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History of the English People - Book II England under Foreign Kings, 1071-1204
Henry the Second--1154-1189
by Green, John Richard (M.A.)
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Henry Fitz-Empress
Young as he was, and he had reached but his twenty-first year when he
returned to England as its king, Henry mounted the throne with a purpose
of government which his reign carried steadily out. His practical,
serviceable frame suited the hardest worker of his time. There was
something in his build and look, in the square stout form, the fiery
face, the close-cropped hair, the prominent eyes, the bull neck, the
coarse strong hands, the bowed legs, that marked out the keen, stirring,
coarse-fibred man of business. "He never sits down," said one who
observed him closely; "he is always on his legs from morning till night."
Orderly in business, careless of appearance, sparing in diet, never
resting or giving his servants rest, chatty, inquisitive, endowed with a
singular charm of address and strength of memory, obstinate in love or
hatred, a fair scholar, a great hunter, his general air that of a rough,
passionate, busy man, Henry's personal character told directly on the
character of his reign. His accession marks the period of amalgamation
when neighbourhood and traffic and intermarriage drew Englishmen and
Normans into a single people. A national feeling was thus springing up
before which the barriers of the older feudalism were to be swept away.
Henry had even less reverence for the feudal past than the men of his
day: he was indeed utterly without the imagination and reverence which
enable men to sympathize with any past at all. He had a practical man's
impatience of the obstacles thrown in the way of his reforms by the older
constitution of the realm, nor could he understand other men's reluctance
to purchase undoubted improvements by the sacrifice of customs and
traditions of bygone days. Without any theoretical hostility to the
co-ordinate powers of the state, it seemed to him a perfectly reasonable
and natural course to trample either baronage or Church under foot to
gain his end of good government. He saw clearly that the remedy for such
anarchy as England had endured under Stephen lay in the establishment of
a kingly rule unembarrassed by any privileges of order or class,
administered by royal servants, and in whose public administration the
nobles acted simply as delegates of the sovereign. His work was to lie in
the organization of judicial and administrative reforms which realized
this idea. But of the currents of thought and feeling which were tending
in the same direction he knew nothing. What he did for the moral and
social impulses which were telling on men about him was simply to let
them alone. Religion grew more and more identified with patriotism under
the eyes of a king who whispered, and scribbled, and looked at
picture-books during mass, who never confessed, and cursed God in wild
frenzies of blasphemy. Great peoples formed themselves on both sides of
the sea round a sovereign who bent the whole force of his mind to hold
together an Empire which the growth of nationality must inevitably
destroy. There is throughout a tragic grandeur in the irony of Henry's
position, that of a Sforza of the fifteenth century set in the midst of
the twelfth, building up by patience and policy and craft a dominion
alien to the deepest sympathies of his age and fated to be swept away in
the end by popular forces to whose existence his very cleverness and
activity blinded him. But whether by the anti-national temper of his
general system or by the administrative reforms of his English rule his
policy did more than that of all his predecessors to prepare England for
the unity and freedom which the fall of his house was to reveal.
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The Great Scutage
He had been placed on the throne, as we have seen, by the Church. His
first work was to repair the evils which England had endured till his
accession by the restoration of the system of Henry the First; and it was
with the aid and counsel of Theobald that the foreign marauders were
driven from the realm, the new castles demolished in spite of the
opposition of the baronage, the King's Court and Exchequer restored. Age
and infirmity however warned the Primate to retire from the post of
minister, and his power fell into the younger and more vigorous hands of
Thomas Beket, who had long acted as his confidential adviser and was now
made Chancellor. Thomas won the personal favour of the king. The two
young men had, in Theobald's words, "but one heart and mind"; Henry
jested in the Chancellor's hall, or tore his cloak from his shoulders in
rough horse-play as they rode through the streets. He loaded his
favourite with riches and honours, but there is no ground for thinking
that Thomas in any degree influenced his system of rule. Henry's policy
seems for good or evil to have been throughout his own. His work of
reorganization went steadily on amidst troubles at home and abroad. Welsh
outbreaks forced him in 1157 to lead an army over the border; and a
crushing repulse showed that he was less skilful as a general than as a
statesman. The next year saw him drawn across the Channel, where he was
already master of a third of the present France. Anjou, Maine, and
Touraine he had inherited from his father, Normandy from his mother, he
governed Britanny through his brother, while the seven provinces of the
South, Poitou, Saintonge, La Marche, Périgord, the Limousin, the
Angoumois, and Gascony, belonged to his wife. As Duchess of Aquitaine
Eleanor had claims on Toulouse, and these Henry prepared in 1159 to
enforce by arms. But the campaign was turned to the profit of his
reforms. He had already begun the work of bringing the baronage within
the grasp of the law by sending judges from the Exchequer year after year
to exact the royal dues and administer the king's justice even in castle
and manor. He now attacked its military influence. Each man who held
lands of a certain value was bound to furnish a knight for his lord's
service; and the barons thus held a body of trained soldiers at their
disposal. When Henry called his chief lords to serve in the war of
Toulouse, he allowed the lower tenants to commute their service for
sums payable to the royal treasury under the name of "scutage," or
shield-money. The "Great Scutage" did much to disarm the baronage, while
it enabled the king to hire foreign mercenaries for his service abroad.
Again however he was luckless in war. King Lewis of France threw himself
into Toulouse. Conscious of the ill-compacted nature of his wide
dominion, Henry shrank from an open contest with his suzerain; he
withdrew his forces, and the quarrel ended in 1160 by a formal alliance
and the betrothal of his eldest son to the daughter of Lewis.
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Archbishop Thomas
Henry returned to his English realm to regulate the relations of the
State with the Church. These rested in the main on the system established
by the Conqueror, and with that system Henry had no wish to meddle. But
he was resolute that, baron or priest, all should be equal before the
law; and he had no more mercy for clerical than for feudal immunities.
The immunities of the clergy indeed were becoming a hindrance to public
justice. The clerical order in the Middle Ages extended far beyond the
priesthood; it included in Henry's day the whole of the professional and
educated classes. It was subject to the jurisdiction of the Church courts
alone; but bodily punishment could only be inflicted by officers of the
lay courts, and so great had the jealousy between clergy and laity become
that the bishops no longer sought civil aid but restricted themselves to
the purely spiritual punishments of penance and deprivation of orders.
Such penalties formed no effectual check upon crime, and while preserving
the Church courts the king aimed at the delivery of convicted offenders
to secular punishment. For the carrying out of these designs he sought an
agent in Thomas the Chancellor. Thomas had now been his minister for
eight years, and had fought bravely in the war against Toulouse at the
head of the seven hundred knights who formed his household. But the king
had other work for him than war. On Theobald's death he forced on the
monks of Canterbury his election as Archbishop. But from the moment of
his appointment in 1162 the dramatic temper of the new Primate flung its
whole energy into the part he set himself to play. At the first
intimation of Henry's purpose he pointed with a laugh to his gay court
attire: "You are choosing a fine dress," he said, "to figure at the head
of your Canterbury monks"; once monk and Archbishop he passed with a
fevered earnestness from luxury to asceticism; and a visit to the Council
of Tours in 1163, where the highest doctrines of ecclesiastical authority
were sanctioned by Pope Alexander the Third, strengthened his purpose of
struggling for the privileges of the Church. His change of attitude
encouraged his old rivals at court to vex him with petty lawsuits, but no
breach had come with the king till Henry proposed that clerical convicts
should be punished by the civil power. Thomas refused; he would only
consent that a clerk, once degraded, should for after offences suffer
like a layman. Both parties appealed to the "customs" of the realm; and
it was to state these "customs" that a court was held in 1164 at
Clarendon near Salisbury.
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Legal Reforms
The report presented by bishops and barons formed the Constitutions of
Clarendon, a code which in the bulk of its provisions simply re-enacted
the system of the Conqueror. Every election of bishop or abbot was to
take place before royal officers, in the king's chapel, and with the
king's assent. The prelate-elect was bound to do homage to the king for
his lands before consecration, and to hold his lands as a barony from the
king, subject to all feudal burthens of taxation and attendance in the
King's Court. No bishop might leave the realm without the royal
permission. No tenant in chief or royal servant might be excommunicated,
or their land placed under interdict, but by the king's assent. What was
new was the legislation respecting ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The
King's Court was to decide whether a suit between clerk and layman, whose
nature was disputed, belonged to the Church courts or the King's. A royal
officer was to be present at all ecclesiastical proceedings in order to
confine the Bishop's court within its own due limits, and a clerk
convicted there passed at once under the civil jurisdiction. An appeal
was left from the Archbishop's court to the King's Court for defect of
justice, but none might appeal to the Papal court save with the king's
leave. The privilege of sanctuary in churches and churchyards was
repealed, so far as property and not persons was concerned. After a
passionate refusal the Primate was at last brought to give his assent to
these Constitutions, but the assent was soon retracted, and Henry's
savage resentment threw the moral advantage of the position into his
opponent's hands. Vexatious charges were brought against Thomas, and he
was summoned to answer at a Council held in the autumn at Northampton.
All urged him to submit; his very life was said to be in peril from the
king's wrath. But in the presence of danger the courage of the man rose
to its full height. Grasping his archiepiscopal cross he entered the
royal court, forbade the nobles to condemn him, and appealed in the teeth
of the Constitutions to the Papal See. Shouts of "Traitor!" followed him
as he withdrew. The Primate turned fiercely at the word: "Were I a
knight," he shouted back, "my sword should answer that foul taunt!" Once
alone however, dread pressed more heavily; he fled in disguise at
nightfall and reached France through Flanders.
Great as were the dangers it was to bring with it, the flight of Thomas
left Henry free to carry on the reforms he had planned. In spite of
denunciations from Primate and Pope, the Constitutions regulated from
this time the relations of the Church with the State. Henry now turned to
the actual organization of the realm. His reign, it has been truly said,
"initiated the rule of law" as distinct from the despotism, whether
personal or tempered by routine, of the Norman sovereigns. It was by
successive "assizes" or codes issued with the sanction of the great
councils of barons and prelates which he summoned year by year, that he
perfected in a system of gradual reforms the administrative measures
which Henry the First had begun. The fabric of our judicial legislation
commences in 1166 with the Assize of Clarendon, the first object of which
was to provide for the order of the realm by reviving the old English
system of mutual security or frankpledge. No stranger might abide in any
place save a borough and only there for a single night unless sureties
were given for his good behaviour; and the list of such strangers was to
be submitted to the itinerant justices. In the provisions of this assize
for the repression of crime we find the origin of trial by jury, so often
attributed to earlier times. Twelve lawful men of each hundred, with four
from each township, were sworn to present those who were known or reputed
as criminals within their district for trial by ordeal. The jurors were
thus not merely witnesses, but sworn to act as judges also in determining
the value of the charge, and it is this double character of Henry's
jurors that has descended to our "grand jury," who still remain charged
with the duty of presenting criminals for trial after examination of the
witnesses against them. Two later steps brought the jury to its modern
condition. Under Edward the First witnesses acquainted with the
particular fact in question were added in each case to the general jury,
and by the separation of these two classes of jurors at a later time the
last became simply "witnesses" without any judicial power, while the
first ceased to be witnesses at all and became our modern jurors, who are
only judges of the testimony given. With this assize too a practice which
had prevailed from the earliest English times, the practice of
"compurgation," passed away. Under this system the accused could be
acquitted of the charge by the voluntary oath of his neighbours and
kinsmen; but this was abolished by the Assize of Clarendon, and for the
fifty years which followed it his trial, after the investigation of the
grand jury, was found solely in the ordeal or "judgement of God," where
innocence was proved by the power of holding hot iron in the hand or by
sinking when flung into the water, for swimming was a proof of guilt. It
was the abolition of the whole system of ordeal by the Council of Lateran
in 1216 which led the way to the establishment of what is called a "petty
jury" for the final trial of prisoners.
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Murder of Thomas
But Henry's work of reorganization had hardly begun when it was broken by
the pressure of the strife with the Primate. For six years the contest
raged bitterly; at Rome, at Paris, the agents of the two powers intrigued
against each other. Henry stooped to acts of the meanest persecution in
driving the Primate's kinsmen from England, and in confiscating the lands
of their order till the monks of Pontigny should refuse Thomas a home;
while Beket himself exhausted the patience of his friends by his violence
and excommunications, as well as by the stubbornness with which he clung
to the offensive clause "Saving the honour of my order," the addition of
which to his consent would have practically neutralised the king's
reforms. The Pope counselled mildness, the French king for a time
withdrew his support, his own clerks gave way at last. "Come up," said
one of them bitterly when his horse stumbled on the road, "saving the
honour of the Church and my order." But neither warning nor desertion
moved the resolution of the Primate. Henry, in dread of Papal
excommunication, resolved in 1170 on the coronation of his son: and this
office, which belonged to the see of Canterbury, he transferred to the
Archbishop of York. But the Pope's hands were now freed by his successes
in Italy, and the threat of an interdict forced the king to a show of
submission. The Archbishop was allowed to return after a reconciliation
with the king at Fréteval, and the Kentishmen flocked around him with
uproarious welcome as he entered Canterbury. "This is England," said his
clerks, as they saw the white headlands of the coast. "You will wish
yourself elsewhere before fifty days are gone," said Thomas sadly, and
his foreboding showed his appreciation of Henry's character. He was now
in the royal power, and orders had already been issued in the younger
Henry's name for his arrest when four knights from the King's Court,
spurred to outrage by a passionate outburst of their master's wrath,
crossed the sea, and on the 29th of December forced their way into the
Archbishop's palace. After a stormy parley with him in his chamber they
withdrew to arm. Thomas was hurried by his clerks into the cathedral, but
as he reached the steps leading from the transept to the choir his
pursuers burst in from the cloisters. "Where," cried Reginald Fitzurse in
the dusk of the dimly-lighted minster, "where is the traitor, Thomas
Beket?" The Primate turned resolutely back: "Here am I, no traitor, but a
priest of God," he replied, and again descending the steps he placed
himself with his back against a pillar and fronted his foes. All the
bravery and violence of his old knightly life seemed to revive in Thomas
as he tossed back the threats and demands of his assailants. "You are our
prisoner," shouted Fitzurse, and the four knights seized him to drag him
from the church. "Do not touch me, Reginald," cried the Primate, "pander
that you are, you owe me fealty"; and availing himself of his personal
strength he shook him roughly off. "Strike, strike," retorted Fitzurse,
and blow after blow struck Thomas to the ground. A retainer of Ranulf de
Broc with the point of his sword scattered the Primate's brains on the
ground. "Let us be off," he cried triumphantly, "this traitor will never
rise again."
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The Church and Literature
The brutal murder was received with a thrill of horror throughout
Christendom; miracles were wrought at the martyr's tomb; he was
canonized, and became the most popular of English saints. The stately
"martyrdom" which rose over his relics at Canterbury seemed to embody the
triumph which his blood had won. But the contest had in fact revealed a
new current of educated opinion which was to be more fatal to the Church
than the reforms of the king. Throughout it Henry had been aided by a
silent revolution which now began to part the purely literary class from
the purely clerical. During the earlier ages of our history we have seen
literature springing up in ecclesiastical schools, and protecting itself
against the ignorance and violence of the time under ecclesiastical
privileges. Almost all our writers from Bĉda to the days of the Angevins
are clergy or monks. The revival of letters which followed the Conquest
was a purely ecclesiastical revival; the intellectual impulse which Bee
had given to Normandy travelled across the Channel with the new Norman
abbots who were established in the greater English monasteries; and
writing-rooms or scriptoria, where the chief works of Latin literature,
patristic or classical, were copied and illuminated, the lives of saints
compiled, and entries noted in the monastic chronicle, formed from this
time a part of every religious house of any importance. But the
literature which found this religious shelter was not so much
ecclesiastical as secular. Even the philosophical and devotional impulse
given by Anselm produced no English work of theology or metaphysics. The
literary revival which followed the Conquest took mainly the old
historical form. At Durham Turgot and Simeon threw into Latin shape the
national annals to the time of Henry the First with an especial regard to
northern affairs, while the earlier events of Stephen's reign were noted
down by two Priors of Hexham in the wild border-land between England and
the Scots.
These however were the colourless jottings of mere annalists; it was in
the Scriptorium of Canterbury, in Osbern's lives of the English saints or
in Eadmer's record of the struggle of Anselm against the Red King and his
successor, that we see the first indications of a distinctively English
feeling telling on the new literature. The national impulse is yet more
conspicuous in the two historians that followed. The war-songs of the
English conquerors of Britain were preserved by Henry, an Archdeacon of
Huntingdon, who wove them into annals compiled from Bĉda, and the
Chronicle; while William, the librarian of Malmesbury, as industriously
collected the lighter ballads which embodied the popular traditions of
the English kings. It is in William above all others that we see the new
tendency of English literature. In himself, as in his work, he marks the
fusion of the conquerors and the conquered, for he was of both English
and Norman parentage and his sympathies were as divided as his blood. The
form and style of his writings show the influence of those classical
studies which were now reviving throughout Christendom. Monk as he is,
William discards the older ecclesiastical models and the annalistic form.
Events are grouped together with no strict reference to time, while the
lively narrative flows rapidly and loosely along with constant breaks of
digression over the general history of Europe and the Church. It is in
this change of historic spirit that William takes his place as first of
the more statesmanlike and philosophic school of historians who began to
arise in direct connexion with the Court, and among whom the author of
the chronicle which commonly bears the name of "Benedict of Peterborough"
with his continuator Roger of Howden are the most conspicuous. Both held
judicial offices under Henry the Second, and it is to their position at
Court that they owe the fulness and accuracy of their information as to
affairs at home and abroad, as well as their copious supply of official
documents. What is noteworthy in these writers is the purely political
temper with which they regard the conflict of Church and State in their
time. But the English court had now become the centre of a distinctly
secular literature. The treatise of Ranulf de Glanvill, a justiciar of
Henry the Second, is the earliest work on English law, as that of the
royal treasurer, Richard Fitz-Neal, on the Exchequer is the earliest on
English government.
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Gerald of Wales
Still more distinctly secular than these, though the work of a priest who
claimed to be a bishop, are the writings of Gerald de Barri. Gerald is
the father of our popular literature as he is the originator of the
political and ecclesiastical pamphlet. Welsh blood (as his usual name of
Giraldus Cambrensis implies) mixed with Norman in his veins, and
something of the restless Celtic fire runs alike through his writings and
his life. A busy scholar at Paris, a reforming Archdeacon in Wales, the
wittiest of Court chaplains, the most troublesome of bishops, Gerald
became the gayest and most amusing of all the authors of his time. In his
hands the stately Latin tongue took the vivacity and picturesqueness of
the jongleur's verse. Reared as he had been in classic studies, he threw
pedantry contemptuously aside. "It is better to be dumb than not to be
understood," is his characteristic apology for the novelty of his style:
"new times require new fashions, and so I have thrown utterly aside the
old and dry method of some authors and aimed at adopting the fashion of
speech which is actually in vogue to-day." His tract on the conquest of
Ireland and his account of Wales, which are in fact reports of two
journeys undertaken in those countries with John and Archbishop Baldwin,
illustrate his rapid faculty of careless observation, his audacity, and
his good sense. They are just the sort of lively, dashing letters that we
find in the correspondence of a modern journal. There is the same modern
tone in his political pamphlets; his profusion of jests, his fund of
anecdote, the aptness of his quotations, his natural shrewdness and
critical acumen, the clearness and vivacity of his style, are backed by a
fearlessness and impetuosity that made him a dangerous assailant even to
such a ruler as Henry the Second. The invectives in which Gerald poured
out his resentment against the Angevins are the cause of half the scandal
about Henry and his sons which has found its way into history. His life
was wasted in an ineffectual attempt to secure the see of St. David's,
but his pungent pen played its part in rousing the nation to its later
struggle with the Crown.
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Romance
A tone of distinct hostility to the Church developed itself almost from
the first among the singers of romance. Romance had long before taken
root in the court of Henry the First, where under the patronage of Queen
Maud the dreams of Arthur, so long cherished by the Celts of Britanny,
and which had travelled to Wales in the train of the exile Rhys ap
Tewdor, took shape in the History of the Britons by Geoffry of Monmouth.
Myth, legend, tradition, the classical pedantry of the day, Welsh hopes
of future triumph over the Saxon, the memories of the Crusades and of the
world-wide dominion of Charles the Great, were mingled together by this
daring fabulist in a work whose popularity became at once immense. Alfred
of Beverley transferred Geoffry's inventions into the region of sober
history, while two Norman _trouveurs_, Gaimar and Wace, translated them
into French verse. So complete was the credence they obtained that
Arthur's tomb at Glastonbury was visited by Henry the Second, while the
child of his son Geoffry and of Constance of Britanny received the name
of the Celtic hero. Out of Geoffry's creation grew little by little the
poem of the Table Round. Britanny, which had mingled with the story of
Arthur the older and more mysterious legend of the Enchanter Merlin, lent
that of Lancelot to the wandering minstrels of the day, who moulded it as
they wandered from hall to hall into the familiar tale of knighthood
wrested from its loyalty by the love of woman. The stories of Tristram
and Gawayne, at first as independent as that of Lancelot, were drawn with
it into the whirlpool of Arthurian romance; and when the Church, jealous
of the popularity of the legends of chivalry, invented as a counteracting
influence the poem of the Sacred Dish, the San Graal which held the blood
of the Cross invisible to all eyes but those of the pure in heart, the
genius of a Court poet, Walter de Map, wove the rival legends together,
sent Arthur and his knights wandering over sea and land in quest of the
San Graal, and crowned the work by the figure of Sir Galahad, the type of
ideal knighthood, without fear and without reproach.
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Walter de Map
Walter stands before us as the representative of a sudden outburst of
literary, social, and religious criticism which followed this growth of
romance and the appearance of a freer historical tone in the court of the
two Henries. Born on the Welsh border, a student at Paris, a favourite
with the king, a royal chaplain, justiciary, and ambassador, his genius
was as various as it was prolific. He is as much at his ease in sweeping
together the chitchat of the time in his "Courtly Trifles" as in creating
the character of Sir Galahad. But he only rose to his fullest strength
when he turned from the fields of romance to that of Church reform and
embodied the ecclesiastical abuses of his day in the figure of his
"Bishop Goliath." The whole spirit of Henry and his Court in their
struggle with Thomas is reflected and illustrated in the apocalypse and
confession of this imaginary prelate. Picture after picture strips the
veil from the corruption of the mediĉval Church, its indolence, its
thirst for gain, its secret immorality. The whole body of the clergy from
Pope to hedge-priest is painted as busy in the chase for gain; what
escapes the bishop is snapped up by the archdeacon, what escapes the
archdeacon is nosed and hunted down by the dean, while a host of minor
officials prowl hungrily around these greater marauders. Out of the crowd
of figures which fills the canvas of the satirist, pluralist vicars,
abbots "purple as their wines," monks feeding and chattering together
like parrots in the refectory, rises the Philistine Bishop, light of
purpose, void of conscience, lost in sensuality, drunken, unchaste, the
Goliath who sums up the enormities of all, and against whose forehead
this new David slings his sharp pebble of the brook.
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Invasion of Ireland
It would be in the highest degree unjust to treat such invectives as
sober history, or to judge the Church of the twelfth century by the
taunts of Walter de Map. What writings such as his bring home to us is
the upgrowth of a new literary class, not only standing apart from the
Church but regarding it with a hardly disguised ill-will, and breaking
down the unquestioning reverence with which men had till now regarded it
by their sarcasm and abuse. The tone of intellectual contempt which
begins with Walter de Map goes deepening on till it culminates in Chaucer
and passes into the open revolt of the Lollard. But even in these early
days we can hardly doubt that it gave Henry strength in his contest with
the Church. So little indeed did he suffer from the murder of Archbishop
Thomas that the years which follow it form the grandest portion of his
reign. While Rome was threatening excommunication he added a new realm to
his dominions. Ireland had long since fallen from the civilization and
learning which its missionaries brought in the seventh century to the
shores of Northumbria. Every element of improvement or progress which had
been introduced into the island disappeared in the long and desperate
struggle with the Danes. The coast-towns which the invaders founded, such
as Dublin or Waterford, remained Danish, in blood and manners and at feud
with the Celtic tribes around them, though sometimes forced by the
fortunes of war to pay tribute and to accept the overlordship of the
Irish kings. It was through these towns however that the intercourse with
England which had ceased since the eighth century was to some extent
renewed in the eleventh. Cut off from the Church of the island by
national antipathy, the Danish coast-cities applied to the See of
Canterbury for the ordination of their bishops, and acknowledged a right
of spiritual supervision in Lanfranc and Anselm. The relations thus
formed were drawn closer by a slave-trade between the two countries which
the Conqueror and Bishop Wulfstan succeeded for a time in suppressing at
Bristol but which appears to have quickly revived. In the twelfth century
Ireland was full of Englishmen who had been kidnapped and sold into
slavery in spite of royal prohibitions and the spiritual menaces of the
English Church. The slave-trade afforded a legitimate pretext for war,
had a pretext been needed by the ambition of Henry the Second; and within
a few months of that king's coronation John of Salisbury was despatched
to obtain the Papal sanction for an invasion of the island. The
enterprise, as it was laid before Pope Hadrian IV., took the colour of a
crusade. The isolation of Ireland from the general body of Christendom,
the absence of learning and civilization, the scandalous vices of its
people, were alleged as the grounds of Henry's action. It was the general
belief of the time that all islands fell under the jurisdiction of the
Papal See, and it was as a possession of the Roman Church that Henry
sought Hadrian's permission to enter Ireland. His aim was "to enlarge the
bounds of the Church, to restrain the progress of vices, to correct the
manners of its people and to plant virtue among them, and to increase the
Christian religion." He engaged to "subject the people to laws, to
extirpate vicious customs, to respect the rights of the native Churches,
and to enforce the payment of Peter's pence" as a recognition of the
overlordship of the Roman See. Hadrian by his bull approved the
enterprise, as one prompted by "the ardour of faith and love of
religion," and declared his will that the people of Ireland should
receive Henry with all honour, and revere him as their lord.
The Papal bull was produced in a great council of the English baronage,
but the opposition was strong enough to force on Henry a temporary
abandonment of his designs, and twelve years passed before the scheme was
brought to life again by the flight of Dermod, King of Leinster, to
Henry's court. Dermod had been driven from his dominions in one of the
endless civil wars which devastated the island; he now did homage for his
kingdom to Henry, and returned to Ireland with promises of aid from the
English knighthood. He was followed in 1168 by Robert FitzStephen, a son
of the Constable of Cardigan, with a little band of a hundred and forty
knights, sixty men-at-arms, and three or four hundred Welsh archers.
Small as was the number of the adventurers, their horses and arms proved
irresistible by the Irish kernes; a sally of the men of Wexford was
avenged by the storm of their town; the Ossory clans were defeated with a
terrible slaughter, and Dermod, seizing a head from the heap of trophies
which his men piled at his feet, tore off in savage triumph its nose and
lips with his teeth. The arrival of fresh forces heralded the coming of
Richard of Clare, Earl of Pembroke and Striguil, a ruined baron later
known by the nickname of Strongbow, and who in defiance of Henry's
prohibition landed near Waterford with a force of fifteen hundred men as
Dermod's mercenary. The city was at once stormed, and the united forces
of the earl and king marched to the siege of Dublin. In spite of a relief
attempted by the King of Connaught, who was recognized as overking of the
island by the rest of the tribes, Dublin was taken by surprise; and the
marriage of Richard with Eva, Dermod's daughter, left the Earl on the
death of his father-in-law, which followed quickly on these successes,
master of his kingdom of Leinster. The new lord had soon however to hurry
back to England and appease the jealousy of Henry by the surrender of
Dublin to the Crown, by doing homage for Leinster as an English lordship,
and by accompanying the king in 1171 on a voyage to the new dominion
which the adventurers had won.
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Revolt of the younger Henry
Had fate suffered Henry to carry out his purpose, the conquest of Ireland
would now have been accomplished. The King of Connaught indeed and the
chiefs of Ulster refused him homage, but the rest of the Irish tribes
owned his suzerainty; the bishops in synod at Cashel recognized him as
their lord; and he was preparing to penetrate to the north and west, and
to secure his conquest by a systematic erection of castles throughout the
country, when the need of making terms with Rome, whose interdict
threatened to avenge the murder of Archbishop Thomas, recalled him in the
spring of 1172 to Normandy. Henry averted the threatened sentence by a
show of submission. The judicial provisions in the Constitutions of
Clarendon were in form annulled, and liberty of election was restored in
the case of bishopricks and abbacies. In reality however the victory
rested with the king. Throughout his reign ecclesiastical appointments
remained practically in his hands, and the King's Court asserted its
power over the spiritual jurisdiction of the bishops. But the strife with
Thomas had roused into active life every element of danger which
surrounded Henry, the envious dread of his neighbours, the disaffection
of his own house, the disgust of the barons at the repeated blows which
he levelled at their military and judicial power. The king's withdrawal
of the office of sheriff from the great nobles of the shire to entrust it
to the lawyers and courtiers who already furnished the staff of the royal
judges quickened the resentment of the baronage into revolt. His wife
Eleanor, now parted from Henry by a bitter hate, spurred her eldest son,
whose coronation had given him the title of king, to demand possession of
the English realm. On his father's refusal the boy sought refuge with
Lewis of France, and his flight was the signal for a vast rising. France,
Flanders, and Scotland joined in league against Henry; his younger sons,
Richard and Geoffry, took up arms in Aquitaine, while the Earl of
Leicester sailed from Flanders with an army of mercenaries to stir up
England to revolt. The Earl's descent ended in a crushing defeat near St.
Edmundsbury at the hands of the king's justiciars; but no sooner had the
French king entered Normandy and invested Rouen than the revolt of the
baronage burst into flame. The Scots crossed the border, Roger Mowbray
rose in Yorkshire, Ferrars, Earl of Derby, in the midland shires, Hugh
Bigod in the eastern counties, while a Flemish fleet prepared to support
the insurrection by a descent upon the coast. The murder of Archbishop
Thomas still hung round Henry's neck, and his first act in hurrying to
England to meet these perils in 1174 was to prostrate himself before the
shrine of the new martyr and to submit to a public scourging in expiation
of his sin. But the penance was hardly wrought when all danger was
dispelled by a series of triumphs. The King of Scotland, William the
Lion, surprised by the English under cover of a mist, fell into the hands
of Henry's minister, Ranulf de Glanvill, and at the retreat of the Scots
the English rebels hastened to lay down their arms. With the army of
mercenaries which he had brought over sea Henry was able to return to
Normandy, to raise the siege of Rouen, and to reduce his sons to
submission.
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Later reforms
Through the next ten years Henry's power was at its height. The French
king was cowed. The Scotch king bought his release in 1175 by owning
Henry's suzerainty. The Scotch barons did homage, and English garrisons
manned the strongest of the Scotch castles. In England itself church and
baronage were alike at the king's mercy. Eleanor was imprisoned; and the
younger Henry, though always troublesome, remained powerless to do harm.
The king availed himself of this rest from outer foes to push forward his
judicial and administrative organization. At the outset of his reign he
had restored the King's Court and the occasional circuits of its
justices; but the revolt was hardly over when in 1176 the Assize of
Northampton rendered this institution permanent and regular by dividing
the kingdom into six districts, to each of which three itinerant judges
were assigned. The circuits thus marked out correspond roughly with those
that still exist. The primary object of these circuits was financial; but
the rendering of the king's justice went on side by side with the
exaction of the king's dues, and this carrying of justice to every corner
of the realm was made still more effective by the abolition of all feudal
exemptions from the royal jurisdiction. The chief danger of the new
system lay in the opportunities it afforded to judicial corruption; and
so great were its abuses, that in 1178 Henry was forced to restrict for a
while the number of justices to five, and to reserve appeals from their
court to himself in council. The Court of Appeal which was thus created,
that of the King in Council, gave birth as time went on to tribunal after
tribunal. It is from it that the judicial powers now exercised by the
Privy Council are derived, as well as the equitable jurisdiction of the
Chancellor. In the next century it became the Great Council of the realm,
and it is from this Great Council, in its two distinct capacities, that
the Privy Council drew its legislative, and the House of Lords its
judicial character. The Court of Star Chamber and the Judicial Committee
of the Privy Council are later offshoots of Henry's Court of Appeal. From
the judicial organization of the realm, he turned to its military
organization, and in 1181 an Assize of Arms restored the national fyrd or
militia to the place which it had lost at the Conquest. The substitution
of scutage for military service had freed the crown from its dependence
on the baronage and its feudal retainers; the Assize of Arms replaced
this feudal organization by the older obligation of every freeman to
serve in defence of the realm. Every knight was now bound to appear in
coat of mail and with shield and lance, every freeholder with lance and
hauberk, every burgess and poorer freeman with lance and helmet, at the
king's call. The levy of an armed nation was thus placed wholly at the
disposal of the Crown for purposes of defence.
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Henry's death
A fresh revolt of the younger Henry with his brother Geoffry in 1183
hardly broke the current of Henry's success. The revolt ended with the
young king's death, and in 1186 this was followed by the death of
Geoffry. Richard, now his father's heir, remained busy in Aquitaine; and
Henry was himself occupied with plans for the recovery of Jerusalem,
which had been taken by Saladin in 1187. The "Saladin tithe," a tax
levied on all goods and chattels, and memorable as the first English
instance of taxation on personal property, was granted to the king at the
opening of 1188 to support his intended Crusade. But the Crusade was
hindered by strife which broke out between Richard and the new French
king, Philip; and while Henry strove in vain to bring about peace, a
suspicion that he purposed to make his youngest son, John, his heir drove
Richard to Philip's side. His father, broken in health and spirits,
negotiated fruitlessly through the winter, but with the spring of 1189
Richard and the French king suddenly appeared before Le Mans. Henry was
driven in headlong flight from the town. Tradition tells how from a
height where he halted to look back on the burning city, so dear to him
as his birthplace, the king hurled his curse against God: "Since Thou
hast taken from me the town I loved best, where I was born and bred, and
where my father lies buried, I will have my revenge on Thee too--I will
rob Thee of that thing Thou lovest most in me." If the words were
uttered, they were the frenzied words of a dying man. Death drew Henry to
the home of his race, but Tours fell as he lay at Saumur, and the hunted
king was driven to beg mercy from his foes. They gave him the list of the
conspirators against him: at its head was the name of one, his love for
whom had brought with it the ruin that was crushing him, his youngest
son, John. "Now," he said, as he turned his face to the wall, "let things
go as they will--I care no more for myself or for the world." The end was
come at last. Henry was borne to Chinon by the silvery waters of Vienne,
and muttering, "Shame, shame on a conquered king," passed sullenly away.
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