The History of England from the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) Political Retrogression And National Progress byTout, T.F. (M.A.)
The ten years from 1248 to 1258 saw the
continuance of the misgovernment, discontent, and futile opposition
which have already been sufficiently illustrated. The history of
those years must be sought not so much in the relations of the king
and his English subjects as in Gascony, in Wales, in the crusading
revival, and in the culmination of the struggle of papacy and
empire. In each of these fields the course of events reacted
sharply upon the domestic affairs of England, until at last the
failures of Henry's foreign policy gave unity and determination to
the party of opposition whose first organised success, in 1258,
ushered in the Barons' War.
The relations between England and France remained anomalous.
Formal peace was impossible, since France would yield nothing, and
the English king still claimed Normandy and Aquitaine. Yet neither
Henry nor Louis had any wish for war. They had married sisters:
they were personally friendly, and were both lovers of peace. In
such circumstances it was not hard to arrange truces from time to
time, so that from 1243 to the end of the reign there were no open
hostilities. In 1248 the friendly feeling of the two courts was
particularly strong. Louis was on the eve of departure for the
crusade and many English nobles had taken the cross. Henry, who was
himself contemplating a crusade, was of no mind to avail himself of
his kinsman's absence to disturb his realm.
The French could afford to pass over Henry's neglect to do
homage, for Gascony seemed likely to emancipate itself from the
yoke of its English dukes without any prompting from Paris. After
the failure of 1243, a limited amount of territory between the
Dordogne and the Pyrenees alone acknowledged Henry. This narrower
Gascony was a thoroughly feudalised land: the absentee dukes had
little authority, domain, or revenue: and the chief lordships were
held by magnates, whose relations to their overlord were almost
formal, and by municipalities almost as free as the cities of
Flanders or the empire. The disastrous campaign of Taiilebourg
lessened the prestige of the duke, and Henry quitted Gascony
without so much as attempting to settle its affairs. In the
following years weak seneschals, with insufficient powers and
quickly succeeding each other, were unable to grapple with
ever-increasing troubles. The feudal lords dominated the
countryside, pillaged traders, waged internal war and defied the
authority of the duke. In the autonomous towns factions had arisen
as fierce as those of the cities of Italy. Bordeaux was torn
asunder by the feuds of the Rosteins and Colons. Bayonne was the
scene of a struggle between a few privileged families, which sought
to monopolise municipal office, and a popular opposition based upon
the seafaring class. The neighbouring princes cast greedy eyes on a
land so rich, divided, and helpless. Theobald IV., the poet, Count
of Champagne and King of Navarre, coveted the valley of the Adour.
Gaston, Viscount of Béarn, the cousin of Queen Eleanor,
plundered and destroyed the town of Dax. Ferdinand the Saint of
Castile and James I. of Aragon severally claimed all Gascony.
Behind all these loomed the agents of the King of France. Either
Gascony must fall away altogether, or stronger measures must be
taken to preserve it.
In this extremity Henry made Simon of Montfort seneschal or
governor of Gascony, with exceptionally full powers and an assured
duration of office for seven years. Simon had taken the crusader's
vow, but was persuaded by the king to abandon his intention of
following Louis to Egypt. He at once threw himself into his rude
task with an energy that showed him to be a true son of the
Albigensian crusader. In the first three months he traversed the
duchy from end to end; rallied the royal partisans; defeated
rebels; kept external foes in check, and administered the law
without concern for the privileges of the great. In 1249 he crushed
the Rostein faction at Bordeaux. The same fate was meted out to
their partisans in the country districts. Order was restored, but
the seneschal utterly disregarded impartiality or justice. He
sought to rule Gascony by terrorism and by backing up one faction
against the other. It was the same with minor cities, like Bazas
and Bayonne, and with the tyrants of the countryside. The Viscount
of Fronsac saw his castle razed and his estates seized. Gaston of
Béarn, tricked by the seneschal out of the succession of
Bigorre, was captured, sent to England, and only allowed to return
to his home, humiliated and powerless to work further evil. The
lesser barons had to acknowledge Simon their master. On the death
of Raymond of Toulouse in 1249, his son-in-law and successor,
Alfonse of Poitiers, had all he could do to secure his inheritance,
and was too closely bound by the pacific policy of his brother to
give Simon much trouble. The truce with France was easily renewed
by reason of St. Louis' absence on a crusade. The differences
between Gascony and Theobald of Navarre were mitigated in 1248 at a
personal interview between Leicester and the poet-king.
Gascony for the moment was so quiet that the rebellious hordes
called the Pastoureaux, who had desolated the royal domain,
withdrew from Bordeaux in terror of Simon's threats. But the
expense of maintaining order pressed heavily on the seneschal's
resources, and his master showed little disposition to assist him.
Moreover Gascony could not long keep quiet. There were threats of
fresh insurrections, and the whole land was burning with
indignation against its governor. Complaints from the Gascon
estates soon flowed with great abundance into Westminster. For the
moment Henry paid little attention to them. His son Edward was ten
years of age, and he was thinking of providing him with an
appanage, sufficient to support a separate household and so placed
as to train the young prince in the duties of statecraft. Before
November, 1249, he granted to Edward all Gascony, along with the
profits of the government of Ireland, which were set aside to put
Gascony in a good state of defence. Simon's strong hand was now
more than ever necessary to keep the boy's unruly subjects under
control. The King therefore continued Simon as seneschal of
Gascony, though henceforth the earl acted as Edward's minister.
"Complete happily," Henry wrote to the seneschal, "all our affairs
in Gascony and you shall receive from us and our heirs a recompense
worthy of your services." For the moment Leicester's triumph seemed
complete, but the Gascons, who had hoped that Edward's establishment
meant the removal of their masterful governor, were bitterly
disappointed at the continuance of his rule. Profiting by Simon's
momentary absence in England, they once more rose in revolt. Henry
wavered for the moment. "Bravely," declared he to his
brother-in-law, "hast thou fought for me, and I will not deny thee
help. But complaints pour in against thee. They say that thou hast
thrown into prison, and condemned to death, folk who have been
summoned to thy court under pledge of thy good faith." In the end
Simon was sent back to Gascony, and by May, 1251, the rebels were
subdued.
Next year Gaston of Béarn stirred up another revolt, and,
while Simon was in England, deputies from the Aquitanian cities
crossed the sea and laid new complaints before Henry. A stormy
scene ensued between the king and his brother-in-law. Threatened
with the loss of his office, Simon insisted that he had been
appointed for seven years, and that he could not be removed without
his own consent. Henry answered that he would keep no compacts with
traitors. "That word is a lie," cried Simon; "were you not my king
it would be an ill hour for you when you dared to utter it." The
sympathy of the magnates saved Leicester from the king's wrath, and
before long he returned to Gascony, still seneschal, but with
authority impaired by the want of his sovereign's confidence.
Though the king henceforth sided with the rebels, Simon remained
strong enough to make headway against the lord of Béarn.
Before long, however, Leicester unwillingly agreed to vacate his
office on receiving from Henry a sum of money. In September, 1252,
he laid down the seneschalship and retired into France. While
shabbily treated by the king, he had certainly shown an utter
absence of tact or scruple. But the tumults of Gascony raged with
more violence than ever now that his strong hand was withdrawn.
Those who had professed to rise against the seneschal remained in
arms against the king. Once more the neighbouring princes cast
greedy eyes on the defenceless duchy. In particular, Alfonso the
Wise, King of Castile, who succeeded his father Ferdinand in 1252,
renewed his father's claims to Gascony.
The only way to save the duchy was for Henry to go there in
person. Long delays ensued before the royal visit took place, and
it was not until August, 1253, that Bordeaux saw her hereditary
duke sail up the Gironde to her quays. The Gascon capital remained
faithful, but within a few miles of her walls the rebels were
everywhere triumphant. It required a long siege to reduce
Bénauge to submission, and months elapsed before the towns
and castles of the lower Garonne and Dordogne opened their gates.
Even then La Réole, whither all the worst enemies of
Montfort had fled, held out obstinately. Despairing of military
success, Henry fell back upon diplomacy. The strength of the Gascon
revolt did not lie in the power of the rebels themselves but in the
support of the neighbouring princes and the French crown. By
renewing the truce with the representatives of Louis, Henry
protected himself from the danger of French intervention, and at
the same time he cut off a more direct source of support to the
rebels by negotiating treaties with such magnates as the lord of
Albret, the Counts of Comminges and Armagnac, and the Viscount of
Béarn. His master-stroke was the conclusion, in April, 1254,
of a peace with Alfonso of Castile, whereby the Spanish king
abandoned his Gascon allies and renounced his claims on the duchy.
In return it was agreed that the lord Edward should marry Alfonso's
half-sister, Eleanor, heiress of the county of Ponthieu through her
mother, Joan, whom Henry had once sought for his queen. As Edward's
appanage included Aquitaine, Alfonso, in renouncing his personal
claims, might seem to be but transferring them to his sister.
In May, 1254, Queen Eleanor joined Henry at Bordeaux. With her
went her two sons, Edward and Edmund, her uncle, Archbishop
Boniface, and a great crowd of magnates. In August Edward went with
his mother to Alfonso's court at Burgos, where he was welcomed with
all honour and dubbed to knighthood by the King of Castile, and in
October he and Eleanor were married at the Cistercian monastery of
Las Huelgas. His appanage included all Ireland, the earldom of
Chester, the king's lands in Wales, the Channel Islands, the whole
of Gascony, and whatsoever rights his father still had over the
lands taken from him and King John by the Kings of France. Thus he
became the ruler of all the outlying dependencies of the English
crown, and the representative of all the claims on the Aquitanian
inheritance of Eleanor and the Norman inheritance of William the
Conqueror. The caustic St. Alban's chronicler declared that Henry
left to himself such scanty possessions that he became a "mutilated
kinglet".1 But Henry was too jealous of power utterly to renounce
so large a share of his dominions. His grants to his son were for
purposes of revenue and support, and the government of these
regions was still strictly under the royal control. Yet from this
moment writs ran in Edward's name, and under his father's direction
the young prince was free to buy his experience as he would. Soon
after his son's return with his bride, Henry III. quitted Gascony,
making his way home through France, where he visited his mother's
tomb at Fontevraud and made atonement at Pontigny before the shrine
of Archbishop Edmund. Of more importance was his visit to King
Louis, recently returned from his Egyptian captivity. The cordial
relations established by personal intercourse between the two kings
prepared the way for peace two years later.
1 Matthew Paris, Chron. Maj., v.,
450.
Edward remained in Gascony about a year after his father. He
checked with a stern hand the disorders of his duchy, strove to
make peace between the Rosteins and Colons, and failing to do so,
took in 1261 the decisive step of putting an end to the tumultuous
municipal independence of the Gascon capital by depriving the
jurats of the right of choosing their mayor.1 Thenceforth
Bordeaux was ruled by a mayor nominated by the duke or his
lieutenant. Edward's rule in Gascony has its importance as the
first experiment in government by the boy of fifteen who was later
to become so great a king. Returning to London in November, 1255,
he still forwarded the interests of his Gascon subjects, and an
attempt to protect the Bordeaux wine-merchants from the exactions
of the royal officers aroused the jealousy of Henry, who declared
that the days of Henry II. had come again, when the king's sons
rose in revolt against their father. Despite this characteristic
wail, Edward gained his point. Yet his efforts to secure the
well-being of Gascony had not produced much result. The hold of the
English duke on Aquitaine was as precarious under Edward as it had
been in the days of Henry's direct rule.
1 See Bémont, Rôles Gascons,
i., supplément, pp. cxvi.-cxviii.
The affairs of Wales and Cheshire involved Edward in
responsibilities even more pressing than those of Gascony. On the
death of John the Scot without heirs in 1237, the palatinate of
Randolph of Blundeville became a royal escheat. Its grant to Edward
made him the natural head of the marcher barons. The Cheshire
earldom became the more important since the Welsh power had been
driven beyond the Conway. Since the death of David ap Llewelyn in
1246, divisions in the reigning house of Gwynedd had continued to
weaken the Welsh. Llewelyn and Owen the Red, the two elder sons of
the Griffith ap Llewelyn who had perished in attempting to escape
from the Tower, took upon themselves the government of Gwynedd,
dividing the land, by the advice of the "good men," into two equal
halves. The English seneschal at Carmarthen took advantage of their
weakness to seize the outlying dependencies of Gwynedd south of the
Dovey. War ensued, for the brothers resisted this aggression. But
in April, 1247, they were forced to do homage at Woodstock for
Gwynedd and Snowdon. Henry retained not only Cardigan and
Carmarthen, but the debatable lands between the eastern boundary of
Cheshire and the river Clwyd, the four cantreds of the middle
country or Perveddwlad, so long the scene of the fiercest warfare
between the Celt and the Saxon. Thus the work of Llewelyn ap
Iorwerth was completely undone, and his grandsons were confined to
Snowdon and Anglesey, the ancient cradles of their house.
It suited English policy that even, the barren lands of Snowdon
should be divided. As time went on, other sons of Griffith ap
Llewelyn began to clamour for a share of their grandfather's
inheritance. Owen, the weaker of the two princes, made common cause
with them, and David, another brother, succeeded in obtaining his
portion of the common stock. Llewelyn showed himself so much the
most resourceful and energetic of the brethren that, when open war
broke out between them in 1254, he easily obtained the victory.
Owen was taken prisoner, and David was deprived of his lands.
Llewelyn, thus sole ruler of Gwynedd, at once aspired to follow in
the footsteps of his grandfather. He overran Merioneth, and
frightened the native chieftains beyond the Dovey into the English
camp. His ambitions were, however, rudely checked by the grant of
Cheshire and the English lands in Wales to Edward.
Besides the border palatinate, Edward's Welsh
lands included the four cantreds of Perveddwlad, and the districts
of Cardigan and Carmarthen. Young as he was, he had competent
advisers, and, while he was still in Aquitaine, designs were formed
of setting up the English shire system in his Welsh lands, so as to
supersede the traditional Celtic methods of government by feudal
and monarchical centralisation. Efforts were made to subject the
four cantreds to the shire courts at Chester; and Geoffrey of
Langley, Edward's agent in the south, set up shire-moots at
Cardigan and Carmarthen, from which originated the first beginnings
of those counties. The bitterest indignation animated Edward's
Welsh tenants, whether on the Clwyd or on the Teivi and Towy. They
rose in revolt against the alien innovators, and called upon
Llewelyn to champion their grievances. Llewelyn saw the chance of
extending his tribal power into a national principality over all
Wales by posing as the upholder of the Welsh people. He overran the
four cantreds in a week, finding no resistance save before the two
castles of Deganwy and Diserth. He conquered Cardigan with equal
ease, and prudently granted out his acquisition to the local
chieftain Meredith ap Owen. Nor were Edward's lands alone exposed
to his assaults. In central Wales Roger Mortimer was stripped of
his marches on the upper Wye, and Griffith ap Gwenwynwyn, the lord
of upper Powys, driven from the regions of the upper Severn. In the
spring of 1257 the lord of Gwynedd appeared in regions untraversed
by the men of Snowdon since the days of his grandfather. He
devastated the lands of the marchers on the Bristol Channel and
slew Edward's deputy in battle. "In those days," says Matthew
Paris, "the Welsh saw that their lives were at stake, so that those
of the north joined together in indissoluble alliance with those of
the south. Such a union had never before been, since north and
south had always been opposed." The lord of Snowdon assumed the
title of Prince of Wales.
Edward was forced to defend his inheritance. Henry III. paid
little heed to his misfortunes, and answered his appeal for help by
saying: "What have I to do with the matter? I have given you the
land; you must defend it with your own resources. I have plenty of
other business to do." Nevertheless, Henry accompanied his son on a
Welsh campaign in August, 1257. The English army got no further
than Deganwy, and therefore did not really invade Llewelyn's
dominions at all. After waiting idly on the banks of the Conway for
some weeks, it retired home, leaving the open country to be ruled
by Llewelyn as he would, and having done nothing but revictual the
castles of the four cantreds. Next year a truce was made, which
left Llewelyn in possession of the disputed districts. Troubles at
home were calling off both father and son from the Welsh war, and
thus Llewelyn secured his virtual triumph. Though fear of the
progress of the lord of Gwynedd filled every marcher with alarm,
yet the dread of the power of Edward was even more nearly present
before them. The marcher lords deliberately stood aside, and the
result was inevitable disaster. Edward found that the territories
handed over to him by his father had to be conquered before they
could be administered, and Henry III.'s methods of government made
it a hopeless business to find either the men or the money for the
task.
England still resounded with complaints of misgovernment, and
demands for the execution of the charters. Before going to Bordeaux
in 1253, Henry obtained from the reluctant parliament a
considerable subsidy, and pledged himself as "a man, a Christian, a
knight, and a crowned and anointed king," to uphold the charters.
During his absence a parliament, summoned by the regents, Queen
Eleanor and Richard of Cornwall, for January, 1254, showed such
unwillingness to grant a supply that a fresh assembly was convened
in April, to which knights of the shire, for the first time since
the reign of John, and representatives of the diocesan clergy, for
the first occasion on record, were summoned, as well as the
baronial and clerical grandees. Nothing came of the meeting save
fresh complaints. The Earl of Leicester became the spokesman of the
opposition. Hurrying back from France he warned the parliament not
to fall into the "mouse-traps" laid for them by the king. In
default of English money, enough to meet the king's necessities was
extorted from the Jews, recently handed over to the custody of
Richard of Cornwall. After his return from France at the end of
1254, Henry's renewed requests for money gave coherence to the
opposition. Between 1254 and 1258 the king's exactions, and an
effective organisation for withstanding them, developed on parallel
lines. To the old sources of discontent were added grievances
proceeding from enterprises of so costly a nature that they at last
brought about a crisis.
The foremost grievance against the king was still his
co-operation with the papacy in spoiling the Church of England.
Though the death of the excommunicated Frederick II. in 1250 was a
great gain for Innocent IV., the contest of the papacy against the
Hohenstaufen raged as fiercely as ever. Both in Germany and in
Italy Innocent had to carry on his struggle against Conrad,
Frederick's son. After Conrad's death, in 1254, there was still
Frederick's strenuous bastard, Manfred, to be reckoned with in
Naples and Sicily. Innocent IV. died in 1254, but his successor,
Alexander IV., continued his policy. A papalist King of Naples was
wanted to withstand Manfred, and also a papalist successor to the
pope's phantom King of the Romans, William of Holland, who died in
1256.
Candidates to both crowns were sought for in England. Since 1250
Innocent IV. had been sounding Richard, Earl of Cornwall, as to his
willingness to accept Sicily. The honourable scruple against
hostility to his kinsman, which Richard shared with the king,
prevented him from setting up his claims against Conrad. But the
deaths both of Conrad and of Frederick II.'s son by Isabella of
England weakened the ties between the English royal house and the
Hohenstaufen, and Henry was tempted by Innocent's offer of the
Sicilian throne for his younger son, Edmund, a boy of nine, along
with a proposal to release him from his vow of crusade to Syria, if
he would prosecute on his son's behalf a crusading campaign against
the enemies of the Church in Naples. Innocent died before the
negotiations were completed, but Alexander IV. renewed the offer,
and in April, 1255, Peter of Aigueblanche, Bishop of Hereford,
accepted the preferred kingdom in Edmund's name. Sicily was to be
held by a tribute of money and service, as a fief of the holy see,
and was never to be united with the empire. Henry was to do homage
to the pope on his son's behalf, to go to Italy in person or send
thither a competent force, and to reimburse the pope for the large
sums expended by him in the prosecution of the war. In return the
English and Scottish proceeds of the crusading tenth, imposed on
the clergy at Lyons, were to be paid to Henry. On October 18, 1255,
a cardinal invested Edmund with a ring that symbolised his
appointment. Henry stood before the altar and swore by St.
Edward that he would himself go to Apulia, as soon as he could
safely pass through France.
The treaty remained a dead letter. Henry found it quite
impossible to raise either the men or the money promised, and
abandoned any idea of visiting Sicily in person. Meanwhile Naples
and Sicily were united in support of Manfred, and discomfited the
feeble forces of the papal legates who acted against him in
Edmund's name. At last the Archbishop of Messina came from the pope
with an urgent request for payment of the promised sums. It was in
vain that Henry led forth his son, clothed in Apulian dress, before
the Lenten parliament of 1257, and begged the magnates to enable
him to redeem his bond. When they heard the king's speech "the ears
of all men tingled". Nothing could be got save from the clergy, so
that Henry was quite unable to meet his obligations. He besought
Alexander to give him time, to make terms with Manfred, to release
Edmund from his debts on condition of ceding a large part of Apulia
to the Church,—to do anything in short save insist upon the
original contract. The pope deferred the payment, but the respite
did Henry no good. Edmund's Sicilian monarchy vanished into
nothing, when, early in 1258, Manfred was crowned king at Palermo.
Before the end of the year, Alexander cancelled the grant of Sicily
to Edmund. Yet his demands for the discharge of Henry's obligations
had contributed not a little towards focussing the gathering
discontent.1
1 For Edmund's Sicilian claims, see W.E. Rhodes'
article on Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, in the English
Historical Review, x. (1895), 20-27.
While Henry was seeking the Sicilian crown for his son, his
brother Richard was elected to the German throne. Since William of
Holland's death in January, 1256, the German magnates, divided
between the Hohenstaufen and the papalist parties, had hesitated
for nearly a year as to the choice of his successor. As neither
party was able to secure the election of its own partisan, a
compromise was mooted. At last the name of Richard of Cornwall was
brought definitely forward. He was of high rank and unblemished
reputation; a friend of the pope yet a kinsman of the Hohenstaufen;
he was moderate and conciliatory; he had enough money to bribe the
electors handsomely, and he was never likely to be so
deeply rooted in Germany as to stand in the way of the princes of
the empire. The Archbishop of Cologne became his paid partisan, and
the Count Palatine of the Rhine accepted his candidature on
conditions. The French party set up as his rival Alfonso X. of
Castile, who, despite his newly formed English alliance, was quite
willing to stand against Richard. At last, in January, 1257, the
votes of three electors, Cologne, Mainz, and the Palatine, were
cast for Richard, who also obtained the support of Ottocar, King of
Bohemia. However, in April, Trier, Saxony, and Brandenburg voted
for Alfonso. The double election of two foreigners perpetuated the
Great Interregnum for some sixteen years. Alfonso's title was only
an empty show, but Richard took his appointment seriously. He made
his way to Germany, and was crowned King of the Romans on May 17,
1257, at Aachen. He remained in the country nearly eighteen months,
and succeeded in establishing his authority in the Rhineland,
though beyond that region he never so much as showed his face.1
The elevation of his brother to the highest dignity in Christendom
was some consolation to Henry for the Sicilian failure.
1 See for Richard's career, Koch's Richard
von Cornwallis, 1209-1257, and the article on Richard, King
of the Romans, in the Dictionary of National
Biography.
The nation was disgusted to see maladministration grow worse and
worse; the nobles were indignant at the ever-increasing sway of the
foreigners; and several years of bad harvests, high prices, rain,
flood, and murrain sharpened the chronic misery of the poor. The
withdrawal of Earl Richard to his new kingdom deprived the king and
nation of an honourable if timid counsellor, though a more capable
leader was at last provided in the disgraced governor of Gascony.
Simon still deeply resented the king's ingratitude for his
services, and had become enough of an Englishman to sympathise with
the national feelings. Since his dismissal in 1253 he had held
somewhat aloof from politics. He knew so well that his interests
centred in England that he declined the offer of the French regency
on the death of Blanche of Castile. He prosecuted his rights over
Bigorre with characteristic pertinacity, and lawsuits about his
wife's jointure from her first husband exacerbated his relations
with Henry. It cannot, however, be said that the two were as yet
fiercely hostile. Simon went to Henry's help in Gascony in 1254,
served on various missions and was nominated on others from which
he withdrew. His chosen occupations during these years of
self-effacement were religious rather than political; his dearest
comrades were clerks rather than barons.
Among Montfort's closer intimates, Bishop Grosseteste was
removed by death in 1253. But others of like stamp still remained,
such as Adam Marsh, the Franciscan mystic, whose election to the
see of Ely was quashed by the malevolence of the court; Eudes
Rigaud, the famous Archbishop of Rouen, and Walter of Cantilupe,
Bishop of Worcester, who formed a connecting link between the
aristocracy and the Church. Despite the ineffectiveness of the
clerical opposition to the papacy, the spirit of independence
expressed in Grosseteste's protests had not yet deserted the
churchmen. Clerks had felt the pinch of the papal exactions, had
been bled to the uttermost to support the Sicilian candidature, and
had seen aliens and non-residents usurping their revenues and their
functions. More timid and less cohesive than the barons, they had
quicker brains, more ideas, deeper grievances, and better means of
reaching the masses. If resentment of the Sicilian candidature was
the spark that fired the train, the clerical opposition showed the
barons the method of successful resistance. The rejection of
Henry's demands for money in the assemblies of 1257 started the
movement that spread to the baronage in the parliaments of 1258. In
the two memorable gatherings of that year the discontent, which had
smouldered for a generation, at last burst into flame. In the next
chapter we shall see in what fashion the fire kindled.
The futility of the political history of the weary middle period
of the reign suggests, to those who make the history of the state
the criterion of every aspect of the national fortunes, a
corresponding barrenness and lack of interest in other aspects of
national life. Yet a remedy for Henry's misrule was only found
because the age of political retrogression was in all other fields
of action an epoch of unexampled progress. The years during which
the strong centralised government of the Angevin kings was breaking
down under Henry's weak rule were years which, to the historian of
civilisation, are among the most fruitful in our annals. In vivid
contrast to the tale of misrule, the historian can turn to the revival
of religious and intellectual life, the growing delight in ideas
and knowledge, the consummation of the best period of art, and the
spread of a nobler civilisation which make the middle portion of
the thirteenth century the flowering time of English medieval life.
It is part of this strange contrast that Henry, the obstacle to all
political progress, was himself a chief supporter of the religious
and intellectual movements which were so deeply influencing the
age.
Much has been said of the alien invasion, and of the strong
national opposition it excited. But insularity is not a good thing
in itself, and the natural English attitude to the foreigners
tended to confound good and bad alike in a general condemnation.
Even the Savoyards were by no means as evil as the English thought
them, and Henry in welcoming his kinsmen was not merely moved by
selfish and unworthy motives; he believed that he was showing his
openness to ideas and his welcome to all good things from
whencesoever they came. There were, in fact, two tendencies,
antagonistic yet closely related, which were operative, not only in
England but all over western Europe, during this period. Nations,
becoming conscious and proud of their unity, dwelt, often
unreasonably, on the points wherein they differed from other
peoples, and strongly resented alien interference. At the same time
the closer relations between states, the result of improved
government, better communications, increased commercial and social
intercourse, the strengthening of common ideals, and the
development of cosmopolitan types of the knight, the scholar, and
the priest, were deepening the union of western Christendom on
common lines. Neither the political nor the military nor the
ecclesiastical ideals of the early middle ages were based upon
nationality, but rather on that ecumenical community of tradition
which still made the rule of Rome, whether in Church or State, a
living reality. In the thirteenth century the papal tradition was
still at its height. The jurisdiction of the papal curia
implied a universal Christian commonwealth. World-wide religious
orders united alien lands together by ties more spiritual than
obedience to the papal lawyers. The academic ideal was another and
a fresh link that connected the nations together. To the ancient
reasons for union—symbolised by the living Latin speech of
all clerks, of all scholars, of all engaged in serious affairs-were
added the newer bonds of connexion involved in the common knightly
and social ideals, in the general spread of a common art and a
common vernacular language and literature.
As Latin expressed the one series of ties, so did French
represent the other. The France of St. Louis meant two things. It
meant, of course, the French state and the French nationality, but
it meant a great deal more than that. The influence of the French
tongue and French ideals was wider than the political influence of
the French monarchy. French was the common language of knighthood,
of policy, of the literature that entertained lords and ladies, of
the lighter and less technical sides of the cosmopolitan culture
which had its more serious embodiments in Latin. To the Englishman
of the thirteenth century the French state was the enemy; but the
English baron denounced France in the French tongue, and leant a
ready ear to those aspects of life which, cosmopolitan in reality,
found their fullest exposition in France and among French-speaking
peoples. In the age which saw hostility to Frenchmen become a
passion, a Frenchman like Montfort could become the champion of
English patriotism, English scholars could readily quit their
native land to study at Paris, the French vernacular literature was
the common property of the two peoples, and French words began to
force their way into the stubborn vocabulary of the English
language, which for two centuries had almost entirely rejected
these alien elements. In dwelling, however briefly, on the new
features which were transforming English civilisation during this
memorable period, we shall constantly see how England gained by her
ever-increasing intercourse with the continent, by necessarily
sharing in the new movements which had extended from the continent
to the island, no longer, as in the eleventh century, to be
described as a world apart. Neither the coming of the friars, nor
the development of university life and academic schools of
philosophy, theology, and natural science, nor the triumph of
gothic art, nor the spread of vernacular literature, not even the
scholarly study of English law nor the course of English political
development-not one of these movements could have been what it was
without the close interconnexion of the various parts of the
European commonwealth, which was becoming more homogeneous at the
same time that its units were acquiring for themselves sped
characteristics of their own.
In the early days of Henry III.'s reign, a modest alien invasion
anticipated the more noisy coming of the Poitevin or the
Provençal. The most remarkable development of the
"religious" life that the later middle age was to witness had just
been worked out in Italy. St. Francis of Assisi had taught the cult
of absolute poverty, and his example held up to his followers the
ideal of the thorough and literal imitation of Christ's life. Thus
arose the early beginnings of the Minorite or Franciscan rule. St.
Dominic yielded to the fascination of the Umbrian enthusiast, and
inculcated on his Order of Preachers a complete renunciation of
worldly goods which made a society, originally little more than a
new type of canons regular, a mendicant order like the Franciscans,
bound to interpret the monastic vow of poverty with such
literalness as to include corporate as well as individual
renunciation of possessions, so that the order might not own lands
or goods, and no member of it could live otherwise than by labour
or by alms. In the second chapter of the Dominican order, at
Whitsuntide, 1221, an organisation into provinces was carried out;
and among the eight provinces, each with its prior, then
instituted, was the province of England, where no preaching friar
had hitherto set foot, and over it Gilbert of Freynet was appointed
prior. Then Dominic withdrew to Bologna, where he died on August 6.
Within a few days of the saint's death, Friar Gilbert with thirteen
companions made his way to England. In the company of Peter des
Roches the Dominican pioneers went to Canterbury, where Archbishop
Langton was then residing. At the archbishop's request Gilbert
preached in a Canterbury church, and Langton was so much delighted
by his teaching that henceforth he had a special affection for the
new order. From Canterbury the friars journeyed to London and
Oxford. Mindful of the work of their leaders at Paris and Bologna,
they built their first English chapel, house, and schools in the
university town. Soon these proved too small for them, and they had
to seek ampler quarters outside the walls. From these beginnings
the Dominicans spread over England.
The Franciscans quickly followed the Dominicans. On September
10, 1224, there landed at Dover a little band of four clerks and five
laymen, sent by St. Francis himself to extend the new teaching into
England. At their head was the Italian, Agnellus of Pisa, a deacon,
formerly warden of the Parisian convent, who was appointed
provincial minister in England. His three clerical companions were
all Englishmen, though the five laymen were Italians or Frenchmen.
Like the Dominican pioneers, the Franciscan missionaries first went
to Canterbury, where the favour of Simon Langton, the archdeacon,
did for them what the goodwill of his brother Stephen had done for
their precursors. Leaving some of their number at Canterbury, four
of the Franciscans went on to London, and thence a little later two
of them set out for Oxford. Alike at London and at Oxford, they
found a cordial welcome from the Dominicans, eating in their
refectories, and sleeping in their dormitories, until they were
able to erect modest quarters in both places. The brethren of the
new order excited unbounded enthusiasm. Necessity and choice
combined to compel them to interpret their vow of poverty as St.
Francis would have wished. They laboured with their own hands at
the construction of their humble churches. The friars at Oxford
knew the pangs of debt and hunger, rejected pillows as a vain
luxury, and limited the use of boots and shoes to the sick and
infirm. The faithful saw the brethren singing songs as they picked
their way over the frozen mud or hard snow, blood marking the track
of their naked feet, without their being conscious of it. The
joyous radiance of Francis himself illuminated the lives of his
followers. "The friars," writes their chronicler, "were so full of
fun among themselves that a deaf mute could hardly refrain from
laughter at seeing them." With the same glad spirit they laboured
for the salvation of souls, the cure of sickness, and the relief of
distress. The emotional feeling of the age quickly responded to
their zeal. Within a few years other houses had arisen at
Gloucester, at Nottingham, at Stamford, at Worcester, at
Northampton, at Cambridge, at Lincoln, at Shrewsbury. In a
generation there was hardly a town of importance in England that
had not its Franciscan convent, and over against it a rival
Dominican house.
The esteem felt for the followers of Francis and Dominic led to
an extraordinary extension of the mendicant type. New orders of
friars arose, preserving the essential attribute of absolute
poverty, though differing from each other and from the two
prototypes in various particulars. Some of these lesser orders
found their way to England. In the same year as Agnellus, there
came to England the Trinitarian friars, called also the Maturins,
from the situation of their first house in Paris, an order whose
special function was the redemption of captives. In 1240 returning
crusaders brought back with them the first Carmelite friars, for
whom safer quarters had to be found than in their original abodes
in Syria. This society spread widely, and in 1287, to the disgust
of the older monks, it laid aside the party-coloured habit, forced
upon it in derision by the infidels, and adopted the white robe,
which gave them their popular name of White Friars. Hard upon
these, in 1244, came also the Crutched Friars, so called from the
red cross set upon their backs or breasts; but these were never
deeply rooted in England. The multiplication of orders of friars
became an abuse, so that, at the Council of Lyons of 1245, Innocent
IV abolished all save four. Besides Dominicans and Franciscans the
pope only continued the Carmelites, and an order first seen in
England a few years later, the Austin friars or the hermits of the
order of St. Augustine. These made up the traditional four orders
of friars of later history. Yet even the decree of a council could
not stay the growth of new mendicant types. In 1257 the Friars of
the Penance of Jesus Christ, popularly styled Friars of the Sack,
from their coarse sackcloth garb, settled down in London, exempted
by papal dispensation from the fate of suppression; and even later
than this King Richard's son, Edmund of Cornwall, established a
community of Bonhommes at Ashridge in Buckinghamshire.
The friars were not recluses, like the older orders, but active
preachers and teachers of the people. The parish clergy seldom held
a strong position in medieval life. The estimation in which the
monastic ideal was held limited their influence. They were, as a
rule, not much raised above the people among whom they laboured. If
the parish priest were a man of rank or education, he was too often
a non-resident and a pluralist, bestowing little personal attention
on his parishioners. Nor were the numerous parishes served by monks
in much better plight. The monastery took the tithes and somehow
provided for the services; but the efforts of Grosseteste to secure
the establishment of permanent stipendiary vicarages in his diocese
exemplify the reluctance of the religious to give their
appropriations the benefit of permanent pastors, paid on an
adequate scale. It was an exceptional thing for the parish
clergymen to do more than discharge perfunctorily the routine
duties of their office, and preaching was almost unknown among
them. The friars threw themselves into pastoral work with such
devotion as to compel the reluctant admiration of their natural
rivals, the monks. "At first," says Matthew Paris,1 "the
Preachers and the Minorites lived a life of poverty and extreme
sanctity. They busied themselves in preaching, hearing confessions,
the recital of divine service, in teaching and study. They embraced
voluntary poverty for God's sake, abandoning all their worldly
goods and not even reserving for themselves their food for
to-morrow." A special field of labour was in the crowded suburbs of
the larger towns, where so often they chose to erect their first
convents. The care of the sick and of lepers was their peculiar
function. Their sympathy and charity carried everything before
them, and they remained the chief teachers of the poor down to the
Reformation. They ingratiated themselves with the rich as much as
with the poor. Henry III. and Edward selected mendicants as their
confessors. The strongest and holiest of the bishops, Grosseteste,
became their most active friend. Simon of Montfort sought the
advice and friendship of a friar like Adam Marsh. The mere fact
that Stephen Langton and Peter des Roches were their first patrons
in England shows how they appealed alike to the best and worst
clerical types of the time.
1Chron. Maj., v., 194.
Men and women of all ranks, while still living in the world and
fulfilling their ordinary occupations, associated themselves to the
mendicant brotherhoods. Besides these tertiaries, as they
were called, still wider circles sought the friars' direction in
all spiritual matters and showed eagerness to be buried within
their sanctuaries. Nor did the friars limit themselves to pastoral
care. They won a unique place in the intellectual history of the
time. They made themselves the spokesmen of all the movements of
the age. They were eager to make peace, and Agnellus himself
mediated between Henry III. and the earl marshal. They were the
strenuous preachers of the crusades, whether against the infidel or
against Frederick II. The Franciscans taught a new and more
methodical devotion to the Virgin Mother. The friars upheld the
highest papal claims, were constantly selected as papal agents and
tax-gatherers, and yet even this did not deprive them of their
influence over Englishmen. Their zeal for truth often made them
defenders of unpopular causes, and it was much to their honour that
they did not hesitate to incur the displeasure of the Londoners by
their anxiety to save innocent Jews accused of the murder of
Christian children. The parish clergy hated and envied them as
successful rivals, and bitterly resented the privilege which they
received from Alexander IV of hearing confessions throughout the
world. Not less strong was the hostility of the monastic orders
which is often expressed in Matthew Paris's free-spoken abuse of
them. They were accused of terrorising dying men out of their
possessions, of laxity in the confessional, of absolving their
friends too easily, of overweening ambition and restless
meddlesomeness. They were violent against heretics and enemies of
the Church. They answered hate with hate. They despised the
seculars as drones and the monks as lazy and corrupt. The
dissensions between the various orders of friars, and particularly
between the sober and intellectual Dominicans and the radical and
mystic Franciscans, were soon as bitter as those between monks and
friars, or monks and seculars. But when all allowances have been
made, the good that they wrought far outbalanced the evil, and in
England at least, the mendicant orders exhibited a nobler
conception of religion, and of men's duly to their fellowmen than
had as yet been set before the people. If the main result of their
influence was to strengthen that cosmopolitan conception of
Christendom of which the papacy was the head and the friars the
agents, their zeal for righteousness often led them beyond their
own rigid platform, and Englishmen honoured the wandering friar as
the champion of the nation's cause.
Like the religious orders, the universities were part of the
world system and only indirectly represented the struggling
national life. The ferment of the twelfth century revival
crystallised groups of masters or doctors into guilds called
universities, with a strong class tradition, rigid codes of rules,
and
intense corporate spirit. The schools at Oxford, whose continuous
history can be traced from the days of Henry II., had acquired a
considerable reputation by the time that his grandson had ascended
the throne. Oxford university, with an autonomous constitution of
its own since 1214, was presided over by a chancellor who,
though in a sense the representative of the distant diocesan at
Lincoln, was even in the earliest times the head of the scholars,
and no mere delegate of the bishop. Five years earlier the Oxford
schools were sufficiently vigorous to provoke a secession, from
which the first faint beginnings of a university at Cambridge
arose. A generation later there were other secessions to Salisbury
and Northampton, but neither of these schools succeeded in
maintaining themselves. Cambridge itself had a somewhat languid
existence throughout the whole of the thirteenth century, and was
scarcely recognised as a studium generale until the bull of
John XXII. in 1318 made its future position secure. In early days
the university owed nothing to endowments, buildings, social
prestige, or tradition. The two essentials was the living voice of
the graduate teacher and the concourse of students desirous to be
taught. Hence migrations were common and stability only gradually
established. When, late in Henry III.'s reign, the chancellor,
Walter of Merton, desired to set up a permanent institution for the
encouragement of poor students, he hesitated whether to establish
it at Oxford, or Cambridge, or in his own Surrey village. Oxford,
though patriots coupled it with Paris and Bologna, only gradually
rose into repute. But before the end of Henry III.'s reign it had
won an assured place among the great universities of western
Europe, though lagging far behind that of the supreme schools of
Paris.
The growing fame of the university of Oxford was a matter of
national importance. Down to the early years of the thirteenth
century a young English clerk who was anxious to study found his
only career abroad, and was too often cut off altogether from his
mother country. Among the last of this type were the Paris
mathematician, John of Holywood or Halifax, Robert Curzon,
cardinal, legate, theologian, and crusader, and Alexander of Hales.
Stephen Langton, who did important work in revising the text of the
Vulgate, might well have been one of those lost to England but for
the wisdom of Innocent III who restored him, in
the fulness of his reputation and powers, to the service of the
English Church. Not many years younger than Langton was his
successor Edmund of Abingdon, but the difference was enough to make
the younger primate a student of the Oxford schools in early life.
Though he left Oxford for Paris, Edmund returned to an active
career in England, when experience convinced him of the vanity of
scholastic success. Bishop Grosseteste, another early Oxford
teacher of eminence, probably studied at Paris, for so late as 1240
he held up to the Oxford masters of theology the example of their
Paris brethren for their imitation. The double allegiance of Edmund
and Grosseteste was typical. A long catalogue of eminent names
adorned the annals of Oxford in the thirteenth century, but the
most distinguished of her earlier sons were drawn away from her by
the superior attractions of Paris. England furnished at least her
share of the great names of thirteenth century scholasticism, but
of very few of these could it be said that their main obligation
was to the English university. It was at Paris that the academic
organisation developed which Oxford adopted. At Paris the great
intellectual conflicts of the century were fought. There the
ferment seethed round that introduction of Aristotle's teaching
from Moorish sources which led to the outspoken pantheism of an
Amaury of Bène. There also was the reconciliation effected
between the new teacher and the old faith which made Aristotle the
pillar of the new scholasticism that was to justify by reason the
ways of God to man. In Paris also was fought the contest between
the aggressive mendicant friars and the secular doctors whom they
wished to supplant in the divinity schools.
There is little evidence of even a pale reflection of these
struggles in contemporary Oxford. English scholars bore their full
share in the fight. It was the Englishman Curzon who condemned the
heresies of Amaury of Bène. Another Englishman, Alexander of
Hales, issued in his Summa Theologiæ the first effective
reconciliation of Aristotelian metaphysic with Christian doctrine
which his Paris pupils, Thomas Aquinas, the Italian, and Albert the
Great, the German, were to work out in detail in the next
generation. Hales was the first secular doctor in Europe who in
1222, in the full pride of his powers, abandoned his position in
the university to embrace the voluntary poverty of the Franciscans
and resume his teaching, not in the regular schools but in a
Minorite convent. And at the same time another English doctor at
Paris, John of St. Giles, notable as a physician as well as a
theologian, dramatically marked his conversion to the Dominican
order by assuming its habit in the midst of a sermon on the virtues
of poverty. All these famous Englishmen worked and taught at Paris,
and it was only a generation later that their successors could
establish on the Thames the traditions so long upheld on the banks
of the Seine.
The establishment of the Dominicans and Franciscans at Oxford
gave an immense impetus to the activity of the university. The
Franciscans appointed as the first lector of their Oxford
convent the famous secular teacher Grosseteste, who ever after held
the Minorites in the closest estimation. Grosseteste was the
greatest scholar of his day, knowing Greek and Hebrew as well as
the accustomed studies of the period. A clear and independent
thinker, he was not, like so many of his contemporaries, overborne
by the weight of authority, but appealed to observation and
experience in terms which make him the precursor of Roger Bacon.
Grosseteste's successor as lector was himself a Minorite,
Adam Marsh, whose reputation was so great that Grosseteste was
afraid to leave him when sick in a French town, lest the Paris
masters should persuade him to teach in their schools. Adam's
loyalty to his native university withstood any such temptation, and
from that time Oxford began to hold up its head against Paris. Even
before this, Grosseteste persuaded John of St. Giles to transfer
his teaching from Paris to Oxford, where he remained for the rest
of his life.
The intense intellectual activity of the thirteenth century
flowed in more than one channel, and Englishmen took their full
share both in building up and in destroying. Two Englishmen of the
next generation mark in different ways the reaction against the
moderate Aristotelianism and orthodox rationalism which their
countryman Hales first brought into vogue. These were the
Franciscan friars, Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus. Bacon, though he
studied at Paris as well as at Oxford, is much more closely
identified with England than with the Continent. His sceptical,
practical intellect led him to heap scorn on Hales and his
followers and to plunge into audacities of speculation which cost him
long seclusions in his convent and enforced abstinence from writing
and study. In his war against the Aristotelians, the intrepid friar
upheld recourse to experiment and observation as superior to
deference to authority, in language which stands in strange
contrast to the traditions of the thirteenth century. Grosseteste,
who also had preferred the teachings of experience to the appeal to
the sages of the past, was the only academic leader that escaped
Bacon's scathing censure. When his order kept him silent, Roger was
bidden to resume his pen by Pope Clement IV. A generation still
later, Duns Scotus, probably a Lowland Scot, who taught at Paris
and died at Cologne in 1308, emphasised, sharply enough, but in
less drastic fashion, the reaction against the teaching of Hales
and Aquinas, by accepting a dualism between reason and authority
that broke away from the Thomist tradition of the thirteenth
century and prepared the way for the scholastic decadence of the
fourteenth. After France, England took a leading part in all these
movements; and even in France English scholars had a large share in
making that land the special home of the Studium, as Italy
was of the Sacerdotium and Germany of the
Imperium.
This intellectual ferment had its results on practical life.
Though the university was cosmopolitan, the individual members of
it were not the less good citizens. A patriot like Grosseteste
strove to his uttermost to keep Englishmen for Oxford or to win
them back from Paris. Oxford clerks fought the battle of England
against the legate Otto, and we shall see them siding with
Montfort. The eminently practical temper of the academic class
could not neglect the world of action for the abstract pursuit of
science. Eager as men were to know, to prove, and to inquire, the
age had little of the mystical temperament about it. The studies
which made for worldly success, such as civil and canon law,
attracted the thousands for whom philosophy or theology had little
attraction. Never before was there a career so fully opened to
talent. The academic teacher's fame took him from the lecture-room
to the court, from the university to the episcopal throne, and so
it was that the university influenced action almost as profoundly
as it influenced thought, and affected all classes of society
alike. The struggles of poor students like Edmund of Abingdon or
Grosseteste must not make us think that the
universities of this period were exclusively frequented by humble
scholars. The academic career of a rich baron's son like Thomas of
Cantilupe, living in his own hired house at Paris with a train of
chaplains and tutors, receiving the visits of the French king, and
feeding poor scholars with the remnants from his table, is as
characteristic as the more common picture of the student begging
his way from one seat of learning to another, and suffering the
severest privations rather than desert his studies. Yet the
function of the studium as promoting a healthy circulation
between the various orders of medieval society, must not be
ignored.
Partly to help on the poor, partly to encourage men to devote
themselves to the pursuit of knowledge, endowments began to arise
which soon enhanced the splendour of universities though they
lessened their mobility and their freedom. The mendicant convents
at Paris and Oxford prepared the way for secular foundations, at
first small and insignificant, like that which, in the days of
Henry III., John Balliol established at Oxford for the maintenance
of poor scholars, but soon increasing in magnitude and distinction.
The great college set up by St. Louis' confessor at Paris for the
endowment of scholars, desirous of studying the unlucrative but
vital subject of theology, was soon imitated by the chancellor of
Henry III. Side by side with Robert of Sorbon's college of 1257,
arose Walter of Merton's foundation of 1263, and twenty years later
Bishop Balsham's college of Peterhouse extended the "rule of
Merton" to Cambridge.
The academic movement was not all clear gain. The humanism, of
the twelfth century was crushed beneath the weight of the
specialised science and encyclopædic learning of the thirteenth.
We should seek in vain among most theologians or the philosophers
of our period for any spark of literary art; and the tendency
dominant in them affected for evil all works written in Latin. Even
the historians show a falling away from the example of William of
Malmesbury or of Roger of Hoveden. The one English chronicler of
the thirteenth century who is a considerable man of letters,
Matthew Paris, belongs to the early half of it, before the academic
tradition was fully established, and even with him prolixity
impairs the art without injuring the colour of his work. The age of
Edward I., the great time of triumphant scholasticism, is recorded
in chronicles so dreary that it is hard to make the dry bones live.
Walter of Hemingburgh, the most attractive historian of the time,
belongs to the next generation: and his excellencies are only great
in comparison with his fellows. Something of this decadence may be
attributed to the falling away of the elder monastic types, whose
higher life withered up from want of able recruits, for the secular
and mendicant careers offered opportunities so stimulating that few
men of purpose, or earnest spiritual character, cared to enter a
Benedictine or a Cistercian house of religion. Something more may
be assigned to the growing claims of the vulgar tongue on literary
aspirants. But the chief cause of the literary defects of
thirteenth century writers must be set down to the doctrine that
the study of "arts"—of grammar, rhetoric and the
rest—was only worthy of schoolboys and novices, and was only
a preliminary to the specialised faculties which left little room
for artistic presentation. Science in short nearly killed
literature.
It was the same with the vulgar tongues as with Latin. French
remained the common language of the higher classes of English
society, and the history of French literature belongs to the
history of the western world rather than to that of England. The
share taken in it by English-born writers is less important than in
the great age of romance when the contact of Celt and Norman on
British soil added the Arthurian legend to the world's stock of
poetic material. The practical motive, which destroyed the art of
so many Latin writers, impaired the literary value of much written
in the vernacular. We have technical works in French and even in
English, such as Walter of Henley's treatise on Husbandry,
composed in French for the guidance of stewards of manors, and
translated, it is said by Grosseteste, into English for the benefit
of a wider public. Grosseteste is also said to have drawn up in
French a handbook of rules for the management of a great estate,
and he certainly wrote French poetry. The legal literature, written
in Latin or French, and illustrated by such names as Bracton,
Britton, and "Fleta," shows that there was growing up a school of
earnest students of English law who, though anxious, like Bracton,
to bring their conclusions under the rules of Roman jurisprudence,
began to treat their science with an independence which secured
for English custom the opportunity of independent development. Of
more literary interest than such technicalities were the rhyming
chronicles, handed on from the previous age, of which one of the
best, the recently discovered history of the great William Marshal,
has already been noticed. The spontaneity of this poem proves that
its language was still the natural speech of the writer, and impels
its French editor to claim for it a French origin. As the century
grew older there was no difficulty in deciding whether French works
were written by Englishmen or Frenchmen. The Yorkshire French of
Peter Langtoft's Chronicle, and the jargon of the Year
Books, attest how the political separation of the two lands,
and the preponderance in northern France of the dialect of Paris,
placed the insular French speech in strong contrast to the language
of polite society beyond the Channel. Yet barbarous as Anglo-French
became, it retained the freshness of a living tongue, and gained
some ground at the expense of Latin, notably in the law courts and
in official documents.
English was slowly making its way upwards. There was a public
ready to read vernacular books, and not at home with French. For
their sake a great literature of translations and adaptations was
made, beginning with Layamon's English version of Wace's
Brut, which by the end of the century made the cycle of
French romance accessible to the English reader. Many works of
edification and devotion were written in English; and Robert of
Gloucester's rhyming history appealed to a larger public than the
Yorkshire French of Langtoft. It is significant of the trend of
events that the early fourteenth century saw Langtoft himself done
into English by Robert Mannyng, of Bourne. While as yet no
continuous works of high merit were written in English, there was
no lack of experiments, of novelties, and of adaptations. Much
evidence of depth of feeling, power of expression, and careful art
lies hidden away in half-forgotten anonymous lyrics, satires, and
romances. The language in which these works were written was
steadily becoming more like our modern English. The dialectical
differences become less acute; the inflections begin to drop away;
the vocabulary gradually absorbs a larger romance element, and the
prosody drops from the forms of the West Saxon period into measures
and modes that reflect a living connexion with the contemporary
poetry of France. Thus, even in the literature of a not too
literary age, we find abundant tokens of that strenuous national
life which was manifesting itself in so many different ways.
Art rather than literature reflected the deeper currents of the
thirteenth century. Architecture, the great art of the middle age,
was in its perfection. The inchoate gothic which the Cistercians
brought from Burgundy to the Yorkshire dales, and William of Sens
transplanted from his birthplace to Canterbury, was superseded by
the more developed art of St. Hugh's choir at Lincoln. In the next
generation the new style, imported from northern France, struck out
ways of its own, less soaring, less rigidly logical, yet of
unequalled grace and picturesqueness, such as we see in Salisbury
cathedral, which altogether dates from the reign of Henry III. Here
also, as in literature, foreign models stood side by side with
native products. Henry III.'s favourite foundation at Westminster
reproduced on English soil the towering loftiness, the vaulted
roofs, the short choir, and the ring of apsidal chapels, of the
great French minsters. This was even more emphatically the case
with the decorations, the goldsmith's and metal work, the
sculpture, painting, and glass, which the best artists of France
set up in honour of the English king's favourite saint. In these
crafts English work would not as yet bear a comparison with
foreign, and even the glories of the statuary of the façade
of Wells cannot approach the sculptured porches of Amiens or Paris.
As the century advanced some of the fashions of the French
builders, notably as regards window tracery, were taken up in the
early "Decorated" of the reign of Edward I.; and here the claims of
English to essential equality with French building can perhaps be
better substantiated than in the infancy of the art. But all these
comparisons are misleading. The impulse to gothic art came to
England from France, like the impulse to many other things. Its
working out was conducted on English local lines, ever becoming
more divergent from those of the prototype, though not seldom
stimulated by the constant intercourse of the two lands.
The new gothic art enriched the medieval town with a splendour
of buildings hitherto unknown, which symbolised the growth of
material prosperity as well as of a keener artistic appreciation. In
the greater towns the four orders of friars erected their large and
plain churches, designed as halls for preaching to great
congregations. The development of domestic architecture is even
more significant than the growth of ecclesiastical and military
buildings. Stone houses were no longer the rare luxuries of Jews or
nobles. Never were the towns more prosperous and more energetic.
They were now winning for themselves both economic and
administrative independence. Magnates, such as Randolph of Chester,
followed the king's example by granting charters to the smaller
towns. Even the lesser boroughs became not merely the abodes of
agriculturists but the homes of organised trading communities. It
was the time when the merchant class first began to manifest itself
in politics, and the power of capital to make itself felt. Capital
was almost monopolised by Jews, Lombards, or Tuscans, and the
fierce English hatred of the foreigner found a fresh expression in
the persecution of the Hebrew money-lenders and in the increasing
dislike felt for the alien bankers and merchants who throve at
Englishmen's expense. The fact that so much of English trade with
the continent was still in the hands of Germans, Frenchmen, and
Italians made this feeling the more intense. But there were limits
even to the ill-will towards aliens. The foreigner could make
himself at home in England, and the rapid naturalisation of a
Montfort in the higher walks of life is paralleled by the
absorption into the civic community of many a Gascon or German
merchant, like that Arnold Fitz Thedmar,1 a Bremen trader's son,
who became alderman of London and probably chronicler of its
history. Yet even the greatest English towns did not become strong
enough to cut themselves off from the general life of the people.
They were rather a new element in that rich and purposeful nation
that had so long been enduring the rule of Henry of Winchester. The
national energy spurned the feebleness of the court, and the time
was at hand when the nation, through its natural leaders, was to
overthrow the wretched system of misgovernment under which it had
suffered. Political retrogression was no longer to bar national
progress.
1 See for Arnold the Chronica majorum et
vicecomitum Londoniarum in Liber de antiquis legibus,
and Riley's introduction to his translation of Chronicles of the
Mayors and Sheriffs of London (1863).
