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History of the English People - Book III The Charter, 1204-1307
Henry the Third - 1216-1232
by Green, John Richard (M.A.)
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William Marshal
The death of John changed the whole face of English affairs. His son, Henry
of Winchester, was but nine years old, and the pity which was stirred by
the child's helplessness was aided by a sense of injustice in burthening
him with the iniquity of his father. At his death John had driven from his
side even the most loyal of his barons; but William Marshal had clung to
him to the last, and with him was Gualo, the Legate of Innocent's
successor, Honorius the Third. The position of Gualo as representative of
the Papal overlord of the realm was of the highest importance, and his
action showed the real attitude of Rome towards English freedom. The
boy-king was hardly crowned at Gloucester when Legate and Earl issued in
his name the very Charter against which his father had died fighting. Only
the clauses which regulated taxation and the summoning of parliament were
as yet declared to be suspended. The choice of William Marshal as "governor
of King and kingdom" gave weight to this step; and its effect was seen when
the contest was renewed in 1217. Lewis was at first successful in the
eastern counties, but the political reaction was aided by jealousies which
broke out between the English and French nobles in his force, and the first
drew gradually away from him. So general was the defection that at the
opening of summer William Marshal felt himself strong enough for a blow at
his foes. Lewis himself was investing Dover, and a joint army of French and
English barons under the Count of Perche and Robert Fitz-Walter was
besieging Lincoln, when gathering troops rapidly from the royal castles the
regent marched to the relief of the latter town. Cooped up in its narrow
streets and attacked at once by the Earl and the garrison, the barons fled
in utter rout; the Count of Perche fell on the field, Robert Fitz-Walter
was taken prisoner. Lewis at once retreated on London and called for aid
from France. But a more terrible defeat crushed his remaining hopes. A
small English fleet which set sail from Dover under Hubert de Burgh fell
boldly on the reinforcements which were crossing under escort of Eustace
the Monk, a well-known freebooter of the Channel. Some incidents of the
fight light up for us the naval warfare of the time. From the decks of the
English vessels bowmen poured their arrows into the crowded transports,
others hurled quicklime into their enemies' faces, while the more active
vessels crashed with their armed prows into the sides of the French ships.
The skill of the mariners of the Cinque Ports turned the day against the
larger forces of their opponents, and the fleet of Eustace was utterly
destroyed. The royal army at once closed upon London, but resistance was
really at an end. By a treaty concluded at Lambeth in September Lewis
promised to withdraw from England on payment of a sum which he claimed as
debt; his adherents were restored to their possessions, the liberties of
London and other towns confirmed, and the prisoners on either side set at
liberty. A fresh issue of the Charter, though in its modified form,
proclaimed yet more clearly the temper and policy of the Earl Marshal.
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Hubert de Burgh
His death at the opening of 1219, after a year spent in giving order to the
realm, brought no change in the system he had adopted. The control of
affairs passed into the hands of a new legate, Pandulf, of Stephen Langton
who had just returned forgiven from Rome, and of the Justiciar, Hubert de
Burgh. It was a time of transition, and the temper of the Justiciar was
eminently transitional. Bred in the school of Henry the Second, Hubert had
little sympathy with national freedom, and though resolute to maintain the
Charter he can have had small love for it; his conception of good
government, like that of his master, lay in a wise personal administration,
in the preservation of order and law. But he combined with this a
thoroughly English desire for national independence, a hatred of
foreigners, and a reluctance to waste English blood and treasure in
Continental struggles. Able as he proved himself, his task was one of no
common difficulty. He was hampered by the constant interference of Rome. A
Papal legate resided at the English court, and claimed a share in the
administration of the realm as the representative of its overlord and as
guardian of the young sovereign. A foreign party too had still a footing in
the kingdom, for William Marshal had been unable to rid himself of men like
Peter des Roches or Faukes de Breauté, who had fought on the royal side in
the struggle against Lewis. Hubert had to deal too with the anarchy which
that struggle left behind it. From the time of the Conquest the centre of
England had been covered with the domains of great houses, whose longings
were for feudal independence and whose spirit of revolt had been held in
check partly by the stern rule of the kings and partly by the rise of a
baronage sprung from the Court and settled for the most part in the North.
The oppression of John united both the earlier and these newer houses in
the struggle for the Charter. But the character of each remained unchanged,
and the close of the struggle saw the feudal party break out in their old
lawlessness and defiance of the Crown.
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Order restored
For a time the anarchy of Stephen's days seemed to revive. But the
Justiciar was resolute to crush it, and he was backed by the strenuous
efforts of Stephen Langton. A new and solemn coronation of the young king
in 1220 was followed by a demand for the restoration of the royal castles
which had been seized by the barons and foreigners. The Earl of Chester,
the head of the feudal baronage, though he rose in armed rebellion, quailed
before the march of Hubert and the Primate's threats of excommunication. A
more formidable foe remained in the Frenchman, Faukes de Breauté, the
sheriff of six counties, with six royal castles in his hands, and allied
both with the rebel barons and Llewelyn of Wales. But in 1224 his castle of
Bedford was besieged for two months; and on its surrender the stern justice
of Hubert hung the twenty-four knights and their retainers who formed the
garrison before its walls. The blow was effectual; the royal castles were
surrendered by the barons, and the land was once more at peace. Freed from
foreign soldiery, the country was freed also from the presence of the
foreign legate. Langton wrested a promise from Rome that so long as he
lived no future legate should be sent to England, and with Pandulf's
resignation in 1221 the direct interference of the Papacy in the government
of the realm came to an end. But even these services of the Primate were
small compared with his services to English freedom. Throughout his life
the Charter was the first object of his care. The omission of the articles
which restricted the royal power over taxation in the Charter which was
published at Henry's accession in 1216 was doubtless due to the
Archbishop's absence and disgrace at Rome. The suppression of disorder
seems to have revived the older spirit of resistance among the royal
ministers; for when Langton demanded a fresh confirmation of the Charter in
Parliament at London William Brewer, one of the King's councillors,
protested that it had been extorted by force and was without legal
validity. "If you loved the King, William," the Primate burst out in anger,
"you would not throw a stumbling-block in the way of the peace of the
realm." The young king was cowed by the Archbishop's wrath, and promised
observance of the Charter. But it may have been their consciousness of such
a temper among the royal councillors that made Langton and the baronage
demand two years later a fresh promulgation of the Charter as the price of
a subsidy, and Henry's assent established the principle, so fruitful of
constitutional results, that redress of wrongs precedes a grant to the
Crown.
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State of the Church
These repeated sanctions of the Charter and the government of the realm
year after year in accordance with its provisions were gradually bringing
the new freedom home to the mass of Englishmen. But the sense of liberty
was at this time quickened and intensified by a religious movement which
stirred English society to its depths. Never had the priesthood wielded
such boundless power over Christendom as in the days of Innocent the Third
and his immediate successors. But its religious hold on the people was
loosening day by day. The old reverence for the Papacy was fading away
before the universal resentment at its political ambition, its lavish use
of interdict and excommunication for purely secular ends, its degradation
of the most sacred sentences into means of financial extortion. In Italy
the struggle that was opening between Rome and Frederick the Second
disclosed a spirit of scepticism which among the Epicurean poets of
Florence denied the immortality of the soul and attacked the very
foundations of the faith itself. In Southern Gaul, Languedoc and Provence
had embraced the heresy of the Albigenses and thrown off all allegiance to
the Papacy. Even in England, though there were no signs as yet of religious
revolt, and though the political action of Rome had been in the main on the
side of freedom, there was a spirit of resistance to its interference with
national concerns which broke out in the struggle against John. "The Pope
has no part in secular matters," had been the reply of London to the
interdict of Innocent. And within the English Church itself there was much
to call for reform. Its attitude in the strife for the Charter as well as
the after work of the Primate had made it more popular than ever; but its
spiritual energy was less than its political. The disuse of preaching, the
decline of the monastic orders into rich landowners, the non-residence and
ignorance of the parish priests, lowered the religious influence of the
clergy. The abuses of the time foiled even the energy of such men as Bishop
Grosseteste of Lincoln. His constitutions forbid the clergy to haunt
taverns, to gamble, to share in drinking bouts, to mix in the riot and
debauchery of the life of the baronage. But such prohibitions witness to
the prevalence of the evils they denounce. Bishops and deans were still
withdrawn from their ecclesiastical duties to act as ministers, judges, or
ambassadors. Benefices were heaped in hundreds at a time on royal
favourites like John Mansel. Abbeys absorbed the tithes of parishes and
then served them by half-starved vicars, while exemptions purchased from
Rome shielded the scandalous lives of canons and monks from all episcopal
discipline. And behind all this was a group of secular statesmen and
scholars, the successors of such critics as Walter Map, waging indeed no
open warfare with the Church, but noting with bitter sarcasm its abuses and
its faults.
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The Friars
To bring the world back again within the pale of the Church was the aim of
two religious orders which sprang suddenly to life at the opening of the
thirteenth century. The zeal of the Spaniard Dominic was roused at the
sight of the lordly prelates who sought by fire and sword to win the
Albigensian heretics to the faith. "Zeal," he cried, "must be met by zeal,
lowliness by lowliness, false sanctity by real sanctity, preaching lies by
preaching truth." His fiery ardour and rigid orthodoxy were seconded by the
mystical piety, the imaginative enthusiasm of Francis of Assisi. The life
of Francis falls like a stream of tender light across the darkness of the
time. In the frescoes of Giotto or the verse of Dante we see him take
Poverty for his bride. He strips himself of all, he flings his very clothes
at his father's feet, that he may be one with Nature and God. His
passionate verse claims the moon for his sister and the sun for his
brother, he calls on his brother the Wind, and his sister the Water. His
last faint cry was a "Welcome, Sister Death!" Strangely as the two men
differed from each other, their aim was the same--to convert the heathen,
to extirpate heresy, to reconcile knowledge with orthodoxy, above all to
carry the Gospel to the poor. The work was to be done by an utter reversal
of the older monasticism, by seeking personal salvation in effort for the
salvation of their fellow-men, by exchanging the solitary of the cloister
for the preacher, the monk for the "brother" or friar. To force the new
"brethren" into entire dependence on those among whom they laboured their
vow of Poverty was turned into a stern reality; the "Begging Friars" were
to subsist solely on alms, they might possess neither money nor lands, the
very houses in which they lived were to be held in trust for them by
others. The tide of popular enthusiasm which welcomed their appearance
swept before it the reluctance of Rome, the jealousy of the older orders,
the opposition of the parochial priesthood. Thousands of brethren gathered
in a few years round Francis and Dominic; and the begging preachers, clad
in coarse frock of serge with a girdle of rope round their waist, wandered
barefooted as missionaries over Asia, battled with heresy in Italy and
Gaul, lectured in the Universities, and preached and toiled among the poor.
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The Friars and the Towns
To the towns especially the coming of the Friars was a religious
revolution. They had been left for the most part to the worst and most
ignorant of the clergy, the mass-priest, whose sole subsistence lay in his
fees. Burgher and artizan were left to spell out what religious instruction
they might from the gorgeous ceremonies of the Church's ritual or the
scriptural pictures and sculptures which were graven on the walls of its
minsters. We can hardly wonder at the burst of enthusiasm which welcomed
the itinerant preacher whose fervid appeal, coarse wit, and familiar story
brought religion into the fair and the market place. In England, where the
Black Friars of Dominic arrived in 1221, the Grey Friars of Francis in
1224, both were received with the same delight. As the older orders had
chosen the country, the Friars chose the town. They had hardly landed at
Dover before they made straight for London and Oxford. In their ignorance
of the road the first two Grey Brothers lost their way in the woods between
Oxford and Baldon, and fearful of night and of the floods turned aside to a
grange of the monks of Abingdon. Their ragged clothes and foreign gestures,
as they prayed for hospitality, led the porter to take them for jongleurs,
the jesters and jugglers of the day, and the news of this break in the
monotony of their lives brought prior, sacrist, and cellarer to the door to
welcome them and witness their tricks. The disappointment was too much for
the temper of the monks, and the brothers were kicked roughly from the gate
to find their night's lodging under a tree. But the welcome of the townsmen
made up everywhere for the ill-will and opposition of both clergy and
monks. The work of the Friars was physical as well as moral. The rapid
progress of population within the boroughs had outstripped the sanitary
regulations of the Middle Ages, and fever or plague or the more terrible
scourge of leprosy festered in the wretched hovels of the suburbs. It was
to haunts such as these that Francis had pointed his disciples, and the
Grey Brethren at once fixed themselves in the meanest and poorest quarters
of each town. Their first work lay in the noisome lazar-houses; it was
amongst the lepers that they commonly chose the site of their homes. At
London they settled in the shambles of Newgate; at Oxford they made their
way to the swampy ground between its walls and the streams of Thames. Huts
of mud and timber, as mean as the huts around them, rose within the rough
fence and ditch that bounded the Friary. The order of Francis made a hard
fight against the taste for sumptuous buildings and for greater personal
comfort which characterized the time. "I did not enter into religion to
build walls," protested an English provincial when the brethren pressed for
a larger house; and Albert of Pisa ordered a stone cloister which the
burgesses of Southampton had built for them to be razed to the ground. "You
need no little mountains to lift your heads to heaven," was his scornful
reply to a claim for pillows. None but the sick went shod. An Oxford Friar
found a pair of shoes one morning, and wore them at matins. At night he
dreamed that robbers leapt on him in a dangerous pass between Gloucester
and Oxford with, shouts of "Kill, kill!" "I am a friar," shrieked the
terror-stricken brother. "You lie," was the instant answer, "for you go
shod." The Friar lifted up his foot in disproof, but the shoe was there. In
an agony of repentance he woke and flung the pair out of window.
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Revival of Theology
It was with less success that the order struggled against the passion of
the time for knowledge. Their vow of poverty, rigidly interpreted as it was
by their founders, would have denied them the possession of books or
materials for study. "I am your breviary, I am your breviary," Francis
cried passionately to a novice who asked for a psalter. When the news of a
great doctor's reception was brought to him at Paris, his countenance fell.
"I am afraid, my son," he replied, "that such doctors will be the
destruction of my vineyard. They are the true doctors who with the meekness
of wisdom show forth good works for the edification of their neighbours."
One kind of knowledge indeed their work almost forced on them. The
popularity of their preaching soon led them to the deeper study of
theology; within a short time after their establishment in England we find
as many as thirty readers or lecturers appointed at Hereford, Leicester,
Bristol, and other places, and a regular succession of teachers provided at
each University. The Oxford Dominicans lectured on theology in the nave of
their new church while philosophy was taught in the cloister. The first
provincial of the Grey Friars built a school in their Oxford house and
persuaded Grosseteste to lecture there. His influence after his promotion
to the see of Lincoln was steadily exerted to secure theological study
among the Friars, as well as their establishment in the University; and in
this work he was ably seconded by his scholar, Adam Marsh, or de Marisco,
under whom the Franciscan school at Oxford attained a reputation throughout
Christendom. Lyons, Paris, and Koln borrowed from it their professors: it
was through its influence indeed that Oxford rose to a position hardly
inferior to that of Paris itself as a centre of scholasticism. But the
result of this powerful impulse was soon seen to be fatal to the wider
intellectual activity which had till now characterized the Universities.
Theology in its scholastic form resumed its supremacy in the schools. Its
only efficient rivals were practical studies such as medicine and law. The
last, as he was by far the greatest, instance of the freer and wider
culture which had been the glory of the last century, was Roger Bacon, and
no name better illustrates the rapidity and completeness with which it
passed away.
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Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon was the child of royalist parents who were driven into exile
and reduced to poverty by the civil wars. From Oxford, where he studied
under Edmund of Abingdon to whom he owed his introduction to the works of
Aristotle, he passed to the University of Paris, and spent his whole
heritage there in costly studies and experiments. "From my youth up," he
writes, "I have laboured at the sciences and tongues. I have sought the
friendship of all men among the Latins who had any reputation for
knowledge. I have caused youths to be instructed in languages, geometry,
arithmetic, the construction of tables and instruments, and many needful
things besides." The difficulties in the way of such studies as he had
resolved to pursue were immense. He was without instruments or means of
experiment. "Without mathematical instruments no science can be mastered,"
he complains afterwards, "and these instruments are not to be found among
the Latins, nor could they be made for two or three hundred pounds.
Besides, better tables are indispensably necessary, tables on which the
motions of the heavens are certified from the beginning to the end of the
world without daily labour, but these tables are worth a king's ransom and
could not be made without a vast expense. I have often attempted the
composition of such tables, but could not finish them through failure of
means and the folly of those whom I had to employ." Books were difficult
and sometimes even impossible to procure. "The scientific works of
Aristotle, of Avicenna, of Seneca, of Cicero, and other ancients cannot be
had without great cost; their principal works have not been translated into
Latin, and copies of others are not to be found in ordinary libraries or
elsewhere. The admirable books of Cicero de Republica are not to be found
anywhere, so far as I can hear, though I have made anxious enquiry for them
in different parts of the world, and by various messengers. I could never
find the works of Seneca, though I made diligent search for them during
twenty years and more. And so it is with many more most useful books
connected with the science of morals." It is only words like these of his
own that bring home to us the keen thirst for knowledge, the patience, the
energy of Roger Bacon. He returned as a teacher to Oxford, and a touching
record of his devotion to those whom he taught remains in the story of John
of London, a boy of fifteen, whose ability raised him above the general
level of his pupils. "When he came to me as a poor boy," says Bacon in
recommending him to the Pope, "I caused him to be nurtured and instructed
for the love of God, especially since for aptitude and innocence I have
never found so towardly a youth. Five or six years ago I caused him to be
taught in languages, mathematics, and optics, and I have gratuitously
instructed him with my own lips since the time that I received your
mandate. There is no one at Paris who knows so much of the root of
philosophy, though he has not produced the branches, flowers, and fruit
because of his youth, and because he has had no experience in teaching. But
he has the means of surpassing all the Latins if he live to grow old and
goes on as he has begun."
The pride with which he refers to his system of instruction was justified
by the wide extension which he gave to scientific teaching in Oxford. It is
probably of himself that he speaks when he tells us that "the science of
optics has not hitherto been lectured on at Paris or elsewhere among the
Latins, save twice at Oxford." It was a science on which he had laboured
for ten years. But his teaching seems to have fallen on a barren soil. From
the moment when the Friars settled in the Universities scholasticism
absorbed the whole mental energy of the student world. The temper of the
age was against scientific or philosophical studies. The older enthusiasm
for knowledge was dying down; the study of law was the one source of
promotion, whether in Church or state; philosophy was discredited,
literature in its purer forms became almost extinct. After forty years of
incessant study, Bacon found himself in his own words "unheard, forgotten,
buried." He seems at one time to have been wealthy, but his wealth was
gone. "During the twenty years that I have specially laboured in the
attainment of wisdom, abandoning the path of common men, I have spent on
these pursuits more than two thousand pounds, not to mention the cost of
books, experiments, instruments, tables, the acquisition of languages, and
the like. Add to all this the sacrifices I have made to procure the
friendship of the wise and to obtain well-instructed assistants." Ruined
and baffled in his hopes, Bacon listened to the counsels of his friend
Grosseteste and renounced the world. He became a friar of the order of St.
Francis, an order where books and study were looked upon as hindrances to
the work which it had specially undertaken, that of preaching among the
masses of the poor. He had written little. So far was he from attempting to
write that his new superiors prohibited him from publishing anything under
pain of forfeiture of the book and penance of bread and water. But we can
see the craving of his mind, the passionate instinct of creation which
marks the man of genius, in the joy with which he seized a strange
opportunity that suddenly opened before him. "Some few chapters on
different subjects, written at the entreaty of friends," seem to have got
abroad, and were brought by one of the Pope's chaplains under the notice of
Clement the Fourth. The Pope at once invited Bacon to write. But
difficulties stood in his way. Materials, transcription, and other expenses
for such a work as he projected would cost at least, £60, and the Pope sent
not a penny. Bacon begged help from his family, but they were ruined like
himself. No one would lend to a mendicant friar, and when his friends
raised the money he needed it was by pawning their goods in the hope of
repayment from Clement. Nor was this all; the work itself, abstruse and
scientific as was its subject, had to be treated in a clear and popular
form to gain the Papal ear. But difficulties which would have crushed
another man only roused Roger Bacon to an almost superhuman energy. By the
close of 1267 the work was done. The "greater work," itself in modern form
a closely-printed folio, with its successive summaries and appendices in
the "lesser" and the "third" works (which make a good octavo more), were
produced and forwarded to the Pope within fifteen months.
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The Opus Majus
No trace of this fiery haste remains in the book itself. The "Opus Majus"
is alike wonderful in plan and detail. Bacon's main purpose, in the words
of Dr. Whewell, is "to urge the necessity of a reform in the mode of
philosophizing, to set forth the reasons why knowledge had not made a
greater progress, to draw back attention to sources of knowledge which had
been unwisely neglected, to discover other sources which were yet wholly
unknown, and to animate men to the undertaking by a prospect of the vast
advantages which it offered." The developement of his scheme is on the
largest scale; he gathers together the whole knowledge of his time on every
branch of science which it possessed, and as he passes them in review he
suggests improvements in nearly all. His labours, both here and in his
after works, in the field of grammar and philology, his perseverance in
insisting on the necessity of correct texts, of an accurate knowledge of
languages, of an exact interpretation, are hardly less remarkable than his
scientific investigations. From grammar he passes to mathematics, from
mathematics to experimental philosophy. Under the name of mathematics
indeed was included all the physical science of the time. "The neglect of
it for nearly thirty or forty years," pleads Bacon passionately, "hath
nearly destroyed the entire studies of Latin Christendom. For he who knows
not mathematics cannot know any other sciences; and what is more, he cannot
discover his own ignorance or find its proper remedies." Geography,
chronology, arithmetic, music, are brought into something of scientific
form, and like rapid sketches are given of the question of climate,
hydrography, geography, and astrology. The subject of optics, his own
especial study, is treated with greater fulness; he enters into the
question of the anatomy of the eye besides discussing problems which lie
more strictly within the province of optical science. In a word, the
"Greater Work," to borrow the phrase of Dr. Whewell, is "at once the
Encyclopedia and the Novum Organum of the thirteenth century." The whole of
the after-works of Roger Bacon--and treatise after treatise has of late
been disentombed from our libraries--are but developements in detail of the
magnificent conception he laid before Clement. Such a work was its own
great reward.
From the world around Roger Bacon could look for and found small
recognition. No word of acknowledgement seems to have reached its author
from the Pope. If we may credit a more recent story, his writings only
gained him a prison from his order. "Unheard, forgotten, buried," the old
man died as he had lived, and it has been reserved for later ages to roll
away the obscurity that had gathered round his memory, and to place first
in the great roll of modern science the name of Roger Bacon.
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Scholasticism
The failure of Bacon shows the overpowering strength of the drift towards
the practical studies, and above all towards theology in its scholastic
guise. Aristotle, who had been so long held at bay as the most dangerous
foe of mediæval faith, was now turned by the adoption of his logical method
in the discussion and definition of theological dogma into its unexpected
ally. It was this very method that led to "that unprofitable subtlety and
curiosity" which Lord Bacon notes as the vice of the scholastic philosophy.
But "certain it is"--to continue the same great thinker's comment on the
Friars--"that if these schoolmen to their great thirst of truth and
unwearied travel of wit had joined variety of reading and contemplation,
they had proved excellent lights to the great advancement of all learning
and knowledge." What, amidst all their errors, they undoubtedly did was to
insist on the necessity of rigid demonstration and a more exact use of
words, to introduce a clear and methodical treatment of all subjects into
discussion, and above all to substitute an appeal to reason for
unquestioning obedience to authority. It was by this critical tendency, by
the new clearness and precision which scholasticism gave to enquiry, that
in spite of the trivial questions with which it often concerned itself it
trained the human mind through the next two centuries to a temper which
fitted it to profit by the great disclosure of knowledge that brought about
the Renascence. And it is to the same spirit of fearless enquiry as well as
to the strong popular sympathies which their very constitution necessitated
that we must attribute the influence which the Friars undoubtedly exerted
in the coming struggle between the people and the Crown. Their position is
clearly and strongly marked throughout the whole contest. The University of
Oxford, which soon fell under the direction of their teaching, stood first
in its resistance to Papal exactions and its claim of English liberty. The
classes in the towns, on whom the influence of the Friars told most
directly, were steady supporters of freedom throughout the Barons' Wars.
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Its Political Influence
Politically indeed the teaching of the schoolmen was of immense value, for
it set on a religious basis and gave an intellectual form to the
constitutional theory of the relations between king and people which was
slowly emerging from the struggle with the Crown. In assuming the
responsibility of a Christian king to God for the good government of his
realm, in surrounding the pledges whether of ruler or ruled with religious
sanctions, the mediæval Church entered its protest against any personal
despotism. The schoolmen pushed further still to the doctrine of a contract
between king and people; and their trenchant logic made short work of the
royal claims to irresponsible power and unquestioning obedience. "He who
would be in truth a king," ran a poem which embodies their teaching at this
time in pungent verse--"he is a 'free king' indeed if he rightly rule
himself and his realm. All things are lawful to him for the government of
his realm, but nothing is lawful to him for its destruction. It is one
thing to rule according to a king's duty, another to destroy a kingdom by
resisting the law." "Let the community of the realm advise, and let it be
known what the generality, to whom their laws are best known, think on the
matter. They who are ruled by the laws know those laws best; they who make
daily trial of them are best acquainted with them; and since it is their
own affairs which are at stake they will take the more care and will act
with an eye to their own peace." "It concerns the community to see what
sort of men ought justly to be chosen for the weal of the realm." The
constitutional restrictions on the royal authority, the right of the whole
nation to deliberate and decide on its own affairs and to have a voice in
the selection of the administrators of government, had never been so
clearly stated before. But the importance of the Friar's work lay in this,
that the work of the scholar was supplemented by that of the popular
preacher. The theory of government wrought out in cell and lecture-room was
carried over the length and breadth of the land by the mendicant brother,
begging his way from town to town, chatting with farmer or housewife at the
cottage door, and setting up his portable pulpit in village green or
market-place. His open-air sermons, ranging from impassioned devotion to
coarse story and homely mother wit, became the journals as well as the
homilies of the day; political and social questions found place in them
side by side with spiritual matters; and the rudest countryman learned his
tale of a king's oppression or a patriot's hopes as he listened to the
rambling, passionate, humorous discourse of the begging friar.
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Henry the Third
Never had there been more need of such a political education of the whole
people than at the moment we have reached. For the triumph of the Charter,
the constitutional government of Governor and Justiciar, had rested mainly
on the helplessness of the king. As boy or youth, Henry the Third had bowed
to the control of William Marshal or Langton or Hubert de Burgh. But he was
now grown to manhood, and his character was from this hour to tell on the
events of his reign. From the cruelty, the lust, the impiety of his father
the young king was absolutely free. There was a geniality, a vivacity, a
refinement in his temper which won a personal affection for him even in his
worst days from some who bitterly censured his rule. The Abbey-church of
Westminster, with which he replaced the ruder minster of the Confessor,
remains a monument of his artistic taste. He was a patron and friend of men
of letters, and himself skilled in the "gay science" of the troubadour. But
of the political capacity which was the characteristic of his house he had
little or none. Profuse, changeable, false from sheer meanness of spirit,
impulsive alike in good and ill, unbridled in temper and tongue, reckless
in insult and wit, Henry's delight was in the display of an empty and
prodigal magnificence, his one notion of government was a dream of
arbitrary power. But frivolous as the king's mood was, he clung with a weak
man's obstinacy to a distinct line of policy; and this was the policy not
of Hubert or Langton but of John. He cherished the hope of recovering his
heritage across the sea. He believed in the absolute power of the Crown;
and looked on the pledges of the Great Charter as promises which force had
wrested from the king and which force could wrest back again. France was
telling more and more on English opinion; and the claim which the French
kings were advancing to a divine and absolute power gave a sanction in
Henry's mind to the claim of absolute authority which was still maintained
by his favourite advisers in the royal council. Above all he clung to the
alliance with the Papacy. Henry was personally devout; and his devotion
only bound him the more firmly to his father's system of friendship with
Rome. Gratitude and self-interest alike bound him to the Papal See. Rome
had saved him from ruin as a child; its legate had set the crown on his
head; its threats and excommunications had foiled Lewis and built up again
a royal party. Above all it was Rome which could alone free him from his
oath to the Charter, and which could alone defend him if like his father he
had to front the baronage in arms.
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England and Rome
His temper was now to influence the whole system of government. In 1227
Henry declared himself of age; and though Hubert still remained Justiciar
every year saw him more powerless in his struggle with the tendencies of
the king. The death of Stephen Langton in 1228 was a yet heavier blow to
English freedom. In persuading Rome to withdraw her Legate the Primate had
averted a conflict between the national desire for self-government and the
Papal claims of overlordship. But his death gave the signal for a more
serious struggle, for it was in the oppression of the Church of England by
the Popes through the reign of Henry that the little rift first opened
which was destined to widen into the gulf that parted the one from the
other at the Reformation. In the mediæval theory of the Papacy, as Innocent
and his successors held it, Christendom, as a spiritual realm of which the
Popes were the head, took the feudal form of the secular realms which lay
within its pale. The Pope was its sovereign, the Bishops were his barons,
and the clergy were his under vassals. As the king demanded aids and
subsidies in case of need from his liegemen, so in the theory of Rome might
the head of the Church demand aid in need from the priesthood. And at this
moment the need of the Popes was sore. Rome had plunged into her desperate
conflict with the Emperor, Frederick the Second, and was looking everywhere
for the means of recruiting her drained exchequer. On England she believed
herself to have more than a spiritual claim for support. She regarded the
kingdom as a vassal kingdom, and as bound to aid its overlord. It was only
by the promise of a heavy subsidy that Henry in 1229 could buy the Papal
confirmation of Langton's successor. But the baronage was of other mind
than Henry as to this claim of overlordship, and the demand of an aid to
Rome from the laity was at once rejected by them. Her spiritual claim over
the allegiance of the clergy however remained to fall back upon, and the
clergy were in the Pope's hand. Gregory the Ninth had already claimed for
the Papal See a right of nomination to some prebends in each cathedral
church; he now demanded a tithe of all the moveables of the priesthood, and
a threat of excommunication silenced their murmurs. Exaction followed
exaction as the needs of the Papal treasury grew greater. The very rights
of lay patrons were set aside, and under the name of "reserves"
presentations to English benefices were sold in the Papal market, while
Italian clergy were quartered on the best livings of the Church.
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Fall of Hubert de Burgh
The general indignation at last found vent in a wide conspiracy. In 1231
letters from "the whole body of those who prefer to die rather than be
ruined by the Romans" were scattered over the kingdom by armed men; tithes
gathered for the Pope or the foreign priests were seized and given to the
poor; the Papal collectors were beaten and their bulls trodden under foot.
The remonstrances of Rome only made clearer the national character of the
movement; but as enquiry went on the hand of the Justiciar himself was seen
to have been at work. Sheriffs had stood idly by while violence was done;
royal letters had been shown by the rioters as approving their acts; and
the Pope openly laid the charge of the outbreak on the secret connivance of
Hubert de Burgh. No charge could have been more fatal to Hubert in the mind
of the king. But he was already in full collision with the Justiciar on
other grounds. Henry was eager to vindicate his right to the great heritage
his father had lost: the Gascons, who still clung to him, not because they
loved England but because they hated France, spurred him to war; and in
1229 a secret invitation came from the Norman barons. But while Hubert held
power no serious effort was made to carry on a foreign strife. The Norman
call was rejected through his influence, and when a great armament gathered
at Portsmouth for a campaign in Poitou it dispersed for want of transport
and supplies. The young king drew his sword and rushed madly on the
Justiciar, charging him with treason and corruption by the gold of France.
But the quarrel was appeased and the expedition deferred for the year. In
1230 Henry actually took the field in Britanny and Poitou, but the failure
of the campaign was again laid at the door of Hubert whose opposition was
said to have prevented a decisive engagement. It was at this moment that
the Papal accusation filled up the measure of Henry's wrath against his
minister. In the summer of 1232 he was deprived of his office of Justiciar,
and dragged from a chapel at Brentwood where threats of death had driven
him to take sanctuary. A smith who was ordered to shackle him stoutly
refused. "I will die any death," he said, "before I put iron on the man who
freed England from the stranger and saved Dover from France." The
remonstrances of the Bishop of London forced the king to replace Hubert in
sanctuary, but hunger compelled him to surrender; he was thrown a prisoner
into the Tower, and though soon released he remained powerless in the
realm. His fall left England without a check to the rule of Henry himself.
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