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Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "English History"

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Title: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "English History"

Author: Various


        
Release date: February 10, 2011 [eBook #35236]
                Most recently updated: January 7, 2021

Language: English

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Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net









Transcriber's notes:

(1) Characters following a carat (^) were printed in superscript.

(2) Side-notes were relocated to function as titles of their respective
      paragraphs.

(3) Macrons and breves above letters and dots below letters were not
      inserted.

(4) The following typographical errors have been corrected:

    ARTICLE ENGLISH HISTORY: "Though he disguised himself, he was
      detected by his old enemy and imprisoned." 'himself' amended from
      'himelf'.

    ARTICLE ENGLISH HISTORY: "Having so done they dispersed, not
      guessing that Lancaster had yielded so easily because he was set on
      undoing their work the moment that they were gone." 'Lancaster'
      amended from 'Lancester'.

    ARTICLE ENGLISH HISTORY: "... but purely and solely to attaint his
      brother, the duke of Clarence, whom he had resolved to destroy."
      'the duke' was missing.

    ARTICLE ENGLISH HISTORY: "... so as to appeal to the
      constituencies, which did not always share in the passions of their
      representatives." 'the' appeared twice.

    ARTICLE ENGLISH HISTORY: "The arrogant spirit of Englishmen made
      them contemptuous towards the colonists, and the desire to thrust
      taxation upon others than themselves made the new colonial
      legislation popular." 'contemptuous' amended from 'comtemptuous'.

    ARTICLE ENGLISH HISTORY: "... and was surprised by the Zulus while
      reconnoitering, created a deep and unfortunate impression."
      'reconnoitering' amended from 'reconnoitring'.




          ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA

  A DICTIONARY OF ARTS, SCIENCES, LITERATURE
           AND GENERAL INFORMATION

              ELEVENTH EDITION


             VOLUME IX, SLICE V

              English History




ARTICLES IN THIS SLICE:


  ENGLISH HISTORY




ENGLISH HISTORY.--The general account of English history which follows
should be supplemented for the earlier period by the article BRITAIN.
See also SCOTLAND, IRELAND, WALES.


I. FROM THE LANDING OF AUGUSTINE TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST (600-1066)

With the coming of Augustine to Kent the darkness which for nearly two
centuries had enwrapped the history of Britain begins to clear away.
From the days of Honorius to those of Gregory the Great the line of
vision of the annalists of the continent was bounded by the Channel. As
to what was going on beyond it, we have but a few casual gleams of
light, just enough to make the darkness visible, from writers such as
the author of the life of St Germanus, Prosper Tiro, Procopius, and
Gregory of Tours. These notices do not, for the most part, square
particularly well with the fragmentary British narrative that can be
patched together from Gildas's "lamentable book," or the confused story
of Nennius. Nor again do these British sources fit in happily with the
English annals constructed long centuries after by King Alfred's scribes
in the first edition of the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_. But from the date
when the long-lost communication between Britain and Rome was once more
resumed, the history of the island becomes clear and fairly continuous.
The gaps are neither broader nor more obscure than those which may be
found in the contemporary annals of the other kingdoms of Europe. The
stream of history in this period is narrow and turbid throughout the
West. Quite as much is known of the doings of the English as of those of
the Visigoths of Spain, the Lombards, or the later Merovingians. The 7th
century was the darkest of all the "dark ages," and England is
particularly fortunate in possessing the _Ecclesiastica historia_ of
Bede, which, though its author was primarily interested in things
religious, yet contains a copious chronicle of things secular. No
Western author, since the death of Gregory of Tours, wrote on such a
scale, or with such vigour and insight.

[Illustration: Map--Anglo-Saxon Britain 597-825.]


  Conversion of England.

The conversion of England to Christianity took, from first to last, some
ninety years (A.D. 597 to 686), though during the last thirty the
ancestral heathenism was only lingering on in remote comers of the land.
The original missionary impulse came from Rome, and Augustine is rightly
regarded as the evangelist of the English; yet only a comparatively
small part of the nation owed its Christianity directly to the mission
sent out by Pope Gregory. Wessex was won over by an independent
adventurer, the Frank Birinus, who had no connexion with the earlier
arrivals in Kent. The great kingdom of Northumbria, though its first
Christian monarch Edwin was converted by Paulinus, a disciple of
Augustine, relapsed into heathenism after his death. It was finally
evangelized from quite another quarter, by Irish missionaries brought by
King Oswald from Columba's monastery of Iona. The church that they
founded struck root, as that of Paulinus and Edwin had failed to do, and
was not wrecked even by Oswald's death in battle at the hands of Penda
the Mercian, the one strong champion of heathenism that England
produced. Moreover, Penda was no sooner dead, smitten down by Oswald's
brother Oswio at the battle of the Winwaed (A.D. 655), than his whole
kingdom eagerly accepted Christianity, and received missionaries, Irish
and Northumbrian, from the victorious Oswio. It is clear that, unlike
their king, the Mercians had no profound enthusiasm for the old gods.
Essex, which had received its first bishop from Augustine's hands but
had relapsed into heathenism after a few years, also owed its ultimate
conversion to a Northumbrian preacher, Cedd, whom Oswio lent to King
Sigeberht after the latter had visited his court and been baptized, hard
by the Roman wall, in 653.

Yet even in those English regions where the missionaries from Iona were
the founders of the Church, the representatives of Rome were to be its
organizers. In 664 the Northumbrian king Oswio, at the synod of Whitby,
declared his adhesion to the Roman connexion, whether it was that he saw
political advantage therein, or whether he realized the failings and
weaknesses of the Celtic church, and preferred the more orderly methods
of her rival. Five years later there arrived from Rome the great
organizer, Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus, who bound the hitherto
isolated churches of the English kingdoms into a well-compacted whole,
wherein the tribal bishops paid obedience to the metropolitan at
Canterbury, and met him frequently in national councils and synods.
England gained a spiritual unity long ere she attained a political
unity, for in these meetings, which were often attended by kings as well
as by prelates, Northumbrian, West Saxon and Mercian first learnt to
work together as brothers.


  The English church.

In a few years the English church became the pride of Western
Christendom. Not merely did it produce the great band of missionaries
who converted heathen Germany--Willibrord, Suidbert, Boniface and the
rest--but it excelled the other national churches in learning and
culture. It is but necessary to mention Bede and Alcuin. The first, as
has been already said, was the one true historian who wrote during the
dark time of the 7th-8th centuries; the second became the pride of the
court of Charles the Great for his unrivalled scholarship. At the coming
of Augustine England had been a barbarous country; a century and a half
later she was more than abreast of the civilization of the rest of
Europe.


  Formation of the kingdoms.

But the progress toward national unity was still a slow one. The period
when the English kingdoms began to enter into the commonwealth of
Christendom, by receiving the missionaries sent out from Rome or from
Iona, practically coincides with the period in which the occupation of
central Britain was completed, and the kingdoms of the conquerors
assumed their final size and shape. AEthelfrith, the last heathen among
the Northumbrian kings, cut off the Britons of the North from those of
the West, by winning the battle of Chester (A.D. 613), and occupying the
land about the mouths of the Mersey and the Dee. Cenwalh, the last
monarch who ascended the throne of Wessex unbaptized, carried the
boundaries of that kingdom into Mid-Somersetshire, where they halted for
a long space. Penda, the last heathen king of Mercia, determined the
size and strength of that state, by absorbing into it the territories of
the other Anglian kingdoms of the Midlands, and probably also by
carrying forward its western border beyond the Severn. By the time when
the smallest and most barbarous of the Saxon states--Sussex--accepted
Christianity in the year 686, the political geography of England had
reached a stage from which it was not to vary in any marked degree for
some 200 years. Indeed, there was nothing accomplished in the way of
further encroachment on the Celt after 686, save Ine's and Cuthred's
extension of Wessex into the valleys of the Tone and the Exe, and Offa's
slight expansion of the Mercian frontier beyond the Severn, marked by
his famous dyke. The conquests of the Northumbrian kings in Cumbria were
ephemeral; what Oswio won was lost after the death of Ecgfrith.


  The "Bretwaldas."

That the conversion of the English to Christianity had anything to do
with their slackening from the work of conquest it would be wrong to
assert. Though their wars with the Welsh were not conducted with such
ferocious cruelty as of old, and though (as the laws of Ine show) the
Celtic inhabitants of newly-won districts were no longer exterminated,
but received as the king's subjects, yet the hatred between Welsh and
English did not cease because both were now Christians. The westward
advance of the invaders would have continued, if only there had remained
to attract them lands as desirable as those they had already won. But
the mountains of Wales and the moors of Cornwall and Cumbria did not
greatly tempt the settler. Moreover, the English states, which had
seldom turned their swords against each other in the 5th or the 6th
centuries, were engaged during the 7th and the 8th in those endless
struggles for supremacy which seem so purposeless, because the hegemony
which a king of energy and genius won for his kingdom always disappeared
with his death. The "Bretwaldaship," as the English seem to have called
it, was the most ephemeral of dignities. This was but natural: conquest
can only be enforced by the extermination of the conquered, or by their
consent to amalgamate with the conquerors, or by the garrisoning of the
land that has been subdued by settlers or by military posts. None of
these courses were possible to a king of the 7th or 8th centuries: even
in their heathen days the English were not wont to massacre their beaten
kinsmen as they massacred the unfortunate Celt. After their conversion
to Christianity the idea of exterminating other English tribes grew even
more impossible. On the other hand, local particularism was so strong
that the conquered would not, at first, consent to give up their natural
independence and merge themselves in the victors. Such amalgamations
became possible after a time, when many of the local royal lines died
out, and unifying influences, of which a common Christianity was the
most powerful, sapped the strength of tribal pride. But it is not till
the 9th century that we find this phenomenon growing general. A kingdom
like Kent or East Anglia, even after long subjection to a powerful
overlord, rose and reasserted its independence immediately on hearing of
his death. His successor had to attempt a new conquest, if he felt
himself strong enough. To garrison a district that had been overrun was
impossible: the military force of an English king consisted of his
military household of _gesiths_, backed by the general levy of the
tribe. The strength of Mercia or Northumbria might be mustered for a
single battle, but could not supply a standing army to hold down the
vanquished. The victorious king had to be content with tribute and
obedience, which would cease when he died, or was beaten by a competitor
for the position of Bretwalda.


  Supremacy of Northumbria.

  Supremacy of Mercia.

In the ceaseless strife between the old English kingdoms, therefore, it
was the personality of the king which was the main factor in determining
the hegemony of one state over another. If in the 7th century the
successive great Northumbrians--Edwin, Oswald, Oswio and Ecgfrith--were
reckoned the chief monarchs of England, and exercised a widespread
influence over the southern realms, yet each had to win his supremacy by
his own sword; and when Edwin and Oswald fell before the savage heathen
Penda, and Ecgfrith was cut off by the Picts, there was a gap of anarchy
before another king asserted his superior power. The same phenomenon
was seen with regard to the Mercian kings of the 8th century; the long
reigns of the two conquerors AEthelbald and Offa covered eighty years
(716-796), and it might have been supposed that after such a term of
supremacy Mercia would have remained permanently at the head of the
English kingdoms. It was not so, AEthelbald in his old age lost his
hegemony at the battle of Burford (752), and was murdered a few years
after by his own people. Offa had to win back by long wars what his
kinsman had lost; he became so powerful that we find the pope calling
him _Rex Anglorum_, as if he were the only king in the island. He
annexed Kent and East Anglia, overawed Northumbria and Wessex, both
hopelessly faction-ridden at the time, was treated almost as an equal by
the emperor Charles the Great, and died still at the height of his
power. Yet the moment that he was dead all his vassals revolted; his
successors could never recover all that was lost. Kent once more became
a kingdom, and two successive Mercian sovereigns, Beornwulf and Ludica,
fell in battle while vainly trying to recover Offa's supremacy over East
Anglia and Wessex.


  Supremacy of Wessex.

The ablest king in England in the generation that followed Offa was
Ecgbert of Wessex, who had long been an exile abroad, and served for
thirteen years as one of the captains of Charles the Great. He beat
Beornwulf of Mercia at Ellandune (A.D. 823), permanently annexed Kent,
to whose crown he had a claim by descent, in 829 received the homage of
all the other English kings, and was for the remainder of his life
reckoned as "Bretwalda." But it is wrong to call him, as some have done,
"the first monarch of all England." His power was no greater than that
of Oswio or Offa had been, and the supremacy might perhaps have tarried
with Wessex no longer than it had tarried with Northumbria or Mercia if
it had not chanced that the Danish raids were now beginning. For these
invasions, paradoxical as it may seem, were the greatest efficient cause
in the welding together of England. They seemed about to rend the land
in twain, but they really cured the English of their desperate
particularism, and drove all the tribes to take as their common rulers
the one great line of native kings which survived the Danish storm, and
maintained itself for four generations of desperate fighting against the
invaders. On the continent the main effect of the viking invasions was
to dash the empire of Charles the Great into fragments, and to aid in
producing the numberless petty states of feudal Europe. In this island
they did much to help the transformation of the mere Bretwaldaship of
Ecgbert into the monarchy of all England.


  Danish invasions.

Already ere Ecgbert ascended the throne of Kent the new enemy had made
his first tentative appearance on the British shore. It was in the reign
of Beorhtric, Ecgbert's predecessor, that the pirates of the famous
"three ships from Heretheland" had appeared on the coast of Dorset, and
slain the sheriff "who would fain have known what manner of men they
might be." A few years later another band appeared, rising unexpectedly
from the sea to sack the famous Northumbrian monastery of Lindisfarne
(793). After that their visits came fast and furious on the shore-line
of every English kingdom, and by the end of Ecgbert's reign it was they,
and not his former Welsh and Mercian enemies, who were the old monarch's
main source of trouble. But he brought his Bretwaldaship to a good end
by inflicting a crushing defeat on them at Hingston Down, hard by the
Tamar, probably in 836, and died ere the year was out, leaving the
ever-growing problem to his son AEthelwulf.


  Influence of viking sea-power.

The cause of the sudden outpouring of the Scandinavian deluge upon the
lands of Christendom at this particular date is one of the puzzles of
history. So far as memory ran, the peoples beyond the North Sea had been
seafaring races addicted to piracy. Even Tacitus mentions their fleets.
Yet since the 5th century they had been restricting their operations to
their own shores, and are barely heard of in the chronicles of their
southern neighbours. It seems most probable that the actual cause of
their sudden activity was the conquest of the Saxons by Charles the
Great, and his subsequent advance into the peninsula of Denmark. The
emperor seemed to be threatening the independence of the North, and in
terror and resentment the Scandinavian peoples turned first to strike at
the encroaching Frank, and soon after to assail the other Christian
kingdoms which lay behind, or on the flank of, the Empire. But their
offensive action proved so successful and so profitable that, after a
short time, the whole manhood of Denmark and Norway took to the pirate
life. Never since history first began to be recorded was there such a
supreme example of the potentialities of sea-power. Civilized Europe had
been caught at a moment when it was completely destitute of a war-navy;
the Franks had never been maritime in their tastes, the English seemed
to have forgotten their ancient seafaring habits. Though their ancestors
had been pirates as fierce as the vikings of the 9th century, and though
some of their later kings had led naval armaments--Edwin had annexed for
a moment Man and Anglesea, and Ecgfrith had cruelly ravaged part of
Ireland--yet by the year 800 they appear to have ceased to be a
seafaring race. Perhaps the long predominance of Mercia, an essentially
inland state, had something to do with the fact. At any rate England was
as helpless as the Empire when first the Danish and Norwegian galleys
began to cross the North Sea, and to beat down both sides of Britain
seeking for prey. The number of the invaders was not at first very
great; their fleets were not national armaments gathered by great kings,
but squadrons of a few vessels collected by some active and enterprising
adventurer. Their original tactics were merely to land suddenly near
some thriving seaport, or rich monastery, to sack it, and to take to the
water again before the local militia could turn out in force against
them. But such raids proved so profitable that the vikings soon began to
take greater things in hand; they began to ally themselves in
confederacies: two, six or a dozen "sea-kings" would join their forces
for something more than a desultory raid. With fifty or a hundred ships
they would fall upon some unhappy region, harry it for many miles
inland, and offer battle to the landsfolk unless the latter came out in
overpowering force. And as their crews were trained warriors chosen for
their high spirit, contending with a raw militia fresh from the plough,
they were generally successful. If the odds were too great they could
always retire to their ships, put to sea, and resume their predatory
operations on some other coast three hundred miles away. As long as
their enemies were unprovided with a navy they were safe from pursuit
and annihilation. The only chance against them was that, if caught too
far from the base-fort where they had run their galleys ashore, they
might find their communication with the sea cut off, and be forced to
fight for their lives surrounded by an infuriated countryside. But in
the earlier years of their struggles with Christendom the vikings seldom
suffered a complete disaster; they were often beaten but seldom
annihilated. Ere long they grew so bold that they would stay ashore for
months, braving the forces of a whole kingdom, and sheltering themselves
in great palisaded camps on peninsulas or islands when the enemy pressed
them too hard. On well-guarded strongholds like Thanet or Sheppey in
England, Noirmoutier at the Loire mouth, or the Isle of Walcheren, they
defied the local magnates to evict them. Finally they took to wintering
on the coast of England or the Empire, a preliminary to actual
settlement and conquest. (See VIKING.)


  Progress of Danish conquest.

King Ecgbert died long ere the invaders had reached this stage of
insolence. AEthelwulf, his weak and kindly son, would undoubtedly have
lost the titular supremacy of Wessex over the other English kingdoms if
there had been in Mercia or Northumbria a strong king with leisure to
concentrate his thoughts on domestic wars. But the vikings were now
showering such blows on the northern states that their unhappy monarchs
could think of nothing but self-defence. They slew Redulf--king of
Northumbria--in 844, took London in 851, despite all the efforts of
Burgred of Mercia, and forced that sovereign to make repeated appeals
for help to AEthelwulf as his overlord. For though Wessex had its full
share of Danish attacks it met them with a vigour that was not seen in
the other realms. The defence was often, if not always, successful; and
once at least (at Aclea in 851) AEthelwulf exterminated a whole Danish
army with "the greatest slaughter among the heathen host that had been
heard of down to that day," as the Anglo-Saxon chronicler is careful to
record. But though he might ward off blows from his own realm, he was
helpless to aid Mercia or East Anglia, and still more the distant
Northumbria.

It was not, however, till after AEthelwulf's death that the attack of the
vikings developed its full strength. The fifteen years (856-871) that
were covered by the reigns of his three short-lived sons, AEthelbald,
AEthelbert and AEthelred, were the most miserable that England was to see.
Assembling in greater and ever greater confederacies, the Danes fell
upon the northern kingdoms, no longer merely to harry but to conquer and
occupy them. A league of many sea-kings which called itself the "great
army" slew the last two sovereigns of Northumbria and stormed York in
867. Some of the victors settled down there to lord it over the
half-exterminated English population. The rest continued their advance
southward. East Anglia was conquered in 870; its last king, Edmund,
having been defeated and taken prisoner, the vikings shot him to death
with arrows because he would not worship their gods. His realm was
annexed and partly settled by the conquerors. The fate of Mercia was
hardly better: its king, Burgred, by constant payment of tribute, bought
off the invaders for a space, but the eastern half of his realm was
reduced to a wilderness.

Practically masters of all that lay north of Thames, the "great army"
next moved against Wessex, the only quarter where a vigorous resistance
was still maintained against them, though its capital, Winchester, had
been sacked in 864. Under two kings named Halfdan and Bacsceg, and six
earls, they seized Reading and began to harry Berkshire, Surrey and
Hampshire. King AEthelred, the third son of AEthelwulf, came out against
them, with his young brother Alfred and all the levies of Wessex. In the
year 871 these two gallant kinsmen fought no less than six pitched
battles against the invaders. Some were victories--notably the fight of
Ashdown, where Alfred first won his name as a soldier--but the English
failed to capture the fortified camps of the vikings at Reading, and
were finally beaten at Marten ("Maeretun") near Bedwyn, where AEthelred
was mortally wounded.


  Alfred the Great.

He left young sons, but the men of Wessex crowned Alfred king, because
they needed a grown man to lead them in their desperate campaigning. Yet
his reign opened inauspiciously: defeated near Wilton, he offered in
despair to pay the vikings to depart. He must have known, from the
experience of Mercian, Northumbrian and Frankish kings, that such
blackmail only bought a short respite, but the condition of his realm
was such that even a moderate time for reorganization might prove
valuable. The enemy had suffered so much in the "year of the six
battles" that they held off for some space from Wessex, seeking easier
prey on the continent and in northern England. In 874 they harried
Mercia so cruelly that King Burgred fled in despair to Rome; the victors
divided up his realm, taking the eastern half for themselves, and
establishing in it a confederacy, whose jarls occupied the "five
boroughs" of Stamford, Lincoln, Derby, Nottingham and Leicester. But the
western half they handed over to "an unwise thegn named Ceolwulf," who
bought for a short space the precarious title of king by paying great
tribute.

Alfred employed the four years of peace, which he had bought in 871, in
the endeavour to strengthen his realm against the inevitable return of
the raiders. His wisdom was shown by the fact that he concentrated his
attention on the one device which must evidently prove effective for
defence, if only he were given time to perfect it--the building of a
national navy. He began to lay down galleys and "long ships," and hired
"pirates"--renegade vikings no doubt--to train crews for him and to
teach his men seamanship. The scheme, however, was only partly completed
when in 876 three Danish kings entered Wessex and resumed the war. But
Alfred blockaded them first in Wareham and then in Exeter. The fleet
which was coming to carry them off, or to bring them reinforcements,
fought an indecisive engagement with the English ships, and was wrecked
immediately after on the cliffs of the Isle of Purbeck, where more than
100 galleys and all their crews perished. On hearing of this disaster
the vikings in Exeter surrendered the place on being granted a free
departure.

[Illustration: Map--England, 886, after Alfred & Guthrum's Peace.]

Yet within a few months of this successful campaign Alfred was attacked
at midwinter by the main Danish army under King Guthrum. He was
apparently taken by surprise by an assault at such an unusual time of
the year, and was forced to escape with his military household to the
isle of Athelney among the marshes of the Parrett. The invaders harried
Wiltshire and Hampshire at their leisure, and vainly thought that Wessex
was at last subdued. But with the spring the English rallied: a Danish
force was cut to pieces before Easter by the men of Devonshire. A few
weeks later Alfred had issued from Athelney, had collected a large army
in Selwood, and went out to meet the enemy in the open field. He beat
them at Edington in Wiltshire, blockaded them in their great camp at
Chippenham, and in fourteen days starved them into surrender. The terms
were that they should give hostages, that they should depart for ever
from Wessex, and that their king Guthrum should do homage to Alfred as
overlord, and submit to be baptized, with thirty of his chiefs. Not only
were all these conditions punctually fulfilled, but (what is more
astonishing) the Danes had been so thoroughly cured of any desire to try
their luck against the great king that they left him practically
unmolested for fourteen years (878-892). King Guthrum settled down as a
Christian sovereign in East Anglia, with the bulk of the host that had
capitulated at Chippenham. Of the rest of the invaders one section
established a petty kingdom in Yorkshire, but those in the Midlands were
subject to no common sovereign but lived in a loose confederacy under
the jarls of the "Five Boroughs" already named above. The boundary
between English and Danes established by the peace of 878 is not
perfectly ascertainable, but a document of a few years later, called
"Alfred and Guthrum's frith," gives the border as lying from Thames
northward up the Lea to its source, then across to Bedford, and then
along the Ouse to Watling Street, the old Roman road from London to
Chester. This gave King Alfred London and Middlesex, most of
Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, and the larger half of Mercia--lands
that had never before been an integral part of Wessex, though they had
some time been tributary to her kings. They were now taken inside the
realm and governed by the ealdorman AEthelred, the king's son-in-law. The
Mercians gladly mingled with the West Saxons, and abandoned all memories
of ancient independence. Twenty years of schooling under the hand of the
Dane had taught them to forget old particularism.

Alfred's enlarged kingdom was far more powerful than any one of the
three new Danish states which lay beyond the Lea and Watling Street: it
was to be seen, ere another generation was out, that it was stronger
than all three together. But Alfred was not to see the happy day when
York and Lincoln, Colchester and Leicester, were to become mere
shire-capitals in the realm of United England.


  Alfred's reforms.

The fourteen years of comparative peace which he now enjoyed were
devoted to perfecting the military organization of his enlarged kingdom.
His fleet was reconstructed: in 882 he went out with it in person and
destroyed a small piratical squadron: in 885 we hear of it coasting all
along Danish East Anglia. But his navy was not yet strong enough to hold
off all raids: it was not till the very end of his reign that he
perfected it by building "long ships that were nigh twice as large as
those of the heathen; some had 60 oars, some more; and they were both
steadier and swifter and lighter than the others, and were shaped
neither after the Frisian nor after the Danish fashion, but as it seemed
to himself that they would be most handy." This great war fleet he left
as a legacy to his son, but he himself in his later campaigns had only
its first beginnings at his disposal.

His military reforms were no less important. Warned by the failures of
the English against Danish entrenched camps, he introduced the
long-neglected art of fortification, and built many "burhs"--stockaded
fortresses on mounds by the waterside--wherein dwelt permanent garrisons
of military settlers. It would seem that the system by which he
maintained them was that he assigned to each a region of which the
inhabitants were responsible for its manning and its sustentation. The
landowners had either to build a house within it for their own
inhabiting, or to provide that a competent substitute dwelt there to
represent them. These "burh-ware," or garrison-men, are repeatedly
mentioned in Alfred's later years. The old national levy of the "fyrd"
was made somewhat more serviceable by an ordinance which divided it into
two halves, one of which must take the field when the other was
dismissed. But it would seem that the king paid even more attention to
another military reform--the increase of the number of the professional
fighting class, the thegnhood as it was now called. All the wealthier
men, both in the countryside and in the towns, were required to take up
the duties as well as the privileges of membership of the military
household of the king. They became "of thegn-right worthy" by receiving,
really or nominally, a place in the royal hall, with the obligation to
take the field whenever their master raised his banner. The document
which defines their duties and privileges sets forth that "every ceorl
who throve so that he had fully five hides of land, and a helm, and a
mail-shirt, and a sword ornamented with gold, was to be reckoned
gesithcund." A second draft allowed the man who had the military
equipment complete, but not fully the five hides of land, to slip into
the list, and also "the merchant who has fared thrice over the high seas
at his own expense." How far the details of the scheme are Alfred's own,
how far they were developed by his son Edward the Elder, it is
unfortunately impossible to say. But there is small doubt that the
system was working to some extent in the later wars of the great king,
and that his successes were largely due to the fact that his army
contained a larger nucleus of fully armed warriors than those of his
predecessors.

Military reforms were only one section of the work of King Alfred during
the central years of his reign. It was then that he set afoot his
numerous schemes for the restoration of the learning and culture of
England which had sunk so low during the long years of disaster which
had preceded his accession. How he gathered scholars from the continent,
Wales and Ireland; how he collected the old heroic poems of the nation,
how he himself translated books from the Latin tongue, started schools,
and set his scribes to write up the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_, is told
elsewhere, as are his mechanical inventions, his buildings, and his
dealings with missionaries and explorers (see ALFRED).

The test of the efficiency of his work was that it held firm when, in
his later years, the Danish storm once more began to beat against the
shores of Wessex. In the years 892-896 Alfred was assailed from many
sides at once by viking fleets, of which the most important was that led
by the great freebooter Hasting. Moreover, the settled Danes of eastern
England broke their oaths and gave the invaders assistance. Yet the king
held his own, with perfect success if not with ease. The enemy was
checked, beaten off, followed up rapidly whenever he changed his base of
operation, and hunted repeatedly all across England. The campaigning
ranged from Appledore in Kent to Exeter, from Chester to Shoeburyness;
but wherever the invaders transferred themselves, either the king, or
his son Edward, or his son-in-law Ethelred, the ealdorman of Mercia, was
promptly at hand with a competent army. The camps of the Danes were
stormed, their fleet was destroyed in the river Lea in 895, and at last
the remnant broke up and dispersed, some to seek easier plunder in
France, others to settle down among their kinsmen in Northumbria or East
Anglia.

Alfred survived for four years after his final triumph in 896, to
complete the organization of his fleet and to repair the damages done by
the last four years of constant fighting. He died on the 26th of October
900, leaving Wessex well armed for the continuance of the struggle, and
the inhabitants of the "Danelagh" much broken in spirit. They saw that
it would never be in their power to subdue all England. Within a few
years they were to realize that it was more probable that the English
kings would subdue them.


  Edward the Elder.

The house of Wessex continued to supply a race of hard-fighting and
capable monarchs, who went on with Alfred's work. His son, Edward the
Elder, and his three grandsons, AEthelstan, Edmund and Edred, devoted
themselves for fifty-five years (A.D. 900-955) to the task of conquering
the Danelagh, and ended by making England into a single unified kingdom,
not by admitting the conquered to homage and tribute, in the old style
of the 7th century, but by their complete absorption. The process was
not so hard as might be thought; when once the Danes had settled down,
had brought over wives from their native land or taken them from among
their English vassals, had built themselves farmsteads and accumulated
flocks and herds, they lost their old advantage in contending with the
English. Their strength had been their mobility and their undisputed
command of the sea. But now they had possessions of their own to defend,
and could not raid at large in Wessex or Mercia without exposing their
homes to similar molestation. Moreover, the fleet which Alfred had
built, and which his successors kept up, disputed their mastery of the
sea, and ended by achieving a clear superiority over them. Unity of plan
and unity of command was also on the side of the English. The
inhabitants of the three sections of the Danelagh were at best leagued
in a many-headed confederacy. Their opponents were led by kings whose
orders were punctually obeyed from Shrewsbury to Dover and from London
to Exeter. It must also be remembered that in the greater part of the
land which they possessed the Danes were but a small minority of the
population. After their first fury was spent they no longer exterminated
the conquered, but had been content to make the Mercians and Deirans
their subjects, to take the best of the land, and exact tribute for the
rest. Only in Lincolnshire, East Yorkshire and parts of Nottinghamshire
and Leicestershire do they seem to have settled thickly and formed a
preponderating element in the countryside. In the rest of the Midlands
and in East Anglia they were only a governing oligarchy of scanty
numbers. Everywhere there was an English lower class which welcomed the
advent of the conquering kings of Wessex and the fall of the Danish
jarls.

Edward the Elder spent twenty-five laborious years first in repelling
and repaying Danish raids, then in setting to work to subdue the
raiders. He worked forward into the Danelagh, building _burhs_ as he
advanced, to hold down each district that he won. He was helped by his
brother-in-law, the Mercian ealdorman AEthelred, and, after the death of
that magnate, by his warlike sister AEthelflaed, the ealdorman's widow,
who was continued in her husband's place. While Edward, with London as
his base, pushed forward into the eastern counties, his sister, starting
from Warwick and Stafford, encroached on the Danelagh along the line of
the Trent. The last Danish king of East Anglia was slain in battle in
918, and his realm annexed. AEthelflaed won Derby and Leicester, while her
brother reduced Stamford and Nottingham. Finally, in 921, not only was
the whole land south of the Humber subdued, but the Yorkshire Danes, the
Welsh, and even--it is said--the remote Scots of the North, did homage
to Edward and became his men.


  AEthelstan.

In 925 Edward was succeeded by his eldest, son AEthelstan, who completed
the reduction of the Danelagh by driving out Guthfrith, the Danish king
of York, and annexing his realm. But this first conquest of the region
beyond Humber had to be repeated over and over again; time after time
the Danes rebelled and proclaimed a new king, aided sometimes by bands
of their kinsmen from Ireland or Norway, sometimes by the Scots and
Strathclyde Welsh. AEthelstan's greatest and best-remembered achievement
was his decisive victory in 937 at Brunanburh--an unknown spot, probably
by the Solway Firth or the Ribble--over a great confederacy of rebel
Danes of Yorkshire, Irish Danes from Dublin, the Scottish king,
Constantine, and Eugenius, king of Strathclyde. Yet even after such a
triumph AEthelstan had to set up a Danish under-king in Yorkshire,
apparently despairing of holding it down as a shire governed by a mere
ealdorman. But its overlordship he never lost, and since he also
maintained the supremacy which his father had won over the Welsh and
Scots, it was not without reason that he called himself on his coins and
in his charters _Rex totius Britanniae_. Occasionally he even used the
title _Basileus_, as if he claimed a quasi-imperial position.


  Edmund: Edred.

The trampling out of the last embers of Danish particularism in the
North was reserved for AEthelstan's brothers and successors, Edmund and
Edred (940-955), who put down several risings of the Yorkshiremen, one
of which was aided by a rebellion of the Midland Danes of the Five
Boroughs. But the untiring perseverance of the house of Alfred was at
last rewarded by success. After the expulsion of the last rebel king of
York, Eric Haraldson, by Edred in 948, we cease to hear of trouble in
the North. When next there was rebellion in that quarter it was in
favour of a Wessex prince, not of a Danish adventurer, and had no
sinister national significance. The descendants of the vikings were
easily incorporated in the English race, all the more so because of the
wise policy of the conquering kings, who readily employed and often
promoted to high station men of Danish descent who showed themselves
loyal--and this not only in the secular but in spiritual offices. In 942
Oda, a full-blooded Dane, was made archbishop of Canterbury. The
Danelagh became a group of earldoms, ruled by officials who were as
often of Danish as of English descent.

It is notable that when, after Edred's death, there was civil strife,
owing to the quarrel of his nephew Edwy with some of his kinsmen,
ministers and bishops, the rebels, who included the majority of the
Mercians and Northumbrians, set up as their pretender to the throne not
a Dane but Edwy's younger brother Edgar, who ruled for a short time
north of Thames, and became sole monarch on the death of his unfortunate
kinsman.


  Edgar.

The reign of Edgar (959-975) saw the culmination of the power of the
house of Alfred. It was untroubled by rebellion or by foreign
invasions, so that the king won the honourable title of _Rex Pacificus_.
The minor sovereigns of Britain owned him as overlord, as they had owned
his grandfather Edward and his uncle AEthelstan. It was long remembered
"how all the kings of this island, both the Welsh and the Scots, eight
kings, came to him once upon a time on one day and all bowed to his
governance." The eight were Kenneth of Scotland, Malcolm of Strathclyde,
Maccus of Man, and five Welsh kings. There is fair authority for the
well-known legend that, after this meeting at Chester, he was rowed in
his barge down the Dee by these potentates, such a crew as never was
seen before or after, and afterwards exclaimed that those who followed
him might now truly boast that they were kings of all Britain.

Edgar's chief counsellor was the famous archbishop Dunstan, to whom no
small part of the glory of his reign has been ascribed. This great
prelate was an ecclesiastical reformer--a leader in a movement for the
general purification of morals, and especially for the repressing of
simony and evil-living among the clergy--a great builder of churches,
and a stringent enforcer of the rules of the monastic life. But he was
also a busy statesman; he probably had a share in the considerable body
of legislation which was enacted in Edgar's reign, and is said to have
encouraged him in his policy of treating Dane and Englishman with exact
equality, and of investing the one no less than the other with the
highest offices in church and state.

Edgar's life was too short for the welfare of his people--he was only in
his thirty-third year when he died in 975, and his sons were young boys.
The hand of a strong man was still needed to keep the peace in the
newly-constituted realm of all England, and the evils of a minority were
not long in showing themselves. One section of the magnates had
possession of the thirteen-year-old king Edward, and used his name to
cover their ambitions. The other was led by his step-mother AElfthryth,
who was set on pushing the claims of her son, the child AEthelred. After
much factious strife, and many stormy meetings of the Witan, Edward was
murdered at Corfe in 978 by some thegns of the party of the
queen-dowager. The crime provoked universal indignation, but since there
was no other prince of the house of Alfred available, the magnates were
forced to place AEthelred on the throne: he was only in his eleventh
year, and was at least personally innocent of complicity in his
brother's death.


  AEthelred the Unready.

  Danish invasions.

With the accession of AEthelred, the "Redeless," as he was afterwards
called from his inability to discern good counsel from evil, and the
consistent incapacity of his policy, an evil time began. The retirement
from public life of Edgar's old minister Dunstan was the first event of
the new reign, and no man of capacity came forward to take his place.
The factions which had prevailed during the reign of Edward "the Martyr"
seem to have continued to rage during his brother's minority, yet
AEthelred's earliest years were his least disastrous. It was hoped that
when he came to man's estate things would improve, but the reverse was
the case. The first personal action recorded of him is an unjust
harrying of the goods of his own subjects, when he besieged Rochester
because he had quarrelled with its bishop over certain lands, and was
bribed to depart with 100 pounds of silver. Yet from 978 to 991 no
irreparable harm came to England; the machinery for government and
defence which his ancestors had established seemed fairly competent to
defend the realm even under a wayward and incapable king. Two or three
small descents of vikings are recorded, but the ravaging was purely
local, and the invader soon departed. No trouble occurred in the
Danelagh, where the old tendency of the inhabitants to take sides with
their pagan kinsmen from over the sea appears to have completely
vanished. But the vikings had apparently learnt by small experiments
that England was no longer guarded as she had been in the days of Alfred
or AEthelstan, and in 991 the first serious invasion of AEthelred's reign
took place. A large fleet came ashore in Essex, and, after a hard fight
with the ealdorman Brihtnoth at Maldon, slew him and began to ravage the
district north of the Thames. Instead of making a desperate attempt to
drive them off, the king bribed them to depart with 10,000 pounds of
silver, accepting it is said this cowardly advice from archbishop
Sigeric. The fatal precedent soon bore fruit: the invaders came back in
larger numbers, headed by Olaf Tryggveson, the celebrated adventurer who
afterwards made himself king of Norway, and who was already a pretender
to its throne. He was helped by Sweyn, king of Denmark, and the two
together laid siege to London in 994, but were beaten off by the
citizens. Nevertheless AEthelred for a second time stooped to pay
tribute, and bought the departure of Dane and Norwegian with 16,000
pounds of silver. There was a precarious interval of peace for three
years after, but in 997 began a series of invasions led by Sweyn which
lasted for seventeen years, and at last ended in the complete subjection
of England and the flight of AEthelred to Normandy. It should be noted
that the invader during this period was no mere adventurer, but king of
all Denmark, and, after Olaf Tryggveson's death in 1000, king of Norway
also. His power was something far greater than that of the Guthrums and
Anlafs of an earlier generation, and--in the end of his life at
least--he was aiming at political conquest, and not either at mere
plunder or at finding new settlements for his followers. But if the
strength of the invader was greater than that of his predecessors,
AEthelred also was far better equipped for war than his ancestors of the
9th century. He owned, and he sometimes used--but always to little
profit--a large fleet, while all England instead of the mere realm of
Wessex was at his back. Any one of the great princes of the house of
Egbert who had reigned from 871 to 975, would have fought a winning
fight with such resources, and it took nearly twenty years of AEthelred's
tried incapacity to lose the game. He did, however, succeed in undoing
all the work of his ancestors, partly by his own slackness and sloth,
partly by his choice of corrupt and treacherous ministers. For the two
ealdormen whom he delighted to honour and placed at the head of his
armies, AElfric and Eadric Streona, are accused, the one of persistent
cowardice, the other of underhand intrigue with the Danes. Some of the
local magnates made a desperate defence of their own regions, especially
Ulfkytel of East Anglia, a Dane by descent; but the central government
was at fault. AEthelred's army was always at the wrong place--"if the
enemy were east then was the _fyrd_ held west, and if they were north
then was our force held south." When AEthelred did appear it was more
often to pay a bribe to the invaders than to fight. Indeed the
_Danegeld_, the tax which he raised to furnish tribute to the invaders,
became a regular institution: on six occasions at least AEthelred bought
a few months of peace by sums ranging from 10,000 to 48,000 pounds of
silver.


  Canute.

At last in the winter of 1013-1014, more as it would seem from sheer
disgust at their king's cowardice and incompetence than because further
resistance was impossible, the English gave up the struggle and
acknowledged Sweyn as king. First Northumbria, then Wessex, then London
yielded, and AEthelred was forced to fly over seas to Richard, duke of
Normandy, whose sister he had married as his second wife. But Sweyn
survived his triumph little over a month; he died suddenly at
Gainsborough on the 3rd of February 1014. The Danes hailed his son
Canute, a lad of eighteen, as king, but many of the English, though they
had submitted to a hard-handed conqueror like Sweyn, were not prepared
to be handed over like slaves to his untried successor. There was a
general rising, the old king was brought over from Normandy, and Canute
was driven out for a moment by force of arms. He returned next year with
a greater army to hear soon after of AEthelred's death (1016). The witan
chose Edmund "Ironside," the late king's eldest son, to succeed him, and
as he was a hard-fighting prince of that normal type of his house to
which his father had been such a disgraceful exception, it seemed
probable that the Danes might be beaten off. But AEthelred's favourite
Eadric Streona adhered to Canute, fearing to lose the office and power
that he had enjoyed for so long under AEthelred, and prevailed on the
magnates of part of Wessex and Mercia to follow his example. For a
moment the curious phenomenon was seen of Canute reigning in Wessex,
while Edmund was making head against him with the aid of the Anglo-Danes
of the "Five Boroughs" and Northumbria. There followed a year of
desperate struggle: the two young kings fought five pitched battles,
fortune seemed to favour Edmund, and the traitor Eadric submitted to him
with all Wessex. But the last engagement, at Assandun (Ashingdon) in
Essex went against the English, mainly because Eadric again betrayed the
national cause and deserted to the enemy.

Edmund was so hard hit by this last disaster that he offered to divide
the realm with Canute; they met on the isle of Alney near Gloucester,
and agreed that the son of AEthelred should keep Wessex and all the
South, London and East Anglia, while the Dane should have Northumbria,
the "five boroughs" and Eadric's Mercian earldom. But ere the year was
out Edmund died: secretly murdered, according to some authorities, by
the infamous Eadric. The witan of Wessex made no attempt to set on the
throne either one of the younger sons of AEthelred by his Norman wife, or
the infant heir of Edmund, but chose Canute as king, preferring to
reunite England by submission to the stranger rather than to continue
the disastrous war.

They were wise in so doing, though their motive may have been despair
rather than long-sighted policy. Canute became more of an Englishman
than a Dane: he spent more of his time in his island realm than in his
native Denmark. He paid off and sent home the great army with whose aid
he had won the English crown, retaining only a small bodyguard of
"house-carls" and trusting to the loyalty of his new subjects. There was
no confiscation of lands for the benefit of intrusive Danish settlers.
On the contrary Canute had more English than Danish courtiers and
ministers about his person, and sent many Englishmen as bishops and some
even as royal officers to Denmark. It is strange to find that--whether
from policy or from affection--he married King AEthelred's young widow
Emma of Normandy, though she was somewhat older than himself--so that
his son King Harthacnut and that son's successor Edward the Confessor,
the heir of the line of Wessex, were half-brothers. It might have been
thought likely that the son of the pagan Sweyn would have turned out a
mere hard-fighting viking. But Canute developed into a great
administrator and a friend of learning and culture. Occasionally he
committed a harsh and tyrannical act. Though he need not be blamed for
making a prompt end of the traitor Eadric Streona and of Uhtred, the
turbulent earl of Northumbria, at the commencement of his reign, there
are other and less justifiable deeds of blood to be laid to his account.
But they were but few; for the most part his administration was just and
wise as well as strong and intelligent.

As long as he lived England was the centre of a great Northern empire,
for Canute reconquered Norway, which had lapsed into independence after
his father's death, and extended his power into the Baltic. Moreover,
all the so-called Scandinavian colonists in the Northern Isles and
Ireland owned him as overlord. So did the Scottish king Malcolm, and the
princes of Wales and Strathclyde. The one weak point in his policy that
can be detected is that he left in the hands of Malcolm the Bernician
district of Lothian, which the Scot had conquered during the anarchy
that followed the death of AEthelred. The battle of Carham (1018) had
given this land to the Scots, and Canute consented to draw the border
line of England at the Tweed instead of at the Firth of Forth, when
Malcolm did him homage. Strangely enough it was this cession of a
Northumbrian earldom to the Northern king that ultimately made Scotland
an English-speaking country. For the Scottish kings, deserting their
native Highlands, took to dwelling at Edinburgh among their new
subjects, and first the court and afterwards the whole of their Lowland
subjects were gradually assimilated to the Northumbrian nucleus which
formed both the most fertile and the most civilized portion of their
enlarged realm.

The fact, that England recovered with marvellous rapidity from the evil
effects of AEthelred's disastrous reign, and achieved great wealth and
prosperity under Canute, would seem to show that the ravages of Sweyn,
widespread and ruthless though they had been, had yet fallen short of
the devastating completeness of those of the earlier vikings. He had
been more set on exacting tribute than on perpetrating wanton massacres.
A few years of peace and wise administration seem to have restored the
realm to a satisfactory condition. A considerable mass of his
legislation has survived to show Canute's care for law and order.

Canute died in 1035, aged not more than forty or forty-one. The crown
was disputed between his two sons, the half-brothers Harold and
Harthacnut; it was doubtful whether the birth of the elder prince was
legitimate, and Queen Emma strove to get her own son Harthacnut
preferred to him. In Denmark the younger claimant was acknowledged by
the whole people, but in England the Mercian and Northumbrian earls
chose Harold as king, and Wessex only fell to Harthacnut. Both the young
kings were cruel, dissolute and wayward, most unworthy sons of a wise
father. It was to the great profit of England that they died within two
years of each other, the elder in 1040, the younger in 1042.


  Edward the Confessor.

  Harold.

On Harthacnut's death he was succeeded not by any Danish prince but by
his half-brother Edward, the elder son of AEthelred and Emma, whom he had
entertained at his court, and had apparently designated as his heir, for
he had no offspring. There was an end of the empire of Canute, for
Denmark fell to the great king's nephew, Sweyn Estrithson, and Norway
had thrown off the Danish yoke. Engaged in wars with each other, Dane
and Norseman had no leisure to think of reconquering England. Hence
Edward's accession took place without any friction. He reigned, but did
not rule, for twenty-four years, though he was well on in middle age
before he was crowned. Of all the descendants of Alfred he was the only
one who lived to see his sixtieth birthday--the house of Wessex were a
short-lived race. In character he differed from all his ancestors--he
had Alfred's piety without his capacity, and AEthelred's weakness without
his vices. The mildest of men, a crowned monk, who let slip the reins of
government from his hands while he busied himself in prayer and church
building, he lowered the kingly power to a depth to which it had never
sunk before in England. His sole positive quality, over and above his
piety, was a love for his mother's kin, the Normans. He had spent his
whole life from 1013 to 1040 as an exile at the court of Rouen, and was
far more of a Norman than an Englishman. It was but natural, therefore,
that he should invite his continental relatives and the friends of his
youth to share in his late-coming prosperity. But when he filled his
court with them, made them earls and bishops, and appointed one of them,
Robert of Jumieges, to the archbishopric of Canterbury, his undisguised
preference for strangers gave no small offence to his English subjects.
In the main, however, the king's personal likes and dislikes mattered
little to the realm, since he had a comparatively small share in its
governance. He was habitually overruled and dominated by his earls, of
whom three, Leofric, Godwine and Siward--all old servants of Canute--had
far more power than their master. Holding respectively the great
earldoms of West Mercia, Wessex and Northumbria, they reigned almost
like petty sovereigns in their domains, and there seemed some chance
that England might fall apart into semi-independent feudal states, just
as France had done in the preceding century. The rivalries and intrigues
of these three magnates constitute the main part of the domestic
politics of Edward's reign. Godwine, whose daughter had wedded the king,
was the most forcible and ambitious of the three, but his pre-eminence
provoked a general league against him and in 1051 he was cast out of the
kingdom with his sons. In the next year he returned in arms, raised
Wessex in revolt, and compelled the king to in-law him again, to restore
his earldom, and to dismiss with ignominy the Norman favourites who were
hunted over seas. The old earl died in 1053, but was succeeded in power
by his son Harold, who for thirteen years maintained an unbroken mastery
over the king, and ruled England almost with the power of a regent.
There seems little doubt that he aspired to be Edward's successor: there
was no direct heir to the crown, and the nearest of kin was ah infant,
Edgar, the great-nephew of the reigning sovereign and grandson of
Edmund Ironside. England's experience of minors on the throne had been
unhappy--Edwy and AEthelred the Redeless were warnings rather than
examples. Moreover, Harold had before his eye as a precedent the
displacement of the effete Carolingian line in France, by the new house
of Robert the Strong and Hugh Capet, seventy years before. He prepared
for the crisis that must come at the death of Edward the Confessor by
bestowing the governance of several earldoms upon his brothers.
Unfortunately for him, however, the eldest of them, Tostig, proved the
greatest hindrance to his plans, provoking wrath and opposition wherever
he went by his high-handedness and cruelty.

Harold's governance of the realm seems to have been on the whole
successful. He put down the Scottish usurper Macbeth with the swords of
a Northumbrian army, and restored Malcolm III. to the throne of that
kingdom (1055-1058). He led an army into the heart of Wales to punish
the raids of King Griffith ap Llewelyn, and harried the Welsh so
bitterly that they put their leader to death, and renewed their homage
to the English crown (1063). He won enthusiastic devotion from the men
of Wessex and the South, but in Northumbria and Mercia he was less
liked. His experiment in taking the rule of these earldoms out of the
hands of the descendants of Siward and Leofric proved so unsuccessful
that he had to resign himself to undoing it. Ultimately one of Leofric's
grandsons, Edwin, was left as earl of Mercia, and the other, Morcar,
became earl of Northumbria instead of Harold's unpopular brother Tostig.
It was on this fact that the fortune of England was to turn, for in the
hour of crisis Harold was to be betrayed by the lords of the Midlands
and the North.


  Origin of the Norman Conquest.

Somewhere about the end of his period of ascendancy, perhaps in 1064,
Harold was sailing in the Channel when his ship was driven ashore by a
tempest near the mouth of the Somme. He fell into the hands of William
the Bastard, duke of Normandy, King Edward's cousin and best-loved
relative. The duke brought him to Rouen, and kept him in a kind of
honourable captivity till he had extorted a strange pledge from him.
William alleged that his cousin had promised to make him his heir, and
to recommend him to the witan as king of England. He demanded that
Harold should swear to aid him in the project. Fearing for his personal
safety, the earl gave the required oath, and sailed home a perjured man,
for he had assuredly no intention of keeping the promise that had been
extorted from him. Within two years King Edward expired (Jan. 5, 1066)
after having recommended Harold as his successor to the thegns and
bishops who stood about his death-bed. The witan chose the earl as king
without any show of doubt, though the assent of the Mercian and
Northumbrian earls must have been half-hearted. Not a word was said in
favour of the claim of the child Edgar, the heir of the house of Alfred,
nothing (of course) for the preposterous claim of William of Normandy.
Harold accepted the crown without a moment's hesitation, and at once
prepared to defend it, for he was aware that the Norman would fight to
gain his purpose. He endeavoured to conciliate Edwin and Morcar by
marrying their sister Ealdgyth, and trusted that he had bought their
loyal support. When the spring came round it was known that William had
begun to collect a great fleet and army. Aware that the resources of his
own duchy were inadequate to the conquest of England, he sent all over
Europe to hire mercenaries, promising every knight who would join him
broad lands beyond the Channel in the event of victory. He gathered
beneath his banner thousands of adventurers not only from France,
Brittany and Flanders, but even from distant regions such as Aragon,
Apulia and Germany. The native Normans were but a third part of his
host, and he himself commanded rather as director of a great joint-stock
venture than as the feudal chief of his own duchy. He also obtained the
blessing of Pope Alexander II. for his enterprise, partly on the plea
that Harold was a perjurer, partly because Stigand, the archbishop of
Canterbury, had acknowledged the late anti-pope Benedict.

All through the summer Harold held a fleet concentrated under the lee
of the Isle of Wight, waiting to intercept William's armament, while the
fyrd of Wessex was ready to support him if the enemy should succeed in
making a landing. By September the provisions were spent, and the ships
were growing unseaworthy. Very reluctantly the king bade them go round
to London to refit and revictual themselves. William meanwhile had been
unable to sail, because for many weeks the wind had been unfavourable.
If it had set from the south the fortune of England would have been
settled by a sea-fight. At this moment came a sudden and incalculable
diversion; Harold's turbulent brother Tostig, banished for his crimes in
1065, was seeking revenge. He had persuaded Harold Hardrada, king of
Norway, almost the last of the great viking adventurers, to take him as
guide for a raid on England. They ran into the Humber with a great
fleet, beat the earls Edwin and Morcar in battle, and captured York.
Abandoning his watch on the south coast Harold of England flew northward
to meet the invaders; he surprised them at Stamford Bridge, slew both
the Norse king and the rebel earl, and almost exterminated their army
(Sept. 25? 1066). But while he was absent from the Channel the wind
turned, and William of Normandy put to sea. The English fleet and the
English army were both absent, and the Normans came safely to shore on
the 28th of September. Harold had to turn hastily southward to meet
them. On the 13th of October his host was arrayed on the hill of Senlac,
7 miles from the duke's camp at Hastings. The ranks of his thegnhood and
house-carles had been thinned by the slaughter of Stamford Bridge, and
their place was but indifferently supplied by the hasty levies of
London, Wessex and the Home Counties. Edwin and Morcar, who should have
been at his side with their Mercians and Northumbrians, were still far
away--probably from treachery, slackness and jealousy.

Next morning (October 14) William marched out from Hastings and attacked
the English host, which stood at bay in a solid mass of spear and axemen
behind a slight breastwork on the hillside. After six hours of desperate
fighting the victory fell to the duke, who skilfully alternated the use
of archers and cavalry against the unwieldy English phalanx. (See
HASTINGS: _Battle of_.) The disaster was complete, Harold himself was
slain, his two brothers had fallen with him, not even the wreck of an
army escaped. There was no one to rally the English in the name of the
house of Godwine. The witan met and hastily saluted the child Edgar
AEtheling as king. But the earls Edwin and Morcar refused to fight for
him, and when William appeared in front of the gates of London they were
opened almost without resistance. He was elected king in the old English
fashion by the surviving magnates, and crowned on Christmas Day 1066.


II. THE NORMAN AND ANGEVIN MONARCHY (1066-1199)

  William the Conqueror.

When William of Normandy was crowned at Westminster by Archbishop Aldred
of York and acknowledged as king by the witan, it is certain that few
Englishmen understood the full importance of the occasion. It is
probable that most men recalled the election of Canute, and supposed
that the accession of the one alien sovereign would have no more
permanent effect on the realm than that of the other. The rule of the
Danish king and his two short-lived sons had caused no break in the
social or constitutional history of England. Canute had become an
Englishman, had accepted all the old institutions of the nation, had
dismissed his host of vikings, and had ruled like a native king and for
the most part with native ministers. Within twenty years of his
accession the disasters and calamities which had preceded his triumph
had been forgotten, and the national life was running quietly in its old
channels. But the accession of William the Bastard meant something very
different. Canute had been an impressionable lad of eighteen or nineteen
when he was crowned; he was ready and eager to learn and to forget. He
had found himself confronted in England with a higher civilization and a
more advanced social organization than those which he had known in his
boyhood, and he accepted them with alacrity, feeling that he was thereby
getting advantage. With William the Norman all was different: he was a
man well on in middle age, too old to adapt himself easily to new
surroundings, even if he had been willing to do so. He never even learnt
the language of his English subjects, the first step to comprehending
their needs and their views. Moreover, unlike his Danish predecessor, he
looked down upon the English from the plane of a higher civilization;
the Normans regarded the conquered nation as barbarous and boorish. The
difference in customs and culture between the dwellers on the two sides
of the Channel was sufficient to make this possible; though it is hard
to discern any adequate justification for the Norman attitude. Probably
the bar of language was the most prominent cause of estrangement. In
five generations the viking settlers of Normandy had not only completely
forgotten their old Scandinavian tongue, but had come to look upon those
who spoke the kindred English idiom not only as aliens but as inferiors.
For three centuries French remained the court speech, and the mark of
civilization and gentility.


  Progress of Norman Settlement.

Despite all this the Conquest would not have had its actual results if
William, like Canute, had been able to dismiss his conquering army, and
to refrain from a general policy of confiscation. But he had won his
crown not as duke of Normandy, but as the head of a band of cosmopolitan
adventurers, who had to be rewarded with land in England. Some few
received their pay in hard cash, and went off to other wars; but the
large majority, Breton and Angevin, French and Fleming, no less than
Norman, wanted land. William could only provide it by a wholesale
confiscation of the estates of all the thegnhood who had followed the
house of Godwine. Almost his first act was to seize on these lands, and
to distribute them among his followers. In the regions of the South,
which had supplied the army that fell at Hastings, at least four-fifths
of the soil passed to new masters. The dispossessed heirs of the old
owners had either to sink to the condition of peasants, or to throw
themselves upon the world and seek new homes. The friction and hatred
thus caused were bitter and long enduring. And this same system of
confiscation was gradually extended to the rest of England. At first the
English landowners who had not actually served in Harold's host were
permitted to "buy back their lands," by paying a heavy fine to the new
king and doing him homage. What would have happened supposing that
England had made no further stir, and had not vexed William by
rebellion, it is impossible to say. But, as a matter of fact, during the
first few years of his reign one district after another took up arms and
endeavoured to cast out the stranger. As it became gradually evident
that William's whole system of government was to be on new and
distasteful lines, the English of the Midlands, the North and the West
all went into rebellion. The risings were sporadic, ill-organized, badly
led, for each section of the realm fought for its own hand. In some
parts the insurrections were in favour of the sons of Harold, in others
Edgar AEtheling was acclaimed as king: and while the unwise earls Edwin
and Morcar fought for their own hand, the Anglo-Danes of the East sent
for Sweyn, king of Denmark, who proved of small help, for he abode but a
short space in England, and went off after sacking the great abbey of
Peterborough and committing other outrages. The rebels cut up several
Norman garrisons, and gave King William much trouble for some years, but
they could never face him in battle. Their last stronghold, the
marsh-fortress of Ely, surrendered in 1071, and not long after their
most stubborn chief, Hereward "the Wake," the leader of the fenmen, laid
down his arms and became King William's man (see HEREWARD).

The only result of the long series of insurrections was to provoke the
king to a cruelty which he had not at first shown, and to give him an
excuse for confiscating and dividing among his foreign knights and
barons the immense majority of the estates of the English thegnhood.
William could be pitiless when provoked; to punish the men of the North
for persistent rebellion and the destruction of his garrison at York, he
harried the whole countryside from the Aire to the Tees with such
remorseless ferocity that it did not recover its ancient prosperity for
centuries. The population was absolutely exterminated, and the great
Domesday survey, made nearly twenty years later, shows the greater part
of Yorkshire as "waste." This act was exceptional only in its extent:
the king was as cruel on a smaller scale elsewhere, and not contented
with the liberal use of the axe and the rope was wont to inflict his
favourite punishments of blinding and mutilation on a most reckless
scale.

The net result of the king's revenge on the rebellious English was that
by 1075 the old governing class had almost entirely disappeared, and
that their lands, from the Channel to the Tweed, had everywhere been
distributed to new holders. To a great extent the same horde of
continental adventurers who had obtained the first batch of grants in
Wessex and Kent were also the recipients of the later confiscations, so
that their newly acquired estates were scattered all over England. Many
of them came to own land in ten or a dozen counties remote from each
other, a fact which was of the greatest importance in determining the
character of English feudalism. While abroad the great vassals of the
crown generally held their property in compact blocks, in England their
power was weakened by the dispersion of their lands. This tendency was
assisted by the fact that even when the king, as was his custom,
transferred to a Norman the estates of an English landowner just as they
stood, those estates were already for the most part not conterminous.
Even before the Conquest the lands of the magnates were to a large
extent held in scattered units, not in solid patches. Only in two cases
did William establish lordships of compact strength, and these were
created for the special purpose of guarding the turbulent Welsh March.
The "palatine" earls of Chester and Shrewsbury were not only endowed
with special powers and rights of jurisdiction, but were almost the only
tenants-in-chief within their respective shires. These rare exceptions
prove the general rule: William probably foresaw the dangers of such
accumulation of territory in private hands. He made a complete end of
the old English system by which great earls ruled many shires: there
were to be no Godwines or Leofrics under the Norman rule. This
particular feudal danger was avoided: where earls were created, and they
were but few, their authority was usually restricted to a single shire.


  Feudalism.

It remains to speak of the most important change which William's
rearrangements made in the polity of England. It is of course untrue to
say--as was so often done by early historians--that he "introduced the
feudal system into England." In some aspects feudalism was already in
the land before he arrived: in others it may be said that it was never
introduced at all. He did not introduce the practice by which the small
man commended himself to the great man, and in return for his protection
divested himself of the full ownership of his own land, and became a
customary tenant in what later ages called a "manor." That system was
already in full operation in England before the Conquest. In some
districts the wholly free small landowner had already disappeared,
though in the regions which had formed the Danelagh he was still to be
found in large numbers. Nor did William introduce the system of great
earldoms, passing from father to son, which gave over-great subjects a
hereditary grip on the countryside. On the contrary, as has been already
said, he did much to check that tendency, which had already developed in
England.

What he really did do was to reconstruct society on the essentially
feudal theory that the land was a gift from the king, held on conditions
of homage and military service. The duties which under the old system
were national obligations resting on the individual as a citizen, he
made into duties depending on the relation between the king as supreme
landowner and the subject as tenant of the land. Military service and
the paying of the feudal taxes--aids, reliefs, &c.--are incidents of the
bargain between the crown and the grantee to whom land has been given.
That grantee, the tenant-in-chief, has the right to demand from his
sub-tenants, to whom he has given out fractions of his estate, the same
dues that the king exacts from himself. As at least four-fifths of the
land of England had fallen into the king's hands between 1066 and 1074,
and had been actually regranted to new owners--foreigners to whom the
feudal system was the only conceivable organization of political
existence--the change was not only easy but natural. The few surviving
English landholders had to fall into line with the newcomers. England,
in short, was reorganized into a state of the continental type, but one
differing from France or Germany in that the crown had not lost so many
of its regalities as abroad, and that even the greater earls had less
power than the ordinary continental tenant-in-chief.

The English people became aware of this transformation in the "theory of
the state" mainly through the fact that the new tenants-in-chief,
bringing with them the ideas in which they had been reared, failed to
comprehend the rather complicated status of the rural population on this
side of the Channel. To the French or Norman knight all peasants on his
manor seemed to be villeins, and he failed to understand the distinction
between freemen who had personally commended themselves to his English
predecessor but still owned their land, and the mass of ordinary servile
tenants. There can be no doubt that the first effect of the Conquest was
that the upper strata of the agricultural classes lost the comparative
independence which they had hitherto enjoyed, and were in many cases
depressed to the level of their inferiors. The number of freemen began
to decrease, from the encroachments of the landowner, and continued to
dwindle for many years: even in districts where Domesday Book shows them
surviving in considerable numbers, it is clear that a generation or two
later they had largely disappeared, and became merged in the villein
class.


  Domesday.

In this sense, therefore, England was turned into a feudal state by the
results of the work of William the Conqueror. But it would be wrong to
assert that all traces of the ancient social organization of the realm
were swept away. The old Saxon customs were not forgotten, though they
might in many cases be twisted to fit new surroundings. Indeed William
and his successors not infrequently caused them to be collected and put
on record. The famous Domesday Book (q.v.) of 1086 is in its essential
nature an inquiry into the state of England at the moment of the
Conquest, compiled in order that the king may have a full knowledge of
the rights that he possesses as the heir of King Edward. Being primarily
intended to facilitate the levy of taxation, it dwells more on the
details of the actual wealth and resources of the country in 1066 and
1086, and less on the laws and customs that governed the distribution of
that wealth, than could have been wished. But it is nevertheless a
monument of the permanence of the old English institutions, even after
the ownership of four-fifths of the soil has been changed. The king
inquires into the state of things in 1066 because it is on that state of
things that his rights of taxation depend. He does not claim to have
rearranged the whole realm on a new basis, or to be levying his revenue
on a new assessment made at his own pleasure. Nor is it in the sphere of
taxation alone that William's organization of the realm stands on the
old English customs. In the military sphere, though his normal army is
the feudal force composed of the tenants-in-chief and the knights whom
they have enfeoffed, he retains the power to call out the _fyrd_, the
old national _levee en masse_, without regard to whether its members are
freemen or villeins of some lord. And in judicial matters the higher
rights of royal justice remain intact, except in the few cases where
special privileges have been granted to one or two palatine earls. The
villein must sue in his lord's manorial courts, but he is also subject
to the royal courts of hundred and shire. The machinery of the local
courts survives for the most part intact.


  Position of the Church.

William's dealings with the Church of England were no less important
than his dealings with social organization. In the earlier years of his
reign he set himself to get rid of the whole of the upper hierarchy, in
order to replace them by Normans. In 1070 Archbishop Stigand was deposed
as having been uncanonically chosen, and six or seven other bishops
after him. All the vacancies, as well as those which kept occurring
during the next few years, were immediately filled up with foreigners.
By the time that William had been ten years on the throne there were
only three English bishops left. At his death there was only one--the
saintly Wulfstan of Worcester. The same process was carried out with
regard to abbacies, and indeed with all important places of
ecclesiastical preferment. By 1080 the English Church was officered
entirely by aliens. Just as with the lay landholders, the change of
_personnel_ made a vast difference, not so much in the legal position of
the new-comers as in the way in which they regarded their office. The
outlook of a Norman bishop was as unlike that of his English predecessor
as that of a Norman baron. The English Church had got out of touch with
the ideals and the spiritual movements of the other Western churches. In
especial the great monastic revival which had started from the abbey of
Cluny and spread all over France, Italy and Germany had hardly touched
this island. The continental churchmen of the 11th century were brimming
over with ascetic zeal and militant energy, while the majority of the
English hierarchy were slack and easy-going. The typical faults of the
dark ages, pluralism, simony, lax observation of the clerical rules,
contented ignorance, worldliness in every aspect, were all too prevalent
in England. There can be no doubt that the greater part of William's
nominees were better men than those who preceded them; his great
archbishop, Lanfranc, though a busy statesman, was also an energetic
reformer and a man of holy life. Osmund, Remigius and others of the
first post-Conquest bishops have left a good name behind them. The
condition of the church alike in the matter of spiritual zeal, of hard
work and of learning was much improved. But there was a danger behind
this revival; for the reformers of the 11th century, in their zeal for
establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, were not content with raising
the moral and intellectual standards prevailing in Christendom, but
sought to bring the whole scheme of life under the church, by asserting
the absolute supremacy of the spiritual over the temporal power,
wherever the two came in contact or overlapped. The result, since the
feudal and ecclesiastical systems had become closely interwoven, and the
frontier between the religious and secular spheres must ever be vague
and undefined, was the conflict between the spiritual and temporal
powers which, for two centuries to come, was to tear Europe into warring
factions (see the articles CHURCH HISTORY; PAPACY; INVESTITURE). The
Norman Conquest of England was contemporaneous with the supreme
influence of the greatest exponent of the theory of ecclesiastical
supremacy, the archdeacon Hildebrand, who in 1073 mounted the papal
throne as Gregory VII. (q.v.). William, despite all his personal faults,
was a sincerely pious man, but it could not be expected that he would
acquiesce in these new developments of the religious reformation which
he had done his best to forward. Hence we find a divided purpose in the
policy which he pursued with regard to church affairs. He endeavoured to
keep on the best terms with the papacy: he welcomed legates and
frequently consulted the pope on purely spiritual matters. He even took
the hazardous step of separating ecclesiastical courts and lay courts,
giving the church leave to establish separate tribunals of her own, a
right which she had never possessed in Saxon England. The spiritual
jurisdiction of the bishop had hitherto been exercised in the ordinary
national courts, with lay assessors frequently taking part in the
proceedings, and mixing their dooms with the clergy's canonical
decisions. William in 1076 granted the church a completely independent
set of courts, a step which his successors were to regret for many a
generation.

At the same time, however, he was not blind to the possibilities of
papal interference in domestic matters, and of the danger of conflict
between the crown and the recently-strengthened clerical order. To guard
against them he laid down three general rules: (1) that no one should be
recognized as pope in England till he had himself taken cognizance of
the papal election, and that no papal letters should be brought into the
realm without his leave; (2) that no decisions of the English
ecclesiastical synods should be held valid till he had examined and
sanctioned them; (3) that none of his barons or ministers should be
excommunicated unless he approved of such punishment being inflicted on
them. These rules seem to argue a deeply rooted distrust of the possible
encroachments of the papacy on the power of the state. The question of
ecclesiastic patronage, which was to be the source of the first great
quarrel between the crown and the church in the next generation, is not
touched upon. William retained in his own hands the choice of bishops
and abbots, and Alexander II. and Gregory VII. seem to have made no
objection to his doing so, in spite of the claim that free election was
the only canonical way of filling vacancies. The Conqueror was allowed
for his lifetime to do as he pleased, since he was recognized as a true
friend of the church. But the question was only deferred and not
settled.


  William's later reign.

The political history of William's later years is unimportant; his main
energy was absorbed in the task of holding down and organizing his new
kingdom. His rather precarious conquest of the county of Maine, his long
quarrels with Philip I. of France, who suborned against him his
undutiful and rebellious eldest son Robert, his negotiation with
Flanders and Germany, deserve no more than a mention. It is more
necessary to point out that he reasserted on at least one occasion (when
King Malcolm Canmore did him homage) the old suzerainty of the English
kings over Scotland. He also began that encroachment on the borders of
Wales which was to continue with small interruptions for the next two
centuries. The advance was begun by his great vassals, the earls of
Chester, Shrewsbury and Hereford, all of whom occupied new districts on
the edge of the mountains of Powys and Gwynedd. William himself led an
expedition as far as St Davids in 1081, and founded Cardiff Castle to
mark the boundary of his realm north of the Bristol Channel.

Perhaps the most noteworthy event of the second portion of the
Conqueror's reign was a rebellion which, though it made no head and was
easily suppressed, marks the commencement of that feudal danger which
was to be the constant trouble of the English kings for the next three
generations. Two of the greatest of his foreign magnates, Roger, earl of
Hereford, and Ralph, earl of Norfolk, rose against him in 1075, with no
better cause than personal grievances and ambitions. He put them down
with ease; the one was imprisoned for life, the other driven into exile,
while Waltheof, the last of the English earls, who had dabbled in a
hesitating way in this plot, was executed. There was never any serious
danger, but the fact that under the new regime baronial rebellion was
possible, despite of all William's advantages over other feudal kings,
and despite of the fact that the rebels were hardly yet settled firmly
into their new estates, had a sinister import for the future of England.
With the new monarchy there had come into England the anarchic spirit of
continental feudalism. If such a man as the Conqueror did not overawe
it, what was to be expected in the reigns of his successors? William had
introduced into his new realm alike the barons, with their personal
ambition, and the clerics of the school of Hildebrand, with their
intense jealousy for the rights of the church. The tale of the dealings
of his descendants with these two classes of opponents constitutes the
greater part of English history for a full century.


  William Rufus.

William died at Rouen on the 7th of September 1087; on his death-bed he
expressed his wish that Normandy should pass to his elder son, Robert,
in spite of all his rebellions, but gave his second son William (known
by the nickname of Rufus) the crown of England, and sent him thither
with commendatory letters to archbishop Lanfranc and his other
ministers. There was at first no sign of opposition to the will of the
late king, and William Rufus was crowned within three weeks of his
father's decease. But the results of the Conquest had made it hard to
tear England and Normandy apart. Almost every baron in the duchy was now
the possessor of a smaller or a greater grant of lands in the kingdom,
and the possibility of serving two masters was as small in 1087 as at
any other period of the world's history. By dividing his two states
between his sons the Conqueror undid his own work, and left to his
subjects the certainty of civil war. For the brothers Robert and William
were, and always had been, enemies, and every intriguing baron had
before him the tempting prospect of aggrandizing himself, by making his
allegiance to one of the brothers serve as an excuse for betraying the
other. Robert was thriftless, volatile and easy-going, a good knight but
a most incompetent sovereign. These very facts commended him to the more
turbulent section of the baronage; if he succeeded to the whole of the
Conqueror's heritage they would have every opportunity of enjoying
freedom from all governance. William's private character was detestable:
he was cruel, lascivious, greedy of gain, a habitual breaker of oaths
and promises, ungrateful and irreligious. But he was cunning,
strong-handed and energetic; clearly the "Red King" would be an
undesirable master to those who loved feudal anarchy. Hence every
turbulent baron in England soon came to the conclusion that Robert was
the sovereign whom his heart desired.

The greater part of the reign of William II. was taken up with his fight
against the feudal danger. Before he had been six months on the throne
he was attacked by a league comprising more than half the baronage, and
headed by his uncles, bishop Odo of Bayeux and Robert of Mortain. They
used the name of the duke of Normandy and had secured his promise to
cross the Channel for their assistance. A less capable and unscrupulous
king than Rufus might have been swept away, for the rising burst out
simultaneously in nearly every corner of the realm. But he made head
against it with the aid of mercenary bands, the loyal minority of the
barons, and the shire-levies of his English subjects. When he summoned
out the fyrd they came in great force to his aid, not so much because
they trusted in the promises of good governance and reduced taxation
which he made, but because they saw that a horde of greedy barons would
be worse to serve than a single king, however hard and selfish he might
be. With their assistance William fought down the rebels, expelled his
uncle Odo and several other leaders from the realm, confiscated a
certain amount of estates, and then pardoned the remainder of the
rebels. Such mercy, as he was to discover, was misplaced. In 1095 the
same body of barons made a second and a more formidable rising, headed
by the earls of Shrewsbury, Eu and Northumberland. It was put down with
the same decisive energy that William had shown in 1088, and this time
he was merciless; he blinded and mutilated William of Eu, shut up
Mowbray of Northumberland for life in a monastery, and hanged many men
of lesser rank. Of the other rebels some were deprived of their English
estates altogether, others restored to part of them after paying
crushing fines. This second feudal rebellion was only a distraction to
William from his war with his brother Robert, which continued
intermittently all through the earlier years of his reign. It was raging
from 1088 to 1091, and again from 1093 to 1096, when Robert tired of the
losing game, pawned his duchy to his brother and went off on the First
Crusade. Down to this moment William's position had been somewhat
precarious; with the Norman war generally on hand, feudal rebellion
always imminent, and Scottish invasions occasionally to be repelled, he
had no easy life. But he fought through his troubles, conquered
Cumberland from the Scots (1092), in dealing with his domestic enemies
used cunning where force failed, and generally got his will in the end.
His rule was expensive, and he made himself hated by every class of his
subjects, baronage, clergy and people alike, by his ingenious and
oppressive taxation. His chosen instrument, a clerical lawyer named
Ranulf Flambard (q.v.), whom he presently made bishop of Durham, was
shameless in his methods of twisting feudal or national law to the
detriment of the taxpayer. William supported him in every device,
however unjust, with a cynical frankness which was the distinguishing
trait of his character; for he loved to display openly all the vices and
meannesses which most men take care to disguise. In dealing with the
baronage Ranulf and his master extorted excessive and arbitrary
"reliefs" whenever land passed in succession to heirs. When the church
was a landholder their conduct was even more unwarrantable; every clerk
installed in a new preferment was forced to pay a large sum down--which
in that age was considered a clear case of simony by all conscientious
men. But in addition the king kept all wealthy posts, such as
bishoprics and abbacies, vacant for years at a time and appropriated the
revenue meanwhile.


  Anselm.

This policy, when pursued with regard to the archbishopric of
Canterbury, brought on Rufus the most troublesome of his quarrels. When
the wise primate Lanfranc, his father's friend, died in 1089, he made no
appointment till 1093, extracting meanwhile great plunder from the see.
In a moment of sickness, when his conscience was for a space troubling
him or his will was weak, he nominated the saintly Anselm (q.v.) to the
archbishopric. When enthroned the new primate refused to make the
enormous gift which the king expected from every recipient of
preferment. Soon after he began to press for leave to hold a national
synod, and when it was denied him, spoke out boldly on the personal
vices as well as the immoral policy of the king. From this time William
and Anselm became open enemies. They fought first upon the question of
acknowledging Urban II. as pope--for the king, taking advantage of the
fact that there was an antipope in existence, refused to allow that
there was any certain and legitimate head of the Western church at the
moment. Then, after William had reluctantly yielded on this point, the
far more important question of lay investitures cropped up. The council
of Clermont (Nov. 1095) had just issued its famous decree to the effect
that bishops must be chosen by free election, and not invested with
their spiritual insignia or enfeoffed with their estates by the hands of
a secular prince. Anselm felt himself obliged to accept this decision,
and refused to accept his own pallium from William when Urban sent it
across the sea by the hands of a legate. The king replied by harrying
him on charges of having failed in his feudal obligation to provide
well-equipped knights for a Welsh expedition, and imposed ruinous fines
on him. It was even said that his life was threatened, and he fled to
Rome in 1097, not to return till his adversary was dead. There was much
to be said for the theory of the king as to the relations between church
and state; he was indeed only carrying on in a harsh form his father's
old policy. But the fact that he was a tyrant and an evil-liver, while
Anselm was a saint, so much influenced public opinion that William was
universally regarded as in the wrong, and the sympathy of the laity no
less than the clergy was with the archbishop. For the remaining three
years of his life the Red King was considered to be in a state of
reprobation and at open strife with righteousness.

Yet so far as secular affairs went William seemed prosperous enough.
Since his brother had pawned the duchy of Normandy to him, so that he
reigned at Rouen no less than at London, the danger of rebellion was
almost removed. His foreign policy was successful: he installed a
nominee of his own, Edgar, the son of Malcolm Canmore, on the throne of
Scotland (1097); he reconquered Maine, which his brother Robert had
lost; he made successful war upon King Philip of France. His barons
subdued much of South Wales, though his own expeditions into North
Wales, which he had designed to conquer and annex, had a less fortunate
ending. He dreamed, we are told, of attacking Ireland, even of crowning
himself king at Paris. But on the 2nd of August 1100 he was suddenly cut
off in the midst of his sins. While hunting with some of his godless
companions in the New Forest, he was struck by an arrow, unskilfully
shot by one of the party. The knight Walter Tyrrell, who was
persistently accused of being the author of his master's death, as
persistently denied his responsibility for it; and whether the arrow was
his or no, it was not alleged that malice guided it. William's
favourites had all to lose by his death.


  Succession of Henry I.

The king's death was unexpected: he was only in his fortieth year, and
men's minds had not even begun to ponder over the question of who would
succeed him. The crown of England was left vacant for the boldest
kinsman to snatch at, if he dared. William had two surviving brothers,
beside several nephews. Robert's claim seemed the more likely to
succeed, for not only was he the elder, but England was full of barons
who desired his accession, and had already taken up arms for him in 1087
or 1095. But he was far away--being at the moment on his return journey
from Jerusalem--while on the spot was his brother Henry, an ambitious
prince, whose previous efforts to secure himself a territorial
endowment had failed more from ill-luck than from want of enterprise or
ability. Seeing his opportunity, Henry left his brother's body unburied,
rode straight off to Winchester with a handful of companions, and seized
the royal treasure. This and his ready tongue were the main arguments by
which he convinced the few magnates present, and persuaded them to back
him, despite the protests of some supporters of Robert. There was hardly
the semblance of an election, and the earl of Warwick and the chancellor
William Giffard were almost the only persons of importance on the spot.
But Henry, once hailed as king, rode hard for London and persuaded
bishop Maurice to crown him without delay at Westminster, since the
primate Anselm was absent beyond seas. He certainly lost no time: Rufus
was shot on Thursday, the 2nd of August--his successor was crowned on
Sunday the 5th of August! The realm heard almost by the same messengers
that it had lost one king and that it had gained another.

Henry at once issued a proclamation and charter promising the redress of
all the grievances with which his brother had afflicted his feudal
tenants, the clergy and the whole nation. He would keep the ancient laws
of King Edward, as amended by his father the Conqueror, and give all men
good justice. These promises he observed more faithfully than Norman
kings were wont to do; if the pledge was not redeemed in every detail,
he yet kept England free from anarchy, abandoned the arbitrary and
unjust taxation of his brother, and set up a government that worked by
rule and order, not by the fits and starts of tyrannical caprice. He was
a man of a cold and hard disposition, but full of practical wisdom, and
conscious that his precarious claim to the crown must be secured by
winning the confidence of his subjects. Almost the first and quite the
wisest of his inspirations was to wed a princess of the old English
line--Edith,[1] the niece of Edgar AEtheling, the child of his sister
Margaret of Scotland and Malcolm Canmore. The match, though his Norman
barons sneered at it, gave him the hearts of all his English subjects,
who supported him with enthusiasm, and not merely (as had been the case
with Rufus) because they saw that a strong king would oppress them less
than a factious and turbulent baronage. Henry won much applause at the
same time by filling up all the bishoprics and abbacies which his
brother had kept so long vacant, by inviting the exiled Anselm to return
to England, and by imprisoning William's odious minister Ranulf
Flambard. He had just time to create a favourable impression by his
first proceedings, when his brother Robert, who had returned from
Palestine and resumed possession of Normandy, landed at Portsmouth to
claim the crown and to rouse his partisans among the English baronage.
Henry bought him off, before the would-be rebels had time to join him,
by promising him an annual tribute of 3000 marks and surrendering to him
all his estates in Normandy (1101). His policy seemed tame and cautious,
but was entirely justifiable, for within a few months of Robert's
departure the inevitable feudal rebellion broke out. If the duke and his
army had been on the spot to support it, things might have gone hardly
with the king. The rising was led by Robert of Belesme, earl of
Shrewsbury, a petty tyrant of the most ruffianly type, the terror of the
Welsh marches. He was backed by his kinsmen and many other barons, but
proved unable to stand before the king, who was loyally supported by the
English shire levies. After taking the strong castles of Arundel,
Tickhill, Bridgnorth and Shrewsbury, Henry forced the rebels to submit.
He confiscated their estates and drove them out of the realm; they fled
for the most part to Normandy, to spur on duke Robert to make another
bid for the English crown. From the broad lands which they forfeited
Henry made haste to reward his own servants, new men who owed all to him
and served him faithfully. From them he chose the sheriffs, castellans
and councillors through whom he administered the realm during the rest
of his long reign.

This minor official nobility was the strength of the crown, and was
sharply divided in spirit and ambition from the older feudal aristocracy
which descended from the original adventurers who had followed William
the Conqueror. Yet the latter still remained strong enough to constitute
a danger to the crown whenever it should fall to a king less wary and
resolute than Henry himself.

Henry was by nature more of an administrator and organizer than of a
fighting man. He was a competent soldier, but his wish was rather to be
a strong king at home than a great conqueror abroad. Nevertheless he was
driven by the logic of events to attack Normandy, for as long as his
brother reigned there, and as long as many English barons retained great
holdings on both sides of the Channel and were subjects of the duke as
well as of the king, intrigues and plots never ceased. The Norman war
ended in the battle of Tenchebrai (Sept. 28, 1106), where Duke Robert
was taken prisoner. His brother shut him up in honourable confinement
for the rest of his life, though otherwise he was not ill-treated. For
the rest of his reign Henry was ruler of all the old dominions of the
Conqueror, and none of his subjects could cloak disloyalty by the
pretence of owing a divided allegiance to two masters. With this he was
content, and made no great effort to extend his dominions farther; his
desire was to reign as a true king in England and Normandy, rather than
to build up a loosely compacted empire around them.


  Henry's difficulties with the church.

Throughout the time of Henry's Norman war, he was engaged in a tiresome
controversy with the primate on the question of lay investitures, the
continuation of the struggle which had begun in his brother's reign.
Every English king for five generations had to face the danger from the
church, no less than the danger from the barons. Anselm had come back
from Rome confirmed in the theories for which he had contended with
Rufus--nay, taught to extend them to a further extreme. He now
maintained not only that it was a sin that kings should invest prelates
with their spiritual insignia, the pallium, the staff, the ring, but
claimed that no clerk ought to do homage to the king for the lands of
his benefice, though he himself seven years before had not scrupled to
make his oath to his earlier master. He now refused to swear allegiance
to the new monarch, though he had recalled him and had restored him to
the possession of his see. He also refused to consecrate Henry's
nominees to certain bishoprics and abbacies on the ground that they had
not been chosen by free election by their chapters or their monks. The
king was loath to take up the quarrel, for he highly respected the
archbishop; yet he was still more loath to surrender the ancient claims
and privileges of the crown. Anselm was equally reluctant to force
matters to an open breach, yet would not shift from his position. There
followed an interminable series of arguments, interrupted by truces,
till at last Anselm, at the king's suggestion, went to Rome to see if
the pope could arrange some _modus vivendi_. Paschal II. for some time
refused to withdraw from his fixed theory of the relation of church and
state, and Anselm, in despair, preferred to remain abroad rather than to
press matters to the rupture that seemed the only logical issue of the
controversy. But in 1107 the pope consented to a compromise, which
satisfied the king, and yet was acceptable to the church. Bishops and
abbots were for the future to be canonically elected by the clergy, and
were no longer to receive the ring and staff from lay hands. But they
were to do homage to the king for their lands, and since they thus
acknowledged him as their temporal lord Henry was content. Moreover, he
retained in practice, if not in theory, his power to nominate to the
vacant offices; chapters and monasteries seldom dared to resist the
pressure which the sovereign could bring to bear upon them in favour of
the candidate whom he had selected. The arrangement was satisfactory,
and served as the model for the similar compromise arrived at between
Pope Calixtus II. and the emperor Henry V. fifteen years later.

From 1107 onward Henry was freed from both the dangers which had
threatened him in his earlier years, and was free to develop his policy
as he pleased. He had yet twenty-eight years to reign, for he survived
to the age of sixty-seven, an age unparalleled by any of his
predecessors, and by all his successors till Edward I.


  Constitutional machinery.

It is to Henry, aided by his great justiciar, Roger, bishop of
Salisbury, that England owed the institution of the machinery of
government by which it was to be ruled during the earlier middle ages.
This may be described as a primitive kind of bureaucracy, which
gradually developed into a much more complicated system of courts and
offices. Around the sovereign was his _Curia Regis_ or body of
councillors, of whom the most important were the justiciar, the
chancellor and the treasurer, though the feudal officers, the constable
and marshal, were also to be found there. The bulk of the council,
however, was composed of knights and clerks selected by the king for
their administrative or financial ability. The Curia, besides advising
the king on ordinary matters of state, had two special functions. It
sat, or certain members of it sat, under the presidency of the king or
the justiciar, as the supreme court of justice of the realm. In this
capacity it tried the suits of tenants-in-chief, and all appeals from
the local courts. But Henry, not contented with this, adopted the custom
of sending forth certain members of the Curia throughout the realm at
intervals, to sit in the shire court, along with or in place of the
sheriff, and to hear and judge all the cases of which the court had
cognizance. From these itinerant commissioners (justices in eyre)
descend the modern justices of assize. The sheriff, the original
president of the shire court, was gradually extruded by them from all
important business.

But there were other developments of the Curia. The justiciar,
chancellor and treasurer sat with certain other members of the council
as the court of exchequer, not only to receive and audit the accounts of
the royal revenue, but to give legal decisions on all questions
connected with finance. Twice in every year the sheriffs and other royal
officials came up to the exchequer court, which originally sat at
Winchester, with their bags of money and their sheaves of accounts.
Their figures were subjected to a severe scrutiny, and the law was laid
down on all points in which the interests of the sheriff and the king,
or the sheriff and the taxpayer, came into conflict. In this way the
exchequer grew into a law court of primary importance, instead of
remaining merely a court of receipt. Though its members were originally
the same men who sat in the Curia Regis, the character of the question
to be tried settled the capacity in which they should sit, and two
separate courts were evolved. (See EXCHEQUER.)

Under the superintendence of the Curia Regis and the exchequer, the
sheriff still remained the king's factotum in local affairs. He led the
shire-levies, collected the royal revenues both feudal and non-feudal,
and presided in the shire-court as judge, till in the course of years
his functions in that sphere were gradually taken over by the itinerant
justices. On his fidelity the king had to rely both for military aid in
times of baronial revolt and for the collection of the money which
formed the sinews of war. Hence the position was one of the highest
importance, and Henry's new nobility, the men of ability whom he
selected and promoted, found their special occupation in holding the
office of sheriff. It was they who had to see that the shire court, and
in minor affairs the hundred court, did not allow cases to slip away
into the jurisdiction of the feudal courts of the baronage.

Henry I. must count not merely as the father of the English bureaucracy,
but as a fosterer of the municipal independence of the towns. He gave
charters of a very liberal character to many places, and in especial to
London, where the citizens were allowed to choose their own sheriff, and
to deal directly with the exchequer in matters of revenue. He even
farmed out to them the charge of the taxes of the whole shire of
Middlesex, outside the city walls. Such a grant was exceptional--though
Lincoln also seems to have been granted the privilege of dealing
directly with the exchequer. But in many other smaller towns the first
grants--the smaller beginnings of autonomy--may be traced back to this
period (see BOROUGH).

Though Henry was an autocrat, and governed through bureaucratic
officials who were entirely under his hand, yet a reign of law and order
such as his was indirectly favourable to the growth of constitutional
liberty. It was equally favourable to the growth of national unity: it
was in his time that Norman and English began to melt together:
intermarriage in all classes became common, and only thirty years after
his death a contemporary writer could remark that it was hard for any
man to call himself either Norman or English, so much had blood been
intermingled.

It is unnecessary to go into the very uninteresting and unimportant
history of Henry's later years. A long war with France, prosecuted
without much energy, led to no results, for the French king's attempts
to stir up rebellions in the name of William the Clito (q.v.), the son
of Duke Robert, came to an end with that prince's death in 1129. But the
extension of the English borders in South Wales by the conquests of the
lords marcher as far as Pembroke and Cardigan deserves a word of notice.


  Henry's heir.

The question of the succession was the main thing which occupied the
mind of the king and the whole nation in Henry's later years. It had a
real interest for every man in an age when any doubt as to the heir
meant the outbreak of civil war such as had occurred at the death of the
Conqueror and of Rufus. There was now a problem of some difficulty to be
solved. Henry's only son William had been drowned at sea in 1120. He had
no other child born in wedlock save a daughter, Matilda, who married the
emperor Henry V., but had no issue by him. On the emperor's decease she
wedded as her second husband Geoffrey of Anjou (1127), to whom during
her father's last years she bore two sons. But the succession of a woman
to the crown was as unfamiliar to English as to Norman ideas, nor did it
seem natural to either to place a young child on the throne. Moreover,
Matilda's husband Geoffrey was unpopular among the Normans; the Angevins
had been the chief enemies of the duchy for several generations, and the
idea that one of them might become its practical ruler was deeply
resented. The old king, as was but natural, had determined that his
daughter should be his successor; he made the great council do homage to
her in 1126, and always kept her before the eyes of his people as his
destined heir. But though he had forced or cajoled every leading man in
England and Normandy to take his oath to serve her, he must have been
conscious that there was a large chance that such pledges would be
forgotten at his death. The prejudice against a female heir was strong,
and there were too many turbulent magnates to whom the anarchy that
would follow a disputed succession presented temptations which could not
be resisted.


  Matilda, and Stephen.

Henry died suddenly on the 25th of November 1135, while he was on a
visit to his duchy of Normandy. The moment that his death was reported
the futility of oaths became apparent. A majority of the Norman barons
appealed to Theobald, count of Blois, son of the Conqueror's daughter
Adela, to be their duke, and to save them from the yoke of the hated
Angevin. His supporters and those of Matilda were soon at blows all
along the frontier of Normandy. Meanwhile in England another pretender
had appeared. Stephen, count of Boulogne, the younger brother of
Theobald, had landed at Dover within a few days of Henry's death,
determined to make a snatch at the crown, though he had been one of the
first who had taken the oath to his cousin a few years before. The
citizens of London welcomed him, but he was not secure of his success
till by a swift swoop on Winchester he obtained possession of the royal
treasure--an all-important factor in a crisis, as Henry I. had shown in
1100. At Winchester he was acknowledged as king by the bishop, his own
brother Henry of Blois, and by the great justiciar, Roger, bishop of
Salisbury, and the archbishop, William of Corbeil. The allegiance of
these prelates was bought by an unwise promise to grant all the demands
of the church party, which his predecessor had denied, or conceded only
in part. He would permit free election to all benefices, and free
legislation by ecclesiastical synods, and would surrender any claims of
the royal courts to have jurisdiction over clerks or the property of
clerks. It then remained necessary to buy the baronage, of which only a
few members had as yet committed themselves to his side. It was done by
grants of lands and privileges, the first instalment of a never-ending
crop of ruinous concessions which Stephen continued to make from the day
of his accession down to the day of his death.

The pretender was crowned at Westminster on the 22nd of December
1135--less than a month after his uncle's death. No one yet openly
withstood him, but he was well aware that his position was precarious,
and that the claims of Matilda would be brought forward ere long by the
section of the baronage which had not yet got from him all they desired.
Meanwhile, however, he was encouraged to persevere by the fact that his
brother Theobald had withdrawn his claim to the duchy of Normandy, and
retired in his favour. For a space he was to be duke as well as king;
but this meant merely that he would have two wars, not one, in hand ere
long. Matilda's adherents were already in the field in Normandy; in
England their rising was only delayed for a few months.


  Civil war.

Stephen, though he had shown some enterprise and capacity in his
successful snatch at the crown, was a man far below his three
predecessors on the throne in the matter of perseverance and foresight.
He was a good fighter, a liberal giver, and a faithful friend, but he
lacked wisdom, caution and the power to organize. Starting his career as
a perjurer, it is curious that he was singularly slow to suspect perjury
in others; he was the most systematically betrayed of all English kings,
because he was the least suspicious, and the most ready to buy off and
to forgive rebels. His troubles began in 1136, when sporadic rebellions,
raised in the name of Matilda, began to appear; they grew steadily
worse, though Stephen showed no lack of energy, posting about his realm
with a band of mercenary knights whenever trouble broke out. But in 1138
the crisis came; the baronage had tried the capacity of their new master
and found him wanting. The outbreak was now widespread and
systematic--caused not by the turbulence of a few wild spirits, but by
the deliberate conspiracy of all who saw their advantage in anarchy.
Matilda had a few genuine partisans, such as her half-brother Robert,
earl of Gloucester, the illegitimate son of Henry I., but the large
majority of those who took arms in her name were ready to sell their
allegiance to either candidate in return for lands, or grants of rank or
privilege. A long list of doubly and triply forsworn nobles, led by
Geoffrey de Mandeville, Aubrey de Vere and Ralph of Chester, made the
balance of war sway alternately from side to side, as they transferred
themselves to the camp of the highest bidder. It is hard to trace any
meaning in the civil war--it was not a contest between the principle of
hereditary succession and the principle of elective kingship, as might
be supposed. It was rather, if some explanation must be found for it, a
strife between the kingly power and feudal anarchy. Unfortunately for
England the kingly power was in the hands of an incapable holder, and
feudal anarchy found a plausible mask by adopting the disguise of
loyalty to the rightful heiress.

The civil war was not Stephen's only trouble; foreign invasion was
added. David I., king of Scotland, was the uncle of Matilda, and used
her wrongs as the plea for thrice invading northern England, which he
ravaged with great cruelty. His most formidable raid was checked by the
Yorkshire shire levies, at the battle of the Standard (Aug. 22, 1138).
Yet in the following year he had to be bought off by the grant of all
Northumberland (save Newcastle and Bamborough) to his son Earl Henry.
Carlisle and Cumberland were already in his hands. Some years later the
Scottish prince also got possession of the great "Honour of Lancaster."
It was not Stephen's fault that the boundary of England did not
permanently recede from the Tweed and the Solway to the Tyne and the
Ribble.

But the affairs of the North attracted little attention while the civil
war was at its height in the South. In 1139 Stephen had wrought himself
fatal damage by quarrelling with the ecclesiastical bureaucrats, the
kinsmen and allies of Roger of Salisbury, who had been among his
earliest adherents. Jealous of their power and their arrogance, and
doubting their loyalty, he imprisoned them and confiscated their lands.
This threw the whole church party on to the side of Matilda; even Henry,
bishop of Winchester, the king's own brother, disowned him and passed
over to the other side. Moreover, the whole machinery of local
government in the realm fell out of gear, when the experienced ministers
who were wont to control it were removed from power.

Matilda had landed in England in the winter of 1139-1140; for a year her
partisans made steady progress against the king, and on the 2nd of
February 1141 Stephen was defeated and taken prisoner at the battle of
Lincoln. All England, save the county of Kent and a few isolated castles
elsewhere, submitted to Matilda. She was hailed as a sovereign by a
great assembly at Winchester, over which Stephen's own brother Bishop
Henry presided (April 7, 1141) and entered London in triumph in June. It
is doubtful whether she would have obtained complete possession of the
realm if she had played her cards well, for there were too many powerful
personages who were interested in the perpetuation of the civil war. But
she certainly did her best to ruin her own chances by showing an unwise
arrogance, and a determination to resume at once all the powers that her
father had possessed. When she annulled all the royal acts of the last
six years, declared charters forfeited and lands confiscated, and began
to raise heavy and arbitrary taxes, she made the partisans of Stephen
desperate, and estranged many of her own supporters. A sudden rising of
the citizens drove her out of London, while she was making preparations
for her coronation. The party of the imprisoned king rallied under the
wise guidance of his wife Matilda of Boulogne and his brother Henry, and
many other of the late deserters adhered to it. Their army drove the
lately triumphant party out of Winchester, and captured its military
chief, Robert, earl of Gloucester. So much was his loss felt that his
sister exchanged him a few months later for King Stephen.

After this the war went on interminably, without complete advantage to
either side, Stephen for the most part dominating the eastern and
Matilda the western shires. It was the zenith of the power of the
baronial anarchists, who moved from camp to camp with shameless
rapidity, wresting from one or other of the two rival sovereigns some
royal castle, or some dangerous grant of financial or judicial rights,
at each change of allegiance. The kingdom was in the desperate state
described in the last melancholy pages of the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_,
when life and property were nowhere safe from the objectless ferocity of
feudal tyrants--when "every shire was full of castles and every castle
filled with devils and evil men," and the people murmured that "Christ
and his saints slept."

Such was England's fate till 1153, when Matilda had retired from the
strife in favour of her son, Henry of Anjou, and Stephen was grown an
old man, and had just lost his heir, Eustace, to whom he had desired to
pass on the crown. Both parties were exhausted, both were sick of the
incessant treachery of their more unscrupulous barons, and at last they
came to the compromise of Wallingford (October 1153), by which it was
agreed that Stephen should reign for the remainder of his life, but that
on his death the crown should pass to Henry. Both sides promised to lay
down their arms, to dismiss their mercenaries, and to acquiesce in the
destruction of unlicensed castles, of which it is said, with no very
great exaggeration, that there were at the moment over 1000 in the
realm. Henry then returned to Normandy, of which his mother had been in
possession since 1145, while Stephen turned his small remaining strength
to the weary task of endeavouring to restore the foundations of law and
order. But he had accomplished little when he died in October 1154. The
task of reconstruction was to be left to Henry of Anjou: his predecessor
was only remembered as an example of the evil that may be done by a weak
man who has been reckless enough to seize a throne which he is incapable
of defending. England has had many worse kings, but never one who
wrought her more harm. If his successor had been like him, feudal
anarchy might have become as permanent in England as in Poland.


  Henry II.

Fortunately the young king to whom Stephen's battered crown now fell was
energetic and capable, if somewhat self-willed and hasty. He was
inferior in caution and self-control to his grandfather Henry I., though
he resembled him in his love of strong and systematic governance. From
the point of view of his English subjects his main achievement was that
he restored in almost every detail the well-organized bureaucracy which
his ancestor had created, and with it the law and order that had
disappeared during Stephen's unhappy reign. But there was this essential
difference between the position of the two Henries, that the elder
aspired to be no more than king of England and duke of Normandy, while
the younger strove all his life for an imperial position in western
Europe. Such an ambition was almost forced upon him by the consequences
of his descent and his marriage. Besides his grandfather's Anglo-Norman
inheritance, he had received from his father Geoffrey the counties of
Anjou and Touraine, and the predominance in the valley of the Lower
Loire. But it was his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, two years before
his accession to the English throne, which gave him the right to dream
of greatness such as his Norman forbears had never enjoyed. This lady,
the divorced wife of Louis VII. of France, brought to her second husband
the whole of the lands from Poitou to the Pyrenees, the accumulated
gains of many warlike ancestors. In wealth and fighting strength the
duchy of Aquitaine was a full third of France. Added to Anjou and
Normandy it made a realm far more important than England. Hence it came
that Henry's ambitions and interests were continental more than English.
Unlike his grandfather he dwelt for the greater part of his time beyond
seas. It must be remembered, too, that his youth had been spent abroad,
and that England only came to him when he was already a grown man. The
concerns of his island realm were a matter of high importance to him,
but only formed a part of his cares. Essentially he was an Angevin,
neither a Norman nor an Englishman, and his primary ambition was to make
the house of Anjou supreme in France. Nor did this seem impossible; he
owned a far broader and wealthier domain beyond the Channel than did his
nominal suzerain King Louis VII., and--what was of more importance--he
far excelled that prince both in vigour and in capacity.

On succeeding to the English crown, however, he came over at once to
take possession of the realm, and abode there for over a year,
displaying the most restless energy in setting to rights the governance
of the realm. He expelled all Stephen's mercenaries, took back into his
hands the royal lands and castles which his predecessor had granted
away, and destroyed hundreds of the "adulterine" castles which the
barons and knights had built without leave during the years of the
anarchy. Hardly a single magnate dared to oppose him--Bridgnorth, now a
castle of the Mortimers, was the only place which he had to take by
force. His next care was to restore the bureaucracy by which Henry I.
had been wont to govern. He handed over the exchequer to Nigel, bishop
of Ely, the nephew of the old justiciar Roger of Salisbury, and the heir
of his traditions. His chancellor was a young clerk, Thomas Becket, who
was recommended to him by archbishop Theobald as the most capable
official in the realm. A short experience of his work convinced the king
that his merits had not been exaggerated. He proved a zealous and
capable minister, and such a strong exponent of the claims of the crown
that no one could have foreseen the later developments by which he was
to become their greatest enemy.

The machine of government was beginning to work in a satisfactory
fashion, and the realm was already settling down into order, when Henry
was called abroad by a rebellion raised in Anjou by his brother
Geoffrey--the first of the innumerable dynastic troubles abroad which
continued throughout his reign to distract his attention from his duties
as an English king. He did not return for fifteen months; but when he
did reappear it was to complete the work which he had begun in 1155, to
extort from the greater barons the last of the royal fortresses which
still remained in their hands, and to restore the northern boundaries of
the realm. Malcolm IV., the young king of Scotland, was compelled to
give up the earldoms of Northumberland and Cumberland, which his father
Henry had received from Stephen. He received instead only the earldom of
Huntingdon, too far from the border to be a dangerous possession, to
which he had a hereditary right as descending from Earl Waltheof. He did
homage to the king of England, and actually followed him with a great
retinue on his next continental expedition. In the same year (1157)
Henry made an expedition into North Wales, and forced its prince Owen to
become his vassal, not without some fighting, in which the English army
received several sharp checks at the commencement of the campaign.

Yet once more Henry's stay on the English side of the Channel was but
for a year. In 1158 he again departed to plunge into schemes of
continental conquest. This time it was an attempt to annex the great
county of Toulouse, and so to carry the borders of Aquitaine to the
Mediterranean, which distracted him. Naturally Louis of France was
unwilling to see his great vassal striding all across his realm, and did
what he could to hinder him. Into the endless skirmishes and
negotiations which followed the raising of the question of Toulouse it
would be fruitless to enter. Henry did not achieve his purpose, indeed
he seems to have failed to use his strength to its best advantage, and
allowed himself to be bought off by a futile marriage treaty by which
his eldest son was to marry the French king's daughter (1160). This was
to be but the first of many disappointments in this direction; there was
apparently some fatal scruple, both in Henry's own mind and in that of
his continental subjects, as to pressing their suzerain too hard. But it
must also be remembered that a feudal army was an inefficient weapon for
long wars, and that the mercenaries, by whom alone it could be replaced,
were both expensive and untrustworthy. Henry developed as far as he was
able the system of "scutage" (q.v.) which his grandfather had apparently
invented; by this the vassal compounded for his forty days' personal
service by paying money, with which the king could hire professional
soldiers. But even with this help he could never keep a large enough
army together.


  Quarrel with the church.

  Becket.

Meanwhile England, though somewhat heavily taxed, was at least enjoying
quiet and strong governance. There is every sign that Henry's early
years were a time of returning prosperity. But there was also much
friction between the crown and its subjects. The more turbulent part of
the baronage, looking back to the boisterous times of Stephen with
regret, was reserving itself for a favourable opportunity. The danger of
feudal rebellion was not yet past, as was to be shown ten years later.
The towns did not find Henry an easy master. He took away from London
some of the exceptional privileges which his grandfather had granted,
such as the free election of sheriffs of Middlesex, and the right of
farming the shire at a fixed rent. He asserted his power to raise
"tallages"--arbitrary taxation--from the citizens on occasion. Yet he
left the foundations of municipal liberty untouched, and he was fairly
liberal in granting charters which contained moderate privileges to
smaller towns. His most difficult task, however, was to come to a
settlement with the Church. The lavish grants of Stephen had made an end
of the old authority which the Conqueror and Henry I. had exercised over
the clergy. Their successor was well aware of the fact, and was resolved
to put back the clock, so far as it was in his power. It was not,
however, on the old problems of free election, of lay investiture, that
his quarrel with the clerical body broke out, but on the comparatively
new question of the conflicting claims of ecclesiastical and secular
courts. The separate tribunals of the church, whose erection William I.
had favoured, had been developing in power ever since, and had begun to
encroach on the sphere of the courts of the state. This was more than
ever the case since Stephen had formally granted them jurisdiction over
all suits concerning clerics and clerical property. During the first few
years of his reign Henry had already been in collision with the
ecclesiastical authorities over several such cases; he had chafed at
seeing two clerks accused of murder and blackmailing claimed by and
acquitted in the church courts; and most of all at the frequency of
unlicensed appeals to Rome--a flagrant breach of one of the three rules
laid down by William the Conqueror. Being comparatively at leisure after
the pacification with France, he resolved to turn his whole attention to
the arrangement of a new _modus vivendi_ with the church. As a
preliminary move he appointed his able chancellor Thomas Becket to the
archbishopric of Canterbury, which fell vacant in 1162. This was the
greatest mistake of his reign. Becket was one of those men who, without
being either hypocrites or consciously ambitious, live only to magnify
their office. While chancellor he was the most zealous servant of the
crown, and had seemed rather secular than clerical in his habits and his
outlook on life. But no sooner had he been promoted to the archbishopric
than he put away his former manners, became the most formal and austere
of men, and set himself to be the champion of the church party in all
its claims, reasonable or unreasonable, against the state. The king's
astonishment was even greater than his indignation when he saw the late
chancellor setting himself to oppose him in all things. Their first
quarrel was about a proposed change in some details of taxation, which
seems to have had no specially ecclesiastical bearing at all. But Becket
vehemently opposed it, and got so much support when the great council
met at Woodstock that Henry withdrew his schemes. This was only a
preliminary skirmish; the main battle opened in the following year, when
the king, quite aware that he must for the future look on Thomas as his
enemy, brought forward the famous _Constitutions of Clarendon_, of which
the main purport was to assert the jurisdiction of the state over
clerical offenders by a rather complicated procedure, while other
clauses provided that appeals to Rome must not be made without the
king's leave, that suits about land or the presentation to benefices, in
which clerics were concerned, should be tried before the royal courts,
and that bishops should not quit the realm unless they had obtained
permission to do so from the king (see CLARENDON, CONSTITUTIONS OF).
Somewhat to the king's surprise, Becket yielded for a moment to his
pressure, and declared his assent to the constitutions. But he had no
sooner left the court than he proclaimed that he had grievously sinned
in giving way, suspended himself from his archiepiscopal functions, and
wrote to the pope to beg for pardon and absolution. He then made a
clandestine attempt to escape from the realm, but was detected on the
seashore and forced to return.

Incensed with Becket for his repudiation of his original submission,
Henry proceeded to open a campaign of lawsuits against him, in order to
force him to plead in secular courts. He also took the very mean step of
declaring that he should call him to account for all the moneys that had
passed through his hands when he was chancellor, though Becket had been
given a quittance for them when he resigned the office more than two
years before. The business came up at the council of Northampton
(October 1164), when the archbishop was tried for refusing to recognize
the jurisdiction of the king's courts, and declared to have forfeited
his movable goods. The sentence was passed by the lay members of the
Curia Regis alone, the bishops having been forbidden to sit, and
threatened with excommunication if they did so, by the accused primate.
When Becket was visited by the justiciar who came to rehearse the
judgment, he started to his feet, refused to listen to a word, declared
his repudiation of all lay courts and left the hall. That same night he
made a second attempt to escape from England and this time succeeded in
getting off to Flanders. From thence he fled to the court of the pope,
where he received less support than he had expected. Alexander III.
privately approved of all that he had done, and regarded him as the
champion of the Church, but he did not wish to quarrel with King Henry.
He had lately been driven from Rome by the emperor Frederick I., who had
installed an antipope in his place, and had been forced to retire to
France. If he sided with Becket and thundered against his persecutor,
there was small doubt that the king of England would adhere to the
schism. Accordingly he endeavoured to temporize and to avoid a rupture,
to the archbishop's great disgust. But since he also declared the
Constitutions of Clarendon uncanonical and invalid, Henry was equally
offended, and opened negotiations with the emperor and the antipope.
This conduct forced Alexander's hand, and he gave Becket leave to
excommunicate his enemies. The exile, who had taken refuge in a French
abbey, placed the justiciar and six other of the king's chief
councillors under the ban of the Church, and intimated that he should
add Henry himself to the list unless he showed speedy signs of
repentance (April 1166).

Thus the quarrel had come to a head. Church and State were at open war.
Henry soon found that Becket's threats had more effect than he liked.
Many of the English clergy were naturally on the side of the primate in
a dispute which touched their loyalty to the Church and their class
feeling. Several bishops declared to the king that, since his ministers
had been duly excommunicated, they did not see how they could avoid
regarding them as men placed outside the pale of Christendom.
Fortunately the pope interfered for a moment to lighten the friction;
being threatened with a new invasion by the emperor Frederick, he
suspended the sentences and sent legates to patch up a peace. They
failed, for neither the king nor the archbishop would give way. At this
juncture Henry was desirous of getting his eldest son and namesake
crowned as his colleague, the best mode that he could devise for
avoiding the dangers of a disputed succession at his death. He induced
the archbishop of York, assisted by the bishops of London and Salisbury,
to perform the ceremony. This was a clear invasion of the ancient rights
of the primate, and Becket took it more to heart than any other of his
grievances.

Yet the next move in the struggle was a hollow reconciliation between
the combatants--a most inexplicable act on both sides. The king offered
to allow Becket to return from exile, and to restore him to his
possessions, without exacting from him any promise of submission, or
even a pledge that he would not reopen the dispute on his return.
Apparently he had made a wrong interpretation of the primate's mental
attitude, and thought him desirous of a truce, if not ready for a
compromise. He had wholly misjudged the situation; Becket made neither
promises nor threats, but three weeks after he reached Canterbury
publicly excommunicated the bishops of London and Salisbury for the part
that they had taken in the coronation of the young king, and suspended
from their functions the other prelates who had been present at the
ceremony. He then proceeded to excommunicate a number of his minor lay
enemies.


  Becket's murder.

The news was carried overseas to Henry, who was then in Normandy. It
roused one of the fits of wild rage to which he was not unfrequently
liable; he burst out into ejaculations of wrath, and cursed "the
cowardly idle servants who suffered their master to be made the
laughing-stock of a low-born priest." Among those who stood about him
were four knights, some of whom had personal grudges against Becket, and
all of whom were reckless ruffians, who were eager to win their master's
favour by fair means or foul. They crossed the Channel with astonishing
speed; two days after the king's outburst they stood before Becket at
Canterbury and threatened him with death unless he should remove the
excommunications and submit to his master. The archbishop answered with
words as scornful as their own, and took his way to the minster to
attend vespers. The knights went out to seek their weapons, and when
armed followed him into the north transept, where they fell upon him and
brutally slew him with many sword-strokes (December 29, 1170). Thomas
had been given time to fly, and his followers had endeavoured to
persuade him to do so. It seems that he deliberately courted martyrdom,
anxious apparently that his death should deal the king the bitterest
blow that it was in his power to inflict (see BECKET).


  Its results.

Nothing could have put Henry in such an evil plight; the whole world
held him responsible for the murder, and he was forced to buy pardon for
it by surrendering many of the advantages over the Church which he had
hoped to gain by enforcing the Constitutions of Clarendon. Especially
the immunity of clerical offenders from the jurisdiction of lay courts
had to be conceded; for the rest of the middle ages the clerk guilty of
theft or assault, riot or murder, could plead his orders, and escape
from the harsh justice of the king's officers to the milder penalties of
the bishop's tribunal. "Benefit of clergy" became an intolerable
anomaly, all the more so because the privilege was extended in practice
not only to all persons actually in minor orders, but to all who claimed
them; any criminal who could read had a fair chance of being reckoned a
clerk. Another concession which Henry was forced to make was that the
appeals to Rome of litigants in ecclesiastical suits should be freely
permitted, provided that they made an oath that they were not
contemplating any wrong to the English crown or the English church, a
sufficiently easy condition. Such appeals became, and remained,
innumerable and vexatious. Pope Alexander also extorted from the king a
pledge that he would relinquish any customs prejudicial to the rights of
the Church which had been introduced since his accession. To the pope
this meant that the Constitutions of Clarendon were disavowed; to the
king, who maintained that they were in the main a mere restatement of
the customs of William I., it bore no such general interpretation. The
points were fought out in detail, and not settled for many years.
Practically it became the rule to regard suits regarding land, or
presentations to benefices, as pertaining to the king's court, while
those regarding probate, marriage and divorce fell to the ecclesiastical
tribunal. The question of election to bishoprics and abbacies went back
to the stage which it had reached in the time of Henry I.; the choice
was made in canonical form, by the chapters or the monasteries, but the
king's recommendation was a primary factor in that choice. When the
electors disregarded it, as was sometimes the case, there was friction;
a weak king was sometimes overruled; a strong one generally got his way
in the end.

Becket's death, then, gave a qualified triumph to the church party, and
he was rightly regarded as the successful champion of his caste. Hence
they held his death in grateful remembrance; the pope canonized him in
1173, and more churches were dedicated to him during the next two
centuries than to any other English saint. In the eyes of most men his
martyrdom had put the king so much in the wrong that the obstinacy and
provocative conduct which had brought it about passed out of memory. His
life of ostentatious austerity, and the courage with which he met his
death, had caused all his faults to be forgotten. Henry himself felt so
much the invidious position in which he was placed that even after
making his submission to the pope's legates at Avranches in 1172, he
thought it necessary to do penance before Becket's tomb in 1174, on
which occasion he allowed himself to be publicly scourged by the monks
of Canterbury, who inflicted on him three cuts apiece.

Between the outbreak of the king's quarrel with Becket at the council of
Woodstock and the compromise of Avranches no less than ten years had
elapsed--the best years of Henry's manhood. During this period his
struggle with the Church had been but one of his distractions. His
policy of imperial aggrandisement had been in progress. In 1163 he had
completed the conquest of South Wales; the marcher lords were now in
possession of the greater part of the land; the surviving Welsh princes
did homage for the rest. In 1166 Henry got practical possession of the
duchy of Brittany, the only remaining large district of western France
which was not already in his hands. Conan, the last prince of the old
Breton house, recognized him as his lord, and gave the hand of his
heiress Constance to Geoffrey, the king's third son. When the count died
in 1171 Henry did not transfer the administration of the land to the
young pair, who were still but children, but retained it for himself,
and clung to it jealously long after his son came of age. Intermittent
wars with France during these years were of small importance; Henry
never pushed his suzerain to extremity. But the Angevin dominions were
extended in a new direction, where no English king had yet made his
power felt.


  Conquest of Ireland.

The distressful island of Ireland was at this moment enjoying the
anarchy which had reigned therein since the dawn of history. Its state
had grown even more unhappy than before since the Danish invasions of
the 10th century, which had not welded the native kingdoms into unity
by pressure from without--as had been the case in England--but had
simply complicated affairs, by setting up two or three alien
principalities on the coastline. As in England, the vikings had
destroyed much of the old civilization; but they had neither succeeded
in occupying the whole country nor had they been absorbed by the
natives. The state of the island was much like that of England in the
days of the Heptarchy: occasionally a "High King" succeeded in forcing
his rivals into a precarious submission; more usually there was not even
a pretence of a central authority in the island, and the annals of
objectless tribal wars formed its sole history. King Henry's eyes had
been fixed on the faction-ridden land since the first years of his
reign. As early as 1155 he had asked and obtained the approval of Pope
Adrian IV., the only Englishman who ever sat upon the papal throne, for
a scheme for the conquest of Ireland. The Holy See had always regarded
with distaste the existence in the West of a nation who repudiated the
Roman obedience, and lived in schismatical independence, under local
ecclesiastical customs which dated back to the 5th century, and had
never been brought into line with those of the rest of Christendom.
Hence it was natural to sanction an invasion which might bring the Irish
within the fold. But Henry made no endeavour for many years to utilize
the papal grant of Ireland, which seems to have been made under the
preposterous "Donation of Constantine," the forged document which gave
the bishop of Rome authority over all islands. It was conveniently
forgotten that Ireland had never been in the Roman empire, and so had
not even been Constantine's to give away.

Not till 1168, thirteen years after the agreement with Pope Adrian, did
the interference of the English king in Ireland actually begin. Even
then he did not take the conquest in hand himself, but merely sanctioned
a private adventure of some of his subjects. Dermot MacMorrough, king of
Leinster, an unquiet Irish prince who for good reasons had been expelled
by his neighbours, came to Henry's court in Normandy, proffering his
allegiance in return for restoration to his lost dominions. The quarrel
with Becket, and the French war, were both distracting the English king
at the moment. He could not spare attention for the matter, but gave
Dermot leave to enlist auxiliaries among the turbulent barons of the
South Welsh Marches. The Irish exile enlisted first the services of
Maurice Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzstephen, two half-brothers, both noted
fighting men, and afterwards those of Richard de Clare, earl of
Pembroke, an ambitious and impecunious magnate of broken fortunes. The
two barons were promised lands, the earl a greater bribe--the hand of
Dermot's only daughter Eva and the inheritance of the kingdom of
Leinster. Fitzgerald and Fitzstephen crossed to Ireland in 1169 with a
mere handful of followers. But they achieved victories of an almost
incredible completeness over Dermot's enemies. The undisciplined hordes
of the king of Ossory and the Danes of Wexford could not stand before
the Anglo-Norman tactics--the charge of the knights and the arrow-flight
of the archers, skilfully combined by the adventurous invaders. Dermot
was triumphant, and sent for more auxiliaries, aspiring to evict Roderic
O'Connor of Connaught from the precarious throne of High King of
Ireland. In 1170 the earl of Pembroke came over with a larger force,
celebrated his marriage with Dermot's daughter, and commenced a series
of conquests. He took Waterford and Dublin from the Danes, and scattered
the hosts of the native princes. Early in the next spring Dermot died,
and Earl Richard, in virtue of his marriage, claimed the kingship of
Leinster. He held his own, despite the assaults of a great army gathered
by Roderic the High King, and of a viking fleet which came to help the
conquered jarls of Waterford and Dublin. At this moment King Henry
thought it necessary to interfere; if he let more time slip away, Earl
Richard would become a powerful king and forget his English allegiance.
Accordingly, with a large army at his back, he landed at Waterford in
1171 and marched on Dublin. Richard did him homage for Leinster,
engaging to hold it as a palatine earldom, and not to claim the name or
rights of a king. The other adventurers followed his example, as did,
after an interval, most of the native Irish princes. Only Roderic of
Connaught held aloof in his western solitudes, asserting his
independence. The clergy, almost without a murmur, submitted themselves
to the Roman Church.

Such was the first conquest of Ireland, a conquest too facile to be
secure. Four years later it appeared to be completed by the submission
of the king of Connaught, who did homage like the rest of the island
chiefs. But their oaths were as easily broken as made, and the real
subjection of the island was not to be completed for 400 years. What
happened was that the Anglo-Norman invaders pushed gradually west,
occupying the best of the land and holding it down by castles, but
leaving the profitless bogs and mountains to the local princes. The
king's writ only ran in and about Dublin and a few other harbour
fortresses. Inland, the intruding barons and the Irish chiefs fought
perpetually, with varying fortunes. The conquest hardly touched central
and western Ulster, and left half Connaught unsubdued: even in the
immediate vicinity of Dublin the tribes of the Wicklow Hills were never
properly tamed. The English conquest was incomplete; it failed to
introduce either unity or strong governance. After a century and a half
it began to recede rather than to advance. Many of the districts which
had been overrun in the time of the Angevin kings were lost; many of the
Anglo-Norman families intermarried with and became absorbed by the
Irish; they grew as careless of their allegiance to the crown as any of
the native chiefs. The "Lordship of Ireland" was never a reality till
the times of the Tudors. But as long as Henry II. lived this could not
have been foreseen. The first generation of the conquerors pushed their
advance with such vigour that it seemed likely that they would complete
the adventure. (See IRELAND: _History_.)


  Rebellion of Henry's sons.

It was in 1173, the year after his return from Ireland and his
submission to the papal legates at Avranches, that King Henry became
involved in the first of a series of troubles which were to pursue him
for the rest of his life--the rebellions of his graceless sons. His wife
Eleanor of Aquitaine had borne him many children. Henry, the eldest
surviving son, had already been crowned in 1170 as his father's
colleague and successor; not only he, but Richard the second, and
Geoffrey the third son, were now old enough to chafe against the
restraints imposed upon them by an imperious and strong-willed father.
The old king very naturally preferred to keep his dominions united under
his own immediate government, but he had designated his eldest son as
his successor in England and Normandy, while Richard was to have his
mother's heritage of Aquitaine, and Geoffrey's wife's dowry, the duchy
of Brittany, was due to him, now that he had reached the verge of
manhood. The princes were shamelessly eager to enter on their
inheritance, the king was loath to understand that by conferring a
titular sovereignty on his sons he had given them a sort of right to
expect some share of real power. Their grudge against their father was
sedulously fostered by their mother Eleanor, a clever and revengeful
woman, who could never forgive her husband for keeping her in the
background in political matters and insulting her by his frequent
amours. Her old subjects in Aquitaine were secretly encouraged by her to
follow her son Richard against his father, whom the barons of the south
always regarded as an alien and an intruder. The Bretons were equally
willing to rise in the name of Geoffrey and Constance against the
guardian who was keeping their prince too long waiting for his
inheritance. In England the younger Henry had built himself up a party
among the more turbulent section of the baronage, who remembered with
regret and longing the carnival of licence which their fathers had
enjoyed under King Stephen. Secret agreements had also been made with
the kings of France and Scotland, who were eager to take advantage of
the troubles which were about to break out.

In 1173 the plot was complete, and Henry's three elder sons all took
arms against him, collecting Norman, Breton and Gascon rebels in great
numbers, and being backed by a French army. At the same moment the king
of Scots invaded Northumberland, and the earls of Norfolk, Chester and
Leicester rose in the name of the younger Henry. This was in all
essentials a feudal rebellion of the old type. The English barons were
simply desirous of getting rid of the strong and effective governance of
the king, and the alleged wrongs of his sons were an empty excuse. For
precisely the same reason all classes in England, save the more
turbulent section of the baronage, remained faithful to the elder king.
The bureaucracy, the minor landholders, the towns, and the clergy
refused to join in the rising, and lent their aid for its suppression,
because they were unwilling to see anarchy recommence. Hence, though the
rebellious princes made head for a time against their father abroad, the
insurrection of their partisans in England was suppressed without much
difficulty. The justiciar, Richard de Lucy, routed the army of the earl
of Leicester at Fornham in Suffolk, the castles of the rebel earls were
subdued one after another, and William of Scotland was surprised and
captured by a force of northern loyalists while he was besieging Alnwick
(1173-1174). The war lingered on for a space on the continent; but Henry
raised the siege of Rouen, which was being attacked by his eldest son
and the king of France, captured most of Richard's castles in Poitou,
and then received the submission of his undutiful children. Showing
considerable magnanimity, he promised to grant to each of them half the
revenues of the lands in which they were his destined heirs, and a
certain number of castles to hold as their own. Their allies fared less
well; the rebel earls were subjected to heavy fines, and their
strongholds were demolished. The king of Scots was forced to buy his
liberty by doing homage to Henry for the whole of his kingdom. Queen
Eleanor, whom her husband regarded as responsible for the whole
rebellion, was placed in a sort of honourable captivity, or retirement,
and denied her royal state.

Henry appeared completely triumphant; but the fourteen years which he
had yet to live were for the most part to be times of trouble and
frustrated hopes. He was growing old; the indomitable energy of his
early career was beginning to slacken; his dreams of extended empire
were vanishing. In the last period of his life he was more set on
defending what he already enjoyed, and perfecting the details of
administration in his realms, than on taking new adventures in hand.
Probably the consciousness that his dominions would be broken up among
his sons after his death had a disheartening effect upon him. At any
rate his later years bear a considerable resemblance to the
corresponding period of his grandfather's reign. The machinery of
government which the one had sketched out the other completed. Under
Henry II. the circuits of the itinerant justices became regular instead
of intermittent; the judicial functions of the Curia Regis were
delegated to a permanent committee of that body which took form as the
court of king's bench (_Curia Regis in Banco_). The sheriffs were kept
very tightly in hand, and under incessant supervision; once in 1170
nearly the whole body of them were dismissed for misuse of their office.
The shire levies which had served the king so well against the feudal
rebels of 1173 were reorganized, with uniformity of weapons and armour,
by the _Assize of Arms_ of 1181. There was also a considerable amount of
new legislation with the object of protecting the minor subjects of the
crown, and the system of trial by jurors was advanced to the detriment
of the absurd old practices of trial by ordeal and trial by wager of
battle. The 13th-century jury was a rough and primitive institution,
which acted at once as accuser, witness and judge--but it was at any
rate preferable to the chances of the red-hot iron, or the club of the
duellist.

The best proof that King Henry's orderly if autocratic regime was
appreciated at its true value by his English subjects, is that when the
second series of rebellions raised by his undutiful sons began in 1182,
there was no stir whatever in England, though in Normandy, Brittany and
Aquitaine the barons rose in full force to support the young princes,
whose success would mean the triumph of particularism and the
destruction of the Angevin empire. Among the many troubles which broke
down King Henry's strong will and great bodily vigour in those unhappy
years, rebellion in England was not one. For this reason he was almost
constantly abroad, leaving the administration of the one loyal section
of his realm to his great justiciar. Hence the story of the unnatural
war between father and sons has no part in English history. It is but
necessary to note that the younger Henry died in 1183, that Geoffrey
perished by accident at a tournament in 1186, and that in 1189, when the
old king's strength finally gave out, it was Richard who was leading the
rebellion, to which John, the youngest and least worthy of the four
undutiful sons, was giving secret countenance. It was the discovery of
the treachery of this one child whom he had deemed faithful, and loved
over well, that broke Henry's heart. "Let things go as they will; I have
nothing to care for in the world now," he murmured on his death-bed, and
turned his face to the wall to breathe his last.


  Richard I.

The death of the younger Henry had made Richard heir to all his father's
lands from the Tweed to the Bidassoa save Brittany, which had fallen to
Arthur, the infant son of the unlucky Geoffrey. John, the new king's
only surviving brother, had been declared "Lord of Ireland" by his
father in 1185, but Henry had been forced to remove him for persistent
misconduct, and had left him nothing more than a titular sovereignty in
the newly conquered island. In this Richard confirmed him at his
accession, and gave him a more tangible endowment by allowing him to
marry Isabella, the heiress of the earldom of Gloucester, and by
bestowing on him the honour of Lancaster and the shires of Derby, Devon,
Cornwall and Somerset. The gift was over-liberal and the recipient was
thankless; but John was distinctly treated as a vassal, not granted the
position of an independent sovereign.

Of all the medieval kings of England, Richard I. (known as Coeur de
Lion) cared least for his realm on the English side of the Channel, and
spent least time within it. Though he chanced to have been born in
Oxford, he was far more of a foreigner than his father; his soul was
that of a south French baron, not that of an English king. Indeed he
looked upon England more as a rich area for taxation than as the centre
of a possible empire. His ambitions were continental: so far as he had a
policy at all it was Angevin--he would gladly have increased his
dominions on the side of the upper Loire and Garonne, and was set on
keeping in check the young king of France, Philip Augustus, though the
latter had been his ally during his long struggle with his father.
Naturally the policy of Richard as a newly crowned king was bound to
differ from that which he had pursued as a rebellious prince. As regards
his personal character he has been described, not without truth, as a
typical man of his time and nothing more. He was at heart a chivalrous
adventurer delighting in war for war's sake; he was not destitute of a
conscience--his undutiful conduct to his father sat heavily on his soul
when that father was once dead; he had a strong sense of knightly honour
and a certain magnanimity of soul in times of crisis; but he was harsh,
thriftless, often cruel, generally lacking in firmness and continuity of
purpose, always careless of his subjects' welfare when it interfered
with his pleasure or his ambitions of the moment. If he had stayed long
in England he would have made himself hated; but he was nearly always
absent; it was only as a reckless and spasmodic extorter of taxation,
not as a personal tyrant, that he was known on the English side of the
Channel.


  The Crusade.

At the opening of his reign Richard had one all-engrossing desire; he
was set on going forth to the Crusade for the recovery of Jerusalem
which had been proclaimed in 1187, partly from chivalrous instincts,
partly as a penance for his misconduct to his father. He visited England
in 1189 only in order to be crowned, and to raise as much money for the
expedition as he could procure. He obtained enormous sums, by the most
unwise and iniquitous expedients, mainly by selling to any buyer that he
could find valuable pieces of crown property, high offices and dangerous
rights and privileges. The king of Scotland bought for 15,000 marks a
release from the homage to the English crown which had been imposed upon
him by Henry II. The chancellorship, one of the two chief offices in
the realm, was sold to William Longchamp, bishop of Ely, for L3000,
though he was well known as a tactless, arrogant and incapable person.
The earldom of Northumberland, with palatine rights, was bought by Hugh
Puiset, bishop of Durham. Countless other instances of unwise bargains
could be quoted. Having raised every penny that he could procure by
legal or illegal means, Richard crossed the Channel, and embarked at
Marseilles with a great army on the 7th of August 1190. The only
security which he had for the safety of his dominions in his absence was
that his most dangerous neighbour, the king of France, was also setting
out on the Crusade, and that his brother John, whose shifty and
treacherous character gave sure promise of trouble, enjoyed a
well-merited unpopularity both in England and in the continental
dominions of the crown.

Richard's crusading exploits have no connexion with the history of
England. He showed himself a good knight and a capable general--the
capture of Acre and the victory of Arsuf were highly to his credit as a
soldier. But he quarrelled with all the other princes of the Crusade,
and showed himself as lacking in tact and diplomatic ability as he was
full of military capacity. The king of France departed in wrath, to
raise trouble at home; the army gradually melted away, the prospect of
recovering Jerusalem disappeared, and finally Richard must be reckoned
fortunate in that he obtained from Sultan Saladin a peace, by which the
coastland of Palestine was preserved for the Christians, while the Holy
City and the inland was sacrificed (Sept. 2, 1192). While returning to
his dominions by the way of the Adriatic, the king was shipwrecked, and
found himself obliged to enter the dominions of Leopold, duke of
Austria, a prince whom he had offended at Acre during the Crusade.
Though he disguised himself, he was detected by his old enemy and
imprisoned. The duke then sold him to the emperor Henry VI., who found
pretexts for forcing him to buy his freedom by the promise of a ransom
of 150,000 marks. It was not till February 1194 that he got loose, after
paying a considerable instalment of this vast sum. The main bulk of it,
as was to be expected, was never made over; indeed it could not have
been raised, as Richard was well aware. But, once free, he had no
scruple in cheating the imperial brigand of his blackmail.


  John's treachery.

For five years Richard was away from his dominions as a crusader or a
captive. There was plenty of trouble during his absence, but less than
might have been expected. The strong governance set up by Henry II.
proved competent to maintain itself, even when Richard's ministers were
tactless and his brother treacherous. A generation before it is certain
that England would have been convulsed by a great feudal rising when
such an opportunity was granted to the barons. Nothing of the kind
happened between 1190 and 1194. The chancellor William Longchamp made
himself odious by his vanity and autocratic behaviour, and was
overthrown in 1191 by a general rising, which was headed by Prince John,
and approved by Walter, archbishop of Rouen, whom Richard had sent to
England with a commission to assume the justiciarship if William should
prove impossible as an administrator. Longchamp fled to the continent,
and John then hoped to seize on supreme power, even perhaps to grasp the
crown. But he was bitterly disappointed to find that he could gather few
supporters; the justiciar and the bureaucrats of the Curia Regis would
give him no assistance; they worked on honestly in the name of the
absent king. Among the baronage hardly a man would commit himself to
treason. In vain John hired foreign mercenaries, garrisoned his castles,
and leagued himself with the king of France when the latter returned
from the Crusade. It was only the news of his brother's captivity in
Austria which gave the intriguing prince a transient hope of success.
Boldly asserting that Richard would never be seen alive again he went to
France, and did homage to King Philip for Normandy and Aquitaine, as if
they were already his own. Then he crossed to England with a band of
mercenaries, and seized Windsor and Wallingford castles. But no one rose
to aid him, and his garrisons were soon being besieged by loyal levies,
headed by the justiciar and by Hubert Walter, the newly elected
archbishop of Canterbury. At the same time King Philip's invasion of
Normandy was repulsed by the barons of the duchy. Richard's faithful
ministers, despite of all their distractions, succeeded in raising the
first instalment of his ransom by grinding taxation--a fourth part of
the revenue of all lay persons, a tithe from ecclesiastical land, was
raised, and in addition much church plate was seized, though the
officials who exacted it were themselves prelates. John and Philip wrote
to the emperor to beg him to detain his captive at all costs, but Henry
VI. pocketed the ransom money and set Richard free. He reached England
in March 1194, just in time to receive the surrender of the last two
castles which were holding out in his treacherous brother's name. With
astonishing, and indeed misplaced, magnanimity, Richard pardoned his
brother, when he made a grovelling submission, and restored him to his
lordship of Ireland and to a great part of his English lands.

The king abode for no more than three months in England; he got himself
recrowned at Winchester, apparently to wipe out the stain of his German
captivity and of an enforced homage which the emperor had extorted from
him. Then he raised a heavy tax from his already impoverished subjects,
sold a number of official posts and departed to France--never to return,
though he had still five years to live. He left behind Archbishop Hubert
Walter as justiciar, a faithful if a somewhat high-handed minister.

Richard's one ruling passion was now to punish Philip of France for his
unfriendly conduct during his absence. He plunged into a war with this
clever and shifty prince, which lasted--with certain short breaks of
truces and treaties--till his death. He wasted his considerable military
talents in a series of skirmishes and sieges which had no great results,
and after spending countless treasures and harrying many regions,
perished obscurely by a wound from a cross-bow-bolt, received while
beleaguering Chalus, a castle of a rebellious lord of Aquitaine, the
viscount of Limoges (April 6, 1199).


  English constitutional development.

During these years of petty strife England was only reminded at
intervals of her king's existence by his intermittent demands for money,
which his ministers did their best to satisfy. The machine of government
continued to work without his supervision. It has been observed that,
from one point of view, England's worst kings have been her best; that
is to say, a sovereign like Richard, who persistently neglected his
duties, was unconsciously the foster father of constitutional liberty.
For his ministers, bureaucrats of an orderly frame of mind, devised for
their own convenience rules and customs which became permanent, and
could be cited against those later kings who interfered more actively in
the details of domestic governance. We may trace back some small
beginnings of a constitution to the time of Henry II.--himself an
absentee though not on the scale of his son. But the ten years of
Richard's reign were much more fruitful in the growth of institutions
which were destined to curb the power of the crown. His justiciars, and
especially Hubert Walter, were responsible for several innovations which
were to have far-spreading results. The most important was an extension
of the use of juries into the province of taxation. When the government
employs committees chosen by the taxpayers to estimate and assess the
details of taxation, it will find it hard to go back to arbitrary
exactions. Such a practice had been first seen when Henry II., in his
last year, allowed the celebrated "Saladin Tithe" for the service of the
crusade to be assessed by local jurors. In Richard's reign the practice
became regular. In especial when England was measured out anew for the
great carucage of 1197--a tax on every ploughland which replaced the
rough calculation of Domesday Book--knights elected by the shires shared
in all the calculations then made for the new impost. Another
constitutional advance was that which substituted "coroners," knights
chosen by the county court, for the king's old factotum the sheriff in
the duty of holding the "pleas of the crown," i.e. in making the
preliminary investigations into such offences as riot, murder or injury
to the king's rights or property. The sheriff's natural impulse was to
indict every man from whom money could be got; the new coroners were
influenced by other motives than financial rapacity, and so were much
more likely to deal equitably with accusations. The towns also profited
in no small degree from Richard's absence and impecuniosity. One of the
most important charters to London, that which granted the city the right
of constituting itself a "commune" and choosing itself a mayor, goes
back to October 1191, the troubled month of Longchamp's expulsion from
England. It was given by Prince John and the ministers, who were then
supporting him against the arrogant chancellor, to secure the adherence
of London. Richard on his return seems to have allowed it to stand.
Lincoln was also given the right of electing its own magistrates in
1194, and many smaller places owe grants of more or less of municipal
privilege to Hubert Walter acting in the name of the absent king. The
English nation began to have some conception of a regime of fixed
custom, in which its rights depended on some other source than the
sovereign's personal caprice. The times, it may be remembered, were not
unprosperous. There had been no serious civil war since the baronial
rising of 1173. Prince John's turbulence had only affected the
neighbourhood of a few royal castles. Despite of the frequent and heavy
demands for money for the king's service, wealth seems to have been
increasing, and prosperity to have been widespread. Strong and regular
governance had on the whole prevailed ever since Henry II. triumphed
over baronial anarchy.


III. THE STRUGGLE FOR CONSTITUTIONAL LIBERTY (1199-1337)

  Accession of John.

Richard's queen, Berengaria of Navarre, had borne him no children. At
the moment of his premature death his nearest kinsmen were his worthless
brother John, and the boy Arthur of Brittany, the heir of Geoffrey, the
third son of Henry II. On his death-bed the king had designated John as
his successor, holding apparently that a bad ruler who was at least a
grown man was preferable to a child. John's claim prevailed both in
Normandy and in England, though in each, as we are told, there were
those who considered it a doubtful point whether an elder brother's son
had not a better right than a younger brother. But the ministers
recognized John, and the baronage and nation acquiesced, though with
little enthusiasm. In the lands farther south, however, matters went
otherwise. The dowager duchess Constance of Brittany raised her son's
claim, and sent an army into Anjou, and all down the Loire many of the
nobles adhered to his cause. The king of France announced that he should
support them, and allowed Arthur to do him homage for Anjou, Maine and
Touraine. There would have been trouble in Aquitaine also, if the aged
Queen Eleanor had not asserted her own primary and indefeasible right to
her ancestral duchy, and then declared that she transferred it to her
best loved son John. Most of her subjects accepted her decision, and
Arthur's faction made no head in this quarter.


  War with Phillip Augustus.

  Loss of Normandy.

It seemed for a space as if the new king would succeed in retaining the
whole of his brother's inheritance, for King Philip very meanly allowed
himself to be bought off by the cession of the county of Evreux, and,
when his troops were withdrawn, the Angevin rebels were beaten down, and
the duchess of Brittany had to ask for peace for her son. But it had not
long been granted, when John proceeded to throw away his advantage by
acts of reckless impolicy. Though cunning, he was destitute alike of
foresight and of self-control; he could never discern the way in which
his conduct would be judged by other men, because he lacked even the
rudiments of a conscience. Ere he had been many months on the throne he
divorced his wife, Isabella of Gloucester, alleging that their marriage
had been illegal because they were within the prohibited degrees. This
act offended the English barons, but in choosing a new queen John gave
much greater offence abroad; he carried off Isabella of Angouleme from
her affianced husband, Hugh of Lusignan, the son of the count of la
Marche, his greatest vassal in northern Aquitaine, and married her
despite the precontract. This seems to have been an amorous freak, not
the result of any deep-laid policy. Roused by the insult the Lusignans
took arms, and a great part of the barons of Poitou joined them. They
appealed for aid to Philip of France, who judged it opportune to
intervene once more. He summoned John to appear before him as suzerain,
to answer the complaints of his Poitevin subjects, and when he failed to
plead declared war on him and declared his dominions escheated to the
French crown for non-fulfilment of his feudal allegiance. He enlisted
Arthur of Brittany in his cause by recognizing him once more as the
rightful owner of all John's continental fiefs save Normandy, which he
intended to take for himself. Philip then entered Normandy, while Arthur
led a Breton force into Anjou and Poitou to aid the Lusignans. The
fortune of war at first turned in favour of the English king. He
surprised his nephew while he was besieging the castle of Mirebeau in
Poitou, where the old Queen Eleanor was residing. The young duke and
most of his chief supporters were taken prisoners (August 1, 1202).
Instead of using his advantage aright, John put Arthur in secret
confinement, and after some months caused him to be murdered. He is said
also to have starved to death twenty-two knights of Poitou who had been
among his captives. The assassination of his nearest kinsman, a mere boy
of sixteen, was as unwise as it was cruel. It estranged from the king
the hearts of all his French subjects, who were already sufficiently
disgusted by many minor acts of brutality, as well as by incessant
arbitrary taxation and by the reckless ravages in which John's mercenary
troops had been indulging. The French armies met with little or no
resistance when they invaded Normandy, Anjou and Poitou. John sat inert
at Rouen, pretending to take his misfortunes lightly, and boasting that
"what was easily lost could be as easily won back." Meanwhile Philip
Augustus conquered all western Normandy, without having to fight a
battle. The great castle of Chateau Gaillard, which guards the Lower
Seine, was the only place which made a strenuous resistance. It was
finally taken by assault, despite of the efforts of the gallant
castellan, Roger de Lacy, constable of Chester, who had made head
against the besiegers for six months (September 1203-March 1204) without
receiving any assistance from his master. John finally absconded to
England in December 1203; he failed to return with an army of relief, as
he had promised, and before the summer of 1204 was over, Caen, Bayeux
and Rouen, the last places that held out for him, had been forced to
open their gates. The Norman barons had refused to strike a blow for
John, and the cities had shown but a very passive and precarious loyalty
to him. He had made himself so well hated by his cruelty and vices that
the Normans, forgetting their old hatred of France, had acquiesced in
the conquest. Two ties alone had for the last century held the duchy to
the English connexion: the one was that many Norman baronial families
held lands on this side of the Channel; the second was the national
pride which looked upon England as a conquered appendage of Normandy.
But the first had grown weaker as the custom arose of dividing family
estates between brothers, on the principle that one should take the
Norman, the other the English parts of a paternal heritage. By John's
time there were comparatively few landholders whose interests were
fairly divided between the duchy and the kingdom. Such as survived had
now to choose between losing the one or the other section of their
lands; those whose holding was mainly Norman adhered to Philip; those
who had more land in England sacrificed their transmarine estates. For
each of the two kings declared the property of the barons who did not
support him confiscated to the crown. As to the old Norman theory that
England was a conquered land, it had gradually ceased to exist as an
operative force, under kings who, like Henry II. or Richard I., were
neither Norman nor English in feeling, but Angevin. John did not, and
could not, appeal as a Norman prince to Norman patriotism.


  Loss of Anjou, Touraine and Poitou.

The successes of Philip Augustus did not cease with the conquest of
Normandy. His armies pushed forward in the south also; Anjou, Touraine
and nearly all Poitou submitted to him. Only Guienne and southern
Aquitaine held out for King John, partly because they preferred a weak
and distant master to such a strenuous and grasping prince as King
Philip, partly because they were far more alien in blood and language to
their French neighbours than were Normans or Angevins. The Gascons were
practically a separate nationality, and the house of Capet had no
ancient connexion with them. The kings of England were yet to reign at
Bordeaux and Bayonne for two hundred and fifty years. But the connexion
with Gascony meant little compared with the now vanished connexion with
Normandy. Henry I. or Henry II. could run over to his continental
dominions in a day or two days; Dieppe and Harfleur were close to
Portsmouth and Hastings. It was a different thing for John and his
successors to undertake the long voyage to Bordeaux, around the stormy
headlands of Brittany and across the Bay of Biscay. Visits to their
continental dominions had to be few and far between; they were long,
costly and dangerous when a French fleet--a thing never seen before
Philip Augustus conquered Normandy--might be roaming in the Channel. The
kings of England became perforce much more home-keeping sovereigns after
1204.

It was certainly not a boon for England that her present sovereign was
destined to remain within her borders for the greater part of his
remaining years. To know John well was to loathe him, as every
contemporary chronicle bears witness. The two years that followed the
loss of Normandy were a time of growing discontent and incessant
disputes about taxation. The king kept collecting scutages and tallages,
yet barons and towns complained that nothing seemed to be done with the
money he collected. At last, however, in 1206, the king did make an
expedition to Poitou, and recovered some of its southern borders. Yet,
with his usual inconsequence, he did not follow up his success, but made
a two years' truce with Philip of France on the basis of _uti
possidetis_--which left Normandy and all the territories on and about
the Loire in the hands of the conqueror.


  Quarrel with the Papacy.

It is probable that this pacification was the result of a new quarrel
which John had just taken up with a new enemy--the Papacy. The dispute
on the question of free election, which was to range over all the
central years of his reign, had just begun. In the end of 1205 Hubert
Walter, archbishop of Canterbury, had died. The king announced his
intention of procuring the election of John de Gray, bishop of Norwich,
as his successor; but, though his purpose was well known, the chapter
(i.e. the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury) met secretly and elected
their sub-prior Reginald as archbishop. They sent him to Rome at once,
to receive confirmation from Pope Innocent III., whom they knew to be a
zealous champion of the rights of the Church. But John descended upon
them in great wrath, and by threats compelled them to hold a second
meeting, and to elect his nominee Gray, in whose name application for
confirmation was also made to the pope. Innocent, however, seeing a
splendid chance of asserting his authority, declared both the elections
that had taken place invalid, the first because it had been clandestine,
the second because it had been held under _force majeure_, and proceeded
to nominate a friend of his own--Cardinal Stephen Langton, an Englishman
of proved capacity and blameless life, then resident in Rome. He was far
the worthiest of the three candidates, but it was an intolerable
invasion of the rights of the English crown and the English Church that
an archbishop should be foisted on them in this fashion. The
representatives of the chapter who had been sent to Rome were persuaded
or compelled to elect him in the pope's presence (Dec. 1206).

King John was furious, and not without good reason; he refused to accept
Langton, whom he declared (quite unjustly) to be a secret friend of
Philip of France, and sequestrated the lands of the monks of Canterbury.
On this the pope threatened to lay an interdict on himself and his
realm. The king replied by issuing a proclamation to the effect that he
would outlaw any clerk who should accept the validity of such an
interdict and would confiscate his lands. Despising such threats
Innocent carried out his threat, and put England under the ban of the
Church on the 23rd of March 1208.

In obedience to the pope's orders the large majority of the English
clergy closed their churches, and suspended the ordinary course of the
services and celebration of the sacraments. Baptism and extreme unction
only were continued, lest souls should be lost; and marriages were
permitted but not inside the walls of churches. Foreseeing the wrath of
the king against all who obeyed the mandate from Rome, the larger number
of the bishops and many others of the higher clergy fled overseas to
escape the storm. Those who were bold enough to remain behind had much
to endure. John, openly rejoicing at the plunder that lay before him,
declared the temporalities of all who had accepted the interdict,
whether they had exiled themselves or no, to be confiscated. His
treasury was soon so well filled that he could dispense with ordinary
taxation. He also outlawed the whole body of the clergy, save the timid
remnant who promised to disregard the papal commands.


  Character of John's rule.

Nothing proves more conclusively the strength of the Angevin monarchy,
and the decreasing power of feudalism, than that an unpopular king like
John could maintain his strife with the pope, and suppress the
discontents of his subjects, for nearly five years before the inevitable
explosion came. Probably his long immunity was due in the main to the
capacity of his strong-handed justiciar Geoffrey Fitz-Peter; the king
hated him bitterly, but generally took his advice. The crash only came
when Geoffrey died in 1213; his ungrateful master only expressed joy.
"Now by God's feet am I for the first time king of England," he
exclaimed, when the news reached him. He proceeded to fill the vacancy
with a mere Poitevin adventurer, Peter des Roches, whom he had made
bishop of Winchester some time before. Indeed John's few trusted
confidants were nearly all foreigners, such men as the mercenary
captains Gerard of Athies and Engelhart of Cigogne, whom he made
sheriffs and castellans to the discontent of all Englishmen. He spent
all his money in maintaining bands of hired _Brabancons_ and _routiers_,
by whose aid he for some time succeeded in terrorizing the countryside.
There were a few preliminary outbreaks of rebellion, which were
suppressed with vigour and punished with horrible cruelty. John starved
to death the wife and son of William de Braose, the first baron who took
arms against him, and hanged in a row twenty-eight young boys, hostages
for the fidelity of their fathers, Welsh princes who had dabbled in
treason. Such acts provoked rage as well as fear, yet the measure of
John's iniquities was not full till 1212. Indeed for some time his
persistent prosperity provoked the indignant surprise of those who
believed him to be under a curse. If his renewed war with Philip of
France was generally unsuccessful, yet at home he held his own. The most
astounding instance of his success is that in 1210 he found leisure for
a hasty expedition to Ireland, where he compelled rebellious barons to
do homage, and received the submission of more than twenty of the local
kinglets. It is strange that he came back to find England undisturbed
behind him.


  John does homage to the pope.

His long-deserved humiliation only began in the winter of 1212-1213,
when Innocent III., finding him so utterly callous as to the interdict,
took the further step of declaring him deposed from the throne for
contumacy, and handing over the execution of the penalty to the king of
France. This act provoked a certain amount of indignation in England,
and in the spring of 1213 the king was able to collect a large army on
Barham Down to resist the threatened French invasion. Yet so many of his
subjects were discontented that he dared not trust himself to the
chances of war, and, when the fleet of King Philip was ready to sail, he
surprised the world by making a sudden and grovelling submission to the
pope. Not only did he agree to receive Stephen Langton as archbishop, to
restore all the exiled clergy to their benefices, and to pay them
handsome compensation for all their losses during the last five years,
but he took the strange and ignominious step of declaring that he ceded
his whole kingdom to the pope, to hold as his vassal. He formally
resigned his crown into the hands of the legate Cardinal Pandulf, and
took it back as the pope's vassal, engaging at the same time to pay a
tribute of 1000 marks a year for England and Ireland. This was felt to
be a humiliating transaction by many of John's subjects, though to
others the joy at reconciliation with the Church caused all else to be
forgotten. The political effect of the device was all that John had
desired. His new suzerain took him under his protection, and forbade
Philip of France to proceed with his projected invasion, though ships
and men were all ready (May 1213). John's safety, however, was secured
in a more practical way when his bastard brother, William Longsword,
earl of Salisbury, made a descent on the port of Damme and burnt or sunk
a whole squadron of the French transports. After this John's spirits
rose, and he talked of crossing the seas himself to recover Normandy and
Anjou. But he soon found that his subjects were not inclined to follow
him; they were resigned to the loss of the Angevin heritage, whose union
with England brought no profit to them, however much it might interest
their king. The barons expressed their wish for a peace with France, and
when summoned to produce their feudal contingents pleaded poverty, and
raised a rather shallow theory to the effect that their services could
not be asked for wars beyond seas--against which there were conclusive
precedents in the reigns of Henry I. and Henry II. But any plea can be
raised against an unpopular king. John found himself obliged to turn
back, since hardly a man save his mercenaries had rallied to his
standard at Portsmouth. In great anger and indignation he marched off
towards the north, with his hired soldiery, swearing to punish the
barons who had taken the lead in the "strike" which had defeated his
purpose. But the outbreak of war was to be deferred for a space.
Archbishop Langton, who on assuming possession of his see had shown at
once that he was a patriotic English statesman, and not the mere
delegate of the pope, besought his master to hold back, and, when he
refused, threatened to renew the excommunication which had so lately
been removed. The old justiciar Geoffrey Fitz-Peter, now on his
death-bed, had also refused to pronounce sentence on the defaulters.
John hesitated, and meanwhile his enemies began to organize their
resistance.


  Opposition of the barons.

A great landmark in the constitutional history of England was reached
when Langton assembled the leading barons, rehearsed to them the charter
issued by Henry I. on his accession, and pointed out to them the rights
and liberties therein promised by the crown to the nation. For the
future they agreed to take this document as their programme of demands.
It was the first of the many occasions in English history when the
demand for reform took the shape of a reference back to old precedents,
and now (as on all subsequent occasions) the party which opposed the
crown read back into the ancient grants which they quoted a good deal
more than had been actually conceded in them. To Langton and the barons
the charter of Henry I. seemed to cover all the customs and practices
which had grown up under the rule of the bureaucracy which had served
Henry II. and Richard I. A correct historical perspective could hardly
be expected from men whose constitutional knowledge only ran back as far
as the memory of themselves and their fathers. The Great Charter of 1215
was a commentary on, rather than a reproduction of, the old accession
pledges of Henry I.


  Alliance against France.

  Battle of Bouvines.

Meanwhile John, leaving his barons to discuss and formulate their
grievances, pushed on with a great scheme of foreign alliances, by which
he hoped to crush Philip of France, even though the aid of the feudal
levies of England was denied him. He leagued himself with his nephew the
emperor Otto IV. (his sister's son), and the counts of Flanders and
Boulogne, with many other princes of the Netherlands. Their plan was
that John should land in Poitou and distract the attention of the French
by a raid up the Loire, while the emperor and his vassals should
secretly mobilize a great army in Brabant and make a sudden dash at
Paris. The scheme was not destitute of practical ability, and if it had
been duly carried out would have placed France in such a crisis of
danger as she has seldom known. It was not John's fault that the
campaign failed. He sent the earl of Salisbury with some of his
mercenaries to join the confederates in Flanders, while he sailed with
the main body of them to La Rochelle, whence he marched northward,
devastating the land before him. Philip came out to meet him with the
whole levy of France (April 1214), and Paris would have been left
exposed if Otto and his Netherland vassals had struck promptly in. But
the emperor was late, and by the time that he was approaching the French
frontier Philip Augustus had discovered that John's invasion was but a
feint, executed by an army too weak to do much harm. Leaving a small
containing force on the Loire in face of the English king, Philip
hurried to the north with his main army, and on the 27th of July 1214
inflicted a crushing defeat on the emperor and his allies at Bouvines
near Lille. This was the greatest victory of the French medieval
monarchy. It broke up the Anglo-German alliance, and gave the conqueror
undisturbed possession of all that he had won from the Angevin house and
his other enemies.


  Magna Carta.

Indirectly Bouvines was almost as important in the history of England as
in that of France. John returned to England foiled, and in great anger;
he resolved to give up the French war, secured a truce with King Philip
by abandoning his attempt to reconquer his lost lands on the Loire, and
turned to attack the recalcitrant subjects who had refused to join him
in his late campaign beyond the Channel. Matters soon came to a head: on
hearing that the king was mobilizing his mercenary bands, the barons met
at Bury St Edmunds, and leagued themselves by an oath to obtain from the
king a confirmation of the charter of Henry I. (November 1214). At the
New Year they sent him a formal ultimatum, to which he would not assent,
though he opened up futile negotiation with them through the channel of
the archbishop, who did not take an open part in the rising. At Easter,
nothing having been yet obtained from the king, an army headed by five
earls, forty barons, and Giles Braose, bishop of Hereford, mustered at
Stamford and marched on London. Their captain was Robert FitzWalter,
whom they had named "marshal of the army of God and Holy Church." When
they reached the capital its gates were thrown open to them, and the
mayor and citizens adhered to their cause (May 17). The king, who had
tried to turn them back by taking the cross and declaring himself a
crusader, and by making loud appeals for the arbitration of the pope,
was forced to retire to Windsor. He found that he had no supporters save
a handful of courtiers and officials and the leaders of his mercenary
bands; wherefore in despair he accepted the terms forced upon him by the
insurgents. On the 15th of June 1215 he sealed at Runnymede, close to
Windsor, the famous _Magna Carta_, in face of a vast assembly among
which he had hardly a single friend. It is a long document of 63
clauses, in which Archbishop Langton and a committee of the barons had
endeavoured to recapitulate all their grievances, and to obtain redress
for them. Some of the clauses are unimportant concessions to
individuals, or deal with matters of trifling importance--such as the
celebrated weirs or "kiddles" on Thames and Medway, or the expulsion of
the condottieri chiefs Gerard d'Athies and Engelhart de Cigogne. But
many of them are matters of primary importance in the constitutional
history of England. The Great Charter must not, however, be overrated as
an expression of general constitutional rights; to a large extent it is
a mere recapitulation of the claims of the baronage, and gives redress
for their feudal grievances in the matters of aids, reliefs, wardships,
&c., its object being the repression of arbitrary exactions by the king
on his tenants-in-chief. One section, that which provides against the
further encroachments of the king's courts on the private manorial
courts of the landowners, might even be regarded as retrograde in
character from the point of view of administrative efficacy. But it is
most noteworthy that the barons, while providing for the abolition of
abuses which affect themselves, show an unselfish and patriotic spirit
in laying down the rule that all the concessions which the king makes to
them shall also be extended by themselves to their own sub-tenants. The
clauses dealing with the general governance of the realm are also as
enlightened as could be expected from the character of the committee
which drafted the charter. There is to be no taxation without the
consent of the Great Council of the Realm--which is to consist of all
barons, who are to be summoned by individual units; and of all smaller
tenants-in-chief, who are to be called not by separate letters, but by a
general notice published by the sheriff. It has been pointed out that
this provides no representation for sub-tenants or the rest of the
nation, so that we are still far from the ideal of a representative
parliament. John himself had gone a step farther on the road towards
that ideal when in 1213 he had summoned four "discreet men" from every
shire to a council at Oxford, which (as it appears) was never held. But
this would seem to have been a vain bid for popularity with the middle
classes, which had no result at the time, and the barons preferred to
keep things in their own hands, and to abide by ancient precedents. It
was to be some forty years later that the first appearance o

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