THE ANGEVIN KINGS
1189-1204
[Sidenote: John and Longchamp]
The fall of Henry the Second only showed the strength of the system he
had built up on this side the sea. In the hands of the Justiciar, Ranulf
de Glanvill, England remained peaceful through the last stormy months of
his reign, and his successor Richard found it undisturbed when he came
for his crowning in the autumn of 1189. Though born at Oxford, Richard
had been bred in Aquitaine; he was an utter stranger to his realm, and
his visit was simply for the purpose of gathering money for a Crusade.
Sheriffdoms, bishopricks, were sold; even the supremacy over Scotland was
bought back again by William the Lion; and it was with the wealth which
these measures won that Richard made his way in 1190 to Marseilles and
sailed thence to Messina. Here he found his army and a host under King
Philip of France; and the winter was spent in quarrels between the two
kings and a strife between Richard and Tancred of Sicily. In the spring
of 1191 his mother Eleanor arrived with ill news from England. Richard
had left the realm under the regency of two bishops, Hugh Puiset of
Durham and William Longchamp of Ely; but before quitting France he had
entrusted it wholly to the latter, who stood at the head of Church and
State as at once Justiciar and Papal Legate. Longchamp was loyal to the
king, but his exactions and scorn of Englishmen roused a fierce hatred
among the baronage, and this hatred found a head in John. While richly
gifting his brother with earldoms and lands, Richard had taken oath from
him that he would quit England for three years. But tidings that the
Justiciar was striving to secure the succession of Arthur, the child of
his elder brother Geoffry and of Constance of Britanny, to the English
crown at once recalled John to the realm, and peace between him and
Longchamp was only preserved by the influence of the queen-mother
Eleanor. Richard met this news by sending Walter of Coutances, the
Archbishop of Rouen, with full but secret powers to England. On his
landing in the summer of 1191 Walter found the country already in arms.
No battle had been fought, but John had seized many of the royal castles,
and the indignation stirred by Longchamp's arrest of Archbishop Geoffry
of York, a bastard son of Henry the Second, called the whole baronage to
the field. The nobles swore fealty to John as Richard's successor, and
Walter of Coutances saw himself forced to show his commission as
Justiciar, and to assent to Longchamp's exile from the realm.
[Sidenote: Richard]
The tidings of this revolution reached Richard in the Holy Land. He had
landed at Acre in the summer and joined with the French king in its
siege. But on the surrender of the town Philip at once sailed home, while
Richard, marching from Acre to Joppa, pushed inland to Jerusalem. The
city however was saved by false news of its strength, and through the
following winter and the spring of 1192 the king limited his activity to
securing the fortresses of southern Palestine. In June he again advanced
on Jerusalem, but the revolt of his army forced him a second time to fall
back, and news of Philip's intrigues with John drove him to abandon
further efforts. There was need to hasten home. Sailing for speed's sake
in a merchant vessel, he was driven by a storm on the Adriatic coast, and
while journeying in disguise overland arrested in December at Vienna by
his personal enemy, Duke Leopold of Austria. Through the whole year John,
in disgust at his displacement by Walter of Coutances, had been plotting
fruitlessly with Philip. But the news of this capture at once roused both
to activity. John secured his castles and seized Windsor, giving out that
the king would never return; while Philip strove to induce the Emperor,
Henry the Sixth, to whom the Duke of Austria had given Richard up, to
retain his captive. But a new influence now appeared on the scene. The
see of Canterbury was vacant, and Richard from his prison bestowed it on
Hubert Walter, the Bishop of Salisbury, a nephew of Ranulf de Glanvill,
and who had acted as secretary to Bishop Longchamp. Hubert's ability was
seen in the skill with which he held John at bay and raised the enormous
ransom which Henry demanded, the whole people, clergy as well as lay,
paying a fourth of their moveable goods. To gain his release however
Richard was forced besides this payment of ransom to do homage to the
Emperor, not only for the kingdom of Arles with which Henry invested him
but for England itself, whose crown he resigned into the Emperor's hands
and received back as a fief. But John's open revolt made even these terms
welcome, and Richard hurried to England in the spring of 1194. He found
the rising already quelled by the decision with which the Primate led an
army against John's castles, and his landing was followed by his
brother's complete submission.
[Sidenote: Richard and Philip]
The firmness of Hubert Walter had secured order in England, but oversea
Richard found himself face to face with dangers which he was too
clear-sighted to undervalue. Destitute of his father's administrative
genius, less ingenious in his political conceptions than John, Richard
was far from being a mere soldier. A love of adventure, a pride in sheer
physical strength, here and there a romantic generosity, jostled roughly
with the craft, the unscrupulousness, the violence of his race; but he
was at heart a statesman, cool and patient in the execution of his plans
as he was bold in their conception. "The devil is loose; take care of
yourself," Philip had written to John at the news of Richard's release.
In the French king's case a restless ambition was spurred to action by
insults which he had borne during the Crusade. He had availed himself of
Richard's imprisonment to invade Normandy, while the lords of Aquitaine
rose in open revolt under the troubadour Bertrand de Born. Jealousy of
the rule of strangers, weariness of the turbulence of the mercenary
soldiers of the Angevins or of the greed and oppression of their
financial administration, combined with an impatience of their firm
government and vigorous justice to alienate the nobles of their provinces
on the Continent. Loyalty among the people there was none; even Anjou,
the home of their race, drifted towards Philip as steadily as Poitou. But
in warlike ability Richard was more than Philip's peer. He held him in
check on the Norman frontier and surprised his treasure at Fréteval while
he reduced to submission the rebels of Aquitaine. Hubert Walter gathered
vast sums to support the army of mercenaries which Richard led against
his foes. The country groaned under its burdens, but it owned the justice
and firmness of the Primate's rule, and the measures which he took to
procure money with as little oppression as might be proved steps in the
education of the nation in its own self-government. The taxes were
assessed by a jury of sworn knights at each circuit of the justices; the
grand jury of the county was based on the election of knights in the
hundred courts; and the keeping of pleas of the crown was taken from the
sheriff and given to a newly-elected officer, the coroner. In these
elections were found at a later time precedents for parliamentary
representation; in Hubert's mind they were doubtless intended to do
little more than reconcile the people to the crushing taxation. His work
poured a million into the treasury, and enabled Richard during a short
truce to detach Flanders by his bribes from the French alliance, and to
unite the Counts of Chartres, Champagne, and Boulogne with the Bretons in
a revolt against Philip. He won a yet more valuable aid in the election
of his nephew Otto of Saxony, a son of Henry the Lion, to the German
throne, and his envoy William Longchamp knitted an alliance which would
bring the German lances to bear on the King of Paris.
[Sidenote: Château Gaillard]
But the security of Normandy was requisite to the success of these wider
plans, and Richard saw that its defence could no longer rest on the
loyalty of the Norman people. His father might trace his descent through
Matilda from the line of Hrolf, but the Angevin ruler was in fact a
stranger to the Norman. It was impossible for a Norman to recognize his
Duke with any real sympathy in the Angevin prince whom he saw moving
along the border at the head of Brabançon mercenaries, in whose camp the
old names of the Norman baronage were missing and Merchade, a Provençal
ruffian, held supreme command. The purely military site that Richard
selected for a new fortress with which he guarded the border showed his
realization of the fact that Normandy could now only be held by force of
arms. As a monument of warlike skill his "Saucy Castle," Château
Gaillard, stands first among the fortresses of the Middle Ages. Richard
fixed its site where the Seine bends suddenly at Gaillon in a great
semicircle to the north, and where the valley of Les Andelys breaks the
line of the chalk cliffs along its banks. Blue masses of woodland crown
the distant hills; within the river curve lies a dull reach of flat
meadow, round which the Seine, broken with green islets and dappled with
the grey and blue of the sky, flashes like a silver bow on its way to
Rouen. The castle formed part of an entrenched camp which Richard
designed to cover his Norman capital. Approach by the river was blocked
by a stockade and a bridge of boats, by a fort on the islet in mid
stream, and by a fortified town which the king built in the valley of the
Gambon, then an impassable marsh. In the angle between this valley and
the Seine, on a spur of the chalk hills which only a narrow neck of land
connects with the general plateau, rose at the height of three hundred
feet above the river the crowning fortress of the whole. Its outworks and
the walls which connected it with the town and stockade have for the most
part gone, but time and the hand of man have done little to destroy the
fortifications themselves--the fosse, hewn deep into the solid rock, with
casemates hollowed out along its sides, the fluted walls of the citadel,
the huge donjon looking down on the brown roofs and huddled gables of Les
Andelys. Even now in its ruin we can understand the triumphant outburst
of its royal builder as he saw it rising against the sky: "How pretty a
child is mine, this child of but one year old!"
[Sidenote: Richard's death]
The easy reduction of Normandy on the fall of Château Gaillard at a later
time proved Richard's foresight; but foresight and sagacity were mingled
in him with a brutal violence and a callous indifference to honour. "I
would take it, were its walls of iron," Philip exclaimed in wrath as he
saw the fortress rise. "I would hold it, were its walls of butter," was
the defiant answer of his foe. It was Church land and the Archbishop of
Rouen laid Normandy under interdict at its seizure, but the king met the
interdict with mockery, and intrigued with Rome till the censure was
withdrawn. He was just as defiant of a "rain of blood," whose fall scared
his courtiers. "Had an angel from heaven bid him abandon his work," says
a cool observer, "he would have answered with a curse." The twelve
months' hard work, in fact, by securing the Norman frontier set Richard
free to deal his long-planned blow at Philip. Money only was wanting; for
England had at last struck against the continued exactions. In 1198 Hugh,
Bishop of Lincoln, brought nobles and bishops to refuse a new demand for
the maintenance of foreign soldiers, and Hubert Walter resigned in
despair. A new justiciar, Geoffry Fitz-Peter, Earl of Essex, extorted
some money by a harsh assize of the forests; but the exchequer was soon
drained, and Richard listened with more than the greed of his race to
rumours that a treasure had been found in the fields of the Limousin.
Twelve knights of gold seated round a golden table were the find, it was
said, of the Lord of Châlus. Treasure-trove at any rate there was, and in
the spring of 1199 Richard prowled around the walls. But the castle held
stubbornly out till the king's greed passed into savage menace. He would
hang all, he swore--man, woman, the very child at the breast. In the
midst of his threats an arrow from the walls struck him down. He died as
he had lived, owning the wild passion which for seven years past had kept
him from confession lest he should be forced to pardon Philip, forgiving
with kingly generosity the archer who had shot him.
[Sidenote: Loss of Normandy]
The Angevin dominion broke to pieces at his death. John was acknowledged
as king in England and Normandy, Aquitaine was secured for him by its
duchess, his mother Eleanor; but Anjou, Maine, and Touraine did homage to
Arthur, the son of his elder brother Geoffry, the late Duke of Britanny.
The ambition of Philip, who protected his cause, turned the day against
Arthur; the Angevins rose against the French garrisons with which the
French king practically annexed the country, and in May 1200 a treaty
between the two kings left John master of the whole dominion of his
house. But fresh troubles broke out in Poitou; Philip, on John's refusal
to answer the charges of the Poitevin barons at his Court, declared in
1202 his fiefs forfeited; and Arthur, now a boy of fifteen, strove to
seize Eleanor in the castle of Mirebeau. Surprised at its siege by a
rapid march of the king, the boy was taken prisoner to Rouen, and
murdered there in the spring of 1203, as men believed, by his uncle's
hand. This brutal outrage at once roused the French provinces in revolt,
while Philip sentenced John to forfeiture as a murderer, and marched
straight on Normandy. The ease with which the conquest of the Duchy was
effected can only be explained by the utter absence of any popular
resistance on the part of the Normans themselves. Half a century before
the sight of a Frenchman in the land would have roused every peasant to
arms from Avranches to Dieppe. But town after town surrendered at the
mere summons of Philip, and the conquest was hardly over before Normandy
settled down into the most loyal of the provinces of France. Much of this
was due to the wise liberality with which Philip met the claims of the
towns to independence and self-government, as well as to the overpowering
force and military ability with which the conquest was effected. But the
utter absence of opposition sprang from a deeper cause. To the Norman his
transfer from John to Philip was a mere passing from one foreign master
to another, and foreigner for foreigner Philip was the less alien of the
two. Between France and Normandy there had been as many years of
friendship as of strife; between Norman and Angevin lay a century of
bitterest hate. Moreover, the subjection to France was the realization in
fact of a dependence which had always existed in theory; Philip entered
Rouen as the overlord of its dukes; while the submission to the house of
Anjou had been the most humiliating of all submissions, the submission to
an equal. In 1204 Philip turned on the south with as startling a success.
Maine, Anjou, and Touraine passed with little resistance into his hands,
and the death of Eleanor was followed by the submission of the bulk of
Aquitaine. Little was left save the country south of the Garonne; and
from the lordship of a vast empire that stretched from the Tyne to the
Pyrenees John saw himself reduced at a blow to the realm of England.
BOOK III
THE CHARTER
1204-1307
AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK III
1204-1307
A Chronicle drawn up at the monastery of Barnwell near Cambridge, and
which has been embodied in the "Memoriale" of Walter of Coventry, gives
us a contemporary account of the period from 1201 to 1225. We possess
another contemporary annalist for the same period in Roger of Wendover,
the first of the published chroniclers of St. Albans, whose work extends
to 1235. Though full of detail Roger is inaccurate, and he has strong
royal and ecclesiastical sympathies; but his chronicle was subsequently
revised in a more patriotic sense by another monk of the same abbey,
Matthew Paris, and continued in the "Greater Chronicle" of the latter.
Matthew has left a parallel but shorter account of the time in his
"Historia Anglorum" (from the Conquest to 1253). He is the last of the
great chroniclers of his house; for the chronicles of Rishanger, his
successor at St. Albans, and of the obscurer annalists who worked on at
that Abbey till the Wars of the Roses are little save scant and lifeless
jottings of events which become more and more local as time goes on. The
annals of the abbeys of Waverley, Dunstable, and Burton, which have been
published in the "Annales Monastici" of the Rolls series, add important
details for the reigns of John and Henry III. Those of Melrose, Osney,
and Lanercost help us in the close of the latter reign, where help is
especially welcome. For the Barons' war we have besides these the
royalist chronicle of Wykes, Rishanger's fragment published by the Camden
Society, and a chronicle of Bartholomew de Cotton, which is contemporary
from 1264 to 1298. Where the chronicles fail however the public documents
of the realm become of high importance. The "Royal Letters" (1216-1272)
which have been printed from the Patent Rolls by Professor Shirley (Rolls
Series) throw great light on Henry's politics.
Our municipal history during this period is fully represented by that of
London. For the general history of the capital the Rolls series has given
us its "Liber Albus" and "Liber Custumarum," while a vivid account of its
communal revolution is to be found in the "Liber de Antiquis Legibus"
published by the Camden Society. A store of documents will be found in
the Charter Rolls published by the Record Commission, in Brady's work on
"English Boroughs," and in the "Ordinances of English Gilds," published
with a remarkable preface from the pen of Dr. Brentano by the Early
English Text Society. For our religious and intellectual history
materials now become abundant. Grosseteste's Letters throw light on the
state of the Church and its relations with Rome; those of Adam Marsh give
us interesting details of Earl Simon's relation to the religious movement
of his day; and Eceleston's tract on the arrival of the Friars is
embodied in the "Monumenta Franciscana." For the Universities we have the
collection of materials edited by Mr. Anstey under the name of "Munimenta
Academica."
With the close of Henry's reign our directly historic materials become
scantier and scantier. The monastic annals we have before mentioned are
supplemented by the jejune entries of Trivet and Murimuth, by the
"Annales Anglic et Scotias," by Rishanger's Chronicle, his "Gesta Edwardi
Primi," and three fragments of his annals (all published in the Rolls
Series). The portion of the so-called "Walsingham's History" which
relates to this period is now attributed by Mr. Riley to Rishanger's
hand. For the wars in the north and in the west we have no records from
the side of the conquered. The social and physical state of Wales indeed
is illustrated by the "Itinerarium" which Gerald de Barri drew up in the
twelfth century, but Scotland has no contemporary chronicles for this
period; the jingling rimes of Blind Harry are two hundred years later
than his hero, Wallace. We possess however a copious collection of State
papers in the "Rotuli Scotiæ," the "Documents and Records illustrative of
the History of Scotland" which were edited by Sir F. Palgrave, as well as
in Rymer's Foedera. For the history of our Parliament the most noteworthy
materials have been collected by Professor Stubbs in his Select Charters,
and he has added to them a short treatise called "Modus Tenendi
Parliamentum," which may be taken as a fair account of its actual state
and powers in the fourteenth century.
CHAPTER I
JOHN
1204-1216
[Sidenote: England and the Conquest]
The loss of Normandy did more than drive John from the foreign dominions
of his race; it set him face to face with England itself. England was no
longer a distant treasure-house from which gold could be drawn for wars
along the Epte or the Loire, no longer a possession to be kept in order
by wise ministers and by flying visits from its foreign king. Henceforth
it was his home. It was to be ruled by his personal and continuous rule.
People and sovereign were to know each other, to be brought into contact
with each other as they had never been brought since the conquest of the
Norman. The change in the attitude of the king was the more momentous
that it took place at a time when the attitude of the country itself was
rapidly changing. The Norman Conquest had given a new aspect to the land.
A foreign king ruled it through foreign ministers. Foreign nobles were
quartered in every manor. A military organization of the country changed
while it simplified the holding of every estate. Huge castles of white
stone bridled town and country; huge stone minsters told how the Norman
had bridled even the Church. But the change was in great measure an
external one. The real life of the nation was little affected by the
shock of the Conquest. English institutions, the local, judicial, and
administrative forms of the country were the same as of old. Like the
English tongue they remained practically unaltered. For a century after
the Conquest only a few new words crept in from the language of the
conquerors, and so entirely did the spoken tongue of the nation at large
remain unchanged that William himself tried to learn it that he might
administer justice to his subjects. Even English literature, banished as
it was from the court of the stranger and exposed to the fashionable
rivalry of Latin scholars, survived not only in religious works, in
poetic paraphrases of gospels and psalms, but in the great monument of
our prose, the English Chronicle. It was not till the miserable reign of
Stephen that the Chronicle died out in the Abbey of Peterborough. But the
"Sayings of Ælfred" show a native literature going on through the reign
of Henry the Second, and the appearance of a great work of English verse
coincides in point of time with the return of John to his island realm.
"There was a priest in the land whose name was Layamon; he was the son of
Leovenath; may the Lord be gracious to him! He dwelt at Earnley, a noble
church on the bank of Severn (good it seemed to him!) near Radstone,
where he read books. It came to mind to him and in his chiefest thought
that he would tell the noble deeds of England, what the men were named
and whence they came who first had English land." Journeying far and wide
over the country, the priest of Earnley found Bæda and Wace, the books
too of St. Albin and St. Austin. "Layamon laid down these books and
turned the leaves; he beheld them lovingly; may the Lord be gracious to
him! Pen he took with finger and wrote a book-skin, and the true words
set together, and compressed the three books into one." Layamon's church
is now that of Areley, near Bewdley in Worcestershire; his poem was in
fact an expansion of Wace's "Brut" with insertions from Bæda.
Historically it is worthless; but as a monument of our language it is
beyond all price. In more than thirty thousand lines not more than fifty
Norman words are to be found. Even the old poetic tradition remains the
same. The alliterative metre of the earlier verse is still only slightly
affected by riming terminations; the similes are the few natural similes
of Cædmon; the battle-scenes are painted with the same rough, simple joy.
[Sidenote: English Patriotism]
Instead of crushing England, indeed, the Conquest did more than any event
that had gone before to build up an English people. All local
distinctions, the distinction of Saxon from Mercian, of both from
Northumbrian, died away beneath the common pressure of the stranger. The
Conquest was hardly over when we see the rise of a new national feeling,
of a new patriotism. In his quiet cell at Worcester the monk Florence
strives to palliate by excuses of treason or the weakness of rulers the
defeats of Englishmen by the Danes. Ælfred, the great name of the English
past, gathers round him a legendary worship, and the "Sayings of Ælfred"
embody the ideal of an English king. We see the new vigour drawn from
this deeper consciousness of national unity in a national action which
began as soon as the Conquest had given place to strife among the
conquerors. A common hostility to the conquering baronage gave the nation
leaders in its foreign sovereigns, and the sword which had been sheathed
at Senlac was drawn for triumphs which avenged it. It was under William
the Red that English soldiers shouted scorn at the Norman barons who
surrendered at Rochester. It was under Henry the First that an English
army faced Duke Robert and his foreign knighthood when they landed for a
fresh invasion, "not fearing the Normans." It was under the same great
king that Englishmen conquered Normandy in turn on the field of
Tenchebray. This overthrow of the conquering baronage, this union of the
conquered with the king, brought about the fusion of the conquerors in
the general body of the English people. As early as the days of Henry the
Second the descendants of Norman and Englishman had become
indistinguishable. Both found a bond in a common English feeling and
English patriotism, in a common hatred of the Angevin and Poitevin
"foreigners" who streamed into England in the wake of Henry and his sons.
Both had profited by the stern discipline of the Norman rule. The
wretched reign of Stephen alone broke the long peace, a peace without
parallel elsewhere, which in England stretched from the settlement of the
Conquest to the return of John. Of her kings' forays along Norman or
Aquitanian borders England heard little; she cared less. Even Eichard's
crusade woke little interest in his island realm. What England saw in her
kings was "the good peace they made in the land." And with peace came a
stern but equitable rule, judicial and administrative reforms that
carried order and justice to every corner of the land, a wealth that grew
steadily in spite of heavy taxation, an immense outburst of material and
intellectual activity.
[Sidenote: The Universities]
It was with a new English people therefore that John found himself face
to face. The nation which he fronted was a nation quickened with a new
life and throbbing with a new energy. Not least among the signs of this
energy was the upgrowth of our Universities. The establishment of the
great schools which bore this name was everywhere throughout Europe a
special mark of the impulse which Christendom gained from the crusades. A
new fervour of study sprang up in the West from its contact with the more
cultured East. Travellers like Adelard of Bath brought back the first
rudiments of physical and mathematical science from the schools of
Cordova or Bagdad. In the twelfth century a classical revival restored
Cæsar and Virgil to the list of monastic studies, and left its stamp on
the pedantic style, the profuse classical quotations of writers like
William of Malmesbury or John of Salisbury. The scholastic philosophy
sprang up in the schools of Paris. The Roman law was revived by the
imperialist doctors of Bologna. The long mental inactivity of feudal
Europe broke up like ice before a summer's sun. Wandering teachers such
as Lanfranc or Anselm crossed sea and land to spread the new power of
knowledge. The same spirit of restlessness, of enquiry, of impatience
with the older traditions of mankind either local or intellectual that
drove half Christendom to the tomb of its Lord, crowded the roads with
thousands of young scholars hurrying to the chosen seats where teachers
were gathered together. A new power sprang up in the midst of a world
which had till now recognized no power but that of sheer brute force.
Poor as they were, sometimes even of servile race, the wandering scholars
who lectured in every cloister were hailed as "masters" by the crowds at
their feet. Abelard was a foe worthy of the threats of councils, of the
thunders of the Church. The teaching of a single Lombard was of note
enough in England to draw down the prohibition of a king.
[Sidenote: Oxford]
Vacarius was probably a guest in the court of Archbishop Theobald where
Thomas of London and John of Salisbury were already busy with the study
of the Civil Law. But when he opened lectures on it at Oxford he was at
once silenced by Stephen, who was at that moment at war with the Church
and jealous of the power which the wreck of the royal authority was
throwing into Theobald's hands. At this time Oxford stood in the first
rank among English towns. Its town church of St. Martin rose from the
midst of a huddled group of houses, girded in with massive walls, that
lay along the dry upper ground of a low peninsula between the streams of
Cherwell and the Thames. The ground fell gently on either side, eastward
and westward, to these rivers; while on the south a sharper descent led
down across swampy meadows to the ford from which the town drew its name
and to the bridge that succeeded it. Around lay a wild forest country,
moors such as Cowley and Bullingdon fringing the course of Thames, great
woods of which Shotover and Bagley are the relics closing the horizon to
the south and east. Though the two huge towers of its Norman castle
marked the strategic importance of Oxford as commanding the river valley
along which the commerce of Southern England mainly flowed, its walls
formed the least element in the town's military strength, for on every
side but the north it was guarded by the swampy meadows along Cherwell or
by an intricate network of streams into which the Thames breaks among the
meadows of Osney. From the midst of these meadows rose a mitred abbey of
Austin Canons, which with the older priory of St. Frideswide gave Oxford
some ecclesiastical dignity. The residence of the Norman house of the
D'Oillis within its castle, the frequent visits of English kings to a
palace without its walls, the presence again and again of important
Parliaments, marked its political weight within the realm. The settlement
of one of the wealthiest among the English Jewries in the very heart of
the town indicated, while it promoted, the activity of its trade. No
place better illustrates the transformation of the land in the hands of
its Norman masters, the sudden outburst of industrial effort, the sudden
expansion of commerce and accumulation of wealth which followed the
Conquest. To the west of the town rose one of the stateliest of English
castles, and in the meadows beneath the hardly less stately abbey of
Osney. In the fields to the north the last of the Norman kings raised his
palace of Beaumont. In the southern quarter of the city the canons of St.
Frideswide reared the church which still exists as the diocesan
cathedral, while the piety of the Norman Castellans rebuilt almost all
its parish churches and founded within their new castle walls the church
of the Canons of St. George.
[Sidenote: Oxford Scholars]
We know nothing of the causes which drew students and teachers within the
walls of Oxford. It is possible that here as elsewhere a new teacher
quickened older educational foundations, and that the cloisters of Osney
and St. Frideswide already possessed schools which burst into a larger
life under the impulse of Vacarius. As yet however the fortunes of the
University were obscured by the glories of Paris. English scholars
gathered in thousands round the chairs of William of Champeaux or
Abelard. The English took their place as one of the "nations" of the
French University. John of Salisbury became famous as one of the Parisian
teachers. Thomas of London wandered to Paris from his school at Merton.
But through the peaceful reign of Henry the Second Oxford quietly grew in
numbers and repute, and forty years after the visit of Vacarius its
educational position was fully established. When Gerald of Wales read his
amusing Topography of Ireland to its students the most learned and famous
of the English clergy were to be found within its walls. At the opening
of the thirteenth century Oxford stood without a rival in its own
country, while in European celebrity it took rank with the greatest
schools of the Western world. But to realize this Oxford of the past we
must dismiss from our minds all recollections of the Oxford of the
present. In the outer look of the new University there was nothing of the
pomp that overawes the freshman as he first paces the "High" or looks
down from the gallery of St. Mary's. In the stead of long fronts of
venerable colleges, of stately walks beneath immemorial elms, history
plunges us into the mean and filthy lanes of a mediæval town. Thousands
of boys, huddled in bare lodging-houses, clustering round teachers as
poor as themselves in church porch and house porch, drinking,
quarrelling, dicing, begging at the corners of the streets, take the
place of the brightly-coloured train of doctors and Heads. Mayor and
Chancellor struggled in vain to enforce order or peace on this seething
mass of turbulent life. The retainers who followed their young lords to
the University fought out the feuds of their houses in the streets.
Scholars from Kent and scholars from Scotland waged the bitter struggle
of North and South. At nightfall roysterer and reveller roamed with
torches through the narrow lanes, defying bailiffs, and cutting down
burghers at their doors. Now a mob of clerks plunged into the Jewry and
wiped off the memory of bills and bonds by sacking a Hebrew house or two.
Now a tavern squabble between scholar and townsman widened into a general
broil, and the academical bell of St. Mary's vied with the town bell of
St. Martin's in clanging to arms. Every phase of ecclesiastical
controversy or political strife was preluded by some fierce outbreak in
this turbulent, surging mob. When England growled at the exactions of the
Papacy in the years that were to follow the students besieged a legate in
the abbot's house at Osney. A murderous town and gown row preceded the
opening of the Barons' war. "When Oxford draws knife," ran an old rime,
"England's soon at strife."
[Sidenote: Edmund Rich]
But the turbulence and stir was a stir and turbulence of life. A keen
thirst for knowledge, a passionate poetry of devotion, gathered thousands
round the poorest scholar and welcomed the barefoot friar. Edmund Rich--
Archbishop of Canterbury and saint in later days--came about the time we
have reached to Oxford, a boy of twelve years old, from a little lane at
Abingdon that still bears his name. He found his school in an inn that
belonged to the abbey of Eynsham where his father had taken refuge from
the world. His mother was a pious woman of the day, too poor to give her
boy much outfit besides the hair shirt that he promised to wear every
Wednesday; but Edmund was no poorer than his neighbours. He plunged at
once into the nobler life of the place, its ardour for knowledge, its
mystical piety. "Secretly," perhaps at eventide when the shadows were
gathering in the church of St. Mary and the crowd of teachers and
students had left its aisles, the boy stood before an image of the
Virgin, and placing a ring of gold upon its finger took Mary for his
bride. Years of study, broken by a fever that raged among the crowded,
noisome streets, brought the time for completing his education at Paris;
and Edmund, hand in hand with a brother Robert of his, begged his way as
poor scholars were wont to the great school of Western Christendom. Here
a damsel, heedless of his tonsure, wooed him so pertinaciously that
Edmund consented at last to an assignation; but when he appeared it was
in company of grave academical officials who, as the maiden declared in
the hour of penitence which followed, "straightway whipped the offending
Eve out of her." Still true to his Virgin bridal, Edmund on his return
from Paris became the most popular of Oxford teachers. It is to him that
Oxford owes her first introduction to the Logic of Aristotle. We see him
in the little room which he hired, with the Virgin's chapel hard by, his
grey gown reaching to his feet, ascetic in his devotion, falling asleep
in lecture time after a sleepless night of prayer, but gifted with a
grace and cheerfulness of manner which told of his French training and a
chivalrous love of knowledge that let his pupils pay what they would.
"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," the young tutor would say, a touch of
scholarly pride perhaps mingling with his contempt of worldly things, as
he threw down the fee on the dusty window-ledge whence a thievish student
would sometimes run off with it. But even knowledge brought its troubles;
the Old Testament, which with a copy of the Decretals long formed his
sole library, frowned down upon a love of secular learning from which
Edmund found it hard to wean himself. At last, in some hour of dream, the
form of his dead mother floated into the room where the teacher stood
among his mathematical diagrams. "What are these?" she seemed to say; and
seizing Edmund's right hand, she drew on the palm three circles
interlaced, each of which bore the name of a Person of the Christian
Trinity. "Be these," she cried, as the figure faded away, "thy diagrams
henceforth, my son."
[Sidenote: The University and Feudalism]
The story admirably illustrates the real character of the new training,
and the latent opposition between the spirit of the Universities and the
spirit of the Church. The feudal and ecclesiastical order of the old
mediæval world were both alike threatened by this power that had so
strangely sprung up in the midst of them. Feudalism rested on local
isolation, on the severance of kingdom from kingdom and barony from
barony, on the distinction of blood and race, on the supremacy of
material or brute force, on an allegiance determined by accidents of
place and social position. The University on the other hand was a protest
against this isolation of man from man. The smallest school was European
and not local. Not merely every province of France, but every people of
Christendom had its place among the "nations" of Paris or Padua. A common
language, the Latin tongue, superseded within academical bounds the
warring tongues of Europe. A common intellectual kinship and rivalry took
the place of the petty strifes which parted province from province or
realm from realm. What Church and Empire had both aimed at and both
failed in, the knitting of Christian nations together into a vast
commonwealth, the Universities for a time actually did. Dante felt
himself as little a stranger in the "Latin" quarter round Mont St.
Genevieve as under the arches of Bologna. Wandering Oxford scholars
carried the writings of Wyclif to the libraries of Prague. In England the
work of provincial fusion was less difficult or important than elsewhere,
but even in England work had to be done. The feuds of Northerner and
Southerner which so long disturbed the discipline of Oxford witnessed at
any rate to the fact that Northerner and Southerner had at last been
brought face to face in its streets. And here as elsewhere the spirit of
national isolation was held in check by the larger comprehensiveness of
the University. After the dissensions that threatened the prosperity of
Paris in the thirteenth century, Norman and Gascon mingled with
Englishmen in Oxford lecture-halls. Irish scholars were foremost in the
fray with the legate. At a later time the rising of Owen Glyndwr found
hundreds of Welshmen gathered round its teachers. And within this
strangely mingled mass society and government rested on a purely
democratic basis. Among Oxford scholars the son of the noble stood on
precisely the same footing with the poorest mendicant. Wealth, physical
strength, skill in arms, pride of ancestry and blood, the very grounds on
which feudal society rested, went for nothing in the lecture-room. The
University was a state absolutely self-governed, and whose citizens were
admitted by a purely intellectual franchise. Knowledge made the "master."
To know more than one's fellows was a man's sole claim to be a regent or
"ruler" in the schools. And within this intellectual aristocracy all were
equal. When the free commonwealth of the masters gathered in the aisles
of St. Mary's all had an equal right to counsel, all had an equal vote in
the final decision. Treasury and library were at their complete disposal.
It was their voice that named every officer, that proposed and sanctioned
every statute. Even the Chancellor, their head, who had at first been an
officer of the Bishop, became an elected officer of their own.
[Sidenote: The Universities and the Church]
If the democratic spirit of the Universities' threatened feudalism, their
spirit of intellectual enquiry threatened the Church. To all outer
seeming they were purely ecclesiastical bodies. The wide extension which
mediæval usage gave to the word "orders" gathered the whole educated
world within the pale of the clergy. Whatever might be their age or
proficiency, scholar and teacher alike ranked as clerks, free from lay
responsibilities or the control of civil tribunals, and amenable only to
the rule of the Bishop and the sentence of his spiritual courts. This
ecclesiastical character of the University appeared in that of its head.
The Chancellor, as we have seen, was at first no officer of the
University itself, but of the ecclesiastical body under whose shadow it
had sprung into life. At Oxford he was simply the local officer of the
Bishop of Lincoln, within whose immense diocese the University was then
situated. But this identification in outer form with the Church only
rendered more conspicuous the difference of spirit between them. The
sudden expansion of the field of education diminished the importance of
those purely ecclesiastical and theological studies which had hitherto
absorbed the whole intellectual energies of mankind. The revival of
classical literature, the rediscovery as it were of an older and a
greater world, the contact with a larger, freer life whether in mind, in
society, or in politics introduced a spirit of scepticism, of doubt, of
denial into the realms of unquestioning belief. Abelard claimed for
reason a supremacy over faith. Florentine poets discussed with a smile
the immortality of the soul. Even to Dante, while he censures these,
Virgil is as sacred as Jeremiah. The imperial ruler in whom the new
culture took its most notable form, Frederick the Second, the "World's
Wonder" of his time, was regarded by half Europe as no better than an
infidel. A faint revival of physical science, so long crushed as magic by
the dominant ecclesiasticism, brought Christians into perilous contact
with the Moslem and the Jew. The books of the Rabbis were no longer an
accursed thing to Roger Bacon. The scholars of Cordova were no mere
Paynim swine to Adelard of Bath. How slowly indeed and against what
obstacles science won its way we know from the witness of Roger Bacon.
"Slowly," he tells us, "has any portion of the philosophy of Aristotle
come into use among the Latins. His Natural Philosophy and his
Metaphysics, with the Commentaries of Averroes and others, were
translated in my time, and interdicted at Paris up to the year of grace
1237 because of their assertion of the eternity of the world and of time
and because of the book of the divinations by dreams (which is the third
book, De Somniis et Vigiliis) and because of many passages erroneously
translated. Even his logic was slowly received and lectured on. For St.
Edmund, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was the first in my time who read
the Elements at Oxford. And I have seen Master Hugo, who first read the
book of Posterior Analytics, and I have seen his writing. So there were
but few, considering the multitude of the Latins, who were of any account
in the philosophy of Aristotle; nay, very few indeed, and scarcely any up
to this year of grace 1292."
[Sidenote: The Town]
If we pass from the English University to the English Town we see a
progress as important and hardly less interesting. In their origin our
boroughs were utterly unlike those of the rest of the western world. The
cities of Italy and Provence had preserved the municipal institutions of
their Roman past; the German towns had been founded by Henry the Fowler
with the purpose of sheltering industry from the feudal oppression around
them; the communes of Northern France sprang into existence in revolt
against feudal outrage within their walls. But in England the tradition
of Rome passed utterly away, while feudal oppression was held fairly in
check by the Crown. The English town therefore was in its beginning
simply a piece of the general country, organized and governed precisely
in the same manner as the townships around it. Its existence witnessed
indeed to the need which men felt in those earlier times of mutual help
and protection. The burh or borough was probably a more defensible place
than the common village; it may have had a ditch or mound about it
instead of the quickset-hedge or "tun" from which the township took its
name. But in itself it was simply a township or group of townships where
men clustered whether for trade or defence more thickly than elsewhere.
The towns were different in the circumstances and date of their rise.
Some grew up in the fortified camps of the English invaders. Some dated
from a later occupation of the sacked and desolate Roman towns. Some
clustered round the country houses of king and ealdorman or the walls of
church and monastery. Towns like Bristol were the direct result of trade.
There was the same variety in the mode in which the various town
communities were formed. While the bulk of them grew by simple increase
of population from township to town, larger boroughs such as York with
its "six shires" or London with its wards and sokes and franchises show
how families and groups of settlers settled down side by side, and
claimed as they coalesced, each for itself, its shire or share of the
town-ground while jealously preserving its individual life within the
town-community. But strange as these aggregations might be, the
constitution of the borough which resulted from them was simply that of
the people at large. Whether we regard it as a township, or rather from
its size as a hundred or collection of townships, the obligations of the
dwellers within its bounds were those of the townships round, to keep
fence and trench in good repair, to send a contingent to the fyrd, and a
reeve and four men to the hundred court and shire court. As in other
townships, land was a necessary accompaniment of freedom. The landless
man who dwelled in a borough had no share in its corporate life; for
purposes of government or property the town consisted simply of the
landed proprietors within its bounds. The common lands which are still
attached to many of our boroughs take us back to a time when each
township lay within a ring or mark of open ground which served at once as
boundary and pasture land. Each of the four wards of York had its common
pasture; Oxford has still its own "Port-meadow."
[Sidenote: Towns and their lords]
The inner rule of the borough lay as in the townships about it in the
hands of its own freemen, gathered in "borough-moot" or "portmanni-mote."
But the social change brought about by the Danish wars, the legal
requirement that each man should have a lord, affected the towns as it
affected the rest of the country. Some passed into the hands of great
thegns near to them; the bulk became known as in the demesne of the king.
A new officer, the lord's or king's reeve, was a sign of this revolution.
It was the reeve who now summoned the borough-moot and administered
justice in it; it was he who collected the lord's dues or annual rent of
the town, and who exacted the services it owed to its lord. To modern
eyes these services would imply almost complete subjection. When
Leicester, for instance, passed from the hands of the Conqueror into
those of its Earls, its townsmen were bound to reap their lord's
corn-crops, to grind at his mill, to redeem their strayed cattle from his
pound. The great forest around was the Earl's, and it was only out of his
grace that the little borough could drive its swine into the woods or
pasture its cattle in the glades. The justice and government of a town
lay wholly in its master's hands; he appointed its bailiffs, received the
fines and forfeitures of his tenants, and the fees and tolls of their
markets and fairs. But in fact when once these dues were paid and these
services rendered the English townsman was practically free. His rights
were as rigidly defined by custom as those of his lord. Property and
person alike were secured against arbitrary seizure. He could demand a
fair trial on any charge, and even if justice was administered by his
master's reeve it was administered in the presence and with the assent of
his fellow-townsmen. The bell which swung out from the town tower
gathered the burgesses to a common meeting, where they could exercise
rights of free speech and free deliberation on their own affairs. Their
merchant-gild over its ale-feast regulated trade, distributed the sums
due from the town among the different burgesses, looked to the due
repairs of gate and wall, and acted in fact pretty much the same part as
a town-council of to-day.
[Sidenote: The Merchant Gild]
The merchant-gild was the outcome of a tendency to closer association
which found support in those principles of mutual aid and mutual
restraint that lay at the base of our old institutions. Gilds or clubs
for religious, charitable, or social purposes were common throughout the
country, and especially common in boroughs, where men clustered more
thickly together. Each formed a sort of artificial family. An oath of
mutual fidelity among its members was substituted for the tie of blood,
while the gild-feast, held once a month in the common hall, replaced the
gathering of the kinsfolk round their family hearth. But within this new
family the aim of the gild was to establish a mutual responsibility as
close as that of the old. "Let all share the same lot," ran its law; "if
any misdo, let all bear it." A member could look for aid from his
gild-brothers in atoning for guilt incurred by mishap. He could call on
them for assistance in case of violence or wrong. If falsely accused they
appeared in court as his compurgators, if poor they supported, and when
dead they buried him. On the other hand he was responsible to them, as
they were to the State, for order and obedience to the laws. A wrong of
brother against brother was also a wrong against the general body of the
gild and was punished by fine or in the last resort by an expulsion which
left the offender a "lawless" man and an outcast. The one difference
between these gilds in country and town was this, that in the latter case
from their close local neighbourhood they tended inevitably to coalesce.
Under Æthelstan the London gilds united into one for the purpose of
carrying out more effectually their common aims, and at a later time we
find the gilds of Berwick enacting "that where many bodies are found side
by side in one place they may become one, and have one will, and in the
dealings of one with another have a strong and hearty love." The process
was probably a long and difficult one, for the brotherhoods naturally
differed much in social rank, and even after the union was effected we
see traces of the separate existence to a certain extent of some one or
more of the wealthier or more aristocratic gilds. In London for instance
the Cnighten-gild which seems to have stood at the head of its fellows
retained for a long time its separate property, while its Alderman--as
the chief officer of each gild was called--became the Alderman of the
united gild of the whole city. In Canterbury we find a similar gild of
Thanes from which the chief officers of the town seem commonly to have
been selected. Imperfect however as the union might be, when once it was
effected the town passed from a mere collection of brotherhoods into a
powerful community, far more effectually organized than in the loose
organization of the township, and whose character was inevitably
determined by the circumstances of its origin. In their beginnings our
boroughs seem to have been mainly gatherings of persons engaged in
agricultural pursuits; the first Dooms of London provide especially for
the recovery of cattle belonging to the citizens. But as the increasing
security of the country invited the farmer or the landowner to settle
apart in his own fields, and the growth of estate and trade told on the
towns themselves, the difference between town and country became more
sharply defined. London of course took the lead in this new developement
of civic life. Even in Æthelstan's day every London merchant who had made
three long voyages on his own account ranked as a Thegn. Its "lithsmen,"
or shipmen's-gild, were of sufficient importance under Harthacnut to
figure in the election of a king, and its principal street still tells of
the rapid growth of trade in its name of "Cheap-side" or the bargaining
place. But at the Norman Conquest the commercial tendency had become
universal. The name given to the united brotherhood in a borough is in
almost every case no longer that of the "town-gild," but of the
"merchant-gild."
[Sidenote: Emancipation of Towns]
This social change in the character of the townsmen produced important
results in the character of their municipal institutions. In becoming a
merchant-gild the body of citizens who formed the "town" enlarged their
powers of civic legislation by applying them to the control of their
internal trade. It became their special business to obtain from the crown
or from their lords wider commercial privileges, rights of coinage,
grants of fairs, and exemption from tolls, while within the town itself
they framed regulations as to the sale and quality of goods, the control
of markets, and the recovery of debts. It was only by slow and difficult
advances that each step in this securing of privilege was won. Still it
went steadily on. Whenever we get a glimpse of the inner history of an
English town we find the same peaceful revolution in progress, services
disappearing through disuse or omission, while privileges and immunities
are being purchased in hard cash. The lord of the town, whether he were
king, baron, or abbot, was commonly thriftless or poor, and the capture
of a noble, or the campaign of a sovereign, or the building of some new
minster by a prior, brought about an appeal to the thrifty burghers, who
were ready to fill again their master's treasury at the price of the
strip of parchment which gave them freedom of trade, of justice, and of
government. In the silent growth and elevation of the English people the
boroughs thus led the way. Unnoticed and despised by prelate and noble
they preserved or won back again the full tradition of Teutonic liberty.
The right of self-government, the right of free speech in free meeting,
the right to equal justice at the hands of one's equals, were brought
safely across ages of tyranny by the burghers and shopkeepers of
the towns. In the quiet quaintly-named streets, in town-mead and
market-place, in the lord's mill beside the stream, in the bell that
swung out its summons to the crowded borough-mote, in merchant-gild, and
church-gild and craft-gild, lay the life of Englishmen who were doing
more than knight and baron to make England what she is, the life of their
home and their trade, of their sturdy battle with oppression, their
steady, ceaseless struggle for right and freedom.
[Sidenote: London]
London stood first among English towns, and the privileges which its
citizens won became precedents for the burghers of meaner boroughs. Even
at the Conquest its power and wealth secured it a full recognition of all
its ancient privileges from the Conqueror. In one way indeed it profited
by the revolution which laid England at the feet of the stranger. One
immediate result of William's success was an immigration into England
from the Continent. A peaceful invasion of the Norman traders followed
quick on the invasion of the Norman soldiery. Every Norman noble as he
quartered himself upon English lands, every Norman abbot as he entered
his English cloister, gathered French artists, French shopkeepers, French
domestics about him. Round the Abbey of Battle which William founded on
the site of his great victory "Gilbert the Foreigner, Gilbert the Weaver,
Benet the Steward, Hugh the Secretary, Baldwin the Tailor," dwelt mixed
with the English tenantry. But nowhere did these immigrants play so
notable a part as in London. The Normans had had mercantile
establishments in London as early as the reign of Æthelred, if not of
Eadgar. Such settlements however naturally formed nothing more than a
trading colony like the colony of the "Emperor's Men," or Easterlings.
But with the Conquest their number greatly increased. "Many of the
citizens of Rouen and Caen passed over thither, preferring to be dwellers
in this city, inasmuch as it was fitter for their trading and better
stored with the merchandise in which they were wont to traffic." The
status of these traders indeed had wholly changed. They could no longer
be looked upon as strangers in cities which had passed under the Norman
rule. In some cases, as at Norwich, the French colony isolated itself in
a separate French town, side by side with the English borough. But in
London it seems to have taken at once the position of a governing class.
Gilbert Beket, the father of the famous Archbishop, was believed in later
days to have been one of the portreeves of London, the predecessors of
its mayors; he held in Stephen's time a large property in houses within
the walls, and a proof of his civic importance was preserved in the
annual visit of each newly-elected chief magistrate to his tomb in a
little chapel which he had founded in the churchyard of St. Paul's. Yet
Gilbert was one of the Norman strangers who followed in the wake of the
Conqueror; he was by birth a burgher of Rouen, as his wife was of a
burgher family from Caen.
[Sidenote: Freedom of London]
It was partly to this infusion of foreign blood, partly no doubt to the
long internal peace and order secured by the Norman rule, that London
owed the wealth and importance to which it attained during the reign of
Henry the First. The charter which Henry granted it became a model for
lesser boroughs. The king yielded its citizens the right of justice; each
townsman could claim to be tried by his fellow-townsmen in the town-court
or hustings whose sessions took place every week. They were subject only
to the old English trial by oath, and exempt from the trial by battle
which the Normans introduced. Their trade was protected from toll or
exaction over the length and breadth of the land. The king however still
nominated in London as elsewhere the portreeve, or magistrate of the
town, nor were the citizens as yet united together in a commune or
corporation. But an imperfect civic organization existed in the "wards"
or quarters of the town, each governed by its own alderman, and in the
"gilds" or voluntary associations of merchants or traders which ensured
order and mutual protection for their members. Loose too as these bonds
may seem, they were drawn firmly together by the older English traditions
of freedom which the towns preserved. The London burgesses gathered in
their town-mote when the bell swung out from the bell-tower of St. Paul's
to deliberate freely on their own affairs under the presidency of their
alderman. Here, too, they mustered in arms if danger threatened the city,
and delivered the town-banner to their captain, the Norman baron
Fitz-Walter, to lead them against the enemy.
[Sidenote: Early Oxford]
Few boroughs had as yet attained to such power as this, but the instance
of Oxford shows how the freedom of London told on the general advance of
English towns. In spite of antiquarian fancies it is certain that no town
had arisen on the site of Oxford for centuries after the withdrawal of
the Roman legions from the isle of Britain. Though the monastery of St.
Frideswide rose in the turmoil of the eighth century on the slope which
led down to a ford across the Thames, it is long before we get a glimpse
of the borough that must have grown up under its walls. The first
definite evidence for its existence lies in a brief entry of the English
Chronicle which recalls its seizure by Eadward the Elder, but the form of
this entry shows that the town was already a considerable one, and in the
last wrestle of England with the Dane its position on the borders of
Mercia and Wessex combined with its command of the upper valley of the
Thames to give it military and political importance. Of the life of its
burgesses however we still know little or nothing. The names of its
parishes, St. Aldate, St. Ebbe, St. Mildred, St. Edmund, show how early
church after church gathered round the earlier town-church of St. Martin.
But the men of the little town remain dim to us. Their town-mote, or the
"Portmannimote" as it was called, which was held in the churchyard of St.
Martin, still lives in a shadow of its older self as the Freeman's Common
Hall--their town-mead is still the Port-meadow. But it is only by later
charters or the record of Domesday that we see them going on pilgrimage
to the shrines of Winchester, or chaffering in their market-place, or
judging and law-making in their hustings, their merchant-gild regulating
trade, their reeve gathering his king's dues of tax or money or
marshalling his troop of burghers for the king's wars, their boats paying
toll of a hundred herrings in Lent-tide to the Abbot of Abingdon, as they
floated down the Thames towards London.
[Sidenote: Oxford and the Normans]
The number of houses marked waste in the survey marks the terrible
suffering of Oxford in the Norman Conquest: but the ruin was soon
repaired, and the erection of its castle, the rebuilding of its churches,
the planting of a Jewry in the heart of the town, showed in what various
ways the energy of its new masters was giving an impulse to its life. It
is a proof of the superiority of the Hebrew dwellings to the Christian
houses about them that each of the later town-halls of the borough had,
before their expulsion, been houses of Jews. Nearly all the larger
dwelling houses in fact which were subsequently converted into academic
halls bore traces of the same origin in names such as Moysey's Hall,
Lombard's Hall, or Jacob's Hall. The Jewish houses were abundant, for
besides the greater Jewry in the heart of it, there was a lesser Jewry
scattered over its southern quarter, and we can hardly doubt that this
abundance of substantial buildings in the town was at least one of the
causes which drew teachers and scholars within its walls. The Jewry, a
town within a town, lay here as elsewhere isolated and exempt from the
common justice, the common life and self-government of the borough. On
all but its eastern side too the town was hemmed in by jurisdictions
independent of its own. The precincts of the Abbey of Osney, the wide
"bailey" of the Castle, bounded it narrowly on the west. To the north,
stretching away beyond the little church of St. Giles, lay the fields of
the royal manor of Beaumont. The Abbot of Abingdon, whose woods of Cumnor
and Bagley closed the southern horizon, held his leet-court in the hamlet
of Grampound beyond the bridge. Nor was the whole space within the walls
subject to the self-government of the citizens. The Jewry had a rule and
law of its own. Scores of householders, dotted over street and lane, were
tenants of castle or abbey and paid no suit or service at the borough
court.
[Sidenote: Oxford and London]
But within these narrow bounds and amidst these various obstacles the
spirit of municipal liberty lived a life the more intense that it was so
closely cabined and confined. Nowhere indeed was the impulse which London
was giving likely to tell with greater force. The "bargemen" of Oxford
were connected even before the Conquest with the "boatmen," or shippers,
of the capital. In both cases it is probable that the bodies bearing
these names represented what is known as the merchant-gild of the town.
Royal recognition enables us to trace the merchant-gild of Oxford from
the time of Henry the First. Even then lands, islands, pastures belonged
to it, and amongst them the same Port-meadow which is familiar to Oxford
men pulling lazily on a summer's noon to Godstow. The connexion between
the two gilds was primarily one of trade. "In the time of King Eadward
and Abbot Ordric" the channel of the Thames beneath the walls of the
Abbey of Abingdon became so blocked up that boats could scarce pass as
far as Oxford, and it was at the joint prayer of the burgesses of London
and Oxford that the abbot dug a new channel through the meadow to the
south of his church. But by the time of Henry the Second closer bonds
than this linked the two cities together. In case of any doubt or contest
about judgements in their own court the burgesses of Oxford were
empowered to refer the matter to the decision of London, "and whatsoever
the citizens of London shall adjudge in such cases shall be deemed
right." The judicial usages, the municipal rights of each city were
assimilated by Henry's charter. "Of whatsoever matter the men of Oxford
be put in plea, they shall deraign themselves according to the law and
custom of the city of London and not otherwise, because they and the
citizens of London are of one and the same custom, law, and liberty."
[Sidenote: Life of the Town]