William of Newburgh was born in 1136 at Bridlington, a quiet little

town lying under the southern escarpment of the York Wolds, not far

from Flamborough Head. Here, between the bleak uplands and the cold

northern sea, a priory of Austin canons had been founded by Walter de

Gant in the reign of Henry I.;[2179] from this house a colony went

forth in the early years of Stephen to settle, under the protection

of Roger de Mowbray, first at Hode near Thirsk, and afterwards, in

1145, at Newburgh near Coxwold. William entered the new house as a

child--probably, therefore, almost at its foundation; there he passed

his whole life; and there, as the reign of Richard Cœur-de-Lion drew

towards its close, he wrote his _English History_, from the Norman

conquest to his own day. The actual composition of the book seems to

have occupied little more than two years; it can scarcely have been

begun earlier than 1196, and it breaks off abruptly in the spring

of 1198. The surroundings of its writer offered comparatively few

advantages for the pursuit of historical study. No atmosphere of

venerable antiquity, no traditions of early scholarship and poetry,

no hallowed associations with the kings and saints and heroes of old,

hung around Newburgh priory; the house was younger than its historian;

the earliest and well-nigh the only memory that can attract a pilgrim

to its now desolate site is the memory of William himself. No crowd

of devotees from all parts of the realm came thither year by year to

bring their offerings and their news, as they came to the shrine of S.

Ealdhelm; no visit of king or prince is likely ever to have startled

the inmates of Newburgh out of the quiet routine of their daily life;

its prior held no such place among the ecclesiastical dignitaries

of his province as the abbot of Malmesbury had held for ages among

the prelates of the south; he and his canons could have little or no

business with the outside world, and it is hardly conceivable that

any of them would ever have occasion to travel further than to the

mother-house at Bridlington, unless indeed his own love of enterprise

and thirst for a wider knowledge of the world should drive him further

afield. Even in such a case, however, the undertaking would have been

beset with difficulties; travelling in Yorkshire was still, even under

Henry Fitz-Empress and his son, a more arduous and dangerous matter

than travelling in Wessex under his grandfather. William, too, had

grown up amid those terrible days when peaceable folk could find no

shelter save within convent-walls, and even that shelter sometimes

proved unavailing--when the men of the north were only too thankful

to wrap themselves in that comparative isolation which saved them at

any rate from sharing in the worst miseries that overwhelmed their

brethren in southern England. The memories of his boyhood were little

calculated to arouse in him such a spirit of enterprise as had fired

the young librarian of Malmesbury. He seems, indeed, never to have set

a foot outside his native shire; we might almost fancy that like the

first and most venerable of all our historians, he never set a foot

outside his own monastery. The vivid sketches of town and country which

give such a picturesque charm to the writings of William of Malmesbury

are wholly absent from those of William of Newburgh; there is but one

bit of local description in his whole book, and even that one--a brief

account of Scarborough[2180]--contains no distinct proof of having

been drawn from personal knowledge of the place. The brotherhood of

Newburgh had, however, ample opportunities of obtaining authentic,

though indirect, intelligence from the outer world. Their home, in

a sheltered spot under the western slope of the Hambledon Hills, was

quiet and peaceful, but not lonely; for it lay on an old road leading

from York to the mouth of the Tees, and within easy reach of a whole

group of famous monastic establishments which had sprung up during the

early years of the religious revival in the little river-valleys that

open around the foot of the moors. A few hours’ journey down the vale

of Pickering would bring the canons of Newburgh to brethren of their

own order at Kirkham and Malton; some ten or twelve miles of hill and

moor lay between them and the famous abbey of Rievaux; another great

Cistercian house, Byland, rose only a mile from their own home. With

the two last-named houses, at least, they were clearly in frequent

and intimate communication; it was indeed at the desire of Abbot

Ernald of Rievaux that William undertook to write his history; and

remembering the important part which the Cistercians, and especially

those of Yorkshire, had played for more than half a century in English

politics, secular as well as ecclesiastical, we can readily see that

his external sources of information were likely to be at once copious

and trustworthy.

[2179] Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. vi. pt. 1, pp. 284, 285.

[2180] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 3 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 104).

The literary resources of Newburgh itself, however, must have been

of the very poorest; its library, if it possessed one at all, could

only be in process of formation even in William’s mature years. He

himself gives us no clue to its contents. His style is that of a man

of education and taste, but he shews little trace of the classical

scholarship which may be detected in William of Malmesbury. Only three

earlier writers are mentioned by name in his preface; with two of

these--Bæda and Gildas--he has of course no ground in common; while

the third, Geoffrey of Monmouth, is named only to be overwhelmed with

scorn. It is plain, however, that William largely used the works of

Simeon of Durham and Henry of Huntingdon; while the fact that his

sketch of the reigns of Henry I. and Stephen is founded upon the

last-named writer seems to shew that his literary ambition had never

been quickened by a sight of the _Gesta Regum_ and _Historia Novella_,

of which nevertheless his book is the sole worthy continuation.

Compared with the works of Richard Fitz-Nigel and Roger of Howden,

its faults are obvious; its details are vague and inaccurate, it is

full of mistakes in names, pedigrees and suchlike small matters, and

its chronology is one long tangle of inconsistencies, confusions and

contradictions. But in the eyes of William of Newburgh, as in the

eyes of William of Malmesbury, the office of an historian is not so

much to record the events of the past as to explain them, to extract

from them their moral and political significance for the instruction

of the present and the future. His work is not a chronicle; it is a

commentary on the whole history of England, political, ecclesiastical

and social, throughout the twelfth century.[2181] Such a commentary,

written at such a time and by such a man, is for later students

above all price. The one short chapter in which William sums up the

causes and effects of the anarchy under Stephen[2182] is of more real

historical worth than the whole chaos of mere disjointed facts which

is all that the chroniclers have to give us, and in which he alone

helps us to discover a meaning and a moral. The same might be said of

many of his reflections upon men and things, both at home and abroad.

In some respects indeed he contrasts favourably even with his greater

namesake of Malmesbury. If he is less anxious for the entertainment

of his reader, he is more in earnest about the philosophical bearings

of his subject; he cares less for artistic effect and more for moral

impressions; his stories are less amusing and less graphically told,

but they are untinged with Malmesbury’s love of gossip and scandal;

his aim is always rather to point a moral than to adorn a tale;

he has a feeling for romance and a feeling for humour,[2183] but

he will ruthlessly, though quietly, demolish a generally-accepted

story altogether, if he knows it to be false.[2184] Only once does

the judicial calmness of his tone change into accents of almost

passionate indignation; and it is this outburst which above all has

gained for him in our own day the title of “the father of historical

criticism,”[2185] for it is the earliest protest against a rising

school of pseudo-historical writers who seemed in a fair way to drive

true history altogether out of the literary field.

[2181] On Will. Newb. and his work see Mr. Howlett’s preface to

vol. i. of his edition of the _Historia Anglicana_ in the Rolls

series.

[2182] Will. Newb., l. i. c. 22 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 69, 70).

[2183] See _e.g._, l. ii. c. 10, and l. iv. c. 32 (as above,

pp. 123–125, 385, 386), l. v. cc. 6 and 14 (vol. ii. pp.

424–427, 451–453).

[2184] L. i. c. 26 (vol. i. p. 81).

[2185] From Mr. Freeman, in the _Contemporary Review_, vol.

xxxiii. (1878), p. 216.

Nowhere, perhaps, has the marvellous vitality of the ancient Celtic

race shewn itself more strikingly than in the province of literature.

Of all the varied intellectual elements that went to the making of the

new England, the Celtic element rose to the surface first. The romantic

literature of England owes its origin to a Welsh monk, Geoffrey of

Monmouth, who became bishop of S. Asaph’s about two years before the

accession of Henry II. Long before that time--probably in the days

when poets and men of letters of every type were thronging to the

court of Henry’s grandmother the good Queen Maude--Walter Calenius,

archdeacon of Oxford, had picked up during a journey in Britanny “a

very ancient book, containing a history of the Britons, from Brut to

Cadwallader son of Cadwallon;” this book he carried home to England

and presented to his friend Geoffrey, begging him to translate it out

of Welsh into Latin.[2186] Some years after the death of Henry I.

Geoffrey’s translation was given to the world. Its original cannot

now be identified; but Geoffrey may fairly take to himself the whole

credit of the _History of the British Kings_ to which his name is

attached. The book is an elaborate tissue of Celtic myths, legends and

traditions, scraps of classical and Scriptural learning, and fantastic

inventions of the author’s own fertile brain, all dexterously thrown

into a pseudo-historical shape and boldly sent forth under the imposing

name of History. The success of Geoffrey’s venture was amazing. The

dedication of the book was accepted by the foremost lay scholar of

the day, William of Malmesbury’s friend and patron, Earl Robert of

Gloucester; its fame spread rapidly through all sections and classes of

society. A Yorkshire priest, Alfred of Beverley, tells us how some of

the clergy of the diocese, when suspended from the usual occupations of

their calling--doubtless by one of the many interdicts which fell upon

them during the struggle between S. William and Henry Murdac--beguiled

their time by discussing the stories which they had heard or read about

the ancient British kings; how, his curiosity aroused by their talk, he

with some difficulty borrowed a copy of the new book which had set them

talking; and how he longed to transcribe it at length, but lacking time

and means was obliged to content himself with an abridgement.[2187]

Norman barons and ladies heard of the wondrous book and became eager

to read it in their own tongue; a copy was borrowed from Earl Robert

himself by no less a personage than Walter Lespec, that he might lend

it in his turn to a friend of his own, Ralf Fitz-Gilbert, whose wife

wanted her household-minstrel Geoffrey Gaimar to translate it into

French verse for her entertainment.[2188]

[2186] Geoff. Monm. _Hist. Reg. Brit._, l. i. c. 1 (Giles,

Caxton Soc., pp. 1, 2).

[2187] Alf. Beverl. (Hearne), pp. 1–3.

[2188] Geoff. Gaimar, vv. 6436–6460 (Wright, Caxton Soc., pp.

224, 225).

The version of Gaimar was superseded in a few years by that of Wace,

a Norman poet who did a better service to the cause of history by his

later work, the _Roman de Rou_ or riming chronicle of the Norman dukes

from Hrolf to Henry II. Neither Alfred nor Gaimar nor Wace seems to

have had any suspicion of the true character of Geoffrey’s book of

marvels; they all alike treated it as genuine history, and from the

point where it closes, at the death of Cadwallon in 689, carried on

their narratives without a break down to the times of the Norman kings.

It was against this blurring of the line between truth and falsehood,

this obliteration of the fundamental distinction between history and

romance, that William of Newburgh lifted up his well-grounded and

eloquent protest in the preface to his _Historia Anglicana_.[2189]

Notwithstanding that protest, the fabulous tales of the _Brut_ (as

Geoffrey’s book is commonly called, from the name of the first British

king mentioned in it) continued to pass current as an integral part of

the history of Britain for many generations after him. The fraud was

in fact countenanced in high places for political ends; Henry himself

was quick to seize upon it as a means of humouring the national

vanity and soothing the irritated national feelings of those Celtic

vassals who were generally among the most troublesome of his subjects,

but who were also not unfrequently among the most necessary and

useful of his allies. On one occasion he is said, though on doubtful

authority, to have conciliated the Bretons by consenting to enter

into a diplomatic correspondence with their long-departed, yet still

mysteriously living monarch, Arthur, and by proposing to hold Britanny

as Arthur’s vassal.[2190] In his last years, however, he turned the new

Arthurian lore to account in a far more significant way in the island

Britain: he set the monks of Glastonbury to find the grave of the

British hero-king. In the cemetery of S. Dunstan’s old abbey stood two

pyramidal stones, of unknown age, and covered with inscriptions so old

and worn that nothing could be read in them save, as it was thought,

Arthur’s name. Between these stones, sixteen feet below the surface

of the ground, Henry--so the monks afterwards declared--guided by

what he had heard from an old Welsh bard and read in the histories of

the Britons,[2191] bade them look for a wooden sarcophagus containing

Arthur’s mortal remains. The discovery was made in 1191; a coffin,

hollowed as Henry had said out of the solid trunk of an oak-tree,

was dug up on the spot indicated; let into a stone at its foot was

a leaden cross, which when taken out proved to bear upon its inner

face the words, “Here in the isle of Avalon lies buried the renowned

King Arthur, with Guinevere his wife.” In the coffin were found a few

rotten bones, and a “cunningly-braided tress of golden hair,” which

however crumbled into dust in the hand of a monk who snatched it up

too eagerly. The bones were carefully preserved and solemnly re-buried

under a marble tomb before the high altar in the abbey-church.[2192]

[2189] Will. Newb. proœm. (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 11–18).

[2190] “Hanc [sc. Britanniam] sub jure tuo, sub pace tuâ,

teneamus;

Jus tibi, pax nobis, totaque terra simul”--

ends Henry’s letter to Arthur in the _Draco Norm._, l. ii. c.

22, vv. 1279, 1280 (Howlett, _Will. Newb._, vol. ii. p. 707).

See above, p. 57, note 2{226}. The whole story is extremely

curious; but I feel too doubtful about the character of the

source from which it comes to venture upon any discussion of its

possible significance.

[2191] “Sicut ab historico cantore Britone audierat antiquo,”

Gir. Cambr. _De Instr. Princ._ (Angl. Christ. Soc.), p. 192.

“Ex gestis Britonum et eorum cantoribus historicis,” _Spec.

Eccles._, dist. ii. c. 9 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 49). These

pyramids were there in William of Malmesbury’s day, when one

of them was already threatening to fall “præ nimiâ vetustate.”

They were covered with “antiquitatis nonnulla spectacula, quæ

plane possunt legi licet non plane possunt intelligi.” These

were pictures of bishops and kings, with old English names

written under them; Arthur, however, is not in the list.

William thought that the persons represented were buried

underneath. Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. i. c. 21 (Hardy, pp.

34, 35).

[2192] See the various accounts of the invention and

translation of Arthur in Gir. Cambr. _Spec. Eccles._, dist. ii.

cc. 9, 10 (Brewer, vol. iv. pp. 48–51), and _De Instr. Princ._

(Angl. Christ. Soc.), pp. 191, 192; R. Coggeshall (Stevenson),

p. 36; Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 48, and Ann. Margam, a.

1190 (Luard, _Ann. Monast._, vol. i. pp. 21, 22). Gerald seems

to have been present himself. He tells us the “translation”

was made by the king’s order; and indeed his account, taken by

itself, would leave an impression that the whole thing occurred

during King Henry’s lifetime; but R. Coggeshall and Rog. Wend.

both distinctly give the date, 1191; the Margam Annals place it

only a year earlier; and in both those years the reigning king

was far away.

It is easy to see what was, at any rate in Henry’s mind, the political

significance of this transaction. When Arthur could be thus publicly

exhibited as dead and buried, it was because the long-cherished dreams

of Celtic national independence, of which his name had been the symbol

and the watchword, were dead and buried too. But the scene thus enacted

at Glastonbury in 1191 had also another meaning of which perhaps none

of the actors in it could be fully aware. It marked the final “passing

of Arthur” out of the sphere of politics into a wholly new sphere of

pure intellect and philosophical romance. If Geoffrey of Monmouth

corrupted the sources of British history, he atoned for his crime by

opening to the poets of the generation succeeding his own a fount of

inspiration which is hardly exhausted yet. Their imagination seized

upon the romantic side of these old-world legends, and gradually wove

them into a poetic cycle which went on developing all through the later

middle ages not in England alone, but over the whole of civilized

Europe. But in the hands of these more highly-cultured singers the wild

products of bardic fancy took a new colour and a new meaning. As usual,

it was the Church who first breathed into the hitherto soulless body

the breath of spiritual and intellectual life. The earliest of the

Arthurian romances, as we possess them now, is a wholly new creation of

the religious mysticism of the twelfth century, the story of the Holy

Grail--

“The cup, the cup itself, from which our Lord

Drank at the last sad supper with His own.

This, from the blessed land of Aromat--

After the day of darkness, when the dead

Went wandering o’er Moriah--the good saint,

Arimathæan Joseph, journeying brought

To Glastonbury, where the winter thorn

Blossoms at Christmas, mindful of our Lord.

And there awhile it bode; and if a man

Could touch or see it, he was heal’d at once,

By faith, of all his ills. But then the times

Grew to such evil that the holy cup

Was caught away to Heaven, and disappear’d.”

As one by one the older legends of Arthur and Merlin, the later stories

of Lancelot and Tristan and Gawaine, were moulded into literary form, a

link to bind them all together was found in the “quest of the Grail,”

vowed by the whole company of Arthur’s knights assembled at the Table

Round, achieved only by one, the Galahad whose pure figure has gleamed

upon all after-time, as it flashed first upon the corrupt court of the

Angevins, the mirror of ideal Christian chivalry.

The greater part--certainly the noblest part--of this vast fabric of

romance seems to have been woven by the genius of one man.[2193] Every

side of the intellectual movement which throughout the latter half

of the twelfth century was working a revolution in English thought

and life is reflected in Walter Map. Born on the marches of England

and Wales, probably in the early years of the civil war, he studied

at Paris under Gerard la Pucelle, and came home again, while Thomas

Becket was still chancellor, to occupy some post at court, doubtless

that of chaplain to the king. He came of a family which had already

done good service to the Crown; but once in personal contact with Henry

himself, Walter can have needed no passport to the royal favour save

his own versatile genius. At once a scholar, a theologian and a poet,

an earnest political and ecclesiastical reformer and a polished man

of the world, shrewd and practical, witty and wise, he soon rose high

in the king’s confidence and esteem. Henry employed him in the most

varied capacities--as a justice-itinerant in England, as an ambassador

to the court of France, as a representative of English orthodoxy and

theological learning at the Lateran council of 1179; while in the

intervals of these missions he was in close and constant attendance

upon the king himself. In addition to his post in the royal household

he held several ecclesiastical preferments--a canonry at S. Paul’s,

the parsonage of Westbury in Gloucestershire, and the precentorship

of Lincoln, which he resigned in 1196 to become archdeacon of

Oxford.[2194] By that time his literary work was probably for the most

part done. The only book now extant which actually bears his name,

the treatise _De Nugis Curialium_--“Courtiers’ Triflings”--is a fruit

of the busy years spent in attendance upon King Henry from 1182 to

1189. By its title and origin it recalls the _Polycraticus_; and the

difference between the two books marks the change which had come over

the tone of educated English thought in the quarter of a century that

lay between them. Walter Map was, in all likelihood, as ripe a scholar

as John of Salisbury; but there is nothing scholastic in his treatment

of his subject. His book is far less elaborate in form and methodical

in arrangement than John’s; it has, in fact, no visible arrangement

at all; it is a collection of miscellaneous notes--scraps of folklore

from the Welsh marches, tales brought home by pilgrims and crusaders

from Byzantium or Jerusalem, stories from the classics, sayings from

the Fathers, fragments of information gleaned from the by-ways of

history, personal anecdotes new and old, sketches of contemporary life

and manners in the world and the Church, court-news, court-gossip,

court-scandal--all, as it seems, picked out at random from the

writer’s private commonplace-book and flashed in picturesque confusion

before the eyes of the literary public of his day. Yet the purpose of

it all is as earnest as that of the _Polycraticus_, though veiled under

a shew of carelessness. Walter appeals to a wider circle than John;

he writes not for a chosen band of kindred souls, but for all sorts

and conditions of men who know Latin enough to read him, for courtiers

and men of the world who have neither time nor patience to go through

a course of philosophical reasonings and exhortations, but who may be

caught at unawares by “truth embodied in a tale,” and are the more

likely to be caught by it the more unexpected the shape in which it

comes. When Walter stops to point the moral of his stories--for a moral

they always have--he does it with the utmost tact; more often he leaves

his readers to find the moral for themselves. “I am your huntsman;

I bring you the game; dress the dishes for yourselves!” he tells

them.[2195] But he strikes down the quarry--if we may venture to borrow

his own metaphor--with a far more unsparing hand than his predecessor.

King Henry himself, indeed, never was spared in his own court; but it

is in the satirist’s attitude towards the Church that we find the most

significant sign of the times. The grave tone of righteous indignation,

the shame and grief of the Theobaldine reformers at the decay of

ecclesiastical purity, has given place to bitter mockery and scathing

sarcasm. Where John lifts up his hands in deprecation of Heaven’s

wrath against its unworthy ministers, Walter points at them the finger

of scorn. John turns with eager hope from the picture of decaying

discipline and declining morality, which he paints with firm hand but

with averted face, to the prospect of a reformation which is to be the

spontaneous work of the clergy and the “religious” themselves; Walter

has seen this dream of reform buried in the grave of S. Thomas--perhaps

we should rather say of Theobald--and now sees no way of dealing with

the mass of corruption but to fling it bodily into the furnace of

public criticism and popular hatred. The mightiest creation of his

genius is the “Bishop Goliath” whose gigantic figure embodies all the

vice and all the crime which were bringing disgrace upon the clerical

order in his day. The “Apocalypse” and “Confession” of this imaginary

prelate have been ascribed to Walter Map by a constant tradition whose

truth it is impossible to doubt, although it rests upon no direct

contemporary authority.[2196] The satire is in fact so daring, so

bitter, and withal so appallingly true to life, that the author may

well have deemed it wiser to conceal his name. He is the anonymous

spokesman of a new criticism which has not yet fully discovered its own

power; of a public opinion which is no longer held in check by external

authority, but which is beginning to be itself an independent force;

which dares to sling its pebble at abuses that have defied king and

Pope, and will dare one day to sling it at king and Pope themselves.

That day, however, was still far distant. Walter’s ideal of perfection

in Church and state is one with John of Salisbury’s, only it is set

forth in a different shape. The moral lesson which lies at the heart

of the Arthurian romances comes home to us the more forcibly as we

remember that the hand which drew Sir Galahad was the same hand which

drew Bishop Goliath.

[2193] On these Arthur-romances and Walter Map’s share in

them see Sir F. Madden’s introduction to his edition of _Sir

Gawayne_ (Bannatyne Club), and that of M. Paulin Paris to the

first volume of his _Manuscrits Français de la Bibliothèque du

Roi_, summarized in Mr. H. Morley’s _English Writers_, vol. i.

pp. 562–569.

[2194] For the life of Walter Map see Mr. Wright’s _Biog.

Britt. Litt._, vol. ii. pp. 295–298, and his preface to _De

Nug. Cur._ (Camden Soc.) pp. i.–viii.

[2195] “Venator vester sum, feras vobis affero, fercula

faciatis.” W. Map, _De Nug. Cur._, dist. ii. c. 32 (Wright, p.

106).

[2196] They have been edited, under the title of _Latin Poems

ascribed to Walter Mapes_, by Mr. T. Wright for the Camden

Society.

Side by side with Walter Map, in the foremost rank of this new school

of critics and satirists, stands his probably younger contemporary,

Gerald de Barri. Gerald was born in 1147 in the castle of Manorbeer,

some three miles from Pembroke. He has left us a vivid picture of his

childhood’s home--its ramparts and towers crowning a lofty hill-top

exposed to all the winds that swept over the stormy Irish Sea, whirled

up the creek that ran up from the Bristol Channel to westward of the

castle, and ruffled with ceaseless wavelets the surface of the little

stream that flowed through the sandy valley on its eastern side;--its

splendid fishponds at the northern foot of the hill, the enclosed

tract of garden-ground beyond, and at the back of all, the protecting

belt of woodland whose precipitous paths and lofty nut-trees were

perhaps alike attractive to Gerald and his brothers in their boyish

days.[2197] His father, William de Barri, the lord of Manorbeer,

represented one of those Norman families of knightly rank who had

made for themselves a home in South Wales, half as conquerors, half

as settlers, in the days of Henry I. His mother, Angareth, was a

granddaughter of Rees Ap-Tewdor, prince of South Wales--a child of his

daughter Nest by her marriage with Gerald the constable of Pembroke;

and the fiery Celtic spirit as well as the quick Celtic wit which the

boy inherited from her shews itself alike in every act of his life

and in every page of his writings. On both sides he came of a race of

fighting-men, and he was certainly not the least pugnacious of his

family. The countless battles of his life were, however, to be fought

with other weapons than the sword which had won Manorbeer for his

paternal ancestors, and which was soon to win for some of his mother’s

nearest kinsmen--for her half-brother Robert Fitz-Stephen, her nephews

Meiler and Robert and Raymond, her own brother Maurice Fitz-Gerald--a

wider heritage and a more lasting fame beyond the Irish Sea. Gerald’s

bent towards the clerical profession shewed itself in his earliest

years; as a child he was known at Manorbeer as “the little bishop.”

At three different periods before he reached the age of twenty-five,

he spent some years in study at Paris, where he also lectured upon

rhetoric with considerable success. He finally came home in 1172, just

as King Henry, having twice passed through South Wales on his way to

and from Ireland, was planning out a new scheme for the government of

the principality. One part of this scheme was, as we have seen, the

delegation of the supreme authority to the young Welsh prince Rees

Ap-Griffith. Another part was the revival of the policy begun by the

Norman kings of managing the Welsh people through the instrumentality

of the Church, and, to this intent, filling the ranks of the clergy

in Wales with as many foreign priests as possible. Experience had,

however, shewn that men of pure English or Norman blood were not always

the fittest instruments for such a purpose. A year after Gerald’s birth

a compromise had been tried in the appointment to the bishopric of

S. David’s of a prelate who was half Norman and half Welsh:--David,

son of Gerald of Pembroke and Nest, brother of Maurice Fitz-Gerald and

of Angareth the wife of William de Barri. When Angareth’s son Gerald

came home from Paris in 1172, therefore, the influence of her family

was at its height. The foremost man in South Wales was her cousin Rees

Ap-Griffith; the second was her brother the bishop of S. David’s. It

was only natural that Gerald, sharing with his uncle the qualification

of mingled Welsh and Norman blood, and already known as a distinguished

scholar of the most famous seat of learning in Europe, should be at

once selected for employment in the business of reforming his native

land. Gerald himself was eager for the work; he had no difficulty in

obtaining from Archbishop Richard a commission to act as his legate

and representative in the diocese of S. David’s; thus armed, he began

a vigorous campaign against the evil doings of clergy and laity

alike--forcing the people to pay their tithes of wool and cheese, a

duty which the Welsh were always very unwilling to fulfil; compelling

the priests to abandon the lax system of discipline which they had

inherited from the ancient British Church, and had contrived to retain

in spite of Lanfranc and Anselm and Theobald; excommunicating the

sheriff and deposing the archdeacon of Brecknock themselves when they

dared to resist his authority, and receiving in 1175, as the reward of

his zeal, the appointment to the vacated archdeaconry.

[2197] Gir. Cambr. _Itin. Kambr._, l. i. c. 12 (Dimock, vol.

vi. p. 92).

Early in the next year his uncle, Bishop David, died. The young

archdeacon had just issued victorious from a sharp struggle in behalf

of the see against the bishop of S. Asaph’s, who had attempted to

encroach upon its rights; the darling wish of his heart was to see it

restored to its ancient metropolitical rank; and he had managed to

kindle in his fellow-canons a spark of the same ambition. They saw

in him the only man capable of bringing their desire to fulfilment,

and made a bold attempt to obtain him for their bishop. By this time,

however, both King Henry and Archbishop Richard had learned enough of

Gerald’s character to perceive that, however useful he might be as an

archdeacon in Wales, he was not at all the man to suit their purposes

as bishop of any Welsh see, least of all as bishop of S. David’s.

Henry, with a burst of fury, summarily refused the nomination of the

chapter; a long wrangle ended in the appointment of Peter de Leia,

prior of the Cluniac house of Much Wenlock, to the vacant see. Peter,

being a foreigner, a monk, and a man of no great intellectual capacity,

was utterly unable either to rule his turbulent Welsh flock or to cope

with his self-willed and quick-witted Welsh canons; Gerald undertook to

teach him his duties, but found him such an unsatisfactory pupil that

he soon gave up the task in disgust, and again betook himself to Paris.

There he remained, studying civil and canon law, and lecturing at the

same time with great success, till the summer of 1180, when he returned

to England, was received by the chapter of Canterbury at a great

banquet on Trinity Sunday, and thence proceeded into Wales. He found

Bishop Peter at his wits’ end, and the diocese in utter confusion,

which he at once set himself to remedy after his own fashion. Thus

matters went on till 1184, when Henry on his last hurried visit to

England found time to intervene once more in the troubled affairs of

South Wales. He called a council on the border, summoned Gerald to meet

him there, and employed him to arrange the final submission of his

cousin Rees to the English Crown; and then he dexterously removed the

over-zealous archdeacon from a sphere where he was likely henceforth to

be more dangerous than useful, by making him one of his own chaplains,

and sending him next year to Ireland in attendance upon John. John came

back in September; Gerald lingered till the following Easter. Two books

were the fruit of this visit: a _Topography of Ireland_, published

in 1187, and dedicated to the king; and the _Conquest of Ireland_,

which came out under the patronage of Count Richard of Poitou in 1188.

Towards the close of that year, when Archbishop Baldwin went to preach

the Crusade in Wales, Gerald accompanied him half as interpreter, half

as guide. An _Itinerary of Wales_ forms the record of this expedition,

which was followed by a journey over sea, still in the company of the

archbishop, with whom Gerald seems to have remained in more or less

close attendance upon Henry’s movements until the final catastrophe

in July 1189. He then offered his services to Richard, who sent him

home once more to his old task of helping to keep order in South

Wales. For a while he found favour with all parties;[2198] William

of Longchamp offered him the bishopric of Bangor, John, in his day

of power after William’s fall, offered him that of Landaff. Gerald

however refused them both, as he had already refused two Irish sees;

he cared in fact for no preferment short of the metropolitan chair

of S. David. Shut out of Paris by the war between Richard and Philip

Augustus, he withdrew to Lincoln and resumed his theological studies

under its chancellor William, whom he had known in his earlier college

days on the Mont-Ste.-Geneviève, till in the summer of 1198 he was

roused to action once more by the death of Bishop Peter de Leia. The

fight began at once; the chapter of S. David’s nominated Gerald for

the vacant see; the archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, set his

face against the nomination; they defied his authority and appealed to

king and Pope; Gerald himself fought his own battle and that of the see

with indomitable courage, at home and abroad, for nearly four years;

but the canons were less resolute than their bishop-elect, he found

himself at last fighting alone against the world, and in 1202 he gave

up the struggle and withdrew to spend the rest of his life in the quiet

pursuit of letters.[2199]

[2198] Gerald himself goes so far as to say, with respect to

Richard’s appointment of William of Longchamp as justiciar,

“cui archidiaconum adjunxit” (_De Rebus a se gestis_, dist. ii.

c. 21, Brewer, vol. i. p. 84). We find however no hint of such

a thing elsewhere.

[2199] Gerald’s life may be studied in his own book, _De Rebus

a se gestis_, published in the first volume of the Rolls

edition of his works; and, more conveniently, in Mr. Brewer’s

preface to the same volume.

For nearly thirty years it had been the aim of Gerald’s highest

ambition to be the S. Thomas of his native land. He had struggled and

suffered for the privileges of S. David’s in the same spirit in which

Thomas had struggled and suffered for those of Canterbury, and it is

by no means unlikely that had the occasion ever arisen, he would have

been found ready to follow his model even unto death.[2200] But,

unlike Thomas, he knew when to yield; and instead of dying for a lost

cause, was content to live for posterity. Both men have had their

fitting reward. Gerald the Welshman--“Giraldus Cambrensis”--still lives

in his writings under the title won for him by his ardent patriotism;

he lives however for us not as the champion of Welsh ecclesiastical

independence, but as what he has been called by a writer of our own

day--“the father of our popular literature.”[2201] Gerald’s first

essay in authorship was made at the age of twenty; he was still busy

with his pen when past his seventieth year;[2202] and all through the

intervening half-century, every spare moment of his active, restless

career was devoted to literary composition. His last years were

spent in revising and embellishing the hasty productions of these

earlier and briefer intervals of leisure. Even in their more finished

shape, however, they still bear the impress of their origin. They

breathe in all its fulness a spirit of which we catch the first faint

indications in William of Malmesbury, and which may be described in

one word as the spirit of modern journalism. Gerald’s wide range of

subjects is only less remarkable than the ease and freedom with which

he treats them. Whatever he touches--history, archæology, geography,

natural science, politics, the social life and thought of the day,

the physical peculiarities of Ireland and the manners and customs of

its people, the picturesque scenery and traditions of his own native

land, the scandals of the court and of the cloister, the petty struggle

for the primacy of Wales and the great tragedy of the fall of the

Angevin empire--is all alike dealt with in the bold, dashing, offhand

style of a modern newspaper or magazine-article. His first important

work, the _Topography of Ireland_, is, with due allowance for the

difference between the tastes of the twelfth century and those of the

nineteenth, just such a series of sketches as a special correspondent

in our own day might send from some newly-colonized island in the

Pacific to satisfy or to whet the curiosity of his readers at home.

The book made no small stir in the contemporary world of letters.

Sober, old-fashioned scholars stood aghast at this daring Welshman’s

disregard of all classical traditions and literary conventionalities,

at the colloquialisms of his style, and still more at the audacity of

his stories.[2203] For Gerald, determined to entertain his readers no

matter by what means, and secure in their universal ignorance of the

country which he professed to be describing, had raked together all the

marvellous and horrible tales that could be found in Irish traditionary

lore or devised by the inventive genius of his Irish informants;

and the more frightful and impossible these stories were, the more

greedily did he seize upon them and publish them. Irish scholars,

almost from that day to this, have justly declaimed against Gerald

for his atrocious libels upon their country and its people; yet the

fact remains that, in the words of one of his latest editors, “to his

industry we are exclusively indebted for all that is known of the state

of Ireland during the whole of the middle ages.”[2204] His treatise

_De Expugnatione Hiberniæ_ is by far the most complete and authentic

account which we possess of the English or Norman conquest of Ireland.

The _Topographia_, despite its glaring faults, has a special merit of

its own; its author “must” (as says the writer already quoted) “take

rank with the first who descried the value, and, in some respects, the

proper limits of descriptive geography.”[2205]

[2200] That Thomas was Gerald’s chosen model may be seen all

through his writings. He harps upon the martyr’s life and death

somewhat as Thomas himself harped upon the life of Anselm.

[2201] Green, _Hist. Eng. People_, vol. i. p. 172.

[2202] Gir. Cambr. _De Jure Menev. Eccles._, dist. vii.

(Dimock, vol. iii. pp. 372, 373).

[2203] Gir. Cambr. _Expugn. Hibern._, introit. (Dimock, vol. v.

p. 209).

[2204] Brewer, _Gir. Cambr._, vol. i. pref. p. xl.

[2205] _Ibid._

A far better specimen of his work in this direction is his _Welsh

Itinerary_, followed some three or four years later by a _Description

of Wales_.[2206] Here Gerald is on familiar and congenial ground,

dealing with a subject which he thoroughly knows and understands,

describing a country which he ardently loves and a people with whom,

although by no means blind or indulgent to their faults, he is yet

heartily in sympathy, because he is one of themselves. In these

treatises therefore we see him at his very best, both as a writer

and as a man. In his own opinion the best of all his works was the

_Gemma Ecclesiastica_,[2207] or _Jewel of the Church_, a handbook of

instructions on the moral and religious duties of the priesthood,

compiled for the clergy of his own archdeaconry of Brecknock. To

modern readers it is interesting only for the glimpse which it affords

of the social, moral and intellectual condition of the South-Welsh

clergy in his day. In his _Mirror of the Church_[2208] the general

state of religious society and ecclesiastical discipline, at home and

abroad, is reflected as unsparingly as in the satires of Walter Map.

The remainder of Gerald’s extant works are of the most miscellaneous

character--a half-finished autobiography, a book of _Invectives_

against his enemies political and ecclesiastical, a collection of

letters, poems and speeches, a treatise on the _Rights of the Church of

S. David’s_, some Lives of contemporary bishops, a tract nominally _On

the Education of Princes_, but really occupied for the most part with

a bitter attack upon the characters of Henry II. and his sons.[2209]

All of them are, more or less, polemical pamphlets, coloured throughout

by the violent personal antipathies of the writer,[2210] but valuable

for the countless side-lights which they cast upon the social life of

the period. As we read their bold language, we can scarcely wonder at

Archbishop Hubert’s relentless determination to put down their author

by every means in his power. But though Gerald the bishop-elect of

S. David’s was no match for the primate of all England, Gerald the

pamphleteer wielded a force against which the religious authority

of the metropolitan and the hostility of the older race of scholars

were both alike powerless. He and his colleagues in the new school of

literature had at their back the whole strength of the class to which

they belonged, a class of men who were rapidly taking the place of the

clergy as leaders of the intellectual life and thought of the nation.

When old-fashioned critics lifted up their protest against Gerald’s

_Irish Topography_, he boldly carried the book down to Oxford, “where

the most learned and famous English clerks were then to be found,” and

read it out publicly to as many as chose to come and hear it. “And

as there were three distinctions or divisions in the work, and each

division occupied a day, the readings lasted three successive days.

On the first day he received and entertained at his lodgings all the

poor of the town; on the next day all the doctors of the different

faculties, and such of their pupils as were of fame and note; on the

third day the rest of the scholars, with the knights, townsmen and many

burgesses.”[2211] If some of the elder teachers shook their heads, it

mattered little to Gerald; their murmurs were lost in the applause

of a younger generation which hailed him as one of its own most

distinguished representatives.

[2206] Dimock, vol. vi.

[2207] Brewer, vol. ii.

[2208] _Speculum Ecclesiæ_ (Brewer, vol. iv.).

[2209] Gerald’s works have all been edited for the Rolls

series by Mr. Brewer and Mr. Dimock, except the _Vitæ Sex

Episcoporum_, which are in Wharton’s _Anglia Sacra_, vol. ii.,

and _De Instructione Principum_, which has been published by

the Anglia Christiana Society.

[2210] It is only fair to note that Gerald at the close of his

life published a little book of _Retractations_, printed in

first volume of his works (ed. Brewer).

[2211] Gir. Cambr. _De Rebus a se gestis_, l. ii. c. 16

(Brewer, vol. i. pp. 72, 73). I have availed myself of Mr.

Brewer’s translation of the passage, in his preface to the same

volume, p. xlvii.

The spirit which breathes through the pages of Gerald and Walter is

the spirit of the rising universities. The word “university” indeed,

as applied to the great seats of learning in the twelfth century,

is somewhat of an anachronism; the earliest use of it in the modern

sense, in reference to Oxford, occurs under Henry III.;[2212] and

the University of Paris appears by that name for the first time in

1215,[2213] the year of our own Great Charter. But although the title

was not yet in use, the institution now represented by it was one of

the most important creations of the age. The school of Bologna sprang

into life under the impulse given by Irnerius, a teacher who opened

lectures upon the Roman civil law in 1113.[2214] Nearly forty years

later, when Gratian had published his famous book on the Decretals,

a school of canon law was instituted in the same city by Pope Eugene

III.; and in 1158 the body of teachers who formed what we call the

University won a charter of privileges from the Emperor Frederic

Barbarossa.[2215] We have already, in the course of our story, had

more than one glimpse of the great school of arts and theology which

was growing up during the same period in Paris. There, where the study

of divinity had long found a congenial home under the shadow of the

cathedral church, William of Champeaux in 1109--the year of S. Anselm’s

death--opened on the Mont-Ste.-Geneviève a school of logic which in a

few years became the most frequented in Europe. Under his successors,

Abelard and Peter Lombard (the latter of whom was made bishop of Paris

in 1159), the schools of Paris became the centre of the intellectual

life of Christendom.[2216] Teachers and scholars from every nation met

on equal terms, as fellow-citizens of a new and world-wide commonwealth

of learning, on the slopes of the “Mount,” and went forth again to

carry into the most distant lands the instruction which they had

acquired. There a Wiltshire lad could begin a lifelong intimacy with

a youth from Champagne;--could pass from the lectures of Abelard to

those of a master who, though disguised under the title of “Robert of

Melun,” was in reality a fellow-countryman of his own; could enter the

_quadrivium_ under the guidance of a German teacher, make acquaintance

with Aristotle by the help of another learned Englishman, and complete

his theological studies, it may be, under the same Robert Pulein whom

we saw lecturing at Oxford some twelve or thirteen years before.[2217]

There a scholar from the Welsh marches could sit at the feet of the

English master Gerard La Pucelle,[2218] and another from the depths of

Pembroke could give lectures on rhetoric and could study theology with

William of Blois, who in after-days came at the call of the Burgundian

S. Hugh to undertake the direction of a school at Lincoln.[2219] There

Ralf de Diceto was a fellow-student with Arnulf of Lisieux;[2220]

there, in all likelihood, John of Salisbury met Nicolas Breakspear and

Thomas Becket. Thence, we cannot doubt, came through some of these

wandering scholars the impulse which called the schools of Oxford into

being. The first token of their existence is the appearance of Robert

Pulein in 1133. From that time forth the intellectual history of Oxford

is again blank till the coming of Vacarius in 1149; and it is not till

the reign of Henry II. has all but closed that we begin to discern any

lasting result from the visits of these two teachers. Then, however,

the words of Gerald would alone suffice to shew that the University

was to all intents and purposes full-grown. It had its different

“faculties” of teachers, its scholars of various grades; and the little

city in the meadows by the Isis, famous already in ecclesiastical

legend and in political and military history, had by this time won

the character which was henceforth to be its highest and most abiding

glory, as the resort of all “the most learned and renowned clerks in

England.”

[2212] Anstey, _Munimenta Academica_, vol. i. introd. p. xxxiv.

[2213] Mullinger, _Univ. Cambridge_, p. 71 (from Savigny,

_Gesch. des Röm. Rechts_, c. xxi. sec. 127).

[2214] _Ib._ pp. 36, 37, 72.

[2215] Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, p. 73.

[2216] _Ib._ pp. 75–77.

[2217] See above, vol. i. pp. 480–483.

[2218] See above, p. 449.

[2219] _Ib._ pp. 453, 456.

[2220] Arn. Lisieux, Ep. 16 (Giles, pp. 100, 101).

On a site less favoured by nature, Oxford’s future rival was more

slowly growing up. A lift of slightly higher ground above the left bank

of the river Grant--better known to us now as the Cam--on the southern

margin of what was then and for five hundred years afterwards a vast

tract of flood-drowned fen stretching northward as far as the Wash,

there stood at the close of the seventh century--long before Oxford

makes its first appearance in history--a “little waste chester”[2221]

representing what had once been the Roman city of Camboritum. At

the coming of the Normans the place was known as Grantebridge, and

contained some three or four hundred houses, twenty-seven of which were

pulled down by the Conqueror’s orders to make room for the erection of

a castle.[2222] It may be that here, as at Lincoln, the inhabitants

thus expelled went to make for themselves a new home beyond the river;

and a church of S. Benet which still survives, and whose tower might

pass for a twin-sister of Robert D’Oilly’s tower of S. Michael’s at

Oxford, may have been the nucleus of a new town which sprang up half a

mile to the south-east of the old one, on the right bank of the Cam.

Around this new town there gathered in the course of the following

century a fringe of religious foundations. The “round church” of the

Holy Sepulchre, clearly a work of the time of Henry I., was probably

built by some crusader whose imagination had been fired by the sight

of its prototype at Jerusalem. A Benedictine nunnery, part of whose

beautiful church now serves as the chapel of Jesus College, was

established under the invocation of S. Radegund early in the reign of

Stephen; an hospital dedicated to S. John the Evangelist was founded

at some time between 1133 and 1169 under the patronage of Bishop

Nigel of Ely. This hospital, like most institutions of the kind, may

have been served by canons regular of the order of S. Augustine. Some

years before this, however, the Augustinians had made a more important

settlement in the same neighbourhood. As early as 1092 Picot the

sheriff of Cambridgeshire had founded within the older town on the left

bank of the river a church of S. Giles, to be served by four regular

canons. In 1112 this little college was removed to Barnwell, some two

miles to the north-eastward, on the opposite side of the river, where

it grew into a flourishing Austin priory. Wherever there were Austin

canons a school was sure to spring up ere long; so, too, we cannot

doubt, it was at Cambridge. Whether the seeds of learning were first

sown in the cloisters of S. John’s or of Barnwell, or under the shadow

of that old S. Benet’s which seems to have been the original University

church[2223]--who it was that played here the part which had been

played at Oxford by Robert Pulein--we know not; but we do know that by

the middle of the following century the old Grantebridge had sunk into

a mere suburb of the new town beyond the river, and the existence of

the schools of Cambridge had become an established fact.[2224]

[2221] Bæda, _Hist. Eccles._, l. iv. c. 19.

[2222] Domesday, vol. i. p. 189.

[2223] See Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, p. 299, note 3; and Willis

and Clark, _Archit. Hist. Cambr._, vol. i. p. 276 and note 3.

[2224] On the rise of Cambridge--town and university--see

Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, pp. 332–334. The schools were not

formally recognized as an “University” till 1318; _ib._ p. 145.

For S. Radegund’s see Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. iv. pp.

215, 216; for Barnwell, _ib._ vol. vi. pt. i. pp. 83–87; for S.

John’s Hospital, _ib._ pt. ii. p. 755. The present S. John’s

College stands on the site of the hospital.

The student-life of the twelfth century--whether it were the life of

scholar or of teacher--had nothing either of the ease or the dignity

which we associate with the college life of to-day. Colleges in the

modern sense there were indeed none. Students of all ranks and ages,

from boys of ten or twelve years to men in full priestly orders, lodged

as they could in a sort of dames’-houses or hostels scattered up and

down the streets and lanes of the city. The schools were entirely

unendowed; there was no University chest, no common fund, no pecuniary

aid of any kind for either scholars or teachers. The sole support of

both was, at first, the power under whose sheltering wings the school

had grown up--the Church. Every book, even, had to be either bought

out of their own private purses or borrowed from the library of some

religious establishment. We may perhaps gather some idea of what

this latter resource was likely to furnish in the great educational

centres from a catalogue which has been preserved to us of the library

attached to Lincoln minster, at the time when the Lincoln school of

theology was at the height of its fame under Gerald’s friend William

of Blois and the saintly bishop Hugh. Five-and-thirty years before

Hugh’s appointment to the see, the church of Lincoln possessed, in

addition to the necessary service-books which were under the care of

the treasurer, some thirty or forty books in the chancellor’s keeping.

Among these we find, besides a number of Psalters, works of the Latin

Fathers, Epistles, Gospels, and a complete Bible in two volumes, the

Canons, Statutes and Decretals of the Popes;--the Decretals edited by

Ivo of Chartres;--the works of Vergil: a copy of the military treatise

of Vegetius, bound up with the Roman History of Eutropius, “which

volume Master Gerard gave in exchange for the Consolations of Boëthius,

which he lost”;--Priscian’s Grammar:--a “Mappa Mundi”: and a _Book of

the Foundation of Lincoln Minster_, with a collection of its charters.

Of nine books presented by Bishop Robert de Chesney, who died in

1166, the most noticeable were the works of Josephus and of Eusebius,

and the _Sentences_ of Peter Lombard. Somewhat later, one Warin of

Hibaldstow presented to the chapter a “book of Aristotle”--doubtless a

Latin version of his treatise on logic or on natural philosophy--and

seven volumes, whose contents are not stated, were given by Master

“Radulphus Niger” or Ralf the Black, known to us as one of the minor

chroniclers of King Henry’s later years. A copy of Gratian’s great book

of Decretals was presented about the same time by an archdeacon of

Leicester; Gerald de Barri, probably during his residence at Lincoln at

the close of Richard’s reign, added another law-book called _Summula

super Decreta_, a copy of S. Anselm’s treatise _Cur Deus Homo_, and

three of his own works, the _Topographia Hiberniæ_, the _Life of Bishop

Remigius_, and the _Gemma Sacerdotalis_ or _Ecclesiastica_; and the

list closes with another copy of the _Sentences_, acquired seemingly in

the early years of the following century.[2225]

[2225] See the Catalogues of Lincoln cathedral library in the

twelfth century, in _Gir. Cambr. Opp._, vol. vii. (Dimock and

Freeman), App. C., pp. 165–171.

The head of the scholastic body was the chancellor, who was an officer

of the diocesan bishop--in the case of Oxford, the bishop of Lincoln.

From him those who had reached a certain degree of proficiency in the

schools received their license to become teachers in their turn; and it

was an established rule that all who had attained the rank of Master

or Doctor should devote themselves for a certain time to the work of

instructing others. They gave their lectures how and where they could,

in cloister or church-porch, or in their own wretched lodgings, their

pupils sitting literally at their feet, huddled all together on the

bare ground; their living depended solely on their school-fees, and

these were often received with one hand only to be paid away again with

the other, for many an ardent young teacher of logic or rhetoric was,

like John of Salisbury and Gerald de Barri, at one and the same time

giving lectures in these arts to less advanced scholars and pursuing

his own studies under some great doctor of theology. The course of

study was much the same everywhere. From the fifth century downwards

it had consisted of two divisions, _trivium_ and _quadrivium_. Under

the former head were comprised Grammar, defined by an early teacher

as the art of “writing and reading learnedly, understanding and

judging skilfully;”[2226] Dialectics, including logic and metaphysics;

and Rhetoric, by which were meant the rules and figures of the art,

chiefly derived from Cicero. The Quadrivium included Geometry, not so

much the science now known by that name as what we call geography;

Arithmetic, which in the middle ages meant the science of mystical

numbers; Music, in other words metre and harmony; and Astronomy, of

course on the Ptolemaic system, although as early as the fifth century

a theory had been put forth which is said to have given in after-days

the clue to Copernicus.[2227] There was a separate faculty of Theology,

and another of Law. Between these different faculties there seems to

have been a good deal of jealousy. The highest authorities of the

Western Church, while encouraging by every means in their power the

study of the canon law, set their faces steadily against the civil law

of imperial Rome; the “religious” were over and over again forbidden

to have anything to do with it: and on the continent the two branches

of the legal profession were followed by different persons. As,

however, the procedure of the canon law was founded upon that of the

Theodosian code, the English clerical lawyers in Stephen’s time and in

Henry’s early years found their account in combining the two studies;

by degrees both together passed out of the hands of the clergy into

those of a new class of lay lawyers; and in later days, while on the

continent the canon law fell into neglect with its exclusively clerical

professors, in England it was preserved by being linked with the civil

law under the care of lay _doctores utriusque juris_.[2228]

[2226] “Docte scribere legereque, erudite intelligere

probareque.” Martianus Capella, quoted by Mullinger, _Univ.

Camb._, pp. 24, 25.

[2227] Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, pp. 24–26.

[2228] _Ib._ pp. 37–39.

Theology had, however, a yet more formidable rival in the schools

of logic. The text-book commonly used in these schools was a Latin

translation, made by Boëthius in the sixth century, of part of

Aristotle’s treatise upon logic. Early in the twelfth century the

natural philosophy of Aristotle was in some measure rendered accessible

to western students through translations made by travelled scholars

such as Adelard of Bath from Arabic versions which they had picked

up in the schools of Salerno or of the remoter East. Of the “Ethics”

nothing was known save a few fragments imbedded in the works of Latin

writers, until a hundred years later, when they found their way back to

Europe, probably in the train of the returning crusaders, and certainly

in a very strange shape--that of a Latin translation from a Hebrew

version of what was, after all, nothing more than an Arabic commentary

founded upon a Syriac version of the original Greek text.[2229] Garbled

as it was, however, this new Aristotelian lore revolutionized the

schools of western Christendom by laying open to them wholly new fields

of criticism and speculation. The spirit of free inquiry in which

Adelard had begun to deal with physical science invaded every region of

intellectual thought and knowledge, while the spread of legal studies

helped to the invention of new methods of argument and disputation. In

vain did Peter Lombard, in the famous book which gained for him his

title of “Master of the Sentences,” strive to stem the rising tide

and counterwork the influence of the rationalizing dialecticians by

applying to the purposes of theology the methods of their own favourite

science. The “Sentences” remained the accepted text-book of theology

down to the cataclysm in the sixteenth century; but their effect was

precisely the opposite to that which their author had desired.[2230]

The endless “doubtful disputations,” the hair-splittings, the “systems

of impossibilities,” which had already taken possession of the

logic-schools in John of Salisbury’s day, were even more irritating

to the practical mind and impetuous temper of Gerald de Barri. They

were in fact ruining both theology and letters. “Our scholars,” Gerald

complains, “for the sake of making a shew, have betaken themselves

to subjects which rather savour of the quadrivium:--questions of

single and compound, shadow and motion, points and lines, acute and

obtuse angles--that they may display a smattering of learning in the

quadrivium, whereof the studies flourish more in the East than in

the West; and thence they have proceeded to the maintaining of false

positions, the propounding of insoluble problems, the spinning of

frivolous and long-winded discourses, not in the best of Latin, hereby

holding up in their own disputations a warning of the consequences

ensuing from their abandonment of the study of letters.”[2231] Yet it

was from those very schools that Gerald himself, and men like him, had

caught the fearless temper, the outspoken, unrestrained tone, in which

they exposed and criticized not only every conspicuous individual,

but every institution and every system, alike in the world and in the

Church of their day. The democratic spirit of independence which had

characterized the strictly clerical reformers of an earlier day had

passed from the ranks of the priesthood into those of the universities,

and had taken a mightier developement there. It was mainly through

them that the nation at large entered in some degree into the labours

of Theobald and his fellow-workers; it was they themselves who entered

into the labours of Thomas Becket. A large proportion of both students

and teachers--a proportion which grew larger and larger as time went

on--were laymen; but an inveterate legal fiction still counted them all

as “clerks.” The schools had grown up under the wings of the Church,

and when they reached their full stature, they were strong enough both

to free themselves from the control of the ecclesiastical authorities

and to keep the privileges for which the clergy had fought. A priest

of the English Church in our own day is as completely subject to the

ordinary law of the land as any of his flock; but the chancellor’s

court of the University of Oxford still possesses sole cognizance over

all causes whatsoever, in all parts of the realm, which concern any

resident member of the University.[2232]

[2229] Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, pp. 94–96 and notes.

[2230] _Ib._ pp. 58–62.

[2231] Gir. Cambr. _Gemma Eccles._, dist. ii. c. 37 (Brewer,

vol. ii. p. 355). Cf. _ib._ pp. 350, 351, and _Spec. Eccles._,

dist. i. proœm. (vol. iv. pp. 4–9).

[2232] This privilege was secured by a charter of Edward III.;

it was successfully asserted as lately as January 1886.

Not the universities, however, but the towns, were the true strongholds

of English freedom. The struggle of the English towns for municipal

liberty which we have seen beginning under Henry I. was renewed

under Henry II. and Richard with increased vigour and success. Henry

Fitz-Empress was far too clear-sighted a statesman to undervalue the

growing importance of this element in English social and political

life. Most of his town-charters, however, date from the earlier years

of his reign, and scarcely any of them contain anything more than

a confirmation of the liberties enjoyed in his grandfather’s time,

with the addition in some cases of a few new privileges, carefully

defined and strictly limited.[2233] In the great commercial cities,

where the municipal movement had probably received a fresh impulse

from the extension of trade and intercourse with the continent which

was a natural consequence of Henry’s accession to the crown, the

merchant-gilds soon began openly to aim at gathering into their

own hands the whole powers of local government and administration,

and acquiring the position of a French “commune.” The French kings

encouraged the growth of the communal principle as a possible

counterpoise to the power of the feudal nobles; Henry, who had little

need of it for such a purpose, saw the dangers which it threatened

to his system of government and held it steadily in check. In 1170

Aylwine the Mercer, Henry Hund and “the other men of the town” paid

a heavy fine to the treasury for an attempt to set up a commune at

Gloucester;[2234] six years later one Thomas “From-beyond-the-Ouse”

paid twenty marks for a like offence at York.[2235] Owing to the close

connexion between the organization of the commune and that of the

gilds, every developement of this latter institution also was watched

by the Crown with jealous care; in 1164 the burghers of Totnes, those

of Lidford and those of Bodmin were all fined for setting up gilds

without warrant from the king;[2236] and in 1180 no less than eighteen

“adulterine gilds” in London met with a similar punishment.[2237] Once

established, however, they seem to have been permitted to retain their

existence, for in the first Pipe Roll of Richard we find them again

paying their fines “as they are set down in the twenty-sixth Roll of

King Henry II.”[2238] A bakers’ gild in London, a weavers’ gild at

Nottingham, one of the same craft and another of fullers at Winchester,

make their appearance as authorized bodies at the opening of Henry’s

reign;[2239] among the “adulterine gilds” of London were those of

the butchers, goldsmiths, grocers, clothiers and pilgrims.[2240] The

golden days of English borough-life, however, began with the crowning

of Henry’s successor. “When History drops her drums and trumpets and

learns to tell the story of Englishmen”--as he who wrote these words

has told it--“it will find the significance of Richard, not in his

crusade or in his weary wars along the Norman border, but in his lavish

recognition of municipal life.”[2241] In his first seven years alone,

we find him granting charters to Winchester, Northampton, Norwich,

Ipswich, Doncaster, Carlisle, Lincoln, Scarborough and York. Some of

these towns were only beginning their career of independence, and were

content with the first step of all, the purchase of the _firma burgi_;

some bought a confirmation of privileges already acquired; Lincoln in

1194 had got so far as to win from the king a formal recognition of its

right to complete self-government in a clause empowering its citizens

to elect their own reeve every year.[2242] King of knights-errant

and troubadours as he seemed, Richard, it is plain, could read the

signs of the times as clearly and act upon their warnings as promptly

and as wisely as any of his race; and we may be very sure that this

bold advance upon his father’s cautious policy towards the towns was

dictated by a sound political instinct far more than by the mere greed

of gain. John went still further in the same direction; the first

fifteen years of his reign afford examples of town-charters of every

type, from the elementary grant of the _firma burgi_ and the freedom of

the merchant-gild to the little Cornish borough of Helston[2243] up to

the crowning privilege bestowed upon the “barons of our city of London”

in 1215, of electing their own mayor every year.[2244]

[2233] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 165–168.

[2234] Madox, _Hist. Exch._, vol. i. p. 563, from Pipe Roll 16

Hen. II.

[2235] Madox, _Firma Burgi_, p. 35, from Pipe Roll 22 Hen. II.

[2236] Madox, _Hist. Exch._, vol. i. pp. 562, 563.

[2237] _Ib._ p. 562, from Pipe Roll 26 Hen. II.

[2238] Pipe Roll 1 Ric. I. (Hunter), p. 226.

[2239] Pipe Roll 2 Hen. II. (Hunter), pp. 4, 39, 52.

[2240] “Aurifabrorum,” “Bocheiorum,” “Piperariorum,”

“Parariorum,” “Peregrinorum.” There are four gilds “de Ponte”;

one “de S. Lazaro”; one “de Haliwell”; the rest are described

simply as “the gild whereof So-and-so is alderman.” Madox,

_Hist. Exch._, vol. i. p. 562, note _z_.

[2241] Green, _Stray Studies_, p. 216.

[2242] Northampton bought the _firma burgi_ in 1191, Norwich

in 1192, Ipswich and Doncaster in 1194 (Madox as above, pp.

399, 400, from Pipe Rolls); Winchester bought a confirmation

of its liberties in 1190 (Stubbs, _Select Chart._, pp. 265,

266), Carlisle in 1194, York and Scarborough in 1195 (Madox

as above). The Lincoln charter is given by Bishop Stubbs, as

above, pp. 266, 267; for its date see Pipe Roll 6 Ric. I.,

quoted by Madox, as above, p. 400.

[2243] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 313, 314.

[2244] _Ib._ pp. 314, 315. John’s town-charters are all in the

_Rotuli Chartarum_, edited by Sir T. D. Hardy for the Record

Commission. See also extracts from Pipe Rolls in Madox, _Hist.

Exch._, vol. i. pp. 400 _et seq._

From the charter of Henry I. to the establishment of the commune under

Richard the constitutional history of London is shrouded in obscurity.

The charter granted by Henry II. to the citizens, some time before

the end of 1158, is simply a confirmation of his grandfather’s.[2245]

During the first fifteen years of his reign two sheriffs of London

appear annually in the Pipe Rolls; in 1171 there were four, as there

had been in the thirty-first year of Henry I.; but in the twentieth

year of Henry II., 1171, we find that their number was again reduced to

two; and from 1182 onwards there seems to have been only one, till at

Michaelmas 1189 the accounts were rendered by Richard Fitz-Reiner and

Henry of Cornhill, both of whom continued in office till 1191.[2246]

In that year, as we have seen, the commune won its legal recognition

from John and Archbishop Walter of Rouen as representatives of the

absent king;[2247] and although the charter which Richard issued to the

citizens of London, shortly before his final departure from England in

1194, is a mere echo of his father’s,[2248] yet the existence of the

new corporation is thenceforth a recognized fact. John’s first charter

to London was issued from Normandy six weeks after his crowning. It

renewed the old grant of the sheriffdom of London and Middlesex, with

all rights and customs thereunto belonging, to the citizens and their

heirs, to have and to hold of the king and his heirs for ever. They

were to appoint as sheriffs any of their own number whom they might

choose, and to remove them at their pleasure; and for this privilege

they were to pay, through the said sheriffs, three hundred pounds

a year to the Treasury.[2249] The establishment of the commune had

reduced the sheriffs to the rank of mere financial officers, and the

real head of the civic administration was the mayor. The first mayor

of London, Henry Fitz-Aylwine, retained his office for life; and his

life extended beyond the limits of our present story. Yet the true

significance of that story is strikingly illustrated by the next

step in the history of London, a step which followed two years after

Fitz-Aylwine’s death. On May 9, 1215, John granted to the “barons of

the city of London” the right of annually electing their mayor.[2250]

Five weeks later the barons of England compelled him to sign, in the

meadows of Runnymede, the Great Charter which secured the liberties

not of one city only but of the whole English people; and among the

five-and-twenty men whom they chose from among themselves to enforce

its execution was Serlo the Mercer, mayor of London.[2251]

[2245] Charter in Riley’s _Munimenta Gildhallæ_, vol. ii. part

i. pp. 31, 32. It is witnessed by “archiepiscopo Cantuariæ” and

“Ricardo episcopo Londoniarum”; _i.e._ Richard of London who

died in May 1162, and Theobald who died in April 1161. As it is

certain that neither of these two prelates ever crossed the sea

after Henry’s accession, the charter must have been issued in

England, and therefore before Henry went abroad in August 1158.

[2246] Stubbs, _Constit. Hist._, vol. i. p. 629.

[2247] Above, p. 301.

[2248] Riley, _Munim. Gildh._, vol. ii. pt. i. pp. 248, 249.

Date, Winchester, April 23, 1194.

[2249] Riley, _Munim. Gildh._, vol. ii. pt. i. pp. 249–251.

Date, Bonneville, July 5, 1199.

[2250] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 314, 315.

[2251] Mat. Paris, _Chron. Maj._ (Luard), vol. ii. p. 605.

Little, indeed, as the burghers themselves may have dreamed of any

such thing, the highest importance of their struggle for municipal

liberty lies in this, that its fruits were to be reaped by a far larger

community than was inclosed within the town-walls. It was from the

burghers that their brethren in the rural districts caught once more

the spirit of freedom which ages of oppression had well-nigh crushed

out of their hearts. “‘Ketel’s case’” at Bury S. Edmund’s--the case

of a tenant of the abbey who, dwelling “outside the gate,” was hanged

for a theft of which he had been found guilty by the Norman process

of the judicial duel usual in the manor-courts, and over whose fate

the townsmen, rejoicing in the Old-English right of compurgation which

they still retained, grew so bitterly sarcastic that the abbot and

the “saner part of the convent” were driven by terror of a peasant

revolt to admit their rural tenants to a share in the judicial

franchise of the town[2252]--was in all probability only one out of

many. The history of this same abbey of S. Edmund’s shews us how even

the villeins were rising into a position more like that of their free

brethren, how the old badges of serfdom, the heavy labour-rents, the

hard customs, were vanishing one by one, and how in this process of

enfranchisement the boroughs led the way.[2253] “The ancient customs

belonging to the cellarer’s office, as we have seen them”--that is,

as Jocelyn of Brakelond, who was a monk of S. Edmund’s from 1172

to 1211, had seen them in the old custom-roll of the house--“were

these: The cellarer had his messuage and barn by the well of Scurun,

where he solemnly held his court for the trial of thieves and of all

pleas and quarrels; and there he received the pledges of his men, and

enrolled them, and renewed them every year, and got gain by it, as

the reeve did in the portmannimot. This messuage was the homestead

of Beodric, who of old time was lord of this township, whence it was

called Beodricesworth; whose demesne lands are now in the demesne of

the cellarer; and what is now called the _aver-land_ was the land of

his rustics. Now the sum of his tenements and those of his men was

three hundred and thirty acres, which are lands still belonging to

the township, whereof the services, when the town was made free, were

divided into two parts; so that the sacristan or the reeve should

receive the quit-rent, that is, twopence on every acre; and the

cellarer should have the ploughings and other services, that is, the

ploughing of one rood for every acre, without food (which custom is

observed still); he was also to have the folds wherein all the men of

the township (except the seneschal, who has his own fold) were bound

to put their sheep (this custom, too, is observed still). He was also

to have the _aver-penny_,[2254] that is twopence for every thirty

acres; this custom was changed before the death of Abbot Hugh (1180).

For the men of the township had to go at the cellarer’s bidding to

Lakenheath, to fetch a load of eels from Southrey, and often they came

back with their carts empty, and so they had their trouble without any

benefit to the cellarer; wherefore it was agreed between them that

every thirty acres should pay a penny a year, and the men should stay

at home. At the present time, however, these lands are so cut up that

scarcely anybody knows from whom the payment is due; so that whereas

I have seen the cellarer receive twenty-seven pence in a year, now he

can hardly get tenpence farthing. Moreover, the cellarer used to have

control over the roads outside the township, so that no one might dig

chalk or clay without his leave. He was also wont to summon the fullers

of the township to lend cloths for carrying his salt; otherwise he

would forbid them the use of the waters, and seize whatever cloths he

found there; which customs are observed unto this day.” “Moreover the

cellarer alone ought, or used, to have one bull free in the fields

of this township; but now several persons have them.” “Moreover the

cellarer used to warrant those who owed service to his court, so that

they were exempt from scot and tallage; but now it is not so, because

the burghers say that those who do service at the court ought to be

exempt for their service, but not for the burgage which they hold in

the town, and forasmuch as they and their wives do publicly buy and

sell in the market.”[2255] After the affair of Ketel, in fact, the

cellarer’s court was merged in that of the town; “it was decreed that

his men should come to the toll-house with the others, and there renew

their pledges, and be written in the reeve’s roll, and there give to

the reeve the penny which is called _borth-silver_, and the cellarer

should have half of it (but he gets nothing at all of it now); and all

this was done, that all might enjoy equal liberty.”[2256]

[2252] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), p. 74. See Mr. Green’s _Stray

Studies_, pp. 222–224, and _Hist. Eng. People_, vol. i. pp.

219, 220.

[2253] On all this see Mr. Green’s _Abbot and Town_, in _Stray

Studies_, pp. 213–229.

[2254] “The money paid by the tenant in commutation of the

service (_avera_) of performing any work for his lord by horse

or ox, or by carriage with either.” Greenwell, Glossary to

_Boldon Buke_ (Surtees Soc.)

[2255] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), pp. 75, 76.

[2256] _Ib._ p. 74.

“That all might enjoy equal liberty”--Jocelyn’s words had a

significance wider and deeper than he himself could know, wider and

deeper than could be known perhaps even to his abbot from whom they

were probably echoed; although it is clear from almost every page

of Jocelyn’s story that Abbot Sampson of S. Edmund’s was a far more

enlightened and far-seeing statesman than most of the great landowners

of his day, whether secular or tonsured. The rural tenants of S. Edmund

in his time had evidently made a good deal more progress towards

enfranchisement than those of some other great houses, such as, for

example, the abbey of Abingdon. In 1185, on the death of Abbot Roger

of Abingdon, a dispute between the “obedientiaries,” or officers of

the convent to whose support various portions of its revenues were

assigned, and the steward appointed by the king to take charge of

the abbot’s property during the vacancy of his office, led to the

drawing-up of a consuetudinary,[2257] which it would be interesting

to compare with the earlier “Black Book” of Peterborough. A large

proportion of the tenants’ dues were paid in money; but there were

still considerable remnants of the older system. The chamberlain of

the abbey, for instance, had an acre of land at Culham, which the men

of that township were bound to reap and carry to make beds for the

monks. The hay to be laid “under the monks’ feet when they bathed” was

supplied in like manner from a meadow at Stockgrave. A tenant named

Daniel of Colebrook was bound, besides paying a rent of five shillings,

to furnish the chamberlain whenever he went to London with hay for his

horses, with wood and salt, and with straw for his bed. At Welsford,

near Newbury, there were twenty-two “cotset-lands,” whose tenants held

them by their services as swineherds, bedels (or messengers of the

chamberlain’s court), shepherds, hedgewards and such like. Of eleven

rent-paying tenants in the same township, one owed, besides his rent

of twenty-seven pence, his personal service for getting in hay and

stacking corn in August. As the whole township was in demesne, its

inhabitants paid a tribute to the lord--in this case the chamberlain of

the abbey--for the pannage of their pigs; they had also to furnish the

services of one man for harvesting in August, and to lend their ploughs

for bene-work. The men of Boxhole, Benham, Easton and Weston did the

like. At Boxhole, out of twelve tenants, eight were bound, besides

paying their rent, to plough an acre of the demesne and sow it with

their own seed; and seven of these had moreover to carry hay and corn.

One Berner and his sons held a “cotset-land” by a rent of six sextaries

of honey to the cellarer and thirty-one pence to the chamberlain.[2258]

There were twenty-six tenants withdrawn from demesne, of whom six owed

work in August, in addition to their rent; and there were five acres of

meadow which had to be mowed and carried by five men of the township.

At Benham, out of twenty-four tenants, eleven were “cotsetles”; three

of these were servants of the chamberlain, holding their lands by

their service; the rest were to hold by rent or by work, as the lord

might choose[2259]--an arrangement which applied also to the cotters

of Boxhole.[2260] Of the remaining thirteen tenants at Benham, six

paid rent only; the rest were bound also to plough and sow an acre or

half an acre apiece, and to carry corn and hay.[2261] One was excused

the ploughing and sowing, doubtless in consideration of her sex and

condition--she was “Ernive a widow.”[2262] The whole township owed a

customary payment or church-shot of forty-six hens.[2263]

[2257] _Hist. Mon. Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. pp. 297, 298.

[2258] _Hist. Mon. Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. pp. 300–302.

[2259] _Ib._ pp. 303–305.

[2260] _Ib._ p. 303.

[2261] And this though one of them was no less a personage

than _Gaufridus vicecomes_! What can this mean? _Hist. Mon.

Abingdon_ as above, pp. 304, 305.

[2262] _Ib._ p. 304.

[2263] _Ib._ p. 305.

On the manor of Weston the dues were thus distributed: Robert of

Pont-de-l’Arche held four acres of the abbot “by the service of half

a knight.” One acre belonged to the church of the township; half a

hide was held by John of S. Helen’s, on what terms we are not told.

Of the remainder, over which the chamberlain was lord, half a hide

was in demesne; the rest was distributed in ten portions, held by

thirteen tenants--a hide or half a hide being in three cases held by

two persons conjointly. Two hides and a half were for work or for

gavel, at the option of the lord; in actual practice, however, there

were only two cotters who owed labour instead of, or in addition

to, their money-rent. On the other hand, the right of poundage, or

exemption from impounding of cattle, was paid for in this village by

the ploughing of two acres.[2264] The township of Berton and several

others were bound to furnish sumpter-horses for conveying fish to

the abbey-kitchen thrice a year; the persons responsible for this

service had to pay their own travelling expenses and those of their

horses; but they got each a loaf from the abbey when they left; and

those who could not fulfil the service were allowed to compound for

it with the kitchener “as best they could.” The same manors rendered

each five hundred eggs on the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed

Virgin, at Christmas, Easter, Rogation-tide and Pentecost; and three

hundred at Candlemas and Quinquagesima, besides eighteen hens apiece

at the festivals of S. Martin and at Christmas. They also gave on the

Wednesday before Easter a hundred herrings, which on the following

Thursday were distributed to the poor;[2265] and each of them sent

moreover to the monks’ kitchen, in the course of the year, besides the

eggs and hens already enumerated, twenty-four bushels of beans.[2266]

Eight fisheries were bound to furnish each a certain number of eels on

Ash-Wednesday;[2267] the fishermen who carried the eels to the hall

were entitled to receive thence two loaves apiece.[2268] From another

fishery a money-rent of seventeen shillings was due, paid in three

terms; and its holder owed church-shot of twelve hens.[2269] Berton

furnished five loads of straw, and Culham as many of hay, three times a

year--on Christmas Eve, Easter Eve, and All Saints’ Eve--for strewing

the refectory.[2270] When the chamberlain went to Winchelcombe fair,

the men of Dumbleton were bound to bring home for him whatever he

purchased there; the same duty fell to the tenantry of Welford when he

went to the fair at Winchester.[2271]

[2264] _Hist. Mon. Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. pp. 305, 306.

[2265] _Ib._ pp. 307, 308.

[2266] _Ib._ p. 323.

[2267] _Ib._ pp. 308, 323.

[2268] _Ib._ p. 308.

[2269] _Ib._ p. 309.

[2270] _Ib._ p. 313.

[2271] _Ib._ pp. 326, 327.

If we compare this Abingdon consuetudinary of 1185 with the

Peterborough Black Book of 1128, the main result seems to be this:

the Abingdon dues are quite as heavy, if not heavier, but the

labour-services are much lighter. We must not indeed assume that the

difference is wholly owing to progress made during the half-century

which elapsed between the compilation of the two books; the customs

of different localities varied in all ages, and those of Abingdon may

never have been so hard as those of Peterborough. On the estates of the

bishop of Durham, on the other hand, when Hugh of Puiset took account

of his dues in 1183, the old labour-rents and customs seem to have

subsisted almost without alteration. A large proportion of the villeins

on the bishop’s manors were holders of two bovates or oxgangs of thirty

acres each, for which each man paid two shillings and sixpence for

scot-pennies, half a chalder of oats, sixteen pence for aver-pennies,

five cart-loads of wood, two hens and ten eggs; he had to work for the

lord three days every week throughout the year except Easter-week,

Whitsun-week and the twelve days of Christmas; moreover, he and all his

family, except the house-wife, had to do in autumn four days boon-work

in reaping; besides this, he had to reap three roods of _averipe_ (ripe

oats), and plough and harrow three roods of _averere_ (oat-stubble).

Each villein plough had to plough and harrow two acres; on this

occasion the villeins had a corrody from the bishop, and so they had on

occasion of a great boon-work. They were to harrow whenever required;

to perform services of carting, for which they got every man a loaf; to

make each one booth for the fair of S. Cuthbert; “and when they make

lodges” (possibly for the bishop’s hunting) “and cart wood, they are

free of other work.” These were the services due from twenty-two out

of the thirty-six tenants on the manor of Boldon. Of the remainder,

twelve were “cotmen,” holding each twelve acres and working throughout

the year, except at the above-named seasons, two days a week, and

rendering twelve hens and sixty eggs. One man held two oxgangs of

thirty-seven acres, at a rent of half a mark; another was the pounder,

who held twelve acres, received from each plough one thrave of corn,

and rendered twenty-four hens and five hundred eggs. The mill paid

five marks and a half. The villeins were bound to give their labour

every year, if required, for the building of a house (perhaps a

hunting-lodge) forty feet long and fifteen feet wide; in that case

they were forgiven fourpence for aver-pennies. The whole township

rendered seventeen shillings for cornage, and one cow.[2272] Clevedon

and Whitburn contained twenty-eight villeins and twelve cotmen whose

services were the same as at Boldon; besides these and the pounder,

there were four other tenants; one held two bovates of twenty-four

acres at a rent of sixteenpence, and “went on the bishop’s errands”;

one held sixty acres and a toft at eightpence, and fulfilled the same

duty; the other two held their lands at a money-rent only.[2273] At

Sedgefield there were fifty-one tenants, of whom twenty were villeins

holding and labouring on the same terms as their brethren at Boldon;

twenty more were “farmers,” holding two bovates apiece, paying five

shillings, ploughing and harrowing half an acre, and finding two men

to mow, two to reap, and two to make hay, for two days, and also one

cart for two days to carry corn, and the same to cart hay; they also

did four days’ boon-work in autumn with all their families except the

housewives. The reeve, the smith and the carpenter held land by their

service; the pounder got his thraves of corn and paid his dues in hens

and eggs as on the other manors. Five _bordarii_ held five tofts, paid

five shillings, and did four days’ boon-work. William of Oldacres and

Uhtred of Butterwick held lands, whose extent is not specified, at a

rent of sixteen shillings and half a mark respectively.[2274] At Norton

there were thirty villeins holding and labouring like those of Boldon,

save that for lack of pasture-land they owed no cornage; and twenty

farmers, whose tenure was much the same as that of the farmers of

Sedgefield. Alan of Normanton held one carucate for ten shillings, and

had to find thirty-two men for a day’s work when required, four carts

for one day or two for two days for carrying corn, and the same for

carting hay; besides which his men, if he had any, were to work four

boon-days in autumn with all their families except the housewives, but

Alan himself and his own household were free of this service. Adam,

son of Gilbert of Hardwick, held a large piece of land by a money-rent.

There was a mill, with eight acres and a meadow, and rendering twenty

marks; a pounder, holding on the usual terms; and there were twelve

cotmen, holding tofts and crofts, and paying partly in money, partly in

work.[2275] The palatine bishopric, it is clear, was an old-fashioned

district where innovations of any kind were slow to penetrate. Even

here, however, the newer system of money-payment in commutation of

service was beginning to make its appearance. The tenures on the manor

of Whickham had undergone a sweeping change, apparently not long

before Bishop Hugh’s survey was drawn up. On this manor there were

thirty-five villeins, holding each an oxgang of fifteen acres. Each

of these had been wont to pay sixteenpence, and to work three days a

week throughout the year, three boon-days in autumn with all his family

except his wife, and a fourth boon-day with two men; in their ordinary

work they had to mow the grass, to cut and carry the hay, to reap and

carry the corn; and over and above this, they had to plough and harrow

two acres of _averere_ with each plough; for this, however, they had a

corrody. They had also, in the course of their work, to “make a house”

forty feet long and fifteen feet wide, to make three fisheries in the

Tyne, and to do carting and carrying like the villeins of Boldon;

they gave nine shillings cornage, one cow, and for every oxgang one

hen and ten eggs. “Now, however,” adds the record, “the said manor of

Whickham is at farm”--demesne, villeins, mill, fisheries and all:--it

may possibly, like its neighbour Ryton, have been let at farm to the

tenants themselves; but at any rate, its entire services and dues,

except a small tribute of hens and eggs, were commuted for a rent of

six-and-twenty pounds.[2276]

[2272] _Boldon Buke_ (Greenwell), pp. 3, 4. Cornage was a

“payment made in commutation of a return of cattle” (_ib._

Glossary).

[2273] _Ib._ p. 5.

[2274] _Ib._ p. 11.

[2275] _Boldon Buke_ (Greenwell), pp. 12, 13.

[2276] _Ib._ pp. 33, 34.

On the whole, the glimpses which we get of the condition of the rural

population of England under the Angevin kings seem to indicate that

they were by no means excluded from a share in the progress of the

kingdom at large. Even if their dues had grown heavier, this surely

points to an advance in agricultural prosperity and of the material

ease and comfort which are its natural results. The spread of industry

shewed itself in many ways. In the towns we can trace it in the growing

importance of the handicraftsmen, proved by the jealousy with which

their gilds were regarded by the central government and still more by

the civic authorities. The weavers seem to have been special objects

of civic dislike; in most of the great towns they were treated as a

sort of outcasts by the governing body; and in 1201 the London citizens

bought of John, at the price of twenty silver marks a year and sixty

marks down, a charter authorizing them to turn the weavers out of the

city altogether. The sequel of this bargain is eminently characteristic

of John; but it is equally significant of the growing influence of

the craftsmen. The king took the citizens’ money and gave them the

charter which they desired, but he made it null and void by granting

his protection to the weavers as before, merely exacting from them an

annual payment of twenty marks instead of eighteen.[2277]

[2277] Riley, _Munim. Gildh._, vol. ii. pt. i. introd. pp.

lxi–lxiii.

Hand in hand with the growth of industry went the growth of trade.

Markets and fairs were springing up everywhere, and a keen commercial

rivalry sprang up with them. The little borough of S. Edmund’s set

up a “merchant-gild,” whose members insisted that all who did not

belong to it must pay toll in their market.[2278] The great success of

Abingdon fair in Henry’s early years stirred up the jealousy of both

Wallingford and Oxford, and their remonstrances compelled the king to

order that inquisition should be made, through twenty-four of the old

men of the shire “who were living in his grandfather’s time,” whether

the obnoxious little township had in those days enjoyed the privilege

of a market. The case was tried in full shire-moot at Farnborough; the

twenty-four elders were duly elected, and swore that Abingdon had had

a full market in the time of King Henry the First. The jurors were

however challenged by the opposing party, whereupon Henry ordered “the

men of Wallingford and the whole county of Berkshire” to meet before

his justices at Oxford, and there to choose fresh recognitors. This

time the jury could not agree among themselves. The Wallingford jurors

swore that they remembered nothing sold at Abingdon in the first King

Henry’s reign except bread and ale; the Oxford men admitted more

than this, but not a “full market”--nothing brought by cart or boat

(there was an old-standing quarrel between Oxford and Abingdon about

boat-cargoes and river-tolls); the shiremen acknowledged that there had

been a “full market,” but doubted whether goods were carried thither

by any boats save those belonging to the abbot himself. The justiciar,

Earl Robert of Leicester, who was presiding over the court in person,

transmitted these various opinions to the king without venturing to

decide the case. As it chanced, however, he could--so at least the

Abingdon story ran--add to them an useful reminiscence of his own

childhood: he had himself seen a full market at Abingdon not only in

the days of King Henry I., but as far back as the days of King William,

when he, Earl Robert, was a little boy in the abbey-school. And so the

men of Abingdon won their case.[2279]

[2278] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), p. 74.

[2279] _Hist. Mon. Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. pp. 227–229.

This happened 1158–1161. Mr. Eyton (_Itin. Hen. II._, pref.

pp. v, vi) denies on chronological grounds the authenticity

of Earl Robert’s supposed witness to the state of affairs in

the Conqueror’s time. He does not adduce his proofs; I can

therefore only leave this part of the matter undecided, and

take the Abingdon story as I find it.

Disputes of this kind, however, were not always so peacefully settled.

Some forty years later--in 1201--the monks of Ely set up, under

the protection of a royal charter, a market at Lakenheath, within

the “liberties” of S. Edmund’s abbey. The chapter of S. Edmund’s,

“together with their friends and neighbours,” sent to Ely an amicable

remonstrance against this proceeding, adding that they would willingly

make good the fifteen marks which the monks of Ely had paid for their

charter, if these latter would consent to forego the use of it. The

remonstrance however produced no effect. The brotherhood of S. Edmund’s

therefore demanded a recognition to declare whether the new market had

been set up to their injury, and to the injury of the market at their

own town. The verdict of the recognitors decided that it was so. The

next step was to inform the king, and ascertain from him the exact

tenour of his charter to Ely; search was made in the royal register,

and it was found that the market had been granted only on condition

that it should not damage the interests of other markets in the

neighbourhood. Hereupon the king, for a promise of forty marks, gave to

S. Edmund’s a charter providing that no market should thenceforth be

set up within the liberties of the abbey save by the abbot’s consent;

and he issued orders to the justiciar, Geoffrey Fitz-Peter, for the

abolition of the market at Lakenheath. The justiciar sent on the order

to the sheriff of Suffolk; and the sheriff, having no jurisdiction

within the liberties of S. Edmund’s, forwarded it to the abbot for

execution. Next market-day the hundred-reeve came to Lakenheath, and

shewing the letters of king and sheriff, supported by the testimony

of the freemen, forbade the market in the king’s name; he was however

met with nothing but contempt and abuse. The abbot, who was in London

at the time, after consulting with some “wise men” there, wrote to his

bailiffs bidding them assemble all the men of S. Edmund’s with their

horses and arms, overthrow the market by force, and take prisoners as

many of the buyers and sellers as they could. In the middle of the

night some six hundred well-armed men set out from S. Edmund’s for

Lakenheath. When they reached it the market was deserted; all the

stall-holders had fled. The prior of Ely was at Lakenheath with his

bailiffs, having come that same night in expectation of the intended

attack; but he “would not come out of his house”; so the bailiffs of S.

Edmund’s, after vainly demanding pledges from him that he would “stand

to right” in the abbey-court, seized the butchers’ trestles and the

planks which formed the stalls, as well as the cart-horses, sheep and

oxen, “yea, and all the beasts of the field,” and carried them away to

Icklingham. The prior’s bailiffs hurried in pursuit, and begged to have

their goods on pledge for fifteen days, which was granted. Within the

fifteen days came a writ summoning the abbot to answer for this affair

at the Exchequer, and to restore the captured animals. “For the bishop

of Ely, who was a man of ready and eloquent speech, had complained in

his own person to the justiciar and the great men of England, saying

that an unheard-of insult had been done to S. Etheldreda in time of

peace; wherefore many were greatly stirred up against the abbot.”[2280]

[2280] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), pp. 98, 99.

The developement of foreign commerce, resulting from the wide-spread

relations of the Angevin kings with lands on both sides of the sea

which encompassed their island-realm, woke a rivalry no less keen

between some of the great trading cities, although they might shew it

in less rough and ready fashion than the champions of the mercantile

privileges of S. Edmund’s. One interesting illustration has recently

come to light, in a writ of Henry II. to the bailiffs of Dublin in

favour of the citizens of Chester. Henry, as we know, had granted

to the men of Bristol the right of colonizing Dublin and holding it

of him and his heirs with the same liberties and privileges as were

enjoyed by Bristol itself. Bristol and Chester had for ages been rivals

in the trade with Ireland; Chester now saw itself in imminent danger

of being altogether shut out of that trade, an exclusion which would

have meant little less than ruin to the city. We can hardly doubt

that its citizens appealed to the king for a reservation of their

commercial privileges in Dublin as against the Bristol merchants.

At any rate, Henry in 1175 or 1176 issued a writ to the bailiffs of

Dublin commanding that the burghers of Chester should be free to buy

and sell at Dublin as they had been wont to do, and should have the

same rights, liberties and free customs there as they had had in his

grandfather’s days.[2281] Yet more important than the trade of the

western seaports with Ireland was that of the eastern coast, not only

with the continental dominions of the Angevin house, but with almost

the whole of Europe. Not the least beneficial result of the Angevins’

renewal of the old political ties between England and the Empire was

the increase of trade which it helped to bring from the merchant-cities

of northern Germany and the Low Countries to the port of London.

Nor were the kings themselves blind to the advantage of these

commercial relations. Richard on the eve of his return from captivity

in 1194 granted to the citizens of Cöln a gildhall in London, “with

all their other customs and demands,” for an annual payment of two

shillings.[2282] The hall of the other Teutonic merchants--famous in

later days under the name of the Steel-yard--was probably established

about the same period; and early in the following century we find

an elaborate and interesting code of regulations for the trade of

the Lorrainers, the “men of the Emperor of Germany,” the Danes and

the Norwegians.[2283] The developement of commerce brought with it

a corresponding growth of riches, and of the material comforts and

refinements of life. Domestic architecture began to improve. Henry

Fitz-Aylwine issued at the opening of his mayoralty an “Assize” which

has been described as “the earliest English Building Act,” and which at

any rate shews that the civic authorities were earnestly endeavouring

to secure health and comfort in the houses within their jurisdiction,

and also to guard against the risk of fire which had ruined so many

citizens in times past.[2284] Ecclesiastical architecture progressed

still more rapidly; church-building or rebuilding went on all over the

country on a scale which proves how great was the advance, both in

artistic taste and material wealth, which England had made under the

just rule and peaceful administration of her first Angevin king. At

the opening of John’s reign the citizens of London were contemplating

an important architectural work of another kind: they were planning

to replace the wooden bridge over the Thames with a bridge of stone.

Degenerate representative as he was in more important respects of the

“great builders” of Anjou, John had yet inherited a sufficient share

of their tastes to feel interested in such an undertaking as this; and

in April 1202 we find him writing to the mayor and citizens of London

to recommend them an architect, Isenbert, master of the schools at

Saintes, whose skill in the construction of bridges had been lately

proved at Saintes and at La Rochelle.[2285] The citizens however seem

not to have adopted the king’s suggestion; they found an architect

among themselves, in the person of Peter, chaplain or curate of S. Mary

Colechurch--the little church beneath whose shadow S. Thomas the martyr

was born. It was Peter who “began the stone bridge at London”; and in a

chapel on that bridge his body found its appropriate resting-place when

he died in 1205.[2286]

[2281] The real meaning of this writ is pointed out by Mr. J.

H. Round in the _Academy_, May 29, 1886 (new issue, No. 734, p.

381). The writ itself is there reprinted from the Eighth Report

of the Royal Commission on Historical MSS., where it has been

wrongly interpreted, owing to a misreading of the word which

stands for Dublin.

[2282] Riley, _Munim. Gildh._, vol. ii. pt. i. introd. p. xli,

from _Placita de quo warranto_, p. 468.

[2283] Riley as above, pp. 61, 64, and introd. pp. xxxv–xxxix.

[2284] Fitz-Aylwine’s Assize is printed by Mr. Stapleton from

the _Liber de Antiquis Legibus_, pp. 206–211. It is there dated

1189.

[2285] Rymer, _Fœdera_, vol. i. p. 83.

[2286] Ann. Waverl. a. 1205 (Luard, _Ann. Monast._, vol. ii.

pp. 256, 257).

There can be little doubt that a large part of the means for this

developement of commercial and architectural energy was furnished by

the Jews. The Jewish settlements increased rapidly both in numbers

and in importance under Henry II. In the Pipe Rolls of his first

five years we find, in addition to the London Jews who appeared

in the thirty-first year of his grandfather, and those of Oxford

and Lincoln of whom there are traces in the next reign, Jewries at

Norwich, Cambridge, Thetford and Bungay, as well as at an unnamed

place in Suffolk, which from other evidence seems to have been Bury

S. Edmund’s;[2287] and we have already seen that before Henry’s death

there were important Hebrew colonies at Lynn, Stamford, York, and many

other places. At Winchester the Jews were so numerous and so prosperous

that a writer in Richard’s early years calls it their Jerusalem.[2288]

The great increase in their numbers throughout England during Henry’s

reign is shewn by the fact that in 1177 he found it necessary to grant

them permission for the making of a Jewish burial-ground outside the

walls of every city in England, instead of sending all their dead to be

buried in London, as had been the practice hitherto.[2289] Legally, the

Jews were still simply chattels of the king. Practically, they were

masters of the worldly interests of a large number of his Christian

subjects, and of a large portion of the wealth of his realm. Without

their loans many a great and successful trading venture could never

have been risked, many a splendid church could never have been built,

nay, many a costly undertaking of the king himself might have been

brought to a standstill for lack of funds necessary to its completion.

The abbey-church of S. Edmund was rebuilt with money borrowed in great

part, at exorbitant interest, from Jewish capitalists. Abbot Hugh,

when he died in 1173, left his convent in utter fiscal bondage to two

wealthy Jews, Isaac son of Rabbi Joses, and Benedict of Norwich.[2290]

The sacred vessels and jewels belonging to Lincoln minster were in

the same year redeemed by Geoffrey, then bishop-elect, from Aaron, a

rich Jew of the city who had had them in pledge for seven years or

more.[2291] In 1187 Aaron died; his treasure was seized for the king,

and a large part of it sent over sea. The ship which bore it went

down between Shoreham and Dieppe, and the sum of the lost treasure

was great enough for its loss to be chronicled as a grave misfortune

by the treasurer, Bishop Richard Fitz-Nigel;[2292] while two years

later the affairs of the dead Jew still made a prominent figure in

the royal accounts.[2293] His house, as it stands at the head of the

“Steep Hill” of Lincoln to this day, is one of the best examples of a

mode of domestic architecture to which Christian townsfolk had scarcely

yet begun to aspire, but which was already growing common among those

of his race: a house built entirely of stone, in place of the wooden

or rubble walls and thatched roofs which, even after Fitz-Aylwine’s

Assize, still formed the majority of dwellings in the capital itself.

[2287] Jews at Norwich, Pipe Roll 2 Hen. II. (Hunter), p.

8; Cambridge, _ib._ p. 15; Thetford and Bungay, 5 Hen. II.

(Pipe Roll Soc.), p. 12. In 4 Hen. II. (Hunter), p. 127, the

sheriff of Suffolk renders an account of twenty silver marks

“pro Judæis”; as we find Jews at S. Edmund’s at the opening of

Richard’s reign, it seems probable that they are the persons

referred to here.

[2288] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 62.

[2289] _Gesta Hen._ (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 182.

[2290] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), pp. 2, 3.

[2291] Gir. Cambr. _Vita S. Remig._, c. 24 (Dimock and Freeman,

vol. vii. p. 36).

[2292] _Gesta Hen._ (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 5.

[2293] Pipe Roll 1 Ric. I. (Hunter), pp. 8, 59, 219, 226, 229,

246.

It is no wonder that these people, with their untold stores of wealth,

their independence of all ordinary jurisdictions, their exemption

from all the burthens of civil life, their voluntary exclusion from

the common brotherhood of Christendom, their strange aspect and their

mysterious language, were objects of universal jealousy, suspicion and

hatred, which they on their part took but little pains to conciliate

or allay. The religious feelings of the whole population of Oxford

were outraged by a Jew who publicly mocked at S. Frideswide amid the

solemnities of her festival-day, well knowing that neither prior nor

bishop, chancellor nor portreeve, dared lift a finger to check or to

punish him.[2294] Darker stories than this, however, were whispered

against his race. They were charged not only with ruining many

Englishmen of all classes by their usury, and with openly insulting

the Christian sacraments and blaspheming the Christians’ Lord, but

with buying Christians for money in order to crucify them.[2295] A

boy, afterwards canonized as S. William, was said to have been thus

martyred at Norwich in 1137;[2296] another, Robert, at S. Edmund’s in

1181;[2297] and a third at Winchester in 1192.[2298] Little as we may

be inclined to believe such tales, we can scarcely wonder that they

found credit at the time, and that the popular hatred of the Jews went

on deepening till it broke out in the massacres of 1190. That outbreak

compelled the king to interfere in behalf of his “chattels”; but the

fines with which he punished it, though they deterred the people from

any further attempts to get rid of the Jews by force, could not alter

the general feeling. At S. Edmund’s Abbot Sampson, immediately after

the massacre, sought and obtained a royal writ authorizing him to turn

all the remaining Jews out of the town at once and for ever;[2299] and

in 1194 Richard, or Hubert Walter in his name, found it needful to make

an elaborate ordinance for the regulation of Jewish loans throughout

the realm and the security of Jewish bonds. Such loans were to be made

only in six or seven appointed places, before two “lawful Christians,”

two “lawful Jews,” two “lawful writers,” and two clerks specially

named in the ordinance; the deed was to be drawn up in the form of an

indenture; one half, sealed with the borrower’s seal, was to be given

to the Jewish lender; the other half was to be deposited in a common

chest having three locks; the two Christians were to keep one key, the

two Jews another, and the two royal clerks the third; and the chest

was to be sealed with three seals, one being affixed by each of the

parties who held the keys. The clerks were to have a roll containing

copies of all such deeds; for every deed threepence were to be paid,

half that sum by the Jew and half by his creditor; the two scribes got

a penny each, and the keeper of the roll the third; and no transactions

whatsoever in connexion with these Hebrew bonds was henceforth to take

place save in accordance with these regulations.[2300]

[2294] _Mirac. S. Fridesw._, in _Acta SS._, vol. lvi. p. 576

(October 19).

[2295] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 28.

[2296] Eng. Chron. a. 1137.

[2297] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), p. 12.

[2298] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 60.

[2299] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), p. 33.

[2300] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 266, 267. These

“Capitula de Judæis” form the twenty-fourth chapter of _Forma

procedendi in placitis Coronæ Regiæ_ (see above, p. 337),

printed also in Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 259–263.

It is just possible that this growth of anti-Jewish feeling may have

helped in some degree to the growth of a sense of national unity among

the other dwellers in the land. All Christians, to whatever race they

might belong, whatever tongue they might speak, could not but feel

themselves to be one people as against these Oriental intruders. It is

at any rate clear that of the foreign elements which had been infused

into the population of England during the hundred and forty years which

had passed since Duke William landed at Pevensey, the Hebrew element

was the only one which had not amalgamated with the native mass. The

fusion in blood between Normans and English, which we saw making rapid

progress under Henry I., was before the end of his grandson’s reign

so far complete that the practice of “presentment of Englishry”--that

is, the privilege whereby the hundred in which a man was found slain

escaped paying the murder-fine to the treasury, if it could prove that

the victim was not of Norman blood--had to be given up because the two

nationalities had become so intermixed in every class above that of

serfs that it could hardly ever be made out to which of them any man

really belonged.[2301] In this fusion the English element, as it was

far the larger, was also the weightier and the stronger. In the matter

of speech it was fast regaining its supremacy. Foreign priests and

foreign prelates were learning to speak and to preach to the English

people in their own tongue; Norman barons and knights were learning

to talk English with their English-speaking followers and dependents;

some of them were learning to talk it with their own wives.[2302]

If the pure Teutonic speech of our forefathers had suffered some

slight corruption from foreign influences, Walter Map’s legend of

the well at Marlborough whereof whosoever drank spoke bad French for

ever after[2303] may hint that the language of the conquerors was

becoming somewhat Anglicized in the mouths of some at least of their

descendants; and the temper of these adoptive Englishmen was changing

yet more rapidly than their speech. Of the many individual figures

which stand out before us, full of character and life, in the pages of

the twelfth-century historians, the one who in all ages, from his own

day to ours, has been unanimously singled out as the typical Englishman

is the son of Gilbert of Rouen and Rohesia of Caen.

[2301] _Dial. de Scacc._, l. i. c. 10 (Stubbs, _Select

Charters_, pp. 201, 202).

[2302] See the story of Helwyse de Morville and her

husband--parents of the Hugh de Morville who was one of the

murderers of S. Thomas--in Will. Cant. (Robertson, _Becket_,

vol. i.), p. 128.

[2303] W. Map, _De Nug. Cur._, dist. v. c. 6 (Wright, pp. 235,

236).

The whole policy of the Angevin kings tended to mould their insular

subjects into an united English nation. Their equal administration

completed that wiping-out of local distinctions which had been begun

by the wisdom of the Norman kings and helped on by the confusion of

the civil war; their developement of old English methods of judicial

and administrative procedure brought the English people again visibly

and tangibly to the forefront of affairs. Even those very qualities

and tendencies which were most un-English in the Angevins themselves

helped indirectly to a like result. The almost world-wide range of

their political interests gave England once more a place among the

nations, and a place far more important than any which she had ever

before held. For, above all, it was England that they represented in

the eyes of the continental powers; it was as “Kings of the English”

that they stood before the world; and it was as Kings of the English

that their successors were to stand there still, when the Angevin

empire had crumbled into dust. On the eve of that catastrophe the new

England found a voice. The English tongue once more asserted its right

to a place among the literary tongues of Europe. The higher English

poetry, which had slumbered ever since the days of Cadmon, suddenly

woke again to life among the Worcestershire hills. The story of the

origin of Layamon’s _Brut_ can never be told half so well as in the

poet’s own words. “A priest there was in the land, Layamon was he

named; he was Leovenath’s son; may the Lord be gracious to him! He

dwelt at Ernley, at a noble church by Severn’s bank--good it there

seemed to him!--hard by Radstone, where he read books. It came into

his mind, and into his chief thoughts, that he would tell the noble

deeds of Englishmen--what they were called, and whence they came, who

first owned English land.... Layamon began to journey wide over this

land, and got the noble books that he took for models. He took the

English book that Saint Beda made; another he took, in Latin, that

Saint Albin made, and the fair Austin, who brought baptism in hither;

a third book he took, and laid there in the midst, that a French clerk

made, Wace was he called, who well could write, and he gave it to the

noble Eleanor who was the high King Henry’s queen. Layamon laid these

books before him, and turned the leaves; he lovingly beheld them;

may the Lord be merciful to him! Pen he took with fingers and wrote

on a bookskin, and the true words set together, and the three books

compressed into one.”[2304] We must not blame a dweller on the western

border in the early days of King John if, when setting himself to

tell “the noble deeds of Englishmen,” he thought it needful to begin

with the fall of Troy after the pattern of Wace and Wace’s original,

Geoffrey of Monmouth. We can only be thankful to this simple English

priest for leaving to us a purely English poem of more than thirty

thousand lines which is indeed beyond all price, not only as a

specimen of our language at one of its most interesting stages, but as

an abiding witness to the new spirit of patriotism which, ten years and

more before the signing of the Great Charter, was growing up in such

quiet corners of the land as this little parish of “Ernley” (or Areley

Kings) by Severn-side. The subject-matter of Layamon’s book might be

taken chiefly from his French guide, Wace; but its spirit and its

language are both alike thoroughly English. The poet’s “chief thought,”

as he says himself, was to “tell the noble deeds of Englishmen,” to

Englishmen, in their own English tongue. A man who wrote with such an

ambition as this was surely not unworthy of the simple reward which was

all that he asked of his readers: “Now prayeth Layamon, for love of

Almighty God, every good man that shall read this book and learn this

counsel, that he say together these soothfast words for his father’s

soul, and for his mother’s soul, and for his own soul, that it may be

the happier thereby. Amen!”[2305]

[2304] Layamon (Madden), vol. i. pp. 1–3.

[2305] Layamon (Madden), vol. i. pp. 3, 4.

Layamon’s _Brut_ was written at some time between John’s crowning and

his return to England, after the loss of Normandy, in 1206.[2306] It

was a token that, on both sides of the sea, the Angevins’ work was all

but ended, their mission all but fulfilled. The noblest part of that

mission was something of which they themselves can never have been

fully conscious; and yet perhaps through that very unconsciousness they

had fulfilled it the more thoroughly. “The silent growth and elevation

of the English people”--as that people’s own historian has taught

us--“was the real work of their reigns;”[2307] and even from a survey

so imperfect as ours we may see that when John came home in 1206 the

work was practically done.

[2306] On the date, etc., of Layamon see Sir F. Madden’s

preface to his edition of the _Brut_, vol. i.; and Mr. Morley’s

_English Writers_, vol. i. pp. 632–635.

[2307] Green, _Stray Studies_, p. 217.

INDEX

Aaron of Lincoln, ii. 487

Abelard, i. 480

Abingdon, its customs in 1185, ii. 475–477;

its fair, 481, 482.

_See_ Faricius

Achard, lord of Châlus, ii. 382, 383

Aclea, battle of, i. 102

Acre taken by the crusaders, ii. 319

Adaland, archbishop of Tours, i. 131, 132

Adalbert, count of Périgord, i. 145

Adam, Master, i. 482, 492, 493

Adam de Bruce, ii. 145

Adam de Port, ii. 162

Adela, first wife of Geoffrey Greygown, i. 121, 135

Adela, countess of Chalon-sur-Saône, second wife of Geoffrey Greygown,

i. 121, 134, 135, 199

Adela of France, daughter of Louis VII. and Eleanor, i. 445

Adela, daughter of Louis VII. and Constance, born, i. 468;

betrothed to Richard, ii. 62;

offered to John, 314;

marries the count of Ponthieu, 374

Adela of Blois, daughter of Theobald IV., third wife of Louis VII.,

i. 468

Adela, daughter of William the Conqueror, wife of Stephen-Henry of

Blois, i. 272;

her children, 273

Adela of Vendôme, daughter of Fulk Nerra and Elizabeth, i. 172

Adela, _see_ Hermengard

Adelaide or Blanche, mother of Queen Constance, i. 191, 192

Adelard of Bath, i. 94, 95

Adeliza of Louvain, second wife of Henry I., i. 94;

married to William of Aubigny, 298;

receives the Empress Matilda, i. 309

Ademar, count of Angoulême, ii. 316, 381, 398, 399

Ademar, viscount of Limoges, ii. 220, 230, 381, 382

Adrian IV., Pope, i. 476;

his relations with the English Church and the _Curia Theobaldi_,

477;

friendship with John of Salisbury, 485;

bull for conquest of Ireland, 431; ii. 95, 96, 182;

relations with Henry II., i. 497;

dies, 498.

_See_ Nicolas

Ælendis of Amboise, wife of Ingelger, i. 105, 131

Aerschot, _see_ Arnold

Agnes of Burgundy, her marriages, i. 174, 197–199;

kinship with Geoffrey Martel, 136, 175, 199;

divorced, 212

Agnes of Merania, ii. 395, 401

Agnes of Poitou, daughter of William IV., marries Emperor Henry III.,

i. 176

“Aids” from towns, i. 25, 29;

the Sheriff’s, ii. 15;

_pour fille marier_, 125, 126;

for the king’s ransom, 325

Aileach, kings of, _see_ Donell, Murtogh

Alan Barbetorte, count of Nantes and duke of Britanny, i. 115

Alan III., duke of Britanny, helps Herbert Wakedog against Avesgaud

and Fulk, i. 159, note 4{343};

marriage, 205;

death, 206, 211

Alan Fergant, duke of Britanny, his marriages, i. 328, note 4{930}

Alan, count of Nantes, i. 146

Alan of Richmond, i. 318, 319, 321

Albano, _see_ Henry

Alberic, bishop of Ostia, legate, i. 299, 300

Alberic, count of Gâtinais, _see_ Geoffrey

Albinus or Aubin, S., bishop of Angers, i. 98

Alcuin, i. 181

Aldgate, priory of Holy Trinity at, i. 66

Alençon, i. 208, 209;

treaty of, 217;

surrendered to Henry I., 233;

restored to William Talvas, 236;

won by Fulk V., _ib._

_See_ Robert, William

Alexander II., Pope, i. 220

Alexander III., Pope, i. 498;

acknowledged in France and England, 502;

grants the pall to Thomas, ii. 6;

meets Henry and Louis at Chouzy, 13;

holds a council at Tours, 14;

relation to the Becket quarrel, 29, 50–52;

condemns Constitutions of Clarendon, 42;

returns to Rome, 55;

appoints Thomas legate, 67;

sends commissioners to mediate between Henry and Thomas, 69, 70;

authorizes Roger of York to crown young Henry, 71;

forbids him, 72;

interdicts the Angevin dominions and excommunicates the murderers of

S. Thomas, 79;

sends envoys to Henry, 80

Alexander, bishop of Lincoln, i. 83, 94, 303, 304

Alfhun, master of S. Bartholomew’s hospital, i. 67

Alfonso II., king of Aragon, ii. 133;

helps Richard in Aquitaine, 230, 231

Alfonso VIII., king of Castille, marries Eleanor, daughter of

Henry II., ii. 60;

submits his quarrel with Navarre to Henry’s arbitration, 190

Alfonso Jordan, count of Toulouse, i. 455, 456, 458

Alfred of Beverley, ii. 445, 446

Alice of Maurienne betrothed to John Lackland, ii. 132–134;

dies, 184

Almeric of Montfort, i. 232, 236, 237, 238, 241

Almeric, viscount of Thouars, ii. 395, 427, 428

Alnwick, ii. 161

Amboise, i. 105, 106;

house of the Angevin counts at, 151;

Odo’s last attack on, 163.

_See_ Lisoy, Sulpice

Ambrières, i. 209, 211

Anagni, _see_ John

Andegavi, i. 97

Andely, Isle of, ii. 376, 377;

besieged by Philip, 411, 412;

John’s attempt to relieve it, 413–415;

taken, 416

Andely, Nouvel or Petit, ii. 377;

taken by Philip, 416;

fate of its townsfolk, 417, 418

_Andes_, i. 97, 130

Andrew of London, i. 363

Angareth, wife of William de Barri, ii. 453

Angers (Juliomagus), i. 98;

its position as a border-fortress, 101;

seized by northmen, 103;

relieved by Charles the Bald, _ib._, 104;

its aspect in tenth century, 108;

palace of the counts, 109, 132–134, 165;

of the bishops, 133;

fires at, _ib._, 152;

R. Diceto’s description of, 134;

Henry I. of France at, 213;

betrayed to Fulk Rechin, 220;

Urban II. at, 225;

burghers of, revolt against Fulk V., 234;

Fulk Nerra’s buildings at, 165;

abbeys of S. Aubin and S. Sergius at, 98;

our Lady of Charity (Ronceray), 165;

S. Nicolas, _ib._, 172, 214, 225, 228;

Henry II.’s buildings at, ii. 197, 199, 200;

Henry and his sons at, 224;

given up to Arthur, 389;

seized by his friends, 407;

retaken by John, 428;

bishops, _see_ Albinus, Dodo, Rainald, Raino, Ulger

Angevin March, the, i. 101;

its extent, 130

Angevins, _see_ Anjou

Angoulême, disputed succession, ii. 220.

_See_ Ademar, Isabel, Matilda, Vulgrin, William

Anjou, its geographical position and character, i. 97;

political position, 106, 107;

its character as a marchland, 107;

its golden age, 113;

sources of its history, 126, 127;

county of, “bipartite,” 128, 129, 130;

its extent, 97, 130;

dependence on the duchy of France, 130;

condition at Fulk Rechin’s death, 229;

placed under interdict, 242;

revolts of the barons, 266–267, 343;

rebels in (1173), ii. 136;

condition under Henry II., 194–196;

John acknowledged in, 388;

accepts Arthur, 389;

submits to Philip, 425;

counts of, their origin, i. 105;

character, 108;

palace at Angers, 109, 132–134, 165;

burial-place, 117, note 3{263};

claims upon Nantes, 116, 117;

upon Maine, i. 124, 140–142;

the demon-countess, 143;

house at Amboise, 151;

rivalry with Blois, 145, 150, 188, 271, 279;

extinction of the male line, 214;

decline after Martel’s death, 215, 218;

relations with France, 164; ii. 357;

growth of their power, 187, 188;

career in Palestine, 239;

their work for England, 490, 492.

_See_ Elias, Fulk, Geoffrey, Guy, Henry, Hermengard, Ingelger,

Lambert, Matilda, Odo, Robert, Sibyl, William

Annonain, Pont de l’, ii. 200, 201

Anselm, S., archbishop of Canterbury, i. 8, 9;

his struggle with Henry I., 15–18;

consecrates Malchus to Waterford, ii. 89;

dies, i. 63;

proposal to canonize him, ii. 14

Aquitaine, its relations with France, i. 123, 145, 383, 456, 457;

ii. 202;

extent and history, i. 454;

granted to Richard, ii. 62;

rebels in (1173), 136;

country and people, 201, 203–205;

its importance for England, 201;

relations with Henry II., 203, 205;

risings in, 58, 109, 220;

submits, 230;

proposal to give it to John, 233;

restored to Richard, 247.

_See_ Eleanor, Odo, Richard, William

_Aquitania_, i. 99, 454

Aragon, _see_ Alfonso, Ramirez, Petronilla

Arcelles, _see_ Saher

Archambald, brother of Sulpice of Amboise, i. 194

Architecture, English, in twelfth century, i. 55

Aremburg of Maine, betrothed to Geoffrey Martel II., i. 226;

marries Fulk V., 232;

dies, 245

Argentan, i. 373; ii. 79, 80

Aristotle, study of, in the middle ages, ii. 466, 467

Arles, _see_ Bertha, Burgundy, Provence, William

Armagh, synod at, ii. 105.

_See_ Malachi

Arms, Assize of, ii. 177, 178

Arnold, count of Aerschot, i. 362

Arnulf, bishop of Lisieux, i. 500;

persuades Henry II. to acknowledge Pope Alexander, 501;

advises Henry to appeal against Thomas, ii. 65;

rebels, 140

Arques, i. 342; ii. 405, 406, 425

Arthur, King, i. 33;

Henry II.’s correspondence with, ii. 57 note 2{226}, 447;

invention and translation of, 447, 448;

romances of, 448, 449

Arthur, son of Geoffrey and Constance of Britanny, born, ii. 245;

recognized by Richard as his heir, 295;

in custody of Philip, 370;

joins Richard, 374;

acknowledged in Anjou, Touraine and Maine, 389;

does homage to Philip, 390;

quarrels with Philip and goes to John, 394;

flies, 395;

does homage to John, 397;

knighted, 404;

meets the Lusignans at Tours, 405;

besieges Mirebeau, 406;

captured, _ib._;

imprisoned, 407;

death, 408, 429, 430;

its consequences, 409

Arundel, i. 10, 309.

_See_ William

Assize of Arms, ii. 177, 178;

of Clarendon, 122, 123;

of the Forest, 177;

Great, 122;

Henry Fitz-Aylwine’s, 485;

of Measures, 348;

of _Mort d’ancester_, 172;

of Northampton, 172, 173;

later developements, 338–340

Aubigny, _see_ William

Aubrey de Vere, i. 305

Augustinians, _see_ Canons

_Aulerci Cenomanni_, i. 201, 202

Aumale, _see_ William

Austin canons, _see_ Canons

Austria, _see_ Leopold

Autun, _see_ Lambert

Auvergne, its feudal relations, ii. 202, 203;

attacked by Philip, 252;

Richard gives up his claims upon, 361

Auxerre, Thomas Becket studies at, i. 379

Avesgaud, bishop of Le Mans, i. 159 note 4{343}, 204, 205

Avice of Gloucester betrothed to John Lackland, ii. 184;

married, 282;

divorced, 398

Avranches, ii. 81

Axholm, ii. 152, 155

Azay, conference at, ii. 263

Baggamore, i. 291

“Baille-hache,” i. 353, 354

Bailleul, _see_ Bernard, Jocelyn

Baldwin II., king of Jerusalem, i. 246

Baldwin III., king of Jerusalem, ii. 239

Baldwin IV., king of Jerusalem, ii. 239, 247