the use of the jury in Henry’s reign or to follow the many changes
still needed to convert the sworn inquest into the modern jury. It is
sufficient for our present purpose to mark its Norman character, first
as being carried to England by the Normans in its older form, and then
as being developed into its newer form on Norman soil. It should,
however, be remembered that its later history belongs to England
rather than to Normandy. With the rise of new forms of procedure
in the thirteenth century, the jury on the Continent declines and
finally disappears; “but for the conquest of England,” says Maitland,
“it would have perished and long ago have become a matter for the
antiquary.”[39] In England, however, it was early brought into
relations with the local courts of the hundred and the county, where
it struck root and developed into a popular method of trial which was
later to become a defence against the king’s officers who had first
introduced it. A bulwark of individual liberty, the jury also holds an
important place in the establishment of representative government, for
it was through representative juries that the voice of the countryside
first asserted itself in the local courts, for the assessment of taxes
as well as for the decision of cases, and it was in the negotiations of
royal officers with the local juries that we can trace the beginnings
of the House of Commons. It is no accident that the first employment
of local juries for the assessment of military and fiscal obligations
belongs to the later years of Henry II.
It may seem a far cry from the Frankish inquests of the ninth century
to the juries and the representative assemblies of the twentieth, but
the development is continuous, and it leads through Normandy. In this
sense the English-speaking countries are all heirs of the early Normans
and of the Norman kings who, all unconsciously, provided for the
extension and the perpetuation of the Norman methods of trial. At such
points Norman history merges in that of England, the British Empire,
and the United States.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The chief events in the history of the Norman empire are treated in
the general works of Miss K. L. Norgate, _England under the Angevin
Kings_ (London, 1887); Sir J. H. Ramsay, _The Angevin Empire_
(London, 1903); G. B. Adams, _History of England from the Norman
Conquest to the Death of John_ (London, 1905); H. W. C. Davis,
_England under the Normans and Angevins_ (London, 1905). There is a
brief biography of _Henry the Second_ by Mrs. J. R. Green (London,
1888; reprinted, 1903); and a more recent one by L. F. Salzmann
(Boston, etc., 1914). A notable characterization of Henry and his
work is given by William Stubbs, in the introduction to his edition
of _Benedict of Peterborough_, II (London, 1867), reprinted in
his _Historical Introductions_ (London, 1902), pp. 89–172. For
the continental aspects of the reign see F. M. Powicke, _The Loss
of Normandy_ (Manchester, 1913); and his articles in the _English
Historical Review_, XXI, XXII (1906–07). Cf. A. Cartellieri, _Die
Machtstellung Heinrichs II. von England_, in _Neue Heidelberger
Jahrbücher_, VIII, pp. 269–83 (1898); F. Hardegen, _Imperialpolitik
König Heinrichs II. von England_ (Heidelberg, 1905). The fullest
account of Irish affairs is G. H. Orpen, _Ireland under the
Normans_ (Oxford, 1911).
* * * * *
The best general accounts of constitutional and legal matters are
those of Stubbs, _Constitutional History of England_, I (last
edition, Oxford, 1903), corrected by various special studies of
J. H. Round, to be found chiefly in his _Feudal England_ (London,
1895; reprinted, 1909) and _Commune of London_ (Westminster, 1899);
and by Pollock and Maitland, _History of English Law_ (second
edition, London, 1898). The results of recent investigation are
incorporated in the studies and notes appended to the French
translation of Stubbs by Petit-Dutaillis (Paris, 1907); this
supplementary material is translated into English by W. E. Rhodes
(Manchester, 1911). There are admirable studies of the chancery
in L. Delisle. _Recueil des actes de Henri II concernant les
provinces françaises et les affaires de France_, introduction
(Paris, 1909); and of the exchequer in R. L. Poole, _The Exchequer
in the Twelfth Century_ (Oxford, 1912). See also Hubert Hall,
_Court Life under the Plantagenets_ (London, 1890; reprinted,
1902). For the more distinctively Norman side of the government
see Haskins, “The Government of Normandy under Henry II,” in
_American Historical Review_, XX, pp. 24–42, 277–91 (1914–15);
and earlier papers on “The Early Norman Jury,” _ibid._, VIII, pp.
613–40 (1903); “The Administration of Normandy under Henry I,” in
_English Historical Review_, XXIV, pp. 209–31 (1909); “Normandy
under Geoffrey Plantagenet,” _ibid._, XXVII, pp. 417–44 (1912);
Delisle, _Des revenus publics en Normandie au XII^e siècle_, in
_Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes_, X-XIII (1848–52); Valin,
_Le duc de Normandie et sa cour_, supplemented by R. de Fréville,
“Étude sur l’organisation judiciaire en Normandie aux XII^e et
XIII^e siècles,” in _Nouvelle Revue historique de droit_, 1912, pp.
681–736. The best general account of Norman law is still that of H.
Brunner, _Die Entstehung der Schwurgerichte_ (Berlin, 1872).
V
NORMANDY AND FRANCE
In July, 1189, Henry II lay dying in his castle at Chinon. Abandoned
and attacked by his sons, driven from LeMans and Tours by Philip of
France and forced to a humiliating peace, sick in body and broken in
spirit, the aged king made his way to the old stronghold of the Angevin
counts in the valley of the Vienne. Cursing the faithless Richard as he
gave him the enforced kiss of peace at Colombières, he had fixed his
hopes on his youngest son John till the schedule was brought him of
those who had thrown off their allegiance. “Sire,” said the clerk who
read the document to the fever-tossed king, “may Christ help me, the
first here written is Count John, your son.” “What,” cried the king,
starting up from his bed, “John, my very heart, my best beloved, for
whose advancement I have brought upon me all this misery? Now let all
things go as they will; I care no more for myself nor for anything in
this world.” Two days later he died, cursing his sons, cursing the day
he had been born, repeating constantly, “Shame on a conquered king.”
Deserted by all save his illegitimate son Geoffrey, who received his
father’s blessing and his signet ring marked with the leopard of
England, Henry was plundered by his attendants of gold and furnishings
and apparel, just as William the Conqueror had been despoiled in the
hour of his death at Rouen, till some one in pity threw over the royal
corpse the short cloak, or ‘curt mantle,’ by which men called him. Two
days later he was laid away quietly in the nunnery of Fontevrault,
where a later age was to rob his tomb of all save the noble recumbent
figure by which it is still marked. Thus passed away the greatest ruler
of his age; thus began the collapse of the Norman empire.
* * * * *
Strikingly dramatic both in its public and private aspects, the end of
Henry II offers material fit for a Greek tragedy, and we may, if we
choose, imagine an Æschylus or a Sophocles painting the rapidity of
his rise, the _hybris_ of his splendor, and the crushing _nemesis_ of
his fall. Even the Promethean touch is not lacking in the withdrawal
of Henry’s unconquered soul from God, as he looked back in flight at
the burning city of Le Mans: “My God, since to crown my confusion
and increase my disgrace, thou hast taken from me so vilely the town
which on earth I have loved best, where I was born and bred, and
where my father lies buried and the body of St. Julian too, I will
have my revenge on thee also; I will of a surety withdraw from thee
that thing that thou lovest best in me.”[40] Henry’s life needs no
blasphemous closing in order to furnish inexhaustible material for
moralizing, and in a period like the Middle Ages, given over as none
other to moral lessons, it served to point many a tale of the crimes
and fate of evil-doers. That vain and entertaining Welshman, Gerald de
Barri, or Giraldus Cambrensis, in whom a recent writer thinks he has
discovered the proto-journalist,[41] found in Henry’s career the basis
for a considerable book devoted to the _Instruction of Princes_. But
whereas the ways of the gods are dark and unsearchable to the Greek
tragedians, they have no mystery for Gerald. Henry’s punishment was due
to his violations of religion, first in his marriage with Eleanor, the
divorced wife of his feudal lord Louis VII, second in his quarrel with
Archbishop Becket and the oppression of the church which followed, and
third and worst of all, in his failure to take part in a crusade. The
hammer of the church, Henry was born for destruction. The modern world
is more cautious in the matter of explaining the inexplicable, and more
prone to seek human causes when they can be found, yet the collapse of
the Plantagenet empire is not the hardest of the historian’s problems.
Something he will ascribe to larger forces of development, something he
can hardly fail to attribute to the character of Henry’s sons and to
his policy in dealing with them.
Henry II is not the only case in history of a king who could rule
every house but his own, of a father who was shrewd and stern in
his dealings with the world but swayed by unrequited affection and
ill-timed weakness in dealing with his children. Knowing other men,
he did not know his sons, and his grave errors in dealing with them
were errors of public policy, since they concerned the government of
his dominions and the succession to the throne. Even those who had
no sympathy for Henry had little to say to excuse the character and
the unfilial conduct of his sons. “From the Devil we come, and to the
Devil we return,” Richard was reported to have said; and none cared
to contradict him. Of the four lawful sons who grew to maturity,
the eldest was Henry, crowned king by his father in 1170, and hence
generally known as the Young King. Handsome and agreeable, prodigal
in _largesse_, a patron of knightly sports and especially of the
tournaments which were then coming into fashion, the Young King enjoyed
great popularity in his lifetime and after his early death was mourned
as a peer of Hector and Achilles and enshrined as a hero of courtly
romance. Yet for all this there was no substantial foundation. He was
faithless, ungrateful, utterly selfish, a thorn in his father’s side
and a constant source of weakness to the empire. Married at the age
of five to the daughter of Louis VII, he became the instrument of the
French king in his intrigues against Henry II and the rallying point of
feudal reaction and personal jealousy. King in name though not in fact,
having been crowned merely as a means of securing the succession,
Prince Henry craved at least an under-kingdom of his own, and on two
occasions, in 1173 and again in 1183, led serious and widespread
revolts against his father, the evil results of which were not undone
by his death-bed repentance in the midst of the second uprising. In
this revolt of 1183 he had with him his younger brother Geoffrey, duke
of Brittany, ‘the son of perdition,’ equally false and treacherous,
without even the redeeming virtue of popularity. Fortunately Geoffrey
also died before his father.
The death of the Young King left as Henry’s eldest heir Richard,
known to the modern world as the Lion-Hearted. With much of his
father’s energy, Richard seems to have inherited more than any of
his brothers the tastes and temperament of his mother, Eleanor of
Aquitaine. Adventurous and high-spirited, fond of pomp and splendor,
a lover of poetry and music, be it the songs of Provençal minstrels
or the solemn chants of the church, he belonged on this side of his
nature to the dukes of Aquitaine and the country of the troubadours.
He loved war and danger, in which he showed great personal courage,
and in the conduct of military enterprises gave evidence of marked
ability as a strategist; but his gifts as a ruler stopped there. The
glamour of his personal exploits and the romance of his crusading
adventures might dazzle the imagination of contemporaries more than
the prosaic achievements of his father, and his gifts to religious
houses might even predispose monastic historians in his favor, but for
all this splendor his subjects paid the bills. In spite of his great
income, he was always in need of money for his extravagances; and for
his fiscal exactions there was never the excuse of large measures of
public policy. Indeed, so far as we can see, Richard had no public
policy. “His ambition,” says Stubbs, “was that of a mere warrior: he
would fight for anything whatever, but he would sell everything that
was worth fighting for.”[42] Self-willed and self-centred, he followed
wherever his desires led, with no sense of loyalty to his obligations
or of responsibility as a ruler. Made duke of Aquitaine at seventeen,
he sought to ride down every obstacle and bring immediate order and
unity into a region which had never enjoyed either of these benefits;
and he quickly had by the ears the land which he should have best
understood. He was soon in revolt against his father and also at war
with the Young King; for his own purposes he later went over to the
king of France, and jested with his boon companions over his father’s
discomfiture and downfall. Even as king at the age of thirty-two,
Richard remained an impetuous youth; he never really grew up. Haughty
and overbearing, he alienated friends and allies; inheriting the
rule of the vast Plantagenet empire, he showed no realization of
imperial duty or opportunity. Thus he visited England but twice in
the course of his reign of ten years and valued it solely as a land
from which revenue might be wrung by his ministers, nor did his
continental dominions derive advantage from his presence. Impetuous and
short-sighted, Richard Yea-and-Nay had to meet the greatest statesman
of his day in deadly rivalry; and though panegyrists placed him above
Alexander, Charlemagne, and King Arthur, he went down ignominiously
before Philip Augustus.
Last of all comes the youngest son John, “my heart, my best beloved.”
Never did father lavish his affection on a more unworthy child. False
to his father, false to his brother Richard, John proved false to
all, man or woman, who ever trusted him. He had none of the dash and
courage of Richard, none of his large and splendid way, and none of
his popularity and gift of leadership. Men saw him as he was, no
Charlemagne or Arthur, but petty, mean, and cowardly, small even in
his blasphemies, swearing by the feet or the teeth of God, when Henry
II had habitually sworn by his eyes, and William the Conqueror by his
splendor--_par la resplendor De!_ Always devious in his ways, John’s
cunning sometimes got him the reputation for cleverness, and John
Richard Green went so far as to call him “the ablest and most ruthless
of the Angevins.” But his ability, particularly in military matters
not inconsiderable, was of the kind which wasted itself in temporary
expedients and small successes; it was incapable of continuous policy
or sustained efforts; and it everywhere ended in failure. Gerald
the Welshman, the friend of his youth, at the end can only pronounce
him the worst of history’s tyrants. John’s whole career offers the
most convincing evidence of the futility of talent when divorced from
character, by which is here meant, not so much private virtue,--for
John’s private vices were shared with others of his family and his
time,--but merely common honor, trustworthiness, and steadfastness.
Even in his wickedness John was shifty and false, and his loss of his
empire was due, not to any single blunder or series of blunders, but to
the supreme sin of lack of character.
It is thus possible to see how largely the collapse of the Norman
empire was bound up with the family history of Henry II--the foolish
indulgence of the father, the ambitions and intrigues of the mother,
the jealousies, treachery, and political incapacity of the sons. A
personal creation, the Plantagenet state fell in large measure for
personal reasons. If it was Henry’s misfortune to have such sons,
one may say it was also his misfortune to have more than one son of
any sort, since each became the nucleus of a separatist movement in
some particular territory. The kings of France, it has often been
pointed out, had for generations the great advantage of having a son
to succeed, but only a single son. The crowning of the French heir in
his father’s lifetime assured an undisputed succession; the crowning of
the Young King left him dissatisfied and stirred up the rivalry of his
younger brothers.
But this is not the whole of the story. The very strength and
efficiency of Henry’s government were sure to produce a reaction in
favor of feudal liberties in which his sons serve simply as convenient
centres of crystallization. Only time could unify each of these
dominions internally, while far more time was required to consolidate
them into a permanent kingdom, and these processes were interrupted
when they had barely begun. Such a solution of the ultimate problem of
consolidation was, we have seen, entirely possible and even natural;
but another was possible and also natural, namely the union of these
territories under the king of France. Geography, as well as history,
favored the second alternative.
* * * * *
The geographical unity of France is one of the most obvious facts on
the map of Europe. The Alps and the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean and
the Atlantic, are its natural frontiers; only on the northeast are
the lines blurred by nature and left to history to determine. Within
these limits there are of course many clearly marked subdivisions--the
valleys of the Rhone, Garonne, Loire, and Seine, Gascony, Brittany,
Normandy, Flanders, and the rest--which formed the great fiefs of the
Middle Ages and the great provinces of later times. Sooner or later,
however, as population increased, as trade and commerce developed, and
as the means of communication were strengthened, these divisions were
certain to draw together into a single great state. Where the centre of
the new state would lie was not a matter of accident but was largely
determined by the great lines of communication, and especially by the
commercial axis which runs from the Mediterranean to Flanders and the
English Channel. On this line are situated the Roman capital of the
Gauls, Lyons, and the modern capital, Paris. This fact, combined with
the central and dominant position of the Paris basin in relation to
the great valleys of the Seine, the Loire, and the Meuse, established
the region about Paris, the Ile-de-France of history, as the natural
centre of this future nation. Such a state might grow from without
toward its centre, as the modern kingdom of Italy closed in on Rome,
but the more natural process was from the centre outward, as England
grew about Wessex or Brandenburg about the region near Berlin. In the
great contest between Capetian and Plantagenet the Capetian “held the
inner lines.” Shut off from the sea on the side of the Loire as well
as on the side of the Seine, he was in a position to concentrate all
his efforts to break through the iron ring, while the Norman rulers
had to hold together the whole of their far-spread territories against
reaction and rebellion at home as well as against the French at Tours
and LeMans and in the Vexin. Meanwhile up and down these valleys the
influences of trade, commerce, and travel were at work breaking down
the political barriers and drawing the remoter regions toward the
geographical centre. The rivers in their courses fought against the
Plantagenets.
The personal element in the struggle was weighted against the
Anglo-Norman empire even more strongly than the physiographic, for the
weak links in the Plantagenet succession ran parallel to the strongest
portion of the Capetian line. Against a knight-errant like Richard and
a trifler like John, stood a great European statesman in the person of
Philip Augustus, king of France during forty-four years, and more than
any single man the creator of the French monarchy.
* * * * *
Philip Augustus was not an heroic figure, and to the men of his age he
was probably less sympathetic than his adversary Richard. Vigorous and
enduring, a generous liver, quick-tempered but slow to cherish hatred,
Philip was preëminently the cautious, shrewd, unscrupulous, far-sighted
statesman. He could fight when necessary, but he had no great personal
courage and excelled in strategy and prevision rather than in tactics
or leadership in the field, and he preferred to gain his ends by the
arts of diplomacy. The quality upon which all his contemporaries dwell
is his wisdom. Throughout his long reign he kept before him as his one
aim the increase of the royal power, and by his patient and fortunate
efforts he broke down the Plantagenet empire, doubled the royal revenue
and more than doubled the royal domain, and made France the leading
international power in western Europe.
As we have already seen, Philip had made substantial headway even
during the lifetime of Henry II. Crowned in 1179 at the age of
fourteen, a year before the death of his paralytic father Louis VII,
Philip was naturally treated as a boy by Henry, who seems, however,
to have acted throughout with due regard to Philip’s position as king
and his feudal suzerain. In the complications of those early years
we find Henry constantly arranging disputes with the king’s vassals
and more than once saving him from a tight place. But as time went on
this relation became impossible. Philip openly abetted the revolts of
the Young King and of Richard, and in the war which broke out at the
end Richard fought openly on his side. As soon, however, as Richard
succeeded to the throne, Philip began hostilities with him, and he soon
used John against Richard as he had used Richard against his father.
“Divide and rule,” was clearly Philip’s policy, and he always had on
his side the fact that he was king in France and the Plantagenets on
the Continent were his vassals.
The first phase of the contest between Richard and Philip comes as a
welcome interlude in the tale of border disputes and family rivalries
which make up the greater part of the tangled story of Philip’s
dealings with the Norman empire. It takes us over the sea to the fair
land of Sicily and on to the very gates of the Holy City. In 1187
the capture of Jerusalem had crowned the long efforts of the great
Saladin, and where a century before Christian knights had ridden “up to
their bridles” in the blood of the slaughtered Moslem, a procession of
knights and priests and poorer folk passed out of the gate of David and
left the Holy Sepulchre to the infidel. To the Saracens a certain sign
that they were the only people “whose doctrine was agreeable to God,”
the fall of Jerusalem killed the aged Pope, plunged Europe into prayer
and fasting, and brought on the Third Crusade, under the leadership
of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Philip of France, and Richard of
England. Richard, then merely count of Poitou, was the first western
prince to take the cross in this holy war; his father and Philip soon
sealed their crusading vows with a public reconciliation under a great
elm on the borders of Normandy and France, and the chroniclers tell
us that every man made peace with his neighbor, thinking no more of
tournaments and fine raiment, the lust of the flesh and the pride of
the eye, but only of the recovery of the Holy City. Such great waves
of renunciation and religious enthusiasm are peculiarly characteristic
of the Middle Ages, but their force was soon spent. Then, as in other
times, there were few who could live as on a mountain-top. In spite of
all that the church could do, Henry and Philip soon came to open war,
and the cause of Jerusalem was swallowed up in a struggle for the Loire
and for Aquitanian fortresses. Richard, as we have seen, was a central
point in these conflicts, and his accession to the throne simply
continued the struggle in another form.