POLITICAL RETROGRESSION AND NATIONAL PROGRESS.
The ten years from 1248 to 1258 saw the continuance of the
misgovernment, discontent, and futile opposition which have already
been sufficiently illustrated. The history of those years must be
sought not so much in the relations of the king and his English
subjects as in Gascony, in Wales, in the crusading revival, and in the
culmination of the struggle of papacy and empire. In each of these
fields the course of events reacted sharply upon the domestic affairs
of England, until at last the failures of Henry's foreign policy gave
unity and determination to the party of opposition whose first
organised success, in 1258, ushered in the Barons' War.
The relations between England and France remained anomalous. Formal
peace was impossible, since France would yield nothing, and the English
king still claimed Normandy and Aquitaine. Yet neither Henry nor Louis
had any wish for war. They had married sisters: they were personally
friendly, and were both lovers of peace. In such circumstances it was
not hard to arrange truces from time to time, so that from 1243 to the
end of the reign there were no open hostilities. In 1248 the friendly
feeling of the two courts was particularly strong. Louis was on the eve
of departure for the crusade and many English nobles had taken the
cross. Henry, who was himself contemplating a crusade, was of no mind
to avail himself of his kinsman's absence to disturb his realm.
The French could afford to pass over Henry's neglect to do homage, for
Gascony seemed likely to emancipate itself from the yoke of its English
dukes without any prompting from Paris. After the failure of 1243, a
limited amount of territory between the Dordogne and the Pyrenees alone
acknowledged Henry. This narrower Gascony was a thoroughly feudalised
land: the absentee dukes had little authority, domain, or revenue: and
the chief lordships were held by magnates, whose relations to their
overlord were almost formal, and by municipalities almost as free as
the cities of Flanders or the empire. The disastrous campaign of
Taiilebourg lessened the prestige of the duke, and Henry quitted
Gascony without so much as attempting to settle its affairs. In the
following years weak seneschals, with insufficient powers and quickly
succeeding each other, were unable to grapple with ever-increasing
troubles. The feudal lords dominated the countryside, pillaged traders,
waged internal war and defied the authority of the duke. In the
autonomous towns factions had arisen as fierce as those of the cities
of Italy. Bordeaux was torn asunder by the feuds of the Rosteins and
Colons. Bayonne was the scene of a struggle between a few privileged
families, which sought to monopolise municipal office, and a popular
opposition based upon the seafaring class. The neighbouring princes
cast greedy eyes on a land so rich, divided, and helpless. Theobald
IV., the poet, Count of Champagne and King of Navarre, coveted the
valley of the Adour. Gaston, Viscount of Béarn, the cousin of Queen
Eleanor, plundered and destroyed the town of Dax. Ferdinand the Saint
of Castile and James I. of Aragon severally claimed all Gascony. Behind
all these loomed the agents of the King of France. Either Gascony must
fall away altogether, or stronger measures must be taken to preserve
it.
In this extremity Henry made Simon of Montfort seneschal or governor of
Gascony, with exceptionally full powers and an assured duration of
office for seven years. Simon had taken the crusader's vow, but was
persuaded by the king to abandon his intention of following Louis to
Egypt. He at once threw himself into his rude task with an energy that
showed him to be a true son of the Albigensian crusader. In the first
three months he traversed the duchy from end to end; rallied the royal
partisans; defeated rebels; kept external foes in check, and
administered the law without concern for the privileges of the great.
In 1249 he crushed the Rostein faction at Bordeaux. The same fate was
meted out to their partisans in the country districts. Order was
restored, but the seneschal utterly disregarded impartiality or
justice. He sought to rule Gascony by terrorism and by backing up one
faction against the other. It was the same with minor cities, like
Bazas and Bayonne, and with the tyrants of the countryside. The
Viscount of Fronsac saw his castle razed and his estates seized. Gaston
of Béarn, tricked by the seneschal out of the succession of Bigorre,
was captured, sent to England, and only allowed to return to his home,
humiliated and powerless to work further evil. The lesser barons had to
acknowledge Simon their master. On the death of Raymond of Toulouse in
1249, his son-in-law and successor, Alfonse of Poitiers, had all he
could do to secure his inheritance, and was too closely bound by the
pacific policy of his brother to give Simon much trouble. The truce
with France was easily renewed by reason of St. Louis' absence on a
crusade. The differences between Gascony and Theobald of Navarre were
mitigated in 1248 at a personal interview between Leicester and the
poet-king.
Gascony for the moment was so quiet that the rebellious hordes called
the _Pastoureaux_, who had desolated the royal domain, withdrew from
Bordeaux in terror of Simon's threats. But the expense of maintaining
order pressed heavily on the seneschal's resources, and his master
showed little disposition to assist him. Moreover Gascony could not
long keep quiet. There were threats of fresh insurrections, and the
whole land was burning with indignation against its governor.
Complaints from the Gascon estates soon flowed with great abundance
into Westminster. For the moment Henry paid little attention to them.
His son Edward was ten years of age, and he was thinking of providing
him with an appanage, sufficient to support a separate household and so
placed as to train the young prince in the duties of statecraft. Before
November, 1249, he granted to Edward all Gascony, along with the
profits of the government of Ireland, which were set aside to put
Gascony in a good state of defence. Simon's strong hand was now more
than ever necessary to keep the boy's unruly subjects under control.
The King therefore continued Simon as seneschal of Gascony, though
henceforth the earl acted as Edward's minister. "Complete happily,"
Henry wrote to the seneschal, "all our affairs in Gascony and you shall
receive from us and our heirs a recompense worthy of your services."
For the moment Leicester's triumph seemed complete, but the Gascons,
who had hoped that Edward's establishment meant the removal of their
masterful governor, were bitterly disappointed at the continuance of
his rule. Profiting by Simon's momentary absence in England, they once
more rose in revolt. Henry wavered for the moment. "Bravely," declared
he to his brother-in-law, "hast thou fought for me, and I will not deny
thee help. But complaints pour in against thee. They say that thou hast
thrown into prison, and condemned to death, folk who have been summoned
to thy court under pledge of thy good faith." In the end Simon was sent
back to Gascony, and by May, 1251, the rebels were subdued.
Next year Gaston of Béarn stirred up another revolt, and, while Simon
was in England, deputies from the Aquitanian cities crossed the sea and
laid new complaints before Henry. A stormy scene ensued between the
king and his brother-in-law. Threatened with the loss of his office,
Simon insisted that he had been appointed for seven years, and that he
could not be removed without his own consent. Henry answered that he
would keep no compacts with traitors. "That word is a lie," cried
Simon; "were you not my king it would be an ill hour for you when you
dared to utter it." The sympathy of the magnates saved Leicester from
the king's wrath, and before long he returned to Gascony, still
seneschal, but with authority impaired by the want of his sovereign's
confidence. Though the king henceforth sided with the rebels, Simon
remained strong enough to make headway against the lord of Béarn.
Before long, however, Leicester unwillingly agreed to vacate his office
on receiving from Henry a sum of money. In September, 1252, he laid
down the seneschalship and retired into France. While shabbily treated
by the king, he had certainly shown an utter absence of tact or
scruple. But the tumults of Gascony raged with more violence than ever
now that his strong hand was withdrawn. Those who had professed to rise
against the seneschal remained in arms against the king. Once more the
neighbouring princes cast greedy eyes on the defenceless duchy. In
particular, Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile, who succeeded his father
Ferdinand in 1252, renewed his father's claims to Gascony.
The only way to save the duchy was for Henry to go there in person.
Long delays ensued before the royal visit took place, and it was not
until August, 1253, that Bordeaux saw her hereditary duke sail up the
Gironde to her quays. The Gascon capital remained faithful, but within
a few miles of her walls the rebels were everywhere triumphant. It
required a long siege to reduce Bénauge to submission, and months
elapsed before the towns and castles of the lower Garonne and Dordogne
opened their gates. Even then La Réole, whither all the worst enemies
of Montfort had fled, held out obstinately. Despairing of military
success, Henry fell back upon diplomacy. The strength of the Gascon
revolt did not lie in the power of the rebels themselves but in the
support of the neighbouring princes and the French crown. By renewing
the truce with the representatives of Louis, Henry protected himself
from the danger of French intervention, and at the same time he cut off
a more direct source of support to the rebels by negotiating treaties
with such magnates as the lord of Albret, the Counts of Comminges and
Armagnac, and the Viscount of Béarn. His master-stroke was the
conclusion, in April, 1254, of a peace with Alfonso of Castile, whereby
the Spanish king abandoned his Gascon allies and renounced his claims
on the duchy. In return it was agreed that the lord Edward should marry
Alfonso's half-sister, Eleanor, heiress of the county of Ponthieu
through her mother, Joan, whom Henry had once sought for his queen. As
Edward's appanage included Aquitaine, Alfonso, in renouncing his
personal claims, might seem to be but transferring them to his sister.
In May, 1254, Queen Eleanor joined Henry at Bordeaux. With her went her
two sons, Edward and Edmund, her uncle, Archbishop Boniface, and a great
crowd of magnates. In August Edward went with his mother to Alfonso's
court at Burgos, where he was welcomed with all honour and dubbed to
knighthood by the King of Castile, and in October he and Eleanor were
married at the Cistercian monastery of Las Huelgas. His appanage
included all Ireland, the earldom of Chester, the king's lands in Wales,
the Channel Islands, the whole of Gascony, and whatsoever rights his
father still had over the lands taken from him and King John by the
Kings of France. Thus he became the ruler of all the outlying
dependencies of the English crown, and the representative of all the
claims on the Aquitanian inheritance of Eleanor and the Norman
inheritance of William the Conqueror. The caustic St. Alban's chronicler
declared that Henry left to himself such scanty possessions that he
became a "mutilated kinglet".[1] But Henry was too jealous of power
utterly to renounce so large a share of his dominions. His grants to his
son were for purposes of revenue and support, and the government of
these regions was still strictly under the royal control. Yet from this
moment writs ran in Edward's name, and under his father's direction the
young prince was free to buy his experience as he would. Soon after his
son's return with his bride, Henry III. quitted Gascony, making his way
home through France, where he visited his mother's tomb at Fontevraud
and made atonement at Pontigny before the shrine of Archbishop Edmund.
Of more importance was his visit to King Louis, recently returned from
his Egyptian captivity. The cordial relations established by personal
intercourse between the two kings prepared the way for peace two years
later.
[1] Matthew Paris, _Chron. Maj._, v., 450.
Edward remained in Gascony about a year after his father. He checked
with a stern hand the disorders of his duchy, strove to make peace
between the Rosteins and Colons, and failing to do so, took in 1261 the
decisive step of putting an end to the tumultuous municipal
independence of the Gascon capital by depriving the jurats of the right
of choosing their mayor.[1] Thenceforth Bordeaux was ruled by a
mayor nominated by the duke or his lieutenant. Edward's rule in Gascony
has its importance as the first experiment in government by the boy of
fifteen who was later to become so great a king. Returning to London in
November, 1255, he still forwarded the interests of his Gascon
subjects, and an attempt to protect the Bordeaux wine-merchants from
the exactions of the royal officers aroused the jealousy of Henry, who
declared that the days of Henry II. had come again, when the king's
sons rose in revolt against their father. Despite this characteristic
wail, Edward gained his point. Yet his efforts to secure the well-being
of Gascony had not produced much result. The hold of the English duke
on Aquitaine was as precarious under Edward as it had been in the days
of Henry's direct rule.
[1] See Bémont, _Rôles Gascons_, i., supplément, pp.
cxvi.-cxviii.
The affairs of Wales and Cheshire involved Edward in responsibilities
even more pressing than those of Gascony. On the death of John the Scot
without heirs in 1237, the palatinate of Randolph of Blundeville became
a royal escheat. Its grant to Edward made him the natural head of the
marcher barons. The Cheshire earldom became the more important since
the Welsh power had been driven beyond the Conway. Since the death of
David ap Llewelyn in 1246, divisions in the reigning house of Gwynedd
had continued to weaken the Welsh. Llewelyn and Owen the Red, the two
elder sons of the Griffith ap Llewelyn who had perished in attempting
to escape from the Tower, took upon themselves the government of
Gwynedd, dividing the land, by the advice of the "good men," into two
equal halves. The English seneschal at Carmarthen took advantage of
their weakness to seize the outlying dependencies of Gwynedd south of
the Dovey. War ensued, for the brothers resisted this aggression. But
in April, 1247, they were forced to do homage at Woodstock for Gwynedd
and Snowdon. Henry retained not only Cardigan and Carmarthen, but the
debatable lands between the eastern boundary of Cheshire and the river
Clwyd, the four cantreds of the middle country or Perveddwlad, so long
the scene of the fiercest warfare between the Celt and the Saxon. Thus
the work of Llewelyn ap Iorwerth was completely undone, and his
grandsons were confined to Snowdon and Anglesey, the ancient cradles of
their house.
It suited English policy that even, the barren lands of Snowdon should
be divided. As time went on, other sons of Griffith ap Llewelyn began
to clamour for a share of their grandfather's inheritance. Owen, the
weaker of the two princes, made common cause with them, and David,
another brother, succeeded in obtaining his portion of the common
stock. Llewelyn showed himself so much the most resourceful and
energetic of the brethren that, when open war broke out between them in
1254, he easily obtained the victory. Owen was taken prisoner, and
David was deprived of his lands. Llewelyn, thus sole ruler of Gwynedd,
at once aspired to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather. He
overran Merioneth, and frightened the native chieftains beyond the
Dovey into the English camp. His ambitions were, however, rudely
checked by the grant of Cheshire and the English lands in Wales to
Edward.
Besides the border palatinate, Edward's Welsh lands included the four
cantreds of Perveddwlad, and the districts of Cardigan and Carmarthen.
Young as he was, he had competent advisers, and, while he was still in
Aquitaine, designs were formed of setting up the English shire system
in his Welsh lands, so as to supersede the traditional Celtic methods
of government by feudal and monarchical centralisation. Efforts were
made to subject the four cantreds to the shire courts at Chester; and
Geoffrey of Langley, Edward's agent in the south, set up shire-moots at
Cardigan and Carmarthen, from which originated the first beginnings of
those counties. The bitterest indignation animated Edward's Welsh
tenants, whether on the Clwyd or on the Teivi and Towy. They rose in
revolt against the alien innovators, and called upon Llewelyn to
champion their grievances. Llewelyn saw the chance of extending his
tribal power into a national principality over all Wales by posing as
the upholder of the Welsh people. He overran the four cantreds in a
week, finding no resistance save before the two castles of Deganwy and
Diserth. He conquered Cardigan with equal ease, and prudently granted
out his acquisition to the local chieftain Meredith ap Owen. Nor were
Edward's lands alone exposed to his assaults. In central Wales Roger
Mortimer was stripped of his marches on the upper Wye, and Griffith ap
Gwenwynwyn, the lord of upper Powys, driven from the regions of the
upper Severn. In the spring of 1257 the lord of Gwynedd appeared in
regions untraversed by the men of Snowdon since the days of his
grandfather. He devastated the lands of the marchers on the Bristol
Channel and slew Edward's deputy in battle. "In those days," says
Matthew Paris, "the Welsh saw that their lives were at stake, so that
those of the north joined together in indissoluble alliance with those
of the south. Such a union had never before been, since north and south
had always been opposed." The lord of Snowdon assumed the title of
Prince of Wales.
Edward was forced to defend his inheritance. Henry III. paid little
heed to his misfortunes, and answered his appeal for help by saying:
"What have I to do with the matter? I have given you the land; you must
defend it with your own resources. I have plenty of other business to
do." Nevertheless, Henry accompanied his son on a Welsh campaign in
August, 1257. The English army got no further than Deganwy, and
therefore did not really invade Llewelyn's dominions at all. After
waiting idly on the banks of the Conway for some weeks, it retired
home, leaving the open country to be ruled by Llewelyn as he would, and
having done nothing but revictual the castles of the four cantreds.
Next year a truce was made, which left Llewelyn in possession of the
disputed districts. Troubles at home were calling off both father and
son from the Welsh war, and thus Llewelyn secured his virtual triumph.
Though fear of the progress of the lord of Gwynedd filled every marcher
with alarm, yet the dread of the power of Edward was even more nearly
present before them. The marcher lords deliberately stood aside, and
the result was inevitable disaster. Edward found that the territories
handed over to him by his father had to be conquered before they could
be administered, and Henry III.'s methods of government made it a
hopeless business to find either the men or the money for the task.
England still resounded with complaints of misgovernment, and demands
for the execution of the charters. Before going to Bordeaux in 1253,
Henry obtained from the reluctant parliament a considerable subsidy,
and pledged himself as "a man, a Christian, a knight, and a crowned and
anointed king," to uphold the charters. During his absence a
parliament, summoned by the regents, Queen Eleanor and Richard of
Cornwall, for January, 1254, showed such unwillingness to grant a
supply that a fresh assembly was convened in April, to which knights of
the shire, for the first time since the reign of John, and
representatives of the diocesan clergy, for the first occasion on
record, were summoned, as well as the baronial and clerical grandees.
Nothing came of the meeting save fresh complaints. The Earl of
Leicester became the spokesman of the opposition. Hurrying back from
France he warned the parliament not to fall into the "mouse-traps" laid
for them by the king. In default of English money, enough to meet the
king's necessities was extorted from the Jews, recently handed over to
the custody of Richard of Cornwall. After his return from France at the
end of 1254, Henry's renewed requests for money gave coherence to the
opposition. Between 1254 and 1258 the king's exactions, and an
effective organisation for withstanding them, developed on parallel
lines. To the old sources of discontent were added grievances
proceeding from enterprises of so costly a nature that they at last
brought about a crisis.
The foremost grievance against the king was still his co-operation with
the papacy in spoiling the Church of England. Though the death of the
excommunicated Frederick II. in 1250 was a great gain for Innocent IV.,
the contest of the papacy against the Hohenstaufen raged as fiercely as
ever. Both in Germany and in Italy Innocent had to carry on his
struggle against Conrad, Frederick's son. After Conrad's death, in
1254, there was still Frederick's strenuous bastard, Manfred, to be
reckoned with in Naples and Sicily. Innocent IV. died in 1254, but his
successor, Alexander IV., continued his policy. A papalist King of
Naples was wanted to withstand Manfred, and also a papalist successor
to the pope's phantom King of the Romans, William of Holland, who died
in 1256.
Candidates to both crowns were sought for in England. Since 1250
Innocent IV. had been sounding Richard, Earl of Cornwall, as to his
willingness to accept Sicily. The honourable scruple against hostility
to his kinsman, which Richard shared with the king, prevented him from
setting up his claims against Conrad. But the deaths both of Conrad and
of Frederick II.'s son by Isabella of England weakened the ties between
the English royal house and the Hohenstaufen, and Henry was tempted by
Innocent's offer of the Sicilian throne for his younger son, Edmund, a
boy of nine, along with a proposal to release him from his vow of
crusade to Syria, if he would prosecute on his son's behalf a crusading
campaign against the enemies of the Church in Naples. Innocent died
before the negotiations were completed, but Alexander IV. renewed the
offer, and in April, 1255, Peter of Aigueblanche, Bishop of Hereford,
accepted the preferred kingdom in Edmund's name. Sicily was to be held
by a tribute of money and service, as a fief of the holy see, and was
never to be united with the empire. Henry was to do homage to the pope
on his son's behalf, to go to Italy in person or send thither a
competent force, and to reimburse the pope for the large sums expended
by him in the prosecution of the war. In return the English and
Scottish proceeds of the crusading tenth, imposed on the clergy at
Lyons, were to be paid to Henry. On October 18, 1255, a cardinal
invested Edmund with a ring that symbolised his appointment. Henry
stood before the altar and swore by St. Edward that he would himself go
to Apulia, as soon as he could safely pass through France.
The treaty remained a dead letter. Henry found it quite impossible to
raise either the men or the money promised, and abandoned any idea of
visiting Sicily in person. Meanwhile Naples and Sicily were united in
support of Manfred, and discomfited the feeble forces of the papal
legates who acted against him in Edmund's name. At last the Archbishop
of Messina came from the pope with an urgent request for payment of the
promised sums. It was in vain that Henry led forth his son, clothed in
Apulian dress, before the Lenten parliament of 1257, and begged the
magnates to enable him to redeem his bond. When they heard the king's
speech "the ears of all men tingled". Nothing could be got save from
the clergy, so that Henry was quite unable to meet his obligations. He
besought Alexander to give him time, to make terms with Manfred, to
release Edmund from his debts on condition of ceding a large part of
Apulia to the Church,--to do anything in short save insist upon the
original contract. The pope deferred the payment, but the respite did
Henry no good. Edmund's Sicilian monarchy vanished into nothing, when,
early in 1258, Manfred was crowned king at Palermo. Before the end of
the year, Alexander cancelled the grant of Sicily to Edmund. Yet his
demands for the discharge of Henry's obligations had contributed not a
little towards focussing the gathering discontent.[1]
[1] For Edmund's Sicilian claims, see W.E. Rhodes' article on
_Edmund, Earl of Lancaster_, in the _English Historical
Review_, x. (1895), 20-27.
While Henry was seeking the Sicilian crown for his son, his brother
Richard was elected to the German throne. Since William of Holland's
death in January, 1256, the German magnates, divided between the
Hohenstaufen and the papalist parties, had hesitated for nearly a year
as to the choice of his successor. As neither party was able to secure
the election of its own partisan, a compromise was mooted. At last the
name of Richard of Cornwall was brought definitely forward. He was of
high rank and unblemished reputation; a friend of the pope yet a kinsman
of the Hohenstaufen; he was moderate and conciliatory; he had enough
money to bribe the electors handsomely, and he was never likely to be so
deeply rooted in Germany as to stand in the way of the princes of the
empire. The Archbishop of Cologne became his paid partisan, and the
Count Palatine of the Rhine accepted his candidature on conditions. The
French party set up as his rival Alfonso X. of Castile, who, despite his
newly formed English alliance, was quite willing to stand against
Richard. At last, in January, 1257, the votes of three electors,
Cologne, Mainz, and the Palatine, were cast for Richard, who also
obtained the support of Ottocar, King of Bohemia. However, in April,
Trier, Saxony, and Brandenburg voted for Alfonso. The double election of
two foreigners perpetuated the Great Interregnum for some sixteen years.
Alfonso's title was only an empty show, but Richard took his appointment
seriously. He made his way to Germany, and was crowned King of the
Romans on May 17, 1257, at Aachen. He remained in the country nearly
eighteen months, and succeeded in establishing his authority in the
Rhineland, though beyond that region he never so much as showed his
face.[1] The elevation of his brother to the highest dignity in
Christendom was some consolation to Henry for the Sicilian failure.
[1] See for Richard's career, Koch's _Richard von Cornwallis_,
1209-1257, and the article on _Richard, King of the Romans_, in
the _Dictionary of National Biography_.
The nation was disgusted to see maladministration grow worse and worse;
the nobles were indignant at the ever-increasing sway of the
foreigners; and several years of bad harvests, high prices, rain,
flood, and murrain sharpened the chronic misery of the poor. The
withdrawal of Earl Richard to his new kingdom deprived the king and
nation of an honourable if timid counsellor, though a more capable
leader was at last provided in the disgraced governor of Gascony. Simon
still deeply resented the king's ingratitude for his services, and had
become enough of an Englishman to sympathise with the national
feelings. Since his dismissal in 1253 he had held somewhat aloof from
politics. He knew so well that his interests centred in England that he
declined the offer of the French regency on the death of Blanche of
Castile. He prosecuted his rights over Bigorre with characteristic
pertinacity, and lawsuits about his wife's jointure from her first
husband exacerbated his relations with Henry. It cannot, however, be
said that the two were as yet fiercely hostile. Simon went to Henry's
help in Gascony in 1254, served on various missions and was nominated
on others from which he withdrew. His chosen occupations during these
years of self-effacement were religious rather than political; his
dearest comrades were clerks rather than barons.
Among Montfort's closer intimates, Bishop Grosseteste was removed by
death in 1253. But others of like stamp still remained, such as Adam
Marsh, the Franciscan mystic, whose election to the see of Ely was
quashed by the malevolence of the court; Eudes Rigaud, the famous
Archbishop of Rouen, and Walter of Cantilupe, Bishop of Worcester, who
formed a connecting link between the aristocracy and the Church.
Despite the ineffectiveness of the clerical opposition to the papacy,
the spirit of independence expressed in Grosseteste's protests had not
yet deserted the churchmen. Clerks had felt the pinch of the papal
exactions, had been bled to the uttermost to support the Sicilian
candidature, and had seen aliens and non-residents usurping their
revenues and their functions. More timid and less cohesive than the
barons, they had quicker brains, more ideas, deeper grievances, and
better means of reaching the masses. If resentment of the Sicilian
candidature was the spark that fired the train, the clerical opposition
showed the barons the method of successful resistance. The rejection of
Henry's demands for money in the assemblies of 1257 started the
movement that spread to the baronage in the parliaments of 1258. In the
two memorable gatherings of that year the discontent, which had
smouldered for a generation, at last burst into flame. In the next
chapter we shall see in what fashion the fire kindled.
The futility of the political history of the weary middle period of the
reign suggests, to those who make the history of the state the
criterion of every aspect of the national fortunes, a corresponding
barrenness and lack of interest in other aspects of national life. Yet
a remedy for Henry's misrule was only found because the age of
political retrogression was in all other fields of action an epoch of
unexampled progress. The years during which the strong centralised
government of the Angevin kings was breaking down under Henry's weak
rule were years which, to the historian of civilisation, are among the
most fruitful in our annals. In vivid contrast to the tale of misrule,
the historian can turn to the revival of religious and intellectual
life, the growing delight in ideas and knowledge, the consummation of
the best period of art, and the spread of a nobler civilisation which
make the middle portion of the thirteenth century the flowering time of
English medieval life. It is part of this strange contrast that Henry,
the obstacle to all political progress, was himself a chief supporter
of the religious and intellectual movements which were so deeply
influencing the age.
Much has been said of the alien invasion, and of the strong national
opposition it excited. But insularity is not a good thing in itself,
and the natural English attitude to the foreigners tended to confound
good and bad alike in a general condemnation. Even the Savoyards were
by no means as evil as the English thought them, and Henry in welcoming
his kinsmen was not merely moved by selfish and unworthy motives; he
believed that he was showing his openness to ideas and his welcome to
all good things from whencesoever they came. There were, in fact, two
tendencies, antagonistic yet closely related, which were operative, not
only in England but all over western Europe, during this period.
Nations, becoming conscious and proud of their unity, dwelt, often
unreasonably, on the points wherein they differed from other peoples,
and strongly resented alien interference. At the same time the closer
relations between states, the result of improved government, better
communications, increased commercial and social intercourse, the
strengthening of common ideals, and the development of cosmopolitan
types of the knight, the scholar, and the priest, were deepening the
union of western Christendom on common lines. Neither the political nor
the military nor the ecclesiastical ideals of the early middle ages
were based upon nationality, but rather on that ecumenical community of
tradition which still made the rule of Rome, whether in Church or
State, a living reality. In the thirteenth century the papal tradition
was still at its height. The jurisdiction of the papal _curia_ implied
a universal Christian commonwealth. World-wide religious orders united
alien lands together by ties more spiritual than obedience to the papal
lawyers. The academic ideal was another and a fresh link that connected
the nations together. To the ancient reasons for union--symbolised by
the living Latin speech of all clerks, of all scholars, of all engaged
in serious affairs-were added the newer bonds of connexion involved in
the common knightly and social ideals, in the general spread of a
common art and a common vernacular language and literature.
As Latin expressed the one series of ties, so did French represent the
other. The France of St. Louis meant two things. It meant, of course,
the French state and the French nationality, but it meant a great deal
more than that. The influence of the French tongue and French ideals
was wider than the political influence of the French monarchy. French
was the common language of knighthood, of policy, of the literature
that entertained lords and ladies, of the lighter and less technical
sides of the cosmopolitan culture which had its more serious
embodiments in Latin. To the Englishman of the thirteenth century the
French state was the enemy; but the English baron denounced France in
the French tongue, and leant a ready ear to those aspects of life
which, cosmopolitan in reality, found their fullest exposition in
France and among French-speaking peoples. In the age which saw
hostility to Frenchmen become a passion, a Frenchman like Montfort
could become the champion of English patriotism, English scholars could
readily quit their native land to study at Paris, the French vernacular
literature was the common property of the two peoples, and French words
began to force their way into the stubborn vocabulary of the English
language, which for two centuries had almost entirely rejected these
alien elements. In dwelling, however briefly, on the new features which
were transforming English civilisation during this memorable period, we
shall constantly see how England gained by her ever-increasing
intercourse with the continent, by necessarily sharing in the new
movements which had extended from the continent to the island, no
longer, as in the eleventh century, to be described as a world apart.
Neither the coming of the friars, nor the development of university
life and academic schools of philosophy, theology, and natural science,
nor the triumph of gothic art, nor the spread of vernacular literature,
not even the scholarly study of English law nor the course of English
political development-not one of these movements could have been what
it was without the close interconnexion of the various parts of the
European commonwealth, which was becoming more homogeneous at the same
time that its units were acquiring for themselves sped characteristics
of their own.
In the early days of Henry III.'s reign, a modest alien invasion
anticipated the more noisy coming of the Poitevin or the Provençal. The
most remarkable development of the "religious" life that the later
middle age was to witness had just been worked out in Italy. St.
Francis of Assisi had taught the cult of absolute poverty, and his
example held up to his followers the ideal of the thorough and literal
imitation of Christ's life. Thus arose the early beginnings of the
Minorite or Franciscan rule. St. Dominic yielded to the fascination of
the Umbrian enthusiast, and inculcated on his Order of Preachers a
complete renunciation of worldly goods which made a society, originally
little more than a new type of canons regular, a mendicant order like
the Franciscans, bound to interpret the monastic vow of poverty with
such literalness as to include corporate as well as individual
renunciation of possessions, so that the order might not own lands or
goods, and no member of it could live otherwise than by labour or by
alms. In the second chapter of the Dominican order, at Whitsuntide,
1221, an organisation into provinces was carried out; and among the
eight provinces, each with its prior, then instituted, was the province
of England, where no preaching friar had hitherto set foot, and over it
Gilbert of Freynet was appointed prior. Then Dominic withdrew to
Bologna, where he died on August 6. Within a few days of the saint's
death, Friar Gilbert with thirteen companions made his way to England.
In the company of Peter des Roches the Dominican pioneers went to
Canterbury, where Archbishop Langton was then residing. At the
archbishop's request Gilbert preached in a Canterbury church, and
Langton was so much delighted by his teaching that henceforth he had a
special affection for the new order. From Canterbury the friars
journeyed to London and Oxford. Mindful of the work of their leaders at
Paris and Bologna, they built their first English chapel, house, and
schools in the university town. Soon these proved too small for them,
and they had to seek ampler quarters outside the walls. From these
beginnings the Dominicans spread over England.
The Franciscans quickly followed the Dominicans. On September 10, 1224,
there landed at Dover a little band of four clerks and five laymen,
sent by St. Francis himself to extend the new teaching into England. At
their head was the Italian, Agnellus of Pisa, a deacon, formerly warden
of the Parisian convent, who was appointed provincial minister in
England. His three clerical companions were all Englishmen, though the
five laymen were Italians or Frenchmen. Like the Dominican pioneers,
the Franciscan missionaries first went to Canterbury, where the favour
of Simon Langton, the archdeacon, did for them what the goodwill of his
brother Stephen had done for their precursors. Leaving some of their
number at Canterbury, four of the Franciscans went on to London, and
thence a little later two of them set out for Oxford. Alike at London
and at Oxford, they found a cordial welcome from the Dominicans, eating
in their refectories, and sleeping in their dormitories, until they
were able to erect modest quarters in both places. The brethren of the
new order excited unbounded enthusiasm. Necessity and choice combined
to compel them to interpret their vow of poverty as St. Francis would
have wished. They laboured with their own hands at the construction of
their humble churches. The friars at Oxford knew the pangs of debt and
hunger, rejected pillows as a vain luxury, and limited the use of boots
and shoes to the sick and infirm. The faithful saw the brethren singing
songs as they picked their way over the frozen mud or hard snow, blood
marking the track of their naked feet, without their being conscious of
it. The joyous radiance of Francis himself illuminated the lives of his
followers. "The friars," writes their chronicler, "were so full of fun
among themselves that a deaf mute could hardly refrain from laughter at
seeing them." With the same glad spirit they laboured for the salvation
of souls, the cure of sickness, and the relief of distress. The
emotional feeling of the age quickly responded to their zeal. Within a
few years other houses had arisen at Gloucester, at Nottingham, at
Stamford, at Worcester, at Northampton, at Cambridge, at Lincoln, at
Shrewsbury. In a generation there was hardly a town of importance in
England that had not its Franciscan convent, and over against it a
rival Dominican house.
The esteem felt for the followers of Francis and Dominic led to an
extraordinary extension of the mendicant type. New orders of friars
arose, preserving the essential attribute of absolute poverty, though
differing from each other and from the two prototypes in various
particulars. Some of these lesser orders found their way to England. In
the same year as Agnellus, there came to England the Trinitarian
friars, called also the Maturins, from the situation of their first
house in Paris, an order whose special function was the redemption of
captives. In 1240 returning crusaders brought back with them the first
Carmelite friars, for whom safer quarters had to be found than in their
original abodes in Syria. This society spread widely, and in 1287, to
the disgust of the older monks, it laid aside the party-coloured habit,
forced upon it in derision by the infidels, and adopted the white robe,
which gave them their popular name of White Friars. Hard upon these, in
1244, came also the Crutched Friars, so called from the red cross set
upon their backs or breasts; but these were never deeply rooted in
England. The multiplication of orders of friars became an abuse, so
that, at the Council of Lyons of 1245, Innocent IV abolished all save
four. Besides Dominicans and Franciscans the pope only continued the
Carmelites, and an order first seen in England a few years later, the
Austin friars or the hermits of the order of St. Augustine. These made
up the traditional four orders of friars of later history. Yet even the
decree of a council could not stay the growth of new mendicant types.
In 1257 the Friars of the Penance of Jesus Christ, popularly styled
Friars of the Sack, from their coarse sackcloth garb, settled down in
London, exempted by papal dispensation from the fate of suppression;
and even later than this King Richard's son, Edmund of Cornwall,
established a community of Bonhommes at Ashridge in Buckinghamshire.
The friars were not recluses, like the older orders, but active
preachers and teachers of the people. The parish clergy seldom held a
strong position in medieval life. The estimation in which the monastic
ideal was held limited their influence. They were, as a rule, not much
raised above the people among whom they laboured. If the parish priest
were a man of rank or education, he was too often a non-resident and a
pluralist, bestowing little personal attention on his parishioners. Nor
were the numerous parishes served by monks in much better plight. The
monastery took the tithes and somehow provided for the services; but the
efforts of Grosseteste to secure the establishment of permanent
stipendiary vicarages in his diocese exemplify the reluctance of the
religious to give their appropriations the benefit of permanent pastors,
paid on an adequate scale. It was an exceptional thing for the parish
clergymen to do more than discharge perfunctorily the routine duties of
their office, and preaching was almost unknown among them. The friars
threw themselves into pastoral work with such devotion as to compel the
reluctant admiration of their natural rivals, the monks. "At first,"
says Matthew Paris,[1] "the Preachers and the Minorites lived a life of
poverty and extreme sanctity. They busied themselves in preaching,
hearing confessions, the recital of divine service, in teaching and
study. They embraced voluntary poverty for God's sake, abandoning all
their worldly goods and not even reserving for themselves their food for
to-morrow." A special field of labour was in the crowded suburbs of the
larger towns, where so often they chose to erect their first convents.
The care of the sick and of lepers was their peculiar function. Their
sympathy and charity carried everything before them, and they remained
the chief teachers of the poor down to the Reformation. They ingratiated
themselves with the rich as much as with the poor. Henry III. and Edward
selected mendicants as their confessors. The strongest and holiest of
the bishops, Grosseteste, became their most active friend. Simon of
Montfort sought the advice and friendship of a friar like Adam Marsh.
The mere fact that Stephen Langton and Peter des Roches were their first
patrons in England shows how they appealed alike to the best and worst
clerical types of the time.
[1] _Chron. Maj._, v., 194.
Men and women of all ranks, while still living in the world and
fulfilling their ordinary occupations, associated themselves to the
mendicant brotherhoods. Besides these _tertiaries_, as they were
called, still wider circles sought the friars' direction in all
spiritual matters and showed eagerness to be buried within their
sanctuaries. Nor did the friars limit themselves to pastoral care. They
won a unique place in the intellectual history of the time. They made
themselves the spokesmen of all the movements of the age. They were
eager to make peace, and Agnellus himself mediated between Henry III.
and the earl marshal. They were the strenuous preachers of the
crusades, whether against the infidel or against Frederick II. The
Franciscans taught a new and more methodical devotion to the Virgin
Mother. The friars upheld the highest papal claims, were constantly
selected as papal agents and tax-gatherers, and yet even this did not
deprive them of their influence over Englishmen. Their zeal for truth
often made them defenders of unpopular causes, and it was much to their
honour that they did not hesitate to incur the displeasure of the
Londoners by their anxiety to save innocent Jews accused of the murder
of Christian children. The parish clergy hated and envied them as
successful rivals, and bitterly resented the privilege which they
received from Alexander IV of hearing confessions throughout the world.
Not less strong was the hostility of the monastic orders which is often
expressed in Matthew Paris's free-spoken abuse of them. They were
accused of terrorising dying men out of their possessions, of laxity in
the confessional, of absolving their friends too easily, of overweening
ambition and restless meddlesomeness. They were violent against
heretics and enemies of the Church. They answered hate with hate. They
despised the seculars as drones and the monks as lazy and corrupt. The
dissensions between the various orders of friars, and particularly
between the sober and intellectual Dominicans and the radical and
mystic Franciscans, were soon as bitter as those between monks and
friars, or monks and seculars. But when all allowances have been made,
the good that they wrought far outbalanced the evil, and in England at
least, the mendicant orders exhibited a nobler conception of religion,
and of men's duly to their fellowmen than had as yet been set before
the people. If the main result of their influence was to strengthen
that cosmopolitan conception of Christendom of which the papacy was the
head and the friars the agents, their zeal for righteousness often led
them beyond their own rigid platform, and Englishmen honoured the
wandering friar as the champion of the nation's cause.
Like the religious orders, the universities were part of the world
system and only indirectly represented the struggling national life.
The ferment of the twelfth century revival crystallised groups of
masters or doctors into guilds called universities, with a strong class
tradition, rigid codes of rules, and intense corporate spirit. The
schools at Oxford, whose continuous history can be traced from the days
of Henry II., had acquired a considerable reputation by the time that
his grandson had ascended the throne. Oxford university, with an
autonomous constitution of its own since _1214_, was presided over by a
chancellor who, though in a sense the representative of the distant
diocesan at Lincoln, was even in the earliest times the head of the
scholars, and no mere delegate of the bishop. Five years earlier the
Oxford schools were sufficiently vigorous to provoke a secession, from
which the first faint beginnings of a university at Cambridge arose. A
generation later there were other secessions to Salisbury and
Northampton, but neither of these schools succeeded in maintaining
themselves. Cambridge itself had a somewhat languid existence
throughout the whole of the thirteenth century, and was scarcely
recognised as a _studium generale_ until the bull of John XXII. in 1318
made its future position secure. In early days the university owed
nothing to endowments, buildings, social prestige, or tradition. The
two essentials was the living voice of the graduate teacher and the
concourse of students desirous to be taught. Hence migrations were
common and stability only gradually established. When, late in Henry
III.'s reign, the chancellor, Walter of Merton, desired to set up a
permanent institution for the encouragement of poor students, he
hesitated whether to establish it at Oxford, or Cambridge, or in his
own Surrey village. Oxford, though patriots coupled it with Paris and
Bologna, only gradually rose into repute. But before the end of Henry
III.'s reign it had won an assured place among the great universities
of western Europe, though lagging far behind that of the supreme
schools of Paris.
The growing fame of the university of Oxford was a matter of national
importance. Down to the early years of the thirteenth century a young
English clerk who was anxious to study found his only career abroad,
and was too often cut off altogether from his mother country. Among the
last of this type were the Paris mathematician, John of Holywood or
Halifax, Robert Curzon, cardinal, legate, theologian, and crusader, and
Alexander of Hales. Stephen Langton, who did important work in revising
the text of the Vulgate, might well have been one of those lost to
England but for the wisdom of Innocent III who restored him, in the
fulness of his reputation and powers, to the service of the English
Church. Not many years younger than Langton was his successor Edmund of
Abingdon, but the difference was enough to make the younger primate a
student of the Oxford schools in early life. Though he left Oxford for
Paris, Edmund returned to an active career in England, when experience
convinced him of the vanity of scholastic success. Bishop Grosseteste,
another early Oxford teacher of eminence, probably studied at Paris,
for so late as 1240 he held up to the Oxford masters of theology the
example of their Paris brethren for their imitation. The double
allegiance of Edmund and Grosseteste was typical. A long catalogue of
eminent names adorned the annals of Oxford in the thirteenth century,
but the most distinguished of her earlier sons were drawn away from her
by the superior attractions of Paris. England furnished at least her
share of the great names of thirteenth century scholasticism, but of
very few of these could it be said that their main obligation was to
the English university. It was at Paris that the academic organisation
developed which Oxford adopted. At Paris the great intellectual
conflicts of the century were fought. There the ferment seethed round
that introduction of Aristotle's teaching from Moorish sources which
led to the outspoken pantheism of an Amaury of Bène. There also was the
reconciliation effected between the new teacher and the old faith which
made Aristotle the pillar of the new scholasticism that was to justify
by reason the ways of God to man. In Paris also was fought the contest
between the aggressive mendicant friars and the secular doctors whom
they wished to supplant in the divinity schools.
There is little evidence of even a pale reflection of these struggles
in contemporary Oxford. English scholars bore their full share in the
fight. It was the Englishman Curzon who condemned the heresies of
Amaury of Bène. Another Englishman, Alexander of Hales, issued in his
_Summa Theologiæ_ the first effective reconciliation of Aristotelian
metaphysic with Christian doctrine which his Paris pupils, Thomas
Aquinas, the Italian, and Albert the Great, the German, were to work
out in detail in the next generation. Hales was the first secular
doctor in Europe who in 1222, in the full pride of his powers,
abandoned his position in the university to embrace the voluntary
poverty of the Franciscans and resume his teaching, not in the regular
schools but in a Minorite convent. And at the same time another English
doctor at Paris, John of St. Giles, notable as a physician as well as a
theologian, dramatically marked his conversion to the Dominican order
by assuming its habit in the midst of a sermon on the virtues of
poverty. All these famous Englishmen worked and taught at Paris, and it
was only a generation later that their successors could establish on
the Thames the traditions so long upheld on the banks of the Seine.
The establishment of the Dominicans and Franciscans at Oxford gave an
immense impetus to the activity of the university. The Franciscans
appointed as the first _lector_ of their Oxford convent the famous
secular teacher Grosseteste, who ever after held the Minorites in the
closest estimation. Grosseteste was the greatest scholar of his day,
knowing Greek and Hebrew as well as the accustomed studies of the
period. A clear and independent thinker, he was not, like so many of
his contemporaries, overborne by the weight of authority, but appealed
to observation and experience in terms which make him the precursor of
Roger Bacon. Grosseteste's successor as _lector_ was himself a
Minorite, Adam Marsh, whose reputation was so great that Grosseteste
was afraid to leave him when sick in a French town, lest the Paris
masters should persuade him to teach in their schools. Adam's loyalty
to his native university withstood any such temptation, and from that
time Oxford began to hold up its head against Paris. Even before this,
Grosseteste persuaded John of St. Giles to transfer his teaching from
Paris to Oxford, where he remained for the rest of his life.
The intense intellectual activity of the thirteenth century flowed in
more than one channel, and Englishmen took their full share both in
building up and in destroying. Two Englishmen of the next generation
mark in different ways the reaction against the moderate
Aristotelianism and orthodox rationalism which their countryman Hales
first brought into vogue. These were the Franciscan friars, Roger Bacon
and Duns Scotus. Bacon, though he studied at Paris as well as at
Oxford, is much more closely identified with England than with the
Continent. His sceptical, practical intellect led him to heap scorn on
Hales and his followers and to plunge into audacities of speculation
which cost him long seclusions in his convent and enforced abstinence
from writing and study. In his war against the Aristotelians, the
intrepid friar upheld recourse to experiment and observation as
superior to deference to authority, in language which stands in strange
contrast to the traditions of the thirteenth century. Grosseteste, who
also had preferred the teachings of experience to the appeal to the
sages of the past, was the only academic leader that escaped Bacon's
scathing censure. When his order kept him silent, Roger was bidden to
resume his pen by Pope Clement IV. A generation still later, Duns
Scotus, probably a Lowland Scot, who taught at Paris and died at
Cologne in 1308, emphasised, sharply enough, but in less drastic
fashion, the reaction against the teaching of Hales and Aquinas, by
accepting a dualism between reason and authority that broke away from
the Thomist tradition of the thirteenth century and prepared the way
for the scholastic decadence of the fourteenth. After France, England
took a leading part in all these movements; and even in France English
scholars had a large share in making that land the special home of the
_Studium_, as Italy was of the _Sacerdotium_ and Germany of the
_Imperium_.
This intellectual ferment had its results on practical life. Though the
university was cosmopolitan, the individual members of it were not the
less good citizens. A patriot like Grosseteste strove to his uttermost
to keep Englishmen for Oxford or to win them back from Paris. Oxford
clerks fought the battle of England against the legate Otto, and we
shall see them siding with Montfort. The eminently practical temper of
the academic class could not neglect the world of action for the
abstract pursuit of science. Eager as men were to know, to prove, and
to inquire, the age had little of the mystical temperament about it.
The studies which made for worldly success, such as civil and canon
law, attracted the thousands for whom philosophy or theology had little
attraction. Never before was there a career so fully opened to talent.
The academic teacher's fame took him from the lecture-room to the
court, from the university to the episcopal throne, and so it was that
the university influenced action almost as profoundly as it influenced
thought, and affected all classes of society alike. The struggles of
poor students like Edmund of Abingdon or Grosseteste must not make us
think that the universities of this period were exclusively frequented
by humble scholars. The academic career of a rich baron's son like
Thomas of Cantilupe, living in his own hired house at Paris with a
train of chaplains and tutors, receiving the visits of the French king,
and feeding poor scholars with the remnants from his table, is as
characteristic as the more common picture of the student begging his
way from one seat of learning to another, and suffering the severest
privations rather than desert his studies. Yet the function of the
_studium_ as promoting a healthy circulation between the various orders
of medieval society, must not be ignored.
Partly to help on the poor, partly to encourage men to devote
themselves to the pursuit of knowledge, endowments began to arise which
soon enhanced the splendour of universities though they lessened their
mobility and their freedom. The mendicant convents at Paris and Oxford
prepared the way for secular foundations, at first small and
insignificant, like that which, in the days of Henry III., John Balliol
established at Oxford for the maintenance of poor scholars, but soon
increasing in magnitude and distinction. The great college set up by
St. Louis' confessor at Paris for the endowment of scholars, desirous
of studying the unlucrative but vital subject of theology, was soon
imitated by the chancellor of Henry III. Side by side with Robert of
Sorbon's college of 1257, arose Walter of Merton's foundation of 1263,
and twenty years later Bishop Balsham's college of Peterhouse extended
the "rule of Merton" to Cambridge.
The academic movement was not all clear gain. The humanism, of the
twelfth century was crushed beneath the weight of the specialised
science and encyclopædic learning of the thirteenth. We should seek in
vain among most theologians or the philosophers of our period for any
spark of literary art; and the tendency dominant in them affected for
evil all works written in Latin. Even the historians show a falling
away from the example of William of Malmesbury or of Roger of Hoveden.
The one English chronicler of the thirteenth century who is a
considerable man of letters, Matthew Paris, belongs to the early half
of it, before the academic tradition was fully established, and even
with him prolixity impairs the art without injuring the colour of his
work. The age of Edward I., the great time of triumphant scholasticism,
is recorded in chronicles so dreary that it is hard to make the dry
bones live. Walter of Hemingburgh, the most attractive historian of the
time, belongs to the next generation: and his excellencies are only
great in comparison with his fellows. Something of this decadence may
be attributed to the falling away of the elder monastic types, whose
higher life withered up from want of able recruits, for the secular and
mendicant careers offered opportunities so stimulating that few men of
purpose, or earnest spiritual character, cared to enter a Benedictine
or a Cistercian house of religion. Something more may be assigned to
the growing claims of the vulgar tongue on literary aspirants. But the
chief cause of the literary defects of thirteenth century writers must
be set down to the doctrine that the study of "arts"--of grammar,
rhetoric and the rest--was only worthy of schoolboys and novices, and
was only a preliminary to the specialised faculties which left little
room for artistic presentation. Science in short nearly killed
literature.
It was the same with the vulgar tongues as with Latin. French remained
the common language of the higher classes of English society, and the
history of French literature belongs to the history of the western
world rather than to that of England. The share taken in it by
English-born writers is less important than in the great age of romance
when the contact of Celt and Norman on British soil added the Arthurian
legend to the world's stock of poetic material. The practical motive,
which destroyed the art of so many Latin writers, impaired the literary
value of much written in the vernacular. We have technical works in
French and even in English, such as Walter of Henley's treatise on
_Husbandry_, composed in French for the guidance of stewards of manors,
and translated, it is said by Grosseteste, into English for the benefit
of a wider public. Grosseteste is also said to have drawn up in French
a handbook of rules for the management of a great estate, and he
certainly wrote French poetry. The legal literature, written in Latin
or French, and illustrated by such names as Bracton, Britton, and
"Fleta," shows that there was growing up a school of earnest students
of English law who, though anxious, like Bracton, to bring their
conclusions under the rules of Roman jurisprudence, began to treat
their science with an independence which secured for English custom the
opportunity of independent development. Of more literary interest than
such technicalities were the rhyming chronicles, handed on from the
previous age, of which one of the best, the recently discovered history
of the great William Marshal, has already been noticed. The spontaneity
of this poem proves that its language was still the natural speech of
the writer, and impels its French editor to claim for it a French
origin. As the century grew older there was no difficulty in deciding
whether French works were written by Englishmen or Frenchmen. The
Yorkshire French of Peter Langtoft's _Chronicle_, and the jargon of the
_Year Books_, attest how the political separation of the two lands, and
the preponderance in northern France of the dialect of Paris, placed
the insular French speech in strong contrast to the language of polite
society beyond the Channel. Yet barbarous as Anglo-French became, it
retained the freshness of a living tongue, and gained some ground at
the expense of Latin, notably in the law courts and in official
documents.
English was slowly making its way upwards. There was a public ready to
read vernacular books, and not at home with French. For their sake a
great literature of translations and adaptations was made, beginning
with Layamon's English version of Wace's _Brut_, which by the end of
the century made the cycle of French romance accessible to the English
reader. Many works of edification and devotion were written in English;
and Robert of Gloucester's rhyming history appealed to a larger public
than the Yorkshire French of Langtoft. It is significant of the trend
of events that the early fourteenth century saw Langtoft himself done
into English by Robert Mannyng, of Bourne. While as yet no continuous
works of high merit were written in English, there was no lack of
experiments, of novelties, and of adaptations. Much evidence of depth
of feeling, power of expression, and careful art lies hidden away in
half-forgotten anonymous lyrics, satires, and romances. The language in
which these works were written was steadily becoming more like our
modern English. The dialectical differences become less acute; the
inflections begin to drop away; the vocabulary gradually absorbs a
larger romance element, and the prosody drops from the forms of the
West Saxon period into measures and modes that reflect a living
connexion with the contemporary poetry of France. Thus, even in the
literature of a not too literary age, we find abundant tokens of that
strenuous national life which was manifesting itself in so many
different ways.
Art rather than literature reflected the deeper currents of the
thirteenth century. Architecture, the great art of the middle age, was
in its perfection. The inchoate gothic which the Cistercians brought
from Burgundy to the Yorkshire dales, and William of Sens transplanted
from his birthplace to Canterbury, was superseded by the more developed
art of St. Hugh's choir at Lincoln. In the next generation the new
style, imported from northern France, struck out ways of its own, less
soaring, less rigidly logical, yet of unequalled grace and
picturesqueness, such as we see in Salisbury cathedral, which
altogether dates from the reign of Henry III. Here also, as in
literature, foreign models stood side by side with native products.
Henry III.'s favourite foundation at Westminster reproduced on English
soil the towering loftiness, the vaulted roofs, the short choir, and
the ring of apsidal chapels, of the great French minsters. This was
even more emphatically the case with the decorations, the goldsmith's
and metal work, the sculpture, painting, and glass, which the best
artists of France set up in honour of the English king's favourite
saint. In these crafts English work would not as yet bear a comparison
with foreign, and even the glories of the statuary of the façade of
Wells cannot approach the sculptured porches of Amiens or Paris. As the
century advanced some of the fashions of the French builders, notably
as regards window tracery, were taken up in the early "Decorated" of
the reign of Edward I.; and here the claims of English to essential
equality with French building can perhaps be better substantiated than
in the infancy of the art. But all these comparisons are misleading.
The impulse to gothic art came to England from France, like the impulse
to many other things. Its working out was conducted on English local
lines, ever becoming more divergent from those of the prototype, though
not seldom stimulated by the constant intercourse of the two lands.
The new gothic art enriched the medieval town with a splendour of
buildings hitherto unknown, which symbolised the growth of material
prosperity as well as of a keener artistic appreciation. In the greater
towns the four orders of friars erected their large and plain churches,
designed as halls for preaching to great congregations. The development
of domestic architecture is even more significant than the growth of
ecclesiastical and military buildings. Stone houses were no longer the
rare luxuries of Jews or nobles. Never were the towns more prosperous
and more energetic. They were now winning for themselves both economic
and administrative independence. Magnates, such as Randolph of Chester,
followed the king's example by granting charters to the smaller towns.
Even the lesser boroughs became not merely the abodes of agriculturists
but the homes of organised trading communities. It was the time when
the merchant class first began to manifest itself in politics, and the
power of capital to make itself felt. Capital was almost monopolised by
Jews, Lombards, or Tuscans, and the fierce English hatred of the
foreigner found a fresh expression in the persecution of the Hebrew
money-lenders and in the increasing dislike felt for the alien bankers
and merchants who throve at Englishmen's expense. The fact that so much
of English trade with the continent was still in the hands of Germans,
Frenchmen, and Italians made this feeling the more intense. But there
were limits even to the ill-will towards aliens. The foreigner could
make himself at home in England, and the rapid naturalisation of a
Montfort in the higher walks of life is paralleled by the absorption
into the civic community of many a Gascon or German merchant, like that
Arnold Fitz Thedmar,[1] a Bremen trader's son, who became alderman
of London and probably chronicler of its history. Yet even the greatest
English towns did not become strong enough to cut themselves off from
the general life of the people. They were rather a new element in that
rich and purposeful nation that had so long been enduring the rule of
Henry of Winchester. The national energy spurned the feebleness of the
court, and the time was at hand when the nation, through its natural
leaders, was to overthrow the wretched system of misgovernment under
which it had suffered. Political retrogression was no longer to bar
national progress.
[1] See for Arnold the _Chronica majorum et vicecomitum
Londoniarum_ in _Liber de antiquis legibus_, and Riley's
introduction to his translation of _Chronicles of the Mayors
and Sheriffs of London_ (1863).