had been paid in money, instead of in necessaries; and he was rigid in
enforcing the payment in coin of the best quality. With this possession
of means, Stephen surrounded himself with troops from Flanders and
Brittany. The objections to his want of hereditary right appear to have
been altogether laid aside for a time, in the popularity which he
derived from his personal qualities and his command of wealth. Strict
hereditary claims to the choice of the nation had been disregarded since
the time of the Confessor. The oath to Matilda, it was maintained, had
been unwillingly given, and even extorted by force. It is easy to
conceive that, both to Saxon and Norman, the notion of a female
sovereign would be out of harmony with their ancient traditions and
their warlike habits. The king was the great military chief, as well as
the supreme dispenser of justice and guardian of property. The time was
far distant when the sovereign rule might be held to be most
beneficially exercised by a wise choice of administrators, civil and
military; and the power of the crown, being coördinate with other
powers, strengthening as well as controlling its final authority, might
be safely and happily exercised by a discreet, energetic, and just
female. King Stephen vindicated the choice of the nation at the very
outset of his reign. He went in person against the robbers who were
ravaging the country. The daughter of "the Lion of Justice" would
probably have done the same. But more than three hundred years had
passed since the Lady of Mercia, the sister of Alfred, had asserted the
courage of her race. Norman and Saxon wanted a king; for though ladies
defended castles, and showed that firmness and bravery were not the
exclusive possession of one sex, no thane or baron had yet knelt before
a queen, and sworn to be her "liege man of life and limb."
The unanimity which appeared to hail the accession of Stephen was soon
interrupted. David, King of Scotland, had advanced to Carlisle and
Newcastle, to assert the claim of Matilda which he had sworn to uphold.
But Stephen came against him with a great army, and for a time there was
peace. Robert, Earl of Gloucester, the illegitimate son of Henry I, had
done homage to Stephen; but his allegiance was very doubtful; and the
general belief that he would renounce his fealty engendered secret
hostility or open resistance among other powerful barons. Robert of
Gloucester very soon defied the King's power. Within two years of his
accession the throne of Stephen was evidently becoming an insecure seat.
To counteract the power of the great nobles, he made a lavish
distribution of crown lands to a large number of tenants-in-chief. Some
of them were called earls; but they had no official charge, as the
greater barons had, but were mere titular lords, made by the royal
bounty. All those who held direct from the Crown were called barons; and
these new barons, who were scattered over the country, had permission
from the King to build castles. Such permission was extended to many
other lay barons. The accustomed manor-house of the land proprietor, in
which he dwelt amid the churls and serfs of his demesne, was now
replaced by a stone tower, surrounded by a moat and a wall. The wooden
one-storied homestead, with its thatched roof, shaded by the "toft" of
ash and elm and maple, was pulled down, and a square fortress with
loopholes and battlement stood in solitary nakedness upon some bleak
hill, ugly and defiant. There with a band of armed men--sometimes with a
wife and children, and not unfrequently with an unhappy victim of his
licentiousness--the baron lived in gloom and gluttony, till the love of
excitement, the approach of want, or the call to battle drove him forth.
His passion for hunting was not always free to be exercised. Venison was
not everywhere to be obtained without danger even to the powerful and
lawless. But within a ride of a few miles there was generally corn in
the barns and herds were in the pastures. The petty baron was almost
invariably a robber--sometimes on his own account, often in some
combined adventure of plunder. The spirit of rapine, always too
prevalent under the strongest government of those times, was now
universal when the government was fighting for its own existence. Bands
of marauders sallied forth from the great towns, especially from
Bristol; and of their proceedings the author of the _Gesta Stephani_
speaks with the precision of an eye-witness. The Bristolians, under the
instigation of the Earl of Gloucester, were partisans of the ex-empress
Matilda; and wherever the King or his adherents had estates they came to
seize their oxen and sheep, and carried men of substance into Bristol as
captives, with bandaged eyes and bits in their mouths. From other towns
as well as Bristol came forth plunderers, with humble gait and courteous
discourse; who, when they met with a lonely man having the appearance of
being wealthy, would bear him off to starvation and torture, till they
had mulcted him to the last farthing. These and other indications of an
unsettled government took place before the landing of Matilda to assert
her claims. An invasion of England, by the Scottish King, without regard
to the previous pacification, was made in 1138. But this attempt,
although grounded upon the oath which David had sworn to Henry, was
regarded by the Northumbrians as a national hostility which demanded a
national resistance. The course of this invasion has been minutely
described by contemporary chroniclers.
The author of the _Gesta Stephani_ says: "Scotland, also called Albany,
is a country overspread by extensive moors, but containing flourishing
woods and pastures, which feed large herds of cows and oxen." Of the
mountainous regions he says nothing. Describing the natives as savage,
swift of foot, and lightly armed, he adds, "A confused multitude of this
people being assembled from the lowlands of Scotland, they were formed
into an irregular army and marched for England." From the period of the
Conquest, a large number of Anglo-Saxons had been settled in the
lowlands; and the border countries of Westmoreland and Cumberland were
also occupied, to a considerable extent, by the same race. The people of
Galloway were chiefly of the original British stock. The historians
describe "the confused multitude" as exercising great cruelties in their
advance through the country that lies between the Tweed and the Tees;
and Matthew Paris uses a significant phrase which marks how completely
they spread over the land. He calls them the "Scottish Ants." The
Archbishop of York, Thurstan, an aged but vigorous man, collected a
large army to resist the invaders; and he made a politic appeal to the
old English nationality, by calling out the population under the banners
of their Saxon saints. The Bishop of Durham was the leader of this army,
composed of the Norman chivalry and the English archers. The opposing
forces met at Northallerton, on the 22d of August, 1138. The
Anglo-Norman army was gathered round a tall cross, raised on a car, and
surrounded by the banners of St. Cuthbert and St. Wilfred and St. John
of Beverley. From this incident the bloody day of Northallerton was
called "the Battle of the Standard." Hoveden has given an oration made
by Ralph, Bishop of Durham, in which he addresses the captains as "Brave
nobles of England, Normans by birth"; and pointing to the enemy, who
knew not the use of armor, exclaims, "Your head is covered with the
helmet, your breast with a coat of mail, your legs with greaves, and
your whole body with the shield." Of the Saxon yeomanry he says nothing.
Whether the oration be genuine or not, it exhibits the mode in which the
mass of the people were regarded at that time. Thierry appears to
consider that the bold attempt of David of Scotland was made in reliance
upon the support of the Anglo-Saxon race. But it is perfectly clear that
they bore the brunt of the English battle; and whatever might be their
wrongs, were not disposed to yield their fields and houses to a fierce
multitude who came for spoil and for possession. The Scotch fought with
darts and long spears, and attacked the solid mass of Normans and
English gathered round the standard. Prince Henry, the son of the King
of Scotland, made a vigorous onslaught with a body of horse, composed of
English and Normans attached to his father's household. These were,
without doubt, especial partisans of the claim to the English crown of
the ex-empress Matilda; and, as the King of Scotland himself is
described, were "inflamed with zeal for a just cause."[42] The issue of
the battle was the signal defeat of the Scottish army, with the loss of
eleven thousand men upon the field. A peace was concluded with King
Stephen in the following year.
[Footnote 42: Scott has given a picturesque account of the battle in his
_Tales of a Grandfather_. Writing, as he often did, from general
impressions, in describing the gallant charge of Prince Henry, he states
that he broke the English line "as if it had been a spider's web."
Hoveden, the historian to whom Scott alludes, applies this strong image
to the scattering of the men of Lothian: "For the Almighty was offended
at them, and their strength was rent like a cobweb."]
The issue of the battle of the Standard might have given rest to England
if Stephen had understood the spirit of his age. In 1139 he engaged in a
contest more full of peril than the assaults of Scotland or the
disturbances of Wales. He had been successful against some of the
disaffected barons. He had besieged and taken Hereford Castle and
Shrewsbury Castle. Dover Castle had surrendered to his Queen. Robert,
Earl of Gloucester, kept possession of the castles of Bristol and Leeds;
and other nobles held out against him in various strong places. London
and some of the larger towns appear to have steadily clung to his
government. The influence of the Church, by which he had been chiefly
raised to sovereignty, had supported him during his four years of
struggle. But that influence was now to be shaken.
The rapid and steady growth of the ecclesiastical power in England, from
the period of the Conquest, is one of the most remarkable
characteristics of that age. This progress we must steadily keep in view
if we would rightly understand the general condition of society. All the
great offices of the Church, with scarcely an exception, were filled by
Normans. The Conqueror sternly resisted any attempts of bishops or
abbots to control his civil government. The "Red King" misappropriated
their revenues in many cases. Henry I quarrelled with Anselm about the
right of investiture, which the Pope declared should not be in the hands
of any layman, but Henry compromised a difficult question with his usual
prudence. Whatever difficulties the Church encountered, during seventy
years, and especially during the whole course of Henry's reign, wealth
flowed in upon the ecclesiastics, from king and noble, from burgess and
socman; and every improvement of the country increased the value of
church possessions. It was not only from the lands of the Crown and the
manors of earls that bishoprics and monasteries derived their large
endowments. Henry I founded the Abbey of Reading, but the _mimus_ of
Henry I built the priory and hospital of St. Bartholomew. This
"pleasant-witted gentleman," as Stow calls the royal mimus (which Percy
interprets "minstrel"), having, according to the legend, "diverted the
palaces of princes with courtly mockeries and triflings" for many years,
bethought himself at last of more serious matters, and went to do
penance at Rome. He returned to London; and obtaining a grant of land in
a part of the King's market of Smithfield, which was a filthy marsh
where the common gallows stood, there erected the priory, whose Norman
arches as satisfactorily attest its date as Henry's charter. The piety
of a court jester in the twelfth century, when the science of medicine
was wholly empirical, founded one of the most valuable medical schools
of the nineteenth century. The desire to raise up splendid churches in
the place of the dilapidated Saxon buildings was a passion with Normans,
whether clerics or laymen. Ralph Flambard, the bold and unscrupulous
minister of William II, erected the great priory of Christchurch, in his
capacity of bishop. But he raised the necessary funds with his usual
financial vigor. He took the revenues of the canons into his hands, and
put the canons upon a short allowance till the work was completed. The
Cistercian order of monks was established in England late in the reign
of Henry I. Their rule was one of the most severe mortification and of
the strictest discipline. Their lives were spent in labor and in prayer,
and their one frugal daily meal was eaten in silence. While other
religious orders had their splendid abbeys amid large communities, the
Cistercians humbly asked grants of land in the most solitary places,
where the recluse could meditate without interruption by his fellow-men,
amid desolate moors and in the uncultivated gorges of inaccessible
mountains. In such a barren district Walter l'Espée, who had fought at
Northallerton, founded Rievaulx Abbey. It was "a solitary place in
Blakemore," in the midst of hills. The Norman knight had lost his son,
and here he derived a holy comfort in seeing the monastic buildings rise
under his munificent care, and the waste lands become fertile under the
incessant labors of the devoted monks. The ruins of Tintern Abbey and
Melrose Abbey, whose solemn influences have inspired the poets of our
own age with thoughts akin to the contemplations of their Cistercian
founders, belong to a later period of ecclesiastical architecture; for
the dwellings of the original monks have perished, and the "broken
arches," and "shafted oriel," the "imagery," and "the scrolls that teach
thee to live and die," speak of another century, when the Norman
architecture, like the Norman character, was losing its distinctive
features and becoming "Early English." We dwell a little upon these
Norman foundations, to show how completely the Church was spreading
itself over the land, and asserting its influence in places where man
had seldom trod, as well as in populous towns, where the great cathedral
was crowded with earnest votaries, and the lessons of peace were
proclaimed amid the distractions of unsettled government and the
oppressions of lordly despotism. Whatever was the misery of the country,
the ordinary family ties still bound the people to the universal
Christian church, whether the priest were Norman or English. The
new-born infant was dipped in the great Norman font, as the children of
the Confessor's time had been dipped in the ruder Saxon. The same Latin
office, unintelligible in words, but significant in its import, was said
and sung when the bride stood at the altar and the father was laid in
his grave. The vernacular tongue gradually melted into one dialect; and
the penitent and the confessor were the first to lay aside the great
distinction of race and country--that of language.
The Norman prelates were men of learning and ability, of taste and
magnificence; and, whatever might have been the luxury and even vices of
some among them, the vast revenues of the great sees were not wholly
devoted to worldly pomp, but were applied to noble uses. After the lapse
of seven centuries we still tread with reverence those portions of our
cathedrals in which the early Norman architecture is manifest. There is
no English cathedral in which we are so completely impressed with the
massive grandeur of the round-arched style as by Durham. Durham
Cathedral was commenced in the middle of the reign of Rufus, and the
building went on through the reign of Henry I. Canterbury was commenced
by Archbishop Lanfranc, soon after the Conquest, and was enlarged and
altered in various details, till it was burned in 1174. Some portions of
the original building remain. Rochester was commenced eleven years after
the Conquest; and its present nave is an unaltered part of the original
building. Chichester has nearly the same date of its commencement; and
the building of this church was continued till its dedication in 1148.
Norwich was founded in 1094, and its erection was carried forward so
rapidly that in seven years there were sixty monks here located.
Winchester is one of the earliest of these noble cathedrals; but its
Norman feature of the round arch is not the general characteristic of
the edifice, the original piers having been recased in the pointed
style, in the reign of Edward III. The dates of these buildings, so
grand in their conception, so solid in their execution, would be
sufficient of themselves to show the wealth and activity of the Church
during the reigns of the Conqueror and his sons. But, during this period
of seventy years, and in part of the reign of Stephen, the erection of
monastic buildings was universal in England, as in Continental Europe.
The crusades gave a most powerful impulse to the religious fervor. In
the enthusiasm of chivalry, which covered many of its enormities with
outward acts of piety, vows were frequently made by wealthy nobles that
they would depart for the Holy Wars. But sometimes the vow was
inconvenient. The lady of the castle wept at the almost certain perils
of her lord, and his projects of ambition often kept the lord at home to
look after his own especial interests. Then the vow to wear the cross
might be commuted by the foundation of a religious house. Death-bed
repentance for crimes of violence and a licentious life increased the
number of these endowments. It has been computed that three hundred
monastic establishments were founded in England during the reigns of
Henry I, Stephen, and Henry II.
We have briefly stated these few general facts regarding the outward
manifestation of the power and the wealth of the Church at this period,
to show how important an influence it must have exercised upon all
questions of government. But its organization was of far greater
importance than the aggregate wealth of the sees and abbeys. The English
Church, during the troubled reign of Stephen, had become more completely
under the papal dominion than at any previous period of its history. The
King attempted, rashly perhaps, but honestly, to interpose some check to
the ecclesiastical desire for supremacy; but from the hour when he
entered into a contest with bishops and synods, his reign became one of
kingly trouble and national misery.
The Norman bishops not only combined in their own persons the functions
of the priest and of the lawyer, but were often military leaders. As
barons they had knight-service to perform; and this condition of their
tenures naturally surrounded them with armed retainers. That this
anomalous position should have corrupted the ambitious churchman into a
proud and luxurious lord was almost inevitable. The authority of the
Crown might have been strong enough to repress the individual
discontent, or to punish the individual treason, of these great
prelates; but every one of them was doubly formidable as a member of a
confederacy over which a foreign head claimed to preside. There were
three bishops whose intrigues King Stephen had especially to dread at
the time when an open war for the succession of Matilda was on the point
of bursting forth. Roger, the Bishop of Salisbury, had been promoted
from the condition of a parish priest at Caen, to be chaplain,
secretary, chancellor, and chief justiciary of Henry I. He was
instrumental in the election of Stephen to the throne; and he was
rewarded with extravagant gifts, as he had been previously rewarded by
Henry. Stephen appears to have fostered his rapacity, in the conviction
that his pride would have a speedier fall; the King often saying, "I
would give him half England, if he asked for it: till the time be ripe
he shall tire of asking ere I tire of giving." The time was ripe in
1139. The Bishop had erected castles at Devizes, at Sherborne, and at
Malmesbury. King Henry had given him the castle of Salisbury. This lord
of four castles had powerful auxiliaries in his nephews, the Bishop of
Lincoln and the Bishop of Ely. Alexander of Lincoln had built the
castles of Newark and Sleaford, and was almost as powerful as his uncle.
In July, 1139, a great council was held at Oxford; and thither came
these three bishops with military and secular pomp, and with an escort
that became "the wonder of all beholders." A quarrel ensued between the
retainers of the bishops and those of Alain, Earl of Brittany, about a
right to quarters; and the quarrel went on to a battle, in which men
were slain on both sides. The bishops of Salisbury and Lincoln were
arrested, as breakers of the king's peace. The Bishop of Ely fled to his
uncle's castle of Devizes. The King, under the advice of the sagacious
Earl Millent, resolved to dispossess these dangerous prelates of their
fortresses, which were all finally surrendered. "The bishops, humbled
and mortified, and stripped of all pomp and vainglory, were reduced to a
simple ecclesiastical life, and to the possessions belonging to them as
churchmen." The contemporary who writes this--the author of the _Gesta
Stephani_--although a decided partisan of Stephen, speaks of this event
as the result of mad counsels, and a grievous sin that resembled the
wickedness of the sons of Korah and of Saul. The great body of the
ecclesiastics were indignant at what they considered an offence to their
order. The Bishop of Winchester, the brother of Stephen, had become the
Pope's legate in England, and he summoned the King to attend a synod at
Winchester. He there produced his authority as legate from Pope
Innocent, and denounced the arrest of the bishops as a dreadful crime.
The King had refused to attend the council, but he sent Alberic de Vere,
"a man deeply versed in legal affairs," to represent him. This advocate
urged that the Bishop of Lincoln was the author of the tumult at Oxford;
that whenever Bishop Roger came to court, his people, presuming on his
power, excited tumults; that the Bishop secretly favored the King's
enemies, and was ready to join the party of the Empress. The council was
adjourned, but on a subsequent day came the Archbishop of Rouen, as the
champion of the King, and contended that it was against the canons that
the bishops should possess castles; and that even if they had the right,
they were bound to deliver them up to the will of the King, as the times
were eventful, and the King was bound to make war for the common
security. The Archbishop of Rouen reasoned as a statesman; the Bishop of
Winchester as the Pope's legate. Some of the bishops threatened to
proceed to Rome; and the King's advocate intimated that if they did so,
their return might not be so easy. Swords were at last unsheathed. The
King and the earls were now in open hostility with the legate and the
bishops. Excommunication of the King was hinted at; but persuasion was
resorted to. Stephen, according to one authority, made humble
submission, and thus "abated the rigor of ecclesiastical discipline." If
he did submit, his submission was too late. Within a month Earl Robert
and the empress Matilda were in England.