the internal history for^ of England, its outward events have chiefly to do with foreign wars and a subtle foreign policy. Within the Peace of island there is comparatively little to tell. When Henry, reign ; ^ like his brother, had crushed one rebellion at the beginning of his reign, he found England even more tranquil for the rest of his days than his brother had found it. In Nor- mandy he had to deal with a competitor within his own POSITION OF ENGLAND UNDER HENEY. 153 duchy and with a jealous and powerful enemy on his border ; oh. xxiii. in England he had neither to disturb him. On the side relations of Scotland there was a time of unusual peace ; the only land and enemies within the four seas of Britain were the half- '^'*1^^- conquered Welsh, ever striving to throw off the yoke in their own land, ever showing themselves as troublesome, if not dangerous enemies, on the English border. But the reign of Henry is set down, with somewhat doubtful truth, as the time of the final conquest of at least the southern part of Wales. 1 It was certainly the time when the policy of Henry took one of the wisest steps to secure his conquests in those regions by a systematic plan of coloni- zation. In the eyes of men of his own time, both of his own subjects and of strangers, Henry seemed the most fortunate and the most powerful of princes.^ In the eyes Henry the of his own subjects, he bore the higher title of the Lion justice." of Justice.'' He was the man whom the national Chro- Character nicler, after uttering not a few complaints in detail, could by the send out of the world with the noblest of panegyrics, d^-onicler. " Good man he was, and mickle awe was of him. Durst none man misdo with other on his time. Peace he made for man and deer." And his praises could be wound up with the same old proverbial phrase which we have heard of every King who did justice from the Bretwalda Ead- wine onward, that " whoso bare his burthen^ gold and silver, durst none man say to him nought but good."'' It is singular that a reign so different in many respects Points of from the reign that went before it should read in so many between of its details like the same story told again. In the ease *f®jjj^f^^ and Henry. ' See GiralduB, It. Kamb. ii. i (vol. vi. p. 103); Will. Malms, iv. 311, V. 401 . There is some exaggeration in the phrase, stiU they mark the reign of Henry as a special epoch in the progress of Welsh conquest. Cf WiU. Gem. viii. 31 ; Hen. Hunt. 318 b. ' ' See Appendix X. ' This title comes from the prophecy of Merlin in Orderic, 887 D, and Suger, Vit. Lud. 15 (Duchesne, iv. 295). * Chron. Petrib. 1135. Cf. vol. ii. p. 172 ; vol. iv. p. 619. 154 THE KOEMAISr KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. XXIII. of Henry, as in the case of Rufus, the King was called to the Crown with the good will of the English people, and in both he had at once to defend his Crown against Norman disloyalty in England and against the assaults of the reigning sovereign of Normandy. Presently, in each case, the internal state of Normandy calls for the intervention of the sovereign of England, and in each case, though by different means, England and Normandy are again united under a single ruler. Each King be- gins with the same eager attempt to draw to himself the loyalty of Englishmen, though it is quite unreason- able to represent the promises of Henry as having been no less utterly trodden under foot than the promises of Rufus. The dispute with Anselm, the exile of the Pri- mate at Rome and Lyons, seem to come over again ; though, on looking more closely into the matter, it will be seen that nearly every detail of the two stories differs. And, utterly different as is the general character which our historians give us of the two Kings and their govern- ment, it is strange to hear nearly the same special com- plaints in each reign ; in both we are told of the same heavy exactions, of the same oppression of the King's immediate followers, and, oddly enough, of the same fre- quency of remarkable natural phsenomena. Bad crops and bad weather it would be unfair to lay to the charge even of William Rufus. With regard to those evils which Kings and laws can cure, the difference seems to have been that, while the same evils arose in both reigns, William did nothing to cure them, while Henry at least did a little. The personal character of Henry is marked by several features which distinguish him from both his father and his brother. His bodily frame was that of his pearance family ; thick-set and strongly made, of moderate height Character of Henry. His per- sonal ap CHARACTER OF HENRY. 155 and inclining to fatness ; but his black hair falling over oh. xxiii. his brow like that of Trajan, and the soft expression of his eyes, a contrast to the fierce look of Rufus, were points peculiar to himself.^ Temperate in all pleasures and con- but two, he inherited the excessive love of the chase which was characteristic of his house, and in his personal life he stood apart alike from the austere virtues of his father and from the foul vices of his brother. He was the father of a His natural ciiild.r6ii, crowd of natural children by various mothers ; yetj after the reign of Rufus, his accession was looked on as bringing with it a great moral reform.^ In other respects the brothers were yet more unlike. Henry was as little disposed as Rufus His defer- •IT •} ' • 1 t • 1 1 ^ 1 ence to the to yield to extreme ecclesiastical claims ; but he always church, treated religion and its ministers with at least a decent re- spect, and he appears as a bountiful founder and benefactor of religious houses.^ He is described as ready and pleasant Hia in speech, but as free, it would seem, from the love of scurri- habits. lous jesting which distinguished Rufus.* The literary tastes His which were the result of his careful education in his child- literary hood are said never to have wholly forsaken him.^ Yet the one actual illustration of his acquirements which we incidentally eome across may perhaps be thought rather to illustrate the prevailing ignorance of men of his own class in his own day. It is set down as something re- markable that the learned King was able himself to read and understand a letter, doubtless in Latin, which was brought to him from King Philip.'^ And signs of intel- 1 We get his personal description from William of Malmesbury, v. 412. Cf. Ord. Vit. 901 D. ' A list of Henry's natural children is given by the Continuator of William of Jumifeges, viii. 29. Compare Lappenberg, Norman Kings, 348. See Ap- pendix X. ^ See Appendix X. * Will. Malms, v. 412. "Faoetiarum pro tempore plenus; neo pro mole negotiorum cum se communioni dedisset, minus jucundus." » See the passage of William of Malmesbury quoted in vol. iv. p. 791. « See Orderic, 812 D. 156 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENQLAND. cH. XXIII. leetual tastes come out in another way. If Henry was S'Lrt^ a sportsman, he was also a naturalist, and, in making peace history. for nian and deer, he brought together a collection of strange animals in his park at Woodstock, for purposes not His cold of cruelty but of study.^ But, if we thus see in Henry sSnle^' a man of higher tastes than his brother, and free from the policy. worst features of his brother's character, be had no share in the chivalrous spirit, the acts of occasional generosity, which, in his own time at least, went some way to redeem the blacker stains of the Red King. Rufus was a creature of impulse, and his impulses, if more commonly evil, were sometimes good. Henry seems to have been under the power of no impulse, good or bad. He appears as cold, crafty, politic, as no lover of war, as always liking to carry out his schemes by wiliness rather than by force. ^ Seeming His admirers gave him credit for a humane dislike of tion of his bloodshed ; they gave him credit for a real desire to save alleged -j^-g pgQpjg from needless burthens and sufferings.^ It is humanity i r o andcruelty. not merely in the high-flown rhetoric of a panegyrist that we find language of this kind used ; and, such is the in- consistency of human nature, that motives of this kind may really have had an influence with a man many of whose actions seem to bear quite another character. We may at least believe that Henry took no delight in wrong for its own sake, and was perfectly ready to hinder wrong, whenever wrong was not called for by bis own purposes. Yet in more than one tale Henry stands forth as guilty, at the bidding either of bis policy or of his revenge, of acts of cold-blooded cruelty, the like of which we do not find re- corded of his father or even of his brother. The man who hurled Conan from the tower of Rouen with his own hands,* ' Henry's zoological garden at "Woodstock is spoken of by William of Malmesbury, v. 409 ; Henry of Huntingdon, Script, p. Bed, 218 B ; and again in the De Contemptu Mundi (Ang. Sac. ii, 695). '' See Will. Malms, v. 412. = See Appendix X. * See above, p. 85. COKTEADICTIO'NS IN HIS CHARACTER. 157 and who did not spare the eyes of his own grandchildren,' oh. xxiii. had something in him of which in the Conqueror we see no trace. We hear of his constancy alike in enmity and in friendship, and of the first part of the description there is at least no doubt. But others paint him as one whose His alleged plighted word went for nothing, as a dissembler who, when ygj,_ he spoke specially well of any one, was sure to be com- passing his destruction.^ His natural powers and his careful education had done much to clear and strengthen his intellect ; they had not done much to warm his heart or to guide his conscience. Self-interest seems to have Self- been his guiding rule through his life ; but he was at ^g guiding least clear-sighted enough to see that the interest of a ''^^• King and the interest of his subjects are for the most part the same. But it was as the Lion of Justice that Henry stood forth His strict before all other rulers in the eyes of the men of his own tiou of day. It is not merely his flatterers who describe him as J"^''"^^* the almost perfect model of a King ; it is from men whose moral sense was not darkened, who neither hide his crimes nor strive to glose over his vices — it is from men who send up the bitterest wail of anguish at particular acts of his reign — that we learn what the merits of Henry as a ruler really were.'' His merits were indeed the merits of a ' Tlie story of Henry's natural daughter Juliana, the wife of Eustace of Pacy, is told by Orderic, 848. Her two daughters were given as hostages for the good faith of her husband, who held the castle of Ivry, while the son of Ralph Harenc was given as a hostage to Eustace. Eustace tore out the boy's eyes and sent him to his father. Henry then, to say the least, allowed Ralph to put out the eyes and cut off the noses of the daughters of Juliana, his own grandchildren. Henry of Huntingdon (De Contemptu Mundi, Ang. Sac. ii. 699) makes the mutilation his own act. The rest of the story of Juliana, her attempt to shoot her father, and Henry's ludicrous vengeance, which reminds one of the grim pleasantry of his father, is told, after Orderic, by Lingard, ii. 23 ; Lappenherg, 325. For other stories of Henry's cruelty, see Appendix X. ' See Appendix X. ' See Appendix X. 158 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. XXIII. His go- vernment practically despotic. His im- partial severity. His pro- motion of new men. He punishes robbery with death. despot, but the strong hand of a despot stretched out in the main to do good, and not to do evil, was what Eng- land in her day of sorrow really needed. " Good man he was, and mickle awe there was of him." These words show what was then deemed to be the first duty of a ruler. Men had no awe of the careless Robert, who could not do justice if he would; they had another feeling than awe for the brutal Rufus, who could have done justice, but who would not. King Henry both could and would. Men sound his praises in the same strains in which they sound the praises of Godwine and Harold and William the Great.' " Durst none man misdo with other on his time." The hand of Henry was heavy on all disturbers of the public peace, great and small, French and English. From his justice no claims of race or of rank could deliver the offender ; ^ indeed his policy went hand in hand with his justice in putting down the proud families whose swords had helped his father to win England, and in raising up a new order of men who owed all their greatness to himself.^ His justice was sharper than his father's ; a special law of Henry, revoking his father's law against capital punish- ment,* secured the peace of the land by denouncing death by hanging against thieves and robbers of every class.^ Both this severer penalty, and the lesser punishment, as it was in those days thought^ of blinding and mutilation, were constantly put in force. And, if it was whispered that now and then the innocent suffered as well as the guilty, that ' See vol. ii. pp. 34, 40, 172. ' Suger (c. 15), applying the prophecy of Merlin to Henry, says, "Perit milvormn rapacitas, et denies luporum hebetabuntur, cum nee nobiles nee innobiles deprsedari aut rapere quacumque audacia prsesumunt." * This is brought out very strongly by Orderic, 805 B, C ; cf. 903 A, and Gesta Stephani, 14. * See vol. iv. p. 625. ° Flor. Wig. 1 108. "Eex Anglorum Heinricus pacem firmam legemque talem constituit, ut, si quis in furto vel latrocinio deprehensue fuisset, Buspenderetur." HIS ADMINISTKATIOK OF JUSTICE. 159 was perhaps in those days deemed a less evil than if the oh. xxiir. guilty had been allowed to go free.^ In Henry's days the people made their moan that they were ground down with strong "motes" and strong " gelds ;"^ they told, in the same words that they had told in the daj^s of his brother, of the wrongful and shameful deeds that were done by his immediate followers. But, imlike his brother, Henry was He ready to redress the wrongs done by his own officers and ^-^^ ^j^f followers, at any rate when thev took the form of open ^f^^^ "^ •' •' ^ his own breaches of the law. The insolence of his immediate followers, followers was cheeked by a severe statute^ put forth by the advice of Anselm and the other great men of the realm. ^ So too, if Henry was greedy in wringing money from his and of the subjects, yet, twice at least in his reign, the full weight of moneyera. his justice came down, to the deep joy of his people, on the moneyers who had cheated both him and them by an issue of false coin. In all these cases bodily mutilation was Frequency the doom of the offenders^ and it may be noticed that, in tio^ ; no this generation, we never meet with any feeling against p'Jf'''^' punishments of this kind, if only the sufferers were against it. * Take for instance the story which the Chronicler tells under the year 1124, of the kind of justice done by the Justiciar Ralph Basset, of which we have already seen one specimen (see above, p. 150). Forty-four thieves or reputed thieves were hanged, and six blinded and mutilated, some of whom were generally believed to be innocent. "Fela soWeste men sseidon ]>ast Jiser wEeron manege mid micel unrihte gespilde, 00 ure Laford God Eelmihtig, Jja eall digelnesae seS and wat, he seoB faet man laet jiaet serme folc mid eaUe unrihte serost man hem bertefoS her eahte, and sifSon man hem ofslae?S." Yet even such a wail as this does not hinder the Chronicler from sending Henry out of the world with the panegyric which has been already quoted. ^ Chron. Petrib. 1 1 24. " Ful hevi gaer wsee hit. Se men ]ie aeni god heafde, him me hit beKefode mid strange geoldes and mid strange motes ; ]>e man ne heafde stearf of hunger.'' These words immediately follow the passage just quoted. ' The grievances of the people at the hands of the King's immediate fol- lowers in the days of Eufus are set forth by Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 94, who records the redress of the grievance. The Chronicler gives a picture of the Bame kind in the year 1 104, 160 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. He com- mutes mutilation for fines. Predomi- nance of Wessex under the two Wil- liams. Constant going to and fro of Henry, believed really to be guilty. In fact, in an age which had few gaols and no penal colonies, it may well have seemed that the best way to deal with a sinner who was not to be put to death was to make him personally incapable of sinning again. ^ We read that, in the earlier part of his reign, Henry was most inclined to punish- ments of this kind;, which he afterwards, whether out of humanity or out of avarice, largely commuted for fines in money.^ There is another feature of Henry's reign which, though it may be explained in other ways, may well have been connected with this strict administration of justice. I have already remarked that, in a certain sense, the Nor- man Conquest was a Saxon Conquest, that it finally established the supremacy of the Southern or Saxon part of England over the rest of the kingdom and of the island.* The King of the English was still, before all things, a King of the West-Saxons. Save when the needs of warfare called for their presence elsewhere, the two Williams are seldom heard of far from the West-Saxon border, seldom further from it than the old place of assembly at Gloucester, itself in a sense West-Saxon ground. The council held by William Rufus at Rockingham * is a rare case of an assembly held on the other side of the Watling- Street. But under Henry we get the beginning of that intense activity on the part of our Kings, that constant moving from place to place, which comes out strongly in many later reigns, and which the Kings of England shared with the German Kings and Emperors. But King Henry is ' The punisliment of the false moneyers ia recorded by all our authorities, including the Continuator of Florence under the year 1 1 25. Eadmer (94), and after him Florence, mention the earlier case in 1108. See Appendix X. In Kymer (i. 12) we find a writ denouncing punishments of this kind against offenders in the matter of the false money. ^ WiU. Malms, v. 41 1. See Appendix X. ' See above, p. 65. ' See above, p. 140. HIS JOURNEYS THEOUGH THE KINGDOM. 161 found holding assemblies, and appeai-ing for various pur- ch. xxiii. poses, in new places within or near the West-Saxon ™ Wessex, border/ Oxford is restored to its old honours ; " but it has to share them with Woodstock, once the scene of legisla- tion in the days of ^thelred, and now the place alike of the royal pleasures and the royal studies.^ But we hear of Henry and out of it. also at places which had never before been heard of as seats of national assemblies, places which, except through the necessities of warfare, had seldom been visited by Kings since England had had one sovereign. He shows him- self in all parts of the kingdom, and the solemn ceremony of wearing the crown is no longer confined to Winchester, Westminster, and Gloucester. It takes place, especially in the latter years of his reign, at Saint Alban's, at Dunstable, at Brampton, at Northampton, and at Nor- wich.'' We read how a deputation from his continental dominions found Henry, as a continental embassy had once found ^thelstan, holding his court within the shire of his birth, in the northern metropolis itself.' And once we His visits find him even further still from the old seats of West- North of Saxon kingship, receiving perhaps the hospitalities of ^"^S^""*^- Randolf Flambard in the episcopal castle of Durham,' and providing for the strength of the great border fortress of Carhsle.'^ Much of this moving to and fro may have had Various to do with the practice of receiving the proceeds of the tj^ese pro- royal estates in kind and consuming them on the spot, g'^^^sea. Much of it may have had to do with the King's love of hunting in the many forests which he so strictly kept for his own pleasure. Still we can well believe that the ' See Appendix X. " Hen. Hunt. 320 b. "Ad pasclia [in 1134, one of the years for which the Chronicle has no entry] fuit Eex apud Oxineford in nova aiila." Compare vol. i. pp. 409, 463 ; ii. p. 498. * See above, p. 156. * See Appendix X. 5 Ord. Vit. 874 B. Cf. vol. i. pp. 308, 224. ' Hen. Hunt. 1122. ' Sim, Dun. 1122. VOL. V. M .162 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. xxin. Their effect on tie conso- lidation of the kingdom. Henry's fiscal exactions. Money extorted from married priests. Fiscal spirit of the Norman Govern- ment. King who did justice was really led, in part at least, by a wish, like that of Alfred or Cnut, to see with his own eyes that justice was done in all parts of his kingdom. This was the more needful now that the viceroyalty of the ancient Earls was swept away, so that, except in one or two special palatinates^ justice had everywhere to be done by the immediate ofiBcers of the Crown. At all events, the system of royal progresses^ of holding assemblies in various parts of the land, is a marked feature of the reign of Henry, and it is one which must have gone far to bring about that more thorough consolidation of the whole kingdom which was one great result of the Norman Conquest. Among the faults attributed to Henry, as well as to his father,^ we find that of avarice, and the charge is accom- panied with a picture of money extorted in various unjust ways, but always, it would seem, under some cover of legal right. The cry against the fiscal oppression of Henry's reign goes up almost year after year from the national Chronicler. In one case we distinctly see the national feeling rising up against one of the new-fangled forms of feudal exaction, the demand of an aid on the marriage of the King's daughter. A pitiful picture is drawn of the sufferings which were endured by the poor, and we hear how every kind of litiga- tion and accusation was encouraged which might bring in gain to the royal Exchequer.^ More than once in his reign Henry found a strange source of revenue in extorting fines from those priests who still dared to keep wives in spite of the new canons.^ In all this we see the further carrying on of that fiscal spirit which came in under the Con- queror, and which grew under his successors till the main ' See vol. iv. p. 620. ^ Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 83. This is in 1105, during Anselm's absence. ^ Eadmer (u. s.) tells this story. The King laid a fine on the married clergy, and, when he found that this did not bring in so much as was looked for, he fined them all round, married and unmarried. The Queen was implored to help them, but she was afraid. HIS FISCAL EXACTIONS. 163 end of government seemed to be the collecting and in- oh.sxiii. creasing of the King's revenue.^ This was one of the direct This form results of the Conquest ; it was the bringing in of a wholly eion'an^'' new spirit into the administration. In the old times we ^^^^^^fl^ read of no complaints of exactions in money, except in Conquest. some such extraordinary case as the laying on of the Dane- geld. Whatever wrongs may have gone on in the days of -i3Ethelred or in any other evil time, we hear nothing of that particular form of unlaw and unright which consisted in abusing the King's authority to wring money out of all classes of the people by every form of vexatious demand. This evil began with the Conqueror ; it went on under the Red King ; it went on under Henry, and we are told that it was all the more heavily felt under Henry, because, after the exactions of his father and brother, the people had less left to pay.^ On the other hand, we hear the praises of Henry sounded on one point on which we should rather have looked for a voice the other way. While the enforcement of the cruel His en- laws of the forest is set down to the bad side of his father's ^f the account, it seems to be said rather to the praise of Henry ^°''®^* ^^^' that " peace he made for man and deer." In his love for the chase he enforced the legislation of his father in all its strictness, and he kept up the cruel mutilation, the lawing as it was called, of all dogs in the neighbourhood of the royal forests.^ But when we read that he kept the right of He keeps hunting throughout the whole kingdom in his own hands/ j^ hiTown hands. ' This is well brought out by Gneist, Englische Verwaltungsrecht, i. 194. 2 Eadmer, u. s. ^ Ord. Vit. 823 B, 0. This brutal practice, on which Sir P. Palgrave has something to say (ir. 648), went on long after Henry's time. It seems to be alluded to in the prophecy of Merlin (Ord. Vit. 887 D) ; " Pedes latrantium truncabuntur. Paoem habebunt ferae, humanitas supplicium dolebit." * This comes out most strongly in Henry of Huntingdon (221 6^ after Henry's death. Stephen swears that he will not keep other men's woods in his hands, " sicut Rex Heniicus fecerat, qui singulis annis implacitaverat eos 164 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. XXIII. we can perhaps see the explanation of the seeming praise which the Chronicler gives him in this matter. The number of men whom the royal monopoly of hunting delivered from the curse of a little Nimrod in every manor ^ would doubtless be greater than the number of those who were themselves wronged by the harshness of the laws which fenced in the King^s own sport. In this, as in all things, we can give Henry the praise — and in some states of society it is no small praise — of putting one tyrant in He keeps the stead of many. Henry at least taught the highest and in order, proudest of his nobles that there was a power in the land higher than their own. Where he reigned, rebellion and private war were not rights to be boasted of, but crimes against the law, which the law knew how to punish.^ To Henry's a King who did this much might be forgiven. Men not to be out- only forgave him crimes and vices which touched but few weighed by ^^ them ; they forgave him the severity of an administra- ms merits. ^ j o j tion which now and then confounded the innocent with the guilty ; they forgave him his frequent and heavy demands si vel venationem cepissent in sUvia propriis, vel si eas ad necessitates suas exstirparent vel diminuerent." He adds, " Quod placiti nefandi genus adeo fuit exsecrabUe ut si alicujus lucum quern habere pecuniam asstimarent a longe couspicerent, statim vastatum perhiberent, sive esset sive non, ut eum immerito redimerent." All this was doubtless unjust and harassing enough, but it must have fallen much more heavily on the great men than on the bulk of the people. William of Newburgh (i. 3) however says, '■ Feras quoque propter venationis delicias plus justo diligens, inpubUois animadver- sionibus cervicidas ab homicidis parum discemebat." Wace (i 5633) gives some curious mocking speeches on Henry's love for the chase, which he puts into the mouth of the younger William of Warren by the corrupt name of " Li Quens de Waumeri." ' For this phrase I have to thank the optimist Blackstone — not often the historian's friend — in the famous passage where he denounces the "bastard slip know by the name of the Game Law," and adds, "the Forest laws established only one mighty hunter tbroughout the land, the Game laws have raised a little Nimrod in every manor." Commentaries, iv. ch. 33. ». 2. ^ The unlawfulness of private war in England (see vol. ii. p. 235) and the rigour with which Henry put down breaches of the law of this kind is strongly marked by a passage in Orderio (805 C) ; " Ivonem [de Grente- EFFECTS OP HENRY S REIGN. 165 upon their purses ; they forgave him the pursuit of a policy ch. xxiii. continental rather than English ; they forgave him even a systematic preference for strangers in the disposal of high offices within his island kingdom. All this, and more also, might be forgiven to the King who did justice, the King who made his peace kept throughout his realm, the King in whose days " none man might misdo with other." It is easy to see what must have been the effect of such Historical a reign as this on the general course of our history. The his reign. rule of the Lion of Justice did, as I have already said, much to lessen the gap between the conquering and the conquered race within his kingdom. It did much to fuse Fusion of together Normans and English, that is to say, in the long and Eng- run to change Normans into Englishmen. But this ^'^^' was done, not so much by an occasional and ostentatious assumption of English manners and feelings, as by bring- ing all men, of whatever race and 'whatever rank, within the grasp of the royal authority. We shall see, in an- other Chapter, how this process worked in detail in those gradual and silent changes in our ancient constitution which the Norman Conquest in the end brought about. It is Growth of enough to say here that many of the later principles of power, government, many of the doctrines which most tend to exalt the kingly power, may be dated from the reign of Henry. The old law and constitution, those laws of Ead- ward which Henry restored, were never abolished ; but, as they had been trodden under foot by the brute force of Rufus, so now they were undermined by the subtle policy of Henry. The change from Rufas to Henry was the change from the fierce impulses of a personal and capiicious will to the despotism of a single man, but a despotism maisnilio] quoque, quia guerram in Anglia cceperat, et vioinorum rura suorum inoendio combusserat, quod in iUa regione crimen est inusitatum, nee sine gravi ultione fit expiatum, rigidus censor accusatum, nee purgatum, ingentis pecunise redditione oneravit, et plurimo angore tribulatum mcesti- ficavit." 166 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. Eeign of law under Henry. Its effect on the revival of the thirteenth century. working according to acknowledged laws. In days when the old freedom could no longer be hoped for, such a desi^otism was a temporary blessing. The reign of law, in whatever shape, succeeded to the reign of brute force. Henry wore the crown of Rufus ; but he used the powers of his crown to put down Eobert of Belesme. The two races were brought together in subjection to a common master, to a master whose will was law in more senses of the proverb than one. This common subjection of Normans and Eng- lish to the kingly power, when the kingly power alone represented law and right, did more than anything else to blend Normans and English into one nation. It paved the way for the day when that united nation should arise in its strength to assert the supremacy of the law, the sovereignty of the people, when the people had grown up in its renewed being, and when the law was once more, as of old, the maker and the master of the King. Henry elected King at Win- chester, On the death of Rnfus it was at once seen how vain was the attempt which had been made to settle the succes- sion to the throne of England before it was vacant. The agreement by which the Crown was to pass to Robert went for nothing. With the general consent of all men of both races, and with the special good will of the English, the crown passed to the JEtheling Henry, the one English-born Aug-ust 3, member of the royal house, the only one who was the son of a crowned King.' A momentary refusal to give up the royal treasury to Henry seems to have been the only sign that ' WiU. Gem. viii. lo, " Annueutibus cunctis Francis et AngUs . . diadema suscepit." Then follows the passage about his royal and English birth quoted in vol. iv. p. 791. So Orderic (7S2 D); "Hunc AngU optaverunt habere dominum, quern nobUiter in eoHo regni noverant genitum." So WU- liam of Newburgh, who at the beginning of the reign of Eufus (see above, p. 76) sympathized with the eldest-bom, says now (i. 3) that Henry was " filiorum WiHehni Magiii ordine nativitatis novissimus, sed prcerogativa primus. Quippe aUis in ducatu patris natis, solus ipse ex eodem jam Eege est ortus." ELECTION AND COEONATION OP HENEY. 167 the pretensions of Robert were remembered by a single oh. xxiii. man.^ The ancient forms of an election were observed ; as soon as Rufus was buried, " the Witan that there near at hand were his brother Henry to King chose." ^ Henry's first act was to show that one of the evil practices of the late reign was at ourje to come to an end. The churches of Eng- land were no longer to be kept without pastors. While still He ap- only King-elect, he exercised^ as the ^theling Eadgar had ^iuiam done,^ one royal right by giving a Bishop to the city inGiffardto which the gathering for his election was held. He bestowed Win- - the bishoprick of Winchester on William Giffard.* Four „. ^ His coro- days after his brother's death, Henry was crowned at West- nation at "West- minster by Maurice Bishop of London, after he had sworn minster. in the fullest terms to restore the good laws, and to do "^"^ *' His oath ; away with all the unright which had been done in the time of his brother.^ On the same day he put forth the famous His Charter. ' Orderic (783 C) tells the tale of the resistance of William of Breteuil, which reminda one of the story of Csesar and MeteUus. Henry is **genuinns hseres," ''praesens h^eres qui suum jus calumniabatur ; " he draws his sword, " nee extraneum quemlibet per frivolam procrastiuationem patris sceptrum prasoccupare permisit." "Ordericus Angligena" clearly sympathized with his countryman. Wace has (15245) a more singular story, according to which the crown was forced upon Henry against his will. The Bishops and Barons come together, seize upon Henry, and crown him ; " Henris pristrent, cil corouerent, Tote la terre li Uvrerent." They cannot wait for Robert, and they cannot do without a King, so " Henris s'en fist assez pr^ier, " Mais li Baron tant le prierent, Ainz k'U le voulsist otr^ier ; Plusors tant le cunseillierent, Son frh-e, yo diat atendreit, Ke il fist 90 ke il li distrent Ki de Jerusalem vendreit ; Et otreia 90 ke il quistrent." ' CJhron. Petrib. 1 100. "SySJjan he bebyrged waea, t)a witan he \>3, neh handa wajron his broSer Heanrig to cynge gecuran." So Hen. Hunt. 2166; "Ibidem [apud Winceater] in regem electus." ' See vol. iii. p. 530. * Chron. Petrib. iioo; Hen. Hunt. 2166. = Chron. Petrib. ib. " Toforan Jam weofode on Weatmynstre, Gode and eallan folce behet eaUe Jja unriht to aleggenne \>e on his broker timan w^ran, and ))a betstan lage to healdene Je on senigea cyngea dsege toforan him stodan." 168 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. xxni. cliai'ter which was the immediate parent of the Great Charter itself. Its general object was to undo the special wrong-doings of the last reign, and to bring things back to the state in which they had been during the reign of law under the Confessor and the Conqueror. King Henry gave back to his people the laws of King Eadward as He keeps amended by King William. On one point alone he was inli^'^^*^ obstinate ; he gave out from the beginning that he would hands. jjgep the forests in his own hands. ^ All his other acts General were popular. As soon as the men of his kingdom had done^to bowcd to him and sworn oaths and become his men,^ he him. began his work of reform. By the advice of his Witan, the King punished the chief minister of his brother's un- Heimpri- right and unlaw and restored their chief victim. Bishop doif Flam- Randolf of Durham, the dregs of wickedness^ was sent to bard ^j^g Towcr, the first man recorded to have dwelled as a and recalls prisoner in the Conqueror's fortress.^ Anselm was sent for from Lyons.* And, yet further to win the love of the He marries native English, he took a wife who by the spindle-side SeouSd ° came of the old kingly line. He had long loved, so we are toldj Eadgyth the daughter of King Malcolm and the November II. ^ I shall speak more of Henry's Charter elsewhere ; its main provisions are summed up by Florence ; " Legem Regis Eadwardi omnibus in commune reddidit, cum ilUs emendationibus quibus pater suus iUam emendavit [see vol. iv. p. 324], sed forestas quas iUe constituit et habuit, in manu sua retinuit." Henry's French admirer Suger (c. 15) brings this out strongly ; " Eex Henricus GuiUelmo fi'atri feliciter succedens, cum consilio peritorum et proborum virorum regnum Anglise regno antiquorum Eegum gratanter disposuisset, ipsasque regni antiquas consuetudines ad captandam eorum benevolentiam jurejurando firmaret." ^ Chron. Petrib. iioo. "Him eaUe on Jieosanlande to abugan and a^as sworan and his men wurdon." This is according to the law of 1086. See vol. iv. p. 695. ^ The Chronicler distinctly marks that the imprisonment of Eandolf Flambard was done "be faere rjede Jie him abutan wceran.'' For the phrase " Kannulfus nequitiarum feex " I have to thank William of Malmesbury, ■>'• 393- * The Chronicler again marks that the embassy to Anselm was sent "be his witena Kede." MAEEIAGE OF HENEY AND EADGYTH. 169 good Queen ilargaret^ who lived in England with her ch. xxiii. aunt Christina, the Abbess of Romsey.-*^ Objections indeed were made to the marriage on the ground that Eadgyth had not only been an inhabitant of her aunt's monastery, but had herself actually taken the vows. On the re- turn of Anselm the case was fully heard ; the objections were judged to be null,^ and the Primate, who declared the daughter of Malcolm free to marry, presently offi- ciated at the marriage and at the coronation of the Queen. ^ To please Norman ears, Eadgyth had, most likely at the Her name rite of her crowning, to change her English name for Matilda, the continental Matilda, just as, to please English ears, Emma had once had to change her continental name for English ^Ifgifu.* England had now once more a King ^ On Cliristina, see vol. iy. p. 697. ° The canonical objections to the marriage, the statement made by Ead- gyth, and the decision of Anselm that the marriage was lawful, are described at length by Eadraer in the beginning of his third book. His decision was grounded on the decision of Lanfranc in cases of the like kind ; see vol. iv. p. 566. A foreign writer, Hermann of Tournay, quoted by Migne in his edition of Eadmer, tells another and less credible story of the way in which an Abbess, seemingly not Christina, shielded Eadgyth from the -laolence of Kufus. The story is worth reading, as it gives us a glimpse of the Red Ejng in quite a new character. The Abbess asks him to step into her flower garden and look at her roses. ^ The marriage is recorded by all our authorities. Florence marks that the King "majores natu Anglise congregavit Lundoniae " for the purpose of the marriage; and an incidental notice of Eadmer (Hist. Nov. 58) lets us see that this gathering still kept up at least a survival of the popular character of our ancient assembhes ; " Pater ipse [Anselmus] totam regni nobilitatem populumque minorem pro hoc ipso circumfluentem necne pro foribus ecclesiss Eegem et illam circumvallantem sublimius cseteris stans in commune edocuit." The Chronicler does not omit to notice that the new Queen was " of fan rihtan ^nglalandes kyne kynue." The former love of Henry for Eadgyth is mentioned by Eadmer, by Orderic, 784 A, William of Mahnesbury, v. 393 ; and one phrase of Eadmer ("dum eos a cupitis amplexibus retardaret") might seem to show that the passion was a mutual one. The story of Matthew Paris (Hist. Aug. i. 189), according to which " beata virgo Matilda " had the strongest distaste for the marriage, sounds like a romance of the convent. * See vol. i. p. 334. The fact that Matilda had formerly borne the name of Eadgyth comes from Orderic, 702 A, 843 B. 170 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. xxm. born on her own soil, a Queen of the blood of the hero Eadmund, a King and Queen whose children would trace Mockery to Alfred by two descents. Norman insolence mocked at Norman the English King and his English Lady under the English courtiers. ^^^^^^ ^f q^^^.j^ ^^^ Godgifu.' The spirit which prompted this mockery soon showed The early itself in a more dangerous shape. The events of the Henry re- beginning of Henry's reign read strangely like the events peat those ^f ^jjg bee-innino- of the reiffn of Rufus over asrain. Henry, ofRufus. . . . . . like his brother, was to have his experience of English loyalty and of Norman treason. It is significantly noticed that the crowning of Henry was accompanied by the special Conspiracy applause of the commons.^ We presently hear how the Robert. head men of the land^ conspired a second time to get rid of "°'- a King who relied mainly on native English support, and whose title to the Crown was more intelligible to English than to Norman minds. The object of the conspiracy was the same as the conspiracy in the days of Rufus. Robert had now come back from the Holy Land^ and those who dreaded the stern justice of Henry sought again to transfer the Crown to him. But this time there was hardly anything Loyalty that could be called open war. Whatever was the feeling English, of the Norman nobles, the English people stuck faithfully to the King born in their own land. It is significantly said that they knew nothing of the rights of Robert.* His ^ Will. Malms, v. 394. " Omnes . . . palam contumeHia dominum inurere, Godrioum eum et comparem Godgivam appellantes.'' ' lb. 393. "Certatim plausu plebeio concrepante, in Eegem coronatus est." ^ Chron. Petrib. iioi. "Sona ])ser8efter wurdon ))a heafodmen her on lande wiSerneden togeanes Jjam cynge." The Chronicler does not, as in 1088, say that they were Frenchmen, though they doubtless were. (See Appendix W.) Cf. Wm. Mahns. v. 594 ; Hen. Hunt. 216 6; Ord. Vit. 7S6 B ; Will. Gem. viii. 12. ' The loyalty of the English is especially asserted by Florence, iioi; WiUiam of MaJmesbury, v. 395 ; Orderic, 786 B, 787 B ; in which latter place his words are, " Omnes quoque Angli, alterius principis j ura nescientes, in sui Regis fidehtate perstiterunt, pro qua certamen inire satis optaverunt." EGBERT INVADES ENGLAND. 171 claim could rest only on a doctrine of primogeniture which ch. xxiii. was unknown to English law, and on an agreement with 'the late King by which the rights of the nation were bartered away. The mercenary soldiers too, of whatever race, clave to King Henry .^ He was likely to be a far more regular paymaster than the spendthrift Robert. The Zeal of An- Bishops were faithful to the King whom they had just the other hallowed. The zeal of the holy Anselm even went so far ^'^'lop^- that he appeared at the head of the men of his lands/ ready to play the part of Leofric and j3^;ifwig against the new Norman invader.' Both the elements of military strength, the fyrd and the /lere, together with the power of the Church, were arrayed on Henry's side. Against such an union the Norman Duke and a handful of Norman nobles had no chance. The King's forces waited for a third land- Robert ing at Pevensey, but Robert, having won over some part of at Ports- the English fleet, landed at Portsmouth.* No battle how- "^^^^^^ ^^ ever followed. According to one account,' Robert now no'- showed one of his occasional acts of generosity by declining to attack the city of Winchesterj where his sister-in-law Cf. "Win. Gem. viii. 12. On the version of these events in Matthew Paris and Thierry, see Appendix Y. ' The "milites gregarii" are mentioned by Florence along with the Bishops and the EngUsh. " Both WiUiam of Malmesbury and Orderio witness to the zeal of Anselm in the King's cause, but it is from his own biographer (59) that we learn the curious fact of his personal presence with tie army ; " Circa Regem Meliter cum suis in expeditione excubabat pater Anselmus." ' See vol. iii. p. 426. * The treason of some of the "Butsecarli " is mentioned by the Chronicler and by Henry of Huntingdon. Florence adds that Robert won them over " consiho Rannulfi episcopi," which seems odd, as Flambard was then in the Tower. ' Wace, 15452. "Passa mer, vint a Poreoestre, D'iloc ala prendre Wincestre ; Maiz Ten li dist ke la Reine Sa serorge esteit en g^sine, Et l1 dist ke vilain sereit, Ki dame en gi^sine assaldreit." 172 THE NOEMAN KmGS m ENGLAND. cH. xxTii. and god-child, Queen Matilda, was tarrying after the birth of her first child. This kind of thoughtfulness for a single person of exalted rank is quite in the spirit of chivalry; a more reasonable spirit might, before undertaking a war of personal aggression, have stopped to think whether the prize was worth the harm which was sure to light on many inno- Treaty cent persons of all ranks. But presently, by the advice of the Henry and great men on both sides, among whom Anselm and Robert Eobert. ^f Meulan are specially mentioned,^ the brothers came to an agreement. Robert gave up his claims on the Crown, he acknowledged his brother's royal dignity, and released him from the tie of personal homage, contracted doubtless when Henry first received his fief of the Cotentin. That fief, and his other continental possessions^ save only his faithful and cherished Domfront, Henry now gave up to Robert. Robert was further to have a pension of three thousand marks yearly, and, as in the old agreement between Robert and Rufus, if either brother died without lawful heirs, the surviving brother was to succeed to his dominions.^ Last open The campaign of Rochester, in the second year of Rufus, between was the last year in which Englishmen and Normans, as anTEng- Englishmen and Normans, met in arms on English soil. lish. The campaign of Portsmouth, if campaign it can be called, in the second year of Henry was the last time when, though Englishmen and Normans did not actually meet in battle on English soil, they at least stood in arms face to face. England had won herself a King ; and under that King her forces were soon to go forth to the conquest of ' Eaclmer (Hist. Nov. 49) is emphatic on the services of Anselm at this time, and he goes so far as to say, " si post gratlam Dei fidelitas et industria non intercessisset Ansekm, Henriciis Eex ea tempestate perdidisset jus Anglici regni." WUliam of Mahnesbury (v. 395) and Orderic (787 C) tell us of Robert of Meulan. ^ Tlie terms of the treaty, as before (see above, p. 87), come out most fuUy in the Chronicle. The Continuator of William of Jumibges (viii. 1 2) raises the money to 4000 marks. ESTABLISHMENT OP HENRY's POWER. 173 Normandy. But before he could stretch forth his hands ch. xxiii. to conquests beyond sea, Henry had to get firm possession Henry P ■,.■,. -, , -tr • • establishes 01 his kingdom at home. X'arious traitors and enemies his power had to be got rid of, not suddenly, we are told, but one by i'^^'^g^™'^- one, and that as King Henry knew how to get rid of men, either by process of law^ or, in ease of open rebellion, by force of arms. In short, the men who were powerful and dangerous, the great Earls and chiefs whose names stand foremost in Domesday, were to make way for a new race of men who owed their greatness to the King himself.^ Foremost among the rebels was the fierce Eobert of Revolt and Belesme, who again openly waged war against his sove- of Robert"* reign. But it was in vain that he built himself castles of Eelesme. 1102. and made a league, like his predecessor Eadwine,' with his British neighbours. The cruel son of Roger and Mabel learned the truth that in England no one man could stand against the King ; * his castles were taken, his Welsh allies were bribed to disperse, and the Earl himself had to leave his English possessions and to content himself with what he held in Normandy and Prance.^ The fall of another noble of almost equal power followed before long. William of Cornwall and Mortain, who had Banish- ment and ' This comes out in the opening of Orderio's eleventh book (804 B, C). He mentions the familiar names of Eobert Malet and Ivo of Grantmesnil, and adds, "ad judicium summonuit, nee simul sed separatim, variisque tem- poribus et multimedia violate fidei reatibus implaoitavit." Fine, confiscation, banishment, are the penalties. ^ See above, p. 158. ' See vol. ii. p. 490 ; iv. p. 182. ' See Will. Malms, iv. 306. ' The war with Eobert of Belesme is recorded in the Chronicle, 1102 (the mention of the Welshmen comes from 3?lorenoe), Will. Malms, v. 396, more briefly in Henry of Huntingdon, 217, and fullest of all in the Shrop- shire man Orderic, 806-808. He gives us the names of the Welsh princes, Cadwgan and Gruflydd, sons of Ehys. The EngUsh followers of the King come out strongly in his narrative, but I think I discern an English Wulfgar in " tJlgerius venator," a captain of mercenaries under Eobert of Belesme. Eobert of Belesme appears again as a visitor in England in the winter of 1105-1106, 174 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN" ENGLAND. cH. XXIII. further succeeded liis uncle Odo in the earldom of Kent, confisca- ^^s driven out by a iudieial sentence.^ These men indeed tion 01 J <> WiUiamof went to swell the strength of resistance against Hemy 1 104. in Normandy j but the meshes of Henry's craft were steadily drawing closer round the eldest- born of the Con- Heury's queror. Duke Robert paid more than one visit to England, Namianriy. in one of which he found it convenient to give up his pension, under the guise of making a present of it to the Queen. 2 But the wealth of Henry, and the wretched misgovernment, or rather no -government, of Robert, stirred up enemies against him throughout his duehy.^ His Two campaigns, separated by one of Robert's fruitless campaions visits to England, brought Normandy into the hands of 1105-1106. Henry. Beneath the walls of Count William's castle of Tinchebrai. Tinchebrai the fate of Normandy was decided. Robert of September ggiggine escaped bv tiiffht for a season ; a crowd of names 28, 1106. ■■■ . . . even prouder than his. Count William the lord of the castle, the ^theling Eadgar, Duke Robert himself, became the prisoners of Henry. William of Mortaiu, the nephew of the Conqueror, whose father's castle had risen within the walls of Anderida, spent the rest of his days in bonds, Eadgar some said in blindness.* Eadgar had but lately left the released. King again to attach himself to his former friend and ' See the Chronicle and Florence, 11 04, and more fully in William of Malmesbury, y. 397. ' Chron. Petrib. and Flor. Wig. 1103. The mention of the Queen comes from Orderio, 805 A ; AVUl, Mahns. iv. 389; v. 395. The story is told at great length by Wace (15688 et seq.). The cahn wisdom of Robert of Meulan plays a chief part in the story. ^ WlU. Malms, v. 398. But the most graphic accounts come from Or- deric (786 E), though they are put somewhat earlier. WiUiara of New- burgh goes so far as to say (i. 3), "Invitatus a majoribus ejusdem pro- vincise Rex Henricus civili magis animo quam hostUi aflFuit." The fullest account of the war is that given byAVace (15950 et seq.), who naturally enlarges in a special way on the fate of his own city of Bayeus, but he mixes different campaigns together. See Pluquet's note, ii. 204. * The captivity of Wilham of Mortain is mentioned by aU our authorities. On his alleged bUuding, see Appendix X. CONQUEST OP NOEMAKDY. 175 fellow- crusader.^ He now, after so many ups and downs of ch. xxm. life, was again spared, again left to spend the rest of his long life in harmless obscurity.^ Robert himself, who had refused the crown of Jerusalem ^ and had twice failed of the crown of England, lived on till the year before the end of the long reign of his brother. For twenty-eight Imprison- years he was a prisoner, moved from castle to castle at his Robert. brother's will, but still treated, so at least his brother pro- ii°o-ii34- fessed, with all the deference and courtesy which his rank and his misfortunes might claim.* The native Chronicler sends up his wail at the sorrows Exaction of which England had to bear through the money -wrung tjjg^ar. from her people to pay the cost of the conquest of Nor- mandy.^ Yet we can hardly doubt that English national Tinohebrai feeling found a subject for rejoicing in the event of the day yi'ctory. of Tinchebrai. That fight was more worthy of the name of a pitched battle than any fight that England or Normandy had seen since the great days of Stamfordbridge and Senlac. And men might deem that at Tinchebrai the wergild of the men who died at Senlac began to be paid back. Englishmen had twice beaten back the Norman from their own shores ; they had now overthrown the Norman on his own soil. A King of the English, raised to his throne by the voice of the English people, a King who won his victory fighting on foot like an Englishman at the head of Englishmen/ had made Normandy his own by force of arms, and had brought back the Duke of the Normans a prisoner to his own island. An historian 1 Chron. Petrib. 1106. 2 See William of Malmesbuiy, iii. 251. Eadgar was clearly aUve wlien he wrote. " Will. Malms, iv. 389, where see Sir T. D. Hardy's note. * See Appendix Z. = See under the years 1 104, 1105. « This clear case of an influence of EngKsh practice on Norman military tactics is marked by Orderic, 821 A; "Eex Anglos et Normannos eecum 176 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. XXIII. who shared the blood of both nations ^ dwells on the fact that £ovtj years, even to the self-same day, after the Normans had set forth at Pevensey for the conquest of England, Normandy itself became a land subject to Eng- Normandy land.^ So in a sense it was. Things were not yet as they by°Eng-'' were to be in the days of the Angevins^ when Normandy and laud. England ahke seemed merged in the vast dominion which stretched from the Orkneys to the Pyrenees. England was the kingdom, and Normandy was the province. It was a province won in open war by a King of the English, at the head of men^ many of whom were doubtless Euglish by blood and all of whom were English by allegiance. Imprison- King Henry, like his namesake three hundred years later, Eobert of Game back as a conqueror to England, to spend some years 1^12^""* in enforcing the peace of his kingdom, in settling ecclesias- tical disputes, and, after a season^, to win the good will of England and of mankind by sending Robert of Belesme to a life-long dungeon. As things stood between the two brothers, Normandy could hardly have failed to fall sooner or later to the lot of Immediate the stronger of the two. And great, we cannot doubt^ Normandy ^^^ ^^^ immediate gain to the conquered country, through of Henry's ^[jg change from the no-rule of Robert to the strict and conquest. pedites detinuit." But from Henry of Huntingdon (217), who gives the Old- English reason (see vol. i. p. 299 ; iii. p. 472), it would seem that Robert also adopted the same tactics; "Kes et dux et acies caaterse pedites erant ut constantius pugnarent." The horse on Henry's side were the Bretons and the men of Maine under HeKas. ^ William of Malmesbury says of liimself in his preface to the third book, "Ego utriusque gentis sanguinem traho.'' ' Will. Malms, v. 398. "Idem dies ante quadraginta circiter annos fuerat, cum Willelmiis Hastingas primus appulit ; provide forsitan Dei judicio ut eo die aubderetur AngHs Normanni, quo ad eam subju- gandam olim venerat Normannorum copia." So William of New- burgh (i. 3) ; " Henrious reg-no Angliae socians ducatum Normannise, sicut pater oUm ducatui Normamnaa regnum sociaverat Anglic, nomen celebre et grande adeptua eat, juxta nomen magnorum qui sunt in terra." HENRY S EEIGN IN NORMANDY. 177 watchful police of Henry .^ But the reunion of England ch. xxiii. and Normandy under a single sovereign was by no means a source of unmixed good to either country. For England, Peace of after the rebellion of Robert of Belesme had been put down, EngUah the reign of Henry, as far as peace at home and abroad were ^^^S^- concerned^ was more than a return to the days of the peaceful Eadgar. Within his island realm the life of King One Henry and the security of his government were threatened agains™*^^ but once, and that only by a conspiracy formed by a '^'""' traitor among his own servants.^ Scotland was friendly ; it was only on the side of Wales that wars or rumours of wars were heard of. But in Normandy things were in a very different case. Whether Henry preferred England to Constant Normandy or not, it is certain that the affairs of his duchy Normandy, often called for his presence, and thus led to long absences from his kingdom. Through a long part of his reign, he had dangerous enemies both within Normandy and on its borders. Robert, in the course of his return from the East, Robert's had married Sibyl of Conversana in the Norman lands of William. Italy, a woman who is described as far fitter to rule his duchy than he was himself.'' Her early death left him ^ The restoration of good order in Normandy is strongly set forth by Orderic, 821 D. In the usual formula, he restored the laws of William the Conqueror ; "patemas leges renovavit." Sugar (c. 15) sets forth the vigour of Henry's Norman government very strongly, but adds that he was " fretua domini Regis Francorum auxilio." So William of Malmesbiuy (v. 405) speaks of Lewis as an ally of Henry in the conquest of Normandy ; " corruptus videlicet Anglorum spoliis et multo regis obryzo." ' This story is told by William of Malmesbury, v. 411. He speaks of the traitor as " quidam cubicularius, plebeii generis patre, sed pro re- giorum thesaurorum oustodia famosi nominis homine, natus." One wishes to know the names of these men, seemingly court officers ; but all that we can get is an initial in Suger (0. 21), where the criminal appears as "H. nomine, &,miliarium intimus. Regis liberalitate ditatus, potens et famosus, famosior proditor.'' Suger goes on to mention his punishment, the usual one of mutilation, with the comment, " quura laqueum suffooantem meruisset, misericorditer est damnatua." He speaks also of Henry's fears in the same style in which those of Cromwell are commonly spoken of. = On the marriage of Robert and Sibyl see Orderic, 780 A, 784 B, and VOL. V. N 178 THE KOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxiii. with a young sou William, whose claims to Normandy, if not to England 1 — though within England they clearly were never heard of — were zealously asserted by a strong party in Normandy, and were found a convenient handle by the Wars with jealous over-lord of the duchy. Constant wars, both with re- FrjLiic6 belKous Normans and with the King of the French, fill up a large space in the annals of Henry's reign. They are wars moreover in which, as at Tinchebrai, engagements which have some right to be called pitched battles do some- thing to diversify the wearisome record of endless petty sieges and skirmishes. Thus the rivalry between France and England which began under Rufus went on under Henry. And, thus early in the strife, Henry turned to the natural ally of England in such a struggle, to the ally with whom in after days we shared in defeat at Bouvines and in victory at Waterloo. Close alliance with Germany, the old policy of England, the policy of J]]thelstan, Cnut, and Harold, was no less the policy of the first King of the stranger dynasty who had the least claim to be looked on as an Ene-lishman. Alliance with the Empire. In his war, Henry dealings with France, both in peace and in had to deal with a far abler and more active rival than his brother had ever had to deal with, or than his father had had in his later years. The accession of Lewis the son of Philip the First, whom we m France. ]-,ave already heard of in the wars of Rufus,^ marks an 1109. ■' _ ' epoch in the history of the French monarchy. The new Accession of Lewis the Fat her death in 810 A, which is differently told by William of Malmesbury, iv. 389. See her panegyric in the Continuator ofWilliam of Jumifeges, viii. 14. ' He is several times called "Clito" by Orderic (838 B). "Clito" is of ccurse equivalent to jEtheling ; but Orderic seems to make a distinction between the "Clito," son of Robert, and the "Adelinus,'' son of Henry. He also once at least applies the name " Clito " to a son of the King of the French. ^ See above, p. loi. He appears in the Chronicle as "LoSewis.'' Orderic gives him, as he does several other princes, a double name, " Ludovicus Tedbaldus ; " but in his Life by Suger he is simply " Ludovicus." on French EEIGN OF LEWIS THE SIXTH IN PRANCE. 179 King betook himself actively to establishing the kingly ch. xxiii. authority within the small part of his nominal kingdom Character which formed the actual domain of his Crown.^ And, as a reign, balance to the power of the turbulent nobles which he was ^^ithThr seeking to overthrow, he was s:lad to encourage the rising nobles and . . ^ ' . '^ " . ^ encourage- spirit of freedom, and to give the royal sanction to the ment of the n ,- n 1 . 1 T J 1 • -±1 • • communes. lormation oi communes which supplied him with a civic militia in his wars. The seed which had been sown at Le Mans a generation earlier^ was now bearing fruit in France and other parts of Gaul ; and the Bishops, no less than the King, found it their interest to encourage the new spirit.^ In France, in short, just as in England at Effects of the moment of Robert's landing, the King, the Church, ofLetrac and the people were leagued together against an oppressive ?!°°'^ nobility. But from this point, the course of the two countries parted oiF in different ways. In France, the Kings used the people against the nobles as long as it suited their purpose, and in the end brought nobles, people, and clergy into one common bondage. In England, the growth of a despotic power in the Crown was checked by the union of nobles, clergy, and people in a cause common to them all. This strengthening of the power of the French King within his own dominions was naturally accompanied by increased vigour in the relations of the ' All the earlier chapters of his Life by Suger are mainly taken up with describing his exploits against various refractory nobles, especially the op- pressors of the churches. Orderic too (836 A, B) enlarges on the vigour of Lewis against the " tyrannis prsedonum et seditiosoruni." He began while his father was alive. A specimen of the kind of men with whom he had to deal is described at length by Suger, c. 2 1 . Cf. the account of the same man in Henry of Huntingdon, De Contemptu Mundi, Ang. Sao. ii. 698. ' See vol. iv. p. 549. ^ Orderic (836 B), just after the passage last quoted, goes on, " Auxilium totam per GaUiam deposcere coactus est episcoporum. Tunc ergo commu- nitas in Francia popularis statu ta est a pr^sulibus, nt presbyteri comi- tarentur Eegi ad obsidionem vel pugnam cum vexiUis et parochianis omnibus.'' So Suger (c. 18), describing one of Lewis's campaigns, says incidentally, " cum communit&tes patriae parochiarum adessent." N a 180 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. XXIII. Crown to the princes who owed it a nominal homage. The reign of Lewis the Fat may be set down as the be- ginning of that gradual growth of the Parisian monarchy which in the end swallowed up all the states which owed it homage/ besides so large a part of the German and Burgundian kingdoms. Wars With such a power growing up on his continental He^™nd frontier, it was hardly possible that Henry, in his character Lewis. Qf master, if not formally Duke,^ of Normandy, should fail to come into collision.^ The two Kings had once been personal friends. Lewis had sought shelter in England when his step-mother was plotting against him ; he had been received with the highest honours, and, it would almost seem, had become the man of the English Eling.* But such ties counted for little when Lewis sat on the throne of his father, and when Normandy was in the First war hands of Henry. A dispute about the border fortress of Gisors, and the enmity between King Lewis and Theobald 1111-1113. of Chartres, the nephew of Henry, the son of his re- nowned sister Adela,^ led to two years of war early in the reign of Lewis.'' The war is told us in some detail, and we read of a characteristic refusal of the English ■ Of course vnth the exceptions made in vol. i. p. 173. ^ Lappenberg (300) remarks that Hemy did not take the title of Duke of the Normans during his brother's lifetime. It is however given to him by others, as by Suger, 0.21. ^ William of Mahnesbury (v. 404) remarks that there was no strife between Philip and Henry, because Henry's small possessions in Normandy marched rather on Britanny than on France. * SeeOrd. Vit. 812D; Sim. Dun. iioi. ° See vol. iv. p. 652. , " The Chronicler, after recording the succession of Lewis in 1108, adds, "and wurdon sySiSon manege gewiun betwux Jiani cynge of France and Jjam of Englelande, J)a hwile ]>e he on Normandig wunode." But the war itself does not begin till mi, when Henry is recorded as going beyond sea, "for unsehte Jie wi^ him haefdon sume be Jiam gemaeran of I'rance." The history of this war in Suger, who alone mentions tlie quarrel about Gisors, begins in 0. 15. The account in Orderic, 836-842, is rather con- fused in its chronology. DEALINGS WITH FRANCE AND FLANDERS. 181 King to jeopard political and military advantages by the ch. xxiii. chivalrous folly of meeting his rival in single combat on a dangerous bridge.' It is more remarkable to find the Enmity of Counts of Flanders arrayed throughout these wars as the ofFlanderb. allies of France and the enemies of England. The Con- queror and Robert the Frisian had indeed been constant enemies ; ^ but with Robert of Jerusalem, the son of the Treaties Frisian, Henry had, early in his reign, concluded twOHemyand treaties of strict alliance.^ Little actually came of^"" ®F' these treaties; but they are highly important in the "03. . 1108-1111. history of the diplomatic art, and they illustrate the t . , . feudal notions of the time. In them, for the first time, thrown by 1 ■ T !• ■ ttem on England appears as grantmg subsidies to a foreign feudal power in exchange for help in time of war. But in those ' ^^' days a subsidy took the form of a feudal grant. Count Robert took King Henry's money; but he took it in fee, and he was to do military service in return. He thus became in some sort the man of his pay-master ; but he was already the man of two other lords, one of them the very prince against whom he was most likely to be called to act. The Count of Flanders was a vassal both of the Emperor and of the King of the French, and in his new engagements he takes care to reserve his allegiance to both his earlier lords. The worst case of all, the case of the King of the French calling on his Flemish vassal to join in an invasion of England, is specially provided for. If this should happen, the Count of Flanders is not to refuse to perform his feudal duty; but he is to take care that its performance shall do as little harm as possible to his new ally, provided always that he is not himself to run any risk of forfeiting the fiefs which ' This story is told at large by Suger. He does not scruple to say (c. 15), " quod Eex Ludovicus, tarn levitate [" avee un cceur leger "] quam audacia appetebat." ' See vol. iv. pp. 538, 687. 5 See Appendix AA. 182 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. Death of Robert of Plaiiders. IHI. Quarrel with Fulk of Anjou about Maine. Adven- tures of Robert's son William. he holds of the French Crown. We could not wish for a better illustration of the strange complications which arose out of the reckless way in which men in those days bound themselves by three or four inconsistent en- gagements at once.^ But, before the French war actually broke out, all this had changed. Quarrels had arisen between Henry and Robert, and now the force of Flanders was ranged on the side of France, and two successive Counts lost their lives in the war with England. Robert him- self was killed in this first stage of the struggle.^ He was succeeded by his son Baldwin, who followed the same policy. Maine too, after the death of Helias, furnished another ground of dispute between Henry and Fulk of Anjou.' Helias had been the firm friend of Henry, and had had a large share in his victory at Tinchebrai. But, now that his rights had passed to the Angevin house,* Maine had become a land hostile to Normandy and England. And Fulk soon found means to stir up another adversary against Henry. Duke Robert's young son, William, Clito at least, if not ^theling, had been, after the victory of Tinchebrai, put by his victorious uncle under the care of his brother-in-law Helias of Saint Saen. As if faith and valour were inherent in the prophetic name, Helias showed the same zeal for the son which he had before shown for the father.^ He led his young charge through all lands, hoping to find some among the princes of Gaul who would take up the cause of the disinherited and worse than orphan child. But his hopes were presently brought for a while to an end by a general peace. A ' See vol. iii.p. 249. ° His death is recorded by the Chronicler, 1 1 11 ; Orderic, 837 C. ' The Chronicler (iiii) makes the affair of Maine the chief ground of Henry's warfare iix France ; " switSost for Jam eorle of Angeow fe Ja Mannie togeanes him heold." ' See above, p. 106. ° See above, p. 84. PEACE OF GISOES. 183 treaty was concluded at Gisors, on terms highly favour- oh. xxm. able to Henry, terms which seemed to so so far as to Jf^<=« '^^ •^ ^ Gisors. forestall the more famous treaty of Bretigny, and to make 1113. the lord of England and Normandy an absolutely inde- f^^''^^' o J J tages pendent power on the mainland.^ The Breton Count reaped by Alan Fergant had already done homage to Henry, who gave his natural daughter Matilda in marriage to Alan's son Conan.^ Pulk of Anjou also did homage to Henry for Maine, and he betrothed his daughter Matilda to Henry's son the ^theling William, to whom, either now or at the time of the actual marriage, he granted as his daughter's dower the county for which he had himself just become the man of his son-in-law's father.^ These arrangements were confirmed by the over-lord King Lewis in terms which might seem to imply that he parted with all his rights over the lands which thus came under Henry's superiority. Lewis also ceded to Henry the border-land of Belesme.* The lord of that border-land was already a Imprison- prisoner. It would seem that, even after his overthrow at Robert of Tinchebrai, he had been again reconciled to Henry, that ^«*l^'*™<'- he had again offended him by disobedience and treason of various kinds, and that he had at last fallen into the hands of the King whom he had so deeply wronged. The cir- cumstances of his arrest are not very clear ; according to a version which is put into the mouth of Lewis himself, Robert had taken shelter with the King of the French, he had been sent by him as an ambassador to his other lord, and ' It will be remembered that by the Bretigny treaty Edward the Third on the one hand gave up his claim to the Crown of France, and on the other was freed from all homage for Aquitaiue and the other continental dominions which he held. The terms of the peace of Gisors are given most at length by Orderic, 841, 842. " Ord. Vit. 841 D. " Homo Regis Anglorum jam factus fuerat." Cf. Will. Gem. viii. 29. 2 Ord. Vit. 841 B. Cf. Will. Malms, v. 419, and Gesta Consulum, D'Achery, iii. 264, in both of which places the grant of Maine to young William is spoken of. * Oid. Vit. 841 D. 184 THE NOEMAW KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxiii. the law of nations had not been found strong enough to protect him against the justice or the vengeance of Henry .^ At all events, in the year before the peace^, the career of the cruel son of the cruel Mabel was brought to an end. The common enemy of mankind was brought from Nor- mandy to safer keeping in England, and was, to the de- light of all men, thrown into the bonds from which he was never to be freed. ^ Henry's Four years of peace now followed, during which Henry with strove to strengthen himself against the time when war Germany. g|-jQ^;[^ break out again by forming a close alliance with the Adeliza or reigning Emperor. About the time of the beginning of betrothed the War, Henry had betrothed his daughter, then a mere th ^'fth c'^il'i) to King Henry of Germany. She was at once sent '"°- to her new home, and in the space between the first and Her mar- gg^Qj^^ wars she was solemnly married and crowned at iiage and ^ coronation. Mainz.' Her husband was now Emperor. It was the January 7, . p • • 1 i i i 1 1 14. fi.rst time that a woman of English birth had been the bride of Ceesar ; for Eadgyth and Gunhild in former ' The imprisonment of Eobert of Belesme in 1 1 1 2 is recorded by all our authorities. William of Malmesbury (v. 398) and Orderio (841 A, 858 D) give details, but Orderio has two versions vi'hich it is not very easy to re- concile with one another. ' It waa never known when he died. See Hen. Hunt. De Contemptu Mundi, Angl. Sacr. ii. 698. ^ Of. Orderic, 838 B, and the Continuator of William of Jumi^ges, viii. 11, with the more accurate date in Florence, mo. Of. Chron. Petrib. 11 13. For the marriage see Otto of Freising, vii. 15, and especially Ekkehard (Pertz, vi. 247), who dwells on the vast numbers of great men who were assembled at the marriage, and says of Matilda, " Erat progenita ex utraque parte ex longa linea magnificse nobiUtatis et regalis prosapiaa, in cujus loquela et opere resplendebat specimen future bonitatis abunde, adeo ut onmibus optaretur Eomani imperii heredis mater fore." It is recorded in good Nether- Dutoh in the Liineburg Chronicle (Pertz, xvi. 76); "Keiser Heinric bot do enon hof to Megenze, dar nam he to wive des koninges dochter van Englelant de was geheten Mechtild, dar makede he se to keiseriime." At this point (1109, 1 1 10) the Chronicler calls Henry simply " se casere." Later, in 1 1 26 and 11 27 (as before in 1106), he appears by the stranger descriptions of "sekasere Heanri of Loherenge" (of. vol. i. p. 601, ed. 2), and "se casere of Sexlande." MAEEIAGE OF MATILDA WITH THE EMPEKOK. 185 times both died before their husbands reached the Imperial oh. xxin. dignity. But, as in all these cases, no English Queen or Empress was fated to be the motlier of an Emperor ; the one Emperor who was the son of an English mother. Otto the son of Henry the Second's daughter Matilda, was not the son of an Imperial father. The real name Change of of the new Empress seems to have been one of the ^^ "^^"i^- names sprung from the old te^el root ;^ but she must, like her mother, have changed her name at her marriage. She is known in history by the name of Matilda, a name venerable in German as well as in Norman earsj as being the name of the renowned mother of Otto the Grreat.^ The marriage was, according to the new feudal Exaction ideas, made the excuse for a heavy exaction of money, an ^j "jje' aid, as the feudal lawyers call it, of which the native damage. Chronicler bitterly complains.' The closest alliance fol- lowed between the English King and his Imperial namesake and son-in-law. It is even hinted that Henry of Germany Influence took Henry of England as his model of government, and ofEnS^d that he specially sought to imitate him in the success o^ Henry with which he contrived to wring money out of his people.'' many. Henry the Fifth held the Imperial power high in his Italian realm ; but in Germany he had^ like other Kings, to strive against rebels, and, in the very year which followed his marriage, he suffered a defeat at the hands of the revolted Saxons.^ He may well have envied the perfect ' Her name is not mentioned by the Chronicler at the time of her mar- riage, but she appears as "jESelio " in 1127. By John of Hexham she is called "Aaliz" in 1 139 (X Scriptt. 266), and " Adela" in 1142 (X Soriptt. 269). ^ See vol. ii. p. 293. ^ Chron. Petiib. iiio. " Dis wass swii^e gedeorfsum gear her on lande, ])urh gyld ]>e se cyng nam for his dohter gyfte." ' Otto of Freising, just before the death of Henry in 11 25, has the very carious entry (vii. 16), "Omnibus bene compositis, consilio generi sui Regis Anglorum, totum regnum vectigale facere volens, multum in se optimatum odium contraxit." ° See Conrad of Ursperg, 11 15, and more fully in the Halberstadt Chronicle in Leibnitz, ii. 132. 186 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND, cH. XXIII. peace which his father-in-law kept in the island realm, and the revenues which he drew from it to overcome or to Hem-y buy over his foes elsewhere. But the German King had the Fifth •', . , • r. ,1 hinders learned one piece of wisdom from the experience or other setttements princes who had taken wives of Norman descent. Some in Ger- ^f ^j-^g eourtiers of Henry of England who followed in the many. '' ° suite of the bride seemed to have thought that they might find an occasion of establishing themselves in Germany and the Empire generally, in the same way in which the marriages of Emma in England and Sichelgauda in Apulia had led the w'ay for bringing both those lands under Norman dominion. The King and princes of Germany saw through their schemes, and sent them away, with honourable treatment indeed, but without giving them any hope of setting up a Norman dominion or Norman influence in yet another land.^ When the war broke out again, its cause or occasion arose out of the claims of William the Clito, the son of the The captive Duke Robert. During the time of peace Henry nobles do ^^'^ done his best to secure the succession of his own son homage to ^^^^g ^theling William, by making all the chief men of Wilham *^ ' ■' ^ the iEthel- Normandy do homage to him.^ This perhaps unwilling ino". 1115. homage may have had some share in bringing about William a movement among the Norman nobles on behalf finds^p*^i-0^ the other William. The cause of the Clito was sans in taken up by Kins: Lewis, who was aarain ill-disposed Normandy. 1. J o ' to f ' This comes out in a remarkable passage of Orderic (838 D) ; " Eogerius filius Ricardi aliique plures ex Normannis comitati sunt, et per hauc copulam Eomanum apicem conscendere putaverunt, atque dignitates optimatmn au- dacia seu feritate suS, sibi aliquando adipisci cupierunt. Sic nimirum antecessores eorum in Anglia per Emmam Eicardi ducis filiam dominati sunt, et in Apulia per Sichelgaudam Guaimalchi duois Psalernitani filiam super geminos ha3redes furuerunt. Hsec siquidem vafer Imperator, qui plura perscrutatus est, agnovit, et alieuigenas indebiti fastils cervici suse im- ponere pnecavit. Unde consultu Germanorum omnes, datis muneribus, ad propria remisit." ' Chrou. Petrib, 11 15. 20. WAR OF WILLIAM CLITO. 187 towards Henry, through the never-ending grudge be- oh. xxm. tween him and Henry's nepliew Theobald.^ Count Bald- Warbegins win of Flanders was also, like his father, specially zealous Baldwin on behalf of the Clito : but this source of help was soon ?"** . . . Lewis. cut off, as Baldwin died of a wound received in one of his 1116-1117. first campaigns against Henry .^ He was succeeded in jT*^.] Flanders by his nephew Charles, the son of the canonized of Baldwin. Cnut of Denmark, who followed another line of policy, and ^^j^ ^^ ., kept the peace towards England and Normandy.^ The Good, war lasted four years, and in the course of it Henry lost Flanders. both his Queen, who was at least a tie between him and ^^ "^ Deaths of his native English subjects^ and also the man who was Queen Matilda their bitterest enemy, his chief counsellor Count Robert of and Robert Meulan.* The war which Henry now waged, largely of^'^ul'^n. with English troops/ against the rebellious nobles of character Normandy and his enemies on the Norman border was g® ^^^' full of incidents of the usual kind^ of sieges and skir- mishes. Among these comes the tale of the defence of Breteuil by Henry's daughter Juliana against her father, which has been already quoted as an illustration of Henry's personal character.^ It is plain that, in this kind of war- '■ Chron. Petrib. 11 16. The Chronicler does not mention the Clito at this stage, but a list of his partisans in Normandy is given by Orderic, 843 C. See also Hen. Hunt. 2176. ' See the details in Orderic, 843 D ; Will. Malms, v. 403 ; Chron. Petrib. 1118, 1119; Hen. Hunt. 218. ^ The Chronicler marks Charles as the son of Cnut ; see vol. iv. pp. 666, 689. On the reign of Charles see also Orderic, 844 A ; Will. Gem. viii. 16; Will. Malms, iii. 257, v. 403, of which passages the former was written during Charles's lifetime. • See the Chronicle in anno ; Orderic, 843 B ; Will. Malms, v. 418, who gives Matilda's panegyric ; Hen. Hunt. 218. " Ord. Vit. 843 D. " Quia pleroaque Normannorum suspectos habuit, stipendiaries Britones et Anglos cum apparatu copioso constituit." So 847 C; " Normannos et Anglos aliosque multos regali jure adseivit." He adds one of the many complaints of the heavy taxation caused by the war. What is the meaning of the odd story in the Bermondsey Annals (1118) ? "Rex Henricus salvatur a leonibus in somno per sanctitatem primi prions Petrei sibi appareiitis, virtute Deifioa dum vixit." ° See above, p. 157. 188 THE NORMAN" KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. XXIII. fare, Henry was often hard pressed by his own rebels as well as by his more lawful enemies.^ But the war was not Battle of confined to petty actions of this kind. It was marked by II 19. ' at least one fight which the small numbers on both sides will hardly allow us to call a pitched battle, but which was ennobled in the eyes of the time by the presence of the two Kings in person. They met at Noyon on the little river Andelle, on the borders of the forest of Lionsj the chief seat of Henry's silvan pleasures on the mainland.'' As at Tinchebrai, we seem to be reading the record of an English victory. The hosts are opposed under the names of French and English ; the royal standard — we are not told its device — was borne by a man of Enghsh descent, the younger Eadward of Salisbury; and again the King of the English fights on foot like an Englishman, at the head of Signs of his immediate following.^ But the tale also tells us how of the the fantastic notions of chivalry, unknown in an earlier spirit °"^ generation to Normans and Englishmen alike, had now begun to influence men's thoughts and actions. Our admiring historian tells us how the steel-clad knights, seeking only for glory and for the good of the Church and of the land, abstained from the needless shedding of Christian blood.* It is more certain that the influence of ' See the emphatic words of the Chronicle, 11 18. ' This battle is recorded by the Chronicler, 1 119, and is described in great detail by Orderic, 853-855, and from another point of view by Suger, 303- 305. Matthew Paris also (Hist. Ang. i. 227) has a glowing account, in which William Crispin, who attacks the King personally, is raised to be "Consul Ebroicensis." ^ AH these details come from Orderic. This Eadward of Salisbury (on whom see ]Mr. J. G. Nichols in the Salisbury volume of the Archseological Institute, p. 214) appears in 854 A. In 854 B we read how the King's son Kichard with a hundred knights fought on horseback ; " Eeliqui vero cum Bege pedites in campo dimicabant." See above, p. 175. Heury of Hunting- don, on the other hand (218), makes the King fight on horseback and his sons on foot. * The passage in Orderic, 854 D, is truly wonderful, and almost carries us to the Italian wars of the fifteenth century. He says that, out of nine BATTLE OF NOYON. 189 the custom of ransoming prisoners was beginning to have ch. xxm. its effect. King Lewis himself was let go by a peasant who acted as his guide, but who knew not the money value of his prisoner.* It was but a fantastic courtesy when King Henry sent back the horse of King Lewis, and when William the JEtheling sent back the horse of Wil- liam the Clito,'^ who had that day for the first time fought the arms of knighthood.' But we may see real generosity^ Instances or perhaps the higher feeling of a real sense of right, when rosfry!*^ King Henry sent back, unhurt and unransomed, certain knights who were at once his own men and the men of the King of the French^ and who had preferred to act ac- cording to their allegiance to the higher lord.* And an- other incident of this battle shows that we are getting into a new age. The fashion of coat-armour, or of some- Intro'luc- thing to the same effect, a fashion unknown in the days of amour"'^ ' the Conqueror,^ had now come into use, and some French knights, throwing aside the devices by which they would hundred knights, tliree only were killed ; " Ferro enim undique vestiti erant, et pro timore Dei notitiaque contubernii vicissim sibi parcebant ; nee tantum occidere fugientes quam comprehendere satagebant ; Christiani equidem bellatores non eflfusionem fratemi sanguinis sitiebant, sed legali triunipho ad utilitatem sanctffi ecclesise et quietem fidelium, dante Deo, tripudiabant.'' 1 Orderic teUs the story in 855 A, where the King of the French is oddly described as " quanti emolumenti vir." '^ Ord. Tit. 855 B. The King's horse is " mannus," that of the Clito is "palefridus." "Guillelmus Adelingus" and " GuUlelmus Clito" are here brought close together. ' lb. 854 A, B. "Ibi Guillelmus CUto armatus est, ut patrem suum de longo carcere liberaret et avitam sibi hereditatem vendicaret." * lb. 835 B. With this we may compare a story of the generosity shown by a baron on the other side, Eicher of L' Aigle, who, though engaged in rebellion, could act worthy of his name (see vol. iv. p. 659). Orderic, 85 7 B, teUs us how Richer, when driving back a raid of peasants on the King's side on his own land, spared a crowd of them who asked for mercy under a way-side cross. The comment is, " NobiUs vir pro Creatoris metu fere centum viUanis pepercit, a quibus, si prehendere eos temere praesumpsisset, grande pretium exigere potuisset." ' See vol. ii. p. 285. 190 THE N"OEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. Council at Hheims. October 20, 1 1 19. Lewis accuses Henry to Pope Calixtus. have been known, were able to mingle themselves with the loyal Normans, and, by help of the common tongue, to join undiscoYered in the songs of triumph which were raised over their defeat.^ Lewis, thus defeated in battle, tried before long to gain a moral advantage over his enemy. Pope Calixtus had called a Council at Rheims, which was attended by a crowd of prelates and others from Germany, Gaul, and England. King Henry let the prelates of England and Normandy go to it, but only with commands, couched almost in the words of his father. They might profess his duty to the apostolic see ; they might promise punctual fulfilment of all accustomed duties and payments ; but he would not give up a jot of the privileges handed down to him from old times, and he would put up with no innovations in his king- dom.^ He had need to give such orders ; for, in the course of the Council, an attempt was made to make the Pope sit as judge, or at least as arbiter, between the contending Kings of Prance and England. King Lewis made his com- plaint in person ; he set forth how Henry had seized on his fief of Normandy, how he had imprisoned his vassal, its lawful Duke, and disinherited his son ; how he had seized his ambassador Robert of Belesme, how he had abetted his rebellious vassal Count Theobald, and had done other things contrary to the duty of a man to his lord.' The feeling of the assembly was with the Prench King, and the Arch- ' Ord. Vit. 855 G. " NonnuUi fugientum cognitiones suas, ne aguos- cerentur, projecerunt, et inseotantibus callide mixti signum triumphautium vociferati sunt, atque magnanimitem Henrici regis suorumque fictis lau- dibus prseconati sunt." ' The Council at Eheims is recorded by the Chronicler, 11 19, and Ead- mer, 124, who connect it chiefly with the affair of Thurstan of York. The fullest account is in Orderic, 857-863. Henry's instructions (858 A) are wound up with the words, " superfluaa adinventiones regno meo inferre nolite." Henry of Huntingdon (218) cuts it short. There is another ac- count in Suger, c. 21. ' The speech of Lewis is given by Orderic, 858-859. It is added that he was " ore facundus, statura procerus, pallidus et corpulentus." COUNCIL OP EHEIMS. 191 bishop of Rouen, Geoffrey, who tried to speak on behalf of oh. xxm. his sovereign, could not even find a hearing.^ But Pope Calixtua Calixtus was too wary rashly to commit himself to any perTOnal ^ condemnation of the King of the English. He was moreover interview Henry's kinsman, a nephew of Guy, the old rebel who was Henry, overthrown at Val-es-dunes.'' He would go and speak in person to his kinsmen, to King Henry and Count Theobald. A crowd of decrees were passed in the Council; the Truce Decrees of of God was again confirmed,' and, if Henry of England ^f j^j^ginis. was spared, an anathema was hurled at his Imperial name- sake and son-in-law, together with his anti-pope.* The Interview interview between the Pope and the King presently took CaKxtus place at Gisors ; and we are told that Henry was able fully '^^'^l^'^^^y to convince the Pontiff of the righteousness of all his acts, ^ng- All that he had done had been to deliver Normandy from anarchy ; he had taken it away, not from his brother, who was a sovereign only in name, but from the thieves and murderers and heathenish robbers of churches who had it in actual possession.^ The plea was certainly a good one; ' Ord. Vit. 859 B. "Orto tumultu dissidentium interoeptus conticuit, quia iUic multi aderant inimicorum, quibus exciisatio pro victorioso principe displicuit." ^ He was a son of William Count of Burgundy, son of Count Reginald and of Adeliza, daughter of Eichard the Good. The pedigree of Guy, Archbishop of Vienne, afterwards Pope Calixtus, is given by Orderic, 848 A. See vol. i. p. J14; vol. ii. pp. i8r, 242. Orderic uses the words "Dux Biu'gundionum," but the Burgundy meant is the Imperial Palatinate and not the French Duchy. 3 Ord. Vit. 860 B. * lb. 863 A. "Karolum Henricum Imperatorem theomachum, et Bur- dinum pseudo-papam, et fautores eorum, moerens excommunicavit." There are a crowd of other decrees on various subjects, among them a further forbidding of clerical marriages and of the investiture of abbots by any layman. ^ This interview is recorded by William of Malmesbury, v. 406 ; more fully by Orderic, 864-866. Henry is made to say (865 B) that in Bobert's days " pene paganismus per Normanniam passim diffundebatur." Henry of Huntingdon (218) remarks that "collocuti sunt sacerdos magnus et Rex raagnus." 192 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. XXIII. and the Pope employed himself in bringing about a peace Peace be- between the two King's, accompanied by a restoration of tween ° -^ Henry and the castles and prisoners which had been taken on both Levpis. . _ ^ 1 1 20. Sides/ This treaty was again followed by a short season of peace, and it was during that season of peace that Henry, victorious over his enemies, had to endure the heaviest of Dying out blows in his own house. We have now reached that event queror's ill Henry's reign which has naturally made a deeper male line, j^jpression on popular imagination than any other, and which was in truth the turning-point in his reign, and indeed in much of English history. The Conqueror had founded a dynasty which was to last from his day to ours ; but it was to be continued in descendants who sprang from him only by the same spindle-side by which they sprang from the older royalty of Alfred and Cerdic. His only direct and legitimate male descendants were now King Henry, the captive Robert, and their sons the two rival Williams. With them, in the second generation, the male line of the great William was to end in sons each of whom was cut off in the lifetime of his father. The turn of the Attempts ^theling came first. Every pains had been taken by his the succes- father to secure his succession on both sides of the sea. ^EflieUn''^ The nobles of Normandy had already done homage to him William, as their future Duke,^ and the year after, the Witan of the'wfton England did the like in a great meeting at Salisbury.' ofEngland. g^jjj further to strengthen his claim to the Norman suc- March 19, ° 1116. cession, William had, seemingly as one of the articles of the ' Chron. Petrib. 11 20. ^ See above, p. 186. ° Eadmer, 117. "Quid sibi eventurum foret ignorans, WilUelmum, quem ex ingenua conjuge sua filium Busceperat, heeredem regni substituere sibi Tolebat. Igitur aguita Eegis voluntate mox ad metum ejus omnes prin- cipes faoti sunt homines ipsius Willielmi, iide et Sacramento confirmati." The Bishops only promised to do homage to the ^theling in case of their outliving the King. The homage is also recorded by Florence (1116) in one of his last entries. HOMAGE DONE TO THE jETHELING WILLIAM. 193 treaty, done homage to the King of the French for the oh. xxm. fief which he was one day to hold of him.^ The fact is Homage remarkable, as there is no record of any homage done by William to either William Rufus or Henry, both of whom seem to ^'^^^■ • ' 1 1 20. have looked on Normandy as a land to be fought for or bargained for without any thought of the rights of the over-lord. But it is no less plain that the King of the French never forgot that the Duke of the Normans was his vassal, and the French version of these events implies that impatience of the feudal relation was one motive for Henry's hostility towards his over-lord.^ In such a state of things, and especially after the cessions which Lewis had made to Henry at the time of the former treaty, this homage done to the King of the French by Henry's son is one of the most speaking signs of Henry's anxiety to secure his son's succession by every means in his power. With the same view, the marriage which had been agreed Marriage of on some years before between young WiUiam and Matilda ^j^ii of Anjou was now celebrated, though her father Fulk, after- ^■■^'1'?* wards King of Jerusalem, was at this time absent in his mg- future kingdom.^ All this points on the one hand to the growing notion of hereditary right, and on the other hand to the fact that it was stiU only a growing notion. It was still needful to take every means to secure the succession ' Will. Malms, v. 405 ; Gesta Consultun, iii. 264. This last writer has his own version of the wars between Henry and Fulk. See also the Continuator of Florence, 11 19, and Simeon, 11 20. ^ Suger, 21. "Quoniam onmis potestas impatiens consortis erit, rex Franconim Ludovicus, ea qua supereminebat regi Anglovum ducique Nor- mannorum Henrico sublimitate in eum semper, tanquam in feodatum suum, efferebatur. Kex vero Anglorum, et regni nobilitate et divitiarum opulentia mirabili inferioritatis impatiens, suffiragio nepotis Theobaldi palatini comitis et multorum regni aemulorum ut ejus dominio derogaret, regnum commovere regem tnrbare nitebatur." ' The marriage is placed by Orderio (851 E) in 11 19, before the Council. William of Malmesbury (v. 405) and the Gesta Consulum (264) connect it with the peace. The Angevin writer speaks of William as " qui post eum [Hemricum] regnaturus erat." VOL. V. 194 THE NORMAN" KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. xxiiT. of the son of fhe reigning King, especially when he was threatened by a competitor who, in Normandy at least. No corona- numbered many partisans. But it is worth notice that we thTKing'-s^ hear nothing of any thought of a coronation during his lifetime, father's lifetime, a course so common both in Prance and in the Empire, and which was followed in England by Henry's grandson without any such pressing need. Per- haps Henry felt sure of England and doubted only of Normandy. Perhaps English ideas of the kingly office did not allow that there should be two crowned Kings in the land at the same time. Perhaps Henry, anxious as he was that his son should reign when he was dead, was no more willing than his father was to do any act which could be construed as giving up one jot of his power in his lifetime, even in favour of that darling son. -'b Failure of But Henry's schemes were not destined to bear fruit. Henry's . , c schemes. No homage, no marriage, no treaty or agreement oi any kind, could in those days rule the succession to the English throne, before that throne was vacant. In this case the plans which had been so wisely laid were shattered, as the men of those times deemed, by the immediate act of The God. When the peace was concluded, and the affairs of drownecTin Normandy had been settled, the King and the ^theling the White ijagtened to come back to England. The King's voyage II20. was prosperous; the .iEtheling perished, as all the world knows, by the sinking of the White Ship.^ Men marked that the ship which thus refused to carry another William from the shores of Normandy to those of England had for its captain the son of the man who had steered the ship which bore his grandfather from Saint Valery to Pevensey.^ • The drowning of William and his companions is recorded by all our writers, beginning with the Chronicler, 1 1 20. Fuller details and comments are given by Orderic, 867-870 ; William of Malmesbury, v. 419 ; Henry of Huntingdon, 218 A, and in Anglia Sacra, ii. 696; Eadmer, 135, and the Continuator of Florence, 1 1 20. Orderic seems to put it under a wrong year. ^ So says Orderic, 867-868. Thomas Fitz-Stephen is made to say that DEATH OF THE ^THELING, 195 With his heir Henry lost his natural son Richard, who had oh. xxm. specially distinguished himself in the French wars,' a natural daughter, Matilda the wife of Rotron Count of Perche, the young Richard Earl of Chester, in whom ended the male line of his father the mighty Hugh,^ and a crowd of others high in rank and office.^ Grave men spoke of many of them as deeply stained with the vices of the last reign, and looked on the blow which swept them away as a special judgement from heaven.* The grief was general. "Whatever may have been the personal character of the young ^theling at the age of seventeen, he had as yet had no great opportunities for working any public wrong.' All Henry's schemes to settle the suc- cession had come to nothing. The succession of William the Clito was a prospect to which he could not bring him- self to look forwardj and we may conceive that, however the Conqueror passed over to England in the ship of his father Stephen, a tale which it is not easy to reconcile with the story of the Mora (see vol. iii. p. 380). Stephen may however have been the captain or pilot. • This Richard, who appears in all the battles, is especially spoken of by Henry of Huntingdon in the De Contemptu Mundi, Ang. Sac. ii. 696. ^ This Eichard is also the subject of the moral comments of Henry of Huntingdon (u. s.). See also Orderio, 522 B. ' Orderic's list (870 B) begins with " Theodericus puer Henrici, nepos Im- peratoris Alemanorum," and ends with " Eobertus Malconductus, et nequam Gisulfus, semha regis," whatever semba may be. * This comes out most clearly in Henry of Huntingdon (218 A), whose words are as strong as words can be. Cf. Gervase, 1339. But the charge is indirectly confirmed by Orderic, who mentions (868 B) that several persons, among them Stephen the future King and Eadward of Salisbury, left the ship, "quia nimiam multitudinem lascivse et pompaticse juventutis inesse conspicati sunt." Matthew Paris (Hist. Ang. i. 230) seems to speak of the charge as a French calumny ; " Si Francigenarum adversantium probris credendum est." There is also a singular statement in the Brut y Tywy- Bogion, I II 7, which I must quote in the translation without pledging myself to its accuracy, how there were with them "about two hundred principal women, who were deemed most worthy of the affection of the King's children." Cf. Sim. Dun. in anno. ^ See Appendix W. On the grief of Henry, which has passed into a popular legend, "Waoe has much to say, 15325-15375. O 2 196 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. xxin. acceptable it may have been in Normandy, it would have been unpopular in England. The King's first remedy for Marriage the danger was the obvious one of a second marriage. In with^"^ the year after his son's death, Henry again took him a L^weu* "^ ^^^*'' ^ ^^^® ^^°' ^^ ^°* English, was at least not French, H2I. and who was sought for among the princes who were the vassals of his son-in-law. The new Queen was Adelaide or Adeliza/ the daughter of Godfrey, Count of Lowen and Duke of Lower Lothringen.^ But this second marriage was childless, and this failure of legitimate male issue presently led Henry to a step which was without parallel either in England or in Normandy. Beginning As before, the peace did not last long. The beginning puteTwith of fresh disturbances seems to have been when Count Fulk Anjou. came back from Jerusalem and demanded the dower of his 1121-1123, daughter, the widow of the ^theling, who was kept in all honour by her father-in-law in England.^ He soon made an alliance with the rebellious nobles of Normandj^, by whom Fulk takes the claims of William the Clito were again asserted.* Among' cause of the these we hear especially of Waleran the son of Henry's late Clito. ' Like her step-daughter, she appears in the Chronicle of Mebose (11 21) as "Aaliz." ^ The marriage is recorded by the Chronicler, 1121 ; "Se cyng Henri . . . toforan Candehngessan on Windlesoran him to wife forgyfen ASeUs and sy?5^"an to cwene gehalgod. Seo wses fses heretogan dohtor of Luuaine ; " wheremark the unusual word" heretoga" (see vol. i.p. 581, Ed. 2). This is translated by Henry of Huntingdon, who adds *' causa pulcritudinis." Orderic, S71 A, says that it was " consultu sapientum " ("mid minra witena ge);eahte"), which comes out more fully in Eadmer, 136, who remarks that the King took this step "ne quid ulterius inhonestum committeret." Tliis phrase may bear more than one meaning, and it may perhaps be oou- tiasted with the words of William of Malmesbury, v. 419. See also Elor. Cont. 1121 ; Brut, 1118; andWace, 15375. Mr. Earle (Parallel Chronicles, 363) collects other forms of her name. She calls herself "Aalidis " and " Aehdis." ^ Chron. Petrib. 1121 ; WUl. Malms, v. 419; Sim. Dun. 1123; Ord. Vit. 875 D. See more of her in Wace, 15380 et seqq. * The war and its causes are well summed up by our own Chi'onicler when he comes to the end of it in 11 24. Cf. Orderic, 8 75 C. SECOND MAREIAGE OF HENRY. 197 counsellor Robert of Meulan, a youth who with his brother oh. xxm. had been brought up under the eye of the learned King, ■^®,^'i'°" and whose youthful powers of disputation had been dis- of Meulan. played before Pope Calixtus himself.^ Again King Lewis stepped in as the ally of the Norman rebels, but this time the English King was able to stir up a mighty adversary against him. Henry's Imperial son-in-law came to his Expedition help against the common enemy of Germany and England. Emperor Again, as in the old days of the Ottos,^ a German host was ^^'^^ gathered for the invasion of the Western kingdom. But the France. march of Csesar acted only as a diversion on behalf of his English ally. The special object of the expedition was to attack Rheims, where Pope Calixtus had a few years before pronounced his anathema. But great was the rejoicing in France when, on the news of civil disturbances within the German realm, the Imperial host turned back from Metz, and when, in the next year, all danger from that quarter Daath passed away by the sudden death of the last Emperor of Emperor, the Prankish house. ^ His marriage with the English "^^' 1 The rebellion of Waleran is marked by Orderic (875 C) and in the Chronicle (11 23), where we find a, remarkable use of English language as applied to Normans, *' and weax ^la micel unfri?! betwux him [Henry] and hise ]>ekj7ia3.^^ Of the early education of Waleran, besides the passage in Orderic, see Will. Malms, v. 406. * See Historical Essays, First Series, pp. 245, et seqq. ' This expedition is recorded by Otto of Freising (vii. 16), and more fully by Bkkehard (Pertz, vi. 262), who is followed by Conrad of Ursperg. He says that the march was made " specie quidem contra Saxoniam, re autem vera contra GaUiam, in regnum regis Ludewici prsebiturus, nimirum auxilium socero sue Heinrico Anglise regi pro possessione Normanniae provinciEe contra eundem regem Gallise Ludewicum contendenti." He adds the re- mark that "Teutonioi non facile gentes impugnant exteras." Suger (21) of course tells the story with great glee, and adds, " Quo facto nostrorum mo- dernitate vel multormn temporum antiquitate nihil clarius Francia fecit, aut potentise suae gloriam viribus membrorum suorum adjuvans gloriosius propalavit, quam quum uno eodemque termino de Imperatore Eomano et Eege AngHco, licet ahsens triumphavit." He had before made Lewis speak of the Germans as men who "in terrarum dominam Franciam superbe pr^sumpserunt." Orderic (882, 883) records the death of Henry, and describes the election of his successor Lothar at great length. THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xsm. Henry de- feats the rebels at Bourg- theroulde. 1 124, Cruel treatment of the prisoners. Augusta was childless, and new pages in the history both of Germany and of England were thus opened. But mean- while the war had been brought to an end in Normandy. In a battle in Bourgtheroulde, in the land between the Seine and the Rille, the rebels were utterly overthrown, chiefly by the prowess of the archers in the royal host. That host is again called English, and it may be that the forefathers of the men whose arrows were to win the fight of Crecy had already learned to wield the weapon of their conquerors.^ Most of the rebel nobles were taken pri- soners, and this time we hear little of generosity or mercy. King Henry held his court at Rouen to sit in judgement on his rebels. Two who had broken their allegiance were sentenced to the loss of their eyes, and the same punish- ment was decreed against Luke of Barre, who had never sworn fealty to Henry, but who had stirred up his bitterest wrath by making satirical verses against him.^ The holy Count Charles of Flanders, whom some chance had brought to Rouen, pleaded in vain for mercy, and it is even implied that the King's arguments convinced him of the justice of the sentence.^ The poet, on hearing his doom, dashed out his brains against the walls of his prison.* ' The battle is recorded by the Chronicler, 11 24, at some length, and more fully by Orderic, 879-8S1. It is he who mentions that the battle was chiefly won by forty archers. He does not distinctly mention their nation, but he makes the rebels oppose the " flos totius Gallise et Nor- mannise" to the " Angli" against whom they had to fight. ^ The places of imprisonment of Hugh and Waleran are carefully marked in the Chronicle. It is from Orderic (880 T>) that we get the story of Luke. The King first blinds two prisoners, " pro perjurii reatu," then ^'Lucam quoque de Barra pro derisioriis cantionibus et temerariis nisibua orbari luminibus imperavit," or, as the King himself is made to say, " inde- centes de me cantilenas facetus coraula composiiit ad injuriam mei palam cantavit, malevolosque mihi hostes ad cachinnos ita s*pe provocavit." See vol. ii. p. 287. ^ Ord. Vit. 881 B. "His auditis Flaiidrise Dux conticuit, quia quid contra hasc rationabiliter objiceret non habuit." * This stc.ry is also told by Orderic (u. 3.). He died " multis nioereutibua qu' probitates ejus et facetias noveraut." henry's plans for his daughter's SUCCESSIOK. 199 Those who fared the best^ Count Waleran and Hugh of Mont- ch. xxiii. fort, passed years in the dungeons of Rouen and Gloucester. Peace again followed. The Clito was once more dis- Peace with owned everywhere. Fulk of Anjou had promised him his n^g younger daughter Sibyl, and he had given him in fief the Marriage county of Maine, again vacant by the death of William the cKto with jSltheling. But the subtlety of Henry's canonists found out ^^^^ °get that the marriage was unlawful on the ground of kindred, aside. and young William was again cast adrift.^ His time of utter distress and wandering did not however last v€ry long. But, before any change took place in his fortunes, Henry Henry's had made another attempt to settle the succession of his the"succes- kingdom and duchy in away unparalleled in both, jjis ^""^ °^ '^'^ former plans had come to nothing. " Filius huic, fato Divom, prolesque viiilis Nulla fuifc, primaque oriens erepta juventa est. Sola domum et tantas servabat filia sedes."^ His son was gone ; his mind seems to have been made up to have any successor rather than his nephew. The His natural growing respect for legitimate birth — a respect springing jjjgjy „ot from the growing conception of kingship as a property tl">»gl't of. rather than an office — seems to have shut out all idea of passing on the Crown which had been held by William the Bastard to any of his grandsons who were not born in lawful wedlock. Richard, whose youth had given such hopes and who had so distinguished himself in the French wars, had died in the White Ship ; but, if England had been called on to choose from among the descendants, legitimate and illegitimate, of her Conqueror, she could hardly have made a worthier choice than Robert of Caen. Enriched by a Robert marriage with the heire.«s of Robert Fitz-Hamon, and in- Gfouc°ester. ' This marriage is referred to in the Chronicle, 1 1 27. See also Will. Malms. V. 419, and Hist. Nov. i. I ; Ord. Vit. 838 B. The kindred was of the most distant kind, and it would tell equally against the Angevin alliances which Henry made for his own children. ^ Virgil, ^ueid, vii. 50. 200 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxTii. vested with the earldom of Gloucester, Henry's son Kobert was one of the first men in the kingdom ; but, at this time at least, no word was breathed of his succession to the Crown.i Henry had now given up all hopes of children by his second marriage ;2 so he now ventured on a step which showed, beyond all others, how far the new notions Novelty of of kingship had already grown. Alike in Normandy and su™ce&tion. ^'^ England, the rule of a woman was something unheard of According to all Teutonic notions, it would have been held absurd to bestow the kingly or ducal office on one who could discharge none of its chief duties. Normandy had never seen a Duchess regnant ; in England the only case is the doubtful, and in any case anomalous and momen- C'ases of tary, reign of Sexburh in Wessex.^ The Lady of the .ind ^thel- Mercians, though she practically discharged the duties of a sovereign, was not a crowned Queen.* But now the feudal conception of kingship had gained such ground that it began to be thought that a kingdom, like any other estate, might, in the absence of a son, pass to a daughter. She might either discharge her kingly duties in person, or she might hand over both the estate and the office to her husband. In either case, the idea of a Queen regnant points to a notion of kingship which was new on both sides of the sea. When therefore, after five years of marriage, Adeliza had brought him no heir, Henry deter- mined to attempt to obtain the acknowledgement of his daughter as his successor. The death of the Emperor had left Matilda a childless widow :^ there was therefore no > See Appendix BB. = Will. Malms. Hist. Nov. i. 2. = See vol. i. p. 580, Ed. 2. * See vol. i, p. 565, Ed. 2. '^ Matthew Paris (Hist. Ang. i. 237) has a wonderful story about the Em- peror forsaking his crown (of. vol. iii. p. 758), and how Matilda was suspected of his death. Cf Roger of Howden, i. 181, who adds that Matilda came to England with the Imperial crown and the hand of Saint James. To receive the relic the abbey of Reading was founded, " coronam autem Imperialem in thesauro suo recondidit." NOVELTY OF FEMALE ETJLEES. 201 fear of either an Imperial husband or an Imperial son ch. xxiii. putting forth claims which might have been dangerous to the island realm. In England and Normandy, on the other handj the belief seems to have been that the notion of placing Matilda in a post so unusual in her sex did not come first from her father or his counsellors, but from some of the princes of the land which now, at her father's bidding, she was called on unwillingly to leave/ Her Matilda 1 -1-111* !■ TT If comes back presence however was needed by his policy. He sent tor ^^^ Qg,.- her from Germany ; she joined him in Normandy, and ac- ™^Y" companied him when he came back in triumph to England with the captives of Bourgtheroulde.^ He now took the decisive step. In the Christmas Her Gemot of the year, which was opened at Windsor and then g^orn to by adiourned to Westminster,^ all the chief men of the land, tteWitan. J ' ■' Cnnstmas, spiritual and temporal, swore that, if the King died with- 1126-1127. ^ Both William of Malinesbury and the Continuator of William of Ju- mif^ges imply that the princes of some part of the Empire, though the more strictly German lands seems to be carefully shut out, sought for Matilda to reign over them, after the example, we may suppose, of Pulcheria — Zoe and the second Theodora would be no precedents in tlie West. The words of the former writer (Hist. Nov. i. I) are, "Constat aliquos Lo- tharingorum et Longobardorum principes succedentibus annis plus quam semel Angham venisse, ut earn sibi dominam requirerent." The Continuator (viii. 25) says, "Licet excellentissimi principes curise Romanas experti prudentiam ipsius, et morum venustatem -vivente imperatore conjuge suo earn omnimodis sibi imperare optarent et hac de causa ipsam prosecuti sint usque ad curiam sui patris id ipsum rogaturi.*' It is not very clear who are meant by the " principes curias Eomanse." But it would seem that the expression was chosen with the same object as that of William of Malmes- bury. But either expression is worth comparing with the words of Orderic, 882 C, "Imperii insignia morions Caesar imperatrici Matilda dimisit." ' The two things, the return of Matilda and the bringing over of the captives, are connected by the Chronicler (11 26), and the visit of David comes directly after. ' The statement of William of Malmesbury that the Gem6t was held in London, and that of the Chronicler that it was at Windsor, are reconciled by the account of Simeon (11 28) that the meeting was adjourned to London (" transiit inde Lundoniam "), where the oath was taken on the Feast of the Circumcision. So Hen. Hunt. 219. 202 THE KORMxlN KINGS IS EXGLAND. CH. XXIII. out heirs male, they would receive his daughter as Lady — the words Queen and Duchess seem to be avoided — over England and Normandy.^ Three among those who swore are specially to be noticedj on account of the part which Oath of they played in the later history. The first place among David of the laity was yielded without dispute to David, King of Scotland. g(,Q(.g_ jj^g kingly rank placed him above all other vassals of the English Crown, and as the uncle of the future Lady, he wasj next after her father^ the natural guardian of her Rivalry rights. The second place was warmly disputed between between , ^ . . ,.,,.. Stephen the King s legitimate nephew and his illegitimate son. decided in '^^® °^^® ^^^ Stephen^ Count of Boulogne and Mortain, favour of the brother of that Count Theobald whose cause had been btepnen. made the excuse for so many wars. The other was Robert Earl of Gloucester. One pleaded the rights of nearness of kin to his father, the other those of legitimate birth and princely rank.^ The arguments of the nephew were ' Chron. Petrib. 1127. "He let sweren ercebiscopes and biscopes and abbotes and eorles and ealle \)a, Seines Sa ]?3er wasron, his dohter iEtSelio Engleland and Normandi to hande aefter his dsei." See also Simeon, 1128; Flor. Wig. 1126; Will. Gem. viii. 25, who makes the oath "qua- tenus ipsi pro suis viribus obniterentur ut eadem Augusta, post decessum patris, luonarchiam majoris Britannise, quam nunc Angliam vocant, ob- tineret." In the Gesta Stephani (7, of. 34) the form of the oath is given; " Ne quern post illius discessum, nisi aut filiam, quam comiti Andegavensi maritarat, aut iUius, si superfuisset, hferedem in regno susciperent." And the partisans of Stephen are made to add, "Ad ipsam quoque hseredandam imperioso illo cui nuUus obsistebat, oris tonitruo, summos totius regni jurare compulit potius quam praecepit." WiUiam of Newburgh (i. 3) makes it an oath ; ' ' Filiae su« et susceptis vel suscipiendis ex ea nepotibus." William of Malmesbury, who gives the fullest account (Hist. Nov. i. 2, 3), is the only one who gives any distinct title ; " Ut si ipse sine heerede masoido de- cedcret, Matildam filiam suam, quondam imperatricem, incunctanter et sine uUa retractione dominam susciperent." She is " Domina Angliee " again in ii. 42. ^ William of Malmesbury alone mentions the dispute between Stephen and Robert. He speaks of it twice in the Historia Novella (i. 3 and iii. 56), but he contradicts himself in the two passages. King David swears first in both, but in one Stephen is described as swearing second, and in the other Robert. In the earlier passage we read, "Notabile, ut dum dioitur, fuit certamen inter Eobertum et Stephanum semula laude vu-tutem inter se matilda's succession accepted, 203 deemed the strong-er, and Hobert held only the third place ch. xxm. in taking the oath, which he afterwards so well kept, of faithfulness to his half-sister. This done, the Assembly departed, after the childless Queen had been comforted with a grant of the earldom of Shrewsbury/ as though it were fit that the principle which had just been estabhshed with regard to the Crown should be at once appUed to lesser dignities also. According to one account, the Witan who had taken the Alleged oath to Matilda were absolved from it as soon as it was ofHen^ taken, by the King's failure to keep an oath of his own. '^^""^ ^^^ , „ marriage oi The famous Bishop Koger of Salisbury declared that he MatUda, and the rest of the assembly swore to the succession of Matilda only on condition that the future Lady of England should not be given in marriage to auy one beyond the realm, unless with the consent of himself and the rest of the Great Council.^ Be this true or false, the fact that Roger should have said so is of itself most remarkable. Roger was so far from being a genuine Englishman that he was not even a native of England. Yet he, truly or falsely, puts into his own mouth words which remind us of the words which are put into the mouth of Harold when he tells the ambassadors of William that he cannot marry a foreign wife without contenderent quis eorum prior juraret, illo privilegium filii, isto dignitatem nepotis spectante." In the second the language is a little changed ; '* Koberto excellentiam filii, Stephano dignitatem nepotis^ defendentibua." I accept the former statement as more careful and trustworthy, coming as it does in the regular historical narrative, "while the other comes only inci- dentally in a panegyric on Kobert. The writer of the Gesta Stephaui (34) also mentions David as swearing first. Among the clergy Archbishop William of course swore first, and " Eogerus magnus Salesbmriensis episcopus " second. Hen. Hunt. 221 6. C£ Will. Neub. i. 4. ' Will. Malms. Hist. Nov. i. 2. ^ lb. 3. " Ego Eogerium Salisbiriensem episoopum asepe dicentem audivi solutum se sacramento quod imperatrici fecerat, eo enim paoto se jurasse, ne rex prseter consilium suum et caeterorum procerum iiliam cuiquam nuptam daret extra regnum." The historian however distinctly refuses to guarantee the truth of the Bishop's statement. 204 THE NOEMAN KIKGS IN ENGLAND. CH. XXIII. the consent of his Witan.^ At any rate, before the year MaiTiageof ^a,s out, Henry had ffiven his widowed daughter to a Matilda to Geofirey of husband out of the realm. According' to the same state- "■'°"' ment of Bishop Koger, it was without any general consent of the kingdom, by the advice only of his son Robert and of two other counsellors, that Matilda was married to Geoffrey, the son of Fulk of Anjou.^ For one who held the rank of Augusta such a marriage seemed degrading in the eyes of many, and not least in the eyes of the Augusta Schemes of herself.^ But the scheme exactly fell in with the plans of theiire^'^ Henry. Anjou was, after all, a more dangerous enemy than suits. France, and the question about Maine was ever starting up in new forms. By this marriage he trusted that his most dangerous neighbour would be turned into a friend, and that, in another generation, Maine, and Anjou itself, would become part of the possessions of the ducal house of Normandy. Such a dominion, even if Normandy and England were to be parted, would make its holder the most powerful prince of Northern Gaul, a prince far more powerful than his nominal lord at Paris. Besides these * See vol. iii. p. 262. ' The marriage is recorded by all our writers ; by the Chronicler, 1127 ; Sim. Dun. 11 28-11 29; Ord. Vit. 763 B, 889 A, where a wrong date is given; Will. Malms, i. I, 3, who quotes Bishop Roger as saying, " ejus matri- monii nullum auctorem, nullum fuisse conscium, nisi Kobertum comitem Gloucestrie et Brianuni filLum comitis, et episcopum Ltisoviensem.'' And this is so far confirmed by the Chronicle that Robert and Brian ("Brian l>es eorles sunu Alein Fergan ") are spoken of as taking Matilda over to Anjou. Geoffrey's personal siu?name of Plantagenet, which has come in popular use to be the name of the whole Angevin dynasty, is found in Wace, 15388 ; " Conte Giffrei son frere Ki Ten clamout Plante-genest." A few lines on he speaks of him as " Plante-genest," without his name, as Eufus is spoken of. ^ She had, according to William of Malmesbury, Hist. Nov. i. i, left Germany unwillingly, and the Chronicler (11 27) says of the Angevin mar- riage, "hit ofjjuhte nabema ealle Freucisc and Englisc." So Will. Gem. viii. 25 ; " Licet invitam, dedit eamdem imperatricem in uxorem Gaufrido Martello." MAEEIAGE OF GEOFFREY AND MATILDA. 205 more distant hopes, there was the immediate gain of oh. xxin. separating the house of Anjou from the cause of the Clito William — now suddenly become a great prince — now that the affinity which had been once contracted with him was transferred to the house of his uncle. ^ The more distant schemes of Henry took effect, at least for a season. Through the marriage of Geoffrey and Matilda, England and Nor- mandy, Anjou and Maine, were all joined under the sceptre of their son. But in taking the steps which led to the establishment of that vast dominion, he was also paving the way for the separation of England and Normandy, for — what no man then could have dreamed of — the annexa- tion of Normandy by France. The direct results of the marriage were a store of public anxiety and private un- happiness, followed by nineteen years of wretchedness for England. The widow of Csesar found the young son of Disputes the Count of Anjou a mate not to her mind. She was Matilda once sent back with scorn to her father, and the Witan ^'^^ ^^°^' frey. of England had to meet in solemn debate to settle this 1129-1131. domestic quarrel. Matilda went back to her husband. Her after her succession had again been solemnly confirmed confirmed by renewed oaths.^ Yet the last years of Henry's reign ^^3i' were disturbed by the claims of his son-in-law to certain Norman castles, which led once more to skirmishes and sieges.^ But in the end some degree of harmony was ' This is clearly put forth by the Chronicler, 1137; " Oc se kyng hit dide for to hauene sibbe of se eorl of Angeow, and for helpe to hauene togsenes his neue WiUelm." ^ This renewal of the oaths to Matnda is recorded by William of Malmesbury, Hist. Nov. i. 6 ; " Imperatrix . . . natali solo adventum suum exhibuifc ; habitoque non parvo procerum conventu apud Northam- tonam priscam fidem apud eos qui dederant novavit, ab his qui non dederant accepit." One would not have found out from this why it was that Matilda came to England, and that she had been spending two years in Normandy. But we make out the story from Simeon, 1 1 29, and Henry of Huntingdon, 220. Matilda's own panegyrist in the continuation of WUliam of Jiimiggea has nothing to say about this. '' Ord. Yit. 900 C. This is in the last year of Henry's reign. 206 THE NOEMA'N KINGS TIST ENGLAND. cH. XXIII. broug-ht about between husband and wife. Matilda became Birth of ^]jg mother of three sons, one of them to be in time another Henry the Second. King Henry of even greater fame than his grandfather." March, II33- Duke It is worthy of notice that the return of Matilda to Bristol. England was accompanied by a change in the prison and the ''^^- warder of her captive uncle. He had been kept under the Robert re- Care of Bishop Roger of Salisbury in his castle of the movedirom Devizes.^ At the request of Matilda and of her uncle the tlie Devizeg ^ to Bristol. King of Scots, he was now moved to Bristol, under what they must have thought to be the safer keeping of the Empress's half-brother, Earl Robert.^ This clearly shows from what quarter danger was looked for ; and presently danger, if not from the captive Robert, at least Lewis from his son the ClitOj again began to threaten. King up the Lewis again took up the cause of William, and he con- wmiam soled him for the loss of Maine and of his Angevin bride January, j^y ^ grant of the French Vexin and of the hand of Adeliza 1127. ■^ "^ Murder of ^^® half-sister of his own Queen. ^ The way to a greater Charles of promotion was, almost at the same moment, opened by the March i, murder of Charles the Good, Count of Flanders, who died by the same death as his father Cnut, though not through the vengeance of an injured people, but through the plots of a competitor for his dominions, his kinsman William of Ypres.^ There were a crowd of competitors for the vacant principality, among whom were King Henry and the Clito ' Ord. Vit. 763 E ; Will. Gem. viii. 25 ; Eobert de Monte (Pertz, vi. 491). II33- ^ Orderic, 887 A, places him at the Devizes a little later, probably by a confusion of chronology. The castle of the Devizes certainly belonged to Bishop Koger. " This is recorded by the Chronicler, II 26, who adds emphatically, " pset waes eall don Surh his dohtres rsed and J)urh se Scotte kyng Dauid hire eam." ' Ord. Vit. 884 C. She was daughter of Eeinerj, Marquess of Montferrat. Art de Verifier les Dates, iii. 10, 630 ; Wace, 15424. » Chron. Petrib. IT27 ; Ord. Vit. 884 D. The actual murderer was Bur- chard of Lille. SUCCESSION OF THE COUNTS OP FLANDERS. 207 William, by virtue of their descent from Matilda the wife oh. xxiir. of the Conqueror, and Theodoric of Elsass, who came in the female line of Robert the Frisian. The King of the French, William as over-lord of the fief, at once hastened into Flanders, and ll^^s put William in possession of the county. ^ This sudden S?""? °^ elevation of his nephew called for the King's presence in 1127. Normandy.^ His attempts to win Flanders for himself through his nephew Stephen came to nothing ; ^ but it appears incidentally that there were English or Norman adventurers in the camp of William who were looked upon as traitors.* War followed between the new Marquess Death of and his competitor Theodoric ; but William died in the juiy'27',' next year, and the news was brought in a dream to '^^^■ his father in his prison.* Theodoric was now confirmed Theodoric in the possession of Flanders with the good will of the FkniJers. rival Kings. Henry even called on his nephew Stephen, ''^*' whose county of Boulogne was a Flemish fief, and others of his subjects who held lands in Flanders, to acknowledge the new prince.* After this we hear no more of warfare between Henry and Lewis. The death of William had Pardon of so completely checked the schemes both of the French Meulan. King and of his Norman allies that Henry could afford ''^9- to set free his prisoners Waleran of Meulan and Hugh of Montfort.'' The few remaining years of Henry's reign ' Orderic, 884, 885, describes this expedition of Lewis and WiUiam; " Guilelmus ducatiun Flandriae dono regis et hereditario jure obtinuit." ' CJhron. Petrib. 11 28. ' This comes from Alberic, n2'j, who gives many particulars from various writers. * Mag. Eot. PipEe, 93. " Agnes de Belfago reddit compotum de xxix. marcia argenti quia filius euus porrexit ad comitem Flandrise." See Mr. Hunter's Prefeoe, xix. ° The Chronicler, 11 28, and Orderic, 885, 886, record his wound, his monastic profession, and his death. So the Continuator of Florence. Or- deric, 887 A, tells the story of Robert's dream. » Ord. Vit: 886 C. ' The Chronicler, 1 1 29, tells this at some length, and adds, " wurtSonfa alswa gode freond swa hi wasron seror feond." 208 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND, CH. xxni. were taken up with the domestic quarrels of his daughter Death of and her husband. In the year before his own death Robert. Duke Eobert died at Cardiff/ and Henry remained the Februarys, ^j^j^ ^^^^ representative of the Conqueror. He most likely deemed that there could now be nothing to hinder the peaceable carrying out of his own scheme for the succession. But the time was not yet come for England actually to invest a woman with a kingly office. It was acknowledgement enough of the new ideas of sovereignty if the realm which the Great William had won by the sword should pass on to those who came of his blood only by the spindle-side. Peace with Within our own island the reign of Henry the First was a time of most unusual peace on the northern frontier. Reigns of Under three sons of Malcolm and Margaret, Eadgar, Alex- 1097°-! 107; ander, and David -^ — three names which well illustrate the 1107-112I' strangely eclectic character of Scottish royal nomenclature David, — Scotland was now passinfir throug'h one of the most im- 1124-1153. . . . portant periods of her history. But it was a time of in- ternal change, sometimes of internal warfare, not a time of enmity between the vassal and the Imperial kingdom. Influences from England, influences partly English, partly Norman, were spreading themselves over Scotland. Ead- gar had been set on the throne by his English uncle ;^ Alexander, according to some accounts, was married to a natural daughter of King Henry/ and we shall see that he played a part in English ecclesiastical affairs. Under David, above all, the connexion with England became closer, and the internal advance of the kingdom was greater than it had ever been before. But David, the brother of one ' Hist. Mon. Glouc. i. 15. See Appendix Z. ' See the accounts of these three Kings, and especially of David, in Wil- liam of Malmesbury, V. 400. ^ See above, p. 122. * Will. Malms, v. 400. But she is not mentioned in the list of Henry's children in Will. Gem. viii. 29. RELATIONS WITH SCOTLAKD AND WALES. 209 Matilda, the uncle of two others, and the husband of a fourth, oh. xxm. holding the earldoms of Northampton and Huntingdon English ... ^ connexions through his marriage with the daughter of the martyred of David. Waltheof,' acted, as long as Henry lived, not as an enemy of the English Crown, but as its highest and most honoured vassal. And, while such a friendly state of things lasted, it may even be that on neither side was there much incli- nation to search over minutely into the question whether in each case it was the Earl of Huntingdon, the Earl of Lothian, or the King of Scots, by whom homage was paid and oaths sworn to the succession of the Crown. While there thus was peace on the side of Scotland, Affairs of there was far from being peace on the side of Wales. It will be remembered that the reign of Henry is spoken of as the time when Wales was altogether subdued,^ and there Flemiah can be no doubt that his settlement of the industrious and j® -p^^^ hardy Flemings in Pembrokeshire was a measure which brokeshire. did much to keep the land in subjection. There, in what once was spoken of as Little England beyond Wales, this last Low-Dutch settlement in Britain, the last of the series of which the coming of Hengest was the first, still remains, forming a wholly separate people from their British neighbours, still speaking a form of the tongue once common to Angle, Saxon, and Pleming.-^ The estab- Appoint- lishment of Norman Bishops in the two South- Welsh ^o^^°„ sees of Llandafi" and Saint David's also marks another Bishops, stage in the complete subjugation of the British land.* Landaff, The two prelates thus appointed. Urban and Bernard, are ^°'^^' often spoken of in the ecclesiastical history of the time. Saint David's, ' See vol. iv. p. 605 ; Chron. Petrib. 11 24. ^ See above, p. 107. ^ See Appendix CO. * Florence ( 1 1 1 5) notes especially, in recording the death of the last British Bishop of Saint David's, vrho however bore the English name of Wilfrith, "Usque ad ilium episcopi exstitere Brytonioi." See Ann. Camb. in anno. VOL. v. r 210 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. Hervey Uisbop of Bangor, 1092, removes to Ely, 1109-1131, Eela'ious of Nor- mans and Welsh. Career of Owen, son of C'adwgan. 1106-1116, and they were followed in their churches by a succession of prelates who, whatever their nationality, were all of them under the allegiance of the English Crown. The attempt, made in the days of Rufus, to set up a foreign Bishop, Hervey by name, in the far less fully subdued diocese of Bangor was less successful. "Agreeing ill with the Welshmen," as a later writer delicately puts it, he forsook his malecontent flock, and came back to England to be the first Bishop of the great see of Ely.i The native Welsh annals of this reign are very full, but it is only now and then that our own writers take any notice of Welsh afiairs. It is plain that this was a time, in South Wales at least, of speedy fusion between the Britons and the Norman settlers, though of fusion of quite another kind from that which was going on in England between Normans and Englishmen. There were constant intermarriages between the houses of the Norman lords and the Welsh princes, through which, alongside of more strictly national warfare, the chiefs of each race got entangled in the local and family quarrels of the other. It is characteristic of the time when we find all South Wales thrown into confusion for several years by an outrage which reminds us of the legend of Troy. Among King Henry's many natural children, one, Henry by name, was the son of a Welsh mother. Nest the daughter of Rhys ap lewdwr.^ Nest was afterwards the wife of Gerald of Windsor, one of the Norman settlers, who, after the fall ^ I have borrowed Bishop Godwin's charming version of the words of "William of Malmesbury, Gest. Pont. 3-26; " Hervens dimiserat spe ma- jorum divitiarum sedem, causatus quod sibi et Walensibus vicinis non conveniret." (William seems to have confounded the Flintshire with the Caernarvonshire Bangor.) The Continuator of Florence specially mentions that a later Bishop of Bangor, David, consecrated in 1 1 20, was " electus a principe GrifBno, clero et populo WaUiae." ' See Appendix BB. OWEN SON OF CADWGAN. 211 of Arnulf of Montgomery, commanded at Pembroke, and she oh. xxiii. was carried off thence by force by her kinsman Owen the son of Cadwgan.'^ Both Owen and his father were men of mark enough for their names to find their way into the works of English writers,^ and the adventures of Owen, Death of his reconciliations with the King and his rebellions against mg. him, his wars with Britons, Normans and Flemings, and his death at the hands of all of them together/ fill up a large space in the native annals. Such a tale as this is typical of the state of the country, a state combining the evils both of independence and of subjection. But more real historical importance belongs to the planting of the Flemish colony and to the end of the native episcopate in South Wales. Of the endless feuds, both among the Welsh themselves and with the Norman and other invading settlers, a few facts only here and there concern us, chiefly those which English writers have thought worthy of recording. We have seen that Robert of Belesme was helped by Welsh allies whom the King won over to his side.* The Welsh writers Story of bitterly complain of King Henry's treatment of Jorwerth theTon of the son of Bleddyn, who seems to have been the chief of Bieddyn. •' II0I-III2. this party, how he was defrauded of the lands which were promised him, and how he was kept in prison for several years. But from his English over-lord he at ' The story is told in both Bruts, 1106-1107 ; it is not mentioned in the Latin Annals. '^ On Cadwgao, see above, pp. no, 113. ^ The career of Owen may be traced, without going into the longer nar- ratives of the Bruts, in the Annales Cambrise, 1 105, 11 10, nil, in 2, 1113, 1116. Under the last year our own Florence records his death, and gives him the kingly title. * See above, p. 173. The entry about this war in the later Brut, iioi, is worth quoting, as showing that the Britons looked on Henry as an English King ; " Jorwerth, son of Bleddyn, son of Cynvyn, embraced the party of King Henry in opposition to the Frenchmen ("y trees Jorwerth ab Bleddyn ab Cynfyn yn mhlaid y brenin Harri, ac yn erbyn y Ffrancod"). V 3 212 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. xxin. least met only with imprisonment ; in the year after Settlement his release he was killed by his own nephew.' Nearly ofaarein ^t the same time a further extension of the Norman ^Mr'^'^'^" or English dominion in Wales was made by the final nil, conquest of Ceredigion by Gilbert Fitz-Richard, or Gilbert of Clare^ the first settler in "Wales of a house which played so great a part alike in England^ Wales, and Ireland.^ Henry's Twice in his reign Henry thought it needful to march [ntoVaTeT against Wales in person. The first time it is recorded that 1114, II2I. }^e returned in peace after the usual precaution of building castles.^ The second expedition immediately followed his second marriage. The men of Powys had risen, after the death of Earl Richard of Chester in the White Ship and the extinction of the house of their great enemy Earl Hugh. It seems to have been in this march that Henry was struck by an arrow and saved only by the strength of his breast-plate, but whether the shaft was sent by a British enemy or by a traitor in his own army was held doubtful.* From this expedition, in which he marched as far as Snowdon, Henry went back successful, having received the submission of the Welsh princes, and taking with him many hostages of the children of the chiefs.^ From this march we may date that subjugation of Wales State of which is attributed to Henry. The Britons at least never Henry's again Called for his personal presence, and the remainder last years. ' See his story in Ann. Camb. 1102, 1103, 11 11, 11 12. ^ Ann. Camb. mi. " Owynus divertens ad Keredigeauu irruptionis fecit in Flandrenses ; pro quo Cadugaun pater ejus Keredigeaun amisit, et Gileberto filio Eicardi traditur." See Mr. Dimook's note to Giraldus, It. Kamb. i. iv., and WiU. Gem. viii. 37. " Chron. Petiib. 11 14. The Margam Annalist, 11 13, here draws a dis- tinction of rank between two Welsh princes; "Eex Angliee Henricus coUecto immense exercitu e diversis Britannia partibus, ad Walliam pro- pera'i'it, ut contra Grifinima Gwinedotum regem et Owein Powisorum regulam pugnaret." * Will. Malms, v. 401. ^ See Chron. Petrib. and Sim. Dun. 1 1 21, where the submission is strongly asserted. STATE OF WALES UNDEE HENRY. 213 of tlieir annals down to Henry's death is taken up with ch. xxm. records of their strifes amongst themselves^ chiefly taking the form of slaughter and mutilation inflicted by kins- man upon kinsman.^ The general result of Henry's reign as regards Wales may be given in the words of a British writer, who is complaining of the unwise doings of a certain Cedivor son of Goronwy ; " And none could be more mischievous than that Cedivor to the country in general, before he left Dyved as he did, full of various nations, such as Flemings and French and Saxons, and his own native tribe ; who, though they were one nation with the men of Ceredigion, nevertheless had hostile hearts, on account of their disquietude and discord formerly; and more than that, being in fear of offend- ing King Henry, the man who had subdued all the sovereigns of the isle of Britain by his power and au- thority, and who had subjugated many countries beyond sea under his rule, some by force and arms, others by innumerable gifts of gold and silver ; the man with whom no one could strive but God alone, from whom he obtained the power." ^ With Ireland the relations of Henry seem to have been Eelationa peaceful. The Irish Kings are described as looking up to ^t^ the King of England with great reverence, though we get ^^^l*"^"' a vague hint that their friendship was not absolutely un- broken.^ It is more certain that, as under the two Wil- liams, so under Henry, the ecclesiastical connexion went on, and at least one Irish Bishop, Gregory of Dublin, was ' See especially the later Brut, 1 122-1 126. ' Brut y Tywysogion, 11 13. I follow the translation in the Chronicles and Memorials. The account in Orderic (900 A) of a great general move- ment in Wales just before Henry's death, which he wished to come back from Normandy to avenge, reads like a confusion with the disturbances which followed his death. ' See Will. Malms, v. 409. Both the Chronicon Scotorum and the Annals of Loch C^ record the death of Henry. In the latter he appears as "Hanrico mac Wiililim ri Franc oous Saxan ecus Bretan." 214 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. XXIII. witli Orkney, consecrated in England.^ We hear also of the friendship between Henry and Paul Earl of the Orkneys, though the homage of that prince was due, not to England, but to Norway, a friendship shown chiefly, it would seem, by gifts to Henry's zoological collection at Woodstock.^ Here again the connexion takes an ecclesiastical form, and the Bishop of Orkney, more strictly a suflFragan of Trondhjem, is seen acting as a suffragan of York.^ In short there can be no doubt that, through the whole isle of Britain and the neighbouring lands, the fame and power of Henry surpassed that of any King that had gone before him. It was more than the reign of Eadgar the Peaceful come Peace of England under Henry. The reign of Henry, as far as the internal affairs of England are concerned, is, except in ecclesiastical matters, little more than a blank. Of a reign in which, after its first three years, the land saw neither domestic revolt nor foreign invasion, there is no really connected narrative to tell. Setting aside ecclesiastical and foreign affairs, our Chroniclers have nothing to tell us beyond the frequent complaints of the King's exactions of money,-* a few notices of his strict justice, degenerating sometimes perhaps into injustice,^ and a crowd of notices of the weather, the crops, and natural phsenomena of all kinds.^ Of single events of this kind by far the most remarkable is the heavy punishment of the false moneyers, which I have already referred to as illustrating the character of ' See Gervase, 1660, and more fully Cont. Flor. 11 21. See vol. iv. p. 529- ^ Win. Malms, v. 409. ^ See Eadmer, 97. * Chron. Petrib. X104, 1105, itio, 1116, Iir7, 1118, 1124, 1128. ^ See above, p. 159. « Chron. Petrib. 1104, 1106, 1107, mo, nil, 1112, 1114, 1115, 1116, 1117, 1118, 1119, 1121, 1122, 1124, 1125, 1127, 1131. See Mr. Earle'a note, Parallel Chronicles, p. 363. PEACE UNDER HENRY. 215 the King.i Heniy's castle-building on the Welsh frontier oh. xxiir. has been already spoken of, and we have seen that, peaceful Henry , 1 ■ 1 ■ 1 p CI 1 1 strengthens as things were on the side of Scotland, he thought it Carlisle. needful to add strength to the city which his brother had called into being on the northern frontier. At the time when he was, as has been already noticed,^ at York, where he, as a King who nas ready to do justice in person, found much to do with the affairs of the city and of northern England generally, he visited Carlisle, and gave orders for further defending the city with walls and towers.^ The new fortress had just become an immediate possession of the Crown, by the transfer of its Earl Ralph Meschines to the earldom of Chester, left void by the fate of the White Ship. In ecclesiastical affairs, on the other hand, the reign of Ecclesias- Henry holds a most important place, especially as a link „f Henry, between the past reigns of his father and brother and the coming reign of his grandson. It is a time of struggle Struggle between the Old-English notions which, as suiting their newnotions own interest, the Norman Kings were as zealous to °^ P^^pai ' ° power, defend as their English predecessors, and the new-fangled notions which, as an unavoidable result of the Conquest, were fast coming in from Rome. It was a time of dispute about the right of investitures and about the marriage of the clergy, two points on both of which the ancient customs of England had more or less fully to yield to Roman innovations. It was a time in which the connexion ' See above, p. 159. 2 See above, p. 161. ' Sim. Dun. 11 22. "Hoc anno rex Henricus, post festum Sanctl Michaelis Northymbranas intrans regiones, ab Eboraco divertit versus mare oooidentale, consideraturus civitatem antiquam quae lingua Brittonum Cairlel dicitur, qua; nunc Carleol Anglice, Latine vero Lugubalia appellatur, quam data peounia casteUo et turribus prsecepit muniri. Hinc rediens Eboracum, post graves civium et comprovinoialium implaoitationes, reversus est Suthymbriani," 216 THE NOEMAJr KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxin. with Rome and the authority of Rome was strengthened New in every way. This is a most speaking sign of the way po'^itiorof in which the island Empire was being drawn into the England, gg^gj-^i pohtica] System of "Western Europe/ and of the way in which the political system of Westei-n Europe was fast coming to look to the Bishop of Rome as its centre. The change must have been unavoidable, when it pressed on with such strides as it did in the reign of a prince like Henry, than whom none was less inclined to give up any of the rights of his crown and kingdom. Henry was sur- rounded, and for the most part supported, by Bishops of Bishops his own or his brother's choosing. They had mostly been foJFtem-*^ promoted to ecclesiastical office from the temporal service poral eer- q£ ^^^ King ; they were able statesmen, often magnificent builders, who left behind them, some on the whole a good, some on the whole a bad, memory in their dioceses ; but none of them could lay any claim to the character of saints,-' Eandolf Randolf Flambard, imprisoned at the beginning of Henry's Flambard . iciii,- , • ^ at Durham, reign at the common demand oi the whole nation, contrived 1099-113 -afterwards to make his peace with Henry, and lived on, engaged in rearing the nave of Saint Cuthberht's minster, Eobert till a late stage of Henry's reign. ^ Another prelate Bishop of whom Henry had inherited from his brother was Robert ioQ4.-i'r2^ I^loet, Bishop of Lincoln ; ^ of his own promoting was the Eoger, more famous Roger of Salisbury. Raised by Henry from Salisbury. ^^'^ lowcst rank of the priesthood, he appears as the chief 1107-1139. adviser of the ^theling in his lowlier days ; he appears no ^ The bad side of Henry's ecclesiastical reign, especially the secularity of the prelates, is set forth in the Gesta Stephani, 16. ^ The imprisonment and escape of Randolf Flambard are recorded by the Chronicler and Florence, Iioo, iioi ; Ord. Vit. J86, 787; Will. Malms. Gesta Eegum, v. 393 (see above, p. 168), 394; Hen. Hunt. 217, who says emphatically, "quern rex Henrious posuerat in \'inculis, oonsiHo gentis Anglorum." ' See his character in Will. Malms. Gest. Pont. 313; Hen. Hunt. De Contemptn Mundi, 694. His remarltable death, which they both record, is told still more graphically by the Chronicler, 1123. SUCCESSION' OF BISHOPS. 217 less, first as Chancellorj then as Justiciar, as the chief coun- oh, xxm. seller of the King-. That post he holds at first in a kind of partnership with Count Robert of Meulan, and after Robert's death he keeps his influence unbroken, and seem- ingly shared by no other rival, till the end of Henry's reign.^ Founder of the episcopal castles of Sherborne and the Devizes, he was the greatest builder of his day, both in military and in ecclesiastical works.^ His architectural tastes were shared Alexander, by his nephew Alexander, who succeeded Robert Bloet ^ at Lincoln. Lincoln, and by William of Warelwast, who figures as the '■'^3-"+ ■ agent both of Rufus and of Henry in the dispute with Warelwast, Anselm. He succeeded the Norman-born but English- -^^^^^ ° minded Osbern* in the chair of Exeter, and his memory 1107-1136. still lives in the twin minster towers of the capital of the West. All these prelates fill no small place in the history The "Pl^Qijvl-pQ ox of the time, and they all illustrate the law by which men this time brought from beyond sea were preferred to high ecclesias- ™°^yy J 1 & foreigners. tical offices, rather than the natives of the land, whether of English or Norman descent.^ Their prominence also makes us see that there was a good as well as a bad side even to the incroachments of Rome. The powers which had been Bad side of exercised by the native Kings without damage to the supremacy. purity of the Church were now abused, not only to the promotion of strangers, but to the general secularizing of ' On Boger of Salisbury and his greatness, see Will. Malms. Gest. Regg. V. 408; Ord. Vit. 904D, 919 C; Hen. Hunt. 219; De Contemptu Mundi, 700 ; Gest. Steph. 46, 62 ; Will. Neub. i. 6 (who tells the well- known story of the way in which he first recommended himself to Henry') ; John of Hexham, 266 ; Stubbs, Constitutional History, 349 et seq. All these writers epeak of Eoger as set over the whole kingdom, and more than one of them uses the special phrase " secundus a rege." * Of the place of Eoger in the history of architecture I shall have to speak in a later Chapter. ' Henry of Huntingdon gives us the panegyric of Alexander in prose in the De Contemptu Mundi, 700, and in his History he sings his praises in several hexameters. ' See vol. iv. p. 378. ' See above, p. 151, and Appendix W. 218 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxni. the spiritual order.^ From tbis point of view we can better understand how a man like Anselm could appear, not only as the servant of Rome, but as the enemy of the ancient laws and liberties of England. The In the early part of this reign, alongside of the con- with quest of Normandy, the chief place is again filled by the "^®™' holy Primate, his disputes with the King, their recon- ciliation, and Anselm's attempted reforms. In this, as in many other matters, the early part of the reign of Henry the First reads at first sight like the reign of William Rufus over again. But it is only in the bare outline that the two stories are like one another; and, if we must compare the ecclesiastical disputes of the reign of Henry the First with those of the reign of Rufus, we must compare them also with the ecclesiastical Compari- disputes of the reign of Henry the Second. A dispute son of Henry the between Rufus and Anselm and a dispute between Henry WiUiam ^^^ Anselm were two widely difierent things. And we Kufus and niay add that, if Anselm the natural saint was a less withHenry . the Second, provoking adversary than Thomas the artificial saint, Anselm had to deal in Henry the First with a sovereign who better understood the rights of his own case than Thomas had to deal with in Henry the Second. Henry acts throughout with that calmness and caution which were leading features in his character. He never allows himself to be hurried into undignified reproaches, into groundless accusations, into acts of petty malignity such as are to be found in the conduct both of William Rufus Firmness and of Henry the Second. He marches also directly to sisteucy of tis point. He lays down a principle, and he keeps to it. '5i"'y- He never allows himself, for the sake of any momentary advantage, to fall into a position inconsistent with his general principle. And, when at last he yields part of his claims, he yields frankly and for ever. In his con- ' See vol. IT. p. 459. HENEY AND ANSELM. 219 troversy with Anselm lie cannot be charged with breach ch. xxiit. of faith, though, at more than one stage of his reign, he is open, like his brother, to the charge of keeping bishopricks vacant that he might enjoy their revenues. In shortj Henry the First, whatever may have been his personal belief on such matters, was far too wary a states- man to show himself to the world either as a scoffer and blasphemer like Rufus, or as one who, like Henry the Second, might be hurried by momentary passion, either into acts unworthy of his character or into admissions inconsistent with his position. In the case of Henry His the First, that position is throughout a simple one, and poJtion. one with which no Englishman ought to quarrel. He would maintain the rights of the Crown of England as he received them. Like his father, he would do what the Kings before him had done ; what the Kings before him had not done he would not do. The English-born Henry, born within Tostig's earldom, could speak as firmly, though with a milder voice, as Tostig had spoken to Pope Nicolas.^ And yet if, as Englishmen, we go along with Position of Henry in defending the rights of England, yet, as men, we cannot help yielding our sympathies to the holy man with whom he strove. In striving with Henry, Anselm had not to wage that mere strife of good against evil which he had to wage in striving against Rufus. But the strife was with him none the less a simple work of duty. It was a work of duty in the strictest sense ; it is plain that his own personal opinion or interest had no share in the matter. Rome had spoken, and Anselm obeyed. And when he so obeyed, the blame rests less with him than with that policy of the Conqueror which had taught men that, when Rome spoke, men should obey. The question between Henry and Anselm True was in no sense a question of eternal right and wrong; of the dispute. "• See vol. il. p. 458, 220 THE NORMAN" KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. XXIII. Kecall of Ansebn. IIOO. He refuses to do and to con- secrate the invested by the King. Change in Ansehn's No personal breach it was a question between the law of England and the innovations of Rome. Henry's first act, as we have seen/ was to recall Anselm. He next called on him to do homage and to receive the restitution of the archiepi- scopal estates at his hands.^ Presentlj^ he called upon him to consecrate the Bishops whom he had invested according to that ancient form in which Anselm himself had been invested by Rufus. Anselm refused both demands. In the days of Rufus he had felt no scruple about doing homage to the King, about receiving the staff from his hands, or about consecrating those who had received it in the same fashion.^ Nor does he now show any sign that these ancient customs of England were in any way ofiensive to himself. But, during Anselm's journeys on the continent^ those customs had been condemned in the Lateran Council in which he himself had been present.* And, with that condemnation in his ears, to have obeyed the law of the land would have been to obey man rather than God. It is the controversy on these points which forms the ecclesiastical side of our history for the first seven years of the reign of Henry. It is a marked contrast between the controversy as carried on by Rufus and as carried on by Henry, that, ' See above, p. i68. ^ Eadmer, 56. " Postulatus est pro consuetudine antecessonun suorum regi hominium facere at archiepiscopatum de manu ejus recipere." Sir Francis Palgrave (iv. 'JoS) and Dean Church (Anselm. 254) seem to look on this demand as something unprecedented, something like the new commissions which the Bishops were made to take out on the accession of Edward the Sixth. But Eadmer does not seem to mark it as any- thing strange, and it surely means no more than that, as the estates of the see (archiepiscopatus) were actually in the King's hands, Anselm was to receive them from him. So below (6x) ; " Exegit ab eo ut aut homo suua fieret, et eos quibus episcopatus vel abbatias se daturum dioebat pro more autecessorum suorum consecraret, aut terram suam sine retractatione et festinanfcer exiret." This harsher form of the demand is oddly said to have been made by the advice of Duke Eobert. ' See above, p. 137. * See above, p. 146. ANSELMS FIRST SYNOD. 221 in its first stage at least, it involved no personal breach oh. xxin. between the King and the Primate. While the question tietween ^ Henry and was still pending, Henry restored the temporalities of Anseim. the see,^ Anseim heard the case of Eadgyth-Matilda, Action of and officiated at her marriage and coronation.^ And during the to his loyalty it was largely owing that Henry kept 'I'^P'^i*^- his crown in the struggle with Robert.^ And, during Synod of the same stage of the dispute^ Anseim, by the King^s mister. licence, held a synod of the realm in the church of^'°^- Westminster.* In that synod, though strictly an eecle- Appear- siastical synod, the great men of the realm generally were, ^en at at Anselm's special request; summoned to appear and to f^^l'^ ^ take their part in its decrees.'' So little was Anseim, when he was left to himself, inclined to find any fault with the old doctrine of England which the Conqueror had set aside, that the English Church and the English nation were one body, and that the assemblies which dealt with temporal affairs should deal with ecclesiastical affairs also.^ Anseim throughout strives, not for forms or for privileges, but for righteousness ; only in his view it was part of righteousness to yield implicit obedience to a power that he had learned to look on as higher ' Eadmer, 56. " See above, p. 169. ' See above, p. 171. * The synod is recorded by the Chronicler, 1102, who draws the same sort of distinction as in 1085 (see vol. iv. pp. 393, 690) ; " Da bierafter to see Michaeles meessan wees se cyng set Waistmynstre and ealle fa hsefod men on >is lands, gehadode and laiwede, and se arcebiscop Anseahn heold gehadodra manna sino^ and hi jpxr manega beboda setton fe to Xpendome belimpaS." The Council is also recorded by Florence, who mentions that it was in this meeting that Roger of Salisbu y and the other Eoger of Here- ford were invested with their staves. See also Hen. Hunt, and Sim. Dun. 1102. 5 Eadmer, 67. The council was held "ipso [Henrico] annuente," and it is added, " Huic conventui affeeerunt, Anselmo archiepiscopo petente a rege, primates regni, quatenus quicquid ejusdem concilii auctoritate de- cerneretur utriusque ordinis concordi cura et sollicitudine ratum servaretur." I suppose that the less carefully measured words of the Chronicler do not exclude this. * See vol. i. p. 405. 222 THE NOEMAK KINGS IN ENGLAND. Decrees of the Synod. Marriage of the clergy more strictly forbidden. Effects of the com- promise under Lanfrano. First complete prohibition in England. Resistance to the new rule. than his own and that of his sovereign. In the decrees too of the Council we see the spirit of the man who filled its chief place. The canons of Anselm's synod, the canons to which he would have the laity as well as the clergy of the land give their consent, did not deal wholly with matters of ecclesiastical discipline or ceremony. A new step indeed was taken in the course of the long warfare against clerical marriages. The legislation of Lanfranc on this matter had fallen very far short of what the zeal of Hildebrand had called for. Marriage was wholly forbidden to members of capitular and collegiate bodies; they were at once to part with their wives. For the rest it was simply decreed that they should not marry for the future, and that no married men should be ordained.' We may be sure that these orders had not been at all strictly carried out during the reign of the Red King. But now Anselm was, after so many years of laxity, holding his synod, and holding it after he had just come back from a share in those foreign Councils in which the marriage of a priest had been denounced as a crime no less heavy than his inves- titure by a layman. And it is further plain that the compromise made by Lanfranc could never satisfy those with whom the Hildebrandine doctrine was a matter of principle. It would amount, in the eyes of Anselm and of those who thought as he did, to a toleration of sin. One of the acts of this synod then was to enforce the new rule in all its fulness on the whole body of the English clergy. Marriage was utterly forbidden to all churchmen of the rank of sub-deacon and upwards.^ The new legislation met with much resistance, and one of our informants, himself the son of a priest, tells us that the ' See vol. iv. p. 424. '^ Eadmer, 67. The only shadow of relaxation seems to be in the case of sub-deacons who were not canons. AH deacons and priests must part from their wives, and the mass of the married priest was not to be heard. MARRIAGE OF PEIESTS FORBIDDEN. 223 newly devised rigour only led to laxity of a worse kind oh. xxm. than any which it was intended to stop.^ Butj at any rate, it was now that the rule of celibacy became for the first time the universal law of the English Church. Anselm's Council at Westminster thus marks an sera in our ecclesiastical history. A number of other decrees which were passed in this Decrees synod had reference only to the duties and behaviour of behaviour the clergy, among which we find more than one forbidding °^ *^® spiritual persons to discharge temporal duties or to hold temporal offices.^ This last canon was one which was very far from being put into execution in those days^ but it would seem to be a natural inference from the separation of the two powers brought in by the Great William. But two of the decrees are of a distinctly Moral moral kind. One was aimed at the prevailing vice of the late reign. It denounced against all sinners of that class, whether clerks or laymen, the loss of all rights and powers belonging to their several orders.^ Another has a yet The slave- higher interest ; it denounces " the wicked merchandize denounced, by which men were still used to be sold in England like brute beasts."* A successor of Kings and Bishops^ down to William and Wulfstan, had done their best to put down ' See Sim. Dun. and Hen. Hunt. 1102 (217). Compare the complaints of the German clergy, vol. iv. p. 424. The prevalence of clerical marriages in England comes out very remarkably in Paschal's letter to Ansehn in Eadmer, 91 ; " De presbyterorum filiia quid in Eomana ecclesia oonstitutum sit frater- nitatem tuam nescire non credimus. Ceterum quia in Anglorum regno tanta hujusmodi plenitudo est ut major pene et melior clerioorum pars in hac specie censeatur, nos dispensationem hanc solicitudini tuse committimus.'' One of the canons of the present Council is, "Ut filii presbyterorum non aiut hzeredes eccleslarum patrum suorum." On the observance of the decrees of the Council in this and other respects compare the letters in Eadmer, 77, 81. 2 Eadmer, 67. "Statutum est, ne episcopi sascularium plaoitorum officium suscipiant . . . ne quilibet clerici sint ssecularium praepositi vel procuratores, aut judioea sanguinis." 2 The punishment of the laity is, " "Ut in toto regno Anghae, legal! suae conditionis dignitate privetur." * Eadmer, 68. " Ne quia iUud ne&rium negotium quo haotenus homines 224 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. OH. XXIII. the foreign slave-trade. But the- words of this canon would seem to apply, not to the foreign slave-trade only, but to all selling of human beings, perhaps to the Deposition existence of slavery altogether. In the same synod several ° ^' Abbots were deposed for simony or other causes. The native Chronicler remarks that they were both French and English,^ and among them we find the distinctly English names of Ealdwine of Ramsey^ Godric of Peterborough, English and JEthelric of Middleton. When we find Englishmen ^|Jg°*^ holding these great abbeys at a time when there was not Rufus. jjj England a single Bishop of English birth, we see the distinction which was drawn in this matter between the highest and the second class of spiritual preferments. We see also that, in the days of Rui'us, the gold of an Englishman was as freely received as the gold of a French- Godric of man. But it does strike us as strange, if we can believe borouffh ^^® account of a local writer which represents Godric of 1098-1102. Peterborough, the successor of the terrible Turold, not only as an Englishman, which his name is enough to prove, but as a brother of that Abbot Brand who, thirty-two years before, had brought the wrath of the Conqueror on his house by seeking investiture at the hands of the iEtheling Eadgar.^ in Anglia solebant velut bruta animalia venundari, deinceps ullatenus facere prsesumat." ' Chron. Petrib. 1102. "And asgSSer manige Frencisce and Englisce t>ser heora stafas and rice forluronj Jte hi mid unrihte begeaton, o^^e mid woge Jiaeron lifedon." So Florence, Simeon, and Henry of Huntingdon. " On Godric see the local historians, John of Peterborough under 1098, and Hugo Candidus, 64. Hugh speaks of Godric as the brother of Brand (see vol. iii. p. 530). and says that he had been " antea electus ad archiepisco- patum in Britannia minori," which one would think must mean the see of Dol. Godric is said to have been chosen abbot against his will, and the simony, if any, was less on his part than that of the monks, who gave the King three hundred marks to be allowed to choose freely. Stories of the same kind with regard to theabbey of Saint Augustine's and the bishoprick of London will be found in the Historia Pontificaiis, Pertz, xx. 544, 545. Ealdwine of Ramsey was afterwards restored; see Eadmer, 92; Florence, 1 103 ; and Hen. Hunt. De Contemptu Mundi, 701. I do not know that anything special is recorded of ^thelric. DEPOSITION OF ABBOTS. 225 The decrees of the Council were passed ; excommunication ch. xxiii. was to be pronounced every Sunday against those who Excommu- , , , 1 . , , „ nioation of transgressed them ; but the number of transgressors in oflfendei-s. all ranks was soon found to be so great that it was deemed expedient to dispense with the weekly anathema. The holding of this synod by Anselm, while the points at issue between him and the King were still unsettled, marks the contrast between the conduct of Henry and the conduct of Rufus, who would never let Anselm hold a synod at all. Meanwhile the controversy went on ; embassies went to and fro between England and Romcj and disputes arose as to the real meaning of Pope Paschal's answers.-^ Meanwhile Henry was appointing and investing Disputes BishopSj the famous Roger of Salisbury among them^ and , consecra- ealling in vain on Anselm to consecrate them.^ Arch- *l°° °^ ^^'^ ° Kings bishop Gerard of York was ready to consecrate anybody; nominees. but either scruples as to the form of investiture or loyalty to the Kentish metropolis began to work on the minds of the men whom Henry was anxious to promote. The Bishop-elect of Hereford, Reinhelmj gave back to the King the staff which he had received from his hand, and William Giffard, whose appointment to the see ofBaniah- Winchester had been the very first act of Henry's reign, wmiam now suffered banishment and spoiling of his goods rather &iff*rd. than receive a wrongful consecration at the hands of Gerard.^ There is no sign of compromise on either side. Henry laid down the simple rule that he would stick to Position of the rights of his predecessors ; he even went so far as to ^nd the ° ask what the Pope had to do with the matter.* Anselm I'nmate. '■ The story is told at length by Eadmer, 58-70, who is followed by Wil- liam of Mahnesbury, v. 413 et seqq.,- and more fuUy Gest. Pont. 106 et seqq. 2 Eadmer, 66, 69. ' Chron. Petrib. and Florence, 1103, and more fuUy in Eadmer, 69. See also the remarks of Dean Church, Anselm, 265, 266. * Eadmer, 70. "Quid mihi de meis cum papa? quffi antecessores mei hoc in regno possidenmt, mea sunt." William Eufua, according to Matthew VOL. T. Q 226 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. XXIII. laid down a rule no less simple, that he would rather lose his life than disobey the orders which he had himself Anselm heard laid down in the Council at Rome.^ Threats may- England, have been used on the King's side; but it is certain that, ''°^' when Anselm left England, it was not as a banished man, but as one who went with the King's full licence.^ His estates Nothing that could strictly be called personally hostile the King's happened between King and Primate till, at a somewhat ™ later stage of the dispute, the archi episcopal estates were seized into the King's hands.^ This step was taken when it was found that nothing had come of an embassy sent by the King to Rome.* Friendly letters however His return, still passed between Henry and Anselm, and at last Henry, now engaged in the conquest of Normandy, and Anselm, on his way back to England, met at Bec.^ The results of their conference came out in a legal form in the next year. In another Council at Westminster the whole matter was settled by the King and the Pope each withdrawing part of his claims. Paschal agreed Paris (Hist. Ang. i. 50), had taken a ground which was practically the same; "Asseruit etiam rex W[illelnius] constanter, quod post conver- sionem ad fidem Christianam, tot et tantas in regno suo Anglise obtinuit libertates, quot imperator in imperio. Quid papffi de vel imperii vel regni laicis libertatibus, cui pertinet tantum de animarum salute soUicitari ?" ' Eadmer, 70. Anselm will not yield " pro redemptione capitis sui." ^ Chron. Petrib. 1103. "fiseraBfter ferde se arcebisceop Anseahn of Cant- warbyrig to Korae, swa swa him and I'am cynge gewearS." Plorence translates, but at the same time enlarges and colours; "Anselmus archi- episcopns, post multas injurias et diversas contumelias quas passus est rogatus a rege perrexit Romam v. Xal. Mali sicut ei et regi convenit." See the story at length in Eadmer, 7°- The Margam Annalist (1103) gives a strange account of Anselm's journey, and takes the opportunity to declaim against the laws of England. He goes on to say, with but little truth, that these same questions were the cause of the former dispute between Anselm and William Bufus and of the later dispute between Thomas and Henry the Second. =■ Earlmer, 76, where the King's just dealing with the archiepiscopal tenants is recorded. * Eor the mission of William of Warelwast, see Eadmer, 72-76. ^ Eadmer, 89 ; Florence, 1 106. SETTLEMENT OF THE DISPUTE. 227 that the prelates should do homage to the King, oh.xxih. and Henry, notwithstanding some counsellors who ex- Compro- horted him to cleave to all the rights of his father between and his brother, agreed to give up his claim to invest Pawhat!^ ecclesiastical persons with the ring and the staff. ^ There "°''- was much to be said for such a compromise, and it was at least far more favourable to the papal claims than the humiliating concessions which four years later Paschal had to make to Henry's Imperial son-in-law.^ The King gave up what might be construed into a claim to confer the actual spiritual office, while the temporal allegiance of the prelates was secured by their becoming the men of the King. The vacant bishopricks were now filled with pastors ; never. Great con- it was said, were so many bishops consecrated at once since BislTops" ° the old times of Eadward the Elder, when Archbishop Plegmund consecrated seven bishops in a day.^ Anselm survived the settlement for two years. He ap- Later days H, TT . , . p J , . of Anselm. enry s counsellor in his measures for putting hjs death. down the outrages of his followers and the false dealings of ''°9- the moneyers.* And he had also to plead for the priests out of whom the King had wrung money after so strange a fashion.^ Anselm had moreover to hold yet another ' See Eadmer (91), who is copied by Florence (1107). So WiU. Mahna. V. 417; " Investituram annuli et baculi indulsit in perpetuum, retento tantum electionis et regalium privilegio." 2 Our historians are specially full on the matters between Paschal and Henry the Fifth. See WiU. Malms, v. 420 et seq. ; Flor. Wig. 11 ri. ^ The Chronicler takes no notice of the synod, except to record the filling up of the vacant bishopricks and abbeys both in England and Normandy. Florence adds the comparison with Plegmund. It is now that the Chroni- cler (1107) gives the remarkable note of time ; " Dis wees rihtlice ymbe vii gear ))aes t>e se cyng Henri cynedoraes onfeng, and wses )>set an and fower- tige^e gear ))8es )Je Francan Jjises landes weoldan." This way of dating seems less in place here than when Henry of Huntingdon (2i8)datesH enry 's victory over Lewis (see above, p. 188) as won " quinquagesimo secundo aimo ex quo Normanni Angliam obtinuerunt." * See above, p. 159. Eadmer (94) distinctly mentions the share of Anselm in this matter. ' See above, p. 162. Q 2 228 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxni. synod, in order further to enforce the decrees of the former one against clerical marriages. He had too the satis- faction, for even to him it doubtless was a satisfaction, of receiving a full profession of obedience from Archbishop Thomaa Gerard of York.^ His last act however was a denunciation of York, against Gerard^s stiff-necked successor in the northern 1109-1114. jjietropolis, Thomas, a kinsman of his renowned namesake Thomas of Bayeux.' The days that Anselm had spent in actual possession of his church had been few, and most of them had been evil. Yet he found means to be one of the Buildings chief benefactors of its material fabric. The extension of the eastern limb of Christ Church— the work of Lanfranc now seemed too small — was one in which the name of Anselm stands coupled with the names of his Priors Conrad and Ernulf ^ And one of the twin towers which form a special feature of this part of the metropolitan church still bears the name of Anselm, a name already His canon- canonized by the voice of the English people, though it was Alexander not till ages after that the title of Saint was formally t e Sixt . bgg^Q^yg^ Q^ l^ijjj ijy tiiat Rome which he had served so well.* The ecclesiastical aspect of the reign of the first Henry ' See Eadmer, 91 ; Gervase, 1659; but T. Stubbs (1710) has altogether another story ; Gerard would not even take a seat in the Council unless his seat was made equal to that of Anselm. ^ See the whole controversy in Eadmer, 97 et seqq., who (100) speaks of Thomas as being "prohibitus a canonicis suis." See the other side in T. Stubbs, 1711,1712. William of Newburgh (i. 3), who draws a very black portrait of Gerard, has nothing but good to say of Thomas. He describes his death by a singular kind of martjTdom. ' See the account of the building, Eadmer, 108 ; Gervase, 1294 ; Willis, Canterbury, 17, 72. This is the building which was consecrated in 1130. See T. Wykes in anno. * The bull of Alexander the Third about the canonization of Anselm, which came to nothing, will be found in Anglia Sacra, ii. 177. It seems to have been under the sixth Pope of that name that Anselm, in the words of Dean Church (301), " suffered the indignity of a canonization at the hands of Borgia." FOUNDATION^ OF THE SEE OF ELY. 229 is further distinguished by a feature which distinguishes it ch, xxm. from all later reigns till we come to that of the last, namely an increase in the number of English biehopricks. Under Eadward the number of bishopricks had been lessened;^ under the two Williams several bishopricks had changed their places,^ but no change was made in their number. Under Henry we see, for the first time since Eadward the Elder, an English diocese divided, on the express ground that it was too large for the pastoral care of a single Bishop. The great abbey of Ely became an episcopal Founda- church, under Hervey, the Bishop who had agreed so iUsee^ofEV with the Welshmen,^ and who found in the Eenland a Hervey first shelter at once safer and richer than his former seat by the Bishop, shores of the Menai. Part of the diocese of Lincoln was detached to form a diocese for the new Bishop ; and Ely, with its unrivalled minster, its great temporal wealthy its temporal powers second only to those of the Palatine lords of Durhamj became one of the greatest among the bishop- ricks of England.* This division of a diocese on the express ground of the spiritual welfare of its inhabitants was quite in accordance with Old-English precedent ; but it ran counter to the feudalizing notions of the time, A New aspect bishoprick, like a kingdom, was coming to be looked on as division of a property rather than an office ; jurisdiction, and the tern- dioceses. poral profits of jurisdiction^ were beginning to be more thought of than the strictly pastoral work of a Wulfstan or an Anselm. To many Bishops of those days a proposal to divide their dioceses would have sounded much as a pro- posal to divide his dominions would sound to a temporal prince. The first division of the vast Mid-English diocese Share of was largely the work of Anselm, and it was a work so the di^gs. ' Seevol.ii. pp.82, 406. '^ Seevol.iv.p.4i4etseqq. = See above, p. 210. ■* On the foundation of the see of Ely, see Eadmer, 95 ; Florence, 1109 ; Will. Malms, v. 445 ; and Geat. Pont. 325. Its wealth is noticed along with that of Lincoln (" quibus opulentiores nescio si habeat Anglia "). Hist. Nov. ii. 32. 230 THE KOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. OH. xxm. worthy of him that one almost wonders that it was not then, instead of more than four hundred years later, that the work was carried further. The diocese of Lincoln still remained the greatest in England; it still stretched from the Thames to the Humber ; nine shires still looked to their spiritual centre on the hill for which the elder Dorchester had been refused, to the temple built on high, with its foundations like the ground that is established Founda- for ever.^ But, if we give credit to Anselm for this reform, see"of^ *^ we must give credit to Henry also, who, long after Anselm's Carlisle. death, added yet another to the roll of English bishop- ricks. This was by the creation of the new see of Carlisle, in the land which the late King had conquered, and in the city which both the late and the present King had taken such pains to strengthen.^ The ecclesiastical allegiance of the new English possession of Cumberland had been as doubtful and fluctuating as its political allegiance. York, Durham, Glasgow, and the defunct see of Hexham, all had or had had rights or claims over it. Henry decided in favour of York ; ^ but he afterwards settled the matter in a yet more satisfactory way by making the newly-won province a separate diocese, and the newly-won city an jEtliel- episcopal see. In that land even William Rufus had Bishop. planted English colonists;* and, now that the un-English 1133-1150. jng,jgjj(jg of Jiobert of Meulan had passed away, Henry did not scruple to give the spiritual care of the last-won possession of the English Crown, the last-planted settle- ment of the English people, to a prelate whose name of ^thelwulf is sure proof of his English birth.'' ' Psalm Ixxviii. 67-69. ^ See above, pp. 118, 161. ^ See the passages collected by Mr. Haddau in the Councils and Eccle- siastical Documents, li. 12. * See above, p. 119. " The passages bearing on the foundation of the see of Carlisle and the opposition on the part of Glasgow are collected by Mr. Haddan, ii. 26, 31, 34. ^thelwulf died in 1156, and tlie see then lay vacant till 1219. j35thelwulf, according to Matthew Paris (Hist. Ang. i. 245), was Henry's own confessor j '* cui peccata solitus fuerat confiteri." THE CISTERCIAN ORDEK. 231 While the reign of Henry was thus marked by the oh. xxiir. creation of two English bishopricks, one of them amonff Introduo- , " tion of the the greatest oi their number, it receives a more special Cistercian character in ecclesiastical history from its being the time Entrkud. * when a new monastic order arose, an order which has, more than any other, impressed its memory upon the scenery and upon the popular mind of England. Zealous prelates had displaced the secular canons from their churches to make room for the more austere Benedictines. But the rule of Saint Benedict, at least as it was practised in their own times, seemed not austere enough for some of his votaries. We have seen under the Conqueror two movements in dif- ferent directions, the introduction of the Cluniaes ^ as a step in favour of strictness, and the introduction of the Austin canons ^ as a step towards something intermediate between the regular and the secular life. But in the early days of Henry the famous order of Citeaux had its beginnings in foreign lands, and, before his reign had ended, it had made its way into the land from whence its founder sprang. An historian of mingled blood feels his English patriotism stir within him as he tells how it was a countryman of his own who had found out the way which in his day was deemed the surest path to heaven.^ Harding or Harding or Stephen,* an Englishman by birth and blood, a monk first Abbot^of at Sherborne and afterwards at Molesmes in the diocese of *^''^'^"^- nog. 1 See vol. iv. p. 500. ^ See vol. iv. p. 363. ' Will. Malms, iv. 334. "Ejus diebus [Willelmi Rufi] religio CisteUensis ccepit, qu£e nunc optima via summi in coelum processus at creditur et dicitur. De qua hie loqui suscepti opens non videtur esse contrarium, quod ad Anglite gloriam pertineat, quae talem virum produxerit qui hujusce religionis fuerit et auctor et mediator. Noster iUe, et nostra puer in pakestra primi aevi tiro- cinium cuourrit." * Harding was doubtless his baptismal name, and Stephen the name which he took on entering religion, just as Orderic became Vital. So Will. Malms, u. s. ; " Is fuit Hardingus nomine, apud Anglos non ita reoonditis natalibus prooreatus.'' In the next chapter he is "Hardingus, qui et Stephanus." 232 THE NOEMAN KTKGS TN ENGLAND. Saint Eernard, Abbot of Clairvaux. 1116. Founda- tion of ^yaverIey. 1128. Founda- tion of Rievaux, of Foun- tains, 1132. Langres, had joined his Abbot Eobert in leaving the last- named house to seek for a higher degree of perfection in the new honse of Citeaux, soon to become so much more famous than its parent. Of Citeaux Harding was the third Abbot J he became the true founder of the order which bore the name of the house, and he had the honour of receiving within its walls the man who raised the Cistercian name to the highest pitch of glory.' From Citeaux to Clairvaux went forth the holy Bernard, the last of the Fathers, the counsellor of Popes and Kings. And pre- sently, while both Bernard and Harding still lived, the new order began to make its appearance in England, and especially in that northern part of England whose valleys and river-sides have received a new character from its settlement among them. The order indeed made its first settlement in the south, where William Giffard, Bishop of Winchester, planted a colony of its monks at Waverley in Surrey.^ Other houses in other parts of the kingdom soon arose ; Cistercian churches were founded at Tintern and at Neath in the lands newly won from the Briton ; but the true English, home of the order was in that North- humbrian land where the monks of the elder order had made so little progress.' A colony sent by Saint Bernard himself was received by Walter of Espec, and, under his care and that of Archbishop Thurstan, it grew into the Cistercian house of Rievaux.* Presently new converts came from the bosom of older foundations. As Earl Siward's church at Galmanho had grown into Saint Mary's Abbey,' so now Saint Mary^s Abbey sent forth thirteen of its monks to make the beginning of the still more famous ' See the early history of the Cistercian order in the Monasticon, v. 220 ; Milman, iii. 331. ^ Monasticon, v. 337 ; iEthelred, 338. ^ ggg vol. iv. p. 664. * Will. Neub. i. 14 ; John of Hexham, 257 ; ^tlielred, 338 ; Monasticon, V. 280. ^ See vol. iv. p. 666. CI8TERCIAK HOUSES IN ENGLAND. 233 house of Fountains.^ A new feature was thus added to ch. xxm. the life of England. The older Benedictine houses had either been planted in towns, or else a town had grown up around the monastic precincts. The Cistercians of set Character purpose lived in the wilderness, and for the most part they Cistercian pitched their dwellings in spots of striking natural beauty, ^"j^*''' Only a few of their houses rose to any great wealth or to any historic fame. But it is the Cistercian houses whose names live on the lips of men. The ruined abbey is far more often a house of the Cistercian order than of any other. The Benedictine houses have commonly either been wholly swept away, or else left, in a more or less perfect state, as cathedral or parochial churches. The Cistercian church, plain and stern in its architecture,^ often more beautiful in its decay than it could ever have been in its day of perfection^ remains as a far more living witness of a state of things which has passed away than those buildings which still survive to be applied to the uses of our own times. On the death of Anselm, Henry fell back into one of Vacancy of the worst practices of his brother, and kept the see of canter- Canterbury vacant for five years.'' This was a distinct j^''^' , breach of his promise ; * but even here he showed a marked diiference from his brother^ in the care which he took not to interfere with the possessions of the monks and the ' Will. Neub. i. 14 ; John of Hexham, 257 ; ^thelred, 338 ; Monas- ticon, V. 286. Fountains was quite an exceptional ease amongst the Cister- cian houses for its wealth and dignity. 2 William of Maimesbury (iv, 337), without distinctly mentioning the architecture strictly so called, is strong on the plainness of the Cistercian churches. They are unlike the other orders, who are not satisiied, " nisi multicoloribus parietes picturis renideant, et solem ad lacunar soUicitent." 5 Eadmei-, 109. * See above, p. 167. Compare an incidental notice in the Winchester Annals, 1109, which also savours of William Rufus; "G-eroldus abbas Theokesberise, regis animum nolens nee valens saturare muneribus, abbatia relicta, ad eoclesiam Wiutoniensem, uude professus fuerat, revereus est," 234 THE NORMAN" KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. XXIII. works wliich they were carrying on.^ At last the metro- Ealph, politan see had asrain a pastor in the person of a Norman, Eishop of ' & 1 r .1,1 Eoohester Ralph, formerly Abbot of Seez, to whom Anselm had Ar°ch~"^'^' given the dependent bishoprick of Rochester. The Eng- C^ntCT^^ lish historian is careful to mark that Ralph, though bury doubtless the choice of the King, was raised to the metro- ' politan throne by a process which he is well pleased to dwell upon, as having at least the likeness of popular election.^ During Ralph^s primacy the strife between England and Rome still went on, and neither King nor Primate failed Disputes in his duty. Again Paschal dared to declare the laws of Paschaitte England to be contrary to the so-called canons of the Second Fathers/ and deemed it wrong that the King and people iiiS) of England had given themselves a Patriarch without und consulting him. Both Paschal and his next successor the Second ^ut One, Calixtus, of whom we have already heard, did '"'^" not scruple to intrigue with a recusant Primate of Calixtus York to undermine the rights of the Kentish metropolis. Thursta "^ ^ong dispute followed, in which Archbishop Thurstan of York, of York refused the accustomed profession to Canter- Tliurstau bury, and, at the council of Rheims, when all men crated at Seemed against England and her King, he received con- of Kheims secration from the hands of Pope Calixtus and certain 1 1 19. French Bishops.* It is not easy to reconcile the Northern and Southern versions of this business ; but it seems clear ' Eadmer, 109. The diocese was administered by Ralph, who succeeded to the archbishopviok. ' Eadmer, no. The King was at first inclined to appoint Fariciua, Abbot of Abingdon (compare the Abingdon History, ii. 287). Then he determines upon Ralph ; " Vellent tautummodo monachi, natuque majores, et populi Cantuarienses ; nee mora, requiritur quale sit in istis velle eorum et vota omnium inveniuntur esse unum. Eefertur in turbam uegotii sunima, et in laudem Dei laxantur pro hoc omnium ora. Sic electus in pontificatum Cantuariensem Radulphua Roifensis episcopus est." ^ Compare the Winchester Annals, 11 16; " Queesivit papa a rege quas- dam consnetudines quas nunquam prsedecessorea sui habuerant." * See above, p. 190. Roger of Howden (i. 1 74) mentions that Randolf riambard was sent to forbid the consecration, but came too late. DISPUTES BETWEEN CANTEEBTJEY AND TOEK. 235 that Thurstan sacrificed tlie interests of England to the oh. xxnr. interests of his own see, and King Henry, no bad judge of Thuretan the interests of England, rewarded his adhesion to the by'iienry, enemies of his country with banishment from all his do- minions.^ He would not even listen to the prayer of Pope Calixtus in his behalf, when, in the conference at Gisors,^ the Pontiff solemnly confirmed the ancient cus- toms of England and Normandy.^ It was only by dint of restored good service done to the King in bringing about the peace with the King of the French that Thurstan earned his restoration.* But the endless strife went on at intervals, both during the remaining years of the primacy of Ralph and during that of his successor William of Corbeil.^ Archbishop William, a Norman like his predecessor, William of does not bear so good a character as his predecessor among Arohbiehop ' See Eaclmer, 125 ; and compare the York version of T. Stubbs, 17 15- 171 7, and the Durham version of Simeon, 1H9. Eadmer makes Henry say, seemingly with reference to the well-known story of Eadgar, " quod nee pro amissione coronse suie, utpote spatio septem annorum excommu- nicatus, propositum suum in hac causa permutaret." ^ Henry's answer (Eadmer, 126) to the Pope's oifer to absolve him from his promise is worthy of all remembrance ; " Dicit se, quoniam apostolicus est, me a fide quam pollicitus sum absoluturum, si contra eandem fidem Thurstanum Eboraci recepero, non videtur regise honestati convenire hujus- cemodi absolutioni consentire. Quis enim fidem suam cuivis pollicenti am- plius crederet, cum earn mei exemplo tarn facile absolutione annihilari posse videret ?" ■'' Eadmer, 125. "Eex a papa impetravit, ut omnes oonsuetudinea, quas pater suus in Anglia habuerat at in Normannia, sibi concederet, et maxime ut nemiuem aliquando legati officio in Anglia fungi permitteret, si non ipse aliqua prsecipua querela exigente, et quae ab archiepiscopo Can- tuariorum caeterisque episcopis regui terminari non posset, hoc fieri a papa postularet.'' * See Sim. Dun. 1120; Eadmer, 136; T. Stubbs, 1717; John of Hex- ham, 266. ° Through the whole controversy Eadmer must be compared with the Yorkist T. Stubbs and with such notices as are given by Simeon. Canter- bury has the great advantage of telling its tale in full through the mouth of a contemporary writer. 236 THE NOEMAIf KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxiii. the writers of the time.^ In his own church of Canter- of Camter- i^uj-y }^{g nomination gave offence, because, though a canon (1123- regular, he was not in strictness a monk, as it was alleged that all his predecessors, save only the usurping Stigand, His eleo- had been since the time of Augustine. His election, we work of are told, was wholly the work of the King and the Bishops, the King; ^^^^ |.|^g jj^onks and the laity withstanding it as far as distmction between they might.^ But his primacy is chiefly memorable for canons being the first time when England was humbled by the sight regular. ^^ ^ stranger usurping the place of her chief pastor. It was Crema HOW that a papal Legate, the too famous John of Crema,' Legate ^^^ satisfied with discharging his proper legatine functions, dared to displace the Primate of all Britain in his own church on the greatest feast of the year.* The only remedy was for the Primate himself to go to Rome, and to come back clothed by Honorius the Second with the powers of Councils of a papal Legate in his own person.' More councils were 1129! held against the married clergy," but in vain Legate, Areh- ' The Continuator of Florence (11 23) and Gervase (1662) both sing his praises, but of. Henry of Huntingdon, De Conteinptu Muudi, yoo, and Gesta Stephani, 6. ^ The compulsory election, the resistance of the monks, earls, and thegns — the English words still live on — the overwhelming influence of the King and the Bishops of Salisbury and Lincoln, are graphically brought out by the Chronicler (11 23), who counts a canon regular as a clerk. See also Simeon, 1123 ; Gervase, 1662. The exception about Stigand comes out when the same question between clerks and monks was argued at the elec- tion of Ealph ; see Will. Malms. Gest. Pout. 1 26. ' His well-known story is told by Henry of Huntingdon (219), whose comment should be studied, and it appears in a more elaborate, and doubtless mythical, shape in the Winchester Annals, 11 25. * This scene stirs up the English spirit of Gervase (1663), who describes at length the xmheard-of sight of the mere presbyter sitting with all the Bishops of England at his feet ; " Ees quam gravi multorum mentes scandalo yulneraverit et inusitate negotii uovitas et antiqui regni Anglorum detrita libertas satis indicat." = Gervase, 1663 ; WiU. Malms. Hist. Nov. i. 7. ° One is John of Crema's own in 1 1 24 ; see the Continuator of Florence in anno ; another in 1127, and another which is graphically described by the Chronicler in 1129. Archbishop William gets together bishops and DECKEES AGAINST THE MAERIED CLERGY. 237 bishop, and Bishops put forth their decrees ; the old custom oh. xxiii. of England was too strong for them^ and the King no I*eorees . against the longer gave his countenance to the innovation. By his married leave, when the Bishops were gone home, the priests kept " ^^^' their wives, as they did aforetime.^ In this time of friendly relations with Scotland the Ecclesias- ecclesiastical connexion between the two parts of the tions with island drew closer. It must be borne in mind that, at all Scotland, events in the belief of York, the northern province of of the England took in all the dioceses of Scotland, and that, ^o^^'^sh ° ' ' Church to at all events in the belief of Canterbury, the Primate of York, all England was also Patriarch of all the British islands.^ Scotland meanwhile had no Metropolitan of her own. Superiority though a certain superiority over his brethren seems of Saint already to be acknowledged in the Bishop of Saint ■^ii'J''®^^- Andrews.' These questions came up more than once during the reign of Henry the First, in the case of two men. Englishmen in the strictest sense, who were called to bear ecclesiastical rule in Scotland. The first was the Turgot elected famous Turgot, whom we have already heard of as the Bishop of confessor and biographer of the holy Queen Margaret.* ^^rews 1107. abbots, archdeacons, priors, monks, and canons, who were to meet in Lon- don, "and Jiser scolden sprecon of ealle Godes rihtes." But " ba hit eall com forS, ))a weorS hit eall of earcedascnes wifes and of preostes wifes fat hi scolden hi forlceten." ' Chron. Petrib. 11 29. ° I must again send the reader to Eadmer, Simeon, and T. Stubbs ; but all the documents are got together by Mr. Haddan, Councils and Ecclesias- tical Documents, ii. 159 et seq. See, on the other hand, the letter of Ni- colas Prior of "Worcester (202) to Eadmer against the clnims of York. The claims of Canterbury to jurisdiction over all Britain and Ireland come out constantly in Eadmer. See also Ralph's letter to Pope Cahxtus, Haddan, ii. 193. ■■ This comes out in several places of Eadmer, and especially in the letter of Nicolas; " Qumn prassul Sancti Andreee summus pontifex Scottorum appelletur, summus vero non est nisi qui super alios est, qui autem super alios episcopos est, quid nisi archiepiscojius est ? licet barbaries gentis pallii honorem ignoret." * See vol. iv. p. 666. 238 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND, Conse- crated by Thurstan. 1 log. Turgot resigns ; vacancy of the see. 1109-I115, Eadmer elected to Saint Andrews. 1120. He was chosen, as we are told, by King Alexander and the clergy and people of Scotland to the see of Saint Andrews.^ But, at the moment of Turgot's election, Thomas of York was not yet consecrated ; long disputes followed, but in the end Thomas consecrated Turgot and several other Scottish bishops.^ Alexander seems at the next vacancy to have thought that Canterbury, though the more powerful, was, as being the more distant, the less dangerous claimant of spiritual supremacy.^ Turgot left Saint Andrews, and went back to his old home at Durham, and the bishoprick of Saint Andrews, the bishoprick of Scotland as it is sometimes called,* remained vacant for some j^ears. At last the choice of the King, and, we are told, that of the clergy and people,^ fell on another English monk, but this time from the south instead of the north. The Bishop-elect of Saint Andrews was no other than Eadmer of Canterbury, the friend and bio- grapher of Anselm and Ralph. But Bishop-elect was all that Eadmer ever became. Though released, as Anselm had been,^ from his spiritual and temporal allegiance to the English King and Primate, Eadmer would hold his bishoprick only as a suffragan of the church of Canter- bury, and as a auffiagan of the church of Canterbury the ' Eadmer (97) seems specially, according to his manner, to insist on the popular character of the election ; " Electus est ab Alexandre rege Scotiae et clero et populo." On the election of Turgot, see Haddan, ii. 1 70. ^ The instances will all be found in Mr. Haddan's second volume. Those relating to Glasgow come under the head of the Church of Cumbria or Strathclyde, ' The author of the Historia Pontificalis (Pertz, xx. 540) asserts the lawful jurisdiction of York over Scotland, though he says that the Scots preferred the connexion with Canterbury. ^ See Simeon, 1107. ' In Archbishop Ralph's letter to King Henry (Eadmer, 131) he says that Alexander had sent to him "cum consensu cleri et populi regni sui," but Alexander does not say so in his own letter to Ealph. So again in p. 132, Eadmer says of himself that he received the bishoprick, "eligente eum clero et populo terras, et concedente rege." " See above, p. 138. ECCLESIASTICAL DEALINGS WITH SCOTLAKD. 239 King of Scots would not have him.^ He came back oh. xxni. to Canterbury unconsecrated, to record, among the mass -^^ S°®^ of correspondence which he has preserved to us^ many Canterbury letters of his own^ of the Primate, and of the two Kings, crated. touching this unsuccessful attempt to turn the claim "^'' of Canterbury to be the patriarchal see of all Britain into something more than a name. Such are the chief features, political, military, and Length, ecclesiastical, of this long and memorable reign. Yet, and im- long and memorable as it is, it is not marked by any ^'^'*"!=^ °^ specially striking events^ nor can it be mapped out into reign. periods by any strongly drawn barriers. We pass on over the thirty-five years of Henry in England, over his twenty- nine years in Normandy, and we are almost surprised to find that the enterprising ^theling whom the voice of England called to her throne at the age of thirty-two has silently changed into the King of sixty-seven planning schemes of continental dominion for his grandchildren. The King at whose power and prosperity all men wondered survived his elder brother, the captive of Bristol and Cardiff, only by a single year.^ At the time of Robert's death Henry was in Normandy, Henry in kept there by his plans for the interests of his daughter 1133-1135. and her children. In the August before Robert's death Henry had crossed the sea for the last time, and the fact that he never came back to England, together with the circumstances of his voyage, seems to have made a deep impression on men's minds. In popular belief the signs and wonders which marked bis last voyage were trans- ferred to the Lammas-tide next before his death two years ' In Eadmer, 133, Alexander is made to say, " Se in vita sua consensuni non praebituruui, ut episoopus Scotise subderetur pontifici Cantuariorum ;" and directly after, "contestans regnum Scotise Cantuariensi ecolesiae nihil sub- jectionis debere, et ipsum ab ea penitus immunem fectum sibi datum esse." ' See above, p. 208. 240 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. xxm. later.^ Signs and wonders in heaven and earth had indeed His last filled no small part of the annals of his reign, and his last voyage • i • i i from Eng- voyage from England was marked by a sign which to the the eclk.se. ^^^ °f those times seemed one of the most fearful of all. August 2, « fi^g other day that he lay on sleep in the ship, then westered the day over all lands, and was the sun swilk as it were three night old moon, with stars about him at mid-day. Then were men in great wonder and dread, and said that miekle things should come thereafter." Our native Chronicler, who thus describes a phenomenon on which we look with so little awe, goes on to say, "so it did ; for that ilk year was the King dead the other day after Saint Andrew's mass-day in Normandy." ^ Two years however passed between the portent and its fulfilment. He stays in Henry, anxious to come back to England, was hindered ^' from so doing by the endless quarrels between the Empress and the young Count her husband. He had been sick before Death of he left England, and these troubles seem to have made his December sickness worse.^ At last, in the winter of the thirty-sixth 1. 1 '35- year of his reign, he died — the talk of the time said that he died from an unwholesome meal on lampreys — at his favourite hunting-seat in the Forest of Lions.* His end ^ The Chronicler places Henry's last voyage and the eclipse in 1135, nothing being recorded under 1133 and 1134. But I find in the list of eclipses in the Art de Verifier les Dates that the eclipse was on August 2, 1133, and not in 1135. And the Continuator of Florence (1133), William of Malmesbury (Hist. Nov. i. 7), Orderic (900 B, C), and Henry of Huntingdon (220?)), all either directly place voyage and eclipse in that year, or else imply a longer stay in Normandy than would be thought from the Chronicle. Orderic however has one or two signs and wonders at a time nearer to the King's death. ' Chron. Petrib. 1135. A still fuller description of the eclipse is given by the Continuator of Florence, 1 132, who goes largely into the philosophy of the matter. He is copied by John of Hexham, X Scriptt. 263. ' Hen. Hunt. 2 20 i. * His death is recorded by AVdliam of Malmesbury, Hist. Nov. i. 8, who adds a letter from Hugh Archbishop of Eouen to Pope Innocent, de- scribing the King's pious end, which winds up, " sic in pace quidvit; pacem dedit ei Deus quia pacem dile-Yit." See also Orderic, 901 B, C, who spealcs DEATH OF HENRY. 241 was all devotion and something more. For we are told oh.xxiii. that the last words which he spoke about the things of ^®*^^^^ this world were a charge to all around him to keep the death-bed. peace and to protect the poor.' He took care however, His last declaration when asked about the succession, to make a last declara- on behalf of tion in favour of his daughter. To her personally he ^ ' *■ bequeathed his dominions, without allotting any crown matrimonial to her husband who had given him so much displeasure. King Henry's body, borne across the whole His burial , ., at Reading. breadth of Normandy and Wessex, after halting for a while by the tomb of his father/ found its last resting-place in the great minster which he had himself reared at Reading.* The first English-born King of the new line, he in whose descendants the green tree was to return to its place, the King who had won Normandy by the strength of England, who had made England the foe of France and the ally of Germany, was not to lie either in Norman soil or in any of the older resting-places of the royal dead of England. The King whose reign marks so great an sera in English history had well earned a last home to himself, apart from to the same effect. Henry of Huntingdon does not go into the same detail, but he dismisses him with the title of " rex magnus." ' Ord. Vit. 901 C. So the letter of Archbishop Hugh, who adds the comment, " utinam sic feciasent qui thesauros ejus tenebant et tenent." Cf. Gesta Stephani, 30, where it is laid to the charge of the Empress that she turned to her own purposes what her father had left to pious uses. The Chronicler (1137) seems rather to lay the blame on Stephen. ' The details of the embalming and burial of Henry, or rather the several burials of the different parts of him, may be studied in Orderic (901 C, D, where his body, which is, first of all, like that of his father, reveren- tially called "soma," afterwards sinks into "pingue cadaver"), in William of Malmesbuiy (Hist. Nov. i. 10, 13), and in the beginning of the eighth book of Henry of Huntingdon, where one of his embalmers comes to a re- markable death, with the comment, " bic est ultimus e multis quem rex Henricus occidit." William of Newburgh (i. 3) tells the same story with another comment ; " Sic, cum HeKsei mortui corpus vivificaverit mortuum, iUius jam mortui corpijs mortificaverit vivum." ^ The burial at Reading is mentioned by aU our authorities, beginning with the Chronicler. See Will. Malms. Gest. Reg. v. 413 ; Gest. Pont. 193 ; where the foundation is said to have been made "pro indicta sibi poenitentia." VOL. V. S 242 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. XXIII. all other Kings before or after him. Nor was it unfit that the victor of Tinchebrai should sleep on a spot all whose associations were purely English, a spot which had won its earlier place in history as the scene of some of the greatest exploits of Alfred. ^ § 4. The Reign of StejjJien. 1135—1154- Eeign of The remaining nineteen years of this period of our ii«-t'i54 history, though they are formally marked by the name of Utter a King, were in truth a time of utter anarchy. They mark the 'time" ^ time in which the effects of the good order which had been established by the strong hand of Henry were for a while utterly undone. During those nineteen years there could not really be said to be any settled government in the land, and during the greater part of them the Crown was actually disputed in arms by two rival claimants. It was a time of utter wretchedness, such as we may safely say that England never saw before and never saw again. The first days of the Norman Conquest, the civil wars of the days of John, even the Danish invasions them- selveSj could never have fully equalled the horrors of a time when every man who had the power did that which was The right in his own eyes. But, though the immediate work Normans °f Henry was undone, his really lasting work lived through ^F"^ ^^' all. Even this wretched time had its share in wiping goes on. out the distinction between the conquerors and the con- quered. In the universal slaying and harrying, the ravaging of fields, the burning of towns and castles, no distinction was made between Norman and English- ' See vol. i. p. 360; Chronn. 871, 1006. I fear however that, when I wrote my first volume, I did not fuUy understand the force of the words " andlang JEscesdune to Cwichelmes hl«we." j^scesdun is not the modern Ashdown Park, but the whole ridge, and the battle was fought at the other end towards Reading. This has been distinctly made out by Mr. James Parker. FUSION OP NOEMANS AND ENGLISH. 243 man, and the work was largely done by the hands of ch. xxiii. mercenaries who were strangers to both. The anarchy itself thus led men to forget older national enmities in more present and more wearing wrongs, and it led them too to join as one people in welcoming the return of order under a prince who was as little Norman as he was English. It is in this reign, if the word reign be not utterly out of place, that we hear the last faint echoes of the time when England was inhabited by men who could be pointedly divided into conquerors and conquered. During this reign we hear for the last time, from a very Last signs few and very uncertain voices, the word Norman used to y^gt^on'of imply a distinct class among the inhabitants of England.^ '■^®- In the next reign the distinction is wholly wiped out j it survives only in a few legal forms and expressions which are fast losing all practical meaning. The events which followed the death of Henry showed Henry's once more, but showed for the last time, that arrange- „£ ^jjg g^g. ments made for the succession to the English throne f'*^!l''° , " meflectual. before its actual vacancy were of no force. Henry had taken every means in his power to secure the succession of his daughter to his dominions ; but his schemes were utterly shattered. Matilda cannot be said ever to have reigned, and her son reigned by virtue of a later com- pact. On the death of Henry, just as on the death of General his father, lawlessness again broke forth, and one special lawlessness form is said to have been a general raid on the royal deer- °J^ 5*"^ ^ parks, so that in a few days hardly a beast of chase was Ravages in to be seen in the country.^ A King however was soon pJkgf^'^" chosen. The old tie between a man and his sister^s son ^ ' This comes out in two passages of Henry of Huntingdon, as when beginning the eighth book he speaks of the reign of Stephen as " tem- pus atrocissimum quod postea per Nonnannorum rabiosas proditiones exarsit." And, in describing the Battle of the Standard, he distinguishes " Normanui et Angli," though he speaks of them together as " omnis populus Anglorum." 2 Gest. Steph. 2. ' See vol. ii. p, 368. So Gest. Steph. 3. 244 THE KOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH.xxiii. had been felt in all its strength between Henry and ^Adela ^^® ^'^'^^ °^ ^^^ sister Adela, and it bound him in a [died special way to her third son Stephen. The support of Theobald ^®^' ®°^ Theobald, the reigning Count of Chartres and Count of Blois and now of Champagne, had been the alleged [no2- ground of Henry's French wars,i and her younger son, Cham-*'' who bore the name of his uncle, stands forth, in political pagne j^^ more than in ecclesiastical history, as Abbot of Glas- 1152]. tonbury. Bishop of Winchester, and Legate of the Holy B'^h'^'^' f ^^®" ^'^^ Stephen, Count of Mortain by his uncle's grant. Win- Count of Boulogne by marriage with the daughter of the 1 1 29-1 1 71. last Eustace,^ stood highest in Henry's favour, and en- Stephen, joyed all that he could hope for short of the kingdom. Boulotrne. Brave, generous, popular in manners, affable and merry II2S-IIS4- towards men of all classes, gentle and merciful to a fault," of Stephen. Stephen had much in him to win, and even to deserve, the general good will. To England he was a stranger both by birth and by descent, and his connexion with Normandy was only through his mother. It was only as the nephew of his uncle that he had any position in His mar- either kingdom or duchy. But, by his marriage with Matilda of a grand-daughter of the holy Margaret, he was the father Boulogne. ' See above, pp. 180, 187. Theobald seems not to have been the eldest son of Stephen and Adela. See Will. Neub. i. 4, and cf. vol. i. p. 520. " Stephen's wife Matilda was the daughter of Eustace of Boulogne and of Mary third daughter of Malcolm and Margaret, and sister of Henry's first Queen. See William of Malmesbury, Hist. Nov. iii. 49. ^ This better side of Stephen's character comes out in all the portraits of him. In William of Malmesbury (Hist. Nov. i. 12) he is " lenis et exora- bilis hostibus, affabilis omnibus ; " he speaks of his ' ' dulcedo in promissia ; ' ' elsewhere (16) he calls him " mansuetissimus homo," and tells (14) how " quum esset comes, facilitate morum et communione jocandi, consedendi, convescendi etiam cum infimis, amorem tantum demeritus quantum vix mente aliquis concipere queat." So Richard of Hexham, 312, calls him "vir tantae mausuetudinis et benignitatis, ut etiam Inimici ejus ad ipsum conversi preeter spem suam in illo misericordiam invenirent." Somewhat different colours will be found in the Continuator of Florence, 1 1 39, and in Henry of Huntingdon, 2266. ELECTION OF STEPHEN. 245 of children who could trace up their line to the ancient ch.xxhi. Kings in the only way in which any man could now trace up a legitimate descent either to Cerdic or to William. His popular qualities, his position as in some sort the male representative of the Conqueror, were strengthened in Normandy hy the old border hatred to Anjou and by a special dislike to its present Count. Even in England they outweighed the English birth of the Empress and the repeated oaths that had been sworn to her. On his Stephen uncle's death, Stephen hastened over to England, and was King, chosen King with little opposition. Dover and Canterbury are said to have refused him admission ;^ but London Zeal of and Winchester were zealous on his behalf. The body ^nd Win- by whom he was actually chosen seems, as in some earlier Chester m •' _ •^ nis cause. elections, to have consisted of the London citizens and of such other of the chief men of the land as could be got together at once.^ Roger, the famous Bishop of Salisbury^ He is sup- who had administered the oath of allegiance to Matilda/ theBishmjs supported him, and he had the zealous help of his brother ofSalisbury at Winchester, to whom writers on both sides pointedly say Chester, that he owed the Crown.* After some hesitation. Arch- He is bishop William performed the consecrating rite,^ and the Archbishop new King was generally acknowledged. Even Robert ^I'l^^- Earl of Gloucester came over and did homage,^ though 22(?).ii35- his own special panegyrist takes care to tell us that he jjobert did so only on condition of Stephen keeping all his ^°^^ engagements, especially towards himself As regards the condi- kingdom at large, those engagements took the form of ', two successive charters.* The former is little more than a charters. > Gervase, X Scriptt. 1340. ' See Appendix DD. ' See above, p. 302, * Gest. Steph. 5 ; Will. Malms. Hist. Nov. i. 11. = The scruples of the Archbishop are described most fuEy in the Gesta Stephani, 6. " Gesta Stephani, 8 ; Will. Mahns. Hist. Nov. i. 14. ' Win. Mahns. Hist. Nov. i. 14. " Homagium regi fecit sub conditione quadam, scilicet, quamdiu iHe dignitatem suam integre custodiret et sibi pacta servaret." » On the difference between the two charters of Stephen, see Stubbs, 246 THE NORMAN ICINGS IN ENGLAND. OH. XXIII. formal document granting again the good laws^ customs, and liberties which the King's men had enjoyed in the days of his uncle King Henry and in the more distant days of King Eadward. The second charter, which is far fuller and goes far more into detail, was put forth at Oxford before the The first year of his reign was out. Stephen had just come back Oxford. victorious from driving back a Scottish invasion,^ and he ''3°- had received a letter from Pope Innocent, in which the Stephen's claims Pontiff, while fully acknowledging the facts of his popular by^Pope election and ecclesiastical consecration, took upon him Innocent ^o usc expressions of friendship which were construed as the Second. '■ _ ^ _ Conditional further confirming Stephen's right to the Crown. ^ On ^th of the ^YiQ strength, it would seem, of this papal acknowledge- ment, the Bishops took an oath of allegiance in conditional terms, somewhat like that taken by Earl Robert. They swore, it is said, to be faithful to Stephen so long as he should preserve the liberties and discipline of the Church.^ Such a form of oath, a form which we may be sure that any earlier King would have cast aside with indignation, a form in which men made their duty as members of the commonwealth conditional on the observation of the va^ue and undefined privileges of one class, a form which might involve an appeal from the King and his Witan to the judgement of a foreign power, shows how low English kingship had fallen, now that it was no longer embodied in the great ruler before whom a year back all men had Terms trembled. In answer to this conditional submission, Kins' of the Charter. Stephen put forth his charter. In this document he Select Charters, 113, 114 ; Constitutional History, 320, 321. The second charter is given by»William of Malmesbury, Hist. Nov. i. 15. His version leaves out an important clause at the end; "Hsc omnia concede et con- firmo, salva regia et justa dignitate mea." ' See below, p. 258. ' On this letter, which seems to be given ordy by Richard of Hexham, X Scrip tt. 313, see Appendix DD. ' Hist. Nov. i. 15. " Juraverunt episcopi fidelitatem regi quamdiu ille libertatem ecclesise et vigorem disciplinse conservaret." STEPHEN S CHARTERS. 247 describes himself as chosen King by the consent of the oh. xxm. clergy and people, a form in itself constitutional enough, Stephen's but which implies a slurring over of that civil election grounded of an English King which went before the ecclesiastical ^de-** election which formed an essential part of the crowning rite. ^'j^^*l'=^l But Stephen goes on to use words such as no English King had ever used before him. He records his consecra- tion by Archbishop William; but, as if consecration by the Patriarch of all Britain were not enough, the Primate is further described by the new-fangled title of Legate of the Holy Roman Church ; and, by a deeper degradation The confir- stillj the King stoops to refer to the letter of Innocent, innocent^ and adds as part of his claim to his Crown that he, the f'J^T' King chosen, crowned, and anointed, had been further con- firmed in his kingdom by Innocent, Pontiff of the holy Roman see.^ William the Great would hardly have set it forth as part of his formal style that his claim to the Crown of England had been approved at Rome. But, when Effects of William the Great sought for an approval of his claim siastical at Rome, when he received his crown at a solemn festival t^^ c'ou- from the hands of Roman Legates, he was making ready the queror- way for this further step in the downward course. Men now dared to imply that the choice of a King of the English needed the confirmation of a Bishop of Rome. Eighty years later such an acknowledgement was to bear its fruit in the vassalage of the Crown of England to the Roman see. The charter itself which is ushered in with so strange a preamble is chiefly taken up with ecclesiastical matters.^ There are indeed a few secular provisions. Stephen binds himself to observe all the good laws and ancient customs, ' Will. M alms Hist. Nov. i. 15. "Ego Stephanus, Dei gratia, assensu cleii et populi in regem Angliee electus, et a domino WiUehuo arohiepiscopo Cantuarise et sanotae ecolesise Komanae legato consecratus, et ab Innocentio sanctse Eomanae sedis pontifice postmodum confirmatus.'' ' See Appendix DD. 248 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH.xxra. and to root out all the misdoings of his sheriffs and other Provision officers. The forests which were held by the Crown in the forests. ^ days of the two Williams he will keep, but those which were added by Henry he will give up.^ But the chief provisions relate to the customs, privileges, and possessions of the Church, which are to remain as they were at the Provisions death of his grandfather King William. He promises to newfeudal give Up the feudal rights which had been brought in by devices tjjg ingenuity of Randolf Flambard, and to forbear from regard to taking the revenues of vacant bishopricks and abbeys to men. his own use. And he promises also to put an end to a practice for which there was much less to be said, but which seems to have been common in the reign of Henry, namely that of seizing to the King's use the personal property of deceased churchmen, even to the prejudice of those in whose favour they had made their wills. Stephen in short, as a writer of the time emphatically says, pro- mised whatever he was asked,^ and the churchmen seem to have been the most diligent in asking. The complaints of Stephen's breaches of all his engagements are many and bitter ; but even a writer on the other side is ready to attribute them less to any evil intention on Stephen's part than to the influence of bad counsellors and to the force of the wretched circumstances in which he found himself.^ Compari- The election of Stephen, a man who had himself sworn elections to the succcssion of another candidate for the Crown, can of Stephen jj^rdly fail to call to our minds a more illustrious election of and -' Harold. the same kind nearly seventy years earlier. What Harold had sworn to William must remain for ever uncertain ; but ' Henry of Huntingdon, 221b, makes Stephen promise the abolition of the Danegeld, a promise which does not appear in the charter. See Stubhs, Select Charters, 114. He adds, " Hasc principaUter Deo vovit et alia, sed nihil hormn tenuit." ' WiU. Neub. i. 4. " Pactus est quaecunque prsesules et proceres exigere voluerunt, quae postea per ejus perfidiam in irritum cuncta cesserunt." s WiU. Mahns. Hist. Nov. 1. 16. THE ELECTIONS OP STEPHEN AND HAEOLD. 249 there is no reason to doubt that he had taken an oath of ch. xxni. such a kind that it could at least be plausibly given out that he had broken it by accepting the Crown. Stephen, Stephen's and the whole nobility of England with him, had sworn Matilda. far more distinctly to receive Matilda as their sovereign on the death of her father. In the teeth of this oath, Stephen accepted the Crown to which he was chosen, seemingly with the general good will, certainly with no open oppo- sition at the moment. What was the legal and moral aspect of such an election on the part either of the electors or the elected ? Had no oath on the other side ever been taken, His elec- nothing could have been said against Stephen's election, saving the He was in fact the most obvious choice. Unless the now °^^^' Other aged Eadgar was still living,^ the male line of Cerdic and possible the male line of William had ahke come to an end. The <^^i"^dates. King of Scots might by the spindle-side be deemed the representative of the old West-Saxon royalty, and, looking at the matter with the experience of seven hundred years, we might think that no course could have been better than to unite the whole island under one rule, and that the rule of such a prince as David. But we may be sure that such a choice would have been altogether unaccept- able to the great mass of Englishmen, whether of Old- English or of Norman descent. Of the descendants of Theobald. the Conqueror by the female line, by far the most promising, in his personal qualities, was Stephen's elder brother, Theobald of Champagne, a son worthy of his mother, and in every respect one of the best princes of his age. But Theobald must have seemed a stranger in Normandy, and yet more so in England, while Stephen, the favourite nephew of his uncle, was well known and beloved in both countries. Stephen's con- tinental principality, the county of Boulogne, was one ' See vol. iii. p. 767. 250 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. XXIII. whieli had already been connected with England in more ways than one. One of Stephen's predecessors had, how- ever unwisely, been called over to England by the voice of at least a part of the English people,^ and men may have thought, in the days of the first as well as of the last Henry, that such a landing-place on the mainland might not be Robert an useless possession for an English King. A hundred Gloucester ; years before, we can well believe that the national voice, in Normandy at least if not in England, would have been raised in favour of the eldest son of the late King, a son so well beloved of his father and in many respects so worthy to reign. Earl Robert, at once soldier and scholar,^ might, if personal qualities alone had been looked to, have been placed on a level with David and far above Stephen. But the days had passed when either Englishmen or Normans were likely to choose a sovereign his who was not of legitimate birth. Robert was the ac- knowledged son of his father; as a King's son, he was held to be first among the nobles of the land ;' but it does not seem that any voice was openly raised for bestowing on him either the kingly crown or the ducal coronet. We hear only a vague rumour that there were some who sug- gested to him to put forward his own pretension, but that he thrust any thoughts of the kind aside.* We can hardly doubt that either David, Theobald, or Robert would have made a far better King than Stephen ; but, as things stood, we cannot wonder that he was preferred to all of them. The only thing that stood in his way was the oath by • See Tol.iv. p. 112. ^ William of Malmesbury (v. 447) enlarges to the Earl on his happy union of the two characters. ^ See Appendix BB. ' Gest. Steph. 8. "Kobertus, comes Glaornife, fUius regis Henrici, sed nothuSjVir probati ingenii laudabilisque prudentite, cum de regni susceptione, patre defuncto, ut fama erat, admoneretur, saniori prasventus consilio, nuUa- tenus adquievit, dicens Eequius esse filio sororis suae, cui justius competebat, regnum cedere quam praesumptive sibi usurpare." VALIDITY OP Stephen's election". 251 which he and all the great men of the land were bound oh.xxiii. to receive Matilda as the successor of her father. His Alleged partisans alleged, when Archbishop William hesitated to of^the oJth crown him, that the oath which they had taken was a *'° ^^til'^^- constrained oath, extorted by a will which they dared not resist, and that such an oath was not binding. A more daring party, among them Hugh the Bigod of Henry's Norfolk, took on themselves to say, with very little change of likelihood of truth, that the late King had changed his V'^"'"'- mind on his death-bed, and had made his last recommen- dation in favour of his nephew and not of his daughter.^ In later years the same arguments seem to have been brought up again and to have been strengthened by a new Alleged one. The legitimacy of the Empress's birth was called in Jn^CT of question, on the ground of the old tale which Anselm Matilda. had cast aside by a formal judgement, the tale that her mother Eadgyth or Matilda had been a professed nun at the time of her marriage.^ The cause of Stephen Dislike to was however less powerfully helped by any of these '^ '^''^' technical objections than by the general dislike of both Normans and English to the Angevin husband of Matilda, stranger as he was to all of them.^ The election of Validity of Stephen was doubtless a lawful one; the moral guilt of election. Stephen and those who broke their oaths along with him may be left to casuists. Their oaths at least could hardly be binding on the citizens of London and Win- chester, who freely exercised their ancient right of sharing in the choice of the King who should reign over them. If any one had a right to complain, it was ' the jnen of Position of the North, who could hardly have had any share in the E^ian™ ' See Appendix DD. ' See Appendix DD. ' See the Continuation of Florence, vol. i. p. 276 of Thorpe's edition ; " Voleute igitur G. comite cum uxore sua, quae haeres erat, in regnum suc- cedere, juramenti sui male reoordantes, regem eum suscipere noluerunt, diceutes, ' alienigena non regnabit super nos.' " 252 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxiiT. action of the men of London. But this was equally true of almost every election both before and after the Con- quest/ and the northern part of England was, as it turned out, the part in -which Stephen's government met with the Stephen least practical opposition. In short, Stephen may stand breaker, Condemned as an oath-breaker ; but he was no usurper, in but not an ^^^ sense in which that word is vulgarly used. In this case, exactly as in the case of Harold, we find the act looked on in different ways in his own generation and in Change of that which followed it. The writers of his own time are Stephen loud in condemnation of his perjury, but it is only of his iiouncedfor P®^'J"^y ^^^^ ^^^^^ speak. In a later stage, when the son of perjury, }^[g rival was firm on the throne, the doctrine of female afterwards forusurpa- succession took root under a King who by the spindle- side sprang from both William and Cerdic, but who by the spear-side had nothing to do with either. Then it was that men began to find out that Stephen had been guilty, not only of breaking his oath, but also of defrauding the heir to the Crown of her lawful right. ^ Character But, if the choice of Stephen was a lawful one, if it was, of Stephen ')-,■■, his unfit- as things then stood, a natural one, it could not be said to ' be a wise one in itself. Stephen was a more amiable man, most likely he was morally a better man, than his uncle ; but he had none of his uncle's gifts for ruling a kingdom in those days. His character and what came of it is summed up in the few pithy words of the native Chronicler ; " The traitors understood that he mild man was and soft and good, and no justice did not." " On this King's time was all unfrith and evil and robbery; for against him rose soon the rich men that were traitors." ^ Henry, with all that ' See vol. iii. p. 58. ' See Appendix DD. ^ Chron. Petrib. 1135, 1137. It ia rather hard measure when the Win- chester Annalist says, 1 135, " Hoc anno rex omnibus magnatibus recmi sui CHARACTER OF STEPHEN. 253 was blameworthy in him, had done justice; that is, he ch.xxih. had kept a stronar hand on evil-doers great and small. Contrast between and under him the land had had peace. Stephen is not Hemyand personally charged with anything like the evil deeds of "^ his uncle; hut under him the reign of law came to an end. A few occasional acts of vigour, one might rather say, of violence, were a poor substitute for the regular, if stern, administration of Henry. "What Henry began he commonly finished ; of Stephen it was specially re- marked that his grand beginnings for the most part led to very small endings.'^ It would seem that a false Stephen's estimate of Stephen's character had been formed during mistaken Henry's lifetime. In Normandy at least, the Chronicler ^^ ^'^ '' contem- emphatically says, " They weened that he should be all poraries. so as his erne was." ^ Men thought that a man who was personally brave, generous, kind and condescending to all classes, would be sure to make a good King. They thought that his rule would be lighter, that his demands on their purses would be smaller, than those of Henry had been. They were indeed deceived. Instead of the yoke of one master, they were left to the goads of a thousand. Instead of the regular exactions of a single King, they were left to the endless robberies of every turbulent baron in the land. Henry was before all things a King ; he was always a statesman ; he was, when need called for it, a soldier. Stephen was neither a statesman nor, in the higher sense, a soldier. He was always a gallant knight and a courteous gentleman, but a King never. The native Chronicler sets down the whole nineteen Wretched- ness of amabilem se exhibebat, metuens sibi quod regnum injuste pneoccupaverat. Semper autem vulpes latebat sub pectore.'' 1 Gervase (X Scriptt. 1 3 70) remarks that "Moserat regis multastrenuiter incipere, pauca laudabiliter finire." Cf. Hen. Hunt. 226 5, '' Chron. Petrib. 1137. 264 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. XXIII. Stephen's reign. Compara- tive peace of Ms early years. The Scottish war. The civil war. Attach- ment of Henry's sons to Matilda. Eight on the side of Stephen. years during which Stephen held the kingly title as one time of anarchy and evil of every kind. Yet even these wretched years admit of some distinctions for the better and for the worse between one part of them and another. The whole time was one of confusion and lawlessness as compared with the rule of Henry, but the worst evils did not at first break forth in all their fulness. For several years at the beginning of his reign Stephen lived in comparative peace ; that is to say, he had to deal with nothinsT worse than isolated revolts of his barons and Scottish invasions — growing into conquests — of the Northern shires. These were burthens easily to be borne as compared with the general break-up of society which followed the open assertion of the rights of the Empress. The men who won the fight at Northallerton, the fight of the Standard, were engaged in a national war in which they have our sympathy as much as the men who fought at Brunanburh or at Flodden. But we can have no sympathy for either side in the civil war which followed. No doubt there were in both armies men who fought for Stephen or for Matilda out of conscientious loyalty to one side or the other. There is something specially pleasing in the faithful attachment of the sons of Henry to their half-sister ; yet it was simply a case of that misapplied loyalty which, for the sake of the supposed rights of a single man, is ready to bring the horrors of civil war on a whole nation. And loyalty to Matilda might have seemed more honourable, had it not taken the form of a breach of allegiance already sworn to Stephen. Whatever may have been the personal guilt of Stephen, or of any others who broke the oaths exacted by Henry, Stephen wasj as regarded the nation, a lawfully chosen King ; he had not been guilty of any oppression which could justify revolt ; his chief fault was a lack of power to remedy the evils of a state of things THE ANAKeHY. 255 which his enemies presently made ten times worse. We oh. xxm. may therefore so far take the side of Stephen as to eon- Nothing demn the attempt to displace him in favour of Matilda ; ^etteeT but, when the war had once broken out^ there was nothing parties in to choose between one side and the other. Neither the itself. King nor Earl Robert can be personally charged with any acts of cruelty going beyond the ordinary licence of warfare in those days. But it is certain that they did not — Stephen at leasts we may be sure^ could not — hinder those frightful doings of their followers which make these nineteen years stand out by themselves with- out a parallel in our history. In truth their followers were followers only in name. Men professed to take up arms for the King or for the Empress, while what they really sought for was unrestrained licence of evil doing.^ Stephen also lies specially open to the charge, though Useofmer- no doubt all the leaders on either side were open ''®'^^"®^' to it also, of fighting his battles with mercenaries of all kinds. The land was overrun by strangers, specially Bretons and Flemings, among whom one favourite leader of Stephen, William of Ypres, has made himself a name in the history of the time.^ The presence of these men was at the time an unmixed evil, and they drew on themselves the common hatred of all classes in the kingdom; but they may incidentally have had their share also in bringing natives of the soil of all classes ' So William of Malmesbury (Hist. Nov. iii. 50) says of most of the Earls of the time, "Erant juvenes et leves, et qui mallent equitationum discursus quam pacem." " Equitatio " here has the meaning which is borne in a more technical way by " cabaUicatio." ^ The coming of these strangers and their doings are set forth in Gest. Steph. 97 ; Will. Malms. Hist. Nov. i. 14, ii. 34. He says that there were joined to them " non solum advenae, sed etiam indigense milites, qui pacem regis Uenrici oderant, quod sub ea tenui victu vitam transigebant." William of Ypres often appears in the history, as Hist. Nov. i. 1 7 ; Ord. Vit. 916 C ; John Hex. 270. His earldom is doubtful. See Stubbs, Const. Hist. 1. 362. 256 THE KORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. OH. sxiii. together in one common loathing for the foreigner. This goes on during the whole time of the civil war. At last, partly through mere exhaustion, partly through the death of Earl Robert, the war slackened on the side of Matilda, and the last few years of Stephen were, like the first, a time of comparative quiet. Then came the compromise by which peace was at once restored, and the way was opened for the second Henry to do over again the work of the first. Then at last Stephen was King. Up to that time there had probably been no moment of his nominal reign at which he had been in full possession of the royal authority in every part of the kingdom. Three periods of Stephen's reign. First, 1135-1139- Second, I139-I147. Third, 1147-I154. Eeign of David in Scotland. 1124-1153. EeFect of his reign on Scottish history. His character. The reign or anarchy of Stephen thus falls naturally into three periods. There is, first, the time of the Scottish war and of isolated revolts ; secondly, the time of the general civil war, from the landing of Matilda; thirdly, the time of comparative peace, after the death of Robert and withdrawal of Matilda, taking in the dealings between Henry and Stephen and the final settlement. And in this case, as the relations with Scotland are now of special importance, and as they have not much connexion with the events of the second period, it may be better to begin with a sketch of the aSairs of the northern part of the island. The reigning King of Scots was the famous David, the son of Malcolm and Margaret, the uncle alike of the Empress Matilda and of Stephen's Queen of the same name.^ In Scottish history he may almost be called the creator of the more recent kingdom, the great strengthener of its ecclesiastical and feudal elements. Closely connected with the reigning house of England, he had spent much time at the court of his brother-in-law, and, like his ' See above, p. 209. DAVID OF SCOTLAND. 257 father, he encouraged the presence in his kingdom of oh xxiii. settlers from England, both of Norman and of Old- English blood. His praises as a man and as a King, as a pattern of every Christian and princely virtue, are loudly sung by writers both in England and in his own kingdom. 1 We have seen him zealous for the succession of his Imperial niece, and as more than once acting as her counsellor. 2 The election of Stephen, to the prejudice of claims for which he was so zealous and to which he had been the first to swear, supplied David with causes or excuses for breaking the peace which had now lasted for so many years between England and Scotland. He was now undisputed master of his own kingdom, having put down a revolt of the hostile house of Moray. That Revolt in revolt has been thought worthy of record in a frag- pressed by mentary notice in one of our national Chronicles, and the E^'^^^^'"'' man who quelled it was of English birth. He was Eadward Siward. the son of Siward, seemingly that Siward Barn who had shared in Hereward's warfare at Ely, and who had been set free from his bonds for one moment by the dying bidding of the Conqueror.^ Thus strengthened, David deemed himself fully a match for a King who was sure to reign over a divided kingdom. Stephen was hardly on his throne before the King of Scots, stirred up, it is said, ' The great panegyric of David is that given of him by jEthelred in his letter to Duke Henry (X Scriptt. 347). See also pp. 346, 368. Compare also John of Hexham, 281 ; WiU. Malms, ii. 22S, v. 4C0 ; while even Serlo (X Scriptt. 331) makes it his business to explain that it was not through cowardice that David iied at the Battle of the Standard ; " Et tunc qnamvis Martis dextram non fugit ut timidus, Sed cum hostes prsevalerent vitavit ut providus." Fordun of course (v. 31, 35) has much to say in honour of "generis sui splendor David." 2 See above, pp. 202, 206. ' Chron. Wig. 1130. See Orderic, 702 D, 703 A for "Eduardus Siuuardi filius, qui sub Eduardo rege tribunus Jlerciorum fuit, princeps militiae et consobrinua David regis." See Kobertson, Scotland under her Early Kings, 1. 189, and vol. iv. p. 710. VOL. V. S 258 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. XXIII. by a letter from his niece, had entered England under Svrefes cover of asserting her rights.^ He took all the northern England on fortresses, the new stronghold of Carlisle among them ; behalf of Matilda. Bamborough alone stood out. Wherever he went, he ^'^ ' took oaths and hostages in the name of the Empress.^ The news of this inroad reached Stephen at Oxford, where he had just put forth his second charter.^ He at once marched northward with all speed ; * he found David preparing for an attack on Durham ; ^ but no military- Peace operations followed. The two Kings agreed on terms of David and peace. The rights of Matilda seem to have been for- ^P ^^- gotten. David perhaps remembered that Stephen's own Matilda stood to him in the same degree of kindred, and that, special promises apart, he was in no way called on to exalt the daughter and grandchildren of one sister at the expense of the daughter and grandchildren of another.^ Nothing was said on behalf of the Empress or her sons ; but David seems to have thought himself clear from all guilt of perjury, because he himself either declined or was not asked to do any personal homage to Stephen.' But he did not scruple to treat with Stephen ' So the author of the GeBta (34, 35), who tells us how David was "zelo justitiae succensus.'' Henry of Huntingdon (222) takes another line ; " Rex Scottorum, quia sacramentum fecerat filise regis Henrici, quasi sub velamento sanctitatis, per sues exsecrabiliter egit." ' Kichard of Hejcham, 312. ' So Henry of Huntingdon, 2216, tells us the tale, but in a form which sounds a little legendary. The message conies, " Rex Scottorum, simulans se paciiice venire ad te gratia hospitandi, veniens in Karloil et Novum Castellum dolose oepit utraque. Cui rex Stephanus, ' Quae dolose cepit, vic- toriose recipiam.' " ' Henry of Huntingdon (221 i) says that his army was "quantum nulliia in A nglife fuisse memorari potuit." This is not unlikely, as, thanks to King Henry's good peace, no great armies had been needed in England since Robert's invasion at the beginning of his reign. ' Compare Henry of Huntingdon with the two Hexham writers. ° See John of Hexham, 265, and the Melrose Chronicle, 1139. ' Mr. Robertson, i. 103, remarks that the Scottish King, still true to his oath, refused " to hold any fiefs of Stephen." This would seem to come from GKANTS TO DAVID AND HIS SON. 259 as sovereign of England, to restore to him part of the oh. xxiii. conquests which he had made in the name of his niece, and to accept a grant of another part, if not in his own name, yet in that of his son. The Northumbrian fortresses Carlieleand were given back to Stephen, but the new possession of jand ceded England, won by Rufus and strengthened by Henry, was *° I'avid. again separated from the immediate allegiance of the English Crown. Henry, the son of King David, was Henry son also the son of Matilda the daughter of Waltheof. In receives the that character he was now held to have the same vague £Ji^l-^^ f . , . Lothian. mysterious of subjects, and it may be discreet to abstain gjj.jg„j ^f fiom searching: over narrowly into the exact relations Cumber- , . . , land. between the territory which was now granted to Henry and the territory which had been in the old time granted to Malcolm. The later grant most likely took in a part only of the earlier. But at any rate the Cumberland of the tenth century and the Cumberland of the twelfth stood in the same relation to the dominions of the Scottish King on that side of the island. In both cases he advanced his south-western frontier, under the form of receiving a fief — we may apply the word even to the earlier case — at the hands of the English King. We may be quite sure that this ancient grant, and the long possession of an appanage in those regions by the heir-apparent to the Scottish Crown, were present to the mind of David when he made the inves- titure of his son with Carlisle and Cumberland one of the conditions of peace. With regard to Northumberland the case is still clearer. Here were no ancient claims to press or to mystify, but, as Scotland had got half Bernicia by the elder cession, so she now got the rest by the later one. In the Cumbrian cession, old and new, the English King granted a recent conquest, one which in the earlier ease was very recent indeed. In the Northumbrian cession, old Effect J. , 1 T-, T 1 of these and new, he lopped off an mtegral portion ot the Jinglish grants on kingdom. It is plain that the effects of these further ^^J^^/y grants, each lying geographically in advance of one of granted, the elder grants, must have done much practically to in- corporate the older grants with the Scottish kingdom. » See vol. i. pp. 64, 136, 138, 610. 262 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxm. As long as Cumberland and Northumberland were held by the King of Scots and his son, Lothian and the Scottish Strathclyde were no longer the border possessions of Scot- land towards England. The new fiefs stepped into the position which the elder fiefs had formerly held. Now that those elder fiefs had other lands in advance of them in the direction of England, men began to look on Lothian and Scottish Strathclyde as parts of the kingdom of Scot- land, ^ while Northumberland and Cumberland took the place which had been held by Lothian and Scottish Strath- Their bear- clyde. The Scottish possession of Northumberland and coutro- " Cumberland did not last long ; but it seems to have lasted versyin lonff enousfh to help to bring about this result,^ a result the time of ° "^ . Edward the importance of which was shown when the great con- troversy came on in the days of Edward the First. By that time it had been nearly forgotten on both sides that Scotland, Strathclyde, and Lothian had anciently stood in three distinct relations of dependence to the English Crown. The question was argued as one of the depend- ence or independence of the whole formed by those three. ^ This confusion cannot fail to have been strongly promoted by the fact that the King of Scots held, or claimed to hold, these new territories in advance of the old ones. The possession soon became a mere claim ; but, if it had been otherwise, if the Scottish Kings had kept their grasp on southern Bernicia and the diocese of Carlisle as firmly as ' It reads almost like a protest when John of Hexham (281), In describing the good works of David, speaks of " ccenobia Saltehou, Mailros, Neubothle, Holmcoltran, leddewerth, Crag, et hseo quidam cis mare Scotias [Scota- water] sta," and adds, "priEter ea quae in Scotia et in aliis locia bona operatus est." ^ We must also remember how much these lands gained during Stephen's time by their connexion with Scotland. William of Newburgh (i. 22) says pointedly, "Aquilonalis regie, quae in potestatem David regis Scottorum usque ad flumen Tesiam cesserat, per ejusdem regis industriam in pace agebat." ' See Historical Essays, i. 65. David's second invasion. 263 they kept it on Lothian and Northern Strathclyde, a de- oh.xxiii. seendant of the Anglian founders of Bamborough, nay, a descendant of the Saxons brought from the South to till the wasted lands of Cumberland, would now be naturally spoken of as a Seotj just as we freely apply the Scottish name to an inhabitant of British Dunbarton or of English Haddington. I have grouped both the grants to Henry of Scotland together, because they form parts of one whole, with refer- ence to events which happened long before and long after. But the grant of Cumberland and the grant of Northum- berland were separated by a space of several years and by important events, by warfare in which the Scottish King was defeated in a great battle^ but was successful in the war. A squabble about precedence at the English court Renewed led to an almost immediate breach of the good understand- between ing between David and Stephen.^ And a not unnatural f*^'''p "„; ^ advantage was taken of it by the Scottish King to with- draw his son's homage. The next year war was threatened; Truces, but a short truce was agreed on, and, as soon as the truce was expired, David again threatened war unless North- humberland was granted to his son.^ When this was re- David fused, that great invasion came which was marked by such England ; pitiless havoc on the part of the Scots, by their first victory ^^l^^ at Clitheroe,^ and by their great defeat near Northallerton Standard. in the Battle of the Standard. Gathered around the con- secrated standard, under the banners of the local saints, the banners not only of Saint Peter of York, but of the holy men of English blood, John of Beverley and Wilfrith 1 Cf. the Chronicle, 1 135, with Richard of Hexham, 313, John, 258. The Melrose Chronicler (1137) makes Archbishop Thurstan obtain a respite. 2 Richard, 315 ; John, 259. 3 John, 261. The battle is also referred to by the Galloway men in .^thelred, 342. 264 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. Northum- berland granted to Henry. 1139- Hostages, Scottish, Norman^ and English, given hy David. Eadgar son of Gospatric. of Ripon/ the men of Northern England, .stirred up by their Archbishop,'^ beat back the motley host of the invaders. The glory of victory fell to England, but its substantial gain fell to Scotland. When, through Stephen's Queen Matilda,^ peace was made in the year after the battle, all Northumberland, except the fortresses of Newcastle and Bamborough and the lands belonging to the churches of York and Durham, were granted as an earldom to her cousin Henry.* Henry received the homage of the ceded lands, pledging to observe within his new dominions the laws of King Henry his uncle.' The names of the hostages who were given on the Scottish side are a good comment on the mixed population of the northern kingdom. The hostages were to be the sons of five earls of Scotland. Two of them bear Celtic names which seem to have puzzled the English historian. Another was the son of an Earl Fergus, but the other two severally represent the Norman and the genuine English settlers in Scotland. One was the son of Hugh of Morville ; another was a son of the younger Earl Gospatric. This is perhaps his natural son Eadgar, who stands charged, with two other comrades of Eng- lish descent, with sacrilegious incursions on the lands of the church of Hexham." The fiefe now granted re- ^ The standard and the banners are described by Eichard, 321 ; John, 262 ; JEthelred, who ought to be more full, is less so. The name is re- cognized by the Chronicler, 11 38, who says that the Northern army "flem- den i>e king set te Standard, and sloghen suithe micel of his genge." Cf. Hen. Hunt. 222 b ; Cent. Flor. 1138. ' Will. Neub. i. 5. = John of Hexham, 265. ' See above, p. 260. The exception of Hexhamshire and the land of Saint Cuthberht, that is the outlying parts of it, is given by Eichard of Hexham, 330. ■^ E. Htxham, u. s. "Leges quoque et consuetudines et statuta quse rex Henricus avunculus ejus in comitatu Northumbrije statuerat per omnia ibi immobiliter custodire debebat." ° Their names are given by Eichard of Hexham, 323, as " Eadgarus, filius nothus Cospatrici comitis, et Eobertus et LTctred filii Meldred." Eobert son of Maldred ia another case of the law which we have so often come across. BATTLE OF THE STANDARD. 265 mained in Scottish possession during the rest of Stephen's oh.xxih. time. We find Earl Henry taking his place at the Eng- Disputes lish court, though still exposed to insult on the part of He"ry"nd Randolf Earl of Chester, his rival for the possession of^''""i°lf ^ , , . Earl of Cumberland. King David also himself appears more than Chester. once in England in the train of his niece the Empress.' It ^f^'^^ts was not till England was ruled by another Henry who Matilda in rivalled the vigour of the first that her northern border ^^ ™ ' again became what it had been in his day. I have passed hurriedly over the great Battle of the Character Standard as simply one event in a rapid sketch of the Battle relations between England and Scotland. It had, as we"^^^" . . Standard. have seen, but little practical effect on the objects of the August 22, war. Yet the Battle of the Standard is one of the most "^ ' striking events in the history of the age. It is one of two or three great actions in the open field in a time when we hear much more of sieges and skirmishes than of pitched battles. And it is an action in which, as at Tinchebrai, though the chiefs are Norman, the tactics are English. When the time for fighting comes, the horsemen, like Brihtnoth or Harold, get down from their steeds and fight on foot.^ It is full of striking incidents, and it is ' See the story in John of Hexham, 268. The King and Queen act as Henry's friends. * Win. Mahns. Hist. Nov. iii. 48, 50. ^ This fact is marked in all the accounts of the battle except in that of Henry of Huntingdon. The Continuator of Florence, 1138, speaks of " Eegii barones cum militibus progressi, qui omnes de equis suis desoen- derant ; " and directly after, " Nostri pedites erant, et omnes equos suos longius abduci fecerant." The Northern writers say the same, and give the ancient reason. .^Ethelred, 342 ; " TJt spes fugse cunctis penitus tol- leretur, equos omnes longius amoventes pedestri more congredi decreverunt, ant mori aut vineere cupientes." John of Hexham, 262 ; " Universus exercitus circa Standard convenit, ne quis de fuga prsesumeret, equis procul amotis ; omnes autem mori aut vineere pro patria unanimiter decementes." From the older writer Richard however it appears that some still kept their horses; "Maxima pars equitum equis relictis fiunt pedites.'' Directly afterwards he speaks of "equestris cohors." The mounted part of the Scots, that is, according to Henry of Huntingdon, the English and Norman 266 THE KOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. OH. xxni. told us at great length by more than one writer.' For our purpose it is less important to dwell on it as a military- exploit than as a witness to several points of importance in Last appeal the history of the fusion of races. It is the last time when, feeli^s!^'' in an harangue addressed to an army which is described as EngHsh, an appeal is made to Norman feelings and to the pride of Norman exploits." This fact is equally to be noticed, whether we believe the speech to be really genuine, or whether the historian, after the manner of historians in such cases, has himself composed such a speech as was deemed to be in character with the speaker. Such an appeal, addressed to an army of which a great numerical majority must have been English, is of course a sign of the times ; but it is a sign of the times which may easily be read wrong. It is the line of thought natural to a man of Norman de- scent ; but it is a line on which such a man would never have ventured to English hearers, unless he had felt that the old wrongs had been by that time pretty well forgiven. It is the same feeling which leads the Celtic and Teutonic in- habitants of Scotland to unite in seeing matter for national Indirect witness to the fusion of races. settlers ("Atigli et Normaimi qui patris [regis David so.] familia oonversa- bantur"), also left their hoFses. It is only Henry of Huntingdon (2226) who speaks of the "acies equitum nostrorum loricata" as the chief arms of the English, and directly after he speaks of " milites loricati pede persistentes et immobilitercoacervati." ' We have a special tract on the battle by Abbot .^thelred, which contains the long speech of Walter of Espec of which I have made some men- tion in Appendix W. Walter, the founder of his own monastery, is of course his chief hero. Henry of Huntingdon has also a full account, in which Walter's place as orator is taken by Ralph Bishop of Orkney, who in any case was there. uEthelred, it must be remembered, was a personal friend of King David. We have also full accounts in the two Hexham writers, of whom Eichard at least was strictly contemporary. The other Northern writer, William of Newburgh, i. 5, cuts the matter shorter than one would have looked for. The Continuator of Florence tells the story at some length, but this part of the Gesta Stephani is imperfect. Nor must we forget the lively trochaics of Serlo, X Scriptt. 331. " See Appendix W. Benedict (i. 52) makes Earl William of Arundel copy the language of Bishop Ralph before the intended battle of Breteuil in 1173, where the "proceres Normannigense " is more in place. WITNESS OF THE FUSION OF EACES. 267 pride alike in every fight in which the Saxon overcame the ch. xxm. Gael, and in every fight in which the Gael overcame the Saxon/ And I do not doubt that there may be some who have read my own pages with a sympathy as deep as my own for England and for Harold, who would yet feel them- selves wounded in the tendere^t point, if any harsh stroke of the critical pruning-knife should cut away the cherished belief that their own forefathers came over with William the Bastard. The beginnings of such a feeling are to be Speech of seen in a speech spoken by, or devised for, the aged Walter Espec. of Espee, the brave and pious founder of the Yorkshire Cistercians, the encourager alike of French literature and of English historical study .^ It is yet more curious to Use of the mark the way in which one portion of the Scotch army, "Gralli"by the fierce Celts of Galloway, are described as speaking of Q^f'^^*^ °^ their enemies. They speak of them, at least of the Nor- man part of them, as Frenchmen.^ But the most instruc- tive lesson to be learned is the insight which the battle as well as the treaty gives us into the strangely mixed popula- tion of the Scottish realm. The host of the barbarians, as Mixture of the Hexham writers delight to call them, was a mixed David's multitude who are described as Normans, Germans, Eng- '"'^y- lish, Northumbrians, Cumbrians, men of Teviotdale, men ' See Macaulay, iii. 367. ' See above, p. 232, and Appendix W. Of Walter's literary side I shall have to speak in a later Chapter. ' jEthelred, 341, 342. The GaUoway men are made "dicere se felicis- simos quos in illud tempus fortuna servaverat quo Gallorum sanguinem bibere potuissent." One man says to hie comra-le, " Ecce quot hodie Gallos solus occidi." And their chief says to David, " Quid GalUs Cliderhou profuere loricae ? " Directly after he speaks of the " Galli " in the Scottish army. But Serlo gives us our revenge when he attributes to these very G^oway men a physical peculiarity which some have thought to be common to all Englishmen, and others to be distinctive of Kentishmen only; "Scotti vero dum grassando efierant immaniter, Ad congressum belli primum terga vertunt pariter. Truces quoque Gawedenses tremebundi fugiunt, Et quas prius extulerunt caudis nates comprimunt." 268 THE NOEMAIT KINGS IN" ENGLAND. The Orkney- men and their Bishop. Normans and English. Germans or Flem- ings. Robert of Bruce and Bernard of Balliol. of Lothian, Piets of Galloway, and the proper Scots last of all.^ Some add that, besides the whole force of David's kingdom, there came many who were not his subjects from the Western Isles and from the earldom of Orkney.^ These last at least were fighting against their spiritual pastor, for Ealph Bishop of Orkney, a suffragan of the see of Yorkj played a prominent part as the spiritual coun- sellor of the English army.^ The reckoning of nations in the roll-call of David's host is hardly a logical division. By Normans and English we are doubtless to understand Norman and English settlers in the strictest sense. The men of Lothian now form a class apart, neither English nor Scottish ; the English character of their country was per- haps less clear now than it had been forty years before. By Germans we may guess that Flemish mercenaries are meant ; and these, like the Normans and English^ must have met with enemies of their own nation in the ranks of the southern army. In this list too, as in some other places, Normans are spoken of in a way which certainly cannot mean descendants of the Conqueror's followers, but must mean mercenaries hired from Normandy, as other mercenaries were hired from Flanders.* And, perhaps more instructive than all, both from the names of the persons concerned, and from the illustrations which it gives us of law and manners^ is the tale of two great chiefs ' Richard of Hexham, 316. "Coadunatus autem erat iste nefandus exercitus de Normannia, Gennanis, Anglis, de Northymbranis et Cnmbris, de Teswetadala, et Lodonea, de Pictis qui vulgo Galleweienses dicuntur, et Scottis ; nee erat qui eorum numerum sciret." So the Continuator of Florence ; " Innumerabilem habuit exercitum, tarn de Francis, quam de Anglis, Scottis, et Galweiensibus, et de omnibus insulia qute ad ae et ad suum dominium pertinebant." ' ^thelred, 337. "Rex Scottorum innumerabilem coegit exercitum non solum eos qui ejus subjacebant imperio, sed et de insulanis et Orcadensibus non parvam multitudinem accersiens." ^ lb. 345. See above, p. 214. « ^thelred (337) speaks of 'Walter of Ghent as " validissimam manum de Flandrensibus et Normannis adducens." CRUELTIES OF THE SCOTS. 269 of the border-land, Robert of Bruce and Bernard of Balliol. oh. xxiir. The bearers of these great names appear in a character most honourable to them. It is strange to find the Scot- Cruelties tish army, under a King like David, one so undoubtedly Scottish pious, just, and merciful in the government of his own ^'^"'y- kingdom, standing charged with excesses far surpassing even the ordinary licence of warfare in those times. Every form of cruelty and sacrilege is attributed to them.^ No doubt all tales of this kind are sure to be exaggerated ; the brutal deeds of a few ruffians are likely to be magnified by the sufferers into the common practice of a whole army. Still there is enough to show that David had let loose on the country a horde of barbarians whom he could not control, and that things were done by them which would not have been done by a regular Norman or English army under King Henry. That the cruelty of the Scots surpassed all Rebuke ordinary bounds is plain from the rebukes given to them Legate next year by the papal Legate, Alberic Bishop of Ostia, who ^lt'«"<=. obtained a promise that some limits should be put to the horrors of war, that at least women and children and con- secrated places should be spared.^ And, if the deeds of this Interces- eampaign stirred up the righteous indignation of a foreign Eobert and priest, they no less stirred up the righteous indignation of -^®™'''''^- the two noble warriors who had seen them with their own eyes. Robert of Bruce and Bernard of Balliol were men who were entangled in one of those strange conflicts of duty which so often arose out of the complications of feudalism. English barons of Norman descent, they were still the men of the King of Scots. Bernard seems to have been bound to him only by that casual kind of homage which we sometimes come across in those days, 1 The details of their cruelties are given at great length by ^thelred, 341 ; Richard, 316; John, 260. Cf. Hen. Hunt. 222 (where he speaks of an earher time) ; Ord. Tit. 917 B. ^ See Rich. Hex. 326. 270 THE JTOEMASr KINGS IN ENGLAND. Relations between Bernard and Robert. Robert of Bmce in- sulted by the King's nephew William. Robert and Bernard "defy" David. Later history of the houses of Bruce and BalKol. sucli a homage, it may be, as that by which Harold bound himself to William." The tie between Robert and the Scottish King was a nearer one. He had spent a great part of his life in the faithful service and intimate friendship of David.^ Both these barons went and prayed the King to hold his hand, to turn back, and to put an end to horrors which no one believed were done by his own command.' Let him cease from his invasion, and they pledged themselves to get for him the object which he professed to be seeking, the Northumbrian earldom for his son.* The gentle heart of David was minded to yield, but his sterner nephew William kept the King back from the biddings of mercy and sent away the lord of Bruce with insult. On this, in a form not uncommon in those times, Robert and Bernard both defied David, that is, they with- drew themselves from all the obligations towards him which they had taken on themselves by the act of homage.'' Then came the battle and all that followed it. But in the two men who stand forth as the champions, not only of England but of outraged humanity, men whose name and lineage is in so strange a way a common possession of Nor- mandy, England; and Scotland, we seem to see a kind of fore- ' See vol. iii. p. 249. ^ See Richard of Hexham, 321 ; jEthelred, 343. Any one who com- pares the two passages will see that the Hexham and the Rievaux writer do not place the intercession of Robert and Bernard at quite the same time. It strikes me that Richard gives the historical account, and that jEthelred has, for dramatic eflFect, moved the speech of Robert — he says nothing about Bernard — to the very eve of the actual battle. ' The words put into Robert's mouth by jEthelred, 344, are very em- phatic ; " Vidisti, rex, abominationes pessimas quas fecerunt hi. Vidisti iuquam, vidisti, horruisti, flevisti, pectus tutudisti, clamasti contra tuum id fieri prseceplum, contra tuam voluntatem, contra tuum decretum.'' ' Richard, 321. This is not mentioned by ^thelred. It might perhaps have taken off something from the effect of the purely moral appeal which in his version Robert makes to David. ° On diffidatio, a word which has a good deal changed its meaning in the modem use of defiance, see Ducange in voc. BEUCE AND BALLIOL. ' 271 shadowing of the history of their more famous descendants, ch. xxm. The momentarj' homage of Bernard of Balliol to the Scottish King might seem to prefigure the momentary reign of his descendant over the Scottish kingdom. The long service of Robert of Bruce has its antitype in the lasting dynasty founded by another of his name, a dynasty through which England first lost her claim to the over- lordship of Northern Britain, but through which in a later generation the old wounds were healed by the peaceful union, first of the crowns and then of the kingdoms.^ If the peace on the side of Scotland which had been so State of well kept during the reign of Henry came to an end at once on the accession of Stephen, the same was yet more sure to be the case on the border of Wales. No British prince had an Imperial kinswoman to support as a claimant for the English Crown, nor had any British prince any hopes or claims on English earldoms as an appanage for his son. But the Britons had, what the Scots had not, Norman and English enemies to strive against in their own land, and the settlement of the Flemings by the late King seems to have been felt as the greatest grievance of all. Nor was this wonderful. The Norman chiefs, with their followers of Norman, English, and every other race, might build their castles on soil which had once been held by British owners, and they might bring as large a part of the land as they could into subjection. But they did not altogether displace the folk of the land. But, The wherever King Henry had planted his Flemish colonies, getUe-^ the new settlers did so. In the Flemish districts of Pem- ■"«"*'• brokeshire and Glamorgan, by whatever means, whether by actual massacre or by mere driving beyond the frontier, the British inhabitants vanished. The land received, and • How the Scottish invasion has been mistaken by a foreign writer for a Danish one, see Appendix BE. 272 THE NORMASr KINGS IN ENGLAND. OH. xxm. it has kept to this day, a new people, a new language, a new- local nomenclature. In short, the settlement of Robert Pitz- hamon, Gilbert of Clare, and their fellows in Wales simply answered to the settlement of themselves or their fathers in England, while the settlement of the Flemings in Dyfed and Gower answers to the earlier settlement of the Angles Revolt of and Saxons in the larger part of Britain. It was no 1 136-1 /?7 wonder then that, when the strong hand of Henry was withdrawn, the Welsh rose in revolt, and that their first attack was made on one of the Flemish colonies. They first burst into Gower ; they then slew Richard son of Gilbert of Clare, and two brothers, Owen and Cadwalader, the sons of Gruffydd the son of Cynan, men who are the subject of an enthusiastic panegyric from the native Chronicler, and destroyed most of the castles in the land of Ceredigion. They even overthrew the foreign settlers of whatever race in a fight by the banks of the Teifi which Welsh seems to have deserved the name of a pitched battle.^ For ^' two years Stephen sent troops under a succession of com- manders to bring back the revolted Britons to submission. One of his captains awakens some interest from his name Robert of and descent. This is the lord of Ewias, Robert, the son of Harold, the son of Ralph, the son of Drogo of Mantes and of Godgifu the daughter of King ^thelred.^ But neither ' The Welsh war is described in the Gesta Stephani, 9-16, by the Con- tinuator of Florence, 1136-1137, and in the Annales Cambrise and the Brut, 1135-1137. The Continuator of Florence under the latter year strongly brings out the great grievance of the Flemish settlement; " Walenses in defensione sua3 nativse terrse, non solum a Normannicis divi- tibus, sed etiam a Flandrenaibus multa perpessi." So the Margam Annalist (i 1 36) ; " Tota Wahia in discordiam oomniota est, rupta pace inter Walenses et alienigenas ; maxime propter Flandrenses eos quasi ex medio affligentes." And it falls in with this that, according both to his own account and to that of the Gesta, the first attack was made on Gower, a district which seems to have puzzled the English editors of both works. ^ ' ' Robertua filius Heraldi, vir stemmatis ingenuissimi," mentioned in the Gesta, 13, is clearly the son of Harold the son of Ralph. See vol. ii. p. 632. Another son, "Johannes Haroldi filius,'' appears as holding his father's WELSH WARS. 273 Robert, nor Miles, afterwards Earl of Hereford, nor oh. xxni. Baldwin of Clare, nor Payne Fitz-John, whose death is recorded and lamented,^ could do anything really to subdue these stubborn enemies. Robert does not seem to have imi- tated the cowardice which his grandfather showed in warfare with the same enemies ; but he at least had no better luck than he had. At last the King, seeing how little came of war The Welsh with the Welsh, how much both Normans and Flemings them- suffered at their hands/ and having his own haHds full else- ^^■^^^■ vrhere, thought it best to leave the Britons to themselves.' During the rest of the time of anarchy, the English writers tell us little of the Welsh, save when they appear once or twice, as in earlier times, as auxiliaries or mercenaries in English warfare. The native chronicles are full of entries during this time. We hear of some Norman successes against the Welsh, but of many more Welsh successes against the Normans.* And, far oftener than either, we hear, as ever, of the feuds and slaughters of the Britons among themselves.^ But one point must be specially Castles noticed ; the Welsh chiefs had learned from their invaders welahf the policy of building castles, as bulwarks alike against the strangers and against one another. During these years, when so many castles were rising in England, several are recorded to have risen in Wales also at the bidding of other lordship of Sudeley in the Continuator of Florence, 1139. These and several other sons of Harold of Ewias appear in the Gloucester Cartulary, i. aSj-iSy. ' Gesta, 16; Cont. Flor. 1137. ' The Continuator, just after the passage which I quoted in the last pagd, says, " Pluribus utrinque peremptis, devictis tamen ad ultimum Flaudren- sibus." Bat it is clear that the settlements of the Flemings were not seriously interfered with, for they are there stfll. ' Gesta Steph. 13. He goes on to show how this poUcy answered in the Welsh destroying one another. * In 1 145 and 1146 the Armales Cambrise record successes of Hugh of Mortimer and Count Gilbert against the Welsh, but they stand almost alone. The Brut has many long stories the other way. = See the entries in the Annales under 1138, 1140, 1142, 1143, 1144, 1146, 1153, and in the Brut, 1151. VOL. T. T 274 THE NOEMAN KmQS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxni. Welsh princes. Most of them lie along- the central sea- board of Ceredigion or in other parts of the South ;^ but it shows how much the power of England must have gone back through the civil wars, when we find a Briton entrenched on ground bearing the name of a Northumbrian Bretwalda. Six years before the death of Stephen, Madoc the son of Meredydd is recorded to have built the castle of Oswestry.^ Beyond the sea, Normandy felt the loss of its great ruler even sooner than England. It does not seem that there was at first in the duchy any party openly in favour of the Empress, though no doubt Earl Robert was biding his time Feeling in till he could put forward the rights of his sister. The in favour of general feeling in Normandy, as in England, looked for a Theobald, sovereign, not to Anjou but to Chartres. The sons of Adela seemed to both countries to be the truest representatives of the Conqueror. But, naturally enoiigh, Norman and Eng- lish feeling did not light on the same member of her house. England had naturally looked to Stephen, the favourite nephew of Henry, the man known and popular in the king- dom, the husband of a wife sprung of the blood of Ironside. Normandy no less naturally looked to the elder son of the renowned Countess, the wise ruler of a neighbouring land, who, if he had not stood to his uncle in the same close personal relation as his younger brother, had been throughout his most faithful ally in policy and warfare.^ 'ihe voice of the Normans was for Count Theobald as Stephen their Duke. But, when they heard that Stephen had been ledo-ed in received as King in England, a sense of the advantage Noraiandy. ^f keeping Up the union between the two countries pre- II 36- vailed, and, with Theobald's consent, his younger brother was acknowledged.* But Stephen's authority was merely ' See the Brut, 1148, and the Annales, 1151. ^ lb. Oswestry appears in the Annales as " Croes Oswald," and in the Brut as "Croes HyswaUt." ^ See above, p. i8b. * Ord. Vit. 902 D, 903 A. So Eobert de Monte, 1135 (Pertz, vi. 492). ANGEVIN INVASION OF NOEMANDY. 275 nominal. Normandy remained without a ruler ; ^ the oh. xxm. anarchy of the days of Robert came back ; the land was torn in pieces by civil brawls, and the poor longed for their prince to come and keep back the evil-doers from mischief.^ Besides this, while Stephen, though elected, was Geoffrey not yet crowned, Geoffrey of Anjou, acting, so we are told, i^nvades'^ as the mercenary soldier of his wife,^ invaded Normandy in Normandy. •' ' "' December, her interests, and through treachery obtained possession of ii35- several fortresses, among them of King Henry's own Dom- ^Y^ ^^'' front. The war went on with some stoppages ; Count Geoffrey. Theobald maintained the cause of his brother,* while a ' WilUam of most important ally appeared on the side of Geoffrey, no Aquitaine other than William the Tenth, Duke of Aquitaine and Q^^ff^gy^ Count of Poitiers,^ the son of that crusading William whose Stephen in dominions William Rufus had purposed to annex.* But March, at last Stephen came, and presently he received some ^^^'^' confirmation of his doubtful possession in the form of an (joes investiture by his French over-lord and a homasre done to ^"'"^'S* ^ Lewis by Stephen's son Eustace.' But whatever popularity May, Orderic says that Stephen was accepted *' annuente Tedbaldo ; " but he adds in a breath that Theobald was " indignatus quod regnum non habuerit." And Robert speaks to the same effect under 1 137. The two states of mind are not inconsistent. ' See Ord. Vit. 903 A, 906 C. ^ When Stephen comes at last (Ord. Vit. 909 A), " pauperum plebs, per integrum annum oppressa et desolata, exsultavit." ^ This first stage of the Angevin war is recorded by Orderic, 903-910, and Kobert de Monte, 1136, 1137. Orderic, 909 B, speaks of Geoffrey as " stipendiariua conjugi suje factus." Ralph the Black, the steady hater of Henry the Second, gives the matter (92, ed. Anstruther) a turn of his own; " Insurrexerunt in eum [Stephanum] Gaufredus comes Andegaviaa cum uxore sua MatUde, quondam imperatrioe, et contenderunt de regno xvii. annis." * Ord. Vit. 903 D, 905 A ; Robert de Monte, 1136, 1137. Itwouldseem however that Theobald acted as a mercenary rather than as a prince or a brother. » Ord. Vit. 905 C. He had several lesser aUiee. ° See above, p. 99. ' The Chronicler (11 3 7) gives the reason why the Normans acknowledged Stephen ; "for?Si fait hi uuenden ])aet he sculde ben alsuio alse the eom wass, and for he hadde get his tresor ao he todeld it and scatered sotUce." Robert T a 276 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. OH. XXIII. Stephen brouglit with him he soon lost. He filled the land with French and Flemish mercenaries, and their conduct, above all that of the Flemish captain William of Ypres, soon lost him the hearts of his Norman subjects.^ Truce with A short moment of peace followed the conclusion of a truce July, 1 137. with Count Geoffrey,^ and, before this^ Stephen's most Pilgrimage powerful continental enemy was taken away. "William of of William Aqnitaine, moved by penitence, so we are told, for the °^Al^^" wrong which he had done to Normandy, made the pilgrim- April 9< age to Compostella and died there.' His last wish was 1137. . that his eldest daughter Eleanor should marry Lewis, son of the King of the French, himself already a crowned King by the unction of Pope Innocent at Rheims,* and that she should carry to her husband the possession of Marriage of all his dominions." The marriage took place, and young Eleanor of Lewis received the ducal coronet at Poitiers." Almost Aquitame. immediately after, the elder King died, and his son, as He sue- if iiow lord of all Gaul, received a second coronation in thF*° h ^*® niost central city. At the nest Christmas feast, the Crown. King of what was really a new monarchy received his 1137.' crown at Bourges, in the presence of a mighty gathering of de Monte, 1135, says that Earl Robert had carried oif a good deal. See Win. Malms. Hist. Nov. i. 17; Cont. Flor. 1137; Ord. Vit. 909 A, B; Hen. Hunt. 232 (of. Eobert de Monte, 1137) ; " Eustachius filius ejus homo regis Francorum effectus est de Normannia, q^tce Francorum adjacet im- perio." ' Ord. Vit. 909 B, C, D. Eobert de Monte, 1137, gives some details. ^ For two years, according to Orderic, 910 A. The time is three years in Eobert de Monte, 1137, accompanied by a yearly payment of two thousand marks. The Hexham writers agree with Orderic, but mention the money, only Richard makes it paid by Geoffrey to Stephen. On this truce see also Walter of Hemingburgh, i. 57. He speaks of Geoffrey's " jus uxorium." ' Ord. Vit. 909 A. He was " memor malorum, quse nuper in Normannia operatua est, pcenitentia motus." Cf. Chron. Mauriniacense, 391, where this motive is not enlarged on. ' Ord. Vit. 895 D, 901 B ; Suger, 319 ; Chron. Maurin. 379. ' Ord. Vit. 909 A; Chron. Maurin. 381. ° Ord. Vit. 91 1 A. " Ludovicus puer Pictavis coronatus est." Cf. Suger, 321 ; Chron. Maurin. 382. MARRIAGE OF LEWIS AND ELEANOR. 277 his whole realm.^ Thus, for one moment, as long as Lewis ch. xxiii. and Eleanor remained man and wife, the lands south of the Momen- T • 1, TIT t'^i'y union lioire became, what they had never been before, what, save of France for one moment of treachery," they were never to be again taiue. '^™" for three hundred years, a part of the dominions of a King of Paris. For the first time, the tongue of oil bore rule over the tongue of oc; the nation formed by the infusion of the Frank upon the Celt bore rule over the nation formed by the infusion of the Goth upon the Iberian.' But the South had not long to bear the unkindly yoke. Few Second however of those who beheld the bridal and the crowning Eieanof*^ " of Lewis and Eleanor could have dreamed that, while Lewis ^""^ Henry, still lived, another marriage of his bride should hand over the Aquitanian lands to the child who was to unite the claims of Stephen and Matilda. In the French Kings the Later great cities of the South would have found masters ; in the Endand English Kings sprung of Eleanor's second marriage they ^^ Aqui- found allies and protectors. With the will of William the Tenth the chain of events opens which leads on to the day when Simon of Montfort brought forth the seal of the city 1252. of Bourdeaux in answer to the calumnies of prelates and nobles,* to the day when the citizens of that noble city, wearied of their first taste of foreign conquest, cried once 1451- more for help to their Duke beyond the sea,'' and when our ' Ord.Vit. 915 B. ^ I refer to the fraudulent dealings of Philip the Fair with Edward the First. ' Orderic (911 A) says in a, marked way, "Sic regnum Francorum et Aquitaniae ducatum, quem nuUus patrum suorum habuit, nactus est." So in one of the many continuations of Sigebert, Pertz, vi. 459 ; " Eegnum Fran- cis et ducatua Aquitanise copulantur." ' See the letter of Adam Marsh to Eobert Grosseteste in the Monumenta Francisoana, p. 122. » There is something pathetic in the cry of the people of Bourdeaux at their first surrender in 145 1; "A ceUe heure ceux de Bordeaux voyans avoir faulte de secours firent &ire un hault cry par un herault, lequel crioyt secours de ceux d'Angleterre pour ceux de Bordeaux auquel cry ne fut aucunement respondu ne donn^ secours." Monatrelet, iii. 36 B. Two years later the succour came under Talbot, and then was the end. 278 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND, CH. xxni. Alliance between Earl Eobert and Count Geoffrey. 1138. Geoffrey's gradual conquest of Normandy. I139-II45. Geoffrey enters Rouen. 1 144. own Talbot died as the champion of Aquitanian freedom against the ever advancing circle of Parisian bondage. The truce was made ; but Normandy was still not free from revolts, and the land was even brought so low as to have to endure the insult of a Breton invasion.' The truce itself was broken the next year/ and now we find Earl Robert in open alliance with the Count of Anjou.' The Earl had sent over to England a solemn defiance to the King, pleading that the oath which he had taken to him was a breach of the earlier oath which he had taken to his sister.* Soon after this, the main interest of the story is transferred to England. While Stephen and Eobert were waging war, each a captive to be exchanged for the other, Geoffrey was conquering Normandy bit by bit.* Again the Normans offered their duchy, and England too, to Theobald. But he declined the offer, and gave his interest to Geoffrey, stipulating only for the release of his brother, and the cession of Tours to himself.* For six years the war went on. At last Geoffrey en- tered Rouen in triumph,'' and, having gained this crowning ' Ord. Vit. 911 C. The invader was from Dol, and we are told that the Norman knights drove him back, " orto clamore pauperis vulgi." 2 Ord. Yit. 916 B. = lb. C; Eobert de Monte, 1138. * "Will. Malms. Hist. Nov. i. 18. "Kegi, more majorum, amicitiam et fidem interdixit, homagio etiam abdicato ; rationem prseferens quani id juste feoerat, quia et rex fllicite ad reg-num aspiraverat, et omnem fidem sibi juratam neglexerat, ne dicam mentitus fuerat ; ipsemet quinetiam contra legem egisset, qui, post sacramentum quod sorori dederat, alteri cuilibet ea vivente, se manus dare non erubuisset." This is a good example of the feudal "difBdatio." ' His progress may be traced year by year in Eobert de Monte from 113S to 1144, that is 1 145 of the true reckoning. Cf. Eoger of Howden, i. 210. " This offer is not recorded by Eobert, but it is mentioned by Orderic, 923 B, C, being nearly the last event which he records. His formula is remark- able ; " Hugo Eothomagensis archiepiscopus, atque Normanni Tedbaldum comitem adierunt, eique regnum Anglite et ducatum Normannias obtu- lerunt." His refusal is thus expressed; "Joffredo Henrici regis o-enero, interpositis quibusdam conditionibus, regium jus concessit." ' We have now got past the guidance of Orderic and the pathetic end of GEOFFREY S CONQUEST OF NOEMANDT. 279 success, he was joined in his further warfare by his allies oh. xxni. the Count of Flanders and the King of the French. All Surrender Normandy was now his, save the castle of Arques, the and end^of seat of one of the Conqueror's early exploits, which held ^^^ ^'"'' out till the next year in the keeping of a valiant Flemish monk, William by name.' Geoffrey was now the acknow- Henry ledged Duke of the Normans, till, five years later, he the Nor- resigned the Duchy which he had conquered to his more ™''°^' famous son Henry .^ We will now come back to our own island, and go as lightly as may be through these nineteen years of utter lawlessness. English writers speak of the first two years of Stephen as years of prosperity and comparative peace ; ^ and so they were. That is to say, there were Isolated only isolated revolts ; this and that castle was held against the King, but there was not as yet general desolation throughout the land. In these separate struggles Stephen Siege and was for the most part successful, especially in the siege Exeter. and recovery of Exeter, which was held against the King "35- by Baldwin of Redvers.* One incident in this siege is his book. Our fact is recorded by Robert de Monte, 1144, and in the verses of the Draco, i. 2 1 8 et seqq. But the long warfare before the surrender of Eouen is summed up in one thunderbolt ; "Interea Gaufridus adest ceu fulmen ab alto, Neustria concutitur fulgore tadta noTO. Improvisus enim, ceu venti tiu-bine facto, Turbat earn per se, per sua, perque suos." 1 Robert de Monte, 1143, 1144. The early stages of Geoffrey's Norman campaign are recorded by William of Mahnesbury, Hist. Nov. ii. 70, and it is pithily summed up by our own Chronicler. ^ Robert de Monte, 1150. "Pater suus reddiderat ei hereditatem suam ex parte matris, scUioet ducatum Normannis." So Draco Normannicus i. 225; "Henricus dux efScitur sudore paterno. ' Hen. Hunt. 222. " Hi ergo duo anni Stephano regi prosperrimi fuerunt. Tertius vero mediocris et intercisus." * Chron. Petrib. 11 35. This siege of Exeter is recorded by aU our au- thorities, except WiUiam of Mahnesbury and Orderic. The fullest account is intheGestaStephani, 20-28. We here (24) get acquainted with "Aiuredus, 280 THE NOEMAF KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. xxui. worthy of notice. When Stephen was inclined to refuse Stephen's terms of Capitulation to the rebels, the barons of his own barons ^ plead for party pleaded for them that they had taken no oath of sieged. allegiance to the King, but had taken up arms only in dis- Extreme charge of their duty to their own lord.^ This was pushing feudal the feudal doctrine to its extreme pointy to the point at theory, -v^hich it upsets all regular government. A man's actions are to be guided by his special obligations to this or that man, rather than by that general duty to the common- wealth, and to the King as its head, which comes before all special obligations. But that such a doctrine could be put forth, that it could even be pressed on a King by those who were loyal to him, shows how things had Its opposi- been changed by the accession of Stephen. The doctrine William's HOW set forth under the walls of Exeter was that great S r-b* political heresy which the last conqueror of Exeter had crushed by the law that was passed upon the plain of Salisbury. The doctrine by which Gaul and Germany were split asunder was one which no man would have dared to breathe in the ears either of the Henry who was gone or of the Henry who was to come. On Stephen men did not fear to press it as an acknowledged rule of law. Stephen's admirer tells us how at this time he was striving, and not without some success, to bring back some measure of peace and order in his kingdom.^ Writers on the other side tell us how he broke all the terms of his charter, especially his engagement to soften the harshness of the forest-laws." More certain than either is the fact that filius Joelia cujusdam iUustrissimi viri," that is doubtless Judhael of Totnes. See vol. iv. p. 173. It may be as well to mention that the " Batthentona '' of ' the Gesta is not Bath, but a place in Devonshire. See Lappenberg, 37 1. ^ Gesta Stephani, 27. "Addebantetillosnoninregiammajestatemjurasse, nee nisi in iideUtatem domini sui arma movisse." So after the surrender we read that Stephen "cuicimique domino veUent adhaerere permisit." ' lb. 14. Stephen's measures are opposed only by those whom Henry had raised from nothing. See above, p. 158. " Henry of Huntingdon (222) mentions one special breach. Stephen CONSPIEACY AGAINST THE NOEMANS. 281 he had to be constantly moving to and fro to meet his ch. xxm. enemies in one quarter of the country or another, besides having to march northward to meet the first Scottish invasion and to win a moment of peace by the treaty of Durham.^ He was thus, as we have seen, unable to cross into Normandy so soon as was called for by his interest beyond the sea.^ His return is said to have been hastened Alleged by tidings of a conspiracy to slay all the Normans in conspiracy England and to make over the Crown to the King of ^p™^* *« ^ ° JN ormans. Scots.' The story is very dark and uncertain, and no 1137- writer living in England, of any race or party, takes any notice of it. It has of course been seized upon as a sign of the abiding hatred which still reigned between the Norman and the Old-English inhabitants of England.* But the one writer who tells the story in no way implies that it was a general national movement. Some perverse The men formed such a scheme, and it was found out by its found out being revealed in confession to Richard Nigel, Bishop of ^ ^^ , Ely.^ The mention of this particular Bishop makes us Ely. went to hunt at Brampton in Huntingdonshire (see above, p. 161), " et ibi placitavit de forestis procerum suorum, id est de silvis et venationibus, et fregit Totum et pactum Deo et populo." * See above, p. 258. " See above, p. 275. ' This story is foimd only in Orderio (911, 912), aud the absence of all mention of it by any author writing in England tempts us to think that the story must be greatly confused and exaggerated. Still it must be the confusion or exaggeration of something which really happened. His words are, " Eeversus in Angliam turbatum regnum invenit, et fomentum nimise crudelitatis et cruentse proditionis persensit. Nam quidam pestiferi con- spirationem fecerant, et claudestinis machinationibus sese ad nefas invicem animaverant, ut constitute die Normannos omnes oooiderent, et regni priu- cipatum Scottis traderent." ■ * Thierry of course makes the most of this. It is with him a great epoch, the point when people left off crying " no Normans,'' and took to crying "no gentlemen." We hear a great deal (ii. 183-186) about "les Anglais de race;" "les Saxons;" "une conspiration nationale;" " un projet de deli- verance, con9U de commun accord entre toutes les classes de la population anglo-saxonne." ' Ord. Vit. 912 B. "Tanta perversitas et Ricardo Nigello ElJensi episcopo primitus nota per conjuratos nequitiae socios facta est." 282 THE NOEMAK KINGS IN ENGLAND. OH. XXIII. ask the question whether now also^ as in earlier and later times, any outlaws or patriots were defending themselves Amount of among the marshes of his diocese. But, in any case, in tlie the notion of a general movement to slay all men of story. Norman descent, to slay every man one of whose grand- fathers might have fought on the invading side at Senlac, is something too wild to be thought of "We might as well take the massacre of Saint Brice for a massacre of all the Danish inhabitants of Northumberland, Lincoln- shire, and East-Anglia. The Normans who were to be massacred must have been Norman mercenaries in Stephen's service, and we cannot undertake to say that all who might join in such a conspiracy, all who might seek to transfer the Crown from the incapable Stephen to such a ruler as David, would necessarily be of Old-English descent. If we accept the tale at all, we must accept it as we find it. And in the tale itself there is not a word to fix the nationality of the conspirators. Indeed, as some of them are spoken of as powerful men, high in wealth and honour, the tale rather sounds as if some at least among them were of Norman blood. We are told that, in such a case, Bishop Eichard did not respect the seal of confession, but that through him the plot became known to the other prelates and chief men of the land. Many of the conspirators were seized and put to death. Others fled before any charge was brought against them, and left their wealth and honours to be confiscated. The more powerful among them took up arms and made common cause with the Scots, the Welsh, and the other enemies of the country.^ Whatever we make of this strange tale, it is certain '■ Ord. Vit.912 A. " Nonnulli malitife oonscii ante accusatiouem fugerunt, et, accusante propria conscientia convicti, relictis omnibus divitiis et hono- rlbus suia, exsulaverunt. Potentiores siquidem, qui rebellionis conscii fuerunt, ad resistendmu temere animati sunt, et fedus cum Scottis et GuaJis, aliisque seditiosis et infidis ad pemiciem populi pepigerunt." THE CIVIL WAK. 283 that Stephen came back to a land which neither Scots oh. xxm. nor Welsh nor any other enemies could have torn in Stephen comes back pieces more cruelly than it was torn by its own inhabi- to England, tants. The Scottish war, with all its horrors, is the least revolting part of the picture. Before long, Earl Robert Robert of sent his defiance, and his castle of Bristol became the defies centre of all opposition to the King, or rather of all ^^^ j°' g opposition to law and order in general. In the eyes of the partisans of Stephen, the great merchant-borough, through the faulty it would seem, of its citizens as well as of the Earl's garrison, deserved to be called the step- mother of all England.'^ Bristol beins: the centre, the War in part of the kingdom which suffered most was naturally western the West and South, and the taking and retaking of^"g'''°'^- castles in this district fill a large part of the annals of the time.^ But the area of confusion spread over all England south of the Humber. The North was not wholly Northern spared ; but its local historians have certainly fewer evil less dis- deeds to tell of than those who speak mainly of southern '"''''^''• and central England.^ Now began the time of which the Picture of native Chronicler has left us such an imperishable record, in the It was the time when every rich man his castles made, C'™'"'"'!^- when the land was full of castle-works, and when, as the castles were made, they filled them with devils and evil men. Those were the days when, if two men or three came riding to a town, all the township fled for them ' Gesta Steph. 41. "Totius Angliae noverca Bristoa." See the whole account of Bristol and the war between Bristol and Bath, pp. 36 et seqq. Compare Will. Malms. Hist. Not. i. 17 ; Hen. Hunt. 222. " Besides Bristol, Bath, Exeter, and Hereford, we hear of Harptree, Carey, Wareham, Ceme, MaJmesbury, Trowbridge, and above all Dunster, as playing a gi'eat part in the early stages of the war. See Ord. Vit. 9 1 7 A ; Hen. Hunt 222 ; Will. Malms, Hist. Nov. ii. 30, 31. ' There was a great deal of fighting in Shropshire, and Nottingham and Lincoln presently play an important part. Further north we hear com- paratively little. There are some notices in John of Hexham (268, 269, 273), but the outrages there recorded stand rather apart from the general story. 284 THK NOEMAS^ KINGS IK ENGLAND. Not a picture of regular civil war, but of utter anarchy. I'se of torture. and weened tbat they were reavers.' They were the days when wretched men starved of hunger, when some lived on alms that were somewhile rich men, and some fled out of the land. In those days the earth bare no corn, for the land was all fordone by such deeds^ and men said openly that Christ slept and His hallows.^ In this won- derful picture, put forth with all the matchless strength of our ancient tongue, two points stand out before all others. The writer takes no side. He is clearly a loyal subject of Stephen^ and he blames the rich traitors who rose up against him ; but, in describing the actual horrors of the struggle, he makes no distinction between the party of the King and the party of the Empress. In fact, all thought of anything like political parties, all thought that the contending warriors strove for any cause or principle of any kind, seems to have passed out of his mind. The picture which he gives us is not a picture of ordinary war, not even of ordinary civil war ; it sets before us a time of universal lawlessness, when every man who had the power did all the mischief that he could do. The picture is not that of men waging war, even the worst forms of war, against the enemies of their country or of their party. It is the picture of a time when every man who had the means to build himself a castle, made it the centre of general havoc, of spoil for the sake of spoil, it would seem of torture for the sake of torture. Even under our worst Kings in their worst moments, we have as yet heard ^ Chron. Petrib. 1137. The castle-building comes out strongly in Hist. Nov. ii. 19, 34; "Castella erant crebra per totam Angliam; qu«que suas partes defendentia, imo, ut verius dicam, depopulantia." ' lb. Mr. Earle (370) asks, " Was it His poor friends or His proud foes that said so ?" Henry of Huntingdon (225 b) will answer one way; " Quia igitur improbi dicebant Deum dormire, excitatus est Deus." William of Newburgh (i. 11) will answer another way; "Eo [Gaufrido de Magna ViUa] sic debaochante videbatur dormire divinitas, et non curare res hu- manas, vel etiam suas, id est ecclesiasticas : dicebaturque a laborantibus piis, ' exsurge, quare obdormis, Domine.' " HOEEOKS OF THE ANARCHY. 285 only of mutilation as a punishment for real or supposed ch. xxiir. crimes. Torture, inflicted either to wring the goods of the sufferer from him or from a mere fiendish delight in suffering, has hitherto been laid to the charge only of Robert of Belesme and of a few more who are branded as exceptional evil-doers. But in this picture we hear little of slaughter, little of the mere general horrors of captivity and bonds. The subject on which the Chronicler is most eloquent is the variety of instruments for the infliction of suffering which were the creation of the cruel ingenuity of the devils and evil men with whom the castles were filled.^ The other point is that, though we have now reached the age of chivalry, though we ever and anon light on references to the maxims of chivalry, yet the evil- doers of those days, the rich men who were traitors, the lords of the castles which our fathers so deeply loathed, had no regard for rank, sex, or calling. Truly might the Chronicler say of the victims of these days^ that never were no martyrs so pined as they were.^ If the painter's art were to set forth in detail the varieties of torment which he describes, they would make a fit companion piece to the forms of martyrdom which are so grimly portrayed on the walls of Saint Stephen's on the Ccelian Hill. I feel in no way called on to go into the details ofindepeud- these horrors, or to describe every revolt and every siege of ^^^^^ °f these days of confusion. Every castle became a separate *^^ castles. and independent centre of evil. Each lord of such a ' The Ghronioler gives many details. The famous "raohenteges," as the word is now written, are explained by Mr. Earle as chains. Compare the accounts of the Oriental cruelties of Eobert Ktz-Hubert in WiU. Malms. Hist. Nov. ii. 30, 36. His blasphemy reminds us of WiUiam Eufus. '■' Chron. Petrib. 11 37. So the Continuator of Horence, 11 39; "Velut ex inferno emerserunt Neroniana seu Deciana tempora et tormenta." Cf. also the verses in Henry of Huntingdon, 223 J ; "Detorquent unotos Domini, simul et midieres, Proh pudor, ut redimant, exeruciare student." 286 THE NOEMAN KIKGS IN EXGLAND. CH. XXIII. stronghold set himself up as king or tyrant ; besides the ravages which spread over all the land within reach of his castle/ each lord coined money, and administered what he called justice, in his own name. It will be enough to point out a few of the most striking in- cidents, and to comment on any points which supply a political lesson. The second of the periods into which I have divided this reign opens with the return of Matilda and the beginning of something more like an intelligible civil war. But there is no doubt that this crisis was hastened by an act of imprudent violence on the part of Stephen. A man of his character, mild, gentle, and merciful, but whose mildness, gentleness, and mercy spring from impulse rather than from principle,^ will often, in a fit of artificial energy, do deeds from which a man of harsher temper, but greater prudence, would shrink. Such an one too will be easily led to half measures, which only stir up hatred and strengthen opposition, while he shrinks from those measures of extreme severity which sometimes really answer their purpose. Stephen at this Effects of Stephen's character. ' So says William of Newburgh (i. 22) ; "CasteUa quoque per singulas provincias studio partium crebra surrexerant, erantque in Anglia quodammodo tot reges, vel potius tyranni, quot domini casteUorum, habentes singuli parous- suram proprii numismatis, et potestatem subditis, regio more, dicendi juris." On the point of the coinage, John of Hexham (278) says, 'Tuit in regno magnum dispendium, unusquisque enim ad adinventionis suae libitum cor- rupit monetae et numismatis pretium." Roger of Howden (i. 210) refers to this when he records the coming of Duke Henry in 1149 ; " Fecit monetam novam, quam vocabant monetam ducis ; et non tantum ipse, sed onmes potentes, tarn episcopi quam comites et barones, suam faciebant monetam. Sed ex quo dux ille venit, plurimorum monetam cassavit." ^ Stephen's clemency was sometimes at least thought excessive. Eoger of Wendover (ii. 219) says that Stephen, "pravo usus consilio, non exercuit vindictam in proditores suos, nnde postea restitevunt ei, et plurima contra eum castra nequiter firmaverunt." This is characteristically improved by Matthew Paris (Hist. Angl. i. 254); "Rex, quorundam effeminatorum et pusillanimium pravo usus consilio, debitam vindictam in captos suos non exercuit proditores, unde multa ei postea mala machinabantur secundum illud propheticum, Misereamur impio, et non discet facere justitiam." BISHOP EOGER OF SALISBUEY. 287 time^ by an act of this kind, contrived to increase the oh. xxni. number of his enemies among the class whose enmity was just then most dangerous. The King whose right to the Crown had been confirmed by the Pope contrived to turn all ecclesiastical feeling against him, and to make an enemy of the great prelate who was at once the Pope's Legate and his own brother. Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, has been often spoken of Greatness already as the chief counsellor of King Henry. Two ofBishop'of his nephews — some whispered that they were his sons — SaKsbury; held two great bishopricks. Richard Nigel ^ held the nephews, see of Ely, and Alexander that of Lincoln.'' An avowed son, whose mother, the Bishop's mistress or unacknow- ledged wife, plays a part in the story, was the King's Chancellorj and was known, in opposition doubtless to the great places held by his brothers or cousins, as Roger the Poor.^ The Bishop of Salisbury himself and his epi- Their scopal nephews had given much offence and scandal by ''*^*^®^- their overweening worldly pomp and by their special passion for building castles. At the bidding of Roger himself arose that great castle of Sherborne which ■witnesses to the improvements which he wrought in the building art. By another of his fortresses he had en- croached on the rights of the monks of Malmesbury, and men said that his castle of the Devizes, raised on a mighty mound of elder days, was surpassed by no building of its kind in Europe.* These bishops then were dangerous ■ He sat from 1133 to 1169. ^ See above, p. 217. ^ In the Chronicle, 1137, "te canoeler Roger hise neue." In Will. Malms. Hist. Nov. ii. 20, he ia " canoellarius, qui nepos esse, vel plusquam nepos ejusdem episcopi ferebatur." In the Gesta Stephani, 50, he is "summus iUius [regis] antigraphus Salesbiriensis episcopi filius." In the Continuator of Florence he is " filius Eogerus, Paupere-censu coguomiue." See in Orderio, 920 A; "Eogerius filius pontificis, cognomento Pauper.'' He gives us the name of his mother ; " Mathildia de Ramesburia, peUex vide- licet episcopi." But she may very well have been his wife. ' The castle-building of these bishops and the scandal which it gave comes 288 THE NORMAN EmGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxin. Hoger's loyalty suspected. The Bishops of Salis- bury and Lincobi seized at Oxford. June 24, II39- persons, and the loyalty of the Bishop of Salisbury was strongly suspected. He seldom obeyed the King's sum- mons to courts and assemblies, and it was believed that he was actually plotting with the Empress and her partisans.' The King, it is said, was strongly stirred up against him by his advisers, especially by Waleran Count of Meulan, the rebel of the days of Henry, to whom Stephen had, early in his reign, given his infant daughter in marriage.^ At last an opportunity came at a Great Council held in Oxford. The Bishops, it is said, came most unwillingly, Roger having a special foreboding of evil to come.' A disturbance arose between the followers of the Bishop and the followers of Count Alan of Richmond. This was made an excuse for seizing the Bishops of Salisbury and Lincoln ; Richard of Ely was lucky enough to escape to his uncle's fortress of the Devizes, which was, it would seem, left to the keeping of the Chancellor's mother.* The details of the story are differently told in different accounts, but it is clear that the cajjtive Bishops were treated with great harshness. The castle of the Devizes was besieged till its surrender was obtained by threats of hanging the Chan- cellor, and by keeping his father without meat or drink. '^ out in most of our writers. Hist. Nov. ii. i, 19, 21 ; Hen. Hunt. 223 ; Will. Neub. i. 6. Alexander atoned somewhat by pious foundations, one of which arose on the forsaken episcopal site of Dorchester. > Ord. Vit. 919 C, D. Cf. Gest. Steph. 46-49. ' Ord. Vit. 903 C. ' William of Malmeshury (Hist. Nov. ii. 20) describes his feelings at length. The Continuator of Florence also saya that he went "nimis in- vitus, utpote jam amplius nou reversurus." * The defence of the castle is mentioned in all our authorities, as it is indeed the central point of the story. But it is only Orderic (920 A) who brings out the vigorous action of Matilda of Eamsbury. " It is the Continuator of Florence, who is not unfavourable to Stephen, who bring-8 out most strongly the harsh captivity of the Bishops. Eoger was kept " in bostario in locum praascepio ; " Alexander " sub vili tugurio." In the Gesta (50) we read, " Jussit ut, locis ab invicem seolusi inhonestis, acribus maoerarentur jejuniis." So Henry of Huntingdon, who adds that the Bishops were "nihil justitise recusautes et judicii sequitatem devotissime poscentes." According to William of Mahnesbury and the Continuator, STEPHEN SEIZES THE BISHOPS. 289 In the end all the other castles of the two Bishops, Salis- oh. xxm. bury, Sherborne, Malmesbury, Newark, and Sleaford, were given into the King's hands, and the Bishops, it is sarcasti- cally said, were sent back to their duties in their dioceses.^ We may be sure that either Henry or his father would have found some other way of dealing with these dangerous prelates. It is plain that there was perfectly good ground for bringing a legal charge against them, and either of those wise Kings would have known how to deal with them according to the forms of law. Stephen's illegal violence Impru- simply set men wondering how one who was so mild and Stephen's soft and good should do such a thing;'' and the imprison- conduct, ment and harsh treatment of the Bishops lost him far more in the way of general good will, especially among the ecclesiastical order, than he gained in the way of strength by seizing the castles and their stores. What followed certainly could not have happened in any earlier reign. An ecclesiastical synod came together to sit in judgement on the King. Theobald, the third of the Primates whom Tiieobald the house of Bee gave to England,' had lately succeeded bishop of William of Corbeil in the see of Canterbury ■* but he had Canter- •^ bury. not succeeded him in his office of Legate, which letters from 1139-1161. Pope Innocent had lately bestowed on the King's brother, Henry Henry Bishop of Winchester.^ The Bishops gathered at t,yI^.^ ° Roger fe,sted three days as a freewill oflfering for his son, to move the heart of the Bishop of Ely to siurelider. Cf. Maine, Early History of Institutions, 39. Orderic makes Matilda offer her own hfe for her son. ' Ord. Vit. 920 B. "Episcopi oum pace in parochias suas reversi sunt." The Tewkesbury Annals, 11 39, say of Roger, most inaccurately, "obiit in carcere.'' ^ It is now that the Chronicler adds, " pa the suikes undergaeton faet he mEde man was and softe and god, and na iustise ne dide, ]>s. diden hi alle wunder." ^ See vol. ii. p. 215. * The Chronicler places the death of William and succession of Theobald in 1 140, and his expression is remarkable ; " te king makede Teodbald srce- bishop fewas abbot in fe Bee.'' (Mark that "the beck" still keeps its article.) But Theobald was consecrated Jan. 8, 1139. ' Wai. Mahns. Hist. Nov. ii. 22. VOL. V. tf 290 THE NOEMA^r KmGS IN ENGLAND. cH. xxm. Wincliester around tte Primate and the Legate. Henry Chester ^g^g ^]^g £j,g^ ^ gg|. fQ^.^}^ ^he Crime of his brother, and to ["29- 1171]. profess that the nearness of his kindred should in no way Papal Legate. stay his hand from executing any sentence which the Synod Primate and his brethren should decree against the guilty at Win- tj ./ Chester. King. Stephen, it seems, was actually summoned before The King the synod^ and he did appear, if not in person, yet by arraigned . ^ , . . before the counsel. He sent certam Earls as his representatives, and August 20 "^^^ them Aubrey of Vere/ a man learned in the law, who set forth the crimes of the imprisoned Bishops, and drew much the same distinction as had been supplied by Lan- franc to the Conqueror in the famous case of Odo.^ The Bishop of Salisbury made his answer. Archbishop Hugh of Rouen argued that the King might lawfully seize the Bishops' castles, because Bishops had no right to have castles, and because in such troubled times any loyal man ought to be glad to put his castle into the King's hands.'' Question of The Bishops threatened to accuse the King at Rome. Rome. Stephen answered by his counsel, that it should be the worse for any one who went on such an errand against the King's crown and dignity ; directly afterwards he gave up his own cause by saying he meant to appeal to the Pope himself.* In the end no formal censure seems to have been pronounced ; but, according to one account^ Stephen submitted to some kind of penance.^ Yet he steadily refused to hearken to any entreaties to give back * Will. Malms. Hist. Nov. ii. 23. " Albericus quidam de Ver, homo cau- sarum varietatibus exercitatus." His name often appears in Henry's Pipe Poll ; he was killed in 1141. See E. Howden, i. 205. ^ See vol. iv. p. 684. ' WUl. Malms. Hist. Nov. ii. 26. " Certe, quia suspectum est tempua, secundum morem aliarum gentium, optimates omnes claves munitionum suarum debent voluntati regis contradere, qui pro omnium pace debet militare." * lb. 27. ° So says the author of the Gesta, 51 ; " Ecclesiastici rigoris duritiam humilitatis subjeotione moUivit, habitumque regalem exutua, gemensque animo, et contritus epiritu, commissi sententiam humiliter suscepit." LAKDIKG OF THE EMPRESS. 291 the castles and stores wMeh he had seized/ Before the year ch. xxiii. was out, Bishop Roger of Salisbury was dead ; his death Death of was commonly believed to have been hastened by the Eoger. harshness of his treatment during his imprisonment.^ 4^ nj^. Soon after Stephen had by this act lost the good will of a most important class of his subjects, came the great crisis of his reign. GeoiFrey of Anjou had already begun the process of swallowing Normandy, in Savoyard phrase, like an artichoke. His wife now risked herself in England. Earl The Em- Robert came over with his sister the Empress, and the fnEno-land! second and most stirring stage of the war began. They September " " * . 30. '139- landed at Portsmouth, and were first of all received by Queen Matilda's step-mother, a step-mother perhaps younger -^^^^^ than herself. King Henry's widow Adeliza, who now liam of held the castle of Arundel with her second husband, William of Albini.^ Stephen was at that moment be- sieging Marlborough. He marched towards Arundel, but Robert was already on the road for his own castle at Bristol.* Stephen, with the ill-timed generosity which Stephen's marked his character, allowed the Empress to join her fo Matilda. brother, even giving her an escort under the command of his brother the Bishop of Winchester, whose loyalty, since ' Will. Malms. Hist. Nov. ii. 28. " So eays William of Malmesbmy (Hist. Nov. ii. 32) expressly, and aa much is implied when the Continuator of Plorence says that he was "prse dolore et tristitia infirmatus," and Henry of Huntingdon that he was " tarn moerore quam senio confectus.'' » Will. Mahns. Hast. Nov. ii. 29 ; Ord. Vit. 9 20 B ; Hen. Hunt. 223; Cont. Flor. Wig. 1 1 29. None of these writers mention Matilda's second husband. But he appears in Robert de Monte, 1 139 ; " Invitaverat enim eos Willermus de Albinneio, qui duxerat Eliz quondam reginam, quae habebat castellum et comitatum Harundel, quod rex Henricus dederat ei in dote." ' Earl Robert's works at Bristol are sung by his namesake, ii. 433, ed. Heame ; " And he brozt in gret sta Jie toun, as he zut ys, And rerde Jier an castel myd J>e noble tour, At of aUe Je tours of Engelcnd ys yholde flour." U 2, 292 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxiii. the wrong done to his episcopal brethren, was beginning to be doubtful.'- A crowd of enemies now arose against Mischief Stephen. The Earl of Gloucester^ in his character of son- E°ober?s in-law and heir of the conqueror of Glamorgan, was joined Welshmen, j^y ^^j^ thousand Welshmen, and a cry of lamentation goes up, even from distant Saint Evroul, to tell us how all England, and especially its holy places, were laid waste by the barbarians.^ A crowd of revolts, a crowd of sieges and marches, follow. One castle is taken after another, and we now not uncommonly hear, what we have seldom heard of in earlier wars, what we have never heard of either in native English warfare or in the warfare of the Conqueror, of the Stephen's hanging of their defenders.^ Among the chief revolters enemies. ^^ ^-j^^g time was Miles, Constable of Gloucester, presently Miles Earl . „ of Here- to be raised to the earldom of Hereford at the bidding of the Empress, and before long to die the death of Brian William Rufus.* Another rebel of great fame was Brian the son of Count Alan, commonly known as Brian Fitz- ' The fullest account is in William of Malmesbury and the Gesta, but there are some special details in Kobert de Monte. On the safe-conduct given to Matilda William of Malmesbury (ii. 29) observes, " Quern cuilibet, quamvis infestissimo inimioo, negare laudabilium militum mos non est." But Orderic says (920 B), " In hac nimirum permissione magna regis simplicitas sive sooordia notari potest : et ipse a prudeutibus, quod su^ salutis regnique sui securitatis immemor fuerit, lugendus est." He goes on to moralize at some length on the relations between sheep and wolves. So John of Hexham (266) says that it was done "ex indiscreta animi simplicitate." It is always worth while to mark common sense protesting against the follies of chivalry. The author of the Gesta attributes the indiscretion to the adidce of Bishop Henry, whose loyalty he already questions. Henry of Huntingdon simply says, " vel perfida credens consilia, vel quia castrum videbat inexpugnabile." ^ Ord. Vit. 920 C. " Decern millia ut fertur, barbari per Angliam diffusi sunt." He goes on to tell of the mischief that was done " Britonum gladiis." The Shropshire man remembered the neighbours of his childhood. ' We can hardly blame any one who hanged Eobert Fitz-Hubert. See the Continuator, 1 140, and Will. Mahns. Hist. Nov. ii. 36. But under Eadward he would most likely have been only banished, under WiUiam kept in bonds for life, and under Henry deprived of his eyes. * See the story of the death of Miles in the Gesta, 10 1. ritz-Gount. THE REBELS. 293 Count, who had shared with Earl Robert the duty of ch. xxiii. taking Matilda herself over the sea for her second mar- riage.^ The Bishop of Ely not unnatixrally rose, though, Richard according to one version, against him Stephen was the Ely."^ ° first aggressor.^ William the son of Richard, who held Reginald Cornwall under the King, received into his castles Regi- King nald of Dunstanville, one of the natura,l sons of King ^""'7- Henry, who, like the rest, was zealous in the cause of his sister.' And the interest of his name and descent, though John of his exploits are not remarkable, leads us to add to our list John of Sudeley, another son of Harold of Ewias, one of a house which could boast by the spindle-side of the blood of the ancient Kings.* In this way the whole land was ravaged, castles and towns were taken and burned, chiefly in the South and West/ till the seat of war begins to change to another part of England^ Earl Robert Robert struck a great blow by the capture and burning tingham. of Nottingham," and this brings us to the most striking September incident in this whole time, to the only military action in this endless scene of sieges and skirmishes which deserves the name of a battle. Early in the year after Matilda's landing an attempt Stephen's Court in had been made to make peace. At Pentecost the King the Tower, held, or tried to hold, the usual festival in London ; but ^^JJ^ ' this time his court was held to the east and not to the west of the city, not in the hall of Rufus, but in the fortress of his father. And it is noted that, among all the Bishops of his dominions on both sides of the sea, one only, John ' See above, p. 204. ^ In the Gesta, 63, the Bishop is made to revolt to revenge the injuries of his uncle, but Henry of Huntingdon, 2236, makes Stephen drive Richard out of his see, " quia nepos pr^dicti episcopi Salesburiensis erat, e quo odii incentivum in progeniam ejus duxerat." 2 Gesta, 65. * Cont. Flor. Wig. 1139. See above, p. 272. » See the years 11 39, 1140 in the Continuator, and Hist. Nov. ii. 29-36. « The fullest account of the taking of Nottingham is also given by the Continuator. 294 THE NOEMAN KINGS IS ENGLAND. CH. XSIII. Vain at- tempt to make peace. Bishop Hem-y in France. September -Novem- ber, 1 140. His at- tempts at mecQatioD. Bishop of Seez, deigned to answer to his summons.^ Such a state of things perhaps brought his desolate condition home to Stephen's mind ; an attempt was made to make peace. Commissioners on both sides met at Bath. Each of the rivals was represented by a brother, but Earl Robert was a more trustworthy representative of the Empress than the Legate Henry was of the King. But Stephen was represented also by the new Archbishop Theobald, and by his own Queen Matilda, who appears throughout as a vigorous defender of the rights of her husband, just as the Countess Mabel showed herself on the other side. But no agreement was come to. We are told that the party of the Empress were ready to submit her claims to an ecclesiastical sentence, which the party of the King naturally refused.^ Stephen had stooped to receive a paj)al confirmation of his right ; he was not going to stoop yet further — at least his wife was not likely to stoop in his name — and to give the venal court of Rome a chance of withdrawing the confirma- tion which it had once given. But presently the Legate Henry crossed the sea ; he had conferences with the King of the French and with his own brother Count Theobald, and came back with further proposals of peace. Theobald was the brother of the King as well as of the Legate, and Lewis had lately formed a family connexion with Stephen by betrothing his sister Constance to Stephen's son Eustace.^ But the mediations of these foreign friends must have been exercised on behalf of Matilda rather than of Stephen. For her party and the panegyrist of her brother deemed them for the good of the land, while Stephen did not.'' The negotiations failed, and war went on. ^ Will. Malms. Hist. Nov. ii. 37. "Cjeteri vel fastidierunt vel timuerunt venire." ' lb. Matilda was " ad bonum pronior." " Henry of Huntingdon, 233, says maliciously, "Accipiens thesauros episcopi, comparavit iude Constantiam sororem Lodovici regis Francorum ad opus Eustatii filii sui." * Will. Mahna. Hist. Nov. ii. 37. "Salubria patriie mandata referens, LINCOLN SEIZED BY THE EAELS. 293 In the last month of the same year the King was oh. xxni. in the city, or at least in the shire of Lincoln,! where ^Stephen at . . Lincoln. the citizens, not greatly heeding, it would seem, his December, treatment of their Bishop, were zealous in his cause. But men of higher rank were less to be trusted. Stephen Lincoln left m the city two Earls, brothers on the mother's side, seized by being sons of the Countess Lucy by her two marriages.^ the Earls These were William of Roumare, Earl of the city, and and Eandolf of Chester, whom the King trusted, but who, it seems, stiU owed him a grudge because not he but Henry of Scotland held the earldom of Cumberland.^ The brother Earls rebelled. By a stratagem they seized the castle on the hill, the fellow of the minster where Alexander was retouching the work of Eemigius, and the loyal citizens, the descend- ants of the men who had left the height when the castle and the minster were reared,* saw the banner of rebellion floating above their heads. In the plot by which the castle Action was taken the wives of the two Earls took a chief part ; it Countesses. was the law of this reign that, while all else were faithless, wives at least bore true allegiance to their husbands.^ The Countess of Chester moreover was bound to the side of the Empress by another tie, as being a daughter of Earl Robert of Gloucester.^ The citizens and their Bishop, the Stephen latter returning good for evil, sent word to the King, and ^ Lincoln, prayed for help.'' Stephen came, with the energy which he ^J^^'™^^j' could show when the actual moment of action came ; writers si esset qni verba faotia apponeret. Et plane imperatrix et comes confestim consensere ; rex vero de die in diem producere, postremo in summa frustravi." 1 Will. Malms. Hist. Nov. iii. 38. ^ See vol. ii. p. 631. But I have spoken of her more at large in Appendix PP. of the second edition of my third volume. ^ The account of the Earl's motives in the Chronicle is not very clear ; " perefter Wiex suythe micel uuerre betuyx Jje king and Eandolf eorl of Cseatre, noht forfi fist he ne iaf al ]>aet he cuthe axon him, alse he dide alle othre, oc ffifre fe mare he iaf heom fe wasrse hi wisron him." * See vol. iv. p. 218. = The story is told in full by Orderic, 921 B. « Will. Malms. Hist. Nov. iii. 38 ; Ord. Vit. 921 C. ' The loyalty of the citizens comes out strongly in Hist. Nov. iii. 38, and 296 THE NOKMAN KIKGS IN EITGLAND. March of Earl Kobert and the AA'elshmen Battle of Lincoln. February 2,1141. on the other side strangely blame him because he came without sending a formal defiance, a formal renunciation of friendship, to the traitors who had certainly stood on no such terms of ceremony towards him.^ He occupied the city, and he seems to have fortified the minster as a means of attacking the neighbouring castle.^ The rebel Earls with their Countesses were straitly besieged in the castle ; but Eandolf contrived to escape from a tower and made his way to ask his father-in-law for help.^ Earl Robert gathered his host, bringing with him, like Mercian Earls in past times, a large band of Welsh under the command of two brothers, Meredydd and Cadwalader.* The army drew near, and portents troubled the mind of Stephen's followers as the King heard the mass of the Bishop whom he had so lately kept in such harsh bondage. ^ The elders on the King's side prayed him to wait for fresh troops ; but he chose rather to listen to the counsels of the Earls who surrounded him, but who in their hearts were traitors.^ We have a vivid picture of the battle, and a no less vivid report of the real or imaginary speeches with which the in the Gesta, 90, as it afterwards does in the battle. Orderio alone men- tions the Bishop. But the panegyrist of Hobert says with a kind of a sneer, " Burgenses Lindocolinse civitatis, qui vellent apud regem grandem locare amicitiam." ' Hist. Nov, iii. 38. " Iniquum id visum multis, quia (sicut dixi) nuUa suspicione rancoris ab eis ante festum abscesserat, nee modo more majorum amicitiam suam eis interdixerat, quod diffidiare dicunt." See above, p. 2 78. He leaves out the fact, which makes some difference, that the Earls had treacherously seized the castle. ^ So it is implied in the workings of Earl Robert's mind, as set forth in Hist. Nov. iii. 39, where the causes of the Earl's coming to Lincoln are said to be " Quia rex generum suum nuEis ejus culpis injuriaverat, filiam obsi- debat, ecclesiam beatse Dei genitricis de Lindocolino incastellaverat." ' Cf. Hist. Nov. iii. 38, with Ord. Vit. 921 C, and John of Hexham, 269, ' The names come from Orderic, 922 A. They led a " vesana Gualorum caterva.'' ° See the legend in Henry of Huntingdon, 224, and the Gesta, 70. " See John of Hexham, 269, Cf. Orderic, 921 D. BATTLE OP LINCOLN. 297 leaders on each side stirred up their men to battle. Such oh. xxin. speeches are commonly the work of the historian who re- cords them, but, when they are the work of a contemporary- historian, they are worth as much as any other witness to the feelings of the time. We may therefore' listen to the Speech voice, whether it be that of the Earl of Gloucester or of the Eobert. Archdeacon of Huntingdon,^ which lets us into several of the secrets and scandals of the age. The Earl, we are told, bade his host be of good courage. They were going to fight against a perjured King, who had seized the Crown in despite of the oath which he had sworn, a King whose usurpation had been the cause of death to many, and of all the troubles of the land. Those who were there to fight against him were the men whom he had deprived of the lands which they had that day come to recover.^ Who was there to fight against them in the host of the perjurer ? The citizens of Lincoln, who would soon run back to their houses^ while they, having crossed rivers and marshes, had no means of retreat. Who were the leaders of the Character enemy ? There was the cruel Count Alan of Britanny, the King's foe of God and man.s There was the Count of Meulan, S^''^'^''^- A.l3jTl Ox the crafty, the deceitful, the proud boaster, mighty in Britanny. words, but weak in deeds, the last to reach the field of Robert of . Meulan. battle and the first to turn away from it. There was g-^ ^ ,, another Earl, Hugh the Bigod, who^ to the perjury which Bigod. he shared with all of them, had added the special lie by which he had said that King Henry had changed his purpose on his death-bed.* There was Earl William of William of Albemarle. ' The speeches on both sides come from Henry of Huntingdon, 223 h, 224 6. ^ " Rex . . . exemplo eui nihil juris habentibus terras distribuit jure pos- sidentibus diripuit, ab ipsis nequitur dehsereditatia . . . prius aggrediendus est." The " exl>seredati " play a large part both in Henry's narrative and in that of Orderic. They formed a separate division of the Earl's army. ' The character of special cruelty given to Alan is borne out by the author of the Gesta, who caUs him (65) " vir summs crudelitatis ^t doli." * See above, p. 251, and Appendix DD. 298 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND, cH. XXIII. Albemarle^ a man who abode firm in the practice of all wickedness, one whose life was such that his own wife had Earl of left him to seek shelter with another man.^ And there Warren or • i i j_i i j.1, Surrey? was another Earl, whose name is passed by rather by the Archdeacon of Huntingdon than by the Earl of Gloucester ; the man who had robbed his guilty comrade of his wife^ a man vigorous in the service of Bacchus, but unknown in Simon of that of Mars.^ There was Simon Earl of Northampton, a Northamp- . , . , . „ ton. man m whom we may claim a share as m one sprung irom the blood of the martyred Waltheof, but who appears in his enemy's invective as a man whose words were his only deeds, whose promises were his only gifts.^ The rest were like unto them, men such as their King, robbers, manslayers, every one of them stained with the guilt of perjury. But those who fought around him were the men whom the great King Henry had set up, whom the usurper Stephen had cast down, who were going forth to execute the just judge- ment of God upon the guilty men who stood before them.* We may perhaps be less inclined to believe in this extreme wickedness of all the nobles who surrounded Stephen, when we hear what was said on Stephen's side against Earl Robert himself. And the event shows that the ' In the Annals of his own monastery (Chronica de Melsa, i. 90, 213) Earl William appears as a man of admirable piety, and there is not a word of scandal against his wife Cecily, the daughter of William the son of Dun- can, the son of King Malcolm of Scotland. Anyhow he was at the Battle of the Standard. ^ " Procedit contra vos, consul flle qui consuli pr*dicto sponsam abripuit' adulter patentissimus et excellenter impiirus, Bacchi devotus, Marti ignotus, vino redolens, bello insolens." This Earl, who seems to have been too dis- reputable to be named, is by Professor Stubbs (E. Howden, i. 201) supposed to be the Earl of Warren. Robert of Gloucester (ii. 454) seema to leave him out. ^ Henry himself, in recording Simon's death in 11 53, says in his own person (2276) that he was "plenus omnium quae nou licebant, omnium quEe non decebant." ' "Vos igitur viri fortissimi, quos magnus Henricus rex erexit, iste dejecit, iUe instruxit, iste destruxit." SPEECHES BEFORE THE BATTLE. 299 greatest fault of Stephen's followers was lack of zeal and oh. xxin. good faith on behalf of Stephen himself. The King, it Speech of seems, with all his popular talents, was no orator ; ' the ciare. speech on his side was made by Baldwin the son of Gilbert, of the house of Clare. In his eyes the righteousness of Stephen's cause was as clear as his unrighteousness was in the eyes of Earl Robert. They had on their side three advantages, the justice of their cause, their greater numbers, their superiority in valour. The charge of perjury was returned. They were fighting for their King, the Lord's anointed, to whom their enemies had taken oaths and broken them. What the chief of the enemy. Earl Robert Character himself, was they all knew. His threats were great, but nobert. his deeds were small ; his famous eloquence never led to action ; a lion in speech, he was in heart no better than a hare.^ These charges sound strange when brought against Robert of Gloucester, but they show perhaps the natural feeling of the mere soldier against the man who was both soldier and scholar, the feeling which made the warlike but unlettered Yolumnius throw out his taunts at the peaceful works of his colleague Appius.' Randolf of Chester is at Eandolf of least not charged with mere cowardice ; he is fierce enough in beginning warfare or anything else, reckless of danger, seeking things beyond his power, but carrying nothing to perfection; beginning his plans with the strength of a man, but leaving them, when begun, with the weakness of a woman. As for the Welsh, rash, unarmed, unskilled in The "Welsh. war, they were no better than beasts running of their own accord upon the hunting-spear.* As for the rest, be they 1 "Tunc quia rex Stephanus festiva voce carebat." la the hexameter intentional ? 2 "Eoberti duces vires notse sunt. Ipse quidem de more multum minatur, parum operatur, ore leoninus, corde leporinus clarus eloquentia, obscurus inertia." ' Livy, X. 19. * " Qui inermem bello prseferunt temeritatem, et arte et usu belli carentes 300 THE NORMAL KINGS IK EKGLAND. CH. XXIII. nobles or knights, runaways or vagabonds of any kind/ all that was to be wished was that there were more of them to triumph over. Stephen The accomits of the battle vary greatly, but one thing by his is plain, that Stephen was basely forsaken by many both owers. ^^ |^^g ^^^ subjects and of his foreign mercenaries. Among these the names of the Count of Meulan and of the Fleming "\'\^illiam of Ypres are specially branded. ^ Personal But a Small band of faithful men still stood round their Stephen. King ; and our thoughts are carried back to another fight and to a nobler leader, when we read how the King of the English, fighting on foot like an Englishman, wielded the sword of J^thelstan or Eadmund till it broke in his hand, how a young citizen of Lincoln brought him in its stead the weapon of Cnut and Harold, and how Stephen, with his Danish axe, laid manfully about him, till its stroke, lighting on the helmet of the Earl of Chester, brought the traitor to his knee.^ But on that day treason quasi pecora deeurrunt in venahula." Compare the dispute between Malise Earl of Strathern, who was as ready to go without a cuirass as another man with, and Alan of Percy, in j35thelred, 342. ^ " Tam proceres quam milites, transfug^ et girovagi." ^ The flight of WiUiam of Ypres comes out in most of the accounts, but Henry of Huntingdon, who calls him "vii esconsularis et magnse probi- tatis," makes him put the Welsh to ilight before he iiies himself; but accord- ing to Orderio, he and his Flemings and Alan and his Bretons were the first to fly. ' The personal valour of Stephen comes out in every account, but es- pecially in Henry of Huntingdon, Orderio, and John of Hexham. Henry arms In'm first with the axe; "Tunc apparuit vis regis fulminea [this is a lightning flash from Assandun, see vol. i. p. 389], bipenni maxima csedens hos, ruens ilk)s." The axe is broken, then he fights witli his sword, **gladio dextera regis digno" — almost the words which he uses of Eadmund — till the sword too is broken. But one can hardly doubt that John of Hexham (269) is right in making him wield the sword first ; " Dissecuit omnes ad congressum sese opponentes donee comminueretur gladius in manibus ejus, posuit vero in manu ejus securim Danicam quidam dvis Linoolni«." So Orderic, 922 B; " Ense vel securi Norica quam quidam illi juvenis ibi administr.averat pugnare non cessavit." The personal combat with Earl Eandolf appears in Henry's account, but comes out more clearly in John of Hexham. STEPHEN TAKEN PEISONEE. 301 had the upper hand; the King's followers had fled, and ch.xxiii. three men only were at his side.^ The soldiers of Earl Robert pressed around him, and a mighty stone, hurled as by the hand of the Homeric Aias,^ brought the King himself to the ground.' A knight called William of Kains seized, like Menelaos,* the fallen King by the helmet, and with a loud voice cried out that he held the King, and bade all his comrades hasten to secure the richest prize of victory.^ Stephen could now do nothing but give him- Stephen self up as a prisoner to the Earl of Gloucester. With prjaoner. him was taken, fighting to the last, Baldwin who had made the speech before the battle, and who at least could not be charged with belying his words by his deeds, and E-ichard the son of Urse, a descendant, it would seem, of the old enemy Urse of Abetot, whose exploits that day might be taken as some atonement for the crimes of his kindred.^ A few valiant men still fought on to be all slain or taken prisoners.' The city was sacked, and its Lincoln inhabitants slaughtered without mercy, by the savage followers of Earl Randolf.' The great Danish city was thus dealt with as no city had been dealt with in the days of the Conqueror ; but it fared no worse than many cities fared in the more polished days of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth ' Orderio is specially emphatic on the treason of Stephen's followers. It is he who speaks of the " tres pugiles " who were still with the King when he was taken. The Chronicler, in his short and pithy account, is of the same mind. ^ niad, vU. 268. ' Hist. Nov. iii. 40. " Hiad, iii. 345. = The name comes from Henry of Huntingdon ; " Irruit in regem, et eum galea arripiens voce magna clamavit, Hue omnes, hue, regem teneo. Advo- lant omnes, et capitur rex." ' Henry of Huntingdon and Orderic both preserve the name of Baldwin. Henry adds that of Richard. See vol. iv. p. 173. ' Hen. Hunt. 2346. "Adhuc capto rege pugnabat aoies regaUs ; neo enim ciroumventi fugere poterant, donee omnes vel capti vel ciesi sunt." ' Henry of Huntingdon simply says, " Civitas hostili lege direpta est." Orderic gives some details, especially of the drowning of five hundred " nobHes elves " who tried to escape by the river. William of Malmesbury 302 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. OH. xxni. centuries. Stephen was first led into Lincoln to see the desolation of the faithful city ;' and it would seem that, in full agreement with chivalrous notions, some who had felt no compassion during the horrors of the sack were moved to pity and repentance by the misfortunes of the Stephen captive Kiug.^ He was presently led by the victorious aTBristol. ^^^'^ of Gloucester to the Empress, who was then in his own city, and was then kept in ward in the castle of Bristol.^ Success All England now submitted to the Empress, save Kent Empress, alone, where Queen Matilda and William of Ypres, who had, it seems, recovered himself from his flight at Lincoln, still kept men in their allegiance.* Castle after castle, district after district, Was won for Earl Robert and Hervey the his sister.^ The fate of one fortress awakens a special Breton be- . , . . , . n ^ c d ^ sieged at interest, as givmg us a gnmpse or a class oi men oi whom the Devizes j^ these times we seldom hear except as victims for the by the men '■ ofWilt- torturer. A Breton Count Hervey had married a daughter of the King, and now he commanded in that great fortress of the Devizes which Stephen had wrested from Bishop Roger. He was overthrown, not by knights or nobles or mercenaries of whatever nation, but by the folk of the land. The churls of the surrounding country, stirred up confirms the fact, and moreover approves ; " Vulgus vero burgensium Lindocolinorum multa parte obtruncatum est, justa ira illorum qui vicis- eent, nuUo dolore illorum qui victi essent, quod ipsi principium et fomes istius mali fuissent." ' Hen. Hunt. 2246. " Eex in earn miserabiliter introductus est." ^ The writer of the Gesta (71, 72) describes the workings of their minds, which went so far "ut non solum in laorimas et ejulatum omnes prorum- perent, sed et cordis, et oris pcenitudine quam maxime afficerenfcur." ^ Gesta, 72 ; Hist. Nov. iii. 41, where we may remark the phrase that the King was presented to the Empress, "juxta morem illius generis homi- num quos captives nominant." Ord. Vit. 922 B; Cent. Flor. Wig. 1141; John of Hexham, 269 ; Will. Neub. i. 8 ; Hen. Hunt. 225. The Chroni- cler says, " and Ited him to Bristowe and diden Jiar in prisun and . . . teres." One would like to fill up the gap, which suggests some form of the word fetters. * Hen. Hunt. 225. So the Gesta, 73. ' See the Gesta, 73, 74, and for places in the north, John of Hexham, 269, THE DEVIZES BESIEGED BY THE EARLS. 303 no doubt by some excess of cruelty, swore his destruction oh. xxiii. as one man. They besieged him in the castle, which was afterwards surrendered to the Empress, and he left England full of shame. ^ It is not clear whether the victorious churls, thinking, as usual, that any change of masters must be for the better, surrendered their prize to those who now had the upper hand, or whether Hervey himself chose to call in the opposite party in the general struggle rather than to abide his fate at the hands of his immediate local enemies. In either case it is something to see a stranger, a Count, a King^s son-in-law, driven to such straits as these by the unaided efforts of the people of an English shire. Matilda was thus in actual possession of by far the greater part of England, while Stephen was in bonds. The next object was to give something like a legal confirma- tion to her possession. To this end the Legate Henry was Henry won over. We have seen that he was already ill-disposed Chester to his brother on account of the seizure of the Bishops, j^^yi^^j and a promise to be guided by his counsels in all weighty February matters, especially in the disposal of bishopricks and abbeys, gained him to the side of the Empress.^ And Novelty of now followed a scene which has no parallel in English reign, history. If Matilda was to reign, her reign needed to begin by something which might pass for an election and coronation. But her followers, Bishop Henry at their head, seem to have shrunk from the actual crowning and anointing, ceremonies which — unless Sexburh had, ages before, received the full royal consecration — had never, either in England or in Gaul, been applied to a female ' Gesta, 74. "Comes Herveua, gener regis, in casteUo quod Divisa dicitur a simplioi rusticorum plebe in unmn se globum in malum illius conjurante diutissime obsessus, tandemque casteUo in manus comi- tissEe reddito, ab omui Anglia inhoneste depulsus, cum paucis trana- meavit." ^ Hist. Nov. iii. 42. 304 THE NOEMAN KIKGS IN ENGLAND. CH. XXIJI. Matilda received at Win- chester. March 3, 1141. Synod at Win- chester. April 7. Speech of Henry. Assertion of the clerical ruler.^ Matilda was solemnly received in the cathedral church of Winchester ; she was led by two Bishops,^ the Legate himself and Bernard of Saint David's, as though to receive the crown and the unction, but no crowning and no unction is spoken of.' An ecclesiastical synod followed, which was also held at Winchester. Archbishop Theobald was there, and some other prelates, who, together with some laymen, had, it is especially remarked, asked Stephen's leave before they bent to the times and plighted their allegiance to the Empress.* In the proceedings of this synod, as reported by an eye-witness, we have a clear setting forth of the arguments on one side of the question. We have also a speaking proof of the way in which ecclesiastical pretensions had grown during the utter break-up of all civil society. The president and the pre- siding spirit of the assembly was the Legate Henry. His speech began and ended with a panegyric on his uncle the late King, and on the happiness which England had enjoyed during his peaceful reign. ° He set forth the rights of Matilda, grounded on the oath taken to her in her father's lifetime. It was only because she delayed to come over to England and take possession of her kingdom that Stephen, that there might be some one to keep the peace of the land, had been allowed to reign." He had been accepted on the strength of promises to defend ' I cannot answer for Urraca Queen of Castile, who reigned from 1109 to 1 1 26. ^ See vol. iii. pp. 43, 558, 622. ' William of Malmesbury (Hist. Nov. iii. 42) seems distinctly to exclude a coronation ; he merely says, " Honorifica facta processione, recepta est ia ecclesia episcopatus Wintoni^." We must therefore see only rhetoric when the Continuator says, " Datur ejus dominio corona regni Angliae," and when the author of the Gesta (75) speaks of " regis casteUo, et regni corona quam semper ardentissime affectarat, .... in deliberationem suam contraditis," and adds tbat Henry "dominam et reginam acclamare prsecepit." The Waverley Annalist, 1141, ventures to say, " Corona regni est ei tradita.'' ' Hist. Nov. u. s. "^ lb. 44. 6 lb. ELECTION OF MATILDA. 305 the Church and preserve the peace, all which promises oH.xxiri. he had broken. To them, to the clergy of England, it"gH'*^ chiefly belonged to elect as well as to consecrate Kings.^ He therefore called on the synod to elect the daughter Matilda of Henry, the great and incomparable King, as Lady of Q^gg^l^but England and Normandy .^ Whether any consecration was ^^'^y- designed to follow, whether at such consecration she would have heen promoted to the specially royal title, we are not told. Countess, Queen, and Empress in other lands, in England the only title that she bears is Lady. The daughter of Henry reigned, so far as she reigned at all, by the same style as the daughter of jSllfred. In the ecclesiastical assembly all agreed to the Legate's Matilda proposal; at least none raised a voice against it.^ But, thrlynod. if Henry, whether as Legate or as Bishop of Winchester, deemed it good to put forward the clergy as especial electors of Kings, he had lived long enough in England to know that there was at least one other body of men who claimed to have a voice in such matters. The men Electoral of London had chosen Stephen to be their King ; and, Londonf without their consent, his Crown could not be transferred to another. The men of London, for the greatness of their city, ranked with the barons of the realm, and many barons of the realm had been admitted to the franchise of their commonalty.* While the Council was still sitting, Interces- a deputation came from the commonalty of London, Londoners ' Hist. Nov. iii. 44. " Clerus Angliae, ad cujua jus potissimum speotat principem eligere, simulque ordinare." ' lb. "Filiam paoifici regis, gloriosi regis, divitis regis, boni regis, et nostro tempore incomparabilis, in AngUse Nonnanniseque dominam eligimus, et ei fidem et manuteuementum promittimus." In her grant of the earldom of Hereford to Miles of Gloucester (Eymer, i. 14) her style is " Matilda Imperatrix, Henrici regis fiUa, et Anglormn domina." ' Hist. Nov. iii. 45. ' lb. " Londonienses, qui sunt quasi optimates, pro magnitudine oivitatis, in Anglia." "Onmes barones, qui in eorum communionem jamdudum recepti fuerant." " Londonienses, qui prsecipui habebantur in Anglia, sicut proceres." VOL. V. X 306 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. xxm. not to make any arrangement with regard to the Crown^ for but to pray that their lord the King might be set free Stephen. ^ ^ „ , ^^ ^ ■ Messacre ^om his bonds.^ A clerk of the Queen put m a from Queen .^^jo,orous protest on behalf of her husband, claiming for Matilda o Jr -- t_. him, not only freedom, but the kingdom which wicked men had taken from him.^ The London deputation went back, promising to do their best on behalf of the Haughti- Empress ; but meanwhile Matilda disgusted even her own Empress. ^ partisans by her extreme haughtiness, a haughtiness which she showed even to those to whom she owed most, to the Legate, to her own brother and champion Earl Robert, to her uncle King David, who had come to join her, and who had been acting on her behalf on the road.^ She then made her way to London by a roundabout path. She was received at Oxford by the younger Eobert of Oily/ and in his castle she found a champion in his stepson, another of her half-brothers, Eobert the son of Eadgyth.^ At Saint Alban's a deputation from London came, as another deputation from London had once come to Berkhampstead,^ oflFering to receive her into the city.'' ' Hist. Nov. ill. 45. "Missi a communione quam vocant Londoniarum, non certamina sed preces offerre, ut dominus suns rex de captione libe- raretur." On the "communio" see vol. iv. pp. 549, 550. ^ Hist. Nov. iii. 47. ' His course is traced by John of Hexham, 270. On her behaviour to the King, the Earl, and the Bishop, see the Gesta, 76. * See the Gesta, 74» 81, and theContinuator, 1141. Cf. vol. iv. pp. 46, 736. ^ " Eobertus filius Edae et Henrici regis nothus " is distinctly mentioned by John of Hexham, 270. I have to thank Mr. E. C. Waters for calling my attention to the two documents in the Monasticon (vi. 253) in which Henry of Oily, the son of Eobert and Eadgyth, appears as the brother of " Eobertus Henrici regis filius," the Robert with whom we are now dealing. See vol. iv. p. 736. Heralds seem to confound this Eobert with the Earl of Gloucester. * See vol. iii. p. 547. ' The place comes from the Contiuuator, who adds, " Adeunt earn ibi cives multi ex Lundonia, tractaturi ibi sermo multimodus de reddenda civitate." So the Gesta, 76, 77 ; "Eogatu Londoniensium, qui se illi supplices obtu- lerunt, ad oivitatem postremo devenit." MATILDA IN LONDON, 307 She took up her abode at Westminster, and again dis- oh. xxiii. played the same haughtiness as before. Again she refused ^'^^, to listen to the prayers of her namesake the Queen^ to the London. prayers of the nobles of her own side, who craved for the gj^^ refuses release of Stephen. She would not hearken even to the all inter- cession for proposal that he should resign the kingdom and spend Stephen. the rest of his days as a monk or pilgrim.'' She offended Bishop Henry by refusing his petition that at least his nephew Eustace might receive his father's continental possessions.^ And, more than all, she drew on herself the She refuses ill will of the men of the great city whose citizens could ofEadward make and unmake Kings. The men of London prayed *° *® ° r .; Londoners. of her that she would observe the laws of King Eadward, Complaints because they were the best of all, not the laws of her Londoners father Henry, because they were too heavy to be borne. ^ against King The words are remarkable in many ways. They are the Henry, only expression of discontent with the general rule of Henry which we meet with ; and it is singular that such a complaint should come from the citizens of London. But it may be remarked that Henry's great merit, the strict administration of justice, was of less importance to the men of a city who had such great franchises in their own hands than it was to the people of the smaller towns and of the open country. And, on the other hand, the ' Cont. Flor. Wig. 1141. The writer here distinctly opposes the Queen and the Lady, " interpellavit dominam Anglorum reginam." ^ Of. Hist. Nov. iii. 49 ; John of Hexham, 270. ' All our authorities speak generally of Matilda's haughtiness to the citizens, but it is only in the Continuator of Moreuce that we find the distinct demand and refusal of the laws of Eadward ; " Interpellata est et a civibus, ut leges eis regis Edwardi observare liceret, quia optimse erant, non patris sui Henrici, quia graves erant, "Verum ilia, non bono usa consilio, prsB nimia austeritate non acquievit eis." There seems to be a dark allusion to this matter in Hist. Nov. iii. 48, where the panegyrist of Robert describes him as busy " justitiam et patrias leges et pacem reformando ; " and without more distinctly blaming Matilda, he goes on to say, " satis constat quod, si ejus moderationi et sapientis a suis esset creditum, non tarn sinistrum postea sensissent aleae casum.'' X a 308 THE NOEMAN" KINGS IN ENGLAND. Memory of the reign of Eadward. Matilda's liauglity Queen Matilda before London. strictness of Henry's forest laws was no doubt felt by the citizens themselves and by the barons who had joined their commonalty. But the great point is that now, seventy-five years after the coming of William, the memory of the last native King is still cherished. His days, the days of the rule of Eadward, that is in truth the days of the rule of Godwine and of Harold, are still looked back to as the happy days of peace and righteousness. Nor is it only in some upland region, where the stranger had appeared only in his character of conqueror, that they are thus looked back to. The days of Eadward are still looked to with yearning by a city to which men flocked from every quarter of the world, and among whose chief citizens a large proportion were undoubtedly of Norman blood. But the prayer of the men of London was unheeded. Matilda, who had worn her crown in the Eternal City, may have there been taught by Roman lawyers that law was whatever the prince deemed good,^ and she may have learned to look on the dooms of Eadward and Henry as alike of little worth. All the answer that the citizens got was stern looks, reproaches for the favour which they had shown to Stephen and the money which they had spent in his cause, and pressing demands of money for her own use.^ Meanwhile another Matilda was at their gates, one who had by birth as good a claim to the allegiance of Englishmen as her Imperial namesake, whose descent from the Old-English Kings was the same as her own, and who, if zeal and energy could win success, might have brought laurels to any cause. While the Empress was trampling on their rights within their walls, the * " Quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem.'' ' We get the most vivid picture of Matilda's treatment of the Londoners in the Gesta, 77. But all our authorities bear witness to her extreme haughtiness. See Hen. Hunt. 225; Will. Neub. i. 9; John of Hexham, 270. MATILBA FLEES TO OXFORD. 309 Queen was threatening them with all the horrors of war ch. xxht. without.^ The citizens made their choice ; they entered The Bm- into a league on Stephens's behalf with his valiant wife, and from Lon- drove the Empress and her followers from their gates.^ q"" *", She fled to Oxford, and presently showed her spite by Stephen's ordering the captive King, who had hitherto been kept '^^'^jj'^^ in an honourable confinement, to be loaded with chains.^ A train of stirring events followed. The Empress held her court at Oxford, while her rival and namesake, in full possession of London, was gathering forces everywhere on behalf of her husband. Bishop Henry now openly changes TheLegate sides ; so do his citizens of Winchester ; and we get a chano-es strange picture of Queen and Empress, the King of^'^^^^ Scots, the Earl and the Bishop, the citizens of London of Win- 1 11 • 1 cheater. and Winchester, all m a manner besieging one another. In the end a large part of the city of Winchester, and with it the New Minster, on its new site of Hyde, was burned, if not by the order, at least by the followers, of its own Bishop.* Then comes the captivity of Earl Robert under Earl the keeping of William of Ypres in Archbishop William's taken ' This campaign of Queen Matilda, " astuti pectoris, virilisque constantise femina," is described in the Gesta, 77, 78. ' The fullest account is that in the Gesta, 78, 79. See also the Con- tinuator, 1141 ; Hist. Nov. iii. 48; John of Hexham; Will. Neub, i. 9; Henry of Huntingdon, 225. ' So says Henry of Huntingdon ; " Irritata igitur muliebri angore, regem unctum Domini in compedibus poni juasit." William of Mahnesbury (Hist,. Nov. iii. 41) had already told us that Stephen was at first honourably treated ("honorifice prseter progrediendi faoultatem servatus est primo") ; afterwards " annulis ferreis innodatus est." * Our authorities now gradually fail us. Orderic'a narrative was finished while the King was in prison. The Continuator breaks off soon after the burning of Winchester. Henry of Huntingdon tells the stoi-y at no great length. William of Mahnesbury gives the account in Hist. Nov. iii. 50, but both the Continuator and the author of the Geata are fuller. The New Minster, the "eoclesia Sanoti Grimbaldi" of the Continuator, had changed its site in mo. See Mr. Edwards' Introduction to Liber de Hyda, xlv. et seqq. The Chronicler does not mention the fire, but the description of the Queen's action is vigorous; "fa com fe kingea cwen mid al hire strengthe, and besset heom, fiet ))er wses inne micel hungaer." 310 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND, CH. XXIIl. prisoner, September 14, 1141. His ex- change for the King. Escape of the Em- press from Oxford. December, 1141. Synod at West- minster. December 7, 1141. still new castle of Rochester/ the vain attempts of their two zealous wives to find in the exchange of King and Earl a means of settling the peace of the kingdom/ and their final exchange, not as anything tending towards peace, but simply as restoring to each party a leader of equal value.^ We come to Stephen^s siege of the Empress at Oxford, and the famous tale of her escape from Robert of Oily's castle.* In the midst of all this we come across another synod, held this time at Westminster, in which we hear the Legate Henry, now a loyal subject of his brother, defending his twofold treason in his brother's hearing, and calling on men to cleave to the King who had been anointed by the will of the people and by the consent of the Apostolic See, and to forsake the Countess of Anjou, no longer Lady of the English, but only Lady ' See the story of Robert's captivity in Will. Malms. Hist. Nov. iii. 5 1 ; Gesta, 84 ; Cont. Flor. Wig. 1151 ; Will. Neub. i. 9. The Chronicler records his imprisonment at Rochester, and Gervase (1356) adds the name of his keeper, "AViiiielmus Yprensis, qui Cantia abutebatur." ^ This comes from the Continuator, who is copied by Gervase. An agree- ment is made between Queen Matilda and the Countess Mabel ("regina nlmium satagente pro rege, et vicecomitisaa, — why mce? it is "comitissa"' in Gervase — valde desudante pro comite ") to this effect ; " Ut rex suo restitutus regno, et comes sub eo totius Angliae subUmatus dominio, fierent ambo regni et patri« justi moderatores et pads recuperatores, sicut totius dissensionis et turbationis exstiterant inoentores atque auctores." But Robert wiU not agree without the consent of the Empress, and that is not to be had. ' The Chronicler thus tells it ; " pa feorden (le wise men betwyx Jje kinges freond and te eorles freond and sahtlede sua jjget me sculde leten ut Jje king of prisun for fe eorl, and te eorl for fe king, and sua diden." See also Hist. Nov. iii. 58 ; Gesta, 85 ; Hen. Hunt. 225. ' The Chronicler again teUs the tale ; " pa Jje king was ute, ])a herde jjset ssegen, and toe his feord and besset hire in Se tur, and me l«t hire dim on niht of pe tur mid rapes, and stal ut and scse fieh and ieede on fote to Walingford." This is the last event recorded by WiUiam of Malmesbury, Hist. Nov. iii. 74. The best known incident of the story comes from Henry of Huntingdon (225) ; " Non procul a natali aufugit Imperatrix per Tamasim glaciatam, circumamicta vestibus albis, reverberatione nivis et similitudine fallentibua oculos obsidentium." Gervase (1358) tells the tale at oreater length. It should be noted that in those days the river at Oxford was the Thames. BISHOP HEJTEY TURNS AGAINST MATILDA. 311 of the Angevins.^ But now for some years there is little oh. xxiir. on which we need dwell. Several more years were passed Strife of in local warfare of the same kind as that of which we ft" ^^'"■' II42— 1I^^> have heard so much already. We hear of the striking deaths of more than one evil-doer/ and we get general pictures of the state of the land, as fearful as that which our own Chroniclers gave us at an earlier stage of the struggle.' We still have the picture of a state of things ia which, though the land is divided between two parties, yet neither of their nominal chiefs is able to exercise any real control over his followers^ but each is obliged to put up with their evil deeds lest they should forsake him for his rival.* But, on the whole, the course of events was favourable to Stephen. We see him twice on his old battle-ground of Lincoln, striving against his old enemy Randolf of Chester. At one stage of the struggle we Lincoln find the faithless Earl besieged by the King in the scene of gteS''^ his old treason at Lincoln.^ Then we see him returning to "44- his allegiance, and presently imprisoned till he gives up i^n"of°' ' Hist. Nov. iii. 52. " Turbatores vero pacis, qui comitissEe Audegavensi faverent, ad excommuuicationem vocandos, prseter earn quae Audegavorum domina easet." ' William of Newburgh (i. 11, 12) gives two chapters to the evil deeds and the appropriate ends of Geofirey of Mandeville and Robert of Marmion, both in the year 1144. For the fate of MUes, Eari of Hereford, see above, p. 293. ^ See the two pictures in the Gesta (96, 1 20) of the general state of England, which may be compared with the more famous one in the Chronicle. In the first passage the writer rebukes the conduct of the fighting Bishops of the time, and complains specially of the foreign mercenaries ; in the second he complains chiefly of the "Welsh. See also the description in William of Newburgh, i. 22. * William of Newburgh, u. o. " Neuter in suos imperiose agere et disci- pline vigorem exercere poterat : sed uterque suos, ne a se deficerent, nihil negando mulcebat." Hen. Hunt. 227 i; " Neutrum exaltare volebant ne, altero subacto, alter iis libere dominaretur, sed semper alter alterum metuens regiam in eos potestatem exercere non posset." This reminds one of Liud- prand's saying of the Italians (Antap. i. 37), how they wish "semper geminis uti dominis, quatenus alterum alterius terrore coerceant." " Hen. Hunt. 225. 312 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. Eandolf repulsed from Djincoln. 1147. cH. XXIII. the precious fortress.^ The recovery of the city which had ^="■1 „ suffered so much in Stephen's cause was'worthily celebrated Randoll. i i j t_ • m. • 1 1 45. by a great national ceremony. Stephen held his Christ- Stephen's jjjg^g jjjj^ ^Qj.g j^ig Oro-wn with all royal pomp within the Chnstmas Feast at walls of the city into which he had once been led as a 1 146-1 147. prisoner.^ By such a rite it might seem that his old ill luck on the same spot was wiped out, and that he began, as it were, another and a happier reign. And so in some sort it was. For, soon after the coronation feast at Lincoln, the city was again attacked by the old enemy ; but this time Randolf was beaten back from its walls, as the King himself had been three years earlier. The Earl's chief captain lay dead before the Roman gate through which the Conqueror had entered, and the loyal citizens rejoiced and gave their thanks to the patroness who had defended the temple which crowned their hill.' And^ before long, Stephen was relieved in different ways from the presence of his two chief enemies. Eight years after her first coming to England as a claimant for its Crown, the Empress, tired of the wretched struggle, withdrew to the continent,* and in the next year her brother and chief champion Earl Robert died.' This leads us to the third and last period of this time of ^^48- anarchy. The last few years of Stephen's reign, when a of Stephen, i^w and mightier actor appears, may claim to be spoken of at somewhat greater length than a long series of sieges The Empress leaves England. 1 147. Death of Earl Robert. ' This is recorded by the Chronicler with much emphasis, though not in its right order. Cf. Hen. Hunt. 225 h; Gervase, 1361 ; Gesta, 124, 125. John of Hexham (278) seems to put this under 1x51. ^ Hen. Hunt. 225 6. "Duodecimo rex Stephauus anno ad natale Domini in urbe Lincolliensi diademate regahter insignitus est, quo regum nuUus introire, prohibentibus quibusdam superstitiosis, ausus fuerat." So Gervase, 1362. It is odd that this belief was not mentioned earlier in the story. ^ See Hen. Hunt. 225 h. * Gervase, 1363. "Imperatrix jam AngKcanse discordis tsedio affecta, ante quadrageaimam in Normanniam transfretavit, malena sub tutela mariti sui in pace quiescere quam in Anglia tot molestias sustinere." ^ In 1148, according to John of Hexham, 276. Gervase (1361) puts it in 1 146. See also the Gesta, 131. TAKING OF LISBON. 313 and skirmishes, rich indeed in local and personal interest, oh. xxiii. but which throw little light on our main subject. We may- turn from them with satisfaction to a field on which men of Norman and English blood joined together in a more worthy cause. In the year that the Empress left England, Taking of a band of men, German, Flemish, Norman, and EngHsh, i]\^!^' among whom we specially hear of men from London, Bristol, Southampton, Hastings, Kent, and Suffolk, set forth from the port of Dartmouth without any princely leader, joined the warfare of Alfonso of Portugal against the Infidels, wrested Lisbon from their hands, and enlarged the bounds of Christendom by a new episcopal see, of which a man, English by birth at least, Gilbert of Hastings, was left as the first Bishop.' An exploit like this is indeed a relief amid the annals of a strife which we can hardly honour with the name even of civil war. Before we come to the chain of events which connects this reign with the next, it may be well to glance at some of those ecclesiastical affairs of the time which do not come into immediate connexion with the political and military story. Stephen had the character of being a prince who Stephen on had no great loye for the clergy ; '' they never forgave his ^jth the seizure of the two Bishops ; and, like perhaps every other ''^^^sy- warrior of that time, he is charged with showing little regard to holy places in his military operations.' But, Growth of 1 ^ • -I 1 ji • -1 1 the ecclesi- as was natural m days when the civil power was so weak, astical there was no time when the ecclesiastical power made ll?'^^F his time. ' See the tract "Osbemus de Expugnatione Lyxbonensi" printed in Professor Stubbs' Chronicles and Memorials of Richard the First, i. cxlir., and the letter of Duodechin in the Annals of Saint Disibod, 1147 (Pertz, xvii. 27). On the aspect of these narratives with which I am most con- cerned I have said something in Appendix W. Cf. Hen. Hunt. 226. ' Hen. Hunt. 2266. "Rex Stephanus numquam clericos liquide di- lexerat, et pridem duos incarceravit episoopos." ' As in the case of Lincoln (see above, p. 296) and Wilton (see Gervase, 1358) ; Heading (Robert de Monte, 1152); Beverley (John of Hexham, 27S). 314 THE Jv^OEJIAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. XXIII. greater strides than during the nineteen years of anarchy. TVe have seen how Stephen stooped to seek for a papal confirmation of his election to the Crown,^ and how an ecclesiastical synod listened complacently to the doctrine Growth of that the election of Kings lay in the clergy.^ During fvome. this same time, and under the administration of the same' man, the Legate Henry of Winchester, a fashion of which particular instances may be found at earlier times took root and flourished. This was the fashion of appealing from English courts to the see of Rome.^ Nor was this wonderful, when Stephen himself, as we have seen, stooped to make, or at least to think of making, an appeal of this kind in his own person.* Nor was this the only instance of Stephen's self-abasement before the papal power. Even when he plucked up heart to refuse a safe-conduct to a Cardinal, unless he pledged himself to do nothing against the rights of the kingdom, he presently found himself driven to humble himself before the power which he had offended.^ In all this we see the growth of those inno- vations which the next Henry tried manfully to stop, but ' See above, p. 246. ^ See above, p. 305. ' Henryof Huntingdon goes too far when he saya (2266), in describing the synod of liji, " Totum illud concilium novis appeUationibus infranduit. In Anglia nanique appeUationes in usu non erant, donee eas Henrious Win- toniensis, dum legatas esset malo suo, crudeliter intrusit. In eodem nanique concilio ad Eomani pontificis audientiam ter appellatus est." William of Saint Carilef had appealed in 1088 ; see above, p. 77. * See above, p. 290. ' According to John of Hexham (279), the Cardinal-Priest John in 1151 was refused a safe-conduct, "nisi fidem daret se in hac profectione regno Anglorum nullum damnum quserere." He went back and complained at Eome, and Stephen presently humbly invited him to England again. Cf. the dealings of Henry the Second with Cardinal Vivian, I176 ; Benedict, i. 118. Stephen's conduct doubtless stood forth in glaring contrast to the reverence with which David received the same Cardinal. One object of his mission was to distribute four pallia to the archiepiscopal sees of Ireland, which Robert de Jlonte (1151) comments on as a breach of the rights of Canter- bury. See above, p. 213, and vol. iv. p. 529. DISPUTES ABOUT THE SEE OP YORK. 315 which it was left for the last Henry of all wholly to sweep oh. xxiir. away. In his ecclesiastical patronage Stephen stands vaguely charged with simony, but without any very dis- tinct proof.^ It is more certain that, like other Kings, he used ecclesiastical preferments as a way of providing for his own kinsfolk, though in one case he stumbled on a kinsman who was also a saint. On the death of Arch- Death of bishop Thurstan of York, the canons, or part of them, of York, chose their Treasurer William, a nephew of Stephen, a '^'*'°' man, we are told, of the holiest life, but whose election election of was set aside by Pope Eugenius on the ground that the ^am'ai'^^^'- archbishoprick had been uncanonieally bestowed by the ^'54) and King. It was not till after the reign and death of his Murdao successor Henry Murdac that William obtained possession u^J)' of the see.^ His own tenure of it was short, and, just Roger before the end of Stephen's reign, he was succeeded by tigbop of a Primate of less fame for holiness, but who played a larMr ^°''^- . ^ •' *' 1154-1181. part in the affairs of the world. This was Roger, then Archdeacon of Canterbury, who, as soon as he was elected to the Northern throne, showed his zeal for its rights in a form which sprang of the new ideas which were now creeping in. He would have consecration at the hands of Theobald, not in his character of Archbishop of Canter- bury, but only in that of Legate of the Holy See.^ His office in the Southern metropolis was at once bestowed by Theobald on a man between whom and the new Arch- ' Henry of Winchester is made by WUliam of Malmesbury (Hist. Nov. iii. 44) to complain of " abbatise venditffi, ecclesise thesauris depilatse." Cf. the story of the election to Saint Augustine's in Gervase, 1370, and the Historia Pontificalis, 42, 44 (Pertz, xx. 544, 645)- '' On the disputed election of Saint William of York, see John of Hex- ham, 268, 277; Will. Neub. i. 17 ; T. Stubbs, i7'2i, 1722, who speaks of him as " strenuissimi comitis Herberti filius, ex Emma sorore regis Anglorum Stephani progenitus." I can find no further notice of this Emma. 2 Such, according to the Yorkist Walter of Hemingburgh (i. 79), was the successful demand of the Chapter of York, " ut eum non tamquam Cantuariensis arobiepiscopus, sed apostolicse sedis legatus consecraret." 316 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. Thomas of London Arch- deacon of Canter- bury. 1154- Hugh of Puiset Bishop of Durham. 1153-1195 Gervase Abbot of West- minster. Schemes of Henry of Win- chester. bishop of York there was to be a rivalry on other grounds besides the old dispute as to the dignity of their pro- vinces. The vacant archdeaconry, the richest secular preferment in England under a bishoprick, formed the first great promotion of Thomas the son of Gilbert Becket of London.! William of York and Thomas of Canterbury both made their way, though by different paths, into the roll of canonized saints. Such was not the case with another kinsman whom Stephen placed in a northern see, Hugh of Puiset, who is also called a nephew of the Kiug^ to whom he gave the bishoprick of Durham, and who during his long episcopate left a name behind him as a mighty ruler and builder, but not altogether as a model of ecclesiastical perfection.^ Another prelate of Stephen's appointment, and who was said to be his son, Gervase Abbot of West- minster, was deposed on a charge of youthful folly in squandering the goods of his monastery.^ But the reign of Stephen was one which left its mark in ecclesiastical matters in other ways than that of increased submission to the Roman See. It would indeed have been a reign to be noted, if one scheme which was proposed had been carried out, and if the ancient landmarks of our ecclesiastical geography had been wholly swept away. York was being practically, and was soon to be formally,* cut short of her spiritual ^ Gervase, 137^- " Dedit arcliiepiscopus Cantuariensis archidiaconatum cuidam clerico suo, scilicet Thomas de LondoniS, viro admodum strenuo atque ingenii perspicacis.'' So R. Howden, i. 213, who speaks of Mm by the unusual description of " Thomas Beket." ^ Will. Neub. i. 26; John of Hexham, 281 ; Gervase, 1375. See his pedigree and character in Professor Stubbs' Preface to the third volume of Roger of Howden, p. xxxiii. ' This sou of Stephen is mentioned by John of Hexham, 281 ; " Amoto abbate Gervasio, filio regis Stephani, qui res loci iUius juveniliter dissi- pavit." ' By the bull of Clement the Third in 1188, professing to release the Scottish Church from its allegiance to York, see Haddan, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents, ii. 273- SCHEMES OP BISHOP HENRY. 317 territory by the growing independence of the Scottish oh.xxiii. Bishops. One daring spirit had a dream of cutting Canterbury short also. The King's brother, Henry of Winchester, pleaded hard at Rome that the ancient capital should be raised to primatial rank, as the metropolitan see of Wessex. Failing this, he prayed that Winchester might at least, like Bamberg, be free from metropolitan jurisdiction, and have no superior but at Rome.i But the prayer was not heard; the eccle- siastical map of England, sensibly altered under Henry, received no changes under Stephen ; but Henry of Win- chester, unable to be an Archbishop himself, lived to lay his consecrating hands on the head of an Archbishop more famous than Theobald.^ But Stephen's reign was really Compara- a most memorable one in the internal history of the of™he"'^ Northern province. There, notwithstanding occasional pr^iiice outrages, occasional breaches of ecclesiastical right, on the part of Count Alan and others,^ comparative quiet reigned, and the work which had begun under Henry still went on. The Cistercian religion flourished, and many Growth of monasteries of the new order arose during these troubled oian Order times.* But of the general effect of these days of eon- ™'^'f ' These schemes of Henry come out in the Historia Ponfcificalis, 39 (Pertz, XX. 542) ; " Elaborare ccepit ut ei pallium daretur et fieret archiepi- scopus oocidentalis AngKs, vel ut ei legatio regni concederetur, vel saltern ut ecclesia sua eximeretur a jurisdictione Cantuariensis." The Pope rejects his prayer in a very strange parable. There is another reference to Henry's schemes in the Winchester Annals, 1 143 ; " Exegit apud papam quod de episcopatu Wintoniensi archiepiscopatum faeeret, et de abbatia de Hida episcopatum, et quod episcopatum Cicestriae sibi subjiceret." The reason is added ; "Hoc fecit propter crebram desertationem qu« fuit inter episcopum et archiepiscopum Cantuarise. Iste enim major videri voluit quam archi- episcopus, ille quam legatus." ^ Henry was the consecrator of Thomas of London, through the vacancy of the see of London. See Gervase, 1383. ' See John of Hexham, 268, 271, 273, 276. But all that happened in those parts was a mere trifle compared with what was going on in southern England. * Will. Neub. i. 15. "Quid autem eentiendum est de his et aliis locis 318 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. XXIII. fusion on the conduct of the clergy we may judge from the state of things with which the next King found that he had to grapple.' Begimiing But there was one spot in England in which light ofTJniver- . , _ • .i sities. arose during the thickest darkness, it was in the reign of Heniy, and still more in the reign of Stephen, that we get the first glimpses in England of a higher education than could be given by schools attached to monasteries and other churches. It is now that we see the beginnings of the system of universities, the first gatherings of independent masters and scholars, not attached to any great ecclesiastical foundation, and not as yet themselves gathered into endowed societies. The twelfth century saw the beginning of universities in England ; the thirteenth century saw the beginning of the incorporated and endowed colleges within them. The Position of borough of Oxford, one of the chief towns of England, a point so specially central for the whole land south of the Humber, a place free from the jurisdiction of any great ecclesiastical lord, the seat neither of a Bishop nor of a monastery of the first rank, was a place well suited for the purpose which has given it all its later fame. No place could be better to become the seat of one of those voluntary settlements of students, which, though they were in after times favoured by Popes and Kings and religiosis, qufe in diebus regis Stephani copiosius exstrui vel florere oceperunt denique multo plura sub brevitate temporis, quo Stepbanus regnavit, vel potius nomen regis obtinuit." T. Wykes, 1098; "Ccepit pullulare et pro- ficere ordo Cisterciensis.'' In 1152 (Robert de Monte, ii5i)itwas for- bidden in the general chapter of the Cistercians to found any more abbeys of the order, as there were already five hundred. In the next year a Lotharingian prophetess announced to the order, •' quod aliquantulum et teporem ordinis et frigus notaret caritatis." This was just before the death of Saint Bernard. - See the description of the state of things with which Henry and Thomas had to deal in William of Newburgh, ii. 16 ; Herbert of Bosham, iii. 17, 18 ; William Fitz-Stephen, Giles, 207-215, BEGINNING OP THE UNIVEKSITT OP OXFORD. 319 Bishops and nobles, yet preeminently, in the first instance, oh. xxiii. came of themselves. The two older characters of Oxford, as a great military post and as a special place for great national assemblies, both come out strongly in Stephen's time. To these characters the border town now began to add the new one which it has ever since kept^ that of a seat of learning. In the days of Henry we hear of Beginning the first public lectures in divinity; in the reign of Stephen, lectures at amid the clash of arms, we find the first beginning of '-*^^°'''^' studies of a more general kind ; amid the special reign of brute force, the antidote appeared in the first systematic teaching of the science of law. In Henry's days, the lectures of the Breton Kobert Pulan, who rose to high place at the Roman court, made the first beginnings of a faculty of theology.^ In Stephen's days, but not till Beginning the crowned Augusta had left the land^ Vacarius began etudy of his first teaching of the Imperial law.^ In after days, ^^"^^ in a kindred land, Leyden received the foundation of its University as the reward of the endurance of the city during its famous siege. The University of Oxford Growth of has no foundation and no founder ; she grew up from a versity. seed east forth at random. But her first step towards a wider and more liberal culture took place at the moment when Oxford had lately recovered from a siege less glorious than that of Leyden. The picturesque inci- dents of that siege have become so famous that the work which was then going on within the walls of Oxford ' Ctron. Osney, 1133. "Magister Eobertus Pulein soripturaa divinas, quae in Anglia obsoluerant, apud Oxoniam legere ccepit. Qui postea, cum ex doctrina ejus ecclesia tam Anglicana quam Gallieana plurimum pro- fecisset, a papa Lucio secundo vocatus et in caucellarium sanotse Eomanae eoolesise promotus est." So the Waverley Annals, 1 145. See more of our first Doctor in John of Hexham, 275, where he is described as "Britannia oriundus." Can we hope that the greater Britain is meant ? ^ Gervase, 1665. "Tunc leges et causidici in Augliam primo yocati sunt, quorum primus erat magister Vacarius; hie in Oxeuefordia legem doouit." Cf. Kobert de Monte, 1 149. 320 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. OH. xxm. has been forgotten. The origin of the great body which took its iirst root in the times with which we are dealing has been carried back to distant ageSj and has become the subject of legend, and worse than legend. Third "We now turn to the third period of Stephen's reign, the Stephen's period whose events form a continuous chain leading us reign. q^ j^^^q times which lie beyond the immediate scope of our 1149-1154. _ ■' ^ . Appear- present narrative. We must turn our eyes from the setting anoe of ^q ^}jg ).{sinp. gmj from Stephen and Matilda alike to the Henry of . Anjou. renowned son of Matilda, who forms the central figure during the years which followed the departure of his mother and the death of his uncle. What Henry the Second was has been set before us in a living portrait by the greatest scholar of our time,^ and the lines drawn by that master hand I will not weaken by a single touch. I have now to deal with Henry only in the first beginnings of his career, in his childhood and in his youth ; of his reign as an epoch in English history I shall have to speak in the form His action of the merest sketch in the last stage of this volume. But years^of ^'^ ^^^ restorer of law and order, the prince whom " all folk Stephen, loved, for he did good justice and made peace," ^ may stand forth, in the few years of his active life which come within the range of this Chapter, as somewhat of a relief to the wretched scenes which we have been going through. His birth has been already recorded as a gleam of joy which lighted up the declining years of his grandfather ; and he might almost seem to have the peculiar character of the position which he was to fill in history stamped Analogy upon him by the place of his birth. The eldest son of Hmry^'and treoffrey and Matilda was called, like the Emperor Charles Charles the tjjg Fifth in later times, to be ruler over a vast sratherinp' Fifth. O t> Fifth, '■ See Professor Stubba' Pre&ce to the second volume of Benedict. ° Chron. Petrib. 1140. "Al folc him luuede, for he dide god iustiae and makede pais.'' These are nearly the last words of the venerable record. HEKEY OF ANJOTJ. 321 of lands and nations, whose one common tie was his rule oh. xxiu. over them. Henry could not, any more than Charles, be Henry claimed as an exclusive countryman of any of them. For Norman the purpose of our history the chief point is that, if he was ^"^^S"™ not English, neither was he Norman. His connexion gevin. with Normandy and with England, with the blood of Rolf and with the blood of Cerdic, was of exactly the same kind ; in both cases alike it was an inheritance handed on to him by his mother. Ear more than either Norman or English, he was Angevin. But we must not forget that the reigning house of Anjou from which he sprang was itself Angevin only on the spindle-side, and that the true cradle of his father's house was the petty county of the Gatinois.i Called to be lord from the Orkneys to the Pyrenees^ to be more truly lord of all Britain than any King that had gone before him, called on the mainland to unite in his own person the dominions of the princes of Normandy, of Anjou, and of Aquitaine, he was fittingly the countryman of none of them, born on the soil neither of England nor of Normandy, neither of Anjou nor of Aquitaine. Yet he was born in a city whose ancient His birth fame made it a worthy birth-place for one who was to n,, inherit the claims of so many houses, and to rule over so many lands. The eldest-born of Matilda first saw the light in that city of Le Mans whose name has filled so large a place at so many stages of our history, and whose name, calling up the remembrance of the deeds of its Counts, its Bishops, and its citizens, always carries with it a charm peculiar to itself.^ The man who was to unite Normandy and Anjou was fittingly born in the city for which Normandy and Anjou had so long striven. The ' See vol. iii. p. i8o. " See above, pp. 102, 206, and vol. iii. p. 185, vol. iv. p. 543. The re- joicings at the birth and baptism of Henry are set forth in fall by the Biographer of the Cenomannian Bishops ("Vet. An. iii. 337). VOL. V. Y 322 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. ca. XXIII. man who was to unite both with Aquitaine was fittingly born in the city in whose buildings the traveller from England or Normandy begins to feel that he has taken his first step toward the land of the South. And the man who was to unite Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine with England was fittingly born in the land and the city which English valour had once won for the Norman Con- queror. The man who was to rule over so many nations, without himself belonging to any one of them, could have no such fitting birth-place as a city at once so famous and so central, connected by one tie or another with each of the lands over which he was to rule. Henry sent But the events of Henry's childhood and youth gradually ljy }iig made him familiar with all the lands which were one father. ^^y ^^ |jg j^jg When he was nine years old, his father, then engaged in his gradual conquest of Normandy, sent him over, at the request of his uncle Earl Robert, to join his mother, who was then in the thick of her strife with Stephen iji England.^ It was well for the interests of the party of the Empress that the child to whom they looked as the future King of the English^ should early make himself known to those who were fighting in his cause. And, even at that early age, his precocious intellect^ was perhaps already able to take in some lessons of war and statesmanship, and certainly those arts could be learned under no better living master Henry's than his uncle of Gloucester. And, as became the nephew inEngiand. 0^ Robert and grandson erf Henry, we read that his literary 1142-1146, ' See Gervase, 1357, 135S; Will. Malms. Hist. Nov. iii. 70-1, 73; Eobert de Monte, 1141. ^ Orderio (763), writing not later than 1141, speaks of him as one " quem multi populi dominum exspectant, si Deus omuipotens, in cujus manu sunt omnia, concesserit." The holy hermit WulMc of Haslebury (Gervase, 1361) prophesied to him that he would be King. ' Henry of Huntingdon (227) calls him "puer annis, mente senilis." So John of Hexham, 278; "Viribus corporis prsevalidus, moribus quiddam senile prseferens." EDUCATION AND KNIGHTHOOD OF HENEY. 323 education was not neglected, and the memory of his teacher, oh. xsm. Matthew by name, has been handed down to us.^ Henry had stayed four years in England, safe in his uncle's fortress of Bristol, when his father, now the acknowledged Duke of the Normans, sent for him to tarry with him at least for a 1146. while, and the Earl parted from his promising nephew with grief.^ Three years later Henry was deemed old enough to receive the belt of knighthood, and the opportunity was taken again to stir up the zeal of the partisans of the Empress, or more truly of her son, which had greatly slackened since the death of Earl Robert.^ Henry there- fore left his books and began to practise the exercises of war.* He entered England at the head of a large army ; he made his way to Carlisle, where he was gladly received by his mother's uncle King David. At He is the hand of the King of Scots Henry received the ty'Da^i badges of knighthood, and, so it is said, he pledged "+9- himself that, if he should ever succeed to the English Crown, he would confirm the grant to David of New- castle and all the lands between Tweed and Tyne.' Special Rivalry rivalry hence arose between Henry and Stephen's souHemTand ' According to G-ervase, 1358, "traditusest magisterio oujusdamMatthsei litteris imbuendus et moribua honestis, ut talem decebat puerum, institu- endus." On Robert's own scholarship, see above, p. 250. ^ Gervase, 1361, 1362. ' lb. 1.^66. The partisans of Matilda would not go on with the war, "nisi ipse, quern omnia de jure contingebant, in AngUani rediret." • lb. "Postpositis litterarum studiis, exercitia ccepit militaria frequen- tare." ' The knighthood at the hands of David is recorded by all our writers ; Hen. Hunt. 226 ; Robert de Monte, 1149 ; John of Hexham, 277 ; Gervase, 1366; ^thelred of Eievaux, 347, who enlarges on the privilege of being knighted by such a King as David. WiEiam of Newburgh (i. 22) adds the important provision, " praestita prius, ut dicitur, cautione, quod nulla parte terrarum quae in ejusdem regis ex Anglia ditionem transissent ejus ullo tempore mutilaret hasredes." So R. Howden, i. 211 ; "Prius dato Sacra- mento quod, si ipse rex Anglise iieret, redderet ei Novum Castellum et totam Northimbriam, et permitteret ilium et haeredes suos in pace sine calumnia in perpetuum possidere totam terram quae est a fluvio Twede ad fluvium Tine." Y a 324 THE KOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. XXIIl. Stephen's son Eustace. Death of Geofirey. 1151- Marriage of Henry and Eleanor. 1152. Eustace/ who was at the same time knighted by his father at York, whither Stephen had come to watch the course of affairs on the Scottish border.^ Randolf of Chester was at Henry's knighting, and did homage to David. He had given up his old grudge about Cumberland, and it was agreed that he should have in exchange the new-made earldom of Lancaster, ^ a land which, it will be remem- bered, has no place in Domesday as a shire. Randolf, Henry^ and David were all to make a vigorous war upon Stephen. But Randolf, as usual, forsook his allies, and the new-made knight went back beyond sea, soon to inherit, by the death of his father, the county of Anjou and its de- pendencies, as well as the duchy of Normandy, with which he is said to have been already invested.-* Prom this time he appears in our history as Duke of the Normans, but he plays no further part in English affairs for some short time. War still went on between Stephen and his enemies ; Worcester specially suffered.^ But meanwhile Duke Henry was increasing his continental dominions in another way. Soon after his father's death came the marriage which has been already spoken of, which extended his dominions to the Spanish frontier. In the pithy words of our own Chronicler, " The Queen of Prance todealecl from the King, and she came to the young Earl Henry, and he took her to wife, and all Poitou with her."" But by this marriage he made himself an enemy in Eleanor's former -* Gervase, 1374; John of Hexham, 27S. ° Hen. Hunt. 226; Gervase, 1367; John of Hexham, 278. ' John of Hexham, 277. * Eobert de Monte (1150) says distinctly, "Pater suus reddiderat ei haereditatem suam ex parte matris, scilicet ducatum Normannise." But the Chronicler and the other English writers, Henry of Huntingdon (226 a), Gervase (1370), and William of Newburgh (i. 29), all speak as if Henry did not succeed to Normandy till his father's death. ° See Hen. Hunt. 226, 2266; Gervase, 1370. ° " Te cuen of France todselde fra fe king, and scEe com to f e iunge eorl Henri, and he toe hire to wiue, and all Peitou mid hire." For details we may go to Eobert of Gloucester, i. 466. HENBY SUCCEEDS TO NOEMANDT AND ANJOU. 325 husband as bitter as any that he had in Stephen or oh. xxih. Eustace.' The union of his foes on both sides of the sea brings us to the last stage of our story. Eustace^ as we have seen, had long been betrothed to Lewis's sister Constance; he now married her, but our Chronicler makes a wide distinction between the characters of the husband and the wife, the "evil man and good woman." ^ Lewis and Eustace and Henry's own younger War of brother Geoffrey now set upon Normandy, but with no Eultace'in great success. The special scene of warfare was the old ^^o^andy. 1152- battle-ground of the Vexin, which Henry's father Geoffrey had again given up to France, but which Henry took occasion of the French invasion to reclaim.^ Stephen now deemed that it was time to take some measure for securing the succession of the Crown to his own house. His wish Attempt of was to have Eustace crowned in his own lifetime. It was prooure'tlie now held that this could not be done without the consent <=o™iia*'°'i of iiUStaoe. of the Pope J* and it is said that this objection was sug- First ap- gested to the mind of Archbishop Theobald by one to "^T^^^^^f whom few then looked as his successor in the patriarchal London. chair, his own clerk, Thomas of London. The ease was ' See Gervase, 1370, 1371 ; Will. Neub. i. 31 ; Robert de Monte, 1151, who adds, " Habebat [Ludovious] duas filiaa de ea, et ideo nolebat ut ab aliquo ilia filios exciperet, unde praedictse filise ause exliEereditarentur." Ralph the Black, on the other hand (p. 92), says, "Traduxit uxorem Alianor relictatn Lodovici regis Francis." He could not think that Lewis was dead. ^ The Chronicler tells us, " pa, ferde Eustace ]>e kinges suue to France, and nam Je kinges suster of France to wife, wende to bigaeton Normandi Jiaer Jjurh, 00 he spedde Htel." He adds, " and be gode rihte, for he was an yuel man, ... he dide mare yuel Jeanne god. . . . God wimman scse wees, oc scse hedde litel blisse mid him, and Xpist ne wolde Jieet he sculde lange rixan.'' ' See Robert de Monte, 1151, 1153. * See Hen. Hunt. 326 6; Gervase, 1371. The appKcatiou to Rome and the debate which followed it there are to be found in the Historia Pontifi- calis, 41 (Pertii, xx. 543). Bishop Henry "promisit se daturum operam et diligentiam ut apostolious Eustachium filium regis coronaret. Quod utique fieri non licebat, nisi Roman! pontificis venia impetrata." I have already •(see above, p. 251) had to refer to some of the points argued in this debate. 326 THE NORMAN" KINGS IN ENGLAND. cH. XXIII. argued before the Papal court. Stephen's right to the Crown was fully discussed, and,. King by the consent of the Holy See as he had once been called, it was decided that the royal consecration could not be given to the son of The a King who had gained his Crown by perjury.^ Theobald veL^ and the assembled Bishops obeyed the Papal command, and refused to crown or anoint Eustace. The wrath of Stephen and his son was great, and the temporalities of all the Bishops who had refused were for a moment The war seized into the King's hands.^ Meanwhile Wallingford Walling- ^ii*i other castles were held for Henry, and the Duke ford and ^f .j-j^g Normans was prayed to come and bring help to elsewhere. r j ox the men who were striving in his cause. ^ He came, and this time he came for some purpose. The war went on, especially at Wallingford and at Stamford/ and many who found that, while it lasted, they were freed from the necessity of obeying either master strove that it might still go on.' But Stephen was weary of the struggle ; his wife, the main stay of his cause, was dead ; so was his Conference brother Theobald.'^ His spirit was softened ; he hearkened Stephen to proposals of peace, and met Duke Henry in a personal andHenry. conference to discuss them. Nothing was settled, but the ' Gervase, 1371, who adds, "Hoc factum est subtilissima providentia et perqnisitione cujusdam Thorns clerici natione Londoniensis ; pater ejus Gilebertus, mater vero Mathildis vocabatur." This is Gervase's first mention of his hero. In the Bermondsey Annals, 1132, the great fire of London in that year arose " de igne Gilberti Eeket," ' See the details in Hen. Hunt. 2266. According to the Waverley Annalist, 1152, homage was done to Eustace. ^ Hen. Hunt, and Gervase, n. s. ^ See Henry of Huntingdon, 2266-227 6; Robert de Monte, 1152, who records an unpleasant fact ; " Dux in quadam turre Kgnea [this was on the bridge at Wallingford] xx. militea jam ceperat, exceptis Ix. sagittariis quos decapitari fecerat." To say nothing of the cruelty, the chivalrous distinc- tion between eorl and ceorl is too much in the style of William Rufus or the Black Prince. ^ See above, pp. 255, 311. " Matilda died in 1152 (Gervase, 1372); Theobald in the same year (Robert de Monte, 1151). VARIOUS DEATHS. 327 fierce spirit of Eustace was kindled at the very name of cH.xxiir. peace. He began to harry the eastern shires far and wide. Suddenly he died, as men said, like Swegen in time past, as he was preparing to spoil the great monastery of Saint Eadmund.^ Other deaths followed, and among them Death of the deaths of several men who were hindrances to peace, u^j Such was Simon Earl of Northampton ; ^ such was the more Death of famous Kandolf of Chester, who at last ended his career of Earl of treason by poison given to him, as it was said, by the Chester. namesake and descendant of the first William Peverel of the Peak.^ And one of higher rank and of purer fame Death of died in the same year. Henry, the eldest son of King Scotland. David, was already dead. His father now followed him. ^J^^ ^'^' The hereditary principle had made such strides in Scot- Death of land that Henry's young son Malcolm was acknowledged geotSnd. as successor to the Scottish Crown, while David's younger '^^^'^ '^' son William succeeded to Northumberland and the other Malcohn fiefs of Stephen's granting.* Stephen himself now stood g °^ almost alone among men of his own standing. It might 1153-1165. have seemed as if the old generation was being swept away to make room for the mighty ruler who was coming, and for the no less mighty spirit who was to be, first his minister, and then his rival. All things now tended towards peace. Archbishop Theobald pressed it on the contending princes, and Bishop Henry, who had now seen the error of his ways, joined in the same good work.^ A treaty was concluded at Win- ' Hen. Hunt. 2275; John of Hexham, 282 ; William of Newburgh, i. 30. Gervase (1374) adds the intended attack on Saint Eadmund's. Cf. vol. i. p. 402. ° Hen. Hunt. 2276. See above, p. 298. ' Robert de Monte, 1155 ; Gervase, 1377. ' John of Hexham, 281, 382. "ToUens omnis populuB terrae Melchol- mum, filium Henrici comitis filii ipsius David regis, apud Scotiam, sicut oonsuetudo iUius nationis est, puerum admodum duodennem, constituerunt regem pro David avo suo." Cf. WiU. Neub. i. 23. * Hen. Hunt. 228; Gervase, 1375- 328 THE jS'ORMAN KIKGS IN ENGLAITD. Treaty between Stephen and Henry. Win- chester, November 6, II53- Compari- son with the Treaty of Troyes (r4i9) and with the award between Henry the Sixth and Dulie Richard (1460). Terms of the Treaty. Stephen to keep the Crown for life and Henry to succeed him. Chester, which was received with universal joy, as bringing hope that an end was now to be put to the long reign of utter wretchedness, to the nineteen winters which England had tholed for her sins.^ The famous treaty which ended the anarchy was, in its provisions, very like two later treaties, which were in the same way designed to put an end to a time of war and confusion, but which were less successful in achieving their purpose. The treaty between Stephen and Henry went on the same general principle as the Treaty of Troyes between Henry the Fifth and Charles the Sixth, and as the parliamentary award between Henry the Sixth and Richard Duke of York. In all three cases, the dispute between the actual possessor and the claimant of the Crown was settled by the compromise that the actual possessor should keep the Crown for life, but that it should pass at his death to the claimant who thus waived his im- mediate right. In all three cases, the prince who thus became King-elect before the vacancy was to have the rights of an heir-apparent, and something more. Richard in England and Henry in France were to be actual regents of the kingdoms to which they were one day to succeed ; and Henry was put into soihething like the same position by Stephen's agreement to be guided in all things by his counsel. In all three cases a son of the reigning King was to be shut out of his rights. By the treaty of AVin- chester Stephen was to remain King of the English for life, but Duke Henry became his adopted son and declared successor.^ Stephen's surviving son William was secured in his own estates and in those of his wife the heiress of Warren, and in the succession to the hereditary estates of his father. And, by a provision which was for the moment ' The general joy is strongly set forth by Henry of Huntingdon, 228. On the details of the treaty, see Appendix EE. ' Hen. Hunt. 228. So the charter in Rymer, i. i8. TEEATY BETWEEN STEPHEN AND HENEY. 329 more important than all, all tlie castles which had sprung oh. sxiii. up unlawfully during the days of confusion were to be '^^^ castles swept away. Other assemblies followed. In one held at destroyed. Christmas at Westminster the terms of the treaty were put forth in the form of a solemn charter, and another Issue of proclamation again denounced the unlawful castles and tions. all breaches of the peace of every kind. In another Assembly Q+- Oxford gathering at Oxford^ the King's son Earl William and all January the chief men of the land did homage to Henry Duke of '3' ^'^'♦' Homage the Normans as the chosen successor to the English done to Crown. According to one account, the new heir-apparent ^'"^' was actually invested with the office of Justiciar ; ^ at all events he made it his duty carefully to look to the peace of the land. In another assembly held at Dunstable some Assembly displeasure was expressed by the Duke that the destruction stable ; of the castles had not been carried out so thoroughly as it P^"^'^ "®" should have been. But there was no open breach between of the castles. him and the King ; and we have the word of the national Chronicler that the land now enjoyed such a peace as it General had never enjoyed before, that is, we may suppose, such as it had never enjoyed since the death of Henry. ^ For the first time in our story, a devise of the Crown made before the actual vacancy took effect. The treaty between Stephen and Henry did not pass away like the two other treaties with which I have compared it. Henry went back to his duchy. Meanwhile in England men Last days said that Stephen at last was really King.^ He was now " ^^ ™' able to act vigorously against the unlawful castles/ and 1 E. Howden, i. 212. See Stubbs, Constitutional History, i. 333. ' Chron. Petrib. 1140. "Hit waid sone suythe God pais, sua )>8et neure was here." ^ Hen. Hunt. 228 ; Will. Neub. i. 30. So the Chronicler; " Jia was be k. strengere >anue he aeuert her was." Yet Gervase (1376) speaks of a con- spiracy of the Flemings to kill Henry, which William knew something about. * Hen. Hunt. 229; Will. Neub. i. 32. Yet Henry implies that it 330 THE NOEMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. OH. xxin. to attend to ecclesiastical affairs, especially to supplying the vacant see of York with an Archbishop/ But his Death of new reign was a short one ; before the year was outj October 26, Stephen died at Canterbury/ and was buried by his "^''■' faithful Queen in the monastery of his own founding at The In- Faversham. There was no doubt as to his successor. So October^s great was the longing for peace^ so great was the fame -Decern- ^f Henry, all men looked to him with such trust as the ber 20. ^ man who had at last made peace and would keep it, that the interregnum passed by without disturbance.^ For a few weeks the rule of England was in the hands of Arch- Coronation bishop Theobald.'' Then Duke Henry crossed the sea, he December "'^^ gladly received by all men, and on the Sunday before 2°. "64- Midwinter day, eighty-eight years after the crowning of his mother's grandfather, Henry the Second, the inheritor of the name and the greatness of the First, was anointed The castles King at Westminster.^ Presently the adulterine castles and the ' wcre Swept away, and the Flemish wolves were driven merce- q^^ ^f ^.j^g land.* England had again a King; the reign nanes ^ ° ° ' ° driven of law had begun once more ; and men deemed too that „ ' the old days had come back, now that England had again Restora- . •' ' fa fa tion of the a King of the blood of Eadgar the Peaceful and Eadward was only Stephen's death which hindered disturbances from beginning ' See above, p. 315. ^ The hostile Winchester Annalist sends him out of the world with an uncharitable hint ; " Hoc anno migTavit rex Stephanus ad locum quo eum merita sua ducebaut." ^ See Hen. Hunt. 228 fc ; E. de Monte, 1154. So the Chronicler; *' J)a J)e king was ded, ^a was be eorl beionde sse, and ne durste nan man don ojier bute god, for pe micel eie of him.'' The words seem borrowed from the picture of his grandfather. * According to Gervase (1376) the peace was kept "nutu divino et co- operante Theodbaldo Cantuariensi archiepiscopo." ' Hen. Hunt. 3286 ; WiU. Neub. ii. i ; Gervase, 1376. Oddly enough, it is only Robert de Monte who uses the phrase " ab omnibus electus et in regem unctus." William of Newburgh says, " hEereditarium reguum suscepit," ° Gervase, 1376, speaks of " Flandrenses lupi," " lupi auUci." ACCESSION OF HENRY THE SECOND. 331 the Unconquered. King Henry^ as much and as little oh. xxm. Nornaan as he was Englishj felt no scorn to listen to °^^ kingly . line in panegyrists who cast aside his descent from the princes Henry, of Normandy and Anjou, and hailed him as the King of the right kingly stock, the son of Matilda, the daughter of Matilda, the daughter of Margaret, the daughter of Eadwardj the son of Eadmund, the son of ^thelred.^ Rufus, Henry, Stephen, all had the blood of Cerdic and Woden in their veins no less than Henry the Second. But men had forgotten a pedigree which had to be traced through a long line of foreign princes in Flanders. Hemy's descent from the old stock was nearer and clearer to men's eyes. The prophecy of the dying Eadward had Fulfilment been fulfilled; the days of usurpation and foreign rule pmpjieoy of were over ; the green tree had come back to its place ; ^a"iward. if its Imperial leaves were somewhat withered, its kingly fruit was there in all its richness and sweetness.^ In all this there was something of the willing delusion of a people that takes its memories for hopes. But there was truth The time in the feeling also. The time of mere conquest, mere now'over.^ foreign rule, was over. England and Normandy alike were England now to become for a while mere parts of a dominion on mandy both sides of the sea such as had never been seen before. *'?'^ P?!;*^ 01 a wider Of that dominion England was only so far the centre dominion. as she gave its sovereign his highest title. But no one could any longer hint that she was a dependency of a single duchy on the mainland. England was in one ' This is the burthen of the epistle written by Abbot ^thelred to Henry at some moment between his marriage with Eleanor and the death of Stephen, which bears the name of Geneaiogia Kegum Anglorum (X Soriptt. 347). Henry is " Andegavensium gloria, Normannorum tutela, spes An- glorum, Aquitanorum deous ;" and again, "Normannorum et Aquitanorum dux, Andegavensiirai comes, Angliae hseres." The whole point of the tract is to set forth Henry's EngHsh descent, which is traced up to Ecgberht, Cerdic, Woden, Noah, and Adam, without a word either about William and Eolf or about Tertullus and Torquatius. ' See Tol. iii. p. 1 1 . 332 THE NORMAN KINGS IN ENGLAND. CH. XXIII. sense more independent, more powerful, more truly Eng- Positionof j^^jj^^ under Henry the Pirst than she was under Henry under the Second. Henry the First was at least born on Eng- First and Hsh soil, and England was the greatest part of his domi- iojOT^d''^^ nions. It was Normandy, conquered by the might of England at Tinchebrai, that was the dependency. Henry the Second was born, not at Selby, but at Le Mans, and the vast continental dominions which he ruled as Duke and Count counted for at least as much in his ej^es as Great the island which made him a King. But it was England position of which did make him a King ; the King of the English Henry the — changing step by step into the King of England — was the greatest prince of the West, far greater than his Acces- nominal lord at Paris, equal in real power even to the Frederick renowned Emperor whose rule began almost at the same Barbarossa. juou^ent as his own. And, with the fame of her Kinsc, the 1152. ' *^' fame of his kingdom grew in foreign lands^ and the feeling that they belonged to one of the greatest powers of the world grew in men's hearts within his kingdom. Under Henry, England is no dependency of Normandy ; Nor- mandy is no dependency of England ; none of the lands united under his rule is a dependency of any other. If bis rule was not purely English^ the course of his reign paved the way for a rule which should be purely English. End of the The merely Norman period of our history has passed per^?" away, when we have a King who, if not born on Eng- lish soil, if sprung of English blood only through a remote female descent, was at least not a Norman, save in a sense in which he might equally be called an Englishman. CHAPTEE XXIV. THE POLITICAL EESULTS OF THE NOEMAN CONQUEST.' AS we have now reached the end of the strictly Norman period of English history, our main narra- tive is done. We have now only to give such a short sketch of the century and a half that followed, from the ' At this stage I bid farewell to the continuous use of ancient writers, as direct authorities in the way of narrative. The original materials for this Chapter are to be found alike in the direct statements and in the casual expressions of a crowd of writers of all dates, both those to whose guidance we have been hitherto used, and many others. It is not my business here to write a complete Constitutional History, even of the times with which I am immediately concerned. If I had ever thought of doing so, any such design would have been made needless by the appearance of the great work of Professor Stubbs, after my last Chapter was written, but before this Chapter was begun. To his work I would send all who wish to go minutely into the details of the whole subject. What I have endeavoured to do my- self is to give a sketch of results, looked at from the special point of view of my own History, keeping such points of detail as it seemed impossible to pass by for discussion in the Appendix. How much I have benefited by Professor Stubbs' work will be seen in every page. On most points it will be seen that my notions are the same as his ; and I could not always undertake to point out where I have directly learned from him, and where views to which I had been led by independent research have been confirmed by his authority. On some points however I have ventured to adhere to views already formed which are not exactly the same as his. But, whether we admit every one of the Professor's conclusions or not, the book is one which stands almost alone for a knowledge of its subject which is absolutely exhaustive, and for an accuracy in detail which is absolutely unfiiiling. But my Appendix will show that I have not gone to Professor Stubbs only, but that I have made use of other writers, ancient and modern, German and English. Sir Francis Palgrave's History of the English Commonwealth 334 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. accession of the Angevin dynasty to the death of Edward the First, as may point out the way in which the imme- diate results of the Norman Conquest passed away, while The its lasting results remained and hore fruit. Speaking CoM^^^t generally^ we may say that the final results of the Norman brings Conquest were to call forth again the Old-English spirit out and ^ . strengthens under new forms, and, in the same way under new forms, spWt!^ ^ to put a fresh life into the Old-English institutions which for a moment might seem to have been swept away. It was said long ago, by one whose lightest words were weighty, that England was "assuredly a gainer by the Sense in Conquest."^ And so it was, though perhaps not alto- Gibbon's gether in the sense in which those words were meant by remark is j^^jjjj ^Jjq spoke them. England was a gainer by the Con- true. -^ . . quest. But England gained, not so much by anything which our Norman conquerors brought with them, as through our own stores which it was an indirect result of Unbroken the Conquest to preserve to us. When we compare our continuity history with the history of kindred lands beyond the sea, of English -^yj-th Germany or with Denmark, we shall see that the history. •' final efiect of conquest by the stranger was to enable us to preserve more of the spirit and institutions of earlier times, to keep up a more unbroken continuity with earlier times, than fell to the lot of our kinsfolk who never underwent such a momentary scourge. We have never had to build up again our political system from the beginning. We have never had to draw up a constitution ; we have never been left without a national assembly. We may still use the language of King Henry's charter, and say that the remains a memorable book, even beside its gi-eater successor. The works of Dr. Gneist, Das Englische Terwaltunrjsreclit, Berlin, 1867, and Self-govern- ment, Communalverfassung, und YcrwaltitngsgeHchte, Berlin, iS'ji, have also their use, but in point of accuracy they form a, marked contrast to that of Professor Stubbs. Several other German works which bear on special parts of my main subject, or which deal with English matters only as parts of a wider whole, will be found referred to elsewhere. ' Gibbon, cap. Ivi. vol. x. p. 253, ed. Milman. CONTINUITY OF ENGLISH HISTORY. 335 laws by which we are ruled are the laws of King Eadward ch. xxiv. with the changes made by King William. We have never Compari- seen, as Denmark saw, the growth of a nobility whose Denmark • privileges were so great and so hateful that, sooner than any longer endure their yoke, the nation threw itself at the feet of the King, and clothed him, hy a legal act, with the full powers of a tyrant. Denmark is again free ; but her freedom is a thing of yesterday; it is not an unbroken inheritance handed on from the days of Swegen and Cnut, but the grant of a patriotic King of our own day. We 1848. have never split asunder^ as Germany did, under the power witli of a crowd of petty princes, trampling under foot alike the '^™"' ^' lawful powers of the Crown and the rights and liberties of the people. Germany too, like Denmark, has risen in our own days to a truer life, but that too is not an unbroken life. It is a life which was kindled afresh by the presence in the land of enemies speaking the same tongue as those who overcame us on our own soil seven centuries and a half earlier. As the Norman Conquest of England preserved the old national life of England, so the momentary French conquest of Germany stirred up again the old national life of Germany. But there was this differ- ence, that the one preserved and the other stirred up. In Germany the invader was a mere foreign enemy who had 1813. simply to be driven out as soon as the nation had gathered strength for the good work. In England the invader was a disguised kinsman, who could be won over and changed into a fellow-'workei'. Still neither in Denmark nor in Germany has there been the same unbroken political life which we can trace in England. The mission of pre- The un- serving, often in new forms, but in new forms quickened by Teutonic the old spirit, the ancient institutions of the Teutonic race P°^*^''^J 1116 DGSt has been given to the Angle and the Saxon, not in their preserved older land, but in the island which they made their second ^, . " . ... Thispre- home. And this preservation of our ancient national being servation largely 336 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. cH. xsiv. we owe^ more than to anj^ other causSj to our momentary due to overthrow by men of another speech. And we owe it in the Con- •' '■ . .,, quest and no Small degree to the personal character, the iron will, queror!^" the far-seeing wisdom, of the Conqueror himself. Effects of Willi am* s peculiar position. Various forms of revolution, conquest, and an- nexation. Compari- son of them with the Norman Conquest. The general results of the Conquest form the subject of the present volume. Its immediate results on the constitution and the general position of England form the special subject of the present Chapter. We have to see how the state of things at home and abroad was affected by the transfer of the Crown to a King of foreign birth, the possessor of foreign dominions, who, as a matter of fact^ made his way to his Crown by the power of the sword, but who in all things carefully gave himself out as one who had succeeded to the kingdom hj legal right. This peculiar position of William has affected all our later history. There have been revolutions and conquests of many kinds. An internal revolt which changes a form of government, which overthrows a King or a dynasty — the peaceful accession of a foreign King, either by election or by the accident of hereditary succession — the settlement in a new land of a chief and his people who win for themselves a new home and cut asunder all ties which bound them to the old one — the annexa- tion of one country to another, as the mere result of war or negotiation — all these are events which have happened in many times and places in the world's history. Several of them have happened at different times in the history of our own island. The Norman Conquest of England has points of likeness to several of them ; but in so far as it is like one it is unlike another. It is in itself something different from any of the various forms of conquest and revolution which we have just gone through. None of them by itself could have had the peculiar results which William's conquest of England had. VAEIOUS FORMS OF EEVOLUTION. 337 A mere internal revolution, without any pressure from oh. xxiv. without, may, as the example of France shows, cut a -^-n^^logieB nation off from its own past, in a way that has never traats with happened to this island or its inhabitants since we our- ^'■™''''' selves made our way into it. A mere foreign annexation, Poland, the result either of open conquest or of force veiled under the guise of diplomacy, may, as the world has seen in Poland and elsewhere, altogether blot out the national being of a people. The incoming of a foreign dynasty, perhaps the mere incoming of a foreign Queen, may sometimes change the whole internal state of a country. It may sometimes involve a country in a system of foreign policy before unknown to it. The internal con- Scotland ,- dition of Scotland was altogether changed through the marriage of Malcolm and Margaret; the European con- the English dition of England was altogether changed by the election of 1688 • to her Crown of princes of the houses of Orange and Hanover. In the time with which we are now immediately the Au- eoncerned, a change of this last kind affected both England cession in and Normandy, when kingdom and duchy together passed England; to the Count of Anjou and the Duchess of Aquitaine. And, to go back to earlier times, a nation settling in a conquered land, parting wholly from their old home and sweeping away the former inhabitants of their new home, may start afresh as a new nation on a new soil, and may begin a new history which has hardly any reference to the former history either of the land of their origin or of the land of their settlement. This last we ourselves did when we left the English the elder England by the Elbe and the Eyder, to make a ofBntain. new England by the Thames, the Severn, and the Humber. The great change which Domesday marks by the simple formula that " King William came into England " differs in itself and in its results from all these. William, as we have so often seen, claimed the Crown according to English law. It was therefore his policy to profess all VOL. V. z 338 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NORMAN" CONQUEST. cH. xxTv. reverence for the law by which, he claimed it, to make no more change in the laws and customs of his kingdom than was absolutely forced upon him by the circumstances in Compai-i- which he found himself. In this he differs from domestic royaTaud revolutionists, whether their revolution takes the form of popular re- anarchy or of tyranny, of popular revolt or of royal oppres- sion. He differs alike from Charles and Philip trampling out the liberties of Castile and Aragon, and from those destroyers alike of good and bad who have made the France of the old monarchy a thing further away from our own days than the England of the West-Saxon Kings. But though William was no systematic, no deliberate, destroyer of the state of things which was before him, yet his character of legal claimant would have stood him in little stead had he not been able to maintain and with it by force of arms. And, as a stranger, he could maintain it conquests. ^^^Y ^J ^^^ swords of strangers. Hence some of the results of foreign conquest could not fail to follow on his accession. Effects of He did not sweep away our laws, our customs, or our of England language, but the presence of the stranger King and his and Nor- stranger followers modified law, custom, and language in a way which has left its traces to this day. Lastly, William was not only a foreigner but a foreign prince, a prince whose conquest of England in no way carried with it the surrender of his older dominions. His chief followers too were men who held lands beyond the sea, and who, in receiving new settlements in our island, had no mind to snap the ties which bound them to their own land. Thus the accession of the Norman Duke to the English Crown at once changed the European position of a kingdom whose ruler was now also one of the rulers Special of the mainland. In all these ways William's Conquest William's of England has a character of its own, different from any Conquest. Q^her recorded conquest, and it has had results different from the results which have followed from any other SPECIAL CHARACTER OP THE CONQUEST. 339 recorded conquest. It gave us a foreign infusion into ch. xxiv. our blood, our laws, and our language ; but, in so doing, it aroused the old national spirit to fresh life, and gave the conquered people fellow-workers in their conquerors. It drew England, as an appendage to a foreign state, into Its effects foreign wars and foreign policy ; but, in so doing, it foreion re- taught England gradually to claim for herself a place in ^*^°,"^ °^ the European world such as she had never held before, and to go on fighting battles of her own where she began by fighting the battles of Normandy. It may be that, under other circumstances and by other means, we might have kept or won back our old laws and freedom, that we might even have kept them, as we have kept them, in a purer form than they have been kept or won back by any kindred nation. It may be that^ under other circum- stances and by other means^ England might have come to fill the place in Europe which she filled under Henry the Eifth and under Elizabeth, under Cromwell and under Chatham. But, as a matter of fact, the course of our history at home and abroad, for the last eight hundred years, has been the direct result of the fact that our Crown was claimed and won by a foreign prince, who gave himself out as the lawful heir of England, but who had to cut his way to the English throne by the help of the swords of strangers. The immediate results of the Conquest will thus fall into two great heads, of which the second will claim by far the larger share of our attention. The first is the External efiects of the Conquest upon the position of England as internal a power in the face of the world. The second is the ?5®°^'' "^ r the Con- eff'ects which the same event had on the internal state quest. of the country, on its written laws, on the system of their administration, on the relations of the various powers of the state and of the various ranks of society. With all these I shall attempt to deal in the present z 2 340 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. , CH. XXIV. Chapter. Some points of special interest^ as the effects of the Conquest on language and on architecture, I shall keep for notice in separate Chapters. § 1. Effects of the Norman Conquest on the External Relations of England. Isolation of Up to the time of the Norman Conquest the isle of Enc'land. Britain still kept up in some measure its old character of another world distinct from the continental or Roman world. 1 Alone among the lands which had ever formed part of the Roman dominion, Britain had beheld the rise of a Teutonic power which inherited no share in the Special traditions or the civilization of Rome. Alone among the of the con- Teutonic settlers within the bounds of the elder Empire, E^'^r'^d"^ the English had received their Christianity, not before their settlement, not during the progress of their settle- ment, but by a fresh and special mission from the general centre of Western Christendom after their settlement had ofEngUsh been fully made. English kingship was thus something °' which arose altogether independently of the Empire, and beyond its bounds. No King of Angles or Saxons ruled, even in name, by an Imperial commission ; none bore the title of Consul or Patrician of the ancient commonwealth. When English Kings took up Roman or Byzantine titles, they took up the Imperial titles themselves, as chiefs of a separate Empire, alongside of the Empire of the Western of the and of the Eastern Rome. No Church was more distinctly Church. '^^ child of the local Roman Church than the English Church ; but, for that very reason, the English Church kept more of distinctness and independence than any other. While the other Western Churches might pass, sometimes for parts of the Roman Church, sometimes for its subjects, the Church of England kept the position, dutiful but not ' See vol. i. pp. 146, 626. EAELY ISOLATION OF BRITAIN. 341 servile, of a child who has reached full age, and who no ch. xxiv longer forms part of his father's household. To these special Effects of circumstances of our history we must add the natural effects position of of our position as an island. The same causes which 2"*^^"- had once made Britain fruitful in tyrants, which, while separate Britain was still a Roman province, had enabled Carausius P°"^*^J^^' and Maximus to hold it apart from the body of the Empire,^ gave further strength to the other causes which tended to give our island a separate being apart from the common body of Western Christendom. Add to this again that the isle of Britain was not occupied by one nation or ruled by one sovereign. The relations between the various Enolish settlements and their British and Scottish neighbours were enough to occupy the minds of Kings and people ; they were enough to make Britain a world of itself, with its own politics, its own wars, neither influencing nor influenced by the wars and the politics of the continent. From all these causes it came to pass that Britain Britain remained for ages insular beyond the other great beyond islands of Europe, insular as Cyprus and Crete and Sicily "gi^^^^^ig could never be. It was an island world, a separate Empire, a separate Church, beyond the bounds of the Empire and the Church of either Rome. Its intercourse with other lands, either for war or peace, had been rare and slight in all ages. If the hand of the Great Charles had not been wholly unfelt within its bounds,^ it had been less felt than in any other European land which had heard his name. The chief form of intercourse that England had Effects of had with other lands was of a kind which served, not to ^ars ; connect it more closely with the general Roman body, but to cut it off more completely from it. For two centuries the chief attention of England was fixed on the great struggle with the Danish invaders. Whether as conquered or as conquerors, the English Kings and the English people had » See vol. i. p. 146. ' lb. p. 626. 3i2 POLITICAL EESULTS OF THE IS^OKMAN" CONQUEST. cH. sxiv. enough to do in their own island. The final, though of the momentary, result of that long struggle was of a kind Cnut. which bound her more closely to one part of the continent than she had ever been bound before, but it was to a part of the continent a connexion with which by no means strengthened any connexion with the general body of the Western world. Under Cnut, England became for a moment the seat of a Northern Empire, an Empire of islands and peninsulas, which in extent and power might almost rival the Empire of the mainland. She became the head, the elder sister, of all the lands, Teutonic and Celtic^, which had accepted the religion of Rome, but which had either thrown off or never submitted to her temporal dominion. Had the dominion of Cnut lasted. Northern Europe would have balanced Eastern and Western, and Winchester would have ranked among the cities of the earth alongside of the Rome of Romulus and the Rome of Constantine. Such an Empire would not have been cut off from intercourse with the elder Empires ; but the intercourse which it held with them would have been of quite another kind from that which brought the states of Western Europe together either for war or for peace. The dominion of the great Dane was not, and could not be, lasting ; but, had it lasted, it might have seemed no more than the natural carrying out of tendencies which had been at work for ages. Yet before Cnut died or reigned, the seed of the change which was actually to take place had been already England sowQ. England never wholly lost her insular character ; nearer ^^^ never was wholly cut oif from her brotherhood with to the j-]^g kindred nations of the mainland ; yet one of the Koinance ^ nations by main effects of the Conquest was to bring her into a the Con- „ • j i i p • -i , quest. far nearer connexion than before with the nations of Earlier the Romance speech. Here too, as in everything else ' the Conquest did but strengthen tendencies which were INFLUENCE OF EMMA AND EADWAKD. 343 ali-eady at work. Whether we count it really for a ch. xxiv. cause, or simply as a siga of causes which had already '^^^ '»*'•■ i_ 1 1 • 1 riage of been brought into play, the marriage of Emma marks Emma. the first stage in the change which was wrought out by the arms of her great-nephew. It was on his descent from her that William rested his strange claim to the English Crown by descent or nearness of kin.i This was indeed a result which no man in the days of ^thelred could have foreseen^ yetj even at the time, the Norman marriage might have been marked as the beginning of a new sera. The marriage of ^thelred and Emma led directly to the Norman education of their son, and to all the Norman tendencies which distinguished his reig-n. We have seen that the promotion of strangers, the building The reign of castles, the closer connexion with the Roman see, all "^^^^ ' the points which distinguish England after the Norman Conquest from England before it, began in the reign of Eadward, and simply bore their full fruit under William. The English spirit of Godwine and Harold checked the foreign influence for a time ; but even they could not wholly root it out. Cheerless as was the counsel which Robert the eon of Wymarc gave to William on his landing,^ yet the fact that there was a Norman, high in wealth and office, ready to give him any kind of greeting on his landing, was a sign that the work of the reign of William had already begun in the reign of Eadward. But whilcj in other respects^ the actual Conquest did but carry out more fully the system which Eadward began and which Godwine and Harold had checked, one form which the new state of things took was wholly Beginning unknown before William's day. In his day, for the first Warfare on time, English troops began to make war on the continent *^® '^°"-' in quarrels not their own. If, in the days of j3ilthelstan Earlier and Eadmund, English fleets had shown themselves in ™'***'^'=s'' ' o always by ' See vol. i. p. 332. '^ See vol. iii. p. 413. 344 POLITICAL EESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. the Channel as allies in Gaulish warfare, it had been to assert the rights of a prince who might almost have passed for an Englishman. If, in the days of ^thelred, English troops had landed in theCotentin, it was to avenge the help which Normandy had given to the invaders of England.^ During the reign of Eadward warhke operations beyond our own island were twice proposed and once decreed. But both times all that was thought of was action by sea, and in both cases the friend to be helped and the enemy to be withstood were both of kindred race. Help was re- fused to Swegen of Denmark against Harold of Norway,^ and help was decreed to Henry of Germany against Baldwin of Flanders.^ But it does not seem to have come into the mind of any man in England, not even into the mind of the Normannized King himself, to give help to Eadward's Norman friend and cousin, either against his rebels at Val-es-dunes or against his invading over-lord Foreignne- at VaraviUe. Strangely enough, the first thought of any of HaroU. interference of England in the internal politics of Gaul, the thought of seeking for French or Angevin allies, seems to have been the thought of Harold and not of Eadward.* But here again we have only a link in the same chain. If Harold dreamed of seeking friends at Paris or Angers, he sought them only to form a diversion against the threatening power at Rouen, a power which, but for Emma and her son, could never have cherished the thought Conti- of threatening England. But, as soon as the Duke of the pioHs of Normans became also the King of the English, the blood men under °^ Englishmen began to be shed in quarrels purely Nor- Wiliiam. man. We have seen Maine won for William by English- men, fighting perhaps under the command of Hereward himself.^ We have seen William's life saved from his rebellious son by the gallant devotion of Tokig of Walling- ' See vol. i. p. 330. '^ See vol. ii. p. 92. » lb. p. 99. ' See vol. ii. p. 430 ; vol. iii. p. 181. '^ See vol. iv. pp. 486, 557. RELATIONS WITH GERMANY AND PEANCB. 345 ford before the walls of Gerberoi.^ But when Enarlishmen ch. xxiv. were once carried beyond sea to fight in the quarrels of others, they soon began to make the quarrels of others their own. The national spirit revived; it found for itself Effects of a new field, when Normandy was won by the arms of ^ars, Englishmen for a King of English birth. And when Englishmen once began to fight in the old quarrel between Normandy and France, they soon changed that local quarrel into an abiding national enmity between France and Eng- land. Under the Conqueror England begins to play a part under in continental quarrels. But it plays a part only as an appendage to a continental duchy, sending its sons to fight in a purely Norman quarrel at the bidding of a purely Norman master. Under the English-born Henry under Henry, this state of things grows into another. England, no longer an appendage to Normandy, but the conqueror of Normandy, appears upon the general scene of European polities as the enemy of France and the ally of Germany. Something of a foreshadowing of those relations had been seen when Otto and Eadmund both stepped in to support the rights of Lewis of Laon against Hugh of Paris. But when the two Henries are joined together against the The Parisian King, we have the very state of things which ^jtii Europe has since seen so many times repeated, from the CJermany. day of overthrow at Bouvines to the day of victory at Waterloo. As a direct result of her conquest by the Norman, as a direct result of her acting for a moment as an appendage to a continental duchy, England stands forth under her own Henry, no longer as the island world of her former being, but as one of the great kingdoms of the European world, as one of the great members of the Western commonwealth. And, strange to say, her Conquest by men of Romance speech was the cause that, when, for the first time, she shows herself before the ' See vol. IT. pp. 648, 731. 346 POLITICAL EESULTS OF THE NOEMAN CONQUEST. CH. XXIV. world in that new character, it was to play her part as the foe of the Romance-speaking King^ as the friend of the Teutonic Emperor. New Under Henry the First then we may fairly say, not poSn of only that the King of the English was one of the chief England potentates of Europe, but that England was one of the Henry the chief states of Europe. The Norman Conquest had given First to the island kinsdom a kind of srreatness which had never belonged to it before. England had been drawu into the general European world as an appendage to Normandy; but, from the day of Tinchebrai, we must count Normandy as an appendage to England, and look on England as holding her European position in her own right. Then came the time of anarchy ; then came the accession of Her place the Angevin dynasty. England, as part of the vast Henry the dominions of Henry the Second, might seem to lose Second. somewhat of her relative importance. She was no longer, as she had been under Henry the Pirst, incomparably greater than the whole continental possessions of her King. But she was still his greatest possession.^ The continental dominion of Henry was not a single united kingdom, joined together under one immediate govern- mentj and whose inhabitants were bound together by a common national feeling. Instead of this, he ruled over an unconnected group of duchies and countries, widely differing in blood, language, and manners, bound together by nothing but their allegiance to a common prince. If England was not greater than all Henry^s continental possessions put together, it was certainly far greater than England any one of them taken by itself. England was to Henry Henry the ^^^^ Second very much what Castile was to Charles the y'f"^ .. Fifth. In either case the European position of the under cosmopolitan sovereign depended largely upon his other ' Will. Neub. ii. 32. "Ee-K Anglorum senior [Hemncus secundus sc], malens sibl fines suos transmarinos periclitari quam regnum." ENGLAND UNDER HENEY THE SECOND. 347 dominions ; but it was the strength of the insular or ch. xxiv. peninsular kingdom which enabled him to keep his hold Charles the 1 . T . Fifth- on his distant possessions, and thus to maintain his Position of European position. Add to this that mere titles go for England as somewhat ; the power and fame and victories of a prince one king- who holds many possessions by different titles will always go largely to the credit of that one among his possessions which gives him his highest title. This is clearly the rule, except when the title highest in rank is a mere shadow, or when it is drawn from a part of his domi- nions which is manifestly secondary. Thus the princes Analogies of Savoy played no small part in the world, while their trasts with highest title was taken, first from the purely imaginaiy j^j^io^s of kingdom of Jerusalem, and secondly from the least valuable *^s House „ . . . . , . . of Savoy; part of their dominions, the island of Sardinia. But the advance of the Savoyard power certainly did not go to the credit either of the kingdom of Jerusalem or of the kingdom of Sardinia. Had Victor Amadous kept the crown of Sicily, things might have been different. So again, as long as Charles the Fifth reigned, the with those majesty of the Empire overshadowed the real power of the Fifth. Spain ; but, when his hereditary dominions passed to his son, it became ^lain that it was not the Roman Emperor^ not even the German King, but the King of Castile and Aragon^ who had really reigned over the Netherlands, Milan, and the Sicilies. But in Henry's case, though so large a part of his dominions was con- tinental, though so large a part of his policy was conti- nental, yet it was the insular kingdom, owning no superior upon earth, which gave him a place in men's eyes which could never have been held by a mere vassal. The Bur- gundian Dukes of the House ofValois, every rood of whose dominions was held of one or other of their two over-lords, could not, mighty as they were, claim the same position as our Angevin Kings. Under Henry the Second the fame 348 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. and greatness of her King went to the credit of England ; Richard and this came out still more strongly when, in the days exploits go of his son, the crusading exploits of Richard spread the *° '?;f c fame of England to the ends of the earth. Richard was credit of ^ England, indeed born in England ; but he had not in him a particle either of English or of Norman feeling. Yet the mingled host which he led to the East passed in the eyes of other nations for an English host. The name of England be- Henry the came great in Sicily, in Cyprus, and in Palestine. Add dominion to this that the power of Henry the Second was largely over all extended in another way which really added to the fame and dignity, if not to the strength, of England. No King of the English before him had ever so truly been Scottish Emperor of the lands beyond the sea. But, though the England, great homage of the Scottish King was done on Norman ^®jj™}"^^ ground, it was the fruit of a victory won on English ground, and it was done, not to the successor of Eolf, but The con- to the successor of iEthelstan. So again, the mixed mul- Ireiand an titude which set forth in the days of Henry to win for Eng ish themselves lands in Ireland were men who set forth to fight conquest. ^ rather for their own hands than on behalf of any prince or any nation. But it was from England that they set forth. It was the King of the English, not the Duke of the Normans, who received the submission of the Irish princes ; and, if Henry or his successors drew any strength or any credit from their dealings with Ireland, it was in their English, not in their continental, character that they drew it. In all these ways, the general position of Eng- land grew under the Angevin Kings; it grew even by the extent of that continental power which seemed almost to overshadow it. Of the vast dominion of Henry, England was at once the head and the centre. It was not the Duke of Normandy or Aquitaine who reigned in Eng- land, but the King of the English who reigned from the Orkneys to the Pyrenees. SCOTLAKD, IRELAND, AND NORMANDY. 349 England was thusj through a variety of causes, all of ch. xxiv. which had their root in the Conquest wrought by Wil- liamij placed in quite another position in the eyes of the world from any that she had ever held under her native Kings. And she was so firmly placed in it that she could still keep it, even after the immediate causes which had placed her in it had passed away. It was through her relations with Normandy that England had first become a chief actor on the general scene of Euro- pean affairs. But it soon appeared that her relations with Normandy had been merely the accidental cause which had drawn her forth, and that she was quite able to keep her place, even after her relations with Normandy had come to an end. The loss of Normandy under John had Effects of its effects on the position of England within and without, ^f ^or- Within, it gave the finishing stroke to the process of™^"'^y- fusion between Normans and English. It made all the pietes the men of the English kingdom feel themselves henceforth j^^^™ '^^ Englishmen and nothing else. Without, it had an effect of and . ... English. exactly the same kind. The English Kings still kept large continental possessions ; but from that time it was plain that they held them as English Kings. The parts Aquitaine of their continental dominions which the English Kings ^g an kept were exactly those which were furthest off, and ^'igjisl' de- ^ •' .... pendency. which had least in common with either their English or their Norman dominions. They no longer reigned on the Seine and the Loire ; but they still kept castles in the Pyrenees and cities on the Adour and the Garonne. Now, whatever remembrances of the time when Normandy had conquered England might still linger in Norman breasts on either side of the Channel, no man could say that Aquitaine had ever conquered England.' Neither had ^ Yet see the wonderful entry (which I have quoted, vol. iii. p. 729, Ed. 2) from the Annales Altahenses (Pertz, xx. 817) ; "Hao testate Aquitani cum Anglo-Saxonicis navali prselio pugnaverunt, eosque victos suo dominio sub- jugaverunt." 350 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NOEMAN CON"QUEST. Division of feeling in Aquitaine. Tlie great cities for England. English wars with Prance. Worlcing of Nor- mandy on England. England ever conquered Aquitaine ; but England and Aquitaine fell into the position which is natural when two countries of very unequal power are united under a common prince. Aquitaine became a dependency of Eng- land, an unwilling dependency, if we look to one class of its inhabitants, a most willing dependency, if we look to another. Bourdeaux and Bayonne well knew their interest in cleaving to the cause of the more distant master. But the land was still a dependency. It was a possession, not of a native Duke, not of a Norman or Angevin prince, not of the master of a cosmopolitan empire^ but simply of a King of England. Henceforth all our continental wars are dis- tinctly and purely English wars, wars waged to main- tain the real or supposed power and honour of England. When Aquitaine is lost and won again — when Edward the Third wins, and when 'Mary loses, Calais — when Henry the Fifth not only wins back Rouen, but holds sway in Paris itself — when, last of all, Henry the Eighth makes our latest conquest of Boulogne — at all these stages the strife is purely English. It is a quarrel which the Englishman had inherited from the Norman, but it is a quarrel which he had long learned to look on as his own. Normandy taught England to become a continental power ; she taught her to become the special rival of France ; and, having done this, she gave up as it were her own separate being, and herself sank into a French province. Such was the course which our history has actually taken. It is perhaps vain to guess what course it might have taken, had the light-armed English on Senlac faith- fully obeyed the orders of their King. Yet we can hardly keep ourselves from the thought that, had the Norman Conquest never happened, our European position could hardly have been what it actually has been. If England and Gaul had never been brought into that close communion which the Norman Conquest brought about, we may eon- COMPAEISON OF ENGLAND AND SCANDINAVIA. 351 ceive that we should have held a place in Europe, higher ch. xxiv. doubtless in degree, but essentially the same kind, as that Compari- son of which has been held by our kinsmen of the Scandinavian England North. Our geographical position would have hardly (jij,avir" allowed us to remain so thoroughly a world of our own, so thoroughly cut off from the general course of European polities^ as even Denmark, and, still more, Sweden and Norway have commonly been. We may compare our Analogy- great days of continental prowess in the fourteenth and conquerino- fifteenth centuries with the passing splendours of Swedish ^™S^ °^ victory under Gustavus Adolphus and Charles the Twelfth. There is indeed the difference that, in the latter case, the chronological order of the wise conqueror and the mere knight-errant is reversed. Henry the Fifth may stand beside Gustavus, while Edward the Third, when his trap- pings of chivalry are torn aside, can hardly ask for a higher place than Charles the Twelfth. But the English Excep- conquerors at least appeared some centuries earlier than position of their Swedish followers, and those days of exceptional and ^°g'*"°- momentary continental conquest are far from making up the whole European career of England. Our insular position, combined with the career which was fixed for us by our Norman Conqueror, has given England a special position of her own in Europe. She can choose, almost at pleasure^ in a way in which hardly any other European state can choose, whether she will take a part in the affairs of the continent or stand aloof from them. We can either play the part which our Norman Conqueror opened to us, or we can fall back on the part of the older England of iEthelstan and Eadgar. We can again be the island Empire surrounded by its vassal states, vassal states no longer to be looked for in our own group of islands, but in the kingdoms which we have won, the colonies which we have planted, in the lands beyond either Ocean .^ • See vol. i. p. 69. 352 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NOEMAK CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. In this way the whole later history of England with reference to foreign powers has been affected by causes of Ecclesiasti- which the Norman Conquest was the beginning. Along- of the side of this influence on our political and military history, Norman ^j^g same event had also an influence not less marked on our Conquest. ecclesiastical history. But while, from the political and military side, increased intercourse with the rest of the world meant increased fame and strength, from the ecclesi- astical side it meant only further subjection to a foreign Encroach- power. Through the whole of the four reigns which we the See of have gone through, we have seen the encroachments of the °™'^' Roman see grow bolder at every step, and we have seen that every stage of encroachment is marked by contempo- rary writers as an innovation on the ancient laws of Eng- English land. But we have seen how vigorously both the Kings and the clergy of England withstood those several forms of innovation which touched their several interests. The two points for which Hildebrand had so zealously striven were both alike innovations on ancient English practice, and Silence of both alike were firmly withstood. We have seen that as to In- Hildebrand and his successors never ventured to suggest yestitures ^^ either "William that he should give up the ancient m England. ^ '^ custom of his predecessors by which the Bishop and the Abbot received their staves from the King. Few things in our whole story are more remarkable than this utter silence of the great Pontiff. The right of investiture was the great point of strife between the Papacy and the Empire ; but not one word is breathed against the exercise by the King of the English of the very power which is so loudly denounced in the Emperor. Gregory makes other demands on William, demands some of which are refused ; he even calls on him, though vainly, to do homage for his Crown ;i but no hint is given that William brings on himself any guilt by a practice which was deemed so ' See vol. iv. p. 432. QUESTION OF INVESTITURES. 353 guilty in Henry. Gregory must have deemed that, of the oh. xxiv. two things, William was more likely to give up the external dignity of his Crown than to give up the exercise of its ancient rights within his kingdom. The one sacrifice is asked for, but in vain ; the other is not even asked for. The question of investitures never troubled the mind either No scruples of the politic Lanfranc or of the saintly Wulfstan. The in- vestitures vestiture of the Bishop by the King forms the very life and S^^^fj*'^'* soul of the most famous of the legends which have gathered prelates. round Wulfstan's name.'^ The question never troubled the mind of Anselm, till, in his foreign sojourn, he learned that the ancient law of England was proscribed by the decrees* of a continental Council.^ At last the question Settlement was settled by the calm policy of Henry, who gave up the Henry the outward ceremony, knowing that all that it really implied "^*' still remained his own. Now that the ingenuity of Randolf Flambard had found out that Bishops and Abbots were the military tenants of the King, bound to do homage to him for their temporal benefices, the King could afibrd to give up the ceremony which to tender consciences looked like a claim to bestow the spiritual office. In truth Henry gained more by this compromise than he lost. StiU, as a matter of form, it must be set down as a step in the advance of the power of Rome in England, when the use which the holy Eadward had freely practised was given up in deference to rules laid down by an Italian Council. But the advance of the Roman power was also marked Roman in more practical ways. From the accession of William ^ents onwardsj applications to Rome, and visits of Legates ™^^^^*^®^ from Rome, become more and more frequent. Questions which in earlier times would have been settled by the powers of the national Church and State begin, step by step, to be referred to the judgement of the Roman Pontiff ' See vol. IT. pp. 380-382. Cf. Giraldus, Spec. Ecol. iv. 34. ' See above, p. 144. VOL. V. A a 354 POLITICAL EESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. CH. XXIV. or his representatives. As WilHam had craved the blessing of Rome on his enterprise^ so^, on one solemn day at least he received his Crown at the hands of Roman Legates.^ In Eadward's days the Norman Robert was driven from the see of Canterbury by the voice of the English people. In William's days English Stigand was deprived of the same Action of see by the authority of the Roman Pontiff. The Legates mfder^^^*''^ come oftener and oftener ; even in Henry's reign a simple Henry. presbyter, deputed by the Pope of one world, presumed to displace the Pope of the other world in his own church. And we have seen how the only way to avoid such degradation was for the Patriarch of Britain himself Humilia- to become the representative of his Roman brother.^ If Stephen these things were done under Henry, it is not wonderful that we find Stephen stooping to ask for a papal confirma- tion of his election to the Crown, ^ or that, throughout the troubles of his reign, the Legate of the Holy See, whether a stranger or an English prelate, holds a place of marked superiority among the temporal and spiritual chiefs of Practice of the kingdom. In the Councils which the Legates hold we Rome. fin*! the practice of appealing to a foreign court at once fast gaining ground and censured as a novelty by the English writers of the time.* At last we see the right to the Crown of England solemnly discussed before the papal Coronation tribunal,® and the Bishops of England are forbidden by forbidden!* *^® Pope to take any part in the coronation of the son of their King.^ Such a coronation might indeed be taken as a breach of the right of the English nation to a free choice at the next vacancy of the Crown; but it is hard to see how the Roman Bishop could have any interest in the matter. In all these different ways the power of the Roman see over our island was strengthened ; the state of things thus grew up which called forth the first resistance ' See Tol. iv. p. 329. ^ See above, p. i^Q. ^ See above, p. 247. * See above, p. 314. " See above, p. 326. * See above, p. 325. ENCROACHMENTS OF ROME. 355 of the second Henry and the more effectual action of ch. xxiv. the Eiffhth. Another sphere of action which was opened to England English by the Norman Conquest partakes both of the military cru^^^es. ^ and of the religious character, and it has been already incidentally glanced at. The first Crusade was in truth that which William himself led against England.^ In the worthier Crusades against the Infidel which followed, Eng- land held no mean place. But we may be sure that it was A result mainly owing to the infusion of the Norman spirit of ad- Norman venture that England came to take the share in them Conquest. which she did. The Englishman, left to himself, was valiant in defending his own shores j he was ready to go on errands of devotion or charity to Rome, to Jerusalem, or even to India. When driven from his own land, he was ready to take service under a distant master, and to fight for the Eastern Caesar as valiantly as he could have fought for a King of the house of Cerdic or of Godwine. But we may doubt whether the thought of combining warfare and devotion, the thought of going forth on an armed pilgrimage, would ever have come, without prompting from outside, into the mind either of Alfred or of Harold. We may judge of ourselves in this matter Small by the part which actually was played by our Scandinavian tij,e'^g(,°n_ kinsfolk. They had their share in the Crusades; but dinavians '^ ^ ^ in the it was by no means a leading share. The expeditions Crusades. of Sigurd the Crusader in Spain and in Palestine stand Crusades almost alone ; and his brother Eystein thought that ° '^"' ' he himself^ did more wisely by staying at home and working for the good of his own people.^ Otherwise we might have looked for the countrymen of Harold Hardrada to bear the foremost share in enterprises in those regions of the world which had beheld his most famous exploits. ' See vol. ill. p. 321. ^ See their discovirBe in Laing, iii. 178, 179. A a 2 356 FOLITICAL EESULTS OP THE STORMAN CONQUEST. CH, xxTv. The same eliange which came over the English some centuries before, seems now to have come over the Northmen. A few generations were enough to turn the Ane-les and Saxons, in their new world of Britain, into a people who had small thought of war or policy beyond that world. In the like sort, the Scandinavian nations seem, about this time, to have lost their spirit of distant enterprise, and to have confined their policy and warfare within the bounds of Northern Europe. If then Scandi- navia took but a small share in the Crusades, we may doubt whether England, left to herself, even with her greater geographical advantages, would have taken a much greater share. From what part of Europe the crusading impulse really came, we see by the name which all the nations of Western Europe have ever since borne The on Eastern lips. From those days till ours they have a^Frajjit always been the Pranks, Franks of course in the sense enterprise, ^jjjgj, -fj^g word Fraiici bore at Paris, not in that which it bore at Aachen. And among such Franks the Nor- mans held a foremost place ; one Norman indeed, the old Roger of Toesny, had waged a private crusade against the Saracens of Spain before Pope Urban had summoned Share of all Christendom for the deliverance of Palestine.^ The mans in the Norman brought the crusading spirit with him into Eng- Crusades. J^nd, he bequeathed it to his English-born descendants, he even taught it to Englishmen in the stricter sense, to the English race whom he had conquered. In this way again England was drawn by the Conquest into the same general current as the other nations of Europe, and a large share of the dangers and the glories of the Holy Wars were borne by men who were English by blood or birth. The list of English crusaders begins with a company strangely grouped and strangely named. We have seen that the call to the first Crusade was obeyed by the foreign-horn ^Etheling Eadgar,^ ' See vol. i. p. 514. ' See above, p. 94. Crusaders. SHAKE OP ENGLAND IN THE CEUSADES. 357 by the English traitor Ealph of Wader,i and by one oh. xxiv. worthier than they, but whose name still speaks of Nor- man influences, the martyr Robert sou of Godwine.^ Against the glory of one English Robert we must indeed set the infamy of another English Robert from the same shire, the renegade Robert of Saint Alban's, whom we hear of as passing to the service of Saladin and insulting the Christian defenders of Jerusalem in the last moment of their agony.^ But all stains are wiped out by the last name on the list of Englishmen who did battle in the Holy Land. That list does not end till England had again Edward a King bearing an English name and speaking the English tongue. It ends when Sir Edward of England, soon to be the greatest of her Kings, chose neither the tongue of his Angevin fathers nor that of his Provengal mother, but the native speech of his own kingdom, as the tongue which his interpreters were bidden to expound to the ambassadors of the unbelieving Soldan.* Another point of increased intercourse with foreign lands was an almost necessary consequence of the accession of a foreign dynasty. We have seen how rare it was in Rarity of the older time for an English King, ^theling, or Ealdor- mamages man to seek a wife beyond the bounds of the Teutonic '^?^ ^^'^■ portions of his own island. English Kings had almost lish Kings, always married the daughters either of other English Kings, as long as there were any, or else of the great men of • See above, p. 94, and vol. iv. p. 591. ^ See above, p. 94, and Appendix K. ^ See Benedict, i. 341, for the account of the treason of " quidam irater Templi, genere et natione Anglicus, Eobertus de Sancto Albano.'' " Na- tione " merely implies a, man's birthplace ; " genere " implies his descent. To be " genere Anglicus " as well as " natione " implies either actual Old- English descent, or at least descent from several generations of foreign settlers. * See Walter of Hemingburgh, i. 337. I shall have to speak of this passage in the next Chapter. 358 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NOEMAN CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. their own kingdom. The foreign marriages of iEthelberht, of ^thelwulf, and of iEthelred all stand out as exceptions ; and the first and the last of the three led to the two most important results in our whole history since our landing in Kings' the isle of Britain.^ On the other hand^ at least since the more days of Alfred, the daughters of English Kings had been mSri^d to f^^ more freely given in marriage to foreign princeSj foreigu Flemish, Saxon, and even French. Still, even these eases princes. may be looked on as exceptional; if one daughter of Alfred became the remote ancestress of the wife of the Conqueror, another and a greater, the wife of ^Ethelred the Ealdorman, had gained undying fame in her own land as the Lady of the Mercians.^ If the foreign marriages of one daughter of ^thelred had cursed England with the first momentary visit of Eustace of Boulogne and with the longer sojourn of Ralph the Timid, the elder sisters of Godgifu had been given to the Ealdormen of the land, and two of their husbands, the traitor Eadric and the hero Ulfcytel, had marched with their royal brother-in-law to the hill of Assandun.^ Foreign From the time of the Conquest onwards, the exception become the becomes the rule ; English Kings now, for the most part, the^Co'^-'^ seek both wives for their sons and husbands for their quest. daughters beyond the limits of their own kingdom. Unless the daughter of Malcolm and Margaret is to count as an English subject, no King between Harold and Edward the Fourth, and only one eldest son of a King,* married a wife of English birth. Many of these foreign marriages led directly or indirectly to political results j but > See vol. i. p. 333. " See vol. i. Appendix F., Ed. 2. = See vol. i. pp. 355, 363, 431, and p. 640, Ed. 2. ' The marriage of the Black Prince with the Fair Maid of Kent is the one case in our history of a Prince of Wales in the modern sense marrying an Englishwoman, unless any one chooses to count the son of Henry the Sixth as Prince of Wales at the time of his marriage with Anne Neville. ROYAL AKD PRINCELY MARRIAGES. 359 for Isabel of Angouleme and Eleanor of Provence there oh. xxiv. would hardly have been room for the career of Earl Simon. When all traces of foreign origin had passed away from English the descendants of the Angevin, when, in the houses of™^^"^*f^g York and Tudor, we had again Kings who, if our tyrants, Tudors. were at least our countrymen, the ancient usage came to life again, and Englishwomen were again deemed worthy to be the wives and mothers of English Kings. Under the Stewart dynasty the foreign fashion set in again, to receive one blow in the marriage which gave us two English Queens in the daughters of James the Second. It was further strengthened, like other foreign fashions, by the coming of the Hanoverian dynasty, till in our own days we have seen another blow dealt to the servile tradition, a tradition in which we must see one of the results of the coming of William, but which would have seemed as strange and contemptible to William himself as it would have seemed to Alfred. In all these various ways the effect of the Norman Con- quest was to make England a member, and a most im- portant member, of the general EuropKin commonwealth. Instead of living a life of her own, as Scandinavia, and to some extent Spain, has done, the island realm has had a more constant influence on general European affairs than either of the peninsular realms. But the result of this General change is not confined merely to wars, negotiations, and intercourse royal marriages, or to the increased power of the Eoman ^^jj^j^'^^^, see over England. An increased intercourse of every kind with other European lands was an immediate result of the Conquest. Hitherto the commercial dealings of England Trade with had been almost wholly confined to the kindred lands ofJ™hi"^ Germany and Flanders. We have seen how, in the old ^^''^^' mercantile Institutes of London, though the Norman and the Frenchman were not shut out, yet it was the " men of 360 POLITICAL EESULTS OF THE NOEMAN CONQUEST. and trade with Gaul increased. Growth of London and other merchant towns. The Hanseatic merchants. Norman ' settlers in London. the Emperor" whose visits were specially encouraged, and who were placed almost on a level with the natives of the land.i The Norman Conquest, followed by the accession of the Angevin dynasty, in no way discouraged the German trade, while it still further quickened the Flemish trade, and opened all the ports of Gaul to constant intercourse with England. It must have made a vast change in the commerce of Western Europe when the mouths of the Seine, the Loire, and the Garonne were in the hands of the same prince as the mouths of the Thames, the Severn, and the Humber. One most important result of the military conquest of England was the way in which it opened the path for peaceful settlement in England. The merchant towns — London above all — became the seats of a large foreign population, chiefly from Normandy and the other French-speaking lands. The commerce both of London and York with the German and Flemish lands still went on and increased in activity.^ But the natural kinsfolk of Englishmen had not the same influence on the English merchant towns as the peaceful kinsfolk of the Conqueror. The German Hansa of London flourished, but it flourished as a foreign settlement ; the Norman settlers in the city became a large and important element among the civic inhabitants. London contained, not only Nor- man merchants, not only Norman lords holding franchises within the city walls, but Norman settlers, as it would seem, with small independent fortunes and of a peaceful turn of mind. In Gilbert Becket we see the type of the Norman citizen, neither merchant nor feudal lord.^ ' See vol. i. p. 309. ^ See Appendix GG. ^ So William Fitz-Stephen (Giles, i. 183) distinctly affirms. The parents of Thomas were "cives Londonis mediastiui, neque foenerantes, neque officiose negotiantes, sed de reditibus suis honorifice viventes.'' But the anonymous Lambeth writer (Giles, ii. 73) calls Gilbert Becket "in com- merciorum exercitio vir indastrius." He speaks of the number of citizens INCEEASED CONTmEISTTAL TRADE. 361 There must have been many others of his class, chiefly ch. xxiv. no doubt in London, but to some extent in other cities also. The effect of the Norman Conquest in bringing about a closer and busier intercourse between England and other Em'opean lands showed itself in another way besides the settlement in England of whole classes of men, like the foreign land-owners and the foreign citizens. England was thrown open to individual settlers of every class, and we are bound to say that foreign lands were in return thrown open to Englishmen. Among the clerical and Cosmo- learned classes, two classes almost, but not quite, the character same, the boundaries of kingdoms and nations were almost jf^^^^ forgotten from one end of Western Europe to another, class of the . . „time. Clerks and scholars freely passed from the dominions of one prince to those of another, sojourning, receiving pre- ferment, keeping up correspondence of various kinds both in their own and in foreign lands. Into this international society England was now freely admitted. To some extent Older o ' -r intercourse this was merely a revival of an earlier state of things. In of English the days of the Frankish Kings and Emperors, English ^^j^™ ' missionaries and English scholars had been freely welcomed scholars. on the continent, and continental scholars had been freely welcomed in England. But the days of Wilfrith and Ealhwine, of Grimbald and John the Old-Saxon, had passed away. Their only trace for a long time before the Conquest was that promotion of German, and espe- cially Lotharingian, churchmen which began under Cnut, and went on when Godwine and Harold acted in the name of Eadward.^ But now, not only were English Promotion offices, temporal and spiritual, bestowed on foreigners as ers in a part of the immediate process of Conquest, but men ^''gl^° of Eouen and Caen who came to London and settled in London for pur- poses of trade. ' See vol. ii. pp. 'J9-S1. 362 POLITICAL RESULTS OF TH£ NORMAN CONQUKST. CH. XXIV. of all nations, chiefly of course of the French-speaking nations, pressed into England. Nor did they always come merely to seek preferment for themselves ; some came on errands which were really to the advantage of the land which they came to. We can hardly judge of that free opening of preferment in one land to natives of another which made Maurilius at home in Normandy, which made Lanfranc and andofEng- Anselm at home both in Normandy and in England, and lishmen ... abroad. which, if it found room for strangers in England, also found Hadrian room for Englishmen in strange lands. It was in this age theFourth .... p,t, , ■, ■ n the one that, lor oncc m the history of the Roman see, the chair of Pope ^ Peter was filled by an Englishman, an Englishman certainly "64-1169- by birth, and, by the way in which he is spoken of, most likely also an Englishman by blood.^ While Nicolas Break- spear of Saint Alban's was winning his way to the papal throne, other Englishmen were holding high offices in the Norman kingdom of Sicily.^ We are again met by the standing difficulty whether the Englishmen so spoken of were Englishmen by blood as well as by birth. But, even if they were the sons of Norman settlers, they were looked on as Englishmen in foreign lands, and they thus give us another witness to the fusion of the two Algarius races. It is yet more striking when we find one who can [^Ifgar?] . Bishc^ of hardly fail to have been an Englishman by blood as well j™™jj^j as by birth, seated on a Norman episcopal throne, on the throne of that very Geoffrey of Mowbray who had had so great a share in the spoils of England. Algarius, Bishop of Coutances, who sat for sixteen years in the ' In the Lives of the Popes (Muratori, iii. 440, 441), Nicolas, afterwards Hadrian, is spoken of as " natione Anglicus de castro Sancti Albani," and it is added that he wa,3 "pauper olericus, sive clericus pauperculus.'' He was " in AngUca et Latina lingua peritus ;" so at least it stands in Muratori ; Lingard quoting from Baronius, instead of "Auglica" reads "Grtxca." See further references to the English birth of Nicolas in William of Newburgh, ii. 6 ; John of Salisbury, Polycraticus, viii. 23 (vol. iv. p. 367, Giles) ; Matthew Paris, Wats, 92 ; and Gest. Abb. i. 112. ^ See Stubbs, Constitutional History, i. 350. PROMOTION" OF ENGLISHMEN ABROAD. 363 days of Stephen, can hardly have heen anything but oh. xxiv. an English ^Ifgar.^ The constant use of the Latin Use of the language, strengthened by the wide range of the French French"' language, spoken as it now was from Dunfermline to languages, Jerusalem, had made men of learning almost forget their personal nationality, and feel themselves members of one great commonwealth spread over all Western Europe. This was, as far as we are concerned, one result of the Norman Conquest. It is a more amiable form of the John of process which had once quartered on us Thurstan of Glas- Bishop of tonbury and Paul of Saint Alban's, a process which we see ^^ "^^^^ has another side, when our John of Salisbury goes to fill the chau- of Eulbert and Ivo at Chartres. It is to the strangers Foreign teachers in who found their way into England, when the barriers of xjniver- blood and language were thus broken down, that we owe, as we have seen, the first beginnings of our Universities, when the Breton Robert revived the study of divinity, and the Italian Vaearius brought in the study of the civil law.^ And the brisrht side of the new state of Saint n ■, A • Hugh of things is shown in all its fulness when our Angevm Burgundy, King sends beyond the bounds both of his kingdom Lj^gX" and his duchies, beyond the dominions of his over-lord 1 186-1200. and his fellow vassals, to seek in the Imperial land between the Rhone and the Alps ^ for the model of every gift which could adorn the Christian pastor in the person of Hugh of Grenoble, of Witham, and of Lincoln. In all these ways we see how the Norman Conquest, partly by its immediate, partly by its more distant effects, ' See Clhronica NormanniEe, Duchesne, 984 D ; Bessin, Concilia, 531. ^ See above, p. 321. = See the greater and lesser Life of Saint Hugh edited by Mr. Dimock. The poet of the metrical Life takes care, in his opening verses, to let us know from which of all the Burgundies his hero came ; "Imperialis ubi Burgundia surgit in Alpes Et condescendit Ehodano, convallia vemant." 364 POLITICAL EESULTS OP THE NORMAN" CONQUEST. CH. XXIV. gave EDgland an altogether new place in the face of other nations. We have now to go on to see the still more important results which it had upon the constitution, the laws, and the social state of Englishmen in their own land. § 2. The Effects of the Norman Conquest on the Kingly Power. The twofold character of the Norman Conquest, as a foreign invasion clothed under legal forms, is naturally brought out in the strongest colours in the changes to which it led in the position of the King and the nature of Williain his government. I have said often already, but it can hardly the position be Said too often, that King William, the heir of Eadward, Kingl^ *^^ ^^^ chosen of the English Witan, the consecrated of the Primate Ealdred, the King to whom all the great men of England swore oaths and became his men, made no formal claim to any position but that which had been held by the Kings who were before him. Nor in truth had he any temptation to wish for any other position. Powers of The lawful powers of an English King were such as, in English the hands of such a King as William, might make him H-va-gs. more powerful than any ruler within the bounds of Western Christendom. The power of an English King was indeed limited by the law, and it could be exercised only in ac- Their cordance with the will of the people. But it had always authority, been fotmd that a King who was worthy to reign, a King who was either loved or feared, much more a King who could call forth that mixed feeling of love and fear which our forefathers spoke of as awe,^ could always govern as well as reign. Under such a King the will of the people simply confirmed the will of the King. An English ' See aboTe, p. 153, for this phrase as applied both to Henry the First and Henry the Second, POWER OP THE KIKG IN ENGLAND. 365 King was not like a Byzantine despot ; it never was oh. xxiv. held in England that the will of the prince had in itself the force of law. But the will of a prince who was wise enough to see that his own interests and the interests of his people were the same, seldom failed to become law by the formal confirmation of his people.^ His power lay Its popular in the fact that he was still the true C//ning, at once the work. choice and the leader of the nation ; that he stiU, always in theory, sometimes in practice, gathered his whole people around him to debate on the common weal. Here lay his strength. His powers were limited by law ; but, within the lawful range of his powers^ he could demand obedience in every corner of his kingdom. He had not The Eng- sunk from a real King of the nation into a nominal atiUaKing, over-lord of a divided realm. His Earls were still magis- ^'°^ "?' j ^ mere lord. trates sent by him, magistrates who met their sovereign and their fellows in the great Gemots of the kingdom ; they were not princes, each sovereign within his own estates, and who never met together in a national assembly of the whole land. The powers which passed to William Compari- by his election and coronation would have been ill ex- ^^^ j;^. changed for a nominal rule over the wider extent of the Ifror and realm which paid the King of Paris a nominal homage, or of the even for the loftier majesty which surrounded the Lord of the World himself. William had every reason to be content with the position of the Kings who had gone before him, if only the circumstances in which he found himself would allow him to abide in their position. But the circumstances Effects of in which he found himself forced another course upon him. position in He could not abide in the position of Alfred, or even in ?*''^^sthen- the position of Cnut. He was driven to be either more kingly or less than iElfred and Cnut had been. And, with this ^°^ choice before him, he chose to be more rather than to be less. Unless he was ready to vsdeld the rod which Ealdred ' See vol. i. pp. 53, 125. 366 POLITICAL RESULTS OP THE NOEMAN CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. tad placed in his hands with a strength with which no earlier King had wielded it, his only choice was to sink from the position of Eadgar or Ciiut into that of his own over-lord at Paris. William made up his mind to be a King, and not a mere feudal lord. In so doing, he drew to his Crown a power second only to that of the despots of Byzantium and Cordova ; but, in so doing, he preserved the ancient laws and liberties of England and handed them on as an heritage for ever. Misunder- It shows liow utterly the history of law has been ofTistofy misunderstood by those whose special business it is to by lawyers, ^j^jerstand it, when we see lawyer after lawyer telling the world that William the Conqueror introduced the The Gemc5t " Feudal System" into England. Ingenious writers have mistaken looked on that great Gemot of Salisbury which was for the in- j^gj^ jjj ^jjg ygj^j, before William^s death as the actual troduction ■' of the moment when this amazing revolution took place.-*^ That System." is to Say, they have picked out, as the act by which a Feudal System was introduced in England, the very act by which William's far-seeing wisdom took care that no Feudal System ever should grow up in England.^ William's So far as any Feudal System ever existed anywherOj its anti-feudal, principle was that every tenant-in-chief of the Crown should make himself as nearly a sovereign prince as he could, that his under-tenants should owe allegiance and obedience to their immediate lord only, and not to the royal or Imperial head. The principle of William's ' The notions of lawyers on these matters may be seen in the talk of Blackstone, bk. ii. c. 4 (vol. ii. p. 48, Ed. 1809), which is repeated by Stephen (i. 174) in the year 1853, and by Kerr (ii. 49) in the year 1857. We find, among other cmrious things, that " the military constitution of the Saxons being then laid aside and no other introduced in its stead, the kingdom was wholly defenceless." Presently, " The principal landowners submitted their lands to the yoke of military tenures, " and what not. One is tempted to refer to Saint Luke, xi, 52. ° See vol. iv. p. 695. WILLIAMS ANTI-FEUDAL LEGISLATION. 367 legislation was that every man througtout the realm of ch. xxiv. England should plight his allegiance to his lord the King, and should pay obedience to the laws which were decreed by his lord the King and his Witan. Instead of William introducing a Feudal System into England, instead of consenting to sink from the national King of the whole nation into the personal lord of a few men in the nation, he stopped for ever any tendencies — whether tendencies at work before his coming or tendencies brought in by the circumstances of his coming — which could lower the King of the English to the level of the feudal Kings of the mainland. The tendency of feudalism is to a divided land, with a weak central government, or no central government at all. Every such tendency William checked, while he strengthened every tendency which could help him in establishing a strong central government over an united realm. To that end he preserved the ancient He makes laws and institutions, laws and institutions which he institutions had no temptation to sweep away, because they could be ^"""^ '"^ easily turned into the best instruments for compassing his pose. object. Under the. forms of lawful succession, he reigned as a conqueror ; under the forms of free institutions, he reigned as a despot. In truth the acts of the despot were needed to undo the acts of the conqueror. As conqueror, he brought us to the brink of feudal anarchy; as despot, he saved us from passing the brink. Of any Feudal System, looked on as a form of government, or rather of no-government, William, instead of being the introducer, was the mightiest and most successful enemy. But the words /eudal and feuiallsm have, in practice at Different least, two distinct meanings. The so-called Feudal System, o/the word that is, the break up of all national unity in a kingdom, ". ^™ See Appendix II. 380 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NOEMAN" CONQUEST. CH. xxiY. he had put himself into a direct personal relation towards the lord of whom the fief was held. The heir was like a King-elect or a Bishop-elect ; he had the sole right to be put into possession ; but a certain process was needed to put him into possession. He had to receive his fief at his lord's handsj and to undertake the accompanying obliga- tions to his lord. The new investiture was a favour^ which might conceivably be refused or delayed ; and the fiscal in- genuity of Flambard found out that the lord might right- fully demand a price for it. In the case of a lay fee, the exaction of such a price was simply oppressive ; in the case of an ecclesiastical fee, it was both oppressive and simoniaeal. The sale of In the case of an ecclesiastical fee, Henry promises that cal bene- be will abstain from turning ecclesiastical property into , j^ \. a source of profit in any way. He will neither take pos- cleauction s. j j r from feudal session of the revenues during the vacancy, nor will he doctrines. ... m • take any price irom the incoming prelate. That is to say, the practices introduced by Flambard^ logical inferences as they were from the feudal principle, were deemed to be sacrilegious. Henry therefore promised wholly to forego those sources of profit. In the case of lay fees, the eccle- siastical objection did not come in. The rights of relief, of wardship^ and of marriage were not given up; they were simply to be made less oppressive in practice. In short, the feudal theory of land-tenure received a more distinct legal establishment through the modifications The contained in Henry's charter. As for the promise to ab- of°t™r^ stain wholly from feudal exactions on ecclesiastical pro- charter not perty, the whole course of the history shows that this was carried out. . . a promise which both Henry and his successors found it easier to make than to keep. The Red King had laid down the principle that no man could keep all his pro- mises.^ The promise not to make a profit of ecclesiastical ' Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 14. " Quia est qui cuncta qufe promittit implere possit ? " ONE SIDE OP FEUDALISM ADOPTED. 381 goods was a promise which most Kings found it con- ch. xxiv. venient to put into the class to which the doctrine of Rufus was to apply. The truth seems to be that the resvilt of the confiscations The feudal and grants of the Conqueror, and of the way in which the adopted by malignant genius of Flambard worked the principle of -^''¥°^'*'^4 SO iSiiT 3jS it those confiscations and grants into a systematic shape, was advanced to adopt and to codify one side of the feudal theory. The interests. minister of Rufus laid hold of that side of the theory which tended to strengthen the royal power, and, above all things, to increase the royal profits. In the new theory the King personally stepped into the place of the commonwealth of which he was the head. The reign of the Conqueror finally changed the ancient /oUcland into Terra Regis} The doctrine was established that the King was the supreme landlord, and that all land was held by his grant. And from this doctrine the fiscal skill of Randolf Plambard found out means whereby every transaction which afiected the land thus held of the King could be turned to the profit of the King's cofiers. Kingship, in short, is losing its New ancient character ; it is passing from an ofiice into a pos- ti^g^jp session. The kingdom is a great estate, out of which all smaller estates are carved. As landlord, the King asserts The King's his right to various dues which come to him strictly in j^'es^as "^ his character of landlord, and which have nothing to do landlord, with his character as chief of the commonwealth. Dues of exactly the same kind are exacted by the King's tenants from those to whom, in their character of landlords, they also have made grants. A network of feudal tenures is thus spread over the whole land. The tenant-in-chief, New posi- subject to relief, wardship, and marriage on the part of the tenant-in-^ Crown, and himself exacting the rights of relief, wardship, ^^^''^■ and marriage from his own under-tenants, is a very difi'erent kind of person, either from the immemorial owner of an ' See vol. i. p. 102. 382 POLITICAL RESULTS OP THE NORMAN CONQUEST. Strength- ening of the royal power. Danger of the sovereign - tenant becoming sovereic^n. This tendency checked by the decree of Salisbury. Other anti- feudal acts of William. ancient e^el, or even from the holder of an estate in book- land granted by the King with the consent of his Witan, and charged with no burthens except the inevitable three. But it was only one side of the feudal principle which it suited the policy of either William to strengthen. The new theory of the tenure of land, and the incidents which were held to arise out of that tenure, filled their purses as landlords rather than as political chiefs. And, in their hands, the theory also strengthened their power. For, as long as the new doctrine was applied only to the mere tenure of land, it tended to the strengthening of the royal power. Against its other side, the side which tended to the weakening of the royal power, our Norman Kings care- fully guarded. The danger, a danger of which other lands supplied no small store of examples, was lest the grantee of the sovereign should himself become a sovereign. William himself, in his character as Duke of the Normans^ best showed, of all men living, how small an amount of real power a nominal lord might keep over his vassal. When the tenant-in-ehief granted out lands to be held of him by the same tenure by which he held his lands of the King, he was himself getting dangerously like a King. If it had once been understood that the primary allegiance of the under- tenant was due to his immediate lord, England might have split up like France and the Empire. As the feudal doctrine had a tendency to turn sovereignty into possession, so it had also a tendency to turn mere possession into sovereignty. Against this danger William secured his kingdom by the great act of the Gemot of Salisbury. He had become supreme landlord ; but he would not so become supreme landlord as to cease to be supreme governor. All the men of his realm, to whatever other lords they might owe ser- vice, should be his men first of all ; they should owe to him a duty which came before all other duties. The other acts of his reign look the same way. The sparing bestowal STEENGTHENING OP THE KINGLY POWEE. 383 of the rank of Earl, the way in which the estates of the ca. xxiv. great tenants-in-chief were scattered through different parts of the country, the constant holding of the ancient assem- blies of the kingdom, were all parts of the same policy. England was to be feudalized, so far as it suited the power One side of and profit of the Crown that it should be feudalized. Every adopted, application of feudal doctrines which could be turned to the advantage of the Crown was carefully fostered. Every ap- plication of feudal doctrines which could be turned against the Crown was as carefully guarded against. Everything in short, whether in the older or the newer theory of kingship, Twofold which tended to exalt the King was pressed into the royal ^f ^^ service. The Norman Kins: was to be all that his English ^mman ° _ *= King. predecessor had been^ and something more. He was to be, like his predecessors, head of the commonwealth of Eng- land, supreme in all causes and over all persons within the realm of England. He was to be all this in a far fuller sense, and with a far more distinct exercise, of personal authority, than any of his predecessors had been. And to His old and these elder sources of power he was to add new sources of p^^eT7 power unknown to the Kings who had gone before him. England was to be, not only his kingdom, but his do- minion ; its land was to become his land, held of him by men who were his tenants, men to whom he stood in the twofold relation of landlord and of sovereign. And out of New the relation of landlord there were to grow, if not under avenue, the first William, at least under the second, sources of royal wealth before unheard of. Every death of a lay tenant, every minority, every marriage, every vacancy or appoint- ment to a bishoprick or an abbey, all brought in money to the King, not in his character as chief of the common- wealth, but in his character of personal landlord. Other lands looked with amazement at the sums which went into, and which, when it was needed, came out of, the hoard of the English King. In earlier days men had wondered 384 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NOEMAN CONQUEST. OH. XXIV. at the wealth of Englaad. The wealth of England had now become the wealth of the King who was not only her ruler but her landlord. The kingly The kingly power was in this way strengthened by the strlngth- innovations to which the Conquest gave rise. But it was ened by strengthened fully as much by the conservative side of the reten- a J J tionofthe the Conqueror's policy, by his systematic retention of the old laws and constitution of England. The Norman King had to deal with two classes of subjects, with the English over whom he claimed to rule by legal rightj and with the foreign followers whose swords had, in his view of the case, enabled him successfully to assert that legal right. Relations And the Norman Kings soon found that it was far more to the °^ o'^ ^^^® conquered English than on the conquering Nor- English. mans that they could safely rest the support of their His rela- throne. The men to whom they owed their Crown were Nonnan ^00 powerful to be neglected. They had to be rewarded nobles. ^nd to be flattered, to be placed in the highest posts in the kingdom, and enriched with the greatest estates. But they had none the less to be watched and guarded against ; it was the native population only which could really be Eufus and trusted. Both William Rufus and Henry the First owed ow^d their their throne to English loyalty, when the Normans, as tothe' ^ ^°^y> were arrayed against them. In the first stage English, of the Conquest, before the Norman settlers had taken firm root in the land, before the policy of Henry had raised up a second class of Norman settlers who were better able to take root in the land,^ the English looked to the Norman King as their protector against his Norman Common followers. There was little room for any real attach- interest of , i , ji t^- the King ment between the King and the body of the nation ; but people.^ *^®y ^^^ distinctly a common interest. And the Conqueror and Henry at least, whatever we say of Rufus, had the ' See above, p. 158. COMMON INTEREST OP KING AND PEOPLE. 38S wisdom to see this. They might have a sentimental pre- oh. xxiv. ference for the race to which they themselves belonged ; they might even have a feeling of contempt for the nation which their own race had overthrown ; but they saw that their solid interest lay on the side of the English people. They saw that the surest way to maintain their power was to keep up the old framework of the English kingdom with as little change as might be. Change, strictly speak- Preserva- ing, there was none ; some Norman institutions were set EngUsh up alongside of some English institutions ; and a great '*"^' part of our later legal history is made up of the way in which these two classes of institutions affected one another. But we cannot say that any English institutions were abolished. The days of King Eadward remained the standard, every departure from which was noticed as a novelty ; the law of the land was still the law of King Eadward, with the improvements made by King William. The kingly power thus drew strength from every quarter. The royal Every part of the old system which gave strength to the draws Crown was kept up, and only so much of the new system ^ti'e°stl' was brought in as could be made to serve the same purpose, quarters. The military tenures supplied the King with a new kind The old and of army, bound to him as lord and grantor of land. But armies. he in no way gave up his right, as an English King, to summon the older army which followed him as chief of the commonwealth. The English ,fyrd went on alongside of the Norman feudal array, and the King could make use of either or both, as suited his purpose. In his character The old and of feudal lord, he drew a new source of revenue from the sources of profitable incidents of the feudal tenures ; but he did not "revenue. give up the older sources of income which belonged to him as chief of the state. Alongside of reliefs and ward- ships, the Danegeld was duly levied on every hide of land. The union of the two characters, old and new, native and The foreign, gave to the Norman Kings of England a degree of ofthg VOL. V. CO to the union of two kinds 386 POLITICAL KESULTS 01 THE NOBMAN CONQUEST. OH. XXIV . power such as no Kings had held before them in our Noi-man island, such as was held by no Kings of their own day- Kings due p 1 /-^ 1 ;i +V. anywhere nearer than the lauds of the (jreek and tne Saracen. The union in one man of the characters of of power, gupj-eme governor and supreme landlord, founded on an ingenious intertwining of the old principles of English constitutional law with the new doctrines of continental feudalism, placed in the hands of the Norman Kings a power all but Imperial. It could not be said that what seemed good to the prince had of itself the force of law; but it was soon found easy to find a legal sanction for whatever seemed good to the prince. For it was part of the wisdom of our Norman Kings to keep np in their fulness all those parts of our ancient constitution which to less discerning despots might have seemed hindrances to their power, but which they knew The how to turn into its instruments. The old Assemblies Assemblies went on ; and, during the reign of the Conqueror at least, go on. they went on in the old places and at the old seasons. Tiie King Three times in the year, at "Winchester, at Westminster, crown as ^^"^ ^^ Gloucester, did King William wear his Crown and before. gather around him the great men of his realm, as King Legislation Eadward had done before him.^ Before that Assembly he Witan. put forth his great schemes of law and of administration, and asked their assent as iElfred and the elder Eadward had done. ^ Before the great Survey was ordered, the King hid mickle thought and very deep speech with his Witan, with that assembly which, from that deep speech, drew, in Open air the stranger tongue, its later name of Parliament. And, on greater occasions still. Assemblies were gathered which needed the open plain of Salisbury to hold them, Assemblies which, however difierent in spirit, may in mere numbers have been not unlike the Assemblies which voted the restora- tion of Godwine and the banishment of Norman Robert. ' See vol. iv. p. 623. ' lb. p. 690. THE ASSEMBLIES GO ON. 387 A less clear-sighted ruler might have shrunk from meeting ch. xxiv. such a joint assembly of the conquerors and the conquered. William knew that it was such gatherings as these which Preeerva- best proved that he was master of conquerors and con- institutions quered alike. In so doing, the despotism of William pre- S?-^^''. served to us our heritage. The spirit of the Assembly, its despotism. practical constitution, the practical extent of its powers, have changed from time to time, and never, we may well believe, was so great a change wrought in so small a time as that which parted off a Gemot under William from a Gemot under Harold. But the continuity of our national Unbroken Assemblies has never been broken. There has been no of English time when we have been left without a national Assembly assemblies. of some kind. This is one of the points which distin- guishes the history of England from the history of perhaps every other European kingdom. Everywhere else, the ancient national Assemblies have vanished altogether, or have been restored after a while under forms wholly dif- ferent from those of earlier days. In England, though the nature of our national Assemblies has greatly changed, it has changed step by step ; there has been no pulling down, no rebuilding. That the Witenagemot could change into the great Council, that the great Council could change into the Parliament, without any absolutely new institution ever being set up, is undoubtedly, as I shall try presently to show more at length, a distinct result of the Norman Conquest. In one of the chief points which touch the position of The the King, the change wrought by the Conquest, though prScipk^ sure, was far slower than might have been looked for. ^^'g^^^'^' The feudal theory which looks on kingship less as an feudal office than as a possession, naturally tends to make the Crown, like any other possession, pass by hereditary descent. If direct heirs fail, it looks with more favour on the ap- c c a 388 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. pointment of a successor by bequest or adoption, perhaps even by bargain and sale, than on his election by those over whom he is called upon to rule. The old Teutonic king- ship, as we have so often shown, was not hereditary, in the sense of passing according to any definite law of succession. The feelings of the old time respected the kingly stockj the stock of gods and heroes ; but the kingliness was in the whole kin ; one son of Woden was as kingly as another ; the nation might call to the duties of actual kingship whichever of the last King's sons or brothers it thought good.^ The natural tendency of the Norman Conquest, and of the feudal ideas which came in with it, was to change this reverential preference for the kingly stock into a definite rule of hereditary descent, marked out according to a definite law of succession. Such was its final result ; but it was a Hindrances result which was very slow in taking place. All the im- eariyestab- mediate circumstances of the time were against the carry- lishment of ^g Qjj-f; gf ^^j regular rule of succession among William's law of _ descendants. In no case was the person whom we should succGssion now call the heir either the man best fitted for the kingly office or the man who had the best opportunities of taking actual possession of the kingly power. Settlements of the Crown before the vacancy came to nothing in these times, as they had come to nothing in earlier times. The rights of elder birth were set aside by the Conqueror himself, when he made his bequest^ if bequest we are to call it, in favour of Rufus. They were equally set aside by the English nation when E-obert was a second time passed by in favour of Henry. Effect of Had the ^theling William survived his father, hereditary of the*^^ succession would most likely have been firmly established. wmf™° But at Henry's death the struggle lay between the obhga- tion of an oath and the right of free election. Neither Stephen nor ]\Iatilda could be called the heir according to to See Comparative Politics, 164, 187. GEOWTH OF THE HEREDITARY DOCTRIKE. 389 any known, law; the succession of either of them was quite oh. x\iv. unlike anything that had ever happened before, either in England or in Normandy. Through all these causes, the new theory had not, for the first hundred years after the Conquest, any chance of working out its natural results. At every vacancy of the throne, the circumstances of the moment were unfavourable to the new doctrine of succes- sion, and favourable to the old doctrine of election. Under Hereditary .. 11, succession the Angevms, circumstances became more lavourable to gradually hereditary succession, and such succession became, not by „^^gj.'the law but by prescription, the rule of English kingship. Angevins. That rule gradually came in through the working of a doe- trine which looked on kingship as a private possession ; it has at last become law through a conviction that hereditary succession, with all that may be said against it, is yet the least of several evils. But the nation has never given up The right .,„,.. . ^ . of election its right ot choosing its sovereign. The King who, ac- never cording to modern notions, becomes King the moment the ^"^^ "P" breath is out of the body of the last King, is as much King by the will of the people as the King who was no King till he was formally chosen, crowned, and anointed. The ancient King reigned by virtue of an act of the national Assembly. The modern King reigns by virtue of an act of the national Assembly none the less. His one claim to ParUamen- the Crown comes from the terms of an Act of Parliament, ship of an act which, like all other acts, may be repealed by the ^^^g™ same authority which decreed it. The Parliament of Eng- land has, for some ages, but sparingly exercised its right of personal election. But it has never shrunk from exercising it whenever the circumstances of the time called for such a course.^ A national Assembly, all the more national, all Election of . . William the more lawful, because no Bang s writ had summoned it, the Third, did once again exercise that great right when it chose ' I have gone more fuUy into this matter in the Growth of the English Constitution, pp. 40, 147. 390 POLITICAL EESULTS OP THE NOEMAN CONQUEST. CH. XXIV. William the Deliverer to complete the cycle which had begun under William the Conqueror. And, at no moment before or since, has the Parliament of England ever given up its eternal right to regulate the royal succession at its will. If we should ever need a change in the law which rules that succession, it is as easy to change it now as it was in the days of Sigeberht or of iEthelred, of Eichard the The events Second or of Henry the Sixth. Now this power we largely Conquest o^^"©) not indeed to the Norman Conquest itself, but to the favoui;able g^j^^g ^f things which immediately followed the Norman to pama- ° •' mentary Conquest, and which hindered the new theory of kingship „ . from at once bearing its natural fruits. If the Crown of Compari- <=' son with William had passed as easily from father to son as the Crown of Hugh Capet did^ kingship might have run the same course in England which it ran in France. The sup- posed divine right of a single family might have taken such root that it could not have been set aside by any form of law. To uproot it might have needed a revolution snch as that which in France has made all stable government of any kind impossible. Directories, Tyrannies, Restorations, Red Republics, and Septennates all come of the unlucky fact that for eight hundred years no successor of Hugh Capet ever lacked a male heir. We have kept our ancient right ; we can at any time change the succession of our Kings ; we can increase or lessen their powers by the same means by which our fathers first called them and their powers into Happy being. And this power we largely owe to three happy acci- working of i • i i i • i • t incidental dents \Ahich happened withm the time with which we are causes. ^^^^ dealing. Had Robert^ instead of Rufus, been the loyal and favom-ed son of his father — had he been at Winchester, instead of far beyond the sea, when Rufus fell in the New Forest — had the ^theling William clung to the mast of the White Ship instead of the butcher of Rouen— had the course of things at any one of those times followed a different path from that which it did follow — the yoke of PARLIAMENTARY KINGSHIP. 391 such a kingship as that of France might have pressed upon ch. xxiv. us till the reign of law had wholly passed away. We might have been held down by the fetters of an arbitrary will, till the foundations of all our institutions were under- mined, till the power of preserving by reformation had wholly failed us, and had left nothing in its stead but the power of destruction. " ' The main results then of the Norman Conquest; as General affecting the kingship of England, were these. The power ^g con- of the King was largely increased ; his position, and the ^^^^ ^ character of his government, were largely changed; but the kingship. change was far more in practice than through any formal enactment. The tendencies in a feudal direction which had been at work before the Conquest were strengthened and hastened by the Conquest. But they were moulded by the hands of men who took care that feudal tendencies should be encouraged so far as they could be turned to the strength- ening and enriching of the Crown, that they should be discouraged whenever they could lead to its weakening. After the coming of William, a King of the English remained Increase of all that he was beforCj and he became something else as power, well. He kept all his old powers, and he gained some new Its twofold ones; he kept all his old revenues, and he gained some new ones. He became universal landlord, but in so doing he did not cease to be universal ruler. At once King and lord," he had two strings to his bow at every critical moment ; if one character failed him, he had the other to fall back upon. He could command his subjects' obedience by a twofold right; he could call them to his standard by a twofold right ; and by a twofold right he could cause their money to flow into that Exchequer which was at once the _fiscus of the feudal landlord and the ararium of the chief of the commonwealth. The history of the Roman Analogy state had shown how the union of all the powers of^' 392 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NOEMAN CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. the commonwealth in a single magistrate was the practical establishment of a tyranny, how the man who was at once Consul, Tribune, and High Pontiff, Im- perator of the Army and Prince of the Senate, was found to be, if not a King, yet more than a King. In the like sort, the union of English and Norman ideas in the per- sons of the Norman Kings of England, the union of every character, Norman or English, which could tend to increase the power of the sovereign, made our Norman Kings the mightiest rulers of their time. The King-Duke wielded the strength of kingdom and duchy in a way which was not within the power either of his royal lord or of his Imperial ally. In a kingdom where men of different and hostile races still dwelled side by side, he was the Position of master of both, because both had need of him. The con- towards° querors could not stand apart from their military chief, the two their feudal lord, the grantor from whom they held all their races. ° •' lands. The conquered could not stand without the help of him who, though stranger and often oppressor, was still King of the English, King chosen, crowned, and anointed. The King could, as occasion served, play off Normans against Englishmen, and Englishmen against Normans. Rufus and Henry alike owed their Crown to the loyalty of the English people ; how one at least of them requited that The King loyalty our tale has already told. Still, even in the blackest tor of "the times, the King was so far the friend of the people that people. jjg jiever was their worst enemy, and was often the enemy of their worst enemies. One tyrant was at least better than many ; not only the iron rule of the Lion of Justice, but even the darkest days of oppression under the Red Effects of King, were better than the anarchy of Stephen. Under the anar- , , , , chy under tbat anarchy, men learned that the system which had Stephen, ^g^^ Legun Under the great William needed a William or a Henry to carry it out. When their rod of rule fell into weaker hands, there was of a truth no King in the UNION OF THE RACKS AGAINST THE KING. 393 land ; every man did that which was right in his own oh. xxiv. eyes. There was no longer a ruler, either to assert his own rights or to defend the rights of his people. Men cried for a King to save them, and a King came indeed, another Henry not less mighty than the first. But under the Change Angevin King and his successors a change began to work. Ano-evina. In the purely Norman time the King had been master alike of Normans and Englishj because each race needed his help against the other. A King in such a position might well be a despot, when it was the interest of every class of his subjects to magnify his office. But, step by step, old wrongs and old distinctions were forgotten. Normans and English were fused into one people, or Fusion of rather men of Norman descent born on English soil were races. in truth born Englishmen. Both races hailed the coming of a King who, as far as his formal pedigree went, was at once Norman and English. But both soon felt the practical working of a dynasty which in truth was neither Norman nor English. There were now no longer two hostile races, each of which hailed the royal despotism as a safeguard against enemies at its side. An united nation was now fast springing up, while the royal power had passed away into a house which was foreign to both the older and the newer elements of that nation. The strong hand of the second Henry could keep together the discordant members of his vast dominion. But, under his son and grand- trnion of son, the Angevin dynasty stood forth as a foreign dynasty against the in the face of an united English people. The descendants Crown. of the men who fought for William and the descendants of the men who fought for Harold had neither of them any wish to see their lands harried by mercenary Bra- bangons, or to feel themselves put aside on their native shore for hungry favourites from Provence or Angouleme. The power of the Crown had once been strengthened by the needs of two hostile parts of a divided people ; now 394 POLITICAL RESULTS OP THE KOEMAN CONQUEST. OH. XXIV. it stood forth as a thing of evil in the eyes of an united people. Of that united people those who sprang from the conquerors of a past day had now become simply the The _ first rank. Under Henry the First a Barons' War would wl°T liave meant a war of stranger Barons against King and people. Under Henry the Third a Barons' War meant a war which the people, with native Barons in their fore- Freedom front, waged against a foreign-hearted King. Despotism through crumbled away, and not anarchy, but lawful freedom came despotism. ^^ ^^^ place. And why ? Because in the eleventh century, just as in the sixteenth, the forms of law and freedom went on, even when there was least of their substance. The Chronicler complains that, when men spake most of right, they did most of unright. But it was because they still Continuity spake of right that right in the end outlived unright. At Law. every stage, whether of oppression or of conflict, the law of England still lived on. The laws of Eadward took a new shape in the charter of Henry. The charter of Henry took a further shape in the greater Charter of John. But at no stage did men ask for new laws ; at every stage they knew that the old were better. No man asked for new rights, for new liberties ; the ancient laws gave them rights and liberties enough, if only those ancient laws could be obeyed, as men deemed they had been obeyed in some happier time. The happiness of the good old times is a mere dream in every age ; but to keep on the laws of the old times, in preserving to reform, in reforming Conserva- to preserve, is the true life of a free people. This we have of tbe done, and that we have the power of doing so is largely due Conquest, .j.^ ^j^g circumstances of the Conquest, to the personal wisdom of the Conqueror. Under an unbroken native djniasty, the old rights might have died out step by step, as they did in so many of the kindred lands. Under a conqueror of another mould, they might have been swept from the earth by the sheer violence of strangers. But it was William FREEDOM PRESERVED THROUGH DESPOTISM. 395 the Great, and no smaller manj with whom England had oh. xxiv. to deal. He was a Conqueror, but he was no destroyer, ^f,*!'^ °^ He had no thought of sweeping away laws and rights which personal he knew how to turn into the truest props of his own power. And the laws and rights which he thus preserved lived on to overthrow the despotism which they once had strengthened. The fiery trial which England went through was a fire which did not destroy, but only purified. Eng- land came forth once more the England of old. She came forth with her ancient laws formed into shapes better suited to changed times, and with a new body of fellow-workers in those long-estranged kinsmen whom birth on her soil had changed into kinsmen once again. That we could do all this came mainly of our momentary overthrow, and of the greatness of him who overthrew us. If ^Elfred and Cnut gave us laws of their own free will, William preserved those laws, perhaps not of his own free will, but he pre- served them none the less. Our short afiliction worked for us an abiding happiness; if we had not perished for a moment, we might for ever have been undone. § 3. The Legislation of the Norman Kings. I have had to point out many times in the course of Small this history that the amount of actual change made in the „£ direct laws of England during the time of strictly Norman rule '^^'°-p '" comes within a very small compass. Not only would it have been quite contrary to all William's policy and to all his professions to make any violent changes in the laws of his new kingdom, but legislation, as we understand it, did Narrow not, in the ideas of those times, fill any prominent place le^s]atia^ among the duties of a King or of a ruling assembly. Law J^? ®^^'y in those days, like the Greek word which translates it, meant custom. A code of laws meant the putting the existing 396 POLITICAL EESULTS OF THE NORMAN" CONQUEST. OH. XXIV, customs into writing ; a new law^ as distinguished from a mere ordinance to meet a particular emergency, was a thing which men always shrank from. The popular cry was never for new laws; it was always for the better observance of the old. The professed object of Kings and their Councils was not to enact new laws, but to find out what the old laws were, and to enforce them afresh with new authority. Sources of The notion that the Norman Conquest at once made some misconcep- great change in our written law springs from an utter tions. misconception of the nature of that Conquest, combined with a misconception of the nature and authority of certain No substi- early monuments of English jurisprudence. The notion Norman that William systematically substituted the law of Nor- law ^^^^^ mandy for the law of England involves a further mis- conception, namely that there was any law of Normandy for him to substitute. Normandy beyond doubt had its legal customs like other countries; and it is quite possible that those customs may have been put into the shape of a written code before William came into England. But there is no evidence that this was so. No Norman code earlier than William, no Norman code of the reign of William or his sons, has ever been produced. The feudal jurisprudence which men have deemed that William brought -with him from Normandy into England really grew up ia both countries side by side, while the two were under the same rulers. The notion that this or that feature of our law was brought over from Normandy is part of the strange belief that nothing English, whether in law or language or any- thing else, can really be English, but that everything must be "derived"' from some foreign source or other. The truth is that, except in some particular cases of which I have already spoken and of which I shall presently speak again, there was no real derivation of English law from Normandy. The administrative PEESEEVATIOK OF ENGLISH LAV. 397 system of the two Henries grew up in both countries oh. xxiv. side by side. There was no real derivation from one '^^^ ^"^^' nistrative country to another ; as for any particular changes in system detail, it is more likely that each of them first came into fj^g by side use in the greater country, and was then adopted in the ™ ?^''*'''^ smaller. mandy. The way in which the law, or rather custom, of Normandy Norman really affected the law of England was of quite another brought in kind. Few or no new institutions were substituted for '^■'°5S^'^.®, of English. old ones, but several new institutions were brought in alongside of old ones. We have already traced this out in the case of the royal power. Nothing was abolished, nothing was taken away ; but some new sources of autho- rity, influence, and profit were set up alongside of the old ones. As it was with the royal power, so it was with many other things. I have mentioned in a former volume^ that, Normans according to a crowd of earlier precedents in the case of owlaw"^ two nations dwelling in the same land, the Norman settlers in England were for some purposes allowed to keep their own customary law. In the same way, Norman ideas, Norman principles, if not actual Norman institutions, crept in alongside of earlier English ideas, sometimes modifying the English institutions, sometimes merely changing their names. In the long struggle between the two languages, sometimes the foreign, sometimes the native name, has won the day. Sometimes the French or Latin introduc- name of a custom or office is no real translation of the jsporman Enarlish, but is the name of the Norman office which was J^^mee of =" ' ^ offices. supposed most nearly to answer to the English one.^ The s/iire becomes the county, two names neither of which has been able wholly to displace the other. Its Sheriff is in Latin vicecomes ; but in this case the foreign name has ' See vol. iv. p. 624. 2 Stubbs, Constitutional History, i. 443. 398 POLITICAL EESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. CH. XXIV. taken no root in our tongue.^ Our institutions, in short, English fij-g ijj jjQ sense of Norman orig'inj but they bear about institutions . modified them the trace of deep and abiding Norman mtluenees. mflue°n™r The laws of England were never abolished to make room for any laws of Normandy; but the laws of England were largely modified, both in form and spirit, by their ad- ministration at the hands of men all whose ideas were Change naturally Norman. The change was silent and gradual. giadull -As a rule, it was change of a kind which was not likely to and silent, ^g gg^ down in written ordinances. Of the three reigns with which we have chiefly to deal, the reign which was most fertile in real change is the one of which we have no written ordinances at all. We have real legislation of the Conqueror, and we have real legislation of Henry the No laws First. But no one ever saw a law of William Rufus. Yet though his we have seen that the reign of William Rufus was the reign was ^jjjjg ^{jg^ the most important novelties were introduced the most ^ fruitful in into the tenure of land. But the evil customs devised chano'e. by Randolf Flambard were not likely to be set down in the form of a code. What the law of Rufus was, we know only negatively, through the law of Henry which professed to sweep it away. No aboli- The theory which attributes to William a settled pur- English pose to uproot the old law of England is the mere in- tlT c'^''-'^ vention of a much later age ; it is of a piece with the queror. notion that he tried to root out the English language. Legendary Even the legendary account of William's legislation gives his legisla- uo Countenance to this notion. It represents William, not as aa innovator, but as the codifier of the laws of Eadward. The utmost that the story attributes to him is an un- fulfilled purpose to enforce the laws of one part of England * This is illustrated by the fact that Viscount came to bear quite another meaning as a degree of peerage. Perhaps the old-fashioned phrase of " Lord Viscount " was meant to distinguish the Vicecomes of the peerage from the official Vicecomes. LEGISLATION OF WILLIAM. 399 over the wLole kingdom.^ Till the unanimous voice of oh. xxiv. the nation taught him to do otherwise, he was minded to decree that the law of the Denalagn, the law of the Danish kinsfolk of the Normans, should become the law of the Saxon and Anglian shires also. This, we cannot doubt, is a pure fancy; all remembrance of any specially Scan- dinavian law had as utterly died away from the minds of the Normans of William's day as the remembrance of their old Scandinavian tongue. But, if we cast away this embellishment, and accept the more possible part of the story, William stands out most distinctly, not as one who brings in new laws^ but as one who enacts the old ones afresh. He summons men from every shire to say what the laws of Eadward were. In the genuine William's pieces of William's legislation^ in those amendments to yon. ° the laws of Eadward which are spoken of in the charter of Henry,^ he nowhere abolishes the old law ; he at most sets up something new by the side of it. In one point only does he venture to speak a word against a law which he found in force. This is in the ordinance for Separation removing ecclesiastical causes from the ordinary courts, clesiastical and establishing separate eeclesiastical courts alongside of <=°°'^^- them. Here, under the influence of the new ecclesiastical ideas, which were familiar on the continent, but which had as yet made but little way in England, he distinctly ventures to say that the ancient laws were bad.^ But even here, though he removes a certain class of causes from the jurisdiction of the old courts, he no way innovates on those courts themselves. The new institution is simply set up alongside of the old one. Of his other ordinances, some are mere confirmations of the existing law, possibly with small variations in detail. Such is the ordinance against Ordinance against the the slave-trade, where he merely re-enacts what other Kings slave-trade. ' See Appendix KK. ' See above, p. i68, and vol. iv. pp. 324, 623. ' See vol. iv. p. 392. 400 POLITICAL EESULTS OP THE NOEMAN CONQUEST. Temporary ordinances. Ordeal and Wager of Battle. Abolition of capital punish- ment. had enacted before him.' Some of the ordinances are in their own nature temporary. They refer to the immediate state of things in his own day, when the status of the native inhabitants of England, of the foreign settlers in Eadward's day, and of his own followers, warlike and peaceful, needed to be fixed.^ But here again, all that is done is to set up the new by the side of the old. The Frenchman is allowed to keep his own law, whilst the Englishman keeps his. Yet, oddly enough, out of this temporary enactment came a change in our judicial pro- ceedingSj the traces of which lingered on within living memory. The custom of deciding causes by wager of battle came in as part of the personal law of the French - man, to which no Englishman could be constrained against his will.^ The Englishman had his choice between the an- cient ordeal and the newly introduced wager of battle. But it is plain that the wager of battle became the more popular form of trial of the two. It ha.d in some points a more taking character, and its adoption put the conquered on a level with his conqueror. The English ordeal, condemned by the Church, went out of use, while the wager of battle lived on, surviving in the Statute-book long after it had been forgotten in practice, till it was formally abolished in our own century. Among the genuine ordinances of William, the only one in which we can see any distinct innovation springing from William's own personal will is that which altogether forbids the punishment of death. ^ This was a distinct innovation on the law of Cnut, which makes death the punishment both of high and of petty treason, and even of certain breaches of the King's peace.^ Here again there is in strictness no abolition of ancient law ; mutilation was. ' See vol. iv. p. 625. ^ See vol. iv, pp. 326, 624. ^ See vol. iv. p. 624, and Appendix LL. * See vol. iv. p. 625. ^ See his Laws, 57, 59, 77 ; Schmid. pp. 302, 314. WILLIAMS GENUINE STATUTES. 401 in the ideas of those days, a merciful substitute for death, ch. xxiv. And this innovation at least did not last beyond William's Lasts only own lifetime ; men, French and English, were freely william hanged in the reigns of both his sons.' The great ordi- liimself. nance which made all the under-tenants become the men of gt^tutg ^f the King, if new in form, was nothing new in substance. SaUabury. Its object was simply to counteract the tendency of the new state of things, and to keep the King and his people in their ancient relations to one another.^ The forest-laws of The forest- William are not to be found in the shape of any genuine ordinance ; their nature has to be made out from later notices and from the rhetorical complaint of the national Chronicler. Here again there must have been distinct innovation ; but here too the innovation took the form of bringing in something new by the side of the old. The general laws of the realm were not interfered with ; but a special and harsher legislation was set up in certain special districts. Even in this, the worst of all the changes directly wrought at this time, the same general principle may be traced. Something new is brought in, but nothing old is taken away. The ffenuine legislation of these times is confined to the The alleged If ordinances of William of which we have already spoken, to -willlain the general charter of Henry, and to his special charters ^'^'^ ■^*'"'y- on particular subjects or to particular places. The col- lections of laws which bear the names of William and Henry must not be mistaken for codes really issued by the authority of those Kings.^ It does not therefore follow Not for- that they are forgeries in the modern sense. When we^^^^'g " remember the true meaning of such phrases as the Law of coUecticns. Eadward or of any other King, that those words did not mean a code of laws enacted by him, but the system of law which had been followed in his time, there was no ' See above, pp. 128, 159. ^ See vol. iv. p. 655. = See Appendix KK. VOL. V. D d 402 POLITICAL EESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. dishonesty if any man versed in the law chose to put such a system into a tabular form and put the name of the King at the head of it. He might do so, either as a help to the administration of the law as it stood when he wrote, or as a record of the law as it stood at a past time within his memory. Such a collection then^ if made during or soon after the time of the King whose name it bears, though it has no kind of legal authority, may be of the highest value as a witness to the state of the law at a given time. It has in truth the same kind of value as any contemporary law-book of any age. When its compiler threw his collection into the shape of formal enactments, he most likely had no notion of de- ception. He was like a classical or mediaeval historian who put into the mouth of any of his actors a speech the matter of which fairly represented what the speaker was likely to saj', but the actual wording of which was the historian's own. The codes which bear the names of Eadwardj of William, of Henry the First, have been examined by the highest powers of modern scholarship, and a summary of the results of that examination I Witness of shall give elsewhere.-^ It is enough to say here that to the they supply the most speaking witness to the way in of ErfXh ""'^i°^ ^^^6 Old-English law was kept in force under law. both William and Henry. Doubtless they give only one side of the actual state of things, and that the most favourable side. They show us the theory of the Old-English law which was still legally in force. They do not tell us much of the Norman customs which were growing up by their side ; still less do they tell us how the Old-English laws must have changed their spirit in the hands of Norman judges and administrators. Every collection of the kind was doubtless meant to be a witness to the old law of the land, and, as such, a protest against foreign ' See Appendix KK. THE ALLEGED CODES OP WILLIAM AND HENRY. 403 innovation. We must therefore allow for a certain degree ch, xxiv. of colouring. Our witness has an object. He puts his facts in a certain shape ; while Domesday gives us a photo- graph, the compilers of codes give us an artistic picture. But both Domesday and the codes witness to the same truth, that no general abolition of English law followed as an immediate result of the Conquest. Some tendencies which were already at work in a particular direction were strengthened; some other tendencies in another direction were set at work. A few special ordinances called for by the circumstances of the time were put forth, some of them of a temporary, some of a lasting nature. In all these ways the law itself was a good deal modified, and the spirit of its administration was largely changed. But there was no sweeping away of one system to make room for another. During the reigns of the two Williams and Eeigns of of Henry the First the old laws went on^ whatever might g^ug grow up by the side of them. The law was still the law of King Eadwardj with the amendments of King William. Then came the time of anarchy, in which the law of Effects Eadward, the amendments of William, and everything else anarchy. which bore the shape of law or right, all went to the ground. Room was thus made for the appearance of a Legislation real lawgiver, a lawgiver who was no more bent than his ^j^g g^nd. predecessors on reckless or systematic abolition, but whose hands were not tied as theirs had been by the unbroken traditions of a past time. By that time too there was no need, as there had been in the first days of the Conquest, to frame separate ordinances for men differing in blood and speech. Henry of Anjou was called to the rule of a land from which the distinction of Norman and Englishman had practically passed away. He could legislate for his whole kingdom in a way in which hardly any King could legislate since the days of ^Ethelwulf. Under the An- Beginning gevin dynasty the modern law of England began, a law in legislation. D d 3 404 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. OH. XXIV. wliich the ancient institutions of the land have sometimes been really set aside for foreign novelties, but in which they have more often been simply veiled under new forms and new names. With Henry the Second begins the legislation which has gone on to our own time. That legislation has always been wisest and noblest when it has taken the form of sweeping away foreign novelties and bringing back the old principles of our ancient law. Return to Its greatest triumphs have ever been to cast away the laws. usurpations of foreign Kings and the subtleties of foreign lawyers, and substantially to give us back the old freedom of England, the Laws of Eadward, the Laws of Alfred, changed in form, but in truth unchanged in substance.^ § 4. AJministration %mder the Norman Kings. Adminis The changes which were made under the Norman Kings aud social in the way of direct legislation, the changes which could changes, j^g aunounced by proclamations or set down in the form of written statutes, we have thus seen to be few indeed. But the changes of another kind, the gradual but inevitable changes in the working of the system of government, were of the greatest moment, and they affected every detail of administration^ from the highest to the lowest. And they no less affected the whole fabric of society and the relations of class to class, from the highest to the lowest. This was the way in which a conquest like William's, a foreign conquest cloked under the forms of native law, was sure to work most thoroughly. And, when both the spirit and the forms of the administration had been thus thoroughly, though silently, changedj the Effect on change reacted on formal legislation. We see the legisla- lation. ° ti'^e results of the Conquest far less in the few ordinances ' See Growth of the English Constitution, p. 136 et seqq. IKDIEECT RESULTS OP THE CONQUEST. 405 of the Conqueror himself than in the statutes of his remote oh. xxiv. descendants. No ordinance can be shown by which mili- Later tary tenures were formally established ; but every act the real which regulates them or takes them for granted, down to the^Con*^ the great act which swept them away, is a legislative quest, result of the coming of William. And so with all the other practical changes which the Conquest brought with it ; they vrere established in practice before they showed themselves in the written law. Every detail of administra- tion, central and local, was changed, if not in its form, at least in its spirit. Sometimes a new institution, a new office, Struggle grew up by the side of the old one ; in any case, the old and new institution, the old office, was clothed with a character elements, wholly new. In this way our administrative system gra- dually changed into a mixed system, in which sometimes the old and sometimes the new element got the upper hand. And in this way we may explain a seeming anomaly. Outwarfl effects We can understand why the forms and titles and phrases most seen of the days when the distinction between Englishman and Jig^^ction Norman was forgotten, have so much more Norman a look of "^aoes _ had pas.5ed than the forms and titles and phrases of the days when away. that distinction was still in full force. The Chroniclers, as long as they go on, still speak the language of earlier times. The King still summons his Witan to a Gemot. Instances When we again, in the days of Edward the First, get nomencla- English chronicles in another shape, we hear no more of*"''®' the Witan and their GemMs; we find ourselves in an age of Councils and Parliaments. This does not show that the age of Edward the First was less English than the age of the Conqueror and Henry the First ; it proves in truth the opposite. As long as the two races were divided, so long did two systems of law and administration, each with its own vocabulary, go on side by side. When they were fused into one, sometimes the native and sometimes the foreign nomenclature prevailed. To take the highest case 406 POLITICAL EBSULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQITEST. CH. XXIV. of all, the King no longer held a Witenagemot but a Parliament ; but he himself still remained a King ; he had not been changed into a Roy} Continuity I have already asserted, or rather taken for granted, of English Assemblies, that, under whatever change of name, under whatever change of form, the continuity of the Old-English national Assemblies went on unbroken through all the changes wrought by the Conquest. A Great Council of Henry the Second undoubtedly differed widely from a Witenagemot of the Confessor, and a Parliament of Edward the First differed yet more widely from a Great Council of Henry the Second. But there is no break between any of the three. The constitution of the As- sembly is changed, first in practice, then by direct ordi- nance ; but the Assembly itself is the same. At no time was one kind of assembly formally abolished and another kind of assembly formally put in its stead. Reform bills we have seen without number ; a constituent assembly we have never seen. Oonstitu- In the first volume of this History I maintained the Witena- A'iew that the Witenagemot, the Mycel Gemot, the ancient °^^ '■ national Assembly of England, was in theory an assembly in which every freeman of the realm had a right to attend. Views of That view I have seen no reason to change ; and the -Professor Stubba. seeming difference on this head between my views and the views of the scholar to whom on these points I am always willing to bow,^ is, I think, more seeming than real. It must be remembered that we have here to deal with an assembly of whose constitution we have no direct or formal aecoimt ; we have to put together our notions of it from a ' This is true of Southern English, the English of the kingdom of England. In the English of Scotland, the King is by sixteenth-centm-y writers often called Hoy ; but this was more likely through later imitation of French than through any Norman tradition. ^ See StHbbs, Constitutional History, i. 121, and Appendix MM. CONSTITUTION OF THE ANCIENT ASSEMBLY. 407 great number of scattered and seemingly contradictory oh. xxiv. notices. According to one view^ the Assembly was in No theory open to every freeman, but in practice only a small difference class habitually attended. According' to the other view, it between ■^ ■ " ' the two was in theory confined to a small class, but in practice it theories, was ever and anon thrown open to large classes of men besides its usual members. I still hold that the former view is the more consistent with the general history of political assemblies throughout the world ; ^ but the prac- tical aspect of the two doctrines is the same. It is not denied on either showing that the Assembly was commonly a comparatively small gathering of the great men of the realm. It is not denied on either showing that the great men of the realm were ever and anon reinforced by the presence of large popular bodies, by whole armies or by the mass of the citizens of great cities.^ Such a body I con- Working ceive the Witenagemot of Eadward to have been. Under ancient As- ordinary circumstances it would consist of the Bishops, the ^'^™^l"'^- AbbotSj the Earls^ the officers of the King's household, of a large number of King's Thegns from the neighbourhood of the place where the Assembly was held, of a smaller number from more distant districts. In ordinary times the nation was willing to let these its natural chiefs act as its repre- sentatives. In times of great national excitement, when Eadward was to be chosen, when Godwine was to be inlawed, the nation asserted its dormant right. At such moments, the citizens of London or Winchester, the armies which had refused to draw the sword against each other/ if they did not join in the deliberations of Earls and Bishops, at least raised their voices along with theirs. Such was the Assembly in the days of King Eadward ; such I believe it to have remained ia legal theory in the days of King William. ' See Comparative Politics, pp. 216-222. 2 See vol. i. pp. 418, 592 ; ii. pp. 105, 332. ' See vol. ii. p. 327. 408 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NOEMAN CONQUEST No formal description of the con- stitution of the Assembly either before or after the Conquest. Distinction betweea the Witan and the " land- sittende menn." Effect of the prac- tice of summons. The notices which we have of the constitution of the Assemhly during the Norman reigns are as scattered and as vasrue as the notices which we have of its constitution in earlier times. But it is plain that the great gatherings which were held three times in the year, when the King had with him " all the rich men over all England, Archbishops and suffragan Bishops, and Abbots and Earls and Thegns and Knights," 1 must have been meetings that were pretty largely attended. In the great Gemot at Salisbury the gathering of the land-owners who came to become the King's men, whether their number reached sixty thousand or not/ must have formed a body rivalluig the greatest Assemblies of earlier times. But in the description of this last Assembly we clearly see the beginning of the distinction which was the source of our whole later parliamentary constitution. The "Witan and the great body of the assembled land-owners are now distinguished from each other. It is hardly going too far to see in this expression the mark of a great practical change. AThen, in any body, great or small, a custom of summoning particular members is one:; established, a great step has been taken towards the disfranchisement of those members who are not summoned. Something of this kind has happened in the history both of the modern Privy Council and of the chapters of cathedral churches.^ The distinction between the "Witan and the other land-owners may very well point to a distinction between two classes. A line seems to be drawn between those great personages who AA-ere personally summoned as a matter of ordinary course, and the lesser men who were summoned only in a body, and who most likely were not summoned at all, unless, as in the Salisbury Gemot, there was some special reason for their attendance. The two classes whom the Chronicler distinguishes in this entry seem to answer to the two ! vol. iv. p. 623. 2 iij p gg^ ' See History of Federal Government, i. 308. PRACTICE OP SUMMONS. 409 classes who are distinguished in the fourteenth section of oh. xxiv. the Great Charter. The Prelates, Earls, and greater Barons -^^j^SY ™ ■ '^ the Great are each to be summoned personally ; the great mass of Charter, the King's tenants-in-chief are to be summoned in a body by the several Sheriffs.' William doubtless summoned whom he would, and in the Salisbury Gemot he summoned a larger body than the tenants-in-chief, namely the tenants- in-chief and all those under-tenants who were thought worth summoning. By the time of John the vague practice of earlier times had stiffened into a definite custom. The clause of the Great Charter supposes a state of things in which no man will come unless he is summoned, but in which large classes have a right to be summoned. A Growth of qualification for membership of the Assembly has practically tio'n'for "" been established. As was natural at this time, when ™?™'^?^' ship 01 the feudal notions were creeping in^ the qualification took a Assembly. feudal shape. The right to be summoned was established in the case of the King's tenants-in-chief, but it did not go further. This amounted to a practical disfranchisement Practical of all except the King's tenants-in-chief. There was no chisement need to take away their right by any formal enactment. J^ ^ -s As soon as the doctrine of the summons was fully estab- tenants-in- chief. lished, it would die out of itself. It would doubtless have done so in any case. It would do so all the more surely and all the more speedily, under the circumstances of England in those times. There was nothing to make an No attrao- attendance in the Assembly attractive to any class of opju^j^yy native Englishmen, except the few who contrived to keep ^^®™f° *" great estates or high offices. The crowd which had pressed joyfully to vote for the driving out of the Norman Arch- bishop Robert would not press with the same zeal when all that was to be done was to become the men of the ' Cap. i4(Stuhbs, Select Charter.?, 2po). "Summoneri faoiemua archiepi- scopos, episcopos, abbates, comites, et majores barones, sigiUatim per literas nostras ; et preeterea faciemus summoneri in generaU, per vicecomites et ballivos nostros, omnes illos qui de nobis tenent in capite." 410 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NOEMAN' CONQUEST. Origin of Lords and Commons. The sum- mons the essence of peerage. Case of LordWens- leydale. The TVitan continued in the Lords. The " land- sittende menu" continued in the linights of the shire. Norman King. The summons would be needful when- ever any special reason made their presence needful. In this way, as it seems to me^ the old national Assembly changed into a body consisting of two definite classes of men. One class consisted of those whose rank or office entitled them to a personal summons ; the other was the whole body of tenants-in-chief who, when summoned, were summoned generally in their several shires. As I have before remarked, we may in this distinction see the germ of Lords and Commons. The Lords are the pregadi, the counsellors who are specially summoned. The origin of their order is exactly analogous to that of the senators so called in the Venetian commonwealth.^ The Witan of the Salisbury Gemot, the great men who had the right of personal summons, became the Peers. Of the peerage the summons is the very essence. It was reserved for a modern House of Lords to trample law and history under foot, by refusing admission to their body to one of the Witan, lawfully summoned by his sovereign, because of the trumpery quibble that his sovereign had not pledged herself to summon his descendants also.- The members of the House of Lords are simply those among Englishmen, Earls, Bishops, and some other more modern classes, who have never lost the right of personal attendance, because they have never lost the right to a personal summons. They represent by unbroken succession the Witan of the Gemot of Salisbury and of all the Gemots before that. The " landsitting men" of Salisbury easily stiffened into the tenants-in-chief of the Great Charter. Their personal attendance was presently exchanged for an attendance through representatives, and we thus come to knights of the shire. But, besides the "landsitting men," there ' See Daru, Histoire de Venise, lib. ii. c. 47. ^ I refer to the case of Lord Wensleydale's peerage in 1856. See Sir Ersliiitie May's Constitutional LOatorj' of England, i. 290, 298. OEIGIN OF LOEDS AND COMMON'S. 411 was another element. "We have seen in the days of oh. xxiv. Stephen the citizens of London and Winchester make Action good their ancient right to a voice in the choosing and citizens. deposing of Kings. ^ Presently that right, in itself some- Kepresen- what vague and precarious, was merged by the act of the the citizens great Simon in the general right of the citizens and trggses burgesses of England to appear by their representatives ™^^^ Earl alongside of the Witan and the landsitting men. Yet that gui-vival of right did not wholly die out ; the tradition of it lived on *^^ "S^* , ^ ^ ' or personal to appear in after times, twice in a tumultuous^ once in a action in the London more regular form. Edward the Fourth and Richard the citizens. Third were called to the Crown, no less than Stephen, by ^dward ' _ i ) J the Fourth, the voice of the citizens of London. And in the Assembly Richard which called on William of Orange to take on himself the t'l^ Third, _ . William provisional government of the kingdom, along with the the Third. Lords and the members of the former Parliaments, the citizens of London had their place as of old.^ It was then without any sudden break, without any Gradual formal act of enfranchisement or of disfranchisement, that jn ti^g the old national Assemblies of Enarland, the common '^J^acter o J of the heritage of the whole Teutonic race and even of the Assemtly. whole Aryan family, the counterpart of the Achaian a (/ore and of the Roman comitia, changed, in the course of a few generations, into the form of a modern Parliament. The change was the natural result of the circumstances of the Norman period and of the influences which were at work during that period. The change seems to be greater Changes of than it was, because of the changes in the names both of the Assembly itself and of the members who composed it. It is not to be denied that the changes of name, from the Witenagemot to the Great Council, from the Great Council to the Parliament, really point to practical changes in the constitution of the Assembly. But if changes of language ' See above, pp. 345, 305. ' See Growth of the English Constitution, pp. 102, 20i. 412 POLITICAL EESULTS OP THE NOEMAN CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. had not brouglit with them changes of name, we should perhaps be less inclined than we now are to dwell on the changes which the names certainly express. The change from an English to a Latin, from a Latin to a French name, makes us fancy that there was more of formal change than there really was. It suggests the notion of breaches of continuity which never happened. And, after all, even the change of name is in many cases more apparent than real. jSTe-w names The new names are often mere translations of the old ones. traiLsiate And this is specially to be seen in the names given to the old ones, j^ggembly itself. The name of Witan indeed dies out ; the formal style of the wise men is lost in such vague descriptions as proceres and magnates. But the ancient title dies out very gradually. It long survives the Conquestj both in its English and its Latin form.' The names of the Assembly itself are palpable translations of earlier phrases. The Magmun Concilium is simply a translation of the alternative name of the Mycel Gemot. The Parliament, the colloquium of our continental kinsfolk, is simply a translation of the deej:! speech which King William had with his Witan. The majores natu by whom Stephen was raised to the Crown simply translate the Ealdormen and Tldestan of earlier times. The Thegns and Knights who came together when William wore his crown are simply translated into the Barons and Chevaliers of the foreign tongue, and in the Barons at least we may see an old Teutonic name under a foreign guise. The Barons of England, a name made dear to us by the great struggle of ^ That the name Witan goes on in English, as long as we have any re- cords in English, no reader of the Chronicle needs to be told ; but the name also goes on in Latin. In Benedict, i. ii6, Henry the Second consults "archiprsesules et episcopos et comites et sa2nenliores regni sui." Again, in i. 169, he appoints a court officer; " Consilio episcoporum suorum et aliorum quorundam sapientum virorum regni sui." Lastly, in i. 207, he settles the number of the judges "per consilium sapientium regni sui." Here is the very phrase of .Alfred, *'mid minra witena gej>eahte." We lose much by having no English Chronicler of this time. CHANGES OP NOMENCLATUEE. 413 the thirteenth century, are but in truth those Beornas to ch. xxiv. whom ^thelstan, the Lord of Earls^ showed himself the giver of bracelets. As our national life lived on, so our national speech and the names of our national institutions lived on also. All that the presence of the stranger did was to clothe some of them with new shapes which, with those whose eyes do not pierce below the surface, have too often hidden the real unbroken life which lurks beneath. But the greatest practical change which the Normaa Conquest wrought in the nature of our national Assem- blies, that at least which must have made itself most seen and felt at the time, was one which could not take the form of written law. It was one which in the nature of things presently passed away. The greatest The of all changes at the time was the change which was becomeii involved in the Conquest itself, what we may roughly ^opj^aiT call the change from an assembly of Englishmen to an Assembly, assembly of Normans. Here again the change made itself; Gradual there was no need for formal legislation ; the circumstances nature of of one generation wrought the change as a matter of course, " ^"°''' and the circumstances of another generation did away with it. At no moment was there any law which shut out Englishmen from the work of administration or legislation in their own land. But, when a foreign King came in with a host of foreign followers^ when the highest offices and the greatest estates of England were bit by bit parted out among those foreign followers, the Assembly gradually changed into what was practically a Norman Assembly, an Assembly in which Normans were many and Englishmen few. Here again, not only was the change gradual, but Presence of there was nothing wonderful in its first beginnings. Eng- under ^^ lishmen had been used to see Danes under Cnut, to see ^^^*^^^^ Normans and Lotharingians under Eadward^ holding high offices in England, and therefore holding a high place 414 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. cH XXIV. among the assembled Witan of England. Under William the number of such strangers increased. Bishop William and Abbot Baldwin, Osbern the Sheriff and Robert the Armour-bearer, went on in their old places. And, step by stepj each of the classes which they represented was reinforced Gradual by strangers in far greater numbers. At the beginning of the foreign William's reign the inner circle of the Assembly, those element whose attendance was habitual, the Witan as distinguished under ^ WiUiam. from the landsitting men, were a body of Epglishmen, among whom a few places here and there were filled by strangers. By the end of William's reign, without any formal enactment, without any sudden change, they had become a body of strangers, among whom a few Englishmen Change kept their places here and there. Step by step, as high posts great^en^ fell vacant by death or deprivation, as great estates passed to new owners by confiscation or by marriage, Normans succeeded Englishmen at every change. Long before Wil- liam died. Bishop Wulfstan and Abbot JEthelsige, Wiggod of WaUingford and Thurkill of Warwick, must have formed a small minority among the mass of foreign and in the jDrelates and nobles. So it was with what we may call the body of the Outer circle. In the shout of " Yea, yea " with which the Assembly, assembled people of England decreed the election of Harold we may doubt whether a single French voice mingled. If any foreign accents were heard, they would be those of the kindred tongues of Flanders and of Denmark. Among the landsitting men at Salisbury, half, or more than half, must have been strangers, and the strangers must have felt themselves far more at home than the natives. Position of The Englishman who had contrived to keep a fragment of in the ^^^ estate as tenant of a Norman lord, and who now came Assembly, ^o plight his faith to the Norman King, the luckier King's Thegn who had no lord but King William himself, must have found themselves in an unwonted and irksome position. Their feelings must have been strange as they FOREIGN' MEMBERS OF THE ASSEMBLY. 415 stood in the presence of a King in whose train there was no oh. xxiv. English Earl and but one English Bishop ; they must have been yet more strange as the native who had kept some small fragment of his lands stood side by side with the foreigner who enjoyed the mass of what had once been his. None of This the the innovations which either law or custom gradually made Sactioal in the constitution of the Assembly could at the time have change, wrought so great a change in its spirit and working as its practical change from a gathering of Englishmen into a gathering of strangers. But here again time did its work. Without any formal enactment, without any change of estab- SUent lished custom, the Assembly of foreigners changed back backao-ain. again into an Assembly of Englishmen. As the distinction of Norman and Englishman was forgotten, places of honour and authority were again opened to men of Old-English birth, and the descendants of Norman conquerors and set- tlers gradually became as truly English as the men of Old-English birth themselves. Long before the time when our national Assemblies put on their modern form, they had again become national in the truest sense. The re- presentative of William of Warren might boast, even in the days of Edward the First, that? he held his lands by right of his sword and by the grant of William the Bastard. But a Parliament of Edward the First was as truly an The Par- English Assembly as a Gemot of his sainted namesake. Edward The change which had been silently made, had been j^^j.^™^ silently, but thoroughly, undone. English. One more point must be noticed with regard to the constitution of our national Assemblies in the Norman times. The three elements which now begin to be dis- tinguished, the Witan, the landsitting men, the occasional appearance of the citizens of London and Winchester, give us the germs of the three great elements in our later Parliaments, the peers, the knights of the shires, the citizens and burgesses. But one of the few recorded pieces 416 POLITICAL RESULTS OP THE KOEMAST CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. of William's legislation gave us, as we have already seen, The ec- another element. His ordinance for the separation of the Convoca- ecclesiastical and temporal courts was consistently carried tion springs ^^^ ^^ ^-^^ ^^^^ ^f ^j^g highest court of the realm by the out of ° "William's establishment of those ecclesiastical Synods which we now of prisdio'- find so often held alongside of the meetings with the Witan.^ tions. Here again we see the germ of an element in our later constitution, the germ of the ecclesiastical Convocation, which attends, as a kind of shadow, upon the temporal Origin of Parliament. The Three Estates of England begin to be Eslates.^^ distinguished ; but we also see the germ of that peculiar Twofold position of the English Lords Spiritual which makes position of . , . -l r i j. i j. the Lords them in a manner members oi two estates at once. Spuitual. wiien King William held his Gemot and Lanfranc directly after held his Synod, the prelates who took part in both assemblies were, then as now, members at once of the Upper House of Parliament and of the Upper House of Relation of Convocation. Notwithstanding William's legislation, the and Convo- temporal Assemblies of England never wholly lost their cation. ecclesiastical character. They have always contained eccle- siastical members, and they have never lost their right of dealing with ecclesiastical subjects. On the other hand, our ecclesiastical Assemblies, summoned along with the Parliament, designed to form part of the Parliament, exercising a strictly parliamentary power with regard to the temporalities of the clergy, have always kept something Compari- of a temporal character about them. In other lands the continental ^l^rgy, high and low, have commonly formed a distinct assemblies, estate in the national Assemblies, while their ecclesiastical Synods have been something wholly distinct. In England the ecclesiastical Synod is inseparable from the national Assembly; but the highest rank of the clergy appears in a twofold character in Parliament and in Convocation. The whole details of this very difficult subject it is not my ' See vol. iv. pp. 393, 690. THE LORDS SPIRITUAL. 417 business to unravel. They belong to a stage of consti- oh. xxiv. tutional history far later than that with which we are now concerned. But, if anybody asks why the Bishops and Abbots, having their place in the Synod, also kept their place in the Gemot, the answer, I think, is plain. To say Origin that the Bishops sit in Parliament simply because they preiatea' hold baronies runs counter to all the facts of our history. !?^*g™ They sit there simply as one of those classes of English- of Lords. men who have never lost their immemorial right. But it Effect of would be perfectly true to say that the fact that they held holdings, baronies enabled them to keep that immemorial right when, others lost it. When the sacrilegious ingenuity of Randolf Flambard subjected the prelates of England to all manner of hitherto unheard-of feudal exactions, his act also settled their place in the national Assembly. It secured that they should keep their seats in the Parliament of England, not, as in France and Sweden, as members of a distinct estate of the clergy, but in their old character of Witan of the land, as an integral part of the same House as the Earls and Barons of England. As no formal change took place in the constitution of No formal the national Assembly, so no formal change took place the power in its powers. In the meetings of the Witan all the affairs ^ *^^, j of the realm were discussed as of old. William, no less than constitu- Alfred, puts forth his laws by their advice and consent, and """"^^ ^^^' when his son Henry, in his charter, renews the laws of William Eadward as amended by his father, he speaks of his father's amendments as made by the same authority .^ The As- sembly of the nation still kept its ancient right of giving the nation a chief; Henry acknowledges that he owed his Crown to the election of the barons 5^ while Stephen of Stephen. ' See above, p. 168. ^ Cap. I (Select Charters, 96) ; " Sciatis me Dei misericordia et communi consiKo baronum totius regni Ajigliae ejusdem regni regem coronatum esse." VOL, V. EC 418 POLITICAL EESULTS OF THE NOEMAN CONQUEST. The As- sembly keeps its ancient powers. Its action in ecclesi- astical matters. The King's supremacy retained. characteristically uses a phrase, at once more ecclesiastical and more popular^ and rests his claim on the choice of the clergy and people.^ The settlement of the royal suc- cession, the bestowal of bishopricks and earldoms, the foreign policy of the realm, matters of war and peace and alliance, were all discussed in the Great Councils of Henry, just as in the days when alliance with Denmark was proposed on the motion of Godwine and rejected on the motion of Leofric.^ It is etill, as of old, by the advice of his Great Council that the King lays taxes on his people ; Henry even forestalls the constitutional language of later times, when he speaks, in words half feudal, half parliamentary, of the aid which his barons had granted to him.^ And^, though separate ecclesiastical courts and councils had arisen, the Witan of the land had not given up their ancient right of ordering the religious affairs of the nation, as well as its civil and military affaii-s. Whether it is Anselm who is to be restored by virtue of a compromise between himself and the King,* whether it is the decrees of an ecclesiastical Synod which need the confirmation of the civil power, in all these cases the King, as supreme governor of the Church, acts by the advice of the same great national Assembly by whose advice he acts in his character as supreme governor of the nation.^ No change in the constitutional powers of ^ See above, p. 247. ^ See vol. ii. pp. 91, 92. ^ See Stubbs, Constitutional History, i. 371. * The action of the Witan in this matter is strongly brought out by Wil- liam of Mahuesbury (v. 417), who tells us how, "coacto apud Londoniam magno episcoporum et prooerum abbatumque concilio, multa ecclesiasti- carum et secularium rerum ordinata negotia, decisa litigia.'' But Eadmer (91) and Florence (1107) — though Eadmer leaves out. the lay " proceres," who appear clearly enough in Florence — give us also the record of the debate, the opposition made by some (see above, p. 227), and the presence of the people as of old ; " Adstante multitudine, annuit rex et statuit." Cf. also the acts of the Witan in the dispute between the two Primates in Eadmer, 102. Of. Fior. Cont. 11 26. ' The decrees of Anselm's synod in 1108 are passed (see Florence in POWERS OF THE ASSEMBLY. 419 the Assembly can be inferred from the language either of ch. xxiv. public documents or of contemporary writers. As the Assembly of the days of Henry was by unbroken personal continuity the same body as the Assembly of the days of Eadward, so the old duties, the old powers, of the Assembly go on uninterruptedly, without any sign of change, either in the shape of legislative ordinance or of established custom. But with the powers of the Assembly, just as with its Practical constitution, while there was no formal change, the practical the'wort change was great. The power of the Norman Kings was'fS°^*^'^ a despotism, but no mistake can be greater than that which looks upon it as an avowed and naked despotism. It was the despotism of Augustus, not the despotism of Diocletian. English history is utterly misunderstood, if the great Assemblies in which the King wore his crown are looked on as assemblies of mere pageantry, as assemblies which came together to see King William or King Henry wear his crown, much as the nobles of France, in the days of their lowest degradation, crowded to see Lewis the Great or Lewis the Well-beloved put on and take off his clothes night and morning.^ The Assembly of the realm of Eng- land was a real Assembly. While the English saw in it English the continuation of the ancient Councils of their Kings, the Norman Normans might see in it the feudal court of their feudal ^^Pf=*' lord.^ But in either view, it was a real deliberative body, Assembly. in which the King listened to the advice of his counsellors, and issued his decrees only with their consent. Yet we anno) "in prassentia gloriosi regis Heinrici, assensu baronnm suonim." When WiUiam, Archbishop and Legate, heldhia synod in 1127 (Cont. Flor. in anno), " Rex Heinricus, anditis gestis assensum prsebuit, auctoritate regia et potestate concessit et confirmavit statuta concilii." The same Primate's synod of 1 1 29 came together only, as the Chronicler witnesses, " be Jies kynges rsed and be his leue." And we have seen (see above, p. 237) that by the King's leave also some of its canons were disobeyed. ' See Appendix MM. ^ See Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 357, 370. E e 2 420 POLITICAL EEStJLTS OF THE NOEMAN CONQUEST, CH. XXI7. Paramount iniiuence of the Kiug. The Grown strength- ened by frequent holding of Assem- blies. •Cessation of Assem- blies a sign of weakness. Ecclesias- tical ad- vances under Stephen. may feel sure that no motion disagreeable to the King was ever carried, that few motions agreeable to the King were thrown out. The old principle is still at work ; a strong King can guide the national Assembly at his pleasure ; a weak King is helpless in the face of it.' In all early times the constant holding of national Assemblies, the constant recognition of their authority, is a sign, not of the weakness of the Crown, but of its strength. As long as the great men of the realm habitually meet together under the eye of the King, they will remain the -great men of an united kingdom ; they will not grow, each man by himself, into sovereigns of separate principalities. It is under a strong King that the Assemblies are regularly held and are kept in vigorous action. It is under a weak King that they gradually fall into disuse. And the first three Kings after the Conquest were emphatically strong Kings. They had the strength of their own personal characters ; they had the strength which they inherited from their English predecessors ; they had the further strength which they drew from their special relations both towards the conquerors and the conquered.^ It was only in the fourth reign, under the anarchy of Stephen, when every man was his own King and his own law, that we hear complaints that the national Assemblies were no longer regularly held.^ In those days, so far from the national Council ruling the affairs of the Church and confirming the decrees of ecclesiastical Synods, ecclesiastical Synods, as the one shadow of law and order that was left, took upon them to rule the affairs of the nation and to dispose of the Crown of England.* But there was one of the ancient powers of the Witan which, during these reigns, was brought into increased ' See vol. i. p. 123. ' See Hen. Hunt. 223 h. ' See above, p. 384. * See above, pp. 305, 310, 326 JUDICIAL POWERS OF THE ASSEMBLY. 421 prominence, and out of which gradually grew some of the oh. xxiv. most important and lasting institutions of the country. In all early constitutions that distinction between judicial Legisla- and legislative powers with which we are so familiar is very judicial faintly drawn. We have seen that the Witan acted £^5^ ""' habitually as a court of justice on great occasions. Their guished in early times. powers m this way have lasted down to our own day. The jujiigigj appellate jurisdiction of that House of Parliament which powers of by lineal succession represents them is only now passing continued away from it ; and the ancient practice of impeachment by uament. one House before the other, though not likely to he again Eight of put in force in our days, has been acted upon within the J^^^^ present century, and has never been formally abolished. In the days of Eadward we saw the national Assembly constantly pronouncing and reversing sentences of out- lawry, and depriving men of the earldoms or the bishop- ricks which it had bestowed upon them.-^ All through Criminal the Norman reigns this power goes on. It was by the if the sentence of the Witan that Waltheof was sent to the ^^f'^'^'y under block and Roger of Hereford to his life-long imprison- WiUiam ment.^ It was before the same highest court of the realm that William of Saint Carilef and William of Eu were arraigned in the days of Rufus ; ^ it was before them that Henry accused Robert of Belesme and GeoflFrey of Clinton.* And, though we may believe that, in trials of this kind, the King's will commonly prevailed, yet the form at least of discussion and free speech went on. If the Conqueror Case of was driven himself to pronounce sentence on his offending brother and to seize him with his own hands, it was because the Assembly stood mute when it was called on to pro- 1 See vol. ii. pp. 151, 335' 336. 385, 396, 465, 498. " See vol. iv. pp. 589, 593. ^ For "WiUiam of Saiut Carilef, see the story in the Monasticon, i. 244 ; on William of Eu, see above, p. 247. * See Hen. Hunt. 220; Ord. Vit. 702 D, 841 A. 422 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NormaN CONQUEST. case of William ofEu. Stephen and the Bishops. Its civil and ecclesi- astical ju- risdiction. Effect of the prac- tice of summons. Growth of the inner Council. nounce sentence on so exalted a criminal.^ In one case we have the name of the counsellor by whom a barbarous punishment was suggested f in another we find the Witan of the realm pleading, and not unsuccessfully, with Kufus himself.^ In the first days of Stephen^ before anarchy had grown to its full height, it was at least with the outward show of the consent of the Assembly that^ in weak imita- tion of the Conqueror, he seized on the Bishops of Salisbury and Lincoln.* The Assembly too acted no less as a civil court between disputants in high place. Both under the Conqueror and under Henry we find the great national Council deciding disputes between rival prelates as to the temporalities of their respective sees and as to the boundaries of their respective dioceses.^ In all these matters the powers of the Great Council of the realm went on, in no way lessened by the coming of the foreign dynasty. If they are not actually strengthened^ they are at least brought into yet greater prominence than before. But all this while we have seen that the tendency of the time was to confine the national Assembly more and more to those who were actually summoned by the King, either personally or in a body. When this tendency was at work, it was natural to carry it still further. By a further de- velopement of the principle of the King's summons^ it was easy to establish what in modern language might be called a standing committee of the Assembly. Such a committee might be needed to deal both with business which could not well be delayed till the regular meetings, and with business which it was for the interest of the King to have handled by a smaller body. Our Kings must from the very beginning ' See vol. iv. p. 684. 2 Orderio (704 C), after recording the fate of William of Eu, adds, "Hoc nimirum Hugone Cestrensium comite pertulit instigante." => lb. 704 D. " Consultu sapientum [see above, p. 412] hujusmodi viris pepercit." * See above, p. 28S. « See above, p. 234. OEIGIN OP THE KINg's COURT. 423 have had, in practice if not in any definite legal shape, a oh. xxiv. smaller council for their more immediate advice, and for the shaping of proposals to be laid before the general Assembly. Under the Norman reigns this important practical element of government took a more distinct shape. We now begin The King's to hear of the King's Court, the Curia Begis, as something different from the general Assembly. But it differed only as the part differs from the whole ; it was in effect a com- mittee of the Assembly made up of the King's immediate officers and advisers. Before this body it was specially convenient to bring much of the judicial business of the general Assembly, those matters, above all, in which the King and the King's revenue were immediately interested. Thus gradually arose a tribunal whose growth was further Strength- strengthened by the working of other ideas, both Enghsh powers. and Norman. Both in the English and in the Norman system, the King, beside being the political head of the nation, was the personal lord of many men in the nation. As such, both the English King and the Norman Duke had his court for the decision of questions among his own immediate men. We may well believe that the functions The Then- of the ancient but somewhat shadowy TJienmgmannagemSt'^ gemdt &adi were transferred to the new Curia Regis of the Norman ^® Cuna Kings, if in fact the Curia Regis was not the Thening- ■mannagemSt under a foreign name. One thing at least is certain, that neither the general Council nor the smaller committee of it were institutions brought over ready made from Normandy. Even the novelties of the Norman reigns were things which grew up on English soil. They grew up indeed under Norman influences ; but they were not brought over as something new from the foreign land. The boundless wealth of the unbroken series of English Wealth of records before and after the Conquest stands out in con- aiTd lack of trast with the utter absence of records or laws in the Norman records. ' See Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. i86, 439. 424 POLITICAL EESULTS OF THE NOEMAN COISTQUEST. Strength- ening of the King's power by the King's Court. Compari- son with Germany under the Frankish Kings. Its effect on the centraliza- tion of justice. Norman duchy. There is neither likelihood nor positive evidence to lead us to believe that institutions which are so clearly the old institutions of the land modified by altered circumstances were brought over in any definite shape from a land which doubtless had institutions, but whose institu- tions can only be guessed at from the analogy of other lands. The King's Court, when once established, naturally be- came one of the chief means of strengthening the power of the King. The change was not unlike that which took place in the ancient Frankish realm^ as the institutions which drew their being from the strong power of the Christian Kings grew up alongside of the immemorial mass of heathen German usage.^ The Cvna Regis was in its origin a committee of the Witenagemot. Practically it was the King's Court, acting in the King's name and for the King's interest, in a way in which the Witenagemot never had acted. Above all, it brought the King's power, in his character of what lawyers call the fountain of justice, home to every man in the land, in a way in which it had never been brought home before. It is to this institution, more than to any other one cause, that we may ascribe that centralization of the administration of justice which is so marked a feature of English law. But it did even more than this. Out of the Cima Begis all the administrative institutions of the kingdom seem to have sprung. The Norman reigns set up, alongside of the solid basis of Old- English local freedom, a- vigour of central administration which was before unknown. To reconcile English freedom with Norman strength has been the great political problem for all later ages. Now it is not too much to say that, in the King's Court, which had first been the representative of strength as opposed to freedom, the means were found for ' See the Chapter, " Die Eeformen der christlich-fraukischeu Zeit," in Erunner's Entstehung der Schwurgerichte, p. 60. OFFSHOOTS OF THE KING S COURT. 425 reconciling the two. All the later institutions, judicial oh. xxiv. and administrative, by which the Crown first controlled the f*^ '"°''^'' •' mgs on our people^ and by which the people have afterwards controlled later con- the Crown, are branches of the Curia Regis. Every court . „ ' where law or equity is administered in the King's name "f 'aw and „ . equity is a fragment of the King's Court of Norman times. So spring again, another side of this inner council of the King . . . . . . . The Privy survives in the Privy Council. And it is instructive to see Council. how, in the history of institutions, the same causes ever produce the same effects. The Gloria Eegis was a fraction of the Witenagemot, certain members of the Witenagemot specially summoned for certain purposes. One side or one fraction of the Curia Regis became the Privy Council, the body of the King's special advisers in the government of his realm. Modern experience has shown that the whole Privy Council was too large a body for this purpose. It The has therefore handed over its political functions to a small number of its own members, that Cabinet Council, so all- important in practical politics, but which has no being in the eye of the written law. The Cabinet has been formed out of the Privy Council by exactly the same process by which the Curia Regis and the later Parliament were formed out of the Witenagemot. Certain members Working of the body are specially summoned ; those who are not practice of specially summoned stay away. No Act of Parliament su^^on^- defines the Cabinet, but it is perfectly well known that the political functions of a Privy Councillor who is not a member of the Cabinet have vanished as utterly as the primitive right of the ordinary freeman to appear un- summoned in the general Assembly of the nation. But, Popular by another silent revolutiouj this inner body of all^ this ai^gygfem. wheel within so many wheels, which might have been thought to be the very innermost sanctuary of royal power, has become the means by which the royal power is exercised in obedience to the popular will. The question who, among 426 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NOEMAN CONQUEST. CH. XXIV. the King's nominal councillors, shall be charged with the practical exercise of the royal power, no longer depends on the will of the sovereign. The question who shall take their places in the innermost Council of all, is now, practically though informally, decided by the voice of the 1 868, representatives of the people ; on two memorable occasions ^^'''^' in very recent times it has been decided by the direct vote The old of the people itself .^ The cycle has come round ; the brought ordinary freeman can no longer come in person to clash new'^sha'^e ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^ -""^^^^ ^^® shout of Yea, yea, or Nay, nay ; but he can, in a manner no less effectual, help determine, not only who shall make the laws by which the Crown itself is bound, but by whom the powers which the law still gives to the Crown shall be virtually exercised. Increased The increased administrative strength which the Crown of ttie great became possessed of under the Norman Kings, and, above officers of g^ji jt^q fiscal Spirit in which the powers of the Crown were state and ' ^ ^ household, exercised, helped to clothe the King's great officers, both officers of the state and officers of the royal household, with an importance which tbey never before possessed. Their We have noticed long ago that, in earlier times, the great position in „. .,, tit • i earlier officers of the Kmg s household were, in accordance with '™'^^' the principle of the Comitahis, men of high rank and im- portance, but that they did not hold the first place in rank and importance.^ We saw that, just as at the present day no man who has a chance of high political office will stoop to court office, so, in its measure, it was then. The King's Stallers were men high in trust, often high in command ; but they did not, either in rank or power, stand alongside even of an ordinary Earl or Bishop, much less of an Earl of the West-Saxons or of the Northumbrians in the days of Eadward. Under the Norman Kings, in accordance with ' I have said more on this matter in the International Eeview, May, I S75. * See vol. i. p. 94. OFFICEES OF STATE AND HOUSEHOLD. 427 the increased power of the Crown and the increased unity oh. xxiv. of the kingdom, all this has turned about. Earls and Lessening Bishops, representatives of local independence, sink in gtrictiy their directly official character. Their importance is now "^"^^ ^^\ *^ ■*■ portance of wholly a corporate importance, as members of the Great Earls and Council or the Parliament. Earls like Godwine, Leofric, and Siward are no longer heard of. It is laid down as an axiom that no one man in the realm shall be strong enough to resist the King.^ While Earls and Bishops sink in im- portance, the ministers of the King, his personal advisers, the personal agents of his will, rise in importance. The growth of the great officers of state is wrapped in a Innovation good deal of obscurity. This is owing, exactly as in the ^^j^ case of the Great Council itself, to the lack of any distinct l^^l^ *" • or direct statements, and to the vague way in which titles ofaces are used. But, besides mere confusion of language, there regard to can be no doubt that, in this matter also, the Norman ^^ '°^ period was a period of transition, and it was perhaps in this matter more than in any other that it was a period of distinct innovation. We hear of high officers with titles hitherto unknown; we see officers whom we have before heard of rise into an importance which never before be- longed to them. And it is not wonderful if we see more direct traces of Norman influence in the composition of the King's court and household than in any other of the insti- tutions of the kingdom. Eadward, as we have seen, was, even under the rule of Godwine and Harold, allowed to surround himself with Norman officers of his household, some of them bearing Norman titles.^ To indulge him in matters of this kind was deemed harmless, as long as the real rule of the kingdom was in the hands of the two great West-Saxon Earls. Under the Norman Kings, it was only ' Will. Malms, iv. 306. "Bxperti quamlibet nobilem, quamlibet coa- sertam manum, nihil adversua regem Anglise posse proficere." ' Seevol. ii. p. 328. 428 POLITICAL RESULTS OP THE NOEMA-N CONQUEST. CH. xsiv. natural that the constitution of the King's own household should be the point in which the most direct importation Analogies of Norman usage can be seen. The great officers of the Fianldsh household were much the same under the Old-Enghsh kingdoms. g;jj^g,g ^^ ^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^gj, ^j^g Frankish Kings and Emperors.i In England we had the High- Reeve of the King's household, his Dish-Thegn, his Cup-Bearer, and his Staller or Stallers. With bearers of the last office we have been familiar throughout our history, and the others may be traced, though with less frequency, through our ancient laws and annals. Officers answering to these, with some slight modification in their offices, passed from the courts of the Frankish Emperors and Kings to those Offices of the Norman Dukes. Under the Empire, four great the Elec- offices of the royal household became attached to the four torates. j^y electorates, and the rule that the Electors of the King should be officers of his household was deemed so inflexible that, when new electorates were founded, new offices of the household were devised for them.^ Here we see the greatest developement of a tendency which, under the Norman rule, Effect of began to work in England also. When offices of the t n p n ^rp- ditary cha- royal household became hereditary, when they became "Offices °^ hereditary in the houses of the greatest princes of the Empire, they naturally became, as offices of the household, altogether nominal or formal. Even when the King of Bohemia and the Emperor were not the same person, the Emperor could not be always served by the King of Bohemia at his daily meals. The time when these offices conferred actual power passed away as the offices them- selves rose in greatness ; the Electors were powerful, but their power did not arise from their offices in the Imperial ' See Appendix 00. " On the foundation of the office of Arch-treasurer of the Empire, borne first by the Elector Palatine and then by the Elector of Brunswick-Liineburg, see Putter, lustitutiones Juris Publici Germanioi, 71, 'J2; Zopfl, Geschichte der deutschen Eechsinstitute, 210. OFFICES BECOME HEEEBITAET. 429 household. In the like sort, in the lowlier court of the ch. xxiv. Dukes of the Normans, the great offices of the household Offices ° hereditary- had begun to be hereditary before the Conquest of Eng- in Nor- land, and the same principle took root in England also under sooner her Norman Kings. Up to that time there is nothing g^Sand to show that any office of the royal household, any more than any earldom, or than the Crown itself, passed as a matter of right from father to son. Such an here- ditary transmission of office would have been quite incon- sistent with all the political notions of our forefathers. Butj as feudal ideas grew and strengthened imder the Norman reigns, the hereditary principle, so favoured by all feudal doctrines, was not imnaturally^ after the precedent of Normandy^ applied to these offices also. Stewardship, constableshipj butlership, chamberlainship, all become fixed in particular families. But, as the offices become hereditary, the policy of the Kings took care that the offices them- selves should lose much or all of their ancient powers. There was no fear of an English Steward or Constable Danger of growing into the position of a German Elector ; still, it ^^ere in might have been dangerous to allow hereditary officers I'^editary to keep the same powers which might be safely trusted to officers whom the King could appoint or remove at pleasure. As therefore the older offices became hereditarj'-, new offices sprang up by their side, which gradually drew to themselves most of the powers of the older ones. In History one case, one of these secondary offices itself became here- ctamber- ditary, and remains hereditary still. Normandy had an '^'"^hip. hereditary Chamberlain before the Conquest of England. ^ England, besides the Lord High Chamberlain of ordinary times, has still an hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain who appears only on a few specially solemn occasions. But Eng- The land has also an hereditary Earl Marshal, and the Marshal and^the * — whose old Teutonic name came over to us disguised in Marshal. ' Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 344. 430 POLITICAL EESULTS OF THE NOEMAN CONQUEST. CH. XXIV. a French shape — was one of the officers of the secondary- order who arose alongside of the more ancient Constable. Amid this constant shifting of the powers of different officers, and these constant confusions in the titles used to describe them, three officers of great importance gradually emerge during the time with which we are now dealing. The The person who held the chief power after the King him- self, who is sometimes spoken of in a pointed way as second to the King,^ was in those days the Justiciar. Yet the growth of the office can be traced only with great difficulty. As usual, its holder has no one distinct title; he is spoken of in various ways, which are descriptions Lax use of rather than titles. Such lax ways of speaking, which may fierhaps puzzle historians of some distant age, are common among ourselves. We far more commonly speak of the Prime Minister or the Premier than of the First Lord of the Treasury ; and even this last more formal title is but an abridged description of the person who ranks first among the Commissioners for executing the office of Lord High Treasurer. It is therefore in no way won- derful if the officers whom, by a faint analogy, we may call the Prime Ministers of the Norman Kings are spoken of by more names than one. On these great officers, as their functions were gradually defined, the title of Justiciar Use of the or Chief Justiciar definitely settled. The name is given ticiar. ^7 writers a little later to the men who acted by the Conqueror's commission during his absences on thecontinent, and also to those who presided in his name in great judicial courts even when he was in England. In this sense we find it vaguely applied to William of Warren and Richard of Bienfaite, and to the more famous Odo of Bayeus, Geoffrey of Coutances, and Lanfranc himself.^ But it does not seem that any definite or permanent office was ' See above, p. 217. ' See vol. iv. p. 580, and Stubba, Const. Hist. i. 346. THE JUSTICIAR. 431 marked out by the name in the days of the Conqueror, oh. xxiv. Under William Rufus, at the beginning of his reign, we have seen William of Saint Carilef supplanting Odo as the King's chief minister ; ^ and both of these are spoken of in the same vague way as those who are called Justiciars under the Conqueror. It is with Randolf Flambard that The office the definite office seems first to stand distinctly out. definite And it has been suggested, with every show of likeli- ^* ^'^™" hood, that Rufus saw the danger of entrusting great powers to men in the position of the Bishops of Bayeux or Durham, and that he thought it safer to seek his ministers among men of his own making, who should owe their greatness to himself personally. Flambard rose in the end to the same place as William of Saint Carilef, and the beginnings of William of Saint Carilef were not so very unlike those of Flambard. Both had risen from the Con- queror's chapel to his council-board. But Rufus found William of Saint Carilef in possession of greatness, while the greatness of Flambard was his own gift. Flambard himself is spoken of in various vague ways, but there is witness enough to show that the chief judicial power was in his hands. Under Henry the same place is held Roger of by his chaplain, the famous Roger, whom we have seen rise to the see of Salisbury, as Flambard rose to the see of Durham. Under him the office and title of Chief Justiciar become more distinct. He is called " second after the King," and it is plain that the administration of the kingdom was chiefly in his hands, and that the system of administration which was brought to perfection in Henry's reign was chiefly his work. Henry, like Rufus, found it to his in- terest to vest these great powers only in a man of his own making, a clerk who might grow into a Bishop. Under Barons the second Henry we find the office held no longer by a under'*"^^ clerk, but by a baron. According to one account, the Henry the ' See above, p. 76. 432 POLITICAL EESULTS OV THE NOEMAN" CONQUEST. OH. XXIV. office was one wliich had reached its highest dignity in its own person. In the last days of Stephen, so we are told, Henry, Duke of the Normans and adopted heir of England, had not scorned to act as Justiciar of the kingdom which was soon to be his own.^ At all events the lay Justiciars of Henry's reign stand out as a distinct class from the clerical Justiciars both of earlier times and of the reign of his son. Eandolf of Foremost in this time is the famous Randolf of Glanville. „. , ,' He was the writer of our first law-book which bears the His legal treatise. name of a personal author, a book which marks the begin- ning of one sera in our law, as the so-called Laws of Henry the First mark the end of an earlier sera. The Justiciar, chief administrator of the law, chief representative of the King in absence, drawing to himself all the important func- tions of the older Steward, was, while his office lasted, the most powerful subject in the realm. But, even under Henry the First, the chief Justiciar was not the only Justiciar. Other The title is borne by a variety of smaller officers ; ^ and besides the every officer who, from that day till now, has any share in administering the law by the King's commission, from a Chief Justice of England to a Justice of the Peace in the smallest borough, may look on himself as having about him some shred of the mantle of Roger of Salisbury and Ran- dolf of Glanville. But the office itself has wholly vanished ; the next great officer of those times, then lower in power and rank than the Justiciar, has outshone him and outlived him, and abides, with increased rather than lessened dignity, in our own day. The This officer was the Chancellor. He first appears in ' England by that name in the reign of Eadward,^ but his name and office had been familiar on the continent since the days of the first Karliugs.* Indeed his office, under ' See above, p. 329, and Brunner, Entstehung der Schwurgerichte, 135. ^ See Sfcubbs, Const. Hist. i. 349. ' See vol. ii. p. 359. ' See Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 352. THE CHANCELLOR. 433 some title or other, must have been a matter of necessity oh. xxiv. everywhere. The Lord High Chancellor of later times, Growth of the highest Judge in equity, the Speaker of the House of Lords, the proverbial keeper of the King's consciencCj arose from more lowly beginnings than any other of the great ofEeers of state. In his first beginnings, if the King^s conscience was in his keeping, it was in his character as King's chaplain, head of the King's chaplains, head of a trained body of men by whom all letters, writs, and aceountSj in all branches of the King's immediate administration, were written and kept. The lowly beginnings of the office are marked by the name being freely applied to other officers who were not in the royal service. The King had his Chancellor, as he had his Steward, or any other officer of his court or household. But the Bishop had his Chancellor other also, and the name has attached itself to two wholly dis- j^j.^ tinct ecclesiastical officers, to the Chancellor of the diocese, the Judge of the Bishop's court, and to the Chancellor of the church, whose place was to stand at the head of education in the cathedral church and in the diocese.' Out of this last office grew another kind of Chancellor, the Chancellors of the Universities, whose office also from lowly beginnings has risen in dignity, if not in power, almost to a level with the royal Chancellor himself But the greatness of the Chancellor belongs to a later time than that with which we are now dealing. The days The Chan- when the chancellorship could add fresh dignity to a derk on Bishop, or even to a Primate of all England, were yet to ^^y™™°" come. The Chancellor of the Norman reigns is a church- man, who looks forward to a bishoprick as the reward of his services ; but it is thought unworthy of a Bishop to accept, or even to keep, a post so much beneath his rank. It marks the difference between the position of the Justiciar and that of the Chancellor, that Roger of Salisbury, ' He holds the same office which Adelard held at Waltham; seevol.ii.p.443. VOL V. !■ f 434 POLITICAL RESULTS OP THE NOEMAN CONQUEST. The Hoarder or Treasurer. The older offices die away or become Survival of the secondary offices. not yet Bishop or Justiciar, held the office of Chancellor, but that, when he was promoted to the higher posts, the lower office was found in the hands of his son.^ Another officer who, in after times, rose into high rank and dignity is now also seen growing into importance, though into far less importance than in after times. The King's "Hoarder" was as old as the King's " hoard." ^ Under the Norman reigns he appears under the Latin title of Treasurer ; and, in accordance with the fiscal spirit of the Norman administration, he grows into increased im- portance. But the Treasurer, like the Chancellor, of these times is a small person compared with the Lord High Treasurer of after days. In comparing all these great offices, we see that their history follows one general law. The court officers, if they rise in dignity, sink in power. Their offices die out altogether, or are changed into here- ditary honours, with merely nominal or occasional func- tions. Their real powers pass away to the secondary class of officers, those whose duties were more practical and more constant ; and these last grew into the highest offices of the realm, offices so high that most of them now only survive in a fragmentary state. The Lord High Constable has passed away; the Lord Great Chamberlain, the Lord High Steward, the Earl Marshal, appear only from time to time. And, in the cases of the Steward and the Chamber- lain, other court offices bearing the same titles have sprung up beside or below them. But the Chancellor still keeps his greatness ; and, though the Justiciar and the Treasurer have been broken up into small fragments, they may be thought to survive in persons of no less importance than the Chief Justice of England and the First Lord of the Treasury. ' See above, p. 287, and Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 353. ' See Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 353. The "Hordere," as a monastic officer, appears rathe Peterborough Chronicle, 1131. THE TEEASUEBE. 435 The mention of the Treasurer leads at once to an insti- ch. xxiv. tution which grew into special importance in the Norman reigns, reigns when the exacting of money seemed to have hecome the chief business of government and the chief duty of its officers. The Old-English Kings had their The Hoard hoard, and the hoard under its Hoarder must always have chequer been a special department of administration. But it is now that, under a new name, it springs into new promi- nence. The malignant genius of Flambard had devised all Promi- manner of new pecuniary rights on the part of the Crown, therevenue and the royal revenue, its management and its increase, '° *^® '^™' "^ ^ ^ man reigns. became the chief matter for thought on the part of the King and his officers. While the Sheriffs, local officers who were constantly before the eyes of the whole people in every part of the kingdom, still kept their English title, the hoard into which they had to make so many payments, a hoard which they represented in the eyes of the mass of the peoplCj naturally took new names in the mouths of the strangers who had its chief management. It became New names fiscus or thesaurus, and it afterwards came to bear a name Hoard ■ fis- which must at first have been given to it in playful mood, ''^^' ° ... '■"*> scac- that. of Scaccarmm or Exchequer. No really serious origin caHum. can be assisrned to a name drawn from the accident that 5"^° °^ ^ ^ ^ the name the table at which the business of the treasury was done Exchequer. was covered with a party-coloured cloth which suggested the notion of a chess-board. The Exchequer is^ in strictness, the table itself ; but the name was easily transferred to the institution of which the table was the chief feature.^ The Origin of origin of the Exchequer, like that of the other institutions tio^™^ of the Norman period, is simple enough. It is an Old- English institution, one of those institutions which must be found under any settled government, but it was modi- fied and developed under foreign rule, and, like so many other things, it was called by a foreign name. The ' See Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 377. P f 3 436 POLITICAL EESULTS OF THE NOEMAN COIfQUEST. CH. XXIV. latest and deepest researches into English constitutional Not history have east aside the dream of some English and brought •' ... over from some foreign writers, that the Exchequer was an institution orman y. ^j^^jj^. fQj.gjg^ ^q England, and was brought over as a The complete novelty from Normandy.' There is nothing to E^c™equer ®^°^ ^^^^ ^'^^ Norman Exchequer, the Exchequer which not older jj^d its seat at Caen, was, even under that name, older than than the English, the Exchequer of England. Among the records of each which remain, records of the highest value, which in Eng- land begin to help us in the later days of Henry the First, the oldest English rolls are older than any to be found in Normandy.^ This might indeed be the result of accident ; but there is absolutely nothing to show that the institution was borrowed from Normandy, and its English origin was not forgotten in the days of Henry Both Ez- the Second.^ The Norman Dukes must have had their oro-anized hoard or treasure no less than the English Kings ; and the hy Bishop ii]j;elihood of the case is, that the earlier and ruder institu- -Koger. ' tions of both countries were wrought into the same more fully developed form by the organizing genius of Henry's great minister Roger. In England the Exchequer appears as one branch of the King's Court, a branch which in later times was to be again divided into a department of ad- Division ministration and a court of lav\'. The judicial functions chequer^' °^ ^^ Exchequer grew out of its financial functions. The into an court, as distinguished from the administrative depart- adnunistra- ... tive and a ment, came into being in order to try causes in which branch. the King had an interest. Under the Norman reigns, the Barons of the Exchequer, so called in the same vague way as so many other royal officers, consisted of the great officers of state, among whom naturally were the Treasurer, the Chancellor, as the keeper of all classes of records, and the president of the whole body, the Justiciar. Of this ' See Appendix PP. ^ See Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 438. ^ See Appendix PP. THE EXCHEQUER. 437 institution in its fully developed form we get our first ch. xxiv. glimpses under Henry and his minister Roger. A full The " Dia- and detailed aecountj setting before us the whole working scaccario." of the Exchequer in the days of Henry's grandson, is due to Roger's grandson or great-nephew, Richard, Treasurer and Bishop of London, and successor in his financial office of his father Richard Bishop of Ely, whom we have heard of in the reign of Stephen.^ The descendants and kinsfolk Monopoly OT OTnCGS of the poor clerk of Caen who so cleverly drew on himself ty Roger's the notice of the iEtheling^ had grown into a family which '°^ ° ' seems to have possessed hereditary administrative ability, and which certainly enjoyed something like a monopoly of the higher administrative offices.^ Even merit however such as the members of this family Purchase n • -in 1 J of offices. seem really to have possessed was not of itself enough to raise them to the high places of the state. In that age, when the Exchequer was the most important branch of government, that evil system of purchase which, banished from the civil administration, still clings * so obstinately to the less intellectual departments of our standing army, was in full force in every branch of the piiblic service. The Treasurer Richard himself had bought his treasurer- ship,^ and the earliest roll of the Exchequer shows us the then Chancellor Geoffrey Rufus as owing a vast sum for his possession of the great seal.'' Smaller posts in the administration of justice, as well as posts in the court and household, were freely sold ; at all events money was freely taken from those who were appointed to them. It '■ See Appendix PP. 2 See the story in William of Newburgh referred to in p. 217. 3 On this official family see Stubbs, Preface to Benedict, i. lix. » I had used a pa«t tense, but the Parliamentary session of 1875 has made me change it back into the presem. " See Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 384. ' Eot. Pip. Hen. I. 140. " Cancellarius debet m.m.m. et vi. li. et xiii. s. et iiii. de pro sigillo." 438 ■ POLITICAL EESULTS OF THE NOEMAN CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. does not necessarily follow that officers wlio paid for their posts would be more corrupt and oppressive than those Effects of who owed them solely to the royal favour. In the old the French ^tate of things in France, the property which various Parlia- magistrates had in their purchased offices really helped to strengthen that spirit of independence in the judicial body which outlived every other trace of freedom. This effiict however would hardly have followed under the ruder In wliat fiscal system of our Norman Kings. A distinction may offices perhaps be drawn between the two cases. It is clear that •n-ere sold. giu^Qg^ every act of the Crown was turned into a means of increasing the revenue of the Crown ; still the entries do not so much give us the idea that offices and favours were in the strictest sense sold, as that those who sought for offices and needed favours had no chance of getting them without contributing to the royal hoard. No source of income indeed seems to have come amiss to a Norman Justice not King. Justice itself, if it was not in the strictest sense without sold, that is, if it was not made a matter of mere briberj^^ payment, ^^g ^^ gjjy j.^^g jjq^ ^q |jg j^j^^ without paying for it. It was something if, when two opposing claimants strove to outbid one another, the one who failed in his suit had the luck to get his money back again. Dut-es of The various sources from which the roj^al Exchequer ' was filled form an easy transition from the central to the loca;l administration of those times. At an earlier sta^e of o our history, we found a French poet of the thirteenth century, when he wished to set forth the supposed covetous- ness and extortion of Harold, describing him as sitting at His office the Exchequer like a Sheriff.^ The reeve of the shire, the the begin- immediate officer of the King in the shire, had doubtless ""'°' been, like smaller reeves, a fiscal officer from the begin- ning. But in these reigns the fiscal side of the office ' See vol. iii. p. 629. THE SHERIFFS. 439 overshadows every other. It was the Sheriff who had to ch, xxiv. see to the King's profit and his own in every corner of his shire, and in almost every transaction that went on in it. He was the collector of the King's dues of every kind. Those different kinds were endless, and for all he had to account to the royal Exchequer. Both the ancient sources of income which belonged to the King strictly in his character of an English King, and the new kinds of profit which bad come in with the new-fangled feudal devieesj all passed through the hands of the Sheriff. The The Sheriff older sources of income were, according to the later use of King's an ancient English word, farmed ^ by the Sheriff. The ^^^^' profits of the King's land — once the Folkland — in the shire, his various dues and rights in kind and in money, were commuted for a fixed sum, the farm of the shire, with regard to which the Sheriff stood much in the position of a Roman publican.^ All that was to be paid, and all that was to be received, in the King's name within his shire passed through his hands. He paid into the Exchequer the fixed yearly sum which formed the farm of the shirCj while he himself, in his character of publican, bore any loss and profited by any excess. And, besides these sources of income, many of which belonged to the King in that character of land-owner in which he had supplanted the nation, there was the great tax due to him more strictly in his character as sovereign or chief of the nation. This was the Danegeld, that name expressive of The public dislike, which had now become the formal name for what in earlier times had been the EeregeU? Six shillings on every hide of land was the regular amount, as fixed by the last taxation of the Conqueror,* the taxation which the great Survey had enabled the Conqueror to levy with a > On the Old-English feorm, see vol. i. p. 360, 2 See Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 381. = See toI. ii. p. 574. ♦ See vol. iv. pp. 685, 696, and Appendix QQ. 440 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NOBMAN CONQUEST. CH. XXIV. regularity and certainty unknown before. But the equal pressure of the tax was modified by various exemptions/ and this source of royal revenue also was farmed by the Sheriff, and accounted for by the payment of a fixed sum Analogy to the Exchequer. With regard then to these two main Eoman sources of roval revenue^ the Sheriffs of the first half of pabUcani. ^^^ twelfth century lay under exactly the same tempta- tions to extortion as their Roman forerunners in earlier times or as the French farmers-general in later times. Aids from And along with the Danegeld, a tax which was strictly a tax on the land^ came the aids of the towns, an impost which has been held to be in effect the Danegeld levied on those parts of the kingdom to which the reckoning by hides of land could not apply. All these sources of in- come, though they might have been increased and altered in various ways, still had their roots in the ancient consti- Newfeudal tution of the kingdom. But along with them came those 30UrC63 of income. new-fangled sources of income which arose out of the new- fangled feudal tenures. These were the profits which came in to the King in his character of feudal lord, the reliefs^ the escheats, the aids, and the yet baser profits of ward- ship and marriage. All these things, which had been made into means of so much arbitrary oppression under Rufus, Henry was pledged by his charter, not indeed to abolish, but to regulate in some more reasonable fashion.^ And the promise was so far fulfilled, that we can see some approaches to a regular rating under Henry the First, which put on a more distinct form under Henry the Witness of Second. And, mixed up with all these dues, ancient and Pipe Roll, modern, we find, in the one roll of Henrj^ the First, as in ^'3°' later rolls, a crowd of nondescript payments which show how carefully the royal officers looked into the affairs of every man, and how narrowly they watched after any damage done in any way to the royal interests. In the ' See Appendix QQ. = See above, pp. i68, 374. A'ARIOUS SOUECES OP EEVENUE. 441 second page of the record we find Restold Sheriff of oh. xxiv. Oxfordshire owing seven pounds ten shillings on account of the King's woods, which were so destroyed that no profit could be had of them. He owes other sums, because, in the King's absence beyond sea^ he had unjustly taken certain moneys from the churls and burgesses of the King's own manors, and because he had paid nothing for the land of Roger Mauduit which he had held in wardship.^ On this last charge he was at the King's mercy. Hugh Talemasche has to account for moneys paid to John of Saint John without the King's order.- Gospatric of Newcastle owes twenty marks for being allowed to purge himself by oath instead of undergoing the ordeal.' Roger the son of Elyon has to make his composition for conceal- ing a robber J* and, an entry of no small importance in Example of the j udge every point of view, the judges and jurors of Yorkshire and jurors pay one hundred pounds for the privilege of being no °^^^^°^ longer judges or jurors.^ There is enough in these instances, and in a crowd of others in Domesday and elsewhere, to show that it was by no means a needless promise, when Stephen, in his second charter^ bound himself, among other measures of ' Eot. Pip. Hen. I. 2. "Eestoldus . . . debet vii. li. et x. a. quoqne anno pro nemoribus regis qu£e adeo destructa sunt quod nuUu.s vicus potest inde reddere firmam. Et idem debet xi.li. et iii.s. et iv.d. de firma terrse Eogeri Maledocti, quia habuit in custodia et niohil inde reddidit. Et inde. est in misericordia regis. Et idem debet u. et xv. li. xv. s. et viii. d. quas in- juste abstulit villanis et burgensibus de propriis maneriis Eegis, postquam rex mare transivit." " Eot. Pip. p. 3. "Hugo Talemasche reddit compotum de iv. li. et xiii. s. et iv.d. pro denariis quos liberavit Johanni de sancto Johanne sine praecepto regis." ^ lb. 35. "Gospatric de Novo Castello debet xx. marcaa ut purgaret se de judicio ferri per sacramentum." ■* lb. 73. "Eogerus filiam Elyon scutellarius reddit compotum de vii. marois aigenti pro latrone quem celavit." •'■ lb. 34. " Judices et juratores Eboraciscire debent c.li. ut non amplius ,sint judices nee juratores." 442 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. OH. XXIV. reform, to put an end to the evil deeds of the Sheriffs.^ But the entry about the Yorkshire judges and jurors has Centraliza- a deeper importance. It points to the change which was justice; gradually taking place in the judicial administration of oFthe local ^^^ country, a change by which the powers of the ancient Courts and local courts of the shire and the hundred were gradually ening of weakening, and the central powers of the King's Court Co^urts"^^ were gradually increasing. The change has worked in the Its final end for good. The periodical visits of Judges immediately ^°° ,. commissioned by the Crown to the several shires, the care results. •' ' taken to keep those Judges free from all local influences, the advantage thus given to every corner of the kingdom of having the cases which arise in it tried vrithin the district, but by the highest judicial ability that the king- dom can supply, — all this is, in its modern developement, one of the brightest features of our English law. But the early steps of the process which led to it must have seemed to the men of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a vexatious interference with the ancient customs of the land. And there can be little doubt that, here as elsewhere, the desire to increase the power, and above all, to increase the revenue of the Crown, was mixed up with that sincere desire to maintain the peace of the land for which we cannot refuse to give credit both to the Conqueror and to his youngest son. Beginning This transfer of power from the local to the central change tribunal was, like the other changes of this time, a further before the caj-j-ying out of a tendency which was at work before the Conquest. J o J Judicial Conquest. In fact, as soon as there was any central the'English government at all, it followed as a matter of course that ^^g^- the common King should take to himself the place of chief judge throughout his dominions. The authority of the ' Select Charters, 115. " Omnes esactiones et injustitias et mesclieningas, sive per viceoomites vel per alios quoslibet male inductas, funditus exstirpo." Cf. vol. iv, p. 218, note 2. CENTRALIZATION OF JUSTICE. 443 local assemblies had been largely undermined by a system oh. xxtv. of immunities and exemptions of which we shall have to say more, and it was further broken down by the practice of sending special royal commissioners, either to displace the ancient presidents of the local courts or to act as a check upon them. The Laws of Cnut, which Cases re- doubtless do not ordain anything new, but simply con- tt,g j^^g . firm what had become the existing practice, set forth ^^ess of the most ancient pleas of the Crown, those classes of of Cnut. offences which were specially reserved to be dealt with in the King's name. Different customs on this head had grown up in Wessex and in the Denalagu ; but in both districts the recorded cases take in, besides certain offences against person and property, those matters in which the King's dignity seemed to be specially touched. Such were breach of the royal protection^ and failure to appear when summoned to the^r^.^ Amongst these crimes it is to be noted that murder is not reckoned. The old Teutonic Teutonic feeling about the vengeance of the kin and the wergild as to murder, its substitute was doubtless still too strong for the slaying of a member of the commonwealth to be as yet treated purely as an offence done against the commonwealth and its chief. But, under the Norman reigns, we find that the Extension list of offences reserved for the King's jurisdiction, and °f ^-^^ ^*' therefore for the King's profitj was widely extended,^ and '^'^T™!! among them one form at least of manslaying holds a pro- Normans. minent place. The King had the profits of all murders; that Mm-der in is, in the language of those days, he received the fines due ^igj^j ^^^^^^ from the hundred when a man was found slain and the slayer was not forthcoming. In the first days of the Conquest, when many Normans fell victims to the vengeance of the conquered^ it had been found needful to make special pro- * See Laws of Cnut, ii. 12. The "gerihta J>e se cyning Sh ofer ealle men on West-Saxen" are defined as "mund-bTJce and ham-sflcne, forstal and flymena-fyrmSe, and fyrd-wite." Cf Ine's Laws, 51. ' See Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 382. 444 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. OH. XXIV. Law of Euglisluy. Change as the fusion of races went on. Pleas of the Crown tried in the local courts by vision for the safety of the King's foreign followers.^ Out of this grew the law of Englishry, one of the most singular of the immediate results of the Conquest^ the law by which a man found killed was held to be a Fi-enchmanj and the hundred was made responsible under this special law, unless evidence could be brought to show that the slain man was an Englishman. As the fusion of the two races went on, it became impossible to determine the ancestry of the slain man, and moreover his ancestry ceased to be of any consequence. Every such case now counted as murder, and brought in the fine to the King, unless indeed it could be sho\^Ti that the slain man was one of that servile class among whom it was not likely that the blood of the conquerors should be found.^ This enactment, one of the very few which draws a legislative distinction between Normans and Englishmen^ be.irs its witness to the ease with which all such distinctions were wiped out ; but it also shows one of the ways in which the CrowTi gained both power and profit at the expense of the old local courts. There can be little doubt that it was this strengthening of the hands of the Crown which enabled Henry, like his father before him, to keep that good peace in the land which was their highest title to honour. But it is only in accordance with the common law of our nature that we find our national Chroniclers at once thankful for Henry's strict administration of justice and discontented at the price which had to be paid for it. The pleas of the Crown, as we have just defined them, were, unless they were speciallj'' called up by the King's writ for a hearing elsewhere, tried in the local courts, but ' See vol. iv. p. 326. '^ Dialogus de Scaccario, i. 10 (Select Chai'ters, 193). "Ea propter pene quicunque sic hodie occisus reperitur, ut murdrum punitur, exceptis his quibus certa sunt, ut diximus, servilis conditionis indicia." See vol. i. p. 493 ; iv. P- 327- MUEDEE AND ENQLISHEY. 445 tried in the King's name before tlie Sheriff or other officer oh. xxiv. of the Kinar. But, besides these eases in which somethinsr ^^^ King's _ _ " officers. is actually withdrawn from the authority of the ancient popular assemblies, we find from an early time an inter- Royal in- ference with those assemblies on the part of the King-, which -with the was in truth almost a necessary consequence of having one g°^"^*' King over the whole land. Of all Kings who are held in Adminis- honour, ^lElfred, Eadgar^ Cnut, we find it set down among justice by their merits, that they either went about doing justice *'^® King. in their own persons, or else sent forth judges to do justice in their names. Such a course might be followed from the purest wish to discharge the highest duties of kingship, or it might be done simply to promote the interests of the King or his favourites. In either case, for Conse- good or for evil, the authority of the self-governing com- weakenint^ munities out of whose union the kingdom had grown up °^*J"' }°!^^^ ° o 1 autnonties. was weakened in favour of the authority of the central power. Our ancient records give us several examples of the way in which the King appeared by his representatives in the local courts, and how he, rightly or wrongly, inter- fered with their action. We have two distinct records of the action of the royal missi under iEthelstan.' So in Cases the days of ^thelred the King's writ and seal were sent ^thelxed down to order justice to be done in a suit in the Scirgemot ™'^ *^'"^'- of Berkshire held on Cwichelmeshlsew.^ So, in Cnut^s day, when the Scirgemot of Herefordshire sat on ^gelnothes- stan to judge between Eanwene and her son Eadwine, ' In the letter of the men of Kent to ^thdstan (Schmid, 148) they say, " Hoc incepimus, quanta diligentia potuimus, auxilio aapientum eor\im quos ad nos misisti." So in his Laws, vi. 10, we read of the meeting of the Witan at Thundersfield, and how "^Elfeah Stybb and BrihtnoS Oddan sunu coman t&geannes Jam gemfite faes oinges worde." " Cod. Dipl. iii. 292. The bearer of the writ was Abbot ^Ifhere. See vol. i. p. 360, and i. 672 (Ed. 2). But it does not appear that the King's commissioner interfered with the judgement of the court. The King simply '■ bsed and het >aet hi soioldon WynflEede and Leofvvine swa rihtlioe gesemaua swa hi sefre rihtlioost Jjuhte." 446 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NOEMAN CONQUEST. CH. xsiv. Tofig the Proud, the first founder of Waltham, came thither on the King's errand.' Both these Gemots were great gatherings of the shires assembled under the local chiefs, Bishops, Abbots, Ealdormen, and Thegns.^ The com- missioners thus sent in the King's name answer exactly to the tnissi of the Carolingian Emperors and Kings, and it is of little consequence whether we look on their employ- ment as actually suggested by the employment of the missi, or whether we hold that Germany and England were both capable of independently inventing so obvious a way of doing Action of business. The officer who came on the King's errand might missioners. come really to see that justice was done in the local court ; or he might come because the King had some special in- terest in the business to be done. But he did not displace the constitutional presidents of the assembly, the Bishop The and the Earl. But, after the Conquest, besides the natural lose their tendency to increase the power of the Crown in every way, ancient those natural presidents had vanished.^ It was only a few the Bishop shires that had Earls ; except the great palatinates on the Earl. border, earldoms were sinking into places of honour, and indeed of profit, but which no longer kept the duties of Stephen's the old ofilcial earldoms. Both Stephen and Matilda had created a crowd of nominal Earls, who were little more than pensioners of the Crown, and who had not always any real territorial connexion with the shires from which • Cod. Dipl. iv. 54. " Tofig Pruda com Sser on Sees cinges serende.'' On Tofig see vol. i. p. 589. The whole account of this trial forms one of the liveliest scenes in the records of our ancient jurisprudence. ' In the Berkshire Gemot the Assembly, " ealle fa witan J^e Jjser ge- somnode wseron,'' consisted of Bishop jjlthelsige (see vol. i, p. 314), Bishop jEscwig (see vol. i. p. 307), Abbot .(Elfric, " and eal sio sclr." In the Herefordshire Gemot we find present Bishop jEthelstan (see vol. ii. p. 391), Ealdorman Raneg (see vol. i. p. 580, il. p. 561), his son Eadwine (see vol.i. p. 580), divers persons byname, and " eaUe i>e >eguas on Herefordsoire." ' The Earl appears as the president in Lincolnshire, Domesday, 336 b, where the powers of the local court are brought out very strono-ly ; " Si quis pro aliquo reatu exulatus fuerit a rege et a comite et ab hominibus vicecomitatus, nuUus nisi rex sibi dare pacem poterit." ROYAL INTERFERENCE WITH LOCAL COURTS. 447 they took their titles.^ The Bishop too, as Bishop, was oh. xxiv. practically, if not formally, removed from the headship of the general assembly of the shire by the ordinance which put him at the head of a distinct ecclesiastical court. The chief places in the local assemblies were thus The King's open to be filled, no longer by the local chiefs, but by the take their immediate representatives of the King. The Sheriff was P^^*^*' his ever-present officer on the spot, and there might be CommissionerSj Justices, Barons, sent specially for the pur- pose from the King's Court. Everything tended to set aside the power of the men of the district and of the two chiefs who embodied its independent existence, and to put the power of the King and of his immediate personal representatives in its place. But all this time there was not the least notion on the part of any of our Norman Kings of abolishing any of the ancient English tribunals and setting up something new in their stead. The old assemblies were carefully kept up, if The old only because it was found that they could be turned into j^g.^ „_ means for increasing the King's profits, as well as extending his authority. Several ordinances of this time require that Penalties the assemblies shall be regularly held at the ancient times, tendance. and impose, as of old, penalties on those who failed to attend at them.^ But the authority of these courts was ' " Imaginarii et pseudo-comites " they are called by Robert de Monte, 1155. See Stabbs, Const. Hist. i. 362, 451. * See the Ordinance of Henry (1108-1112) in Select Charters, 99; "Sciatisquod concede et prsecipio ut amodo comitatus mei et hundreda in alia locis et eisdem terminis sedeant, sicut sederunt in tempore regis Ead- wardi et non aJiter. Ego enim, quando voluero, faoiam ea satis summonere propter mea dominica necessaria ad voluntatem meam. . . . Et volo et prsecipio ut omnes de comitatu eant ad comitatus et hundreda sicut fecerunt in tempore regis Eadwardi, nee remorent propter aliquam causam pacem meam vel quietudinem, qui non sequuntur placita mea et judicia mea, sicut tunc temporia feoissent." So Domesday, 269 6, where " qui renianebat de siremot sine rationabiK excusatione '' is put on a level with some of the gravest offenders. Cf. Comp. Politics, 221, 466. For the older legislation, see iEthelstan's Laws, ii. 20. 448 POLITICAL EESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. fast passing into the hands of the King or his immediate representatives. Throughout the Norman reigns we find judges sent by the King holding the chief place in the local assemblies. Nothing can be more expressive than the phrase of the Chronicler in which he speaks of Randolf Flambard " driving " all the Gemots throughout England.^ And we have already heard of the doings of Ralph Basset under Henry, of his bloody Witenagemot in Leicester- Itinerant shire, and of some of his dealings in other matters.^ It is plain that the custom of sending itinerant justices was in full force under Henry the First ; it simply needed to be organized in a more systematic shape by Henry the The King Second.^ The King thus gradually became in practice, "theFoim- what in the theory of lawyers he is represented as being tain of ^^ from all eternity, the fountain of justice. But he became sOj not by any eternal and inherent right, but because circumstances enabled him to undermine step by step the authority of the older popular tribunals of the land. He could now at pleasure call up causes to be heard in his own courts, often in his own presence.* In cases of less urgency he could send his Barons or Justices to hear them, that is, practically to decide them, in what had once been the courts of the people. The attendance of the Thegns of the shire ^ and of the reeve and the four men from each township was still enforced;^ but the spirit of ' Chron. Petrib. 1099. "Eanuulf . . . Jie «rov ealle his gemot ofer eaU Engleland draf." ' See above, p. 159. ^ See Stubbs, Const. Hist. 391, 600 et seq. ' In the ordinance quoted in the last page, it is provided that causes about land between the King's barons shall be tried in the King's Court ; "Et si amodo exsurgat plaoitum de divisione terrarum, si est inter barones meos dominicos, traotetur plaoitum in curia mea, et si est inter vavassores duorum dominorum, tractetur in comitatu.'' ' See in the Laws of Henry (vii. 2) the long list of persons whose at- tendance was obligatory. So Stubbs, Const. Hist. 393; "barones et vavas- sores" represent the ancient Thegns. The "tungrevii" may not at first strike us as being simply town-reeves. , '' Leg. Hen. vii, 7. " Si uterque [baro et dapifer ejus] necessai-io desit. LATER HISTORY OP THE LOCAL COURTS. 449 the ancient institution had passed away. The King's oh. xxiv. barons were now the real judges. There was no longer No general anything to draw either thegn or churl to an assembly ment to where all was done by royal officers, and those officers in ^^^^^^ *^ •' •' courts. most eases of foreign blood and speech. It was only gradually that those who had once been judges again found a sphere marked out for them, as the functions of judges, jurors, and witnesses began to be more accurately distin- guished. It was no wonder then that men strove to avoid attendance in courts which had so wholly changed their nature. It is no wonder if fines for non-attendance be- Exemption come a considerable item in the King's revenue,' or that the men of the men of Yorkshire should, as we lately saw, be willing Yorkshire, to buy at a heavy price a perpetual dispensation from taking any part in the administration of justice. At the time every change of this kind must have been felt as a cruel hardship, though even at the time there doubtless was in them an element of good. Things changed as the central government gradually came to be no longer looked on as an enemy. A time came when it was found that better justice The was done by the King's Judges, assisted by the men of the works in shire in their definite character of grand and petty jurors, ^ ® ®"^ than could be done in the old assemblies, where each man had his place, but where the dififerent functions of judge, juror, and witness were not accurately defined. But mark in Return to how singular a way, in the case of one institation at least, gtitutions. the old system has come back again. One class of the Justices of royal mmi, the Justices of the Peace in each shire, have been so multiplied, and their character has been so thoroughly changed, that an assembly of them is practically an as- sembly, not of royal officers, but of the Thegns of the shire in their local character. A court of Quarter Sessions has become an assembly whose best rule of action could prsepositus et sacerdo.s et quatuor de melioribus villse adsint pro omnibus qui nominatim non erunt ad placitum submoniti." » See the cases brought together by Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 398, VOL. V. G g 450 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NOEMAN" CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. not be better described than in the words of Eanwene, when she bade the Seirgemot of Herefordshire to " do thegnly and well." ^ The shire has become an aristocratic commonwealth, ruled by an assembly not so very unlike what the gathering of the Thegns of Herefordshire must have been in the days of Cnut. No royal missi/s is there^ except in so far as all the Thegns have themselves become missL The Thegns alone can speak and vote, but the rest of the men of the shire may, if they think good, look on. And they now have means of influence and criticism, whichj though less direct, are perhaps as effectual, as the Grand and ancient right to cry Yea or Nay. In the judicial business Juries. of the court, popular juries, grand and petty, keep up the ancient right of every freeman to have a share in the administration of justice. And the judges of the court are Thegns of the shire, men commissioned indeed by the Crown, but whom no one looks on as royal officers. Indeed^ whenever a cry is raised for the transfer of their judicial powers to other hands, it is sought to transfer it to men in whom the character of royal officers The shall be more prominent. The Sheriff" too, once the im- mediate instrument of the King, the dreaded royal " ex- actor/' has ceased to be, in any practical sense, a royal missus. A Thegn of the shire, for his year the first Thegn of the shire, his main business is to appear, in the name of the shire, to receive the real royal missi with fitting The officers respect. The central and the local authorities have Crown been reconciled ; but this has largely been through a ocahzed. pj-Q^ggg \^j ^^ich the officers of the Crown have been practically localized. Through the stern discipline of the Henriesj we have come back to the days of Cnut in a better form. The freemen of the shire^ Thegns and churls alike, keep their old judicial rights under new shapes. ' Cod. Dipl. iv. 55 (see above, p. 446). " And he5 s3'^SSan to Sam ])egnon cwEeS ; D5tS >egidlce and wel." ORIGIN OF TRIAL BY JURY. 451 And those who come on the King's errand, the successors oh. xxiv. of Tofig and Ralph Basset, now brine with them no '^^^'^ ^°^'^' _ ^ _ " missioners suspicion that they are acting as instruments of an arbi- of Assize. trary will^ or that the King's errand on which they have come can ever be other than the errand of the law. Out of this sketch of the change which the Norman Trial by Conquest wrought in the administration of justice, the old ^^^' question at once starts up as to the invention or intro- duction of Trial by Jury. To this question, in the way in which it has often been put, it is almost answer enough to say that Trial by Jury never was invented or introduced at all. At this time of day, no one need waste his time in Popular proving that Trial by Jury was not invented by Alfred, to its And it is almost as needless to prove that it was not °"S™- brought ready made in the keels of Hengest and Horsa, that it was not copied from this or that kindred institution to be found in this or that German or Scandinavian land, and that, if it was not brought over ready made by Hengest, neither was it brought over ready made by Wil- liam. All notions of this kind, though they have often been maintained with much learning and much ingenuity,^ go on a misconception of the early history of institutions. Trial by Jury, in the form in which we now see it, was certainly not invented or introduced by any particular man at any particular time. If by Trial by Jury we Primitive mean any kind of trial in which the case is decided of the by the oaths of men taken from among the community ^g^^;™" at large, then Trial by Jury is as old as any institution of the Teutonic race. If by Trial by Jury we mean a Its existing form of trial in which, while the royal Judge lays down ^'^Za.'^ the law, a sworn body of men from among the com- munity decides all questions of fact— still more, if we understand a form of trial in which the Jurors cannot ' The various theories will be found collected in Stubbs, Const. Hist, i, 612. See Appendix ER. Gg 2 452 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NOEMAN CONQUEST. CH. XXIV. be called in question for any verdict which they may give — then Trial by Jury is a very modern thing indeed. In this form it cannot be said to be older than the time of Charles the Second, when Jurors were still fined for giving verdicts which were displeasing to the Judge ; ^ we might almost say that it was not older than the days when Judges still claimed to decide whether a Early ap- given Writing were a libel.^ The compurgators of our oldest Jmy trial ■ ^^^ were not a Jury in the modern sense, but they were Compur- one of the elements out of which the Jury arose. The ga ois , Juroi-g or sworn witnesses of the laws of ^Ethelstan and bworn wit- nesses ; Eadgar^ were not a Jury in our sense, but they too doubtless the served as another element in its developement. The twelve Theims of eldest Thegns of the law of ^Ethelred, who swore to accuse ^thelred ; j^q man. falsely,* are exceedingly like a modern Grand Jury ; but as they stand by themselves, all that we can say is that they too may ha;ve helped in the work, but that they certainly do not amount to Jury trial, as Jury trial is Eecog- now understood. The inquests by Becognifois which we hear of from the time of the Conqueror onwards, the sworn men by whose oaths Domesday was drawn up ^ or those by whose oaths the lands of Fracenham were wrongly judged to the Crown,^ come much more nearly to our notion of Jurors, but still they are not the thing itself. Distinction The recognitors are not judges but witnesses, witnesses de- Eeooc- daring their verdict from their personal knowledge, while nitor.^ and j^^ -g |.|^g essence of the modern Jury that they should not modern ^ '^ Jurors. use their personal knowledge, but should give their verdict The Assize according to the evidence laid before them by others. The the Second greatest step made at any one time in the developement of 1166. ' See the case of the trial of William Penn in 1670. Forsyth, Trial by Jury, p. 403. ^ On Lord Mansfield's doctrine of libel, and Mr. Fox's Libel Act, see May, Const. Hist. ii. 253 et seq., 261 et seq. ' ^thelstan, v. 5 (Schmid, 154) ; Eadgar, iv. B. 3 (Schniid, 196). * iEthehred,iii. s^Schmid, 212). ° See vol. iv. p. 692. ' lb. pp. 371, 372. GROWTH OF THE JURY SYSTEM. 453 the Jury system was when the practice of recognition was ch. xxiv. organized by the great Assize of Henry the Second.^ Here we have sworn men who give a verdict, and their verdict is decisive. But they give their verdict from their own knowledge ; they do not perform that special function of modern Jurors which consists in giving a verdict after weighing the evidence of others. As late as the reign of Charles the Second, the notion was not wholly got rid of that personal knowledge of the facts in dispute was rather a recommendation than a disqualification on the part of a Juror.2 Till this notion was got rid of, the Jurors had not fully exchanged their primitive function of wit- nesses for their later function of judges of the witness of others. And^ so long as any shred of the character of witnesses still clave to them, we can understand that they mightj like other witnesses, be held to be personally responsible for their verdict, and liable to punishment if their verdict could be shown to be false or corrupt. The The stages of the process by which the modern Jury grew up the modem have been endless ; the greatest landmark in the series ''J , ' ° gradual ; undoubtedly belongs to the days of Henry the Second, t^e From the time of Henry the Second we may without in- ft'^g'**^^^|' accuracy speak of Trial by Jury, if we bear in mind the under points by which a Jury of his day differed from a Jury of Second. our day. But Henry no more invented Trial by Jury, he Action of no more brought it in from any other land, than Alfred did. His organizing mind gave a more regular shape to the action of the popular Jurors, as it gave a more regular shape to the action of the royal Judges. But even he did not in any sense create an institution the germs of which are immemorial, but the perfect shape of which did not show itself till ages after his time. 1 See the Assizes of Clarendon and Northampton in Select Charters, 137, 143 ; Const. Hist. i. 615. See Appendix RE. ' See Forsyth, Trial by Jury, p. 163, 454 POLITICAL EESULTS OP THE NOEMAN COJ^'QUEST. OH. XXIV. I hold then that it is simply meaningless to dispute whether Trial by Jury is an Old-English or a Norman institution, or to raise any other questions of that kind. It is an institution which grew up gradually out of germs Working common to England with other Teutonic lands. But here Norman again the circumstances of the Norman Conquest helped Conquest ^^ foster the growth of those native germs. Foreign growth of Kings and foreign Judges had special need of trustworthy T,, , „ ' information as to matters both of fact and of law. As the ^eed of trust- courts became less and less the courts of the people and worthy in- . . formation more and more the courts of the Kmg, it was more and iudtres ""^^ more important that the royal missi who had become the judges should have trustworthy evidence set before them. In an ancient popular Gemot, every man in the assembly was likely to have some knowledge of the facts either as to an alleged crime or as to a disputed possession. Everyman could from that personal knowledge act as judge both of law and of fact. But King William, Bishop Odo, or Ralph Basset, needed to have a clear and truthful account of the Theveidict disputed points set before them. This clear and truthful coo-nitois. account was sought for in the oaths of the recognitors^ What they swore was held to be truth ; it was a verdict, but a verdict given from their own knowledge. But^ as soon as that verdict was once ruled to be decisive, though they did not lose the character of witnesses, they began to Jurors put on Something of the character of judges. The later from^wit- history of Trial by Jury is a history of the steps by which nesses into ^q character of the Jurors as judges grew, and their cha- judges. J o o J Trial by racter as witnesses died out. Even if we grant that Wil- Jurynot ^^jjj followed in England a system of reeoffnition which introduced o .; o from Nor- was already in use in Normandy but which did not before exist in the same shape in England, that would not make Trial by Jury a Norman institution. The recognitors are only another form of the same principle which shows itself in the compurgators, in ^e frithiorh, in every detail of the THE POEESTS. 455 action of the popular courts. The Norman administrators, oh. xxiv. in the very act of lessening the power of the popular courts, were driven to make special use of a form of inquiry which sprang from the same source as those which they set aside, and which in the end, as it grew and prospered, brought back the main principle of ancient English juris- prudence in a new shape. The ancient courts of the people were thus gradually changed into the courts of the King. But, in the working of the cycle which has played so great a part in English aifairs, the courts of the King have again gradually changed into courts in which both King and people have a share, but in which King and people alike find a higher power in the Law. And, largely as the government of the realm, and the administration of justice within it, had come to be looked on as a source of income for the King, we can hardly believe that, even in the worst days of Rufus, men would have said openly that the King's pleasure and profit was the object for which they were carried on. But there Excep- was one kind of legislation, one kind of tribunal, which racter of avowedly stood outside the common law of the land, which '^^ Forest existed only for the King's personal pleasure, and was ruled only by his personal will. Such is the description which a writer of the days of Henry the Second, high in office and in the royal trust, gives of the legislation of the forests and of the courts by which it was enforced.' A Nature royal forest, that is a greater or smaller extent of waste Forests. land inhabited by beasts of chase, was in itself nothing new. 1 Dialogus de Soacoario, i. ii (Select Charters, 197). "Sane forestarum ratio, poena quoque vel absolutio delinquentium in eas, sive peouniaria fuerit sive corporalis, seorsum ab aliis regni judiciis seoernitur, et solius regis arbitrio vel cujuslibet familiaris ad hoc speoialiter deputati subjicitur. Legi- bus quidem propriis subsistit ; quas non conununi regni jure, sed voluntaria principum institutione subnixas dicuat ; adeo ut quod per legem ejus factum fuerit, non justum absolute, sed justum secundum legem forests: dicatur. In forestis etiam penetralia regum sunt, et eorum maximfe delicis." 456 POLITICAL EESULTS OF THE N"oemAN C0A^Q,UEST. cH. XXIV. In days when the old system of Teutonic occupation was Their g^^jj undisturbed, it was natural that each communitj' should origin. have part of its folkland in the form of a common forest as well as in that of common meadow. The forest was not simply a place for hunting the wild deer ; its wooded parts supplied pasture for swine/ and wood alike for fuel Communal and for building. Rights of this kind are usual wherever sonafriglits Communities retain their common land, and such rights, mthe rigbts of pasture^ of hunting, of fishing, of cutting timber, are granted by countless ancient charters.* As the folk- land passed more and more into the hands of the King, the forests, so rich in materials both for sport and for profit, came gradually to be looked on as the King's special possession. How far they had^ in the days before the Conquest, become lands apart from the shire and the The hundred is not at all clear. I have already said that I Forest Can put no faith in the Code of Forest Laws which bears If*^^"^ the name of Cnut.' Every time that I look at that Cnut. •' document, I feel more convinced that, as it stands, it is the work of a later age. It is most likelj'' a forgery of one of the Norman reigns, of no time so likely as the reign of Henry the First. It was doubtless designed to employ the venerated name of the great Dane to shelter the His legislation against which men cried out. But the genuine fegislation. laws of Cnut make it plain that in his day there already were roj'al hunting-grounds, all encroachments on which were forbidden, and the memorable declaration that every man might hunt on his own ground might possibly be taken as a sign that that right had already been called in question.* Of the services which had to be rendered to the royal hunting in the days of Eadward I have ' A "wood of so many pigs" is an entry which is found in ahnost every page of Domesday. - See a number of such instances collected by Kemble, Saxons in Eng- land, 284. ' See vol. i. p. 482. * lb. THE FOREST LAWS. 457 already spoken,' and we find in Domesday a special oh. xxiv. class of royal huntsmen, who seem to have all been Eadward's -,-,,., T , 1 huntsmen -tinglishmen, and to have all passed into the service of pass into William.2 If we take the so-called code of Cnut as a witness glrlicT' to the state of the law under Henry and his two prede- cessors, it would certainly show that the officers of the royal forests formed a distinct class exempt from the ordinary local jurisdiction. It will be remembered that Henry, The iu promising to reform all other abuses, declared his uXf ^ determination to keep the forests in his own hands, ^®"'7 '"^"^ 1 . „ , First. as his father had done.^ The practice of Henry the Henry the First in this matter is thus carried hack to the days Second's •^ Apsize of of the Conqueror, and what the practice of Henry the Forest, the First was we learn from the Assize of Henry the ^' Second. It is an arbitrary code, setting up a separate and arbitrary jurisdiction within certain districts, a juris- diction which over-rode all ordinary rights of property, rank, office, and calling. It was a jurisdiction fenced in by heavy penalties denounced against man and beast.* Still it was a jurisdiction ; it had a system of law, with courts to administer it. It was therefore not without a popular Popular element, an element which may have been preserved from the Forest the times before the forests were cut off from the body *^°^"^*'- of the shires and hundreds, or which may have crept in in after times, in imitation of other jurisdictions. Certain it is that, within the forest jurisdictions, some of the old forms of the ancient courts have gone on with less change than they did in the country in general. It is not inappro- priate that the scholar to whom English history owes more than to any other should be able to report that the reeve and four men of our earliest laws still come together in the forest courts of the district of his own birth. ^ ' See vol. iv. p. 609. ' Onthe "Venatores,''seeEllis,Domesday,i. no. ^ See above, p. 168. ' See above, p. 163. * See Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 107, where the customs of the courts of the 458 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NOKMAN" CONQUEST. ca. XXIV. This last example is a striking proof of the abiding character of ancient English custom. It shows how it, as it were, seized upon and made its own those very insti- tutions of the stranger which were most novel and most Adapta- hateful. The Old-English law, never formally abolished, foreio-n but merely modified under the circumstances of foreign En'l'^h ^^ ^^^^®' °^^^^ disguised under a show of foreign names and law. foreign laws, still lived on, ready at any moment to show itself again in some new shape, and to turn the very evils and wrongs of the foreign rule to its own behoof. The centralized despotism of the Norman Kings failed to root out the ancient popular jurisprudence of England. For a while despotism made use of freedom as its instru- ment. Gradually, by a silent change, freedom learned to turn despotism itself to its own purposes. We see, at every turn of our story, how foreign tyranny worked in The the end for the establishment of native freedom. Nowhere element *^o we see this more clearly than in the administration of in the iustice. Our ancient popular courts, as they became un- courts pre- •' ^ '^ ; j served by suited for the requirements of a more advanced state of man inno- Society, might, like the popular courts of other lands, have died out before courts in which the King's judges were all in all, unchecked by any popular element in any shape. As it was, the intrusion of the King's judges into the popular courts really preserved the popular element, by causing it to take a new form, one better suited than the ancient one for the needs of later times. So it is in all things ; we have advanced by going back, but it was the momentary check of the foreign rule which has enabled us to go back. Step by step we have thrown off the yoke ; but we have been able to throw off the yoke only because the 3'oke was there to be thrown off. And it is the process of throwing off a yoke which ever makes freedom surest. forest of Knaresborough are referred to as among the best illustrations of early customs still remaining. vations. LAW OP " FEEA NATURA. 459 Had there never been a time of foreign tyranny, our liberties oh. xxiv. might have crumbled away without our knowing it. It was the foreign tyranny which taught us to know them, to love them, to win them back in more lasting forms. The English people learned to use and to know its own strength, in the process, first of supporting a foreign King against foreign barons, and then of supporting foreign barons against a foreign King. By so doing it turned both the foreign King and the foreign barons into English- men, or rather it washed away the foreign varnish which the Northern followers of Rolf and Harold Blaatand had put on during their sojourn on Gaulish soil. But for the process of foreign conquest, we might have seen, as other lands did, our native Kings growing into despots, our native Thegnhood growing into such a nobility as has been the curse of continental lands. It was not in vain that our forefathers called for the laws of Eadward ; we have won them back, and more than won them back. But with regard to the last subject of which we spoke, we might wish to go back even beyond the laws of Eadward and the laws of Cnut. We have hardly gone back to the stage of Cnut's legislation, as long as the faintest trace of the forest law survives in the feeblest shadow of its "bastard slip." ^ We at least lag far behind the wisdom of the code Roman of Rome, which, from the principle that animals_/%r^ natures ^\^ legfa, could be the property of no man, did not make the strange ^^'-""j"" deduction that the exclusive privilege of slaying them "ferai should be fenced m by sanctions sterner than those by which property is fenced in.^ Or rather, in a fully civilized ' See above, p. 164. ^ Starting from the principle that animals "ferae naturse" belong to no one, the Eoman Law draws the natural inference that any one may take them, subject doubtless to the consequences of the ordinary law of trespass, in ease of any intrusion on another man's land. Enghsh law, starting from the same principle, does not venture to make the wild animals the property of any man, but it sets up a system of special regulations to preserve for the benefit of particular men something which is not their property. 460 POLITICAL KESULTS OF THE NOEMAST CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. timcj the once rightful objects of forests and of hunting have passed away. In a time when it is acknowledged that the lower animals have a right to protection against the cruelty of man, we should do well to legislate more in an English and less in a Norman spirit ; we should do well to undo the evil deeds of those who still, like the Conqueror, delight to turn the dwelling-places of man into a wilder- ness ; while we so carefully legislate to stop the brutal pleasures of the poor who have simply to obey the law, we should no longer spare the no less brutal pleasures of the rich by whom the law is made. § 5. Local and Social Effects of the Conquest. Some of the changes which have been spoken of in the last section lead us directly to certain local and social changes which have left their mark upon England ever since. The great change which was going on in the king- dom, the change which had begun before the Conquest, but which the Conquest hastened and completed, was car- ried on on a smaller scale in every corner of the land. The Feudaliza- process which has been called the feudalization of Europe,^ tion'al and the process which, in the case of the kingdom, changed the "'^ ' elective chief of the people into the hereditary lord of the land, was going on at the same time in every manor in The word England. The word manor is in itself one of the most manor "".».. . , , t ■ purely distmct foreign importations m our whole story. It is not oi'eign. Qjji^y ^ foreign word, but there is not, as there is in the case of most of the foreign words which came in along with it, any English word which it can be said exactly to trans- late.^ And yet, as in other cases, the thing was not absolutely new; it was again the hastening and completing Origin of of tendencies which were already at work. In the dreams Lawyers' of lawyers, as there has been an hereditary King from all ' See Maine, Village Communities, Lecture the Fifth, and Early History of Institutions, p. 85. ^ See above, p. 412. ORIGIN OF MANOES. 461 eternity, so there Las been an hereditary lord of the manor oh. xxiv. from a time only so far short of eternity as to ffive the tlieory on . the subject. King- time to make him a grant. In the realities of Qro-wih of history, the Kins- and the lord, that is the lord on a great ^^^ ^'"ff ° and of the scale and the lord on a small one, are each something which local lord. has crept in unawares, something which has grown up at the expense of rights more ancient than its own. Each alike. King and lord, grew to his full dimensions by a series of gradual and stealthy encroachments on the rights of the people. As the King swallowed up the powers and the possessions of the nation, so the lord swallowed up the rights and the possessions of the mark. Through the Change in happy accidents of our history, the usurper of the rights jacter and of the nation has been changed into an instrument of the Position. will of the nation ; the usurper of the rights of the mark, for whom no such use could be found, has gradually sunk into a shadow. He is now known only when some vexatious privilege is called up out of oblivion, to show that the parts of Lucius Opimius and Caius Gracchus are parts which may be played over again in any time or place. The general order of the changes by which the old self- governing communities changed into local principalities have been treated of by several great scholars, German and English.^ There can be little doubt that, besides the Grants of general causes which helped on all such changes, whether „ exemp- on a great or on a small scale, one special instrument of *^°°®- the change was the growth of that system of immunities or exemptions from the ordinary local jurisdiction which gradually grew up both in England and on the continent.^ '■ See, above all, the works of G. L. von Maurer, Einleitung sur Gesohichte der Mark- Hof- Dorf- mid Stadt-verfassung und der offentlichen Gewalt (Miinchen, 1 854), and the larger works which followed it, beginning with the Gesohichte der Markenverfassung in Deutschland (Erlangen, 1856). The subject is also constantly recurring in the works of Professor Stubbs and Sir Henry Maine. 2 See the heading "Emunitat" in Maurer, Einleitung, 239. 462 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. CH. XXIV. Every grant of sac and soc to an ecclesiastical corporation ^ac and ^j, ^q ^ private man established a separate jurisdiction, cut off from the regular authorities of the mark, the hun- Change of dred, the shire, and the kii)gdom.^ A power was thus set up communfty which had strong tendencies to grow, one which largely into the helped in the process by which the smallest self-governing the manor, unit, whether we call it the mark, the village com- munity, the gemeinde, or the commune, has in this country been gradually lost in the ecclesiastical parish and the territorial manor. The parish and the manor are in truth the ancient mark, changed into new shapes, according to The gens or ecclesiastical and according to territorial ideas. Where, chief turns ^s in the Celtic parts of the British islands, the old con- mto the stitution of the aens or clan went on longer than it did landlord. -^ " among ourselves,^ we can see the actual process by which, under the influence of an alien jurisprudence, the chief of the clan changed into the lord of the soil. The land of the clan was held to be the land of the chief, and the body of the clansmen, in truth his fellow-owners, came to be Earliest looked on as tenants holding of him." In England, where private the gentile system died out so much sooner, our earliest glimpses of territorial lords set them before us as holding their lands and jurisdictions by grants from the King, grants of course confirmed by the assent of his Witan. Encroach- And wc can see from Domesday that, by the time of the the primi- Conquest, the encroachments which had been made on the before th™ Primitive system must have reached no small growth. The Conquest, form in which Domesday is drawn up assumes the terri- witnessof torial lordship as a rule. The Commissioners must have found something at work so nearly akin to the Norman manor that they called it by the same name. Each manor is set down as held by a certain lord, of whom the land is held in different ways by tenants of every class, from men of ' See Stubbs, Const. Hist. 184, 399. " See Comparative Politics, 103, 117, 394. » See Macaulay, iii. 315. GERMS OP THE MANOR BEFORE THE CONQUEST. 463 his own rank down to personal slaves. The smaller King's ch. xxiv. Thegns and others holding of no lord but the King, though a very numerous^ are an exceptional class, and the mention of lands actually held by communities is very rare.' Actual Cases of common lands, the remains of the most ancient form of j^j^jg"" property, must, as is shown by the large traces of them that still exist, have been far more usual than the entries in Domesday would lead us to think. But the The tendency of the Norman Commissioners, just like the Btrength- tendency of later lawyers, would be to look on these ^''^ *l>® vestiges of possession older than the lord's right as against something which the commoners held by the lord's grant, munities. The exact stages it is impossible to trace ; but we can hardly doubt that, even before the Norman Conquest, the encroachments of the territorial lords had not been small, and that the change from an English to a Norman lord still further strengthened the hands of the lord against the community. Then too, lawyers and administrators alike would naturally look at everything with feudal eyes. The The true lord's property and the lord's powers were in truth some- ^jjg ^^^^ thing exceptional, something cut off from the possessions feversed and powers of the community. But they would look on lawyers' everything that was left either to the community or to smaller land-owners as something exceptional, as something cut off from the possessions and rights of the lord, either by his own grant, or by some special privilege of the Crown. The common practice of commendation no doubt The nature largely helped in this work, and it seems certain that the mendrtion nature of the process was misunderstood in Norman eyes, ^^^g™^^®^^;^ In the older theory, the process of commendation, the seek- Normans. ing of a lord, is a purely voluntary act, a mutual engage- '■ We have seen some examples in the cases of boroughs, as in the case of Cambridge, vol. iv. p. 223. There is a case of a rural cormnunity holding common land at Goldington in Bedfordshire, 2136; "Hanc terram tenu- erunt homines villas communiter, et vendere potuerunt." 464 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. Effects of the reign of William. Traces of the older system remain. Courts-leet and courts- baron. The court- baron re- presents the old Assembly. ment between the lord and his man. But it is plain that, by the time that Domesday was drawn up, commenda- tion had come to be looked on as a right of the lord over the man, as a kind of property which could be handed over to another at the lord's will.^ We may fully believe that, between 1067 and 1085, greater changes had been made to the behoof of the territorial lords than were ever made in the same number of years before or since. But such changes could not have been made so quickly and so thoroughly, unless there had been changes earlier than 1067 of which these greater changes were only the further carrying out. The manor then is a thing which has grown up by the process of which we have seen so many instances, by the growth of one side of an institution, by the growth of that side of it which best fitted in with the new ideas which became dominant after the Conquest. But, though the lord gradually crept into the place of the community, some of the ancient institutions of the community survived. Of the court-leet and court-baron, the later name has the more Norman and feudal sound. But it is really the court- baron which represents the ancient assembly of the mark, while the court-leet represents the lord's jurisdiction of sac and soc, whether granted before or since the coming of William.^ Nor does the machinery of the court seem to have been greatly altered by the mere fact that it was held in the name of the lord and not in the name of the com- munity. In fact, strangely enough, it is in these manorial courts, whether they are in private hands or whether the manors for which they are held form part of the ancient demesne of the Crown, that the most curious relies of early procedure are still to be found.^ The right of sac and soc ' See Appendix SS. " See Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 399. Is ' primitive sense of " man ? " ' baron " here to be taken in the ' See above, p. 457. TRACES OP THE OLD LOCAL ASSEMBLIES. 465 was terrible enough in the days of Stephen, when there oh. xxiv. were as many Kings as there were lords of castles ; but^ in Working ordinary times, the courts of the lord, exercising their lord's jurisdiction according to the custom of the manor and not °°"''*' according to the lord's arbitrary will, soon became harmless enough. But the whole tendency of the Norman reigns Separate was to multiply all those kinds of private and separate tions jurisdictions which had already begun to show themselves. "^^^ j^ Honours — that is manors on a larger scale ^ — liberties, Norman reigns. hundreds m private hands, all helped in the gradual work of undermining the ancient local jurisdictions. Where they now survive at all, they survive rather as curiosities than as institutions having any practical working. The ancient The an- scirgemol was still called into being at every county election, modem as long as open nomination of candidates remained the S"!!^''*' law. The ballot alone would in no way have affected it ; but private written nominations have given it its death- blow. And, even before that change, the name of the ancient assembly had been strangely transferred to a wholly modern tribunal. It had become the name of a tribunal as unlike as possible to anything in our ancient lawj a county court where justice is administered by a single royal judge, and where the jury itself is optional and exceptional. But while, on one side, the elder popular rights died away before the growth of separate and exceptional juris- dictions in the hands of particular men, on the other hand, popular freedom grew with the growth of separate and exceptional jurisdictions of another kind. The English The Eng- town, the English jsori! or borough^ is a thing wholly ofofpmeiy English growth^ and nothing can be more vain than the English attempts of ingenious men to trace up the origin of English municipalities to a Roman source.^ It has been said • See Stubbs, Const. Hist. 401 ; Gneist, Englische Verwaltungsrecht, i. I jg. "See Appendix TT. VOL. V. H h 466 POLITICAL KBSULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. CH. XXIV. mockingly, with more than one meaning, that the pre- sent capital of England is a province covered vrith houses. If we put some other word instead of the word pro- vince, a word meaningless in England except in its ecelesiaetical sense, this is really no bad description of the Bifferenoe growth of an English borough. It was not, like an EngUeh ancieiit Greek or Roman, like a mediaeval Italian or Pro- t"*^ "w" ■^engal city, the centre of the whole civil life of its district, towns. It was simply one part of the district, in which men lived closer together than elsewhere ; it was simply several town- ships packed tightly together, a hundred smaller in extent The and thicker in population than other hundreds.^ As we see borough in Domesday, the several towns had their several customs, as follows the sj^ires and divisions of shires had.^ And the marks or town- analogy of the shire ships which had come together in the shape of boroughs hundred, had been more lucky than those in the open country, in Common being better able to keep the common land which in many cases they still keep to this day. But it is only in a few Beal muni- of the greatest towns that we can see at the time of the rare at the Conquest anything like a real municipal constitution ; and andoften ^ some of those of which we have the fullest accounts, the aristo- municipal constitution is rather aristocratic than demo- cratic. Lincoln cratic. The hereditary Lawmen of Lincoln had in them, as I have said long ago,^ all the elements of the ruling class in an aristocratic commonwealth. But alongside of the Lavranen, whom we may look on strictly as civic magis- trates, we have seen the great men of the kingdom also All _ holding their personal jurisdictions within the city walls.* political and social An English town was, in short, a collection of every class brought^ of inhabitants, of every kind of authority, which could be together in found in the whole land, all brought close together. Lords the towns. ' ^ ^ ' See Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 92, 403. ^ The customs of the shires are given in Domesday under each shire. For special customs in a district less than a shire, see vol. ii. p. 3S8, ^ See vol. iv. p. 208. * See vol. iv. p. 214. ENGLISH ORIGIN OF BOROUGHS. 467 with tlieir sac and soc, churches with their property and oh. xxiv. privileges, gilds — that is, artificial families — with their property, their usages, their religious rites/ thegns and churls in the language of one age, barons and villains in the language of another, merchants, churchmen, monks, all the elements of English society, were to be seen side by side in a small compass. The various classes thus brought together were united by neighbourhood, by common in- terests, by common property, customs, and privileges ; but they did not yet show any peculiarities of tenure ; they were not yet fused together into a single corporate body. The greatness of London is witnessed by the special legis- London, lation of which it is made the subject in the days of Jjlthelstan and in the days of ^thelred.^ But those an- cient laws, while they provide for the privileges and good order of the city, while they recognize various customs and institutions which had grown up in it, do not set before not yet an . • . , organized US even so near an approach to an organized municipal munici- constitution as we see at Lincoln and elsewhere. The ^^ ' ^' share taken by the citizens in the election of Kings does not necessarily imply any special municipal organization. The citizens, as being on the spot, could exercise the right which belonged to them in common with all the freemen of the land, just as in some other cases we find armies acting in the same way, simply because they also were on the spot.3 The famous charter of William confirms the customs Charter of WilUarQ ' of the city as to the succession of land, but it points to no special civic constitution. It is addressed to the Bishop and the Portreeve, as a writ in a shire was addressed to the Bishop and the Shire-reeve.* But under Henry the of Henry ^. - f. , ■, ■ -L X the First. First we see signs of great advances, owing perhaps to that influx of Norman and other foreign citizens which is 1 On Gilds, see Toulmin Smith's Engliah Gilds, and Appendix TT. " See vol. 1. p. 309. ^ See vol. iii. p. 547. * See the charter in vol. iv. p. 29. H h a 468 POLITICAL EESULTS OF THE NqemAN CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. witnessed by William's own charter. In Henry's charter to London we find the ancient rights, privileges, and customs of the city confirmed. Churches, barons, citizens, are confirmed in their rights and jurisdictions, the ancient assemblies, busting, folk-motes, ward-motes, are to be kept up, and the law of the city is to be followed by the King himself in all cases touching the succession of land within the city. But, more than this, the men of London are not to be summoned in any cause beyond their own bounds ; they are to have a SheriflF and a Justiciar of their own choosing. And, more even than this, the city, like many another city in Greece, Italy, and Germany, has its subject Middlesex district. London, like Sparta or Bern, has her irepioiKoi, Loudon, lier Vnterthanen. The shire of Middlesex is let to the men of London and their heirs, to be held in farm of the King and his heirs.^ And to this day Middlesex keeps its character of a subject district. It has neither a SheriflT chosen by the men of the shire nor yet one appointed by the common sovereign. The subject shire has to submit to the authority of the Sheriffs chosen by the ruling city. Still, even in London, among such great privileges and powers, we see nothing that can be called a municipal constitution. The phrase about heirs may not quite exclude the notion of cor- porate succession,^ but it is hardly the phrase which would Notices of have been chosen as suggestive of it. Later in the reign later in of Henry, some change or breach of the charter must have Henry s taken place, as we find the citizens making' a fresh pav- reign. -r j cs f j 1130- ment for the right to choose their own Sheriif.^ And here ' See the charter in Select Charters, 103. " Sciatis me concessisse civibus meis Londoniarum, tenendum Middlesex ad firmam pro coc. libris ad compotum, ipsis at hseredibus suis, de me et hasredibus meis, ita quod ipsi cives ponent vicecomitem qualem voluerint de se ipsis, et justitiarium qualem voluerint de seipsis, ad custodiendum placita coronae mese et eadem plaoitanda, et mdlus alius erit justitiarius super ipsos homines Londoni- arum." 2 See vol. iii. p. 682. ^ See Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 406. On the growth of London and the other towns, see Green, Short History of the English People, 8g. CONSTITUTION OF LONDON. 469 we get a most interesting note of time. We see by an in- oh.xxit. cidental phrase that what the days of King Eadward were Poi'treeve- to the kmgdom at large, the days of King Eadward's last Leofstan Portreeve were to the city over which he ruled. As lands time.* ° and privileges were elsewhere to be held as they had been in the days of Eadward, in London they were to be held as they had been in the days of Leofstan. ^ In the civil war of Stephen and Matilda we have seen the citizens, by their title of baronSj share, as of old, in the election and deposition of Kings ; ^ and, what is just now more important, we now First first hear the famous name commmiio or commune.'^ It is ^'*the°'' perhaps not used with strict legal preeiseness, but it is at any i^ommune. rate a witness of a tendency towards closer organization as an united body. At last, among the changes and troubles of The the last years of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth ^^""^^ century, the commune of London comes forth into full light under a Mayor of its own choosing.* Presently, among the barons who were named to carry out the Great Charter, 12 15. the Mayor of London has his place. ^ In all the struggles London of the thirteenth century, London is ever foremost in the thirteenth cause of freedom. And when the nobles, clergy, and century. people of England put forth their famous letter denounciag 1247. the wrongs which England suffered at the hands of the ' In the writ of Henry the First, by which the lauds of the English Cnihtenagild (see Appendix TT.) are granted to the Priory of the Holy Trinity (Foedera, i. 11), a writ addressed " Viceoomitibus et baronibus London'," the lands are to be held "sicut antecessores eorum unquam Hberius tenuerunt, tempore patris mei et fratris mei, et tempore' Leostani." This answers to "tempore regis Eadwardi" in the writ on the same subject just before. Leofistan (on whom see Cod. Dipl. iv. 213, 214, and vol. iv. p. 30) had two sons, one of whom, according to the general rule, bore the Norman name of Robert. See Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 406. It is therefore unlikely that he died at Senlac, as I once thought. ^ See above, pp. 245, 305. ' See above, p. 305. ' Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 630. The first Mayor, Henry Fitz-Alwin, whether we take the latter name to be a male JEMvdne or a female JElfw^a, is again a ease of the Englishman disguised under a Norman name. ' See the list of the barons in Select Charters, 398, where " Major de Luudoniis " comes about the middle. 470 POLITICAL EESULTS OV THE NORMAN CONQUEST. Customs of the English towns im- memorial. No succes- sion from Komau munici- palities. A later class of towns strictly founded. Taunton by Ine, 710-722 ; Chester by ^thelfliEd, 907. Roman Bishop, it was with the seal of the city of London, as the centre of the national life^ that the national protest was signed/ I can hardly be called on to go at length through all those changes in the history of English municipal insti- tutions whose beginnings may be traced up to this time. But one or two special points may be noticed. The oldest privileges of the English towns are immemorial; they are part of the common heritage of the nation. The customs of a town were no more the grant of anybody than were the customs of a shire or a hundred. The town was, as I have said, simply a district which got to itself a special character and special customs from the fact that its in- habitants lived closer together, and had their dwellings better fenced in, than the inhabitants of other districts. The origin of our most ancient towns is shrouded in utter darkness. All that we can say is that, if London and York, Colchester and Lincoln, were — a point which I would not take upon me to determine — continuously inhabited from Roman times, they had no political succession from Roman times.^ "Whenever it was that the first English- men settled within the Roman walls, their settlement was of exactly the same kind as the settlements of their brethren in the open lands around them. These great and historic cities have no founder, except so far as the founders of the English nation were their founders. But presently a new class of towns arises, which are the natural fore- runners of the towns which arose in the Norman period. When Ine founded Taunton as a bulwark against the West -Welsh/ when the Lady of the Mercians called the City of the Legions into a new life and a crowd of other ' See Matthew Paris, 721 (Wats); Growth of English Constitution, 81, 188. 2 geg Appendix TT. = I have spoken at large on this matter in the Proceedings of the Somer- setshire Archaeological and Natural History Society for 1872, pp. 45, 51. VARIOUS CLASSES OF TOWNS. 471 Mid-English towns into their first life, they were distinctly oh. xxiv. founders with the rights of founders. The customs and privileges of the towns which they founded might fairly be said to be their grant. The later history of such towns differed in different cases. Taunton became a mere epi- scopal manor ; Warwick and Chester grew into independent and powerful boroughs. Still the rights and customs of such boroughs as these were not immemorial, and their existence, alongside ' of the growing power of the King and of other lords, helped to foster the idea that all towns were the towns of some lord, and that their rights needed a grant or confirmation by his charter. Thus, as we have Charters seen, cfiarters were granted to London itself, and in after thelin- times to York, Lincoln, and other immemorial cities. In f emo"al towns. the charters to Lincoln we find the confirmation of the L^ter con- gild-merchant, the grant of elective rights, but all signs of ?*?'"ti°° »* the Danish patriciate, the ancient Lawmen, have vanished. Nay, among the many and strange sources of income which Payments found their way into the hoard of the Lion of Justice, we the First. find the burghers of Lincoln paying two hundred marks of ''3°' silver and four marks of gold that they might hold their city in chief of the King.^ The next stage was when, after these patterns, a crowd Towns with of towns arose whose privileges really were the grants of pgaiiy the King, Bishop, Abbot, or other lord on whose lands f f^"^®"^ ^^ they arose. A collection of houses grew up on the manor of some lord or prelate, or at the gate of some castle or monastery. The settlement grew into a town, and, as the town increased in importance, it received a charter of privileges from its lord. Sometimes the privilege might not go beyond the grant of a market. In other cases, where the burghers were pushing, and the lords, especially the ^ Kot. Pip. Hen. I. 114. "Burgensea Linoolis reddunt compotum de 00. marcis argenti et iiij. marcis auri ut teneant civitatem de rege in capite." 472 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE IfOEMAN CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. ecclesiastical lords, were weak, the town grew into the full Growth of likeness of an immemorial city. The growth of some cat towns, of these ecclesiastical towns at the expense of their ecclesiastical lords forms one of the most interesting branches of study for the purely municipal historian. I am concerned with them only in so far as they began to arise within the Norman period, and in so far as the form which they took was an avowed imitation of the great Thurstau's immemorial cities. Archbishop Thurstan's charter grants Beverley. ^® ^ S^^^ ^^ ^^^ burgesses of Beverley the same rights and ^"9'^^4o- liberties which the citizens of York held of immemorial TheHansa. right.^ The men of York had their Hanse-house ; the men of Beverley should have their Hanse-house too. The name has died out among ourselves, but it still lives among the cities of the Saxon mainland. To their citizens the last modern changes have again given a right to claim the privileges which in ancient days were granted to them in the English havens. They are again the men of the Emperor who come in their ships, and are worthy of good laws even as we ourselves.^ Growth of There can thus be no doubt that the growth of the strength- towns in England, and thereby the growth of one form ened by ^f freedom, was greatly strengthened by the effects of the quest. Conquest. The Norman settlers in the English boroughs brought with them those ideas of more complete municipal independence which were springing up afresh in the lands where the old Roman traditions had never quite died out. Spirit of And moreover the independence of towns was one form, separation. ^^^ by far -the best form, of that spirit of separation and isolation which was so characteristic of the time. The separate privileges and separate jurisdictions claimed by ■ See the charter in Select Charters, 105. Professor Stubbs remarks that the Sanshus of the North is the GiWiall of th« South. The Arch- bishop grants the charter " consilio capituli Eboracensis et Beverlaoensis et consilio meorum baronum." ^ See vol. i. p. 311. GROWTH OF THE BOROUaHS AFTER THE CONQUEST. 473 the boroughs were really forms of the same tendency oh. xxiv. which everywhere tried to put some special and excep- tional jurisdiction in the place of the regular authorities of Church and State. It was the same spirit which made every lord a petty prince in his own manor, which led monasteries to throw off the authority of their Bishops, and which thus turned every shire and every diocese into a con- fused assemblage of separate and exempt jurisdictions. We Privileges are dealing with days in which it has been well said that emptions. liberty meant privilege, when every local or professional collection of men- thought more of the privileges of their own district or order than of the general well- being of the commonwealth. In most eases privileges of this kind, whatever they were in the beginning, have proved mischievous in the long run. In the towns alone Good work- the working of things has been different. A privileged gyfjem in town might keep itself selfishly isolated from the country *^^ towns. around it; its internal constitution might shrink up into an oligarchy ; but in the worst case it still cherished elements of law, freedom, and order which could not fail to tend to the general well-being of the nation. And in Eng- Causes land the circumstances of the country hindered the muni- ^ept back cipal developement from being carried too far. Under the *^® i^j*™" strong power of the Crown^ as it was established by the velopement Norman KingSj English boroughs had no chance of grow- ing into free Imperial cities. And the way in which the Municipal English towns grew up helped, among other causes, to ^ot the hinder them from becoming, as they became in France, ^"'^ f'^'^' the only dwelling-places of freedom. They were not, England. like the towns on the mainland, something distinct from the country around, often lording it over the country around ; they were simply settlements among other settle- ments whose circumstances caused them to take a some- what different shape from their neighbours. In England the shires and the towns, springing as they had done from 474 POLITICAL EESITLTS OF THE NOEMAN" CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. a common origin, could never become so utterly separated Compan- frora each other as they did in lands where the cities had son with ^ the con- once been colonies of Roman or Latin citizens in the midst of conquered provincials. Had the towns been much weaker, they might have been unable to play the part which they did play in winning the general freedom of the nation. Had they been much stronger, they might simply have won their own freedom and have kept it wholly to themselves. Common The way in which the English towns grew up had also the towns another result. The population of the towns had, in the rest of the ^^^^^ state of things, been formed out of the same elements nation. as the rest of the nation, and it remained so in the newer state of things. A new element indeed came in with the Conquest; but it was an element which did not touch either town or country exclusively, but touched both in much the same degree. The King's men, French and English, were to be found within the walls of the borough, just as much No special as without them. There was therefore less opportunity class. ^'^ than in other lands for the formation of a special burgher class. An English town contained men of all classes, just as an English hundred did. Before the Conquest, a North- humbrian Earl married the daughter of a citizen of York.'- After the Conquest^ a great Norman land-owner took his Trade not place among the Lawmen of Lincoln.^ The town was not a mere collection of traders, and moreover, in the days with which we are concerned, both before and after the Conquest, we see no signs of any contempt for trade. By Old-English law the prosperous merchant could claim Thegn's rank of right, ^ and by the Truce of God, the mer- chant, the minister of peaceful intercourse between diiferent ^ See vol. i. p. 359. ' See vol. iv. p. 213. ^ See the Laws, " Be leod-geHncSum and Lage," 6, (Schmid, 390). "And gif massere ge}>eah, J'set he ferde hrige ofer wid S£e be his agenum crsfte, se wses Jionne sy'SSan J>egen-rihtes weorSe.'' NO SPECIAL BURGHER CLASS IN ENGLAND. 475 lands, was clothed with something like a sacred character.^ oh. xxiv. Contempt for the trader was the feeling of a somewhat Contempt tor XiTBidQ later time. It was the feeling of the days of chivalry and a later IScllDS' its accompanying follies ; and, in England at least, in the land where the ducal house of Suffolk rose from among the traders of Kingston-upon-HuU, the feeling was neither very lasting nor at any time very deep. This last line of thought leads us to the question of the Social ©ffscts of effect of the Conquest on the different classes of society in the Con- England, and especially on the relations between the two 1"®^*- races, Norman and English. I must again repeat that No broad the dream of romances and romantic historians, which sets tween Nor- before us a picture of lasting and conscious separation S'^^Lh^'^ between Normans and Englishmen, has no foundation in authentic history. To go no further, not a sign of it is No ancient ©vidsiicc to be seen in the vast mass of letters which has gathered for the round the great controversy between King and Primate P"?^^"^ o J o notion. in the days of Henry the Second, while the fact of any such distinction is denied in so many words by an im- portant and experienced official of the same reign.^ No law, no custom even, drew any hard and fast line between the two races. Notwithstanding all the rhetoric of Henry of Huntingdon^ and of a crowd of modern writers, it would be hard to find any man born in England by whom the name of Englishman is used as a name of contempt.* The social relations of the country were left, like everything else, to settle themselves by force of cir- cumstances. The higher the rank of any class of men, ' See the Truce as renewed in 1095, Ord. Vit. 721 C. "Mercatores" are among the protected classes. ^ See the well-known extract from the Dialogus de Scaccario, quoted in vol. It. p. 327. ' See Tol. Hi. p. 505. * William Eufus and Bishop WUliam of Longchamp, whose sayings on this head will be found in Appendix W., were not bom in England. 476 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NOEMAN COKQUBST. cH. XXIV. the greater would be the proportion of Norman^ and the smaller the proportion of Old-English, blood among them. But whatever distinction was drawn soon became a distinc- tion of rank and not of race. That the result of the Norman Conquest was the social thrusting down of the great mass of Englishmen there can be no doubt, but it was not directly as Englishmen that they were thrust down. And Other one class, the most unhappy of all, undoubtedly gained. thrust Speaking generally, we may say that every class above ?u^' * the lowest sank a step, but that the lowest class of the slaves J^' rise. all rose a step. Earls, thegns, churls, all lost ; the per- The churl sonal slave gained. We have already seen that, before before the the Conquest, many causes were tending to lower the Conquest, pggition of the churl or the simple freeman. In the days of King Eadward he was clearly in a different and a worse position from that which he had held in the old days of the free Teutonic community. Every man now had his lordj and the tendency was for the rights of the lord, to grow at the expense of the rights of the man. And this tendency was, like every other tendency of the kind. Witness of strengthened and hastened by the Conquest. Domesday still sets before us a most minute scale of classes among the actual occupiers of land, from the absolutely free land- owner who could go where he would with his land — that is, could commend himself to what lord he thought good — down to the personal slave who could be sold in the market Classes in or shipped off for Ireland. Of the minute distinctions between iordarii, cotarii, and the like I shall speak else- Villaiius where.^ But one thing is plain, that, throughout the ^f^j.1 . Survey, villanus is meant to translate ceorl. Now the Latin word must^ like the English word, be looked at without any of the later associations which gathered round use of the it. There is nothing in the mere word villanus which im- plies villainage in the later legal sense, any more than there ^ See Appendix tJU. DEGRADATION OP THE CHURLS. 477 is anything in it which, implies villany in the later moral oh. xxiv. sense. The mllanus or ceorl is still distinguished from the servus or tliemc. But the tendency of the Conquest clearly The ceorl was to confound the two classes together, to thrust down Q^^^y, oon- the ceorl and to raise the theow to the intermediate state f°"°^^ the class ot of the later villamis, rnsticiis, or nativiis. The ceorl is the villani. villain regardant of the lawyers ; the theow is the villain in gross} The theoretical distinction survived ; but it is Villains plain that the mass of the villains in gross gradually passed and «- into the class of villains regardant, a change which, for the ?«'"<'''"*■ actual slave, the mere chattel of his master, was undoubted promotion. But it is no less clear that, if the tJieow had risen, the ceorl had sunkj by both of them meeting on the same level. Under the manorial system everything tended Working to strengthen the hands of the lord^ to fix and stiffen his manorial rights, to change free commendation, free tenancy of land, ^y^'®™- into servitude of both the land and the man. In this state of things, no one was really free save the man who could go with his land whither he would. ^ He who could go whither he would, but only without his land, would find such a right by no means profitable. And it would soon come to be held that he was bound to the land, and could not go away from it against his lord's will. Griven a Change . , . , .„ of free tenant bound to certain rents or services by agreement ; li tenants it is once held that he cannot cancel that agreement, he ^"{jains. practically becomes a bondman. That is, he becomes a villain regardant ; he is a bondman as regards his lord ; as ' For the distinction see Blackstone, ii. 6, and on the growth of fillainage, Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 428. Blackstone'e editor Christian quotes Lord Coke as saying that " the lord may beat his villein, and, if it be without cause, he cannot have any remedy." Under the Lion of Justice at least it was not so. See the extract from Henry's Pipe Eoll in Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 430. Glanville in hia fifth book (Phillips, Engliache Eeichs und Eechtsgesohichte, ii. 377) ™es the word " servus " in the headings, but in the text the man him- self is "nativua," though his condition is "villenagium " and " servitus." ^ The common Domesday phrase, "Potuit ire quo voluit;" "cum ista terra" is sometimes added. 478 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. regards other men, his status need not be in any way The changed. There is nothing in the personal relation be- refatio'n to ^ween him and his lord which need at all hinder him from the lord exercisinsr the rights of a freeman either towards the eom- strictly , to & i • , i i personal, monwealth or towards other men. And tms was the legal theory of villainage, even when it was harshest. The lord's rights had grown to a fearful degree ; the practical position of the villain towards other classes of men had sadly sunk ; stUl in theory the relation of lord and villain was purely a private one. The villain was not a slave, but a freeman minus the very important rights of his lord. As against all men but his lord, he was free. The rights of his lord over him were something special and exceptional. If they were disputed, the lord had to prove them ; and under certain circumstances of non user, such for instance as the villain living unclaimed for a fixed time in a chartered town, the rights of the lord were lost for ever. The whole position of the villain shows that he was one who had sunk from a higher to a lower position. The relation of villainage is a very artificial one, one which could never have been devised from the beginning in the form in which it stands in our law-books. Actual slavery is a very simple thing, which may Villainage arise in a thousand ways. But the artificial institution of of free com- villainage could hardly have come about in any way except mendation. |jy. ^jjg pj-Qcess which changed free commendation between a man and his lord, first into the lord's qualified ownership of the land, and then into his qualified ownership of the TheviUain man himself. It is only by degrees that the private fo'sesTia'^ bondage of the villain cuts him ofi" from the public rights public Qf ^Q freeman. In old days the villani, the ceorlas, of Kent had sent their greetings to King ^Ethelstan as one Stages of class among the freemen of the shire.' Long after the gradation. Conquest we find them keeping their place for some pur- poses in the local assemblies ; successive ordinances, for- ■ See vol. i. p. io8. NATTJEE OF VILLAINAGE. 479 bidding them to act as judges or jurors, forbidding them oh. xxit. to escape from their bondage by admission to holy orders,^ mark different stages in their degradation. But, in so doing, they mark that it was a process of degradation, a fall from a higher state to a lower. For it is inconceivable that, in such a state of things, villains could ever have put forth new claims to rights which they had never before enjoyed. The innovation must have been in the law which forbade, not in the thing which was forbidden. By the ViUainage time of Henry the Second the status of the villain seems Henry the to have been fixed. As against his lord, he no longer had S®"=°i"i- any full right of property; he could not even redeem the services due to his lord by a payment in money, because, as against his lord, he had no full property in anything.^ To this state the descendants, doubtless not of all, but of a large part, of the churls, the simple freemen of the old Teutonic society, had been brought within little more than a century after the Conquest. The change was wrought The change by the working of causes to which the Conquest gave a ^hen the new and strong impulse ; but the same causes had been, ^"^9'j'* though less powerfully, at work ever since the new nobility *lie Eorls. of the Thegns began to supplant the immemorial nobility of the Eorls.3 This was, on the whole, the blackest and saddest result of the Norman Conquest. Yet even this had its bright side. The process which thrust down the churl into a The slaves modified slavery, raised the slave into what, as compared conquest. with his former state, might be called a modified freedom. The general confusion of all the lower classes together worked to the advantage of the lowest class of all. The The feudal strict feudal theory, with its ascending scale of classes, had no place • See the passages in Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 396, 431. ^ GlanviUe, v. 5. " Omnia catalla cujuslibet nativi ita intelHguntur esse in potestate domini sui, quod propriis denariis versus dominum a viUeuagio redimere se non poterit." ' See vol. i. pp. 94, 95. 480 POLITICAL EESULTS OF THE NORMAK CONQUEST, cH. XXIV. hardly any room for the personal slave. At every stage, for the from the Emperor and the Pope downward, the lord had rights over his man, the man owed duties to his lord. Those duties^ as we get lower in the scale, might be base and burthensome ; but they did not imply actual property in the man himself. The lowest step of all, in such a system as this, was more naturally filled by villainage than by actual slavery. For, grievous as the villain's bondage might be, the form which that bondage took was rather that the lord had rights over the villain than that he had a The slaves property in him. Absolute property in a man, the pro- rafsed to P^rty which enables the master to sell his slave in the TiiLuEage. market, has no place in the feudal range of ideas. Silently then and gradually^ but none the less efl'ectuallyj while the churl sank to the state of villainage, the slave rose to it. In this way, that very spirit of oligarchic contempt for the lower classes, which did such wrong to the lowest class but one, did for the lowest class of all what the preaching of Wulfstan and Anselm, the legislation of Cnut and William, had failed to do. "Without the operation of Slaveryfor- any law, without any general act of emancipation, the Ensland slave class rose to the rank of villainage. The state of ^h*i°>rT s^^"^6ry, never abolished by law^ passed so utterly out of use and out of mind, that English Judges, who remem- bered that there had been such a thing as villainage, denied Negro that there ever had been such a thing as slaveiy. At last, when a new kind of slavery had arisen in the outlying pos- sessions of England, when slaves who were no longer English criminals or British captives, but men utterly alien in race and colour, were again bought and sold in England, the question which had troubled the consciences of Wulfstan and Slavery Anselm again became a practical one. It is characteristic not by law, of English history that slavery was finally wiped out Jud<^es*^^ from among us, not by a legislative enactment, but by a 1772- judicial decision which did more credit to the hearts of the ABOLITION OP SLAVERY. 481 Judges who gave it than it did to their knowledge of ch, xxiv. history.^ The doctrine that a man became free merely by treading the soil or breathing the air of England would have sounded strange in the ears of any judge or legislator in the twelfth century. But, long before that doctrine was put forth, while actual slavery had so utterly passed away that its very existence in former days was forgotten^ villainage, though not forgotten, had passed away as utterly. Neither No legal slavery nor villainage was ever abolished by law. As „£ either villainage came in by the gradual degradation of the ^^J^^^^y °'^ o JOB Tillamage. poorer freemen, so it went out by the gradual emancipa- tion of the villains. The details of that process belong to a later stage of history than mine. The completion of the Abolition good work in which Wulfstan and Anselm laboured, the i^ ^u abolition, first of the slave-trade and then of slavery, first ^i^gji?!^- ^ speaking within the dependent, then within the independent, colonies land8. of England, forms a page in modern history which aptly follows on some pages of history in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. But there was one great difierence be- tween slavery in earlier and in later times. The descendant Difference of the English Wite-theow, the descendant of the British ^^jj^e and captive, when he was once set free, differed in nothing ^^^^ from his free neighbours. The great difficulties which have arisen from the emancipation of slaves who are unlike their masters in every respect in which man can be unlike man, is a difficulty with which Wulfstan and William were not called upon to grapple. The same causes which fostered the growth of manors. Growth and which helped to thrust down the free churls into chivalrous villainagej naturally strengthened every feeling and every ^P'"*' ' See Blackstone, i. 1, i. 14 (vol. i. pp. 127, 424, ed. Christian). See also May, Const. Hist. iii. 35, 36. Blackstone and his editor would seem never to have looked into Domesday or into any other record of om- history or law. VOL. T. I i 482 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NOEMAN CONQUEST. Nature of chivalry. Counter- acting ecclesias- tical and municipal influences. No chi- valry in WiUiam the Con- queror or Henry the Pirst. custom of that kind which, for want of a better name, may be called chivalrous. The chivalrous spirit is, above all things, a class spirit. The good knight is bound to end- less fantastic courtesies towards men, and still more to- wards women, of a certain rank ; he may treat all below that rank with any degree of scorn and cruelty. The spirit of chivalry implies the arbitrary choice of one or two virtues, to be practised in such an exaggerated degree as to become vices, while the ordinary laws of right and wrong are forgotten. The false code of honour supplants alike the laws of the commonwealth, the law of God^ and the eternal principles of right. Chivalry again, in its military aspect, not only encourages the love of war for its own sake, without regard to the cause for which war is waged ; it encourages also an extravagant regard for a fantastic show of personal daring which cannot in any way advance the objects of the siege or campaign which is going on. Chivalry, in short, is in morals very much what feudalism is in law ; each substitutes purely personal obligations, obligations devised in the interests of an exclusive class, for the more homely duties of an honest man and a good citizen. That these influences never became wholly dominant in Western Europe is largely owing to the counteracting influences of ecclesiastical and municipal institutions. Both those classes of institutions have their weak side ; they have their temp- tations and their corruptions ; but they both helped to keep aUve the great ideas of duty and common sense alongside of the follies and fripperies of the reign of knights and ladies. In England these wholesome influ- ences were strengthened by the personal wisdom of so many of our Kings. It is only once, in his extreme youth, that anything savouring of chivalry is recorded of William the Great.^ Neither in the good nor the bad side of Henry the First do we see a spark of chivalry ; he ' See vol. ii. p. 285. OEIGIN OP CHIVALRY. 483 might sacrifice either duty to interest or — in some better ch. xxiv. moment — interest to duty; but he never sacrificed either to a point of honour. He might go through a form of chivalrous courtesy to a defeated enemy ; but he refused to risk the smallest political or military advantage by any purposeless display of personal prowess.^ Between these Chivalry of two great and wise rulers we see the ideal of the mag- Rufus ; nanimous knight in the form of William E,ufus. We see it Stephen; again, in a more attractive shape, in the weak and generous Stephen. At a later time Edward the First cannot be Edward wholly acquitted of having had a hand in encouraging the '^ '^'' ' same false ideal. Politically, I need not say, Edward was one of the truest of Englishmen, the true successor of our ancient KingSj the true Bretwalda and Emperor of Britain. Yet in one side of his personal character we cannot help seeing a certain French influence, which marred his great- ness with a touch of the follies of chivalry.^ The whole Edward chivalrous idea, an idea quite un-Eufflish, and rather French "^, . ^ . Chivalry than Norman, flourished most of all during the French neither wars of Edward the Third. How little English, how little nor^Nor- Norman, it is, we see if we try to conceive either Harold or ™™> ^"* William risking his life in a tournament or taking an oath upon the swans. It would be as hard to conceive Earl Roger as to conceive Earl Gyrth, riding up to run his spear into the gate of a besieged town, or keeping one eye bandaged for a year's space for the love of his lady. Yet, Slight hold so far as France influenced Normandy, so far as the con- g^ Eng- nexion with Normandy laid England open to influences '*°'^- from France, so far may the slight touch of chivalrous feeling which was all that ever infected England be set down as a result of the Norman Conquest. As far as chivalry had any real eflect on our institutions, it acted rather by falling in with and strengthening one or two ' See above, pp. l8l, 189. ' See Green, Short History of the English People, p. 176. I i 3 484 POLITICAL EESTJLTS OF THE NOEMAN CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. already existing' customs than by bringing in anything that was positively new. Forms of To begin with mere outward badges and ceremonies, Mgh™^ there can be no doubt that some form of investing the hood ; youth who had reached the age of warfare with the weapons of warfare was a custom which had its root in genuine Teu- in England; tonic antiquity. In our own land a-Ethelstan is said to have been girded with the belt and sword of knighthood by his in Nor- grandfather Alfred ; ' and it would seem that this ceremony "^^^ y- hatd, in Normandy at least, grown by the middle of the eleventh century into something of more special meaning than it bore in England. Otherwise we could never have heard of William bestowing arms on so tried a warrior as Ecclesiasti- Harold.^ By the end of the century the ceremony seems to monies of have put on somewhat of a religious character ; if King knight- William dubbed his son Henry to rider,^ both Henry and William Rufus are said to have received their knighthood Chivalry as at the hands of Lanfranc* It may be that the difference with horse- between English and Norman notions of knighthood lurks in manship. ^j^g -^01.^3 dicier, ritter, chevalier;^ and in the religious cere- mony, whatever was its nature, we may perhaps see the beginning of that special notion of knighthood or chivalry as something mystical and sacred of which we hear so much at a somewhat later time. And it is undoubtedly under William Rufus that the " good knight " first appears as a being of a special class, bound by special ties to others of the same class.^ In short, the chivalrous side of feu- ' Will. Malms, ii. 133. " Avus Elfredus . . . premature militem fecerat, donatum chlamyde coccinea, gemmato baltheo, ense Saxonico cum vagina aurea." ^ See vol. iii. pp. 228, 240, 685. ^ See vol. iv. p. 694. * See Will. Malms, iv. 305. We here see how utterly wrong is the statement of the false Ingulf (70, Gale) that the religious form of bestowing knighthood was something specially English and disliked by the Normans, a statement which has misled many. See more in Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. .^67. ' See Comp. Politics, 73. e See above, pp. 73, 74. CEEEMONIES OP KNIGHTHOOD. 485 dalisnij as represented by the Red King, and its financial oh. xxiv. side, as represented by his minister, must have come into prominence exactly at the same time. From that time the notion of the knight, the chevalier, goes on and prospers, till it reaches its full developement under Edward the Third. Ceremonies of knighthood, orders of knighthood, are now in full force. Yet we must always distinguish the strict Legal use legal meaning of chevalier and its cognate words from their chivalry. fantastic social meaning. Tenure in chivalry, guardian in chivalry, are words of dry legal meaning, coined in the mint of Flambard ; ^ and guardianship in chivalry at least was a relationship which did not often savour much of any laws of courtesy or honour. In process of time the Survivals mystic character of the knight died out; he remains among ^ood. " us in his various forms, whether for life or hereditary, as a singular instance of a rank which is marked by a title of foreign origin, but a title which has in practice become so purely English that no other nation seems able to under- stand its use. Somewhat like the history of knighthood and its titles Origia is the history of the special badge, if not exactly of knight- armour, hood, yet of that gentle blood which knighthood took for granted, the use of hereditary coat-armour. We have seen that devices of this kind, purely arbitrary in the eleventh century, had become, perhaps hereditary, certainly per- sonally distinctive, among the French warriors of the reign of Lewis the Sixth.^ For a man to be distin- guished in battle by a badge on his shield, and for that badge to become the distinguishing mark of his family, was in itself harmless, perhaps in some cases useful. Heraldry becomes ridiculous only when it takes to itself somewhat of a mystical importance, and boasts itself as the subject of an imaginary science. Here again we must look on the ' See above, p. 377. ° See above, p. 189. 486 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. cH. XXIV. introduction of knighthood in the special sense, of here- ditary coat-armour, and of the whole range of ideas con- nected with either^ as results of the Norman Conquest. Yet we cannot but remark that^ just as the legal side of feudalism obtained less perfect establishment in England than any- Lessvalued where else in Western Europe, so its words and ideas and than else- outward badges grew into far less importance in England where. |.j,^^ ^j^g^ grew into, not only in France, but also in Ger- many. The gentilJiotume of France, the sixteen quarterings of Germany^ are things which have no English equivalents. Again, if the actual introduction of these things among us is due to the Norman Conquest, still the fact that they never rose among us to the same mischievous importance to which they rose in other lauds is due partly to the wise despotism of the Norman Kings, partly to the English spirit of the nation which that despotism called forth into fuller life. The Court An instance of the way in which the growing notions of ' chivalry modified an actually existing institution may be seen in the institution which bears the fantastic name of Functions the Court of Chivalry. The Constable and the Marshal, the of the Constable, former of whom was merely the ancient Stallerwith a Latin name, were really great and important officers in time of war.' That they should hold a court for the trial of strictly military offences — that is, that the ancient judicial functions of the army itself, the armed nation, should be transferred to them — was only one example more of the centralization of judicial power, of the transfer of authority from the assembled people to the King and his immediate repre- sentatives. And if, as we are told, the judges of this court gave judgement, not according to the common law of Eng- land, but according to some undefined code called the law of arms,^ such a special jurisdiction was at least not more ' See Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 354. ^ See Keeves, History of English Law, iii. 194. THE. WAGER OF BATTLE. 487 unreasonable or oppressive than the jurisdiction of the ch. xxiv. forests. But when vie find the Court of Chivahy acting Its use as as a court of honour, deciding questions of words by which honour, men's honour was supposed to be touched, and deciding all questions about coat-armour,' we see the effect of chivalrous ideas in their most fantastic shape. But we see also how little real hold such notions had upon the mind of England. Military jurisdiction of some kind there must be wherever there is an army, and a court-martial is still a practical thing. But the Constable has vanished altogether^ and it is long indeed since an Earl-Marshal has been called on solemnly to sit in court to decide questions about coat-armour or about the honour of its bearers. But the most notable case in which the chivalrous spirit seized upon an existing institution and turned it into something of quite another kind, is to be seen if we compare the wager of battle with the tournament. We The ordeal have already traced the history of the two forms of direct ^^ger of appeal to the judgement of God, the wager of battle and ^^*"^- the ordeal.^ Trial by battle, the Norman use, supplanted the The ordeal ordeal, the English use. The story of the judicial combat of Godwine and Ordgar,^ whether true or false, shows that the Normaa use was already adopted by Englishmen in the days of William Rufus. The change is not wonderful. To adopt the wager of battle was not merely to follow the more fashionable and courtly use ; it was to follow the use that was clearly more attractive to any one of a warlike spirit; The wonder is that the wager of battle, which certainly was no Norman invention, but which had its root in old Scandinavian usage, was not as well known in England as it was in Normandy. The ordeal therefore died out, while the wager of battle was abolished only 1 Blackstone, iii. 7 (vol. iii. p. 103, ed. Christian). Compare vol. iii. p. 67 ; iv. p. 267. '■' See vol. iv. p. 624, and above, p. 400. ^ See Appendix K. 488 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE ISTOEMAN CONQUEST. The wager of battle strictly judicial. Chivalrous character of the tour- nament. Its intro- duction into Eng- land. in our own time. The wager of battle is essentially a warlike institution, but it is in no sense a chivalrous institution. It may be called cruel, irrational, or impious ; but it was no risking of human life in mere sport or frivolity. Strange as such a means of coming at the truth may seem to us, the wager of battle was a grave judicial proceeding, the object of which was to come at the truth. It was to the direct judgement of God, the God who, as men deemed, would give victory in the strife to the righteous cause, that William challenged Harold. ^ And, had it been merely his own cause that was at stake, and not the cause of the English people, Harold might perhaps not have refused thS challenge. The challenge was given in the spirit of a warrior ; it was not given in the spirit of a mere knight-errant. But, once bring in the chivalrous spirit, once set men to fight and risk their lives, not to decide any issue of truth and right, but for mere sport, mere display, mere excitement, and the wager of battle becomes the tournament. The public practice of military exercises can hardly fail to be the usage of any people among whom every man may be called on to bear arms. Wulfstan, not yet priest or monk, won fame by his early prowess in displays of this kind.^ But mere military exercises, which need not involve any greater danger than bodily exercises of any other kind, are something utterly different from the wanton risking of life which is the essence of the tournament. The tournament appears among us as a novelty of the twelfth century, a French device unknown to England, and it is spoken of by grave writers of that age with the horror which it deserved. Neither of the great Henries allowed any such doings in his days. They began under the anarchy of Stephen ; they began again in the days of the knight-errant Richard. The Church denounced them, but the Church denounced ^ See vol. iii. p. 448. See vol. ii. p. 463. TOURNAMENTS. 489 them in vain. The ordeal was in the like sort forbidden, oh. xxiv. and the ban took effect, because the institution was already waning. The ban against the tournament was fruitless, because the institution was the fruit of the growing spirit of the age ; it was the very embodiment of chivalry.^ Another result of that class of feelings of which we have Growth of been tracing the effect in the manor and the tournament fu^e. comes out in the grov^th of the system of primogeniture after the Norman Conquest. Domesday is full of eases in Equal which land was held by several owners in common, whom before the we may commonly guess to have been brothers^ as in some Conquest, cases they are distinctly said to have been.^ When the ' The histoiy of the tournament is given by William of Newburgh, v. 4, under the year 1194 ; " Meditationea militares, id est armorum exercitia quse torneamenta vulgo dicantur, in Anglia celebrari eceperunt, rege id deoemente et a singulis qui exerceri vellent indictae pecuniae modulum exigente." He adds, " Sane hujusmodi, nullo interveniente odio, sed pro solo exercitio atque ostentatione virium, concertatio militaris nunquam in Anglia fuisse noscitur, nisi in diebus regis Stephani, quumper ejus indecentem moUitiem nullua esset publicEe vigor disoipUnae." The contemporary Con- tinuator of Florence (i 1 39) thus comments on the novelty ; " Vere erat miseria videre, dum quis in alium hastam vibrans laucea perforaret, et ignorans quod judicium spiritus subiret, morti traderet." William of New- burgh goes on to tell how Henry the Second forbad tournaments, how those who loved the practice went over to France to indulge in them, and how Richard introduced them into England ; " Ut ex bellorum solemni prae- ludio verorum- addiscerent artem usumque bellorum, neo insultarent Galli Anglis multibus tanquam rudibus et minus gnaris." He then mentions the prohibition of the tournament in various ecclesiastical councils, and adds how the prohibition was despised by the "fervor juvenum, armorum vanissime afFectantium gloriam, gaudens favore principum probates habere tirones volentium." '"■ Of many cases in Domesday I take a few from Somerset, where they lie thick together. Single manors, as they had become in the time of King William, had been in the time of King Eadward held by two Thegna (89 6, 92 5, 93), three (91, 93), four, five, seven (92 6, 93), fourteen (90). In Lincolnshire (354) we get a good case of the division of land between brothers ; " In Covenham habuerunt Alsi et Chetel et Turver iii. oarucatas terraa et dimidiam. . . . Chetel et Turver fratres fuerunt, et post mortem patris sui terram diviserunt, ita tamen ut Chetel faciens servitium regis haberet adjutorium Turver fratris sui." The landa of the two brothers 490 POLITICAL EESULTS OF THE NOE.MAN" CONQUEST. CH. XXIV. possession of land Lad been changed into a kind of princi- pality carrying with it jurisdiction, it became natural to vest that property and jurisdiction in a single person only. As the growth of the notion of property in the royal office had made the royal office more strictly hereditary^ so the turning of property in land into a kind of office made it seem reasonable to lay down for the manorj as well as for the kingdom, a distinct law of succession, marking out a single undoubted successor at each vacancy. But it must not be forgotten that the doctrine of primogeniture, the doctrine that one son only should be held to represent the father^ has had to struggle with an older, and in truth Doctrine of a more aristocratic, instinct. The doctrine of primogeni- ture con- ture goes distinctly in the teeth of the doctrine of the nobUit" ^oi' "^o^ility — i^^ ^^^ highest rank of all, the kingliness — of the the whole whole kin.' In a Roman patrician gens one member was as noble as another ; in a Teutonic kingly house the youngest brother was as much a son of Woden as the eldest. Prom this doctrine came the frequent partitions of kingdoms among the early Emperors and Kings f from it came the constant partition of their dominions Conti- among the princely houses of Germany; from it came the doctrine of general doctrine of contineDtal nobility, the doctrine nobiKty. ^^^^ j^]j |.jjg descendants of a noble are noble to the ninth and tenth generation. Of these two shoots of an evil stock, that which took root in England was com- Primo- paratively harmless. The law of primogeniture has its hinders dark side ; but it has a very bright side also, when we "r^biJit'^ remember that it is the law of primogeniture, more than anything else^ which has saved us from the curse of an had become the subject of distinct grants ; for " terrain Chetel habet Willel- mus [de Perci] de rege, terrain autem Turver emit isdem WiUelmus ab Anschitillo quodam coquo T. K. AViUelmi." A good deal about the old practice of division of land, commonly called gavelkind, will be found in Elton's Tenures of Kent, chap. iv. v. ' See Comparative Politics, 164. ' lb. 172. PEIMOGENITUEE, 491 exclusive nobility. The heaping of property, honours, and oh. xxiv. oiBees on one son only in each family, the gathering together, as it were, of the whole nobility of the family in his single person, has hindered in England the growth of a nohlesse, a Junkerthum, like those of foreign lands. Our The hereditary peerage is founded on a combination of the law peerage of primogeniture and the right of summons ; the dignity oppo^^'l ^ of a peer in truth consists in a perpetual right of summons nobility, vested in one member of his family at a time. Such a peerage is of all things the most opposed to the continental doctrine of nobility.^ Because the eldest son is a here- ditary legislator and a hereditary judge, his brothers sink into the general mass of the people. Under the working of the new feudal doctrines, the custom of primogeni- ture gradually supplanted the Old-English custom of equal partition of lands. The change seems at first sight a change in an aristocratic direction ; and so it may well have been felt to be. In truth its working has been democratic. Had all the sons of a Thegn remained Thegns for ever and ever, a nobility of the strict con- tinental type, a nobility fenced off by exclusive hereditary barriers, might have arisen in England as it arose in other lands. As it was, the working of primogeniture has brought about the rule which more than any other one rule has preserved equality of rights among us, the rule that the younger children of a baron, an earl, a duke, or of the King himself, are simple commoners. The foundation of a peerage which keeps to a great extent the character of a nobility of office has done more than any other one cause to hinder the growth of a real nobility of birth. § 6. Ecclesiastical Effects of the Norman Conqiiest. One side of the ecclesiastical results of the Norman Con- quest has been dealt with already, when we spoke of the new position which England now took with regard to the ' See Comparative Politics, 264. 492 POLITICAL EESULTS OF THE NOEMAN" COlirQUEST. CH. XXIV. Increased connexion with Eome tlfroug'h the Con- quest. G-eneral intercom- munion throughout Western Christen- dom. Older relations between England and Eome. Romescot, Roman encroach- ments after the Conquest. Beginnings under Eadward. Interfer- ence of Roman Papacy and to foreign lands generally. The Norman Con- quest made England a part of the common ecclesiastical system of Western Christendom ; it made her one of the spiritual dependencies of the see of Rome in a fuller sense than she had ever been before. If foreign churchmen were quartered on the sees and benefices of England, the sees and benefices of other lands were thrown open to Englishmen, that is to natives of England of both races, in a way in which they had not been before. In the internal history of the English Church, the effects of that fuller submission to the Roman see which was one result of the Norman Conquest were of much the same kind as the final results of the Conquest itself. In both cases, a season of a more complete submission called out the spirit of resistance in a more definite and antagonistic form. The older England of our native Kings had no quarrel with Rome, because she had no grievances to com- plain of at Roman hands. She looked up to Rome with the reverence due from a colony to its metropolis, and she paid her Romescot,'^ as far as we know, without a murmur. But, from the time of the Conquest, from the time when a Bishop of Rome had in some sort disposed of the English Crown, the encroachments on the ecclesiastical freedom of England come upon us thicker and thicker. They had indeed, like all the other changes which came of the Conquest, begun before the Conquest. We saw some signs of what was coming in the days of Eadward, when the Roman Pontiff" could keep Spearhafoc out of the see to which he had been lawfully nominated by the English King,^ and could denounce Stigand as an usurper of the patriarchal throne to which he had been yet more lawfully called by the voice of the English people.^ The coming of Roman Legates, the meddling of those Legates in English ' See vol. iv. p. 431. ' See vol. ii. pp. 120-122. ^ See vol. ii. pp. 341-344. ENCROACHMENTS OF THE POPES. 493 afPairs, begins under Eadward ; it quickens under William^ ch. xxiv. who himself stoops to receive his Crown from Roman hands Legates under on one of the great feast days of the English realm. We Eadward, have seen how under Henry men wondered at the insolence ™I^f.'' •' WiUiam, of the stranger who displaced the Primate of all Britain under in his own church, and how Henry himself could find no Henry, remedy for the evil, save that of clothing the Primate himself with the character of a Legate of the Roman see.^ Under the anarchy of Stephen England sank so low that under the right to the English Crown was debated, and argu- '^^ ^"' ments were heard on either side, in the court of the Roman Bishop.^ The efforts of Henry the Second to assert the Henry the ancient liberties of the realm were thwarted, and that ^""'^ ' partly by the mistakes of his own conduct, by his stooping, when it served his momentary ends, to admit the very claims against which he had begun to strive. Presently John. came the day when an English King, a strange wearer of ^^'^' the Crown of William, knelt to receive the English king- dom as a fief of Rome. Then came the long years of Henry the Third papal pillage, the days when the land lay as a ready farm for Roman tax-gatherers as truly as it had lain in elder days for Danish invaders.^ But with the crowning wrong came also the national uprising. The ignominy of the days of John, the plunder of the days of Henry, awoke the old spirit of Englishmen. It awoke the spirit that Opposition breathes in the patriotic pages of Matthew Paris, the spirit ;„ ^.j^g which hailed a saint and a martyr in the hero of Lewes thirteenth ■' _ century. and Evesham, and which saw no power in the curse of Rome to hinder an English Earl from working signs and wonders. From that day the struggle went on. A long Struggle succession of statutes, restraining the encroachments of the emanoipa- see of Rome, lead on to those great statutes of all by *'™- . 1634- which the authority of Rome was thrown aside altogether. In all this, the growth of the papal power, like the growth 1 See ahove, p. 236. ^ See above, p. 325. ^ See vol. i. p. 360. 494 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NqemaN" CONQUEST. OH. XXIV. of the king]y power, wrought in the end for good. In both cases the utter bondage of a moment led in the long run to fuller freedom. As against King and Pope alike, our freedom is the more complete and the more precious, because it is a freedom for which our fathers had to strive. Internal But, besides its effect on the relations of England with cal effects Rome, the Conquest had important effects on the more of the strictly internal concerns of the English Church. The Conquest. '' ° Exemption Separation of the ecclesiastical and temporal jurisdictions by ofchnrch- ^j^g Conqueror led almost immediately to those claims on men from ^ '' temporal the part of churchmen to exemption from all temporal juris- jiirisdic- tion. diction which became one of the great subjects of strife in Their the days of Plenry the Second. But this class of results is connexion • i i i with the closely Connected with the other class. It is inconceivable encroach- ^^^^ claims of this kind could ever have been put forward meuts. by a strictly national clergy. They could hardly have occurred to a clergy who owned no allegiance beyond the sea, who felt themselves bound to other Churches by the tie of Christian brotherhood, but by the tie of Christian brotherhood only. Claims to exemption from the ordinary authority of the commonwealth of which they were members could have been dreamed of only by men who felt them- selves members of a society which spread far beyond the island realm. They were natural on the part of an organized body which had its branches in every land, which obeyed a chief who ranked in the eyes of his votaries above all temporal rulers, a chief to whom at last the lord of the island Empire bowed and swore oaths and became his Compari- man. The natural tendency of England, had she remained theEastern untouched by the Romanizing influences of Eadward and and Em- ^iHi^'i^^ would have been to such a state of things as was pire. seen at the other end of Europe. There the Eastern Em- peror looked on his faith and his orthodoxy as the richest jewels in his Imperial diadem; but it was none the less DIRECT ECCLESIASTICAL RESULTS OF THE CONQUEST. 495 well understood that the Patriarch of the New Rome was oh. xxiv. in all things the subject of her Csesar. The ecclesiastical Direct ec- independence of England was more utterly overthrown on effects of' the day of Senlac than her political freedom. On her ^^^ ^°"" political side, she did but exchange a native for a foreign King. On her ecclesiastical side^ she became a province of a foreign empire. Had the fate of that day been otherwise, had the excommunicated Harold lived and reigned with the excommunicated Stigand by his side, had a succession of schismatic Primates poured the kingly oil on the heads of a succession of schismatic Kings, the work which was not done till the sixteenth century might perhaps have been done in the eleventh. The immediate changes which the reign of the Conqueror Effects of wrought in ecclesiastical matters, the substitution of foreign juction of for English ecclesiastics in nearly all the high places of the ^°^f^ English Church, are rather to be looked on as part of the actual process of the Conquest than as part of its results. But it was a change which led to many other changes. The Norman Bishop, ignorant of the English tongue, stood in a very different position from his English predecessor. There was, in the nature of things^ a gap between him and Gap be- the mass of his flock and of his clergy which there had not jj^her and been when the Church had native chief pastors. Here again ^°'^^^ ^ "^ clergy. the change began under Eadward, and was strengthened under William. And everything tended to make the gap between the shepherd and his flock grow wider and wider. The first set of Bishops of William's appointment were, for the most part, men well fitted^ except in their foreign birth, for the office in which they were placed. But when^ Seculariza- in the later days of the Conqueror and in the reign of^j^jjopg Henry — to say nothing of the mere corruption and simony ^^'^j.^j^^'® of Rufus — bishopricks were systematically given away to the Kings. King's clerks as the reward of their temporal services. 496 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. CH. xxrv. when the King's Chancellor succeeded to a bishoprick as a matter of course^ the change in the position of the Bishops grew more and more marked. The Bishop so appointed had commonly the habits of a courtier and a man of busi- ness, rather than those of a churchman. And all the recent changes tended to strengthen the temporal side of his office at the expense of its spiritual side. He indeed no longer sat, dii-ectly in his character as Bishop, as joint president with the Ealdorman in the assembly of the shire. But he not uncommonly appeared there in the more dis- tinctly temporal character of a royal missus, and the devices of Randolf Flambard had given him a new character, alike in the kingdom at large and in his own diocese and his own house. As an English freeman, he had always been a member of the national Assembly. As a father of the Church, he had often been the special coun- Theirnew sellor of the King. But now he had become a baron, podtkin holding his lands by military tenure, a character which in the larger and wealthier dioceses — to say nothing of the actual palatinates — clothed its owner with a good deal of Their the character of a temporal prince. The Bishop had his rastle^'and ™^iiors, and on his manors, as on those of other lords, military castles often arose. He had his military retinue ; even the followers. . mild Wulfstan was surrounded in Norman fashion by a following of knights. 1 All this tended to strengthen the character of the lord at the expense of the character Feudaliza- of the overscsr of the flock. In accordance -^dth the clesiastical spirit of the time, even purely ecclesiastical relations be- relations. game feudalized. The Bishop seemed to have become a feudal lord, with the lesser clergy to his vassals. We now hear less of the duty of the chief pastor to over- look both shepherds and flocks within the range of his ' Will. Malms. Gest. Pout. 281. " Consuetudines Normannorum non omittebat, pompam militum secum ducens, qui stippendii anuuis quoti- dianisque cibis iuimane quantum populabantur." CHANGE IN THE POSITION OF BISHOPS. 497 authority, and we hear more of the rights of visitation oh. xxiv. which the episcopal or abbatial church holds over the lesser churches. Those were rights which Bishops and Abbots, no less than Kings, valued as a source of profit as well as of dignity and power. Money, so powerful with those who exercised jurisdiction in the King's name, was not without its weight with those who exercised jurisdic- tion in the Bishop's name. The Archdeacons of the twelfth Corruption century had won for themselves a reputation as bad as that Aroh- of the Sheriffs.'' In everything the tendency was to put '^«^'>'">^' the benefice before the office, possession and right before duty. Everything helped to stiffen the fatherly care of the shepherd and Bishop of souls into a formal jurisdic- tion exercised according to a rigid and technical law. The Bishop, like the King, had made himself lord over God's heritage, in a sense which was as strange to the democracy of the primitive Church as it was to the democracy of the old Teutonic community. Good Bishops, like good Kings, General might rise above the temptations among which they were tneculari- placed ; but the tendency to secularity which beset all the j?*'?? °^ , Teutonic Churches from the beginning both grew in strength and put on a worse form through the changes which followed on the Norman Conquest. This new position of the Bishops, strengthened by the Changed passion for exemptions and special jurisdiction of all kinds Bishops to which was now sweeping over Church and State, led also *^^r(.t^s'' to another change. As the Bishop became separated from his diocese, he also became separated from his cathedral church. He was often far away from his diocese, busy with ' See John of Salisbury, Ep. 146 (Giles, vol. i. p. 260). "Erat, ut memini, genus hominum, qui in eoclesia Dei archidiaconorum censentur nomine, quibus vestra discretio omnem salutis viam querebatur esse praeclu- sam. Nam, ut dicere consuevistis, diligunt munera, sequuntur retributiones, ad injurias proni sunt, calumniia gaudent, peccata populi comedunt et bibunt, quibus vivitur ex rapto, ut non sit hospes ab hospite tutus." VOL. V. K k 498 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. CH. XXIV. temporal offices in the court, the council, or the foreign embassy. When he was in his diocese, his baronial character often led him to the castle on his rural manor, rather than to the palace under the shadow of his own church. Of that church and its ministers he was be- coming rather the absent lord and visitor than the present Growing head. He was led to tolerate the growing independence of ence of the ^'S canons, to grant them charters and privileges of ex- Chapters. gmp^JQQ^ {t^ much the same spirit in which he granted charters to the burgesses who were growing into something Lessening of a settled Community round his castle gates. It is most Bishofs' striking to compare the seemingly absolute authority ™ °'' y -^vhich the Bishops exercised in their cathedral churches under William, how they changed the nature of their foundations, how they arranged and altered offices at pleasure, with the state of things which we see in the thirteenth century, or even in the later years of the twelfth. Things had changed greatly at Lincoln between the days when Remigius constituted the Chapter ^ and the days Lincoln, when Robert Grosseteste was defied by it.^ They had changed a good deal at York between the days when Thomas of Bayeux founded the offices of Praecentor and York. Treasurer^ and the days when the minster and its Arch- ■ bishop-elect were left in silence and darkness at the arbitrary bidding of a refractory Treasurer.* Under the influence of these ideas, instead of the ministers of the chief church of the diocese forming' a household with the Changes in Bishop at their head, we find the canons making them- Cliapters. selves, as far as might be, independent of the Bishop ; we find the vicars making themselves, as far as might be, in- ^ See Garaldus Cambrensis, "Vit. Ep. I!inc., Ang. Sac. ii. 415 ; Hen. Hunt. De Cont. IMundi, Ang. Sac. ii. 695. ^ The letters of Robert Grosseteste .are full of this matter. See those numbered 71, 73, 77, 80, 90, 94, 122, and compare the story in Matthew Paris, Wats, 485, 522. ' See vol. iv. p. 374. ■* See Roger of Howden, iii. 31 (iigo). EXEMPTION OP MONASTEEIES AND CHAPTERS. 499 dependent of the canons ; nay^ we find each canon making ch. xxiv. himself, for many purposes, independent both of the Bishop and of his brethren, holding his separate estate, his separate patronage, and often his separate ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Andj if all this isolation and separation took place among Exemption the secular clergy, there was yet more room for it among teiies from the monastic bodies. We have seen how their striving's fpifoopal " junscUc- after exemption from episcopal jurisdiction began in the tion. days of William, if they had not already begun in the days of Eadward. Such claims grew and strengthened ; and from the separate monasteries they spread to those monasteries of which the Bishops themselves were the im- mediate heads. The fashion of having monks instead of Monks in canons in cathedral churches was all but exclusively English, churchet a The continental examples are extremely few ; it was only specially here and there that the imitation of England brought the usage, use into Scotland and Ireland, and the episcopal churches of Wales escaped the innovation altogether. In England the change had begun under Dunstan, and, as we have seen, it went on with increased vigour under William and Lanfranc.i It is only now and then that we hear of the Monks opposite process, the substitution, or attempted substitu- f"^ canons tion, of secular canons in the place of monks.^ But it is Their plain that, when the passion for exemption had begun to *t i^i^f work, the monks of a cathedral monastery would naturally P^ndence. strive after it with yet more zeal than a chapter of secular canons. Their nominal Abbot the Bishop, often absent, Position in many cases himself a secular priest, could not exercise Bishop as the real control of an Abbot. Saint Wulfstan might ^^'^''*- show himself the model of an Abbot among the monks of Worcester, but Randolf Flambard, and even Hugh of Puiset, were strange Abbots indeed to set over the ' See vol. iv. p. 370. ' See the account of the doings of Hugh of Nonant, Bishop of Chester or Coventry, as described by Richard of the Devizes, 64-67. K k a 500 POLITICAL RESULTS OP THE NOEMAN CONQUEST. CH. XXIV. monks of Durham. Lanfranc, fresh from Bee and Saint Stephen's, seems to have done whatever his wisdom Disputes of thought good with his monks of Christ Church. By the the monks of Christ end of the next century the disputes of the same convent with^Arch- ^^^^ ^^'^ Abbot and Primate had begun to fill a large space bishop Jq ^lyQ ecclesiastical, and even in the secular, history of iigi. the time. Effects On the whole we may say that the dispute between of the Conquest regulars and seculars, which had gone on since the days of of th™"" Dunstan and .^thelwold, was, through the eifects of the regulars. Norman Conquest, decided for several centuries in favour of the regulars. Between the coming of William and the fourteenth century a crowd of monasteries arose, and not many secular foundations. Many secular colleges, Harold's own Waltham among them, were turned into monasteries ; very few monasteries were turned into secular colleges. Regulars of one class or another had the upper hand in the English Church for three hundred years after William's coming. The zeal for monks, which showed itself in the foundation of so many monasteries, showed itself also in the rising up of new orders. Cluniacs and Austin canons came in the train of William and Lanfranc,^ to take their place alongside of the elder Benedictines. The Friars. In the next age came the reform of the Cistercians, in the next came the reform of the Friars. And the fashion for founding monasteries of all kinds led to one form of en- dowing them which was unheard of in the earlier days of England, and which has proved a lasting source of evil in Appropiia- the English Church. We can hardly say whether it was tithe to to be called an abuse or not, when tithe which had been bodies, ^"^ iuimemorially paid to the Bishop and his chapter was cut New orders. ' See the whole history in the Epistolse Cantuarienses, especially in the Preface of Professor Stubbs. ^ See vol. iv. pp. 363, 500. HISTORY OP TITHE. 501 up into prebends to form estates for particular canons, oh. xxiv. But it was clearly an abuse wben Bishops appropriated the tithe of parishes which had been already settled as parochial benefices to the behoof either of their chapters or of particular members of them.^ And it was to monas- a further abuse when grants of this kind were made, not only to the diocesan chapters, but to monasteries, some- times to distant and even foreign monasteries. This practice of appropriation of parochial endowments to monasteries illustrates several of the growing ideas of the time. Some traces may be found in Domesday of the Older old state of things, when the payment of tithe was to^tfae*^ preached as a religious duty, but when it was still open to the tithe-payer to pay his tithe to what church he would.^ But appropriations more commonly grew out of the right of Patrouage patronage or advocatio, a right which, in its origin a combina- vowsons. tion of right and duty, was stiffening into a mere property. A church or monastery found it expedient to choose some Advocates powerful neighbour as advocate, patron, or champion. Such ecclesiasti- patronage might often involve trouble, cost, and even per- *^' bod'es. sonal danger ; it was therefore reasonably enough rewarded with some share in the estates of the house or some in- fluence over its elections and nominations. The right might exist on every scale, from the Emperor, Advocate of the Universal Church, to the smallest lord who was patron of the parish church on his manor. Or again, the right of Patronage patronage might grow, not out of the choice of the ecclesi- founders. astical body, but out of the rights which a founder re- served to himself and his heirs. In either case, patronage involved, what in later times has come to be its whole substance, a right of nomination, a right which naturally ' SeeHistory of the Church ofWeUs, pp. 88, 173. ' Domesday, 280. In the borough of Derby we read, "De Stori antecesaore Walterii de Ainourt, dicunt quod sine alicujus lioentia potuit facere sibi ecclesiam in sua terra et in sua soca, et suam decimam mittere quo vellet." 502 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE KOEMAN CONQUEST. OH. XXIV, involves the duty of selection. But, by a process nearly the same as that by which so many other rights and duties stiffened into property, patronage, a combined right and duty, did the like ; it became something not only to be inherited^ but to be granted away and even sold at pleasure. The patron grew in much the same fashion in which the lord grew, and of course, in most cases^ the character of lord and patron would be united in the same Notices of person. Not a few entries in Domesday show that a m Dmnes- church, that is the advowson of a church, was already ^^y- looked on as a matter of property which could be granted, sold, divided, or unjustly occupied in exactly the same way as any other property.^ Here too the notion of leneficium Feudal overshadowed the notion of offickim. Spiritual preferments, clesiastical great and smallj were ceasing to be looked on as offices livings -vvritli an endowment for the maintenance of those who held the office ; they rather became benefices, livings charged, like a temporal benefice, with certain duties, but duties which might be discharged at pleasure in person or by and eccle- deputy. The endowment of the church thus became a patronao-e. benefice, a property, and the right of the patron came to be looked at chiefly as a right to bestow that property, Grants of a right which was a property in itself. It was therefore to mouas- One of the easiest forms of gift for the founder or bene- factor of a monastery to give his churches, that is to say his advowsons, to the house which he wished to enrich. ' In Domesday, 280, we find a string of entries at Derby following the formula "Edric habet ibi i. ecclesiam quae fuit Coin patris ejus." This however is the only case of an English holder or of hereditary succession. In 298, among the possessions of Hugh the son of Baldric at York, is "ecclesia S. Andrese quam emit." In 340, 353, 365 b, 356, 370, are various entries of persons holding "tertiam partem eccle.siEe," and the like. In the famous inscription over the south door of Kirkdale church in Yorkshire, we read how Orm "bought Saint Gregory's minster, when it was all tobroken and tofallen." This sounds like actually buying the fabric itself. At Ottringham in the same county we read in Domesday, 304, " Ibi ecclesia, et presbyter est; quidam miles locat earn, et reddit x. solidoa." teries. ADVOWSOKS AND APPEOPBUTIONS. 603 And when the advowson, the right to bestow the benefice, oh. xxiv. had come into the hands of ecclesiastical owners, it was an 4??™?"*' tion of easy step for the patron to slide into the beneficiary^ for the beneficea monks to take to themselves the tithe or other property of teries. the church of which they already had the patronage, to become the corporate rector and to provide for its duties by deputy. All these processes were busily at work in the times which followed the Conquest ; and they were, to say the least, greatly fostered by the ideas which the Conquest sometimes brought in and sometimes strengthened. The result was that a very large share of the parochial endow- ments of England came into the hands of distant, some- times of foreign, monasteries. Tithe, whose payment had History of first been preached as a duty and then had been enforced by law, had thus thoroughly changed into a mere form of property. It became something which might be disposed of without any regard either to the will or to the profit of the tithe-payer, provided only it was paid into ecclesi- astical hands. When the tithe of a parish in Hampshire Layimpro- might thus go to a monastery in Northumberland, when the tithe of a parish in England might go to a monastery in Normandy or Tianoe, the change did not seem so very great, when^ in the sixteenth century, the tithes, as well as the lands, belonging to the suppressed monasteries were granted out as mere property to laymen. The lay rector is in this way an indirect fruit of the Norman Conquest, as the lord of the manor is a more direct fruit. I have now, in a general way, gone through the chief General effects of that great event which is the subject of my the Con- history. I have traced its efiects on the relations ofl"®^*' England to foreign lands, on the working of her political, her local, and her ecclesiastical institutions. In all alike Quicken- we see that tendencies which were already at work were tendencies strengthened and quickened. Changes which were already ^1""^^^ ^* 504 POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE NOEMAN COITQITEST. Feudal tendencies already at work. Indirect benefits of the Conquest. cH. XXIV. beginning, but wbieh, if England had been left to herself, would certainly have been more slow and would most likely have been less thorough, were carried out more thoroughly and more speedily. The influences which were at work over all Western Europe, influences which, for want of a better word, we cannot help calling feudal, were already working in England, and they would doubtless have gone on workings even if the Crown of England had passed on to a long succession of Kings of the House of Godwine. But under the foreign rule they worked faster and more fiercely. They came in more distinctly as inno- vations, as innovations brought in by the sword of the stranger. As such, they called out a national spirit of opposition in a way which could not happen in lands where they simply crept in unawares. The reign of unlaw paved the way for the reign of a better law than that which unlaw had displaced. It was because our old institutions were for a moment perverted rather than abolished, that we have been able to win them back under new shapes. It was because England had a dynasty and a nobility founded on foreign conquest, that she was able to make her Kings and nobles more truly national, less cut ofli' from the bulk of the people, less fenced in by invidious powers and privileges, than the Kings and nobles of any other land. Had the shock of the foreign conquest never come upon us, we might have slumbered on till we woke to find our- selves under a despotism like that of France or an oligarchy like that of Denmark, with the poor comfort that our tyrants were our countrymen. Strangers whom we knew how to turn into countrymen have served our purpose better. Their coming into the land, their rule when they came into it, awoke the nation for ever. We have kept our freedom because we had to win it ; had it never been for a moment wrested from us by force, it might have slipped away from us for ever. If our national life had SUMMARY. 505 not been crushed for a moment, it might have sickened oh. xxiv. and died of a long disease. Through the whole of this Chapter we have thus had before us at every step the general law that the Conquest did not so much bring in new tendencies as give new strength to tendencies which were already at work. There are still two subjects to which the same law applies, which by their nature seem to call for a separate treatment distinct from the general run of political, military, and ecclesiastical affairs. The Norman Conquest had a great and lasting effect upon Effects of our language ; it has, not in its immediate but in its final quest on results, changed our vocabulary more largely than the ^^^S^'>-S<^_ ' o J o ./ and arcni- vocabulary of any European language ever has been teoture. changed without being wholly displaced by another lan- guage. It also had a great and lasting effect on our architecture, both ecclesiastical and military. But in both these cases again the same law largely applies. Changes both in language and in art had begun before the Con- quest, though after the Conquest change worked, as in other things, more thoroughly and more speedily. To these two special subjects then, the influence of the Con- quest on language and its influence on architecture, I purpose to give two separate Chapters before we come to that short narrative of its historical consequences which will wind up my whole work. CHAPTER XXV. THE EPrECTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE No purpose i\F all the dreams which have affected the history on wn- I f p ,, ,. , . , , 1 liam's part 01 the times on which we are engaged, none has Jj^™^* ™J^ led to more error than the notion that William the tongue. Conqueror set to work with a fixed purpose to root out the use of the English tongue. He is not the latest conqueror, or would-be conqueror, of England Design against whom such a charge has been brought. More attributed ^ „ .-j,..,.. , to Philip than two hundred years after William s day, his suc- !,tr ^^' cessor Edward the First, in the course of the wars which, as Duke of Aquitaine, he waged against his faithless over-lord at Paris, found that it served his purpose to stir up the patriotism of his English subjects by setting forth the threatening horrors of a French conquest. Foremost among them stood the design of the enemy, if he suc- ceeded in carrying out his purposes, to wipe out the use * In tills Chapter I deal with philological matters in the only way in which I am competent to deal with them, that is, purely in their bearing upon history ; but I have of course profited much by the writings of those who have gone deeper than I have done into the strictly grammatical re- lations of the English language. I am specially indebted to Dr. Guest's English Rhythms — unhappily the only book, strictly so called, which that great scholar has put forth — and to the writings of Mr. Earle and Dr. Morris; but I have perhaps made yet more frequent use — because the book so exactly suits my purpose as a summary of the whole matter — of Mr. Kington-Oliphant's volume, The Sources of Standard English. POPULAR COKFUSIONS. 507 of the English tongue.^ By that time, though French ch, xxv. was in constant official use in England, the French origin of the reigning family was practically forgotten. Yet nothing is more certain than that the Conqueror was hardly more likely than Edward himself to attempt a deliberate rooting up of the speech of their island king- dom. The notion that any such design was entertained comes from that great store-house of errors which, till very lately, so deeply affected the history of these times. The Error statement of the false Ingulf ^ proves only that, when the the false forgery was made, men were seeking for an explanation ^"S"^^- of the facts which they saw around them. French still was, or lately had been, the speech of official docu- ments and of polite intercourse. Men sought to find Ph^no- a cause for a state of things which seemed so strange, language and they could think of no cause except a deliberate fourteenth policy on the part of a Conqueror whose own speech century, was French. The ease is one of the many cases in which popular belief is so easily led to give to a single man the credit of changes which were really due to the gradual working of general causes. The Changes in long use of French in England as a polite and official gradually tongue, the large French infusion which has made its 0°^^™° way into our language, are among the fruits of Wil- Norman liam's Conquest. They are therefore among the fruits of William's personal character and actions. Had Ead- ward left a son, had Harold's soldiers kept their post ^ See the Summons to Parliament in Select Charters, 474, where it is said that the King of France " linguam Anglioam, si conceptse iniquitatis proposito detestabili potestas oorrespondeat, quod Deus avertat, omnino de terra delere proponit." ' Ingulf, Gale, 71. Speaking of the dislike of the Normans to the Eng- lish, the forger says, " Ipsum etiam idiuma tantimi abhorrebant quod leges terrse statutaque Anglicorum regum lingua Gallica tra,ctarentur et pueris etiam in scholia principia litterarum grammatica Gallice ac non Anglice traderentur ; modus etiam scribendi AngHcus omitteretur et modus GaJlious in chartis et in libris omnibus admitteretur." 508 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE. CH. XXV. instead of following the flying Normans, the sentences which I am now writing might be kept as free from words of foreign birth as they still might be if I were writing in the tongue of Germany, Holland, or Denmark. But though, in this sense, the later history of the English language has been directly affected by the events of the Conquest, the way in which it has been affected by them is wholly different from that which is set forth in the Ingulfie legend. No legislative measure was ever passed against Gradual the Use of the English tongue. The changes which did nature of . ic- the change, take place were the natural and silent result of circum- stances, nor were those changes by any means sudden or immediate results of the Conquest. In this, as in all other matters, William made no more change than was ab- solutely necessary for his immediate purposes. That is to say, in the case now before us, he made no formal change at all. But the transfer of the English Crown to a French-speaking King, the partition of the highest offices and the greatest estates in England among his French-speaking followers, did lead, slowly but surely, to two results of the highest importance to the history of our language. French for a time supplanted English as the speech of courtly intercourse, of the lighter forms of literature, and of such official documents as were not Infusion of written in Latin. The evil in this respect was temporary ; words into ™ another respect it has been lasting, and we suffer under ngiish. j^ j-Q ^jjjg ^g^y.^ ^g |.jjg French-speaking classes gradually came to leave off French and to make English their com- mon speech, as the English-speaking classes gradually came to adopt words and idioms from what was supposed to be the politer tongue, a crowd of words expressing foreign things or foreign aspects of things made their way into our ancient speech. The result was that the native tongue of England received a greater infusion of foreign words than has been received by any other European GRADUAL NATUEE OF THE CHANGE. 509 tongue. And the same causes did more than this. The oh. xxv. shock which our language thus underwent, its fall from the rank of a courtly and literary speech to that of a mere speech of the people, heightened and hastened another process, which, had the Norman Conquest never happened, would doubtless have affected our language less swiftly and less fully. Had French never been spoken in England^ had no French words intruded themselves into our lan- guage, the great change which distinguishes the English of our day from the Enghsh of a thousand years back would still have taken place. Of the elaborate system of Loss of grammatical inflexions which came naturally to the lips S^EngiTsh. of Alfred, our modern tongue keeps but few and feeble traces. But this change is in no way peculiar to our- Shaved selves; we share it with our Teutonic brethren on the "^^1. L^w- mainland. The modern forms of the Scandinavian and l>"'<=h . and Scau- the continental Nether-Dutch have^ without the help ofdinavian any Norman Conquest, become as little inflexional as the '*°°"^^'*^- modern form of English. The High-Dutch indeed keeps a larger share of the ancient store^ but the inflexions even of the modern High-Dutch are but fragments of the old grammatical wealth of our common fathers. Their survival too is, to a certain extent, artificial ; their accurate preservation marks the tongue of polite literature, rather than the tongue of the people. Had no Norman ever set foot on our shores, the inflexional Old-English would still have passed, sooner or later, into the non-inflexional modern English. But the gradual and indirect effect The change of the Norman settlement among us was at once to b^ti^e"^'* hasten the inevitable process and to make it more Norman Conquest. complete. But besides the dream, now perhaps pretty well got rid Errors of, that William the Conqueror or any other man ever laid l^mn- SL deliberate plan to get rid of the English language, there ^^^^ j" is another dream much more dangerous and which still tare. 510 EFFECTS OP THE CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE. CH. XXV. leads the minds of many into strange misconceptions of history. This is the dream that there was no such thing as an English language for William to get rid of. I have to protest at the end of my work, as I had to protest at the beginning, against the unhappy custom of speaking of all Englishmen who lived before the coming of "William by some other name than that by which Englishmen have ever called themselves. Hence spring the further notions that the times before William's coming are something altogether cut off from our own times, that the men who lived in those times were not simply our own forefathers, but some other undefined^ perhaps extinct, race of men. We have been gravely told that the English nation of which ^Ethelstan was King, that the English tongue which JSlfred wrote, had no being till the thirteenth century. This way of speaking is no mere confusion of nomenclature, no mere use of an accurate instead of an inaccurate name ; it involves utter confusion and mis- understanding with regard to the whole history of our speech and nation. Of this matter I have spoken already in an earlier stage of this work.^ But it is necessary to come back to the subject again, now that I have reached that stage of my undertaking in which I have directly to speak of the effects of the Norman Conquest upon our Origin and language. That language, I may briefly repeat, is, in its the English Origin, simply a dialect of the Low-Dutch branch of the language, gj-g^t Teutonic family, a dialect which was brought over into the conquered island of Britain by the Angles, Saxons, and other kindred tribes, in their great migration of the fifth and sixth centuries. For the purposes of the historian, we may say that they brought with them one language, and that that language remained substantially unchanged till the time of the Norman Conquest. In a strict philological view such a statement would be inaccurate. No extent ' See vol. i. Appendix A. HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 511 of country so large as that which was occupied by the Teu- oh. xxv, tonic settlers in Britain was ever without marked dialectic differences in different districts. Even now, when each Different nation has one classical standard of speech and writing, the En„iiaii popular dialects of different districts still keep large traces of their old diversities. And in early times, before each language had a fixed classical standtod — th&,t is to say before the language of some one district had won its way to the front and had come to be looked on as the one standard — those dialectical differences were yet more numerous and more strongly marked. While districts whiijh are now firmly fused together into one whole were still isolated, while they were often hostile and held little intercourse with one another, none of them was likely to give up its own dialect for that of any of the others. Without coming down to smaller differences, the distinctions between Northern, Mid- Northern, land, and Southern English, between the speechj as we may and put it, of the followers of Siward, of Leofric, and of God- Sauthem. wine, has been clearly marked in all ages of our history. It is a difference which it was not left for modern scholars Witness of to find out. William of Malmesbury complains of the writers. diSiculty of understanding the speech of Yorkshire,^ much as Thudydides complains of the difficulty of understanding the speech of ^tolia.^ A little later the same difference is still strongly marked by Giraldus Cambrensis ; ^ and, when we come to writers of a few centuries later, the distinction ' Gest. Pont. 209. " Sane tota lingua Nordanimbrorum, et maxime in Eboraco, ita inconditmn stridet ut nihil nos australes intelligere possimus." William here speaks as an Englishman, and indeed as a West-Saxon. ^ iii. 94. KvpvTcivcs, onep fieyLffTOt* fji4pos effTi rwv AiruXwi', dyvwarSTaTOt Se y\Si(TC7av, Koi ajfiocpayoi eialv, as Xiyovrai. This last rumour may perhaps be compared with th« tales about the Scots eating man's flesh. ' Descr. Kamb. i. 6 (vol. vi. p. 177, Dimock). "In australibus Anglise fiuibus, et praecipue circa Devoniam, Anglica lingua hodie magis videtur in- oomposita : ea tamen, vetustatem longe plus reddens, boreaUbus ilisulse par- tibus per crebraa Dacorum 6t Norwagensium irru^tiones valde corruptis, originalis lingua proprietatem, et antiquum loquendi modum magis observat." 512 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST OST LANGUAGE, Changes in the English language before the Norman Conquest. Contrast with the changes between the different forms of English is as clearly marked out as it could be by any modern scholar.^ So again, as it is well always to remember that a space of more than six hundred years, a space much nearer half than a third of our whole national history, slipped away between the coming of Hengest and the coming of William, so it is specially needful to remember the fact in tracing out the history of our language. No language ever yet lived on wholly unchanged through a space of six hundred years. It is undoubtedly true that the change which those six hundred years made in the English language must have been much slighter than the change which the same space of time has often made in other cases. English certainly did not change so much in the six hundred years between Hengest and William as it changed in the six hundred years between William and Charles the Second. It did not change so much as the Latin speech of Gaul changed in the six hundred years between Gregory of Tours and Master Waee of Bayeux. Still the changes which hap- pened in the English language within those six hundred years were in themselves by no means small. Modern Teutonic scholars are doing good service by pointing out the distinctions which may be marked between different stages of our language earlier than the time of the great change.^ Still, for our present purpose, those changes are of little moment ; they are simply examples of that constant silent process of change which is ahvays going on in every language. During those six hundred years there was nothing which could be called a revolution in ' See the whole chapter of Higden, i. 59 (vol. ii. p. 16 0) ; his summing up is, "Quod Mercii sive ilediterranei Angli, tanquam participantes naturam extremorum, coUaterales linguas, arcticam at antarcticam, melius intelligant quara advicem se intelligunt jam extremi." See Garnett's Philological Essays, 41 ; Guest, English Rhythms, ii. 187, 194. ^ See especially Mr. Sweet's Preface to his edition of jElfred'a Transla- tion of the Pastoral of Gregory. Cf. Oliphant, Standard English, 36. CHANGES BEFOEE THE CONQUEST. 513 language. There was no general change in grammatical oh. xxv. forms ; there was no large infusion of foreign words into **^'' ^'^ . Conquest. the ordmary vocabulary. Within a much shorter space of time after the Norman Conquest both those changes had taken place. There had been something more than or- dinary change ; there had been a great, though not a sudden, revolution. Compared with the changes which fol- lowed the Norman Conquest, the changes which happened before the Norman Conquest seem as nothing. So too with local diversities of dialect. They existed before the Norman Conquest ; they lived through the Norman Con- quest ; they have lived on to our own time. But, as the Diversity dialects of all parts of England were alike brought, though "f littir by no means equally brought, within the reach of those ""portance influences which the Norman Conquest set at work, my present immediate subject has little to do with their differences. For our purpose we may look on the tongue of England, as it stood at the coming of William, as forming one tongue, one variety of Teutonic speech, now brought face to face with the Romance enemy. We may look on the tongue of Harold and Stigand as essentially the same as the tongue of Hengest and JElle. We may look on the tongue of the Jute, the Angle, even of the Dane of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, as essentially the same as the tongue of the Saxon. The common tongue of England, in all its varieties alike, was now brought within the reach of influences and causes of change which, in the long ages between Hengest and Harold, had never been brought to bear upon it. § 1. Effects of the Conquest on the English Language. The changes in language which followed the Norman Changes Conquest were, as we have already seen, of two kinds. the°Co^ There is the great infusion of foreign words into our 1"^^*' vocabulary, and there is the loss of inflexions, and the up of iu- VOL. V. li 1 514 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON LAKGTJAGE. CH. IXV. flexions and the influx of foreign words. Influx of foreign words in all languages. Foreign ideas keep their foreign names. Native words dis- placed by foreign wor(&. general break up of g-rammatieal forms. Of these the former was a direct result of the Norman Conquest; the latter, so far as it was a result at all, was an indirect result. The change in grammar has its parallel in other Teutonic languages ; the change in vocabulary, in anything like the degree in which it took place in English, is peculiar to our own tongue. It was the direct result of what happened in Britain and did not happen elsewhere ; namely, the conquest of a Teutonic people by Romance-speaking conquerors. Still this change, the change in our vocabulary by the infusion of a vast number of foreign words, is only an example on an unusual scale of a change which always more or less affects all languages. No language is wholly pure ; none has ever yet kept itself wholly free from the intrusion of foreign words into its vocabulary. New ideas, unknown objects, call for names which the language does not supply. And when those ideas, those objects, come from a foreign source, it is often easier to adopt the foreign name along with the foreign thing than to devise a new and appropriate name for it in the native tongue. All languages have adopted words in this way. Conquerors have borrowed words from the conquered ; the conquered have borrowed words from their conquerors ; nations have borrowed them from one another in the ordinary way of peaceful intercourse. But words like these are of the nature of technical terms. They are additions^ sometimes needful, sometimes needless, to the vocabulary of the language ; but they are simply ad- ditions. They do not displace anything. The foreign word becomes naturalized ; but it does not turn a native word out of its place ; it is not even set up as a rival to a native word. The case is different when, from what- ever cause, a language takes foreign words into its vo- cabulary to express ideas which it already has native words to express. The first process takes place as a matter INFUSION OF FOREIGN WORDS. 515 of course, to a greater or less degree, in every language ; ch. xxv. the second is not likely to take place to any appreciable extent in any language which has not special and powerful influences brought to bear upon it from without. In- fluences of this kind were not brought to bear upon the English language in the days before the Norman Con- quest ; their introduction was one of the most striking and lasting results of the Norman Conquest. In earlier Foreign days the English language had adopted a certain number of the earliest foreign words from more sources than one ; but they were ^■'&^^''- adopted to express ideas which were hitherto unknown ; they therefore neither displaced native words nor set themselves up as rivals beside them. When our forefathers came into Eoman Britain, they found many objects which were new to them, names of and for which their native speech supplied no names, objects. For several of those foreign objects they kept the foreign names, Celtic or Roman. Their descendants do exactly Modern the same thing at this moment, as often as they conquer, '^^^^ * *' or settle in, or even simply visit, a foreign country. We have not only borrowed words in this way from all the civilized tongues of Europe and Asia ; we have borrowed a few words even from those nations of America and Australia which we have made it our business to sweep away far more thoroughly than our fathers swept away the Briton from Kent and Norfolk. The very names of those Illustra- districts illustrate the law. Sometimes the native name locai of a district perishes; sometimes it survives. Kent has °^"'®^' kept its British name through the process of change which gave more than one Teutonic name to Norfolk. So Mas- sachusetts has kept its Indian name through the process of change which gave more than one Teutonic name to New York. So it is with great natural objects ; the rivers very largely, the hills more sparingly, keep their native names. No one in any age has thought of changing the name either of the Thames or of the Susquehanna. And, L 1 a 516 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE. OH. XXV. as it is with proper names, so it is with the names of other objects which are strange to the new-comers. Pagoda, im^wam, jpaJi, are words which have crept into our lan- guage through the process of conquest and settlement in Foreign later times. Street, port, Chester, are words which crept into words adopted at our tongue through exactly the same process m earner the English times. A paved road^ a town with walls and gates, were Conquest, things which our forefathers had never seen in the older England. They knew a wai/ and a path; they could raise a hedge round a borough;'^ but a street leading through a port into a Chester was something so different from any- thing that they had before seen that they called all those objects by their Latin names.^ It makes no difference that, in this case, the objects which awakened their wonder were objects which belonged to a higher state of civilization than their own, while, in the case of wigwams and pahs, the comparison lies the other way. The mere process of language is exactly the same in the two cases. The ground for keeping the native name is not that the object described by it is better or worse, but simply that it is strange. Nor does it make any difference that the few words which make up this first foreign infusion into Eng- lish have all been in some way modified in use or meaning. Street is now scarcely ever used of any road except one inside a town. Tort, in the sense of town, is now known only in a few compound words, like Port-reeve and Port- meadow? Chester is now unknown, except in proper names, either alone or in composition. But the history of the ' See the Chronicle, 547 (cf. vol. i. p. 338), for the successive fortifications of Bebbantin-A. ^ The word dreet may have come into the language even before the EngUsh settlement in Britain. It is used in Beowulf, 637, "Street wass stan-fab," and in 476, "Ofer lagu-strtete,'' and in 1022, " mere-straeta," just like the Homeric vypoi Ke\€v6d. But the word is none the less foreign. ^ The name of the still abiding folkland of the freemen, the elder citizens — shall I say the patricians ? — of the city of Oxford. See Comparative Politics, 281, 282. LATIN AND WELSH WORDS IN OLD-ENGLISH. 517 words, and their analogy with some of the foreign in- oh. xxv. fiisions of later times, is in no way touched by these in- stances of the caprice of language. This class of foreign words came from the Latin and not British from the Welsh. They are the names of objects which, ^opted in when the Roman conquerors brought them in, must have ^*^ earliest been as strange to the Briton as they were in after days to the Englishman. But a few Welsh words crept in also. Only, while the few Latin words which were adopted at this stage marked the great works of Roman civilization which could not fail to strike the conquerors with amaze- ment, the somewhat longer list of British words are, as British philologers have often remarked,' almost all of them names chiefly of small domestic objects. They are, in short, the kind of •Jo^'^^i'^- words which would be brought in by women and slaves. Far Second more important than the British infusion into English is inf„gion ■ the second Latin infusion, the words, chiefly ecclesiastical, which came in with the Roman missionaries. These, like ecolesiasti- the first Latin infusion, are strictly of the nature of technical terms. Bishop, Priest, Mass, and many others, were names of things which were new to the heathen English, and for which they had no names in their own tongue. Our teachers from beyond the Alps taught us also to call the great barrier between them and us by the geographical name of the Mountain. Before the Norman Conquest this name is applied to the Alps only ; after- wards, even within the days of the English Chronicles, it came to be applied to the lowlier heights of our own island.^ And there is also a string of Latin words, names of fruits Names of and the like^ of which it is not easy to say whether they wMoh^may > This remark was I suppose first made by Gamett. See his list of Welsh words in his PhUological Essays, p. i6i. ^ In the description in the Chronicles, 887, of the division of the Frankish dominions, the Italian Kings take "to >am landum on )>3, healfe muntes," just as we now speak of TJUra-montane. It is not tUl 1095 that we read how ">a WyUsce a toforan into muntwn and moran ferdan." EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST OJT LANGUAGE. be of either date. Words of both these classes mere additions to the vo- cabulary. Many religious terms translated. belong- to the first or to the second infusion, whether we found them in the land and learned their names from the BritonSj or whether missionaries, merchants, or pilgrims brought in names and things alike during the second stage.' In either case the names of the pear and the cherry came into our language by a process exactly the same as that which has made tea and coffee familiar words in later times. Now both this first and this second infusion are, as I have said, instances of the law which afiects all languages, the law by which foreign objects for which a language supplies no name keep their foreign names. With one or two doubtful exceptions,^ the Latin words which came into English at both these stages are strictly additions to our vocabulary ; they did not displace native words. Even in accepting a new religion, and with it a new religious vocabulary, our fathers adopted no more foreign words than they could possibly help. A crowd of ecclesiastical words which we now use in a Latin form were then boldly translated into our native English.^ So strong was the feeling in favour of keeping to the native tongue whenever it could be done, that in the Low-Dutch, both of England and of the continent, in the English Gospels and in the great Christian poem of the Old-Saxons, the Founder of Christianity bears the name, not of the Saviour ' Mr. Pearson (History of England, i. 651) gives a long list of words of this class. Some of his examples are to the purpose ; in others he has mistaken common Aryan origin for derivation, like the German who, wishing to get rid of Latin words, began by forbidding VaUr and Muttefi\ See also Earle, Philology of the English Tongue, 18; Morris, Historical Outlines, 29. ° I refer to such words as meowle and fccmne (see Earle, u. s.), if these really are Latin words. ' This nowhere comes out more strongly than in some of the early entries in the Chronicles. 30, "Hser waes Crist gefullod;" 33, "Haerwses Crist ahangen;" 34, "Herwses Scs Paulus gehwyi'fed;" 63, "Her Marcus se godspelhre for^ferde.'' DANISH INFUSION. 519 but of the Healer} Such was the language, a language oh. xxv. whose native vocabulary had been enlarged by a few Teutomo •' o .; character technical words borrowed from the Roman, and a few words of the of meaner use borrowed from the Briton, but on whose English, essential character these foreign elements had wrought no perceptible change — a language in which page after page might be written without a single foreign word — which our fathers spoke when their own tongue was to meet face to face with a rival on its own ground. The slight Slight change which was caused by the Danish conquest hardly influence, concerns us here. Philologers haye pointed out not a few words and forms which may rank as a Scandinavian infu- sion into English ;^ but the mere student of history finds the coming of the Dane marked by little more than a change of name in a single office. The shire is no longer ruled by its Ealdormen Ealdorman but by its Earl. But, even if the Scandinavian influence on English had been far greater than it was, the tongue of the Dane would have been simply a third Teutonic dialect, alongside of the tongues of the Angle and the Saxon. All three would have formed but a single whole in the face of the coming Romance invasion. In French this matter also, as in all others, the days of King William brouo-ht cast their shadow before them in the days of King Ead- ^adward ward. When Robert the son of Wymarc and Richard the son of Scrob settled on English ground, they brought with them at least one French thing with a French name in the form of the hateful castle.^ And, as Eadward loved to surround himself with Romance-speaking courtiers, one of them, if he did not bring his oflSce from beyond sea, at least brought with him a new name for his ofiice, when the writ and seal of the English King were ' The Eeliand is the weU-known name of the Old-Saxon poem. So in the English Gospels "se ffwlend" has displaced the proper name Jesus. 2 See Gamett, Philological Essays, p. i88 ; Standard English, 41, 47. * See vol. ii. p. 140. 520 EFFECTS OP THE COls^QUEST ON LANGUAGE, CH. XXV. The Conquest itself. Neceeaity of under- standing both French and Eng- lish. Third infusion, from the French instead of the Latin. French words in the Chronicle. first issued by his Norman CJiancellor} Then came the actual Conquest^ the settlement of the French-speaking King- and his following of French-speaking Earls, Bishops, knights, clerks, and citizens. They spread themselves through every corner of the land, and took their place, instead of or alongside of Englishmen, in every rank above the villain. Nothing is plainer than that, from the very first, crowds of Englishmen must have found it needful to learn French, and crowds of Frenchmen must have found it expedient to learn English. The wonder is that, for so long a time, the two languages went on side by side, almost untouched by one another's presence. In the later years of the Chronicles a few French words creep in. We must now say French ; for this third infusion is not, like the two earlier infusions, a direct Latin infusion. It is an infusion of words which are indeed of Latin origin, but which came to us, not in their older Latin shape, but in the shape which they had taken in the Romance speech of Northern Gaul. A few Norman objects and Norman ideas keep their French names. William Rufus builds the tower, ^ and Robert of Belesme is, to the joy of all men, ra pnson done.2 The tower was something of which men had not be- fore seen the like in the land, and the doing of men in prison was a thing which had, to say the least, become far more common since the elder William came into England. Justice too, not in the general sense of right, but in the special sense of heavy and speedy vengeance on ofienders, was, if not a new idea, a thing which was far more on men's lips than it had been in the elder day. We therefore read of the good justice which Henry of Anjou did, and which his prede- cessor Stephen failed to do. All these words may in some sort pass for technical terms. They are additions to the ' See vol. ii. p. 359, and above, p. 432. ' Chron. Petrib. 1097, 1 100. ^ lb. 1112. " Rotbert de Bfelesme he let niman and on prisune don." EARLY FRENCH INFUSION. 621 vocabulary of the language which are accounted for by the oh. xxv. circumstances of the time. In one case only do we find a French word in the Chronicle where an English word would have expressed the same meaning as fully and as clearly. Under the Conqueror we heard of the good frith "Pais" for . . . "Frits." that he made in the land; of the two Henries, his son and his great-grandson, we read that they made peace} Here in this last case we have perhaps the very first Beginning beginning of a process which has gone on ever since, the placement process by which foreign words have been added to our ^^^-^"^ ^ language, not only when they were really needed to express things which had no English names, but when there were English words in use which would have served the purpose as well. No difference can be seen between \hQ frith which was made by King William and the peace which was made by King Henry. When the Chronicler wrote peace when frith would have done as well, he was, perhaps for the first time in the history of (fax language, doing exactly the same thing as the modern writer who uses any other word of French or other foreign birth when he has a plain English word at hand which would in most cases set forth his meaning far more clearly. But by the time that we reach the last pages of the Peterborough Chronicle, another kind of change has come in. The language has not only begun to take in foreign words, as it had done more or less from the beginning — it has not only reached the further stage of taking them in when they were not needed — the language itself is begin- ning to change. The few foreign words which had thus far crept in had in no way affected the integrity of the EngHsh tongue ; but that tongue itself was already affected ' Chron. Petrib. 1137, of Stephen, "He na imtise ue did;" 1087, of William, " fat gode friS J>e he macode on Jjisan lande ; " 1 1 58, of Henry the Second, "for he dide god iudwe and makede Jims'' On Henry the First, see above, p. 15 3. 522 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE. CH. XXV. Loss of inflexions common to all Check put on decay by the use of writing. Instances in Greek, and Latin, Origin of Komaic and Komance. by a cause wbich the Conquest did much to strengthen. All languages, as I have already said, have a tendency to lose the elaborate systems of inflexion veith which they began. Men become too idle or too careless to regard minute dis- tinctions of endings, just as they become too idle or too careless to give every letter its full sound. ^ There is pro- bably no stage of any language in which every grammatical nicety is strictly attended to in ordinary speech. The real wonder is that they ever were attended to at all, that the elaborate system of the Greek or the Gothic inflexions was preserved, as in any case it must have been^ for many ages without the use of writing. When a lan- guage is written, when it becomes the instrument of literary comjiosition, a check is at once put on the process of decay. A standard of correctness is formed which for literary purposes may last for ages. In the very earliest Greek that we have, in the Homeric poems themselves, we can see the beginnings of the changes which distinguish modern Greek from ancient. In the earliest Latin inscriptions we can see the beginnings of the changes which distinguish modern Italian from Latin. But in each case a literary standard was fixed. One among the languages of Italy became the sole instru- ment of literary composition, and one among the dialects of Greece became the sole instrument of literary prose composition. But, alongside of both, the local dialects, the colloquial forms, the hasty and careless speech which did not always trouble itself to give every word its right ending, went on to take a more definite shape in later times in the form of the Komaic and Romance languages. For eighteen hundred years the literary or courtly ascendency of Athens, Pergamos, Alexandria, and Constantinople kept up one fixed standard of literary Greek. But Polybios no more wrote in the ordinary colloquial speech of his own ^ Max MuHer, Science of Language, i. 41, ii. 185. LOSS OP A LITEEAEY STANDARD OF ENGLISH. 523 city than Chalkokondyles did.^ So it was with English, oh. xxv. As long as there was a native courts native nobles, native Elder prelates, a native literary class who loved to read the gianSd of Chronicles or to hearken to the songs of their own f "gl'^h " destroyed people, so long there was a fixed standard of literary by the English, just as in after days there came to be a fixed standard of literary English again. But for three hundred years English ceased to be a literary and courtly language. English became, in the face of French^ pretty Compari- much what Welsh is now in Wales in the face of English, ^"tory of The comparison is not quite exact. English never went ^"^^^ , so utterly out of ofiicial and polite use in England as Welsh has done in Wales. In the modern Principality there are many among what are called the upper classes who profess a strong Welsh patriotism, especially if they happen to he of English birth. But the British tongue is to them a foreign tongue. If they know anything about it at all, they have learned it of set purpose, as a matter of curiosity. But during the whole time when French was the polite language of England, it is certain that very many of the French-speaking classes in England could speak English on occasion, and that many who could not speak it understood it when it was spoken. Still, in the rough way in which alone one state of things ever resembles another, the position of Welsh now gives a fair general idea of the position of English then. English had be- come a mere popular tongue, a vulgar tongue, the tongue which was the daily speech only of the less cultivated classes. The tongue of learning was Latin; the tongue of polite intercourse was French. Thus there was no longer any fixed literary standard of English ; the chief check on that process of decay which goes on in all times and places was taken away. It followed then, as a matter of course, that, besides the introduction of foreign words ' See Comparative Politics, 314, 491. 524 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE. cH. XXV. into the language, the language itself became corrupted. *^°""P*'°'' There was no longer anything to check the natural language tendency to disregard the grammatical delicacies of the written language. Men wrote as they spoke, and they spoke as it gave them least trouble to speak. The old distinctions, the old inflexions^ were no longer regarded. The change comes in with a rush^ as soon as the generation which had been taught by men who could remember the Later part old time had died out. The later pages of the Chronicle, Chronicle, though they contain passages of the highest natural elo- quence, are, in point of mere language, utterly corrupt. It needs a skilful philologer to mark the difference between the English of the days of -Alfred and the English of the days of Harold. But any one can mark the difference between the English of the days of Harold and the English of the days of Stephen. One most important difference is that, while special study is needed fully to understand the elder form of the language, any one who understands modern English, if he has any share at all of linguistic tact, can pretty well make out the last few pages Beginning of the Chronicle. That is to say, the language had begun of modem , i -j i r> i English in to take One great step towards its modern lorm by castmg inflexions ^^ide Or confusing all grammatical delicacies. The same Illustra- thing has happened with the kindred tongues. A man the Scan- '^^0 has never learned the Scandinavian languages, but dinavian ^j,q ^j,jgg ^ make them out by the help of English and and High- -' r b Dutch German, will find, perhaps somewhat to his surprise, that his knowledge of modern English helps him more with modern Danish than his knowledge of Old-English helps him with Old-Norsk. In the like sort, some of the local forms of High-German, in which no great heed is paid to inflexion, strange and uncouth as they seem at first sight, will soon be found to come nearer to English than the classical High-German. That is to say, while the different Teutonic dialects have in some points been parting away from EFFECT OF THE LOSS OF INFLEXIONS, 525 one another, in one point they have been drawing nearer to oh. xxv. one another. By getting rid, more or less completely, of the ancient system of inflexions, the vocabulary of each tongue has been brought nearer to the original roots, and the iden- tity of those roots is thus enabled to stand forth more clearly. In this way we see that, before a century had passed Summary from the coming of William, before the English Chronicle linguistic had died out in the last broken sentences which record the ^^^^^^ of the coming and the praises of Henry of Anjou, the Norman Conquest. Conquest had affected the English language in two ways. It had had a direct effect by adding to the number of words of Latin origin in the English tongue. And it had done this in a new way, by bringing in words which did not come direct from the Latin, but which had already gone through the stage of passing from Latin into French. And many of these French words no longer expressed new ideasj but merely displaced or stood beside English words of the same meanings. The Conquest also indirectly affected the language by thrusting it down from the rank of a literary to that of a mere popular language, and thereby taking away the chief check to that process of decay which affects all languages. Both processes were Gradual gradual. French words were constantly coming in, in- of the flexions were constantly dropping off; but, for more than ^^^'^g^^- two hundred years after the coming of William, both processes, though they were always going on, went on but slowly. That is, they went on but slowly as long as the Use of ..-,.,. , French and two languages really lived on, side by side, like two streams Enghsh flowing side by side, but not intermingling. During this f^l^y time a very large part of the people of England must, like a large part of the people of Wales now, have habitually spoken two languages. The difference between the French- speaking and the English-speaking man did not always mean that the one could speak no English and the other could 526 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE. cH. XXV. speak no French. It simply meant that the one spoke French at his fire-side and English only on occasion, while the other spoke English at his fire-side and French only on occasion. Each And we must also remember that many of each class would u'Merstood Understand the language of the other, even when they could by many not speak it. When a language is learned as a mere matter who could ^ o o not apeak of book-leaming, a man may read a language with perfect ease, though he can neither speak it himself nor understand it when others speak it. The written words are familiar to his eye, but their sounds are not familiar to his ear. And, of the two, he commonly finds it easier to speak the foreign language himself than to understand it when it is spoken by others. He can understand each word by itself, but the general sound of the language is strange to him. In a time when there is comparatively little book- learning, but when several languages are spoken in the same country, the case is exactly opposite. The sounds of all are familiar ; and it may happen that a man can thoroughly understand a language when spoken which he can scarcely speak at aU himself. And we must remember that, in every country of Western Europe, the sound of one language beside the vernacular must have been perfectly familiar. Everybody in England was used to the sound of Latin as weU as to the sound of English. Everybody in Normandy was used to the sound of Latin as well as to the sound of French. This alone would make it more easy for each to become familiar with the sound of a third language. The state of a man who perfectly understands a language, though he can speak it only imperfectly or not at all, is recorded in the case of several illustrious men, and the like must have been the case with myriads of men of whom it is not recorded. Charles the Great, eloquent in Latin as well as in German, understood Greek when spoken, but could not speak it well himself.^ Frederick ' Eginhard, Vita K. 25. " Latinam ita didicit, ut asque ilia ac patria TJee of Latin. Case of Charles the Great USE OF FRENCH AND ENGLISH SIDE BY SIDE. 527 Barbarossa, eloquent in German, understood Latin when oh. xxv. spoken, but spoke it himself only imperfectly.^ So in our of Frede- own land, an incidental story lets us know that Henry baroasa ; the Second understood spoken English, though it would °^-^®°^ seem that he could not himself speak it.^ In the reign of of England. his son we find a Bishop of Norman birth mentioninff it as ^"f^'^^ ' ° understood something remarkable and blameworthy in another Bishop by men of of Norman birth that he understood no English.^ In the An- the same generation we find an Abbot of Saint Eadmund's, S^""^- the famous Samson, counting it as a merit in an English churl whom he raised to the rank of a lord-farmer that he could speak no French.* It is plain then that, through- out the twelfth century, though French was the home- speech of the higher ranks and English the home-speech of the lower, there was at least nothing wonderful in a man of the highest rank being able to speak English, or in lingua orare sit solitus ; Graeoam vero melius intelligere quam prouuntiare poterat." * Radevic, iv. 8o (wlio clearly copies Eginhard) ; " In patria lingua ad- modum facundus, Latinam vero melius intelligere potest quam pronuntiare." ^ The story is told more than once by Giraldus Cambrensis, It. Kamb. i. 6, Expug. i. 40, where a Welshman speaks to Henry the Second in English (quasi Teutonice). The King clearly understands him, but he either cannot or will not answer him in the same tongue. Henry speaks in French (lingua Gallica) to a knight of Glamorgan, Philip of Marcross, who ex- plains the King's meaning to the Welshmen in English (Anglice). The fact that the knight of Glamorgan both understood and spoke English, while the King understood it but did not speak it, is worth noting. I conceive that " Teutonice " is simply the grand style for English. If any one chooses to take it for the speech of the Flemings, it shows that Flemish and English were so near that he who understood one, understood the other. Thierry (iii. 98) prefers to quote the story from Bromton (1079) rather than from Giraldus, and misapplies it to prove that Henry did not understand English. For other cases of the use of English see Appendix WW. 3 See the letter of Hugh of Nonant, Bishop of Coventry, about William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely (see Appendix W.), in Benedict, ii. 219; R. Howden, iii. 146. * This story is told by Jocelin of Brakelond, 24. "Unum solum manerium de Torp carta sua confirmavit cuidam Anglico natione glebse adsoripto, de cujus fideKtate plenius coniidebat, quia bonus ag-ricola erat, et quia nesciebat loqui GaUice." 528 EFFECTS OP THE CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE. Rare notices of language in the twelfth century. Slow intro- duction of French as an ofBcial language. English writs of William. a man of the lowest rank being able to speak French, when so to speak was needful for either of them. One of the most, singular things connected with this branch of our subject is that, throughout the twelfth century, our notices of language in any way are so few. Here and there, as in some of the cases already quoted, we are told what language a man spoke or did not speak ; but we are far oftener left to guess. I do not remember that, in the vast mass of literature which has gathered round the quarrel of King Henry and Archbishop Thomas, there is any distinct notice of the kind. We see that Thomas and many of those about him were in feeling very good Englishmen ; we are not told when they spoke French and when they spoke English.^ A reader who knew nothing of the real state of things might be tempted to think that they spoke nothing but Latin. One thing at least is certain ; the use of French as an official language^ though undoubtedly a result of the Norman Conquest, was a very gradual and distant result. English went out of use, but for a long time French did not come in. From the days of ^thelberht English and Latin had been alternative languages for public and private docu- ments, and in the days of William they rernained so. Under William himself, though most of his writs and other acts are in Latin, a good many are in English ; not one is in French. The English writs of William follow the ancient formulse, and it is curious to see a document which otherwise might have come from Cnut, if not from ' It is mentioned in one of the letters of Thomas (No. 346, Giles, iv. 191) that the Empress Matilda ordered the Constitutions of Clarendon to be read in Latin and explained in French ("prsecepit nobis eas Latiue legere, et exponere Gallice "). In Alan's Life of Thomas (Giles, i. 358) the Earl of Arundel speaks " eleganter, sed in sua lingua ; " that is doubtless in French. Lyttelton (iv. 77) and Berington (Heruy the Second, 133) both make him speak EngUsh. In both these cases the opposition is not between French and EngUsh, but between French and Latin. fusion of races. OFFICIAL USE OP FRENCH. 529 Eadgar, crowded with Norman names. But after William's ch. xw. day documents in the national tongue become rarer, and after Henry the First they are rare indeed.^ But Increased it is by Latin, not by French, that the place of the Latin. national tongue is taken. French does not come in till a later time, and the time when it does come in is most significant. While the Conquest was fresh, while the distinction between Norman and Englishman was still sharply drawn, the English language remained in frequent use. As Norman and Englishman began to draw nearer together, the common tongue of Western Christendom was used instead of the distinctive tongue of either of them. It is only when diflFerences were forgotten, when all the Use of men of the land were alike Englishmen, when all English- ajgn of the men were leagued together in the common struggle against the stranger, that the tongue of the stranger became a common tongue for official documents. All through the thirteenth century, while everything else is getting more and more English, the official speech is getting more and more French. This may at first sight seem to be an anomaly ; but the cause is plain. As long as a broad line was drawn between Normans and Englishmen, the use of the French tongue was a badge of conquest ; it was an insult to the conquered English. And, whatever smaller people may have done, most certainly no King, hardly Eufus himself, was at all likely to do anything that would be a mere useless insult to his English subjects. It was a kind of compromise between the two hostile tongues — between the tongue of the people which was strange to men high in rank and office and the tongue of men high in rank and office which was strange to the people— when it was silently agreed to lay both aside in favour of that Imperial tongue which was equally familiar or equally strange to men of both nations. But, when old wrongs ' See Appendix WW. VOL. V. Mm 530 EPPECTS OP THE CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE. Use of -French under Edward the First. cH. XXV. and diiferences were forgotten , when the descendants of the Norman settlers had become Englishmen in feeling, things altogether changed. The use of the French tongue was no longer an insult, even to those who did not them- selves understand it. It was no longer a badge of con- quest, but simply a matter of convenience, to make use on many public occasions of the tongue which was most familiar both to the courtly and to the literary class. It is a speaking fact that the first certain instance of the use of French in an ofEeial document should come in the year of the Great Charter and from the hand of Stephen Langton.^ So, in the reign of Edward the First, Acts of Parliament, public letters, and the like, are commonly written in French and are never written in English. This is in truth one of the many signs that the fusion of Normans and English was now complete. French was still the tongue which was best understood by the mass of those who had a hand in public affairs ; but its use was no longer felt as marking them off as a conquering class from the mass of a conquered nation. It was thus a result, but a most indirect result, of the Nor- man Conquest that the tongue of the Norman conquerors seemed for a while to become the public language of Eng- land. For a while it utterly displaced the national tongue ; it partially displaced even the common tongue of Western Christendom. This was a distant result of the Conquest, one which could not take place till the immediate results of the Conquest had passed away. But, before we come to this stage, there is one moment, one of the greatest moments even in that great age, when we see the three tongues which men spoke in England employed side by side to announce one of the triumphs of English freedom. The proclamation in which the Provisions of Oxford were announced to the English people was put forth in Latin, ' See Earle, Philology of the English Tongue, 53. The three- fold Procl 1 mation of HS8. PEOCLAMATION OF HENRY THE THIRD. 531 in French, and in English. Its English form has heen spoken oh. xxv. of, from different points of view, as the first and as the last of English public documents. Now it has been remarked by a master of English philology that this document bears the stamp of being put into form by some one to whom English composition was unusual. It does not belong to any natural stage of any English dialect. Its spelling is strange and artificial ; it looks like one of those cases in which a man, in striving to reproduce the peculiarities of a tongue with which he is little familiar, reproduces them in an exaggerated shape. 1 This document, the document which bears among its signatures the name of England's deliverer written in the English tongue, the document signed by " Simon of Muntfort, Eorl on Leicester," is perhaps the only piece of English of that age which was addressed to the whole English nation. Since English had ceased to be a literary No stan- language, since it had ceased to have one common literary English standard, there had been nothing to check the diversities of local dialects. Each man who wrote, wrote in the speech of his own district. Each man followed the spelling which he thought best expressed the sound, even if he did not, as was done by at least one ingenious writer, devise an elaborate system of spelling for himself.^ The royal oflScial, whoever he was, who was called on to draw up the three forms of the famous proclamation of Henry the Third must have been perfectly familiar with the sound of English ; he could no doubt speak it, whenever there was any need for him so to do. But he was not likely to be in the habit of English composition; when he wrote, he was doubtless wont always to write either in Erench or in Latin. It is not wonderful then that his English should not be the natural English of the time. It was as when ' Tliis is Mr. Earle's remark, Philology of the English Tongue, 69-72. ° Like Onniuj on whose spelling see Dr. White's Preface, Ixxx ; Earle, SI. M m 3 532 EFFECTS OP THE CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE. OH. XXV. an educated man tries to write in a provincial dialect ; he never writes it exactly as it is spoken by those to Import- whose lips it comes as a matter of course. Still both the document. poHtical and the linguistic importance of this famous document is of the highest order. It shows that those who were in power fully understood that the class who understood only English, at any rate the class to whom English was more familiar than either French or Latin, was a class which was entitled to have its share in a national movement and to know all that was being done for the good or the iU of the nation. A proclamation of this kind was something which needed to be brought within the knowledge of every man ; an Act of Parliament or a state True paper was something of a different kind. At no time is the the official actual text of the law very familar to the mass of those who Sff **'', are called on to obey it, or the exact text of a treaty very familiar to all who are bound by it. That sucli documents should be written in French could be no real grievance to those who never grumbled at their being written in Latin. The use of French was convenient to one part of the nation, and it did no damage to the other. The Eng- lish proclamation of Henry the Third proves that the English-speaking part of the nation was not neglected ; the French documents of Edward the First in no way prove that it was. It is also possible that the more frequent use of French which marks the latter part of the thirteenth century may have something to do with another cause. Under the circumstances of the Norman and English races in Eng- land it was, as I have just shown, only natural that the tongue of the Norman should make its greatest appa- rent conquest just at the time when the Englishman had made his greatest real conquest. It was then that the Romance speech of Northern Gaul won that place as the official speech of England which it has not quite lost FRENCH UNDER EDWARD THE EIRST. 633 yet. But it may be doubted whether it was purely in the oh. xxv. character of a Norman tongue that it won that place. Possible Besides the causes which were at work in the relations from between Englishmen and Normans, the process is not at ^^l^ all unlikely to have been helped by a direct influence ^'^^t^!^'^, from France. The thirteenth century was the time when the French tongue had reached the height of its influence, the time when it was the tongue of half the courts of Europe, from Scotland to Cyprus. And we have seen^ that, great and English as Edward the First was in his main character, there was still a French side to him ; and it seems likely that under him the foreign influence which, as a matter of politics, was swept away, went on and was actually strength- ened as a matter of fashion. There is no doubt that Edward Edward's the First could speak English familiarly; it might almost of English. seem that he spoke it habitually.^ But this is in no way inconsistent with the belief that in his time the use of French as a fashionable language received a new impulse. There are states of society in which people speak a lan- guage, not because it is the one which is most familiar to them, but because it is the one whose use is thought to be the sign of the highest politeness and refinement. This cause may very well have helped to give French a new start just at the time when other causes were giving the advantage to English. And this seems to be borne out Eirst signs of specula- by the fact that, from about this time, we come across signs tion on the of a distinct consciousness on the subject, of a habit of j^j^J.^" " speculation on the relations between the different languages used in the country. Of such a feeling we have seen ' See aboTe, p. 483. 2 When the Turkish ambassadors are brought before Edward (Walt. Hem. i. 337), "Et ait Edwardus in Anglico, ' vos quidem adoratis me sed minime diligitis;' nee iutellexerunt verba ejus, eo quod per interpretem loquerentur ei." This is ■■•■ most remarkable case, as English and French would be aU the same to the Turks, and Edward could hardly have been without a French-speaking interpreter. See Appendix WW. 534 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE. CH. sxv. nothing before/ and it would seem to have been called out by some new and special cause. It is now that, for the first time, an English chronicler stops to explain how it came that French as well as English was spoken in England. Robert And in so doing, he uses for the first time the word " Saxon" cester's use in that modern sense which has led to so many mistakes "Sa?on ""^"^ and confusions. 2 This conscious speculation about the matter stands in marked contrast with the tone of the Chroniclers of the very days of the Conquest, who, while they felt the difference between a foreign and a native King, seem hardly to have known the cause of that differ- ence. ^ The distinct voice of " nationality " is first heard at the moment when all pretence for talking about an " oppressed nationality" was swept away. The poet for- sakes the old formula of " French and English " for the new formula of " Normans and Saxons." He does so because in his days " Normans " and " Saxons " had come to be simply two classes, no longer very well defined classes, of Englishmen. He complains, perhaps not with much truth in a general view of the history of the world, that " there is no land that holdeth not to its kindly speech save England only." Here are the words of a distinct protest, a protest which goes on through the whole of the century "Witness of which followed. "We find it made matter of complaint Hio-den. that the children of the English gentry were taught French from their childhood,* and that men who could well speak English chose rather to speak French. Men now learned to remark that the native speech of Eng- ' The philological speculations of Giraldus and Eoger Bacon (see Com- parative Politics, 486) do not bear at all on these points. ' I have quoted the passage of Robert of Gloucester in vol. i. p. 599. ' See vol. iv. p. 618. * See Higden, ii. 159. I quote him in the version of Trevisa; "Also gentil men ohildi-en bee)> i-taujt to speke Frensche from i>e tyme jiat )>ey beejj i-rokked in here cradel, and kunne); speke and playe wij) a childea broche ; and vplondisshe men wil Ukne hym self to gentil men, and fonde)) wif greet besynesse for to speke Frensce, for to be i-tolde of." EFrECTS OF THE FRENCH WARS. flOo land was cut up into an endless variety of dialects, oh. xxv. while tlie strange speech which had come in with the Normans was spoken after one fashion only.^ All this is the language of an age of reflexion, of an age when the feeling of nationality, and of language as the great badge of nationality, was conscious and strong. And Influence nothing could better tend to strengthen such feelings than French the state of things which went on through the greater ^^^ *""} part of the fourteenth century. This was a state of things fashions, marked by constant rivalry and warfare with France as a power, combined with increasing influence of French ways as a matter of fashion. Edward the Third himself warred in France, less as an English King engaged in a national strife with Frenchmen than as a French prince seeking the Crown of France. But his English armies, as English armies had done from the days of Henry the First — perhaps from the days of the Conqueror himself — fought in France strictly as Englishmen fighting against Frenchmen. French wars would bring it more clearly home to men's minds that the polite and courtly speech of their own land was strictly a foreign tongue. It was in no way wonderful that the reign of Edward the First should mark the time when a new impulse was given to the use of French ; it was still less wonderful that the reign of Edward the Third should mark the time of a distinct revolt of English against French, and of the final victory^ though only a qualified victory, on the part of English. It VFill be noticed that some of the complaints which French I have just noticed bring out strongly the point on which uah both I have insisted throughout, that those who spoke French jge'^g^^^gy in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries could, in pers-'a^. ' Higden, ii. i6i. " pe langage of Normandie is oomlynge of ano>er londe, and hath oon manere soun among alle men fat spekef hit arijt in Enge- lond." This marks the distinction between a genuine popular speech and one which is merely a speech of learning or fashion. See Guest, English Khythms, ii. 427. 536 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE. CH. XXV. a large and of course increasing proportion, speak English also. But things had changed between the twelfth century and the fourteenth. In the twelfth century the man of Norman descent spoke French naturally and habitually. He knew English only as an acquired tongue^ to be spoken only when French would not serve. The English gentle- man of the fourteenth century — his Norman or Old- English descent is now quite forgotten — spoke English naturally ; but he was taught French from his childhood, because to speak French was the polite and fashionable thing. When it came to this, the victory of English was certain. French had lost all real hold on any class in the country; it was kept up by a mere fashion which might change at any moment. And in the later years of the fourteenth century the strife was decided. A name which all Englishmen ought to hold in honour is that of John Cornwell, master of grammar, who first began the change by which English boys were allowed to be taught in their own tongue and no longer in that of the stranger, i By the Pleadings death of Edward the Third the victory was won. If we iggj ' ask for a particular date for the victory of English, we may take the year when English displaced French as the language of pleadings in the higher courts of law. From this time the steps in advance are swift. The enemy of Survival of course does not give way all at once. Men wrote in French French. after they had ceased to speak it. French was used in public documents after it had ceased to be used in private writings. A few legal and oiRcial phrases linger among us still, as relics of a state of things which has wholly ^ So says Trevisa in an insertion of his translation of Higden (ii. i6i) ; ** John Comwaile, a maister of grammer, chaunged j^e lore in gramer scole and construccioun of Frensche in to Englische ; and Richard Pencriche lamed ])e manere techjnge of hym and of ojjere men of Pencrich ; so )>at now, )3e Jere of cure Lorde a Jjowsand })re hundred and foure score and fyve, and of fe secounde kyng Eichard after J>e conquest nyne, in alle Jpe gTamere scoles of Engelond, children leve)) Frensche and construe)) and leme]) an Englische." FINAL VICTORY OF ENGLISH. 537 passed away. The successor of Alfred when, like Alfred, oh. xxv. she lays schemes of law before her Witan, speaks the tongue of Alfred. But, when those schemes of law have, according to later usage, taken the form of petitions addressed to the sovereign,^ the successor of William gives her assent to those petitions in the tongue of William. All through the fifteenth century, down to the earlier days of Henry the Seventh, we find Acts of Parliament written in French, while the letters even of Kings are in English.^ But the use of French for any public purpose must by that time have been the merest survival. Lons: before those days Henry the Fifth was represented in a negotiation with France by ambassadors who could not speak or understand the French tongue. In a spirit which later diplomatists would have done well to follow, they de- manded that acts to which Englishmen were to put their signatures should be drawn up, not in the local dialect of the French kingdom, but in the common speech of Western Europe.^ I have said that, though the victory of English over Influence French was complete, yet it was only a modified victory, on English. French in the fourteenth century gave way to English ; but, in the process of giving way to English, it greatly affected the tongue to which it gave way. It gave way to 'The assent of the Crown to Acts of Parliament, that is, in theory, petitions of Parliament, is still, eta every one knows, given in French. But both the Queen's speech and an Act of Grace are in English. ^ The last case of the use of French would seem to be in 1488-9. See the Revised Statutes, i. 354, 360. But in the letters and papers of the same date (see the two volumes published by Mr. Gairdner), whenever French is used, one can see why it was used, unless perhaps in such a paper as that addressed to Sir John Wilshire, i. 220. It is assumed throughout, and not unreasonably, that Englishmen understand French, but that French- men do not understand English. But men of each nation use their own tongue among themselves. ' Lingard, iii. 515, 538 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE. CH. XXV. Great in- fusion of Romance words. English ; but it did not give way till it had poured into English the greatest infusion of foreign words and foreign idioms which any European tongue ever received from a foreign source. It is the business of the philologer rather than of the historian to refute the fallacies of those who, by a mere counting up of words in dictionaries, try to show that English is not a Teutonic tongue, but a mere jumble of Teutonic and Romance. But it may be no harm to repeat that philology knows nothing of mixed languages,' that, though English has borrowed a vast stock of words from French, though it has lost a vast stock of native English words, though it has adopted many a French idiom and has been influenced by French in endless in- Analogy of the Teutonic infusion iu the Komance languages. direct ways, it still remains English all the same. It remains English, just as the Romance tongues still remain Latin, notwithstanding the great infusion of Teutonic words into their vocabulary, and the powerful efieet which Teutonic conquest has had on them in every way. Great as has been the French infusion into our language, the French influence on our language, it still remains an infusion and influence from without. It in no way alters the personality of that ancient English tongue which the keels of Hengest brought from the older Eng- land to the conquered isle of Britain. It is true that most of us can now read Wace himself more easily than we can read Beowulf. But that is simply as Cicero could read Homer more easily than he could read the hymn of the Arval Brethren. I have already spoken of the two ways in which the Norman Conquest affected the speech of England, how it affected it directly by the bringing in of foreign words, and indirectly by giving a further impulse to the loss of inflexions. Both of these influences were in their own nature sure to grow, and to widen their range as ^ ' Max Miiller, Science of Language, i. 74. EFFECTS OP FRENCH ON ENGLISH. 539 they went on. For a long time the two languages stood oh. xxv. side by side. They were spoken by two different classes ofT^'^ *^" people^ or by the same class on different kinds of occasions, stand But very little intermixture took place. During the twelfth a while. century the process of grammatical corruption was far Corruption more busily at work than the process of adopting foreign matical words. The same may, on the whole, be said of the elrUer thirteenth, though the proportion in which foreiern words *'''"i *^® ' ^ i^ r i, ^ great in- crept in, and the tendency to make them needlessly dis- fusion of place English words, were both constantly growing. During wor(C^ all this time the language may be looked on as going through a process of breaking up, preparatory to its put- ting on a new shape. And it must not be forgotten that the rival tongue was going through a process of the same kind. The old French, though it had lost most of the Latin Corruption inflexions, stiU kept traces of them which may be called matical considerable, as compared with the modern form of the 5""^ j!" language. French and English alike were going through a process which every tongue goes through in passing from the inflexional to the non-inflexional stage. Just as out of the many local dialects of a language some process of natural selection brings one to the front and makes it the standard of the language, so, in the break-up of inflexions, a like process of natural selection brings some particular endings to the front and gets rid of the rest. I wish throughout to leave details, as much as may be, to professed philologers, but one instance of this rule is so instructive that I cannot help giving a few words to it. Of the many Illustra- endings of the Old-English plural, that which in this way plural in s. became the normal ending was that which ended in s. This ending, once only one among several, has now become the rule, and those words in which any other way of forming the plural still abides are looked on as exceptional. But the s ending did not win this supremacy without a struggle on the part of the n ending. That ending has not only 540 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON" LANGUAGE. cH. XXV. kept its place at the end of a few words which were its rightful possession, but it has in the struggle got pos- session of one or two words to which it has no right. We speak, after the manner of our forefathers, of men and oxen, but we speak also of Irethren and children, where the n is an intruder.! This is an illustration of the kind of process which goes on when the checks on linguistic corruption are taken away. But the triumph of the s ending in English Compari- is remarkable in another way. Among all the old Teu- Hifh- tonic endings^ the one which has become dominant in Dutch^aud Engiigij ig the very one which has gone wholly out of use in High-Dutch. Thus, by a mere accident, two nearly allied languages have come to seem further apart than they really are. And more than this, the same accident has made two languages which are much less nearly allied seem to be nearer to each other than they are. "While the English tongue was, so to speak, choosing one out of several Teutonic endings, the French tongue was also choosing one out of several Latin endings. The s ending was common to both Latin and Teutonic ; it was the ending which became the choice of both French and English. It is quite possible that, while this process was going on in the two languages side by sidcj the choice of the English may have been in some measure determined by the choice of the French. If it is not so, the coincidence is a very singular one. If it is so, we see how manifold and how subtle were the forms of the foreign influence which was now brought to bear upon our language. We chose our dominant ending from among our own stock ; but some silent influence led us to choose that one among the native candidates which had more than any other the look of a stranger. While all these changes were going on, while foreign words were pouring in in increased numbers, while the old grammatical system was being broken up, while, ' See Earle, Philology of the English Tongue, 316, 317, DIALECTS OF ENaLISH. 541 instead of one standard of literary English, there was oh. xxv. nothing but a crowd of popular local dialects, the time came when the English language was to win back its own place, and to become once more the one acknowledged language of England. This was the work of the four- teenth century. But in doing this work, the fourteenth Question century had further to fix what kind of English should the dialects become the acknowledged language of England. First of °^ J^iig'^^'^- all, which of the many dialects of English should come to the front, and become the standard English tongue? Which should be to England what Castilian is to Spain, what Tuscan is to Italy, what the speech of Touraine is to France ? The Northern dialect, the Anglian of Northum- berland modified under Scandinavian influences, had no chance. We have seen that there is a sense in which the Norman Conquest was in truth a Saxon Conquest.^ The tongue of York was not likely to become the standard of language at the court either of Winchester or of Westminster. Northern English indeed kept its ground as a literary and courtly language ; but it was beyond the political boundaries of England that it did so. One form of the The North- speech of Northumberland was the speech of Lothian, and dialect Northern Enfflish naturally flourished at the courts of?°™fJ'?^ '^ •' m Lothian; princes who sprang at once from Margaret and from Wal- theof, those Earls of Lothian who were also Kings of Scots. This Northern English, broken up, as far as its inflexions go, at an earlier time than the Southern/ but far less cor- rupted by the inroad of foreign words, lived on for some ages as a national speech, and it survives even in our own day as something more than a mere local dialect. But, by one of the strangest chances of political nomenclature, this purest ' See above, p. 65. ^ On the character of the Northern EngHsh, even before the Danish in- vasion, and on the effect which that invasion had in helping the break-up of inilexions, see Standard English, 36, 48, 50 ; Garnett, Philological Essays, 1 39' 542 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE. CH. XXV. commonly called " Scotch." Advan- tages of a middle dialect. Standard English the speech of Eastern Meroia. surviving form of English, vnth its rich store of ancient English forms and ancient English words, is to most Englishmen known by no other name than that of " Scotch." But the tongue which was the polite speech beneath the walls of the abbey of Dunfermline was not the polite speech beneath the walls of the abbey of West- minster. It might perhaps have been thought that, among the various dialects of English, the one which would come to the front would be the true Saxon speech of the South, the tongue both of the elder and the younger capital, the tongue of the spiritual metropolis of the land and of the three kingly seats where both King Eadward and King William wore their Crown.' But in cases of this kind, when dialects are left to themselves, that which wins in the long run is likely to be a dialect which holds a middle place between extremes at both ends. It was neither the Northern nor the Southern, neither the broadly Anglian nor the broadly Saxon, variety of our language -which was to set the standard of the English tongue. The English of books and of modern speech is not the tongue of Northumberland ; it is not the tongue of Wessex j it is the tongue of those eastern shires of Meroia which border on East-Anglia. It is not the tongue of Godwine ; it is not the tongue of Siward ; but it is the tongue, if not of Waltheof himself, yet of the men of his first earldom. And the man by whom it was first thrown into a literary shape was a native of the spot which legend, if not history, has chosen for the home of Hereward. Without pretending to fix the geographical limit very exactly, there can be no doubt that the English language, in the form which has been classical ever since the fourteenth ' Gloucestershire, part of the great conquest of Ceawlin, though after- wards Mercian in allegiance, still remains Saxon in speech. TRIUMPH OF THE EAST-MIDLAND DIALECT. 543 century, is the language of the shires bordering on the great oh. xxv. monastic region of the Fenland, the tongue of Northampton- shire, Huntingdonshire, Rutland, and Holland.' The writer influence who first gave currency to the dialect was Robert Manning ^^"'j'*'^ of Bourne, in the later days of Edward the First.^ Under <=. isoO' the great writers of the fourteenth century it grew and prospered, and it was the form of the language which, at the end of that century, finally displaced French as the polite and literary speech of England. Classical English is neither Northern, nor Southern, but Midland ; and of Midland it is Eastern, and not Western. Any one may convince himself of this who has learned enough of the local dialects of England to know how much nearer the tongue of a Northamptonshire peasant comes to the Eng- lish of books than the tongue of a peasant either of York- shire or of Somerset. I suspect that, if the three were brought together, the true test of a standard dialect would show itself; the Northumbrian and the West-Saxon would have some ado to understand one another ; the Mercian would be easily understood by both.^ From the eleventh Northern to the fourteenth century, all forms of English south of Southern the Tweed were mere popular dialects in the presence of a English ^ ■*■ ^ remain dominant foreign tongue. Since the fourteenth century only as the tongues of the North and the South have sunk into the dialects. still lower position of popular dialects in the presence of a dominant form of the same tongue. The ancient Saxon tongue, which in the fourteenth century was still the speech ' See Oliphant, Standard English, 184; Gamett, Philological Essays, 153 ; Guest, English Ehythmg, ii. 198, where it is said of Leicestershire, " It has contributed more than any of our living dialects to the formation of our present standard English." I am not concerned to assert the claims of any particular shire, if it is only allowed that it is on this side of England that the source of modem book-English is to be looked for. I myself, when very young, noticed how little the common speech of Northamptonshire differed from book-English. ' See Standa.rd English, 182. ' See the extract from Higden in p. 513. 544 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE. CH. XXV. The special Season tongue driven westward. Debt due to Peter- borough. Changes between 1 1 54 and 1363- of written Kentisli prose/ has long passed out of written use, to become once more in our own day the written speech of Dorset rimes. The tongue of Cerdic, Ine, and iElfred has been, step by step, beaten back westward, till it survives only in the lands which, in days later than those of jElfred, were still looked on as the Wealhcyn, the march of the conquered Briton. We have thus seen at what point of time it was that the English tongue finally drove out the intruder which had usurped its place for three hundred years. We have seen too to which local form of the English language it was that the final victory fell. Neither North nor South ought to grudge the East-Midland speech its victory. The land where, in the cloister of Peterborough, men still went on writing the annals of England in the English tongue, after Canterbuiy and Winchester and Worcester and Abingdon had ceased to speak, did indeed deserve to be the land whose tongue should be rewarded for that long endurance by becoming the common speech of Eng- land. But when the East-Midland English gained its victory in the fourteenth century, its form had greatly changed. It had gone far away from the tongue of that monk of the Golden Borough whose pen dropped from his hand in recording the mickle worship with which his house received the first Abbot of Angevin days.^ If the victorious tongue had simply taken in a few foreign words to express foreign ideas, it would have been no more than has happened to all tongues. If it had simply lost its inflexions, it would have been no more than ' The Ayenbite of Inwit, written in Kent in 1 340, has that use of 2 and » which is now thought to be distinctive of Somerset. ^ See the last broken entry in the Peterborough Chronicle. In 994 Anlaf was received "mid mycclum wurSsoipe.'' Now William of Walter- ville is received "mid micel wurtscipe,'' but moreover "mid micel pro- cessiun." Yet a psalmist four hundred years later might have said, " It is well seen how thou goest." INFUSION OF FOREIGN WORDS. 545 has happened to the kindred tongues of the Low-Dutch oh. xxv. and Scandinavian stock. But, while English was kept in the background and French was the tongue of the court and of the lighter literature, the fashion of bringing in words from the politer tongue grew stronger and stronger. But we must mark again that this corruption of the Infusion of national tongue was, like the extended use of the foreign word^"a tongue, a sign that the days of mere conquest had gone fJ,^o°^of'^ by. As long as the two races remained at all distinct and races. hostile, but few French words crept into English, and for most of those which did we can see a distinct reason.^ But, as the fusion of races went on, as French became, not, so much a foreign tongue as a fashionable tongue, the infusion of French words into English went on much faster. The love of hard words, of words which are thought to sound learned or elegant, that is, for the most part, words which are not thoroughly understood, is, I conceive, not peculiar to any one age. What it leads to in our own day we see in that foul jargon against whose further inroads lovers of their native tongue have to strive. But it was busily at Inroad of work in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Every ^ordsin man who thought in English, but to whom a sprinkling of *'^'^ *^"'' foreign words seemed an ornament of speech, did some- century. thing in the way of corruption. And the same thing happened, with more of excuse, in the opposite case, when a man who thought in French spoke or wrote in English. It was a sign that the English tongue was again looking The up, when, early in the thirteenth century, a Bishop wrote a ai^ie. devotional work in English for the use of a sisterhood of"- "^°' nuns.2 But, in so doing, he brought into his work a crowd of foreign words which had not shown them- selves in English before, but which have stayed in our ' See a lively picture of the kind of French words which naturally came in first in Standard English, 218, 219. ^ The language of the Ancren Riwle is discussed by Mr. Oliphant, 221. VOL. V. N n 546 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE. CH. XXV. tongue ever since. The greater learning of the clergy, their greater intercourse with other parts of the world, was, from one point of view, one of the better results Intrusion of the Conquest. But there can be no doubt that of foreign . . . ^ . words into it led to a Vast inroad of foreign words into our re- formulEe. ligious and devotional speech. ^ Even the Lord's Prayer and the Belief have not escaped ; and that venerable relic of our ancient tongue, that old-world form — that lex /iorrendi carminis — in which Englishmen and English- women have been joined in wedlock for a thousand years, has not escaped the presence of a single stranger in the Great foreign word " endow." Throughout the thirteenth century foreign p • t t • • • i p intrusion new foreign words were dropping m ; in the fourteenth fourteenth ^'^^J came in with a rush. By the end of that century century. English had won its final victory ; but the Parthian shafts of the defeated enemy had done the conqueror the dead- liest of harm in the very moment of his conquest. But the loss would have been less, if all that had hap- pened had been a mere infusion of foreign words. The presence of a stranger in the land may be endured ; but his presence is a tenfold greater evil when the sons of the soil have to leave their native land to make room for him. As it was with the men of England, so it was with their Displace- speech. As the Norman Conquest not only planted Nor- native mans in England, but caused Englishmen to exchange words. thtir native land for Denmark or Byzantium, so it was with words as well as men. With every fresh inroad of French wordsj more English words were displaced to make room for them. Thus it came that crowds of true^ ancient, and vigorous Teutonic words, words which have lived on in the kindred tongues of the mainland, which have lived on in the purer English of Lothian and Fife, have perished from our classical speech, and now come among us as strangers. Crowds of words which formed part of the ' See Standard English, 229. DISPLACEMENT OF NATIVE WORDS. 547 everyday speech of Alfred and Harold are now set down, ch. xxv. sometimes as Scottish, sometimes as High-German. This dropping of our own words, which went on all through the centuries of change, was a far greater evil than the mere borrowing of new words. And along with it came Lobs of the another evil fully as great ; our tongue gradually lost the making power, a power inherent in any really living language, of ''ew native making new words at pleasure out of the stock of the lan- guage itself. We could once make compound words as freely as the Greek has always made them, as freely as the High- German can still make them when he chooses. When once the French fashion had set in, it was found easier to bring in a French or Latin word, or to coin an English word after a French or Latin fashion, than it was to frame a com- pound or derivative word out of the ancient stock of the language. Thus the grand old compound words of the true English speech died out of use, and no new ones were made to take their places. It has become almost hopeless to frame abstract words, technical words of any kind, in our own tongue. In this way the frightful jargon of modern science, the daily increasing stock of meaningless words with which our dictionaries are cumbered, is one result, and a very ugly result it is, of the Norman Con- quest. It is owing to the coming of William that we cannot trace the history of our native speech, that we cannot raise our wail for its corruption, without borrowing largely from that store of foreign words which, but for his coming, would have never crossed the sea. So strong a hold have the intruders taken on our soil that we cannot even tell the tale of their coming without their help. This abiding corruption of our language I believe to Evil result have been the one result of the Norman Conquest which q^ggt q^ has been purely evil. In every other respect, the evil of a l*iig"age. few generations has been turned into good in the long run. But the tongue of England — rather, we should say, the N n a 548 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE. OH. XXV. tongue of Englishmen before any rood of Britain became England — the tongue wliich we brought with us from the elder England — the tongue in which men sang the deeds of Beowulf while Englishmen still dwelled in their old home — the tongue of Csedmon and iElfred and the long roll of our ehromclers and poets — has become for ever the spoil of the enemy. The change is purely evil. We are always told of the greater varietj^ the greater flexibility, which our language has gained by its foreign corruptions. I deny every count. The foreign words which have poured, and are still pouring, into our language are poor substitutes indeed for the treasures of ancient speech which we have cast away. Men who speak in this way simply know not the power, the richness, even the variety and the flexibility^ of the true English speech. The mere fact that we are now driven to borrow foreign words, or to coin words in foreign tongues, instead of forming them^ as of old, out of our own stores, shows that the truest life of our tongue was taken out of it in the process by which it Powers of again climbed up into courts and palaces. The moment lish tongue when the English tongue was pulled down from its high el V ith pl^cs was the moment when it had just shown the fulness century, of its powers. The blow came when the hopes of the growing tongue were at their very highest, when the Herodotus of England had arisen alongside of her Homer, \vhen for the first time the living strength of English Portrait of prosc had been shown forth among men. Surely no form of the speech of man ever outdid, for true vigour and awful grandeur^ the portrait of William the Great drawn by the hand of the Englishman who had looked on Descrip- him. And, notwithstanding the corruption of mere gram- anarchy, matical forms^ the same awful power comes out in the harrowing picture of the anarchy of Stephen. How truly their words still speak to Englishmen, even in our later days, is shown by the fact that those wonderful pictures CORRUPTION OF ENGLISH. 549 are well known to thousands who never read a line of our ch. xxv. ancient annals for themselves. The feeblest compiler hardly dares to tell the tale of the Conquest and the anarchy without at least some scraps about the King who was so stark, who loved the high deer as though he had been their father, or about the nineteen winters which we tholed for our sins, when the castles were made and when they filled them with devils and evil men. Such then was the speech of England, a speech of such true and living power as no later age has seen, a speech which from its own stores could supply every need of the thoughts of man. It was only when we had to name the things of evil, when we had to speak of the castles and of the devils, that we needed to borrow a word from any tongue beyond the sea. The struggle which our tongue has had to wage has Analogies been with the French form of Romance ; yet the history of English that form of Romance supplies some most instructive i , analogies with the history of our own tongue. The French speech itself was formed by a process which had much in common with the process which affected the English tongue in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Teutonic Latin speech which so deeply affected the Teutonic speech French, of England had itself been only less deeply affected by a Teutonic speech in its own land. As so large a part of the Teutonic conquerors of England were really her disguised kinsmen, brought so not a few of the words which crept from the Romance ^^^^ ^ of France into the Teutonic of England were but good old shape by T • 1 1 T ■ *'^^ Nor- Teutonic words slightly disguised under a Latin mask. mans. Sometimes indeed a disguised Teutonic word has lived Words on side by side with the same word in its true Teutonic Tpure^ '" shape. Two of the last devised names of English offices J^^\°"^° illustrate this law. A reform of a generation back en- Romanized trusted the care of the poor — the poor being called by a 550 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST OK LANGUAGE. The Teutonic infusion in French answers to the Romance infusion in English. Compari- son be- tween tlie Franliish Conquest of Gaul and the Nonnan Conquest ofEnsrland, Gaul adopts the Latin tongue ; smallness of the Celtic in- fusion in French. French name — to Boards of Guardians ; a later reform has entrusted the care of the highways — which still keep their Teutonic name — to Boards of Wardens. The two words are the same ; both come from that old Teutonic root which we see in the names of Eadward and iEthelward, but one of them shows the Teutonic root only in the shape into which it had been moulded on Romance lips. These are the fruits of that large Teutonic infusion in French which, though far smaller in extent than the Romance infusion in English, is exactly analogous to it in its origin, and to some extent also in its history.^ I remarked at the very beginning of this work that the Norman Conquest of England, as it was most unlike the English conquest of Britain, was also a conquest of a different kind from the Teutonic conquests on the Roman mainland.^ But I implied that of the two it was far more like the continental than the insular settlement. And I might have added that, of all the Teutonic settlements in the Roman mainland, it had most in common with the Frankish conquest of Gaul. In short, the Frankish conquest of Gaul and the Norman Conquest of England, among many points of unlikeness, have enough of likeness to make it possible to compare, and not merely to contrast, them. And it is in the matter of language that the points of likeness between the two Conquests are greatest, and the points of unlikeness smallest. When the English con- quered Britain, they kept their own tongue, borrowing only a handful of words from the British tongue. When the Romans conquered Gaul, the mass of the natives gradually adopted the Latin language, bringing with them only a handful of words from their own tongue.^ But when the Franks conquered Gaul, and when the ' See vol. i. p. 17. ^ See vol. i. pp. 3, 4. ' On the smallness of the Celtic element in French, see Braohet, Diction- naire Etymologique, xxxiv. COMPAEISOSr OF ENGLISH AKD FRENCH. 551 Normans conquered England, in botb cases tte conquerors ch. xxv. gradually adopted the language of the conquered. In "^^ each case, in adopting the language of the conquered, adopt the they brought into it an infusion of words from their speech as own language, and an infusion far greater than the ' ^^ j" ^ handful of words which English has borrowed from the *.^® ^^^g- Celtic of Britain and French from the Celtic of Gaul. The general process in the two cases is exactly analogous, but the smaller shades of difference are highly instructive. ^ The Teutonic element in French and the K,omance element Analogy in. English are in truth no real elements at all, but in- t^e two fusions which do not afftct the true essence and structure ™^"^-o"^- of the two languages. The test is that which I gave at starting, that English may be written without using any Romance words and that French may be written without any Teutonic words. This shows, without going any further, that French, notwithstanding a large Teutonic infusion, is still a Romance language, and that English, notwithstanding a much larger Romance infusion, is still a Teutonic language. Thus far the two cases are the same ; the difference of proportion between the foreign infusions in the two cases in no way hinders the truth of the analogy. But there is a real difference between the two Poiats of cases in another way. The whole Teutonic infusion in . . One French came from a single source, and came in at a Teutonic single stage of the history of the language. The Romance French • infusion in English came in from more than one source, ^''^^^^ ^ Komance and at more than one stage. We have already marked infusions in three stages of Romance infusion into English. There is a fourth which does not come within the limit of my history. Of these four the third exactly answers to the Teutonic infusion in French ; but there is nothing in French which at all answers to the first, the second, or the fourth. The first and the second Romance infusions into English consist ' I am here enlarging what I said in Comparative Politics, pp. 1 28, 420. 552 EFFECTS OF THE COITQUEST OK LANGUAGE. No parallel in French to the eaxlier in- fusions in English. Analogy of the Prank- ish and Norman infusions. Teutonic words in Latin. of the few Latin words which the English picked lip in the first days of their Conquest and the larger numher which were brought in by Augustine and his successors. To these classes of Romance words in English there are no analogous Teutonic words in Erench, because the events in the history of Britain out of which those classes of words arose have no events answering to them in the history of Gaul. But the third source of Romance in- fusion in English exactly answers to the single source of Teutonic infusion in French. This is that Romance in- fusion into English which forms one chief subject of the present chapter, that infusion which was a direct effect of the Norman Conquest. This, the Norman infusion, as distinguished from the earlier British and ecclesiastical infusions, answers to the one Teutonic infusion in Erenchj the Frankish infusion. The Franks in Gaul gradually adopted the language of the country, but, in adopting it, they modified it just in the same way in which the Normans modified English. As the process of breaking up the Teutonic endings and inflexions in English was hastened and confirmed by the Norman Conquest, so the process of breaking up the Latin endings and inflexions in the Romance of Gaul was hastened and confirmed by the Frankish conquerors. And, as the English tongue borrowed a crowd of Romance words from our Romance-speaking conquerors, so the Romance of Gaul borrowed a crowd of Teutonic words from the Teutonic conquerors of Gaul. The process indeed began before the conquest. One or two Teutonic words made their way into Latin, while Latin was still classical. If we adopted the Latin castrum, the Romans adopted the Teutonic iurh} But the mass of the Teutonic words came in with the Franks, Burgundians, ' See Br.^chet, Dictionnaire Etymologique, xxxviii. In Scheller's Dic- tionary references for the word hurgus are given to Vegetius, Orosius, and the Code of Justinian. TEUTONIC INFUSION" IN FEENCH. 553 and other Teutonic settlers in the fifth century, and the oh. xxv. stock received a further small increase by the coming of the Normans in the tenth. That stock consists, not only of mili- tary, political, and maritime words, all of which we might have looked for, but of words of all kinds. The number of Great Teutonic words in French outweighs over and over again the of the number of non-Latin words of any other kind ; ^ onlv most ^'!'^*?'''': •' ' •' miusion m of them have put on a form so thoroughly French that it French, needs some philological tact to know many of them for what they really are. So it is with many of the words which we ourselves borrowed from the Romance. There Romance are words which came to us from Normandj', just as there naturalized are men who came to us from Normandy, which have put ^" English. on a shape so thoroughly English that it needs philological tact to see that they are really strangers.^ It is only when words bring with them foreign endings and other outward marks of foreign origin that we not only know but feel that they are intruders. Thus far the analogy between the Frankish conquest of Gaul and the Norman Conquest of England, and between the effects which those conquests severally had on the French and English languages, is exact ; but there is another side in which the likeness between the two cases wholly fails. The Teutonic infusion in French is very great; but it The Ten- came in all at once^ or, if we take in words brought in by j^ French the Normans in the tenth century^ at most at twice. The ^°P^ • ^^^ Romance infusion in English has gone on growing from influx in the eleventh century till now. That is to say, the results goes on. of the two conquests were alike as far as their historical circumstances were alike ; the results were different as far as the circumstances were different. In each case the conquerors adopted the language of the conquered, and, ' See Brachet, Dictionnaire Etymologique, xxxviii. 2 Nothing but philological knowledge could teach any one that please, pay, money, are not as strictly native words as tease, say, honey. 554 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE. cH. XXV. in adopting, modified it. But in French the modifying^ process happened once for all ; in English it has never ceased. We have always gone on adding to our stock of words borrowed either directly from the Latin or from the Latin through the French. But it is not likely that a single Teutonic word made its way into French between the tenth century and the seventeenth. The causes of this difference are plain. In England English was simply the local speech ; it was not even the exclusive speech. Latin, as the tongue of religion and learning, was common to Norman and Englishman. But Latin at the time of the Frankish conquest was more than the mere local speech of Gaul ; it was the one speech of culture and literature Different common to the whole Latin West. It followed then that Frankish the Teutonic speech in Gaul was a speech of conquest^ and and of^ of Conquest only. French in England was not only the French in speech of COD quest ; it was also the speech of fashion and England. "^ , . ^ ._. ^ of some kmds of literature. Thus, while the Frankish con- quest helped, along with other causes, to change Latin into French as the spoken language, it did not wholly displace Latin. The new form of the language, the French, grew Survival of up, but Latin still survived as a written language, as for Gaul. some centuries the only written language, as the abiding language of religion, law, and learning. But in England, while the Norman Conquest helped along with other causes to change the older form of English into the newer, the older form did not in the like sort survive. The parallel there- fore is not perfect. Latin does not stand to French in exactly the same relation in which Old-English stands to modern English. The exact parallel would be if the older form of English, with its inflexions and its vocabulary unchanged, had gone on as a written language alongside of the modern English of common speech. But this could not happen with English; it could not happen with any tongue except the Imperial speech of Rome. Latin in RELATION'S BETWEEN FRENCH AND LATIN. 555 short played in Gaul the part which English and Latin oh. xxv. together played in England. When Teutonic went out of Difference use' in Gaul, the two remaining languages of the country relationa were two stages of the same language. French grew up^ ^ tTn and but the Latin out of which it sprung was still remem- French and ^ ^ . Old-Eng- bered. When French went out of use in England, the lish and two remaining languages of the country were wholly dis- English. tinct. Latin went on for its own purposes; modern English grew up, and the older English out of which it grew was forgotten. Add to this that, even after French had ceased to be spoken in England, it was still the most commonly known among foreign tongues. In Gaul, on the other hand, after the older German had died out, no foreign language was less commonly known than the later German. It followed then that in England, after French had ceased to be spoken, the Romance influence and the influx of Romance words still went on in another form. In Gaul, on the other hand, as soon as the immediate effects of the Teutonic conquest had passed away, the influx of Teutonic words ceased. The French language "Learned" contains a class of words which exactly answers to those French Romance words which have crept into English during ^''^^ Latm. the last three centuries, the class of words which do not grow but are made. We often find in French a real word which has changed from Latin into French by the natural historical process, side by side with a word which has not grown out of the Latin word but has been made from it in modern times. But in French, made words of this kind are still Latin ; no new words are coined in French from a Teutonic mould. But we still go on Coinage of coining words from a Romance mould ; the fashion which ^ords in began- in the eleventh century has never since stopped, ^'^s'^'i'^- And yet, by a kind of ej^cle, an old analogy has again showed itself in the very latest stage of the two languages. As the Normans brought into English many good Teutonic 556 EFFECTS OF THE COXQUEST ON LANGUAGE. cH. XXV. words in a French dress, so, among the handful of words which modem French has borrowed from modern English, some are simply good old French words in an English dress. ^ Effects of the Con- quest on personal nomencla- ture. Specially Teutonic character of Old- English names. Nomen- clature of Germany and Nor- mandy, § .2. JEffecis of the Conquest on Personal and Local Koinenclature. There is one form of the infusion of foreign words into our vocabulary of which I have once or twice spoken in- cidentally, but which may jfittingly receive some further notice at this stage. I mean the changes which the Norman Conquest wrought in the English system of no- menclature, in the proper names both of persons and of places. "With regard to personal nomenclature, the change was twofold. A new set of Christian names came in, and along with them came in also the foreign fashion of hereditary surnames. The Old-English system of no- menclature was a very marked one. Nowhere were per- sonal names more purely Teutonic than they were in England up to the Norman Conquest. That is to say, England was specially slow in adopting either scriptural names or Greek and Latin names of saints. In the whole time between the coming of Augustine and the coming of ^Yilliam no layman in England bore any but a purely Teutonic name. The few churchmen who bore scriptural or saintly names had, we may be sure, taken them at their ordination or monastic profession. Germany in this respect was almost, if not quite, as Teutonic as England, and even in Normandy the use of scriptural or saintly names seems to have come in only a generation or two before the Conquest of England. There also the fashion seems to have been most common among churchmen, and, ' See Bracliet, Grammaire Historique, 66. He mentions "fashion" and "tunnel" as two French words which have in this way gone back into France, " frappes a I'effigie sasonne." OLD-ENGLISH PEKSONAL NOMENCLATURE. 557 though it was not unknown among the laity, it had not, ch. xxv. as far as male names were concerned, reached the ducal family or the other great houses. To take names which Scriptural afterwards became familiar on both sides of the seaj Domes- Domesday, day has not a single Philip to show in either nation ; it has no Thomas, save the Archbishop of York, and only a handful of Johns. A stray Joseph^ and a stray Isaac might have been suspected of being Jews, had not one holder of the latter name been Provost of the church of Wells.^ All this stands in marked contrast to Scandinavia, Nomenda- where we find scriptural names from the first moment of g(,aiie wel coujie writen, leide fer amidden, and he hoc 5ef )>are sSelen, >a makede a Frenchis clerc, Alienor t>e wes Henries quene Wace wes ihoten. >ea hejes tinges." See Sir F. Madden's Preface, i. xi. " Hengest is "an hae'Sene hund" in ii. 272 (to be sure a Welshman is speaking), but it needs a man with the English name of Aldolf (Ealdwulf ) to kill him. 592 EFFECTS OP THE CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE, CH. sxv. lord of Earlsj the giver of bracelets, is in his hands chaBged into an invader from beyond the sea.^ All trace of national feeling must have gone from the heart of the man who could waste so many good words of English Its effects, speech upon the silly tales of Brute and Arthur. The first sinner has had his following ; he has done his work. To the mass of Englishmen Arthur and his fantastic company seem more their own than Hengest and Cerdic. We see what the coming of the stranger had done ; it had rooted out the truest memories of our national life. Fancy for a moment a Brut sung at the court of ^thelstan, or even at the court of the denationalized Eadward. Even at that court men would not have displaced the heroes of the Eng- lish name for the fancied glories of an enemy whose name neither Bseda nor the Chroniclers thought it worth while to The Pro- record. From the Brut of Lajamon we turn with pleasure TGrbs of Alfred. to the contemporary Proverbs which, by a pardonable fiction, bear the name of JElirei.* If they prove nothing else, they at least prove that even then there were English- men by whom the name and the worth of the greatest of Englishmen were not forgotten. English In this age then, the age when the influences of the chronicles. Conquest were first brought to bear on English literature, Robert of our old heroic poetry sank for ever. At the end of the ■ thirteenth century somewhat of English spirit awakes again in the chronicle of Robert of Gloucester. The English tongue, in its metrical form, is again used to record the deeds of Englishmen. But even here we have to make our way to English history through a preface of Welsh fable, and Robert's work at its best is but a riming ' See the wild way in which ^thelstan is spoken of by La5amon, iii. 284. He comes before Ine. One might almost suppose that he had been con- founded with Guthrnm-^thelstan. See vol. i. p. iSS. ' See Standai-d English, 91, 141. SATIRE AND PANEGYRIC. 593 chronicle, and not an heroic song. When English verse ch. xxv. wakes again to deal with other than devotional subiects. Satirical ... J •> ^jj^ pane- it wakes, not m the form of the heroic lay, but in the gyrioal form of contemporary satire and panegyric. The praises ^?^™'' of Earl Simon and of his conqueror and disciple were sung Montfort in all the three tongues which were in use in England ; m three and the great political manifesto which set forth the ^''"^"ageg. platform of the patriots was written, neither in English nor in French, but in riming Latin.^ The first really Poem on original effort of the newer English verse took the shape of King of the a piece of scathing mockery which did not spare the I'*™''^^- majesty of Augustus himself. English portraiture of con- temporary Kings seems to leap from the broken words which told how all men loved Henry of Anjou, to the jeering song against the King of Alemaigne, how he asked for thirty thousand pounds, and how he " makede him a castel of a mulne-post." ^ Of this song we have no French version, nor is there any French version of the song in which somewhat later the husbandman set forth his wrongs, or of those in which men denounced the pride of the ladies and the corruption of the ecclesiastical courts.^ It is only when we again come to panegyric, when the grief, less of England than of Christendom, is poured forth over the bier of the great Edward, that we find his praises sung in both the tongues of his subjects.* But the vein of satiric poetry which thus awoke in the thirteenth century was, in the course of the fourteenth, to miingle in one stream with another vein of English poetry, newer only than the oldest. If the poets of Beowulf and Finnesburh had Union of no mediaeval successors, the poets of Genesis and Judith, ^^^ ^g, of Christ and Satan,' were the fathers of a line which did ^lf°^''^ ' This earliest systematic setting forth of constitutional principles in England wUl be found in Wright's Political Songs, Camden Society, 72. - Political Songs, Camden Society, 69. 3 lb. 149, 153, 155. ' lb, 241, 245. '' See Grein, Bibliotek der angelaachsischen Poesie, i. 129. VOL. V. Q q 594 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE. Ormin. Piers PlougK- man. not in the like sort die away. Cfficlmon, whose name we know, has not been left without followers like the older and later makers whose names we know not. "^Thatever we say of Lajamon, we have no charge to bring against Ormin, who in Lajamon's day kept up the succession of our sacred poets in honest English.^ The devotional poetry of England still went on when the heroic lay was silent, till, in the moment of the final victory of our tongue, the two streams of devotion and satire flowed together in the Vision of Piers the Ploughman. French in- fluenced by English. Teutonic words in Latin. Transla- tions from English into French. Mary of France, But while we have thus to dwell on the way in which the literature of our own tongue was affected by the language and literature of our Romance conquerors, we must not forget that our literature had its influence, though doubtless in a much slighter degree, upon theirs. The Trouvere and the Trouludour could not indeed sing his lai/ vsdthout using at least one Teutonic word. The name by which he called his song had found its way from the German into the Roman speech long before Provenjal and French were distinguished from Latin.^ And the matter of his song as well as its name sometimes came from a Teutonic source. In the thirteenth century, when so much French verse was translated into English, there was at least one case when English verse was translated into French. 'Whether the fables which Mary of France turned from French into English were the work of Alfred or of Henry, they were at least fables wrought in the English ' On Ormin, his dialect, its strong Scandinavian leaning, and his peculiar system of spelling, see Dr. White's Pieface to tbe Ormulum, Ixx, and Standard English, go. ' Lai, Lay, is simply the Old-English LeffSe, the High-Dutch Lied. The word eren found its way, like hurgvx, into Latin, and appears in the form of lendas. In Venantius Fortunatus, '* Barbaros leudos harpa relidebat." See M. de Roquefort's Preface to the Poems of Mary, i. 29. See also Ducange in Harpa. ENGLISH INFLUENCE ON FKBNCH. 595 tongue by an English King who understood the tongue of oh. xxv. his people. They were turned into French by a French Earl Wil- poetess at the bidding of an Earl of illegitimate royal de- Salisbury scent, the famous William of Salisbury.^ This looks as if ^^^^ Earl William, whether able or not to read an English book, was at least able to understand an English book when it was read to him. The poems of Mary, though written in French, show distinct signs of distinct English influence.^ We may be sure that her works did not stand absolutely alone in this ; alongside of the vast influence which French exercised upon English, English all the while exercised a slighter influence upon J^rench. By Mutual . influciicc the time that English finally displaced French, if French ^f ^]^g two had corrupted English, English had also corrupted French, languages. and the speech of Stratford-atte-Bow was no longer the same as the speech of Paris. At last, when the language of England came back to its old place^ the literature of England, in its new shape, came with it. We see in Chaucer Geoffrey Chaucer, not indeed the earliest of English poets, \^ n bat the head and type of English poetry in its new shape. *^® ^ With him we again come to English poetry, no longer list poet written for the churl only^ but once more, after so long ranks. a timCj written for earl and churl alike in the tongue which was once more the tongue of both. As it is absurd to No special speak of Chaucer as the eldest of a series which begins jjJjq a thousand years before his day, as it is absurd to ' See vol. iv. p. 792. ' M. de Koquefort (i. 11) lias collected several passages where Mary brings in English words and explains them, much as Wace (see vol. iii. p. 480) explains the English war-cries. Thus in the Lai du Chevrefoil, i. 398. " Ootelef I'apelent en Engleis, Chevrefoil le nument en Franceis." So in the Lai du Laustie, i. 314, she says of the bird so called in Breton, " C^o est reisun en Franceis E niktegale en dreit Engleis.'' Reisun must be the modem French rossignol. Qq2 596 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON LANGUAGE. CH. XXV. speak of him as the father of English poetry^ it is no less unfair to speak of him as the chief corrupter of the Eng- lish tongue. It was in the nature of things that a fiercer rush of French words into English should come at the moment when English displaced French. But neither Chaucer nor his contemporaries began the fashion. The fourteenth century in this matter only followed the lead The cor- of the thirteenth. The infusion of French words into Eiutiish English was the unavoidable condition of English win- "u^""^ ning back its old place from the intruding French. When England had once been made the prey of Romance- speaking conquerors, the land, its folk, its laws, its speech, could never be the same as if those Romance-speaking conquerors had never crossed the sea. In many things the stain has been, gradually and silently, but effectually. Reforms wiped out. Every step in advance has been made by "otngback. taking a step backward. Every political reform has been in truth, however unwittingly, a falling back on the General older day. Of the good and evil which the Chronicler of the '^ spoke of as mingled in the character and in the work of Conquest. ^|-^g Conqueror, the good for the most part still lives ; the evil has for the most part vanished with the bones which no longer rest in their tomb at Caen. If the Norman changed our free churldom into villainage, villainage is gone, and our older national crime of slavery is gone with it. In political and in social matters this might be ; if we cannot call back the past by a conscious effort, we can come back to it by creeping step by step along paths which, while they seem to be leading us to new things, are in truth only leading us back to our oldest heritage of Return im- all. In language and in literature this cannot be. There, language when the stain has once fixed itself, it can never wholly and litera- |-,g ^pg(j q^^_ "^v^g q^^ never get rid of the Romance infu- ture. ^ ^ sion which has been pouring into our tongue ever since King Henry made, no longer fri//i, hut peace for man and GENEIUL EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST. 597 deer. Nor can we get rid of evils far greater than any ca. xxv. mere infusion into our vocabulary. The weakening and deadening of our tongue, the loss of its old creative power, the long habit of looking to alien models, have taken too deep root among us to be wholly cast away. Since Lajamon first taught Englishmen to dream of m effects Arviragus and Arthur as national heroes, it has been a Conquest hard task to make them feel as they ouffht towards ths °^ national •' " conscious- heroes of their own blood, towards Arminius and Theod- ness. oric, towards Hengest and Cerdie and ^thelstan. It has been a hard task to make Englishmen understand that they are Englishmen., that their tongue is English, that they have a rightful share in a speech and a literature which have lived on for more than fourteen hundred years. In this way the effects of the Norman Conquest, which, in every other point, have been in the end for good, have been, in all that belongs to our tongue and whatever is written in our tongue, only and wholly evil. From this darkest page of our story we may turn with pleasure to the influence of tbe Norman Conquest in another way, to its effects on a side of our national life of less weight than our law, of less weight than our language, but which still is not wholly to be scorned. We will trace in our next Chapter the eflfects of the coming of the Nor- man on the art of England, above all on that highest form of art which found a new home on the conquered soil, to grow up there into the mighty tower of Rochester, into the pillared hall of Oakham, and into the crowning glories of Saint Cuthberht's minster by the Wear. CHAPTEE XXVI. THE EFFECTS OF THE NORMAN COXQUEST ON ART.' Art in the XN speaking of the art of Nortlierii Europe in the century eleventh and twelfth centuries, the word art is nearly synony- synoBvmous with tlie word architecture. Paintins" and mous with ./ ./ o architeo- sculpture, SO far as they existed at all, held a subordinate position, and were moreover at a very low ebb. Then, as in earlier and later times, illuminated books were wrought which we admire for their antiquity, for the brilliancy of their colouring, for the gorgeousness of their general effect. But works of this kind, as far at least as the drawing of the human figure is concerned, do not rank Painting of high in the esteem of technical students of painting. Of painting, as applied to buildings of this age, we know that its use was common, but we know little more. Richard the Fearless, when he whitewashed the outer walls of his church at Fecamp, enriched its interior with paintings of ^ In this Chapter I have to give less the result of reading than of travel- ling. But no man can master the subject of architecture, least of all the architecture of the Romanesque age, unless he is thoroughly master of the history of the time. Disjointed and misquoted scraps of ancient writers simply lead to error. In speaking of architectural matters, I must pay my tribute to the names of Thomas Hope, of Petit, and of Willis, so lately lost to us ; but I may truly say that my doctrine of the relation of Romanesque to other styles is one which I worked out for myself many years ago, and which greater experience has shown me no reason to change. See Fortnightly Review, October, 1872. ART IN THE ELEVENTH CENTURY. 599 historical scenes. '^ But as to the style of those paintings oh. xxvt. we are left to guess from contemporary illuminations. The everlasting mosaics of Ravenna, Rome, and Pisa were un- known in Normandy and England. As for the sculpture of these times, it is in Northern countries grotesque and barbarous, in strange contrast to the marvellous forms of beauty which came into being in the thirteenth century. In fact, in the lands with which we have to dealj we can hardly set the art of the painter or sculptor of this age higher than the kindred craft of the goldsmith. They Sulordina- held — what some may hold to be their fitting position Jther arts in all times — a relation of distinct subordination to the *° archi- tecture, master-art which pressed them all into its service. For the art then of the eleventh and twelfth centuries Import- we must look almost wholly to their buildings, and among eleventh their building's primarily to those of an ecclesiastical kind, ^fnt^y m = ^ •' _ the history And in the annals of architecture the eleventh century of architec- h olds one of the highest places. It was one of the turning- points in the history of art. Alike in ecclesiastical, in military, and even in domestic architecture, it was a great creative age. Of all these forms of the art something must The style be said ; but it is in the great churches of the time that mainly the principles of the style must really be studied. This studied m i^ r J J eccleaiasti- is true in a great degree of all mediaeval architecture north cal build- of the Alps; but it is specially true of the architecture " ' of the ages with which we are concerned. Then^ as in all ages of good art, men built their religious, their civil, and their military buildings in the same style. But in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, no civil or military building afforded the same room for working out the prin- ciples of the style as was afforded by the inside of a great minster. Of the changes which the Norman Conquest ' Dudo, 153 D. "Hinc forinsecus dealbavit illud, intriusecua autem de- pinxit historialiter." Then follows the account of the gold and gems of the altars, vessels, &o. We are reminded of the matchless altar of Saint Am- brose at Milan, 600 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON ART. OH. xxvr. wrouglit in military and civil architecture, changes which almost amounted to a creation out of nothing, we shall speak in their turn. But it is in the great churches of the time that the style of those ages must be really studied. Historical To that style, the Norman variety of Romanesque, I th^El^" hold that justice is seldom done. I claim for Romanesque manesque ^q ^,g Jooked on, neither as debased Roman nor as im- style. perfect Gothic^ but as a genuine and independent style, of which Italy and Norman Ed gland produced two varieties of co-equal merit. The detail of the Northern Romanesque has the highest historical interest; it has a certain barbaric richness and grandeur, a certain ap- propriateness to the constructive form which it is called on to enrich. But it is not, in an artistic sense, strictly beautiful ; it cannot be set side by side with the archi- tectural detail either of old Greece or of later mediseval Europe. But, if we pass from the mere detail to the general design and construction of buildings, the eleventh and twelfth centuries may hold their own against any period in the history of the art. The fully- developed Romanesque style, whether in its Southern or in its Northern form, whether as we see it at Pisa or as we see it at Durham, is fully entitled to take its place as an independent style, a style worthy to rank on equal terms with the works of Iktinos and with the works of Wyke- Three ham. Each of the three great styles is the architectural construe- expression of a great leading idea ; each is the most per- ^'T^n"^'^'^ feet carrying out of one of the three great forms of arehi- tkree great tectural construction. The architecture of the round arch styles, . . p , . Grecian, IS m every sense the peer of the architecture of the en- esqu'e'^ tablature and of the architecture of the pointed arch. Gothic. rpijg architectural expression of rest and immobility is an esqiie the artistic Conception in no way inferior to the architectural ture^or' expression of either of the two forms of horizontal and rest and vertical extension. If not for actual beauty, yet for awful eolidity. HISTOEICAL POSITION OP KOMANESQUE. 601 grandeur and sublimity, for the feeling of eternity wrought oh. xxvi. in stone, no work of man can surpass the minsters and castles which were reared in the new style which King Eadward brought into England.^ As in everything else. The older so in art ; what the Norman tastes of Eadward began, E^ia^a the Norman Conquest of William brought to its height, supplanted One of the direct results of that Conquest was the sup- the Nor- planting of the older style of English architecture, a quest, style common to England with the rest of Western Christendom, by the new style which, among the other improvements of William's Norman reign, was fast grow- ing to perfection in the great buildings of his duchy. And, if we hold that the buildings of any age or people are an essential part of its history, a consideration of the effects of the Conqviest on the building art in England is a natural and not unimportant part of our subject. In most other points the effect of the Norman Conquest was to take England in some measure out of its older insular position, to bring it into a closer connexion, not only with Normandy, but with continental Christendom in general. Its effect with regard to architecture was somewhat different. It brought England into a closer continental connexion than was known before, but it was a connexion with one part of the continent only; its connexion with the rest of the world was rather weakened. England received the local style of Normandy in exchange for a style which she had received from the common centre at Rome. The so-called " Anglo-Saxon " The , T-' 1 T I'rimitive style of architecture is simply a style common to England Roman- with the rest of Western Europe, and which is best dis- H^^^^^ ^ tino-aished by the name of Primitive Romanesque. Owing Western o -I . Europe, to the passion of the Norman prelates for rebuilding their churches on a vaster scale, the remains of this early style * See vol. ii. p. 508. 602 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON AET. Growth of local styles of Roniaji- esque in the eleventh century. Analogy of language. The Primitive style kept on in Gei-many. in England are few, small, and rude. Still there is enough left to show their close kindred to greater and more elaborate buildings in other parts of the world, especially in the kindred land of Germany. This common style, which prevailed through all "Western Christendom up to the middle of the eleventh century, was, in the course of that century, supplanted in most countries by local styles. All these new styles followed the same general construc- tive principles, but each showed marked national features of its own. Each land, Italy, Aquitaine, Northern Gaul, developed a distinct local form of architecture for itself. As the tongue wliich all these lands had learned from Rome had now broken up into distinct national languages, as men had learned that thej'' were speaking, no longer a common Roman tongue, but the distinct national speech of Aquitaine or of France, so, in the like sort, the style of architecture which all had learned from Rome broke up into distinct national forms of art. As each national tongue was a variety of the common Romance speech, so each national style was a variety of the common Roman- esque architecture. In the Teutonic mainland the course of things was different. There, if art was from the beginning foreign, language was from the beginning native. Ger- many had never changed her speech as Gaul and Spain had done ; there was therefore no moment in the history of her language which answered to the moment when the Ro- mance lands first found out that they were speaking distinct national languages. As the eleventh century did not in Germany form the same marked epoch in language which it formed in the Romance lands, so neither did it form the same marked epoch in architecture. The German archi- tecture even of the twelfth century is not a distinct form of Romanesque, like the Romanesque of Normandy and Aquitaine. It is rather the Primitive Romanesque, im- proved indeed and developed, but not supplanted by any new THE PRIMITIVE ROMANESQUE. 603 and distinct style. The architecture of the pointed arch oh. xxvi. was in Germany the immediate successor, not of a style analogous to our Norman, but of a style which we at once recognize as a more artistic form of our so-called "Anglo-Saxon." Whether, if the Norman Conquest had never happened, the architectural history of the Teutonic island would have been tbe same as the architectural history of the Teutonic mainland, we have no means of judging. What we do know is that, in the course of In Eng- the latter half of the eleventh century, the Primitive primitive Romanesque of England gave way to the new form of ^*^'''^ ,^^®*' Romanesque which, had grown up in Normandy. The Norman, reign of Eadward saw the beginning of a great change in our ecclesiastical architecture ; for then the English type of church began to give way to the Norman. In military architecture it saw the beginning of a still greater change ; for the Norman castle, name and thing, was then first brought in among us. And what the reign of Eadward began the reign of William finished. In rude, small, and obscure buildings the elder style still lingered on by the side of buildings in the newer fashion. But by the end of the eleventh century the elder style had nearly died out ; the Norman forms had become the rule in small buildings as well as in great. The Romanesque style is, in the eyes of classical pedantry, Roman- a mere corruption, of the architecture of classical Rome, corruption, A wider view of the history of the art pronounces it to be ,' * . no corruption, but rather a more perfect carrying out of of Roman ideas which classical Rome attempted only imperfectly, tm-e. It is with the architecture of Rome as it is with her law and her language. None of them won its- truly Imperial and oecumenical position till long after the stage at which the mere classical student brings his studies of Roman history and literature to an end. But, more than this, Analogy of 11- o -n ji Roman both in the literature and m the architecture ot Rome the architec- 604 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON AET. CH. XXVI. ture and Koman literature. The Em- porium at Kome. Clabsical Roman architec- ture a transition from Grecian to Roman- esque. The plainest Roman buildings the most truly Roman. latest form, the so-called post-classical form, is in truth a falling back on the earliest, the ante-classical form. That is to say, in both eases it falls back on the true Roman form, after a time in which the true Eoman form had given T»'ay to a foreign influence. The native poetry of Rome, the native architecture of Rome, lay hidden during the days of the Julii, the Flavii, and the Anto- nines. As the true Roman poetry, which had fallen with Nffivius, rose again with Prudentius/ so, when we look on the Emporium by the Tiber, a building earlier than the days of Emperors or of Perpetual Dictators, we see, in its simple round-arched construction on which no Greek element has intruded, a perfect foreshadowing of any un- adorned Romanesque building of the eleventh or twelfth century. Of this style the classical Roman is in fact a corruption. Practically we may look on it as a transitional style between Grecian architecture, the architecture of the entablature, and Romanesque, the architecture of the round arch. The characteristic of the classical Roman style is that the round-arched construction is more or less dis- guised by features borrowed from the Greek architecture of the entablature. A consistent round-arched style begins again when those Greek features are cast away, and when the round-arched construction stands out boldly without any attempt at disguise. Such a style, the style of the Emporium, existed all along in buildings like aque- ducts and military towers, where Greek features do not appear at all, and in those where, as in the amphitheatres, they play quite a secondary part. But in buildings of a more ornamental kind, buildiugs where the column and not the massive square pier is the characteristic feature, the first beginnings of a consistent round-arched style are to be found when the architect first ventured to design an arcade where the arches rest immediately on the ' See Comparative Politica, p. 323. OEIGIN OF EOMANESQUE. 605 capitals of the columns. Such a beginning of consistent oh. xxvr. round-arched architecture is to be found in the palace of ^^S'^^^'^S Diocletian at Spalato, a building which contains the germ sistent of all later architecture, RomanesquCj Byzantine, Saracenic, arched and Gothic. There, in the arcades of the great peristyle, "^ll^^^l the slender shafts, the gorgeous capitals, of the Corinthian *".i"e in Diocle" order, have found themselves a new work, to bear up no tian's pa- longer the dead entablature, but the living arch. "When gp^iati, this great step had once been taken, the full developement of Romanesque architecture was only a work of time. The Buildings basilicas of Ravenna, of the fifth and sixth centuries, the venna; works of the degenerate Roman and of the triumphant Goth, exhibit essentially the same type, though the buildings alike of Placidia, of Theodorie, and of Justinian fell back in some things from the bold innovation of the master-mind that planned the court of Jovius.^ Grecian conceptions have now utterly died out. The one feature of the Greek style which could be turned to the purposes of a arched mode of con- struction has been pressed into the service and has found its proper place. On the buildings of Ravenna follow of Lucca the buildings of Lucca, and Lucca leads the way to the crowning glories of Pisa. In Rome itself the fisrht was Cliurchea hardest. In the Mother and Head of all churches, and in the basilica of Saint Paul beyond the walls, the columns supported arches from the beginning. But in the two churches of Saint Mary, on the Esquiline and beyond the Tiber, the entablature alone was used, and in the old Saint Peter's, the crowning-place of Charles and Otto, room for both constructions was found among its many ranges of columns. In Rome indeed the struggle went on till ^ In the buildings of Ravenna, as also at Trieste and Parenzo, a member is commonly thrust in between the abacus and the capital. In Byzantine work, as in Saint Vital at Earenna.this grows into a double capital. There is something to be said for this unsightly feature on constructive grounds, as guarding the delicate capital from the pressure of the arch. The true remedy is found in the heavier abaci of Lucca and Pisa. 606 EFFECTS OF THE CON"QUEST OX ART. cH. XXVI. elsewhere the round arch itself had passed away; the entablatures of the nave of the basilica of Saint Lawrence Basilican are Contemporary with Salisburj^ and Amiens. Still it interiors. ^^^^ ^^^^ ^^ ^ survival that the entablature lived on ; the true form of the basilica is that in which the main feature is the arcades, resting in one type on columns, in another on square piers, or, by a not uncommon arrangement, on Campa- columns and piers alternately. A stage a little later °'''^'^" brings in that special feature of the external outline which distinguishes the Christian church from the temples of every other religion. The invention of bells led to the building of lofty towers, adjoining or all but adjoining the churches. Thus arose the purely Italian type of chui'ch, all glorious within with its long arcades, its arch of triumph, and its apse^ but depending for its external efiFect almost wholly on the tall, slender, tower. Butj even before this type of church had grown to perfection, another wholly distinct type had grown up in the lands beyond the The By- Hadriatic. The New Rome had her own great archi- domical"'^ tectural invention, the noblest offspring of the arched *yp^- construction, the spreading cupola, the liveliest copy that man's skill can frame of the vault of heaven itself. No- where could that great invention have been so fittingly brought to its perfection as in the city which was Greek Growth of and Roman at once. In the earliest times of Greece, before her written history begins, the Kings of Mykene, the Brefiraldas of Hellas, had reared those tombs or treasuries which show such a wonderful striving after the domical form while the domical construction was not yet understood. AYhat early Greece strove after, the Old Rome brought to its constructive perfection, and the New Rome first em- ployed for its noblest use. The cupola of Agrippa rose only from its own walls, and was unequally yoked together with a portico of Grecian conception. But the cupola of Jus- tinian, the work of the genius of Anthemios, rose in air TYPES OF CHURCHES. 607 on four mighty arches, the roof and crown of the four ch. xxvi. arms which joined in one common effort to bear it aloft. Thus arose two distinct types of churches. There was Two types the Roman basilica with its long rows of columns, and BasiUoan*^' there were the churches of the Byzantine tvpe, where ^^^ ■' . " . Byzantine. the cupola is the main feature of the building, sometimes in truth the building itself. Both types flourished side by side in Italy; both influenced the architecture of the lands beyond the Alps. The influence of the basilica is present wherever we see the long nave and aisles unbroken by any central lantern. The influence of the Byzantine type is Byzantine present; not only in Saint Vital and at Aachen, in Saint ti,g central Mark at Venice and Saint Front at Perigaeux, but in l^°*em. buildings where Byzantine forms were far less directly imitated. Wherever a central lantern^ be it an octagonal cupola or simply a square tower, forms the d<3minant crown of the building, we see a trace of the great architec- tural invention of the Eastern Rome. In many buildings, Fusion of and among them in nearly all the great minsters of England types. and Normandy, we see the two types fused together. Their union is seen wherever the long basilican nave is united with the central lantern in anj' shape, be it the cupola of Pisa or the square tower of Durham. The exuberant fancy of the German architects worked the two elements together into forms of wonderful complexity and picturesqueness. And the union of the two types specially concerns our subject, because the primitive Romanesque architecture of England was of purely Italian origin, while the later style which was brought in from Normandy was not without a Byzantine element. It is a favourite dream of a certain school of antiquaries Vulgar that Englishmen before tlie Norman Conquest were in- "bouTLg- eapable of putting stone and mortar together. This J^^^l^^^rohi- notion has sprung in a great degree from the unlucky before the 608 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST OK ART. cH. XXVI. practice of speaking of all Eng-lislimen before the Norman Norman Conquest confusedly as "the Saxons." As some people seem to fancy that all "the ancients^' lived at one time, so some people seem to fancy that all " the Saxons " lived at one time. Let it be once fully understood that be- 449-1066. tween Hengest and Harold as long a time passed away 1066-16S3. as between Harold and Charles the Second, and the difficulty is pretty well got rid of.^ It must however be granted that the history of architecture in England does not begin with Hengest, but with ^Ethelberht^ and it 597-1066. may further be granted that the four hundred and seventy years between ^Ethelberht and Harold were not so rich 1066-1537. in architectural developements as the four hundred and seventy years between Harold and Henry the Eighth. Those ages were, both in England and elsewhere, a time when the art was unusually stationary. The reason for its stationary character undoubtedly was that the different nations of Western Europe still followed one common model, and had not yet struck out national varieties of art for themselves. No English It is not likely that any buildings of stone were built of stonf^ in the Teutonic parts of Britain between the first settle- before ment of the English and their conversion to Christi- Augustine. . anity. It is most unlikely that our forefathers brought with them the art of building in stone from their elder home ; and assuredly they never thought, as the ^ I have before now, when arguing that stone buildings of the eleventh century might possibly exist, been told that "the Saxons" could not build in stone, and I have been referred to the description in Breda (iii. 25) of the church which Finan, "non de lapide sed de robore secto, totam composuit atque anmdine texit." It was forgotten that this was not the work of any *' Saxon," and that it is expressly said to have been built " more Scottorum." But it would seem that some hold that all the inhabitants of the Isle of Britain from 449 to 1066 were contemporary with each other, and that all were alike " Saxons." Bseda (iii. 4) speaks of Ninian building "eccle- siam de lapide, insolito Brittonibus more." On this question of stone and wood, especially in Scotland, see the re- marks of Jlr. Stuart, Book of Deer, p. cxlix. OLD-ENGLISH BUILDINGS. 609 Goths did in Italy, of preserving or imitating the works of oh. xxvi. that Roman civilization which they swept away. Wood Use of was no doubt the common material for houses in early ^°° ' times/ as, in districts which are rich in timber but poor in stone, it has remained almost to our own times. And, while houses were commonly of wood, churches, and even minsters, were beyond doubt not uncommonly built of the same material.'"^ But tlie use of stone for ecclesiastical Use of buildings was perfectly familiar in England from the AugustS^ days of Augustine onwards. Augustine himself made his oiiwarda. metropolitan church out of the remains of a Roman tiy™ basilica ; -^ his church was, not destroyed, but raised in height, by Oda ; * and it lived on through the fires of the Danish plunderers to fall a victim to the same means of destruction in the early days of William.^ At Dover Dover, the work of Eadbald still remains.^ At York, Eadwine York, began the building of a church of stone,'' which was ruined in the troubles which followed his death, and was repaired by the care of Wilfrith.^ Wilfrith himself was a ^ On the substitution of stone for wood in domestic buildings, see vol. ii. p. 139. See also vol. i. pp. 472, 486 on the difference between different dis- tricts in that matter. ^ It will be remembered (see vol. ii. p. 513) that Eadgyth substituted a stone church for a wooden one at Wilton. ^ Bseda, i. 33. " Augustinus . . . recuperavit . . ecclesiam quam inibi antiquo Romanorum fidelium opera factam fuisse didicerat et earn ... sa- cra vit." * See vol. iv. p. 125. ^ See vol. iv. p. 125. ' See vol. iii. p. 535. ' He first built a temporary chm-ch of wood (ecclesia Sancti Petri Apo- stoU, quam ibidem ipse de ligno . . citato opere coustruxit), and afterwards began one of stone which Oswald finished (curavit majorem ipso in loco et augustiorem de lapide fabricare basilicam . . . pr^paratis ergo fundamentis . . . ccepit aedificare basilicam. Sed . . . opus successori suo Osualdo pei-ficien- dum reliquit). But the church which he built at Campodunum was clearly of wood, because when it was burned " evasit ignem altare, quia lapideum erat." Beeda, ii. 14. ' He found (Eddius, "Vit. Wilf. 16, Gale, p. 59) the stone walls broken down (basilicse . . in diebus Eadwini . . primo fundatae . . officia semiruta lapidea eminebant) ; the windows were open (fenestrae apertse), and the whole place was forsaken. Wilfrith covered the roof with lead, glazed the windows VOL. V, K r 610 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON ART. CH. XXVI. great builder. His church at Ripon was built of polished ^ipon. stone, and adorned with columns of various kinds, probably, like those in the basilicas of Ravenna, the spoil of earlier building-s.i Nor have the works of this early time alto- Hexham. gether perished from among US. Wilfrith's crypt at Ripon, and its fellow of like workmanship at Hexham,^ still re- main, and there is reason to believe that some small traces of the masonry of Eadwine and Paullinus may still be traced under the many strata of various ages which are Brixwoxth. embedded in the more spacious crypt of York.^ The same century probably beheld the building of the still existing basilica at Brixworth, built out of the bricks of some Roman building.* It saw also both in northern and south- ern England the rise of buildings of higher historic interest than any that had risen since the very first days of the con- version. The age of Bseda in Northumberland, the age of Ealdhelm in Wessex, was no less a church-building age than any of those later ages of which we have greater remains. As it is, we have enough left at once to bear witness to the state of art in those days, and to serve as still living memorials both of the saint of Jarrow and of the Works of saint of Sherborne. By the banks of the Wear and the Biscop at Don, Benedict Biscop, by the help of workmen from Gaul, Jarrow and reared the churches where Bseda worshipped and which Monkwear- ^': mouth. Ealdwine repaired, and where the havoc of the ninth (per fenestras introitum avium et imbrium vitro prohibuit, per quod tamen intro lumen radiabat), and whitewashed the walls (parietes , . . su- per nivem dealbavit), like Richard at Fecamp. ' Eddius, 1 7. " In Hrypis basilicam polito lapide a fundamentis in terra usque ad sumraum, tediiacatam vai'ii^ columnis et porticibus suffultam, in altum erexit et consumroavit." ^ The crypt at Hexham is largely built out of stones with Roman in- scriptions and ornaments, fragments most likely of the great wall which is not far off. ^ See vol. iv. p. 373. ' I speak of the church of Brixworth only from very old remembrances ; but I distinctly remember the arches of Roman brick which suggested the idea of its having been made out of the remains of an earlier building. SURVIVING OLD-ENGLISH CHURCHES. 611 century and the renovation of the eleventh have still left us ch. xxvi. no small portions of the venerable work of the seventh.^ In the south too, under the fostering patronage of Ine, Works of Ealdhelm reared at Malmesbury and at Sherborne min- g^^ ghgr- sters parts of which gave way only to the great works of ^™®' Roger iu the twelfth century, and which the historian of tury, Malmesbury who had seen them did not despise. Of a number of smaller churches which were also the work of Ealdhelm one still stands to upset preconceived theories by the simple evidence of fact. Small in size, but by no means and rude in workmanship, far more finished than the buildings on-Avon. of Benedict in the north, showing in its arcades a near likeness to the works of Honorius — let us rather say of Stilicho — on the gates of Rome, the old church of Bradford- on-Avon still lives, a witness of the forms which the arts of Rome took on English soil while Wessex was still a land which had to struggle against the Mercian on the one side and the Briton on the other. Bradford too, besides its value as a work of architecture, gives us also what I believe is a solitary example of the sculpture of so early a time.^ It is remarkable that among our dated buildings a greater number belong to these very early times than to either of the two great later times of church-building, just before and just after the Danish conquest. The churches Churches of Oswald at Worcester, of ^Ethelwold at Winchester, of ofDim- a crowd of others which marked the reforming age "**" ' of Dunstan, have utterly perished. But we have evidence enough to show that they were, as common sense would lead us to expect, large and complicated buildings of stone.^ Of the many buildings the foundation of which > See vol. iv. p. 665, and Appendix YT. 2 On the buildings of Ealdhelm, and the evidence about them supplied by WiUiam of Malmesbury, I have spoken minutely in the Proceedings of the Somersetshire Archssological and Natural History Society, 1874, pp. 27. 53- " On the church of ^thelwold, see Willis, Winchester, 11, 34. Era 612 EFFECTS OF THE CON"QUEST ON AKT. cH. XXVI. we have had to record in the course of our immediate ofCnut"'' history, of the church of Cnut at Saint Eadmundsburj', and Ead- of the church of Ealdred at Gloucester, of the church of Leofric at Coventry, of the church of Eadgyth at Wilton, nothing is left. AVe know not how far those among their builders who were contemporary with the Normannizing- Eadward shared his foreign tastes, and how far they clave Deerhurst. to the earlier traditions of England. One example only remains, the nave and tower — the choir has perished — of Earl Odda's church at Deerhurst, a distinct example of Primitive work without the slightest sign of Norman in- fluence. ^ Odda's work at Deerhurst, when compared with Ead ward's work at AVestminster, shows clearly that the new style which was brought in by Eadward was in strictness a new style which supplanted the elder one and did not grow out of it. Of undated examples of Primitive Romanesque, without in all eases ruling that they are chronologically older than the coming of William, we have a considerable store, but they are all small, rude, and mutilated.^ Save Bradford, a perfect church of this time hardly exists. But fragments, single arches and the like, are not very un- common, and towers, in some districts at least, may almost be called abundant. The towers are the best preserved portions of these ancient buildings, those in which we are best able to study the characteristic features of the style, and to make the needful comparison with the analogous examples in other lands. The The distinctive features of the Primitive Romanesque Roman- i^ England all tend to connect it with the earlier Italian, esque style ^^^^ ^^^^ ^-^j^j^ ^]^g i^^^-^ Norman style. It is not an im- esaentially ^ Roman. perfect Norman ; it is not something out of which Norman grew ; it is an independent, however rude, form of art, '■ See vol. ii. pp. i6i, 407. " Lists of fragments of this kind, commonly called " Saxon," will be found in many architectural works. CHARACTER OF THE PRIMITIVE STYLE. 613 which the Norman style supplanted. It was called the ch.xxvi. " Roman " fashion in the days when it first came in,' and Roman in its essential character it remained as long- as it lasted at all. Its masonry shows its Roman origin. I cannot indeed point to any distinct examples in England, such as may be found in Gaul,' of an undoubted imitation of the Roman manner of walling. But the huge stones which form the sides and arches of the doors and windows are thoroughly Roman in feeling, however rude in exe- cution. The long-and-short work, though it looks so temptingly like a wooden construction imitated in stone, is far more likely to be an imitation of such masonry as may be seen in the vaults and passages of the amphi- theatre of Verona. Everything is hard and square ; the mouldings and other attempts at ornament — and in some cases the attempt at ornament is rather extensive — are quite unlike the future Norman^ and have far more the feeling of a rude imitation of Roman work. The windows are small and narrow, and are often furnished with a splay without as well as within. Square strips, the descendants of pilasters, form one of the few sources of external en- richment. The point as to which we know least is the The in- treatment of the main arcades of the churches, as hardly tiie early a single building with aisles remains to us. The massive <'''"''<''"^'*- square pier, so characteristic of the churches of Germany down to a far later time, was certainly sometimes used. But the description of Wilfrith's church at Ripon shows Use of that the column was also used, and at Repton we still see ' Baeda, Vit. S. Ben. 5. " Benedictus, oceano transmisso, Gallia.s petens, csementarios, qui lapideam sibi ecclesiam juxta Romanorum, quem semper amabat, morem fa<;erent, postulavit, accepit, attulit." ' As one example out of many I may quote the Romanesque work at Le Mans, both in the cathedral and in the palace of the Counts. Its masonry is a close imitation of the neighbouring Roman walls. These cases must be distinguished from those in which Roman materials were used up again. 614 EFFECTS OP THE CONQUEST OS ART. cH.xxvi. a style of column, fantastic indeed and uncouth, but not altogether forgetting classical proportions. And we may- be sure too that the massive round pier was not unknown. It is a feature so exclusively characteristic of English, as opposed to continental, Norman that it is hardly possible to account for its use, except on the belief that it was an insular fashion which the Norman builders in England Ground- adopted. The usual form of the greater churches was churches. Certainly basilican ; the metropolitan church was a vast basilica with an apse at each end, as in so many German examples.^ The projecting transepts and the central lantern, whether in its Byzantine or in its Norman shape, were rare, though not altogether unknown.^ In short, the Old- English style, Roman in its origin, kept on to the last those distinctive features which proclaimed its close con- nexion with the native architecture of Italy. The early But it is in its towers that the Primitive Romanesque of England has left its most precious relies. Some of the existing examples of the style are undoubtedly of later date than the Norman Conquest ; but that fact, when rightly understood^ only proves more distinctly that England had a distinct form of Romanesque before the Norman Conquest. Of others, which have no like- ness whatever to Norman work, whose builders cannot be conceived to have seen any Norman detail, no one can reasonably doubt that they are older than the Norman Conquestj though it would be vain to attempt to fix exact dates to each in cases where we have no docu- mentary evidence. Such, among others^ are the towers of Earl's Barton in Northamptonshire and of Barton-on-the- ' See vol. iv. p. 361. ' The central tower is found in the church in Dover Castle, at JaiTow, and in some other Primitive examples, but it cannot be called a character- istic of the earlier style, as it is of the Norman. THE PEIMITIYE TOWERS. 615 Humber, of Ovingham and Bywell in Northumberland, oh. xxvi. of Sompting in Sussex and of Saint Benet's at Cam- bridge, and the tower into which some hand later than Benedict and earlier than Ealdwine carried up the venerable western porch of Monkwearmouth.' Among these towers there are many points of unlikeness, and a minute examination might easily range them under several classes; but they all have a common character, a character which parts them off from the Norman towers which followed them, and which connects them with a large class of towers in Italy and elsewhere in Western Europe. All alike are tall, hard, unbuttressed ; their ornament, when they have any, is sought in the hard, and commonly square, strips. In most of them even this kind of enrichment is but sparingly used, while sometimes, as in the famous tower of Earl^s Barton, it is lavished to an extent which produces a striking effect of barbaric grandeur. But the distinctive feature of all is the windows. Two, some- times more, round-headed lights are grouped together and divided by mid-wall shafts, or sometimes balusters. The thing is as unlike any Norman work as it can be ; not only are the details different, but the feeling is as unlike as possible. These early towers have a strongly marked Examples character of their own, a character strikingly unlike their game kind Norman successors in England^ but no less strikingly like g^ntinent a large class of towers in various countries of Europe. Towers of essentially the same class are found in the combes and on the mountain slopes of the Pyrenees ; they are found in the great Burgundian valley of the Rhone and in the outlying Burgundian valley of Aosta ; they are spread over the whole breadth of the German king- dom, from Bremen to the Brenner pass. But Saint ' Much longer lists will be found in many architectural works. I njention only those towers which I have myself specially studied. On the tower of Monkwearmouth, see Appendix YY. 616 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON AET. cH. XXVI. Aventin in tlie Pyrenees and Earl's Barton in Mercia did Their not borrow from one another, neither did either of them origin. horrow from Sitten or Schaffhausen. It is in architecture as it is in language; the likeness among these distant examples is to be accounted for only by their derivation AU come from a common source. That source is to be sought in om ay. j^^j^^ rpj^^ Primitive towers of England, Germany, Bur- gundy, and Aquitaine are all reproductions of the cam- paniles of Italy. Our examples are plain and rude ; but this is simply because all our minsters of this age have given way to later successors. Schaffhausen and Saint Zeno itself differ from our "Anglo-Saxon" towers, not as members of a different class, but as superior members of the same class. Between the English towers and the smaller and ruder Italian towers there is hardly any difference ; there are towers in Lincoln and in "S^erona which might change places and still seem at home. In all of them, great and small, there is the same general character ; the same hard, square outline, the same lack of buttresses, the same mid-wall shafts. But the English towers are invariably square ; the round towers of Ravenna found no imitators, unless any of those of East-Anglia can be shown to be of so early a date. How far the Ravenna type influenced the architecture of Ireland is Irish round another and a more diflBcult question. If the Irish round towers are copied from those of Italy, they have forsaken their models in almost everything except their mere shape. The Italian towers are tall and slender ; but there is nothing in Italy, in England, or even in Germany, to compare with the height and slenderness of the Irish examples. We are tempted to call this height and slender- ness exaggerated ; but that word hardly applies to build- ings which have so strongly marked a character of their own, and which really can be compared to nothing in the world but themselves. ITALIAN OKIGIN OF THE STYLE. 617 This Primitive style^ which England, like the rest of ch. xxvi. Western Europe, borrowed from Italy, underwent a dif- History of ^ _ ■ _ Koman- ferent fate in Italy and in Germany from that which befell esque in it in Gaul and Britain. In Italy the native Romanesque Germany. gave way^ in the thirteenth century^ to a helpless imitation of the Northern Gothic. Still the type of the Italian cam- panile never wholly died out ; towers reproducing its general type^ but with details of the fourteenth, fifteenth, or even sixteenth century, are found both at Venice and at Verona ; and the noblest example of the square campanile in its later form, the mighty bell-tower of Sp^lato, a thousand years later in date, is still thoroughly kindred in spirit with the arcades of Jovius over which it soars. And before the Italian Romanesque gave way to the corrupt Italian Gothic, it produced at Lucca and Pisa a style of singular beauty by falling back on a more classical style of column. In Germany too, though no strictly new style The was brought in in the twelfth century, yet the buildings Roman- of that century show a marked improvement on those of f^^^g/°nj the eleventh. The later German style, the Romanesque improved of the great churches on the Rhine, is essentially the same many. as the earlier style of Hildesheim, Soest^ and Wurzburg, but it is the same style refined and improved. With its mid-wall shafts, its double splays, its massive square piers, its rare use of distinctly Norman ornaments, it stands distinct from the Norman and English architecture of the twelfth century. In Germany in short the Primitive style lived on through the twelfth century, and was the im- mediate predecessor of the Gothic. In Gaul and Britain the case was widely difierent. We History of have abundant evidence that the Primitive torm ot esque in Romanesque prevailed in all parts of the Gaulish lands. "*" • One of those lands, the royal Burgundy, among a crowd of Romain- „ , , T p moutier. smaller examples, can boast of the wonderful church ot Romainmoutier, almost the only building on a large scale 618 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON ART. CH. XXVI. whicli has survived with but little change from the eighth century. And no Englishman who sees that venerable pile can fail to see in it, carried out with grander proportions, a style absolutely the same as that which is shown in the smallj rude, and mutilated remains of his own island. Primitive Scattered through Aquitaine and France other buildings Attain™ of the same type will here and there meet the eye of the ^^^^ traveller, such as the Temple of Saint John at Poitiers, the abbey of Pleinpied in Berry, the ancient nave at Beauvais, and, above all, a building which has a special charm for the student of English history in the eleventh century, The abbey the mickle minster of Rheims. In the mighty pile where Eeridgius the ambassadors of England met Pope and Caesar at its at Kheims. hallowing/ the pile on which Gyrth, and perhaps Harold himself, looked while still in its freshness,- the work of the first half of the eleventh century still lives, half covered, but by no means wholly effaced, by the richer forms of the twelfth. The forms of its capitals, strange and uncouth as they seem to eyes familiar with either classical or Norman forms, belong to the last days of the Primitive style, but they still claim kindred alike with Repton and Kew forms with Hildesheim. But the Primitive style of Gaul, esque in Southern or Northern, did not, like that of Germany, Gaul. itself grow into a more finished form of art in the next century. In all parts of the land, from the Pyrenees to the Cotentin, it gave way to new forms, fresh and in- dependent developements of the common round-arched idea. Style of In the lands south of the Loire forms of singular novelty and were struck out. The last half of the eleventh century rovence. ^^^ ^^^ beginning of that great series of wide and lofty churches, special triumphs of the art of vaulting, which go on, through the various varieties of Romanesque and Gothic detail, till a foreign style was gradually intro- duced by the English and French masters of Aquitaine. ' See vol. ii. p. 112. ' See vol. ii. p. 459. KOMANESQUE OF GAUL. 619 Two points especially distinguish the Aquitaniau and oh. xxvi. Provengal style. There is the early vaulting of large spaces, Toulouse. commonly by a barrel-vault, as in the great Saint Sernin at Toulouse ; ^ and there is the early use of the pointed arch as a constructive form. In Southern Gaul this is not, any more than at Pisa, a sign of the coming Gothic ; it is rather a trophy which pilgrims or crusaders have brought back from the land of the Saracen. The pointed arch is in this region linked in special fellowship with another Eastern feature. The domes which the architects Domical of Perigueux and Angouleme borrowed from Venice, as Venice had borrowed them from Constantinople, har- monized well with that local love of stone roofing which had already begun to show itself in other ways. And in architecture, as in everything else, there is a marchland. That marchland stretches northwards into Maine, south- Angevin wards into Poitou, but its centre is Anjou. An Angevin church, like an Angevin Count, is neither Norman nor Aquitanian, nor anything else but Angevin. The Primitive style in Anjou, to judge from one example, the thoroughly Roman church of Saint Martin at Angers, had much in common with the Primitive style elsewhere. But the wide aisle-less Angevin churches, which go on from the middle of the eleventh century to the middle of the thirteenth, have a character of their own, a character intermediate between the North and the South ; but they certainly come nearer to Aquitanian than to Norman forms. In the lands north and south of Anjou we may perhaps see the beginnings of the new style in the church of Saint Hilary at Poitiers and in the older parts of the great churches of Le Mans. These buildings have a place in our history. The tall Poitiers, columns round the apse of Saint Hilary claim to be part 1 In this great minster, consecrated, if I mistake not, by Pope Urban tKe Second, it is impossible not to be reminded of tbe chapel in the White Tower on a vaster scale. 620 EFFECTS OP THE CONQUEST OK" AET. OH. XXVI. of the pile which rose through the bounty of Emma ;^ and Le Mans, we may feel more certainty in affirming that those older parts of the nave of Saint Julian which still peep out from beneath the gorgeous work of the next century were there before the Cenomannian county and city first bowed to William as their master.^ In Aquitaine it would seem that the introduction of the later form of Romanesque was mainly due to a distinct Origin impulse from without. In Normandy, though the result Norman of the change is no less marked, yet its origin is less easy l^man-° ^° trace. In no part of Western Christendom are remains esque. of the Primitive style more rare. Here and there, as at Primitive OaiUy-le-Vicomte and at Vieuxpont, we see masonry which, work m whatever its date, is in character Roman and not Norman.^ Normandy. But of distinctive work of the Primitive style there is hardly anything, except one or two small examples^ like the church of Querqueville in the Cotentin, and some small parts of the abbey of Jumieges^ which last are said to date from Merowingian times. Not a single tower of the type of which we have seen so many in Italy, Germany, Burgundj', Aquitaine, and England is, as far as I know, to be found in the Norman duchy.* This utter absence of early Romanesque is remarkable. We can well believe that buildings earlier than the settlement of Rolf were more utterly swept away than elsewhere ; but the buildings of the tenth centurj^^ the earlier churches of ' See vol. i. p. 438, Ed. 2. ' See vol. iii. p. 205, Ed. 2. ■' See above, p. 614. * At Vieuxpont there seems really to be the stump of a Primitive tower • but it has been carried up in later times, so that the ornamental details are Norman. The general character of the Norman towers, even when they are somewhat less massive than usual, is quite unlike Italian or Old-English work. At Ver, near Bayeux, is a tower whose general effect is somewhat Italian, but the details are ordinary Norman. At QuiUy, near Caen, is a tower whose beltry-windows really do look like a transition between the Primitive mid-waU shaft and the usual Norman form. ORIGIN OF THE NORMAN STYLE. 621 Fecamp and Jumieges, might be expected to belong to oh. xxvi. the same class as other buildings of that age. But the continuous series of Norman buildings cannot be carried further back than the later years of the first half of the eleventh century. Of that date there are one or two Transition examples in which we do see something like a transition p^utive between the Primitive and the distinctly Norman forms. '°^°™^°- Something of this kind may be seen in Judith's minster Bemay. at Bernay,! where the untouched parts of the church have a character more like that of some of the German buildings than anything to be found at Caen or even at Cerisy.2 The German character of Archbishop Robert's Jumifeg&s. work at Jumieges was noticed long ago by two of our best architectural observers.^ The columnar piers, with their rude capitals, show only the very beginning of Norman forms, and the general effect is quite unlike that of the genuine Norman buildings. But in our next group Early of buildings, as at Cerisy and at William's own church at at°^tsy Caen, the distinctively Norman style is fully developed. ^^^ ^^™- It is as yet without any approach to the elaborate deco- rations of the next age ; but this is far from proving that those decorations were wholly unknown. Much is due in these matters both to individual taste and to the character of particular classes of buildings. The difference between the two minsters at Caen, between the work of William and the work of Matilda, is clear to every eye.* And throughout the The largest period of Norman work it seems to have been a fixed rule, ^jjg a rule thoroughly in harmony with the spirit of Roman- P^^^"-^*^- esque art, that, the larger a building was, the more easily it might dispense with ornaments. The richest examples of Norman work are almost always to be found in buildings ' See vol. i. p. 508. ^ See vol. i. p. 529. ' See vol. ii. p. 341 ; vol. iv. p. 94; WheweU, German Churches, 281 ; Petit, Church Architecture, i. 93, 94. Mr. Petit was clearly feeling his way towards the distinction between German and Norman Eomanesque. * See vol. iii. p. 109. 622 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST OJT ART CH. XXVT. Contrast between Primitive and Nor- man Ro- manesque. No essential difference between early and late Nor- Characters of the windows, Norman type of church. on a small scale. But there is in the Norman style a certain severity which distinguishes it from the Primitive style. In Primitive work there is often a kind of barbaric richness, a certain kind of fancifulness in the forms of capitals and abaci, of which there is no trace in the severely cut capitals of the early Norman. Their two most common varieties^ the cushion and the voluted capitals, the Romanesque forms of Doric and lonic^, can easily be traced up to earlier types ; but they put on a character of their own in the hands of the Norman architects. In the earliest and plainest Norman work there is something which, as compared with the earlier forms, may be called regular; and between the plainest and the richest Nor- man there is no difference in the essential forms. As long as the style remains purely Norm'en, untouched by the approach of the coming Gothic, the only diflPerence between the plainest and the richest examples is a difference in the amount of ornament. In the internal elevations the column is hardly found in buildings of any great size. The rectangular pier with shafts in its angles is the prevailing form, but in England it is often ex- changed for the vast cylindrical pier, no column, but a mass of wall made round instead of square, which is pro- bably a vestige of earlier insular practice. Windows of any richness have small shafts at their sides ; the double splay of the Primitive and the German windows is unknown ; and when two or more windows are grouped together, the shafts which divide them never follow the mid-wall ar- rangement. These last points of detail are worthy of notice, because there is nothing in which the difference between the Primitive and the Norman forms of Roman- esque is more strongly marked than in the windows. In the arrangements of their churches the Norman architects finally established the type which, amid all varieties of style, prevailed through the whole mediaeval NORMAN CHURCHES. 623 period. The wide naves and cupolas of Aquitaine, the oh. xxvi. double clipirs and variously grouped towers of Germany, the basilicas of Italy with their single detached campanile, were all rejected by the Norman architects. A Norman minster followed the shape of the Latin cross ; the short eastern limb contained little beside the apse. The choir was placed under the broad central tower which took the place of the Byzantine cupola. Sometimes it overflowed into the boundless length of the western limb, which thus, as at Norwich and Saint Alban's, took in nave and choir without any architectural break. The west end, which in Germany was often the place of a second choir, was, in the Norman, as in the Italian style, the fa§ade of entrance, flanked in most cases by two lowlier towers grouping in due subordination to the great central lan- tern. Within, the threefold division of pier-arch, tri- forium, and clerestory is clearly marked in the larger churches, and the triforium, especially in the earlier ex- amples, is a bold and important feature. The vaulting of large spaces was not attempted by the Norman architects till quite the last days of the style. In the earlier examples the aisles might be vaulted, the apse might now and then be covered with its conch, but the nave was covered with a flat ceiling which afibrded a grand field for the display of the subsidiary arts.^ Now whence did the Norman architects of the eleventh Origin of century learn this distinct and marked variety of the com- archite" mon Romanesque .family ? The question is not very easily *■'^^■ answered. The other form of Romanesque which has most Its likeness in common with the Norman is certainly that peculiar form ii°eavier of the Italian Romanesque in which the least trace of Y?'*'*'^'^ classical influence is seen. The older portions of such ' On the ceiling of Lanfrano's church at Canterbury, see vol. iv. p. 362. 624 EFFECTS OF THE CON^QUEST O'S AKT. CH. XXVI. churehes as Saint Ambrose at Milan ^ and Saint Michael at Pavia have far more of likeness to our familiar Norman than we see in the columnar varieties of the Italian Romanesque, or even in the later churches of Germany and Aquitaine. But such a low, dark, cavernous, pile as Saint Ambrose is certainly a very rude forerunner of the lofty naves of Saint Stephen's and Ely. Yet the like- ness between the two styles is not to be denied ; and in such a building as the cathedral of Modena, which, as a work of the Great Countess^ is actually contemporary with our Norman buildings, there is a still closer approximation Inter- to Norman forms. When we think of the close connexion between between Normandy and Italy in peace and war, of the mili- ^Tm*^^ tary adventurers whom Normandy sent into Southern Italy, and of the saints and scholars whom Normandy received from Northern Italy, Normandy had every chance of re- ceiving an importation of Italian art during the early days of William. Some instinctive feeling of kindred may have led those, whether Normans or Italians, who carried the arts of Italy into Normandy, to carry them in their ruder and less classical shape, as a shape which had better prospect of taking Norman firm root in a Northern soil. It may well have been the ture heavier Lombard style of Milan and Pavia, it certainly was brought'' ^°^ ^'^® columnar style of Pisa and Lucca, out of which from Italy, t]je later Romanesque of Normandy and Enffland srrew. but de- •<. ■ , . b b veioped in Butj if it be SO, the Norman builders received from Lom- orman y. 'j^g^j.^jy ^ mere germ, which in their hands grew up for the first time into real life. From whatever quarter they learned the first rudiments of the style, the style itself, in its full growth, is thoroughly their own. In their hands the Romanesque of the North was no longer a mere imita- tion of the Roman or Romanesque of the South ; it became a distinct and equal style, an independent developement of ' I am aware that this church was largely repaired in the twelfth century, but I believe that its main walls belonged to the ninth. CONNEXION OF NOEMAN AND LOMBARD AECHITECTUEE. 625 the same constructive principle. Lombard architecture oh. xxvi. may well have grown into Norman ; but if so^ it was on the foreign soil to which it was transplanted that it first became worthy to contend on equal terms with other kindred forms of art. No church in Christendom has a deeper interest on many grounds than the church of Saint Am- brose at Milan. But, simply as a work of architecture, no one would for a moment set it up as a woi'thy rival to Pisa. It was not till the art had passed from Lombardy Pisa and to Normandy, and from Normandy to England, that the glory of Tuscan skill, the highest effort of the Southern Romanesque, found a true and equal compeer in the highest effort of the Northern Romanesque, in the mighty nave and choir of Saint Cuthberht's minster. This style, which grew up in Normandy during the Norman early years of William, was brought into England in brought the days of Eadward ; it was merely strengthened and J"*^ ^°^" brought to perfection after William's coming. That the Eadward. beginning of Norman architecture in England was the Eadward'a rebuilding of the West Minster by Eadward is declared West- in express words by an all but contemporary writer. The description which we have of the new church of Saint Peter sets it before us as a Norman minster of the very highest rank, and we know that it long remained the great model of the style, the object of imitation for English architects, even in the following century.^ This last fact, so distinctly recorded, is of no small importance in the 1 See vol. ii. p. 508, and the passage there quoted from William of Malmes- bury. The modification of that passage by Matthew Paris (2, Wats) is almost more remarkable than the original passage ; " Ipse novo oomposi- tionis genere construxerat, a qua post multi ecclesias construentes exemplum adepti, opus illud expensis semulabantur sumptuosis." The past tense re- places the present, because in Matthew's time the Romanesque of Eadward was no longer the model for imitation which it had been in the days of William. Of. also Will. Malms, iii. 246 ; " Videas ubique in villis ecclesias, in vicis et urbibus mouasteria, novo iedificandi genere consurgere." VOL. V. S S 626 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON ART. CH. XXVI. history of architecture. It shows that no arbitrary line Degr.e of can be drawn between early and late Norman work. The nXal^ys* degree of ornament and of finish in workmanship is not always a sign of ^ question of date ; it is often a question of the taste and the means of the builders. There is some reason to believe that Eadward's minster was a richer and more finished ex- ample of the Norman style than some later buildings. The few fragments which remain of the original church seem to point to a work of no small finish and ornament. These facts should be borne in mind when we consider AValtham. another question which has been raised, whether Harold as well as Eadward did not bring in the new style in the minster which he raised at Waltham, and whether any portion of the church which he raised there still remains.^ However this may be, there is in one point a marked difference between Westminster and Increase in Waltham. Not the least marked among the architec- the size of . _...^., ii- churches, tural innovations ot which Eadward was the beginner was the vast scale " which was now given to the great churches which began everywhere to be built. This is a feature which is specially characteristic of the Norman style as it appears in England. The size of the cathedral and abbatial churches of Normandy is not excessive. Ju- mieges is the only church of strictly Romanesque style which has any claim to rank in point of size with our greatest English churches. And the fashion of building churches on the scale which Eadward brought in at West- minster remained distinctly English, and never spread into Scotland, Wales, or Ireland. But in England the Norman bishops and abbots began rebuilding their churches, after the model set by the English King, on a scale far sur- passing what they were used to in their own country. The Primate indeed followed a different course in the metro- politan church, and he was thus enabled to finish what he ' On the date of Waltham, see Appendix Y Y. DESTEUCTION OP OLD-ENGLISH BUILDINGS. 627 began. 1 But almost everywhere else churches of gigantic ch. xx%'i. size began to supplant the elder works of English bishops and abbots. Old Saiut Paul's, Saint Alban's, AVinchester, Elj^j were begun on a scale such as had never been seen either in England or in Normandy. Here we probably The have the key to that almost universal destruction of the chm'ches older buildinsrs which marked this ase. The English clestroyed, ^ o o mainly churches were despised as being too small for the grand because they were conceptions of the Norman prelates and architects. It thought is absurd to suppose that buildings less than a century °° ^^^ old, buildings of the days of Cnut or of Eadward himself, could have needed rebuilding on the score of decay. It is almost as absurd to suppose that they were so utterly inferior in point of art to the often plain and rude Norman work which supplanted them that they were swept away simply as being too barbarous to be endured. In some eases, as in the two metropolitan churches, the rebuilding was a matter of necessity. But both Lanfranc and Thomas built on a moderate scale, and Thomas even preserved a part of the elder building.'' Dur- ham, Winchester, and a crowd of other cases stand on a different ground. It could have been only because they were too small for the dominant fashion that buildings so recent as the works of Ealdhun, Leofric, and Ealdred, to say nothing of the elder works of Dunstan, Oswald, and ^thelwold, were sentenced to destruction. The Norman style was thus brought in, and most of the The Nor- great churches of England were rebuilt after the new model, in England But the form which the style took in England was in l^^^lf ^^ some degree affected by the earlier usages of the country. English Not only did the Primitive style remain for some time m use alongside of the new style ; the new style itself was modified by the examples of elder buildings. The sub- West- ordinate buildings of Eadward's monastery at Westminster "'""' ^''' ' See vol. iv. p. 361. ' See vol. iv. p. 373. S S 3 628 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON AET. CH. XXVI. show an earlier form of capital than is usual in Norman Worcester, work, and this is still more distinctly the case with the work of Wulfstan at Worcester. There the elder church was altogether destroyed; yet the slype, the narrow passage between the church and the conventual buildings, contains a whole store of capitals which are certainly rather to be called Primitive than Norman. ^ If it be said that Wulfstan, and even Eadward, may have cherished some lingering love for the earlier style of his own people, vrin- no such reason applies to Walkelin of Winchester ; yet a certain ante-Norman tinge can be plainly seen in the Saint untouched parts of his building.^ And the most scorn- ful of all the Norman prelates, Paul of Saint Alban's, while overthrowing the tombs and insulting the memories of his English predecessors,^ did not scruple both to imi- tate their style of building and to make use of the materials which they had gathered together. The vast pile of his abbey, built out of the bricks of Roman Verulam, is the least Norman of Norman churches, and it is the best example of the rule that, the vaster the scale of the building, the smaller is its allowance of ornament. Where there is any detail, it is detail of an earlier kind. Balusters which would be hardly out of place at Jarrow or Monkwearmouth are found among the work of Paul, to the no small confusion of purely chronological inquirers.* This occasional recurrence of forms which might easily be assigned to an earlier time goes on to the end of the Tewkea- eleventh century. In the west front of Tewkesbury^ we bury. ' It has been doubted wbetlier these are not fragments preserved from the church of Oswald. If so, as the site was changed, they must have been used up again. ^ See the capital engraved inAVillis, Winchester, 36. ^ See vol. iv. p. 399. * On the balusters at Saint Alban's, which are singularly Hke some at Chancellade in Perigord, see Buoliler, 133, 134. The authors look on them as used up again from the older church, but I do not know that this theory is absolutely necessary. ■'■ In the Annals of Tewkesbury we read undei; the year 1 102 (Ann. Men, LINGERING OF OLD-ENGLISH FORMS. 629 again find balusters whicli seem to hand on the earlier ch. xxvi. tradition. After that time these traces of earlier diiys are lost, at least in our greater buildings. This lingering influence of earlier forms seems to be quite peculiar to England. I remember nothing in the work of "William at Caen or of Odo at Bayeux at all analogous even to such slight Primitive traces as we see at Winchester and Tewkesbury. And I have little doubt that the earlier style influenced the later in a much more important feature than any of these. The huge cylindrical The • • o T-\ f T ~KT 1 cylindrical pierSj so characteristic oi tnglish Norman, assume several piers, forms. In smaller buildings they shade ofi' by infinite degrees into the strictly columnar pier. In larger churches they sometimes appear in a low and massive form, giving room for a large triforium. Such is the case in the eastern limb of Gloucester, the work of Serlo,' now veiled by the net-work of the fourteenth or fifteenth century. In other cases, as in the naves of Gloucester and Tewkesbury, the cylindrical pier is carried up to an extravagant height, so as to leave hardly any space for the triforium, but yet without assuming the proper character of the column. At Dm-ham Durham, piers of this kind appear in a form more satis- fection of factory than either of the two other classes. Their inter- ^o^^n™ mediate proportion is far more pleasing to the eye, and the esque. masonry of the pier is relieved by flutings and ehanuellings of various kinds, which may possibly carry us back to the grotesque forms of Repton, and thereby, by a strange pedigree, to the more regular flutings of classical columns. It is, as I hold, in the eastern and western limbs of Saint Cuthberht's abbey that we are to look for the highest i. 44), " Hie primum in novum monasterium ingressi sumus ;" and in 1 1 23, "Dedicatio ecclesije Theokesberiae x. kal. NovemLris." The actual finishing of the west front would probably come between these two dates. ' See vol. iv. p. 389. 630 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON AKT. cH. XXVI. degree of perfection that has ever been reached by round- arched architecture in its Northern form. Durham by the Wear and Pisa by the Arno rank side by side as the noblest examples of the Northern and the Southern Romanesque. And we feel instinctively that the forms which are at home by the "Wear would have been out of place hj the Arno, and that the forms which are at home by the Arno would have been out of place by the Wear. Among ex- amples of the specially Norman style, none, either in our own island or beyond the sea, can compare with the matchless pile which arose at the bidding of William of Saint Carilef.' I speak not of its outward shell, glorious as is its outline, nobly as it stands on its peninsular height. I speak not of the Saracenic grace of Hugh of Puiset's Galilee, of the long range of the nine altars, or of the soaring tower of Walter of Skirlaw. I speak of the church which, above all others, is all glorious within, of the presbytery, lantern, and nave, unequalled in their stately and solemn majesty, of the faultless proportions of the mighty channelled piers, avoiding a mere massiveness which seems to grovel on the earth, and avoiding too the vain attempt at a soaring height consistent only with pillars of either an earlier or a later form. I speak of the wonderful skill which enriched the constructive forms with exactly the fitting degree of ornament, a degree of ornament which avoided alike the rude bareness of some contemporary examples and the lavish gorgeousness of some later ones. The designer of such a pile, whether Bishop William himself or some nameless genius in his employ, must rank alongside of Diocletian's architect at Spalato, of Saint Hugh's architect at Lincoln. And the church of Durham not only stands thus preeminent as an example of Norman art; it holds a place instructive above all Lessons from the successive works at Durham. others in the history of Norman art. ' See vol. iv. p. 677. No building more HIGHEST TYPE OF NORMAN AT DURHAM. 631 thoroughly supplies the hatchet to their argument who ch. xxvi. cannot rise above a purely chronological arrangement of architectural works. The work of William of Saint Carilef was far in advance of all contemporary buildings. He died, and for a while none was found to carry on his work as he had begun it. In three years — so quickly 1093-1096. he pushed on his work— he finished the eastern limb, the lantern arches, the eastern arches of the transept, and built just so much of the nave as to form a gigantic buttress. The transepts, during the vacancy of the 1096-1099. bishoprick, were carried on by the monks.' But either worldly means or artistic genius was now lacking. The church of Bishop William was no longer carried on as Bishop William had begun it ; the transepts were finished in a style which elsewhere might not be deemed con- temptible, but which seems mean and feeble by the side of the earlier work. And if the dates of the building were not accurately recorded, we should be tempted to assign to it a date at least a generation earlier than the work which we know that it followed. Another stage in the local Work of history came ; the throne of Saint Cuthberht was filled by iogq-n28. the famous or infamous Randolf Flambard.^ He set him- ' The history of the fiibrio is most clearly given by Durham writers. Sim. Dun. Hist. Eccl. Dun. iv. 8 ; " Ecclesiam 98. anno ex quo ab Alduno fimdata fuerat, destrui prsecepit, et sequenti anno positis fundamentis nobiliori satis et majori opere aliam construere coepit. Est autem incepta M. xeiij. Dominiose incamationis anno, pontificatus autem Willielmi 13. ex quo autem monachi in Dunelmum convenerant xj. tertio Idus Augusti, feria 5. Eo enim die episcopus, et qui post eum secundus erat in eoclesia Prior Turgotus cum caeteris fratribus primes in fundamento lapides poeuerunt. Nam paulo ante, id est, quarto Kal. Augusti feria sexta idem episcopus et prior facta cum fratribus oratione ac data benediotione fundamentum ccepe- rant fodere. Igitur monachis suas officinas sedifioantibus suis episcopus sumptibus ecclesiae opus faciebat." ' The continuation (X Soriptt. 61) goes on to tell us how matters fared after the death of WiUiam. The writer is recording the acts of Kandolf Flambard ; " Navem ecclesiaB circumductis parietibus, ad sui usque testu- dinem erexerat. Porro prsedecessor iUius, qui opus inchoavit, id decemendo statuerat, ut episcopus ex suo ecclesiam monachi vero suas ex eoclesise 632 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON ART. CH. XXVI. self to work to atone for his former evil deeds, specially perhaps for the wrong which he had done years before to Saint Cuthberht's heritage.' He carried the work of William of Saint Carilef to perfection in a shape even nobler than that planned by its original designer. The meagre forms of the transepts were now cast aside ; the vast nave rose after the pattern of the earlier choir, keeping strictly to the same proportions and the same general design, but bringing in a slight increase of ornament, as if purposely to mark that the two parts of the building were not absolutely the work of the same hands. Truly no work of the mason's skill more worthily claims our ad- miration as a matter of art^ none is richer in instruction as a matter of history, than the unrivalled work of the stranger to which we can hardly grieve that the native church of Ealdhun gave way. The Norman form of Romanesque, first introduced by the foreign tastes of a native King, was thus finally estab- lished as the national style of England. This was one of the immediate results of the Norman Conquest. In our larger churches the triumph of the foreign style was complete and speedy. Except in the case of the cylindrical pier^ the traces of the earlier style which still hung about some of our greatest churches were so slight, and affected only matters of such small detail, as in no sort to take away from Introduc- the essentially Norman character of the buildings. But, tion of the ... ■ " . , Norman HI buildings of a humbler class, the success of the invading smaller style was for a long time far from being so complete. The buildings, jiew style indeed did make its way even into very remote cor- ners while Eadward was yet upon the throne. In a secluded colleotis facerent officinas quod illo cadente cecidit. Monachi enim-omisais officinarum aedificationibus, operi ecclesije insistunt, quam usque iiavem Ranulphus jam factam invenit." The " testudo " or vault of the nave is clearly later than Flambard's work. ' See vol. iv. p. 521. BEGmNINGS OF NORMAN IN SMALL BUILDINGS. 633 dell of the Yorkshii-e hills, in a spot famous for researches of oh. xxvi. other kinds than those of the historian, Orm the son of ^"''^'J'^^'* church. Gamel — names familiar to us in Northumbrian history ^ — 1055-1065. rebuilt Saint Gregory's minster at Kirkdale in the days of Eadward the King and Tostig the Earl.^ Here^ in a church of very small size and pretensions, a church unfurnished with a tower, the western doorway shows a distinct, though rude, approach to Norman work. It is such work as a local craftsman might produce, if called on to imitate what the founder had seen on some day of solemn gathering in the church which was rising year by year at the bidding of King Eadward. But, as a rule, in smaller buildings, which would be largely the work of English builders, the national taste long and manfully withstood the foreign fashion. At least down to the end of the eleventh century, men went on building as their fathers had built before them, even in places where the Norman castle or minster was rising above their heads. The fact that we have "Anglo-Saxon" — that is Primitive Romanesque — buildings of a date undoubtedly later than the Norman Conquest has sometimes been strangely used to prove that no "Anglo- Saxon" or Primitive Romanesque style ever existed. Because men went on with their national way of building after a foreign fashion had been brought in among them, it has been strangely argued that they never had any national wav of building at all. In truth the fact that Retention there are buildings m England which are ot a date later style. than the Norman Conquest, but which are not Norman ' On Gamels and Orms, see vol. ii. pp. 482, 483. I suspect that our Orm was the father of the Gamel who was killed by Tostig in 1064. " The date of the early work at Kirkdale is fixed by the inscription over the south doorway, which says, in somewhat of stone-cutter's Old-English, that it was built "in Eadward dagum cng in Tosti dagum eorl." This is not the language of the Chronicles, any more than the language of a Roman stone-cutter was the language of Cicero. But it should be noted that thja little building is called minster. Cf. vol. i. p. 472. 634 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON AET. The Old- English towers. Cole- .swegen's Churches at Lincoln, 1068-1085, in style, is the strongest proof of all that England had a distinct Romanesque style before the Norman came. While the great -n-orks of the Norman prelates were building, men were found who in their smaller works still clave to the forms of earlier days ; and it is clear that in some cases they clave to them, not through blind tradition or prejudice, but through a reasonable prefer- ence. Of the remains of the Primitive style in Eng- land, both earlier and later than the Conquest, by far the greater number of examples consist of towers. And no wonder ; for the Old-English tower, rude imitation as it was of the great Italian works which it strove to reproduce, had a majesty and stateliness of its own which the new style could not rival. The massive Norman tower, admirable as a lantern, fails as a campanile ; and, when it is used as a western tower, it cannot for a moment be com- pared with the dignity of effect which belongs to the older English form. No wonder then that men still went on build- ing the tall slender tower with its mid-wall shafts^ and no wonder that the architects of later days so often spared a form which was surpassed only by the soaring spires of the thirteenth century and by the lordly embattled towers of the fifteenth. In one case at least a church-builder of the reign of William employed both the native and the foreign style for those parts of his buildings for which each was severally best suited. Coleswegen's towers at Lincoln,^ built in the new town on the plain while the Norman castle and min- ster were rising on the height, are essentially Primitive in their style. We can see from the details of their windows that their designer had seen Norman work, but the approach to Norman is in the details only; the essential characters of the towers, their whole proportion and design, are thoroughly Primitive. The neighbouring church of Bracebridge has a tower which is no less distinctly Primitive in its general ' See vol. iv. p. 218. PRIMITIVE BUILDINGS AFTEE THE CONQUEST. 635 conception, but which has details of yet more confirmed ch. xxvi. Norman style than the towers of Coleswegen. Examples like these show how men clave to the ancient forms, especially in that position where the ancient forms had a distinct ad- vantage over the new. Coleswegen or his architect felt that for a western campanile the older style of England supplied him with better models than the new style which had come in from Normand3\ But for the piers and arches of the inside the new style supplied him with better models than the old, and the contemporary arcades attached to the Old-English tower of Saint Peter at Gowt's were built in a style distinctly Norman. In the like sort, when Ealdwine and his companions set Works of forth on their errand of restoring the monastic life in at Jarrow. Northern England, one of their tasks was to repair one of ^°'^^' the most venerable monuments of a far earlier day, the church of Benedict Biscop at Jarrow.^ A central tower was carried up, but even in that favourite Norman position, though some of the details show the influence of Norman models, the feeling of the whole tower is dis- tinctively Primitive and not Norman. The small remains of the domestic buildings have an air which is Roman rather than Norman, but there is no reason to doubt that they also are the work of the Mercian pilgrims. On such a spot, where they found such remains still abiding, it may have been felt as a kind of point of honour to cleave to every ancient English tradition. Still it is strange to see work of such early character reared in the days and under the patronage of Walcher.^ It almost rises to a trial of faith to believe that work which seems to have more in common with the days of Benedict and Bseda is less than twenty years older than the choir of William of Saint Carilef. • See vol. iv. p. 665, and Appendix YY. ' See Tol. iv. p. 665. 636 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON" ART. Oxford Castle. 1071. Saint Michael's, Oxford. But these instances of Primitive work later than the Norman Conquest are not to be found only in buildings which owed their origin to Eno-lishmen. The tower of Saint Michael's church at Oxford is distinctly of the Primitive type^ and even the existing tower of the castle may be fairly referred to the same style. The castle tower, there can be no doubt, is the work of the elder Robert of Oily,' and the church tower has commonly been thought to be his also. If this be so, it is the most remarkable case of all, for the tower is of unmixed and characteristic Primitive work, without any of those signs of approach to Norman detail which are to be seen in the towers at Lincoln, Jarrow, and Bracebridge. It might be refining too much to at- tribute this peculiar character of Robert's works to the influence of his English wife ; but certain it is that the style, not only of the church, which may be his, but of the castle, which certainly is his, keef)s marked traces of the earlier fashion. The use of the native style in a building distinctly military is specially worthy of notice. It shows that there must have been a greater interchange of ideas between men of the two races in the conquered island than we might at first feel inclined to believe. Influence Our view of the influence of the Norman Conquest on architec- architecture would be imperfect if we did not carry it S^U d beyond the actual bounds of the kingdom of England. Scotland, under the civilizing and reforming influence of Margaret, no doubt received from England every improve- ment which was there introduced in architectural style. Malcolm According to one account, King Malcolm himself, as became foundation the layman of highest rank in the Bernician diocese, was of Durham, p^gggj^t, and played a chief part, in the foundation of the minster of William of Saint Carilef.^ And the impress of ' See vol. iv. pp. 46, 735, 778. ^ Sim. Dun. 1093, p.- 103 Hinde. " Ecclesia nova Dunelnii est inoepta SCOTTISH BUILDINGS. 637 that great model of Romanesque work is stamped deep on ch. xxvr. the piers and arches, though certainly not on the upper Dunferm- range, of the royal abbey of Dunfermline.' But there were other spots in Scotland where the traditions of earlier times lingered on to a date when in England they were wholly forgotten. If Turgot carried architectural fashions with him to Saint Andrews,^ they were fashions English rather than Norman. Long after his death, under the reign ofSaiutRule . . ... at Saint good King David, the ancient church of Saint Regulus Andrews. was rebuilt^ but it was rebuilt in a form savouring even less of foreign fashions than the buildings of an earlier generation at Lincoln. The small church which, ruined as it is, is far more perfect than the greater pile which grew up to overshadow it, is Primitive in all its features. Its " four-nooked " tower, with its mid-wall shafts, the very tallest and squarest and sternest of its class, still soars proudly over the fragments of later days. It still stands, by the rocks of the Northern Ocean, the one perfect portion of that vast group of buildings, church, monastery, and episcopal castle, standing in all the simplicity of earlier days, as if to rebuke at once the worldly pomp of one age and the merciless havoc of another. While in England and Normandy, and elsewhere in Scotland also, Norman art was fast putting on its later and more gor- geous form, the tower of Saint Regulus fell back on the most ancient type of all. It is square indeed, but, in all tertio idus Augusti feria quinta, episoopo Willelmo et Malcholmo rege Soottorum et Turgoto priore ponentibua primos in fundamento lapidea." This is one of the passages which Mr. Hinde makes use of to throw doubt on the trustworthiness of the writer whom I quote as Simeon. The entry is followed by the Durham writer in Mon. Ang. i. 249. ' On the date of Dunfermline, see Ohahners, History of Dunfermline, i. 115, ii. 160. It seems that 1150 is the probable date of the dedication. But, just as any one would think that the transepts at Durham were much earlier than the eastern limb, so any one would think that the triforium and clerestory of Dunfermline were much earlier than the arcade below them. ' See above, p. 238. 638 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON ART. cH. XXVI. but actual shape, it recalls the likeness of the round towers ^tth tt^"^ of Abernethy and Brechin, of Cashel, Kildare, and Monas- round terboice. It supplies the link which was needed, the link which binds the Scottish towers of either island to the first birth-place of Christian art. It shows that they too have a share in that ancient fellowship which binds Earl's Barton and Lincoln to E-omainmoutier and to Ravenna. One great architectural genius, either Bishop William of Durham in his own person or some one in his employ, brought the earlier form of the Norman Romanesque to Works of perfection in the last years of the eleventh century. Another Salisbury, great architectural genius of the twelfth century, whom we may with more certainty affirm to have been Bishop Roger of Salisbury in his own person,^ brought to perfection that later form of Norman architecture, lighter and richer than the earlier type, which slowly died out before the introduc- AJvanced tion of the jDointcd arch and its accompanying details. As of his i^ the ease of William of Saint Carilef, so in the case of ^°^^- Roger, the creative genius was in advance of his age, and it took some little time for smaller men to come up with him. As it is a trial of our faith to believe that the eastern limb of Durham is older than the transepts, so it is a trial of our faith to believe that the work of Roger in his castle of Sherborne, the few fragments which are still left in his castle of the Devizes, really belong to the reign of Henry the First, and not to the reign of Henry the Second. Yet the thing is in no way wonderful. A great architect struck out a path for himself in an age of peace ; a time of anarchy followed in which men built castles indeed, but not such castles as those of Roger. The rude fortresses built merely for defence and plunder were swept away as soqn as the days of law and peace came back again.'' Then men had again leisure to turn ' On the architectural tastes of Bishop Eoger, see above, pp. 217, 287. ' See above, p. 329. THE LATER NORMAN STYLE. 639 their thoughts to art and ornament, and the style which oh. xxvi. had come in at the bidding of Roger was copied by lesser men almost a generation after his time. The Style of greater lightness and richness of Eoger's work became the second's fashion in the days of Henry the Second ; and, when the *™^- fashion had once been set, lightness and richness went on increasing. At last, in the Galilee of Durham^ we find a The style whose constructive forms are the same as those of Wil- Galilee. liam of Saint Carilef, but whose artistic effect is as unlike that of his work as the effect of any two buildings can be which use the same constructive forms. So it is everywhere else. Ornament becomes richer and more elegant, pillars become lighter, capitals show a return to classical models, till we find columns at Canterbury which would be hardly out of place at Toreello or at Ravenna. But, along with these changes, Introduc- a still greater change was going on. As the Primitive pointed Romanesque, the common possession of Western Europe, ^ had given way to the local styles of Normandy and Aqui- taine, so now all forms of Romanesque, the architecture of the round arch, were to give way to the fully developed architecture of the pointed arch. Or rather, as the archi- tecture of the round arch had gradually shaken itself free from the trammels of the elder system of the entablature, so the architecture of the pointed arch was gradually to shake itself free from the trammels of the elder system of the round arch. The pointed arch, as a mere mathe- matical form, is doubtless as old as the round. As a con- Construc- struetive form, it had been used in Saracenic mosques for the pointed ages before it made its appearance in Christian churches, ™''"' and it has been used no less freely in later times in the great works of the Mahometan conquerors of India. As a trophy of the conquered Paynim, it appears in the gorgeous buildings of the Norman Kings of Sicily, and even in the inner range of columns in the nave of Pisa. But in all these buildings the pointed arch appears as a 640 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON ART. CH. XXYI. Growth of an appro- priate system of detail. The mere forms borrowed from the East. Stajtea of the Tran- sition from Ro- manesque to Gothic. Imperfect Gothic of Italy. Growth of the Gothic detail. mere constructive form ; in none of them, any more than in the so-called Gothic architecture of Italy^ did it work out for itself an appropriate and consistent system of decoration. To work out such a system was the archi- tectural problem of the later years of the twelfth century. That was the time of struggle between the later Roman- esque and the coming Gothic, just as the later years of the eleventh century were the time of struggle between the earlier form of Romanesque and the later. The use of the pointed arch as the main constructive feature was, there can hardly be a doubt^ brought back to Western Europe by the Crusaders. But what they brought back was a mere germ, a germ which had brought forth no worthy fruit in its earlier Eastern home, but which was to bring forth a goodly crop indeed in the kindlier soil of England, Prance, and Germany. As in the classical Roman architecture, the architecture of the transitional time before Diocletian, the forms of the entablature and of the round arch were strangely intermingled, sOj in the early use of the pointed arch, its constructive forms were no less strangely inter- mingled with the decorative forms of the round arch. The pointed arch was first placed on supports belonging to the earlier style, whether on the massive piers of Malmesbury or on the graceful columns of Palermo. At Palermo^ at Lucca, at all places south of the Alps, the style advanced no further. The native Romanesque of Italy, in the height of its richness and beauty, was cast aside for a feeble imitation of the native pointed architecture of the North. The lands beyond the Alps were more lucky. The germ which we see at Malmesbury and Kirkstall grew up, by slow but easy steps^ into the full growth of Lincoln and Ely and Salisbury, of Koln and Rheims and southern Bayonne. The pointed arch, brought in at first as a mere constructive form in the main arcades and vaults, gradually spread itself to the decorative, as well as the ORIGIN OF GOTHIC AECHITECTUEE. 641 constructive, arches of the building-. Left at first in the oh. xxvi. plain square section of the ruder, or adorned with the surface ornament of the richer, Norman, it gradually worked out for itself a system of mouldings and other ornaments, a system better suited to a constructive form whose leading idea is neither rest nor horizontal extension, but extension strictly vertical. Reared at first on the more massive piers of the earlier architecture, it gradually exchanged them for the clustered pillars, detached and banded, grouped together as many members under one head, which form one of the most special characteristics of the earlier Gothic. Thus, before the twelfth century had run its course, the fully developed pointed architecture had reached its perfection, not at the hands of a Frenchman at Saint Denis, but at the Work of T • 1 T> T Saint hands of the saint whom the Imperial Burgundy gave to Hugh England. What Diocletian did at Spalato for the round i*86™i™oo' arch. Saint Hugh did at Lincoln for the pointed arch. But the after-battle was still to be fought. We have seen how, while the elder church of Remigius was rising in the stern grandeur of early Norman times, men were still found who clave to the older traditions of inde- pendent England. So, while its eastern limb was giving way to the new forms which rose at the bidding of Saint Hugh, men were still rearing the naves of Peterborough Relation of , . , _ • ,1 • 1 J •! ■ early forms and Ely, works which show in their details some signs at Peter- of the change which was beginning, but which, in their ^°™g^y leading lines and proportions, vary not at all from the earlier works which they continue. As a matter of The •^ ... Transi- architectural study, no works are of higher interest than tionai those in which, as in the eastern limb of Canteibury and ^ ^ ®" the nave of Romsey, we can trace out the various steps by which the architecture of the pointed arch gradually grew out of the architecture of the round arch. But to follow out that inquiry in detail lies beyond the limits of my sub- ject. To trace the steps by which the Norman Romanesque VOL. V. T t 642 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON ART. OH. XXVI, supplanted the earlier Romanesque once common to England with all Western Europe is the business of the historian of the Norman Conquest. To trace the steps by which the Norman Romanesque grew into the fully developed Gothic is the business of the historian of the Angevin Kings. ■^° . „ In this sketch of the effects of the Norman Conquest on Bpecially _ '■ ecelesiasti- the architecture of England, I have drawn my examples almost wholly from ecclesiastical buildings. I have done so, not from choice but through necessity. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as in all times and places where any rational style of architecture has prevailed, there was no such thing as a specially ecclesiastical style. The Roman- esque architects, like the architects who went before them and those who followed them, had no thought of any particular architectural forms being specially appropriate for religious buildings. Whatever was the object of a building, ecclesi- astical, municipalj military, or domestic, widely different as might be the plan, proportions, and general effect re- quired by such different purposes, the style of architecture The style was strictly the same in all. Still, for many reasons, studied in the architecture of these centuries must be studied cal build-'" ^1™°^^ wholly in ecclesiastical buildings. It is only in inga. some special and exceptional classes of secular build- ings, such as the great hall of a roj^al or municipal palace, that the characteristic features of a style, its pillars and arches, can be displayed to the same advantage as they can in the interior of a church even of the second Earity of order. And in the centuries with which we have to do, manesque while we have abundance of churches great and small, our " '"^^- examples of civil and domestic buildings are indeed few Little and far between. Examples of military art are indeed ture more abundant ; but the square keep of the Norman castle Ktnctly so jg jjQ^ jjj i|-gg]f a work of architecture strictly so called. caUed in "^ the castles. Whatever ornamental details it has are exactly the same CIVIL BUILDINGS. 643 as the ornamental details of the contemporary churches, ch. xxvr. But the castle is a work of artistic architecture only when, as in castles of the highest class, it contains some special huilding on a scale large enough to display distinctly architectural features. The ereat towers of London and London Rochester aiforded space for distinct architectural interiors. Rochester. We have therefore from the hand of Gundulf a noble example of the Norman of the days of the Conqueror. From the hand of William of Corbeil we have an equally noble example of the Norman of the days of Henry the First. But as such a special building within a castle can hardly fail to be either a hall or a chapel, it is not so much an example of military as either of domestic or of ecclesiastical architecture. It is domestic or ecclesiastical architecture modified by military requirements. For the highest type of secular architec- ture, the municipal type, we are not to look in the Eng- land of the eleventh or twelfth century. England is Municipal richer in fine civic halls than might at first be thought ; but they are all of a date long after the times with which we are dealing. And at no age can we venture to put our civic buildings on a level with those of Italy, Germany, or Flanders. The cause is a very simple one ; no English municipality ever grew into a sovereign commonwealth. Such civic halls as we have are buildings of essentially Halls, the same class as the great halls of monasteries and colleges, of royal, noble, or ecclesiastical palaces and castles. The series of these halls begins in the Norman age, but the earlier examples have more in common with ecclesi- astical buildings than the later ones have. The pillared West- hall of Rufus at Westminster was doubtless a noble and example of the earlier stage of Norman, as the pillared (^^^''^^'^■ hall of Oakham still is a noble example of its latest stage. No buildings are more valuable, more admirable, in their own way. But, strictly as examples of a style, even this highest class of secular buildings must rank alongside of T t 3 644 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON" ART. Churclies the most perfect models of style. quite a secondary class of churches. The hall of Oakham, with its single ranges of pillars and arches, cannot compare with the triple elevation of Durham^ or even with that of Caen or Southwell. Mediasval architecture is in no way exclusively ecclesiastical ; so to deem it is a mark of the most vulgar ignorance. But it is in ecclesiastical buildings that the principles of medieval architecture, and, above all, the principles of its Homanesque form, must, through the historical necessities of their age, be almost exclusively studied. Effect of the Con- quest on domestic architec- ture. I have thus far been speaking of architecture, distinc- tively as a matter of artistic style ; I have traced out the growth of the new architectural forms which the Norman Conquest brought into England. In this point of view our attention has been almost exclusively claimed by the churches, and above all by the churches of the highest rank, the great minsters of Bishops and Abbots. We have been dealing with architecture as one of the fine arts, and with the artistic succession of its styles. If we turn from this side to the necessary art of building, as illustrating the manner of life at the time, we shall see that the Norman Conquest has left its mark there also. Of the domestic architecture of England before the Nor- man Conquest we really know nothing. It is certain that to the men of the twelfth century the Norman Conquest seemed to have brought with it a great improvement in the art of building houses. The houses of the English were looked on as small and mean when compared with the great and stately buildings of the French and Normans.^ ' So says William of Malmesbury in his famous comparison of English and Normans (iii. 245); "Parvis et abjectis domibus totos absumebant [Angli] sumptus, Francis et Normannis absimiles, qui amplis et superbis sedificiis modicas expensas agunt." In the next chapter speaking of the Normans as nsual, " domi ingentia, ut dixi, sedificia, moderates sumptus, moliri." HOUSES. 645 Among other differences, one can hardly fail to have been oh. xxvi. that the practice of building m stone was less familiar in '^°'"™™ England than it was on the mainland. It is certain that wood, houses in England before the Conquest were largely built of timber. I do not know that -there is any distinct mention of a house of stone. Still we must remember that, as in the case of churches, so in the case of houseSj stone would come into common use in some districts much sooner than it would in others. '^ On the other hand, we have seen several instances on the continent of the way in which stone was displacing wood as the material of domestic buildings.^ We have heard, both in Domesday Mention and elsewhere, of stone houses capable of defence, which houses in still were something different from castles.^ The hall of D°ff'''^y o and else- the English Thegn is also frequently mentioned, but where, without any mention of its form or material.* A few Norman houses of the Norman period still remain. The best ex- amples, as at Lincoln and Bury, are found in towns, and are, at least by tradition, said to be the work of Jews.'' A few others are found, not strictly in the towns but in their outskirts, as at Christ Churchy Cambridge, and Lincoln.'' 1 See vol. i. p. 472. ^ See vol. ii. p. 139. * See vol. ii. p. 264. So twice in Domesday, 184 i, 187, we read of " domus una defensabilia " as something distinct from a castle. In the Continuator of Florence also (1 140) we hear of the " magnifica domus" of the Earl of Gloucester at Tewkesbury, and in a letter of Richard the First (E. Howden, iv. 58) a " domus fortis " is pointedly distinguished from a " castrum cum turre." * See Domesday, 6, 20, 27, 63, 163, 1726, 222, where the phrase is " doml- nioum asdificium ; " 284 h, where ten Thegns have each his hall in what had become a single manor; 312 i, where in one manor there had been two Thegns with halls and the &raous Archill without one ; 3 1 7 ; 3 20, where we hear of the hall of Waltheof; ii. 6, where we read of "halla regis;'" 29 b, where is the phrase "istoa homines posuit Ingelricus [see vol. iv. p. 726] ad suamhallam;" 304. "We hear of the destruction of halls in 41, 62 ; cf. 46, 68 6 ; in 34 we read of the house of Robert of Mortain at Bermondsey, "ubi sedit domus ejus." Cf. above, p. 43. » See Turner, Domestic Architecture in England, 40, 46. « See vol. iv. pp. 211, 219, and Domestic Architecture, 38, 63. Several other instances of twelfth-century houses are collected there. 646 EFFECTS OE THE CONQUEST ON AET. CH. XXVI. Here and there a twelfth-century manor-house is also found, and, from the specimens which are left to us, we are tempted to wonder at the language in which the pane- gyrist of Norman manners contrasts the Norman buildings with their English predecessors. They consist of little besides the hall and the most necessary rooms and offices,^ such as can hardly fail to have been found in the English buildings also. We are thus driven to believe that there was really little change besides the improvement in style and material. Yet there can be no doubt that the Con- quest did none the less give a real impulse to domestic architecture. The improvement in style and material was in itself a great change, and the new start which most of the English towns took from this time cannot fail to have been accompanied with a general improvement in building, at least within the city walls. Still, as in this age few classes of men besides the priest and the soldier have left their mark on history, so the remains of strictly domestic architecture of Romanesque date in England are few and unimportant, compared with the vast store of military, and the still vaster store of ecclesiastical works. Effect of the Con- quest on military architec- ture. The Castles. The special badge of conquest. On military architecture the effect of the Norman Con- quest was, from the point of view from which we are now looking at it, of yet greater importance than its effect on ecclesiastical and domestic architecture. The Conquest led to improvements in the building of houses and churches ; still men had houses and churches before. But the hateful castle was wholly new. The stern square tower, perched on its height, frowning over the city or guarding the entrance of the valley, was, before all other things, the badge of the Conquest, the sign of the dominion of the stranger. It was the castles which sheltered the devils • Domestic Architecture, 3-6. CASTLES. 647 and evil men who wrought the fearful deeds of the days of oh. xxvt. anarchy. It was the castles which contained those dens of torment where men pined as no martyrs had pined in the days of old. And^ setting aside such exceptional times of horror, the castle was the badge of the great change, social and political, to which the Norman Conquest had put the finishing stroke. The change which had gradually The castles put the lord, with his manorial possessions and his ma- of the norial jurisdiction, in the place of the free community, ^fSJe''"' with its common land and its popular assembly, was lords. wrought to the life in stone and lime when the lord was a stranger and when his dwelling-place was a castle. It was from the castle that men did wrong to the poor around them;^ it was from the castle that they bade defiance to the King who, stranger and tyrant as he might be, was still a protector against smaller tyrants. The castle is the very embodiment of the feudal spirit on both its sides, its spirit of oppression towards those below it, its spirit of rebellion towards those above it. It is a speaking Castlea fact, which we have seen more than once in our history, j^^. elch that every return to law and order after days of confusion, *™*^ o^, '' restored the accession of every prince who knew how to wield the order. rod of rule, was marked, as one of its first acts, by a general sweeping away of these homes of evil. Their presence threatened the lawful rights of the Crown ; it threatened no less the lives and goods of those whom it was alike the duty and the interest of the common sovereign to guard against their common enemies.^ But even in this matter of castle-building, as in every- thing else, the Norman did but build on an English foundatioUj and the works of the Englishman have com- ' Chron. Petrib. 1087. See vol. ii. p. 192. There is here perhaps a special allusion to men being forced to work in building the castles. Cf. 1097. ^ See vol. iv. p. 190. 648 EFFECTS OF THE CON"QUEST ON ART. CH. XXVI. monly outlived the works of the Norman. In a crowd of raste on ^^^^ ^^^ Norman castle rose on a spot which had in English earlier times been made into a place of defence by Eng'lish, and British . ^ J a > sites. sometimes by British, hands. The square tower rose on the natural height which Briton and Englishman had already occupied; the shell-keep rose on the very mound which The earlier the hands of Eng'lishmen had thrown up. And in many works often . . the more places the works of the Briton and the Englishman are still there, while the works of the Norman have vanished. At Warwick the mound of the Lady of the Mercians still stands ; for the castle of the Conqueror we seek in vain. At Wallingford the English mound, the British dyke, are both still to be seen; there is no sign of the keep to form whose precinct so many of the houses of the town gave way.^ At Old Sarum the Norman castle and the Norman minster have alike vanished ; but no hand of man is ever likely to fill up the mighty ditches which checked the advance of Cerdic. All this is the outward sign of that return to the older and better state of things which has been the real life of our later history. A day came when the castle was no longer hateful. A well-known proverb marks the change. No man would have said that every man's house was his castle, in days when such a phrase could have meant only that every man's house was his prison and his torture- chamber. As the castle became harmless, so did its lord. If we have not wholly come back to the days before lords and castles were, we have at least reached times when the lord and his rights are little more than curious sur- vivals. The castle, if it has not wholly vanished, has sunk into a ruin, or it has become a harmless dwelling- house, or it is used as a prison, no longer for victims of arbitrary oppression, but for offenders against the majesty of the law. In all these forms alike, whether the castle is a perfect building, or a mere shell, or a thing that is gone ' See vol. iii. p. 543, Ed. 2. CHANGES IN WARFAEE. 649 and can be traced only in its foundations, its present ch. xxvi. estate symbolizes our return to the time before castles were. The un-English importation of Eadward's foreign favourites has passed away from among us. A private fortress wherein a private man might defy the law would seem even stranger to us now than it seemed to our fore- fathers when Richard the son of Scrob raised the first castle on English ground. The introduction of the castles concerns us also as having Change in altogether changed the character of warfare for two hun- owing^to dred years after the Conquest. The warfare of the old time, ^^® castles. the warfare of .^Slfred and Guthrum, of Eadmund and Cnut, was mainly a warfare of pitched battles. The war- Warfare fare of the two centuries after the Conquest is almost series of wholly a warfare of sieges. It is only at one stage of our ^'^g®^- earlier history that the taking and fortifying of towns and fortresses stands out with any prominence. This is when Sieges and Eadward and iEthelflsed were winning the land back bit by under bit from the Danes. Their position was to some extent "^^^^[u^ like that of William a hundred and fifty years later ; and, flsed. as far as the inferior means of fortification at their com- mand allowed them^ they forestalled his policy by making a fortress for the defence of each town as it was won back. Still the great military event of that age is not any siege, but the pitched battle of Brunanburh. So through- The Danish out the later Danish wars, though sieges, successful and „£ pij^jjed unsuccessful, are not uncommon, yet the main interest ''^wi^s. gathers round a long series of fights in the open field from Maldon to Assandun. But, after the one great day of Few Senlac, through the rest of the reigns of William, his sons, battles and his nephew, while every year of warfare is crowded with ™ *''® sieges, there is only one great fight in the open field, that period. Battle of the Standard in which men might almost have deemed that the day of Brunanburh had come again. Till we reach the reign of Henry the Third, every other deed 650 EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST ON ART. ca. XXVI. at arms is, if not an actual siege, at least done close under the walls of a fortress. To win this or that town or castle Pitched was the object of every military operation. But when the Earl days came which were truly to make England once more Simon. England, the wergild of the sons of Godwine could be paid only on ground like that on which the sons of Godwine had fallen. It was not beneath the walls of any town or castle, but on the open height of Senlac, that the freedom of England had sunk. So it was not beneath the walls of any town or castle, but on the open heights which looked down on town and castle and minster^ that the triumph of Lewes and the martyrdom of Evesham undid the work of the stranger, and gave to Englishmen more than the free- dom for which Harold^ Gyrth, and Leofwine had died. Summary. I have thus gone through the chief effects of the Norman Conquest on the political constitution, the language and Import- literature, and the art of our country. Such an esamina- Norman tion brings home to us at every stage the great truth with Conquest -^yijiQii \ gg^; Q^^ that the importance of the Norman Con- as a turn- ' ■•■ ing-point. quest is not the importance either of a beginning or of an ending, but the importance of a turning-point. We have seen how in almost everything the real work of the Con- quest was to give a fresh impulse to causes which were already at work, to do more speedily and more thoroughly that which in any other case could hardly have failed to be done less thoroughly and more slowly. In everything it hastened tendencies to change which had already begun. But, by a strange and happy destiny, the completion of the change brought with it the beginnings of a return to better things. The Conquest itself gave us the means of undoing the Conquest. Our subjugation by Romance- speaking conquerors really gave us the means of keeping up a more unbroken continuity than any other land with the days of our Teutonic forefathers. Even if the Conquest PERSONAL AGENCY OP WILLIAM. 661 marred for ever the purity of our ancient tonguej it pre- oh. xxvi. served to us so many precious things of native birth that we can submit to the necessity of calling many of them by foreign names. But the Norman Conquest could never have Personal worked in the way which it has worked, if it had not been wiuiam. for the personal character of the great actor in the work. Wittingly or unwittingly, William the Great takes his place alongside of those rulers of our own race whose lawful heir he claimed to be. He finished the work of Ecgberht ; he preserved to us the laws of ./Elfred. And with all this, he gave our land an European position which, if we had been left to ourselves, could hardly have been our lot to win. In one point only he erred ; but the error was one which in his time was unavoidable. In making England part of that great Western commonwealth of which Rome was still the head, he bent our necks beneath the yoke of Rome, the yoke no longer of her Csesar but of her Pontiff. That yoke, pressed upon us by the first prince of Gaul who won a footing in England, was thrown off by the last prince of England who won a footing in Gaul. To that stage of our history my subject does not lead me even in the shape of the slightest sketch. But I have now in my final chapter to trace, slightly and rapidly, the steps by which England, after seeming for a moment to become a mere pro- vince of an Angevin Empire, came out once more, through a series of happy misfortunes, the England of our ancient Kings. I have still to trace how the English nation, strengthened by winning within her own pale the dis- guised kinsmen who had come to conquer her, arose once more in its full strength, till, under the rule and legislation of another Edward, the cry for the laws of his earlier namesake was heard no more. CHAPTER XXVII. THE ANGEVIN EEIGNS.' Sketch rriHE main characteristics of the Angevin reiffns have ofthe ■ T Angevin -"- been already set forth. The tale is briefly this. Period one member, but the hisfhest member, of a vast dominion. J Eng-landj by the accession of Henry of Anjou, becomes Continental insular and continental. By the loss of Normandy and England, the neighbouring lands the proportion between the insular and the continental portions of that dominion are altogether changed. England becomes again a strictly insular king- dom, but, unlike its older state of complete isolation, it now holds a distant continental dependency in the duchy Its re- of Aquitaine. But meanwhile, alongside of this great within the position of the English kingdom beyond the sea, the old l3k''d Imperial character of the English Crown within its own Ireland, island is not forgotten. An attempt, which at most cannot be called more than half successful, is made to extend that power over the whole group of islands of which Britain is the chief by the invasion and imperfect conquest of Ireland. Wales, At last, under Edward the First, the direct English power ' As in this Chapter I hardly ever go into any special detail, it seems needless to discuss the endless mass of authorities at length. But I must once more pay my homage to the great scholar who, while making all EngUsh history alike his emjjire, has chosen the Angevin reigns as his im- mediate kingdom. For the reigns of Henry the Second and his sons Pro- fessor Stubbs gives us, not only the Select Charters and the Constitutional History, but the wonderful Prefaces to Benedict, Roger of Howden, Walter of Coventry, and the Memorials of Richard the First. SKETCH OF THE PERIOD. 653 is established for a moment over the whole isle of Britain ch. xxvn. by the complete incorporation of Wales and Scotland. In Scotland. the case of Wales the incorporation is lasting ; in the case of Scotland it is only for a moment. Then follow the estab- Independ- lishment and recognition of complete independence on the Scotland. part of Scotland, accompanied by a hostile feeling between '3^'' the two parts of the island stronger and more abiding than had ever been felt before. The same cause leads to Eolations a form of continental interference in the affairs of the Scotiand isle of Britain which had before been imheard of. England 5?*^ o ± ranee. had become the rival of Erance through her connexion with Normandy, and she remained the rival of France after her separation from Normandy. France therefore now becomes the natural ally of the British enemies of England ; her interference is constant in the affairs of Scotland, fre- quent in the affairs of Wales. The final result of the Two long disputes and wars which sprang out of the Imperial kin|doms, claims of the West-Saxon Kings was to create two in- ^^"^ ™^*'^ . . . Celtic de- dependent English kingdoms within the isle of Britain, pendencies. each of them burtbened with a dominion over trouble- some and rebellious Celtic subjects. Southern England remains, with her Welsh and Irish dependencies ; but, under the name of Scotland, a part of Northern England has been cut off from the body of the English realm to form an independent kingdom ruling in the like sort over Celtic dependencies to the north of it. Of these two kingdoms, Their the kindred, the English, parts of each meet one another ^^a^ong face to face as enemies. Meanwhile the Celtic subjects of each ally themselves with the enemies of their own masters. The Scots or Irish of Britain are the allies of Southern England against the English King of Lothian and Fife. The Irish or Scots of Ireland^ subjects or enemies of Southern England, are glad to be helped against English enemies or masters by Englishmen who had taken their own ancient name. 654 THE ANGEVIN" EEIGNS. All the events of the time tend towards fusion. Explana- tion of seeming anomalies. French Conquest of Nor- mandy. War of Lewis and Henry the Third. Union of the nation against Henry the Third. Such is a sketch of the external relations of the English kingdom for more than two hundred years. It reaches from the time when England and Normandy received a common sovereign who was as much and as little English as he was Norman^ till the time when the great outward badge of Norman influence in England was swept away by the restoration of the English tongue to its old place. Every event of this time tended, in one way or another, to wipe out all remembrance of the distinction between the conquering and the conquered race within the king- dom. Nothing happened to bring fresh Norman influences to bear on the meu of Old-English descent ; everything tended to bring fresh English influences to bear on the men of Norman descent. The union of the vast dominions of Henry the Second helped the process of fusion in one way ; its dismemberment helped it in another. Even things which at first sight seem to have another meaning really look the same way. In the first years of the thirteenth century we are amazed at the ease with which the Normans in Normandy, the descendants of the victors of Mortemer and Varaville, allow their country to sink into a French province. A few years later we are yet more amazed to see the Normans in England, English barons of Norman descent, ofier the Crown of England to a French prince. The key to both of these seemingly strange events is the same. When Henry was gone, the rule of his house seemed a foreign rule alike in England and in Normandy; the Frenchman was not more of a stranger than the Angevin, and Philip and Lewis promised to be better rulers than John. Yet the presence of the Frenchman in the land drew forth a distinct reaction, a reaction not Norman, but English, and Henry the Third came to his Crown as an English candidate victorious over a French rival. But the King who thus owed his Crown to his birth on English soil soon drew all the natives of his realm together against him by his preference for natives of TENDENCIES TO FUSION. 655 any othersoil than Eng-land. All differences of race and speech ch. xxvn. and rank and order were forgotten as the barons, clergy, and commons of England waged their common struggle against Pope and King. The Scottish wars again^ though The Scot- they permanently cut off from England a large part of the English land and nation, served to strengthen the national spirit of all the inhabitants of the land which kept the English name. So did the conquest of Wales ; so did the attempted conquest of Ireland ; so, above all, did the long TheFrencH wars with France. It was by Englishmen, fighting for the honour and profit of the English King and the English nation, that all these wars were waged, whether with success or with failure. In presence of the enemy, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, or French, men utterly forgot that their own fore- fathers had once met as enemies on the hills of Sussex or before the gates of York. The legislation and the other political changes of this Legislation time all look the same way. It is the legislation of an Angevin united nation. Many of the institutions, and much of the ^^^S^^- legislation of these times, bear an outwardly foreign form, but I have already shown how different a meaning often lurks under the foreign form. I have shown that, while this is in one sense a result of the Norman Conquest, it is in another sense a sign that the immediate effects of the Con- quest had passed by, and that names and things of Norman origin were no longer felt as badges of Conquest. From the No sign of accession of Henry the Second — we are safe in fixing this betweea*"^ date, for we miffht well fix an earlier one — it is impossible Enghsh- ' ® ^ man ana to find in legislation, in literature, in common speech, any Norman. sign of a consciously abiding distinction between English- man and Norman. It is Giraldus alone, the antiquary Excep- and philologer, who, as he fancied himself a Welshman and g^^ge of a champion of Wales,i also remembered that the English Giraldus. ' See liis own account of himself, De Inst. Princ. p. 184. Three parts of him come " ab Anglis et Normannis." 656 THE ANGEVIN EEIGNS. later scholars. OH. XXVII. were or had been a conquered people.* The laws of Distino- England know no distinction save those of freeman and tions of ^ race villaiHj or in after days of peer and commoner, distinctions forn-ottenf which antiquarian research might have shown to have been largely influenced by the events of the Conquest, but Eemeni- whose origin had long passed out of popular memory. It again by was only when men began to look back on past times with a more conscious, if not a more critical, spirit that they began again to feel that the Norman Conquest had had a lasting effect on the history and state of England. Then the scholars of the seventeenth century began gravely to discuss the nature of the entry of the Norman Conqueror, as something which had a practical bearing on disputed points touching the extent of the prerogative of the Crown, of the liberty of the subject, and of the privilege of Parliament. Working This time of fusion, during which all direct traces of man and foreign conquest were got rid of, was naturally the time jerfd'" during which the political and social institutions of the country gradually took that form which distinguishes modern England, the England of the last six hundred years, from the older England of the first six hundred years of English history. Between the two come the two stages of the transitional period, the Norman stage, in which foreign elements were brought into the land, andthe Angevin stage, during which those foreign elements were fused together with the native stock of the land and its people. In law, in language, in art, the same process goes on. By ' In the Descriptio Kambrise, i. 1 5, Giraldus, after mentioning the bold- ness of speech of the Welsh, adds, " Romanes et Francos hano eamdem naturse dotem habere videmus ; non autem Anglos, sicut nee Saxones a quibus descenderant, nee Germanos. Sin autem servitutem causaria in Anglia, et hunc eis inde defectum assignas, in Saxouibus et Germanis qui et libertate gaudent, et eodem tamen vitio vexantur, ratio non provenit." A good deal of ethnological speculation follows, but I beheve that Giraldus's way of .speaking is without parallel in any practical writer of the time. CHAEACTER OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 657 the time of Edward the First, though the English tongue oh. xxvii. had not yet finally displaced French, yet it had assumed Completed the main characters which distinguish its modern from Edwaxd its ancient form. In architecture a great change had taken place, by which the Romanesque style gave way to the so-called Gothic. The subordinate arts had taken prodigious strides. The sculpture of the thirteenth cen- tury is parted from the sculpture of the twelfth by a wider gap than any that parts those centuries in law or language. And in the root of the matter, in our law and constitution itself, those changes have been made which wrought the body politic of England into a shape which has left future ages nothing to do but to im- prove in detail. In short, the great destructive and General creative age of Europe and civilized Asia passed overgftjj"'^ England as it passed over other lands. The ao-e which t'^irteenth '^ r •=' century saw the Eastern Empire fall beneath the arms of the throughout Frank and the Eastern Caliphate before the arms of the Mogul — the age which saw the true power and glory of the Western Empire buried in the grave of the Wonder of the World — the age which ruled that the warriors of the Cross should work their will in Spain and in Prussia, and should not work their will in the Holy Land itself — the age which made Venice mistress of the eastern seas, and bade Florence stand forth as the new type of democratic freedom — the age which changed the nominal kingship of the lord of Paris and Orleans into the mighty realm of Philip Augustus and Philip the Fair — this age of wonders did its work of wonder in England also. But in Its effect England it neither destroyed nor created ; the utmost ™ ^ *" ' limit of its work was to raise a new building out of the materials of the old. In our own history this great century forms only part of a period which begins fifty years earlier. Two of the great ones of the world's history, two of the foremost in greatness, as they are well VOL. v. u u 658 THE ANGEVm EEIGNS. CH. XXVII. nigh the last in time, of the long line of our royal law- givers, mark the beginning and ending of the period. Henry the Henry the Second at its beginning, Edward the First at Edward its end, did a work among us which made it needless that the First, g^^^y. j^jjjgg pf .^lieir own stature should come after them. Apparent If the annals of England were no fuller than the annals betw°e?n^ of some of the ancient kingdoms of the East, we might be Henry the tempted to think that the two great Kings of the twelfth Fu'st and -"^ o o Henry the century were one and the same person. If we read on a brick or a tablet of two Kings of England within the same century, each bearing the same name, each reigning the same number of years, each coming to the crown in a somewhat irregular fashion, each renowned as the law- giver of his realm, the restorer of peace and order after an evil time, each marked by the same private vices and public merits, each distinguished by a degree of learning and enlightenment beyond his age, each having a dispute with the chief prelate of his dominions, each losing his eldest son by an untimely death, each dying away from his island realm in the midst of domestic troubles beyond the sea — if we read of two Kings whose character and history seemed so exactly to be cast in the same mould, we might be tempted to believe that the actions attributed to the second Henry were but a careless repetition of the Real points actions which had been really done by the first. The and un- parallel is indeed remarkable. As regards the internal likeness. history of England, the second reign of law under the younger Henry, following after the anarchy of Stephen, seems exactly to reproduce the earlier reign of law under the elder Henry, following after the tyranny of Rufus. But the likeness in some of the striking outward incidents of the two reigns is more seeming than real. Each of the Henries had a dispute with his chief prelate ; each pre- maturely lost his eldest son. But the relations between EEIGN OP HENRY THE SECOND. 659 Anselm and Henry the First were widely different from ch. xxvii. the relations between Thomas and Henry the Second. And the lives of William the JStheling and of Henry the young King have nothing in common, save that each of them died in the lifetime of his father. Neither primate nor son in any way disturbed the long peace of the reign of the elder Henry. But the peace of the earlier days of Henry the Second was brought to an end through the dispute with Thomas. That dispute was seized on by Henry^s enemies as an occasion of stirring up strife against him in his own house, strife of quite another kind from the petty bickerings between his daughter and her husband which disturbed the last years of Henry the First. The reign of Henry the Second falls Three naturally into three periods, and each period, directly though the rei