THE NEW ENGLAND.
1170–1206.
In the eyes of all contemporary Europe the most striking and important
event in English history during the half-century which had passed away
since the accession of Henry II. was the murder of Archbishop Thomas.
The sensation which it produced throughout western Christendom was
out of all proportion both to the personal influence of its victim
during his lifetime and to its direct political results. The popular
canonization bestowed upon the martyr was ratified by Rome with
almost unprecedented speed, in little more than two years after his
death;[2164] the stream of pilgrims which flowed to his shrine, from
the east and from the west, from the north and from the south, was
such as had hardly been seen even at the “threshold of the Apostles”
or at the Holy Sepulchre itself; and it flowed on without a break for
more than three hundred years. Yet Pope and pilgrims all alike were
probably as blind as Thomas himself had been to the true significance
for England of his life and his death. The great ecclesiastical
struggle of which he was the hero and the martyr marks a turning-point
in the social history of the reign of Henry II. even more than in
its political history. With the quarrel between Henry and Thomas the
direction of the moral and intellectual revival whose growth we have
in earlier chapters endeavoured to trace from the accession of Henry
I. to the death of Archbishop Theobald passed altogether out of the
hands in which it had prospered so long and so well--the hands of the
higher clergy and the monastic orders. The flight of Thomas scattered
to the winds the little band of earnest churchmen who had been sharers
with him in the inheritance of Theobald’s policy and Theobald’s work,
and left the reforming party in the Church without a rallying-point
and without a leader. One man alone still remained among the higher
clergy who under more favourable circumstances might have taken up the
work with a far more skilful hand than that of Thomas himself; but the
leadership of Gilbert Foliot was made impossible by the subsequent
course of events, which ranged all the religious opinion and all
the popular sympathies of England on the side of the persecuted and
martyred primate, and set Gilbert, as the primate’s most conspicuous
adversary, in the light of an enemy to the Church, a rebel against her
divine authority, and almost a denier of her faith.[2165]
[2164] He was canonized by Alexander III. on Ash-Wednesday,
February 21, 1173. Epp. dcclxxxiii.–dcclxxxvi., Robertson,
_Becket_, vol. vii. pp. 544–550.
[2165] The story of Gilbert’s dream, in Mat. Paris, _Chron.
Maj._ (Luard), vol. ii. p. 240, was probably suggested by a
line in the French _Life of S. Thomas_:
--“Gilebert Foliot, De lettres sout assez e servi Astarot”--
(Garnier, ed. Hippeau, p. 77)--where again in all likelihood the last
words were prompted by nothing more than the exigencies of rime. That
some such charges were however brought against Foliot we have seen
above, p. 70, note 5{295}.
The final settlement of the controversy was in some sense a defeat
of both parties; but the one which seemed to have gained the victory
really suffered the heaviest loss. The king was indeed compelled to
abandon his scheme for reforming the morals of the priesthood by the
strong hand of his royal justice; the privilege of the clergy was
saved, to fall at last before another King Henry four centuries later.
Yet its staunchest champions must surely have felt their cause reduced
well-nigh to an absurdity when they found that the first result of its
triumph was to secure the primate’s very murderers from the penalty
due to their crime;[2166] and far greater than the seeming gain of
Henry’s surrender at Avranches was the loss to the English Church
involved in the break-down of Theobald’s plans for the reform of the
episcopate. The cowardice of the bishops during the struggle left
them at its close wholly at the mercy of the king. The vacant sees,
of which there were eight besides Canterbury, were filled after long
delays with secular clerks wholly subservient to the royal will; and
before the end of Henry’s life the English episcopate was as completely
secularized as it had been in the worst days of his grandfather. The
inevitable consequences followed. As were the bishops, so, and even
worse, were the lower clergy. The cry against the extortion and tyranny
of the diocesan officials which rang at the opening of Henry’s reign
through the _Polycraticus_ of John of Salisbury rang yet more loudly
and bitterly at its close through the pages of Walter Map and Gerald
de Barri; the immorality which had once stirred the indignant zeal of
Henry himself grew more wide-spread and more frightful year by year,
as a direct result of his own shortsighted and selfish ecclesiastical
policy. To that policy there were, indeed, two honourably marked
exceptions. In 1186 Henry raised to the bishopric of Lincoln one of
the holiest and wisest men then living, Hugh of Avalon. His dealings
with the important and difficult question of the succession to the
metropolitan see itself appear to have been prompted by equally
disinterested motives. It was not the apathy or procrastination of
the king, but the determination of the monks of Christ Church to
use to the uttermost the favourable opportunity for asserting their
independence, and the difficulty of finding any willing candidate for
such a siege--perilous as the chair of S. Thomas was felt to be,
that delayed the election of his successor for two years and a half,
and his consecration for nine months longer still.[2167] The new
Archbishop Richard was a monk of unblemished character, and though
possessed of little talent or learning, fulfilled his office creditably
for ten years;[2168] while Baldwin, who took his place in 1185, was a
Cistercian of the best type--a type which, however, was now rapidly
passing away.
[2166] Henry, not knowing what to do with the archbishop’s
murderers, counselled or connived at their flight into
Scotland. The Scot king and people, however, shewed such a
strong disposition to hang them that they were driven to
re-cross the border (MS. Lansdown., Robertson, _Becket_, vol.
iv. p. 162). They then, it seems, took refuge at Knaresborough,
and there lay hid till hunger compelled them to issue from
their lurking-place. Finding themselves everywhere shunned like
wild beasts, they at last in desperation gave themselves up to
the mercy or the vengeance of the king. But the murderer of
a priest was legally amenable to none save an ecclesiastical
tribunal; Henry could do nothing with them but send them on
to the Pope; and all that the Pope could do with them was to
sentence them to lifelong exile and penance in Holy Land.
Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 25 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 163, 164);
cf. MS. Lansdown (as above), pp. 162, 163. See also a minor
illustration of the inconveniences attaching to this other side
of the clerical immunities, in a letter of Archbishop Richard
to some of his suffragans; Ep. dccxciv., Robertson, _Becket_,
vol. vii. pp. 561–564.
[2167] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 239–245, 247.
[2168] “Homo quidem mediocriter literatus, sed laudabiliter
innoxius, et, ne ambularet in magnis, modulo suo prudenter
contentus.” Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 8 (Howlett, vol. i. pp.
235, 236).
The monastic revival which had shed such brightness over the earlier
half of the twelfth century died down long before its close. S. Bernard
had not yet been seven years in his grave when John of Salisbury,
certainly not a hostile witness, was compelled to acknowledge that the
love of power and the greed of gain had infected the whole monastic
body, not excepting even the White Monks. Rome herself soon found it
needful to make an attempt, although a vain one, to curb the arrogance
of the military orders.[2169] Reformers in the next generation vied
with each other in denouncing the vices and crimes of the Cluniacs and
those of the “white-robed herd, the abominable order” of Cîteaux.[2170]
The fall of the Cistercians indeed was the most terrible of all;
within the space of two generations their name, once the symbol of
the highest moral and spiritual perfection which the men of their
day were capable of conceiving, had become a by-word for the lowest
depths of wickedness and corruption. Startling as was the change, its
causes are not far to seek. Pledged though they were by the origin and
primitive constitution of their order to be a standing protest against
the wealth and luxury of the Benedictines, they had nevertheless
become, in less than a hundred years from their first appearance in
England, the richest and most powerful body of monks in the realm.
At the time of their coming, almost the whole extent of arable land
throughout the country was already occupied; the only resource open to
the new-comers was the yet unexhausted and, as it seemed in England
at least, well-nigh inexhaustible resource of pasturage. They brought
to their sheep-farming the same energy, skill and perseverance which
characterized all their undertakings; and their well-earned success in
this pursuit, together with the vast increase of the wool-trade which
marked the same period, made them in a few years masters of the most
productive branch of English industry. Temptation came with prosperity.
But the more obvious temptations of wealth, the temptations to ease
and vanity and luxurious self-indulgence, had little power over the
stern temper of the White Monks; it was a deeper and a deadlier snare
into which they fell; not sloth and gluttony, but avarice and pride,
were their besetting sins. In the days of Richard and John, when we
find them struggling and bargaining almost on equal terms with the
king’s ministers and the king himself, they were indeed a mighty power
both in Church and state; but the foundation on which their power now
rested was wholly different from that upon which it had first arisen;
its moral basis was gone. As an element in the nation’s spiritual life
the Order of Cîteaux, once its very soul, now counted for worse than
nothing.
[2169] See a canon of the third Lateran Council (A.D. 1179),
in Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 3 (as above, pp. 221–223). On the
Templars and Hospitaliers see also W. Map, _De Nug. Cur._,
dist. i. c. 23 (Wright, pp. 36–38).
[2170] See especially Gir. Cambr. _Spec. Eccles._, distt. ii.
and iii. (Brewer, vol. iv. pp. 29 _et seq._). “Grex albus,
ordo nefandus,” is a description of the Cistercians quoted
apparently from W. Map by his opponent W. Bothewald; Wright,
_Latin Poems attributed to W. Mapes_, introd. p. xxxv. See also
King Richard’s opinion of these two orders and of the Templars,
in Gir. Cambr. as above, dist. ii. c. 12 (p. 54).
Still the monastic impulse which had guided so many religious movements
in the past was not wholly dead. On the continent it was giving indeed
fresh proofs of its vitality in the growth of two remarkable orders,
those of Grandmont and of the Chartreuse, both of earlier origin
than that of Cîteaux, but overshadowed until now by its transcendent
fame. These however had little influence upon English religious
life. The “Good Men” of Grandmont--as the brotherhood were commonly
called--although special favourites of King Henry, never set foot in
his island realm; the Carthusians reached it only in his last years,
and the few settlements which they formed there never rose to any
great importance.[2171] Out of all the English monasteries, of various
orders, whose dates of foundation are known, only one hundred and
thirteen arose during the thirty-five years of Henry’s reign, while
a hundred and fifteen owed their origin to the nineteen troubled
winters of his predecessor. In Yorkshire alone no less than twenty
new houses had been founded under Stephen; only eleven were founded
there under Henry.[2172] Towards the close of the century, indeed, the
reputation of English monachism had fallen so low that in the high
places of the Church a reaction in favour of secular clerks began to
set in once more. One bishop, Hugh of Coventry, not only ventured to
repeat the experiment which had been vainly tried elsewhere under the
Confessor and the Conqueror, of turning the monks out of his cathedral
and replacing them by secular canons, but actually proposed that all
the cathedral establishments served by monks should be broken up and
put upon a new foundation of a like secular character. Hugh himself
was however scarcely the man to meet with general recognition in the
capacity of a reformer; and his bold anticipation of the ecclesiastical
revolution which was to come four centuries later ended in ignominious
failure.[2173] It was, however, no less a personage than Archbishop
Baldwin himself who in 1186 proposed to endow out of his archiepiscopal
revenues a college of secular priests at Hackington by Canterbury,
with the avowed object of providing a dwelling-place and a maintenance
for the scholarship which monkish jealousy and monkish sloth had all
but driven out of the cloisters where from the days of Theodore to
those of Theobald it had found a home. This scheme was at once met by
a determined opposition on the part of the monks of Christ Church,
who suspected, perhaps not without reason, that it was part of a
design for curtailing the privileges and destroying the independence
of the metropolitan chapter. They instantly appealed to Rome, and the
appeal opened a contest which absorbed the unlucky primate’s energies
throughout the remainder of his life. He was steadily supported by
the king; but the weight of the whole monastic body, except his own
order, was thrown into the opposite scale; the general drift of
ecclesiastical feeling still lay in the same direction; and after
nearly four years of wearisome litigation at Rome and almost open
warfare at Canterbury, the building of the new college was stopped by
order of the Pope. The undaunted primate transferred his foundation
to a new site at Lambeth, where it might have seemed less open to
suspicion of rivalry with the Canterbury chapter; but the jealousy of
the monks pursued it with relentless hatred, and Baldwin’s absence
and death in Holy Land enabled them to secure an easy victory a year
later. The next archbishop, Hubert Walter, took up his predecessor’s
scheme with a zeal doubtless quickened by the fact that he was himself
a secular clerk. The dispute dragged on for five more years, to end at
last in the defeat of the primate, and, with him, of the last attempt
made in England systematically to utilize the superfluous wealth of
a great monastic corporation for the promotion of learning and the
endowment of study.[2174] The attempt was made under unfavourable
circumstances, perhaps by unskilful hands; and it was moreover made
too soon. In English national sentiment, monachism was inseparably
bound up with Christianity itself. To the monastic system England
owed her conversion, her ecclesiastical organization, her earliest
training as a nation and as a Church. Even if the guides to whom she
had so long trusted were failing her at last, the conservatism and the
gratitude of Englishmen both alike still shrank from casting aside
a tradition hallowed by the best and happiest associations of six
hundred years. The bent of popular sympathy was strikingly shewn by
an episode in Baldwin’s quarrel with his monks, when their insolent
defiance of his authority provoked him to cut off all their supplies,
in the hope of starving them into submission. For eighty-four weeks
not a morsel of food reached them save what was brought by their
friends or by the pilgrims who crowded to the martyr’s shrine; so
great however was the amount of these contributions, some of which
came even from Jews, that--if we may believe the tale of one who was
himself an inmate of the convent at this time--the brethren were able
out of their superabundance to give a daily meal to two hundred poor
strangers.[2175] As a spiritual force, however, monachism in England
was well-nigh dead. Though it still kept a lingering hold upon the
hearts of the people, it had lost its power over their souls. It might
produce individual saints like Hugh of Lincoln; but its influence had
ceased to mould the spiritual life of the nation. The time was almost
ripe for the coming of the Friars.
[2171] On Grandmont (founded in 1176, by Stephen of Tierny,
near Muret in the diocese of Limoges) see _Gall. Christ._, vol.
ii. col. 645; _Vita S. Steph. Muret._ (Labbe, _Nova Biblioth._,
vol. ii. pp. 674–683); Bern. Guidon, _De Ordine Grandimont._
(_ib._ p. 275 _et seq._); W. Map, _De Nug. Curial._, dist. i.
cc. 17, 27 (Wright, pp. 28, 29, 58, 59); and Gir. Cambr. _Spec.
Eccles._, dist. iii. c. 21 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 254). Henry’s
reverence for the brethren showed itself not only in frequent
visits and benefactions to their house, and also in his desire
to be buried there (above, p. 270), but also by the remarkable
way in which he deferred to their suggestions and sought their
counsel on grave matters of policy. Examples of this are
frequent during the Becket controversy; another may be seen
in _Gesta Hen._ (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 194. For the Chartreuse
(diocese of Grenoble--founded in 1084 or 1086 by Bruno of
Cöln, a canon of Reims) see W. Map, _De Nug. Cur._, dist. i.
cc. 16 and 28 (Wright, pp. 26–28, 59, 60); Gir. Cambr. _Spec.
Eccles._, dist. iii. c. 20 (as above, pp. 248–252); _Gall.
Christ._, vol. xvi. cols. 268, 269. The history of the English
Carthusian houses is in Dugdale’s _Monasticon_, vol. vi. pt.
i.; a full account of one, Witham, is given in the Life of S.
Hugh of Lincoln, who had been its first prior.
[2172] These figures are from Mr. Howlett’s introduction to
Will. Newb., vol. i. pp. xiii, xiv.
[2173] Gir. Cambr. _Spec. Eccles._, dist. ii. c. 23 (as above,
pp. 65, 67). Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), pp. 65–67. Gerv. Cant.
(Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 470, 488, 489, 550.
[2174] The history of this quarrel is told at wearisome length
by Gervase of Canterbury, and in the _Epistolæ Cantuarienses_.
It is summed up and explained by Bishop Stubbs in his preface
to the last-named book.
[2175] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 405.
Meanwhile the decay of holiness and learning in the cloister was
brought into more vivid light by a great outburst of intellectual
vigour of a wholly new type. The literary activity of the reign of
Henry I. had been all but quenched by the troubles of Stephen’s
reign. Chronicler after chronicler lays down his pen, as if in
disgust or despair, in the middle of the dreary story, till Henry
of Huntingdon and the nameless English annalist at Peterborough are
left to struggle almost alone through the last years of anarchy to
welcome the new king; and he is no sooner crowned than they, too,
pass away into silence.[2176] The first half of Henry’s reign has
no contemporary historian at all. The other branches of literature
continued equally barren; and a promise of better things had scarcely
dawned in the miscellaneous treatises of John of Salisbury when the
whole intellectual horizon was darkened by the great ecclesiastical
storm. No sooner had it subsided, however, than the literary impulse
revived under wholly changed conditions. Its bent was still mainly
historical; and, as might be expected, the first subject-matter upon
which it seized was the history of the new martyr. Within twenty
years of his death, no less than ten different biographies of S.
Thomas were composed by writers of the most diverse characters--his
old comrade John of Salisbury, three of his own confidential clerks,
a Benedictine abbot of Peterborough, an Augustinian prior of Oxford,
a monk of Canterbury who was probably an Irishman by blood, a French
poet who had seen the primate in his chancellor-days, a Cambridge
clerk who had joined him on the eve of his martyrdom. But meanwhile a
new school of English history was springing up in the court instead
of the cloister. Modern research has ascertained that the book which
may fairly be called the foundation-stone of this new school, as well
as the primary authority for English political history from the death
of S. Thomas to the third year of Richard Cœur-de-Lion--- the “Acts
of King Henry and King Richard,” long attributed to Benedict abbot
of Peterborough--is really the work of Richard Fitz-Nigel, bishop of
London and treasurer. Its continuator, Roger of Howden, was a clerk
of the royal chapel and an active and trusted officer of the royal
administration under both Henry and Richard.[2177] A third chronicler
of the period, Ralf de Diceto, was archdeacon of Middlesex from 1153 to
1180, when he became dean of S. Paul’s, an office of great political
as well as ecclesiastical importance, which he filled with distinction
until his death in the fourth year of King John.[2178] The works of
these three writers are examples of a species of historical composition
which is one of the most valuable literary products of the later
twelfth century. They are chronicles in the strictest sense of the
word:--records of facts and events arranged year by year in orderly
chronological sequence, and for the most part without any attempt at
illustration, comment or criticism. But the gap which parts them from
the ordinary type of monastic chronicle is as wide as that which parted
the highly-placed ecclesiastical dignitary, the trusted minister of
the Crown, or the favourite court-chaplain from the obscure monk who
had spent, it may be, well-nigh his whole life in copying manuscripts
in the scriptorium of Burton or Dunstable or Waverley. Their writers
were not merely chroniclers; they were statesmen and diplomatists
as well. Their position as members of the royal administration,
dwelling in the capital or at the court, placed them in constant and
intimate communication with the chief actors in the events which they
narrate, events of which not only were they themselves frequently
eye-witnesses, but in which they even took a personal, though it might
be subordinate, share; it gave them access to the most authentic
sources of political intelligence, to the official records of the
kingdom, to the state-papers and diplomatic correspondence of the
time, whereof a considerable part, if not actually drawn up by
themselves, must at any rate have passed through their hands in the
regular course of their daily business. The fulness and accuracy, the
balance of proportion, the careful order which characterize the work
of these statesmen-chroniclers are scarcely more remarkable than its
cosmopolitan range; Henry’s historiographers, like Henry himself, sweep
the whole known world into the wide circle of their intelligence and
their interest; the internal concerns of every state, from Norway to
Morocco and from Ireland to Palestine, find a place in the pages of
Richard Fitz-Nigel and Roger of Howden, side by side with the narrative
of their sovereign’s wars with France or with the text of the various
assizes whereby he was reforming the legal and judicial administration
of their own native land. While, however, the first works of this new
historical school thus rose far above the level of mere annals, they
still stood far below the literary standard of history in the higher
sense, which had been set up by a monk at Malmesbury half a century
before. The only writer who in the latter half of the twelfth century,
like William of Malmesbury in its earlier half, looked at history in
its true light, not as a mere record of facts, but according to its
old Greek definition, as “philosophy teaching by examples,” must be
sought after all not in the court but in the cloister. William indeed
had left no heir to his many-sided literary genius; but if some shreds
of his mantle did fall upon any historian of the next generation, they
fell upon one who bore his name, in an Augustinian priory among the
Yorkshire moors.
[2176] Henry of Huntingdon, we know, intended to “devote a new
book to the new king”; but it seems that this intention was not
fulfilled.
[2177] On the _Gesta Hen._ and Rog. Howden see Bishop Stubbs’s
prefaces to his editions of them in the Rolls series.
[2178] Stubbs, _R. Diceto_, vol. i. pref. pp. xxvi–lxxxiii.
William of Newburgh was born in 1136 at Bridlington, a quiet little
town lying under the southern escarpment of the York Wolds, not far
from Flamborough Head. Here, between the bleak uplands and the cold
northern sea, a priory of Austin canons had been founded by Walter de
Gant in the reign of Henry I.;[2179] from this house a colony went
forth in the early years of Stephen to settle, under the protection
of Roger de Mowbray, first at Hode near Thirsk, and afterwards, in
1145, at Newburgh near Coxwold. William entered the new house as a
child--probably, therefore, almost at its foundation; there he passed
his whole life; and there, as the reign of Richard Cœur-de-Lion drew
towards its close, he wrote his _English History_, from the Norman
conquest to his own day. The actual composition of the book seems to
have occupied little more than two years; it can scarcely have been
begun earlier than 1196, and it breaks off abruptly in the spring
of 1198. The surroundings of its writer offered comparatively few
advantages for the pursuit of historical study. No atmosphere of
venerable antiquity, no traditions of early scholarship and poetry,
no hallowed associations with the kings and saints and heroes of old,
hung around Newburgh priory; the house was younger than its historian;
the earliest and well-nigh the only memory that can attract a pilgrim
to its now desolate site is the memory of William himself. No crowd
of devotees from all parts of the realm came thither year by year to
bring their offerings and their news, as they came to the shrine of S.
Ealdhelm; no visit of king or prince is likely ever to have startled
the inmates of Newburgh out of the quiet routine of their daily life;
its prior held no such place among the ecclesiastical dignitaries
of his province as the abbot of Malmesbury had held for ages among
the prelates of the south; he and his canons could have little or no
business with the outside world, and it is hardly conceivable that
any of them would ever have occasion to travel further than to the
mother-house at Bridlington, unless indeed his own love of enterprise
and thirst for a wider knowledge of the world should drive him further
afield. Even in such a case, however, the undertaking would have been
beset with difficulties; travelling in Yorkshire was still, even under
Henry Fitz-Empress and his son, a more arduous and dangerous matter
than travelling in Wessex under his grandfather. William, too, had
grown up amid those terrible days when peaceable folk could find no
shelter save within convent-walls, and even that shelter sometimes
proved unavailing--when the men of the north were only too thankful
to wrap themselves in that comparative isolation which saved them at
any rate from sharing in the worst miseries that overwhelmed their
brethren in southern England. The memories of his boyhood were little
calculated to arouse in him such a spirit of enterprise as had fired
the young librarian of Malmesbury. He seems, indeed, never to have set
a foot outside his native shire; we might almost fancy that like the
first and most venerable of all our historians, he never set a foot
outside his own monastery. The vivid sketches of town and country which
give such a picturesque charm to the writings of William of Malmesbury
are wholly absent from those of William of Newburgh; there is but one
bit of local description in his whole book, and even that one--a brief
account of Scarborough[2180]--contains no distinct proof of having
been drawn from personal knowledge of the place. The brotherhood of
Newburgh had, however, ample opportunities of obtaining authentic,
though indirect, intelligence from the outer world. Their home, in
a sheltered spot under the western slope of the Hambledon Hills, was
quiet and peaceful, but not lonely; for it lay on an old road leading
from York to the mouth of the Tees, and within easy reach of a whole
group of famous monastic establishments which had sprung up during the
early years of the religious revival in the little river-valleys that
open around the foot of the moors. A few hours’ journey down the vale
of Pickering would bring the canons of Newburgh to brethren of their
own order at Kirkham and Malton; some ten or twelve miles of hill and
moor lay between them and the famous abbey of Rievaux; another great
Cistercian house, Byland, rose only a mile from their own home. With
the two last-named houses, at least, they were clearly in frequent
and intimate communication; it was indeed at the desire of Abbot
Ernald of Rievaux that William undertook to write his history; and
remembering the important part which the Cistercians, and especially
those of Yorkshire, had played for more than half a century in English
politics, secular as well as ecclesiastical, we can readily see that
his external sources of information were likely to be at once copious
and trustworthy.
[2179] Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. vi. pt. 1, pp. 284, 285.
[2180] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 3 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 104).
The literary resources of Newburgh itself, however, must have been
of the very poorest; its library, if it possessed one at all, could
only be in process of formation even in William’s mature years. He
himself gives us no clue to its contents. His style is that of a man
of education and taste, but he shews little trace of the classical
scholarship which may be detected in William of Malmesbury. Only three
earlier writers are mentioned by name in his preface; with two of
these--Bæda and Gildas--he has of course no ground in common; while
the third, Geoffrey of Monmouth, is named only to be overwhelmed with
scorn. It is plain, however, that William largely used the works of
Simeon of Durham and Henry of Huntingdon; while the fact that his
sketch of the reigns of Henry I. and Stephen is founded upon the
last-named writer seems to shew that his literary ambition had never
been quickened by a sight of the _Gesta Regum_ and _Historia Novella_,
of which nevertheless his book is the sole worthy continuation.
Compared with the works of Richard Fitz-Nigel and Roger of Howden,
its faults are obvious; its details are vague and inaccurate, it is
full of mistakes in names, pedigrees and suchlike small matters, and
its chronology is one long tangle of inconsistencies, confusions and
contradictions. But in the eyes of William of Newburgh, as in the
eyes of William of Malmesbury, the office of an historian is not so
much to record the events of the past as to explain them, to extract
from them their moral and political significance for the instruction
of the present and the future. His work is not a chronicle; it is a
commentary on the whole history of England, political, ecclesiastical
and social, throughout the twelfth century.[2181] Such a commentary,
written at such a time and by such a man, is for later students
above all price. The one short chapter in which William sums up the
causes and effects of the anarchy under Stephen[2182] is of more real
historical worth than the whole chaos of mere disjointed facts which
is all that the chroniclers have to give us, and in which he alone
helps us to discover a meaning and a moral. The same might be said of
many of his reflections upon men and things, both at home and abroad.
In some respects indeed he contrasts favourably even with his greater
namesake of Malmesbury. If he is less anxious for the entertainment
of his reader, he is more in earnest about the philosophical bearings
of his subject; he cares less for artistic effect and more for moral
impressions; his stories are less amusing and less graphically told,
but they are untinged with Malmesbury’s love of gossip and scandal;
his aim is always rather to point a moral than to adorn a tale;
he has a feeling for romance and a feeling for humour,[2183] but
he will ruthlessly, though quietly, demolish a generally-accepted
story altogether, if he knows it to be false.[2184] Only once does
the judicial calmness of his tone change into accents of almost
passionate indignation; and it is this outburst which above all has
gained for him in our own day the title of “the father of historical
criticism,”[2185] for it is the earliest protest against a rising
school of pseudo-historical writers who seemed in a fair way to drive
true history altogether out of the literary field.
[2181] On Will. Newb. and his work see Mr. Howlett’s preface to
vol. i. of his edition of the _Historia Anglicana_ in the Rolls
series.
[2182] Will. Newb., l. i. c. 22 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 69, 70).
[2183] See _e.g._, l. ii. c. 10, and l. iv. c. 32 (as above,
pp. 123–125, 385, 386), l. v. cc. 6 and 14 (vol. ii. pp.
424–427, 451–453).
[2184] L. i. c. 26 (vol. i. p. 81).
[2185] From Mr. Freeman, in the _Contemporary Review_, vol.
xxxiii. (1878), p. 216.
Nowhere, perhaps, has the marvellous vitality of the ancient Celtic
race shewn itself more strikingly than in the province of literature.
Of all the varied intellectual elements that went to the making of the
new England, the Celtic element rose to the surface first. The romantic
literature of England owes its origin to a Welsh monk, Geoffrey of
Monmouth, who became bishop of S. Asaph’s about two years before the
accession of Henry II. Long before that time--probably in the days
when poets and men of letters of every type were thronging to the
court of Henry’s grandmother the good Queen Maude--Walter Calenius,
archdeacon of Oxford, had picked up during a journey in Britanny “a
very ancient book, containing a history of the Britons, from Brut to
Cadwallader son of Cadwallon;” this book he carried home to England
and presented to his friend Geoffrey, begging him to translate it out
of Welsh into Latin.[2186] Some years after the death of Henry I.
Geoffrey’s translation was given to the world. Its original cannot
now be identified; but Geoffrey may fairly take to himself the whole
credit of the _History of the British Kings_ to which his name is
attached. The book is an elaborate tissue of Celtic myths, legends and
traditions, scraps of classical and Scriptural learning, and fantastic
inventions of the author’s own fertile brain, all dexterously thrown
into a pseudo-historical shape and boldly sent forth under the imposing
name of History. The success of Geoffrey’s venture was amazing. The
dedication of the book was accepted by the foremost lay scholar of
the day, William of Malmesbury’s friend and patron, Earl Robert of
Gloucester; its fame spread rapidly through all sections and classes of
society. A Yorkshire priest, Alfred of Beverley, tells us how some of
the clergy of the diocese, when suspended from the usual occupations of
their calling--doubtless by one of the many interdicts which fell upon
them during the struggle between S. William and Henry Murdac--beguiled
their time by discussing the stories which they had heard or read about
the ancient British kings; how, his curiosity aroused by their talk, he
with some difficulty borrowed a copy of the new book which had set them
talking; and how he longed to transcribe it at length, but lacking time
and means was obliged to content himself with an abridgement.[2187]
Norman barons and ladies heard of the wondrous book and became eager
to read it in their own tongue; a copy was borrowed from Earl Robert
himself by no less a personage than Walter Lespec, that he might lend
it in his turn to a friend of his own, Ralf Fitz-Gilbert, whose wife
wanted her household-minstrel Geoffrey Gaimar to translate it into
French verse for her entertainment.[2188]
[2186] Geoff. Monm. _Hist. Reg. Brit._, l. i. c. 1 (Giles,
Caxton Soc., pp. 1, 2).
[2187] Alf. Beverl. (Hearne), pp. 1–3.
[2188] Geoff. Gaimar, vv. 6436–6460 (Wright, Caxton Soc., pp.
224, 225).
The version of Gaimar was superseded in a few years by that of Wace,
a Norman poet who did a better service to the cause of history by his
later work, the _Roman de Rou_ or riming chronicle of the Norman dukes
from Hrolf to Henry II. Neither Alfred nor Gaimar nor Wace seems to
have had any suspicion of the true character of Geoffrey’s book of
marvels; they all alike treated it as genuine history, and from the
point where it closes, at the death of Cadwallon in 689, carried on
their narratives without a break down to the times of the Norman kings.
It was against this blurring of the line between truth and falsehood,
this obliteration of the fundamental distinction between history and
romance, that William of Newburgh lifted up his well-grounded and
eloquent protest in the preface to his _Historia Anglicana_.[2189]
Notwithstanding that protest, the fabulous tales of the _Brut_ (as
Geoffrey’s book is commonly called, from the name of the first British
king mentioned in it) continued to pass current as an integral part of
the history of Britain for many generations after him. The fraud was
in fact countenanced in high places for political ends; Henry himself
was quick to seize upon it as a means of humouring the national
vanity and soothing the irritated national feelings of those Celtic
vassals who were generally among the most troublesome of his subjects,
but who were also not unfrequently among the most necessary and
useful of his allies. On one occasion he is said, though on doubtful
authority, to have conciliated the Bretons by consenting to enter
into a diplomatic correspondence with their long-departed, yet still
mysteriously living monarch, Arthur, and by proposing to hold Britanny
as Arthur’s vassal.[2190] In his last years, however, he turned the new
Arthurian lore to account in a far more significant way in the island
Britain: he set the monks of Glastonbury to find the grave of the
British hero-king. In the cemetery of S. Dunstan’s old abbey stood two
pyramidal stones, of unknown age, and covered with inscriptions so old
and worn that nothing could be read in them save, as it was thought,
Arthur’s name. Between these stones, sixteen feet below the surface
of the ground, Henry--so the monks afterwards declared--guided by
what he had heard from an old Welsh bard and read in the histories of
the Britons,[2191] bade them look for a wooden sarcophagus containing
Arthur’s mortal remains. The discovery was made in 1191; a coffin,
hollowed as Henry had said out of the solid trunk of an oak-tree,
was dug up on the spot indicated; let into a stone at its foot was
a leaden cross, which when taken out proved to bear upon its inner
face the words, “Here in the isle of Avalon lies buried the renowned
King Arthur, with Guinevere his wife.” In the coffin were found a few
rotten bones, and a “cunningly-braided tress of golden hair,” which
however crumbled into dust in the hand of a monk who snatched it up
too eagerly. The bones were carefully preserved and solemnly re-buried
under a marble tomb before the high altar in the abbey-church.[2192]
[2189] Will. Newb. proœm. (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 11–18).
[2190] “Hanc [sc. Britanniam] sub jure tuo, sub pace tuâ,
teneamus;
Jus tibi, pax nobis, totaque terra simul”--
ends Henry’s letter to Arthur in the _Draco Norm._, l. ii. c.
22, vv. 1279, 1280 (Howlett, _Will. Newb._, vol. ii. p. 707).
See above, p. 57, note 2{226}. The whole story is extremely
curious; but I feel too doubtful about the character of the
source from which it comes to venture upon any discussion of its
possible significance.
[2191] “Sicut ab historico cantore Britone audierat antiquo,”
Gir. Cambr. _De Instr. Princ._ (Angl. Christ. Soc.), p. 192.
“Ex gestis Britonum et eorum cantoribus historicis,” _Spec.
Eccles._, dist. ii. c. 9 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 49). These
pyramids were there in William of Malmesbury’s day, when one
of them was already threatening to fall “præ nimiâ vetustate.”
They were covered with “antiquitatis nonnulla spectacula, quæ
plane possunt legi licet non plane possunt intelligi.” These
were pictures of bishops and kings, with old English names
written under them; Arthur, however, is not in the list.
William thought that the persons represented were buried
underneath. Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. i. c. 21 (Hardy, pp.
34, 35).
[2192] See the various accounts of the invention and
translation of Arthur in Gir. Cambr. _Spec. Eccles._, dist. ii.
cc. 9, 10 (Brewer, vol. iv. pp. 48–51), and _De Instr. Princ._
(Angl. Christ. Soc.), pp. 191, 192; R. Coggeshall (Stevenson),
p. 36; Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 48, and Ann. Margam, a.
1190 (Luard, _Ann. Monast._, vol. i. pp. 21, 22). Gerald seems
to have been present himself. He tells us the “translation”
was made by the king’s order; and indeed his account, taken by
itself, would leave an impression that the whole thing occurred
during King Henry’s lifetime; but R. Coggeshall and Rog. Wend.
both distinctly give the date, 1191; the Margam Annals place it
only a year earlier; and in both those years the reigning king
was far away.
It is easy to see what was, at any rate in Henry’s mind, the political
significance of this transaction. When Arthur could be thus publicly
exhibited as dead and buried, it was because the long-cherished dreams
of Celtic national independence, of which his name had been the symbol
and the watchword, were dead and buried too. But the scene thus enacted
at Glastonbury in 1191 had also another meaning of which perhaps none
of the actors in it could be fully aware. It marked the final “passing
of Arthur” out of the sphere of politics into a wholly new sphere of
pure intellect and philosophical romance. If Geoffrey of Monmouth
corrupted the sources of British history, he atoned for his crime by
opening to the poets of the generation succeeding his own a fount of
inspiration which is hardly exhausted yet. Their imagination seized
upon the romantic side of these old-world legends, and gradually wove
them into a poetic cycle which went on developing all through the later
middle ages not in England alone, but over the whole of civilized
Europe. But in the hands of these more highly-cultured singers the wild
products of bardic fancy took a new colour and a new meaning. As usual,
it was the Church who first breathed into the hitherto soulless body
the breath of spiritual and intellectual life. The earliest of the
Arthurian romances, as we possess them now, is a wholly new creation of
the religious mysticism of the twelfth century, the story of the Holy
Grail--
“The cup, the cup itself, from which our Lord
Drank at the last sad supper with His own.
This, from the blessed land of Aromat--
After the day of darkness, when the dead
Went wandering o’er Moriah--the good saint,
Arimathæan Joseph, journeying brought
To Glastonbury, where the winter thorn
Blossoms at Christmas, mindful of our Lord.
And there awhile it bode; and if a man
Could touch or see it, he was heal’d at once,
By faith, of all his ills. But then the times
Grew to such evil that the holy cup
Was caught away to Heaven, and disappear’d.”
As one by one the older legends of Arthur and Merlin, the later stories
of Lancelot and Tristan and Gawaine, were moulded into literary form, a
link to bind them all together was found in the “quest of the Grail,”
vowed by the whole company of Arthur’s knights assembled at the Table
Round, achieved only by one, the Galahad whose pure figure has gleamed
upon all after-time, as it flashed first upon the corrupt court of the
Angevins, the mirror of ideal Christian chivalry.
The greater part--certainly the noblest part--of this vast fabric of
romance seems to have been woven by the genius of one man.[2193] Every
side of the intellectual movement which throughout the latter half
of the twelfth century was working a revolution in English thought
and life is reflected in Walter Map. Born on the marches of England
and Wales, probably in the early years of the civil war, he studied
at Paris under Gerard la Pucelle, and came home again, while Thomas
Becket was still chancellor, to occupy some post at court, doubtless
that of chaplain to the king. He came of a family which had already
done good service to the Crown; but once in personal contact with Henry
himself, Walter can have needed no passport to the royal favour save
his own versatile genius. At once a scholar, a theologian and a poet,
an earnest political and ecclesiastical reformer and a polished man
of the world, shrewd and practical, witty and wise, he soon rose high
in the king’s confidence and esteem. Henry employed him in the most
varied capacities--as a justice-itinerant in England, as an ambassador
to the court of France, as a representative of English orthodoxy and
theological learning at the Lateran council of 1179; while in the
intervals of these missions he was in close and constant attendance
upon the king himself. In addition to his post in the royal household
he held several ecclesiastical preferments--a canonry at S. Paul’s,
the parsonage of Westbury in Gloucestershire, and the precentorship
of Lincoln, which he resigned in 1196 to become archdeacon of
Oxford.[2194] By that time his literary work was probably for the most
part done. The only book now extant which actually bears his name,
the treatise _De Nugis Curialium_--“Courtiers’ Triflings”--is a fruit
of the busy years spent in attendance upon King Henry from 1182 to
1189. By its title and origin it recalls the _Polycraticus_; and the
difference between the two books marks the change which had come over
the tone of educated English thought in the quarter of a century that
lay between them. Walter Map was, in all likelihood, as ripe a scholar
as John of Salisbury; but there is nothing scholastic in his treatment
of his subject. His book is far less elaborate in form and methodical
in arrangement than John’s; it has, in fact, no visible arrangement
at all; it is a collection of miscellaneous notes--scraps of folklore
from the Welsh marches, tales brought home by pilgrims and crusaders
from Byzantium or Jerusalem, stories from the classics, sayings from
the Fathers, fragments of information gleaned from the by-ways of
history, personal anecdotes new and old, sketches of contemporary life
and manners in the world and the Church, court-news, court-gossip,
court-scandal--all, as it seems, picked out at random from the
writer’s private commonplace-book and flashed in picturesque confusion
before the eyes of the literary public of his day. Yet the purpose of
it all is as earnest as that of the _Polycraticus_, though veiled under
a shew of carelessness. Walter appeals to a wider circle than John;
he writes not for a chosen band of kindred souls, but for all sorts
and conditions of men who know Latin enough to read him, for courtiers
and men of the world who have neither time nor patience to go through
a course of philosophical reasonings and exhortations, but who may be
caught at unawares by “truth embodied in a tale,” and are the more
likely to be caught by it the more unexpected the shape in which it
comes. When Walter stops to point the moral of his stories--for a moral
they always have--he does it with the utmost tact; more often he leaves
his readers to find the moral for themselves. “I am your huntsman;
I bring you the game; dress the dishes for yourselves!” he tells
them.[2195] But he strikes down the quarry--if we may venture to borrow
his own metaphor--with a far more unsparing hand than his predecessor.
King Henry himself, indeed, never was spared in his own court; but it
is in the satirist’s attitude towards the Church that we find the most
significant sign of the times. The grave tone of righteous indignation,
the shame and grief of the Theobaldine reformers at the decay of
ecclesiastical purity, has given place to bitter mockery and scathing
sarcasm. Where John lifts up his hands in deprecation of Heaven’s
wrath against its unworthy ministers, Walter points at them the finger
of scorn. John turns with eager hope from the picture of decaying
discipline and declining morality, which he paints with firm hand but
with averted face, to the prospect of a reformation which is to be the
spontaneous work of the clergy and the “religious” themselves; Walter
has seen this dream of reform buried in the grave of S. Thomas--perhaps
we should rather say of Theobald--and now sees no way of dealing with
the mass of corruption but to fling it bodily into the furnace of
public criticism and popular hatred. The mightiest creation of his
genius is the “Bishop Goliath” whose gigantic figure embodies all the
vice and all the crime which were bringing disgrace upon the clerical
order in his day. The “Apocalypse” and “Confession” of this imaginary
prelate have been ascribed to Walter Map by a constant tradition whose
truth it is impossible to doubt, although it rests upon no direct
contemporary authority.[2196] The satire is in fact so daring, so
bitter, and withal so appallingly true to life, that the author may
well have deemed it wiser to conceal his name. He is the anonymous
spokesman of a new criticism which has not yet fully discovered its own
power; of a public opinion which is no longer held in check by external
authority, but which is beginning to be itself an independent force;
which dares to sling its pebble at abuses that have defied king and
Pope, and will dare one day to sling it at king and Pope themselves.
That day, however, was still far distant. Walter’s ideal of perfection
in Church and state is one with John of Salisbury’s, only it is set
forth in a different shape. The moral lesson which lies at the heart
of the Arthurian romances comes home to us the more forcibly as we
remember that the hand which drew Sir Galahad was the same hand which
drew Bishop Goliath.
[2193] On these Arthur-romances and Walter Map’s share in
them see Sir F. Madden’s introduction to his edition of _Sir
Gawayne_ (Bannatyne Club), and that of M. Paulin Paris to the
first volume of his _Manuscrits Français de la Bibliothèque du
Roi_, summarized in Mr. H. Morley’s _English Writers_, vol. i.
pp. 562–569.
[2194] For the life of Walter Map see Mr. Wright’s _Biog.
Britt. Litt._, vol. ii. pp. 295–298, and his preface to _De
Nug. Cur._ (Camden Soc.) pp. i.–viii.
[2195] “Venator vester sum, feras vobis affero, fercula
faciatis.” W. Map, _De Nug. Cur._, dist. ii. c. 32 (Wright, p.
106).
[2196] They have been edited, under the title of _Latin Poems
ascribed to Walter Mapes_, by Mr. T. Wright for the Camden
Society.
Side by side with Walter Map, in the foremost rank of this new school
of critics and satirists, stands his probably younger contemporary,
Gerald de Barri. Gerald was born in 1147 in the castle of Manorbeer,
some three miles from Pembroke. He has left us a vivid picture of his
childhood’s home--its ramparts and towers crowning a lofty hill-top
exposed to all the winds that swept over the stormy Irish Sea, whirled
up the creek that ran up from the Bristol Channel to westward of the
castle, and ruffled with ceaseless wavelets the surface of the little
stream that flowed through the sandy valley on its eastern side;--its
splendid fishponds at the northern foot of the hill, the enclosed
tract of garden-ground beyond, and at the back of all, the protecting
belt of woodland whose precipitous paths and lofty nut-trees were
perhaps alike attractive to Gerald and his brothers in their boyish
days.[2197] His father, William de Barri, the lord of Manorbeer,
represented one of those Norman families of knightly rank who had
made for themselves a home in South Wales, half as conquerors, half
as settlers, in the days of Henry I. His mother, Angareth, was a
granddaughter of Rees Ap-Tewdor, prince of South Wales--a child of his
daughter Nest by her marriage with Gerald the constable of Pembroke;
and the fiery Celtic spirit as well as the quick Celtic wit which the
boy inherited from her shews itself alike in every act of his life
and in every page of his writings. On both sides he came of a race of
fighting-men, and he was certainly not the least pugnacious of his
family. The countless battles of his life were, however, to be fought
with other weapons than the sword which had won Manorbeer for his
paternal ancestors, and which was soon to win for some of his mother’s
nearest kinsmen--for her half-brother Robert Fitz-Stephen, her nephews
Meiler and Robert and Raymond, her own brother Maurice Fitz-Gerald--a
wider heritage and a more lasting fame beyond the Irish Sea. Gerald’s
bent towards the clerical profession shewed itself in his earliest
years; as a child he was known at Manorbeer as “the little bishop.”
At three different periods before he reached the age of twenty-five,
he spent some years in study at Paris, where he also lectured upon
rhetoric with considerable success. He finally came home in 1172, just
as King Henry, having twice passed through South Wales on his way to
and from Ireland, was planning out a new scheme for the government of
the principality. One part of this scheme was, as we have seen, the
delegation of the supreme authority to the young Welsh prince Rees
Ap-Griffith. Another part was the revival of the policy begun by the
Norman kings of managing the Welsh people through the instrumentality
of the Church, and, to this intent, filling the ranks of the clergy
in Wales with as many foreign priests as possible. Experience had,
however, shewn that men of pure English or Norman blood were not always
the fittest instruments for such a purpose. A year after Gerald’s birth
a compromise had been tried in the appointment to the bishopric of
S. David’s of a prelate who was half Norman and half Welsh:--David,
son of Gerald of Pembroke and Nest, brother of Maurice Fitz-Gerald and
of Angareth the wife of William de Barri. When Angareth’s son Gerald
came home from Paris in 1172, therefore, the influence of her family
was at its height. The foremost man in South Wales was her cousin Rees
Ap-Griffith; the second was her brother the bishop of S. David’s. It
was only natural that Gerald, sharing with his uncle the qualification
of mingled Welsh and Norman blood, and already known as a distinguished
scholar of the most famous seat of learning in Europe, should be at
once selected for employment in the business of reforming his native
land. Gerald himself was eager for the work; he had no difficulty in
obtaining from Archbishop Richard a commission to act as his legate
and representative in the diocese of S. David’s; thus armed, he began
a vigorous campaign against the evil doings of clergy and laity
alike--forcing the people to pay their tithes of wool and cheese, a
duty which the Welsh were always very unwilling to fulfil; compelling
the priests to abandon the lax system of discipline which they had
inherited from the ancient British Church, and had contrived to retain
in spite of Lanfranc and Anselm and Theobald; excommunicating the
sheriff and deposing the archdeacon of Brecknock themselves when they
dared to resist his authority, and receiving in 1175, as the reward of
his zeal, the appointment to the vacated archdeaconry.
[2197] Gir. Cambr. _Itin. Kambr._, l. i. c. 12 (Dimock, vol.
vi. p. 92).
Early in the next year his uncle, Bishop David, died. The young
archdeacon had just issued victorious from a sharp struggle in behalf
of the see against the bishop of S. Asaph’s, who had attempted to
encroach upon its rights; the darling wish of his heart was to see it
restored to its ancient metropolitical rank; and he had managed to
kindle in his fellow-canons a spark of the same ambition. They saw
in him the only man capable of bringing their desire to fulfilment,
and made a bold attempt to obtain him for their bishop. By this time,
however, both King Henry and Archbishop Richard had learned enough of
Gerald’s character to perceive that, however useful he might be as an
archdeacon in Wales, he was not at all the man to suit their purposes
as bishop of any Welsh see, least of all as bishop of S. David’s.
Henry, with a burst of fury, summarily refused the nomination of the
chapter; a long wrangle ended in the appointment of Peter de Leia,
prior of the Cluniac house of Much Wenlock, to the vacant see. Peter,
being a foreigner, a monk, and a man of no great intellectual capacity,
was utterly unable either to rule his turbulent Welsh flock or to cope
with his self-willed and quick-witted Welsh canons; Gerald undertook to
teach him his duties, but found him such an unsatisfactory pupil that
he soon gave up the task in disgust, and again betook himself to Paris.
There he remained, studying civil and canon law, and lecturing at the
same time with great success, till the summer of 1180, when he returned
to England, was received by the chapter of Canterbury at a great
banquet on Trinity Sunday, and thence proceeded into Wales. He found
Bishop Peter at his wits’ end, and the diocese in utter confusion,
which he at once set himself to remedy after his own fashion. Thus
matters went on till 1184, when Henry on his last hurried visit to
England found time to intervene once more in the troubled affairs of
South Wales. He called a council on the border, summoned Gerald to meet
him there, and employed him to arrange the final submission of his
cousin Rees to the English Crown; and then he dexterously removed the
over-zealous archdeacon from a sphere where he was likely henceforth to
be more dangerous than useful, by making him one of his own chaplains,
and sending him next year to Ireland in attendance upon John. John came
back in September; Gerald lingered till the following Easter. Two books
were the fruit of this visit: a _Topography of Ireland_, published
in 1187, and dedicated to the king; and the _Conquest of Ireland_,
which came out under the patronage of Count Richard of Poitou in 1188.
Towards the close of that year, when Archbishop Baldwin went to preach
the Crusade in Wales, Gerald accompanied him half as interpreter, half
as guide. An _Itinerary of Wales_ forms the record of this expedition,
which was followed by a journey over sea, still in the company of the
archbishop, with whom Gerald seems to have remained in more or less
close attendance upon Henry’s movements until the final catastrophe
in July 1189. He then offered his services to Richard, who sent him
home once more to his old task of helping to keep order in South
Wales. For a while he found favour with all parties;[2198] William
of Longchamp offered him the bishopric of Bangor, John, in his day
of power after William’s fall, offered him that of Landaff. Gerald
however refused them both, as he had already refused two Irish sees;
he cared in fact for no preferment short of the metropolitan chair
of S. David. Shut out of Paris by the war between Richard and Philip
Augustus, he withdrew to Lincoln and resumed his theological studies
under its chancellor William, whom he had known in his earlier college
days on the Mont-Ste.-Geneviève, till in the summer of 1198 he was
roused to action once more by the death of Bishop Peter de Leia. The
fight began at once; the chapter of S. David’s nominated Gerald for
the vacant see; the archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, set his
face against the nomination; they defied his authority and appealed to
king and Pope; Gerald himself fought his own battle and that of the see
with indomitable courage, at home and abroad, for nearly four years;
but the canons were less resolute than their bishop-elect, he found
himself at last fighting alone against the world, and in 1202 he gave
up the struggle and withdrew to spend the rest of his life in the quiet
pursuit of letters.[2199]
[2198] Gerald himself goes so far as to say, with respect to
Richard’s appointment of William of Longchamp as justiciar,
“cui archidiaconum adjunxit” (_De Rebus a se gestis_, dist. ii.
c. 21, Brewer, vol. i. p. 84). We find however no hint of such
a thing elsewhere.
[2199] Gerald’s life may be studied in his own book, _De Rebus
a se gestis_, published in the first volume of the Rolls
edition of his works; and, more conveniently, in Mr. Brewer’s
preface to the same volume.
For nearly thirty years it had been the aim of Gerald’s highest
ambition to be the S. Thomas of his native land. He had struggled and
suffered for the privileges of S. David’s in the same spirit in which
Thomas had struggled and suffered for those of Canterbury, and it is
by no means unlikely that had the occasion ever arisen, he would have
been found ready to follow his model even unto death.[2200] But,
unlike Thomas, he knew when to yield; and instead of dying for a lost
cause, was content to live for posterity. Both men have had their
fitting reward. Gerald the Welshman--“Giraldus Cambrensis”--still lives
in his writings under the title won for him by his ardent patriotism;
he lives however for us not as the champion of Welsh ecclesiastical
independence, but as what he has been called by a writer of our own
day--“the father of our popular literature.”[2201] Gerald’s first
essay in authorship was made at the age of twenty; he was still busy
with his pen when past his seventieth year;[2202] and all through the
intervening half-century, every spare moment of his active, restless
career was devoted to literary composition. His last years were
spent in revising and embellishing the hasty productions of these
earlier and briefer intervals of leisure. Even in their more finished
shape, however, they still bear the impress of their origin. They
breathe in all its fulness a spirit of which we catch the first faint
indications in William of Malmesbury, and which may be described in
one word as the spirit of modern journalism. Gerald’s wide range of
subjects is only less remarkable than the ease and freedom with which
he treats them. Whatever he touches--history, archæology, geography,
natural science, politics, the social life and thought of the day,
the physical peculiarities of Ireland and the manners and customs of
its people, the picturesque scenery and traditions of his own native
land, the scandals of the court and of the cloister, the petty struggle
for the primacy of Wales and the great tragedy of the fall of the
Angevin empire--is all alike dealt with in the bold, dashing, offhand
style of a modern newspaper or magazine-article. His first important
work, the _Topography of Ireland_, is, with due allowance for the
difference between the tastes of the twelfth century and those of the
nineteenth, just such a series of sketches as a special correspondent
in our own day might send from some newly-colonized island in the
Pacific to satisfy or to whet the curiosity of his readers at home.
The book made no small stir in the contemporary world of letters.
Sober, old-fashioned scholars stood aghast at this daring Welshman’s
disregard of all classical traditions and literary conventionalities,
at the colloquialisms of his style, and still more at the audacity of
his stories.[2203] For Gerald, determined to entertain his readers no
matter by what means, and secure in their universal ignorance of the
country which he professed to be describing, had raked together all the
marvellous and horrible tales that could be found in Irish traditionary
lore or devised by the inventive genius of his Irish informants;
and the more frightful and impossible these stories were, the more
greedily did he seize upon them and publish them. Irish scholars,
almost from that day to this, have justly declaimed against Gerald
for his atrocious libels upon their country and its people; yet the
fact remains that, in the words of one of his latest editors, “to his
industry we are exclusively indebted for all that is known of the state
of Ireland during the whole of the middle ages.”[2204] His treatise
_De Expugnatione Hiberniæ_ is by far the most complete and authentic
account which we possess of the English or Norman conquest of Ireland.
The _Topographia_, despite its glaring faults, has a special merit of
its own; its author “must” (as says the writer already quoted) “take
rank with the first who descried the value, and, in some respects, the
proper limits of descriptive geography.”[2205]
[2200] That Thomas was Gerald’s chosen model may be seen all
through his writings. He harps upon the martyr’s life and death
somewhat as Thomas himself harped upon the life of Anselm.
[2201] Green, _Hist. Eng. People_, vol. i. p. 172.
[2202] Gir. Cambr. _De Jure Menev. Eccles._, dist. vii.
(Dimock, vol. iii. pp. 372, 373).
[2203] Gir. Cambr. _Expugn. Hibern._, introit. (Dimock, vol. v.
p. 209).
[2204] Brewer, _Gir. Cambr._, vol. i. pref. p. xl.
[2205] _Ibid._
A far better specimen of his work in this direction is his _Welsh
Itinerary_, followed some three or four years later by a _Description
of Wales_.[2206] Here Gerald is on familiar and congenial ground,
dealing with a subject which he thoroughly knows and understands,
describing a country which he ardently loves and a people with whom,
although by no means blind or indulgent to their faults, he is yet
heartily in sympathy, because he is one of themselves. In these
treatises therefore we see him at his very best, both as a writer
and as a man. In his own opinion the best of all his works was the
_Gemma Ecclesiastica_,[2207] or _Jewel of the Church_, a handbook of
instructions on the moral and religious duties of the priesthood,
compiled for the clergy of his own archdeaconry of Brecknock. To
modern readers it is interesting only for the glimpse which it affords
of the social, moral and intellectual condition of the South-Welsh
clergy in his day. In his _Mirror of the Church_[2208] the general
state of religious society and ecclesiastical discipline, at home and
abroad, is reflected as unsparingly as in the satires of Walter Map.
The remainder of Gerald’s extant works are of the most miscellaneous
character--a half-finished autobiography, a book of _Invectives_
against his enemies political and ecclesiastical, a collection of
letters, poems and speeches, a treatise on the _Rights of the Church of
S. David’s_, some Lives of contemporary bishops, a tract nominally _On
the Education of Princes_, but really occupied for the most part with
a bitter attack upon the characters of Henry II. and his sons.[2209]
All of them are, more or less, polemical pamphlets, coloured throughout
by the violent personal antipathies of the writer,[2210] but valuable
for the countless side-lights which they cast upon the social life of
the period. As we read their bold language, we can scarcely wonder at
Archbishop Hubert’s relentless determination to put down their author
by every means in his power. But though Gerald the bishop-elect of
S. David’s was no match for the primate of all England, Gerald the
pamphleteer wielded a force against which the religious authority
of the metropolitan and the hostility of the older race of scholars
were both alike powerless. He and his colleagues in the new school of
literature had at their back the whole strength of the class to which
they belonged, a class of men who were rapidly taking the place of the
clergy as leaders of the intellectual life and thought of the nation.
When old-fashioned critics lifted up their protest against Gerald’s
_Irish Topography_, he boldly carried the book down to Oxford, “where
the most learned and famous English clerks were then to be found,” and
read it out publicly to as many as chose to come and hear it. “And
as there were three distinctions or divisions in the work, and each
division occupied a day, the readings lasted three successive days.
On the first day he received and entertained at his lodgings all the
poor of the town; on the next day all the doctors of the different
faculties, and such of their pupils as were of fame and note; on the
third day the rest of the scholars, with the knights, townsmen and many
burgesses.”[2211] If some of the elder teachers shook their heads, it
mattered little to Gerald; their murmurs were lost in the applause
of a younger generation which hailed him as one of its own most
distinguished representatives.
[2206] Dimock, vol. vi.
[2207] Brewer, vol. ii.
[2208] _Speculum Ecclesiæ_ (Brewer, vol. iv.).
[2209] Gerald’s works have all been edited for the Rolls
series by Mr. Brewer and Mr. Dimock, except the _Vitæ Sex
Episcoporum_, which are in Wharton’s _Anglia Sacra_, vol. ii.,
and _De Instructione Principum_, which has been published by
the Anglia Christiana Society.
[2210] It is only fair to note that Gerald at the close of his
life published a little book of _Retractations_, printed in
first volume of his works (ed. Brewer).
[2211] Gir. Cambr. _De Rebus a se gestis_, l. ii. c. 16
(Brewer, vol. i. pp. 72, 73). I have availed myself of Mr.
Brewer’s translation of the passage, in his preface to the same
volume, p. xlvii.
The spirit which breathes through the pages of Gerald and Walter is
the spirit of the rising universities. The word “university” indeed,
as applied to the great seats of learning in the twelfth century,
is somewhat of an anachronism; the earliest use of it in the modern
sense, in reference to Oxford, occurs under Henry III.;[2212] and
the University of Paris appears by that name for the first time in
1215,[2213] the year of our own Great Charter. But although the title
was not yet in use, the institution now represented by it was one of
the most important creations of the age. The school of Bologna sprang
into life under the impulse given by Irnerius, a teacher who opened
lectures upon the Roman civil law in 1113.[2214] Nearly forty years
later, when Gratian had published his famous book on the Decretals,
a school of canon law was instituted in the same city by Pope Eugene
III.; and in 1158 the body of teachers who formed what we call the
University won a charter of privileges from the Emperor Frederic
Barbarossa.[2215] We have already, in the course of our story, had
more than one glimpse of the great school of arts and theology which
was growing up during the same period in Paris. There, where the study
of divinity had long found a congenial home under the shadow of the
cathedral church, William of Champeaux in 1109--the year of S. Anselm’s
death--opened on the Mont-Ste.-Geneviève a school of logic which in a
few years became the most frequented in Europe. Under his successors,
Abelard and Peter Lombard (the latter of whom was made bishop of Paris
in 1159), the schools of Paris became the centre of the intellectual
life of Christendom.[2216] Teachers and scholars from every nation met
on equal terms, as fellow-citizens of a new and world-wide commonwealth
of learning, on the slopes of the “Mount,” and went forth again to
carry into the most distant lands the instruction which they had
acquired. There a Wiltshire lad could begin a lifelong intimacy with
a youth from Champagne;--could pass from the lectures of Abelard to
those of a master who, though disguised under the title of “Robert of
Melun,” was in reality a fellow-countryman of his own; could enter the
_quadrivium_ under the guidance of a German teacher, make acquaintance
with Aristotle by the help of another learned Englishman, and complete
his theological studies, it may be, under the same Robert Pulein whom
we saw lecturing at Oxford some twelve or thirteen years before.[2217]
There a scholar from the Welsh marches could sit at the feet of the
English master Gerard La Pucelle,[2218] and another from the depths of
Pembroke could give lectures on rhetoric and could study theology with
William of Blois, who in after-days came at the call of the Burgundian
S. Hugh to undertake the direction of a school at Lincoln.[2219] There
Ralf de Diceto was a fellow-student with Arnulf of Lisieux;[2220]
there, in all likelihood, John of Salisbury met Nicolas Breakspear and
Thomas Becket. Thence, we cannot doubt, came through some of these
wandering scholars the impulse which called the schools of Oxford into
being. The first token of their existence is the appearance of Robert
Pulein in 1133. From that time forth the intellectual history of Oxford
is again blank till the coming of Vacarius in 1149; and it is not till
the reign of Henry II. has all but closed that we begin to discern any
lasting result from the visits of these two teachers. Then, however,
the words of Gerald would alone suffice to shew that the University
was to all intents and purposes full-grown. It had its different
“faculties” of teachers, its scholars of various grades; and the little
city in the meadows by the Isis, famous already in ecclesiastical
legend and in political and military history, had by this time won
the character which was henceforth to be its highest and most abiding
glory, as the resort of all “the most learned and renowned clerks in
England.”
[2212] Anstey, _Munimenta Academica_, vol. i. introd. p. xxxiv.
[2213] Mullinger, _Univ. Cambridge_, p. 71 (from Savigny,
_Gesch. des Röm. Rechts_, c. xxi. sec. 127).
[2214] _Ib._ pp. 36, 37, 72.
[2215] Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, p. 73.
[2216] _Ib._ pp. 75–77.
[2217] See above, vol. i. pp. 480–483.
[2218] See above, p. 449.
[2219] _Ib._ pp. 453, 456.
[2220] Arn. Lisieux, Ep. 16 (Giles, pp. 100, 101).
On a site less favoured by nature, Oxford’s future rival was more
slowly growing up. A lift of slightly higher ground above the left bank
of the river Grant--better known to us now as the Cam--on the southern
margin of what was then and for five hundred years afterwards a vast
tract of flood-drowned fen stretching northward as far as the Wash,
there stood at the close of the seventh century--long before Oxford
makes its first appearance in history--a “little waste chester”[2221]
representing what had once been the Roman city of Camboritum. At
the coming of the Normans the place was known as Grantebridge, and
contained some three or four hundred houses, twenty-seven of which were
pulled down by the Conqueror’s orders to make room for the erection of
a castle.[2222] It may be that here, as at Lincoln, the inhabitants
thus expelled went to make for themselves a new home beyond the river;
and a church of S. Benet which still survives, and whose tower might
pass for a twin-sister of Robert D’Oilly’s tower of S. Michael’s at
Oxford, may have been the nucleus of a new town which sprang up half a
mile to the south-east of the old one, on the right bank of the Cam.
Around this new town there gathered in the course of the following
century a fringe of religious foundations. The “round church” of the
Holy Sepulchre, clearly a work of the time of Henry I., was probably
built by some crusader whose imagination had been fired by the sight
of its prototype at Jerusalem. A Benedictine nunnery, part of whose
beautiful church now serves as the chapel of Jesus College, was
established under the invocation of S. Radegund early in the reign of
Stephen; an hospital dedicated to S. John the Evangelist was founded
at some time between 1133 and 1169 under the patronage of Bishop
Nigel of Ely. This hospital, like most institutions of the kind, may
have been served by canons regular of the order of S. Augustine. Some
years before this, however, the Augustinians had made a more important
settlement in the same neighbourhood. As early as 1092 Picot the
sheriff of Cambridgeshire had founded within the older town on the left
bank of the river a church of S. Giles, to be served by four regular
canons. In 1112 this little college was removed to Barnwell, some two
miles to the north-eastward, on the opposite side of the river, where
it grew into a flourishing Austin priory. Wherever there were Austin
canons a school was sure to spring up ere long; so, too, we cannot
doubt, it was at Cambridge. Whether the seeds of learning were first
sown in the cloisters of S. John’s or of Barnwell, or under the shadow
of that old S. Benet’s which seems to have been the original University
church[2223]--who it was that played here the part which had been
played at Oxford by Robert Pulein--we know not; but we do know that by
the middle of the following century the old Grantebridge had sunk into
a mere suburb of the new town beyond the river, and the existence of
the schools of Cambridge had become an established fact.[2224]
[2221] Bæda, _Hist. Eccles._, l. iv. c. 19.
[2222] Domesday, vol. i. p. 189.
[2223] See Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, p. 299, note 3; and Willis
and Clark, _Archit. Hist. Cambr._, vol. i. p. 276 and note 3.
[2224] On the rise of Cambridge--town and university--see
Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, pp. 332–334. The schools were not
formally recognized as an “University” till 1318; _ib._ p. 145.
For S. Radegund’s see Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. iv. pp.
215, 216; for Barnwell, _ib._ vol. vi. pt. i. pp. 83–87; for S.
John’s Hospital, _ib._ pt. ii. p. 755. The present S. John’s
College stands on the site of the hospital.
The student-life of the twelfth century--whether it were the life of
scholar or of teacher--had nothing either of the ease or the dignity
which we associate with the college life of to-day. Colleges in the
modern sense there were indeed none. Students of all ranks and ages,
from boys of ten or twelve years to men in full priestly orders, lodged
as they could in a sort of dames’-houses or hostels scattered up and
down the streets and lanes of the city. The schools were entirely
unendowed; there was no University chest, no common fund, no pecuniary
aid of any kind for either scholars or teachers. The sole support of
both was, at first, the power under whose sheltering wings the school
had grown up--the Church. Every book, even, had to be either bought
out of their own private purses or borrowed from the library of some
religious establishment. We may perhaps gather some idea of what
this latter resource was likely to furnish in the great educational
centres from a catalogue which has been preserved to us of the library
attached to Lincoln minster, at the time when the Lincoln school of
theology was at the height of its fame under Gerald’s friend William
of Blois and the saintly bishop Hugh. Five-and-thirty years before
Hugh’s appointment to the see, the church of Lincoln possessed, in
addition to the necessary service-books which were under the care of
the treasurer, some thirty or forty books in the chancellor’s keeping.
Among these we find, besides a number of Psalters, works of the Latin
Fathers, Epistles, Gospels, and a complete Bible in two volumes, the
Canons, Statutes and Decretals of the Popes;--the Decretals edited by
Ivo of Chartres;--the works of Vergil: a copy of the military treatise
of Vegetius, bound up with the Roman History of Eutropius, “which
volume Master Gerard gave in exchange for the Consolations of Boëthius,
which he lost”;--Priscian’s Grammar:--a “Mappa Mundi”: and a _Book of
the Foundation of Lincoln Minster_, with a collection of its charters.
Of nine books presented by Bishop Robert de Chesney, who died in
1166, the most noticeable were the works of Josephus and of Eusebius,
and the _Sentences_ of Peter Lombard. Somewhat later, one Warin of
Hibaldstow presented to the chapter a “book of Aristotle”--doubtless a
Latin version of his treatise on logic or on natural philosophy--and
seven volumes, whose contents are not stated, were given by Master
“Radulphus Niger” or Ralf the Black, known to us as one of the minor
chroniclers of King Henry’s later years. A copy of Gratian’s great book
of Decretals was presented about the same time by an archdeacon of
Leicester; Gerald de Barri, probably during his residence at Lincoln at
the close of Richard’s reign, added another law-book called _Summula
super Decreta_, a copy of S. Anselm’s treatise _Cur Deus Homo_, and
three of his own works, the _Topographia Hiberniæ_, the _Life of Bishop
Remigius_, and the _Gemma Sacerdotalis_ or _Ecclesiastica_; and the
list closes with another copy of the _Sentences_, acquired seemingly in
the early years of the following century.[2225]
[2225] See the Catalogues of Lincoln cathedral library in the
twelfth century, in _Gir. Cambr. Opp._, vol. vii. (Dimock and
Freeman), App. C., pp. 165–171.
The head of the scholastic body was the chancellor, who was an officer
of the diocesan bishop--in the case of Oxford, the bishop of Lincoln.
From him those who had reached a certain degree of proficiency in the
schools received their license to become teachers in their turn; and it
was an established rule that all who had attained the rank of Master
or Doctor should devote themselves for a certain time to the work of
instructing others. They gave their lectures how and where they could,
in cloister or church-porch, or in their own wretched lodgings, their
pupils sitting literally at their feet, huddled all together on the
bare ground; their living depended solely on their school-fees, and
these were often received with one hand only to be paid away again with
the other, for many an ardent young teacher of logic or rhetoric was,
like John of Salisbury and Gerald de Barri, at one and the same time
giving lectures in these arts to less advanced scholars and pursuing
his own studies under some great doctor of theology. The course of
study was much the same everywhere. From the fifth century downwards
it had consisted of two divisions, _trivium_ and _quadrivium_. Under
the former head were comprised Grammar, defined by an early teacher
as the art of “writing and reading learnedly, understanding and
judging skilfully;”[2226] Dialectics, including logic and metaphysics;
and Rhetoric, by which were meant the rules and figures of the art,
chiefly derived from Cicero. The Quadrivium included Geometry, not so
much the science now known by that name as what we call geography;
Arithmetic, which in the middle ages meant the science of mystical
numbers; Music, in other words metre and harmony; and Astronomy, of
course on the Ptolemaic system, although as early as the fifth century
a theory had been put forth which is said to have given in after-days
the clue to Copernicus.[2227] There was a separate faculty of Theology,
and another of Law. Between these different faculties there seems to
have been a good deal of jealousy. The highest authorities of the
Western Church, while encouraging by every means in their power the
study of the canon law, set their faces steadily against the civil law
of imperial Rome; the “religious” were over and over again forbidden
to have anything to do with it: and on the continent the two branches
of the legal profession were followed by different persons. As,
however, the procedure of the canon law was founded upon that of the
Theodosian code, the English clerical lawyers in Stephen’s time and in
Henry’s early years found their account in combining the two studies;
by degrees both together passed out of the hands of the clergy into
those of a new class of lay lawyers; and in later days, while on the
continent the canon law fell into neglect with its exclusively clerical
professors, in England it was preserved by being linked with the civil
law under the care of lay _doctores utriusque juris_.[2228]
[2226] “Docte scribere legereque, erudite intelligere
probareque.” Martianus Capella, quoted by Mullinger, _Univ.
Camb._, pp. 24, 25.
[2227] Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, pp. 24–26.
[2228] _Ib._ pp. 37–39.
Theology had, however, a yet more formidable rival in the schools
of logic. The text-book commonly used in these schools was a Latin
translation, made by Boëthius in the sixth century, of part of
Aristotle’s treatise upon logic. Early in the twelfth century the
natural philosophy of Aristotle was in some measure rendered accessible
to western students through translations made by travelled scholars
such as Adelard of Bath from Arabic versions which they had picked
up in the schools of Salerno or of the remoter East. Of the “Ethics”
nothing was known save a few fragments imbedded in the works of Latin
writers, until a hundred years later, when they found their way back to
Europe, probably in the train of the returning crusaders, and certainly
in a very strange shape--that of a Latin translation from a Hebrew
version of what was, after all, nothing more than an Arabic commentary
founded upon a Syriac version of the original Greek text.[2229] Garbled
as it was, however, this new Aristotelian lore revolutionized the
schools of western Christendom by laying open to them wholly new fields
of criticism and speculation. The spirit of free inquiry in which
Adelard had begun to deal with physical science invaded every region of
intellectual thought and knowledge, while the spread of legal studies
helped to the invention of new methods of argument and disputation. In
vain did Peter Lombard, in the famous book which gained for him his
title of “Master of the Sentences,” strive to stem the rising tide
and counterwork the influence of the rationalizing dialecticians by
applying to the purposes of theology the methods of their own favourite
science. The “Sentences” remained the accepted text-book of theology
down to the cataclysm in the sixteenth century; but their effect was
precisely the opposite to that which their author had desired.[2230]
The endless “doubtful disputations,” the hair-splittings, the “systems
of impossibilities,” which had already taken possession of the
logic-schools in John of Salisbury’s day, were even more irritating
to the practical mind and impetuous temper of Gerald de Barri. They
were in fact ruining both theology and letters. “Our scholars,” Gerald
complains, “for the sake of making a shew, have betaken themselves
to subjects which rather savour of the quadrivium:--questions of
single and compound, shadow and motion, points and lines, acute and
obtuse angles--that they may display a smattering of learning in the
quadrivium, whereof the studies flourish more in the East than in
the West; and thence they have proceeded to the maintaining of false
positions, the propounding of insoluble problems, the spinning of
frivolous and long-winded discourses, not in the best of Latin, hereby
holding up in their own disputations a warning of the consequences
ensuing from their abandonment of the study of letters.”[2231] Yet it
was from those very schools that Gerald himself, and men like him, had
caught the fearless temper, the outspoken, unrestrained tone, in which
they exposed and criticized not only every conspicuous individual,
but every institution and every system, alike in the world and in the
Church of their day. The democratic spirit of independence which had
characterized the strictly clerical reformers of an earlier day had
passed from the ranks of the priesthood into those of the universities,
and had taken a mightier developement there. It was mainly through
them that the nation at large entered in some degree into the labours
of Theobald and his fellow-workers; it was they themselves who entered
into the labours of Thomas Becket. A large proportion of both students
and teachers--a proportion which grew larger and larger as time went
on--were laymen; but an inveterate legal fiction still counted them all
as “clerks.” The schools had grown up under the wings of the Church,
and when they reached their full stature, they were strong enough both
to free themselves from the control of the ecclesiastical authorities
and to keep the privileges for which the clergy had fought. A priest
of the English Church in our own day is as completely subject to the
ordinary law of the land as any of his flock; but the chancellor’s
court of the University of Oxford still possesses sole cognizance over
all causes whatsoever, in all parts of the realm, which concern any
resident member of the University.[2232]
[2229] Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, pp. 94–96 and notes.
[2230] _Ib._ pp. 58–62.
[2231] Gir. Cambr. _Gemma Eccles._, dist. ii. c. 37 (Brewer,
vol. ii. p. 355). Cf. _ib._ pp. 350, 351, and _Spec. Eccles._,
dist. i. proœm. (vol. iv. pp. 4–9).
[2232] This privilege was secured by a charter of Edward III.;
it was successfully asserted as lately as January 1886.
Not the universities, however, but the towns, were the true strongholds
of English freedom. The struggle of the English towns for municipal
liberty which we have seen beginning under Henry I. was renewed
under Henry II. and Richard with increased vigour and success. Henry
Fitz-Empress was far too clear-sighted a statesman to undervalue the
growing importance of this element in English social and political
life. Most of his town-charters, however, date from the earlier years
of his reign, and scarcely any of them contain anything more than
a confirmation of the liberties enjoyed in his grandfather’s time,
with the addition in some cases of a few new privileges, carefully
defined and strictly limited.[2233] In the great commercial cities,
where the municipal movement had probably received a fresh impulse
from the extension of trade and intercourse with the continent which
was a natural consequence of Henry’s accession to the crown, the
merchant-gilds soon began openly to aim at gathering into their
own hands the whole powers of local government and administration,
and acquiring the position of a French “commune.” The French kings
encouraged the growth of the communal principle as a possible
counterpoise to the power of the feudal nobles; Henry, who had little
need of it for such a purpose, saw the dangers which it threatened
to his system of government and held it steadily in check. In 1170
Aylwine the Mercer, Henry Hund and “the other men of the town” paid
a heavy fine to the treasury for an attempt to set up a commune at
Gloucester;[2234] six years later one Thomas “From-beyond-the-Ouse”
paid twenty marks for a like offence at York.[2235] Owing to the close
connexion between the organization of the commune and that of the
gilds, every developement of this latter institution also was watched
by the Crown with jealous care; in 1164 the burghers of Totnes, those
of Lidford and those of Bodmin were all fined for setting up gilds
without warrant from the king;[2236] and in 1180 no less than eighteen
“adulterine gilds” in London met with a similar punishment.[2237] Once
established, however, they seem to have been permitted to retain their
existence, for in the first Pipe Roll of Richard we find them again
paying their fines “as they are set down in the twenty-sixth Roll of
King Henry II.”[2238] A bakers’ gild in London, a weavers’ gild at
Nottingham, one of the same craft and another of fullers at Winchester,
make their appearance as authorized bodies at the opening of Henry’s
reign;[2239] among the “adulterine gilds” of London were those of
the butchers, goldsmiths, grocers, clothiers and pilgrims.[2240] The
golden days of English borough-life, however, began with the crowning
of Henry’s successor. “When History drops her drums and trumpets and
learns to tell the story of Englishmen”--as he who wrote these words
has told it--“it will find the significance of Richard, not in his
crusade or in his weary wars along the Norman border, but in his lavish
recognition of municipal life.”[2241] In his first seven years alone,
we find him granting charters to Winchester, Northampton, Norwich,
Ipswich, Doncaster, Carlisle, Lincoln, Scarborough and York. Some of
these towns were only beginning their career of independence, and were
content with the first step of all, the purchase of the _firma burgi_;
some bought a confirmation of privileges already acquired; Lincoln in
1194 had got so far as to win from the king a formal recognition of its
right to complete self-government in a clause empowering its citizens
to elect their own reeve every year.[2242] King of knights-errant
and troubadours as he seemed, Richard, it is plain, could read the
signs of the times as clearly and act upon their warnings as promptly
and as wisely as any of his race; and we may be very sure that this
bold advance upon his father’s cautious policy towards the towns was
dictated by a sound political instinct far more than by the mere greed
of gain. John went still further in the same direction; the first
fifteen years of his reign afford examples of town-charters of every
type, from the elementary grant of the _firma burgi_ and the freedom of
the merchant-gild to the little Cornish borough of Helston[2243] up to
the crowning privilege bestowed upon the “barons of our city of London”
in 1215, of electing their own mayor every year.[2244]
[2233] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 165–168.
[2234] Madox, _Hist. Exch._, vol. i. p. 563, from Pipe Roll 16
Hen. II.
[2235] Madox, _Firma Burgi_, p. 35, from Pipe Roll 22 Hen. II.
[2236] Madox, _Hist. Exch._, vol. i. pp. 562, 563.
[2237] _Ib._ p. 562, from Pipe Roll 26 Hen. II.
[2238] Pipe Roll 1 Ric. I. (Hunter), p. 226.
[2239] Pipe Roll 2 Hen. II. (Hunter), pp. 4, 39, 52.
[2240] “Aurifabrorum,” “Bocheiorum,” “Piperariorum,”
“Parariorum,” “Peregrinorum.” There are four gilds “de Ponte”;
one “de S. Lazaro”; one “de Haliwell”; the rest are described
simply as “the gild whereof So-and-so is alderman.” Madox,
_Hist. Exch._, vol. i. p. 562, note _z_.
[2241] Green, _Stray Studies_, p. 216.
[2242] Northampton bought the _firma burgi_ in 1191, Norwich
in 1192, Ipswich and Doncaster in 1194 (Madox as above, pp.
399, 400, from Pipe Rolls); Winchester bought a confirmation
of its liberties in 1190 (Stubbs, _Select Chart._, pp. 265,
266), Carlisle in 1194, York and Scarborough in 1195 (Madox
as above). The Lincoln charter is given by Bishop Stubbs, as
above, pp. 266, 267; for its date see Pipe Roll 6 Ric. I.,
quoted by Madox, as above, p. 400.
[2243] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 313, 314.
[2244] _Ib._ pp. 314, 315. John’s town-charters are all in the
_Rotuli Chartarum_, edited by Sir T. D. Hardy for the Record
Commission. See also extracts from Pipe Rolls in Madox, _Hist.
Exch._, vol. i. pp. 400 _et seq._
From the charter of Henry I. to the establishment of the commune under
Richard the constitutional history of London is shrouded in obscurity.
The charter granted by Henry II. to the citizens, some time before
the end of 1158, is simply a confirmation of his grandfather’s.[2245]
During the first fifteen years of his reign two sheriffs of London
appear annually in the Pipe Rolls; in 1171 there were four, as there
had been in the thirty-first year of Henry I.; but in the twentieth
year of Henry II., 1171, we find that their number was again reduced to
two; and from 1182 onwards there seems to have been only one, till at
Michaelmas 1189 the accounts were rendered by Richard Fitz-Reiner and
Henry of Cornhill, both of whom continued in office till 1191.[2246]
In that year, as we have seen, the commune won its legal recognition
from John and Archbishop Walter of Rouen as representatives of the
absent king;[2247] and although the charter which Richard issued to the
citizens of London, shortly before his final departure from England in
1194, is a mere echo of his father’s,[2248] yet the existence of the
new corporation is thenceforth a recognized fact. John’s first charter
to London was issued from Normandy six weeks after his crowning. It
renewed the old grant of the sheriffdom of London and Middlesex, with
all rights and customs thereunto belonging, to the citizens and their
heirs, to have and to hold of the king and his heirs for ever. They
were to appoint as sheriffs any of their own number whom they might
choose, and to remove them at their pleasure; and for this privilege
they were to pay, through the said sheriffs, three hundred pounds
a year to the Treasury.[2249] The establishment of the commune had
reduced the sheriffs to the rank of mere financial officers, and the
real head of the civic administration was the mayor. The first mayor
of London, Henry Fitz-Aylwine, retained his office for life; and his
life extended beyond the limits of our present story. Yet the true
significance of that story is strikingly illustrated by the next
step in the history of London, a step which followed two years after
Fitz-Aylwine’s death. On May 9, 1215, John granted to the “barons of
the city of London” the right of annually electing their mayor.[2250]
Five weeks later the barons of England compelled him to sign, in the
meadows of Runnymede, the Great Charter which secured the liberties
not of one city only but of the whole English people; and among the
five-and-twenty men whom they chose from among themselves to enforce
its execution was Serlo the Mercer, mayor of London.[2251]
[2245] Charter in Riley’s _Munimenta Gildhallæ_, vol. ii. part
i. pp. 31, 32. It is witnessed by “archiepiscopo Cantuariæ” and
“Ricardo episcopo Londoniarum”; _i.e._ Richard of London who
died in May 1162, and Theobald who died in April 1161. As it is
certain that neither of these two prelates ever crossed the sea
after Henry’s accession, the charter must have been issued in
England, and therefore before Henry went abroad in August 1158.
[2246] Stubbs, _Constit. Hist._, vol. i. p. 629.
[2247] Above, p. 301.
[2248] Riley, _Munim. Gildh._, vol. ii. pt. i. pp. 248, 249.
Date, Winchester, April 23, 1194.
[2249] Riley, _Munim. Gildh._, vol. ii. pt. i. pp. 249–251.
Date, Bonneville, July 5, 1199.
[2250] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 314, 315.
[2251] Mat. Paris, _Chron. Maj._ (Luard), vol. ii. p. 605.
Little, indeed, as the burghers themselves may have dreamed of any
such thing, the highest importance of their struggle for municipal
liberty lies in this, that its fruits were to be reaped by a far larger
community than was inclosed within the town-walls. It was from the
burghers that their brethren in the rural districts caught once more
the spirit of freedom which ages of oppression had well-nigh crushed
out of their hearts. “‘Ketel’s case’” at Bury S. Edmund’s--the case
of a tenant of the abbey who, dwelling “outside the gate,” was hanged
for a theft of which he had been found guilty by the Norman process
of the judicial duel usual in the manor-courts, and over whose fate
the townsmen, rejoicing in the Old-English right of compurgation which
they still retained, grew so bitterly sarcastic that the abbot and
the “saner part of the convent” were driven by terror of a peasant
revolt to admit their rural tenants to a share in the judicial
franchise of the town[2252]--was in all probability only one out of
many. The history of this same abbey of S. Edmund’s shews us how even
the villeins were rising into a position more like that of their free
brethren, how the old badges of serfdom, the heavy labour-rents, the
hard customs, were vanishing one by one, and how in this process of
enfranchisement the boroughs led the way.[2253] “The ancient customs
belonging to the cellarer’s office, as we have seen them”--that is,
as Jocelyn of Brakelond, who was a monk of S. Edmund’s from 1172
to 1211, had seen them in the old custom-roll of the house--“were
these: The cellarer had his messuage and barn by the well of Scurun,
where he solemnly held his court for the trial of thieves and of all
pleas and quarrels; and there he received the pledges of his men, and
enrolled them, and renewed them every year, and got gain by it, as
the reeve did in the portmannimot. This messuage was the homestead
of Beodric, who of old time was lord of this township, whence it was
called Beodricesworth; whose demesne lands are now in the demesne of
the cellarer; and what is now called the _aver-land_ was the land of
his rustics. Now the sum of his tenements and those of his men was
three hundred and thirty acres, which are lands still belonging to
the township, whereof the services, when the town was made free, were
divided into two parts; so that the sacristan or the reeve should
receive the quit-rent, that is, twopence on every acre; and the
cellarer should have the ploughings and other services, that is, the
ploughing of one rood for every acre, without food (which custom is
observed still); he was also to have the folds wherein all the men of
the township (except the seneschal, who has his own fold) were bound
to put their sheep (this custom, too, is observed still). He was also
to have the _aver-penny_,[2254] that is twopence for every thirty
acres; this custom was changed before the death of Abbot Hugh (1180).
For the men of the township had to go at the cellarer’s bidding to
Lakenheath, to fetch a load of eels from Southrey, and often they came
back with their carts empty, and so they had their trouble without any
benefit to the cellarer; wherefore it was agreed between them that
every thirty acres should pay a penny a year, and the men should stay
at home. At the present time, however, these lands are so cut up that
scarcely anybody knows from whom the payment is due; so that whereas
I have seen the cellarer receive twenty-seven pence in a year, now he
can hardly get tenpence farthing. Moreover, the cellarer used to have
control over the roads outside the township, so that no one might dig
chalk or clay without his leave. He was also wont to summon the fullers
of the township to lend cloths for carrying his salt; otherwise he
would forbid them the use of the waters, and seize whatever cloths he
found there; which customs are observed unto this day.” “Moreover the
cellarer alone ought, or used, to have one bull free in the fields
of this township; but now several persons have them.” “Moreover the
cellarer used to warrant those who owed service to his court, so that
they were exempt from scot and tallage; but now it is not so, because
the burghers say that those who do service at the court ought to be
exempt for their service, but not for the burgage which they hold in
the town, and forasmuch as they and their wives do publicly buy and
sell in the market.”[2255] After the affair of Ketel, in fact, the
cellarer’s court was merged in that of the town; “it was decreed that
his men should come to the toll-house with the others, and there renew
their pledges, and be written in the reeve’s roll, and there give to
the reeve the penny which is called _borth-silver_, and the cellarer
should have half of it (but he gets nothing at all of it now); and all
this was done, that all might enjoy equal liberty.”[2256]
[2252] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), p. 74. See Mr. Green’s _Stray
Studies_, pp. 222–224, and _Hist. Eng. People_, vol. i. pp.
219, 220.
[2253] On all this see Mr. Green’s _Abbot and Town_, in _Stray
Studies_, pp. 213–229.
[2254] “The money paid by the tenant in commutation of the
service (_avera_) of performing any work for his lord by horse
or ox, or by carriage with either.” Greenwell, Glossary to
_Boldon Buke_ (Surtees Soc.)
[2255] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), pp. 75, 76.
[2256] _Ib._ p. 74.
“That all might enjoy equal liberty”--Jocelyn’s words had a
significance wider and deeper than he himself could know, wider and
deeper than could be known perhaps even to his abbot from whom they
were probably echoed; although it is clear from almost every page
of Jocelyn’s story that Abbot Sampson of S. Edmund’s was a far more
enlightened and far-seeing statesman than most of the great landowners
of his day, whether secular or tonsured. The rural tenants of S. Edmund
in his time had evidently made a good deal more progress towards
enfranchisement than those of some other great houses, such as, for
example, the abbey of Abingdon. In 1185, on the death of Abbot Roger
of Abingdon, a dispute between the “obedientiaries,” or officers of
the convent to whose support various portions of its revenues were
assigned, and the steward appointed by the king to take charge of
the abbot’s property during the vacancy of his office, led to the
drawing-up of a consuetudinary,[2257] which it would be interesting
to compare with the earlier “Black Book” of Peterborough. A large
proportion of the tenants’ dues were paid in money; but there were
still considerable remnants of the older system. The chamberlain of
the abbey, for instance, had an acre of land at Culham, which the men
of that township were bound to reap and carry to make beds for the
monks. The hay to be laid “under the monks’ feet when they bathed” was
supplied in like manner from a meadow at Stockgrave. A tenant named
Daniel of Colebrook was bound, besides paying a rent of five shillings,
to furnish the chamberlain whenever he went to London with hay for his
horses, with wood and salt, and with straw for his bed. At Welsford,
near Newbury, there were twenty-two “cotset-lands,” whose tenants held
them by their services as swineherds, bedels (or messengers of the
chamberlain’s court), shepherds, hedgewards and such like. Of eleven
rent-paying tenants in the same township, one owed, besides his rent
of twenty-seven pence, his personal service for getting in hay and
stacking corn in August. As the whole township was in demesne, its
inhabitants paid a tribute to the lord--in this case the chamberlain of
the abbey--for the pannage of their pigs; they had also to furnish the
services of one man for harvesting in August, and to lend their ploughs
for bene-work. The men of Boxhole, Benham, Easton and Weston did the
like. At Boxhole, out of twelve tenants, eight were bound, besides
paying their rent, to plough an acre of the demesne and sow it with
their own seed; and seven of these had moreover to carry hay and corn.
One Berner and his sons held a “cotset-land” by a rent of six sextaries
of honey to the cellarer and thirty-one pence to the chamberlain.[2258]
There were twenty-six tenants withdrawn from demesne, of whom six owed
work in August, in addition to their rent; and there were five acres of
meadow which had to be mowed and carried by five men of the township.
At Benham, out of twenty-four tenants, eleven were “cotsetles”; three
of these were servants of the chamberlain, holding their lands by
their service; the rest were to hold by rent or by work, as the lord
might choose[2259]--an arrangement which applied also to the cotters
of Boxhole.[2260] Of the remaining thirteen tenants at Benham, six
paid rent only; the rest were bound also to plough and sow an acre or
half an acre apiece, and to carry corn and hay.[2261] One was excused
the ploughing and sowing, doubtless in consideration of her sex and
condition--she was “Ernive a widow.”[2262] The whole township owed a
customary payment or church-shot of forty-six hens.[2263]
[2257] _Hist. Mon. Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. pp. 297, 298.
[2258] _Hist. Mon. Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. pp. 300–302.
[2259] _Ib._ pp. 303–305.
[2260] _Ib._ p. 303.
[2261] And this though one of them was no less a personage
than _Gaufridus vicecomes_! What can this mean? _Hist. Mon.
Abingdon_ as above, pp. 304, 305.
[2262] _Ib._ p. 304.
[2263] _Ib._ p. 305.
On the manor of Weston the dues were thus distributed: Robert of
Pont-de-l’Arche held four acres of the abbot “by the service of half
a knight.” One acre belonged to the church of the township; half a
hide was held by John of S. Helen’s, on what terms we are not told.
Of the remainder, over which the chamberlain was lord, half a hide
was in demesne; the rest was distributed in ten portions, held by
thirteen tenants--a hide or half a hide being in three cases held by
two persons conjointly. Two hides and a half were for work or for
gavel, at the option of the lord; in actual practice, however, there
were only two cotters who owed labour instead of, or in addition
to, their money-rent. On the other hand, the right of poundage, or
exemption from impounding of cattle, was paid for in this village by
the ploughing of two acres.[2264] The township of Berton and several
others were bound to furnish sumpter-horses for conveying fish to
the abbey-kitchen thrice a year; the persons responsible for this
service had to pay their own travelling expenses and those of their
horses; but they got each a loaf from the abbey when they left; and
those who could not fulfil the service were allowed to compound for
it with the kitchener “as best they could.” The same manors rendered
each five hundred eggs on the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed
Virgin, at Christmas, Easter, Rogation-tide and Pentecost; and three
hundred at Candlemas and Quinquagesima, besides eighteen hens apiece
at the festivals of S. Martin and at Christmas. They also gave on the
Wednesday before Easter a hundred herrings, which on the following
Thursday were distributed to the poor;[2265] and each of them sent
moreover to the monks’ kitchen, in the course of the year, besides the
eggs and hens already enumerated, twenty-four bushels of beans.[2266]
Eight fisheries were bound to furnish each a certain number of eels on
Ash-Wednesday;[2267] the fishermen who carried the eels to the hall
were entitled to receive thence two loaves apiece.[2268] From another
fishery a money-rent of seventeen shillings was due, paid in three
terms; and its holder owed church-shot of twelve hens.[2269] Berton
furnished five loads of straw, and Culham as many of hay, three times a
year--on Christmas Eve, Easter Eve, and All Saints’ Eve--for strewing
the refectory.[2270] When the chamberlain went to Winchelcombe fair,
the men of Dumbleton were bound to bring home for him whatever he
purchased there; the same duty fell to the tenantry of Welford when he
went to the fair at Winchester.[2271]
[2264] _Hist. Mon. Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. pp. 305, 306.
[2265] _Ib._ pp. 307, 308.
[2266] _Ib._ p. 323.
[2267] _Ib._ pp. 308, 323.
[2268] _Ib._ p. 308.
[2269] _Ib._ p. 309.
[2270] _Ib._ p. 313.
[2271] _Ib._ pp. 326, 327.
If we compare this Abingdon consuetudinary of 1185 with the
Peterborough Black Book of 1128, the main result seems to be this:
the Abingdon dues are quite as heavy, if not heavier, but the
labour-services are much lighter. We must not indeed assume that the
difference is wholly owing to progress made during the half-century
which elapsed between the compilation of the two books; the customs
of different localities varied in all ages, and those of Abingdon may
never have been so hard as those of Peterborough. On the estates of the
bishop of Durham, on the other hand, when Hugh of Puiset took account
of his dues in 1183, the old labour-rents and customs seem to have
subsisted almost without alteration. A large proportion of the villeins
on the bishop’s manors were holders of two bovates or oxgangs of thirty
acres each, for which each man paid two shillings and sixpence for
scot-pennies, half a chalder of oats, sixteen pence for aver-pennies,
five cart-loads of wood, two hens and ten eggs; he had to work for the
lord three days every week throughout the year except Easter-week,
Whitsun-week and the twelve days of Christmas; moreover, he and all his
family, except the house-wife, had to do in autumn four days boon-work
in reaping; besides this, he had to reap three roods of _averipe_ (ripe
oats), and plough and harrow three roods of _averere_ (oat-stubble).
Each villein plough had to plough and harrow two acres; on this
occasion the villeins had a corrody from the bishop, and so they had on
occasion of a great boon-work. They were to harrow whenever required;
to perform services of carting, for which they got every man a loaf; to
make each one booth for the fair of S. Cuthbert; “and when they make
lodges” (possibly for the bishop’s hunting) “and cart wood, they are
free of other work.” These were the services due from twenty-two out
of the thirty-six tenants on the manor of Boldon. Of the remainder,
twelve were “cotmen,” holding each twelve acres and working throughout
the year, except at the above-named seasons, two days a week, and
rendering twelve hens and sixty eggs. One man held two oxgangs of
thirty-seven acres, at a rent of half a mark; another was the pounder,
who held twelve acres, received from each plough one thrave of corn,
and rendered twenty-four hens and five hundred eggs. The mill paid
five marks and a half. The villeins were bound to give their labour
every year, if required, for the building of a house (perhaps a
hunting-lodge) forty feet long and fifteen feet wide; in that case
they were forgiven fourpence for aver-pennies. The whole township
rendered seventeen shillings for cornage, and one cow.[2272] Clevedon
and Whitburn contained twenty-eight villeins and twelve cotmen whose
services were the same as at Boldon; besides these and the pounder,
there were four other tenants; one held two bovates of twenty-four
acres at a rent of sixteenpence, and “went on the bishop’s errands”;
one held sixty acres and a toft at eightpence, and fulfilled the same
duty; the other two held their lands at a money-rent only.[2273] At
Sedgefield there were fifty-one tenants, of whom twenty were villeins
holding and labouring on the same terms as their brethren at Boldon;
twenty more were “farmers,” holding two bovates apiece, paying five
shillings, ploughing and harrowing half an acre, and finding two men
to mow, two to reap, and two to make hay, for two days, and also one
cart for two days to carry corn, and the same to cart hay; they also
did four days’ boon-work in autumn with all their families except the
housewives. The reeve, the smith and the carpenter held land by their
service; the pounder got his thraves of corn and paid his dues in hens
and eggs as on the other manors. Five _bordarii_ held five tofts, paid
five shillings, and did four days’ boon-work. William of Oldacres and
Uhtred of Butterwick held lands, whose extent is not specified, at a
rent of sixteen shillings and half a mark respectively.[2274] At Norton
there were thirty villeins holding and labouring like those of Boldon,
save that for lack of pasture-land they owed no cornage; and twenty
farmers, whose tenure was much the same as that of the farmers of
Sedgefield. Alan of Normanton held one carucate for ten shillings, and
had to find thirty-two men for a day’s work when required, four carts
for one day or two for two days for carrying corn, and the same for
carting hay; besides which his men, if he had any, were to work four
boon-days in autumn with all their families except the housewives, but
Alan himself and his own household were free of this service. Adam,
son of Gilbert of Hardwick, held a large piece of land by a money-rent.
There was a mill, with eight acres and a meadow, and rendering twenty
marks; a pounder, holding on the usual terms; and there were twelve
cotmen, holding tofts and crofts, and paying partly in money, partly in
work.[2275] The palatine bishopric, it is clear, was an old-fashioned
district where innovations of any kind were slow to penetrate. Even
here, however, the newer system of money-payment in commutation of
service was beginning to make its appearance. The tenures on the manor
of Whickham had undergone a sweeping change, apparently not long
before Bishop Hugh’s survey was drawn up. On this manor there were
thirty-five villeins, holding each an oxgang of fifteen acres. Each
of these had been wont to pay sixteenpence, and to work three days a
week throughout the year, three boon-days in autumn with all his family
except his wife, and a fourth boon-day with two men; in their ordinary
work they had to mow the grass, to cut and carry the hay, to reap and
carry the corn; and over and above this, they had to plough and harrow
two acres of _averere_ with each plough; for this, however, they had a
corrody. They had also, in the course of their work, to “make a house”
forty feet long and fifteen feet wide, to make three fisheries in the
Tyne, and to do carting and carrying like the villeins of Boldon;
they gave nine shillings cornage, one cow, and for every oxgang one
hen and ten eggs. “Now, however,” adds the record, “the said manor of
Whickham is at farm”--demesne, villeins, mill, fisheries and all:--it
may possibly, like its neighbour Ryton, have been let at farm to the
tenants themselves; but at any rate, its entire services and dues,
except a small tribute of hens and eggs, were commuted for a rent of
six-and-twenty pounds.[2276]
[2272] _Boldon Buke_ (Greenwell), pp. 3, 4. Cornage was a
“payment made in commutation of a return of cattle” (_ib._
Glossary).
[2273] _Ib._ p. 5.
[2274] _Ib._ p. 11.
[2275] _Boldon Buke_ (Greenwell), pp. 12, 13.
[2276] _Ib._ pp. 33, 34.
On the whole, the glimpses which we get of the condition of the rural
population of England under the Angevin kings seem to indicate that
they were by no means excluded from a share in the progress of the
kingdom at large. Even if their dues had grown heavier, this surely
points to an advance in agricultural prosperity and of the material
ease and comfort which are its natural results. The spread of industry
shewed itself in many ways. In the towns we can trace it in the growing
importance of the handicraftsmen, proved by the jealousy with which
their gilds were regarded by the central government and still more by
the civic authorities. The weavers seem to have been special objects
of civic dislike; in most of the great towns they were treated as a
sort of outcasts by the governing body; and in 1201 the London citizens
bought of John, at the price of twenty silver marks a year and sixty
marks down, a charter authorizing them to turn the weavers out of the
city altogether. The sequel of this bargain is eminently characteristic
of John; but it is equally significant of the growing influence of
the craftsmen. The king took the citizens’ money and gave them the
charter which they desired, but he made it null and void by granting
his protection to the weavers as before, merely exacting from them an
annual payment of twenty marks instead of eighteen.[2277]
[2277] Riley, _Munim. Gildh._, vol. ii. pt. i. introd. pp.
lxi–lxiii.
Hand in hand with the growth of industry went the growth of trade.
Markets and fairs were springing up everywhere, and a keen commercial
rivalry sprang up with them. The little borough of S. Edmund’s set
up a “merchant-gild,” whose members insisted that all who did not
belong to it must pay toll in their market.[2278] The great success of
Abingdon fair in Henry’s early years stirred up the jealousy of both
Wallingford and Oxford, and their remonstrances compelled the king to
order that inquisition should be made, through twenty-four of the old
men of the shire “who were living in his grandfather’s time,” whether
the obnoxious little township had in those days enjoyed the privilege
of a market. The case was tried in full shire-moot at Farnborough; the
twenty-four elders were duly elected, and swore that Abingdon had had
a full market in the time of King Henry the First. The jurors were
however challenged by the opposing party, whereupon Henry ordered “the
men of Wallingford and the whole county of Berkshire” to meet before
his justices at Oxford, and there to choose fresh recognitors. This
time the jury could not agree among themselves. The Wallingford jurors
swore that they remembered nothing sold at Abingdon in the first King
Henry’s reign except bread and ale; the Oxford men admitted more
than this, but not a “full market”--nothing brought by cart or boat
(there was an old-standing quarrel between Oxford and Abingdon about
boat-cargoes and river-tolls); the shiremen acknowledged that there had
been a “full market,” but doubted whether goods were carried thither
by any boats save those belonging to the abbot himself. The justiciar,
Earl Robert of Leicester, who was presiding over the court in person,
transmitted these various opinions to the king without venturing to
decide the case. As it chanced, however, he could--so at least the
Abingdon story ran--add to them an useful reminiscence of his own
childhood: he had himself seen a full market at Abingdon not only in
the days of King Henry I., but as far back as the days of King William,
when he, Earl Robert, was a little boy in the abbey-school. And so the
men of Abingdon won their case.[2279]
[2278] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), p. 74.
[2279] _Hist. Mon. Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. pp. 227–229.
This happened 1158–1161. Mr. Eyton (_Itin. Hen. II._, pref.
pp. v, vi) denies on chronological grounds the authenticity
of Earl Robert’s supposed witness to the state of affairs in
the Conqueror’s time. He does not adduce his proofs; I can
therefore only leave this part of the matter undecided, and
take the Abingdon story as I find it.
Disputes of this kind, however, were not always so peacefully settled.
Some forty years later--in 1201--the monks of Ely set up, under
the protection of a royal charter, a market at Lakenheath, within
the “liberties” of S. Edmund’s abbey. The chapter of S. Edmund’s,
“together with their friends and neighbours,” sent to Ely an amicable
remonstrance against this proceeding, adding that they would willingly
make good the fifteen marks which the monks of Ely had paid for their
charter, if these latter would consent to forego the use of it. The
remonstrance however produced no effect. The brotherhood of S. Edmund’s
therefore demanded a recognition to declare whether the new market had
been set up to their injury, and to the injury of the market at their
own town. The verdict of the recognitors decided that it was so. The
next step was to inform the king, and ascertain from him the exact
tenour of his charter to Ely; search was made in the royal register,
and it was found that the market had been granted only on condition
that it should not damage the interests of other markets in the
neighbourhood. Hereupon the king, for a promise of forty marks, gave to
S. Edmund’s a charter providing that no market should thenceforth be
set up within the liberties of the abbey save by the abbot’s consent;
and he issued orders to the justiciar, Geoffrey Fitz-Peter, for the
abolition of the market at Lakenheath. The justiciar sent on the order
to the sheriff of Suffolk; and the sheriff, having no jurisdiction
within the liberties of S. Edmund’s, forwarded it to the abbot for
execution. Next market-day the hundred-reeve came to Lakenheath, and
shewing the letters of king and sheriff, supported by the testimony
of the freemen, forbade the market in the king’s name; he was however
met with nothing but contempt and abuse. The abbot, who was in London
at the time, after consulting with some “wise men” there, wrote to his
bailiffs bidding them assemble all the men of S. Edmund’s with their
horses and arms, overthrow the market by force, and take prisoners as
many of the buyers and sellers as they could. In the middle of the
night some six hundred well-armed men set out from S. Edmund’s for
Lakenheath. When they reached it the market was deserted; all the
stall-holders had fled. The prior of Ely was at Lakenheath with his
bailiffs, having come that same night in expectation of the intended
attack; but he “would not come out of his house”; so the bailiffs of S.
Edmund’s, after vainly demanding pledges from him that he would “stand
to right” in the abbey-court, seized the butchers’ trestles and the
planks which formed the stalls, as well as the cart-horses, sheep and
oxen, “yea, and all the beasts of the field,” and carried them away to
Icklingham. The prior’s bailiffs hurried in pursuit, and begged to have
their goods on pledge for fifteen days, which was granted. Within the
fifteen days came a writ summoning the abbot to answer for this affair
at the Exchequer, and to restore the captured animals. “For the bishop
of Ely, who was a man of ready and eloquent speech, had complained in
his own person to the justiciar and the great men of England, saying
that an unheard-of insult had been done to S. Etheldreda in time of
peace; wherefore many were greatly stirred up against the abbot.”[2280]
[2280] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), pp. 98, 99.
The developement of foreign commerce, resulting from the wide-spread
relations of the Angevin kings with lands on both sides of the sea
which encompassed their island-realm, woke a rivalry no less keen
between some of the great trading cities, although they might shew it
in less rough and ready fashion than the champions of the mercantile
privileges of S. Edmund’s. One interesting illustration has recently
come to light, in a writ of Henry II. to the bailiffs of Dublin in
favour of the citizens of Chester. Henry, as we know, had granted
to the men of Bristol the right of colonizing Dublin and holding it
of him and his heirs with the same liberties and privileges as were
enjoyed by Bristol itself. Bristol and Chester had for ages been rivals
in the trade with Ireland; Chester now saw itself in imminent danger
of being altogether shut out of that trade, an exclusion which would
have meant little less than ruin to the city. We can hardly doubt
that its citizens appealed to the king for a reservation of their
commercial privileges in Dublin as against the Bristol merchants.
At any rate, Henry in 1175 or 1176 issued a writ to the bailiffs of
Dublin commanding that the burghers of Chester should be free to buy
and sell at Dublin as they had been wont to do, and should have the
same rights, liberties and free customs there as they had had in his
grandfather’s days.[2281] Yet more important than the trade of the
western seaports with Ireland was that of the eastern coast, not only
with the continental dominions of the Angevin house, but with almost
the whole of Europe. Not the least beneficial result of the Angevins’
renewal of the old political ties between England and the Empire was
the increase of trade which it helped to bring from the merchant-cities
of northern Germany and the Low Countries to the port of London.
Nor were the kings themselves blind to the advantage of these
commercial relations. Richard on the eve of his return from captivity
in 1194 granted to the citizens of Cöln a gildhall in London, “with
all their other customs and demands,” for an annual payment of two
shillings.[2282] The hall of the other Teutonic merchants--famous in
later days under the name of the Steel-yard--was probably established
about the same period; and early in the following century we find
an elaborate and interesting code of regulations for the trade of
the Lorrainers, the “men of the Emperor of Germany,” the Danes and
the Norwegians.[2283] The developement of commerce brought with it
a corresponding growth of riches, and of the material comforts and
refinements of life. Domestic architecture began to improve. Henry
Fitz-Aylwine issued at the opening of his mayoralty an “Assize” which
has been described as “the earliest English Building Act,” and which at
any rate shews that the civic authorities were earnestly endeavouring
to secure health and comfort in the houses within their jurisdiction,
and also to guard against the risk of fire which had ruined so many
citizens in times past.[2284] Ecclesiastical architecture progressed
still more rapidly; church-building or rebuilding went on all over the
country on a scale which proves how great was the advance, both in
artistic taste and material wealth, which England had made under the
just rule and peaceful administration of her first Angevin king. At
the opening of John’s reign the citizens of London were contemplating
an important architectural work of another kind: they were planning
to replace the wooden bridge over the Thames with a bridge of stone.
Degenerate representative as he was in more important respects of the
“great builders” of Anjou, John had yet inherited a sufficient share
of their tastes to feel interested in such an undertaking as this; and
in April 1202 we find him writing to the mayor and citizens of London
to recommend them an architect, Isenbert, master of the schools at
Saintes, whose skill in the construction of bridges had been lately
proved at Saintes and at La Rochelle.[2285] The citizens however seem
not to have adopted the king’s suggestion; they found an architect
among themselves, in the person of Peter, chaplain or curate of S. Mary
Colechurch--the little church beneath whose shadow S. Thomas the martyr
was born. It was Peter who “began the stone bridge at London”; and in a
chapel on that bridge his body found its appropriate resting-place when
he died in 1205.[2286]
[2281] The real meaning of this writ is pointed out by Mr. J.
H. Round in the _Academy_, May 29, 1886 (new issue, No. 734, p.
381). The writ itself is there reprinted from the Eighth Report
of the Royal Commission on Historical MSS., where it has been
wrongly interpreted, owing to a misreading of the word which
stands for Dublin.
[2282] Riley, _Munim. Gildh._, vol. ii. pt. i. introd. p. xli,
from _Placita de quo warranto_, p. 468.
[2283] Riley as above, pp. 61, 64, and introd. pp. xxxv–xxxix.
[2284] Fitz-Aylwine’s Assize is printed by Mr. Stapleton from
the _Liber de Antiquis Legibus_, pp. 206–211. It is there dated
1189.
[2285] Rymer, _Fœdera_, vol. i. p. 83.
[2286] Ann. Waverl. a. 1205 (Luard, _Ann. Monast._, vol. ii.
pp. 256, 257).
There can be little doubt that a large part of the means for this
developement of commercial and architectural energy was furnished by
the Jews. The Jewish settlements increased rapidly both in numbers
and in importance under Henry II. In the Pipe Rolls of his first
five years we find, in addition to the London Jews who appeared
in the thirty-first year of his grandfather, and those of Oxford
and Lincoln of whom there are traces in the next reign, Jewries at
Norwich, Cambridge, Thetford and Bungay, as well as at an unnamed
place in Suffolk, which from other evidence seems to have been Bury
S. Edmund’s;[2287] and we have already seen that before Henry’s death
there were important Hebrew colonies at Lynn, Stamford, York, and many
other places. At Winchester the Jews were so numerous and so prosperous
that a writer in Richard’s early years calls it their Jerusalem.[2288]
The great increase in their numbers throughout England during Henry’s
reign is shewn by the fact that in 1177 he found it necessary to grant
them permission for the making of a Jewish burial-ground outside the
walls of every city in England, instead of sending all their dead to be
buried in London, as had been the practice hitherto.[2289] Legally, the
Jews were still simply chattels of the king. Practically, they were
masters of the worldly interests of a large number of his Christian
subjects, and of a large portion of the wealth of his realm. Without
their loans many a great and successful trading venture could never
have been risked, many a splendid church could never have been built,
nay, many a costly undertaking of the king himself might have been
brought to a standstill for lack of funds necessary to its completion.
The abbey-church of S. Edmund was rebuilt with money borrowed in great
part, at exorbitant interest, from Jewish capitalists. Abbot Hugh,
when he died in 1173, left his convent in utter fiscal bondage to two
wealthy Jews, Isaac son of Rabbi Joses, and Benedict of Norwich.[2290]
The sacred vessels and jewels belonging to Lincoln minster were in
the same year redeemed by Geoffrey, then bishop-elect, from Aaron, a
rich Jew of the city who had had them in pledge for seven years or
more.[2291] In 1187 Aaron died; his treasure was seized for the king,
and a large part of it sent over sea. The ship which bore it went
down between Shoreham and Dieppe, and the sum of the lost treasure
was great enough for its loss to be chronicled as a grave misfortune
by the treasurer, Bishop Richard Fitz-Nigel;[2292] while two years
later the affairs of the dead Jew still made a prominent figure in
the royal accounts.[2293] His house, as it stands at the head of the
“Steep Hill” of Lincoln to this day, is one of the best examples of a
mode of domestic architecture to which Christian townsfolk had scarcely
yet begun to aspire, but which was already growing common among those
of his race: a house built entirely of stone, in place of the wooden
or rubble walls and thatched roofs which, even after Fitz-Aylwine’s
Assize, still formed the majority of dwellings in the capital itself.
[2287] Jews at Norwich, Pipe Roll 2 Hen. II. (Hunter), p.
8; Cambridge, _ib._ p. 15; Thetford and Bungay, 5 Hen. II.
(Pipe Roll Soc.), p. 12. In 4 Hen. II. (Hunter), p. 127, the
sheriff of Suffolk renders an account of twenty silver marks
“pro Judæis”; as we find Jews at S. Edmund’s at the opening of
Richard’s reign, it seems probable that they are the persons
referred to here.
[2288] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 62.
[2289] _Gesta Hen._ (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 182.
[2290] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), pp. 2, 3.
[2291] Gir. Cambr. _Vita S. Remig._, c. 24 (Dimock and Freeman,
vol. vii. p. 36).
[2292] _Gesta Hen._ (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 5.
[2293] Pipe Roll 1 Ric. I. (Hunter), pp. 8, 59, 219, 226, 229,
246.
It is no wonder that these people, with their untold stores of wealth,
their independence of all ordinary jurisdictions, their exemption
from all the burthens of civil life, their voluntary exclusion from
the common brotherhood of Christendom, their strange aspect and their
mysterious language, were objects of universal jealousy, suspicion and
hatred, which they on their part took but little pains to conciliate
or allay. The religious feelings of the whole population of Oxford
were outraged by a Jew who publicly mocked at S. Frideswide amid the
solemnities of her festival-day, well knowing that neither prior nor
bishop, chancellor nor portreeve, dared lift a finger to check or to
punish him.[2294] Darker stories than this, however, were whispered
against his race. They were charged not only with ruining many
Englishmen of all classes by their usury, and with openly insulting
the Christian sacraments and blaspheming the Christians’ Lord, but
with buying Christians for money in order to crucify them.[2295] A
boy, afterwards canonized as S. William, was said to have been thus
martyred at Norwich in 1137;[2296] another, Robert, at S. Edmund’s in
1181;[2297] and a third at Winchester in 1192.[2298] Little as we may
be inclined to believe such tales, we can scarcely wonder that they
found credit at the time, and that the popular hatred of the Jews went
on deepening till it broke out in the massacres of 1190. That outbreak
compelled the king to interfere in behalf of his “chattels”; but the
fines with which he punished it, though they deterred the people from
any further attempts to get rid of the Jews by force, could not alter
the general feeling. At S. Edmund’s Abbot Sampson, immediately after
the massacre, sought and obtained a royal writ authorizing him to turn
all the remaining Jews out of the town at once and for ever;[2299] and
in 1194 Richard, or Hubert Walter in his name, found it needful to make
an elaborate ordinance for the regulation of Jewish loans throughout
the realm and the security of Jewish bonds. Such loans were to be made
only in six or seven appointed places, before two “lawful Christians,”
two “lawful Jews,” two “lawful writers,” and two clerks specially
named in the ordinance; the deed was to be drawn up in the form of an
indenture; one half, sealed with the borrower’s seal, was to be given
to the Jewish lender; the other half was to be deposited in a common
chest having three locks; the two Christians were to keep one key, the
two Jews another, and the two royal clerks the third; and the chest
was to be sealed with three seals, one being affixed by each of the
parties who held the keys. The clerks were to have a roll containing
copies of all such deeds; for every deed threepence were to be paid,
half that sum by the Jew and half by his creditor; the two scribes got
a penny each, and the keeper of the roll the third; and no transactions
whatsoever in connexion with these Hebrew bonds was henceforth to take
place save in accordance with these regulations.[2300]
[2294] _Mirac. S. Fridesw._, in _Acta SS._, vol. lvi. p. 576
(October 19).
[2295] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 28.
[2296] Eng. Chron. a. 1137.
[2297] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), p. 12.
[2298] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 60.
[2299] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), p. 33.
[2300] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 266, 267. These
“Capitula de Judæis” form the twenty-fourth chapter of _Forma
procedendi in placitis Coronæ Regiæ_ (see above, p. 337),
printed also in Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 259–263.
It is just possible that this growth of anti-Jewish feeling may have
helped in some degree to the growth of a sense of national unity among
the other dwellers in the land. All Christians, to whatever race they
might belong, whatever tongue they might speak, could not but feel
themselves to be one people as against these Oriental intruders. It is
at any rate clear that of the foreign elements which had been infused
into the population of England during the hundred and forty years which
had passed since Duke William landed at Pevensey, the Hebrew element
was the only one which had not amalgamated with the native mass. The
fusion in blood between Normans and English, which we saw making rapid
progress under Henry I., was before the end of his grandson’s reign
so far complete that the practice of “presentment of Englishry”--that
is, the privilege whereby the hundred in which a man was found slain
escaped paying the murder-fine to the treasury, if it could prove that
the victim was not of Norman blood--had to be given up because the two
nationalities had become so intermixed in every class above that of
serfs that it could hardly ever be made out to which of them any man
really belonged.[2301] In this fusion the English element, as it was
far the larger, was also the weightier and the stronger. In the matter
of speech it was fast regaining its supremacy. Foreign priests and
foreign prelates were learning to speak and to preach to the English
people in their own tongue; Norman barons and knights were learning
to talk English with their English-speaking followers and dependents;
some of them were learning to talk it with their own wives.[2302]
If the pure Teutonic speech of our forefathers had suffered some
slight corruption from foreign influences, Walter Map’s legend of
the well at Marlborough whereof whosoever drank spoke bad French for
ever after[2303] may hint that the language of the conquerors was
becoming somewhat Anglicized in the mouths of some at least of their
descendants; and the temper of these adoptive Englishmen was changing
yet more rapidly than their speech. Of the many individual figures
which stand out before us, full of character and life, in the pages of
the twelfth-century historians, the one who in all ages, from his own
day to ours, has been unanimously singled out as the typical Englishman
is the son of Gilbert of Rouen and Rohesia of Caen.
[2301] _Dial. de Scacc._, l. i. c. 10 (Stubbs, _Select
Charters_, pp. 201, 202).
[2302] See the story of Helwyse de Morville and her
husband--parents of the Hugh de Morville who was one of the
murderers of S. Thomas--in Will. Cant. (Robertson, _Becket_,
vol. i.), p. 128.
[2303] W. Map, _De Nug. Cur._, dist. v. c. 6 (Wright, pp. 235,
236).
The whole policy of the Angevin kings tended to mould their insular
subjects into an united English nation. Their equal administration
completed that wiping-out of local distinctions which had been begun
by the wisdom of the Norman kings and helped on by the confusion of
the civil war; their developement of old English methods of judicial
and administrative procedure brought the English people again visibly
and tangibly to the forefront of affairs. Even those very qualities
and tendencies which were most un-English in the Angevins themselves
helped indirectly to a like result. The almost world-wide range of
their political interests gave England once more a place among the
nations, and a place far more important than any which she had ever
before held. For, above all, it was England that they represented in
the eyes of the continental powers; it was as “Kings of the English”
that they stood before the world; and it was as Kings of the English
that their successors were to stand there still, when the Angevin
empire had crumbled into dust. On the eve of that catastrophe the new
England found a voice. The English tongue once more asserted its right
to a place among the literary tongues of Europe. The higher English
poetry, which had slumbered ever since the days of Cadmon, suddenly
woke again to life among the Worcestershire hills. The story of the
origin of Layamon’s _Brut_ can never be told half so well as in the
poet’s own words. “A priest there was in the land, Layamon was he
named; he was Leovenath’s son; may the Lord be gracious to him! He
dwelt at Ernley, at a noble church by Severn’s bank--good it there
seemed to him!--hard by Radstone, where he read books. It came into
his mind, and into his chief thoughts, that he would tell the noble
deeds of Englishmen--what they were called, and whence they came, who
first owned English land.... Layamon began to journey wide over this
land, and got the noble books that he took for models. He took the
English book that Saint Beda made; another he took, in Latin, that
Saint Albin made, and the fair Austin, who brought baptism in hither;
a third book he took, and laid there in the midst, that a French clerk
made, Wace was he called, who well could write, and he gave it to the
noble Eleanor who was the high King Henry’s queen. Layamon laid these
books before him, and turned the leaves; he lovingly beheld them;
may the Lord be merciful to him! Pen he took with fingers and wrote
on a bookskin, and the true words set together, and the three books
compressed into one.”[2304] We must not blame a dweller on the western
border in the early days of King John if, when setting himself to
tell “the noble deeds of Englishmen,” he thought it needful to begin
with the fall of Troy after the pattern of Wace and Wace’s original,
Geoffrey of Monmouth. We can only be thankful to this simple English
priest for leaving to us a purely English poem of more than thirty
thousand lines which is indeed beyond all price, not only as a
specimen of our language at one of its most interesting stages, but as
an abiding witness to the new spirit of patriotism which, ten years and
more before the signing of the Great Charter, was growing up in such
quiet corners of the land as this little parish of “Ernley” (or Areley
Kings) by Severn-side. The subject-matter of Layamon’s book might be
taken chiefly from his French guide, Wace; but its spirit and its
language are both alike thoroughly English. The poet’s “chief thought,”
as he says himself, was to “tell the noble deeds of Englishmen,” to
Englishmen, in their own English tongue. A man who wrote with such an
ambition as this was surely not unworthy of the simple reward which was
all that he asked of his readers: “Now prayeth Layamon, for love of
Almighty God, every good man that shall read this book and learn this
counsel, that he say together these soothfast words for his father’s
soul, and for his mother’s soul, and for his own soul, that it may be
the happier thereby. Amen!”[2305]
[2304] Layamon (Madden), vol. i. pp. 1–3.
[2305] Layamon (Madden), vol. i. pp. 3, 4.
Layamon’s _Brut_ was written at some time between John’s crowning and
his return to England, after the loss of Normandy, in 1206.[2306] It
was a token that, on both sides of the sea, the Angevins’ work was all
but ended, their mission all but fulfilled. The noblest part of that
mission was something of which they themselves can never have been
fully conscious; and yet perhaps through that very unconsciousness they
had fulfilled it the more thoroughly. “The silent growth and elevation
of the English people”--as that people’s own historian has taught
us--“was the real work of their reigns;”[2307] and even from a survey
so imperfect as ours we may see that when John came home in 1206 the
work was practically done.
[2306] On the date, etc., of Layamon see Sir F. Madden’s
preface to his edition of the _Brut_, vol. i.; and Mr. Morley’s
_English Writers_, vol. i. pp. 632–635.
[2307] Green, _Stray Studies_, p. 217.
INDEX
Aaron of Lincoln, ii. 487
Abelard, i. 480
Abingdon, its customs in 1185, ii. 475–477;
its fair, 481, 482.
_See_ Faricius
Achard, lord of Châlus, ii. 382, 383
Aclea, battle of, i. 102
Acre taken by the crusaders, ii. 319
Adaland, archbishop of Tours, i. 131, 132
Adalbert, count of Périgord, i. 145
Adam, Master, i. 482, 492, 493
Adam de Bruce, ii. 145
Adam de Port, ii. 162
Adela, first wife of Geoffrey Greygown, i. 121, 135
Adela, countess of Chalon-sur-Saône, second wife of Geoffrey Greygown,
i. 121, 134, 135, 199
Adela of France, daughter of Louis VII. and Eleanor, i. 445
Adela, daughter of Louis VII. and Constance, born, i. 468;
betrothed to Richard, ii. 62;
offered to John, 314;
marries the count of Ponthieu, 374
Adela of Blois, daughter of Theobald IV., third wife of Louis VII.,
i. 468
Adela, daughter of William the Conqueror, wife of Stephen-Henry of
Blois, i. 272;
her children, 273
Adela of Vendôme, daughter of Fulk Nerra and Elizabeth, i. 172
Adela, _see_ Hermengard
Adelaide or Blanche, mother of Queen Constance, i. 191, 192
Adelard of Bath, i. 94, 95
Adeliza of Louvain, second wife of Henry I., i. 94;
married to William of Aubigny, 298;
receives the Empress Matilda, i. 309
Ademar, count of Angoulême, ii. 316, 381, 398, 399
Ademar, viscount of Limoges, ii. 220, 230, 381, 382
Adrian IV., Pope, i. 476;
his relations with the English Church and the _Curia Theobaldi_,
477;
friendship with John of Salisbury, 485;
bull for conquest of Ireland, 431; ii. 95, 96, 182;
relations with Henry II., i. 497;
dies, 498.
_See_ Nicolas
Ælendis of Amboise, wife of Ingelger, i. 105, 131
Aerschot, _see_ Arnold
Agnes of Burgundy, her marriages, i. 174, 197–199;
kinship with Geoffrey Martel, 136, 175, 199;
divorced, 212
Agnes of Merania, ii. 395, 401
Agnes of Poitou, daughter of William IV., marries Emperor Henry III.,
i. 176
“Aids” from towns, i. 25, 29;
the Sheriff’s, ii. 15;
_pour fille marier_, 125, 126;
for the king’s ransom, 325
Aileach, kings of, _see_ Donell, Murtogh
Alan Barbetorte, count of Nantes and duke of Britanny, i. 115
Alan III., duke of Britanny, helps Herbert Wakedog against Avesgaud
and Fulk, i. 159, note 4{343};
marriage, 205;
death, 206, 211
Alan Fergant, duke of Britanny, his marriages, i. 328, note 4{930}
Alan, count of Nantes, i. 146
Alan of Richmond, i. 318, 319, 321
Albano, _see_ Henry
Alberic, bishop of Ostia, legate, i. 299, 300
Alberic, count of Gâtinais, _see_ Geoffrey
Albinus or Aubin, S., bishop of Angers, i. 98
Alcuin, i. 181
Aldgate, priory of Holy Trinity at, i. 66
Alençon, i. 208, 209;
treaty of, 217;
surrendered to Henry I., 233;
restored to William Talvas, 236;
won by Fulk V., _ib._
_See_ Robert, William