Transcriber’s Note
Words in italics are marked with _underscores_.
Words in small capitals are shown in UPPER CASE.
Please see the note at the end of the book, which is preceded by the
Index to Volumes I and II, copied from Volume II.
ENGLAND
UNDER
THE ANGEVIN KINGS
[Illustration: Publisher’s colophon]
ENGLAND
UNDER
THE ANGEVIN KINGS
BY
KATE NORGATE
IN TWO VOLUMES--VOL. I.
WITH MAPS AND PLANS
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1887
_All rights reserved_
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
WITH THE DEEPEST REVERENCE AND GRATITUDE
TO THE MEMORY OF
MY DEAR AND HONOURED MASTER
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
PREFACE
This attempt to sketch the history of England under the Angevin kings
owes its existence to the master whose name I have ventured to place
at its beginning. It was undertaken at his suggestion; its progress
through those earliest stages which for an inexperienced writer are the
hardest of all was directed by his counsels, aided by his criticisms,
encouraged by his sympathy; and every step in my work during the past
eleven years has but led me to feel more deeply and to prize more
highly the constant help of his teaching and his example. Of the book
in its finished state he never saw a page. For its faults no one is
answerable but myself. I can only hope that, however great may be its
errors and its defects, it may yet shew at least some traces of that
influence which is so abidingly precious to me.
I desire respectfully to express my gratitude to the Lord Bishop of
Chester and to Mr. Freeman, who, for the sake of the friend who had
commended me to their kindness, have been good enough to help me with
information and advice on many occasions during my work.
A word of acknowledgement is due for some of the maps and plans. The
map of Gaul in the tenth century is founded upon one in Mr. Freeman’s
_Norman Conquest_. The plans of Bristol and Lincoln are adapted from
those in the _Proceedings of the Archæological Institute_; for Lincoln
I was further assisted by the local knowledge kindly placed at my
disposal by the Rev. Precentor Venables. For Oxford I have followed the
guidance of the Rev. Father F. Goldie, S.J. (_A Bygone Oxford_), and of
Mr. J. Parker (_Early History of Oxford_); and for London, that of its
historian the Rev. W. J. Loftie, whom I have especially to thank for
his help on some points of London topography.
My greatest help of all has been the constant personal kindness and
ever-ready sympathy of Mrs. Green. To her, as to my dear master
himself, I owe and feel a gratitude which cannot be put into words.
KATE NORGATE.
_January 1887._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
THE ENGLAND OF HENRY I., 1100–1135 1
CHAPTER II
THE BEGINNINGS OF ANJOU, 843–987 97
Note A.--The Sources of Angevin History 126
Note B.--The Palace of the Counts at Angers 132
Note C.--The Marriages of Geoffrey Greygown 134
Note D.--The Breton and Poitevin Wars of Geoffrey Greygown 136
Note E.--The Grant of Maine to Geoffrey Greygown 140
CHAPTER III
ANJOU AND BLOIS, 987–1044 143
Note A.--The Siege of Melun 189
Note B.--The Parents of Queen Constance 190
Note C.--The Pilgrimages of Fulk Nerra 192
Note D.--Geoffrey Martel and Poitou 197
CHAPTER IV
ANJOU AND NORMANDY, 1044–1128 200
Note A.--The Houses of Anjou and Gâtinais 249
Note B.--The Heir of Geoffrey Martel 251
Note C.--The War of Saintonge 252
Note D.--The Descendants of Herbert Wake-dog 253
Note E.--The Siege of La Flèche and Treaty of Blanchelande 256
Note F.--The Marriage of Geoffrey and Matilda 258
CHAPTER V
GEOFFREY PLANTAGENET AND STEPHEN OF BLOIS, 1128–1139 261
CHAPTER VI
ENGLAND AND THE BARONS, 1139–1147 308
Note.--The Topography of the Battle of Lincoln 344
CHAPTER VII
THE ENGLISH CHURCH, 1136–1149 347
CHAPTER VIII
HENRY DUKE OF THE NORMANS, 1149–1154 372
CHAPTER IX
HENRY AND ENGLAND, 1154–1157 407
CHAPTER X
HENRY AND FRANCE, 1156–1161 440
CHAPTER XI
THE LAST YEARS OF ARCHBISHOP THEOBALD, 1156–1161 474
LIST OF MAPS
I. GAUL _c._ 909–941 _To face page_ 107
II. GAUL _c._ 1027 ” 143
PLANS
I. WINCHESTER. II. BRISTOL _To face page_ 31
III. LINCOLN. IV. OXFORD ” 40
V. LONDON ” 44
VI. ANGERS ” 165
CHAPTER I.
THE ENGLAND OF HENRY I.
1100–1135.
“When the green tree, cut asunder in the midst and severed by the space
of three furlongs, shall be grafted in again and shall bring forth
flowers and fruit,--then at last may England hope to see the end of her
sorrows.”[1]
[1] _Vita Edwardi_ (Luard), p. 431.
So closed the prophecy in which the dying king Eadward the Confessor
foretold the destiny in store for his country after his departure. His
words, mocked at by one of the listeners, incomprehensible to all,
found an easy interpretation a hundred years later. The green tree of
the West-Saxon monarchy had fallen beneath Duke William’s battle-axe;
three alien reigns had parted its surviving branch from the stem; the
marriage of Henry I. with a princess of the old English blood-royal
had grafted it in again.[2] One flower sprung from that union had
indeed bloomed only to die ere it reached its prime,[3] but another
had brought forth the promised fruit; and the dim ideal of national
prosperity and union which English and Normans alike associated with
the revered name of the Confessor was growing at last into a real and
living thing beneath the sceptre of Henry Fitz-Empress.
[2] Æthelred of Rievaux, _Vita S. Edw. Regis_ (Twysden, _X.
Scriptt._), col. 401.
[3] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 419 (Hardy, p. 652),
notes that the fulfilment of the prophecy was looked for in
William the Ætheling.
There are, at first glance, few stranger things in history than the
revival thus prefigured:--a national revival growing up, as it seems,
in the most adverse circumstances, under the pressure of an alien
government, of a race of kings who were strangers alike to the men of
old English blood and to the descendants of those who had come over
with the Conqueror: at a time when, in a merely political point of
view, England seemed to be not only conquered but altogether swallowed
up in the vast and varied dominions of the house of Anjou. It was
indeed not the first time that the island had become an appendage to a
foreign empire compared with which she was but a speck in the ocean.
Cnut the Dane was, like Henry of Anjou, not only king of England but
also ruler of a great continental monarchy far exceeding England in
extent, and forming together with her a dominion only to be equalled,
if equalled at all, by that of the Emperor. But the parallel goes no
farther. Cnut’s first kingdom, the prize of his youthful valour, was
his centre and his home, of which his Scandinavian realms, even his
native Denmark, were mere dependencies. Whatever he might be when
he revisited them, in his island-kingdom he was an Englishman among
Englishmen. The heir of Geoffrey of Anjou and Matilda of Normandy, on
the other hand, was virtually of no nationality, no country; but if he
could be said to have a home at all, it was certainly not on this side
of the sea--it was the little marchland of his fathers. In the case
of his sons, the southern blood of their mother Eleanor added a yet
more un-English element; and of Richard, indeed, it might almost be
said that the home of his choice was not in Europe at all, but in Holy
Land. Alike to him and to his father, England was simply the possession
which gave them their highest title, furnished them with resources
for prosecuting their schemes of continental policy, and secured to
them a safe refuge on which to fall back in moments of difficulty or
danger. It was not till the work of revival was completed, till it had
resulted in the creation of the new England which comes to light with
Edward I., that it could find a representative and a leader in the king
himself. The sovereign in whose reign the chief part of the work was
done stood utterly aloof from it in sympathy; yet he is in fact its
central figure and its most important actor. The story of England’s
developement from the break-down of the Norman system under Stephen
to the consolidation of a national monarchy under Edward I. is the
story of Henry of Anjou, of his work and of its results. But as the
story does not end with Henry, so neither does it begin with him. It
is impossible to understand Henry himself without knowing something of
the race from which he sprang; of those wonderful Angevin counts who,
beginning as rulers of a tiny under-fief of the duchy of France, grew
into a sovereign house extending its sway from one end of Christendom
to the other. It is impossible to understand his work without knowing
something of what England was, and how she came to be what she was,
when the young count of Anjou was called to wear her crown.
The project of an empire such as that which Henry II. actually wielded
had been the last dream of William Rufus. In the summer of 1100 the
duke of Aquitaine, about to join the Crusaders in Holy Land, offered
his dominions in pledge to the king of England. Rufus clutched at the
offer “like a lion at his prey.”[4] Five years before he had received
the Norman duchy on the same terms from his brother Robert; he had
bridled its restless people and brought them under control; he had won
back its southern dependency, his father’s first conquest, the county
of Maine. Had this new scheme been realized, nothing but the little
Angevin march would have broken the continuity of a Norman dominion
stretching from the Forth to the Pyrenees, and in all likelihood the
story of the Angevin kings would never have had to be told. Jesting
after his wont with his hunting-companions, William--so the story
goes--declared that he would keep his next Christmas feast at Poitiers,
if he should live so long.[5] But that same evening the Red King lay
dead in the New Forest, and his territories fell asunder at once.
Robert of Normandy came back from Palestine in triumph to resume
possession of his duchy; while the barons of England, without waiting
for his return, chose his English-born brother Henry for their king.
[4] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 780.
[5] Geoff. Gaimar, vv. 6296–6298 (Wright, p. 219).
Thirteen years before, at his father’s death, Henry, the only child
of William and Matilda who was actually born in the purple--the child
of a crowned king and queen, born on English soil, and thus by birth,
though not by descent, entitled to rank as an English Ætheling--had
been launched into the world at the age of nineteen without a foot of
land that he could call his own. The story went that he had complained
bitterly to the dying Conqueror of his exclusion from all share in the
family heritage. “Have patience, boy,” was William’s answer, “let thine
elder brothers go before thee; the day will come when thou shalt be
greater than either of them.” Henry was, however, not left
a penniless adventurer dependent on the bounty of his brothers; the
Conqueror gave him a legacy of ten thousand pounds as a solid provision
wherewith to begin his career. A year had scarcely passed before Duke
Robert, overwhelmed with troubles in Normandy, found himself at his
wits’ end with an empty treasury, and besought Henry to lend him some
money. The Ætheling, as cool and calculating as his brothers were
impetuous, refused; the duke in desperation offered to sell him any
territory he chose, and a bargain was struck whereby Henry received,
for the sum of three thousand pounds, the investiture of the Cotentin,
the Avranchin, and the Mont-St.-Michel--in a word, the whole western
end of the Norman duchy.[6] Next summer, while the duke was planning
an attempt on the English crown and vainly awaiting a fair wind to
enable him to cross the Channel, the count of the Cotentin managed
to get across without one, to claim the estates in Gloucestershire
formerly held by his mother and destined for him by his father’s
will. He was received by William Rufus only too graciously, for the
consequence was that some mischief-makers, always specially plentiful
at the Norman court, persuaded Duke Robert that his youngest brother
was plotting against him with the second, and when Henry returned in
the autumn he had no sooner landed than he was seized and cast into
prison.[7] Within a year he was free again, reinstated, if not in
the Cotentin, at least in the Avranchin and the Mont-St.-Michel,
and entrusted with the keeping of Rouen itself against the traitors
stirred up by the Red King. William, while his young brother was safe
in prison, had resumed the Gloucestershire estates and made them over
to his favourite Robert Fitz-Hamon. Henry in his natural resentment
threw himself with all his energies into the cause of the duke of
Normandy, acted as his trustiest and bravest supporter throughout the
war with Rufus which followed, and at the close of the year crowned
his services by the promptitude and valour with which he defeated a
conspiracy for betraying the Norman capital to the king of England.[8]
The struggle ended in a treaty between the elder brothers, in which
neither of them forgot the youngest. Their remembrance of him took
the shape of an agreement to drive him out of all his territories and
divide the spoil between themselves. Their joint attack soon brought
him to bay in his mightiest stronghold, the rock crowned by the abbey
of S. Michael-in-Peril-of-the-Sea, commonly called Mont-Saint-Michel.
Henry threw himself into the place with as many knights as were willing
to share the adventure; the brethren of the abbey did their utmost
to help, and for fifteen days the little garrison, perched on their
inaccessible rock, held out against their besiegers.[9] Then hunger
began to thin their ranks; nothing but the inconsistent generosity of
Robert saved them from the worse agonies of thirst;[10] one by one they
dropped away, till Henry saw that he must yield to fate, abide by his
father’s counsel, and wait patiently for better days. He surrendered;
he came down from the Mount, once again a landless and homeless man;
and save for one strange momentary appearance in England as a guest at
the Red King’s court,[11] he spent the greater part of the next two
years in France and the Vexin, wandering from one refuge to another
with a lowly train of one knight, three squires, and one chaplain.[12]
He was at length recalled by the townsmen of Domfront, who, goaded to
desperation by the oppressions of their lord Robert of Bellême, threw
off his yoke and besought Henry to come and take upon himself the
duty of defending them, their town and castle, against their former
tyrant. “By the help of God and the suffrages of his friends,” as his
admiring historian says,[13] Henry was thus placed in command of his
father’s earliest conquest, the key of Normandy and Maine, a fortress
scarcely less mighty and of far greater political importance than
that from which he had been driven. He naturally used his opportunity
for reprisals, not only upon Robert of Bellême, but also upon his own
brothers;[14] and by the end of two years he had made himself of so
much consequence in the duchy that William Rufus, again at war with the
duke, thought it time to secure his alliance. The two younger brothers
met in England, and when Henry returned in the spring of 1095 he came
as the liegeman of the English king, sworn to fight his battles and
further his interests in Normandy by every means in his power.[15]
[6] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 665.
[7] _Ib._ p. 672. Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 392
(Hardy, pp. 616, 617).
[8] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 690. Will.
Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 392 (Hardy, pp. 617, 618).
[9] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 697.
[10] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. iv. c. 310 (Hardy, pp. 491,
492).
[11] See Freeman, _William Rufus_, vol. i. pp. 293, 295, 305;
vol. ii. pp. 535, 536.
[12] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 697.
[13] _Ib._ p. 698.
[14] _Ib._ pp. 698, 706, 722.
[15] Eng. Chron. a. 1095.
William and Henry had both learned by experience that to work with
Robert for any political purpose was hopeless, and that their true
interest was to support each other--William’s, to enlist for his own
service Henry’s clear cool head and steady hand; Henry’s, to secure for
himself some kind of footing in the land where his ultimate ambitions
could not fail to be centred. He had learned in his wanderings to adapt
himself to all circumstances and all kinds of society; personally,
he and Rufus can have had little in common except their passion for
the chase. Lanfranc’s teaching, moral and intellectual, had been all
alike thrown away upon his pupil William the Red. Henry, carefully
educated according to his father’s special desire, had early shown a
remarkable aptitude for study, was a scholar of very fair attainments
as scholarship went among laymen in his day, and retained his literary
tastes not only through all his youthful trials but also through the
crowd of political and domestic cares which pressed upon his later
life. Yet such tastes seem almost as strange in Henry as they would in
William Rufus. The one prosaic element in the story of Henry’s youth
is the personality of its hero. No man had ever less of the romantic
or poetic temperament; if he had none of the follies or the faults
of chivalry, he had just as little of its nobler idealism. From his
first bargain with Robert for the purchase of the Cotentin to his
last bargain with Fulk of Anjou for the marriage of his heir, life
was to him simply a matter of business. The strongest points in his
character were precisely the two qualities which both his brothers
utterly lacked--self-control, and that “capacity for taking trouble”
which is sometimes said to be the chief element of genius. But of the
higher kind of genius, of the fire which kindles in the soul rather
than merely in the brain, Henry had not a spark. He was essentially
a man of business, in the widest and loftiest sense of the words.
His self-control was not, like his father’s, the curb forcibly put
by a noble mind upon its own natural impetuosity; it was the more
easily-practised calmness of a perfectly cold nature which could always
be reasonable because it had to fight with no impulse of passion, which
was never tempted to “follow wandering fires” because they lit in it no
responsive flame; a nature in which the head had complete mastery over
the heart, and that head was one which no misfortunes could disturb, no
successes turn, and no perplexities confuse.
The sudden vacancy of the English throne found every one else quite
unprepared for such an emergency. Henry was never unprepared. His
quickness and decision secured him the keys of the treasury and the
formal election of those barons and prelates who had been members of
the fatal hunting-party, or who hurried to Winchester at the tidings of
its tragic issue; and before opposition had time to come to a head, it
was checked by the coronation and unction which turned the king-elect
into full king.[16] Henry knew well, however, that opposition there was
certain to be. Robert of Normandy, just returned from the Crusade and
covered with glory, was sure to assert his claim, and as sure to be
upheld by a strong party among the barons, to whom a fresh severance
of England and Normandy was clearly not desirable. In anticipation of
the coming struggle, Henry threw himself at once on the support of his
subjects. In addition to the pledges of his coronation-oath--taken
almost in the words of Æthelred to Dunstan[17]--he issued on the same
day a charter in which he solemnly and specifically promised the
abolition of his brother’s evil customs in Church and state, and a
return to just government according to the law of the land. The details
were drawn up so as to touch all classes. The Church, as including
them all, of course stood first; its freedom was restored and all
sale or farming of benefices renounced by the king. The next clause
appealed specially to the feudal vassals: those who held their lands
“by the hauberk”--the tenants by knight-service--were exempted from all
other imposts on their demesne lands, that they might be the better
able to fulfil their own particular obligation. The tenants-in-chief
were exempted from all the unjust exactions with regard to wardships,
marriages, reliefs and forfeitures, which had been practised in the
last reign; but the redress was not confined to them; they were
distinctly required to exercise the same justice towards their own
under-tenants. The last clause covered all the rest: by it Henry
gave back to his people “the laws of King Eadward as amended by King
William.”[18] Like Cnut’s renewal of the law of Eadgar--like Eadward’s
own renewal of the law of Cnut--the charter was a proclamation of
general reunion and goodwill. As a pledge of its sincerity, the Red
King’s minister, Ralf Flambard, in popular estimation the author of all
the late misdoings, was at once cast into the Tower;[19] the exiled
primate was fetched home as speedily as possible; and in November the
king identified himself still more closely with the land of his birth
by taking to wife a maiden of the old English blood-royal, Eadgyth of
Scotland, great-granddaughter of Eadmund Ironside.[20]
[16] Eng. Chron. a. 1100.
[17] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, p. 99 (3d ed.).
[18] Charter of Henry I., _ib._ pp. 100–102.
[19] Eng. Chron. a. 1100.
[20] Eng. Chron. a. 1100.
His precautions were soon justified. Robert had refused the thorny
crown of Jerusalem, but the crown of England had far other charms;
and his movements were quickened by Ralf Flambard, who early in the
spring made his escape to Normandy.[21] It was probably through Ralf’s
management that the duke won over some of the sailors who guarded the
English coast and thus got ashore unexpectedly at Portsmouth while the
king was keeping watch for him at the old landing-place, Pevensey.[22]
At the first tidings of the intended invasion Henry, like Rufus in the
same case thirteen years before, had appealed to Witan and people,
and by a renewal of his charter gained a renewal of their fealty.
No sooner, however, was Robert actually in England than the great
majority of the barons prepared to go over to him in a body. But the
king born on English soil, married to a lady of the old kingly house,
had a stronger hold than ever Rufus could have had upon the English
people; and they, headed by their natural leader and representative,
the restored archbishop of Canterbury, clave to him with unswerving
loyalty.[23] The two armies met near Alton;[24] at the last moment,
the wisdom either of Anselm, of the few loyal barons, or of Henry
himself, turned the meeting into a peaceful one. The brothers came to
terms: Robert renounced his claim to the crown in consideration of a
yearly pension from England; Henry gave up all his Norman possessions
except Domfront, whose people he refused to forsake;[25] and, as in the
treaty made at Caen ten years before between Robert and William, it
was arranged that whichever brother lived longest should inherit the
other’s dominions, if the deceased left no lawful heirs.[26]
[21] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), pp. 786, 787.
[22] Eng. Chron. a. 1101.
[23] Eadmer, _Hist. Novorum_ (Rule), p. 127.
[24] See Freeman, _William Rufus_, vol. ii. p. 408.
[25] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 788.
[26] Eng. Chron. a. 1101.
The treaty was ratified at Winchester in the first days of August;[27]
and thus, almost on the anniversary of the Red King’s death, ended the
last Norman invasion of England. But the treaty of Winchester, like
that of Caen, failed to settle the real difficulty. That difficulty
was, how to control the barons. According to one version of the treaty,
it was stipulated that those who had incurred forfeiture in England
by their adherence to Robert and those who had done the same in
Normandy in Henry’s behalf should alike go unpunished;[28] according
to another, perhaps a more probable account, the brothers agreed to
co-operate in punishing traitors on both sides.[29] Henry set to work
to do his part methodically. One after another, at different times, in
various ways, by regular process of law, the offenders were brought to
justice in England: some heavily fined, some deprived of their honours
and exiled. It was treason not so much against himself as against
the peace and order of the realm that Henry was bent upon avenging;
Ivo of Grantmesnil was fined to the verge of ruin for the crime of
making war not upon the king in behalf of the duke, but upon his own
neighbours for his own personal gratification--a crime which was part
of the daily life of every baron in Normandy, but which had never been
seen in England before,[30] and never was seen there again as long
as King Henry lived. The most formidable of all the troublers of the
land was Henry’s old enemy at Domfront--Robert, lord of Bellême in
the border-land of Perche, earl of Shrewsbury and Arundel in England,
count of Alençon and lord of Montgomery in Normandy, and now by his
marriage count of Ponthieu. Robert was actually fortifying his castles
of Bridgenorth and Arundel in preparation for open revolt when he was
summoned to take his trial on forty-five charges of treason against
the king of England and the duke of Normandy. As he failed to answer,
Henry led his troops to the siege of Bridgenorth. In three weeks it
surrendered; Shrewsbury and Arundel did the same, and Robert of Bellême
was glad to purchase safety for life and limb at the cost of all his
English possessions.[31]
[27] Sim. Durh. _Gesta Reg._ a. 1101.
[28] Eng. Chron. a. 1101.
[29] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 788.
[30] _Ib._ p. 805.
[31] _Ib._ pp. 807, 808. Eng. Chron. a. 1102.
From that moment Henry’s position in England was secured; but all his
remonstrances failed to make his indolent elder brother fulfil his part
of their compact. The traitors whom Henry expelled from England only
carried their treason over sea to a more congenial climate, and the
helpless, heedless duke looked passively on while Robert of Bellême,
William of Mortain the banished earl of Cornwall, and their fellows
slaked their thirst for vengeance upon King Henry by ravaging the
Norman lands of those who were faithful to him in England.[32] Their
victims, as well as Henry himself, began to see that his personal
intervention alone could re-establish order in the duchy. On his
appearance there in 1104 he was joined by all the more reasonable
among the barons. For the moment he was pacified by fresh promises of
amendment on Robert’s part, and by the cession of the county of Evreux;
but he knew that all compromise had become vain; and in the last week
of Lent 1105 he landed again at Barfleur in the full determination of
making himself master of Normandy. His Norman partisans rallied round
him at once,[33] and he was soon joined by two valuable allies, Elias
count of Maine and his intended son-in-law, the young count Geoffrey
of Anjou.[34] It was they who won for Henry his first success, the
capture of Bayeux.[35] Warned by the fate of this unhappy city, which
was burnt down, churches and all, Caen surrendered at once, and Henry
thus came into possession of the Norman treasury. A siege of Falaise
failed through the unexplained departure of Count Elias,[36] and the
war dragged slowly on till Henry, now busy in another quarter with
negotiations for the return of S. Anselm, went back at Michaelmas to
England. Thither he was followed first by Robert of Bellême, then by
Robert of Normandy,[37] both seeking for peace; but peace had become
impossible now. Next summer Henry was again in Normandy, reconciled to
S. Anselm, released from anxieties at home, free to concentrate all his
energies upon the final struggle. It was decided with one blow. As he
was besieging the castle of Tinchebray on Michaelmas Eve Duke Robert
at the head of all his forces approached and summoned him to raise the
siege. He refused, “preferring,” as he said, “to take the blame of a
more than civil war for the sake of future peace.” But when the two
hosts were drawn up face to face, the prospect of a battle seemed too
horrible to be endured, composed as they were of kinsmen and brothers,
fathers and sons, arrayed against each other. The clergy besought
Henry to stay his hand; he listened, pondered, and at length sent a
final message to his brother. He came, he said, not wishing to deprive
Robert of his duchy or to win territories for himself, but to answer
the cry of the distressed and deliver Normandy from the misrule of one
who was duke only in name. Here then was his last proposition: “Give
up to me half the land of Normandy, the castles and the administration
of justice and government throughout the whole, and receive the value
of the other half annually from my treasury in England. Thus you may
enjoy pleasure and feasting to your heart’s content, while I will take
upon me the labours of government, and guarantee the fulfilment of
my pledge, if you will but keep quiet.” Foolish to the last, Robert
declined the offer; and the two armies made themselves ready for
battle.[38] In point of numbers they seem to have been not unequally
matched, but they differed greatly in character. Robert was stronger
in footsoldiers, Henry in knights; the flower of the Norman nobility
was on his side now, besides his Angevin, Cenomannian and Breton
allies;[39] while of those who followed Robert some, as the issue
proved, were only half-hearted. Of Henry’s genuine English troops there
is no account, but the men of his own day looked upon his whole host
as English in contradistinction to Robert’s Normans, and the tactics
adopted in the battle were thoroughly English. The king of England
fought on foot with his whole army, and it seems that the duke of
Normandy followed his example.[40]
[32] Eng. Chron. a. 1104. Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c.
397 (Hardy, p. 623).
[33] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 814.
[34] Chron. S. Albin. a. 1105 (Marchegay, _Eglises d’Anjou_, p.
30).
[35] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 818.
Chron. S. Albin. a. 1105 (Marchegay, _Eglises d’Anjou_, p. 30).
[36] “Helias a Normannis rogatus discessit,” says Orderic (as
above). What can this mean?
[37] Eng. Chron. a. 1106.
[38] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 820.
[39] _Ib._ p. 820. Hen. Huntingdon, l. vii. c. 25 (Arnold, p.
235).
[40] Hen. Hunt., l. vii. c. 25 (Arnold, p. 235).
The first line of the Norman or ducal host under William of Mortain
charged the English front under Ralf of Bayeux, and by the fury of
their onset compelled them to fall back, though without breaking their
ranks. The issue was still doubtful, when the only mounted division
of Henry’s troops, the Bretons and Cenomannians under Count Elias,
came up to the rescue, took the duke’s army in flank, and cut down
two hundred men in a single charge. Those Cenomannian swords which
William the Conqueror was so proud to have overcome now carried the
day for his youngest son. Robert of Bellême, as soon as he saw how
matters were going, fled with all his followers, and the duke’s army at
once dissolved.[41] In Henry’s own words, “the Divine Mercy gave into
my hands, without much slaughter on our side, the duke of Normandy,
the count of Mortain, William Crispin, William Ferrers, Robert of
Estouteville, some four hundred knights, ten thousand foot--and the
duchy of Normandy.”[42]
[41] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 821. Eng.
Chron. a. 1106. Hen. Hunt., as above.
[42] Letter of Henry to S. Anselm in Eadmer, _Hist. Nov._
(Rule), p. 184.
Forty years before, on the very same day, William the Conqueror had
landed at Pevensey to bring the English kingdom under the Norman
yoke. The work of Michaelmas Eve, 1066, was reversed on Michaelmas
Eve, 1106; the victory of Tinchebray made Normandy a dependency of
England.[43] Such was the view taken by one of the most clear-sighted
and unprejudiced historians of the time, a man of mingled Norman and
English blood. Such was evidently the view instinctively taken by all
parties, and the instinct was a true one, although at first glance it
seems somewhat hard to account for. The reign of Henry I., if judged
merely by the facts which strike the eye in the chronicles of the
time, looks like one continued course of foreign policy and foreign
warfare pursued by the king for his own personal ends at the expense
of his English subjects. But the real meaning of the facts lies deeper.
The comment of the archbishop of Rouen upon Henry’s death--“Peace be
to his soul, for he ever loved peace”[44]--was neither sarcasm nor
flattery. Henry did love peace, so well that he spent his life in
fighting for it. His early Norman campaigns are enough to prove that
without being a master of the art of war like his father, he was yet
a brave soldier and a skilful commander; and the complicated wars of
his later years, when over and over again he had to struggle almost
single-handed against France, Flanders and Anjou, amid the endless
treasons of his own barons, show still more clearly his superiority to
nearly all the other generals of his time. But his ambitions were not
those of the warrior. Some gleam of the old northman’s joy of battle
may have flashed across the wandering knight as he defied his besiegers
from the summit of his rock “in Peril of the Sea,” or swooped down
upon the turbulent lords of the Cenomannian border, like an eagle upon
lesser birds of prey, from his eyrie on the crest of Domfront; but the
victor of Tinchebray looked at his campaigns in another light. To him
they were simply a part of his general business as a king; they were
means to an end, and that end was not glory, nor even gain, but the
establishment of peace and order. In his thirteen years of wandering to
and fro between England, Normandy and France he had probably studied
all the phases of tyranny and anarchy which the three countries amply
displayed, and matured his own theory of government, which he practised
steadily to the end of his reign. That theory was not a very lofty or
noble one; the principle from which it started and the end at which
it aimed was the interest of the ruler rather than of the ruled; but
the form in which Henry conceived that end and the means whereby he
sought to compass it were at any rate more enlightened than those of
his predecessor. The Red King had reigned wholly by terror; Henry did
not aspire to rule by love; but he saw that, in a merely selfish point
of view, a sovereign gains nothing by making himself a terror to any
except evil-doers, that the surest basis for his authority is the
preservation of order, justice and peace, and that so far at least
the interests of king and people must be one. It is difficult to get
rid of a feeling that Henry enforced justice and order from motives
of expediency rather than of abstract righteousness. But, as a matter
of fact, he did enforce them all round, on earl and churl, clerk and
layman, Norman and Englishman, without distinction. And this steady,
equal government was rendered possible only by the determined struggle
which he waged with the Norman barons and their French allies. His
home policy and his foreign policy were inseparably connected; and the
lifelong battle which he fought with his continental foes was really
the battle of England’s freedom.
[43] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 398 (Hardy, p. 625).
[44] Will. Malm. _Hist. Nov._, l. i. c. 9 (Hardy, p. 702).
From the year 1103 onward the battle was fought wholly on the other
side of the Channel. In England Henry, as his English subjects joyfully
told him, became a free king on the day when he drove out Robert of
Bellême.[45] One great hindrance indeed still remained, hanging upon
him like a dead weight throughout his early struggles in Normandy; the
controversy concerning ecclesiastical investitures, with which the rest
of Europe had been aflame for a quarter of a century before it touched
England at all. The decree of the Lateran Council of 1075 forbidding
lay sovereigns to grant the investiture of any spiritual office with
ring and staff was completely ignored in practice by William the
Conqueror and Lanfranc. Their position on this and all other matters of
Church policy was summed up in their reply to Pope Gregory’s demand of
fealty: William would do what the English kings who went before him had
done, neither more nor less.[46] But the king and the primate were not
without perceiving that, as a necessary consequence of their own acts,
the English Church had entered upon a new and more complicated relation
both to the state and to the Apostolic see, and that the day must
shortly come when she would be dragged from her quiet anchorage into
the whirlpool of European controversies and strifes. Their forebodings
found expression in the three famous rules of ecclesiastical policy
which William laid down for the guidance of his successors rather than
himself:--that no Pope should be acknowledged in England and no letter
from him received there by any one without the king’s consent;--that
no Church council should put forth decrees without his permission
and approval;--and that no baron or servant of the crown should be
laid under ecclesiastical censure save at the king’s own command.[47]
These rules, famous in the two succeeding reigns under the name of
“paternal customs,” were never put to the test of practice as long as
William and Lanfranc lived. The Red King’s abuse of the two first, by
precipitating the crisis and driving S. Anselm to throw himself into
the arms of Rome, showed not so much their inadequacy as the justice
of the misgivings from which they had sprung. Henry at his accession
took his stand upon them in the true spirit of their author; but the
time was gone by; Anselm too had taken his stand upon ground whence
in honour and conscience he could not recede, and the very first
interview between king and primate threw open the whole question of
the investitures. But in England and in the Empire the question wore
two very different aspects. In England it never became a matter of
active interest or violent partisanship in the Church and the nation
at large. Only a few deep thinkers on either side--men such as Count
Robert of Meulan among the advisers of the king, perhaps such as the
devoted English secretary Eadmer among the intimate associates of
Anselm--ever understood or considered the principles involved in the
case, or its bearing upon the general system of Church and state.
Anselm himself stood throughout not upon the abstract wrongfulness of
lay investiture, but upon his own duty of obedience to the decree of
the Lateran Council; he strove not for the privileges of his order, but
for the duties of his conscience. The bishops who refused investiture
at Henry’s hands clearly acted in the same spirit; what held them
back was not so much loyalty to the Pope as loyalty to their own
metropolitan. The great mass of both clergy and laity cared nothing at
all how the investitures were given, and very little for papal decrees;
all they cared about was that they should not be again deprived of
their archbishop, and left, as they had already been left too long,
like sheep without a shepherd. In their eyes the dispute was a personal
one between king and primate, stirred up by Satan to keep the English
Church in misery.
[45] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 808.
[46] Lanfranc. Ep. x. (Giles, vol. i. p. 32).
[47] Eadmer, _Hist. Nov._ (Rule), p. 10.
In the manner in which it was conducted on both sides, the case
compares no less favourably with its continental parallel and with
the later contest in England of which it was the forerunner, and for
which, in some respects, it unquestionably furnished a model, though
that model was very ill followed. For two years the dispute made
absolutely no difference in the general working of the Church; Anselm
was in full enjoyment of his canonical and constitutional rights as
primate of all Britain; he ruled his suffragans, held his councils,
superintended the restoration of his cathedral church, and laboured
at the reform of discipline, with Henry’s full concurrence; and the
clergy, with the archbishop at their head, were the life and soul
of the party whose loyalty saved the king in his struggle with the
barons. Even when Anselm’s position in England had become untenable,
he went over sea in full possession of his property, as the king’s
honoured friend and spiritual father. Not till Henry was provoked
by a papal excommunication of all the upholders of the obnoxious
“paternal customs” except himself, did he seize the temporalities
of the archbishopric; and even then Anselm, from his Burgundian
retreat, continued in active and unrestrained correspondence with his
chapter and suffragans, and in friendly communication not only with
Queen Matilda, but even with the king himself. And when at last the
archbishop who had gone down on his knees to the Pope to save William
Rufus from excommunication threatened to put forth that very sentence
against William’s far less guilty brother, he was only, like Henry
himself in Normandy at the same moment, preparing his most terrible
weapon of war as the surest means of obtaining peace. Henry’s tact
warned him, too, that the time for a settlement was come, and the
sincerity of his motives enabled him to strike out a line of compromise
which both parties could accept without sacrificing their own dignity
or the principles for which they were contending. The English king and
primate managed to attain in seven years of quiet decorous negotiation,
without disturbing the peace or tarnishing the honour of either Church
or crown, the end to which Pope and Emperor only came after half a
century of tumult, bloodshed and disgrace; the island-pontiff who
“loved righteousness and hated iniquity,” instead of “dying in exile”
like his Roman brother, came home to end his days in triumph on the
chair of S. Augustine. The settlement made little or no practical
difference as far as its immediate object was concerned. Henry ceased
to confer the spiritual insignia; but the elections, held as of old
in the royal court, were as much under his control as before. He
yielded the form and kept the substance; the definite concession of
the bishops’ homage for their temporalities fully compensated for the
renunciation of the ceremonial investiture. But the other side, too,
had gained something more than a mere form. It had won a great victory
for freedom by bringing Henry to admit that there were departments of
national life which lay beyond the sphere of his kingly despotism.
It had, moreover, gained a distinct practical acknowledgement of the
right of the Apostolic Curia to act as the supreme court of appeal
in ecclesiastical causes, like the Curia Regis in secular matters.
In a word, the settlement indicated plainly that the system of
William and Lanfranc was doomed to break down before long. It broke
down utterly when Anselm and Henry were gone; the complications of
legatine intervention, avoided only by careful management in Henry’s
later years, led to the most important results in the next reign;
and when the slumbering feud of sceptre and crozier broke out again,
the difference between the cool Norman temper and the fiery blood of
Anjou, between the saintly self-effacement of Anselm and the lofty
self-assertion of Thomas, was only one of the causes which gave it such
an increase of virulence as brought to nought the endeavours of king
and primate to tread in the steps of those whom they professed to have
taken for their examples.
Of more direct and wide-reaching importance, but less easy to trace, is
the working of Henry’s policy in the temporal government of England.
Like his Church policy, with which it was in strict accord, it was
grounded upon definite and consistent principles. At the outset of his
reign circumstances had at once compelled the king to throw himself
upon the support of his English subjects and enabled him to find in
them his surest source of strength. Personally, his sympathies were not
a whit more English or less despotic than those of his predecessor;
but, unlike Rufus, he fairly accepted his position with all its
consequences so far as he understood them, and throughout his reign
he never altogether forsook the standpoint which he had taken at its
beginning. That standpoint, as expressed in his coronation-charter, was
“the law of King Eadward as amended by King William.” In other words,
Henry pledged himself to carry out his father’s system of compromise
and amalgamation, to take up and continue his father’s work; and as
soon as his hands were free he set himself to fulfil the pledge. But
the scheme whose first outlines had been sketched by the Conqueror’s
master-hand had to be wrought out under conditions which had changed
considerably since his death and were changing yet farther every day.
The great ecclesiastical question was only the first and most prominent
among a crowd of social and political problems whose shadows William
had at the utmost only seen dimly looming in the future, but which
confronted Henry as present facts that he must grapple with as best he
could. At their theoretical, systematic solution he made little or no
attempt; the time was not yet ripe, nor was he the man for such work.
He was neither a great legislator nor an original political thinker,
but a clear-headed, sagacious, practical man of business. Such a man
was precisely the ruler needed at the moment. His reign is not one of
the marked eras of English history; compared with the age which had
gone before and that which came after it, the age of Henry I. looks
almost like a “day of small things.” That very phrase, which seems so
aptly to describe its outward aspect, warns us not to despise or pass
it over lightly. It is just one of those periods of transition without
which the marked eras would never be. Henry’s mission was to prepare
the way for the work of his grandson by completing that of his father.
The work was no longer where his father had left it. When the secular
side of the Norman government in England, somewhat obscured for a
while by the ecclesiastical conflict, comes into distinct view again
after the settlement of 1107, one is almost startled at the amount
of developement which has taken place in the twenty years since the
Conqueror’s death--a developement whose steps lie hidden beneath the
shadows of the Red King’s tyranny and of Henry’s early struggles. The
power of the crown had outgrown even the nominal restraints preserved
from the older system: the king’s authority was almost unlimited, even
in theory; the Great Council, the successor and representative of the
Witenagemot, had lost all share in the real work of legislation and
government; of the old formula--“counsel and consent”--the first half
had become an empty phrase and the second a mere matter of course.
The assembly was a court rather than a council, the qualification
of its members, whether earls, barons, or knights, being all alike
dependent on their position as tenants-in-chief of the crown; the
bishops alone kept their unaltered dignity as lineal successors of
the older spiritual Witan; but even the bishops had been compelled by
the compromise of 1107 to hold their temporalities on the baronial
tenure of homage and fealty to the king, a step which involved the
strict application of the same rule to the lay members of the assembly.
Moreover, the Witenagemot was being gradually supplanted in all its
more important functions by an inner circle of counsellors, forming
a permanent ministerial body which gathered into its own hands the
entire management of the financial and judicial administration of the
state. In one aspect it was the “Curia Regis” or King’s Court, the
supreme court of judicature which appropriated alike the judicial
powers of the Witenagemot, of the old court of the king’s thegns
or _theningmanna-gemot_, and of the feudal court of the Norman
tenants-in-chief. In another aspect it was the Exchequer, the court
which received the royal revenues from the sheriffs of the counties,
arranged and reviewed the taxation, transacted the whole fiscal
business of the crown, and in short had the supreme control and
management of the “ways and means” of the realm. The judicial, military
and social organization under the Norman kings rests so completely on a
fiscal basis that the working of the Exchequer furnishes the principal
means of studying that of the whole system; while the connexion between
the functions of the Exchequer and those of the Curia Regis is so close
that it is often difficult to draw a line accurately between them, and
all the more so, that they were made up of nearly the same constituent
elements. These were the great officers of the royal household:--the
justiciar, the treasurer, the chancellor, the constable, the marshal,
and their subordinates:--titles of various origin, some, as for example
the chancellor, being of comparatively recent origin, while others
seem to have existed almost from time immemorial;--but all titles
whose holders, from being mere personal attendants upon the sovereign,
had now become important officials of the state. Like a crowd of
other matters which first come distinctly to light under Henry, the
system seems to have grown up as it were in the dark during the reign
of William Rufus, no doubt under the hands of Ralf Flambard. At its
head stood the justiciar;--second in authority to the king in his
presence, his representative and vicegerent in his absence, officially
as well as actually his chief minister and the unquestioned executor
of his will. This office, of which the germs may perhaps be traced as
far back as the time of Ælfred, who acted as “secundarius” under his
brother Æthelred I., was directly derived from that which Æthelred
II. had instituted under the title of high-thegn or high-reeve, and
which grew into a permanent vice-royalty in the persons of Godwine
and Harold under Cnut and Eadward, and of Ralf Flambard under William
Rufus. Ralf himself, a clerk from Bayeux, who from the position of an
obscure dependent in the Conqueror’s household had made his way by
the intriguing, pushing, unscrupulous temper which had earned him his
nickname of the “Firebrand,” was an upstart whom the barons of the
Conquest may well have despised as much as the native English feared
and hated him. After an interval during which his office was held
by Robert Bloet, bishop of Lincoln--a former chancellor of the Red
King--it passed to a man who from beginnings almost as lowly as those
of Ralf rose to yet loftier and, it is but fair to add, purer fame.
Henry in his wandering youth, as he rode out from Caen one morning
with a few young companions, stopped to hear mass at a little wayside
chapel. The poor priest who served it, guessing by their looks the
temper of his unexpected congregation, rattled through the office with
a speed which delighted them; they all pronounced him just the man for
a soldier’s chaplain; Henry enlisted him as such, and soon found that
he had picked up a treasure. Roger became his steward, and discharged
his functions with such care, fidelity and good management as earned
him the entire confidence of his master.[48] Soon after Henry’s
accession he was appointed chancellor, a post whose duties involved,
besides the official custody of the royal seal, the superintendence
of the clerks of the king’s chapel or chancery, who were charged
with the keeping of the royal accounts, the conducting of the royal
correspondence, the drawing up of writs and other legal documents and
records, and who were now formed into a trained and organized body
serving as secretaries for all departments of state business. From 1101
to 1106 this office seems to have been held successively by Roger,
William Giffard, and Waldric; Roger probably resumed it in 1106 on
Waldric’s elevation to the bishopric of Laon, but if so he resigned it
again next year, to become bishop of Salisbury and justiciar.[49]
[48] Will. Newburgh, l. i. c. 6 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 36).
[49] Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 56.
Henry’s justiciar-bishop was the type of a class. The impossibility
of governing England securely by means of feudal machinery, even
with all the checks and safeguards which could be drawn from the old
English administrative system, had by this time become self-evident.
The conduct of the barons had at once proved to Henry the necessity
and given him the justification for superseding them in all the more
important functions of government, by carrying out, with a free and
strong hand, the scheme which Æthelred II. had originated under less
favourable circumstances--the organization of a distinct ministerial
body, directly dependent upon the crown. Of this body the model, as
well as the head, was the bishop of Salisbury. Under his direction
there grew up a trained body of administrators, most of them clerks
like himself, several being his own near relatives, and almost all
upstarts--_novi homines_, “new men” in the phrase of the time--compared
with the nobles whose fathers had come over with the Conqueror; forming
a sort of official caste, separate alike from the feudal nobility
and from the mass of the people, and no doubt equally obnoxious to
both, but very much better fitted than any instruments which either
could have furnished for managing the business of the state at that
particular crisis. Over and above the obloquy which naturally fell upon
them as the instruments of royal justice or royal extortion, there
was, however, another cause for the jealousy with which they were
generally regarded. Henry is charged with showing, more especially in
his later years, a preference for foreigners which was equally galling
to all his native subjects, whatever their descent might be.[50] It
was not that he set Normans over Englishmen, but that he set men of
continental birth over both alike. The words “Norman” and “English”
had in fact acquired a new meaning since the days of the Conquest. The
sons and grandsons of the men who had come over with Duke William never
lost one spark of their Norman pride of race; but the land of their
fathers was no longer their home; most of them were born in England,
some had English wives, and even English mothers; to nearly all, the
chief territorial, political and personal interests of their lives
were centred in the island. The constant wars between the Conqueror’s
successors tended still further to sever the Normans of the duchy from
those of the kingdom, and to drive the latter to unite themselves,
at least politically, with their English fellow-subjects. Already in
the wars of Rufus and Robert the change of feeling shows itself in
the altered use of names; the appellations “Norman” and “French” are
reserved exclusively for the duke and his allies, and the supporters
of the king of England are all counted together indiscriminately as
English. Tinchebray is distinctly reckoned as an English victory.
From that moment Normandy was regarded, both by its conquerors and
by its French neighbours, as a foreign dependency of the English
crown. Historians on both sides of the sea, as they narrate the wars
between Henry and Louis of France which arose out of that conquest,
unconsciously shadow forth the truth that the reunion of England and
Normandy really tended to widen the gulf between them. The greatest
French statesman of the day, Suger, abbot of S. Denis, sets the
relation between the two nationalities in the most striking light when
he justifies the efforts of his own sovereign Louis to drive Henry
out of the duchy on the express ground that “Englishmen ought not to
rule over Frenchmen, nor French over English.”[51] One of our best
authorities on the other side, the son of a Frenchman from Orléans who
had come in the train of Roger of Montgomery and married an English
wife--though he spent his whole life, from the age of ten years, in the
Norman monastery of Saint-Evroul, never ceased to regard his mother’s
country as his own, showed his love for it in the most touching
expressions of remembrance, and took care to send forth his history to
the world under the name of _Orderic the Englishman_. This last was no
doubt a somewhat extreme case. Still the fusion between the two races
had clearly begun; it was helped on directly by Henry’s whole policy,
by the impartial character of his internal administration, by the
nature and circumstances of his relations with his chief continental
neighbours, France and Anjou; indirectly it was helped on by the
sense of a common grievance in the promotion of “strangers”--men born
beyond sea--over the heads of both alike. Slight as were the bonds
between them at present, they were the first links of a chain which
grew stronger year by year; and the king’s last and grandest stroke
of policy, the marriage of his daughter and destined successor with
the count of Anjou, did more than anything else to quicken the fusion
of the two races by driving them to unite against sovereigns who were
equally aliens from both.
[50] Eadmer, _Hist. Nov._ (Rule), p. 224.
[51] Suger, _Vita Ludovici Grossi_, c. 1 (_Rer. Gall.
Scriptt._, vol. xii. p. 12).
Roger’s great work as justiciar was the organization of the Exchequer.
Twice every year the barons of the Exchequer met under his presidency
around the chequered table whence they derived their name, and
settled accounts with the sheriffs of the counties. As the sheriffs
were answerable for the entire revenue due to the crown from their
respective shires, the settlement amounted to a thorough review of the
financial condition of the realm. The profits of the demesne lands
and of the judicial proceedings in the shire-court, now commuted at a
fixed sum under the title of “ferm of the shire”; the land-tax, or as
it was still called, the Danegeld, also compounded for at a definite
rate; the so-called “aids” which in the case of the towns seem to have
corresponded to the Danegeld in the rural districts; the feudal sources
of income, reliefs, wardships, marriage-dues, escheats; the profits
arising out of the strict and cruel forest-law, the one grievance of
his predecessor’s rule which Henry had from the beginning refused to
redress; all these and many other items found their places in the
exhaustive proceedings of King Henry’s court of Exchequer. Hand in hand
with its financial work went the judicial work of the Curia Regis: a
court in theory comprehending the whole body of tenants-in-chief, but
in practice limited to the great officers of the household and others
specially appointed by the king, and acting under him, or under the
chief justiciar as his representative, as a supreme tribunal of appeal,
and also of first resort in suits between tenants-in-chief and in a
variety of other cases called up by special writ for its immediate
cognisance. It had moreover the power of acting directly upon the lower
courts in another way. The assessment of taxes was still based upon the
Domesday survey; but transfers of land, changes in cultivation, the
reclaiming of wastes on the one hand and the creation of new forests on
the other, necessarily raised questions which called for an occasional
revision and readjustment of taxation. This was effected by sending the
judges of the King’s Court--who were only the barons of the Exchequer
in another capacity--on judicial circuits throughout the country, to
hold the pleas of the crown and settle disputed points of assessment
and tenure in the several shires. As the justices thus employed held
their sittings in the shire-moot, the local and the central judicature
were thus brought into immediate connexion with each other, and the
first stepping-stone was laid towards bridging over the gap which
severed the lower from the higher organization.
By the establishment of a careful and elaborate administrative routine
Henry and Roger thus succeeded in binding together all branches of
public business and all classes of society in intimate connexion with
and entire dependence on the crown, through the medium of the Curia
Regis and the Exchequer. The system stands portrayed at full length
in the _Dialogue_ in which Bishop Roger’s great-nephew expounded the
constitution and functions of the fully developed Court of Exchequer;
its working in Roger’s own day is vividly illustrated in the one
surviving record which has come down to us from that time, the earliest
extant of the “Pipe Rolls” (so called from their shape) in which the
annual statement of accounts was embodied by the treasurer. The value
of this solitary roll of Henry I.--that of the year 1130--lies less in
the dry bones of the actual financial statement than in the mass of
personal detail with which they are clothed, and through which we get
such an insight as nothing else can afford into the social condition of
the time. The first impression likely to be produced by the document is
that under Henry I. and Roger of Salisbury--“the Lion of Justice” and
“the Sword of Righteousness”--every possible contingency of human life
was somehow turned into a matter of money for the benefit of the royal
treasury. It must, however, be remembered that except the Danegeld,
there was no direct taxation; the only means, therefore, of making up
a budget at all was by the feudal levies and miscellaneous incidents;
and these were no longer, as in the Red King’s days, instruments of
unlimited extortion, but were calculated according to a regular and
fairly equitable scale, subject to frequent modification under special
circumstances. Still the items look strange enough. We see men paying
to get into office and paying to get out of it; heirs paying for the
right to enter upon their inheritance; would-be guardians paying that
they may administer the estates of minors; suitors paying for leave
to marry heiresses or dowered widows; heiresses and widows paying for
freedom to wed the man of their own choice. The remittances are not
always in money; several of the king’s debtors sent coursing-dogs or
destriers; one has promised a number of falcons, and there are some
amusingly minute stipulations as to their colour.[52] There is an
endless string of land-owners, great and small, paying for all sorts
of privileges connected with their property; some for leave to make an
exchange of land with a neighbour, some to cancel an exchange already
made; some to procure the speedy determination of a suit with a rival
claimant of their estates, some on the contrary to delay or avoid
answering such a claim, and some for having themselves put forth claims
which they were unable to prove; the winner pays for his success, the
loser for failing to make good his case; the treasury gains both ways.
Jewish usurers pay for the king’s help in recovering their debts from
his Christian subjects.[53] The citizens of Gloucester promise thirty
marks of silver if the king’s justice can get back for them a sum of
money “which was taken away from them in Ireland.”[54] This last-quoted
entry brings us at once to another class of items, perhaps the most
interesting of all; those which relate to the growing liberties of the
towns.
[52] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 111.
[53] _Ib._ pp. 147, 148, 149.
[54] _Ib._ p. 77.
The English towns differed completely in their origin and history
from those of the states which had arisen out of the ruins of the
Roman Empire. The great cities of Italy and Gaul were daughters of
Rome; they were the abiding depositaries of her social, municipal and
political traditions; as such, they had a vitality and a character
which, like their great mistress and model, they were able to
preserve through all the changes of barbarian conquest and feudal
reorganization. The English towns had no such imperial past; in their
origin and earliest constitution they were absolutely undistinguishable
from the general crowd of little rural settlements throughout the
country. Here and there, for one reason or another, some particular
spot attracted an unusually large concourse of inhabitants; but
whether sheltered within the walls of a Roman military encampment like
Winchester and York, or planted on the top of an almost immemorial
hill-fort like Old Sarum, or gathered in later days round some fortress
raised for defence against the Welsh or the Danes like Taunton or
Warwick, or round some venerated shrine like Beverley or Malmesbury
or Oxford, still the settlement differed in nothing but its size
from the most insignificant little group of rustic homesteads which
sent its reeve and four men to the court of the hundred and the
shire. The borough was nothing more than an unusually large township,
generally provided with a dyke and palisade, or sometimes even a
wall, instead of the ordinary quickset hedge; or it was a cluster of
townships which had somehow coalesced, but without in any way forming
an organic whole. Each unit of the group had its own parish church
and parochial machinery for both spiritual and temporal purposes,
its own assembly for transacting its own internal affairs; while the
general borough-moot, in a town of this kind, answered roughly to
the hundred-court of the rural districts, and the character of the
borough-constitution itself resembled that of the hundred rather
than that of the single township. The earlier and greater towns
must have been originally free; a few still retain in their common
lands a vestige of their early freedom. But the later towns which
grew up around the hall of a powerful noble, or a great and wealthy
monastery, were dependent from the first upon the lord of the soil
on which they stood; their inhabitants owed suit and service to the
earl, the bishop, or the abbot, whichever he might chance to be, and
their reeve was appointed by him. On the other hand, when it became
a recognized principle that everybody must have a lord, and that all
folkland belonged to the king, it followed as a natural inference that
all towns which had no other lord were counted as royal demesnes,
and their chief magistrate was an officer of the crown. In the great
cities he usually bore the title of _port-reeve_, a word whose first
syllable, though here used to represent the town in general, refers
in strict etymology to the _porta_, or place where the market was
held, and thus at once points to the element in the life of the towns
which gave them their chief consequence and their most distinctive
character. The Norman conquest had led to a great increase of their
trading importance; a sense of corporate life and unity grew up within
them; their political position became more clearly defined; they began
to recognize themselves, and to win their recognition at the hands of
the ruling powers, as a separate element in the state. The distinction
was definitely marked by the severance of their financial interests
from those of the shires in which they stood; a fixed “aid,” varying
according to their size and wealth, was substituted in their case
for the theoretically even, but practically very unfair pressure of
the Danegeld; and to avoid all risk of extortion on the part of the
sheriff, their contribution to the ferm of the shire was settled at a
fixed round sum deducted from the total and accounted for as a separate
item, under the name of _firma burgi_, either by the sheriff or, in
some cases where the privilege had been specially conferred, by the
towns themselves. At the same time the voluntary institution of the
gilds, which had long acted as a supplement to the loose territorial
and legal constitution of the boroughs, forced its way into greater
prominence; the merchant-gilds made their appearance no longer as
mere private associations, but as legally organized bodies endowed
with authority over all matters connected with trade in the great
mercantile cities; the recognition of their legal status--generally
expressed by the confirmation of the right to possess a “gild-hall”
(or, as it was called in the north, a “hans-house”)--became a main
point in the struggles of the towns for privileges and charters. The
handicraftsmen, fired with the same spirit of association, banded
themselves together in like manner; the weavers of London, Huntingdon
and Lincoln, the leather-sellers and weavers of Oxford, bought of
the crown in 1130 a formal confirmation of the customs of their
respective gilds.[55] The lesser towns followed, as well as they
could, the example of the great cities; they too won from their lords
a formal assurance of their privileges; Archbishop Thurstan’s charter
to Beverley was expressly modelled on that granted by King Henry to
York.[56]
[55] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), Oxford, pp. 2 and 5;
Huntingdon, p. 48; Lincoln, pp. 109, 114; London, p. 144.
[56] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 109, 110 (3d ed.).
[Illustration: Plan I.
WINCHESTER in the XII century.
Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic. London, Macmillan & Co.
]
We may glance at some of the towns of southern England in company
with some travellers from Gaul who visited them in the later years
of Henry’s reign. The cathedral church of Laon had been burnt down
and its bishop Waldric slain in a civic tumult in 1112. Waldric had
once been chancellor to King Henry,[57] and the reports which he
and others had brought to Laon of the wealth and prosperity of the
island[58] led some of the canons, after perambulating northern Gaul
to collect donations for the restoration of their church, to venture
beyond sea for the same object. They set sail from Wissant--seemingly
in an English ship, for its captain bore the English-sounding name of
Coldistan--in company with some Flemish merchants who were going to
buy wool in England, and they landed at Dover after a narrow escape
from some pirates who chased their vessel in the hope of seizing the
money which it was known to contain.[59] They naturally made their
way to Canterbury first, to enlist the sympathies of the archbishop
and his chapter, as well as those of the scarcely less wealthy and
powerful abbey of S. Augustine.[60] Thence they apparently proceeded
to Winchester.[61] The old West-Saxon capital had lost its ancient
rank; London, which had long surpassed it in commercial and political
importance, had now superseded it as the crowning-place and abode of
kings. But its connexion with the crown was far from being broken.
Its proximity to the New Forest made it a favourite residence of the
Conqueror and his sons; William himself had built not only a castle on
the high ground at the western end of the city, just below the west
gate of the Roman enclosure, but also a palace in its south-eastern
quarter, hard by the cathedral and the New Minster; it was here that
he usually held his Easter court, and his successors continued the
practice. One very important department of the royal administration,
moreover, was still permanently centred at Winchester--the Treasury,
which under its English title of the “Hoard” had been settled there
by Eadward the Confessor, and which seems not to have been finally
transferred to Westminster till late in the reign of Henry II.[62]
Of the two great religious foundations, one, the “Old Minster,” or
cathedral church of S. Swithun, the crowning-place and burial-place of
our native kings, assumed under the hands of its first Norman bishop
the aspect which, outwardly at least, it still retains. The other,
the “New Minster,” so strangely placed by Ælfred close beside the old
one, had incurred William’s wrath by the deeds of its abbot and some
of its monks who fought and fell at Senlac; to punish the brotherhood,
he planted his palace close against the west front of their church;
and they found their position so intolerable that in 1111, by Henry’s
leave, they migrated outside the northern boundary of Winchester to a
new abode which grew into a wealthy and flourishing house under the
name of Hyde Abbey, leaving their old home to fall into decay and to
be represented in modern days by a quiet graveyard.[63] As a trading
centre Winchester ranked in Henry’s day, and long after, second to
London alone; the yearly fair which within living memory was held on S.
Giles’s day upon the great hill to the east of the city[64] preserved a
faint reminiscence of the vast crowds of buyers and sellers who flocked
thither from all parts of the country throughout the middle ages.
[57] On Waldric (or Gualdric) and Laon see Guibert of Nogent,
_De Vitâ suâ_, l. iii. c. 4, _et seq._ (D’Achéry, _Guib.
Noviog. Opp._, p. 498, _et seq._). Cf. above, p. 22.
[58] “Quæ [sc. Anglia] tunc temporis magnâ divitiarum florebat
opulentiâ pro pace et justitiâ quam rex ejus Henricus ... in
eâ faciebat.” Herman. Mon. _De Mirac. S. Mariæ_, l. ii. c. 1
(D’Achéry, _Guib. Noviog. Opp._, p. 534).
[59] _Ib._ c. 4 (pp. 535, 536).
[60] _Ib._ c. 6 (p. 536).
[61] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 7 (D’Achéry, _Guib. Noviog. Opp._,
p. 536).
[62] At the date of the _Dialogus de Scaccario_ (A.D. 1178)
its headquarters seem to have fluctuated between London and
Winchester, and to have been quite recently, if they were
not even yet, most frequently at the latter place. See the
payments to the accountants: “Quisque iii denarios si Londoniæ
fuerint; si Wintoniæ, quia inde solent assumi, duos quisque
habet.”--_Dial. de Scacc._, l. i. c. 3 (Stubbs, _Select
Charters_, p. 175, 3d ed.).
[63] Flor. Worc. (Thorpe) vol. ii. p. 64. Ann. Waverl. a.
1111. The king’s charter confirming the removal is dated 1114;
Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. ii. p. 444.
[64] It is mentioned in Henry’s charter to Hyde; Dugdale, as
above.
At the opposite end of the New Forest the little town of Twinham,
or Christchurch as it was beginning to be called from its great
ecclesiastical establishment, whose church had been rebuilt on a grand
scale by Ralf Flambard, had, on the octave of Pentecost, a fair which
the travellers took care to attend, much to the disgust of the dean,
who was anxious to secure all the offerings of the assembled crowd
for the improvement of his own church, and had no mind to share them
with our Lady of Laon.[65] They met with a warmer welcome at Exeter at
the hands of its archdeacon and future bishop Robert.[66] In the next
reign Exeter was counted as the fourth city in the kingdom.[67] Natural
wealth of its own it had none; the bare rocky soil of the south coast
of Devon produced nothing but a few oats, and those of the poorest
quality;[68] but the mouth of the Exe furnished a safe and convenient
anchorage for small merchant vessels either from Gaul or from Ireland,
and though Bristol was fast drawing away this latter branch of her
trade, Exeter could still boast of “such an abundance of merchandise
that nothing required for the use of man could ever be asked for
there in vain.”[69] It was far otherwise with Salisbury, to which the
travellers were probably drawn chiefly by the fame of its bishop;[70]
the Salisbury of those days was not the city in the plain which now
spreads itself around the most perfect of English Gothic minsters,
but the city whose traces, in a very dry summer, may still now and
then be seen in the fields which cover the hill of Old Sarum. Crowded
as it was into that narrow circle--narrow, and without possibility
of enlargement--Bishop Roger’s Salisbury was an excellent post for
military security, but it had no chance of attaining industrial or
commercial importance, although he did not disdain to accept the
grant of its market tolls, which till 1130 formed part of the ferm of
Wilton.[71] Wilton was apparently still the chief town of the shire to
which it had originally given its name; like Christchurch it had its
fair, but, like Christchurch too, its importance was mainly derived
from its abbey, where the memory of S. Eadgyth or Edith, a daughter
of Eadgar, was venerated by English and Normans alike, by none more
than the queen who shared Eadgyth’s royal blood and had once borne
her name.[72] The visitors from Laon, however, seem to have been more
impressed by another name which one is somewhat startled to meet in
this southern region--that of Bæda, whose tomb was shown them in the
abbey church of Wilton, and was believed to be the scene of miraculous
cures.[73] They retraced their steps into Devonshire, where they found
the legends of Arthur as rife among the people as they were among the
Bretons of Gaul; they were shown the chair and oven of the “blameless
king,” and a tumult nearly arose at Bodmin out of a dispute between one
of their party and a man who persisted in asserting that Arthur was
still alive.[74] After visiting Barnstaple and Totnes[75] they turned
northward towards the greatest seaport of the west, and indeed, with
one exception, of all England: Bristol.
[65] Herman. Mon., l. ii. cc. 10, 11 (D’Achéry, _Guib. Noviog.
Opp._, pp. 537, 538).
[66] _Ib._ l. ii. c. 12 (p. 539).
[67] _Gesta Stephani_ (Sewell), p. 21.
[68] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 94 (Hamilton, p.
201).
[69] _Ibid._
[70] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 13 (p. 539).
[71] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 13.
[72] _Ibid._
[73] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 14 (D’Achéry, _Guib. Noviog.
Opp._, p. 539).
[74] _Ib._ l. ii. cc. 15, 16 (pp. 539, 540).
[75] _Ib._ l. ii. cc. 17–19 (p. 540).
[Illustration: Plan II.
BRISTOL in the XII century.
Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic. London, Macmillan & Co.
]
To trace out the Bristol of the twelfth century in the Bristol of
to-day is a matter of difficulty not only from the enormous growth of
the town, but from the changes which have taken place in the physical
conformation of its site. Nominally, it still stands on the peninsula
formed by the junction of the Frome and the Avon; but the courses of
both rivers have been so altered and disguised that the earlier aspect
of the place is very hard to realize. The original Bristol stood wholly
upon the high ground which now forms the neck of the peninsula, then a
small tongue of land surrounded on the south-east by the Avon, on the
north, west and south by the Frome, which flowed round it almost in
the form of a horse-shoe and fell into the Avon on the southern side
of the town, just below the present Bristol Bridge.[76] Before the
Norman conquest, it seems, the lower course of the Frome had already
been diverted from its natural bed;[77] its present channel was not dug
till the middle of the thirteenth century, across a wide expanse of
marsh stretching all along the right bank of both rivers, and flooded
every day by the tide which came rushing up the estuary of Severn
almost to the walls of the town, and made it seem like an island in the
sea.[78] Within its comparatively narrow limits Bristol must have been
in general character and aspect not unlike what it is to-day--a busy,
bustling, closely-packed city, full of the eager, active, surging life
of commercial enterprise. Ostmen from Waterford and Dublin, Northmen
from the Western Isles and the more distant Orkneys, and even from
Norway itself, had long ago learnt to avoid the shock of the “Higra,”
the mighty current which still kept its heathen name derived from the
sea-god of their forefathers,[79] and make it serve to float them into
the safe and commodious harbour of Bristol, where a thousand ships
could ride at anchor.[80] As the great trading centre of the west
Bristol ranked as the third city in the kingdom,[81] surpassed in
importance only by Winchester and London. The most lucrative branch
of its trade, however, reflects no credit on its burghers. All the
eloquence of S. Wulfstan and all the sternness of the Conqueror had
barely availed to check for a while their practice of kidnapping men
for the Irish slave-market; and that the traffic was again in full
career in the latter years of Henry I. we learn from the experiences
of the canons of Laon. They eagerly went on board some of the vessels
in the harbour to buy some clothes, and to inspect the strange wares
brought from lands which can have had little or no intercourse with the
inland cities of Gaul. On their return they were solemnly implored by
their friends in the city not to run such a risk again, as they would
most likely find the ships suddenly put to sea and themselves sold into
bondage in a foreign land.[82]
[76] See the description of Bristol in _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell),
p. 37.
[77] Seyer, _Memoirs of Bristol_, vol. ii. pp. 18–27.
[78] _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell), p. 37.
[79] See the description of the “Higra,” and of Bristol, in
Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. cc. 153, 154 (Hamilton, p.
292).
[80] _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell), p. 37.
[81] In _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell), p. 21, Exeter is called the
fourth city in the realm. As London and Winchester are always
counted first and second, the third can only be Bristol.
[82] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 21 (D’Achéry, _Guib. Noviog.
Opp._, p. 541).
No such dangers awaited them at Bath. With their reception there by the
bishop[83]--whom the healing virtues of its waters had induced first
to remove his bishopstool thither from its lowlier seat at Wells, and
then to buy the whole city of King Henry for the sum of five hundred
pounds[84]--their itinerary comes to an abrupt end. If they penetrated
no further up the Severn valley than Bristol they turned back from the
gates of a region which was then reckoned the fairest and wealthiest
in England. The vale of Gloucester is described as a sort of earthly
paradise, where the soil brought forth of its own accord the most
abundant and choicest fruits, where from one year’s end to another
the trees were never bare, where the apples hung within reach of the
traveller’s hand as he walked along the roads;--above all, where the
fruit of the vine, which in other parts of England was mostly sour,
yielded a juice scarcely inferior to the wines of Gaul. Another source
of wealth was supplied by the fisheries of the great river, the
fertilizer as well as the highway of this favoured district. Religion
and industry, abbeys and towns, grew and flourished by Severn-side.[85]
Worcester was still the head of the diocese; but in political rank it
had had to give way to Gloucester. Standing lower down the river,
Gloucester was more accessible for trade, while its special importance
as the key of the South-Welsh border had made it one of the recognized
places for assemblies of the court from the time of the Danish kings.
The chief town of the neighbouring valley of the Wye, Hereford, had
once been a border-post of yet greater importance; but despite its
castle and its bishop’s see, it was now a city “of no great size,”
whose broken-down ramparts told the story of a greatness which had
passed away.[86]
[83] _Ib._ l. ii. c. 22 (p. 541).
[84] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontiff._, l. ii. c. 90 (Hamilton, p.
194). The grant of the city is in Rymer, _Fœdera_, vol. i. pt.
i. p. 8; date, August 1111.
[85] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontiff._, l. iv. c. 153 (Hamilton, pp.
291, 292).
[86] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontiff._, l. iv. c. 163 (Hamilton, p.
298).
Far different was the case of Chester. What the estuary of the Severn
was to the southern part of western England, that of the Dee was to its
northern part; Chester was at once the Bristol and the Gloucester of
the north-west coast--the centre of its trade and its bulwark against
the Welsh. Beyond the Dee there was as yet little sign of industrial
life. Cultivation had made little or no progress among the moorland and
forest-tracts of western Yorkshire, and its eastern half had not yet
recovered from the harrying with which the Conqueror had avenged its
revolt in 1068. For more than sixty miles around York the ground still
lay perfectly bare. “Cities whose walls once rose up to heaven--tracts
that were once well watered, smiling meadows--if a stranger sees them
now, he groans; if a former inhabitant could see them, he would not
recognize his home.” The one thing which had survived this ruin was, as
ever, the work of the Roman.[87] York still kept its unbroken life, its
ecclesiastical primacy, its commercial greatness; the privileges of its
merchants were secured by a charter from the king; they had their gild
with its “alderman” at its head,[88] their “hans-house” for the making
of bye-laws and the transaction of all gild business; and they were
freed from all tolls throughout the shire.[89] Far to the north-west,
on the Scottish border, Carlisle, after more than two centuries of
ruin, had been restored and repeopled by William Rufus. The city had
been destroyed by the Danes in 875, and its site remained utterly
desolate till in 1092 the Red King drove out an English thegn who
occupied it under the protection of Malcolm of Scotland, and reunited
it to the English realm.[90] The place still kept some material relics
of its earlier past; fragments of its Roman walls were still there,
to be used up again in the new fortifications with which the Red King
encircled his conquest; and some years later the _triclinium_ of one
of its Roman houses called forth the admiring wonder of a southern
visitor, William of Malmesbury.[91] But the city and the surrounding
country lay almost void of inhabitants, and only the expedient of a
colony sent by Rufus from southern England, “to dwell in the land and
till it,”[92] brought the beginnings of a new life. Yet before the end
of Henry’s reign, that life had grown so vigorous that the archbishop
of York found himself unable to make adequate provision for its
spiritual needs, and was glad to sanction the formation of Carlisle and
its district into a separate diocese.
[87] _Ib._ l. ii. c. 99 (Hamilton, pp. 208, 209).
[88] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 34.
[89] Charter of Beverley, Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 109,
110 (3d ed.).
[90] Eng. Chron. a. 1092.
[91] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 99 (Hamilton, p.
208).
[92] Eng. Chron. a. 1092.
The chief importance of Carlisle was in its military character, as an
outpost of defence against the Scots. On the opposite coast we see
springing up, around a fortress originally built for the same purpose,
the beginning of an industrial community at Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
The “customs” of the town contain provisions for the regulation of
both inland and outland trade; if a merchant vessel put in at the
mouth of the Tyne, the burghers may buy what they will; if a dispute
arise between one of them and a foreign merchant, it must be settled
before the tide has ebbed thrice; the foreign trader may carry his
wares ashore for sale, except salt and herrings, which must be sold
on board the ship. No merchant, save a burgher, may buy wool, hides,
or any other merchandise outside the town, nor within it, except
from burghers; and no one but a burgher may buy, make, or cut cloth
for dyeing.[93] Round the minster of S. John of Beverley, on the
marshy flats of Holderness, there had grown up a town of sufficient
consequence to win from the lord of the soil, Archbishop Thurstan
of York, a charter whose privileges were copied from those of the
metropolitan city itself. As a whole, however, the north was still
a wild region, speaking a tongue of which, as William of Malmesbury
complained, “we southrons could make nothing,” and living a life so
unconnected with that of southern England that even King Henry still
thought it needful to reinforce his ordinary body-guard with a troop of
auxiliaries whenever he crossed the Humber.[94]
[93] Customs of Newcastle, Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 111,
112.
[94] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 99 (Hamilton, p.
209).
This isolation was in great part due to physical causes. What is now
the busy West Riding was then mainly a vast tract of moor and woodland,
stretching from Wakefield to the Peak and from the Westmoreland hills
to the sources of the Don; while further east, the district between
the lower course of the Don and that of the Trent was one wide morass.
Such obstacles were still strong enough to hinder, though not to bar,
the intercourse of Yorkshire with mid-England. The only safe line of
communication was the Foss Way, which struck across the central plain
and along the eastern side of the Trent valley to Lincoln, and thence
turned north-westward to cross the Trent and wind round between forest
and fen to York. Lincoln was thus the chief station on the highway
between York and the south. Under the Norman rule the city had risen to
a new importance. Two of its quarters had been entirely transformed;
the south-western was now covered by a castle, and the south-eastern
by a cathedral church. Neither building was the first of its kind
which had occupied the spot. Few sites in England could have been
more attractive to a soldier’s eye than the crest of the limestone
ridge descending abruptly to the south into a shallow sort of basin,
watered by the little river Witham, and on the west sloping gradually
down to a broad alluvial swamp extending as far as the bank of the
Trent. The hundred and sixty-six houses which the Conqueror swept away
to make room for his castle[95] were but encroachments on an earlier
fortification, a “work” of mounds and earthen ramparts of the usual
old English type, which now served as a foundation for his walls of
stone.[96] To the ardent imagination of the medieval Church, on the
other hand, the rocky brow of Lincoln might well seem to cry out for
a holier crown, and a church of S. Mary was already in existence[97]
on the site where Bishop Remigius of Dorchester, forsaking his lowly
home in the valley of the Thames, reared his bishopstool amid the
foundations of that great minster of our Lady whose noble group of
towers now rises on the crest of the hill as a beacon to all the
country round.[98] But there were other reasons for the translation
of the bishopric than those of sentiment or of personal taste. Of
the vast Mid-Anglian diocese, which stretched from the Thames to the
Humber, Lincoln was beyond all comparison the most important town.
Even in Roman times the original quadrangular enclosure of Lindum
Colonia had been found too small, and a fortified suburb had spread
down to the left bank of the Witham. During the years of peace which
lasted from the accession of Cnut to that of William, the needs of an
increasing population, as we have seen, covered the site of the older
fortress with dwellings: when these were cleared away at William’s
bidding, their exiled inhabitants found a new home on a plot of
hitherto waste ground beyond the river; and a new town, untrammelled
by the physical obstacles which had cramped the growth of the city
on the hill, sprang up around the two churches of S. Mary-le-Wigford
and S. Peter-at-Gowts.[99] Some fifty years later Lincoln was counted
one of the most populous and flourishing cities in England.[100] The
roads which met on the crest of its hill to branch off again in all
directions formed only one of the ways by which trade poured into its
market. Not only had the now dirty little stream of Witham a tide
strong enough to bring the small merchant vessels of the day quite
up to the bridge: it was connected with the Trent at Torksey by a
canal, probably of Roman origin, known as the Foss Dyke; this after
centuries of neglect was cleared out and again made navigable by order
of Henry I.,[101] and through it there flowed into Lincoln a still more
extensive trade from the lower Trent Valley and the Humber. The “men of
the city and the merchants of the shire” were already banded together
in a merchant-gild;[102] and it is doubtless this gild which is
represented by the “citizens of Lincoln” who in 1130 paid two hundred
marks of silver and four marks of gold for the privilege of holding
their city in chief of the king.[103]
[95] Domesday, vol. i. p. 336 b.
[96] G. T. Clark, _Lincoln Castle_ (_Archæol. Journal_, vol.
xxxiii. pp. 215–217).
[97] “Sancta Maria de Lincoliâ in quâ nunc est episcopatus,”
Domesday, vol. i. p. 336. The patron saint of this older
church, however, was the Magdalene, not the Virgin. See John
de Schalby’s _Life of Remigius_, in Appendix E. to Gir. Cambr.
(Dimock), vol. vii. p. 194, and Mr. Freeman’s remarks in
preface, _ib._ pp. lxxx., lxxxii.
[98] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. c. 177 (Hamilton, p.
312). Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 30.
[99] See Domesday, vol. i. p. 336 b, and Mr. Freeman’s remarks
in _Norm. Conq._, vol. iv. pp. 218, 219.
[100] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. c. 177 (Hamilton, p.
312).
[101] Sim. Durh. _Gesta Reg._ a. 1121.
[102] Said to date from the time of Eadward; Stubbs, _Select
Charters_, p. 166.
[103] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 114.
[Illustration: Plan III.
LINCOLN in the XII century.
Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic. London, Macmillan & Co.
]
The removal of Bishop Remigius from Dorchester to Lincoln was in
accordance with a new practice, which had come in since the Norman
conquest, of placing the episcopal see in the chief town of the
diocese. The same motive had prompted a translation of the old Mercian
bishopric from Lichfield, now described as “a little town in the
woodland, with a rivulet flowing by it, far away from the throng of
cities,”[104] to Chester, whence, however, it was soon removed again to
the great abbey of Coventry.[105] The same reason, too, caused Norwich
to succeed Thetford as the seat of the bishopric of East-Anglia. It was
but very recently that Lincoln had outstripped Norwich as the chief
city of eastern England. The mouth of the Yare, which had a tideway
navigation quite up to the point where the Wensum falls into it, was
no less conveniently placed than that of the Witham for intercourse
with northern Europe; and the Scandinavian traders and settlers in the
first half of the eleventh century had raised Norwich to such a pitch
of prosperity that at the coming of the Norman it contained twenty-four
churches, and its burghers seem to have been more numerous than those
of any town in the realm except London and York.[106] Twenty years
later their number was indeed greatly diminished; the consequences of
Earl Ralf’s rebellion had wrought havoc in the city. But if its native
population had decreased, a colony of Norman burghers was growing up
and flourishing in a “new borough,” now represented by the parishes
of S. Peter Mancroft and S. Giles; the number of churches and chapels
had risen to forty-four,[107] and in the Red King’s last years the
foundations of the cathedral were laid by Bishop Herbert Lozinga,
whose grave may still be seen before its high altar.[108] Once in the
next reign Norwich supplanted Gloucester as the scene of the Midwinter
Council; King Henry kept Christmas there in 1121.[109] It may have been
on this occasion that the citizens won from him their first charter;
but the charter itself is lost, and we only learn the bare fact of its
existence from the words of Henry II., confirming to the burghers of
Norwich “all the customs, liberties and acquittances which they had in
the time of my grandfather.”[110]
[104] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. c. 172 (Hamilton, p.
307).
[105] _Ib._ cc. 172–175 (pp. 307–311).
[106] Domesday, vol. ii. pp. 116, 117.
[107] _Ib._ pp. 116–118.
[108] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 74 (Hamilton, p.
151).
[109] Eng. Chron. a. 1122.
[110] Charter printed in Blomefield, _Hist. of Norfolk_, vol.
iii. p. 34.
[Illustration: Plan IV.
OXFORD in the XII century.
Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic. London, Macmillan & Co.
]
It was, however, in the valley of the Thames that English town-life was
growing up most vigorously. Tried by the test of statistics, indeed,
Oxford was still but a small place; in the time of the Confessor
it had only contained about a thousand dwellings, and before the
Domesday survey was made the town had, through some unexplained cause,
suffered such decay that more than half of these were waste.[111] But
the “waste” was quickly repaired under the wise government of Robert
of Oilly, to whom the chief command at Oxford was entrusted by the
Conqueror, and of his nephew and namesake who succeeded to his office.
Before the close of Henry’s reign every side of that marvellously
varied life of Oxford which makes its history seem like an epitome of
the history of all England was already in existence, though only in
germ. The military capabilities of the site, recognized long ago by
Eadward the Elder, had been carefully strengthened; within the natural
protection of its encircling rivers, the town was “closely girt about
with rampart and ditch,”[112] and the mound, raised probably by Eadward
himself, at its western end had been made the nucleus of a mighty
fortress which was soon to become famous in the struggle of Stephen
and Matilda.[113] Nor was fortification the sole care of the D’Oillys;
within and without the city, works of piety and of public utility
sprang up under their direction. The ancient ford which had given the
town a name was no longer the sole means of crossing the network of
streams which fenced it in on every side save one; the High Bridge of
our own day represents one built by the first Robert of Oilly.[114]
Of the sixteen churches and chapels which Oxford now contained,[115]
S. George’s-in-the-Castle was certainly and S. Peter’s-in-the-East
probably founded by him;[116] several of the older parish churches
which had fallen into decay were restored at his expense;[117] and
those of S. Michael and S. Mary the Virgin, as well as that of S.
Mary Magdalene without the walls, were all founded in his time or in
that of his nephew, if not actually by their munificence.[118] One of
these, S. Mary the Virgin, was to become famous in after-days as the
University church. As yet, the centre of intellectual life at Oxford
was the ancient monastery of S. Fritheswith or Frideswide, which after
many vicissitudes had finally passed into the hands of the Austin
canons,[119] and entered upon a new career of prosperity under its
learned prior Guimund, the builder of the beautiful church which now
stands hidden away beneath the later splendours of Christ Church, like
a buried and yet living relic of an earlier and simpler age. Even S.
Frideswide’s, however, had a formidable rival in the priory of Oseney
which the younger Robert of Oilly founded, also for Austin canons, in
the island-meadow overlooked by his castle-tower.[120] The Augustinians
were a new order whose rise was closely associated with the revival of
intellectual and social culture; their houses were the best schools
of the time--schools in which the scholars were trained for secular
no less than for clerical careers--and their presence at Oseney and
S. Frideswide’s was already preparing the intellectual soil of Oxford
to receive, at the close of Henry’s reign, the seeds of the first
English University in the divinity lectures of Robert Pulein.[121]
The burgher-life of the city had long gathered round the church of S.
Martin; in its churchyard was held the portmannimot or general assembly
of the citizens; they had their merchant-gild and their gild-hall;[122]
they had their common pasture-land,[123] the wide green “Port-meadow”
beyond the Isis; and we see the growth of a local industry in the
appearance of the leather-sellers’ and weavers’ gilds. Shortly before
Henry’s death, there were indications that Oxford was soon to regain
the political position which it had held under the old English and
Danish kings, but had entirely lost since their time. A strange legacy
of awe had been left to the city by its virgin patroness. The story
went that Fritheswith, flying from the pursuit of her royal lover,
sank down exhausted at the gate, and, despairing of further escape,
called upon Heaven itself to check him; as he entered the town he was
struck blind, and though her prayers afterwards restored his sight,
no king after him dared set foot within the boundaries of Oxford for
fear of incurring some similar punishment.[124] It must be supposed
that the councils held at Oxford under Æthelred and Cnut met outside
the walls; we cannot tell whether any countenance was given to the
legend by the circumstances of Harald Harefoot’s death; but from that
time forth we hear of no more royal visits to Oxford till 1133--the
very year of Robert Pulein’s lectures. Then we find that Henry I.,
whose favourite country residence was at Woodstock, had been so drawn
to the neighbouring town as to build himself a “new hall” there,[125]
just outside the northern wall, on the ground afterwards known as
Beaumont-fields. He held but one festival there, the last Easter which
he ever spent in England; but each in turn of the rival candidates for
the throne left vacant by his death found Oxford ready to become a
political as well as a military centre of scarcely less importance than
London itself.
[111] Domesday, vol. i. p. 154. Mr. Parker, in his _Early Hist.
of Oxford_ (Oxf. Hist. Soc.), pp. 200, 201, suggests that the
damage was done by the army of Eadwine and Morkere on their
southward march in 1065.
[112] _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell), p. 88.
[113] The chief stronghold of the new fortress, however, was
not on the mound; it was a lofty tower--still standing--on the
western side of the enclosure. It was built by the first Robert
of Oilly, in 1071; Ann. Osen. ad ann. See Parker, _Early Hist.
Oxf._, pp. 202–204.
[114] _Hist. Monast. de Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. pp. 15,
284. See also Parker, _Early Hist. Oxf._, p. 219.
[115] See lists in Parker as above, pp. 284–286.
[116] He founded S. George’s in 1074; Ann. Osen. ad ann. On S.
Peter’s see Parker as above, pp. 250–254.
[117] _Hist. Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. p. 15.
[118] See the evidence in Parker’s _Early Hist. of Oxford_, pp.
209, 223, 258–261.
[119] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. c. 178 (Hamilton, pp.
315, 316). Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. ii. pp. 143, 144. The
Augustinians came there in 1111, according to the chronicle
of Tynemouth, quoted in _Monast._ (as above), p. 143; but the
local record in p. 144 gives 1121.
[120] Ann. Osen. a. 1129.
[121] _Ib._ a. 1133.
[122] Charter of Henry II., Stubbs, _Select Charters_, p. 167.
[123] Domesday, vol. i. p. 154.
[124] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. c. 178 (Hamilton p.
315).
[125] “Ad Pascha fuit rex apud Oxineford in novâ aulâ.” Rob. of
Torigni, a. 1133.
[Illustration: Plan V.
LONDON in the XII century.
Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic. London, Macmillan & Co.
]
Our great picture of medieval London belongs in all its completeness
to a somewhat later date; it was painted in the closing years of the
twelfth century. But, as in the case of so many other things which only
come out into full light under Henry II., although the colouring and
the details may belong more especially to his time, the main features
were already there in the time of his grandfather. The outline of
the city was a sort of irregular half-ellipse, fenced in upon the
northern or land side by a girdle of massive walls pierced with gates
and fortified with lofty towers; the wall on the south side, being
built close upon the river bank, was gradually washed away by the ebb
and flow of the tide constantly beating upon its foundations. On this
side the river itself was an all-sufficient protection. The eastern
extremity of the city, where the wall came down towards the water’s
edge, was guarded by a mighty fortress, founded by King William in the
earliest days of his conquest to hold his newly-won capital in check,
and always known by the emphatic name of “the Tower.” The western
end was protected by two lesser fortresses,[126]--Castle Baynard and
Montfichet, whose sokes filled up the space between the cathedral
precincts and the city wall. Another, which must have stood in the
same neighbourhood, seems to have been partly destroyed by the fire
which ravaged London a few months before the Conqueror’s death, and
in which the cathedral of S. Paul entirely perished.[127] Part of the
ditch of this fortress was surrendered by King Henry to make room for
a wall with which Bishop Richard was now enclosing his precincts;[128]
while within this enclosure a new church, gorgeous with all the latest
developements of Norman architectural skill, was now fast approaching
completion.[129] S. Paul’s was the rallying-point, as it had been the
nucleus, of municipal life in London. In time of peace the folkmoot
assembled at the eastern end of its churchyard at the summons of its
great bell; in time of war the armed burghers gathered at its west door
and beneath its banner, with the lord of Baynard’s castle as their
standard-bearer.[130] The internal constitution of London, however, was
scarcely a town-constitution of any kind; it was more like an epitome
of the organization of all England. The ordinary system of the parish
and the township, the special franchises and jurisdictions of the
great individual landowners, of the churches, of the gilds--all these
were loosely bundled together under the general headship of the bishop
and the port-reeve, to whom King William addressed his one surviving
English writ, just as he would have addressed the bishop and sheriff
of a county. The writ itself merely confirmed to the citizens “all the
law whereof they had been worthy in King Eadward’s day”;[131] but by
the end of Henry I.’s reign the Londoners had got far beyond this. By
virtue of a royal charter, they had exchanged their regally-appointed
port-reeve for a sheriff of their own choice, and this officer served
at once for the city and for the shire of Middlesex, which was granted
in ferm to the citizens for ever, as the other shires were granted
year by year to their respective sheriffs; they were exempted from
all tolls and mercantile dues throughout the realm, and from suit and
service to all courts outside their own walls, even the pleas of the
crown being intrusted to a special justiciar elected by themselves. Yet
there was no complete civic organization; the charter confirmed all the
old separate jurisdictions and franchises, the various “sokens” and
“customs” of churches, barons and burghers, the wardmoots or assemblies
of the different parishes or townships, as well as the husting or
folkmoot in which all were gathered together,[132]--and left London as
it found it, not a compact, symmetrical municipality, but, as it has
been truly called, simply “a shire covered with houses.”
[126] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, _Memorials of Becket_, vol.
iii.), p. 3.
[127] Eng. Chron. a. 1087.
[128] Dugdale, _Hist. of S. Paul’s_, app. xxiv. (Ellis), p.
305. Stow (_London_, ed. Thoms, p. 26) says that this fortress
“stood, as it may seem, where now standeth the house called
Bridewell.” But this is impossible; for the later palace of
Bridewell stood on the right bank of the Fleet, separated from
S. Paul’s by the course of that river and the whole width of
the soke of Castle Baynard, so that the gift of the ditch of a
castle on its site would have been perfectly useless for the
enlargement of the precincts.
[129] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 73 (Hamilton, p.
146).
[130] Stow, _London_ (Thoms, p. 121). For the rights and duties
of the lord of Castle Baynard, see _ib._ p. 24.
[131] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 82, 83.
[132] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, p. 108.