England under the Angevin Kings, Volumes I and II
Date: 2022-06-19T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: England -- Civilization -- 1066-1485; Great Britain -- History -- Angevin period; 1154-1216; Anjou; House of

The Project Gutenberg eBook of England under the Angevin Kings, Volumes I and II

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Title: England under the Angevin Kings, Volumes I and II

Author: Kate Norgate

Release date: June 19, 2022 [eBook #68348]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Macmillan and Co, 1887

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68348

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLAND UNDER THE ANGEVIN KINGS, VOLUMES I AND II ***

ENGLAND UNDER THE ANGEVIN KINGS

VOLUME I

Transcriber’s Note

The cover image was created by the transcriber, and is placed in the public domain.

This is a combination of the two volumes (Vol. I, Vol. II) of “England Under the Angevin Kings”. Volumes I and II of this book are also published separately by Project Gutenberg.

Please also see the note at the end of the book.

ENGLAND

UNDER

THE ANGEVIN KINGS

ENGLAND

UNDER

THE ANGEVIN KINGS

BY

KATE NORGATE

IN TWO VOLUMES—VOL. I.

WITH MAPS AND PLANS

London

MACMILLAN AND CO.

AND NEW YORK

1887

All rights reserved

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
WITH THE DEEPEST REVERENCE AND GRATITUDE
TO THE MEMORY OF
MY DEAR AND HONOURED MASTER
JOHN RICHARD GREEN

PREFACE

This attempt to sketch the history of England under the Angevin kings owes its existence to the master whose name I have ventured to place at its beginning. It was undertaken at his suggestion; its progress through those earliest stages which for an inexperienced writer are the hardest of all was directed by his counsels, aided by his criticisms, encouraged by his sympathy; and every step in my work during the past eleven years has but led me to feel more deeply and to prize more highly the constant help of his teaching and his example. Of the book in its finished state he never saw a page. For its faults no one is answerable but myself. I can only hope that, however great may be its errors and its defects, it may yet shew at least some traces of that influence which is so abidingly precious to me.

I desire respectfully to express my gratitude to the Lord Bishop of Chester and to Mr. Freeman, who, for the sake of the friend who had commended me to their kindness, have been good enough to help me with information and advice on many occasions during my work.

A word of acknowledgement is due for some of the maps and plans. The map of Gaul in the tenth century is founded upon one in Mr. Freeman’s Norman Conquest. The plans of Bristol and Lincoln are adapted from those in the Proceedings of the Archæological Institute; for Lincoln I was further assisted by the local knowledge kindly placed at my disposal by the Rev. Precentor Venables. For Oxford I have followed the guidance of the Rev. Father F. Goldie, S.J. (A Bygone Oxford), and of Mr. J. Parker (Early History of Oxford); and for London, that of its historian the Rev. W. J. Loftie, whom I have especially to thank for his help on some points of London topography.

My greatest help of all has been the constant personal kindness and ever-ready sympathy of Mrs. Green. To her, as to my dear master himself, I owe and feel a gratitude which cannot be put into words.

KATE NORGATE.

January 1887.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
| PAGE
The England of Henry I., 1100–1135 | 1
CHAPTER II
The Beginnings of Anjou, 843–987 | 97
Note A.—The Sources of Angevin History | 126
Note B.—The Palace of the Counts at Angers | 132
Note C.—The Marriages of Geoffrey Greygown | 134
Note D.—The Breton and Poitevin Wars of Geoffrey Greygown | 136
Note E.—The Grant of Maine to Geoffrey Greygown | 140
CHAPTER III
Anjou and Blois, 987–1044 | 143
Note A.—The Siege of Melun | 189
Note B.—The Parents of Queen Constance | 190
Note C.—The Pilgrimages of Fulk Nerra | 192
Note D.—Geoffrey Martel and Poitou | 197
CHAPTER IV
Anjou and Normandy, 1044–1128 | 200
Note A.—The Houses of Anjou and Gâtinais | 249
Note B.—The Heir of Geoffrey Martel | 251
Note C.—The War of Saintonge | 252
Note D.—The Descendants of Herbert Wake-dog | 253
Note E.—The Siege of La Flèche and Treaty of Blanchelande | 256
Note F.—The Marriage of Geoffrey and Matilda | 258
CHAPTER V
Geoffrey Plantagenet and Stephen of Blois, 1128–1139 | 261
CHAPTER VI
England and the Barons, 1139–1147 | 308
Note.—The Topography of the Battle of Lincoln | 344
CHAPTER VII
The English Church, 1136–1149 | 347
CHAPTER VIII
Henry Duke of the Normans, 1149–1154 | 372
CHAPTER IX
Henry and England, 1154–1157 | 407
CHAPTER X
Henry and France, 1156–1161 | 440
CHAPTER XI
The Last Years of Archbishop Theobald, 1156–1161 | 474

LIST OF MAPS

I. | Gaul c. 909–941 | To face page | 107
II. | Gaul c. 1027 | ” | 143

PLANS

I. | Winchester. II. Bristol | To face page | 31
III. | Lincoln. IV. Oxford | ” | 40
V. | London | ” | 44
VI. | Angers | ” | 165

CHAPTER I.
THE ENGLAND OF HENRY I.
1100–1135.

“When the green tree, cut asunder in the midst and severed by the space of three furlongs, shall be grafted in again and shall bring forth flowers and fruit,—then at last may England hope to see the end of her sorrows.”[1]

- [1] Vita Edwardi (Luard), p. 431.

So closed the prophecy in which the dying king Eadward the Confessor foretold the destiny in store for his country after his departure. His words, mocked at by one of the listeners, incomprehensible to all, found an easy interpretation a hundred years later. The green tree of the West-Saxon monarchy had fallen beneath Duke William’s battle-axe; three alien reigns had parted its surviving branch from the stem; the marriage of Henry I. with a princess of the old English blood-royal had grafted it in again.[2] One flower sprung from that union had indeed bloomed only to die ere it reached its prime,[3] but another had brought forth the promised fruit; and the dim ideal of national prosperity and union which English and Normans alike associated with the revered name of the Confessor was growing at last into a real and living thing beneath the sceptre of Henry Fitz-Empress.

- [2] Æthelred of Rievaux, Vita S. Edw. Regis (Twysden, X. Scriptt.), col. 401.

- [3] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 419 (Hardy, p. 652), notes that the fulfilment of the prophecy was looked for in William the Ætheling.

There are, at first glance, few stranger things in history than the revival thus prefigured:—a national revival growing up, as it seems, in the most adverse circumstances, under the pressure of an alien government, of a race of kings who were strangers alike to the men of old English blood and to the descendants of those who had come over with the Conqueror: at a time when, in a merely political point of view, England seemed to be not only conquered but altogether swallowed up in the vast and varied dominions of the house of Anjou. It was indeed not the first time that the island had become an appendage to a foreign empire compared with which she was but a speck in the ocean. Cnut the Dane was, like Henry of Anjou, not only king of England but also ruler of a great continental monarchy far exceeding England in extent, and forming together with her a dominion only to be equalled, if equalled at all, by that of the Emperor. But the parallel goes no farther. Cnut’s first kingdom, the prize of his youthful valour, was his centre and his home, of which his Scandinavian realms, even his native Denmark, were mere dependencies. Whatever he might be when he revisited them, in his island-kingdom he was an Englishman among Englishmen. The heir of Geoffrey of Anjou and Matilda of Normandy, on the other hand, was virtually of no nationality, no country; but if he could be said to have a home at all, it was certainly not on this side of the sea—it was the little marchland of his fathers. In the case of his sons, the southern blood of their mother Eleanor added a yet more un-English element; and of Richard, indeed, it might almost be said that the home of his choice was not in Europe at all, but in Holy Land. Alike to him and to his father, England was simply the possession which gave them their highest title, furnished them with resources for prosecuting their schemes of continental policy, and secured to them a safe refuge on which to fall back in moments of difficulty or danger. It was not till the work of revival was completed, till it had resulted in the creation of the new England which comes to light with Edward I., that it could find a representative and a leader in the king himself. The sovereign in whose reign the chief part of the work was done stood utterly aloof from it in sympathy; yet he is in fact its central figure and its most important actor. The story of England’s developement from the break-down of the Norman system under Stephen to the consolidation of a national monarchy under Edward I. is the story of Henry of Anjou, of his work and of its results. But as the story does not end with Henry, so neither does it begin with him. It is impossible to understand Henry himself without knowing something of the race from which he sprang; of those wonderful Angevin counts who, beginning as rulers of a tiny under-fief of the duchy of France, grew into a sovereign house extending its sway from one end of Christendom to the other. It is impossible to understand his work without knowing something of what England was, and how she came to be what she was, when the young count of Anjou was called to wear her crown.

The project of an empire such as that which Henry II. actually wielded had been the last dream of William Rufus. In the summer of 1100 the duke of Aquitaine, about to join the Crusaders in Holy Land, offered his dominions in pledge to the king of England. Rufus clutched at the offer “like a lion at his prey.”[4] Five years before he had received the Norman duchy on the same terms from his brother Robert; he had bridled its restless people and brought them under control; he had won back its southern dependency, his father’s first conquest, the county of Maine. Had this new scheme been realized, nothing but the little Angevin march would have broken the continuity of a Norman dominion stretching from the Forth to the Pyrenees, and in all likelihood the story of the Angevin kings would never have had to be told. Jesting after his wont with his hunting-companions, William—so the story goes—declared that he would keep his next Christmas feast at Poitiers, if he should live so long.[5] But that same evening the Red King lay dead in the New Forest, and his territories fell asunder at once. Robert of Normandy came back from Palestine in triumph to resume possession of his duchy; while the barons of England, without waiting for his return, chose his English-born brother Henry for their king.

- [4] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 780.

- [5] Geoff. Gaimar, vv. 6296–6298 (Wright, p. 219).

Thirteen years before, at his father’s death, Henry, the only child of William and Matilda who was actually born in the purple—the child of a crowned king and queen, born on English soil, and thus by birth, though not by descent, entitled to rank as an English Ætheling—had been launched into the world at the age of nineteen without a foot of land that he could call his own. The story went that he had complained bitterly to the dying Conqueror of his exclusion from all share in the family heritage. “Have patience, boy,” was William’s answer, “let thine elder brothers go before thee; the day will come when thou shalt be greater than either of them.” Henry was, however, not left a penniless adventurer dependent on the bounty of his brothers; the Conqueror gave him a legacy of ten thousand pounds as a solid provision wherewith to begin his career. A year had scarcely passed before Duke Robert, overwhelmed with troubles in Normandy, found himself at his wits’ end with an empty treasury, and besought Henry to lend him some money. The Ætheling, as cool and calculating as his brothers were impetuous, refused; the duke in desperation offered to sell him any territory he chose, and a bargain was struck whereby Henry received, for the sum of three thousand pounds, the investiture of the Cotentin, the Avranchin, and the Mont-St.-Michel—in a word, the whole western end of the Norman duchy.[6] Next summer, while the duke was planning an attempt on the English crown and vainly awaiting a fair wind to enable him to cross the Channel, the count of the Cotentin managed to get across without one, to claim the estates in Gloucestershire formerly held by his mother and destined for him by his father’s will. He was received by William Rufus only too graciously, for the consequence was that some mischief-makers, always specially plentiful at the Norman court, persuaded Duke Robert that his youngest brother was plotting against him with the second, and when Henry returned in the autumn he had no sooner landed than he was seized and cast into prison.[7] Within a year he was free again, reinstated, if not in the Cotentin, at least in the Avranchin and the Mont-St.-Michel, and entrusted with the keeping of Rouen itself against the traitors stirred up by the Red King. William, while his young brother was safe in prison, had resumed the Gloucestershire estates and made them over to his favourite Robert Fitz-Hamon. Henry in his natural resentment threw himself with all his energies into the cause of the duke of Normandy, acted as his trustiest and bravest supporter throughout the war with Rufus which followed, and at the close of the year crowned his services by the promptitude and valour with which he defeated a conspiracy for betraying the Norman capital to the king of England.[8] The struggle ended in a treaty between the elder brothers, in which neither of them forgot the youngest. Their remembrance of him took the shape of an agreement to drive him out of all his territories and divide the spoil between themselves. Their joint attack soon brought him to bay in his mightiest stronghold, the rock crowned by the abbey of S. Michael-in-Peril-of-the-Sea, commonly called Mont-Saint-Michel. Henry threw himself into the place with as many knights as were willing to share the adventure; the brethren of the abbey did their utmost to help, and for fifteen days the little garrison, perched on their inaccessible rock, held out against their besiegers.[9] Then hunger began to thin their ranks; nothing but the inconsistent generosity of Robert saved them from the worse agonies of thirst;[10] one by one they dropped away, till Henry saw that he must yield to fate, abide by his father’s counsel, and wait patiently for better days. He surrendered; he came down from the Mount, once again a landless and homeless man; and save for one strange momentary appearance in England as a guest at the Red King’s court,[11] he spent the greater part of the next two years in France and the Vexin, wandering from one refuge to another with a lowly train of one knight, three squires, and one chaplain.[12] He was at length recalled by the townsmen of Domfront, who, goaded to desperation by the oppressions of their lord Robert of Bellême, threw off his yoke and besought Henry to come and take upon himself the duty of defending them, their town and castle, against their former tyrant. “By the help of God and the suffrages of his friends,” as his admiring historian says,[13] Henry was thus placed in command of his father’s earliest conquest, the key of Normandy and Maine, a fortress scarcely less mighty and of far greater political importance than that from which he had been driven. He naturally used his opportunity for reprisals, not only upon Robert of Bellême, but also upon his own brothers;[14] and by the end of two years he had made himself of so much consequence in the duchy that William Rufus, again at war with the duke, thought it time to secure his alliance. The two younger brothers met in England, and when Henry returned in the spring of 1095 he came as the liegeman of the English king, sworn to fight his battles and further his interests in Normandy by every means in his power.[15]

- [6] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 665.

- [7] Ib. p. 672. Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 392 (Hardy, pp. 616, 617).

- [8] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 690. Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 392 (Hardy, pp. 617, 618).

- [9] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 697.

- [10] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iv. c. 310 (Hardy, pp. 491, 492).

- [11] See Freeman, William Rufus, vol. i. pp. 293, 295, 305; vol. ii. pp. 535, 536.

- [12] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 697.

- [13] Ib. p. 698.

- [14] Ib. pp. 698, 706, 722.

- [15] Eng. Chron. a. 1095.

William and Henry had both learned by experience that to work with Robert for any political purpose was hopeless, and that their true interest was to support each other—William’s, to enlist for his own service Henry’s clear cool head and steady hand; Henry’s, to secure for himself some kind of footing in the land where his ultimate ambitions could not fail to be centred. He had learned in his wanderings to adapt himself to all circumstances and all kinds of society; personally, he and Rufus can have had little in common except their passion for the chase. Lanfranc’s teaching, moral and intellectual, had been all alike thrown away upon his pupil William the Red. Henry, carefully educated according to his father’s special desire, had early shown a remarkable aptitude for study, was a scholar of very fair attainments as scholarship went among laymen in his day, and retained his literary tastes not only through all his youthful trials but also through the crowd of political and domestic cares which pressed upon his later life. Yet such tastes seem almost as strange in Henry as they would in William Rufus. The one prosaic element in the story of Henry’s youth is the personality of its hero. No man had ever less of the romantic or poetic temperament; if he had none of the follies or the faults of chivalry, he had just as little of its nobler idealism. From his first bargain with Robert for the purchase of the Cotentin to his last bargain with Fulk of Anjou for the marriage of his heir, life was to him simply a matter of business. The strongest points in his character were precisely the two qualities which both his brothers utterly lacked—self-control, and that “capacity for taking trouble” which is sometimes said to be the chief element of genius. But of the higher kind of genius, of the fire which kindles in the soul rather than merely in the brain, Henry had not a spark. He was essentially a man of business, in the widest and loftiest sense of the words. His self-control was not, like his father’s, the curb forcibly put by a noble mind upon its own natural impetuosity; it was the more easily-practised calmness of a perfectly cold nature which could always be reasonable because it had to fight with no impulse of passion, which was never tempted to “follow wandering fires” because they lit in it no responsive flame; a nature in which the head had complete mastery over the heart, and that head was one which no misfortunes could disturb, no successes turn, and no perplexities confuse.

The sudden vacancy of the English throne found every one else quite unprepared for such an emergency. Henry was never unprepared. His quickness and decision secured him the keys of the treasury and the formal election of those barons and prelates who had been members of the fatal hunting-party, or who hurried to Winchester at the tidings of its tragic issue; and before opposition had time to come to a head, it was checked by the coronation and unction which turned the king-elect into full king.[16] Henry knew well, however, that opposition there was certain to be. Robert of Normandy, just returned from the Crusade and covered with glory, was sure to assert his claim, and as sure to be upheld by a strong party among the barons, to whom a fresh severance of England and Normandy was clearly not desirable. In anticipation of the coming struggle, Henry threw himself at once on the support of his subjects. In addition to the pledges of his coronation-oath—taken almost in the words of Æthelred to Dunstan[17]—he issued on the same day a charter in which he solemnly and specifically promised the abolition of his brother’s evil customs in Church and state, and a return to just government according to the law of the land. The details were drawn up so as to touch all classes. The Church, as including them all, of course stood first; its freedom was restored and all sale or farming of benefices renounced by the king. The next clause appealed specially to the feudal vassals: those who held their lands “by the hauberk”—the tenants by knight-service—were exempted from all other imposts on their demesne lands, that they might be the better able to fulfil their own particular obligation. The tenants-in-chief were exempted from all the unjust exactions with regard to wardships, marriages, reliefs and forfeitures, which had been practised in the last reign; but the redress was not confined to them; they were distinctly required to exercise the same justice towards their own under-tenants. The last clause covered all the rest: by it Henry gave back to his people “the laws of King Eadward as amended by King William.”[18] Like Cnut’s renewal of the law of Eadgar—like Eadward’s own renewal of the law of Cnut—the charter was a proclamation of general reunion and goodwill. As a pledge of its sincerity, the Red King’s minister, Ralf Flambard, in popular estimation the author of all the late misdoings, was at once cast into the Tower;[19] the exiled primate was fetched home as speedily as possible; and in November the king identified himself still more closely with the land of his birth by taking to wife a maiden of the old English blood-royal, Eadgyth of Scotland, great-granddaughter of Eadmund Ironside.[20]

- [16] Eng. Chron. a. 1100.

- [17] Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 99 (3d ed.).

- [18] Charter of Henry I., ib. pp. 100–102.

- [19] Eng. Chron. a. 1100.

- [20] Eng. Chron. a. 1100.

His precautions were soon justified. Robert had refused the thorny crown of Jerusalem, but the crown of England had far other charms; and his movements were quickened by Ralf Flambard, who early in the spring made his escape to Normandy.[21] It was probably through Ralf’s management that the duke won over some of the sailors who guarded the English coast and thus got ashore unexpectedly at Portsmouth while the king was keeping watch for him at the old landing-place, Pevensey.[22] At the first tidings of the intended invasion Henry, like Rufus in the same case thirteen years before, had appealed to Witan and people, and by a renewal of his charter gained a renewal of their fealty. No sooner, however, was Robert actually in England than the great majority of the barons prepared to go over to him in a body. But the king born on English soil, married to a lady of the old kingly house, had a stronger hold than ever Rufus could have had upon the English people; and they, headed by their natural leader and representative, the restored archbishop of Canterbury, clave to him with unswerving loyalty.[23] The two armies met near Alton;[24] at the last moment, the wisdom either of Anselm, of the few loyal barons, or of Henry himself, turned the meeting into a peaceful one. The brothers came to terms: Robert renounced his claim to the crown in consideration of a yearly pension from England; Henry gave up all his Norman possessions except Domfront, whose people he refused to forsake;[25] and, as in the treaty made at Caen ten years before between Robert and William, it was arranged that whichever brother lived longest should inherit the other’s dominions, if the deceased left no lawful heirs.[26]

- [21] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 786, 787.

- [22] Eng. Chron. a. 1101.

- [23] Eadmer, Hist. Novorum (Rule), p. 127.

- [24] See Freeman, William Rufus, vol. ii. p. 408.

- [25] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 788.

- [26] Eng. Chron. a. 1101.

The treaty was ratified at Winchester in the first days of August;[27] and thus, almost on the anniversary of the Red King’s death, ended the last Norman invasion of England. But the treaty of Winchester, like that of Caen, failed to settle the real difficulty. That difficulty was, how to control the barons. According to one version of the treaty, it was stipulated that those who had incurred forfeiture in England by their adherence to Robert and those who had done the same in Normandy in Henry’s behalf should alike go unpunished;[28] according to another, perhaps a more probable account, the brothers agreed to co-operate in punishing traitors on both sides.[29] Henry set to work to do his part methodically. One after another, at different times, in various ways, by regular process of law, the offenders were brought to justice in England: some heavily fined, some deprived of their honours and exiled. It was treason not so much against himself as against the peace and order of the realm that Henry was bent upon avenging; Ivo of Grantmesnil was fined to the verge of ruin for the crime of making war not upon the king in behalf of the duke, but upon his own neighbours for his own personal gratification—a crime which was part of the daily life of every baron in Normandy, but which had never been seen in England before,[30] and never was seen there again as long as King Henry lived. The most formidable of all the troublers of the land was Henry’s old enemy at Domfront—Robert, lord of Bellême in the border-land of Perche, earl of Shrewsbury and Arundel in England, count of Alençon and lord of Montgomery in Normandy, and now by his marriage count of Ponthieu. Robert was actually fortifying his castles of Bridgenorth and Arundel in preparation for open revolt when he was summoned to take his trial on forty-five charges of treason against the king of England and the duke of Normandy. As he failed to answer, Henry led his troops to the siege of Bridgenorth. In three weeks it surrendered; Shrewsbury and Arundel did the same, and Robert of Bellême was glad to purchase safety for life and limb at the cost of all his English possessions.[31]

- [27] Sim. Durh. Gesta Reg. a. 1101.

- [28] Eng. Chron. a. 1101.

- [29] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 788.

- [30] Ib. p. 805.

- [31] Ib. pp. 807, 808. Eng. Chron. a. 1102.

From that moment Henry’s position in England was secured; but all his remonstrances failed to make his indolent elder brother fulfil his part of their compact. The traitors whom Henry expelled from England only carried their treason over sea to a more congenial climate, and the helpless, heedless duke looked passively on while Robert of Bellême, William of Mortain the banished earl of Cornwall, and their fellows slaked their thirst for vengeance upon King Henry by ravaging the Norman lands of those who were faithful to him in England.[32] Their victims, as well as Henry himself, began to see that his personal intervention alone could re-establish order in the duchy. On his appearance there in 1104 he was joined by all the more reasonable among the barons. For the moment he was pacified by fresh promises of amendment on Robert’s part, and by the cession of the county of Evreux; but he knew that all compromise had become vain; and in the last week of Lent 1105 he landed again at Barfleur in the full determination of making himself master of Normandy. His Norman partisans rallied round him at once,[33] and he was soon joined by two valuable allies, Elias count of Maine and his intended son-in-law, the young count Geoffrey of Anjou.[34] It was they who won for Henry his first success, the capture of Bayeux.[35] Warned by the fate of this unhappy city, which was burnt down, churches and all, Caen surrendered at once, and Henry thus came into possession of the Norman treasury. A siege of Falaise failed through the unexplained departure of Count Elias,[36] and the war dragged slowly on till Henry, now busy in another quarter with negotiations for the return of S. Anselm, went back at Michaelmas to England. Thither he was followed first by Robert of Bellême, then by Robert of Normandy,[37] both seeking for peace; but peace had become impossible now. Next summer Henry was again in Normandy, reconciled to S. Anselm, released from anxieties at home, free to concentrate all his energies upon the final struggle. It was decided with one blow. As he was besieging the castle of Tinchebray on Michaelmas Eve Duke Robert at the head of all his forces approached and summoned him to raise the siege. He refused, “preferring,” as he said, “to take the blame of a more than civil war for the sake of future peace.” But when the two hosts were drawn up face to face, the prospect of a battle seemed too horrible to be endured, composed as they were of kinsmen and brothers, fathers and sons, arrayed against each other. The clergy besought Henry to stay his hand; he listened, pondered, and at length sent a final message to his brother. He came, he said, not wishing to deprive Robert of his duchy or to win territories for himself, but to answer the cry of the distressed and deliver Normandy from the misrule of one who was duke only in name. Here then was his last proposition: “Give up to me half the land of Normandy, the castles and the administration of justice and government throughout the whole, and receive the value of the other half annually from my treasury in England. Thus you may enjoy pleasure and feasting to your heart’s content, while I will take upon me the labours of government, and guarantee the fulfilment of my pledge, if you will but keep quiet.” Foolish to the last, Robert declined the offer; and the two armies made themselves ready for battle.[38] In point of numbers they seem to have been not unequally matched, but they differed greatly in character. Robert was stronger in footsoldiers, Henry in knights; the flower of the Norman nobility was on his side now, besides his Angevin, Cenomannian and Breton allies;[39] while of those who followed Robert some, as the issue proved, were only half-hearted. Of Henry’s genuine English troops there is no account, but the men of his own day looked upon his whole host as English in contradistinction to Robert’s Normans, and the tactics adopted in the battle were thoroughly English. The king of England fought on foot with his whole army, and it seems that the duke of Normandy followed his example.[40]

- [32] Eng. Chron. a. 1104. Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 397 (Hardy, p. 623).

- [33] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 814.

- [34] Chron. S. Albin. a. 1105 (Marchegay, Eglises d’Anjou, p. 30).

- [35] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 818. Chron. S. Albin. a. 1105 (Marchegay, Eglises d’Anjou, p. 30).

- [36] “Helias a Normannis rogatus discessit,” says Orderic (as above). What can this mean?

- [37] Eng. Chron. a. 1106.

- [38] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 820.

- [39] Ib. p. 820. Hen. Huntingdon, l. vii. c. 25 (Arnold, p. 235).

- [40] Hen. Hunt., l. vii. c. 25 (Arnold, p. 235).

The first line of the Norman or ducal host under William of Mortain charged the English front under Ralf of Bayeux, and by the fury of their onset compelled them to fall back, though without breaking their ranks. The issue was still doubtful, when the only mounted division of Henry’s troops, the Bretons and Cenomannians under Count Elias, came up to the rescue, took the duke’s army in flank, and cut down two hundred men in a single charge. Those Cenomannian swords which William the Conqueror was so proud to have overcome now carried the day for his youngest son. Robert of Bellême, as soon as he saw how matters were going, fled with all his followers, and the duke’s army at once dissolved.[41] In Henry’s own words, “the Divine Mercy gave into my hands, without much slaughter on our side, the duke of Normandy, the count of Mortain, William Crispin, William Ferrers, Robert of Estouteville, some four hundred knights, ten thousand foot—and the duchy of Normandy.”[42]

- [41] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 821. Eng. Chron. a. 1106. Hen. Hunt., as above·/·l. vii. c. 25 (Arnold, p. 235).

- [42] Letter of Henry to S. Anselm in Eadmer, Hist. Nov. (Rule), p. 184.

Forty years before, on the very same day, William the Conqueror had landed at Pevensey to bring the English kingdom under the Norman yoke. The work of Michaelmas Eve, 1066, was reversed on Michaelmas Eve, 1106; the victory of Tinchebray made Normandy a dependency of England.[43] Such was the view taken by one of the most clear-sighted and unprejudiced historians of the time, a man of mingled Norman and English blood. Such was evidently the view instinctively taken by all parties, and the instinct was a true one, although at first glance it seems somewhat hard to account for. The reign of Henry I., if judged merely by the facts which strike the eye in the chronicles of the time, looks like one continued course of foreign policy and foreign warfare pursued by the king for his own personal ends at the expense of his English subjects. But the real meaning of the facts lies deeper. The comment of the archbishop of Rouen upon Henry’s death—“Peace be to his soul, for he ever loved peace”[44]—was neither sarcasm nor flattery. Henry did love peace, so well that he spent his life in fighting for it. His early Norman campaigns are enough to prove that without being a master of the art of war like his father, he was yet a brave soldier and a skilful commander; and the complicated wars of his later years, when over and over again he had to struggle almost single-handed against France, Flanders and Anjou, amid the endless treasons of his own barons, show still more clearly his superiority to nearly all the other generals of his time. But his ambitions were not those of the warrior. Some gleam of the old northman’s joy of battle may have flashed across the wandering knight as he defied his besiegers from the summit of his rock “in Peril of the Sea,” or swooped down upon the turbulent lords of the Cenomannian border, like an eagle upon lesser birds of prey, from his eyrie on the crest of Domfront; but the victor of Tinchebray looked at his campaigns in another light. To him they were simply a part of his general business as a king; they were means to an end, and that end was not glory, nor even gain, but the establishment of peace and order. In his thirteen years of wandering to and fro between England, Normandy and France he had probably studied all the phases of tyranny and anarchy which the three countries amply displayed, and matured his own theory of government, which he practised steadily to the end of his reign. That theory was not a very lofty or noble one; the principle from which it started and the end at which it aimed was the interest of the ruler rather than of the ruled; but the form in which Henry conceived that end and the means whereby he sought to compass it were at any rate more enlightened than those of his predecessor. The Red King had reigned wholly by terror; Henry did not aspire to rule by love; but he saw that, in a merely selfish point of view, a sovereign gains nothing by making himself a terror to any except evil-doers, that the surest basis for his authority is the preservation of order, justice and peace, and that so far at least the interests of king and people must be one. It is difficult to get rid of a feeling that Henry enforced justice and order from motives of expediency rather than of abstract righteousness. But, as a matter of fact, he did enforce them all round, on earl and churl, clerk and layman, Norman and Englishman, without distinction. And this steady, equal government was rendered possible only by the determined struggle which he waged with the Norman barons and their French allies. His home policy and his foreign policy were inseparably connected; and the lifelong battle which he fought with his continental foes was really the battle of England’s freedom.

- [43] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 398 (Hardy, p. 625).

- [44] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 9 (Hardy, p. 702).

From the year 1103 onward the battle was fought wholly on the other side of the Channel. In England Henry, as his English subjects joyfully told him, became a free king on the day when he drove out Robert of Bellême.[45] One great hindrance indeed still remained, hanging upon him like a dead weight throughout his early struggles in Normandy; the controversy concerning ecclesiastical investitures, with which the rest of Europe had been aflame for a quarter of a century before it touched England at all. The decree of the Lateran Council of 1075 forbidding lay sovereigns to grant the investiture of any spiritual office with ring and staff was completely ignored in practice by William the Conqueror and Lanfranc. Their position on this and all other matters of Church policy was summed up in their reply to Pope Gregory’s demand of fealty: William would do what the English kings who went before him had done, neither more nor less.[46] But the king and the primate were not without perceiving that, as a necessary consequence of their own acts, the English Church had entered upon a new and more complicated relation both to the state and to the Apostolic see, and that the day must shortly come when she would be dragged from her quiet anchorage into the whirlpool of European controversies and strifes. Their forebodings found expression in the three famous rules of ecclesiastical policy which William laid down for the guidance of his successors rather than himself:—that no Pope should be acknowledged in England and no letter from him received there by any one without the king’s consent;—that no Church council should put forth decrees without his permission and approval;—and that no baron or servant of the crown should be laid under ecclesiastical censure save at the king’s own command.[47] These rules, famous in the two succeeding reigns under the name of “paternal customs,” were never put to the test of practice as long as William and Lanfranc lived. The Red King’s abuse of the two first, by precipitating the crisis and driving S. Anselm to throw himself into the arms of Rome, showed not so much their inadequacy as the justice of the misgivings from which they had sprung. Henry at his accession took his stand upon them in the true spirit of their author; but the time was gone by; Anselm too had taken his stand upon ground whence in honour and conscience he could not recede, and the very first interview between king and primate threw open the whole question of the investitures. But in England and in the Empire the question wore two very different aspects. In England it never became a matter of active interest or violent partisanship in the Church and the nation at large. Only a few deep thinkers on either side—men such as Count Robert of Meulan among the advisers of the king, perhaps such as the devoted English secretary Eadmer among the intimate associates of Anselm—ever understood or considered the principles involved in the case, or its bearing upon the general system of Church and state. Anselm himself stood throughout not upon the abstract wrongfulness of lay investiture, but upon his own duty of obedience to the decree of the Lateran Council; he strove not for the privileges of his order, but for the duties of his conscience. The bishops who refused investiture at Henry’s hands clearly acted in the same spirit; what held them back was not so much loyalty to the Pope as loyalty to their own metropolitan. The great mass of both clergy and laity cared nothing at all how the investitures were given, and very little for papal decrees; all they cared about was that they should not be again deprived of their archbishop, and left, as they had already been left too long, like sheep without a shepherd. In their eyes the dispute was a personal one between king and primate, stirred up by Satan to keep the English Church in misery.

- [45] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 808.

- [46] Lanfranc. Ep. x. (Giles, vol. i. p. 32).

- [47] Eadmer, Hist. Nov. (Rule), p. 10.

In the manner in which it was conducted on both sides, the case compares no less favourably with its continental parallel and with the later contest in England of which it was the forerunner, and for which, in some respects, it unquestionably furnished a model, though that model was very ill followed. For two years the dispute made absolutely no difference in the general working of the Church; Anselm was in full enjoyment of his canonical and constitutional rights as primate of all Britain; he ruled his suffragans, held his councils, superintended the restoration of his cathedral church, and laboured at the reform of discipline, with Henry’s full concurrence; and the clergy, with the archbishop at their head, were the life and soul of the party whose loyalty saved the king in his struggle with the barons. Even when Anselm’s position in England had become untenable, he went over sea in full possession of his property, as the king’s honoured friend and spiritual father. Not till Henry was provoked by a papal excommunication of all the upholders of the obnoxious “paternal customs” except himself, did he seize the temporalities of the archbishopric; and even then Anselm, from his Burgundian retreat, continued in active and unrestrained correspondence with his chapter and suffragans, and in friendly communication not only with Queen Matilda, but even with the king himself. And when at last the archbishop who had gone down on his knees to the Pope to save William Rufus from excommunication threatened to put forth that very sentence against William’s far less guilty brother, he was only, like Henry himself in Normandy at the same moment, preparing his most terrible weapon of war as the surest means of obtaining peace. Henry’s tact warned him, too, that the time for a settlement was come, and the sincerity of his motives enabled him to strike out a line of compromise which both parties could accept without sacrificing their own dignity or the principles for which they were contending. The English king and primate managed to attain in seven years of quiet decorous negotiation, without disturbing the peace or tarnishing the honour of either Church or crown, the end to which Pope and Emperor only came after half a century of tumult, bloodshed and disgrace; the island-pontiff who “loved righteousness and hated iniquity,” instead of “dying in exile” like his Roman brother, came home to end his days in triumph on the chair of S. Augustine. The settlement made little or no practical difference as far as its immediate object was concerned. Henry ceased to confer the spiritual insignia; but the elections, held as of old in the royal court, were as much under his control as before. He yielded the form and kept the substance; the definite concession of the bishops’ homage for their temporalities fully compensated for the renunciation of the ceremonial investiture. But the other side, too, had gained something more than a mere form. It had won a great victory for freedom by bringing Henry to admit that there were departments of national life which lay beyond the sphere of his kingly despotism. It had, moreover, gained a distinct practical acknowledgement of the right of the Apostolic Curia to act as the supreme court of appeal in ecclesiastical causes, like the Curia Regis in secular matters. In a word, the settlement indicated plainly that the system of William and Lanfranc was doomed to break down before long. It broke down utterly when Anselm and Henry were gone; the complications of legatine intervention, avoided only by careful management in Henry’s later years, led to the most important results in the next reign; and when the slumbering feud of sceptre and crozier broke out again, the difference between the cool Norman temper and the fiery blood of Anjou, between the saintly self-effacement of Anselm and the lofty self-assertion of Thomas, was only one of the causes which gave it such an increase of virulence as brought to nought the endeavours of king and primate to tread in the steps of those whom they professed to have taken for their examples.

Of more direct and wide-reaching importance, but less easy to trace, is the working of Henry’s policy in the temporal government of England. Like his Church policy, with which it was in strict accord, it was grounded upon definite and consistent principles. At the outset of his reign circumstances had at once compelled the king to throw himself upon the support of his English subjects and enabled him to find in them his surest source of strength. Personally, his sympathies were not a whit more English or less despotic than those of his predecessor; but, unlike Rufus, he fairly accepted his position with all its consequences so far as he understood them, and throughout his reign he never altogether forsook the standpoint which he had taken at its beginning. That standpoint, as expressed in his coronation-charter, was “the law of King Eadward as amended by King William.” In other words, Henry pledged himself to carry out his father’s system of compromise and amalgamation, to take up and continue his father’s work; and as soon as his hands were free he set himself to fulfil the pledge. But the scheme whose first outlines had been sketched by the Conqueror’s master-hand had to be wrought out under conditions which had changed considerably since his death and were changing yet farther every day. The great ecclesiastical question was only the first and most prominent among a crowd of social and political problems whose shadows William had at the utmost only seen dimly looming in the future, but which confronted Henry as present facts that he must grapple with as best he could. At their theoretical, systematic solution he made little or no attempt; the time was not yet ripe, nor was he the man for such work. He was neither a great legislator nor an original political thinker, but a clear-headed, sagacious, practical man of business. Such a man was precisely the ruler needed at the moment. His reign is not one of the marked eras of English history; compared with the age which had gone before and that which came after it, the age of Henry I. looks almost like a “day of small things.” That very phrase, which seems so aptly to describe its outward aspect, warns us not to despise or pass it over lightly. It is just one of those periods of transition without which the marked eras would never be. Henry’s mission was to prepare the way for the work of his grandson by completing that of his father.

The work was no longer where his father had left it. When the secular side of the Norman government in England, somewhat obscured for a while by the ecclesiastical conflict, comes into distinct view again after the settlement of 1107, one is almost startled at the amount of developement which has taken place in the twenty years since the Conqueror’s death—a developement whose steps lie hidden beneath the shadows of the Red King’s tyranny and of Henry’s early struggles. The power of the crown had outgrown even the nominal restraints preserved from the older system: the king’s authority was almost unlimited, even in theory; the Great Council, the successor and representative of the Witenagemot, had lost all share in the real work of legislation and government; of the old formula—“counsel and consent”—the first half had become an empty phrase and the second a mere matter of course. The assembly was a court rather than a council, the qualification of its members, whether earls, barons, or knights, being all alike dependent on their position as tenants-in-chief of the crown; the bishops alone kept their unaltered dignity as lineal successors of the older spiritual Witan; but even the bishops had been compelled by the compromise of 1107 to hold their temporalities on the baronial tenure of homage and fealty to the king, a step which involved the strict application of the same rule to the lay members of the assembly. Moreover, the Witenagemot was being gradually supplanted in all its more important functions by an inner circle of counsellors, forming a permanent ministerial body which gathered into its own hands the entire management of the financial and judicial administration of the state. In one aspect it was the “Curia Regis” or King’s Court, the supreme court of judicature which appropriated alike the judicial powers of the Witenagemot, of the old court of the king’s thegns or theningmanna-gemot, and of the feudal court of the Norman tenants-in-chief. In another aspect it was the Exchequer, the court which received the royal revenues from the sheriffs of the counties, arranged and reviewed the taxation, transacted the whole fiscal business of the crown, and in short had the supreme control and management of the “ways and means” of the realm. The judicial, military and social organization under the Norman kings rests so completely on a fiscal basis that the working of the Exchequer furnishes the principal means of studying that of the whole system; while the connexion between the functions of the Exchequer and those of the Curia Regis is so close that it is often difficult to draw a line accurately between them, and all the more so, that they were made up of nearly the same constituent elements. These were the great officers of the royal household:—the justiciar, the treasurer, the chancellor, the constable, the marshal, and their subordinates:—titles of various origin, some, as for example the chancellor, being of comparatively recent origin, while others seem to have existed almost from time immemorial;—but all titles whose holders, from being mere personal attendants upon the sovereign, had now become important officials of the state. Like a crowd of other matters which first come distinctly to light under Henry, the system seems to have grown up as it were in the dark during the reign of William Rufus, no doubt under the hands of Ralf Flambard. At its head stood the justiciar;—second in authority to the king in his presence, his representative and vicegerent in his absence, officially as well as actually his chief minister and the unquestioned executor of his will. This office, of which the germs may perhaps be traced as far back as the time of Ælfred, who acted as “secundarius” under his brother Æthelred I., was directly derived from that which Æthelred II. had instituted under the title of high-thegn or high-reeve, and which grew into a permanent vice-royalty in the persons of Godwine and Harold under Cnut and Eadward, and of Ralf Flambard under William Rufus. Ralf himself, a clerk from Bayeux, who from the position of an obscure dependent in the Conqueror’s household had made his way by the intriguing, pushing, unscrupulous temper which had earned him his nickname of the “Firebrand,” was an upstart whom the barons of the Conquest may well have despised as much as the native English feared and hated him. After an interval during which his office was held by Robert Bloet, bishop of Lincoln—a former chancellor of the Red King—it passed to a man who from beginnings almost as lowly as those of Ralf rose to yet loftier and, it is but fair to add, purer fame. Henry in his wandering youth, as he rode out from Caen one morning with a few young companions, stopped to hear mass at a little wayside chapel. The poor priest who served it, guessing by their looks the temper of his unexpected congregation, rattled through the office with a speed which delighted them; they all pronounced him just the man for a soldier’s chaplain; Henry enlisted him as such, and soon found that he had picked up a treasure. Roger became his steward, and discharged his functions with such care, fidelity and good management as earned him the entire confidence of his master.[48] Soon after Henry’s accession he was appointed chancellor, a post whose duties involved, besides the official custody of the royal seal, the superintendence of the clerks of the king’s chapel or chancery, who were charged with the keeping of the royal accounts, the conducting of the royal correspondence, the drawing up of writs and other legal documents and records, and who were now formed into a trained and organized body serving as secretaries for all departments of state business. From 1101 to 1106 this office seems to have been held successively by Roger, William Giffard, and Waldric; Roger probably resumed it in 1106 on Waldric’s elevation to the bishopric of Laon, but if so he resigned it again next year, to become bishop of Salisbury and justiciar.[49]

- [48] Will. Newburgh, l. i. c. 6 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 36).

- [49] Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 56.

Henry’s justiciar-bishop was the type of a class. The impossibility of governing England securely by means of feudal machinery, even with all the checks and safeguards which could be drawn from the old English administrative system, had by this time become self-evident. The conduct of the barons had at once proved to Henry the necessity and given him the justification for superseding them in all the more important functions of government, by carrying out, with a free and strong hand, the scheme which Æthelred II. had originated under less favourable circumstances—the organization of a distinct ministerial body, directly dependent upon the crown. Of this body the model, as well as the head, was the bishop of Salisbury. Under his direction there grew up a trained body of administrators, most of them clerks like himself, several being his own near relatives, and almost all upstarts—novi homines, “new men” in the phrase of the time—compared with the nobles whose fathers had come over with the Conqueror; forming a sort of official caste, separate alike from the feudal nobility and from the mass of the people, and no doubt equally obnoxious to both, but very much better fitted than any instruments which either could have furnished for managing the business of the state at that particular crisis. Over and above the obloquy which naturally fell upon them as the instruments of royal justice or royal extortion, there was, however, another cause for the jealousy with which they were generally regarded. Henry is charged with showing, more especially in his later years, a preference for foreigners which was equally galling to all his native subjects, whatever their descent might be.[50] It was not that he set Normans over Englishmen, but that he set men of continental birth over both alike. The words “Norman” and “English” had in fact acquired a new meaning since the days of the Conquest. The sons and grandsons of the men who had come over with Duke William never lost one spark of their Norman pride of race; but the land of their fathers was no longer their home; most of them were born in England, some had English wives, and even English mothers; to nearly all, the chief territorial, political and personal interests of their lives were centred in the island. The constant wars between the Conqueror’s successors tended still further to sever the Normans of the duchy from those of the kingdom, and to drive the latter to unite themselves, at least politically, with their English fellow-subjects. Already in the wars of Rufus and Robert the change of feeling shows itself in the altered use of names; the appellations “Norman” and “French” are reserved exclusively for the duke and his allies, and the supporters of the king of England are all counted together indiscriminately as English. Tinchebray is distinctly reckoned as an English victory. From that moment Normandy was regarded, both by its conquerors and by its French neighbours, as a foreign dependency of the English crown. Historians on both sides of the sea, as they narrate the wars between Henry and Louis of France which arose out of that conquest, unconsciously shadow forth the truth that the reunion of England and Normandy really tended to widen the gulf between them. The greatest French statesman of the day, Suger, abbot of S. Denis, sets the relation between the two nationalities in the most striking light when he justifies the efforts of his own sovereign Louis to drive Henry out of the duchy on the express ground that “Englishmen ought not to rule over Frenchmen, nor French over English.”[51] One of our best authorities on the other side, the son of a Frenchman from Orléans who had come in the train of Roger of Montgomery and married an English wife—though he spent his whole life, from the age of ten years, in the Norman monastery of Saint-Evroul, never ceased to regard his mother’s country as his own, showed his love for it in the most touching expressions of remembrance, and took care to send forth his history to the world under the name of Orderic the Englishman. This last was no doubt a somewhat extreme case. Still the fusion between the two races had clearly begun; it was helped on directly by Henry’s whole policy, by the impartial character of his internal administration, by the nature and circumstances of his relations with his chief continental neighbours, France and Anjou; indirectly it was helped on by the sense of a common grievance in the promotion of “strangers”—men born beyond sea—over the heads of both alike. Slight as were the bonds between them at present, they were the first links of a chain which grew stronger year by year; and the king’s last and grandest stroke of policy, the marriage of his daughter and destined successor with the count of Anjou, did more than anything else to quicken the fusion of the two races by driving them to unite against sovereigns who were equally aliens from both.

- [50] Eadmer, Hist. Nov. (Rule), p. 224.

- [51] Suger, Vita Ludovici Grossi, c. 1 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 12).

Roger’s great work as justiciar was the organization of the Exchequer. Twice every year the barons of the Exchequer met under his presidency around the chequered table whence they derived their name, and settled accounts with the sheriffs of the counties. As the sheriffs were answerable for the entire revenue due to the crown from their respective shires, the settlement amounted to a thorough review of the financial condition of the realm. The profits of the demesne lands and of the judicial proceedings in the shire-court, now commuted at a fixed sum under the title of “ferm of the shire”; the land-tax, or as it was still called, the Danegeld, also compounded for at a definite rate; the so-called “aids” which in the case of the towns seem to have corresponded to the Danegeld in the rural districts; the feudal sources of income, reliefs, wardships, marriage-dues, escheats; the profits arising out of the strict and cruel forest-law, the one grievance of his predecessor’s rule which Henry had from the beginning refused to redress; all these and many other items found their places in the exhaustive proceedings of King Henry’s court of Exchequer. Hand in hand with its financial work went the judicial work of the Curia Regis: a court in theory comprehending the whole body of tenants-in-chief, but in practice limited to the great officers of the household and others specially appointed by the king, and acting under him, or under the chief justiciar as his representative, as a supreme tribunal of appeal, and also of first resort in suits between tenants-in-chief and in a variety of other cases called up by special writ for its immediate cognisance. It had moreover the power of acting directly upon the lower courts in another way. The assessment of taxes was still based upon the Domesday survey; but transfers of land, changes in cultivation, the reclaiming of wastes on the one hand and the creation of new forests on the other, necessarily raised questions which called for an occasional revision and readjustment of taxation. This was effected by sending the judges of the King’s Court—who were only the barons of the Exchequer in another capacity—on judicial circuits throughout the country, to hold the pleas of the crown and settle disputed points of assessment and tenure in the several shires. As the justices thus employed held their sittings in the shire-moot, the local and the central judicature were thus brought into immediate connexion with each other, and the first stepping-stone was laid towards bridging over the gap which severed the lower from the higher organization.

By the establishment of a careful and elaborate administrative routine Henry and Roger thus succeeded in binding together all branches of public business and all classes of society in intimate connexion with and entire dependence on the crown, through the medium of the Curia Regis and the Exchequer. The system stands portrayed at full length in the Dialogue in which Bishop Roger’s great-nephew expounded the constitution and functions of the fully developed Court of Exchequer; its working in Roger’s own day is vividly illustrated in the one surviving record which has come down to us from that time, the earliest extant of the “Pipe Rolls” (so called from their shape) in which the annual statement of accounts was embodied by the treasurer. The value of this solitary roll of Henry I.—that of the year 1130—lies less in the dry bones of the actual financial statement than in the mass of personal detail with which they are clothed, and through which we get such an insight as nothing else can afford into the social condition of the time. The first impression likely to be produced by the document is that under Henry I. and Roger of Salisbury—“the Lion of Justice” and “the Sword of Righteousness”—every possible contingency of human life was somehow turned into a matter of money for the benefit of the royal treasury. It must, however, be remembered that except the Danegeld, there was no direct taxation; the only means, therefore, of making up a budget at all was by the feudal levies and miscellaneous incidents; and these were no longer, as in the Red King’s days, instruments of unlimited extortion, but were calculated according to a regular and fairly equitable scale, subject to frequent modification under special circumstances. Still the items look strange enough. We see men paying to get into office and paying to get out of it; heirs paying for the right to enter upon their inheritance; would-be guardians paying that they may administer the estates of minors; suitors paying for leave to marry heiresses or dowered widows; heiresses and widows paying for freedom to wed the man of their own choice. The remittances are not always in money; several of the king’s debtors sent coursing-dogs or destriers; one has promised a number of falcons, and there are some amusingly minute stipulations as to their colour.[52] There is an endless string of land-owners, great and small, paying for all sorts of privileges connected with their property; some for leave to make an exchange of land with a neighbour, some to cancel an exchange already made; some to procure the speedy determination of a suit with a rival claimant of their estates, some on the contrary to delay or avoid answering such a claim, and some for having themselves put forth claims which they were unable to prove; the winner pays for his success, the loser for failing to make good his case; the treasury gains both ways. Jewish usurers pay for the king’s help in recovering their debts from his Christian subjects.[53] The citizens of Gloucester promise thirty marks of silver if the king’s justice can get back for them a sum of money “which was taken away from them in Ireland.”[54] This last-quoted entry brings us at once to another class of items, perhaps the most interesting of all; those which relate to the growing liberties of the towns.

- [52] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 111.

- [53] Ib. pp. 147, 148, 149.

- [54] Ib. p. 77.

The English towns differed completely in their origin and history from those of the states which had arisen out of the ruins of the Roman Empire. The great cities of Italy and Gaul were daughters of Rome; they were the abiding depositaries of her social, municipal and political traditions; as such, they had a vitality and a character which, like their great mistress and model, they were able to preserve through all the changes of barbarian conquest and feudal reorganization. The English towns had no such imperial past; in their origin and earliest constitution they were absolutely undistinguishable from the general crowd of little rural settlements throughout the country. Here and there, for one reason or another, some particular spot attracted an unusually large concourse of inhabitants; but whether sheltered within the walls of a Roman military encampment like Winchester and York, or planted on the top of an almost immemorial hill-fort like Old Sarum, or gathered in later days round some fortress raised for defence against the Welsh or the Danes like Taunton or Warwick, or round some venerated shrine like Beverley or Malmesbury or Oxford, still the settlement differed in nothing but its size from the most insignificant little group of rustic homesteads which sent its reeve and four men to the court of the hundred and the shire. The borough was nothing more than an unusually large township, generally provided with a dyke and palisade, or sometimes even a wall, instead of the ordinary quickset hedge; or it was a cluster of townships which had somehow coalesced, but without in any way forming an organic whole. Each unit of the group had its own parish church and parochial machinery for both spiritual and temporal purposes, its own assembly for transacting its own internal affairs; while the general borough-moot, in a town of this kind, answered roughly to the hundred-court of the rural districts, and the character of the borough-constitution itself resembled that of the hundred rather than that of the single township. The earlier and greater towns must have been originally free; a few still retain in their common lands a vestige of their early freedom. But the later towns which grew up around the hall of a powerful noble, or a great and wealthy monastery, were dependent from the first upon the lord of the soil on which they stood; their inhabitants owed suit and service to the earl, the bishop, or the abbot, whichever he might chance to be, and their reeve was appointed by him. On the other hand, when it became a recognized principle that everybody must have a lord, and that all folkland belonged to the king, it followed as a natural inference that all towns which had no other lord were counted as royal demesnes, and their chief magistrate was an officer of the crown. In the great cities he usually bore the title of port-reeve, a word whose first syllable, though here used to represent the town in general, refers in strict etymology to the porta, or place where the market was held, and thus at once points to the element in the life of the towns which gave them their chief consequence and their most distinctive character. The Norman conquest had led to a great increase of their trading importance; a sense of corporate life and unity grew up within them; their political position became more clearly defined; they began to recognize themselves, and to win their recognition at the hands of the ruling powers, as a separate element in the state. The distinction was definitely marked by the severance of their financial interests from those of the shires in which they stood; a fixed “aid,” varying according to their size and wealth, was substituted in their case for the theoretically even, but practically very unfair pressure of the Danegeld; and to avoid all risk of extortion on the part of the sheriff, their contribution to the ferm of the shire was settled at a fixed round sum deducted from the total and accounted for as a separate item, under the name of firma burgi, either by the sheriff or, in some cases where the privilege had been specially conferred, by the towns themselves. At the same time the voluntary institution of the gilds, which had long acted as a supplement to the loose territorial and legal constitution of the boroughs, forced its way into greater prominence; the merchant-gilds made their appearance no longer as mere private associations, but as legally organized bodies endowed with authority over all matters connected with trade in the great mercantile cities; the recognition of their legal status—generally expressed by the confirmation of the right to possess a “gild-hall” (or, as it was called in the north, a “hans-house”)—became a main point in the struggles of the towns for privileges and charters. The handicraftsmen, fired with the same spirit of association, banded themselves together in like manner; the weavers of London, Huntingdon and Lincoln, the leather-sellers and weavers of Oxford, bought of the crown in 1130 a formal confirmation of the customs of their respective gilds.[55] The lesser towns followed, as well as they could, the example of the great cities; they too won from their lords a formal assurance of their privileges; Archbishop Thurstan’s charter to Beverley was expressly modelled on that granted by King Henry to York.[56]

- [55] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), Oxford, pp. 2 and 5; Huntingdon, p. 48; Lincoln, pp. 109, 114; London, p. 144.

- [56] Stubbs, Select Charters, pp. 109, 110 (3d ed.).

Plan I.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

We may glance at some of the towns of southern England in company with some travellers from Gaul who visited them in the later years of Henry’s reign. The cathedral church of Laon had been burnt down and its bishop Waldric slain in a civic tumult in 1112. Waldric had once been chancellor to King Henry,[57] and the reports which he and others had brought to Laon of the wealth and prosperity of the island[58] led some of the canons, after perambulating northern Gaul to collect donations for the restoration of their church, to venture beyond sea for the same object. They set sail from Wissant—seemingly in an English ship, for its captain bore the English-sounding name of Coldistan—in company with some Flemish merchants who were going to buy wool in England, and they landed at Dover after a narrow escape from some pirates who chased their vessel in the hope of seizing the money which it was known to contain.[59] They naturally made their way to Canterbury first, to enlist the sympathies of the archbishop and his chapter, as well as those of the scarcely less wealthy and powerful abbey of S. Augustine.[60] Thence they apparently proceeded to Winchester.[61] The old West-Saxon capital had lost its ancient rank; London, which had long surpassed it in commercial and political importance, had now superseded it as the crowning-place and abode of kings. But its connexion with the crown was far from being broken. Its proximity to the New Forest made it a favourite residence of the Conqueror and his sons; William himself had built not only a castle on the high ground at the western end of the city, just below the west gate of the Roman enclosure, but also a palace in its south-eastern quarter, hard by the cathedral and the New Minster; it was here that he usually held his Easter court, and his successors continued the practice. One very important department of the royal administration, moreover, was still permanently centred at Winchester—the Treasury, which under its English title of the “Hoard” had been settled there by Eadward the Confessor, and which seems not to have been finally transferred to Westminster till late in the reign of Henry II.[62] Of the two great religious foundations, one, the “Old Minster,” or cathedral church of S. Swithun, the crowning-place and burial-place of our native kings, assumed under the hands of its first Norman bishop the aspect which, outwardly at least, it still retains. The other, the “New Minster,” so strangely placed by Ælfred close beside the old one, had incurred William’s wrath by the deeds of its abbot and some of its monks who fought and fell at Senlac; to punish the brotherhood, he planted his palace close against the west front of their church; and they found their position so intolerable that in 1111, by Henry’s leave, they migrated outside the northern boundary of Winchester to a new abode which grew into a wealthy and flourishing house under the name of Hyde Abbey, leaving their old home to fall into decay and to be represented in modern days by a quiet graveyard.[63] As a trading centre Winchester ranked in Henry’s day, and long after, second to London alone; the yearly fair which within living memory was held on S. Giles’s day upon the great hill to the east of the city[64] preserved a faint reminiscence of the vast crowds of buyers and sellers who flocked thither from all parts of the country throughout the middle ages.

- [57] On Waldric (or Gualdric) and Laon see Guibert of Nogent, De Vitâ suâ, l. iii. c. 4, et seq. (D’Achéry, Guib. Noviog. Opp., p. 498, et seq.). Cf. above, p. 22.

- [58] “Quæ [sc. Anglia] tunc temporis magnâ divitiarum florebat opulentiâ pro pace et justitiâ quam rex ejus Henricus ... in eâ faciebat.” Herman. Mon. De Mirac. S. Mariæ, l. ii. c. 1 (D’Achéry, Guib. Noviog. Opp., p. 534).

- [59] Ib. c. 4 (pp. 535, 536).

- [60] Ib. c. 6 (p. 536).

- [61] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 7 (D’Achéry, Guib. Noviog. Opp., p. 536).

- [62] At the date of the Dialogus de Scaccario (A.D. 1178) its headquarters seem to have fluctuated between London and Winchester, and to have been quite recently, if they were not even yet, most frequently at the latter place. See the payments to the accountants: “Quisque iii denarios si Londoniæ fuerint; si Wintoniæ, quia inde solent assumi, duos quisque habet.”— Dial. de Scacc., l. i. c. 3 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 175, 3d ed.).

- [63] Flor. Worc. (Thorpe) vol. ii. p. 64. Ann. Waverl. a. 1111. The king’s charter confirming the removal is dated 1114; Dugdale, Monast. Angl., vol. ii. p. 444.

- [64] It is mentioned in Henry’s charter to Hyde; Dugdale, as above.

At the opposite end of the New Forest the little town of Twinham, or Christchurch as it was beginning to be called from its great ecclesiastical establishment, whose church had been rebuilt on a grand scale by Ralf Flambard, had, on the octave of Pentecost, a fair which the travellers took care to attend, much to the disgust of the dean, who was anxious to secure all the offerings of the assembled crowd for the improvement of his own church, and had no mind to share them with our Lady of Laon.[65] They met with a warmer welcome at Exeter at the hands of its archdeacon and future bishop Robert.[66] In the next reign Exeter was counted as the fourth city in the kingdom.[67] Natural wealth of its own it had none; the bare rocky soil of the south coast of Devon produced nothing but a few oats, and those of the poorest quality;[68] but the mouth of the Exe furnished a safe and convenient anchorage for small merchant vessels either from Gaul or from Ireland, and though Bristol was fast drawing away this latter branch of her trade, Exeter could still boast of “such an abundance of merchandise that nothing required for the use of man could ever be asked for there in vain.”[69] It was far otherwise with Salisbury, to which the travellers were probably drawn chiefly by the fame of its bishop;[70] the Salisbury of those days was not the city in the plain which now spreads itself around the most perfect of English Gothic minsters, but the city whose traces, in a very dry summer, may still now and then be seen in the fields which cover the hill of Old Sarum. Crowded as it was into that narrow circle—narrow, and without possibility of enlargement—Bishop Roger’s Salisbury was an excellent post for military security, but it had no chance of attaining industrial or commercial importance, although he did not disdain to accept the grant of its market tolls, which till 1130 formed part of the ferm of Wilton.[71] Wilton was apparently still the chief town of the shire to which it had originally given its name; like Christchurch it had its fair, but, like Christchurch too, its importance was mainly derived from its abbey, where the memory of S. Eadgyth or Edith, a daughter of Eadgar, was venerated by English and Normans alike, by none more than the queen who shared Eadgyth’s royal blood and had once borne her name.[72] The visitors from Laon, however, seem to have been more impressed by another name which one is somewhat startled to meet in this southern region—that of Bæda, whose tomb was shown them in the abbey church of Wilton, and was believed to be the scene of miraculous cures.[73] They retraced their steps into Devonshire, where they found the legends of Arthur as rife among the people as they were among the Bretons of Gaul; they were shown the chair and oven of the “blameless king,” and a tumult nearly arose at Bodmin out of a dispute between one of their party and a man who persisted in asserting that Arthur was still alive.[74] After visiting Barnstaple and Totnes[75] they turned northward towards the greatest seaport of the west, and indeed, with one exception, of all England: Bristol.

- [65] Herman. Mon., l. ii. cc. 10, 11 (D’Achéry, Guib. Noviog. Opp., pp. 537, 538).

- [66] Ib. l. ii. c. 12 (p. 539).

- [67] Gesta Stephani (Sewell), p. 21.

- [68] Will. Malm. Gesta Pontif., l. ii. c. 94 (Hamilton, p. 201).

- [69] Ibid.

- [70] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 13 (p. 539).

- [71] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 13.

- [72] Ibid.

- [73] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 14 (D’Achéry, Guib. Noviog. Opp., p. 539).

- [74] Ib. l. ii. cc. 15, 16 (pp. 539, 540).

- [75] Ib. l. ii. cc. 17–19 (p. 540).

Plan II.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

To trace out the Bristol of the twelfth century in the Bristol of to-day is a matter of difficulty not only from the enormous growth of the town, but from the changes which have taken place in the physical conformation of its site. Nominally, it still stands on the peninsula formed by the junction of the Frome and the Avon; but the courses of both rivers have been so altered and disguised that the earlier aspect of the place is very hard to realize. The original Bristol stood wholly upon the high ground which now forms the neck of the peninsula, then a small tongue of land surrounded on the south-east by the Avon, on the north, west and south by the Frome, which flowed round it almost in the form of a horse-shoe and fell into the Avon on the southern side of the town, just below the present Bristol Bridge.[76] Before the Norman conquest, it seems, the lower course of the Frome had already been diverted from its natural bed;[77] its present channel was not dug till the middle of the thirteenth century, across a wide expanse of marsh stretching all along the right bank of both rivers, and flooded every day by the tide which came rushing up the estuary of Severn almost to the walls of the town, and made it seem like an island in the sea.[78] Within its comparatively narrow limits Bristol must have been in general character and aspect not unlike what it is to-day—a busy, bustling, closely-packed city, full of the eager, active, surging life of commercial enterprise. Ostmen from Waterford and Dublin, Northmen from the Western Isles and the more distant Orkneys, and even from Norway itself, had long ago learnt to avoid the shock of the “Higra,” the mighty current which still kept its heathen name derived from the sea-god of their forefathers,[79] and make it serve to float them into the safe and commodious harbour of Bristol, where a thousand ships could ride at anchor.[80] As the great trading centre of the west Bristol ranked as the third city in the kingdom,[81] surpassed in importance only by Winchester and London. The most lucrative branch of its trade, however, reflects no credit on its burghers. All the eloquence of S. Wulfstan and all the sternness of the Conqueror had barely availed to check for a while their practice of kidnapping men for the Irish slave-market; and that the traffic was again in full career in the latter years of Henry I. we learn from the experiences of the canons of Laon. They eagerly went on board some of the vessels in the harbour to buy some clothes, and to inspect the strange wares brought from lands which can have had little or no intercourse with the inland cities of Gaul. On their return they were solemnly implored by their friends in the city not to run such a risk again, as they would most likely find the ships suddenly put to sea and themselves sold into bondage in a foreign land.[82]

- [76] See the description of Bristol in Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 37.

- [77] Seyer, Memoirs of Bristol, vol. ii. pp. 18–27.

- [78] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 37.

- [79] See the description of the “Higra,” and of Bristol, in Will. Malm. Gesta Pontif., l. iv. cc. 153, 154 (Hamilton, p. 292).

- [80] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 37.

- [81] In Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 21, Exeter is called the fourth city in the realm. As London and Winchester are always counted first and second, the third can only be Bristol.

- [82] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 21 (D’Achéry, Guib. Noviog. Opp., p. 541).

No such dangers awaited them at Bath. With their reception there by the bishop[83]—whom the healing virtues of its waters had induced first to remove his bishopstool thither from its lowlier seat at Wells, and then to buy the whole city of King Henry for the sum of five hundred pounds[84]—their itinerary comes to an abrupt end. If they penetrated no further up the Severn valley than Bristol they turned back from the gates of a region which was then reckoned the fairest and wealthiest in England. The vale of Gloucester is described as a sort of earthly paradise, where the soil brought forth of its own accord the most abundant and choicest fruits, where from one year’s end to another the trees were never bare, where the apples hung within reach of the traveller’s hand as he walked along the roads;—above all, where the fruit of the vine, which in other parts of England was mostly sour, yielded a juice scarcely inferior to the wines of Gaul. Another source of wealth was supplied by the fisheries of the great river, the fertilizer as well as the highway of this favoured district. Religion and industry, abbeys and towns, grew and flourished by Severn-side.[85] Worcester was still the head of the diocese; but in political rank it had had to give way to Gloucester. Standing lower down the river, Gloucester was more accessible for trade, while its special importance as the key of the South-Welsh border had made it one of the recognized places for assemblies of the court from the time of the Danish kings. The chief town of the neighbouring valley of the Wye, Hereford, had once been a border-post of yet greater importance; but despite its castle and its bishop’s see, it was now a city “of no great size,” whose broken-down ramparts told the story of a greatness which had passed away.[86]

- [83] Ib.·/·Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 22 (D’Achéry, Guib. Noviog. Opp., p. 541).

- [84] Will. Malm. Gesta Pontiff., l. ii. c. 90 (Hamilton, p. 194). The grant of the city is in Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. pt. i. p. 8; date, August 1111.

- [85] Will. Malm. Gesta Pontiff., l. iv. c. 153 (Hamilton, pp. 291, 292).

- [86] Will. Malm. Gesta Pontiff., l. iv. c. 163 (Hamilton, p. 298).

Far different was the case of Chester. What the estuary of the Severn was to the southern part of western England, that of the Dee was to its northern part; Chester was at once the Bristol and the Gloucester of the north-west coast—the centre of its trade and its bulwark against the Welsh. Beyond the Dee there was as yet little sign of industrial life. Cultivation had made little or no progress among the moorland and forest-tracts of western Yorkshire, and its eastern half had not yet recovered from the harrying with which the Conqueror had avenged its revolt in 1068. For more than sixty miles around York the ground still lay perfectly bare. “Cities whose walls once rose up to heaven—tracts that were once well watered, smiling meadows—if a stranger sees them now, he groans; if a former inhabitant could see them, he would not recognize his home.” The one thing which had survived this ruin was, as ever, the work of the Roman.[87] York still kept its unbroken life, its ecclesiastical primacy, its commercial greatness; the privileges of its merchants were secured by a charter from the king; they had their gild with its “alderman” at its head,[88] their “hans-house” for the making of bye-laws and the transaction of all gild business; and they were freed from all tolls throughout the shire.[89] Far to the north-west, on the Scottish border, Carlisle, after more than two centuries of ruin, had been restored and repeopled by William Rufus. The city had been destroyed by the Danes in 875, and its site remained utterly desolate till in 1092 the Red King drove out an English thegn who occupied it under the protection of Malcolm of Scotland, and reunited it to the English realm.[90] The place still kept some material relics of its earlier past; fragments of its Roman walls were still there, to be used up again in the new fortifications with which the Red King encircled his conquest; and some years later the triclinium of one of its Roman houses called forth the admiring wonder of a southern visitor, William of Malmesbury.[91] But the city and the surrounding country lay almost void of inhabitants, and only the expedient of a colony sent by Rufus from southern England, “to dwell in the land and till it,”[92] brought the beginnings of a new life. Yet before the end of Henry’s reign, that life had grown so vigorous that the archbishop of York found himself unable to make adequate provision for its spiritual needs, and was glad to sanction the formation of Carlisle and its district into a separate diocese.

- [87] Ib.·/·Will. Malm. Gesta Pontiff., l. ii. c. 99 (Hamilton, pp. 208, 209).

- [88] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 34.

- [89] Charter of Beverley, Stubbs, Select Charters, pp. 109, 110 (3d ed.).

- [90] Eng. Chron. a. 1092.

- [91] Will. Malm. Gesta Pontif., l. ii. c. 99 (Hamilton, p. 208).

- [92] Eng. Chron. a. 1092.

The chief importance of Carlisle was in its military character, as an outpost of defence against the Scots. On the opposite coast we see springing up, around a fortress originally built for the same purpose, the beginning of an industrial community at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The “customs” of the town contain provisions for the regulation of both inland and outland trade; if a merchant vessel put in at the mouth of the Tyne, the burghers may buy what they will; if a dispute arise between one of them and a foreign merchant, it must be settled before the tide has ebbed thrice; the foreign trader may carry his wares ashore for sale, except salt and herrings, which must be sold on board the ship. No merchant, save a burgher, may buy wool, hides, or any other merchandise outside the town, nor within it, except from burghers; and no one but a burgher may buy, make, or cut cloth for dyeing.[93] Round the minster of S. John of Beverley, on the marshy flats of Holderness, there had grown up a town of sufficient consequence to win from the lord of the soil, Archbishop Thurstan of York, a charter whose privileges were copied from those of the metropolitan city itself. As a whole, however, the north was still a wild region, speaking a tongue of which, as William of Malmesbury complained, “we southrons could make nothing,” and living a life so unconnected with that of southern England that even King Henry still thought it needful to reinforce his ordinary body-guard with a troop of auxiliaries whenever he crossed the Humber.[94]

- [93] Customs of Newcastle, Stubbs, Select Charters, pp. 111, 112.

- [94] Will. Malm. Gesta Pontif., l. ii. c. 99 (Hamilton, p. 209).

This isolation was in great part due to physical causes. What is now the busy West Riding was then mainly a vast tract of moor and woodland, stretching from Wakefield to the Peak and from the Westmoreland hills to the sources of the Don; while further east, the district between the lower course of the Don and that of the Trent was one wide morass. Such obstacles were still strong enough to hinder, though not to bar, the intercourse of Yorkshire with mid-England. The only safe line of communication was the Foss Way, which struck across the central plain and along the eastern side of the Trent valley to Lincoln, and thence turned north-westward to cross the Trent and wind round between forest and fen to York. Lincoln was thus the chief station on the highway between York and the south. Under the Norman rule the city had risen to a new importance. Two of its quarters had been entirely transformed; the south-western was now covered by a castle, and the south-eastern by a cathedral church. Neither building was the first of its kind which had occupied the spot. Few sites in England could have been more attractive to a soldier’s eye than the crest of the limestone ridge descending abruptly to the south into a shallow sort of basin, watered by the little river Witham, and on the west sloping gradually down to a broad alluvial swamp extending as far as the bank of the Trent. The hundred and sixty-six houses which the Conqueror swept away to make room for his castle[95] were but encroachments on an earlier fortification, a “work” of mounds and earthen ramparts of the usual old English type, which now served as a foundation for his walls of stone.[96] To the ardent imagination of the medieval Church, on the other hand, the rocky brow of Lincoln might well seem to cry out for a holier crown, and a church of S. Mary was already in existence[97] on the site where Bishop Remigius of Dorchester, forsaking his lowly home in the valley of the Thames, reared his bishopstool amid the foundations of that great minster of our Lady whose noble group of towers now rises on the crest of the hill as a beacon to all the country round.[98] But there were other reasons for the translation of the bishopric than those of sentiment or of personal taste. Of the vast Mid-Anglian diocese, which stretched from the Thames to the Humber, Lincoln was beyond all comparison the most important town. Even in Roman times the original quadrangular enclosure of Lindum Colonia had been found too small, and a fortified suburb had spread down to the left bank of the Witham. During the years of peace which lasted from the accession of Cnut to that of William, the needs of an increasing population, as we have seen, covered the site of the older fortress with dwellings: when these were cleared away at William’s bidding, their exiled inhabitants found a new home on a plot of hitherto waste ground beyond the river; and a new town, untrammelled by the physical obstacles which had cramped the growth of the city on the hill, sprang up around the two churches of S. Mary-le-Wigford and S. Peter-at-Gowts.[99] Some fifty years later Lincoln was counted one of the most populous and flourishing cities in England.[100] The roads which met on the crest of its hill to branch off again in all directions formed only one of the ways by which trade poured into its market. Not only had the now dirty little stream of Witham a tide strong enough to bring the small merchant vessels of the day quite up to the bridge: it was connected with the Trent at Torksey by a canal, probably of Roman origin, known as the Foss Dyke; this after centuries of neglect was cleared out and again made navigable by order of Henry I.,[101] and through it there flowed into Lincoln a still more extensive trade from the lower Trent Valley and the Humber. The “men of the city and the merchants of the shire” were already banded together in a merchant-gild;[102] and it is doubtless this gild which is represented by the “citizens of Lincoln” who in 1130 paid two hundred marks of silver and four marks of gold for the privilege of holding their city in chief of the king.[103]

- [95] Domesday, vol. i. p. 336 b.

- [96] G. T. Clark, Lincoln Castle (Archæol. Journal, vol. xxxiii. pp. 215–217).

- [97] “Sancta Maria de Lincoliâ in quâ nunc est episcopatus,” Domesday, vol. i. p. 336. The patron saint of this older church, however, was the Magdalene, not the Virgin. See John de Schalby’s Life of Remigius, in Appendix E. to Gir. Cambr. (Dimock), vol. vii. p. 194, and Mr. Freeman’s remarks in preface, ib. pp. lxxx., lxxxii.

- [98] Will. Malm. Gesta Pontif., l. iv. c. 177 (Hamilton, p. 312). Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 30.

- [99] See Domesday, vol. i. p. 336 b, and Mr. Freeman’s remarks in Norm. Conq., vol. iv. pp. 218, 219.

- [100] Will. Malm. Gesta Pontif., l. iv. c. 177 (Hamilton, p. 312).

- [101] Sim. Durh. Gesta Reg. a. 1121.

- [102] Said to date from the time of Eadward; Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 166.

- [103] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 114.

Plan III.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

The removal of Bishop Remigius from Dorchester to Lincoln was in accordance with a new practice, which had come in since the Norman conquest, of placing the episcopal see in the chief town of the diocese. The same motive had prompted a translation of the old Mercian bishopric from Lichfield, now described as “a little town in the woodland, with a rivulet flowing by it, far away from the throng of cities,”[104] to Chester, whence, however, it was soon removed again to the great abbey of Coventry.[105] The same reason, too, caused Norwich to succeed Thetford as the seat of the bishopric of East-Anglia. It was but very recently that Lincoln had outstripped Norwich as the chief city of eastern England. The mouth of the Yare, which had a tideway navigation quite up to the point where the Wensum falls into it, was no less conveniently placed than that of the Witham for intercourse with northern Europe; and the Scandinavian traders and settlers in the first half of the eleventh century had raised Norwich to such a pitch of prosperity that at the coming of the Norman it contained twenty-four churches, and its burghers seem to have been more numerous than those of any town in the realm except London and York.[106] Twenty years later their number was indeed greatly diminished; the consequences of Earl Ralf’s rebellion had wrought havoc in the city. But if its native population had decreased, a colony of Norman burghers was growing up and flourishing in a “new borough,” now represented by the parishes of S. Peter Mancroft and S. Giles; the number of churches and chapels had risen to forty-four,[107] and in the Red King’s last years the foundations of the cathedral were laid by Bishop Herbert Lozinga, whose grave may still be seen before its high altar.[108] Once in the next reign Norwich supplanted Gloucester as the scene of the Midwinter Council; King Henry kept Christmas there in 1121.[109] It may have been on this occasion that the citizens won from him their first charter; but the charter itself is lost, and we only learn the bare fact of its existence from the words of Henry II., confirming to the burghers of Norwich “all the customs, liberties and acquittances which they had in the time of my grandfather.”[110]

- [104] Will. Malm. Gesta Pontif., l. iv. c. 172 (Hamilton, p. 307).

- [105] Ib. cc. 172–175 (pp. 307–311).

- [106] Domesday, vol. ii. pp. 116, 117.

- [107] Ib. pp. 116–118.

- [108] Will. Malm. Gesta Pontif., l. ii. c. 74 (Hamilton, p. 151).

- [109] Eng. Chron. a. 1122.

- [110] Charter printed in Blomefield, Hist. of Norfolk, vol. iii. p. 34.

Plan IV.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

It was, however, in the valley of the Thames that English town-life was growing up most vigorously. Tried by the test of statistics, indeed, Oxford was still but a small place; in the time of the Confessor it had only contained about a thousand dwellings, and before the Domesday survey was made the town had, through some unexplained cause, suffered such decay that more than half of these were waste.[111] But the “waste” was quickly repaired under the wise government of Robert of Oilly, to whom the chief command at Oxford was entrusted by the Conqueror, and of his nephew and namesake who succeeded to his office. Before the close of Henry’s reign every side of that marvellously varied life of Oxford which makes its history seem like an epitome of the history of all England was already in existence, though only in germ. The military capabilities of the site, recognized long ago by Eadward the Elder, had been carefully strengthened; within the natural protection of its encircling rivers, the town was “closely girt about with rampart and ditch,”[112] and the mound, raised probably by Eadward himself, at its western end had been made the nucleus of a mighty fortress which was soon to become famous in the struggle of Stephen and Matilda.[113] Nor was fortification the sole care of the D’Oillys; within and without the city, works of piety and of public utility sprang up under their direction. The ancient ford which had given the town a name was no longer the sole means of crossing the network of streams which fenced it in on every side save one; the High Bridge of our own day represents one built by the first Robert of Oilly.[114] Of the sixteen churches and chapels which Oxford now contained,[115] S. George’s-in-the-Castle was certainly and S. Peter’s-in-the-East probably founded by him;[116] several of the older parish churches which had fallen into decay were restored at his expense;[117] and those of S. Michael and S. Mary the Virgin, as well as that of S. Mary Magdalene without the walls, were all founded in his time or in that of his nephew, if not actually by their munificence.[118] One of these, S. Mary the Virgin, was to become famous in after-days as the University church. As yet, the centre of intellectual life at Oxford was the ancient monastery of S. Fritheswith or Frideswide, which after many vicissitudes had finally passed into the hands of the Austin canons,[119] and entered upon a new career of prosperity under its learned prior Guimund, the builder of the beautiful church which now stands hidden away beneath the later splendours of Christ Church, like a buried and yet living relic of an earlier and simpler age. Even S. Frideswide’s, however, had a formidable rival in the priory of Oseney which the younger Robert of Oilly founded, also for Austin canons, in the island-meadow overlooked by his castle-tower.[120] The Augustinians were a new order whose rise was closely associated with the revival of intellectual and social culture; their houses were the best schools of the time—schools in which the scholars were trained for secular no less than for clerical careers—and their presence at Oseney and S. Frideswide’s was already preparing the intellectual soil of Oxford to receive, at the close of Henry’s reign, the seeds of the first English University in the divinity lectures of Robert Pulein.[121] The burgher-life of the city had long gathered round the church of S. Martin; in its churchyard was held the portmannimot or general assembly of the citizens; they had their merchant-gild and their gild-hall;[122] they had their common pasture-land,[123] the wide green “Port-meadow” beyond the Isis; and we see the growth of a local industry in the appearance of the leather-sellers’ and weavers’ gilds. Shortly before Henry’s death, there were indications that Oxford was soon to regain the political position which it had held under the old English and Danish kings, but had entirely lost since their time. A strange legacy of awe had been left to the city by its virgin patroness. The story went that Fritheswith, flying from the pursuit of her royal lover, sank down exhausted at the gate, and, despairing of further escape, called upon Heaven itself to check him; as he entered the town he was struck blind, and though her prayers afterwards restored his sight, no king after him dared set foot within the boundaries of Oxford for fear of incurring some similar punishment.[124] It must be supposed that the councils held at Oxford under Æthelred and Cnut met outside the walls; we cannot tell whether any countenance was given to the legend by the circumstances of Harald Harefoot’s death; but from that time forth we hear of no more royal visits to Oxford till 1133—the very year of Robert Pulein’s lectures. Then we find that Henry I., whose favourite country residence was at Woodstock, had been so drawn to the neighbouring town as to build himself a “new hall” there,[125] just outside the northern wall, on the ground afterwards known as Beaumont-fields. He held but one festival there, the last Easter which he ever spent in England; but each in turn of the rival candidates for the throne left vacant by his death found Oxford ready to become a political as well as a military centre of scarcely less importance than London itself.

[111] Domesday, vol. i. p. 154. Mr. Parker, in his Early Hist. of Oxford (Oxf. Hist. Soc.), pp. 200, 201, suggests that the damage was done by the army of Eadwine and Morkere on their southward march in 1065.

[112] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 88.

[113] The chief stronghold of the new fortress, however, was not on the mound; it was a lofty tower—still standing—on the western side of the enclosure. It was built by the first Robert of Oilly, in 1071; Ann. Osen. ad ann. See Parker, Early Hist. Oxf., pp. 202–204.

[114] Hist. Monast. de Abingdon (Stevenson), vol. ii. pp. 15, 284. See also Parker, Early Hist. Oxf., p. 219.

[115] See lists in Parker as above, pp. 284–286.

[116] He founded S. George’s in 1074; Ann. Osen. ad ann. On S. Peter’s see Parker as above, pp. 250–254.

[117] Hist. Abingdon (Stevenson), vol. ii. p. 15.

[118] See the evidence in Parker’s Early Hist. of Oxford, pp. 209, 223, 258–261.

[119] Will. Malm. Gesta Pontif., l. iv. c. 178 (Hamilton, pp. 315, 316). Dugdale, Monast. Angl., vol. ii. pp. 143, 144. The Augustinians came there in 1111, according to the chronicle of Tynemouth, quoted in Monast. (as above), p. 143; but the local record in p. 144 gives 1121.

[120] Ann. Osen. a. 1129.

[121] Ib. a. 1133.

[122] Charter of Henry II., Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 167.

[123] Domesday, vol. i. p. 154.

[124] Will. Malm. Gesta Pontif., l. iv. c. 178 (Hamilton p. 315).

[125] “Ad Pascha fuit rex apud Oxineford in novâ aulâ.” Rob. of Torigni, a. 1133.

Plan V.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

Our great picture of medieval London belongs in all its completeness to a somewhat later date; it was painted in the closing years of the twelfth century. But, as in the case of so many other things which only come out into full light under Henry II., although the colouring and the details may belong more especially to his time, the main features were already there in the time of his grandfather. The outline of the city was a sort of irregular half-ellipse, fenced in upon the northern or land side by a girdle of massive walls pierced with gates and fortified with lofty towers; the wall on the south side, being built close upon the river bank, was gradually washed away by the ebb and flow of the tide constantly beating upon its foundations. On this side the river itself was an all-sufficient protection. The eastern extremity of the city, where the wall came down towards the water’s edge, was guarded by a mighty fortress, founded by King William in the earliest days of his conquest to hold his newly-won capital in check, and always known by the emphatic name of “the Tower.” The western end was protected by two lesser fortresses,[126]—Castle Baynard and Montfichet, whose sokes filled up the space between the cathedral precincts and the city wall. Another, which must have stood in the same neighbourhood, seems to have been partly destroyed by the fire which ravaged London a few months before the Conqueror’s death, and in which the cathedral of S. Paul entirely perished.[127] Part of the ditch of this fortress was surrendered by King Henry to make room for a wall with which Bishop Richard was now enclosing his precincts;[128] while within this enclosure a new church, gorgeous with all the latest developements of Norman architectural skill, was now fast approaching completion.[129] S. Paul’s was the rallying-point, as it had been the nucleus, of municipal life in London. In time of peace the folkmoot assembled at the eastern end of its churchyard at the summons of its great bell; in time of war the armed burghers gathered at its west door and beneath its banner, with the lord of Baynard’s castle as their standard-bearer.[130] The internal constitution of London, however, was scarcely a town-constitution of any kind; it was more like an epitome of the organization of all England. The ordinary system of the parish and the township, the special franchises and jurisdictions of the great individual landowners, of the churches, of the gilds—all these were loosely bundled together under the general headship of the bishop and the port-reeve, to whom King William addressed his one surviving English writ, just as he would have addressed the bishop and sheriff of a county. The writ itself merely confirmed to the citizens “all the law whereof they had been worthy in King Eadward’s day”;[131] but by the end of Henry I.’s reign the Londoners had got far beyond this. By virtue of a royal charter, they had exchanged their regally-appointed port-reeve for a sheriff of their own choice, and this officer served at once for the city and for the shire of Middlesex, which was granted in ferm to the citizens for ever, as the other shires were granted year by year to their respective sheriffs; they were exempted from all tolls and mercantile dues throughout the realm, and from suit and service to all courts outside their own walls, even the pleas of the crown being intrusted to a special justiciar elected by themselves. Yet there was no complete civic organization; the charter confirmed all the old separate jurisdictions and franchises, the various “sokens” and “customs” of churches, barons and burghers, the wardmoots or assemblies of the different parishes or townships, as well as the husting or folkmoot in which all were gathered together,[132]—and left London as it found it, not a compact, symmetrical municipality, but, as it has been truly called, simply “a shire covered with houses.”

- [126] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Memorials of Becket, vol. iii.), p. 3.

- [127] Eng. Chron. a. 1087.

- [128] Dugdale, Hist. of S. Paul’s, app. xxiv. (Ellis), p. 305. Stow (London, ed. Thoms, p. 26) says that this fortress “stood, as it may seem, where now standeth the house called Bridewell.” But this is impossible; for the later palace of Bridewell stood on the right bank of the Fleet, separated from S. Paul’s by the course of that river and the whole width of the soke of Castle Baynard, so that the gift of the ditch of a castle on its site would have been perfectly useless for the enlargement of the precincts.

- [129] Will. Malm. Gesta Pontif., l. ii. c. 73 (Hamilton, p. 146).

- [130] Stow, London (Thoms, p. 121). For the rights and duties of the lord of Castle Baynard, see ib. p. 24.

- [131] Stubbs, Select Charters, pp. 82, 83.

- [132] Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 108.

This mass of growing life lay chiefly north-east of S. Paul’s, where a crowd of lesser churches, conventual and parochial, rose out of a network of close-packed streets and alleys thronged with busy craftsmen and noisy, chaffering traders. Through the heart of it flowed the “Wall-brook,” on whose bank there lingered, long after the stream itself was buried and built over, a tradition of the barges laden with merchandise which were towed up from the Thames to a landing-place at the eastern end of the Cheap.[133] Beyond the Walbrook lay the East-Cheap, almost busier and more crowded still; while to the north, along the upper course of the Walbrook, was a thriving Jewish quarter.[134] Population was spreading, too, beyond the walls. Many of the wealthier citizens dwelt in pleasant suburban houses, surrounded with bright gardens and shady trees.[135] Some two miles higher up the river, the populous suburb of Westminster clustered round the famous abbey built in honour of S. Peter by the last Old-English king, and the palace of William Rufus, a splendid edifice with a breast-work and bastion stretching down to the water’s edge.[136] North-west of the city, just outside the wall, lay the plain of Smithfield, where a great horse-fair was held every Friday.[137] Beyond was an expanse of fruitful tillage-lands and rich pastures, watered by running streams and made merry with the rush of countless watermills;[138] and this tract was sheltered by a wide belt of woodland stretching away across the northern part of Middlesex to the foot of the Chiltern Hills. Here the stag and the fallow-deer, the boar and the wild bull, had their coverts, beside a multitude of lesser game; all of which the citizens were by a special privilege entitled to hunt at their pleasure.[139] Such quasi-regal sport was doubtless only enjoyed by the greater and wealthier among them; the mass of the young burghers were content, in the summer evenings when their day’s work was done, with a saunter among the shady gardens and fresh springs which enlivened the northern suburbs; while in winter their favourite resort was a tract of low-lying moor or marsh—the Moorfields of later times—on whose frozen surface they could enjoy to their heart’s content the exercises of sliding, sledging and skating.[140] Business, pleasure, piety, intellectual culture, all had their places in the vigorous life of the great city. Each of the two great minsters, S. Paul’s and S. Peter’s, had a school attached to it, and so had the abbey of our Lady at Bermondsey, just over the water.[141] Money-getting did not absorb all the energies of the burghers; “they were respected and noted above all other citizens for their manners, dress, table and discourse.”[142] “Moreover, almost all the bishops, abbots and great men of England are, in a manner, citizens and freemen of London; as they have magnificent houses there, to which they resort, spending large sums of money, whenever they are summoned thither to councils and assemblies by the king or their metropolitan, or are compelled to go there by their own business.”[143] And between these visitors and the resident citizens there was no hard and fast line of demarcation. Neither the knight-errant’s blind contempt for practical industry nor the still blinder contempt of the merely practical man for everything which has not its value in hard cash had as yet come into existence. Under the old English system the merchant who had made three long voyages over sea on his own account was entitled to rank as a thegn, and to take his place among the nobles of the land. Under the Norman system a link between the two classes was supplied by the citizens of Norman origin, to whom London in no small measure owed the marked importance which it attained under Henry I. The Norman knights had no monopoly of the enterprizing spirit of their race; the victorious host had scarcely settled down upon the conquered soil when it was followed by a second invasion of a very different character. Merchants, traders, craftsmen of all sorts, came flocking to seek their fortunes in their sovereign’s newly-acquired dominions, not by forcible spoliation of the native people, but by fair traffic and honest labour in their midst. The fusion of races in this class, the class of which the town population chiefly consisted, began almost from the first years of the conquest. The process was very likely more helped than hindered by the grinding tyranny which united all the Red King’s victims in a community of suffering; but its great working-out was in the reign of Henry I. His restoration of law and order, his administrative and judicial reforms, gave scope for a great outburst of industrial and commercial energy. England under him had her heavy burthens and her cruel grievances; they stand out plainly enough in the complaints of her native chronicler. But to men who lived amidst the endless strife of the French kingdom or the Flemish border-land, or of the Norman duchy under the nominal government of Robert Curthose, a country where “no man durst misdo with other,” and where the sovereign “made peace for man and deer,”[144] may well have looked like a sort of earthly paradise. It is no wonder that peaceable citizens who only wanted to be quiet and get an honest living came across the sea to find shelter and security in the rich and prosperous island. For settlers of this kind it was easy enough to make a home. No gulf of hatred and suspicion, no ever-present sense of wrong suffered and wrong done, stood fixed between them and their English fellow-burghers. Even before the Conqueror’s reign had closed, English and Normans were living contentedly side by side in all the chief cities of England: sometimes, as we have noticed in the case of Norwich, the new-comers dwelt apart in a suburb or quarter of their own, but the distinction was one of locality only; the intercourse was perfectly free and perfectly amicable; Norman refinement, Norman taste, Norman fashions, especially in dress, made their way rapidly among the English burghers; and intermarriages soon became frequent.[145] In the great cities, where the sight of foreign traders was nothing new or strange, and the barriers of prejudice and ignorance of each other’s languages had been worn away by years of commercial intercourse, the fusion was naturally more easy; in London, whither the “men of Rouen” had come in their “great ships,” with their cargoes of wine or sturgeons,[146] long before their countrymen came with bow and spear and sword, it was easiest of all. The great commercial centre to which the Norman merchants had long been attracted as visitors attracted them as settlers now that it had become the capital of their own sovereign; and the attraction grew still stronger during the unquiet times in Normandy which followed the Conqueror’s death. “Many natives of the chief Norman cities, Rouen and Caen, removed to London, and chose them out a dwelling there, because it was a fitter place for their trade, and better stored with the goods in which they were wont to deal.”[147]

- [133] Stow, London (Thoms), p. 97.

- [134] The only body of Jews who appear in the Pipe Roll of 31 Hen. I are those of London.

- [135] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.) p. 3.

- [136] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.) p. 3.

- [137] Ib. p. 6.

- [138] Ib. p. 3.

- [139] Ib. p. 12.

- [140] Ib. p. 11.

- [141] Ib. p. 4.

- [142] Ibid.

- [143] Ib. p. 8.

- [144] Eng. Chron. a. 1135.

- [145] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 520.

- [146] De Institutis Lundoniæ, Thorpe, Anc. Laws, p. 127 (folio ed.).

- [147] Vita S. Thomæ, Anon. II. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.) p. 81.

That the influence of these Norman burghers was dominant in the city there can be little doubt; but they seem to have won their predominance by fair means and to have used it fairly. If they, as individuals, prospered in the English capital, they contributed their full share to its corporate prosperity, and indirectly to that of the nation at large. They brought a great deal more than mere wealth; they brought enterprize, vigour, refinement, culture, social as well as political progress. In their pleasant, cheerful, well-ordered dwellings many a noble knight or baron may have been glad to accept a hospitality such as his own stately but comfortless and desolate castle could never afford; many a learned and dignified ecclesiastic may have enjoyed a refinement of society such as he could rarely hope to meet among the rough and reckless swordsmen with whom the ranks of the high-born laity were filled. We are not dependent on mere general statements; we can do as did these barons and prelates themselves; we can go with them to visit the home of a typical London citizen of the early twelfth century. In the heart of the busiest trading quarter, on the spot where Mercer’s Hall now stands in Cheapside, under the shadow of S. Mary Colechurch, and well within sound of the bells of the more famous S. Mary-at-Bow, was the house of Gilbert Becket and Rohesia his wife. When their son, grown to manhood and high in office, was asked of his origin and extraction, he answered simply that his parents were citizens of London, dwelling blameless and respected among their fellow-burghers.[148] Had not the inquisitive zeal of his biographers led them to search more closely into his pedigree, we might never have known that his father and mother were foreigners—Gilbert, born at Rouen, of a respectable burgher family; Rohesia, sprung from the same rank of life at Caen.[149] Gilbert once filled the office of port-reeve of London,[150] and bore a high character for intelligence, industry and upright dealing. Rohesia was the pattern of wives and mothers. Her domestic affections and her wider Christian sympathies, her motherly love and her charity to the needy, are seen exquisitely blended together in her habit of weighing her little son at stated intervals against money, clothes and food which she gave to the poor, trusting thereby to bring a blessing on the child.[151] As soon as he was old enough, he was sent to school at Merton Priory in Surrey,[152] where his father seems to have been treated as a friend by the prior; and when the boy came home for his holidays, it was to spend them in riding and hawking with Richer de L’Aigle, a young knight sprung from one of the noblest families of Normandy, and a constant visitor and intimate friend of the little household in Cheapside.[153] It is plain from the simple, matter-of-fact way in which that household is described that it in nowise differed from the generality of burgher-households around it. Its head was wealthy, but not to such a degree as to excite special notice or envy; he and his wife lived in comfort and affluence, but only such as befitted their station; they seem to have been in no way distinguished from the bulk of respectable, well-to-do, middle-class citizens of their day. The one peculiarity of their home was the circumstance to which we owe our knowledge of its character and its history:—that in it had been born a child who was to begin his career as Thomas of London the burgher’s son, and to end it as Thomas of Canterbury, archbishop, saint and martyr.

- [148] S. Thomæ Ep. cxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. p. 515).

- [149] Anon. II. Vita S. Thomæ (ib.vol. iv.), p. 81.

- [150] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii. p. 14) calls him vicecomes, which in relation to London at this period can only mean port-reeve; and a constant tradition of later days pointed to the father of S. Thomas as the most venerated predecessor of the mayor.

- [151] Anon. I. Vita S. Thomæ (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 7.

- [152] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 14.

- [153] E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 359. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 6. Garnier, Vie de S. Thomas (Hippeau), p. 3.

The Norman settlers were not the only new element in the population of the English towns. Flanders, the border-land of Normandy, France and the Empire, the immediate neighbour of the Norman dukes, the ally of the English kings, had been for ages associated with the destinies of England. The relation between the two countries was primarily a political one; but kindred blood, kindred speech and kindred temper drew Fleming and Englishman together in the bonds of a natural sympathy which grew with the growth of both nations. The merchants of Bruges were even more familiar visitors in London than those of Rouen and Caen. The trade with Flanders was the most important part of the trade of eastern England. Not only was the estuary of the Scheld a high-way of communication with the more distant regions of central Europe, but Flanders herself was the head-quarters of a flourishing industry for which the raw material was in great part furnished by England. The cloth which all Europe flocked to buy at the great yearly fairs of Bruges and Ghent was made chiefly from the wool of English sheep. Dover was the chief mart for this export; in the itinerary of the canons of Laon we see Flemish merchants dispersing to buy wool all over the country and bringing it up to Dover in great bales, which were deposited in a warehouse built for that special purpose till they could be shipped over sea.[154] As yet the Flemings had almost a monopoly of this weaving trade, although the appearance of weavers’ gilds at Huntingdon, Lincoln, Oxford and London may show that Englishmen were already beginning to emulate their example; it may, on the other hand, point to a Flemish element in the population of these towns. In the time of William the Conqueror some fellow-countrymen of his Flemish queen had come not merely to traffic but to dwell in England; in the time of Henry I. they seem to have become numerous and prosperous enough to excite the jealousy of both Normans and English. It may have been partly to allay this jealousy, but it was surely, nevertheless, a marked testimony to their character as active and trustworthy members of the state, that in 1111 Henry, casting about for a means of holding in check the turbulent Welsh whose restlessness was the one remaining element of disturbance in his realm, planted a colony of these Flemings in the extremity of South Wales, the southern part of our Pembrokeshire.[155] The experiment was a daring one; cut off as they were from all direct communication with England, there must have seemed little chance that these colonists could hold their own against the Welsh. The success of the experiment is matter not of history but of present fact; South Pembrokeshire remains to this day a Teutonic land, a “little England beyond Wales.” But the true significance of the Flemish settlements under Henry I. is for England rather than for Wales. They are the first links of a social and industrial, as distinguished from a merely political, connexion between England and the Low Countries, which in later days was to exercise an important influence on the life of both peoples. They are the forerunners of two greater settlements—one under Edward III. and one under Elizabeth—which were to work a revolution in English industry.

- [154] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 5 (D’Achéry, Guib. Noviog. Opp., p. 536).

- [155] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 401 (Hardy, p. 628). Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 64; Ann. Camb. a. 1107; Brut y Tywysogion, a. 1105.

A third class of foreign settlers stood in a totally different position from both the Fleming and the Norman. These were the Jews. Their first appearance in England is said to have been due to the Conqueror, who brought over a Jewish colony from Rouen to London.[156] They were special favourites of William Rufus; under Henry they play a less conspicuous part; but in the next reign we find them at Lincoln, Oxford, and elsewhere, and there can be no doubt that they were already established in most of the chief English towns. They formed, however, no part of the townsfolk. The Jew was not a member of the state; he was the king’s chattel, not to be meddled with, for good or for evil, save at the king’s own bidding. Exempt from toll and tax and from the fines of justice, he had the means of accumulating a hoard of wealth which might indeed be seized at any moment by an arbitrary act of the king, but which the king’s protection guarded with jealous care against all other interference. The capacity in which the Jew usually appears is that of a money-lender—an occupation in which the scruples of the Church forbade Christians to engage, lest they should be contaminated with the sin of usury. Fettered by no such scruples, the Hebrew money-lenders drove a thriving trade; and their loans doubtless contributed to the material benefit of the country, by furnishing means for a greater extension of commercial enterprize than would have been possible without such aid. But, except in this indirect way, their presence contributed nothing to the political developement of the towns; and in their social developement the Jewry, a distinct quarter exempt from the jurisdiction of merchant-gild or port-reeve as well as from that of sheriff or bishop, shut off by impassable barriers from the Christian community around it, had no part at all.

- [156] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iv. c. 317 (Hardy, p. 500, note).

Outside this little separate world of the Jewry the general manner of life was much the same in all ranks of society. The domestic arrangements of the castle or manor-house differed little from those of the citizen’s dwelling. In both the accommodation usually consisted merely of a hall, a “solar” or upper chamber raised on a substructure of cellars, and a kitchen with its appendant offices.[157] The hall was the general living, eating, and sleeping-apartment for the whole household. Its floor was of wood, strewn with hay or rushes;[158] a fire blazed upon a great stone hearth in its centre, or in a wide recess at one end; and round the fire were ranged in due order the tables and benches at which the family, guests and servants all assembled for meals. In the higher ranks of society the king’s friend Count Robert of Meulan had set a fashion of taking but one daily repast—the mid-day dinner—and those who wished to ape courtly manners followed his example; the practice, however, found little favour with the mass of the people, who attributed it to aristocratic stinginess, and preferred their four meals a day according to ancient English custom.[159] It was in the hall that noble or merchant transacted his business or conversed with his friends; and it was in the hall too that at nightfall, when the tables were cleared and the wooden shutters which closed the unglazed windows safely barred,[160] guests and servants, divided at most by a curtain drawn across the room, lay down to sleep in the glow of the dying fire.[161] The solar was used at once as bedroom and private sitting-room by the master and mistress of the house;[162] a curtainless bed and an oaken chest,[163] serving as a wardrobe and fastened with lock and hinges often of elaborate ironwork,[164] made up its ordinary furniture; in the story of S. Thomas we catch a glimpse, too, of the cradle in which a burgher-mother rocked her baby to sleep, wrapped in a dainty silken coverlet.[165] The whole house, whether in town or country, was commonly of wood.[166] With open hearths and chimneys ill-constructed, or more probably altogether lacking, the natural consequence was that fires in towns were of constant occurrence and disastrous extent; Gilbert Becket’s house was burnt over his head several times, and in each case a large part of London shared in the destruction.[167] But the buildings thus easily destroyed were as easily replaced; while the cost of a stone house was beyond the means of any but the great nobles, unless it were here and there some exceptionally wealthy Jew; and there was no other building material to be had except wood or rubble, for the nearest approach to a brick which had yet come into general use was a tile;[168] and although these were sometimes used for roofing, the majority of houses, even in great cities like London, were covered with thatch.[169] All the architectural energy of the time spent itself in two channels—military and ecclesiastical; and even the castle was as yet a very simple edifice. The various buildings which occupied its outer ward were mere huts of wood or rubble; and the stone wall of the keep itself, though of enormous thickness and solidity, was often nothing more than a shell, the space inside it being divided by wooden partitions into rooms covered with lean-to roofs of thatch. Even where the keep was entirely of stone, all thought of accommodation or elegance was completely subordinated to the one simple, all-important purpose of defence. It is this stern simplicity which gives to the remains of our early castles a grandeur of their own, and strikes the imagination far more impressively than the elaborate fortifications of later times. But it left no scope to the finer fancies of the architect. His feeling for artistic decoration, his love of beauty, of harmonious light and shade, had free play only in his work for the Church; while the more general taste for personal luxury and elegance had to find expression chiefly in minor matters, and especially in dress. During the last reign the extravagance of attire among the nobles had been carried to a pitch which called forth the energetic remonstrances of serious men; prelate after prelate thundered against the unseemly fashions—the long hair curled and scented like a woman’s, the feminine ornaments, the long pointed shoes and loose flowing garments which rendered all manly exercises impossible.[170] After the Red King’s death a reforming party, headed by the new sovereign and his friend Robert of Meulan,[171] succeeded in effecting a return to the more rational attire of the ordinary Norman knighthood; a close-fitting tunic with a long cloak, reaching almost to the feet, thrown over it for riding or walking.[172] The English townsfolk, then as now, endeavoured to copy the dress of their neighbours from beyond the Channel. Among the rural population, however, foreign fashions were slow to penetrate; and the English countryman went on tilling his fields clad in the linen smock-frock which had once been the ordinary costume of all classes of men among his forefathers, and which has scarcely yet gone out of use among his descendants.

[157] Turner, Domestic Architecture, vol. i. pp. 2, 5.

[158] Ib. p. 16.

[159] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 407 (Hardy, p. 636).

[160] Turner, Domestic Architecture, vol. i. p. 13.

[161] Ib. pp. 2, 15.

[162] Ib. p. 5.

[163] Ib. p. 16.

[164] Ib. p. 10.

[165] Ed. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 357. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 4.

[166] Turner, Domestic Architecture, pp. 8, 17, 18.

[167] According to Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii. p. 8), fires and drunkenness were the two plagues of London.

[168] Turner, Domestic Architecture, p. xxvii. (introduction).

[169] Ib. p. 18.

[170] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 816. Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iv. c. 314 (Hardy, p. 498).

[171] Will. Malm. as above, and l. v. c. 407 (p. 636).

[172] We see this long cloak in a story of Robert of Bellême (Hen. Hunt. De Contemptu Mundi, ed. Arnold, p. 310), and in that of Henry “Curt-Mantel” (Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 28., ed. Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 157).

The life of the English country folk had changed since the first days of the Norman settlement almost as little as their dress. The final transformation, now everywhere complete, of the ancient township into the feudal manor was but the last step in a process which had begun at least as far back as the time of Eadgar. The castle or manor-house of the baron or lord, into which the thegn’s hall had now developed, was the centre of rural life. Around it lay the home-farm, the lord’s demesne land, cultivated partly by free tenants, partly by the customary labour due from the villeins whose cottages clustered on its border, and whose holdings, with a tract of common pasture and common woodland, made up the remainder of the estate. In the portion thus held in villenage, the arable land was distributed in large open fields in strips of an acre or half an acre in extent, each man holding a certain number of strips scattered one in one field and one in another; while in proportion to the total amount of land which he thus held he contributed one ox or more to the team that drew the heavy plough wherewith each whole field was ploughed in common. On the estates of the great abbey of Peterborough the holdings were mostly of virgates or half-virgates—that is, land to the extent of some thirty or fifteen acres, and furnishing in the former case two oxen, in the latter one ox, to the common plough team, which usually consisted of four; those belonging to the demesne were usually of six or eight. Each tenant had, besides his land, a right to his share of the common pasture and the common hay-meadow, as well as of the common woodland where he fed his pigs on the oak-mast, and cut turf and brushwood for fuel and other household uses. Some of the lesser tenants had no land, but were merely “cottiers,” occupying their little cottage with or without a garden. Whatever the extent and character of their holding, they held it in consideration of certain services due to the lord, discharged partly by labour upon his demesne land, partly by customary payments in money or in kind, partly in work for specified purposes on particular occasions, known as “boon” or “bene-work.”[173] The superintendence of all these matters was in the hands of the reeve or bailiff of the manor, who was charged with the regulation of its labour, the maintenance of its farming-stock, the ingathering of its dues, the letting of its unoccupied land, and the general account of its revenues. Under his orders every villein was bound to do a certain amount of “week-work”—to plough, sow, or reap, or otherwise labour on the demesne land a certain number of days every week; generally the obligation, on every virgate held in villenage, was for two or three days a week throughout the year, sometimes with an extra day at harvest-tide. The customary dues and services varied with the special custom of each manor; they consisted partly of payments either in kind or money, or both, and partly of services such as hewing, carting, and drying wood, cutting turf, making thatch, making malt, mowing and carrying hay, putting up fences, providing ploughs and labour for a specified length of time at particular seasons, ploughing, sowing, harrowing and reaping a given extent of the demesne land. Some of the rents were paid by the discharge of a special duty; the cowherds, oxherds, shepherds, swineherds, usually held a piece of land “by their service,” that is, in consideration of their charge over the flocks and herds of the lord; sometimes we find a further labour-rent paid by their wives, who winnow and reap so much corn on the demesne.[174] Many of the cotters doubtless held their little dwellings on a similar tenure, by virtue of their offices as the indispensable craftsmen of the village community, such as the blacksmith, the carpenter, or the wheelwright. The mill, too, an important institution on every large manor, paid a fixed money rent, and sometimes a tribute of fish from the mill-stream.[175]

- [173] “Præcaria” or “præcationes.”

- [174] Liber Niger (App. to Chron. Petroburgense, ed. Stapleton, Camden Soc.), pp. 158, 163, 164, 165.

- [175] Liber Niger Petrob. (Stapleton), p. 158, “i molendinus cum i virgâ terræ reddit xl solidos et cc anguillas.”

We may draw some illustrations of the life of these rural communities from the “Black Book” of Peterborough, in which the manors belonging to the abbey were described about the year 1125. On the manor of Thorp there were twelve “full villeins” holding eleven acres each, and working on the demesne three days a week; there were also six half villeins who did the like in proportion to their holdings. All these paid of custom ten shillings annually, besides five sheep for eating, ten ells of linen cloth, ten porringers, and two hundred loaves for the love-feast of S. Peter; moreover they all ploughed sixteen acres and a half for their lord. Six bordarii paid seven shillings a year; and they all rendered twenty-two bushels of oats for their share of the dead wood, twenty-two loaves, sixty-four hens, and one hundred and sixty eggs.[176] At Colingham twenty villeins worked each one day a week, and three boon-days in August; they brought sixty waggon-loads of wood to the manor-house, dug and carried twenty loads of turf and twenty of thatch, harrowed all the winter-ploughing, and paid annually four pounds in money. There were also fifty sokemen who paid twelve pounds a year, ploughed, harrowed and reaped eighteen acres, besides ploughing with their own ploughs three times in Lent; each of them worked three days in August, and served of custom six times a year in driving the deer for the abbot’s hunting.[177] At Easton twenty-one villeins holding a virgate each worked twice a week throughout the year and three boon-days in August; they had twelve ploughs with which they worked once in winter and once in spring, and then harrowed; they ploughed fifteen acres and three roods, whereof five acres and one rood were to be sown with their own seed; in spring they had to plough ten acres and a half and sow twenty and a half with their own seed; in summer, for fifteen days, they had to do whatsoever the lord commanded. They also made seventy-three bushels of malt from the lord’s barley; and they paid seventeen shillings and sixpence a year. A man named Toli held one virgate at a rent of five shillings a year; and eleven sokemen held thirteen virgates and a half by a payment of twelve shillings, two days’ work in summer and winter, and fifteen days in summer at the lord’s bidding. The miller, with a holding of six acres of arable land and two of meadow, rendered one mark of silver to the lord.[178]

- [176] Liber Niger Petrob. (Stapleton), pp. 158, 159.

- [177] Liber Niger Petrob. (Stapleton), p. 159.

- [178] Ib. pp. 159, 160.

Fisherton, again, supplies illustrations of a great variety of services. On this manor there were twenty-six “full villeins,” twelve “half villeins,” one “cotsetus” and three “bordarii.” The full villeins worked two days a week, the half villeins one day, throughout the year; the four cottagers worked one day a week in August, their food being supplied by the lord. The villeins had among them nine ploughs, which were all brought into requisition once in winter and three times in spring. The full villeins carted a load of wood, the half villeins in proportion; the full villeins moreover ploughed and harrowed of custom an acre in spring, and half an acre in winter; they also lent their ploughs once in summer for fallowing. At Pentecost the lord received one penny for every villein plough-ox. Each full villein paid twopence at Martinmas and thirty-two pence on the four quarter-days; the half villeins paid half the sum. Every one of them gave a hen at Christmas. The mill brought three shillings a year, the fishing five shillings. Land enough for twelve full villeins lay unoccupied; the reeve had to discharge its dues out of his own purse, and hire it out at the best rent he could get. There were twenty sokemen, holding three ploughlands, and lending their ploughs once in winter, twice in spring, and once for fallowing; each of them reaped one acre, and did two days bene-work in August; at hay-harvest they gave of custom three days’ work, one for mowing, one for turning the hay, and one for carrying it; each gave a hen at Christmas, and they all paid four pounds a quarter. On the demesne were three ploughs, each with a team of eight oxen; these were under the care of five ox-herds, who held five acres each, and whose wives reaped one day a week in August, the lord supplying their food.[179] At Oundle we get a glimpse not only of the rural township, but of the little dependent town growing up on it. “In Oundle are four hides paying geld to the king. Of these hides, twenty-five men hold twenty virgates, and pay of custom twenty shillings a year, forty hens, and two hundred eggs. The men of the township have nine ploughs; from Michaelmas to Martinmas they find ploughs for the lord’s use once a week, and from Martinmas to Easter once a fortnight, and ten acres fallow. Each virgate owes three days’ work a week. There are ten bordarii, who work one day a week; and fifteen burghers, who pay thirty shillings. The market of the township renders four pounds and three shillings. A mill with one virgate renders forty shillings and two hundred eels. The abbot holds the wood in his own hand. The men of the township, with six herdsmen, pay five shillings a year poll-tax. The church of this township belongs to the altar of the abbey of Borough.”[180]

- [179] Liber Niger Petrob. (Stapleton), p. 164.

- [180] Ib. p. 158.

Services such as these were doubtless an irksome and a heavy burthen; to modern ideas of independence, the life of the rural population was the degraded life of serfdom. But there was another side to the system. The lord had his duties as well as the villein; the villein had his rights as well as the lord. When their work for the lord was done and their customary dues were paid, the villagers were free to make their own arrangements one with another for the yoking of their oxen to the common ploughs and the tillage of the common fields; and the rest of their time and produce of their labour was theirs to do with as they would, subject merely to such restrictions as to grinding at the lord’s mill, or obtaining his license for the sale of cattle, as were necessary for maintaining the integrity of the estate. While they owed suit and service to their lord, he was bound by his own interest as well as by law and duty to guard them against external interference, oppression, or injury; the extent of his rights over them, no less than of their duties to him, was defined by a strict and minute code of custom to which long prescription gave all and more than all the force of law, and law itself could occasionally step in to avenge the wronged villein even upon his lord; Alfred of Cheaffword is recorded in the Pipe Roll as having paid a fine of forty shillings for scourging a rustic of his own.[181] The villein’s life was not harder than that of the poor free man; it was quite as secure from wrong, and far more secure from want. The majority of the cultivators were indeed tied to their land; but their land was equally tied to them; the lord was bound to furnish each little bundle of acre-strips with its proper outfit of plough-oxen, to provide each tenant with his little cottage, and to see that the heritage passed on to the next generation, just as the manor itself, and with it the tenants and their services, passed from father to son in the case of a lay proprietor, or from one generation of monks to another in a case like that of Peterborough. Even if a villein failed in his dues, the worst punishment that could befall him was the seizure of his little household goods; eviction was out of the question. The serfdom of the villein was after all only the lowest link in a chain of feudal interdependence which ended only with the king himself. If the “rustics” possessed their homesteads only on condition of work done at the lord’s bidding and for his benefit, the knight held his “fee” and the baron his “honour” only on condition of a service to the king, less laborious indeed, but more dangerous, and in reality not a whit more morally elevating. If they had to ask their lord’s leave for giving a daughter in marriage, the first baron of the realm had to ask a like permission of the king, and to pay for it too. If their persons and their services could be transferred by the lord to another owner together with the soil which they tilled, the same principle really applied to every grade of feudal society; Count William of Evreux only stated a simple fact in grotesque language when he complained that his homage and his services had been made over together with the overlordship of his county by Robert Curthose to Henry I., with no more regard to his own will than if he had been a horse or an ox.[182] The mere gift of personal freedom, when it meant the uprooting of all local and social ties and the withdrawal of all accustomed means of sustenance, would have been in itself but a doubtful boon. There were, however, at least three ways in which freedom might be attained. Sometimes the lord on his death-bed, or in penance for some great sin, would be moved by the Church’s influence to enfranchise some of his serfs. Sometimes a rustic might flee to one of the chartered towns, and if for the space of a year and a day he could find shelter under its protecting customs from the pursuit of his lord’s justice, he was thenceforth a free burgher. And there was a greater city of refuge whose protection was readier and surer still. The Church had but to lay her consecrating hands upon a man, and he was free at once. To ordain a villein or admit him as a monk without his lord’s consent was indeed forbidden; but the consecration once bestowed was valid nevertheless; and the storm of indignation which met the endeavour of Henry II. to enforce the prohibition shows that it had long been almost a dead letter.

- [181] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 55.

- [182] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 814.

If the spiritual life of the English Church in the time of Henry I. were to be judged solely from her highest official representatives, it would certainly appear to have been at a low ebb. S. Anselm had lived just long enough to accomplish the settlement of the investitures, but not to direct its working or experience its results. On his death early in 1109 Henry so far fell back into his brother’s evil ways as to keep the metropolitan see vacant for five years. The supreme direction of affairs in the Church as well as in the state was thus left in the hands of the party represented by Roger of Salisbury. Roger’s policy and that of his master was indeed less flagrantly insulting to religion than that of Rufus and Flambard; but it was hardly less injurious in a moral and spiritual point of view. The most important sees were no longer farmed by Jewish usurers for the king’s benefit; the most sacred offices of the Church were no longer openly sold to the highest bidder; but they were made appendages to the great offices of the state; the Church herself was practically turned into a mere handmaid of the state, and her ministers into tools for the purposes of secular government. The system had undoubted advantages in a worldly point of view. A great deal of the most important political and administrative work was of a nature which, in the condition of society then existing, required the services of a clerk rather than of a layman; moreover, a man in holy orders, incapable of founding a family, and standing, so to say, alone in the world, was less exposed to the temptations and corruptions of place and power than a layman surrounded with personal and social ties and open to all sorts of personal and social ambitions, and could thus be safely intrusted with a freedom of action and authority such as in the hands of a lay baron with territorial and family influence might have led to the most dangerous results. On these and similar grounds Henry made a practice of choosing his chief ministers from the ranks of the clergy, and bestowing vacant bishoprics upon them, by way either of rewarding their past labours or of insuring a continuance of their zeal and devotion in the discharge of their temporal functions. Thereby he undoubtedly secured to the state the services of a more able, vigorous and honest set of administrators than could have been obtained by any other means; but from another side the system lay open to grave objection. The men whom it set over the dioceses of England were, beyond all question, men of very superior intelligence and energy, and, on the whole, of fair moral character, men whom it would be most unjust to compare for a moment with the hirelings who bought their sees of William Rufus. But they were essentially of the world, worldly; their minds and their hearts were both alike fixed on their thoroughly well fulfilled duties as treasurer or justiciar, not on their too often neglected duties as bishop of Ely or Salisbury. And as were the bishops, so were the priests. When once it became clear that the main road to ecclesiastical preferment lay through the temporal service of the crown, the whole body of secular clergy turned into a nursery of statesmen, and while they rose to their highest point of worldly importance the little spiritual influence which they still retained passed altogether away. But the Church’s life was not in her bishops and her priests; it was in her humble, faithful laity. Down below the dull utilitarianism, the “faithless coldness of the times,” the finer sympathies and higher instincts of the soul lay buried but not dead; ready to spring to the surface with a burst of enthusiasm at the touch first of the Austin canons, and then of the monks of Citeaux.

Of the two religious movements which at this time stirred the depths of English society, the earlier, that of the Austin canons, was in its origin not monastic but secular. It arose, in fact, out of a protest against monasticism. About the middle of the eleventh century an attempt had been made to redress the balance between the regular and secular clergy, and restore to the latter the influence and consideration in spiritual matters which they had, partly by their own fault, already to a great extent lost. Some earnest and thoughtful spirits, distressed at once by the abuse of monastic privileges and by the general decay of ecclesiastical order, sought to effect a reform by the establishment of a stricter and better organized discipline in those cathedral and other churches which were served by colleges of secular priests. For this end a rule composed in the eighth century by Archbishop Chrodegang of Metz for the members of his own chapter, and generally followed in the collegiate churches of Gaul, was the model adopted by cathedral reformers in England in the reigns of Eadward the Confessor and William the Conqueror. Bishops Gisa of Wells and Leofric of Exeter under the former king, Archbishop Thomas of York under the latter, severally attempted to enforce it upon their canons, but without success. The English clergy were accustomed to the full enjoyment not only of their separate property but of their separate houses; many were even yet, in spite of Pope Gregory, married men and fathers of families; and the new rule, which required them to break up their homes and submit to community of table and dwelling, was naturally resented as an attempt to curtail their liberty and bring them under monastic restraint. Lanfranc soon found that the only way to get rid of the old lax system was to get rid of the canons altogether; accordingly, from some few cathedrals the secular clerks were once again, as in Eadgar’s days, driven out and replaced by monks, this time to return no more till the great secularization in the sixteenth century. But in the greater number of churches the canons were influential enough to resist expulsion as well as reform, and to maintain the old fashion with its merits and its abuses, its good and evil sides, all alike undisturbed and unrestrained. On the Continent, too, the rule of Chrodegang proved unequal to the needs of the time. Those who had the attainment of its object really at heart ended by taking a lesson from their rivals and challenging the monks with their own weapons. Towards the beginning of the twelfth century the attempts at canonical reform issued in the foundation of what was virtually a new religious order, that of the Augustinians or Canons Regular of the order of S. Augustine. Like the monks and unlike the secular canons, from whom they were carefully distinguished, they had not only their table and dwelling but all things in common, and were bound by a vow to the observance of their rule, grounded upon a passage in one of the letters of that great father of the Latin Church from whom they took their name.[183] Their scheme was a compromise between the old-fashioned system of canons and that of the monastic confraternities; but a compromise leaning strongly towards the monastic side, tending more and more towards it with every fresh developement, and distinguished from it chiefly by a certain simplicity and elasticity of organization which gave scope for an almost unlimited variety in the adjustment of the relations between the active and the contemplative life of the members of the order, thus enabling it to adapt itself to the most dissimilar temperaments and to the most diverse spheres of religious activity.

- [183] On Austin canons see Mosheim, Eccles. Hist. (Eng. trans. ed. Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 47; on canons in general, ib. vol. i. pp. 494, 495, 538; Stubbs, pref. to Tract. de Inv. S. Crucis; and Freeman, Norm. Conq., vol. ii. pp. 84, 85, 452, 453, and vol. iv. p. 374.

The Austin canons, as they were commonly called, made their way across the Channel at the beginning of Henry’s reign. The circumstances of their earliest settlement illustrate the intimate connexion between the religious and the national revival in England. Their first priory was founded in 1108 by the English queen Matilda—“Maude the good queen,” as they gratefully called her—in the soke of Aldgate, just within the eastern wall of London. Part of its endowment was furnished by the estates of an old English cnihtengild whose members surrendered their property for the benefit of the new community. The house was dedicated to the Holy Trinity; its first prior, Norman by name, was a native of Kent who had studied in Gaul under S. Anselm; through Anselm he was enabled to bring the Augustinian order under the notice of Matilda, whose confessor he afterwards became. How he lavished all his funds on the furnishing of his church and the stocking of his library; how the starving brotherhood set out a row of empty plates in the refectory to attract the sympathy of the citizens who were taking their Sunday stroll round the suburb and peeping curiously in at the windows of the new building; how the pitying burgher-wives vowed each to bring a loaf every Sunday; and how the plates in the refectory were never empty again[184]—is a story which need not be repeated in detail. Some fifteen years later Rahere the king’s minstrel threw up his post at court to become the head of an Austin priory which he built on a plot of waste marshy ground along the eastern border of Smithfield. He dedicated his establishment to S. Bartholomew and attached to it an hospital for the relief of the sick and needy. Every day—so tradition told—Alfhun, the master of the hospital, went about the city as the Little Sisters of the Poor do to this day, begging in the shops and markets for help towards the support of the sick folk under his care. Most likely he was himself a London citizen; his name is enough to prove him of genuine English birth.[185] Another famous Augustinian house was that of Merton in Surrey. There the brotherhood devoted themselves to educational work. Their most illustrious scholar—born in the very year in which their house was founded, 1117—is known to us already as Thomas the son of Gilbert Becket. At the other end of England, Walter Lespec, the noblest character among the lay barons of the time, found comfort for the loss of an only son in “making Christ his heir”—devoting to God’s service the heritage which had been destined for his boy, and founding the priory of Kirkham in Yorkshire on the spot where the lad had expired.[186] Before the close of Henry’s reign the Austin canons had acquired such importance that two of their order were raised to the episcopate, one even to the primacy of all Britain. After five years of vacancy the metropolitan chair of Canterbury was still too vividly haunted by memories of S. Anselm for Henry and Roger to venture on trying to fill it from the ranks of the latter’s party; they gave it to Anselm’s old friend and suffragan, Ralf, bishop of Rochester.[187] But when Ralf, who at the time of his election was already an aged man, died in 1122, the seculars, headed by Roger of Salisbury, made a successful effort to secure a non-monastic primate. Not daring, however, to go the full length of appointing one of themselves, they took a middle course and chose a canon regular, William of Corbeil, prior of S. Osyth’s at Chiche in Essex.[188] The strict monastic party counted the new sort of canons very little better than the old ones. William himself, however, was a perfectly blameless churchman, whose worst fault was a constitutional timidity and shrinking from political responsibilities which made him powerless to stem the tide of worldliness among his suffragans, though he at least kept the metropolitan chair itself safe from contaminating influences. The case of the other Augustinian prelate is a specially interesting one. Henry, who so irritated both his English and Norman subjects by his general preference for foreign churchmen, had nevertheless chosen for his own spiritual adviser a priest whose name, Eadwulf, shows him to have been of English origin, and who was prior of an Augustinian house at Nostell in Yorkshire. The king’s last act before he left England in 1133, never to return, was to promote his confessor to a bishopric. Twenty-three years before, following out a cherished plan of S. Anselm’s, he had caused the overworked bishop of Lincoln to be relieved of part of his enormous diocese by the establishment of a new see with the great abbey of Ely for its cathedral and the monks for its chapter.[189] He now lightened the cares of the archbishop of York in like manner by giving him a new suffragan whose see was fixed at Carlisle. Eadwulf was appointed bishop; naturally enough he constituted his chapter on the principles of his own order; and Carlisle, the last English bishopric founded before the Reformation, was also the only one whose cathedral church was served by canons regular of the order of S. Augustine.[190]

[184] The history of H. Trinity, Aldgate, is printed in the appendix to Hearne’s edition of William of Newburgh, vol. iii. pp. 688–709.

[185] The story of S. Bartholomew’s and its founder comes from “Liber fundacionis ecclesiæ S. Bartholomæi Londoniarum,” a MS. of Henry II.’s time, part of which is printed in Dugdale’s Monast. Angl., vol. vi. pt. i. pp. 292–295. The remainder is as yet unprinted; but Dr. Norman Moore has published in the S. Bartholomew’s Hospital Reports, vol. xxi. pp. xxxix.–cix., a translation made about A.D. 1400; the 22d chapter of this (pp. lxix., lxx.) contains the account of Alfhun.

[186] The stories of all these Austin priories are in Dugdale, Monast. Angl., vol. vi. pts. i. and ii. Merton is in pt. i. pp. 245–247; Kirkham, ib. pp. 207–209.

[187] Eadmer, Hist. Nov. (Rule), pp. 221–223; Will. Malm., Gesta Pontif., l. i. c. 67 (Hamilton, p. 126). The king wanted to appoint Faricius, abbot of Abingdon; his choice was opposed by the seculars, who wanted one of their own party. This the monks of Christ Church resisted, but, as Faricius was obnoxious because he was an Italian, they finally all agreed upon Ralf, and the king confirmed their choice.

[188] Eng. Chron. a. 1123; Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 7; Gerv. Cant., Actus Pontif. (Stubbs, vol. ii.), p. 380. On S. Osyth’s see Will. Malm., Gesta Pontif., l. ii. c. 731 (Hamilton, p. 146).

[189] Eadmer, Hist. Nov. (Rule), pp. 195, 211; Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 60; Will. Malm., Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 445 (Hardy, p. 680); Gesta Pontif., l. iv. c. 185 (Hamilton, p. 325).

[190] On Carlisle and Eadwulf (or Æthelwulf) see Joh. Hexham, a. 1133 (Raine, vol. i. pp. 109, 110); and Dugdale, Monast. Angl., vol. vi. pt. i. pp. 141–145.

Meanwhile a mightier influence than theirs was regenerating all the Churches of the West—our own among the number. Its root was in a Burgundian wilderness; but the seed from which it sprang was of English birth. Harding was an Englishman who spent his boyhood in the monastery of Sherborne in Dorset, till he was seized with a passion for wandering and for study which led him first to Scotland, then to Gaul, and at last to Rome. It chanced that on his return thence, passing through the duchy of Burgundy, he stopped at the abbey of Molêmes. As he saw the ways and habits familiar to his childhood reproduced in those of the monks, the wanderer’s heart yearned for the peaceful life which he had forsaken; he took the vows, and became a brother of the house. But when, with the zeal of a convert, he began to look more closely into his monastic obligations, he perceived that the practice of Molêmes, and indeed of most other monasteries, fell very far short of the strict rule of S. Benedict. He remonstrated with his brethren till they had no rest in their minds. At last, after long and anxious debates in the chapter, the abbot determined to go to the root of the matter, and appointed two brethren, whose learning was equalled by their piety, to examine diligently the original rule and declare what they found in it. The result of their investigations justified Harding’s reproaches and caused a schism in the convent. The majority refused to alter their accustomed ways; finding they were not to be reformed, the zealous minority, consisting of Robert the abbot, Harding himself (or Stephen, as he was called in religion), and sixteen others equally “stiff-necked in their holy obstinacy,” left Molêmes, and sought a new abode in the wilderness. The site which they chose—in the diocese of Chalon-sur-Saône, not far from Dijon—was no happy valley, no “green retreat” such as the earlier Benedictine founders had been wont to select. It was a dismal swamp overgrown with brushwood, a forlorn, dreary, unhealthy spot, from whose marshy character the new house took its name of “the Cistern”—Cistellum, commonly called Citeaux. There the little band set to work in 1098 to carry into practice their views of monastic duty. The brotherhood of Molêmes, left without a head by their abbot’s desertion, presently appealed to the archbishop of Lyons and the Pope, and after some negotiation Robert, willingly or unwillingly, returned to his former post. His departure gave a shock to the foundations of the new community; zeal was already growing cold, and of those who had followed him out from Molêmes all save eight followed him back again. Those eight—“few in number, but a host in merit”—at once chose their prior Alberic to be abbot in Robert’s stead, while the true founder, Stephen Harding, undertook the duties of prior. Upon Alberic’s death in 1110 Stephen became abbot in his turn, and under him the little cistern in the wilderness became a fountain whose waters flowed out far and wide through the land. Three-and-twenty daughter-houses were brought to completion during his life-time. One of the earliest was Pontigny, founded in 1114, and destined in after-days to become inseparably associated with the name of another English saint. Next year there went forth another Cistercian colony, whose glory was soon to eclipse that of the mother-house itself. Its leader was a young monk called Bernard, and the place of its settlement was named Clairvaux.[191]

- [191] For the Life of S. Stephen Harding, and the early history of Citeaux and its order, see Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iv. cc. 334–337 (Hardy, pp. 511–517); Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 711–714; and Gallia Christiana, vol. iv. pp. 980–984.

From Burgundy and Champagne the “White Monks,” as the Cistercians were called from the colour of their habit, soon spread over France and Normandy. In 1128 they crossed the sea and made an entrance into their founder’s native land; William Giffard, bishop of Winchester, founded the abbey of Waverley in Surrey for twelve monks from the Cistercian house of Aumône in Normandy.[192] The movement spread rapidly in all directions. In 1131 Walter Lespec the founder of Kirkham, zealous in every good work, established in the heart of the Yorkshire wolds a “daughter of S. Bernard,” the abbey of Rievaux;[193] far away on the Welsh border, in the valley of the Wye, Tintern was founded in the same year by Walter de Clare.[194] The story of another famous Yorkshire house, Fountains, is a curious repetition of that of Citeaux itself. Thirteen monks of the Benedictine convent of S. Mary at York, fired by the example of the newly-established brotherhood at Rievaux, determined, like Stephen Harding and his friends at Molêmes, to go forth into the wilderness where they might follow the Cistercian rule in freedom. But when they asked their abbot’s leave to depart it was sternly refused. Archbishop Thurstan, to whom they appealed for support, came in person to plead their cause with the abbot, and was so insolently received that after a stormy scene in the chapter-house he laid the convent under interdict, and walked out followed by the zealous thirteen “with nothing but the clothes on their backs.” The warmly-sympathizing primate gave them a temporary shelter in his own home; at Christmas he bestowed upon them for their dwelling a lonely valley called Skeldale, near Ripon, “full of thorns and enclosed by rocks,” and for their maintenance the little township of Sutton. They at once chose one of their number, Richard by name, as abbot, and went forth under his guidance to settle in their new abode, although the cold of a Yorkshire winter was at its bitterest, and they had not where to lay their heads. In the middle of the valley stood a great elm—“thick and leafy as elms are wont to be.”[195] That tree was the original abbey of our Lady of Fountains. Its spreading branches formed a roof to shelter the little band of monks; “their bread was supplied to them by the archbishop, their drink by the streamlet which ran through the valley,” and which, as in the case of Citeaux, suggested a name for the future house. In this primitive dwelling they fulfilled their religious exercises in peace and contentment till the winter was past, when they began to think of constructing a more substantial abode. They had no mind to follow their own inspirations and set up an independent rule of their own; in all humility they wrote to S. Bernard (who since the death of S. Stephen Harding was universally looked up to as the head of the Cistercian order), telling him all their story, and beseeching him to receive them as his children. Bernard answered by sending to them, with a letter full of joyous welcome and hearty sympathy, his friend and confidant, Godfrey, to instruct them in the Cistercian rule. They had now been joined by ten more brethren. But the elm-tree was still their only shelter, and their means of subsistence were as slender as at the first. Presently there came a famine in the land; they were reduced to eke out their scanty store of bread with leaves and stewed herbs. When they had just given away their two last loaves—one to the workmen engaged on the building, the other to a passing pilgrim—this supreme act of charity and faith was rewarded with a supply sent them by the lord of Knaresborough, Eustace Fitz-John. At last, after struggling on bravely for two years, they found it impossible to continue where they were, with numbers constantly increasing and means at a standstill; so the abbot went to Clairvaux and begged that some place might be assigned to them there. S. Bernard granted the request; but when Abbot Richard came back to fetch the rest of the brotherhood he found that all was changed. Hugh, dean of York, had just made over himself and all his property to Fountains. It was the turn of the tide; other donations began to flow in; soon they poured. Five years after its own rise the “Fountain” sent out a rivulet to Newminster; after that her descendants speedily covered the land. Justly did the brotherhood cherish their beloved elm-tree as a witness to the lowly beginnings whence had sprung the mightiest Cistercian house in England. It bore a yet more touching witness four centuries later, when it still stood in its green old age, the one remnant of the glory of Fountains which the sacrilegious spoiler had not thought it worth his while to touch.[196]

- [192] Dugdale, Monast. Angl., vol. v. pp. 237, 241.

- [193] Ib. pp. 274, 280, 281.

- [194] Ib. pp. 265, 267, 270.

- [195] So says the historian of Fountains. How this can have been, in Yorkshire and at Christmas-time, I cannot pretend to explain.

- [196] The story of Fountains is in the Narratio of Hugh of Kirkstall, in Memorials of Fountains (Walbran, Surtees Soc.), and Dugdale, Monast. Angl., vol. v. pp. 292 et seq. See also Will. Newb., l. i. c. 14 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 50). The elm was standing in Leland’s day.

The influence of the Cistercians was different in kind from that of the earlier monasticism. The life of the Benedictines was, so to say, in the world though not of it. They sought tranquillity and retirement, but not solitude; the site of an abbey was chosen with a careful eye to the natural resources of the place, its accessibility, and the advantages which it offered for cultivation and production of all kinds. A Benedictine house almost invariably became, and indeed was intended to become, the nucleus of a flourishing lay population, either a cluster of rural settlements, or, not unfrequently, a busy, thriving town. But by the close of the tenth century, although the palmy days of the Benedictine fathers as the guardians of art and literature were in part still to come, the work in which they had been unrivalled for five hundred years, as the missionaries, cultivators and civilizers of Europe, was well-nigh accomplished; and the position into which they had unavoidably drifted as owners of vast landed property protected by special privileges was beginning to show its dangerous side. On the one hand, the secularizing spirit which had made such inroads upon the Church in general was creeping even into the cloister. On the other, the monasteries were growing rich and powerful at the expense of the parochial and diocesan organization. The laity were too apt, while showering their pious gifts upon the altars of the religious houses, to leave those of their own parish churches naked and uncared-for; and the growing habit of diverting the tithes of various estates and districts to the endowment of some abbey with which they were quite unconnected was already becoming a distinct abuse. Against all this the scheme of the Cistercians was a direct protest. They refused to have anything to do with tithes in any shape, saying that monks had no right to them; their houses were of the plainest possible construction: even in their churches scarcely an ornament was admitted to soften the stern grandeur of the architecture; there were no broidered hangings, no delicate paintings, no gold and silver vessels, no crucifixes glittering with enamel and precious gems; they hardly allowed, even for the most solemn rite, the use of any vestment more ornate than the simple white surplice or alb; and their ordinary habit, made from the wool of their flocks, was not black like that of the Benedictines, but the natural white or gray, for they looked upon dyeing as a refinement useless to men who had renounced the cares and pleasures of this life as well as the deceitfulness of riches.[197] Their aim was to be simply voices crying in the wilderness—a wilderness wherein they were resolved to dwell, as much as possible, alone. Their rule absolutely forbade the erection of a house even of their own order within a certain distance of another. But the cry that came forth from the depth of their solitude thrilled through the very hearts of men, and their influence spread far beyond the number of those who actually joined the order. It was the leaven of that influence, more than all others, which worked on and on through the nineteen years of anarchy that followed Henry’s death till it had leavened the whole lump, regenerated the Church, and made her ready to become in her turn the regenerator of the state and the nation. Already, before the order of Citeaux had been half a century in existence, William of Malmesbury, himself a member of one of the most ancient and famous of English Benedictine abbeys, could describe it as the unanimously acknowledged type of the monastic profession, the ideal which served as a mirror to the diligent, a goad to the negligent, and a model to all.[198]

- [197] See abstract of rule in Dugdale, Monast. Angl., vol. v. pp. 224, 225.

- [198] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iv. c. 337 (Hardy, p. 517).

How deeply the spirit of religious enthusiasm had penetrated among the people we see in the story of S. Godric. Godric was born in the last years of the Conqueror or the earliest years of the Red King at Walpole, a village in the north-western marshlands of Norfolk; thence his parents, Ælward and Ædwen, seem to have removed to a place on the river Welland, near Spalding in Lincolnshire. They were apparently free rustics of the poorest class, simple, unlearned, upright folk, who taught their three children to say the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, and brought them up in the fear of God; other education they could give them none, and of worldly goods just as little. In the dreary fenland round the shores of the Wash agriculture and industry were almost unknown, and the population subsisted chiefly on whatever they found left behind by the waves on the long reaches of shining sand that lay exposed whenever the tide was out. As a boy Godric once wandered thus nearly three miles out to sea in search of food for himself and his parents; as he was retracing his steps, laden with part of a large fish which he had at length found dead upon the sand, he was overtaken by the returning tide; press onward as he might, the waves came surging higher and higher, first to his knees, then to his waist, then to his shoulders, till to the boy’s excited fancy their gurgling rose even above his head, and when at last he struggled to land with his burthen, it seemed to him that only a miracle had brought him through the waters in safety. Presently he began an independent life as a wandering chapman, trudging from village to village and selling small wares to country-folk as poor as himself. The lad was gifted with a wisdom and seriousness beyond his age; after some four years of this life he became associated with some merchants in the neighbouring towns; with them he visited the castles of the local nobles, the markets and fairs of the local trading centres, and at length made his way as far as S. Andrews in Scotland, and after that to Rome. He next, entering into partnership with some other young men, acquired a fourth share in the profits of one trading-vessel and half the ownership of another. Very soon his partners made him captain of the ship. In the long, blank days of his boyhood by the shore of the Wash he had learned to discern the face of both sea and sky; and his sturdy frame, steady hand, and keen observant eye, as well as his stedfast thoughtful temper, fitted him for a skilful seaman no less than for a successful merchant. The young sailor’s heart, however, was not wholly set upon money-getting. As he tramped over the fens with his pack upon his back he had been wont to soothe his weariness with the holy words of prayer and creed learnt at his mother’s knee; as he guided his bark through the storm, or outran the pirates who were ever on the look-out for such prey, he did not miss the lesson specially addressed to those who “go down to the sea in ships.” Wherever his business took him—Scotland, Britanny, Flanders, Denmark—he sought out the holy places of the land and made his offerings there. One of the places he visited most frequently was S. Andrews; and on his way back from thence he rarely failed to turn aside to S. Cuthbert’s old home at Holy Isle and his yet more lonely retreat at Farne, there to spend hours in ecstatic meditation upon the hermit-life which he was already longing to imitate. At last he took the cross and went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On his return, weary of independence, he became steward to a rich man who intrusted him with the whole management of his household; soon, however, he grew so disgusted with the thievery among the servants, which he saw but could not prevent, and with the master’s indifference to it, that he threw up his situation and went off on another pilgrimage, first to S. Gilles in Provence and then to Rome. He came home to his parents, but he could not stay; he must go back yet a third time, he told them, to the threshold of the Apostles; and this time his mother accompanied him. At a period when religious men of greater experience in this world’s affairs were pouring out heart-rending lamentations over the corruptions of Rome, it is touching to see that she still cast over this simple English rustic the spell which she had cast of old over Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop. It was in the land of Wilfrid and Benedict, in the wild Northumbria, with its long reaches of trackless moor and its mighty forests, scarcely penetrated save by the wild beasts, that Godric at last found refuge from the world. He sought it first at Carlisle, then a lonely outpost on the western borders of the moors, just beginning a new life after its conquest by William Rufus. His hopes of remaining there in obscurity were, however, defeated by the recognition of a kinsman, doubtless one of the Red King’s colonists, and he fled yet further into the wilderness. Weeks and months of lonely wandering through the forest brought him unexpectedly to an aged hermit at Wolsingham; there he remained nearly three years, tending the old man until his death; then a vision of S. Cuthbert sent Godric off again, first on another journey to Holy Land, and then to a hermitage in Eskdale near Whitby. Thence the persecution of the lord of the soil drove him to a surer refuge in the territory of S. Cuthbert. He settled for a while in Durham and there gave himself up to practical works of piety, frequenting the offices of devotion, giving alms out of his penury to those who were yet poorer than himself, and constantly sitting as a scholar among the children in the church of S. Mary. His kinsman at Carlisle had given him a Psalm-book; whether he ever learned actually to read it is not clear; but he already knew by heart a considerable part of the Psalter; at Durham he learned the whole; and the little book, which he had carried in all his wanderings, was to the end of his life his most cherished possession. When asked in later years how one of his fingers had grown crooked, he answered with a smile that it had become cramped with constantly grasping this book. Meanwhile he was seeking a place of retirement within easy distance of the chief object of his devotion—S. Cuthbert’s shrine. His choice was decided by the chance words of a shepherd to his comrade: “Let us go water our flocks at Finchale!” Godric offered the man his sole remaining coin—a farthing—to lead him to the spot, and saw at once that he had reached the end of his wanderings.

Even to-day the scene is wild and solemn enough, to the traveller who, making his way from Durham over the lonely country-side, suddenly dips down into a secluded hollow where the ruins of Finchale Priory stand on a low grassy ledge pressed close between the rushing stream of Wear and the dark wooded hills which, owing to the sharp bend made by the river, seem to close round it on every side. But in Godric’s day the place was wilder still. The road which now leads through the wood was a mere sheep-track worn by the feet of the flocks as they made their way down to the river; the site of the priory was a thicket of briars, thorns and nettles, and it was only on a narrow strip of rocky soil hanging over the water’s edge and thinly covered with scant herbage that the sheep could find a foothold and the hermit a place for his dwelling. His first abode was a cave scooped in the rock; later on he seems to have built himself a little hut with an oratory attached. A large stone served him at once for table and pillow; but only when utterly worn out with a long day’s toil in clearing away the thickets and preparing the soil for cultivation would he lie down for a few hours of quiet vigil rather than of sleep; and on moonlight nights the rustics of the country-side woke with a start at the ring of the hermit’s axe, echoing for miles through the woodland. The spirit of the earlier Northumbrian saints seems to breathe again in Godric’s ceaseless labour, his stern self-mortification, his rigid fasts, his nightly plunges into the Wear, where he would stand in the hollow of the rocks, up to his neck in the stream, singing Psalms all through the winter nights, while the snow fell thick on his head or the waters froze around him. With the fervour of the older asceticism he had caught too its poetic tenderness. As he wandered through forest after forest from Carlisle to the Tees he had found like S. Guthlac of old that “he who denies himself the converse of men wins the converse of birds and beasts and the company of angels.” Noxious reptiles lay passive beneath his feet as he walked along and crawled harmlessly about him as he lay on the bare ground at night; “the hissing of a viper scared him no more than the crowing of a cock.” The woods of Finchale were thronged with wild beasts of every kind; on his first arrival he was confronted by a wolf of such enormous size that he took it for a fiend in wolf’s shape, and the impression was confirmed when at the sign of the Cross the animal lay down for a moment at his feet and then slunk quietly away. The toads and vipers which swarmed along the river-side played harmlessly about the floor of his hut, and basked in the glow of his fire or nestled between his feet, till finding that they disturbed his devotions he gently bade them depart, and was at once obeyed. A stag browsing upon the young shoots of the trees in his little orchard suffered him to put a halter about its neck and lead it away into the forest. In the long hard frosts of the northern winter he would roam about seeking for frozen or starving animals, carry them home in his arms and restore them to warmth and animation at his fire. Bird and beast sought shelter from the huntsman in the hermit’s cell; one stag which he had hidden from the followers of Bishop Ralf came back day after day to be petted and caressed. Amid the silence of the valley, broken only by the rustling of the wind through the trees, the ripple of the stream over its rocky bed, and the chirping of the birds who had probably given their name to the “Finches-haugh,” strains of angel-harps and angel-voices sounded in the hermit’s ears; and the Virgin-Mother came down to teach him how to sing to her in his own English tongue. As the years went on Godric ceased to shrink from his fellow-men; his mother, his sister, came to dwell near him in religious retirement; a little nephew was admitted to tend his cow. Some of the younger monks of Durham, among them the one to whom we owe the record of Godric’s life, were the devoted attendants of his extreme age; while from the most distant quarters men of all ranks flocked to seek counsel and guidance in every variety of circumstances, temporal and spiritual, from one whom not only all Durham but almost all England looked upon as a saint and a prophet.[199]

- [199] The story of S. Godric is in Libellus de Vitâ S. Godrici, by Reginald of Durham (Surtees Society).

It was in 1122—two years after the wreck of the White Ship—that Godric settled at Finchale, and he dwelt there sixty years. He is the last of the old English saints; his long life, beginning probably before the Conqueror’s death and ending only seven years before that of Henry II., is a link between the religious life of the earlier England which had passed away and that of the newer England which was arising in its place. The spiritual side of the revival was in truth closely connected with its national side. All the foreign influences which the Norman conquest had brought to bear upon the English Church had failed to stamp out her intensely national character; nay, rather, she was already beginning to lead captive her conquerors. One of the most striking signs of the times was the renewal of reverence for those older English saints whose latest successor was striving to bury himself in the woodlands of S. Cuthbert’s patrimony. Normans and English hushed their differences before the grave of the Confessor; Lanfranc was forced to acknowledge the sanctity of Ælfheah. At Canterbury itself the memory not only of Lanfranc but even of Anselm was still eclipsed by that of Dunstan. The very changes introduced by Norman prelates or Norman patrons, their zeal for discipline or their passion for architectural display, worked in the same direction. It was in the old minster of S. Werburg that Earl Hugh of Chester had placed the Benedictine colony whose settlement helped to bring about the appointment of Anselm as primate; it was in honour of another early Mercian saint, Milburg, that Roger of Shrewsbury reared his abbey at Wenlock. Bishop Richard of London planted the Austin canons at Chiche over the shrine of S. Osyth; Bishop Roger of Salisbury planted them at Oxford over that of S. Frideswide. The foundation of a bishop’s see at Ely brought a fresh lustre to the glory of S. Etheldreda; and the matchless church at Durham on which two of the very worldliest and worst of Norman prelates, William of S. Calais and Ralf Flambard, lavished all the splendour that art could devise or wealth procure, was one vast monument to the honour of S. Cuthbert. Literary activity was re-awakened by a like impulse. Two successive precentors of Canterbury, Osbern and Eadmer, had already worked up into more elaborate biographies the early memorials of S. Dunstan. Eadmer’s best inspiration came to him indeed from a nearer source; his most valuable work is the history of his own time, which he grouped, as in a picture, around the central figure of his own master, Anselm. It was doubtless from that master that he had learnt a breadth of sympathy which extended far beyond his local associations at Canterbury. The saints of the rival archbishopric, Wilfrid and Oswald, found in him a new biographer. In the northern province, Simeon and his fellow-monks were busy at Durham with the story of their own church and its patron, Cuthbert. In the south, again, Faricius, the Italian abbot of Abingdon, was writing a life of S. Ealdhelm; while almost every church of importance in central and southern England was throwing open its archives to the eager researches, and contributing its memorials of early Mercian and West-Saxon saints to swell the hagiological collections of a young monk at Ealdhelm’s own Malmesbury.

There was one cathedral monastery in the west of England where the traditions of a larger historical sentiment had never died out. The scriptorium at Worcester had been for more than a century the depository of the sole contemporary edition of the English Chronicle;[200] and there alone the national history continued to be recorded in the national tongue down to the early years of Henry I. In the middle of his reign the monks of Peterborough, probably in consequence of the loss of their own records in a fire which destroyed their abbey in 1116, borrowed a copy of the Chronicle from Worcester, and wrote it out afresh for their own use, with additions from local history and other sources. It is only in their version that the earliest Chronicle of Worcester has been preserved to us. But they did more than transcribe the story of the past. When the copyist had brought his work down to the latest event of his own day—the sinking of the White Ship in 1120—another scribe carried on the annals of Peterborough and of England for ten more years, in the native speech of the land; and when he laid down his pen it was taken up by yet another English writer whose notices of contemporary history, irregular and fragmentary though they are, still cast a gleam of light across the darkness of the “nineteen winters” which lie between the death of the first King Henry and the coming of the second.[201]

- [200] In strictness, we must except the years 1043–1066, when the Abingdon Chronicle is also contemporary.

- [201] On the school of Worcester and its later influence, and the relations between the Chronicles of Worcester and Peterborough, see Green, Conquest of England, pp. 341, 342 and notes, and p. 370, note 2; and Earle, Parallel Chronicles, Introd.

Precious as it is to us, however, this English chronicle-work at Peterborough was a mere survival. Half its pathetic interest indeed springs from the fact that it stands utterly alone; save in that one abbey in the Fens, English had ceased to be a written tongue; the vernacular literature of England was dead. If the reviving national sentiment was to find a literary expression which could exercise any lasting and widespread influence, the vehicle must be not English but Latin. This was the work now taken up by the historical school of Worcester. Early in the twelfth century a Worcester monk named Florence made a Latin version of the Chronicle. Unhappily, he infused into his work a violent party spirit, and overlaid the plain brief statements of the annals with a mass of interpolations, additions and alterations, whose source it is impossible to trace, and which, adopted only too readily by later writers, have gone far to bring our early history into what until a very recent time seemed well-nigh hopeless confusion. But the very extent of his influence proves how true was the instinct which led him—patriot of the most narrow, insular, exaggerated type, as the whole tone of his work shows him to have been—to clothe the ancient vernacular annals in a Latin dress, in the hope of increasing their popularity. If English history has in one way suffered severely at his hands, it owes him a debt of gratitude nevertheless upon another ground. While the last English chronicle lay isolated and buried in the scriptorium at Peterborough, it was through the Latin version of Florence that the national and literary tradition of the school of Worcester made its way throughout the length and breadth of the land, and inspired a new generation of English historians. Simeon of Durham, copying out and piecing together the old Northumbrian annals which had gone on growing ever since Bæda’s death, no sooner met with the chronicle of Florence than he made it the foundation of his own work for the whole space of time between Ælfred’s birth in 848 and Florence’s own death in 1118; and from Simeon it was handed down, through the work of another local historian, to be incorporated in the great compilation of Roger of Howden.[202] Henry of Huntingdon, who soon after 1125, at the instigation of Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, began to collect materials for a history of the English, may have learnt from the same source his method of dealing with the English Chronicle, though he seems, naturally enough, to have chiefly used the copy which lay nearest to his own hand at Peterborough. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of England, a finer and subtler intellect than that of either Florence or Simeon or Henry had caught the historical impulse in an old West-Saxon monastery.

- [202] On Simeon, see Bishop Stubbs’s preface to Roger of Howden, vol. i. (Rolls ed.); Mr. Arnold’s prefaces to Simeon, vol. i., and Henry of Huntingdon (ibid.); and Mr. Hodgson Hinde’s preface to Simeon (Surtees Soc.).

William of Malmesbury was born some three or four years before the Conqueror’s death,[203] in or near the little town in Wiltshire from which his surname was derived. One of his parents seems to have been Norman, the other English.[204] They early destined their son to a literary career; “My father,” he says, “impressed upon me that if I turned aside to other pursuits, I should but waste my life and imperil my good name. So, remembering the recommendation to make a virtue of necessity, I persuaded myself, young as I was, to acquire a willing taste for that to which I could not in honour show myself disinclined.” It is plain that submission to the father’s wishes cost no great effort to the boy. As he tells us himself, “Reading was the pleasure whose charms won me in my boyhood and grew with my growing years.”[205] His lot was cast in a pleasant place for one of such a disposition. Fallen though it was from its ancient greatness, some remnants of its earlier culture still hung about Malmesbury abbey. The place owed its rise to an Irish recluse, Maidulf, who, in the seventh century sought retirement from the world in the forest which at that time covered all the northern part of Wiltshire. Maidulf, however, was a scholar as well as a saint; and in those days, when Ireland was the light of the whole western world, no forest, were it never so gloomy and impenetrable, could long hide an Irish scholar from the eagerness of the disciples who flocked to profit by his teaching. The hermitage grew into a school, and the school into a religious community. Its second abbot, Ealdhelm, is one of the most brilliant figures in the history of early West-Saxon learning and culture. The architecture of Wessex owed its birth to the churches which he reared along the edge of the forest-tract of Dorset and Wiltshire, from the seat of his later bishopric at Sherborne to his early home at Malmesbury; its Latin literature was moulded by the learning which he brought back from Archbishop Theodore’s school at Canterbury; and the whole ballad literature of southern England sprang from his English songs. The West-Saxon kings, from Ine to Eadgar, showered their benefactions upon the house of one whom they were proud to call their kinsman. It escaped as by a miracle from the destruction of the Danish wars; and in the Confessor’s reign its wealth and fame were great enough to tempt the diocesan bishop, Herman of Ramsbury, into a project for making it the seat of his bishopric. Darker times began with the coming of the first Norman abbot, Turold, whose stern and warlike character, more befitting a soldier than a monk, soon induced the king to transfer him to Peterborough, as a check upon the English outlaws and their Danish allies in the camp of refuge at Ely. His successor at Malmesbury, Warin, alienated for his own profit the lands and the treasures which earlier benefactors had lavished upon the abbey, and showed his contempt for the old English abbots by turning the bones of every one of them, except Ealdhelm, out of their resting-places on either side the high altar, and thrusting them into a corner of one of the lesser churches of the town, with the mocking comment: “Whosoever is mightiest among them may help the rest!” William’s boyhood, however, fell in happier days. About the time of his birth Warin died, and the next abbot, Godfrey, set himself to a vigorous work of material, moral and intellectual reform which must have been in full career when William entered the abbey-school.[206] The bent of the lad’s mind showed itself in the subjects which he chose for special study out of the general course taught in the school. “Logic, which serves to give point to our discourse, I tasted only with my ears; to physic, which cures the diseases of our bodies, I paid somewhat closer heed. But I searched deeply into the various branches of moral philosophy, whose dignity I hold in reverence, because it is self-evident to those who study it, and disposes our minds to virtuous living;—and especially into history, which, preserving in a pleasing record the manners of times gone by, by example excites its readers to follow that which is good and shun that which is evil.”[207] Young as he was, his studious habits gained him the confidence of the abbot. Godfrey’s darling scheme was the formation of a library; and when at length he found time and means to attempt its execution, it was William who became his most energetic assistant. “Methinks I have a right to speak of this work,” he tells us with pardonable pride, “for herein I came behind none of my elders, nay, if it be not boastful to say so, I far outstripped them all. I rivalled the good abbot’s own diligence in collecting that pile of books; I did my utmost to help in his praiseworthy undertaking. May those who now enter into our labours duly cherish their fruits!”[208]

- [203] This conclusion, which seems the only one possible, as to the date of William’s birth is that of Mr. W. de Gray Birch, On the Life and Writings of Will. of Malmesbury, pp. 3, 4 (from Trans. R. Soc. of Lit., vol. x., new series).

- [204] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., prolog. l. iii. (Hardy, p. 389).

- [205] Ib. prolog. l. ii. (Hardy, p. 143).

- [206] The history of Malmesbury is in Will. Malm.’s Vita S. Aldhelmi, i.e. Gesta Pontif., l. v. (Hamilton, pp. 332 et seq.)

- [207] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., prolog. l. ii. (Hardy, p. 143).

- [208] Will. Malm. Gesta Pontif., l. v. c. 271 (Hamilton, p. 431).

It is not difficult to guess in what department of the library William took the deepest interest. Half Norman as he was by descent, the chosen literary assistant of a Norman abbot,[209] it was natural that his first endeavour should be to “collect, at his own expense, some histories of foreign nations.” As he pondered over them in the quiet cloisters of the old English monastery which by this time had become his home, the question arose—could nothing be found among our own people worthy of the remembrance of posterity?[210] He had but to look around him, and the question answered itself. To the antiquary and the scholar Malmesbury was already classic ground, where every step brought him face to face with some memory of the glories of Wessex under the old royal house from which Ealdhelm sprang. To Ealdhelm’s own fame indeed even the prejudices of Abbot Warin had been forced to yield, and a new translation of the saint’s relics in 1078 had been followed by a fresh outburst of popular devotion and a fresh influx of pilgrims to his shrine. Every year his festival brought together a crowd of devotees, of sick folk seeking the aid of his miraculous powers, and—as generally happened in such cases—of low jesters seeking only to make their profit out of the amusement which they afforded to the gaping multitude. The punishment of one of these, who was smitten with frenzy and only cured after three days’ intercession on the part of the monks, during which he lay chained before the shrine, was one of the most vivid recollections of William’s childhood.[211] In the vestiary of the abbey-church he beheld with wonder and awe the chasuble which, as a quaint legend told, the saint in his pious abstraction of mind had once hung upon a sunbeam, and whose unusual length helped to furnish a mental picture of his tall stately form.[212] Among the older literary treasures which served as a nucleus for the new library, he gazed with scarcely less reverence on a Bible which Ealdhelm had bought of some foreign merchants at Dover when he visited Kent for his consecration.[213] The muniment-chest was full of charters granted by famous kings of old, Ceadwalla and Ine, Ælfred and Eadward, Æthelstan and Eadgar. In the church itself a golden crucifix, a fragment of the wood of the Cross, and several reliquaries containing the bones of early Gaulish saints were shown as Æthelstan’s gifts, and the king himself lay buried beneath the tower.[214] On the left of the high altar, facing S. Ealdhelm’s shrine, stood a tomb which in William’s day was believed to cover the remains of a scholar of wider though less happy fame than Ealdhelm himself—John Scotus, who, flying from his persecutors in Gaul, was said to have established a school under Ælfred’s protection at Malmesbury, and to have been there pricked to death by his pupils with their styles in the little church of S. Laurence.[215] The scanty traces of a vineyard on the hill-side which sheltered the abbey to the north were associated with a visitor from a yet more distant land. In the time of the Danish kings there came seeking for admission at Malmesbury a stranger of whom the brotherhood knew no more than that he was a Greek and a monk, and that his name was Constantine. His gentle disposition, abstemious habits, and quiet retiring ways won him general esteem and love; his whole time was spent in prayer and in the cultivation of the vineyard which he planted with his own hands for the benefit of the community; and only when at the point of death he arrayed himself in a pallium drawn from the scrip which he always carried at his side, was it revealed to the astonished Englishmen that he had been an archbishop in his Eastern home.[216]

- [209] Godfrey was a monk of Jumièges; Will. Malm. Gesta Pontif., l. v. c. 271 (Hamilton, p. 431).

- [210] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., prolog. l. ii. (Hardy, p. 142).

- [211] Will. Malm. Gesta Pontif., l. v. c. 275 (Hamilton, pp. 438, 439).

- [212] Ib. c. 218 (p. 365).

- [213] Ib. c. 224 (pp. 376–378).

- [214] Ib. c. 246 (p. 397).

- [215] Will. Malm. Gesta Pontif., l. v. c. 240 (Hamilton, p. 394), and Gesta Reg., l. ii. c. 122 (Hardy, p. 190). The story seems however to be false. It probably originated in a confusion, first between John Scotus and John the Old-Saxon, who was nearly murdered by the monks of Athelney; and secondly, between both these Johns and a third scholar bearing the same name, who is mentioned by Gotselin of Canterbury as buried at Malmesbury, but whose real history seems to be lost. See Lanigan, Eccles. Hist. of Ireland, vol. iii. pp. 300, 301, 315, 316, 318–320.

- [216] Will. Malm. Gesta Pontif., l. v. c. 260 (Hamilton, p. 415).

Under the influence of surroundings such as these William began his studies in English history. But he was brought to a standstill at the very threshold for lack of a guide. From the death of Bæda to his own day, he could not by the most diligent researches discover a single English writer worthy of the name of historian. “There are indeed certain records of antiquity in the native tongue, arranged according to the years of our Lord after the manner of a chronicle, whereby the times which have gone by since that great man (Bæda) have been rescued from complete oblivion. For of Æthelweard, a noble and illustrious man who set himself to expound those chronicles in Latin, it is better to say nothing; his aim indeed would be quite to my mind, if his style were not unbearable to my taste.”[217] The work of Florence was probably as yet altogether unpublished; it was certainly not yet finished, nor does it appear to have been heard of at Malmesbury. That of Eadmer, whose first edition—ending at the death of Anselm—must have been the last new book of the day, received from William a just tribute of praise, both as to its subject-matter and its style; but it was essentially what its title imported, a History of Recent Events; the introductory sketch prefixed to it was a mere outline, and, starting as it did only from Eadgar’s accession, still left between its beginning and Bæda’s death a yawning chasm of more than two centuries which the young student at Malmesbury saw no means of bridging over save by his own labour.[218] “So, as I could not be satisfied with what I found written of old, I began to scribble myself.”[219]

- [217] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., prolog. l. i. (Hardy, pp. 1, 2).

- [218] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., prolog. l. i. (Hardy, p. 2).

- [219] Ib. prolog. l. ii. (Hardy, pp. 143, 144).

Such, as related by the author himself, was the origin of William’s first historical work, the Gesta Regum Anglorum or Acts of the English Kings, followed a few years later by a companion volume devoted to the acts of the bishops. He was stirred by the same impulse of revived national sentiment which stirred Florence of Worcester to undertake his version of the Chronicle. But the impulse acted very differently on two different minds. William’s Gesta Regum were first published in 1120, two years after the death of Florence. The work of Florence, although he never mentions it, had doubtless reached him by this time, and must certainly have been well known to him before he issued his revised edition in 1128. To William, indeed, the Chronicle had no need of a Latin interpreter; and he probably looked upon Florence in no other light. He set before himself a loftier aim. In his own acceptation of the word, he is the first English historian since Bæda; he is in truth the founder of a new school of historical composition. William’s temper, as displayed in his works, might form the subject of a curious psychological study. It is a temper which, in many respects, seems to belong rather to a man of the world in our own day than to a monk of the twelfth century. He has none of the narrowness of the cloister; he has little of the prejudices common to his profession or his age; he has still less prejudice of race. The Norman and the English blood in his veins seem completely to neutralize each other; while Florence colours the whole story not only of the Norman but even of the Danish conquest with his violent English sympathies, William calmly balances the one side against the other, and criticizes them both with the judicial impartiality of a spectator to whom the matter has a purely philosophical interest. The whole bent of his mind indeed is philosophical, literary, artistic, rather than political. With him the study of history is a scientific study, and its composition a work of art. His aim is to entertain his readers quite as much as to instruct them. He utterly discards the old arrangement of events “by the years of our Lord,” and groups his materials in defiance of chronology on whatever plan seems to him best adapted to set them in the most striking and effective light. He never loses sight of his reader; he is always in dread of wearying him with dry political details, always seizing an opportunity to break in upon their monotony with some curious illustration, some romantic episode, some quaint legend, or—when he reaches his own time—some personal scandal which he tells with all the zest of a modern newspaper-writer. His love of story-telling, his habit of flying off at a tangent in the midst of his narrative and dragging in a string of irrelevant tales, sometimes of the most frivolous kind, is positively irritating to a student bent only upon following the main thread of the history. But in William of Malmesbury the main thread is often of less real value than the mass of varied adornment and illustration with which it is overlaid. William is no Bæda; but, Bæda excepted, there are few of our medieval historians who can vie with him in the telling of a story. His long and frequent digressions into foreign affairs are often of great intrinsic value, and they show a depth of insight into the history of other nations and a cosmopolitan breadth of thought and feeling quite without parallel in his time. His penetration into individual characters, his power of seizing upon their main features and sketching them to the life in a few rapid skilful strokes—as in his pictures of the Norman kings or of the Angevin counts—has perhaps not many rivals at any time. Even when his stories are most utterly worthless in themselves, there is a value in the light which they throw upon the writer’s own temper or on that of the age in which he lived. Not a few of them have a further interest as fragments saved from the wreck of a popular literature whose very existence, but for William and his fellow-historians, we might never have known. The Norman conquest had doomed to gradual extinction a vast growth of unwritten popular verse which, making its way with the wandering gleeman into palace and minster, hall and cottage, had coloured the whole social life and thought of England for four hundred years. The gleeman’s days were numbered. He had managed to hold his ground against the growing hostility of the Church; but the coming of the stranger had fatally narrowed his sphere of influence. His very language was unintelligible to the nobles who sat in the seat of his former patrons; jongleur and ménestrel from over sea had taken in the king’s court and the baron’s castle the place which the gleeman had once filled in the halls of ealdorman and thegn, and only the common people still hailed his appearance as a welcome break in the monotonous drudgery of their daily life. Before his day was quite over, however, the new school of patriotic historians had arisen; and they plunged into the mass of traditional and romantic lore of which he was the depositary as into a treasure-house from whose stores they might fill up the gaps and deck the bare outlines of the structure which they were building up on the meagre foundations of the Chronicle. Florence was the first to enter upon this somewhat dangerous process. William drank more deeply of a stream whose source lay at his own door: a simple English ballad which the country-folk around Malmesbury in his day still chanted as they went about their work was the spell by which S. Ealdhelm had drawn their forefathers to listen, first to his singing and then to his preaching, four hundred years before.[220] The same spell of song, handed on from generation to generation, and passing from the gleeman’s lips into the pages of the twelfth century historians with William at their head, has transformed the story of the later royal house of Wessex into a romance that too often only serves to darken the true character of the period which it professes to illustrate. What it does illustrate is not the tenth century but the twelfth. It helps us to learn something of the attitude of the national revival towards the national past, by showing us the England of Æthelstan and Eadmund, of Eadgar and Dunstan, not as it actually was, but as it appeared to the England of Henry I. and Roger of Sarum,—to the England of Florence of Worcester, Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury.

- [220] Will. Malm. Gesta Pontif., l. v. c. 190 (Hamilton, p. 336).

We must not take William as an average specimen of the monastic culture and intelligence of his day. In any age and in any circumstances he would probably have been a man of exceptional genius. But his outward life and surroundings were those of the ordinary monk of his time; and those surroundings are set in a very striking light by the fact, abundantly evident from his writings, that such a man as William could feel himself thoroughly at home in them, and could find in them full scope for the developement of his powers. It was in truth precisely his monastic profession which gave him opportunities of acquiring by personal experience, even more than by wide reading, such a varied and extensive knowledge of the world as could hardly be obtained in any other circumstances. A very slight acquaintance with William is enough to dispel all notions of the medieval monk as a solitary student, a mere bookworm, knowing no more of the world and of mankind than he could learn from the beatings of his own heart and within the narrow circle of the brotherhood among whom he dwelt. A community like that of Malmesbury was in active and constant relations with every rank and class of society all over the kingdom. Its guest-hall stood open alike to king and bishop, to Norman baron or English yeoman, to the high-born pilgrim who came back from a distant shore laden with relics and with tales of the splendours of Byzantium or the marvels of Holy Land, to the merchant who came to sell his curious foreign wares at the local fair and to pay his devotions, like S. Godric, at the local shrine, as well as to the monk of another house who came, perhaps, to borrow a book from the library, to compare notes with the local history, or to submit some literary question to the judgement of the great local scholar, whoever he might happen to be. All the political news, all the latest intellectual speculations, all the social gossip of the day, found its way thither by one or other of these channels, and was discussed within the safe shelter of the inviolable convent-walls with a boldness and freedom impossible amid the society of the outside world, fettered by countless bonds of custom, interest, and mutual dependence. The abbot ranked as a great noble who sat among earls and bishops in the meetings of the Great Council, whom they treated almost as an equal, and whom they came, with a train of secular clerks and lay followers, to visit and consult on matters of Church or state or of their own personal interests. If the king himself chanced to pass that way, it was matter of course that he should lodge in the monastery. William’s vivid portraits of all the three Norman kings were doubtless drawn, if not from the observation of his own eyes, at any rate from that of his friend Abbot Godfrey; his portrait of Henry I. was in all likelihood painted from life as the king paid his devotions before S. Ealdhelm’s shrine or feasted at the abbot’s table in the refectory, or—quite as probably—as William, in his turn, sat in the royal hall discussing some literary question with his friend and patron, the king’s son Earl Robert of Gloucester, if not actually with the king himself. The hospitality of the abbey was repaid by that which greeted its brethren wherever they went, on business for their house or for themselves. The monk went in and out of castle or town, court or camp, as a privileged person. Such a man as William, indeed, might be sure of a welcome anywhere; and William, indefatigable as a student, was almost equally so as a traveller. The little sketches of town and country which illustrate his survey of the dioceses of England in the Gesta Pontificum must have been made on the spot. He had seen the marvels of Glastonbury;[221] he had probably taken down the legend of S. Eadmund of East-Anglia on the very site of the martyrdom;[222] he had seen with his own eyes the Roman walls of Carlisle, and heard with his own ears the rough Yorkshire speech, of which, puzzling as it was to a southerner, he yet learned enough to catch from some northern gleeman the echo of Northumbria’s last heroic lay, the lay of Waltheof at the gate of York;[223] he had, we cannot doubt, wandered with delight up that vale of Severn which he paints in such glowing colours, and been drawn to write the life of S. Wulfstan by a sight of his church and his tomb at Worcester. His own cell at Malmesbury was the garner in which treasures new and old, of every kind, gathered from one end of England to the other, were stored up to be sifted and set in order at leisure amid that perfect tranquillity, that absolute security from outward disturbance and worldly care, which to the modern student is but a hopeless dream.

- [221] Will. Malm. Gesta Pontif., l. ii. c. 91 (Hamilton, pp. 196–198); Gesta Reg., l. i. c. 20 (Hardy, pp. 32–34); Antiq. Glaston., passim.

- [222] Gesta Pontif., l. ii. c. 74 (Hamilton, pp. 152–155); Gesta Reg., l. ii. c. 213 (Hardy, p. 366).

- [223] Gesta Reg., l. iii. c. 253 (Hardy, p. 427).

The new intellectual movement, however, was by no means confined to the cloister. Clerk and layman had their share in it; king and queen encouraged it warmly, and their sympathy with the patriotic revival which animated it was marked enough to excite the mockery of their Norman courtiers, who nicknamed them “Godric and Godgifu.”[224] Learning and culture of every kind found a ready welcome at the court; Henry never forgot the favourite maxim of his youth, that “an unlettered king is but a crowned ass.”[225] His tastes were shared by his good queen Maude, who had received in her aunt’s convent at Romsey such an education as was probably given to few women of her time; and in her later years, when the king’s manifold occupations beyond sea left her alone in her palace at Westminster, the crowd of poor and sick folk on whom she bestowed her boundless charities was almost equalled by that of the scholars and poets who vied with each other to gain her ear by some new feat of melody or of rime.[226] Her stepson Earl Robert of Gloucester was renowned as a scholar no less than as a warrior and a statesman; to him William of Malmesbury dedicated his chief historical works, as to a comrade and an equal in the world of letters; it may even be that the “Robert” of whom we once catch a glimpse, sitting in the library at Malmesbury, eagerly turning over its treasures, and suggesting plans of work to the willing friend at his side, is no other than the king’s son.[227] The secular clergy had no mind to be outstripped by the regulars in literary activity; Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, a nephew of the justiciar, urged his archdeacon Henry of Huntingdon to compose a History of the English in emulation of the Gesta Regum. Nor did history alone absorb the intellectual energy of the time. Natural science had its followers, among them the king himself, who studied it in characteristically practical fashion at Woodstock, where he kept a menagerie full of lions, leopards, camels, lynxes and other strange beasts collected from all parts of the world;[228] and the “Bestiary” of an Anglo-Norman poet, Philip de Thaun, found a patroness in his second queen, Adeliza of Louvain. A scholar of old English race, Adelard of Bath, carried his researches into a wider field. Towards the close of the eleventh century he had crossed the sea to study in the schools of Tours and Laon. At the latter place he set up a school of his own, but he soon quitted it to enter upon a long course of wandering in distant lands. He crossed the Alps, made his way to the great medical school at Salerno, thence into Greece and Asia Minor, and finally, it seems, to the great centre of Arab culture and learning at Bagdad, or what we now call Cairo. Thence, after seven years’ absence, he returned to England soon after the accession of Henry I., and published his first book, a philosophical allegory dedicated to Bishop William of Syracuse, whose acquaintance he had made in his travels. He next opened a school, apparently in Normandy, for the diffusion of the scientific lore which he had acquired in the East. He had picked up, among other things, an Arabic version of Euclid, and the Latin translation which he made of this became the text-book of all succeeding mathematicians for centuries after. But his teaching of the physical science of the East was vehemently opposed by western scholars; his own nephew, who had been one of his pupils at Laon, was among his opponents, and it was in the shape of a discussion with this nephew that Adelard put forth, under the title of Quæstiones Naturales, a plea for a more free inquiry into the principles of natural science, instead of the blind following of old authorities which had hitherto contented the scholars of the West.[229] In the last years of Henry’s reign he seems to have returned once more to settle in his native land.[230] His career shows how daring was the spirit of enterprize now stirring among Englishmen, and how vast was the range of study and experience now thrown open to English scholars. We see that England was already within reach of that wider world of which her Angevin kings were soon to make her a part.

- [224] Ib.·/·Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 394 (p. 620).

- [225] Ib. c. 390 (p. 616).

- [226] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 418 (Hardy, p. 650).

- [227] “In historicis nos narrationibus occupatos detorsit a proposito tua, Rodberte, voluntas. Nuper enim cum in bibliothecâ nostrâ sederemus, et quisque pro suo studio libros evolveret, impegisti in Amalarium de Ecclesiasticis Officiis. Cujus cum materiam ex primâ statim tituli fronte cognosceris, amplexus es occasionem quâ rudimenta novæ professionis animares. Sed quia confestim animi tui alacritatem turbavit testimoniorum perplexitas et sermonum asperitas, rogasti ut eum abbreviarem. Ego autem ... munus injunctum non aspernanter accepi.” ... (Will. Malm. Abbreviatio Amalarii, prolog.) Mr. Birch (Will. Malm., p. 43) takes this Robert to be the earl. But does not the phrase about “nova professio” rather suggest a new-made monk of the house?

- [228] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 409 (Hardy, p. 638).

- [229] On Adelard, see Wright, Biog. Britt. Litt., vol. ii. pp. 94–100.

- [230] “In Perdonis ... Adelardo de Bada, 4s. et 6d.” Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter) p. 22—among the “Nova placita et novæ conventiones” of Wiltshire. Mr. Hunter (ib., pref. p. xxi.) takes this to be the traveller, but Mr. Wright doubts it.

What gave scope for all this social, moral and intellectual developement was, to borrow a phrase from the Peterborough Chronicler, “the good peace” that Henry, like his father, “made in this land.”[231] The foundations of the political and administrative system by which that peace was preserved inviolate to the end of his reign were laid in the three years succeeding the battle of Tinchebray—the brightest period of Henry’s prosperity, and the only time in his life when he himself could enjoy, on both sides of the sea, the tranquillity which he fought to secure. In England, indeed, from the day when he drove out Robert of Bellême in 1103 to his own death in 1135, the peace was never broken save by an occasional disturbance on the Welsh border. Even in Wales, however, the settlement of the Flemings and the appointment of a “Saxon” bishop to the see of St. David’s[232] were doing their work; and though in Henry’s later years the restlessness of the Welsh princes and people twice provoked him to march into their country, the danger from them was never great enough to mar the general security of the realm. From Scotland there was still less to fear; its three successive kings, Eadgar, Alexander and David, were the brothers of the good queen Maude and the faithful allies of her husband. But in Henry’s dominions beyond the sea, the state of things was very different. In the duchy of Normandy the year 1110 saw the opening of a new phase of politics, the beginning of a train of complications in which England seemed at the moment less directly concerned than in the earlier struggles between the king and the barons, but which in the end exercised an important influence on the course of her after history by bringing her into contact with the power of Anjou. Before we can trace the steps whereby this came to pass, we must change our line of thought and study. We must turn aside from the well-worn track of English history to travel awhile in less familiar paths; we must leave our own land and make our way into the depths of Gaul; we must go back from the broad daylight of the twelfth century into the dim dawn of the ninth, there to seek out the beginnings and thence to follow the romantic story of the house of Anjou.

- [231] Eng. Chron. a. 1087.

- [232] Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 68.

CHAPTER II.
THE BEGINNINGS OF ANJOU.
843–987.

The cradle-land of our Angevin kings, the original county of Anjou, was a small territory in central Gaul, lying about the lower course of the river Loire and that of its affluent the Mayenne[233] or Maine. Its chief portion consisted of a wedge-shaped tract hemmed in between the right bank of the Loire, which bounded it on the south, and the streams of Loir, Sarthe and Mayenne, which flowed round it on the north and west; along its southern border stretched a belt of alluvial soil which in winter and in rainy seasons became a vast flood-drowned fen, swallowed up by the overflowing waters of the Loire; to the northward, the country consisted chiefly of level uplands broken here and there by patches of forest and tiny river-valleys, and rising in the west into a range of low hills, which again died down into a fringe of swampy meadow-land along the eastern bank of the Mayenne. A narrow strip of ground on the southern bank of the Loire, with a somewhat wider strip of hilly and wooded country beyond the Mayenne, completed the district to which its earliest known inhabitants, a Gallic tribe called Andes or Andegavi, have left their name. A few miles above the angle formed by the confluence of the two rivers, a lofty mass of black slate rock thrown out from the upland furnished a ready-made fortress important alike by its natural strength and by its geographical position, commanding the main lines of communication with central, northern and southern Gaul through the valleys of the Loire and its tributaries. Under the Roman conquerors of Gaul the place was called Juliomagus; the hill was crowned by a lofty citadel, and strengthened by a circuit of rampart walls; while from its crest a road struck eastward along Loire-side into the heart of central Gaul, another followed the westward course of the river to its junction with the sea, and others struck southward and northward into Aquitania and across the upland into the basin of the Seine. In the middle of the fourth century a Christian bishop, probably one of a band of mission-preachers who shared with the famous S. Martin of Tours the work of evangelizing central Gaul, laid beside the citadel of Juliomagus the foundations of a church, which in after-time grew into the cathedral of S. Maurice; and it is from the extent of the diocese over which his successors ruled that we learn the extent of the civil jurisdiction of Juliomagus. A later bishop, Albinus, left his name to the great abbey of S. Aubin, founded in Merovingian days on the slope of the hill just outside the city wall; a monastery dedicated to S. Sergius grew up to the north, in a low-lying marshy meadow by the river-side; while the place of the Roman prefects was taken by a succession of Frankish counts, the delegates first of the Merovingian kings of Neustria and then of the Karolingian emperors; and the Roman name of Juliomagus itself gave way to a native appellation cognate with that of the district of which it was the head—“Andegavis,” Angers.[234]

- [233] From the point where the Sarthe joins it, this river is now called the Maine. In the middle ages it had but one name, Meduana, from its source to its junction with the Loire. The old nomenclature is far more convenient for historical purposes.

- [234] The ecclesiastical history of Angers is in Gallia Christiana, vol. xiv. col. 543 et seq.

City and county acquired a new importance through the political arrangements by which the Karolingian realms were divided between the three sons of the Emperor Louis the Gentle. By a treaty made at Verdun in 843, the original Frankish kingdom and its Saxon dependencies, answering roughly to what we call Germany now-a-days, fell to the second brother Louis; the Gallic conquests of the Franks, between the Moselle, the Rhone, the Pyrenees and the ocean, were the share of the youngest, Charles the Bald; while the necessity that the eldest brother Lothar, as Emperor, should hold the two capitals, Rome and Aachen, involved the creation in his favour of a middle kingdom consisting of a long narrow string of countries reaching from the Frisian to the Pontine marshes. Although the limits thus fixed were afterwards altered more than once, the main lines of this treaty left indelible traces, and from that day we may date the beginning of modern France and modern Germany. The tripartite division, however, was soon overthrown by the extinction of the elder or Lotharingian line; the incongruous middle kingdom fell asunder and became a bone of furious contention between its two neighbours, and the imperial crown itself was soon an object of rivalry no less fierce. On the other hand, the extent of territory actually subject to Charles the Bald fell far short of the limits assigned to him by the treaty. Even Charles the Great had scarcely been able to maintain more than a nominal sway over the vast region which stretched from the southern shores of the Loire to the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean Sea, and was known by the general name of Aquitania; its princes and its people, wrapped in the traditions of Roman culture and Roman greatness, held disdainfully aloof from the barbarian conquerors of the north, and remained utterly indifferent to claims of supremacy which each succeeding Karolingian found it more and more hopeless to enforce. To the west, again, in the peninsula of Britanny or Armorica, the ancient Celtic race preserved, as in the Welsh hills of our own island, its native tongue, its primitive laws and customs, and its separate political organization under a dynasty of native princes who owed, indeed, a nominal allegiance to the West-Frankish overlord at Laon, but whose subjection to him was scarcely more real than that of the princes of Aquitania, while their disaffection was far more active and far more threatening; for the pirate fleets of the northmen were now hovering about the coast of Gaul as about that of Britain; and the Celts of the Breton peninsula, like the West-Welsh of Cornwall, were ever ready to make common cause with these marauders against the Teutonic conquerors of the land.

The work of the northmen in West-Frankland was a work both of union and disunion. There, as in England, the need for organization and defence against their attacks produced a new upgrowth of national life; but while in England this life was moulded by the consolidation of the earlier Engle and Saxon realms into a single state under the leadership of the West-Saxon kings, in Frankland it was created through the forcible breaking-up of an outward unity already threatened with the doom which never fails sooner or later to overtake a kingdom divided against itself. The West-Frankish king was not, like the king of Wessex, the leader, the natural exponent, the impersonation almost, of the dawning national consciousness; it was not he who led and organized the struggle for existence against the northern foe; the nation had to fight for itself, with but little help from its sovereign. This difference was caused partly by the political circumstances of the Karolingian realms, partly by geographical conditions. The brunt of the battle necessarily fell, not upon the royal domains lying far from the sea around the inland fortress of Laon, but on the coast, and especially on the districts around the great river-inlets by which the pirates made their entrance into the country. Of these, the estuary of the Seine lay nearest to them, and was their first point of attack. Between it and the other great inlet, the mouth of the Loire, lay the Breton peninsula; once round that, and the broad lands of Aquitania, rich with the natural wealth of a southern soil and with the remains of a luxury and splendour in which its cities had almost outdone Rome herself, would tempt the northmen with a fairer harvest of spoil than they could find on the shores of the Channel. The desolate rocky coast and barren moorlands of the intervening peninsula offered little chance of booty; but if the pirates could secure the alliance or even the neutrality of the Bretons, they had but to force an entrance into the Loire, and not only Aquitaine, but the inmost heart of the West-Frankish realm would be laid open to their attacks. Two barriers, however, would have to be overcome before such an entrance could be gained. The first was the city of Nantes, which stood on the northern bank of the Loire, some thirty miles above its mouth. Politically, Nantes was the extreme western outpost of the Karolingian power, for its count held his fief directly of the king at Laon, not of the nearer Breton under-king at Rennes; but by its geographical position and the character of its people it was far more Breton than Frankish. The true corner-stone of the West-Frankish realm lay on the other side of the Mayenne. The county of Anjou or “Angevin march,” the border-land of Neustria and Aquitaine, was for all practical purposes the border-land also of Neustria and of Britanny. Angers, with its Roman citadel and its Roman walls, perched on the crest of its black slate-rock, at once guarding and guarded by the two rivers which flowed round its foot, was a far mightier fortress than Nantes; Angers, rather than Nantes, was the true key of the Loire valley, and the stronghold of the Neustrian border against all attacks from the west, whether by land or by sea.

In the first days of Charles the Bald, when the new king was struggling with his brothers, and the pirate ships were beginning again to strike terror into the coasts of Gaul, Lambert, a Breton-born count of the Angevin march, sought from Charles the investiture of the neighbouring and recently-vacated county of Nantes. On the refusal of his demand, he threw off his allegiance, offered his services to the Breton king Nomenoë, and on failing to obtain the coveted prize by his help, called in that of a pirate fleet which was cruising about the shores of Britanny. It was thus at the invitation and under the guidance of a man who had been specially intrusted with its defence that the northmen made their first entrance into the hitherto peaceful estuary of the Loire. Nantes was stormed and sacked;[235] the desolate city was left in the hands of Lambert and the Bretons, and the ravagers sailed away, probably to swell the forces and share the spoil of a fleet which in the following year made its way to the estuary of the Garonne, and pushed inland as far as Toulouse. Nearly ten years passed away before the northmen repeated their dash upon central Gaul. The valley of the Seine and the city of Paris were the victims of their next great expedition, in 845; and a series of plundering raids upon the Aquitanian coast were crowned in 848 by the conquest of Bordeaux. For a moment, in 851, the fury of the pirates’ attack seemed to be turning away from Gaul to spend itself on Britain; but a great victory of the West-Saxons under Æthelwulf at Aclea threw them back upon their old field of operations across the Channel, and in the terror of their threatened onset Charles sought to detach the Bretons from their alliance by a formal cession of the counties of Rennes and Nantes and the district west of the Mayenne, which had passed into Breton hands by the treason of Count Lambert.[236] His precautions failed to avert the blow which he dreaded. Next year the pirates made their way back again round the Armorican coast, up the mouth of the Loire, past Nantes, and through the Angevin march—now shrunk to a little corner of territory wedged in between the Mayenne and the Loire—as far inland as Tours, where they sacked and burned the abbey of S. Martin and drove its canons into exile with the hardly-rescued body of their patron saint.[237]

- [235] Chron. Namnet. in Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. vii. pp. 217, 218; Chronn. Rainald. Andeg., S. Serg., Vindoc., a. 843 (Marchegay, Eglises d’Anjou, pp. 5, 129–132, 158).

- [236] Ann. Bertin. a. 851 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. vii. p. 68) mention the cession of Nantes, etc. That the Mayenne was made the boundary of the two kingdoms appears from a charter of the Breton king Herispoë, dated August 23, 852; “Erispoë princeps Britanniæ provinciæ et usque ad Medanum fluvium.... Dominante Erispoë ... in totam Britanniam et usque ad Medanum fluvium.” Lobineau, Hist. de Bretagne, vol. ii. p. 55.

- [237] Ann. Bertin. a. 853 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. vii. p. 70).

In a breathing-space which followed upon this last attack, Charles received from Æthelwulf of Wessex a personal visit and an overture of mutual alliance against the common foe. The scheme was shattered by a political revolution in Wessex which followed Æthelwulf’s return; and meanwhile a new danger to the Karolingian power arose in the threatening attitude of Robert the Brave, a warrior of obscure birth who was now count of the Angevin march. Under pretext, as it seems, of securing their aid against the northmen, Robert leagued himself with the foes of the monarchy beyond his two frontier rivers, and made a triple alliance with the revolted Bretons and the king’s rebel nephew, Pepin of Aquitaine.[238] Charles, more and more hard pressed every year by domestic and political difficulties, and haunted by the perpetual horror of the pirate ships always in the background, felt that this second wavering lord of the marchland must be won back at any cost. Two years later, therefore, the count of the Angevin march was invested with a vast duchy comprising the whole territory between Seine and Loire as far as the sea and the Breton border; and with this grant the special work of keeping out both Bretons and northmen was distinctly laid upon his shoulders.[239]

- [238] Ann. Bertin. a. 859 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt. vol. vii. p. 75).

- [239] Regino a. 861 (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. i. p. 571). Ann. Mettens. a. 861 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. vii. p. 190).

Robert fulfilled his trust gallantly and successfully till he fell in a Scandinavian ambush at Brissarthe in 866.[240] His territories were given to a cousin of the king, Hugh of Burgundy, who was either so incapable or so careless of their defence that before six years had passed he suffered the very corner-stone of his duchy, the most important point in the whole scheme of operations against the northmen in central Gaul, to fall into the enemies’ hands. A band of pirates, sailing unopposed up the Loire and the Mayenne after Robert’s death, found Angers deserted and defenceless, and settling there with their families, used it as a centre from which they could securely harry all the country round. The bulk of the pirate forces, however, was now concentrated upon a great effort for the conquest of Britain, and while the invaders of Angers lay thus isolated from their brethren across the Channel, Charles the Bald seized his opportunity to attempt the recovery of the city. In concert with the Breton king, Solomon, he gathered his forces for a siege; the Franks encamped on the eastern side of the Mayenne, the Bretons on the opposite shore. Their joint blockade proved unavailing, till one of the Bretons conceived the bold idea of turning the course of the Mayenne, so as to leave the pirate ships stranded and useless. The whole Breton army at once set to work and dug such an enormous trench that the northmen saw their retreat would be hopelessly cut off. In dismay they offered to purchase, at a heavy price, a free withdrawal from Angers and its district; their offer was accepted, and Angers was evacuated accordingly.[241]

- [240] Ann. Bertin. a. 866 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. vii. p. 94).

- [241] Regino, a. 873 (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. i. pp. 585, 586). Ann. Bertin. and Mettens. and Chron. Namnet. a. 873 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. vii. pp. 117, 200, 220, 221). Chron. Sigebert. a. 875 (ib. p. 252). Chron. S. Serg., a. 873. (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 132, 133).

But the long keels sailed away only to return again. Amid the gathering troubles of the Karolingian house, as years passed on, the cry rose up ever louder and louder from the desolated banks of Seine, and at last even from the inland cities of Reims and Soissons, perilously near the royal abode at Laon itself: “From the fury of the northmen, good Lord, deliver us!” It was not from Laon that deliverance was to come. The success of Charles the Bald at Angers, the more brilliant victory of his grandson Louis III. over Guthrum at Saucourt, were but isolated triumphs which produced no lasting results. At the very moment when the Karolingian empire was reunited under the sceptre of Charles the Fat came the crisis of the struggle with the northmen in West-Frankland; and the true national leader shewed himself not in the heir of Charles the Great, but in Count Odo of Paris, the son of Robert the Brave. It was Odo who saved Paris from the northmen when they besieged it with all their forces throughout the winter of 885; and by saving Paris he saved the kingdom. Before the siege was raised the possessions which his father had held as duke of the French were restored to him by the death of Hugh of Burgundy. A few months later the common consent of all the Karolingian realms deposed their unworthy Emperor, and the acclamations of a grateful people raised their deliverer Odo to the West-Frankish throne.

The times, however, were not yet ripe for a change of dynasty, and the revolution was followed by a reaction which on Odo’s death in 898 again set a Karolingian, Charles the Simple, upon the throne; but though the monarchy of Laon lingered on till the race of Charles the Great became extinct, it was being gradually undermined and supplanted by the dukes of the French, the rulers of the great duchy between Seine and Loire. Paris was now, since the siege of 885, the chief seat of the ducal power; and in the new feudal organization which grew up around this centre, the cradle of the ducal house, the border-stronghold of Angers, sank to a secondary position. The fiefs which the dukes parcelled out among their followers fell to the share of men of the most diverse origin and condition. In some cases, as at Chartres and Tours, the Scandinavian settler was turned into a peaceful lieutenant of the Frankish chief against whom he had fought. In others the reward of valour was justly bestowed on men who had earned it by their prowess against the invaders. It may be that the old alliance of Count Robert the Brave with the Bretons had sowed the seeds of a mighty tree. In the depths of a gloomy forest-belt which ran along the Breton border at the foot of a range of hills that shelter the western side of the valley of the Mayenne, there dwelt in Robert’s day—so the story went—a valiant forester, Tortulf. He quitted the hardy, hazardous borderer’s life—half hunter, half bandit—to throw himself into the struggle of Charles the Bald and Robert the Brave against the northmen: Charles set him to keep the pirates out of Touraine, and gave him a congenial post as forester of a wooded district known as the “Nid-de-Merle”—the Blackbird’s Nest. In its wild fastnesses Tortulf lay in wait for the approach of the marauders, and sprang forth to meet them with a daring and a success which earned him his sovereign’s favour and the alliance of the duke of the French. His son, Ingelger, followed in his steps; marriage came to the help of arms, and with the hand of Ælendis, niece of the archbishop of Tours, Ingelger acquired her lands at Amboise. The dowry was a valuable one; Amboise stood in the midst of one of the most rich and fertile districts of central France, half way between Tours and Blois, on the south bank of the Loire, which was spanned at this point by a bridge said to have been built by Julius Cæsar; two centuries later tradition still pointed out the site of Cæsar’s palace on the banks of the little river Amasse, at the western end of the town; while opposite the bridge a rocky brow, crowned to-day by the shell of a magnificent castle of the Renascence, probably still kept in Ingelger’s days some traces of a fortress built there by a Roman governor in the reign of the Emperor Valens. A mightier stronghold than Amboise, however, was to be the home of Ingelger’s race. His son, a ruddy youth named Fulk, early entered the service of Count Odo of Paris and remained firmly attached to him and his house; and one of the earliest acts of Odo’s brother Robert, who succeeded him as duke of the French—if indeed it was not rather one of the last acts of King Odo himself—was to intrust the city of Angers to Fulk the Red as viscount.[242] The choice was a wise one; for Fulk was gifted with a sound political instinct which found and kept the clue to guide him through all the revolutions and counter-revolutions of the next forty years. He never swerved from his adherence to the dukes of the French; and by his quiet tenacity he, like them, laid the foundation of his house’s greatness. Preferments civil and ecclesiastical—the abbacies of S. Aubin and S. Licinius at Angers, the viscounty of Tours, though this was but a momentary honour—were all so many stepping-stones to his final investiture, shortly before the death of Charles the Simple, as count of the Angevin March.

- [242] On the whole story of Tortulf, Ingelger and Fulk, see note A at end of chapter.

Map I.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

This little county of Anjou, of which Fulk thus became the first hereditary count, ended by overshadowing in political importance all the other divisions which made up the duchy of France. In point of territorial extent Anjou, at its present stage, was one of the smallest of the under-fiefs of the duchy. The dominions of Theobald the Trickster, the first count of Blois and Chartres, were far larger than those of Fulk; and so was the county of Maine or Cenomannia, which lay to the north of Anjou on the right bank of the Loire. Yet in a few generations Blois and Maine were both alike outstripped by the little Angevin march. The proud independence of Maine proved her ruin as well as her glory. She too was a border-land; her western frontier marched with that of Britanny, her northern with that of a great Scandinavian settlement which was growing into the duchy of Normandy. But her political status was altogether undefined and insecure. France and Normandy alike claimed the overlordship of Maine; Maine herself acknowledged the claims of neither; and this uncertain condition placed her at the mercy of her neighbours to north and south, and made her a bone of contention between them and a battle-ground for their quarrels till the day when all three were united. Blois and Chartres, on the other hand, with their dependency Touraine, stood like Anjou on a perfectly definite footing as recognised under-fiefs of the duchy of France. In the extent of their territory, and in the natural resources derived from the fertility of its soil and the number and wealth of its towns, the counts of Blois had at starting a very considerable advantage over the Angevins. But this seeming advantage proved in a few years to be a disadvantage. The house of Blois grew too fast, and soon outgrew its strength; its dominions became straggling; and when they straggled out eastward into Champagne, what was gained at one end was lost at the other, and Touraine, the most precious possession of the counts of Blois, was absorbed in the gradual steady advance of the Angevins.

Anjou’s position as a marchland marked her out for a special career. Forming the extreme south-western corner of France properly so called, divided from Aquitania by the Loire, from Britanny by the Mayenne, she had the advantage of a strong and compact geographical situation to start with. Her political position was equally favourable; she was neither hindered and isolated like Maine by a desperate endeavour to reclaim a lost independence, nor led astray by a multiplicity of scattered interests like Blois. She had simply to take her choice between the two alternatives which lie before every marchland. Such a land must either submit to be swallowed up piecemeal by its neighbours, or it must in sheer self-defence swallow up some of them; to keep what it has got, it must get more. Anjou, as represented by Fulk the Red and his successors, strongly embraced this latter alternative. The growth of the Angevin power during the next two centuries was due chiefly to the character of its rulers, working in a sphere which gave exceptional scope for the exercise of their peculiar gifts. Whoever Fulk’s real ancestors may have been, there can be no question that his descendants were a very remarkable race. From first to last there is a strong family likeness among them all. The first thing that strikes one about them is their thoroughness; whatsoever their hands found to do, whether it were good or evil, they did it with all their might. Nearly all of them were men of great and varied natural powers, gifted with a lofty military capacity and a deep political insight, and with a taste and a talent for all kinds of pursuits, into which they threw themselves with the full ardour of their stirring, restless temper. Daring, but not rash; persevering, watchful, tenacious; sometimes seeming utterly unscrupulous, yet with an odd vein of irregular piety running through the characters of many of them, and coming to light in the strangest shapes and at the most unexpected moments; passionate almost as madmen, but with a method in their madness—the Angevin counts were patriots in their way; for their chief aim was aggrandizement, but it was the aggrandizement of Anjou as well as of themselves. They were not to be led away, like their rivals of Blois, by visionary schemes of merely personal promotion involving neglect of their own little home-county; they were proud and fond of their “black Angers” on its steep above the Mayenne, and never forgot that there was the centre whence their power was to spread to the ends of the earth. It is easy to see how exactly such a race as this was fitted for its post in Anjou. Given such men in such a place, we can scarcely wonder at what they made of it.

The Angers in which Fulk came to rule as count, about the time when Æthelstan succeeded Eadward the Elder as king of Wessex, was a town not of dark slate walls as it is chiefly now, but of red flintstone and redder brick, such as the medieval builders long copied from the works of their Roman masters, and such as may still be found embedded in the outer walls of the bishop’s palace and half hidden behind the mighty black bastions of the later castle. That castle covers, or rather encloses, the site of a hall which Count Odo, the successor of the traitor Lambert, had built about the year 851 on ground acquired by exchange with Bishop Dodo. For some time after Frankish counts had been substituted for Roman prefects, the spiritual and temporal rulers of Angers had continued to dwell side by side on the hill-top; Odo, however, instead of again occupying the palace which Lambert had deserted, made it over to the bishop in return for a plot of ground lying just outside the south-west corner of the city wall. There he built himself a house, with the river at its feet and a vine-clad hill at its back; and there from that time forth was the dwelling-place of the Angevin counts.[243] Fulk the Red took up his abode there in the early days of a great political transition which was to change the kingdom of the West-Franks into a kingdom of Parisian France. Half a century had yet to elapse before the transition was accomplished; at its present stage indeed few could foresee its ultimate issue. If the ducal house of Paris had many friends, it had also many foes. The old Karolingian nobility was slowly dying out or sinking into the background before the new nobility of the sword; the great house of Vermandois had thrown its weight into the scale with the advancing power; but there were still many who looked with contempt and disgust on the new order of things, on the house of Paris and all its connexions. The count of Anjou was wedged in between powers anything but favourably disposed towards him and his patrons. The princes of Aquitania looked scornfully across the Loire at the upstarts on its northern bank; little as they recked of any authority beyond their river-barrier, the only one which they acknowledged at all was that of the Karolingian king at Laon. The Bretons beyond the Mayenne were as far from being subdued as ever. Within the duchy of France itself, one little corner was equally scornful of the dukes and of their partisans; Maine, although from its geographical position necessarily reckoned part of the duchy “between Seine and Loire,” still refused to acknowledge any such reckoning; its ruling house, as well as the great nobles of the South, claimed to have inherited the traditions of the Roman Empire and the blood of its Frankish conquerors. In the eyes of the Cenomannian counts, who traced their pedigree from a nephew of Charles the Great, the heirs of Tortulf the Forester were nothing but upstart barbarians.

- [243] See note B at end of chapter.

Their disdain, however, mattered little to Fulk. In those critical times, he who had the keenest sword, the strongest arm, the clearest head and the boldest heart, had the best title to nobility—a title whose validity all were sooner or later compelled to acknowledge. Fulk held Anjou by the grace of God, the favour of his lord the duke, and the might of his own good sword. He was, however, no mere man of war; he was quite willing to strengthen his position by peaceful means. One method of so doing was suggested by his father’s example; it was one which in all ages finds favour with ambitious men of obscure origin, and which was to be specially characteristic of the Angevin house. As Ingelger had married Ælendis of Amboise, so Fulk sought and won the hand of another maiden of Touraine, Roscilla, the daughter of Warner, lord of Loches, Villentras and Haye. It can only have been as the dowry of his wife that Fulk came into possession of the most valuable portion of her father’s lands, the township of Loches.[244] It lay some twenty miles south of Amboise, on the left bank of the Indre, a little river which takes its rise in the plains of Berry and winds along a wooded valley, through some of the most romantic scenery of southern Touraine, to fall into the Loire about half way between Amboise and Angers. In a loop of the river, sheltered on the south and west by a belt of woodland which for centuries to come was a favourite hunting-ground of Roscilla’s descendants, rose a pyramidal height of rock on whose steep sides the houses of the little township clustered round a church said to have been built in the sixth century by a holy man from southern Gaul, named Ursus, the “S. Ours” whom Loches still venerates as its patron saint.[245] By the acquisition of Loches Fulk had gained in the heart of southern Touraine a foot-hold which, coupled with that which he already possessed at Amboise, might one day serve as a basis for the conquest of the whole district.

- [244] Gesta Cons. Andeg. (Marchegay, Comtes d’Anjou), pp. 65, 66. The pedigree there given to Roscilla is impossible.

- [245] The life of S. Ours is in Gregory of Tours, Vitæ Patrum, c. xviii.

A few years before Fulk’s investiture as count of Anjou, the relations between the West-Frankish kingdom and its northern foes had entered upon a new phase. In 912 King Charles the Simple and Duke Hugh of Paris, finding themselves unable to wrest back from a pirate leader called Hrolf the Ganger the lands which he had won around the mouth of the Seine, made a virtue of necessity, and by a treaty concluded at St.-Clair-sur-Epte granted to Hrolf a formal investiture of his conquest, on condition of homage to the king and conversion to the Christian faith. Tradition told how a rough Danish soldier, bidden to perform the homage in Hrolf’s stead, kissed indeed the foot of Charles the Simple, but upset him and his throne in doing so; and although to the declining Karolingian monarchy the new power thus established at the mouth of the Seine was useful as a counterpoise to that of the Parisian dukes, yet the story is not altogether an inapt parable of the relations between the duchy of Normandy and its royal overlord during several generations. The homage and the conversion of Hrolf and his comrades were alike little more than nominal. His son, William Longsword, strove hard to force upon his people the manners, the tongue, the outward civilization of their French neighbours; but to those neighbours even he was still only a “leader of the pirates.” The plundering, burning, slaughtering raids did indeed become less frequent and less horrible under him than they had been in his father’s heathen days; but they were far from having ceased. Politically indeed it was William’s support alone that enabled Charles the Simple to carry on to his life’s end a fairly successful struggle with a rival claimant of his crown, Rudolf of Burgundy, a brother-in-law of Hugh, duke of the French. No sooner was Charles dead and Rudolf seated on his throne than the hostility of the northmen to the new king broke out afresh in a pirate-raid which swept across the Norman border, past Orléans and through the Gâtinais, into the very heart of the kingdom, to the abbey of S. Benedict at Fleury on the Loire. It was not the first time the monastery had been ravaged by pirates; the abbot was now evidently expecting their attack, for he had called to his aid Count Gilbald of Auxerre and Ingelger of Anjou, Fulk’s eldest son, who, young as he was, had already made himself a name in battle with the northmen. The fight was a stubborn one; the defenders of Fleury had resolved to maintain it to their last gasp, and when at length all was over there was scarcely a man of them left to tell the tale. The young heir of Anjou, taken prisoner by the pirates, was slaughtered beneath the shadow of S. Benet’s abbey as Count Robert the Brave had been slaughtered long ago at the bridge of Sarthe.[246] Fortunately, however, the future of the Angevin house did not depend solely on the life thus cut off in its promise. Two sons yet remained to Fulk. The duty of stepping into Ingelger’s place fell upon the youngest, for the second, Guy, was already in holy orders. Eight years later, in 937, Duke Hugh of Paris, the great maker of kings and bishops, who had just restored Louis From-over-sea to the throne of his father Charles the Simple, procured Guy’s elevation to the see of Soissons.[247] The son’s promotion was doubtless owed to the long and steady service of the father; but the young bishop soon shewed himself worthy of consideration on his own account. He played a conspicuous part in the politics of his time, both ecclesiastical and secular; he adhered firmly to the party of Duke Hugh and his brother-in-law Herbert of Vermandois, and even carried his devotion to them so far as to consecrate Herbert’s little son Hugh, a child six years old, to the archbishopric of Reims in 940;[248] and through all the scandals and censures which naturally resulted from this glaringly uncanonical appointment Guy stuck to his boy-archbishop with a courage worthy of a better cause. He could, however, shew zeal for the Karolingian king as well as for the Parisian duke. When in 945 Louis From-beyond-sea fell a prisoner into the hands of the Normans, they demanded as the condition of his release that his two sons should be given them as hostages. On Queen Gerberga’s refusal to trust them with her eldest boy, the bishop of Soissons offered himself in the child’s stead, and the Normans, well knowing his importance in the realm, willingly accepted the substitution.[249] The dauntless Angevin was possibly more at home in the custody of valiant enemies than amid the ecclesiastical censures which fell thick upon him for his proceedings in connexion with Hugh of Reims, and from which he was only absolved in 948 by the synod of Trier.[250] His father was then no longer count of Anjou. A year after Hugh’s consecration, in the winter of 941 or the early spring of 942, Fulk the Red died “in a good old age,” leaving the marchland which his sword had won and guarded so well to his youngest son, Fulk the Good.[251]

- [246] Hist. S. Flor. Salm. (Marchegay, Eglises), p. 239. The true date is shewn by a charter of Fulk, in Mabille’s Introd. to Comtes d’Anjou, pièces justif. no. vi., p. ci.

- [247] Chron. Frodoard, a. 937 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. viii. p. 192).

- [248] Richer, l. ii. c. 82.

- [249] Richer, l. ii. c. 48; Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 66, where the king is miscalled Charles the Simple.

- [250] Chron. Frodoard, a. 948 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. viii. p. 204). Richer, l. ii. c. 82.

- [251] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 67. The date is proved by two charters, one dated August 941, signed by “Fulco comes” and “Fulco filius ejus” (Mabille, ibid., introd., pièces justif., no. viii. p. cv); the other, dated May 942, and signed by one Fulk only (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. ix. p. 723).

The reign of the second Count Fulk is the traditional golden age of Anjou. Under him, she is the proverbially happy land which has no history. While the name of the bishop of Soissons is conspicuous in court and camp, that of his brother the count is never once heard; he waged no wars,[252] he took no share in politics; the annalists of the time find nothing to record of him. But if there is no history, there is plenty of tradition and legend to set before us a charming picture of the Good Count’s manner of life. The arts he cultivated were those of peace; his gentle disposition and refined taste led him to pursuits and habits which in those rough days were almost wholly associated with the clerical profession. His favourite place of retirement, the special object of his reverence and care, was the church of S. Martin at Châteauneuf by Tours. There were enshrined the relics of the “Apostle of the Gauls”; after many a journey to and fro, many a narrow escape from the sacrilegious hands of the northmen, they had been finally brought back to their home, so local tradition said, under the care of Fulk’s grandfather Ingelger. The church was now a collegiate foundation, served by a body of secular canons under the joint control of a dean and—according to an evil usage of the period—a lay-abbot who had only to enjoy his revenues on pretence of watching over the temporal interests of the church. Since the time of Hugh of Burgundy the abbacy of S. Martin’s had always been held by the head of the ducal house of France; and it was doubtless their influence which procured a canonry in their church for Fulk of Anjou. His greatest delight was to escape from the cares of government and go to keep the festival of S. Martin with the chapter of Châteauneuf; there he would lodge in the house of one or other of the clergy, living in every respect just as they did, and refusing to be called by his worldly title; not till after he was gone did the count take care to make up for whatever little expense his host might have incurred in receiving the honorary canon.[253] While there he diligently fulfilled the duties of his office, never failing to take his part in the sacred services. He was not only a scholar, he was a poet, and had himself composed anthems in honour of S. Martin.[254] One Martinmas eve King Louis From-beyond-sea came to pay his devotions at the shrine of the patron saint of Tours. As he and his suite entered the church at evensong, there they saw Fulk, in his canon’s robe, sitting in his usual place next the dean, and chanting the Psalms, book in hand. The courtiers pointed at him mockingly—“See, the count of Anjou has turned clerk!” and the king joined in their mockery. The letter which the “clerk” wrote to Louis, when their jesting came round to his ears, has passed into a proverb: “Know, my lord, that an unlettered king is but a crowned ass.”[255] Fulk was indeed a living proof that it is possible to make the contemplative life of the scholar a help and not a hindrance to the active life of the statesman. The poet-canon was no mere dreamer; he was a practical, energetic ruler, who worked hard at the improvement and cultivation, material as well as intellectual, of his little marchland, rebuilding the churches and the towns that had been laid waste by the northmen, and striving to make up for the losses sustained during the long years of war. The struggle was completely over now; a great victory of King Rudolf, in the year after Ingelger’s death,[256] had finally driven the pirates from the Loire; and there was nothing to hinder Fulk’s work of peace. The soil had grown rich during the years it had lain fallow, and now repaid with an abundant harvest the labours of the husbandman; the report of its fertility and the fame of Fulk’s wise government soon spread into the neighbouring districts; and settlers from all the country round came to help in re-peopling and cultivating the marchland.[257] This idyl of peace lasted for twenty years, and ended only with the life of Fulk. In his last years he became involved in the intricacies of Breton politics, and storm-clouds began to gather on his western border; but they never broke over Anjou itself till the Good Count was gone.

- [252] “Iste Fulco nulla bella gessit.” Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 69.

- [253] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 70.

- [254] Ib. pp. 71, 72.

- [255] “Scitote, domine, quod rex illitteratus est asinus coronatus.” Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 71. It is curious that John of Salisbury, writing at the court of Henry of Anjou some years before the compilation of the Gesta Consulum, quotes the saying as coming from “literis quas Regem Romanorum ad Francorum regem transmisisse recolo” (Polycraticus, l. iv. c. 6; Giles, vol. iii. p. 237). The proverb was well known in the time of Henry I.; see Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 390 (Hardy, p. 616).

- [256] Fragm. Hist. Franc. in Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. viii. p. 298.

- [257] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 74, 75.

The old Breton kingdom had now sunk into a duchy which was constantly a prey to civil war. The ruling house of the counts of Nantes were at perpetual strife with their rivals of Rennes. Alan Barbetorte, count of Nantes, had been compelled to flee the country and take shelter in England, at the general refuge of all exiles, the court of Æthelstan, till a treaty between Æthelstan’s successor Eadmund and Louis From-over-sea restored him to the dukedom of Britanny for the rest of his life. He died in 952, leaving his duchy and his infant son Drogo to the care of his wife’s brother, Theobald, count of Blois and Chartres, a wily, unscrupulous politician known by the well-deserved epithet of “the Trickster,” who at once resolved to turn his brother-in-law’s dying charge to account for purposes of his own. But between his own territories and the Breton duchy lay the Angevin march; his first step therefore must be to make a friend of its ruler. For this end a very simple means presented itself. Fulk’s wife had left him a widower with one son;[258] Theobald offered him the hand of his sister, the widow of Alan, and with it half the city and county of Nantes, to have and to hold during Drogo’s minority; while he gave the other half to the rival claimant of the duchy, Juhel Berenger of Rennes, under promise of obedience to himself as overlord.[259] Unhappily, the re-marriage of Alan’s widow was soon followed by the death of her child. In later days Breton suspicion laid the blame upon his step-father; but the story has come down to us in a shape so extremely improbable that it can leave no stain on the memory of the Good Count.[260] Two sons of Alan, both much older than Drogo, still remained. But they were not sons of Drogo’s mother; Fulk therefore might justly think himself entitled to dispute their claims to the succession, and hold that, in default of lawful heirs, the heritage of Duke Alan should pass, as the dowry of the widow, to her second husband—a practice very common in that age. And Fulk would naturally feel his case strengthened by the fact that part at least of the debateable land—that is, nearly half the territory between the Mayenne and Nantes itself—had once been Angevin ground.

- [258] Her name was Gerberga, as appears by a charter of her son, Geoffrey Greygown, quoted in Art de vérifier les Dates, vol. xiii. p. 47.

- [259] Chron. Brioc. in Morice, Hist. Bret., preuves, vol. i. cols. 29, 30. Chron. Namnet., Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. viii. p. 277.

- [260] The Chron. Brioc. (Morice, Hist. Bret., preuves, vol. i. col. 30) tells how “ille comes Fulco Andegavensis, vir diabolicus et maledictus,” bribed the child’s nurse to kill him by pouring boiling water on his head when she was giving him a bath. The fact that the Angevin count is further described as “Fulco Rufus” (ib. col. 29), would alone throw some doubt on the accuracy of the writer. Moreover, this Chronicle of S. Brieuc is a late compilation, and such a circumstantial account of a matter which, if it really happened, must have been carefully hushed up at the time, is open to grave suspicion when unconfirmed by any other testimony. The Angevin accounts of Fulk’s character may fairly be set against it: they rest on quite as good authority. But the sequel of the story furnishes a yet stronger argument, for it shows that the murder would have been what most of the Angevin counts looked upon as much worse than a crime—a great blunder for Fulk’s own interest.

Just at this crisis the Normans made a raid upon Britanny, of which their dukes claimed the overlordship. They captured the bishop of Nantes, and the citizens, thus left without a leader of any kind, and in hourly fear of being attacked by the “pirates,” sent an urgent appeal to Fulk for help. Fulk promised to send them succour, but some delay occurred; at the end of a week’s waiting the people of Nantes acted for themselves, and succeeded in putting the invaders to flight. Indignant at the Angevin count’s failure to help, they threw off all allegiance to him and chose for their ruler Hoel, one of the sons of Alan Barbetorte.[261]

- [261] Chron. Brioc., Morice, Hist. Bret., preuves, vol. i. cols. 30, 31. Chron. Namnet., Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. viii. p. 277.

These clouds on the western horizon did not trouble the peace of Fulk’s last hour. As he knelt to receive the holy communion in S. Martin’s church on one of the feasts of the patron saint, a slight feeling of illness came over him; he returned to his place in the choir, and there, in the arms of his brother-canons, passed quietly away.[262] We cannot doubt that they laid him to rest in the church he had loved so well.[263] With him was buried the peace of the Marchland. Never again was it to have a ruler who “waged no wars”; never again, till the title of count of Anjou was on the eve of being merged in loftier appellations, was that title to be borne by one whose character might give him some claim to share the epithet of “the Good,” although circumstances caused him to lead a very different life. Fulk the Second stands all alone as the ideal Angevin count, and it is in this point of view that the legends of his life—for we cannot call them history—have a value of their own. The most famous of them all is, in its original shape, a charming bit of pure Christian poetry. One day—so the tradition ran—the count, on his way to Tours, was accosted by a leper desiring to be carried to S. Martin’s. All shrank in horror from the wretched being except Fulk, who at once took him on his shoulders and carried him to the church-door. There his burthen suddenly vanished; and at the midnight service, as the count-canon sat in his stall, he beheld in a trance S. Martin, who told him that in his charity he had, like another S. Christopher, unwittingly carried the Lord Himself.[264] Later generations added a sequel to the story. Fulk, they said, after his return to Angers, was further rewarded by a second vision; an angel came to him and foretold that his successors to the ninth generation should extend their power even to the ends of the earth.[265] At the time when this prophecy appears in history, it had already reached its fulfilment. In all likelihood it was then a recent invention; in the legend to which it was attached it has obviously no natural place. But its introduction into the story of Fulk the Good was prompted by a significant instinct. At the height of their power and their glory, the reckless, ruthless house of Anjou still did not scorn to believe that their greatness had been foretold not to the warrior-founder, not to the bravest of his descendants, but to the good count who sought after righteousness and peace. Even they were willing, in theory at least, to accept the dominion of the earth as the promised reward not of valour but of charity.

- [262] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 75. According to Gallia Christiana (vol. xiv. col. 808) the Norman attack on Nantes took place about 960. It is probable that Fulk died soon after; but no charters of his successor are forthcoming until 966.

- [263] The Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 67, 75) say that Ingelger, Fulk the Red and Fulk the Good were all buried in S. Martin’s. Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 376) says the place of their burial is unknown to him. The statement of the later writers therefore is mere guess-work or invention; but in the case of Fulk the Good it is probably right.

- [264] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 73, 74.

- [265] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 149.

Whatever may be the origin of the prophecy, however, it was in the reign of Fulk’s son and successor Geoffrey Greygown that the first steps were taken towards its realization. Legend has been as busy with the first Geoffrey of Anjou as with his father; but it is legend of a very different kind. The epic bards of the marchland singled out Geoffrey for their special favourite; in their hands he became the hero of marvellous combats, of impossible deeds of knightly prowess and strategical skill, of marvellous stories utterly unhistoric in form, but significant as indications of the character popularly attributed to him—a character quite borne out by those parts of his career which are attested by authentic history. Whatever share of Fulk’s more refined tastes may have been inherited by either of his sons seems to have fallen to the second, Guy, who early passed into the quiet life of the monk in the abbey of S. Paul at Corméri in Touraine.[266] The elder was little more than a rough, dashing soldier, whose careless temper shewed itself in his very dress. Clad in the coarse grey woollen tunic of the Angevin peasantry,[267] Geoffrey Greygown made himself alike by his simple attire and by his daring valour a conspicuous figure in the courts and camps of King Lothar and Duke Hugh.

- [266] Gall. Christ., vol. xiv. col. 258.

- [267] “Indutus tunicâ illius panni quem Franci Grisetum vocant, nos Andegavi Buretum.” Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 81.

The receiver of Fulk’s famous letter had gone before him to the grave; Louis From-over-sea, the grandson of Eadward the Elder, the last Karolingian worthy of his race, had died in 954. His death brought the house of France a step nearer to the throne; but it was still only one step. Lothar, the son of Louis, was crowned in his father’s stead; two years later the king-maker followed the king; and thenceforth his son, the new duke of the French, Hugh Capet, steadily prepared to exchange his ducal cap for a crown which nevertheless he was too prudent to seize before the time. In the face of countless difficulties, Louis in his eighteen years’ reign had contrived to restore the monarchy of Laon to a very real kingship. His greatest support in this task had been his wife’s brother, the Emperor Otto the Great. The two brothers-in-law, who had come to their thrones in the same year, were fast friends in life and death; and Otto remained the faithful guardian of his widowed sister and her son. So long as he lived, Hugh’s best policy was peace; and while Hugh remained quiet, there was little scope for military or political action on the part of his adherent Geoffrey of Anjou. In 973, however, the great Emperor died; and soon after he was gone the alliance between the Eastern and Western Franks began to shew signs of breaking. Lothar and Otto II. were brothers-in-law as well as cousins, but they were not friends as their fathers had been. In an evil hour Lothar was seized with a wild longing to regain the land which bore his name,—that fragment of the old “Middle Kingdom,” known as the duchy of Lotharingia or Lorraine, which after long fluctuating between its attachment to the imperial crown and its loyalty to the Karolingian house had finally cast in its lot with the Empire, with the full assent of Louis From-over-sea. Lothar brooded over its loss till in 978, when Otto and his queen were holding their court at Aachen, his jealousy could no longer endure the sight of his rival so near the border, and he summoned the nobles of his realm to an expedition into Lorraine.[268] Nothing could better fall in with the plans of Hugh Capet than a breach between Lothar and Otto; the call to arms was readily answered by the duke and his followers, and the grey tunic of the Angevin count was conspicuous at the muster.[269] The suddenness of Lothar’s march compelled Otto to make a hasty retreat from Aachen; but all that the West-Franks gained was a mass of plunder, and the vain glory of turning the great bronze eagle on the palace of Charles the Great towards the east instead of the west.[270] While they were plundering Aachen Otto was preparing a counter-invasion.[271] Bursting upon the western realm, he drove the king to cross the Seine and seek help of the duke, and before Hugh could gather troops enough to stop him he had made his way to the gates of Paris. For a while the French and the Germans lay encamped on opposite banks of the river, the duke waiting till his troops came up, and beguiling the time with skirmishes and trials of individual valour.[272] But as soon as Otto perceived that his adversaries were becoming dangerous he struck his tents and marched rapidly homewards, satisfied with having inflicted on his rash cousin a far greater alarm and more serious damage than he had himself suffered from Lothar’s wild raid.[273]

- [268] Richer, l. iii. c. 68.

- [269] Chron. Vindoc. a. 954 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 163).

- [270] Richer, l. iii. c. 71.

- [271] The exact date of Lothar’s attack on Lotharingia seems to be nowhere stated. That of Otto’s invasion of Gaul, however, which clearly followed it immediately, is variously given as 977 (Chronn. S. Albin. and Vindoc., Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 21, 163) and 978 (Chronn. S. Flor. Salm. and S. Maxent., ib. pp. 186, 381). The later date is adopted by Mr. Freeman, Norm. Conq., vol. i. p. 264.

- [272] Among these the Angevin writers (Gesta Cons., Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 79, 80) introduce Geoffrey Greygown’s fight with a gigantic Dane, Æthelwulf. It seems to be only another version, adorned with reminiscences of David and Goliath, of Richer’s account (l. iii. c. 76) of a fight between a German champion and a man named Ivo; and the whole story of this war in the Gesta is full of hopeless confusions and anachronisms.

- [273] Richer, l. iii. cc. 72–77.

From that time forth, at least, Geoffrey Greygown’s life was a busy and a stirring one. It seems to have been in the year of the Lotharingian raid that he married his second wife, Adela, countess in her own right of Chalon-sur-Saône, and now the widow of Count Lambert of Autun.[274] By his first marriage, with another Adela, he seems to have had only a daughter, Hermengard, who had been married as early as 970[275] to Conan the Crooked, count of Rennes. There can be little doubt that this marriage was a stroke of policy on Geoffrey’s part, intended to pave the way for Angevin intervention in the affairs of Britanny. The claims of Fulk the Good to the overlordship of Nantes had of course expired with him; whatever rights the widow of Duke Alan might carry to her second husband, they could not pass to her stepson. Still Geoffrey could hardly fail to cherish designs upon, at least, the debateable ground which lay between the Mayenne and the original county of Nantes. Meanwhile the house of Rennes had managed to establish, by the right of the stronger, its claim to the dukedom of Britanny. Hoel, a son of Alan Barbetorte, remained count of Nantes for nearly twenty years after Fulk’s death; his career was ended at last by the hand of an assassin;[276] and as his only child was an infant, his brother Guerech, already bishop of Nantes, was called upon to succeed him, as the only surviving descendant of Alan who was capable of defending the state. Guerech was far better fitted for a secular than for an ecclesiastical ruler; as bishop, his chief care was to restore or rebuild his cathedral, and for this object he was so eager in collecting contributions that he made a journey to the court of Lothar to ask help of the king in person. His way home lay directly through Anjou. Geoffrey felt that his opportunity had come; and he set the first example of a mode of action which thenceforth became a settled practice of the Angevin counts. He laid traps in all directions to catch the unwary traveller, took him captive, and only let him go after extorting homage not merely for the debateable land, but also for Nantes itself; in a word, for all that part of Britanny which had been held or claimed by Fulk as Drogo’s guardian.[277]

- [274] See note C at end of chapter.

- [275] Morice, Hist. Bret., vol. i. p. 63. See note C at end of chapter.

- [276] Chron. Brioc., Morice, preuves, vol. i., p. 31. Chron. Namnet., Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. viii. p. 278. “C. 980,” notes the editor in the margin.

- [277] Chron. Brioc., Morice, Hist. Bret., preuves, vol. i. col. 32.

Geoffrey had gained his hold over Nantes; but in so doing he had brought upon himself the wrath of his son-in-law. Conan, as duke of Britanny, claimed for himself the overlordship of Nantes, and regarded Guerech’s enforced homage to Geoffrey as an infringement of his own rights. His elder sons set out to attack their step-mother’s father, made a raid upon Anjou, and were only turned back from the very gates of Angers by a vigorous sally of Geoffrey himself.[278] Conan next turned his vengeance upon the unlucky count-bishop of Nantes. The Angevin and his unwilling vassal made common cause against their common enemy, who marched against their united forces, bringing with him a contingent of the old ravagers of Nantes—the Normans.[279] The rivals met not far from Nantes, on the lande of Conquereux, one of those soft, boggy heaths so common in Britanny; and the issue of the fight was recorded in an Angevin proverb—“Like the battle of Conquereux, where the crooked overcame the straight.”[280] Conan was, however, severely wounded, and does not appear to have followed up his victory; and the Nantes question was left to be fought out ten years later, on the very same ground, by Geoffrey’s youthful successor.

- [278] See note D at end of chapter.

- [279] Chron. Brioc., as above·/·Morice, Hist. Bret., preuves, vol. i. col. 32.

- [280] See note D at end of chapter.

The death of Lothar, early in March 986, brought Hugh Capet within one step of the throne. The king’s last years had been spent in endeavouring to secure the succession to his son by obtaining for him the homage of the princes of Aquitaine and the support of the duke of the French—two objects not very easy to combine, for the great duchies north and south of the Loire were divided by an irreconcileable antipathy. In 956 William “Tête-d’Etoupe,” or the “Shockhead,” strong in his triple power as count of Poitou, count of Auvergne and duke of Aquitaine—strong, too, in his alliance with Normandy, for he had married a sister of his namesake of the Long Sword—had bidden defiance not unsuccessfully to Lothar and Hugh the Great both at once.[281] In 961 Lothar granted the county of Poitiers to Hugh;[282] but all he could give was an empty title; when William Shockhead died in 963,[283] his son William Fierabras stepped into his place as count of Poitou, duke of Aquitaine, and leader of the opposition to Hugh Capet.

- [281] Richer, l. iii. cc. 3–5.

- [282] Ib. c. 13.

- [283] Chron. S. Maxent. ad ann. (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 381).

It was now evident that the line of Charles the Great was about to expire in a worthless boy. While the young King Louis, as the chroniclers say, “did nothing,”[284] the duke of the French and his followers were almost openly preparing for the last step of all. The count of Anjou, following as ever closely in the wake of his overlord, now ventured on a bold aggression. Half by force, half by fraud, he had already carried his power beyond the Mayenne; he now crossed the Loire and attacked his southern neighbour the count of Poitou. Marching boldly down the road which led from Angers to Poitiers, he took Loudun, and was met at Les Roches by William Fierabras, whom he defeated in a pitched battle and pursued as far as a place which in the next generation was marked by the castle of Mirebeau. Of the subsequent details of the war we know nothing; it ended however in a compromise; Geoffrey kept the lands which he had won, but he kept them as the “man” of Duke William.[285] They seem to have consisted of a series of small fiefs scattered along the valleys of the little rivers Layon, Argenton, Thouet and Dive, which furrow the surface of northern Poitou.[286] The most important was Loudun, a little town some eighteen miles north-west of Poitiers. Even to-day its gloomy, crooked, rough-paved streets, its curious old houses, its quaintly-attired people, have a strangely old-world look; lines within lines of broken wall wind round the hill on whose slope the town is built, and in their midst stands a great square keep, the work of Geoffrey’s successors. He had won a footing in Poitou; they learned to use it for ends of which, perhaps, he could as yet scarcely dream. Loudun looked southward to Poitiers, but it looked northward and eastward too, up the valley of the Thouet which led straight up to Saumur, the border-fortress of Touraine and Anjou, and across the valley of the Vienne which led from the Angevin frontier into the heart of southern Touraine. Precious as it might be in itself, Loudun was soon to be far more precious as a point of vantage not so much against the lord of Poitiers as against the lord of Chinon, Saumur and Tours.

- [284] “Ludovicus qui nihil fecit” is the original form of the nickname usually rendered by “le Fainéant.”

- [285] See note D at end of chapter.

- [286] Fulk Nerra’s Poitevin castles, Maulévrier, Thouars, etc., must have been built on the ground won by Geoffrey.

The little marchland had thus openly begun her career of aggression on the west and on the south. It seems that a further promise of extension to the northward was now held by Hugh Capet before the eyes of his faithful Angevin friend. Geoffrey’s northern neighbour was as little disposed as the southern to welcome the coming king. The overlordship of Maine was claimed by the duke of the Normans on the strength of a grant made to Hrolf in 924 by King Rudolf; it was claimed by the duke of the French on the strength of another grant made earlier in the same year by Charles the Simple to Hugh the Great,[287] as well as in virtue of the original definition of their duchy “between Seine and Loire”; but the Cenomannian counts owned no allegiance save to the heirs of Charles the Great, and firmly refused all obedience to the house of France. Hugh Capet, now king in all but name, laid upon the lord of the Angevin march the task of reducing them to submission. He granted Maine to Geoffrey Greygown[288]—a merely nominal gift at the moment, for Hugh (or David) of Maine was in full and independent possession of his county; and generation after generation had to pass away before the remote consequences of that grant were fully worked out to their wonderful end. Geoffrey himself had no time to take any steps towards enforcing his claim. Events came thick and fast in the early summer of 987. King Louis V. was seized at Senlis with one of those sudden and violent sicknesses so common in that age, and died on May 22. The last Karolingian king was laid in his grave at Compiègne; the nobles of the realm came together in a hurried meeting; on the proposal of the archbishop of Reims they swore to the duke of the French a solemn oath that they would take no steps towards choosing a ruler till a second assembly should be held, for which a day was fixed.[289] Hugh knew now that he had only a few days more to wait. He spent the interval in besieging a certain Odo, called “Rufinus”—in all likelihood a rebellious vassal—who was holding out against him at Marson in Champagne; and with him went his constant adherent Geoffrey of Anjou. At the end of the month the appointed assembly was held at Senlis. Passing over the claims of Charles of Lorraine, the only surviving descendant of the great Emperor, the nobles with one consent offered the crown to the duke of the French. From his camp before Marson Hugh went to receive, at Noyon on the 1st of June,[290] the crown for which he had been waiting all his life. Geoffrey, whom he had left to finish the siege, fell sick and died before the place, seven weeks after his patron’s coronation;[291] and his body was carried back from distant Champagne to be laid by his father’s side in the church of S. Martin at Tours.[292]

- [287] Chron. Frodoard, a. 924 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. viii. p. 181).

- [288] See note E at end of chapter.

- [289] Richer, l. iv. cc. 5 and 8.

- [290] Richer, l. iv. c. 12. On this Kalckstein (Geschichte des französischen Königthums unter den ersten Capetingern, vol. i. p. 380, note 2), remarks: “Aus Rich. iv. 12 wäre zu schliessen, dass Hugo in Noyon gekrönt wurde ... aber eine gleichzeitige Urkunde von Fleury entscheidet für Reims. Richer gibt wohl in Folge eines Gedächtnissfehlers den 1 Juli (wie für Juni zu verbessern seine wird) als Krönungstag. Hist. Francica um 1108 verfasst, Aimoin Mirac. S. Bened. ii. 2 (Bouq., x. 210 u. 341).” The Hist. Franc. Fragm. here referred to places the crowning at Reims on July 3. Aimoin, however, places it at Noyon and gives no date. The question therefore lies really between Richer and the Fleury record referred to, but not quoted, by Kalckstein; for the two twelfth century writers are of no authority at all in comparison with contemporaries. We must suppose that the Fleury charter gives the same date as the Hist. Franc. Fragm. But is it not possible that Hugh was really crowned first at Noyon on 1st June, and afterwards recrowned with fuller state at Reims a month later?

- [291] Chronn. S. Albin., S. Serg., and Vindoc., a. 987; Rain. Andeg. a. 985; S. Maxent. a. 986 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 21, 134, 164, 9, 382). Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 376.

- [292] Fulk Rechin, as above, and Gesta Cons. (ib.), p. 89, say he was buried in S. Martin’s. R. Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 165) buries him in S. Aubin’s at Angers.

The century of preparation and transition was over; the great change was accomplished, not to be undone again for eight hundred years. The first period of strictly French history and the first period of Angevin history close together. The rulers of the marchland had begun to shew that they were not to be confined within the limits which nature itself might seem to have fixed for them; they had stretched a hand beyond their two river-boundaries, and they had begun to cast their eyes northward and dream of a claim which was to have yet more momentous results. In the last years of Geoffrey Greygown we trace a foreshadowing of the wonderful career which his successor is to begin. From the shadow we pass to its realization; with the new king and the new count we enter upon a new era.

Note A.
ON THE SOURCES AND AUTHENTICITY OF EARLY ANGEVIN HISTORY.

Our only detailed account of the early Angevins, down to Geoffrey Greygown, is contained in two books: the Gesta Consulum Andegavensium, by John, monk of Marmoutier, and the Historia Comitum Andegavensium, which goes under the name of Thomas Pactius, prior of Loches. Both these works were written in the latter part of the twelfth century; and they may be practically regarded as one, for the latter is in reality only an abridgement of the former, with a few slight variations. The Gesta Consulum is avowedly a piece of patchwork. The author in his “Proœmium” tells us that it is founded on the work of a certain Abbot Odo which had been recast by Thomas Pactius, prior of Loches, and to which he himself, John of Marmoutier, had made further additions from sundry other sources which he enumerates (Marchegay, Comtes d’Anjou, p. 353. This “Proœmium” is there printed at the head of the Historia Abbreviata instead of the Gesta Consulum, to which, however, it really belongs; see M. Mabille’s introduction, ib. p. xxxi.). The Historia Comitum Andegavensium (ib. p. 320) bears the name of Thomas of Loches, and thus professes to be the earlier version on which John worked. But it is now known that the work of Thomas, which still exists in MS., is totally distinct from that published under his name (see M. Mabille’s introduction to Comtes d’Anjou, pp. xviii., xix.), and, moreover, that the printed Historia Comitum is really a copy of a series of extracts from Ralf de Diceto’s Abbreviationes Chronicorum—extracts which Ralf himself had taken from the Gesta Consulum (see Bishop Stubbs’ preface to R. Diceto, vol. ii. pp. xxiii.–xxix). There is, however, one other source of information about the early Angevins which, if its author was really what he professed to be, is of somewhat earlier date and far higher value, although of very small extent. This is the fragment of the Angevin History which goes under the name of Count Fulk Rechin. Its authorship has been questioned, but it has never been disproved; and one thing at least is certain—the writer, whoever he may have been, had some notion of historical and chronological possibilities, whereas John of Marmoutier had none. Fulk Rechin (as we must for the present call him, without stopping to decide whether he has a right to the name) gives a negative testimony against all John’s stories about the earlier members of the Angevin house. He pointedly states that he knows nothing about the first three counts (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 376), and he makes no mention of anybody before Ingelger. Now, supposing he really was Count Fulk IV. of Anjou, it is fairly safe to assume that if anything had been known about his own forefathers he would have been more likely to know it than a monk who wrote nearly a hundred years later. On the other hand, if he was a twelfth-century forger, such a daring avowal of ignorance, put into the mouth of such a personage, shews the writer’s disregard of the tales told by the monk, and can only have been intended to give them the lie direct.

The two first members of the Angevin house, then—Tortulf of Rennes and his son Tertullus—rest solely on the evidence of these two late writers. Their accounts are not recommended by intrinsic probability. We are roused to suspicion by the very first sentence of the Gesta Consulum:—“Fuit vir quidam de Armoricâ Galliâ, nomine Torquatius. Iste a Britonibus, proprietatem vetusti ac Romani nominis ignorantibus, corrupto vocabulo Tortulfus dictus fuit” (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 35). When one finds that his son is called Tertullus, it is impossible not to suspect that “Torquatius” and “Tertullus” are only two different attempts to Latinize a genuine Teutonic “Tortulf.” For the lives of these personages John of Marmoutier gives no distinct dates; but he tells us that Torquatius was made Forester of Nid-de-Merle by Charles the Bald, “eo anno quo ab Andegavis et a toto suo regno Normannos expulit” (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 35). Now this is rather vague, but it looks as if the date intended were 873. We are next told that Tertullus went to seek his fortune in France “circa id temporis quo Karolus Calvus ... ex triarcho monarchus factus, non longo regnavit spatio” (ib. pp. 36, 37), whatever that may mean. The next chronological landmark is that of the “reversion” of S. Martin, which John copies from the Cluny treatise De Reversione B. Martini, and copies wrong. Then comes Fulk the Red, on whom he says the whole county of Anjou was conferred by Duke Hugh of Burgundy, guardian of Charles the Simple, the county having until then been divided in two parts; and he also says that Fulk was related to Hugh through his grandmother (ib. pp. 64, 65).

There are several unmanageable points in this story. 1. The pedigree cannot be right. It is clear that John took Hugh the Great (“Hugh of Burgundy,” as he calls him) to be a son of the earlier Hugh of Burgundy (one copy of the Gesta, that printed by D’Achéry in his Spicilegium, vol. iii. p. 243, actually adds “filius alterius Hugonis”), and this latter to have been the father of Petronilla, wife of Tertullus.

The chronology of the life of Fulk the Red, long a matter of mingled tradition and guess-work, has now been fairly established by the investigations of M. E. Mabille. This gentleman has examined the subject in his introduction to MM. Marchegay and Salmon’s edition of the Chroniques des Comtes d’Anjou, and in an article entitled “Les Invasions normandes dans la Loire,” in the Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes, series vi. vol. v. pp. 149–194; to each of these works is appended by way of pièces justificatives a series of charters of the highest importance for establishing the facts of the early history of Anjou and Touraine. The first appearance of Fulk is as witness to a charter given at Tours by Odo, as abbot of S. Martin’s, in April 886. (Mabille, introd. Comtes, p. lxix. note). Now if Fulk the Red was old enough to be signing charters in 886, his parents must have been married long before the days of Louis the Stammerer—in 870 at the very latest, and more likely several years earlier still. His grandparents therefore (i.e. Tertullus and Petronilla) must have been married before 850. It is possible that Hugh the Abbot who died in 887 may have had a daughter married as early as this; but it does not seem very likely.

2. The story of Ingelger’s investiture with Orleans and the Gâtinais is suspicious. His championship of the slandered countess of Gâtinais (Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 40–45) is one of those ubiquitous tales which are past confuting. Still the statement that he somehow acquired lands in the Gâtinais is in itself not impossible. But the coupling together of Gâtinais and Orléans is very suspicious. Not one of the historical descendants of Ingelger had, as far as is known, anything to do with either place for nearly two hundred years. There is documentary proof (see the signatures to a charter printed in Mabille’s introd. Comtes, p. lxiv, note 1; the reference there given to Salmon is wrong) that in 942, the year after the death of Fulk the Red, the viscount of Orléans was one Geoffrey; and he belonged to a totally different family—but a family which, it seems, did in time acquire the county of Gâtinais, and in the end became merged in the house of Anjou, when the son of Geoffrey of Gâtinais and Hermengard of Anjou succeeded his uncle Geoffrey Martel in 1061. It is impossible not to suspect that the late Angevin writers took up this story at the wrong end and moved it back two hundred years.

3. Comes the great question of Ingelger’s investiture with half the county of Anjou.

In not one of the known documents of the period does Ingelger’s name appear. The only persons who do appear as rulers of the Angevin march are Hugh the Abbot and his successor Odo, till we get to Fulk the Viscount. Fulk’s first appearance in this capacity is in September 898, when “Fulco vicecomes” signs a charter of Ardradus, brother of Atto, viscount of Tours (Mabille, Introd. Comtes, p. xciii). He witnesses, by the same title, several charters of Robert the Abbot-Count during the next two years. In July 905 we have “signum Fulconis Turonorum et Andecavorum vicecomitis” (ib. p. xcv); in October 909 “signum domni Fulconis Andecavorum comitis” (ib. p. xcviii); and in October 912 he again signs among the counts (ib. p. lxi, note 4). But in May 914, and again as late as August 924, he resumes the title of viscount (ib. pp. c and lxii, note 2). Five years later, in the seventh year of King Rudolf, we find a charter granted by Fulk himself, “count of the Angevins and abbot of S. Aubin and S. Licinius” (ib. p. ci); and thenceforth this is his established title.

These dates at once dispose of R. Diceto’s statement (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 143) that Fulk succeeded his father Ingelger as second count in 912. They leave us in doubt as to the real date of his appointment as count; but whether we adopt the earlier date, in or before 909, or the later one, between 924 and 929, as that of his definite investiture, we cannot accept the Gesta’s story that it was granted by Hugh the Great on behalf of Charles the Simple. For in 909 the duke of the French was not Hugh, but his father Robert; and in 924–929 the king was not Charles, but Rudolf of Burgundy.

But the chronology is not the only difficulty in the tale of Count Ingelger. The Gesta-writers admit that “another count” (i.e. the former count, Duke Hugh) went on ruling beyond the Mayenne. This at once raises a question, very important yet very simple—Did the Angevin March, the March of Robert the Brave and his successors, extend on both sides of the Mayenne? For the assumption that it did is the ground of the whole argument for the “bipartite” county.

The old territory of the Andes certainly spread on both sides of the river. So also, it seems, did the march of Count Lambert. The commission of a lord marcher is of necessity indefinite; it implies holding the border-land and extending it into the enemy’s country if possible. It appears to me that when Lambert turned traitor he carried out this principle from the other side; when Nantes became Breton, the whole land up to the Mayenne became Breton too. This view is distinctly supported by a charter in which Herispoë, in August 852, styles himself ruler of Britanny and up to the river Mayenne (Lobineau, Hist. Bretagne, vol. ii. col. 55); and it gives the most rational explanation of the Breton wars of Fulk the Good, Geoffrey Greygown and Fulk Nerra, which ended in Anjou’s recovery of the debateable ground. If it is correct, there is an end at once of the “bipartite county” and of Count Ingelger; “the other count” cannot have ruled west of the Mayenne, therefore he must have ruled east of it, and there is no room for any one else.

The one writer whose testimony seems to lend some countenance to that of the Gesta need not trouble us much. Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 374) does call Ingelger the first count; but his own confession that he knew nothing about his first five ancestors beyond their names gives us a right to think, in the absence of confirmatory evidence, that he may have been mistaken in using the title. He says nothing about the county having ever been bipartite, and his statement that his forefathers received their honours from Charles the Bald, not from the house of Paris (ib. p. 376), may be due to the same misconception, strengthened by a desire, which in Fulk Rechin would be extremely natural, to disclaim all connexion with the “genus impii Philippi,” or even by an indistinct idea of the investiture of Fulk I. For, if this is regarded as having taken place between 905 and 909, it must fall in the reign of Charles the Simple, and might be technically ascribed to him, though there can be no doubt that it was really owing to the duke of the French. Every step of Fulk’s life, as we can trace it in the charters, shows him following closely in the wake of Odo, Robert and Hugh; and the dependance of Anjou on the duchy of France is distinctly acknowledged by his grandson.

The latter part of the account of Ingelger in the Gesta (Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 47–62) is copied bodily from the Tractatus de reversione B. Martini a Burgundiâ, which professes to have been written by S. Odo of Cluny at the request of his foster-brother, Count Fulk the Good. The wild anachronisms of this treatise have been thoroughly exposed by its latest editor, M. A. Salmon (Supplément au Recueil des Chroniques de Touraine, pp. xi–xxviii), and M. Mabille (“Les Invasions normandes dans la Loire et les pérégrinations du corps de S. Martin,” in Bibl. de l’Ecole des Chartes, ser. vi. vol. v. pp. 149–194). It is certain, from the statement of S. Odo’s own biographer John, that the saint was born in 879 and entered religion in 898; at which time it is evident that Fulk the Good, the Red Count’s youngest son, must have been quite a child, if even he was in existence at all. The letters in which he and the abbot address each other as foster-brothers are therefore forgeries; and the treatise which these letters introduce is no better. The only part of it which directly concerns our present subject is the end, recounting how the body of the Apostle of the Gauls, after a thirty years’ exile at Auxerre, whither it had been carried to keep it safe from the sacrilegious hands of Hrolf and his northmen when they were ravaging Touraine, was brought back in triumph to its home at Tours on December 13, 887, by Ingelger, count of Gâtinais and Anjou, and grandson of Hugh, duke of Burgundy. Now there is no doubt at all that the relics of S. Martin were carried into Burgundy and afterwards brought back again, and that the feast of the Reversion of S. Martin on December 13 was regularly celebrated at Tours in commemoration of the event; but the whole history of the adventures of the relics as given in this treatise is manifestly wrong in its details; e.g. the statements about Hrolf are ludicrous—the “reversion” is said to have taken place after his conversion. M. Salmon has gone carefully through the whole story: M. Mabille has sifted it still more thoroughly. These two writers have shewn that the body of S. Martin really went through a great many more “peregrinations” than those recounted in the Cluny treatise, that the real date of the reversion is 885, and in short that the treatise is wrong in every one of its dates and every one of the names of the bishops whom it mentions as concerned in the reversion, save those of Archbishop Adaland of Tours and his brother Raino, who, however, was bishop of Angers, not of Orléans as the treatise says. The passages in the Tours chronicle where Ingelger is described as count of Anjou are all derived from this source, and therefore prove nothing, except the writer’s ignorance about counts and bishops alike.

The mention of Archbishop Adaland brings us to another subject—Ingelger’s marriage. Ralf de Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 139) says that he married Ælendis, niece of Archbishop Adaland and of Raino, bishop of Angers, and that these two prelates gave to the young couple their own hereditary estates at Amboise, in Touraine and in the Orléanais. The Gesta Consulum (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 45) say the same, but afterwards make Raino bishop of Orléans. This story seems to be a bit of truth which has found its way into a mass of fiction; at any rate it is neither impossible nor improbable. The author of the De Reversione is quite right in saying that Archbishop Adaland died shortly after the return of the relics; his statement, and those of the Tours Chronicle, that Adaland was consecrated in 870 and died in 887, are borne out by the same charters which enable us to track the career of Fulk the Red. As to Raino—there was a Raino ordained bishop of Angers in 881 (Chron. Vindoc. ad ann. in Marchegay, Eglises d’Anjou, p. 160). The version which makes Orléans his see is derived from the false Cluny treatise.

Fulk the Red was witnessing charters in 886 and died in 941 or 942. He must have been born somewhere between 865 and 870; as the traditional writers say he died “senex et plenus dierum, in bonâ senectute,” it may have been nearer the earlier date. There is thus no chronological reason why these two prelates should not have been his mother’s uncles; and as the house of Anjou certainly acquired Amboise somehow, it may just as well have been in this way as in any other.

Note B.
THE PALACE OF THE COUNTS AT ANGERS.

Not only ordinary English tourists, but English historical scholars have been led astray in the topography of early Angers by an obstinate local tradition which long persisted in asserting that the counts and the bishops of Angers had at some time or other made an exchange of dwellings; that the old ruined hall within the castle enclosure was a piece of Roman work, and had served, before this exchange, as the synodal hall of the bishops. The date adopted for this exchange, when I visited Angers in 1877 (I have no knowledge of the place since that time) was “the ninth century”; some years before it was the twelfth or thirteenth century, and the synodal hall of the present bishop’s palace, with its undercroft, was shown and accepted as the home of all the Angevin counts down to Geoffrey Plantagenet at least. The whole history of the two palaces—that of the counts and that of the bishops—has, however, been cleared up by two local archæologists, M. de Beauregard (“Le Palais épiscopal et l’Eglise cathédrale d’Angers,” in Revue de l’Anjou et de Maine-et-Loire, 1855, vol. i. pp. 246–256), and M. d’Espinay, president of the Archæological Commission of Maine-et-Loire (“Le Palais des Comtes d’Anjou,” Revue historique de l’Anjou, 1872, vol. viii. pp. 153–170; “L’Evêché d’Angers,” ib. pp. 185–201). The foundation and result of their arguments may be briefly summed up. The first bit of evidence on the subject is a charter (printed by M. de Beauregard, Revue de l’Anjou et de Maine-et-Loire, as above, vol. i. pp. 248, 249; also in Gallia Christiana, vol. xiv. instr. cols. 145, 146) of Charles the Bald, dated July 2, 851, and ratifying an exchange of lands between “Dodo venerabilis Andegavorum Episcopus et Odo illustris comes.” The exchange is thus described:—“Dedit itaque præfatus Dodo episcopus antedicto Odoni comiti, ex rebus matris ecclesiæ S. Mauricii, æquis mensuris funibusque determinatam paginam terræ juxta murum civitatis Andegavensis, in quâ opportunitas jam dicti comitis mansuræ sedis suorumque successorum esse cognoscitur. Et, e contra, in compensatione hujus rei, dedit idem Odo comes ex comitatu suo terram S. Mauricio æquis mensuris similiter funibus determinatam prænominato Dodoni episcopo successoribusque suis habendam in quâ predecessorum suorum comitum sedes fuisse memoratur.” As M. de Beauregard points out, the traditionary version—whether placing the exchange in the ninth century or in the twelfth—is based on a misunderstanding of this charter. The charter says not a word of the bishop giving up his own actual abode to the count; it says he gave a plot of ground near the city wall, and suitable for the count to build himself a house upon. Moreover the words “sedes fuisse memoratur” seem to imply that what the count gave was not his own present dwelling either, but only that which had been occupied by his predecessors. There can be little doubt that the Merovingian counts dwelt on the site of the Roman citadel of Juliomagus; and this was unquestionably where the bishop’s palace now stands. That it already stood there in the closing years of the eleventh century is proved by a charter, quoted by M. d’Espinay (Revue historique de l’Anjou, vol. viii. p. 200, note 2) from the cartulary of S. Aubin’s Abbey, giving an account of a meeting held “in domibus episcopalibus juxta S. Mauricium Andegavorum matrem ecclesiam,” in A.D. 1098.

So much for the position of the bishop’s dwelling from 851 downwards. Of the position of the count’s palace—the abode of Odo and his successors, built on the piece of land near the city wall—the first indication is in an account of a great fire at Angers in 1132: “Flante Aquilone, accensus est in mediâ civitate ignis, videlicet apud S. Anianum; et tanto incendio grassatus est ut ecclesiam S. Laudi et omnes officinas, deinde comitis aulam et omnes cameras miserabiliter combureret et in cinerem redigeret. Sicque per Aquariam descendens,” etc. (Chron. S. Serg. a. 1132, Marchegay, Eglises, p. 144). The church of S. Laud was the old chapel of S. Geneviève,—“capella B. Genovefæ virginis, infra muros civitatis Andegavæ, ante forum videlicet comitalis aulæ posita,” as it is described in a charter of Geoffrey Martel (Revue Hist. de l’Anjou, 1872, vol. viii. p. 161)—the exact position of a ruined chapel which was still visible, some twenty years ago, within the castle enclosure, not far from the hall which still remains. A fire beginning in the middle of the city and carried by a north-east wind down to S. Laud and the Evière would not touch the present bishop’s palace, but could not fail to pass over the site of the castle. The last witness is Ralf de Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. pp. 291, 292), who distinctly places the palace of the counts in his own day—the day of Count Henry Fitz-Empress—in the south-west corner of the city, with the river at its feet and the vine-clad hills at its back; and his description of the “thalami noviter constructi” just fits in with the account of the fire, the destruction thereby wrought having doubtless been followed by a rebuilding on a more regal scale. It seems impossible to doubt the conclusion of these Angevin archæologists, that the dwelling of the bishops and the palace of the counts have occupied their present sites ever since the ninth century. In that case the present synodal hall, an undoubted work of the early twelfth century, must have been originally built for none other than its present use; and to a student of the history of the Angevin counts and kings the most precious relic in all Angers is the ruined hall looking out upon the Mayenne from over the castle ramparts. M. d’Espinay denies its Roman origin; he considers it to be a work of the tenth century or beginning of the eleventh—the one fragment, in fact, of the dwelling-place of Geoffrey Greygown and Fulk the Black which has survived, not only the fire of 1132, but also the later destruction in which the apartments built by Henry have perished.

Note C.
THE MARRIAGES OF GEOFFREY GREYGOWN.

The marriages of Geoffrey Greygown form a subject at once of some importance and of considerable difficulty. It seems plain that Geoffrey was twice married, that both his wives bore the same name, Adela or Adelaide, and that the second was in her own right countess of Chalon-sur-Saône, and widow of Lambert, count of Autun. There is no doubt about this second marriage, for we have documentary evidence that a certain Count Maurice (about whom the Angevin writers make great blunders, and of whom we shall hear more later on) was brother at once to Hugh of Chalon, son of Lambert and Adela, and to Fulk, son of Geoffrey Greygown, and must therefore have been a son of Geoffrey and Adela. A charter, dated between 992 and 998 (see Mabille, Introd. Comtes, pp. lxx–lxxi), wherein Hugh, count of Chalon, describes himself as “son of Adelaide and Lambert who was count of Chalon in right of his wife,” is approved by “Adelaide his mother and Maurice his brother.” Now as R. Glaber (l. iii. c. 2; Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 27) declares that Hugh had no brother, Maurice must have been his half-brother, i.e. son of his mother and her second husband; and that that second husband was Geoffrey Greygown appears by several charters in which Maurice is named as brother of Fulk Nerra.

It is by no means clear who this Adela or Adelaide of Chalon was. Perry (Hist. de Chalon-sur-Saône, p. 86) and Arbois de Jubainville (Comtes de Champagne, vol. i. p. 140) say she was daughter of Robert of Vermandois, count of Troyes, and Vera, daughter of Gilbert of Burgundy and heiress of Chalon, which at her death passed to Adela as her only child. But the only authority for this Vera, Odorannus the monk of S. Peter of Sens, says she was married in 956, and Lambert called himself count of Chalon in 960 (Perry, Hist. Chalon, preuves, p. 35. See also Arbois de Jubainville as above), so that if he married Vera’s daughter he must have married a child only three years old. And to add to the confusion, Robert of Troyes’s wife in 959 signs a charter by the name of “Adelais” (Duchesne, Maison de Vergy, preuves, p. 36). What concerns us most, however, is not Adela’s parentage, but the date of her marriage with Geoffrey Greygown; or, which comes to much the same thing, the date of her first husband’s death. The cartulary of Paray-le-Monial (Lambert’s foundation) gives the date of his death as February 22, 988. If that were correct, Geoffrey, who died in July 987, could not have married Adela at all, unless she was divorced and remarried during Lambert’s life. This idea is excluded by a charter of her grandson Theobald, which distinctly says that Geoffrey married her after Lambert’s death (Perry, Hist. Chalon, preuves, p. 39); therefore the Art de vérifier les Dates (vol. xi. p. 129) proposes to omit an x and read 978. Adela and Geoffrey, then, cannot have married earlier than the end of 978. Geoffrey, however, must have been married long before this, if his daughter Hermengard was married in 970 to Conan of Britanny (Morice, Hist. Bret., vol. i. p. 63. His authority seems to be a passage in the Chron. S. Michael. a. 970, printed in Labbe’s Bibl. Nova MSS. Librorum, vol. i. p. 350, where, however, the bride is absurdly made a daughter of Fulk Nerra instead of Geoffrey Greygown). And in Duchesne’s Maison de Vergy, preuves, p. 39, is the will, dated March 6, 974, of a Countess Adela, wife of a Count Geoffrey, whereby she bequeathes some lands to S. Aubin’s Abbey at Angers; and as the Chron. S. Albin. a. 974 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 20) also mentions these donations, there can be little doubt that she was the wife of Geoffrey of Anjou. M. Mabille (Introd. Comtes, p. lxx) asserts that this Adela, Geoffrey Greygown’s first wife, was Adela of Vermandois, sister of Robert of Troyes, and appeals to the will above referred to in proof of his assertion; the will, however, says nothing of the sort. He also makes the second Adela sister-in-law instead of daughter to Robert (ib. p. lxxi). It seems indeed hopeless to decide on the parentage of either of these ladies; that of their children is, however, the only question really important for us. Hermengard, married in 970 to the duke of Britanny, was clearly a child of Geoffrey’s first wife; Maurice was as clearly a child of the second; but whose child was Fulk the Black? Not only is it a matter of some interest to know who was the mother of the greatest of the Angevins, but it is a question on whose solution may depend the solution of another difficulty:—the supposed, but as yet unascertained, kindred between Fulk’s son Geoffrey Martel and his wife Agnes of Burgundy. If Fulk was the son of Geoffrey Greygown and Adela of Chalon, the whole pedigree is clear, and stands thus:

1
Lambert

=

Adela

=

2
Geoffrey

| ｜ | | ｜ |
Adalbert of Lombardy | = | Gerberga | Fulk |
| ｜ | | ｜ |
Otto William | ｜ |
| ｜ | | ｜ |
| Agnes | = | Geoffrey.

The two last would thus be cousins in the third degree of kindred according to the canon law. The only apparent difficulty of this theory is that it makes Fulk so very young. The first child of Adela of Chalon and Geoffrey cannot have been born earlier than 979, even if Adela remarried before her first year of widowhood was out; and we find Fulk Nerra heading his troops in 992, if not before. But the thing is not impossible. Such precocity would not be much greater than that of Richard the Fearless, or of Fulk’s own rival Odo of Blois; and such a wonderful man as Fulk the Black may well have been a wonderful boy.

Note D.
THE BRETON AND POITEVIN WARS OF GEOFFREY GREYGOWN.

The acts of Geoffrey Greygown in the Gesta Consulum are a mass of fable. The fight with the Dane Æthelwulf and that with the Saxon Æthelred are mythical on the face of them, and the writer’s habitual defiance of chronology is carried to its highest point in this chapter. From him we turn to the story of Fulk Rechin. “Ille igitur Gosfridus Grisa Gonella, pater avi mei Fulconis, cujus probitates enumerare non possumus, excussit Laudunum de manu Pictavensis comitis, et in prœlio superavit eum super Rupes, et persecutus est eum usque ad Mirebellum. Et fugavit Britones, qui venerant Andegavim cum prædatorio exercitu, quorum duces erant filii Isoani (Conani). Et postea fuit cum duce Hugone in obsidione apud Marsonum, ubi arripuit eum infirmitas quâ exspiravit; et corpus illius allatum est Turonum et sepultum in ecclesiâ B. Martini” (Fulk Rechin, Marchegay, Comtes, p. 376).

Whoever was the author of this account, he clearly knew or cared nothing about the stories of the monkish writers, but had a perfectly distinct source of information unknown to them. For their legends he substitutes two things: a war with the count of Poitou, and a war with the duke of Britanny. On each of these wars we get some information from one other authority; the question is how to make this other authority tally with Fulk.

1. As to the Breton war, which seems to be the earlier in date.

No one but Fulk mentions the raid of Conan’s sons upon Angers; and M. Mabille (Introd. Comtes, p. xlviii) objects to it on the ground that Conan’s sons were not contemporaries of Geoffrey.

Conan of Rennes was killed in 992 in a battle with Geoffrey’s son. He had been married in 970 to Geoffrey’s daughter Hermengard (see above, pp. 121, 135). Now a daughter of Geoffrey in 970 must have been almost a child, but it by no means follows that her husband was equally young. On the contrary, he seems to have been sufficiently grown up to take a part in politics twenty years before (Morice, Hist. Bret. vol. i. p. 62). It is certain that he had several sons; it is certain that two at least of them were not Hermengard’s; it is likely that none of them were, except his successor Geoffrey. Supposing Conan was somewhat over fifty when killed (and he may have been older still) that would make him about thirty when he married Hermengard; he might have had sons ten years before that, and those sons might very easily head an attack upon their stepmother’s father in 980 or thereabouts. Surely M. Mabille here makes a needless stumbling-block of the chronology.

If no other writer confirms Fulk’s story, neither does any contradict it. But in the Gesta Consulum (Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 91–93) an exactly similar tale is told, only in much more detail and with this one difference, that Fulk Nerra is substituted for Geoffrey Greygown, and the raid is made to take place just before that other battle of Conquereux, in 992, in which Conan perished. The only question now is, which date is the likeliest, Fulk’s or John’s? in other words, which of these two writers is the better to be trusted? Surely there can be no doubt about the choice, and we must conclude that, for once, the monk who credits Greygown with so many exploits that he never performed has denied him the honour of one to which he is really entitled.

Fulk Rechin’s account of Geoffrey’s Breton war ends here. The Breton chroniclers ignore this part of the affair altogether; they seem to take up the thread of the story where the Angevin drops it. It is they who tell us of the homage of Guerech, and of the battle of Conquereux; and their accounts of the latter are somewhat puzzling. The Chron. Britann. in Lobineau (Hist. Bret., vol. ii. col. 32) says: “982. Primum bellum Britannorum et Andegavorum in Concruz.” The Chron. S. Michael. (Labbe, Bibl. Nova, vol. i. p. 350; Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. ix. p. 98) says: “981. Conanus Curvus contra Andegavenses in Concurrum optime pugnavit.” But in the other two Breton chronicles the Angevins do not appear. The Chron. Namnetense (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. viii. p. 278) describes the battle as one between Conan and Guerech; the Chron. Briocense (Morice, Hist. Bret., preuves, vol. i. col. 32) does the same, and moreover adds that Conan was severely wounded in the right arm and fled defeated. This last is the only distinct record of the issue of the battle; nevertheless there are some little indications which, taken together, give some ground for thinking its record is wrong. 1st. There is the negative evidence of the silence of the Angevin writers about the whole affair; they ignore the first battle of Conquereux as completely as the Bretons ignore the unsuccessful raid of Conan’s sons. This looks as if each party chronicled its own successes, and carefully avoided mentioning those of its adversaries. 2d. In the Hist. S. Flor. Salm. (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 260) is a proverb “Bellum Conquerentium quo tortum superavit rectum”—an obvious pun on Conan’s nickname, “Tortus” or “Curvus.” It is there quoted as having arisen from the battle of Conquereux in 992—the only one which it suits the Angevin writers to admit. But this is nonsense, for the writer has himself just told us that in that battle Conan was defeated and slain. Therefore “the crooked overcame the straight,” i.e. Conan won the victory, in an earlier battle of Conquereux.

But how then are we to account for the Chronicle of St. Brieuc’s very circumstantial statement of Conan’s defeat?—This chronicle—a late compilation—is our only authority for all the details of the war; for Guerech’s capture and homage, and in short for all matters specially relating to Nantes. The tone of all this part of it shews plainly that its compiler, or more likely the earlier writer whom he was here copying, was a violently patriotic man of Nantes, who hated the Rennes party and the Angevins about equally, and whose chief aim was to depreciate them both and exalt the house of Nantes in the person of Guerech. So great is his spite against the Angevins that he will not even allow them the credit of having slain Conan at the second battle of Conquereux, but says Conan fell in a fight with some rebel subjects of his own! He therefore still more naturally ignores the Angevin share in the first battle of Conquereux, and makes his hero Guerech into a triumphant victor. The cause of his hatred to Anjou is of course the mean trick whereby Geoffrey obtained Guerech’s homage. There can be little doubt that the battle was after this homage—was in fact caused by it; but the facts are quite enough to account for the Nantes writer putting, as he does, the battle first, before he brings the Angevins in at all, and giving all the glory to Guerech.

2. As to the Poitevin war. “Excussit Laudunum,” etc. (Fulk Rechin, Marchegay, Comtes, p. 376. See above, p. 137).

The only other mention of this war is in the Chron. S. Maxent. (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 384), which says: “Eo tempore gravissimum bellum inter Willelmum ducem et Gofridum Andegavensem comitem peractum est. Sed Gaufridus, necessitatibus actus, Willelmo duci se subdidit seque in manibus præbuit, et ab eo Lausdunum castrum cum nonnullis aliis in Pictavensi pago beneficio accepit.” M. Mabille pronounces these two accounts incompatible; but are they? The Poitevin account, taken literally and alone, looks rather odd. William and Geoffrey fight; Geoffrey is “compelled by necessity” to make submission to William—but he is invested by his conqueror with Loudun and other fiefs. That is, the practical gain is on the side of the beaten party. On the other hand, Fulk Rechin, taken literally and alone, gives no hint of any submission on Geoffrey’s part. But why cannot the two accounts be made to supplement and correct each other, as in the case of the Breton war? The story would then stand thus: Geoffrey takes Loudun and defeats William at Les Roches, as Fulk says. Subsequent reverses compel him to agree to terms so far that he holds his conquests as fiefs of the count of Poitou.

The case is nearly parallel to that of the Breton war; again the Angevin count and the hostile chronicler tell the story between them, each telling the half most agreeable to himself, and the two halves fit into a whole.

M. Mabille’s last objection is that the real Fulk Rechin would have known better than to say that Geoffrey pursued William as far as Mirebeau, a place which had no existence till the castle was built by Fulk Nerra in 1000. Why should he not have meant simply “the place where Mirebeau now stands”? And even if he did think the name existed in Greygown’s day, what does that prove against his identity? Why should not Count Fulk make slips as well as other people?

The date of the war is matter of guess-work. The S. Maxentian chronicler’s “eo tempore” comes between 989 and 996, i.e. after Geoffrey’s death. One can only conjecture that it should have come just at the close of his life.

Note E.
THE GRANT OF MAINE TO GEOFFREY GREYGOWN.

That a grant of the county of Maine was made by Hugh Capet to a count of Anjou is pretty clear from the later history; that the grant was made to Geoffrey Greygown is not so certain. The story comes only from the Angevin historians; and they seem to have systematically carried back to the time of Greygown all the claims afterwards put forth by the counts of Anjou to what did not belong to them. They evidently knew nothing of his real history, so they used him as a convenient lay figure on which to hang all pretensions that wanted a foundation and all stories that wanted a hero, in total defiance of facts and dates. They have transferred to him one exploit whose hero, if he was an Angevin count at all, could only have been Fulk Nerra—the capture of Melun in 999. An examination of this story will be more in place when we come to the next count; but it rouses a suspicion that after all Geoffrey may have had no more to do with Maine than with Melun.—The story of the grant of Maine in the Gesta Consulum (Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 77, 78) stands thus: David, count of Maine, and Geoffrey, count of Corbon, refuse homage to king Robert. The king summons his barons to help him, among them the count of Anjou. The loyal Geoffrey takes his rebel namesake’s castle of Mortagne and compels him to submit to the king; David still holds out, whereupon Robert makes a formal grant of “him and his Cenomannia” to Greygown and his heirs for ever.

On this M. l’abbé Voisin (Les Cénomans anciens et modernes, p. 337) remarks: “Cette chronique renferme avec un fonds de vérité des détails évidemment érronés; le Geoffroy d’Anjou, dont il est ici question, n’est pas suffisamment connu. C’est à lui que Guillaume de Normandie fait rendre hommage par son fils Robert; c’est lui, sans doute, qui, suivant les historiens de Mayenne, fut seigneur de cette ville et commanda quelque temps dans le Maine et l’Anjou, sous Louis d’Outremer; au milieu d’une assemblée des comtes et des barons de son parti, Robert l’aurait investi de ce qu’il possédait alors dans ces deux provinces.”

The Abbé’s story is quite as puzzling as the monk’s. His mention of Robert of Normandy is inexplicable, for it can refer to nothing but the homage of Robert Curthose to Geoffrey the Bearded in 1063. His meaning, however, seems to be that the Geoffrey in question was not Greygown at all, but another Geoffrey of whom he says in p. 353 that he was son of Aubert of Lesser Maine, and “gouverneur d’Anjou et du Maine, sous Louis IV. roi de France; il avait épousé une dame de la maison de Bretagne, dont on ignore le nom; il eu eut trois fils; Juhel, Aubert et Guérin; il mourut l’an 890.” This passage M. Voisin gives as a quotation, but without a reference. He then goes on: “Nous avons cherché précédemment à expliquer de quelle manière ce Geoffroi se serait posé en rival de Hugues-David;” and he adds a note: “D’autres aimeront peut-être mieux supposer une erreur de nom et de date dans la Chronique” [what chronicle?] “et dire qu’il s’agit de Foulques-le-Bon.” There is no need to “suppose”; a man who died in 890 could not be count of anything under Louis IV. But where did M. Voisin find this other Geoffrey, and how does his appearance mend the matter? He seems to think the Gesta-writers have transferred this man’s doings to their own hero Greygown, by restoring them to what he considers their rightful owner he finds no difficulty in accepting the date, temp. King Robert. But the Abbé’s King Robert is not the Gesta-writers’ King Robert. He means Robert I., in 923; they mean Robert II., though no doubt they have confused the two. In default of evidence for M. Voisin’s story we must take that of the Gesta as it stands and see what can be made of it.

In 923, the time of Robert I., Geoffrey Greygown was not born, and Anjou was held by his grandfather Fulk the Red. In 996–1031, the time of Robert II., Geoffrey was dead, and Anjou was held by his son Fulk the Black. Moreover, according to M. Voisin, David of Maine died at latest in 970, and Geoffrey of Corbon lived 1026–1040.

From all this it results:

1. If Maine was granted to a count of Anjou by Robert I., it was not to Geoffrey Greygown.

2. If it was granted by Robert II., it was also not to Geoffrey.

3. If it was granted to Geoffrey, it can only have been by Hugh Capet.

There is one writer who does bring Hugh into the affair: “Electo autem a Francis communi consilio, post obitum Lotharii, Hugone Capet in regem ... cum regnum suum circuiret, Turonisque descendens Cenomannensibusque consulem imponeret,” etc. (Gesta Ambaz. Domin., Marchegay, Comtes, p. 160). He does not say who this new count was, but there can be little doubt it was the reigning count of Anjou; and this, just after Hugh’s accession, would be Fulk Nerra. On the other hand, the writer ignores Louis V. and makes Hugh succeed Lothar. Did he mean to place these events in that year, 986–7, when Hugh was king de facto but not de jure? In that case the count would be Geoffrey Greygown.

The compilers of the Gesta, however, simplify all these old claims by stating that the king (i.e. the duke) gave Geoffrey a sort of carte-blanche to take and keep anything he could get: “dedit Gosfrido comiti quidquid Rex Lotarius in episcopatibus suis habuerat, Andegavensi scilicet et Cenomannensi. Si qua vero alia ipse vel successores sui adquirere poterant, eâ libertate quâ ipse tenebat sibi commendata concessit.” Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 76.

Map II.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

CHAPTER III.
ANJOU AND BLOIS.
987–1044.

One of the wildest of the legends which have gathered round the Angevin house tells how a count of Anjou had wedded a lady of unknown origin and more than earthly beauty, who excited the suspicions of those around her by her marked dislike to entering a church, and her absolute refusal to be present at the consecration of the Host. At last her husband, urged by his friends, resolved to compel her to stay. By his order, when the Gospel was ended and she was about to leave the church as usual, she was stopped by four armed men. As they laid hold of her mantle she shook it from her shoulders; two of her little children stood beneath its folds at her right hand, two at her left. The two former she left behind, the latter she caught up in her arms, and, floating away through a window of the church, she was seen on earth no more. “What wonder,” was the comment of Richard Cœur-de-Lion upon this story; “what wonder if we lack the natural affections of mankind—we who come from the devil, and must needs go back to the devil?”[293]

- [293] Girald. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 27 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 154).

One is tempted to think that the excited brains of the closing tenth century, filled with dim presages of horror that were floating about in expectation of the speedy end of the world, must have wrought out this strange tale by way of explaining the career of Fulk the Black.[294] His contemporaries may well have reckoned him among the phenomena of the time; they may well have had recourse to a theory of supernatural agency or demoniac possession to account for the rapid developement of talents and passions which both alike seemed almost more than human. When the county of Anjou was left to him by the death of his father Geoffrey Greygown, Fulk was a child scarce eight years old.[295] Surrounded by powerful foes whom Geoffrey’s aggressions had provoked rather than checked—without an ally or protector unless it were the new king—Fulk began life with everything against him. Yet before he has reached the years of manhood the young count meets us at every turn, and always in triumph. Throughout the fifty-three years of his reign Fulk is one of the most conspicuous and brilliant figures in French history. His character seems at times strangely self-contradictory. Mad bursts of passion, which would have been the ruin of an ordinary man, but which seem scarcely to have made a break in his cool, calculating, far-seeing policy; a rapid and unerring perception of his own ends, a relentless obstinacy in pursuing them, an utter disregard of the wrong and suffering which their pursuit might involve; and then ever and anon fits of vehement repentance, ignorant, blind, fruitless as far as any lasting amendment was concerned, yet at once awe-striking and touching in its short-lived, wrong-headed earnestness—all these seeming contradictions yet make up, not a puzzling abstraction, but an intensely living character—the character, in a word, of the typical Angevin count.

- [294] “Fulco Nerra” or “Niger,” “Palmerius” and “Hierosolymitanus” are his historical surnames. I can find no hint whether the first was derived from his complexion or from the colour of the armour which he usually wore (as in the case of the “Black Prince”); the origin of the two last will be seen later.

- [295] This is on the supposition that Adela of Chalon was his mother; see note C to chap. ii. above.

For more than a hundred years after the accession of Hugh Capet, the history of the kingdom which he founded consists chiefly of the struggles of the great feudataries among themselves to get and to keep control over the action of the crown. The duke of the French had gained little save in name by his royal coronation and unction. He was no nearer than his Karolingian predecessors had been to actual supremacy over the Norman duchy, the Breton peninsula, and the whole of southern Gaul. Aquitaine indeed passed from cold contempt to open aggression. When one of her princes, the count of Poitou, had at length made unwilling submission to the northern king, a champion of southern independence issued from far Périgord to punish him, stormed Poitiers, marched up to the Loire, and sat down in triumph before Tours, whose count, Odo of Blois, was powerless to relieve it. The king himself could find no more practical remonstrance than the indignant question, “Who made thee count?” and the sole reply vouchsafed by Adalbert of Périgord was the fair retort, “Who made thee king?” Tours fell into his hands, and was made over, perhaps in mockery, to the youthful count of Anjou. The loyalty of its governor and citizens, however, soon restored it to its lawful owner, and Adalbert’s dreams of conquest ended in failure and retreat.[296] Still, Aquitaine remained independent as of old; Hugh’s real kingdom took in little more than the old duchy of France “between Seine and Loire”; and even within these limits it almost seemed that in grasping at the shadow of the crown he had loosened his hold on the substance of his ducal power. The regal authority was virtually a tool in the hands of whichever feudatary could secure its exercise for his own ends. As yet Aquitaine and Britanny stood aloof from the struggle; Normandy had not yet entered upon it; at present therefore it lay between the vassals of the duchy of France. Foremost among them in power, wealth, and extent of territory was the count of Blois, Chartres and Tours. His dominions pressed close against the eastern border of Anjou, and it was on her ability to cope with him that her fate chiefly depended. Was the house of Anjou or the house of Blois to win the pre-eminence in central Gaul? This was the problem which confronted Fulk the Black, and to whose solution he devoted his life. His whole course was governed by one fixed principle and directed to one paramount object—the consolidation of his marchland. To that object everything else was made subservient. Every advantage thrown in his way by circumstances, by the misfortunes, mistakes or weaknesses of foes or friends—for he used the one as unscrupulously as the other—was caught up and pursued with relentless vigour. One thread of settled policy ran through the seemingly tangled skein of his life, a thread never broken even by the wildest outbursts of his almost demoniac temper or his superstitious alarms. While he seemed to be throwing his whole energies into the occupation of the moment—whether it were the building or the besieging of a fortress, the browbeating of bishop or king, the cajoling of an ally or the crushing of a rival on the battle-field—that work was in reality only a part of a much greater work. Every town mirrored in the clear streams that water the “garden of France”—as the people of Touraine call their beautiful country—has its tale of the Black Count, the “great builder” beneath whose hands the whole lower course of the Loire gradually came to bristle with fortresses; but far above all his castles of stone and mortar there towered a castle in the air, the plan of a mighty political edifice. Every act of his life was a step towards its realization; every fresh success in his long career of triumph was another stone added to the gradual building up of Angevin dominion and greatness.

- [296] Ademar of Chabanais, Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 146. The date seems to be about 990; but Ademar has confused Odo I. of Blois with his son Odo of Champagne.

Fulk’s first victory was won before he was fourteen, over a veteran commander who had been more than a match for his father ten years earlier. The death of Geoffrey Greygown was soon followed by that of Count Guerech of Nantes; he, too, left only a young son, Alan; and when Alan also died in 990, Conan of Rennes, already master of all the rest of Britanny, seized his opportunity to take forcible possession of Nantes,[297] little dreaming of a possible rival in his young brother-in-law beyond the Mayenne. While his back was turned and he was busy assembling troops at Bruerech, at the other end of Britanny, the Angevin worked upon the old hatred of the Nantes people to the house of Rennes; with the craft of his race he won over some of the guards, by fair words and solid bribes, till he gained admittance into the city and received oaths and hostages from its inhabitants. He then returned home to collect troops for an attack upon the citadel, which was held by Conan’s men. Conan, as soon as he heard the tidings, marched upon Nantes with all his forces; as before, he brought with him a body of Norman auxiliaries, likely to be of no small use in assaulting a place such as Nantes, whose best defence is its broad river—for the “Pirates” had not yet forgotten the days when the water was their natural element and the long keels were their most familiar home. While the Norman ships blocked the river, Conan’s troops beset the town by land, and thus, with the garrison shooting down at them from the citadel, the townsfolk of Nantes were between three fires when Fulk advanced to their rescue.[298] Conan at once sent the audacious boy a challenge to meet him, on such a day, in a pitched battle on the field of Conquereux, where ten years before a doubtful fight had been waged between Conan and Fulk’s father. This time the Bretons trusted to lure their enemies to complete destruction by a device which, in days long after, was successfully employed by Robert Bruce against the English army at Bannockburn; they dug a series of trenches right across the swampy moor, covered them with bushes, branches, leaves and thatch, supported by uprights stuck into the ditches, and strewed the surface with ferns till it was indistinguishable from the surrounding moorland. Behind this line of hidden pitfalls Conan drew up his host, making a feint of unwillingness to begin the attack. Fulk, panting for his first battle with all the ardour of youth, urged his men to the onset; the flower of the Angevin troops charged right into the Breton pitfalls; men and horses became hopelessly entangled; two thousand went down in the swampy abyss and were drowned, slaughtered or crushed to death.[299] The rest fled in disorder; Fulk himself was thrown from his horse and fell to the ground, weighed down by his armour, perhaps too heavy for his boyish frame. In an instant he was up again, wild with rage, burning to avenge his overthrow, calling furiously upon his troops. The clear, young voice of their leader revived the courage of the Angevins; “as the storm-wind sweeps down upon the thick corn-rigs”[300]—so their historian tells—they rushed upon the foe; and their momentary panic was avenged by the death of Conan and the almost total destruction of his host.[301] The blow overthrew the power of Rennes; the new duke Geoffrey, the son of Conan and Hermengard, was far indeed from being a match for his young uncle. In the flush of victory Fulk marched into Nantes; the citizens received him with open arms; the dismayed garrison speedily surrendered, and swore fealty to the conqueror; the titular bishop, Judicaël, a young son of Count Hoel, was set up as count under the guardianship of Aimeric of Thouars, a kinsman of the Angevin house, who ruled solely in Fulk’s interest;[302] while the territory on the right bank of the Mayenne, lost a century and a half before by the treason of Count Lambert, seems to have been reunited to the Angevin dominions.

- [297] Morice, Hist. de Bret., vol. i. p. 64 (from a seemingly lost bit of the Chron. Namnet.).

- [298] Richer, l. iv. c. 81.

- [299] Ib. cc. 82–85. Rudolf Glaber, l. ii. c. 3 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 15).

- [300] R. Glaber, l. ii. c. 3 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 15).

- [301] Richer, l. iv. c. 86. R. Glaber (as above) says that Conan was not slain, but only taken prisoner with the loss of his right hand—a confusion with the first battle of Conquereux. Conan’s death appears in all the chief Breton chronicles, especially Chron. S. Michael. a. 992 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 175), etc. See also Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 377. The Gesta Cons. copy R. Glaber.

- [302] Richer, l. iv. c. 86. The first viscount of Thouars, a brother of Ebles, count of Poitou, had married Roscilla, daughter of Fulk the Red. Chron. Com. Pictaviæ in Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. pp. 294, 295.

The boy count had well won his spurs on the field of Conquereux. With the control over Nantes he had secured the control over the whole course of the Loire from his own capital down to the sea—a most important advantage in an age when the water-ways were the principal channels of communication, whether for peace or war. The upper part of the Loire valley, its richest and most fertile part, was in the hands of the count of Blois. But his sway was not unbroken. Midway between his two capitals, Blois and Tours, stood Amboise, the heritage of the Red Count’s mother; farther south, in the valley of the Indre, stood Loches, the heritage of his wife. It was not in human nature—certainly not in Angevin nature—that the owner of Amboise and Loches should not seek to extend his power a little further at the expense of his neighbour in Touraine; and no great provocation on the part of Odo of Blois was needed to make the fiery young Angevin dash into his territories, and ride plundering, wasting and burning to the outskirts of Blois itself.[303] Raid and counter-raid went on almost without ceasing, and once it seems that King Hugh himself came to help his Angevin ally.[304] In 995 Odo died, and his widow, Bertha, shortly afterwards married Robert of France, who next year became king on the death of his father Hugh Capet. Robert and Bertha were cousins; the Church pronounced their marriage illegal, and punished it with an interdict on the realm; amid the general confusion which followed, Fulk carried on a desultory warfare with Odo’s two elder sons, Thierry and Theobald, till the death of the latter in 1004 brought him face to face with his lifelong antagonist, Odo II. The contest made inevitable by circumstances was to be rendered all the more bitter by the character of the two men who were now to engage in it. Odo, indeed, was even yet scarcely more than a boy;[305] but, like Fulk, he had begun his public career at a very early age. His beginning was as characteristic as Fulk’s beginning at Conquereux. In 999 he openly insulted his royal step-father by wresting the castle of Melun from Robert’s most trusty counsellor, Count Burchard of Vendôme; and no might short of that of the Norman duke, who had now grown from a “leader of the Pirates” into the king’s most valued supporter, sufficed to avenge the outrage.[306] The boy’s hasty, unprovoked spoliation of Burchard, his insolent defiance of the king, his overweening self-confidence, ending suddenly in ignominious flight, were typical of his whole after-career. Odo’s life was as busy and active as Fulk’s, but his activity produced no lasting effects. His insatiable ambition lacked the restraint and regulation of the Angevin practical sagacity, and ran hopelessly to seed without bringing forth any lasting fruit. There was no fixed purpose in his life. New ideas, daring schemes, sprang up in his brain almost as quickly as in that of Fulk; but he never waited till they were matured; he never stopped to count their cost; and instead of working together to one common end, they only drove him into a multiplicity of irreconcileable and often visionary undertakings which never came to perfection. He was entirely a creature of impulse; always ready to throw himself into a new project, but generally lacking patience and perseverance enough to carry it through; harassed by numberless conflicting cares;[307] breaking every engagement as soon as made, not from any deep-laid policy, but simply from sheer inability to keep long to anything. “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel,” might have been the burthen of Odo and of Odo’s whole race. The house of Blois failed through their utter lack of the quality which was the main strength of their rivals: thoroughness. The rivalry and the characters of the two houses have a bearing upon English history; for the quarrel that began between them for the possession of Touraine was to be fought out at last on English ground, and for no less a stake than the crown of England. The rivalry of Odo and Fulk was a foreshadowing of the rivalry between Stephen of Blois and Henry of Anjou. The end was the same in both cases. With every advantage on their side, in the eleventh century as in the twelfth, in Gaul as in England, the aimless activity of the house of Blois only spent itself against the indomitable steadiness, determination and persistency of the Angevins, as vainly as the storm-wind might beat upon the rocky foundations of Black Angers.

- [303] Richer, l. iv. c. 79.

- [304] Richer, l. iv. cc. 90–94. His account of the war, and indeed his whole account of Fulk and of Odo, is extremely strange and confused; it has been examined by M. Léon Aubineau in a “Notice sur Thibaut-le-Tricheur et Eudes I.” in the Mém. de la Soc. Archéol. de Touraine, vol. iii. (1845–1847), pp. 41–94, but the result is far from convincing.

- [305] He is called “puerulus” at the time of his mother’s second marriage, i.e. in 995–996. Hist. Franc. Fragm. in Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 211. But considering the date of the Melun affair, this can hardly be taken literally.

- [306] Vita Burchardi, in Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. pp. 354, 355. Will. Jumièges, l. v. c. 14 (ib. p. 189; Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 255). Richer, l. iv. cc. 74–78. See note A at the end of chapter.

- [307] See the character given of him by R. Glaber, l. iii. cc. 2, 9 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. pp. 27, 40).

In the ten years of misery and confusion which followed the death of Odo I. and the re-marriage of his widow, Fulk had time nearly to complete a chain of fortresses which, starting from Angers and sweeping along the line of Geoffrey Greygown’s Poitevin conquests in a wide irregular half-circle up again to Amboise, served the double purpose of linking his own outlying possessions in Touraine with his head-quarters in Anjou, and of cutting in halves the dominions of his neighbour. The towers of Montreuil, Passavant and Maulévrier, of Loudun and the more remote Mirebeau, were a standing menace to Saumur and Chinon. Sᵗᵉ·-Maure was an eyesore to the garrison of Ile-Bouchard.[308] Farther east, on a pile of rock with the little blue Indre winding round its foot, rose, as it rises still in ruined majesty, the mighty keep of Loches; and on the banks of the Indrois that of Montrésor, whose lord, Roger, rejoiced in the surname of “the devil.”[309] To Roger Fulk also intrusted the command of another great fortress, Montrichard, whose dark donjon frowned down upon the Cher from a plot of ground stolen from the metropolitan see of Tours.[310] At Amboise itself, the site of the Roman governor’s palace—now crowned by the modern castle—was occupied by a strong domicilium of the Angevin count,[311] and the place was a perpetual obstacle between the archiepiscopal city of S. Martin and the secular capital of its rulers. Langeais and Montbazon, which for a while threatened Tours more closely still, were soon wrested from their daring builder;[312] but the whole course of the Indre above Montbazon was none the less in Fulk’s hands, for either by force or guile, the lords of all the castles on its banks had been won over to his cause; he had gained a foothold on every one of the affluents of the Loire upon its southern side; while on the north, in the valley of the Loir, Hugh of Alluye, the lord of Château-la-Vallière and St.-Christophe, was so devoted to the Angevin interest that the count’s usual route to and from Amboise lay through his lands.[313]

- [308] Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 377.

- [309] Gesta Cons. (ibid.), p. 107; Gesta Amb. Domin. (ibid.), p. 167.

- [310] Gesta Cons., as above.

- [311] Gesta Amb. Domin. (as above), p. 175.

- [312] That Montbazon was built by Fulk appears by a charter of King Robert (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. pp. 577, 578), date seemingly about A.D. 1000. It had, however, passed into Odo’s hands. Langeais, whose building is recorded by Fulk Rechin (as above), was probably taken by Odo I. in 995; there is a charter of his dated “at the siege of Langeais” in that year. Mabillon, Ann. Bened., vol. iv. p. 96.

- [313] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 91. Gesta Amb. Domin. (ibid.), p. 164.

The early part of the eleventh century was an age of castle-building; Fulk, however, had begun his line of fortifications before the century dawned, in those gloomy years of interdict when the royal power was at its lowest ebb, when the people, cut off from the helps and comforts of religion, lay in hopeless anarchy and misery, and half in terror, half in longing, men whispered to each other that the end of the world was near. The superstitious terrors which paralyzed gentler souls only goaded Fulk into more restless activity and inflamed his fierce temper almost to madness. He had married the heiress of Vendôme, the daughter of Count Burchard;[314] but this union came to a terrible end while its only child was still in her cradle. In the very dawn of the dreaded year 1000 Countess Elizabeth expiated her real or supposed sins as a wife by death at the stake; and a conflagration which destroyed a large part of the city of Angers immediately after her execution may well have caused the horror-stricken subjects of her husband to deem that judgement was indeed at their gates.[315]

- [314] They were already married in 990; see a charter in Mabillon, Ann. Bened., vol. iv. p. 59.

- [315] This, or something like it, must be the meaning of the not very intelligible accounts given in the Angevin chronicles of the death of Elizabeth and the fire which followed it. “Incensa est urbs Andegavensis post incensionem Comitissæ Elizabeth.” Chron. S. Michael. in Peric. Maris, a. 1000 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 175). “Prima incensio urbis Andegavæ, quæ evenit paucis diebus post combustionem comitissæ Helisabeth.” Chron. S. Albin., a. 1000 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 22). “Urbs Andecava incensa est post combustionem comitissæ Elisabeth.” Breve Chron. S. Flor. Salm. a. 999 (ib. p. 187). “Fulco ... cum Elysabeth conjugem suam Andegavis, post immane præcipitium salvatam, occidisset, ipsamque urbem paucis defendentibus flammarum incendiis concremâsset.” Hist. S. Flor. Salm. (ibid.), p. 273. Cf. ib. p. 260.

After the paroxysm came the reaction. When the dreaded year had passed over and the world found itself still alive; when the king had at last consented to purchase relief from the interdict by parting from his beloved Bertha, and the nation was rousing itself to welcome the new queen who stepped into Bertha’s place; then the blood which he had shed at Conquereux and elsewhere—one may surely add, the ashes of his wife—began to weigh heavily on the Black Count’s soul; “the fear of Gehenna” took possession of him, and leaving the marchland to the care of his brother Maurice he set out for the Holy Sepulchre.[316] This journey was the first link in a chain which, through the later pilgrimages of Fulk Nerra himself and those of his great-grandson Fulk V., brought the counts of Anjou into a specially intimate relation with the Holy Land and led to the establishment of an Angevin dynasty upon its throne. Legend has not been slack to furnish Fulk the Palmer with characteristic adventures, to tell how his craft outwitted that of the Turks who tried to exclude him from the Sepulchre, and how he not only procured a piece of the true Cross, but while kissing the sacred stone in the fervour of his devotion, detected a loose fragment which he managed to bite off and bring home as the most precious trophy of his journey.[317] His first care on his return was to build an abbey for the reception of this relic. From the rocky angle by the winding Indre where the great “Square Tower”—as the natives emphatically call the keep of Loches—was rising in picturesque contrast to a church reared by Geoffrey Greygown in honour of our Lady,[318] the land which the wife of the first count of Anjou had transmitted to her descendants stretched a mile eastward beyond the river in a broad expanse of green meadow to a waste plot of ground full of broom, belonging to a man named Ingelger. From its original Latin name, Belli-locus, now corrupted into Beaulieu, it seems possible that the place was set apart for trials by ordeal of battle.[319]

- [316] R. Glaber, l. ii. c. 3 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 15). On the regency of Maurice see note C at end of chapter, and Mabille, Introd. Comtes d’Anjou, p. lxxvi.

- [317] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 102, 103. There is a versified account of the pious theft in the Beaulieu office of the Holy Sepulchre, Salies, Hist. de Foulques-Nerra, p. 529.

- [318] In 963; Chron. Turon. Abbrev. ad ann. (Salmon, Chron. de Touraine, p. 185). From the foundation-charter, cited by M. l’abbé Bardet (La Collégiale de Loches, p. 8), it seems that Geoffrey founded the church on his return from a pilgrimage to Rome. A fragment of his work possibly remains in the present church (now called S. Ours), which was built by the historian-prior, Thomas Pactius, in the time of Henry II.

- [319] This is a remark quoted by M. de Salies (Foulques-Nerra, pp. 115, 361) from Dufour, “Dict. hist. de l’arrond. de Loches,” and grounded on the fact that while the many other Beaulieus, in France and in England, all appear in Latin as “Bellus-locus,” this one is “Belli-locus” in its foundation charter. See a similar case of verbal corruption below, p. 187.

This field Fulk determined to purchase for the site of his abbey. A bargain was struck; the count paid down the stipulated sum, carried the former owner on his shoulders from the middle of the field to the foot of the bridge, and there set him down, saying, “A man without wit his freehold must quit”—by which ceremony the contract was completed.[320] Despite his fiery haste, Fulk did all things with due method,[321] and his next anxiety was to decide upon the dedication of his intended minster. He found his best counsellor in his newly-married wife, the Lady Hildegard, and by her advice the church was placed under the direct invocation, not of saint or angel, but of the most Holy Trinity Itself.[322] By the time it stood ready for consecration the son of Fulk and Hildegard was nearly three years old:[323] he had been nursed by a blacksmith’s wife at Loches;[324] and many a time, as the count and countess went to inspect the progress of architect and builder in the meadow beyond the river, they must have lingered beside the forge to mark the growth of their little Geoffrey, the future conqueror of Tours. The consecration of the church proved a difficulty; the archbishop of Tours refused to perform it unless Fulk would restore to his see the stolen land of Montrichard.[325] Fulk swore—doubtless his customary oath, “by God’s souls”[326]—that he would get the better of the primate, and went straight off to Rome to lay his case before the Pope. After several years’ wrangling it was decided in his favour,[327] and one morning in May 1012 the abbey-church of the Holy Trinity at Beaulieu was hallowed with all due pomp and solemnity by a Roman cardinal-legate. But though Rome had spoken, the case was not ended yet. That very afternoon a sudden storm of wind blew up from the south, whirled round the church, and swept the whole roof completely off. Clergy and laity alike seized on the prodigy as an evident token of Heaven’s wrath against the insolence and presumption of Fulk;[328] not so the Black Count himself, who simply replaced the roof and pushed on the completion of the monastic buildings as if nothing had happened.[329] He had successfully defied the Church; he next ventured to defy the king and the count of Blois both at once. The divorced queen Bertha, mother of young Odo of Blois, still lived and was still loved by the king; Fulk, if he was not actually, as tradition relates, a kinsman of the new Queen Constance,[330] was at any rate fully alive to the policy of making common cause with her against their common rivals of Blois. He crushed King Robert’s last hope of reunion with Bertha by sending twelve armed men to assassinate at a hunting-party, before his royal master’s eyes, the king’s seneschal or comes palatii Hugh of Beauvais who was the confidant of his cherished scheme.[331] It is a striking proof not only of the royal helplessness but also of the independence and security which Fulk had already attained that his crime went altogether unpunished and even uncensured save by one bishop,[332] and almost immediately after its commission he could again venture on leaving his dominions under the regency of his brother Maurice, while he set off upon another long journey which the legendary writers of Anjou, by some strange confusion between their own hero and the Emperor Otto III., make into a mission of knight-errantry to deliver the Pope from a tyrant named Crescentius, but which seems really to have been a second pilgrimage to Holy Land.[333] He came back to find the storm which had so long been gathering on his eastern border on the point of breaking at last.

[320] 11th lesson of the Beaulieu Office, Salies, Foulques-Nerra, p. 528. “Stultus a proprio expellitur alodo.”

[321] “Ut semper curiose agebat,” R. Glaber, l. ii. c. 4 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 15).

[322] Ibid. (pp. 15, 16).

[323] He was born October 14, 1006, according to Chronn. Vindoc. and S. Flor. Salm. ad ann. (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 164, 187). The Chron. S. Serg. (ib. p. 134) gives the same day, but makes the year 1007; the Chron. S. Maxent. (ib. p. 387) places the event on April 12, 1005. The Chron. S. Albin. (ib. p. 22) gives no day, but confirms the two first-named authorities for the year, 1006.

[324] Hist. S. Flor. Salm. (Marchegay, Eglises), p. 260.

[325] R. Glaber, as above (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 16). Cf. Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 107).

[326] “Fulco Nerra, cui consuetudo fuit Animas Dei jurare,” begins his history in the Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 89.

[327] R. Glaber, l. ii. c. 4 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 17). See also a bull of Pope John XVIII. in Migne’s Patrologia, vol. cxxxix., cols. 1491, 1492; and two of Sergius IV., ib. cols. 1525–1527.

[328] R. Glaber, as above (p. 16).

[329] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 99. This writer copies the whole story of Beaulieu from R. Glaber.

[330] See note B at end of chapter.

[331] R. Glaber, l. iii. c. 2 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 27).

[332] Fulbert of Chartres; see his letter to Fulk, Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. pp. 476, 477.

[333] See note C at end of chapter.

The adherents of the count of Blois, headed by Landry of Châteaudun, had profited by Fulk’s absence to concert a scheme for the expulsion of the Angevins from Touraine. In spite of a vigorous resistance made by Fulk’s lieutenant at Amboise, Sulpice, treasurer of S. Martin’s at Tours, they seemed in a fair way to succeed, when Fulk himself dropped like a thunderbolt in their midst, dashed right through the county of Blois into that of Chartres, punished Landry by sacking Châteaudun and harrying the surrounding district, and marched home in triumph to Amboise.[334] A raid such as this was a distinct declaration of war, not upon Landry, but upon Landry’s lord. Fulk had intended it as such, and he went home to set in action every possible means that could gain him help and support in a fight to the uttermost with Odo for the possession of Touraine. At that very moment the county of Maine was thrown virtually into his hands by the death of its aged count Hugh; with the alliance of Hugh’s youthful successor he secured the northern frontier of Touraine and the support of a body of valiant fighting-men whose co-operation soon proved to be of the highest value and importance. The rapid insight which singled out at a glance the most fitting instruments for his purpose, the gifts of attraction and persuasion by which he knew how to attach men to his service, and seemed almost to inspire them with some faint reflex of his own spirit, while making them devoted creatures of his will, were all brought into play as he cast about in all directions for aid in the coming struggle, and were strikingly shown in his choice of a lieutenant. The instinct of genius told him that he had found the man he wanted in young Lisoy, lord of the castle of Bazogers, in Maine. As prudent in counsel as he was daring in fight, Lisoy was a man after Fulk’s own heart; they understood each other at once; Lisoy was appointed to share with the now aged Sulpice the supreme command of Loches and Amboise; and while Sulpice provided for the defence of Amboise by building on his own land there a lofty tower of stone,[335] the burned and plundered districts of St.-Aignan, Chaumont and Blois soon had cause to know that the “pride of Cenomannian knighthood” had thrown himself heart and soul into the service of the count of Anjou.[336]

- [334] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 88, 89–91.

- [335] Gesta Amb. Domin. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 169.

- [336] Ib. pp. 160–164.

The crisis came in the summer of 1016, when Odo of Blois gathered all his forces for an attack upon Montrichard. His rival was fully prepared to meet him. Before he set out from Blois, the allied hosts of Anjou and Maine had assembled at Amboise, and thence separated again to post themselves in such a manner as to render a battle unavoidable. Fulk turned eastward, and took up a position close to Pontlevoy, seemingly in a wood now known as the Bois-Royal, which in that day was skirted by the high road from Blois to Montrichard. Herbert of Maine rode down to the banks of the Cher, and pitched his camp just above Montrichard, at Bourré.[337] If Odo followed the high road he would be met by the Angevins; if he contrived to turn their position by taking a less direct route to the eastward, he must encounter the Cenomannians, with the garrison of Montrichard at their back; while whichever engaged him first, the distance between the two bodies of troops was so slight that either could easily come to the other’s assistance. It was well for Anjou and for her count that his strategical arrangements were so perfect, and so faithfully carried out by his young ally; for never in all his long life, save in the panic at Conquereux, was Fulk the Black so near to complete overthrow as on that Friday morning in July 1016, when he met Odo of Blois face to face in the battle-field.

- [337] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 107. The topography of the battle of Pontlevoy is cleared up by Salies, Foulques-Nerra, p. 175 et seq.

Odo, who always trusted to be saved by the multitude of an host,[338] was greatly astonished, on arriving with all his forces opposite Pontlevoy, to find the Angevins drawn up against him in battle array. With a few hurried words he urged his men to the onset. Fortune seemed for a while to favour the stronger side; Fulk and his troops were sore bested; Fulk himself was thrown from his horse and severely stunned, and the fate of Anjou hung trembling in the balance, when the scale was turned by the sword of Herbert of Maine. A messenger hurried off to tell the Cenomannian count that his friend was defeated, nay, captured. Herbert and his knights flew to the rescue; they charged the left wing of the enemies with a vigour which changed the whole position of affairs, and snatched from the count of Blois the victory he had all but won; the chivalry of Blois fled in confusion, leaving the foot to be cut to pieces at will, and their camp to be plundered by the victorious allies, who returned in triumph to Amboise, laden with rich spoils and valuable prisoners.[339]

- [338] “More suo, nimiâ multitudine confisus.” Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 107.

- [339] Ib. pp. 107, 108. The date—July 6—is given in Chronn. S. Serg., Vindoc. and S. Flor. Salm., a. 1016 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 134, 164, 187). There is an account of the battle in Hist. S. Flor. Salm. (ib.), p. 274, but it has a very impossible look.

The victory of Pontlevoy was the turning-point of Fulk’s career. Nine years passed away before Odo recovered from the check enough to make any attempt to avenge it. It seems at first glance strange that Fulk did not employ the interval in pushing forward his conquest of Touraine. But in the eyes of both Fulk and Odo the possession of Touraine was in reality a means rather than an end; and a sort of armed truce, so long as Odo did not provoke him to break it, suited Fulk’s purpose better than a continued war. His western frontier had been secured by his first victory at Conquereux; his eastern frontier was now secured, at any rate for a time, by his victory at Pontlevoy; from the south there was nothing to fear, for the duke of Aquitaine, to whom he owed homage for Loudun, was his staunch friend, and presently gave proof of his friendship by bestowing on him the city of Saintes.[340] Fulk at once made use of the gift as a means of extorting something yet more valuable from a neighbour to whom he owed a far deeper obligation—Herbert of Maine. It may be that they had quarrelled since the days of Pontlevoy; it may be that Herbert had begun that career of nocturnal raids against the fortified towns of Anjou which scared men and beasts from their rest, and gained him his unclassical but expressive surname of “Wake-the-dog.”[341] If so, the wily Angevin took effectual measures to stop them. He enticed the count of Maine to pay him a visit at Saintes, proposing to grant him the investiture of that city. Suddenly, in the midst of conversation, Herbert was seized by Fulk’s servants and flung into prison, whence he was only released at the end of two years, and on submission to such conditions as Fulk chose to dictate.[342] What those conditions were history does not tell; but there can be little doubt that they included some acknowledgment of the suzerain rights of Anjou over Maine, with which Geoffrey Greygown had been invested by Hugh Capet, but which he had not had time to make good, and which Fulk had only enforced for a moment, at the sword’s point, when the aged count Hugh was dying.[343] Fulk’s dealings with Maine are only an episode in his life; but they led even more directly than his struggle with the house of Blois to consequences of the utmost importance. They paved the way for an Angevin conquest of Maine which extended the Angevin power to the Norman border, brought it into contact and collision with the Norman ducal house, and originated the long wars which were ended at last by the marriage of Geoffrey Plantagenet and the Empress Matilda. The imprisonment of Herbert is really the first step in the path which leads from Anjou to England.

- [340] Ademar of Chabanais, Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 149.

- [341] “Vulgo, sed parum Latine, cognominari Evigilans-canem pro ingenti probitate promeruit. Nam ... in eundem [sc. Fulconem] arma levans nocturnas expeditiones crebro agebat, et Andegavenses homines et canes in ipsâ urbe, vel in munitioribus oppidis terrebat, et horrendis assultibus pavidos vigilare cogebat.” Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.) p. 532. It is however only fair to add that in another place (ib. p. 487) Orderic says Herbert “vulgo Evigilans-canem cognominabatur, propter gravissimas infestationes quas a perfidis affinibus suis Andegavensibus incessanter patiebatur”—as if he kept the Cenomannian dogs awake to give notice of the enemy’s approach, we must suppose.

- [342] Ademar of Chabanais (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x.), p. 161; Will. Poitiers (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 189; Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iii. c. 235 (Hardy, p. 401). Ademar says Herbert’s imprisonment lasted two years; and the Chronn. S. Albin. and Vindoc. a. 1027 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 22, 167), give us the date of his release, by giving that of the Breton invasion which followed it.

- [343] “Hugonis ... quem Fulco senior sibi violentur subjugârat.” Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 532. The terms of Herbert’s submission to Fulk are matter of inference from what followed his release. He at once began to quarrel with Avesgaud, the bishop of Le Mans, and being by him defied and excommunicated, called in the help of Duke Alan of Britanny (Acta Pontif. Cenoman., c. 30, in Mabillon, Vet. Analecta, p. 304). Alan, when he had helped to defeat the bishop, marched down to besiege Le Lude, one of the chief Angevin fortresses on the Cenomannian border, and only desisted when he had extorted from Fulk the hostages given him by Herbert on his release; Chron. Vindoc. a. 1027 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 166). It is not hard to see why the rival overlord of Nantes should be ready to make war, on any pretext, upon the count of Anjou; but, making due allowance for Fulk’s possible difficulties—Odo’s last attack occurred in this year—still it is very hard to see why Fulk, “the ingenious Fulk,” as the writer of the Gesta Amb. Domin. calls him (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 165), could find no better way of raising the siege of a petty border-fortress than by making restitution to Herbert at the bidding of Alan, unless he felt so sure of his hold over Herbert as not to think the hostages worth keeping. The striking resemblance between Fulk’s treatment of Herbert and his father’s treatment of Guerech also suggests that there was probably a like resemblance in the terms of release.

But the step could never have been followed up as it was by Fulk’s successor had not Fulk himself at once turned back to his special work of clearing away the obstacle to Angevin progress formed by the rivalry of Blois, which once again threatened to become a serious danger in the very year of Herbert’s capture. Odo had lately[344] succeeded to the inheritance of his cousin Stephen, count of Champagne, an acquisition which doubled his wealth and power, and gave him a position of such importance in the French kingdom as enabled him to overawe the crown and cause a complete change in its policy. In 1025 King Robert, “or rather his queen Constance,” as the chroniclers significantly add, made peace with Count Odo who had hitherto been their enemy, and left their old friend Fulk of Anjou to carry on alone the struggle which he had begun with their good will, and, ostensibly at least, partly in their interest.[345] Odo thought his hour was come; “with all his might he set upon” Fulk;[346] and his might now included all the forces of Touraine, Blois, Chartres and Champagne, aided, it seems, by a contingent from the Royal Domain itself.[347] With this formidable host Odo laid siege to a great fortified camp known as the Montboyau, which Fulk had reared some ten years before on the northern bank of the Loire almost opposite Tours, as a standing menace to the city and a standing defiance to its ruler.[348] Fulk, to whom the besieged garrison appealed for succour, had advanced[349] as far as Brain-sur-Alonnes when he was met by tidings which induced him to change his course.[350] Nearly over against the spot where he stood, a ridge of white chalk-cliff rising sheer above the southern bank of the Loire was crowned by the fortress of Saumur, the south-western key of Touraine, close to the Angevin border. It had belonged to the counts of Tours since the days of Theobald the Trickster at least; but in an earlier time it had probably formed a part of the Angevin March, as it still formed a part of the diocese of Angers. Its lord, Gelduin, was the sole human being whom the Black Count feared; “Let us flee that devil of Saumur!” was his cry, “I seem always to see him before me.”[351] But now he learned that Gelduin had joined his count at the siege of the Montboyau. A hurried night-ride across Loire and Vienne brought Fulk at break of day to the gates of Saumur,[352] and before sunset he was master of the place, although its inhabitants, with a spirit worthy of their absent leader, fired the town before they surrendered, and only admitted the victors into a heap of ashes. Not the least valiant of its defenders had been the monks of S. Florence, a little community who dwelt within the castle-enclosure, keeping guard over the relics of a famous local saint. As they came forth with their patron’s body from the blazing ruins, the Black Count’s voice rose above the din: “Let the fire burn, holy Florence! I will build thee a better dwelling at Angers.” The relics were placed in a boat and rowed down the stream till they reached the limit of the lands of Saumur, at Trèves. Once the boundary had been further west, at Gennes; till Fulk, despite his terror of the “devil,” had taken courage to march against him, doubtless at a moment when Gelduin was unprepared for defence, for he at once asked a truce. It was granted, but not exactly as he desired; on the spot where Gelduin’s envoy met him Fulk planted a castle and called it mockingly “Treva,” truce. Opposite this alien fortress the boat which carried the relics of S. Florence now stuck fast in one of the sandbanks of treacherous Loire, and all the efforts of the rowers failed to move it. The saint—said the monks—was evidently determined not to be carried beyond his own territory. Fulk, who was superintending the voyage in person, began to rail at him as “an impious rustic who would not allow himself to be well treated”: but there was a grain of humour in the Black Count’s composition, and he was probably as much amused as angered at the saint’s obstinacy; at any rate he suffered the monks to push off in the opposite direction—which they did without difficulty—and deposit their charge in the church of S. Hilary, an old dependency of their house, till he should find them a suitable place for a new monastery.[353] Thus far Odo’s grand expedition had brought him nothing but the loss of the best stronghold he possessed on the Angevin border. There was apparently nothing to prevent Fulk from marching in triumph up the valley of the Vienne, where Chinon and Ile-Bouchard now held out alone for the count of Blois amid a ring of Angevin fortresses. His present object, however, was to relieve the Montboyau; and turning northward he laid siege to a castle of his own building which had somehow passed into the enemy’s hands, Montbazon[354] on the Indre, only three leagues distant from Tours. Odo, whose siege operations had proved a most disastrous failure,[355] at once broke up his camp and marched to the relief of Montbazon. To dislodge him from the siege of Montboyau was all that Fulk wanted; simulating flight, he retreated up the valley to Loches and thence retired gradually upon Amboise.[356] A month later Odo made an ineffectual attempt to regain Saumur. Some time afterwards he tried again, pitching his tents among the vineyards on the banks of the Thouet, hard by the rising walls of the new abbey of S. Florence; the monks acted as mediators between their former lord and their new patron, and peace was made, Odo definitely relinquishing Saumur, and Fulk agreeing to raze the Montboyau[357]—that is, to raze the keep on its summit; for the white chalky slopes of the mighty earthwork itself rise gleaming above the river to this day. The struggle between Fulk and Odo was virtually over. Once again, in the following year, the count of Blois attempted to surprise Amboise, in company with the young King Henry, Robert’s son and recently crowned colleague. The attack failed;[358] it was Odo’s last effort to stem the tide of Angevin progress. Fulk had done more than beat his rival in the battle-field; he had out-generalled him in every way, and won a triumph which made the final issue of their rivalry a foregone conclusion. That issue he never sought to hasten, for with all his fiery vehemence Fulk knew how to wait; unlike Odo, he could look beyond the immediate future, beyond the horizon of his own life, and having sown and watered his seed he could be content to leave others to gather its fruit, rather than risk the frustration of his labours by plucking at it before the time.

[344] Stephen seems to have died in 1019; Art de vérifier les dates, vol. xi. p. 347.

[345] Chron. Rain. Andeg. a. 1026 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 10); Chron. Vindoc. a. 1025 (ib. p. 165). This last is probably the right date, as the Angevin capture of Saumur, which follows, is dated in 1026 by the Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. (ib. pp. 22, 134), and in 1025 by the Chronn. S. Flor. Salm. and S. Maxent. (ib. pp. 187, 388).

[346] “Totis nisibus adorsus est.” Chronn. Rain. Andeg. and Vindoc. as above.

[347] “Cum Francis,” says the Hist. S. Flor. Salm. (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 276). This writer afterwards speaks of Odo’s whole host as “Franci.” He has already done the same at Pontlevoy (ib. p. 274); but surely there cannot have been any royal vassals fighting under Odo there. What can be the writer’s real meaning?

[348] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 108. Gesta Amb. Domin. (ibid.), p. 165. See, for dates, Chron. Rain. Andeg. a. 1026 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 10).

[349] The Gesta Amb. Domin. (as above), p. 165, say that Fulk was accompanied by Herbert of Maine. But, on calculating dates, it seems that Herbert must have been by this time in prison. It is however highly probable that Cenomannian troops would be supplied to Fulk by Bishop Avesgaud.

[350] Hist. S. Flor. Salm. (Marchegay, Eglises), p. 276.

[351] Ib. p. 275.

[352] Hist. S. Flor. Salm. (Marchegay, Eglises), p. 276.—“Ligerique ac Vigennâ transvadatis.” The writer, living close to the spot, can hardly have mistaken its topography; but unless he has done so, the confluence of the Vienne and the Loire must at that time have been considerably farther west than at present; it is now at Candes, some distance to the east of Saumur and Brain.

[353] Hist. S. Flor. Salm. (Marchegay, Eglises), pp. 276–278.

[354] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 109. Gesta Amb. Domin. (ibid.), p. 165.

[355] Chron. Rain. Andeg. a. 1026 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 10).

[356] Gesta Cons. and Gesta Amb. Domin. as above.

[357] Hist. S. Flor. Salm. (Marchegay, Eglises), p. 280.

[358] Chron. Vindoc. a. 1027 (ib. p. 165). Cf. Chron. S. Albin. a. 1027 (ib. p. 22).

Plan VI.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

Fulk was now at the height of his prosperity. He had been count of Anjou for forty years, and his reign had been one of unbroken success. Each in turn of the greater neighbours who had stood, a threatening ring, around Geoffrey Greygown’s boy-heir had been successfully dealt with in some way or other, till the little Marchland had grown to be a power in the realm second only to Normandy and perhaps to Aquitaine; and before Fulk’s reign closed, even Aquitaine, the only one of Anjou’s immediate neighbours which had not had to bow before him, fell prostrate at the feet of his son. Fulk’s last years were to be years of peace. Only once again did he take part in the general affairs of the French kingdom; and then, as ever, his action was in strict accord with the policy which he had begun and which his descendants followed consistently down to the time of Henry Fitz-Empress: a policy of steady loyalty to the lawful authority of the French Crown, against which the counts of Blois lived in perpetual opposition. After Robert’s death, in 1031, Fulk appeared in the unexpected character of peace-maker between Queen Constance and her son, the young King Henry, whom she was trying to oust from his throne;[359] and he afterwards accompanied Henry on an expedition to dislodge Odo of Champagne from Sens, which however succeeded no better than the attempt once made by Odo and Henry to dislodge Fulk himself from Amboise.[360] But peace or war, it mattered not to the Black Count; he was never at a loss for work. When there was no enemy to fight or to outwit, his versatile energies flung themselves just as readily into the encouragement of piety or the improvement and embellishment of his capital. Over the black bastions of the castle with which the French King Philip Augustus, when he had wrested Angers from a degenerate descendant of its ancient counts, found it needful to secure his hold on “this contemptuous city,” there still looks out upon the river a fragment of a ruined hall, chiefly of red flintstone; it is the sole remains of the dwelling-place of Fulk Nerra—in all likelihood, his own work.[361] A poetic legend shows him to us for once quietly at home, standing in that hall and gazing at the view from its windows. At his feet flowed the purple Mayenne between its flat but green meadows—for the great suburb beyond the river did not yet exist—winding down beneath a bridge of his own building to join the Loire beyond the rising hills to the south-west. His eyes, keen as those of the “Falcon” whose name he bore, reached across river and meadow to the slope of a hill directly opposite him, where he descried a dove flying to and fro, picking up fragments of earth and depositing them in a cavity which it seemed to be trying to fill. Struck by the bird’s action, he carefully marked the spot, and the work of the dove was made the foundation-stone of a great abbey in honour of S. Nicolas, which he had vowed to build as a thank-offering for deliverance from a storm at sea on his return from his second pilgrimage.[362] This abbey, with a nunnery founded near it eight years later—in 1128—by his countess Hildegard, on the site of an ancient church dedicated to our Lady of Charity,[363] became the nucleus round which gathered in after-years a suburb known as Ronceray, scarcely less important than the city itself. These tranquil home-occupations, however, could not long satisfy the restless temper of Fulk. The irresistible charm exercised by the Holy Land over so many of the more imaginative spirits of the age drew him to revisit it in 1035. One interesting event of the journey is recorded: his meeting at Constantinople with Duke Robert of Normandy, father of William the Conqueror.[364] The old and the young penitent completed their pilgrimage together; but only the former lived to see his home again; and when he reached it, he found the gates of Angers shut in his face by his own son. The rebellion was soon quelled. Saddled and bridled like a beast of burthen, Geoffrey came crawling to his father’s feet. “Conquered art thou—conquered, conquered!” shouted the old count, kicking his prostrate son. “Aye, conquered by thee, for thou art my father; but unconquered by all beside!” The spirited answer touched Fulk’s paternal pride, and Geoffrey arose forgiven.[365] The power which he had thus undutifully tried to usurp was soon to be his by right; not, however, till the Black Count had given one last proof that neither his hand nor his brain had yet forgotten its cunning. Odo of Champagne had long ago left Touraine to its fate, and for the last four years he had been absorbed in a visionary attempt to wrest from the Emperor Conrad II., first the kingdom of Burgundy, then that of Italy, and at last the imperial crown itself; while Fulk’s conquests of the valleys of the Indre and the Cher had been completed by the acquisition of Montbazon and St.-Aignan.[366] When at the close of 1037 tidings came that Odo had been defeated and slain in a battle with the imperial forces at Bar, the Angevin at once laid siege to Langeais, and took it.[367] One more stronghold still remained to be won in the valley of the Vienne. From the right bank of the little river, winding down silvery-blue between soft green meadows to join the Loire beyond the circle of the distant hills to the north-west, the mighty steep of Chinon rises abruptly, as an old writer says, “straight up to heaven”; range upon range of narrow streets climb like the steps of a terrace up its rocky sides; acacias wave their bright foliage from every nook; and on the crest of the ridge a long line of white ruins, the remains of a stately castle, stand out against the sky. A dense woodland of oaks and larches and firs, stretching north-eastward almost to the valley of the Indre, and crowded with game of every kind, formed probably no small part of the attractions which were to make Chinon the favourite retreat of Fulk Nerra’s greatest descendant. In those ruined halls, where a rich growth of moss and creepers has replaced the tapestried hangings, earlier and later memories—memories of the Black Count or of the Maid of Orleans—seem to an English visitor only to flit like shadows around the death-bed of Henry Fitz-Empress. But it was Fulk who won Chinon for the Angevins. The persuasion of his tongue, as keen as his sword, sufficed now to gain its surrender.[368] The Great Builder’s work was all but finished; only the keystone remained to be dropped into its place. Tours itself stood out alone against the conqueror of Touraine. One more blow, and the count of Anjou would be master of the whole valley of the Loire from Amboise to the sea.

- [359] R. Glaber, l. iii. c. 9 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 40). Fulk’s mediation was done in characteristic fashion; he asked Constance “cur bestialem vesaniam erga filios exerceret.” It took effect, however.

- [360] Chron. S. Petr. Senon. and Chronolog. S. Marian. Autissiod. a. 1032 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xi. pp. 196, 308).

- [361] See note B to chapter ii. above.

- [362] Hist. S. Flor. Salm. (Marchegay, Eglises) p. 275. The church was consecrated December 1, 1020; Chronn. S. Serg. ad ann. (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 134.) The foundation-charter is in Le Pelletier’s Breviculum S. Nicolai, p. 4.

- [363] The foundation-charter, dated July 14, 1128, is in Hiret, Antiquitez d’Anjou, pp. 100, 101. The whole history of the church is fully discussed by M. d’Espinay, in the Revue Historique de l’Anjou, vol. xii. (1874), pp. 49–64, 143–155. A grotesque legend, which yet has a somewhat characteristic ring, was told of the origin of this nunnery. Fulk one day, watching a potter at his work, was seized with a desire to try his hand. He succeeded in producing a well-shaped pan, which he carried home in triumph and gave to his wife, telling her that it was made by the man whom she loved best. Hildegard, mistaking the jest for a serious charge, vowed to disprove it at once by undergoing the ordeal of water, and flung herself out of the window and into the river, before her husband could stop her. The spot where she came to land was marked by the abbey of our Lady (Revue hist. de l’Anjou, as above, pp. 54, 55, and note 1; Marchegay, Eglises, p. 279 note.) Its later name of “Ronceray” was derived from a bramble-bush (ronce) which forced its way through the pavement of the choir, despite all attempts to uproot it. This however was in the sixteenth century.

- [364] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 101. See note C at end of chapter.

- [365] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iii. c. 235 (Hardy, pp. 401, 402).

- [366] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 116.

- [367] Gesta Amb. Domin. (ibid.), p. 168.

- [368] Ibid.

Strangely, yet characteristically, that final blow Fulk left to be struck by his successor. As his life drew to its close the ghostly terrors of his youth came back to him with redoubled force; and the world which had marvelled at his exploits and his crimes marvelled no less at his last penance. For the fourth time he went out to Jerusalem, and there caused two servants, bound by an oath to do whatsoever he should bid them, to drag him round the Holy City in the sight of all the Turks, one holding him by a halter round his neck, the other scourging his naked back, while he cried aloud for Heaven’s mercy on his soul as a perjured and miserable sinner.[369] He made his way homeward as far as Metz.[370] There, on June 21st, 1040, the Black Count’s soul passed away;[371] and his body was embalmed, carried home to Beaulieu, and buried in the chapter-house of the abbey which had been the monument of his earliest pilgrimage, the first-fruits of his youthful devotion and daring.[372]

- [369] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iii. c. 235 (Hardy, p. 402).

- [370] “Metensem urbem,” Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes) p. 117. From the last word one would imagine this could only mean Metz in Lorraine; but there is another Metz in the Gâtinais; and although it is, and clearly always has been, an insignificant little town, quite undeserving the title of “urbs,” it seems more likely than its greater namesake to be the place really meant. For Metz in Lorraine would be completely out of the way of a traveller from Palestine to Anjou, while Metz in the Gâtinais was not merely close to Fulk’s home, but was actually in the territory of his own son-in-law (of whom we shall hear again later). It would be as natural for him to stop there on his way as it would be unnatural for him to fetch a compass through the remote dominions of the duke of Lorraine; and, on the other hand, the place is so insignificant that a careless and ignorant writer, such as John of Marmoutier, even though dwelling at no great distance, might easily forget its existence.

- [371] Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1040 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 24, 135). Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 377. Gesta Cons. (ibid.), p. 117.

- [372] Fulk Rechin and Gesta Cons., as above.

From Beaulieu, at least, he had deserved nothing but gratitude, and Beaulieu never forgot the debt. For seven centuries the anniversary of his death was solemnly observed in the abbey; so was that of his widow, who as a bride had helped to the dedication of the church, and who now, following her husband’s last steps, went out to die at Jerusalem.[373] For seven centuries, as the monks gathered in the church to keep their yearly festival in honour of his gift, the fragment of sacred stone, they read over in the office of the day the story of his pilgrimage, and chanted the praise of his pious theft.[374] Next to that trophy, his tomb was their pride; it vanished in the general wreck of 1793; but research within the last few years has happily succeeded in bringing the Black Count’s earthly resting-place to light once more.[375] But it was not Beaulieu alone that kept his memory green. His own little Angevin marchland, his fairer conquest Touraine, are sown thick with memorials of him. So strong was the impression made by his activity in one direction that after-generations have persisted in attributing to him almost every important architectural work in his dominions, and transferred the credit of several constructions even of Henry Fitz-Empress to the first “great builder” of Anjou, who was believed to have had command over more than mortal artificers. Popular imagination, with its unerring instinct, rightly seized upon the Black Count as the embodiment of Angevin glory and greatness. The credit of the astute politician, the valiant warrior, the consummate general, the strenuous ruler—all this is his due, and something more; the credit of having, by the initiative force of genius, launched Anjou upon her career with an impetus such as no opposing power could thenceforth avail to check. One is tempted to wonder how far into the future of his house those keen eyes of the Black Falcon really saw; whether he saw it or not, that future was in a great measure of his own making; for his fifty-three years of work and warfare had been spent in settling the question on which that future depended—the question whether Anjou or Blois was to be the chief power of central Gaul. When his place was taken by Geoffrey Martel, there could no longer be any doubt of the answer.

- [373] See extract from Martyrology of Ronceray in Marchegay, Eglises, p. 395, note 3.

- [374] See the office in Salies, Foulques-Nerra, pp. 499 et seq.

- [375] See Salies, Foulques-Nerra, pp. 456 et seq.

The new count of Anjou began his reign in circumstances very unlike those of his father half a century before. Not only had Fulk wholly changed the political position of Anjou, but Geoffrey’s own position as an individual was totally different. He was no untried boy, left to fight his own way with no weapons save the endowments which nature had given him; he was a full-grown man, trained in the school of Fulk Nerra, and already experienced in politics and war. In his own day Geoffrey Martel was looked up to with as much respect as his father, and with even more dread. His career is an illustration of the saying that nothing succeeds like success. Till he came into collision with the duke of Normandy, he carried all before him like chaff before the wind. He crushed Aquitaine; he won Tours; he won Le Mans. It was no wonder if he delighted to commemorate in the surname of Martel, “the Hammer,” the victorious blows which laid opponent after opponent at the feet of the blacksmith’s foster-son.[376] But Geoffrey was not the artificer of his own fortune. He owed his pre-eminence among the great vassals of the Crown to his extended possessions and his military reputation; he owed his extended possessions more to his father’s labours and to a series of favourable accidents than to his own qualities as a statesman; and he owed his military reputation—as one writer who understood the Angevins thoroughly has very plainly hinted—more to luck than to real generalship.[377] Geoffrey stands at a disadvantage thus far, that in contemplating him one cannot avoid two very trying comparisons. It was as unlucky for his after-fame as it was lucky for his material prosperity that he was the son of Fulk the Black; it was unlucky for him in every way that he was the rival of William the Conqueror. Neither as a statesman, a ruler, a strategist, or a man was Geoffrey equal to his father. As a statesman he showed no very lofty capacity; his designs on Aquitaine, sweeping but pointless, came to nothing in the end: and with regard to Touraine and Maine, politically, he had little to do but to reap the fruit of Fulk’s labours and use the advantages which the favour of the king in one case, the rashness of the bishop in the other, and the weakness of the rival count in both, threw absolutely into his hands. As a ruler he seems to have been looked up to with simple dread; there is little trace of the intense personal following which others of his race knew so well how to inspire;[378] the first time he was intrusted with the government of Anjou his harshness and oppression roused the indignation alike of his subjects and of his father; his neighbours looked on him to the last as a tyrant,[379] and his own people seem to have feared far more than they loved him. As a strategist there is really no proof that he possessed any such overwhelming superiority as he himself boasted, and as others were led to believe. His two great victories, at Montcontour and Montlouis, dazzled the world because the one was gained over a prince who by the tradition of ages counted as the first potentate in the realm after the duke of Normandy, and the other led to the acquisition of Tours; but the capture of William of Aquitaine was really nothing more than the fortune of war; while in the case of the victory over Theobald of Blois at Montlouis, a considerable part of the credit is due to Geoffrey’s lieutenant Lisoy of Amboise; and moreover, to have beaten the successor of Odo II. is after all no very wonderful achievement for the successor of Fulk the Black. Twice in his life Geoffrey met his master. The first time he owned it himself as he lay at his father’s feet. The second time he evaded the risk of open defeat by a tacit withdrawal far more shameful in a moral point of view. It is small blame to Geoffrey Martel that he was no match for William the Conqueror. Had he, in honest consciousness of his inferiority, done his best to avoid a collision, and when it became inevitable stood to face the consequences like a man, it would have been small shame to him to be defeated by the future victor of Senlac. The real shame is that after courting an encounter and loudly boasting of his desire to break a lance with William, when the opportunity was given him he silently declined to use it. It was but a mean pride and a poor courage that looked upon defeat in fair fight as an unbearable humiliation, and could not feel the deeper moral humiliation of shrinking from the mere chance of that defeat. And it is just this bluntness of feeling, this callousness to everything not visible and tangible to outward sense, which sets Geoffrey as a man far below his father. There is in Fulk a living warmth, a quickness of susceptibility, which breaks out in all sorts of shapes, good and bad, in all the stories of the Black Count, but which seems wholly lacking in Geoffrey. Fulk “sinned bravely,” ardently, impulsively; Geoffrey sinned meanly, coldly, heartlessly. His was altogether a coarser, lower nature. Fulk was truly the falcon that wheels its swift and lofty flight ever closer and closer above the doomed quarry till it strikes it down irresistibly with one unerring swoop. Geoffrey rightly thought himself better represented by the crashing blows of the insensible sledge-hammer.

- [376] Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, Comtes) p. 379; cf. Hist. S. Flor. Salm. (Marchegay, Eglises), p. 260, and Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iii. c. 231 (Hardy, p. 395).

- [377] “Gaufredus cognomento Martellus, quod ipse sibi usurpaverat, quia videbatur sibi felicitate quâdam omnes obsistentes contundere.” Will. Malm. as above.

- [378] Even the devotion of Lisoy of Amboise seems to have been given to Geoffrey chiefly because he was his father’s son. Fulk was its real object.

- [379] See the Norman writers, Orderic and William of Poitiers.

Geoffrey had been an independent ruler in a small sphere for nearly ten years before his father’s death. In 1030 or 1031 he became master of the little county of Vendôme by purchase from his half-sister Adela, the only child of Fulk’s ill-starred first marriage, and the heiress of her maternal grandfather Count Burchard. After doing homage to King Henry for the fief, Geoffrey’s first act was to found in the capital of his new dominions an abbey dedicated to the Holy Trinity.[380] The appointment of an abbot proved the occasion for the first recorded outbreak of that latent discord between Fulk and his heir which, as we have seen, culminated at last in open war. A monk named Reginald had just been sent at Fulk’s request from the great abbey of Marmoutier near Tours, to take the place of Baldwin, abbot of S. Nicolas at Angers, who had fled to bury himself in a hermitage. Before the day came for Reginald’s ordination, however, he deserted to a younger patron, and accepted the abbotship of Geoffrey’s newly-founded abbey at Vendôme. Fulk, thus disappointed by two abbots in succession, “flew,” as he himself said, “into a mighty rage,” summarily ordered the whole colony of monks whom he had brought from Marmoutier to S. Nicolas back to their parent monastery, and replaced them with some of the brethren of S. Aubin’s at Angers, with Hilduin, prior of that convent, as their head.[381] Fulk’s wrath seems to have been directed against the monks rather than against his son; but the incident serves as an illustration of the tendency to opposition that was springing up in Geoffrey’s mind. The quiet, waiting policy of Fulk’s latter years was evidently irksome to the young man’s impatient spirit, and he chose to strike out a path for himself in a direction which, it is not surprising to learn, did not please the old count. The only one of his neighbours with whom Fulk seems to have been always on peaceable terms was the count of Poitou. William Fierabras, the count from whom Geoffrey Greygown had wrested Loudun, died about two years after the second battle of Conquereux.[382] His wife was a daughter of Theobald the Trickster,[383] and his son and successor was therefore first cousin to Odo II. of Blois; but William IV.—whom Aquitaine reckoned as her “William the Great”—seems to have had little in common with his erratic kinsman, and to have always, on the other hand, maintained a friendly understanding with Anjou. Like Odo, he once received an offer of the crown of Italy; Fulk appears in the negotiations as the friendly advocate of the duke’s interests with King Robert,[384] and though the project came to nothing, it may have been in return for Fulk’s good offices on this occasion that William bestowed on him the investiture of Saintes, a gift which was to form the pretext for more than one war between their descendants. On January 31st, 1029, William died,[385] leaving as his successor a son who bore the same name, and whose mother seems to have been a sister of Queen Constance.[386] It was this new duke of Aquitaine, known as William the Fat, whom Geoffrey Martel selected as the first victim of his heavy hand. An Angevin story attributes the origin of the war to a dispute about Saintes or Saintonge,[387] but it will not bear examination. Geoffrey Martel simply trod in the steps of Geoffrey Greygown, and with more marked success. In the autumn of 1033 he started on an expedition against the duke of Aquitaine; William encountered him on September 20th in a pitched battle near the abbey of S. Jouin-de-Marne, not far from Montcontour in Poitou; the Poitevins were defeated, partly, it seems, through treason in their own ranks, and their duke was taken prisoner.[388] For three years the duke of Aquitaine, the second great feudatary of the realm, was kept in a dungeon by the count of Vendôme;[389] not till the whole district of Saintonge[390] and several important towns were ceded to Geoffrey, and an annual tribute promised, would he release his captive. From the execution of the last humiliating condition William was delivered by death; the cruel treatment he had suffered in prison had done its work; Geoffrey had exacted the ransom for his prisoner just in time, and sent him home only to die three days after his liberation.[391]

[380] Origo Com. Vindoc., in Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xi. p. 31. See also Mabillon, Ann. Bened., vol. iv. pp. 378, 379.

[381] The whole story is told only by Fulk himself, in a charter to the abbey of S. Nicolas; Breviculum S. Nicolai (Le Pelletier), quoted in Mabillon, Ann. Bened., vol. iv. p. 379.

[382] See editor’s note to Peter of Maillezais, Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 183, note g.

[383] Chron. S. Maxent. a. 972 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 380).

[384] Adem. Chabanais, Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 161. Letters of William of Poitou, ib. pp. 483, 484; of Fulk to Robert, ib. pp. 500, 501.

[385] Chron. S. Maxent. ad ann. (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 390).

[386] She was Adelmodia, widow of Boso, count of La Marche, and daughter of William count of Arles and “Candida,” otherwise Adelaide the White; see Pet. Maillezais, l. i. c. 6 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 182), and note B at end of chapter.

[387] See note C at end of chapter iv. below.

[388] Chronn. S. Maxent. a. 1032, S. Albin. and S. Flor. Salm. a. 1033 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 391, 392, 23, 188); S. Serg. a. 1028 (ib. p. 135). Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 378. Cf. Gesta Cons. (ibid.), pp. 128–130, and note C to chapter iv. below.

[389] Chron. S. Maxent. a. 1036 (as above, p. 392).

[390] “Sanctonas cum toto pago.” Chron. Tur. Magn., Salmon, Chron. de Touraine, p. 122. (The date, “anno Henrici Imperatoris iv et Henrici regis xiii,” is of course absurd, like most of the dates in the Tours chronicle at this period, except those which relate to local matters). Cf. Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 126, and note C to chapter iv. below.

[391] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iii. c. 231 (Hardy, p. 395). Cf. Will. Poitiers (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 182.

Then Geoffrey threw off the mask. William had no children; his next heir was his half-brother Odo, the son of his father’s second marriage with Brisca, heiress of Gascony.[392] But after Brisca’s death, William the Great had married a third wife, whom he had left a still young widow with three little children. Before William the Fat had been many months dead, his stepmother the widowed Countess Agnes gave her hand to Geoffrey of Vendôme.[393] Geoffrey’s motive is plain; he sought to prevent the union of Poitou and Gascony and to get the former practically into his own hands as stepfather and guardian to the young sons of Agnes. But in Anjou the wedding gave great scandal; Geoffrey and Agnes were denounced in the harshest terms as too near akin to marry.[394] They seem in fact to have been, by the reckoning of the canon law, cousins in the third degree, as being, one a grandson, the other a great-granddaughter of Adela of Chalon, the second wife of Geoffrey Greygown.[395] At any rate they were looked upon as sinners, and by no one more than the bridegroom’s father. The whole scheme of Geoffrey’s meddlings in Aquitaine was repugnant to Fulk Nerra’s policy; he looked to his son to complete his own labours in Touraine and Maine, and it was no good omen for the fulfilment of his hopes when Geoffrey thus turned his back upon his appointed work for the love of Countess Agnes or of her late husband’s possessions. The capture of William the Fat had been the signal for the first outbreak of a “more than civil war” between father and son;[396] Geoffrey’s misconduct during his regency in Anjou brought matters to the crisis which ended in his first and last public defeat. Nevertheless he obstinately pursued his projects. The Poitevins, by the death of their count, were left, as their own chronicler says, “as sheep having no shepherd”; there was a party among them ready to support the claims of Agnes’s sons against their elder half-brother Odo of Gascony; and one of the leaders of this party, William of Parthenay, built with Angevin help a fortress at Germont in which he held out successfully against the besieging forces of Odo. The count of Gascony then proceeded to Mausé, another stronghold of his enemies, and in assaulting this place he was slain.[397] He left no children; the elder of Geoffrey Martel’s stepsons was now therefore heir to Poitou. The boys were twins; the third child of Agnes was a girl, who bore her mother’s name, and for whom her mother and stepfather contrived in 1043 to arrange a marriage with no less important a personage than the Emperor Henry III.,[398] whose first wife had been a daughter of Cnut. It was not till the year after this imperial wedding that the troubled affairs of Aquitaine were definitely settled. In 1044 Countess Agnes came to Poitiers accompanied by her two sons, Peter and Geoffrey, and her husband, their stepfather, Geoffrey Martel; there they held with the chief nobles of Poitou a council at which Peter, or William as he was thenceforth called, was solemnly ordained as duke of Aquitaine, and his brother sent into Gascony to become its count.[399] Agnes at least must now have attained her object; whether Geoffrey Martel was equally satisfied with the result of his schemes may be a question, for we do not clearly know how wide the range of those schemes really was. If, as seems likely, they included the hope of acquiring a lasting hold over Aquitaine, then their issue was a failure. By the victory of Montcontour Geoffrey had gained for himself at one blow a great military reputation; but for Anjou the only solid gain was the acquisition of Saintonge, and this, like some of the outlying possessions of the house of Blois, soon proved more trouble than profit. If Martel expected that his stepsons would hold themselves indebted to him for their coronets and remain his grateful and dutiful miscalculation. The marriage of a duchess-dowager of Aquitaine with Geoffrey Martel naturally suggests thoughts of the marriage of a duchess-regnant with a later count of Anjou; but the resemblance between the two cases is of the most superficial kind; the earlier connexion between Anjou and Aquitaine did little or nothing to pave the way for their later union. Geoffrey himself, indeed, had already discovered that although the count of Vendôme might go seeking adventures in the south, the duties and the interests of the count of Anjou still lay to the north, or at the utmost no farther away than the banks of the great frontier-river.

[392] Chron. S. Maxent. a. 1010 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 387, 388).

[393] Will. Poitiers (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 182. Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iii. c. 231 (Hardy, p. 395). Chron. S. Maxent. a. 1037 (as above, pp. 392, 393); Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1032 (ib. pp. 23, 135). On the date see note D at end of chapter.

[394] Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1032 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 23, 135).

[395] See note D at end of chapter.

[396] Chronn. S. Albin. a. 1032, 1033 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 23); S. Serg. a. 1028 (ib. p. 135); Rain. Andeg. a. 1036, 1037 (ib. p. 11). The Chron. S. Albin. a. 1033, says: “Gaufridus ... Willelmum comitem Pictavorum sumpsit in bello; quare orta est discordia inter patrem et filium.” Labbe in his Bibl. MSS. Librorum printed this “patrem et matrem,” and thereby originated a perfectly groundless story of a quarrel between Fulk and Hildegard.

[397] Chron. S. Maxent. a. 1037 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 392, 393).

[398] Hermann. Contract., a. 1043 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xi. p. 19). Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. ad ann. (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 24, 135, 136). The Chron. S. Maxent. (ib. p. 398) dates the marriage vaguely “per hæc tempora” under 1049.

[399] Chron. S. Maxent. a. 1044 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 394, 395). It seems quite plain that the elder boy’s baptismal name was Peter, but he signs his charters “William” (see Besly, Comtes de Poitou, preuves, pp. 314, 317). The Chron. S. Maxent. a. 1058 (as above, p. 400) calls him “Willelmus qui et Petrus, cognomento Acer.” In recording the birth of the two boys (a. 1023, ib. p. 388) the same writer calls them “Petrum cognomine Acerrimum, et Gaufredum qui et Wido vocatus est”; and he afterwards speaks of the latter by both names indifferently. It seems however to have been an established rule that the reigning duke of Aquitaine must be officially called William; for Guy-Geoffrey also assumed the name when he succeeded his brother in 1058.

The visions of empire to which Odo of Champagne had sacrificed the latter years of his life had perished with him on the field of Bar. Not a foot of land outside the limits of the kingdom of France had he left to his heirs. He had two sons, Theobald and Stephen, whose very names seemed to mark out their destined shares in his dominions. Stephen, the younger, became count of Champagne; to Theobald, the elder, fell the original territories of his house—Blois, Chartres and Tours.[400] Theobald’s heritage however was shorn of its fairest portion. The county of Tours now comprised little more than the capital; all Touraine south of the Loire—by far the most fertile and valuable half—was in the power of the Angevin; Tours itself, once a secure central post, had become a closely threatened border-city. Theobald’s first duty was to protect it, but it seems to have been the last thing he thought of. Odo’s sons had inherited all his wrongheadedness without his quickness of thought and action. Shut in as they were on all sides by powerful foes, the two young men began their career by rebelling after the manner of their forefathers;[401] and the king’s youngest brother Odo was lured, by a promise of dethroning Henry in his favour, into joining in their rebellion. Odo, a youth of weak intellect, was in himself no very formidable person, but he might for the very same reason become a dangerous tool in the hands of his fellow-conspirators; and a rebellious coalition of Blois and Champagne threatened to be a serious difficulty for the king at a moment when there was scarcely one of the great feudataries on whom he could reckon for support. The death of Duke Robert of Normandy had plunged his duchy into confusion and deprived Henry of all chance of help in the quarter which had hitherto been his chief source of strength. The county of Burgundy was governed by the king’s brother Robert, who had with difficulty been induced to accept it as compensation for the failure of his hopes of the crown. Flanders and Britanny were always indifferent to the troubles and necessities of the king; the count of Vermandois was a kinsman and ally of Champagne; Aquitaine was as powerless as Normandy. The one vassal to whom Henry could look for aid was the count of Anjou. Had the rebels possessed sense and spirit they might have given Henry quite as much trouble as their father had given Robert; but they seem to have had no well-concerted plan; each acted independently, and each was crushed singly. Young Odo, their puppet pretender, was easily caught and imprisoned at Orléans; Stephen of Champagne was defeated in a pitched battle by the king himself;[402] Theobald of Blois was left to be dealt with by other hands. With a master-stroke of policy, Henry proclaimed the city of Tours forfeit by Theobald’s rebellion, and granted its investiture to the count of Anjou.[403]

- [400] Hugh of Fleury, Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xi. p. 159. Chron. Fr. Andreæ, ib. p. 364.

- [401] Hugh of Fleury and Chron. Fr. Andreæ, as above. Hist. Franc. Fragm. (ibid.), p. 160.

- [402] Hist. Franc. Fragm. (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xi.), p. 160. Hugh of Fleury (ibid.), p. 159.

- [403] Chron. Virdun. a. 1039 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xi. p. 144). R. Glaber, l. v. c. 2 (ib. vol. x. p. 60), copied in Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 122, 123. Fulk Rechin (ibid.), p. 378.

To understand the full importance of this grant and of the war which followed it, we must know something of the history of Tours and of the peculiar feelings and interests attached to it. The origin of Tours as a city dates from the time of the Roman empire, when it appears under the name of Cæsarodunum.[404] The Roman castrum was built in a broad, shallow sort of basin, watered on the north by the Loire, on the south by the Cher; it probably occupied the site of some village of those Turones or Turoni, who play a part in the Gallic wars of Cæsar,[405] and whose name in the end superseded that which the place received from its conqueror. The “city of the Turones” became the central point of a network of roads connecting it with Poitiers, Chartres, Bourges, Orléans, Le Mans and Angers;[406] and owing to the convenience of its situation for military and administrative purposes it was made the capital of the Third Lyonnese province.[407] But its hold on the minds of men was due to another gift of Rome, more precious than roads or fortifications or even political traditions. It was the holy city of Gaul, the cradle of Gaulish Christianity. Its first bishop, Gatian, was one of seven missionaries sent out from Rome to evangelize the Gallic provinces in the days of the Decian persecution.[408] S. Gatian’s episcopate of half a century fell in one of the most distracted periods of the Empire; after his death the Church which he had planted remained untended for nearly forty years, and it was not till after the death of Constantine that Tours received her second bishop in the person of Lidorius, one of her own sons, who laid the foundations of a cathedral church.[409] But the fame of the two first bishops of Tours was completely overshadowed by that of the third. The work of S. Gatian and S. Lidorius was confined to their own immediate flock; S. Martin was the apostle not only of Touraine but of all central Gaul. Born at Sabaria[410] in the Upper Pannonia, in the reign of the first Christian Emperor, but of heathen parents, Martin rose to high military distinction under the Cæsar Julian, accompanied him into Gaul, and enjoyed his utmost esteem and regard till he forfeited them by renouncing the standard of the eagles for that of the Cross. Neither the wrath of his commander nor the entreaties of his fellow-soldiers, by whom he was greatly beloved, availed to shake his resolution; he fled to Poitiers, and there found a friend and counsellor in the holy bishop Hilary, from whom he received the minor orders. After braving toil and peril by land and sea in a journey to his native country for the conversion of his family, he returned to a life of seclusion in Gaul, and acquired such a reputation for holiness that on the death of Lidorius in 371 the people of Tours, in spite of his strenuous resistance, actually forced him to become their bishop.[411] From that moment Tours became a mission-centre whence the light of the faith spread with marvellous rapidity over all the surrounding country. Anjou and all the neighbouring lands owed their conversion to S. Martin and the missionaries sent out by him; everywhere paganism gave way before his eloquent preaching, his dauntless courage, his almost apostolic endowments—above all, perhaps, his good example. He was looked upon as the Thaumaturgus of Gaul, and countless legends were told of his wonder-working powers; more famous than all of them is a story of the saint in his soldier-days, when, Christian already in feeling though not yet in profession, he stopped his horse one cold winter’s night, drew his sword and cut his military cloak in halves to share it with one whose necessity was greater than his own. That night he dreamed that the Lord whom, not knowing, he yet instinctively served, appeared to him wearing the half cloak which he had thus given away; and it was this vision which determined him to receive baptism.[412] Amid all his busy, active life he never lost the love of solitary contemplation so characteristic of the early Christian missionaries. His episcopal city lay on the south side of the Loire, but had on the north or right bank a large suburb afterwards known by the name of S. Symphorian; beyond this, farther to the eastward, the bishop found for himself a “green retreat,” which has scarcely yet lost its air of peaceful loneliness, and which, before the suburb had spread to its present extent, must have been an ideal spot for monastic retirement. A little wooden cell with its back against the white limestone rock which shelters the northern side of the basin of Tours—an expanse of green solitude in front, stretching down to the broad calm river—such was the nest which S. Martin built him in the wilderness; gathering round him a little band of men likeminded with himself, he snatched every spare moment from his episcopal cares to flee away thither and be at rest;[413] and the rock-hewn cells of the brotherhood became the nucleus of a famous abbey, the “Great Monastery,” as it was emphatically called—Majus Monasterium, Marmoutier. Another minster, of almost greater fame, grew up over the saint’s burial place outside the western wall of the city, on low-lying ground which, before it was reclaimed by the energetic dyke-makers of the ninth and tenth centuries, must have been not unfrequently under water. It is within the episcopal city of S. Martin, in the writings of Bishop Gregory of Tours, that West-Frankish history begins. An English student feels a nearer interest in the abbey without the walls, remembering that the abbot under whom it reached its highest glory and became the very fount and source of all contemporary learning, human and divine, was Alcuin of York.

- [404] Ptolem., l. ii. c. 8.

- [405] Cæsar, De Bello Gallico, l. ii. c. 35; l. vii. c. 75; l. viii. c. 46.

- [406] Article by M. E. Mabille on “Topographie de la Touraine,” in Bibl. de l’Ecole des Chartes, series v. vol. iv. pp. 413, 414.

- [407] Notitia Provinciarum Galliæ, Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. i. p. 122.

- [408] Greg. of Tours, Hist. Franc., l. i. c. 28.

- [409] Chron. Archiep. Turon., Salmon, Chron. de Touraine, p. 201.

- [410] Now Stein-am-Angern.

- [411] Sulpitius Severus, Vita B. Martini, cc. 2–9. Greg. Tours., Hist. Franc., l. i. cc. 34, 36, 43.

- [412] Sulp. Severus, Vita B. Martini, c. 3.

- [413] Sulp. Severus, Vita B. Martini, c. 10.

When the great English scholar and the great Emperor who had brought him into Gaul were gone, Tours underwent her full share of suffering in the invasions of the northmen. City and abbey became to the valley of the Loire something like what Paris and S. Denis were to that of the Seine, the chief bulwark against the fresh tide of heathen force which threatened to sweep away the footsteps of saints and scholars. Once, indeed, Tours had been in danger from heathens of another sort, and a body of Saracens had been turned back from her gates and destroyed by Charles Martel.[414] There was no Martel to save her from the northmen; her only defence consisted in the valour of her citizens, and the fortifications left to her by her Roman governors and carefully strengthened by her Karolingian sovereigns.[415] Over and over again the pirates were driven back from the walls of Cæsarodunum; over and over again S. Martin’s Abbey was burnt to the ground. For years the canons, who in Alcuin’s days had taken the place of the original monks,[416] lived in constant fear of desecration befalling their patron’s body, and carried it from place to place, like the body of our own S. Cuthbert, sometimes depositing it within the city walls, sometimes removing it farther inland—once even to the far-off Burgundian duchy—bringing it home whenever they dared, or whenever they had a church fit to contain it. Two of these “reversions”—one on December 13, 885, the other on May 12, 919—were annually celebrated at Tours, in addition to two other feasts of S. Martin, his ordination on July 4 and his “deposition” on November 11.[417] In the first reversion Ingelger, the founder of the Angevin house, was said to have borne a prominent part. The story of the second was afterwards superseded by a famous legend known as that of the “subvention of S. Martin.” Once, it was said, when the citizens of Tours were sore pressed by the besieging hosts of the northmen, they resolved to intrust their cause to a heavenly champion, and brought out upon the walls the corpse of the saint, which had been deposited for safety within the city. The living heathen fled at once before the dead saint; they were pursued by the triumphant citizens, still carrying their patron in their midst, and utterly routed at a spot which thence received the name of “S. Martin of the Battle.”[418] This story seems to belong to the siege of 903, when Marmoutier was destroyed, and the abbey of S. Martin burnt to the ground for the third time. When the canons again rebuilt it, they took the precaution of encircling it with a wall, and procured from Charles the Simple a charter which resulted in the creation of a new fortified borough, exempt from the jurisdiction of both bishop and count, and subject only to its own abbot—in other words, to the duke of the French, who from the middle of the eighth century always held in commendam the abbey of S. Martin at Tours, as he did that of S. Denis at Paris.[419] Thus, side by side with the old city of the Turones, Cæsarodunum with its Roman walls, its count, its cathedral and its archbishop, there arose the “Castrum Novum,” Châteauneuf, “Castellum S. Martini,” Martinopolis as it is sometimes called, with its own walled enclosure, its collegiate church and its abbot-duke. The counts of Anjou, who followed so steadily in the train of the ducal house, were not blind to the means of gaining a footing in such tempting neighbourhood to the walls of Tours; from an early period they took care to connect themselves with the abbey of which their patron was the head. The first count of Anjou and his father play an important part in the legendary history of the two great “reversions”; Fulk the Good is almost more familiar to us as canon than as count, and the stall next to that of the dean of S. Martin’s, which he so loved to occupy, whence he wrote his famous letter, and where he saw his vision of the saint, seems to have become hereditary among his descendants like the abbotship among those of Hugh the Great. Good Canon Fulk prized it as a spiritual privilege; his successors probably looked upon it rather in the light of a political wedge whereby they might some day force an entrance into the greedily-coveted city itself. Tours was the point towards which Fulk the Black had worked steadily all his life long; and when he left his son to complete his labours, that point was almost reached. But, with her broad river and her Roman walls, Tours was still hard to win. To block the river was impossible; to break down the walls would need nothing less than a regular siege, and one which could not fail to be long, tedious and costly. Geoffrey seems to have delayed the task until by the king’s grant of the investiture it became a point of honour as well as a matter of the most pressing interest to make good the claim thus placed in his hands.

[414] Fredegar. Contin., l. ii. c. 108 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. ii. p. 454); Chron. Fontanell. a. 732 (ib. p. 660), etc.

[415] See Ann. Bertin., Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. vii. p. 107.

[416] Chron. Petr. Fil. Bechin., in Salmon, Chron. de Touraine, p. 40. Chron. Tur. Magn. a. 991 (ib. p. 93). See Gall. Christ., vol. xiv. col. 154.

[417] For the whole history of the wanderings and the festivals of S. Martin, and of the sieges of Tours by the northmen, see an article by M. Mabille, “Les Invasions normandes dans la Loire et les pérégrinations du corps de S. Martin,” in Bibl. de l’Ecole des Chartes, series vi. vol. v. pp. 149–194.

[418] Tract. de Revers. B. Martini, in Salmon, Supplément aux Chron. de Touraine, pp. 14–34; copied in Gesta Cons. (see note A to chapter ii. above). On the date, see Mabille, “Inv. Norm.” (Bibl. de l’Ecole des Chartes, series vi. vol. v. p. 190). This device of the citizens of Tours was several times imitated elsewhere; e.g. by the monks of Saumur with the body of S. Docelinus, when Fulk Nerra besieged the place in 1025 (Hist. S. Flor. Salm., Marchegay, Eglises, p. 277); and by the monks of S. Peter at Sens, against the same opponent, in 1032 (Chron. S. Petr. Senon. ad ann., Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xi. p. 196). The former failed, the latter succeeded.

[419] Charter of Charles the Simple, a. 918, in Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. ix. p. 540. For the history of the “Castellum S. Martini,” and the topography of Tours and Châteauneuf, see “Topographie de la Touraine,” by M. E. Mabille, in Bibl. de l’Ecole des Chartes, series v. vol. v. pp. 321–366; and for the topography and history of the whole district from the earliest times see previous articles under the same title, series v. vol. iii. pp. 309–332, vol. iv. pp. 388–428, and vol. v. pp. 233–258.

He woke at once from his Aquitanian dreams, gathered his forces, and led them out, probably not by the old Roman road from Juliomagus to Cæsarodunum past the white steeps of his father’s Montboyau, but by a safer though longer route, passing along the southern bank of the Loire and across the valleys of the Vienne and the Indre, to lay siege to Tours. With the royal sanction to his enterprise he had the great advantage of being able to use Châteauneuf as a basis of operations. The monastery of S. Julian, at the north-east corner of the town, close against the city wall, was especially convenient for attacking the latter; Geoffrey took possession of it and used it accordingly.[420] The city, however, held out against him for a whole year, during which its inhabitants seem to have been left by their count to defend themselves as best they could. At last, in August 1044, Theobald collected an army for its relief, in union with the forces of Champagne under his brother Stephen.[421] Geoffrey, in expectation of this, had detached from his main force a body of two hundred knights and fifteen hundred foot, whom he posted at Amboise under Lisoy, to guard the road against Theobald.[422] The services of Lisoy were a special legacy from Fulk the Black to his son. Of all Fulk’s adherents, none had served him so intelligently and so devotedly as this Cenomannian knight whom he had chosen to be the colleague of the aged Sulpice in the defence of Amboise and Loches. Fulk, when he felt his end approaching, had striven hard to impress on his son the value of such a true and tried friend, and at the same time to bind Lisoy yet more closely to him by arranging his marriage with Hersendis, the niece and heiress of Sulpice, whereby Lisoy came into possession of all Sulpice’s estates at Loches and Amboise, including the famous tower of stone.[423] Lisoy proved as true to the new count as to the old one. Theobald, not daring to come within reach of Amboise, avoided the direct route from Blois to Tours along the Loire,[424] and took the road by Pontlevoy to Montrichard. The chief force of Montrichard, with its commander Roger, was no doubt with Geoffrey before Tours, so the count of Blois pursued his way unmolested, plundering as he went, down the valley of the Cher, till he pitched his tents in the meadows of St.-Quentin opposite Bléré, and there stayed a day and a night to rest.[425] All his movements were known to the watchful lord of Amboise; and as soon as Lisoy had fully ascertained the numbers and plans of the enemy, he hurried off to seek his count in the army before Tours, and offer him some sound military advice. He represented that it would be far better to raise the siege, join the whole Angevin force with that which was already at Amboise, and stake everything on a pitched battle. The enemy might beat either Geoffrey or his lieutenant singly, but united they would be irresistible; and whereas the siege must be long and tedious, and its result uncertain, one victory in the field would lay all Touraine at the victor’s feet. Only let the count be quick and not suffer his foe to catch him at unawares.[426]

- [420] See Gall. Christ., vol. xiv. col. 243.

- [421] R. Glaber, l. v. c. 2 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 60).

- [422] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 118.

- [423] Gesta Amb. Domin. (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 168, 169.

- [424] Ib. p. 170.

- [425] Gesta Cons. (ibid.), p. 119.

- [426] Ib. pp. 118, 119.

Geoffrey, as he listened to this bold counsel, must have been reminded of his father’s warning, that a true friend like Lisoy was a surer source of strength than either hosts or treasures.[427] He took the advice, and while Lisoy returned to Amboise to bring up his little force to the trysting-place agreed upon between them, his count, after diligent prayers and vows to S. Martin, took the consecrated banner of the abbey from its place above the shrine, affixed it to his own spear, and rode forth with it at the head of all his troops to do battle with Theobald.[428] On the same day when Theobald encamped opposite Bléré Geoffrey reached Montlouis, a hill on the south bank of the Loire, about half way between Tours and Amboise. Next morning the men of Blois resumed their march; turning in a north-westerly direction they were met at a place called Noit by the Angevins coming down from Montlouis. The Hammer of Anjou, ever foremost in fight, headed the attack on the enemy’s centre; his faithful Lisoy came up, as he had promised, at the head of his contingent, and threw himself on their right wing.[429] What followed scarcely deserved the name of a battle. The army of the brother-counts seemed spell-bound, and made no resistance at all; Stephen took to flight at once and escaped with a few knights;[430] the rest of the troops of Blois and Champagne were utterly defeated and taken prisoners almost in a body. The men of Amboise were hottest in pursuit of the fugitives, and they won the great prize of the day. They drove Theobald with some five or six hundred knights into a wood called Braye, whence it was impossible for horsemen to extricate themselves; and thus Lisoy had the honour of bringing the count of Blois a captive to the feet of Geoffrey Martel.[431] No one at the time doubted that the Angevins owed their easy victory to the saint whose standard they were following. The few soldiers of Theobald who escaped declared that they had seen Geoffrey’s troops all clad in shining white raiment, and fled in horror, believing themselves to be fighting against the hosts of Heaven.[432] The village near which the fight took place was called “burgum S. Martini Belli”[433]—S. Martin of the Battle, a name derived from the “subvention of S. Martin,” supposed to have occurred at the same place two hundred years before. Most curiously, neither the well-known legend of the saint’s triumph over the northmen nor the fame of Geoffrey’s triumph over the count of Blois availed to fix in popular memory the true meaning of the name. While the English “Place of Battle” at Senlac has long forgotten its dedication to S. Martin, its namesake in Touraine has forgotten both its battles and become “St.-Martin-le-Beau.”

- [427] Gesta Amb. Domin. (ibid.·/·Marchegay, Comtes), p. 168.

- [428] R. Glaber, l. v. c. 2 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 60); copied in Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 122.

- [429] Gesta Cons. (as above), p. 120.

- [430] R. Glaber, l. v. c. 2 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 61); copied in Gesta Cons. (as above), p. 122.

- [431] Gesta Cons. (as above), p. 121; Gesta Amb. Domin. (ibid.), p. 170.

- [432] R. Glaber, as above; Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 123.

- [433] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 120.

With very little bloodshed, the Angevins had gained over a thousand prisoners.[434] The most valuable of them all was put in ward at Loches;[435] but he took care not to stay there long. Theobald took warning by the fate of William of Aquitaine;[436] he had no mind to run the risk of dying in prison, and held his person far dearer than his property.[437] Three days after his capture, finding that no amount of silver or gold would avail to purchase his release, he yielded the only ransom which Geoffrey would accept: the city of Tours and the whole county of Touraine.[438] A nominal overlordship over the ceded territory was reserved to Theobald, and Geoffrey had to go through the formality of doing homage for it to him.[439] When the substance was securely his own, the count of Anjou could well afford to leave to his vanquished rival the shadowy consolation of an empty ceremony. Moreover, the circumstances of the whole transaction and the account of King Henry’s grant to Geoffrey clearly imply that Theobald’s rights over the most important point of all, the capital itself, were considered as entirely forfeited by his rebellion, so that with regard to the city of Tours Geoffrey stepped into the exact place of its former counts, holding it directly of the king alone.

- [434] Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 378; R. Glaber, l. v. c. 2 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 61). For the date of the battle—August 21, 1044—see Chronn. Rain. Andeg., S. Albin., S. Serg., Vindoc., S. Flor. Salm., and S. Maxent. ad ann. (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 11, 24, 136, 166, 188, 395). The Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 121, and Gesta Amb. Domin. (ibid.), p. 170, make it 1042, but they cannot possibly be right.

- [435] Gesta Amb. Domin. as above.

- [436] Will. Poitiers (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 182.

- [437] Gesta Cons., as above. See the comment of Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iii. c. 231 (Hardy, p. 396).

- [438] Will. Jumièges, l. vii. c. 18 (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 276); Gesta Cons. (as above), pp. 121, 122; the details of the treaty are in pp. 123, 124.

- [439] Gesta Amb. Domin. as above.

The acquisition of Tours closes the second stage in the career of the house of Anjou. Looked at from a strictly Angevin point of view, the period just passed through, although in one sense only preliminary, is the most important of all, for it is that on which depended all the later growth, nay, almost the very existence of Anjou. Had the counts of Blois proved too strong for her in these her early years, she would have been swallowed up altogether; had they merely proved themselves her equals, the two states so closely bound together would have neutralized each other so that neither of them could have risen to any commanding eminence; till one or the other should sweep its rival out of its path, both must be impeded in their developement. At the opening of the struggle, in Fulk Nerra’s youth, Blois was distinctly in the ascendant, and the chances of independent existence for the little Marchland hung solely on the courage and statesmanship of its count. His dauntless genius, helped by Odo’s folly, saved Anjou and turned the tide completely in its favour. The treaty sworn, four years after Fulk’s death, in his great castle by the Indre, was the crowning of his life’s work, and left his son absolutely without a rival till he chose to seek one beyond the debateable ground of Maine. The long struggle of Fulk and Odo, completed by Geoffrey and Theobald, had made a clear field for the future struggles of Geoffrey and William, of Fulk V. and Henry I., and at last—by a strange turn of fate—for a renewal of the old feud with the house of Blois itself, in a new form and for a far higher stake, in the struggle of Stephen and Henry Fitz-Empress for the English crown.

Note A.
THE SIEGE OF MELUN.

The fullest account of this Melun affair is in Richer, l. iv. cc. 74–78. Briefly, it comes to this: Odo (described simply by his name, without title of any kind) “rerum suarum augmentum querebat,” and especially the castle of Melun, partly for the convenience of getting troops across the Seine, and partly because it had formerly belonged to his grandfather and was now in the hands, not of the king, but of “another” (not named). He managed to corrupt the officer in command and to obtain possession of the place. As soon as the kings (reges) heard of it, they gathered their forces to besiege him there: “et quia castrum circumfluente Sequanâ ambiebatur, ipsi in litore primo castra disponunt; in ulteriore, accitas piratarum acies ordinant.” These “pirates” furnished a fleet which blockaded the place, and finally discovered a secret entrance whereby they got into the town, surprised the castle, and compelled it to surrender to the king (regi).

2. William of Jumièges (l. v. c. 14, Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 255) tells the story more briefly, but to exactly the same effect. He mentions however only one king: he supplies the name of the “other man” who held Melun—viz. Burchard: he clearly implies that “Odo” is Odo II. of Blois (of whose doings with Normandy he has just given an account in c. 12, ib. p. 254); and, of course, he gives the “pirates” their proper name of Normans, and puts them under their proper leader, Duke Richard [the Good].

3. Hugh of Fleury tells the same tale very concisely, but with all the names, and gives a date, a. 999 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. pp. 220, 221). (He is copied by the Chron. S. Petr. Senon., ib. p. 222.)

4. The Abbreviato Gestorum Franciæ Regum tells the same, but gives no date beyond “eo tempore,” coming just after Hugh Capet’s death (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 227).

5. The Vita Burchardi Comitis gives no dates, does not identify Odo, and does not mention the Normans, but makes Burchard himself the chief actor in the regaining of the place (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. pp. 354, 355. In p. 350, note a, the editor makes Burchard a son of Fulk the Good; but he gives no authority, and I can find none).

6. The Angevins have a version of their own. In the Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 76, 77) the captor of Melun is “Herbert count of Troyes”; in Hugh of Clères (ib. p. 388) he has the same title but no name, and neither has the king, who in the Gesta is called Robert. The victim is not named at all; but the hero who plays a part equivalent to that of the Normans in the other versions is Geoffrey Greygown.

The main question is the date. One authority—Hugh of Fleury—gives it distinctly as 999. Will. Jumièges clearly identifies the Odo in question as Odo II. Now Odo II. was not count till 1004; but his father died in 995, so William may have given him the title by anticipation at any time after that date. The Abbr. Gest. Franc. Reg. would seem to place it thereabouts, as its note of time is “eo tempore” in reference to Hugh Capet’s death (which occurred in October 996). On the other hand, Richer speaks of “the kings” in the plural; from which Kalckstein, Waitz and Luchaire (Hist. des Institutions monarchiques de la France, vol. ii. p. 7, note 1) conclude that it is Odo I. who is concerned, and they date the affair 991. Why they fix upon this year, in defiance of both William of Jumièges and Hugh of Fleury, I cannot see. M. d’Arbois de Jubainville (Comtes de Champagne, vol. i. p. 196) adopts Hugh’s date, 999. Is it not possible, however, from a comparison of the other authorities, that the right year is 996, just before Hugh’s death, or even that he died while the siege was in progress? for it is to be noticed that Richer mentions only one king at the surrender. Richer has made such a confusion about these Odos and their doings that it is hardly fair to set him up as an infallible authority on the subject against such writers as Hugh of Fleury and William of Jumièges. Anyhow, the Angevin story cannot stand against any of them.

Note B.
THE PARENTS OF QUEEN CONSTANCE.

The parentage of Constance requires some notice here, as she is usually called either a niece or a cousin of Fulk Nerra. The one point on which all authorities are agreed is that her father’s name was William. It was long disputed whether he was William III. (Taillefer) count of Toulouse or William I. count of Arles and Provence. M. Mabille, in a note to the latest edition of Vic and Vaissète’s Hist. du Languedoc (Toulouse, 1872), vol. iv. pp. 157–161, has made it clear that he was William of Arles; this conclusion is adopted by M. Luchaire (Hist. des Instit. Monarch., vol. ii. p. 211, note 1).

M. Mabille however does not attempt to decide who was Constance’s mother, through whom her kindred with the Angevins is said to have come; and this is the question which we now have to investigate. The evidence at present known is as follows:—

1. An unprinted MS. of R. Glaber’s history, l. iii. c. 2 (quoted by Mabille, note to Vic and Vaissète, as above, p. 158; Marchegay, Comtes d’Anjou, Introd., p. lxxiii. note 2), describes Constance as “neptem prædicti Fulconis ... natam de Blancâ sorore ejus.” This is the version adopted in Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 110).

2. A letter of Bishop Ivo of Chartres (Ep. ccxi., Migne, Patrologia, vol. 162, cols. 215, 216), written about A.D. 1110, makes Constance’s mother sister, not of Fulk, but of his father Geoffrey Greygown. So does an anonymous chronicle ending in 1109, printed in Duchesne’s Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. iv. p. 96.

3. The Chron. S. Albin. (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 21) has under date 987: “Hlotharius rex obiit.... In isto reges Francorum defecerunt. Hic accepit uxorem Blanchiam filiam Fulconis Boni comitis Andegavensium, patris Gaufredi Grisegonellæ, et habuit ex eâ filiam, Constantiam nomine, quæ fuit data cum regno Roberti regis filio, scilicet Hugonis Magni.” Wildly confused as this passage is, I believe that it really contains a clue to the identity of Constance’s mother. Whoever she was, she certainly must, at the time of Constance’s birth, have been wife not of Louis the Lazy (who is evidently meant, instead of Lothar), but of Count William I. of Arles. Now it is plain (see Vic and Vaissète as above, pp. 62, 63) that William was twice married; first to Arsindis, who was living 968–979; and secondly, to Adelaide, who appears in 986, was mother of his successor William II., and apparently still living in 1026. Of Arsindis nothing further is known; but with Adelaide the case is otherwise. King Louis the Lazy, at some time between 978 and 981, married a lady “ab Aquitanis partibus” (R. Glaber, l. i. c. 3, Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 5), whose name was Adelaide according to Richer (l. iii. c. 92), but whom the Chron. S. Albin. (as we have already seen) and the Chron. S. Maxent. (a. 986, Marchegay, Eglises, p. 382) call Blanche. After two years of marriage with the young king she divorced him, or was divorced by him, and married William of Arles (Richer, l. iii. cc. 94, 95). This is clearly the lady of whom we are in search. The dates fit exactly; William’s first wife, Arsindis, is dead; he marries the divorced queen, probably about 982–983, and they have a daughter who in 1000 will be, as Constance evidently was at her marriage, in the prime of girlish beauty. The probability is strengthened by the fact that Adelaide’s first husband actually was what R. Glaber (l. iii. c. 2, Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 27) mistakenly calls Constance’s father, count of the “First Aquitaine,” or Toulouse; for Richer (l. iii. c. 92) says she was widow of Raymond “duke of the Goths,” i.e. of Septimania or Toulouse:—by the name of “Candida,” the Latin equivalent for “Blanche,” given to the wife of William of Arles by Peter of Maillezais (l. i. c. 6, Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 182; see above, p. 173, note 5{386});—and even by the blundering Angevin chronicle which makes Constance a daughter of “Blanche” and “Lothar,” meaning of course Blanche the wife of Lothar’s son, and her third husband. This same Chron. S. Albin., however, adds that the said “Blanche” was a daughter of Fulk the Good. Nobody else seems to have known her origin, and this very “perplexed and perplexing” chronicler is a doubtful authority to build upon; but as there is no intrinsic impossibility in this part of his statement, and as there evidently was in the early twelfth century a tradition that Constance was akin to the house of Anjou, he may be right. From the dates, one would think she was more likely to have been Greygown’s daughter than his sister. If she was his sister, it must surely have been by the half-blood. She might be a daughter of Fulk the Good by his second marriage with the widow of Alan Barbetorte.

Note C.
THE PILGRIMAGES OF FULK NERRA.

Of all the writers, ancient and modern, who have treated of Fulk Nerra, scarcely any two are wholly agreed as to the number and dates of his journeys to Holy Land. Some make out four journeys; some three; one, his own grandson, makes only two (Fulk Rechin, Marchegay, Comtes, p. 377). It is, however, abundantly evident that there were at least three—one before the foundation of Beaulieu (Gesta Cons., ib. p. 117; Hist. S. Flor. Salm., Marchegay, Eglises, p. 273); one after the foundation of Beaulieu, and before that of S. Nicolas (Hist. S. Flor. Salm. as above, p. 275); and one in returning from which he died (see above, p. 168). It is admitted on all hands that his death took place at Metz on June 21st, 1040; the date of the last pilgrimage is therefore undisputed. That of the first is now fixed by a charter quoted by M. Mabille (Marchegay, Comtes, Introd. p. lxxix) to 1003. The points still remaining to be decided therefore are (1) the date of the second journey; (2) the reality of the third.

The only real clue which our original authorities give us to the date of the second journey is the statement of Hist. S. Flor. that it was after the foundation of Beaulieu and before that of S. Nicolas (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 275). Now S. Nicolas was founded in 1020 (ibid.). Beaulieu was consecrated in 1012, but all we know of its foundation is that it cannot have been before Fulk’s return from his first journey in 1004. Modern writers have proposed three different dates for this second pilgrimage. The Art de vérifier les dates (vol. xiii. p. 50) places it in 1028; M. d’Arbois de Jubainville (Hist. des Comtes de Champagne, vol. i. p. 245) in 1019–20; M. Mabille (Introd. Comtes, pp. lxxviii, lxxx) and M. de Salies (Foulques-Nerra, pref. pp. xxxii, xxxiii, 143) in 1010–11. The first date, founded on a too literal reading of Ademar of Chabanais (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 164), is disposed of at once by the History of S. Florence. The theory of M. de Jubainville has a good deal of plausibility, but there is no documentary evidence for it. M. Mabille quotes in support of his date, 1010, a charter of S. Maur-sur-Loire, setting forth how Fulk, Hildegard and Geoffrey visited that abbey on the eve of Fulk’s departure for Holy Land. This charter is in Marchegay’s Archives d’Anjou, vol. i. p. 356; it has no date of any sort; and it does not specify whether Fulk’s intended journey was his second or third. The presence of Geoffrey proves it was not the first, but nothing more. M. Mabille pronounces for the second, and dates it “vers 1010”; but the editor of the Archives, M. Marchegay, says in a note “vers l’an 1030.” This charter therefore does not help at all. M. de Salies (Foulques-Nerra, p. 143, and pref. ib. p. xxxii) appeals in support of the same date, 1010, to the Chronicle of Tours, whose chronology throughout the century is so wild as to have no weight at all, except in strictly local matters; to the Chron. S. Petr. Senon., where I can find nothing about the question at issue;—and above all, to a charter in Baluze’s collections which says: “In natali S. Barnabæ Apostoli, qui est in Idibus Junii, Rainaldus ... Andecavensium Episcopus rebus terrenis exemptus est ... Ad sepulchrum Domini Hierosolymam comitante Fulcone vicecomite tendebat, progressusque usque Ebredunum” ... died and was there buried “anno ab Incarnatione Domini nostri Jesu Christi 1010.”

In the first place, this charter is suspicious as to date, for the Chronn. S. Albin. (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 22), Vindoc. (ib. p. 164), S. Flor. Salm. (ib. p. 187), all date Bishop Rainald’s death 1005, and so, according to Gallia Christiana, vol. xiv. col. 558, does the Obituary of S. Maurice; and the Chron. S. Serg. (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 134) dates the consecration of his successor Hubert 1007. In the next place, what ground has M. de Salies for assuming that “Fulco vicecomes” is Fulk Nerra count of Anjou? The authors of Gallia Christiana quote this same charter, and their comment on it is this: “Fulco sedenim comes” [it is vicecomes in the charter] “quocum Rainaldus Hierosolymitanum iter aggressus supra memoratur, Andegavensis rei curam annum circa 1010, teste non uno, suscepit.” And as they have been describing various dealings of the bishop with Fulk the Black long before 1010, it is quite clear they take this Fulk to be some one else; though one would like to see their witnesses and know who he really was.

There is however another clue which may suggest a different date for this second pilgrimage. There are only two ways of making sense of the account given in the Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 88–91) of “the wicked Landry’s” attack on Anjou and the war of Châteaudun. In that account the first misdoings of Landry and his aggressions against Sulpice and Archambald of Amboise are put in the reign of Count Maurice; then Maurice dies and his son Fulk succeeds him, and the raid upon Châteaudun follows as the first exploit of “juvenis haud modici pectoris.” Now we have seen that Maurice was not Fulk’s father but his younger brother, and never was count of Anjou at all. We must therefore either regard the introduction of Maurice as a complete myth and delusion, or interpret the tale as a distorted account of a regency undertaken by Maurice during his brother’s absence. It is hard to see why the chroniclers should have gratuitously dragged in Maurice without any reason. Moreover the charter which establishes the date of Fulk’s first pilgrimage informs us that he left his brother as regent of Anjou on that occasion (Mabille, Introd. Comtes, p. lxxvi); it is therefore quite possible that he may have done the same thing a second time. On this theory, to ascertain the date of the war with Landry would be equivalent to ascertaining the date of Fulk’s second pilgrimage.

If we take the Gesta’s account of Landry just as it stands, Landry’s attack on Anjou must have been made at the close of 1014 or in 1015; for he was resisted (say they) by Sulpice, treasurer of S. Martin’s, and his brother Archambald. Now Sulpice could not be treasurer of S. Martin’s before 1014, as his predecessor Hervey died in that year (Chron. Tur. Magn. ad ann., Salmon, Chron. de Touraine, p. 119; Chronol. S. Mar. Autiss. ad ann., Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 275); and on the other hand, Archambald must have died in 1015 or very early in 1016, for the Chron. Tur. Magn. (as above)—which is likely to be right in its dating of local matters, though hopelessly confused in its general chronology—places in 1016 the building of Sulpice’s stone tower at Amboise, which the Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 88, 89) tell us took place after his brother’s death; and the whole affair was certainly over some time before July 1016, the date of the battle of Pontlevoy. According to the Gesta (as above, pp. 89, 90), Landry makes another attack on Sulpice, after his brother’s death, just when Maurice has also died and Fulk succeeded him [i.e. Fulk has come home and resumed the reins of government]; and the raid on Châteaudun follows immediately. Here comes in a new difficulty; Odo of Blois is now brought in with a minute list of his possessions in Champagne, which he only acquired in 1019 at earliest, so that if this part of the story is also to be taken literally, Landry’s war with Sulpice and Fulk’s raid on Châteaudun must be separated by nearly four years. Maurice cannot possibly have been regent all that time, so we must either give him up entirely, or conclude that some of the details are wrong. And the one most likely to be wrong is certainly the description of Odo, whom almost all the old writers call “Campanensis” long before he had any right to the epithet. This is the view of M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, who dates the whole affair of Landry and Châteaudun in 1012–1014 (Comtes de Champagne, vol. i. pp. 227, 228), but ignores Maurice and puts Fulk’s second journey in 1019, without giving any reason. It seems to me that this strange Angevin hallucination about Count Maurice, so utterly inexplicable in any other way, becomes intelligible if we believe that he was regent of Anjou in 1014–1015 during a second journey of his brother to Holy Land; a theory which, if it has no positive evidence to support it, seems at least to have none to contradict it, and is not rendered improbable by the general condition of Angevin affairs at the time.

2. As to the third journey. The Gesta Cons. state that Fulk, on one of his pilgrimages, went in company with Robert the Devil. Now as Robert died at Nikaia in July 1035 Fulk cannot have met him on either of his first two journeys, nor on his last; therefore, if this incident be true, we must insert another pilgrimage in 1034–1035. The story appears only in the Gesta Cons. and is therefore open to suspicion, as the whole account of Fulk’s travels there given is a ludicrous tissue of anachronisms (Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 100–103). Fulk first goes to Rome and promises to deliver Pope Sergius IV. (who reigned 1009–1012) from Crescentius (who was killed in 997); then he goes to Constantinople, and thence in company with Robert to Jerusalem; Robert dies on the way home (1035) and Fulk on his return founds Beaulieu Abbey (consecrated 1012.) The monk has confounded at least two journeys, together with other things which had nothing to do with either.

The idea of a journey intermediate between the second and the last is however supported by the story of R. Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 164; Marchegay, Comtes, p. 329) that Geoffrey Martel having been left regent while his father was on pilgrimage kept him out on his return. Now at the time of Fulk’s first pilgrimage Geoffrey was not born; at the time of the second he was a mere child; and from the last Fulk came home only in his coffin. Consequently this story implies another journey; and we seem to get its date at last on no less authority than that of Fulk’s own hand. The charter in Epitome S. Nicolai (quoted in Mabillon, Ann. Bened., vol. iv. p. 386), after relating Fulk’s application to Abbot Walter of S. Aubin’s to find him an abbot for S. Nicolas, and the consequent appointment of Hilduin in 1033, ends thus: “Res autem præscriptas a domno Beringario atque domno Reginaldo scribere jussi, et priusquam ad Jerusalem ultimâ vice perrexissem manu meâ roboravi.” The Chron. S. Albin. says Walter was not abbot till 1036 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 23; the extract in note 3, ibid., makes it 1038), and if so the date of Hilduin’s consecration is wrong. But the authors of Gallia Christiana think it more likely that the abbot’s name is wrong and the date right. Now by “ultimâ vice” Fulk must have meant “the journey whence I last returned.” Before starting for that of 1040 he might hope, but he could not know, that it would be his last. So here we have, apparently, his own authority for a third pilgrimage soon after Hilduin’s consecration—i.e. in 1034 or 1035.

The worst stumbling-block, however, in the way of our chronology of Fulk’s last years is William of Malmesbury. He gives a much fuller account than any one else of Geoffrey’s rebellion and Fulk’s last pilgrimage, and his account, taken alone, is so thoroughly self-consistent and reasonable, and withal so graphic, that it is hard not to be carried away by it. But it utterly contradicts the date which the sources above examined assign to the third journey, as well as that which all other authorities agree in assigning to the last, and also the universally-received account of Fulk’s death. William (l. iii. c. 235; Hardy, pp. 401, 402) says nothing about Geoffrey having rebelled during his father’s absence. He tells us that Fulk in his last years ceded his county to his son; that Geoffrey misconducted himself, and was brought to submission (here comes in the story of the saddle); that Fulk in the same year went out to Palestine (here follows the story of the penance); that he came quietly home, and died a few years after.

This account of William’s is entitled to very much more respectful handling than those of the Gesta Consulum and Ralf de Diceto. William’s statements about the counts of Anjou are of special value, because they are thoroughly independent; where they come from is a mystery, but they certainly come from some source perfectly distinct from those known to us through the Angevin writers. Moreover William shews a wonderfully accurate appreciation of the Angevins’ characters and a strong liking for them—above all for Fulk Nerra, whom he seems to have taken special pains to paint in the most striking colours. His version therefore is not to be lightly treated; nevertheless it seems clear that he is not altogether correct. His omitting all mention of the pilgrimage which immediately preceded Geoffrey’s rebellion is no proof of its non-reality. His account of the last journey of all is a graver matter. According to him, it must have taken place about 1036–1037, and Fulk died, not at Metz, but at home. There is only one other writer who countenances this version, and that is the chronicler of S. Maxentius (a. 1040, Marchegay, Eglises, p. 393), who says that Fulk died in his own abbey of S. Nicolas at Angers. But this very same chronicle gives also an alternative statement—the usual one of the death on pilgrimage which is given by the Gesta, R. Diceto and Fulk Rechin. Against either of the two former witnesses singly William’s solitary word might stand, but not against them with Fulk Rechin to support them. The pilgrimages therefore stand thus: 1. in 1003; 2. in 1014–1015; 3. in 1034–1035; 4. in 1040.

Note D.
GEOFFREY MARTEL AND POITOU.

The whole story of Geoffrey Martel’s doings in Poitou—his wars and his marriage—is involved in the greatest perplexity. There is no lack of information, but it is a mass of contradictions. The only writer who professes to account for the origin of the war is the author of the Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 126), and his story, so far as it can apply to anything at all, certainly applies to the battle of Chef-Boutonne between Geoffrey the Bearded and William VII. (Guy-Geoffrey) in 1062. All other authorities are agreed that the battle was fought at S. Jouin-de-Marne, or Montcontour, on September 20, 1033, that William was captured and kept in prison three years, and that he died immediately after his release. As to the marriage of Geoffrey and Agnes, there is a question whether it took place before William’s capture or immediately after his death.

1. The Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg., a. 1032 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 23, 135) say positively that Geoffrey and Agnes were married on January 1 in that year. The Chron. S. Michael. in Per. Maris ad ann. also gives the date 1032 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 176).

2. Will. Poitiers and Will. Malm. say they married after William’s death. “Porro ipsius defuncti ... novercam ... thoro suo [Gaufridus] sociavit.” Will. Poitiers (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 182. “Tunc Martellus, ne quid deesset impudentiæ, novercam defuncti matrimonio sibi copulavit.” Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iii. c. 231 (Hardy, p. 395).

These five are the only writers who directly mention the marriage, except the Chron. S. Maxent. (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 392), which says under date 1037: “Per hæc tempora Gaufredus Martellus duxerat uxorem supradictam,” etc. “Per hæc tempora” with the chronicler of S. Maxentius is a phrase so frequent and so elastic that this passage cannot be used to support either of the above dates. There are therefore three witnesses for 1032, and two for 1036. The chroniclers of S. Aubin and S. Sergius are both Angevin witnesses, and both nearly contemporary; but the S. Sergian writer’s authority is damaged by his having confused the whole story, for he dates the capture of the duke of Aquitaine in 1028, thus evidently mistaking Agnes’s step-son for her husband. William of Poitiers is in some sense a Poitevin witness, and is also nearly contemporary. William of Malmesbury is further from the source, and in this passage seems to have been chiefly following his Poitevin namesake, but his whole treatment of the Angevin counts shews such clear signs of special study and understanding that he is entitled to be regarded as in some degree an independent authority.

That the marriage was not later than 1036 is certain from several charters of that year, in which Agnes appears as Geoffrey’s wife (Marchegay, Archives d’Anjou, vol. i. pp. 377, 402). But the Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 131, 132) tell a story of Geoffrey having founded his abbey at Vendôme in consequence of a shower of stars which he saw when standing at his palace window with “his wife, Agnes by name.” As the first abbot of Holy Trinity at Vendôme was appointed in 1033 (Mabillon, Ann. Bened., vol. iv. p. 379), if this story is true, Agnes must have been married to Geoffrey in 1032. But unluckily, the foundation-charter of the abbey is missing. The only documentary evidence connected with the question consists of two charters. One of these is printed in Besly, Comtes de Poitou, preuves, p. 304. It has no date, and simply conveys some lands for the site of the abbey to Count Geoffrey and Agnes his wife. Of course if this is the deed of sale for the land on which the original buildings were begun in 1032, it settles the question as to the previous marriage; but as the abbey was not consecrated till 1040, it is quite possible that its building was a slow process, and more ground was required as it proceeded. The endowment-charter (dated 1040, Mabillon, Ann. Bened., vol. iv. p. 732) says: “Ego Goffredus comes et uxor mea Agnes ... monasterium ... a novo fundaremus.” Does the solution lie in those words, “a novo”? Did Geoffrey found his abbey alone in 1032; stop work for a while on account of the Poitevin war and his quarrel with his father; and then, having married Agnes and acquired means by her step-son’s ransom, set to work in earnest conjointly with her and found the abbey anew? It is hard to throw over the distinct statements of two such writers as William of Poitiers and William of Malmesbury for the sake of three not very accurate chronicles and a late twelfth century romancer, doubtfully supported by a very vague charter.

As to the crime of the marriage, it is only the Angevin chroniclers who are so shocked at it. The S. Sergian writer’s mistake between Agnes’s first husband and her step-son might account for his horror, but not for the word he uses; and the Hist. S. Flor. Salm. (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 282) which uses the same, says distinctly that her husband was dead. The two Williams seem to see nothing worse in it than some “impudence” in the count of Vendôme daring to take a wife of such high birth and position. The Chron. S. Maxent. makes no remark on the subject; the chronicler of S. Sergius seems to have thought that Geoffrey’s kinship was not with Agnes herself, but with her former husband, for he says that Geoffrey married her “quæ fuerat consobrini sui Willelmi ... uxor.” The canon law forbade marriages within the seventh degree of kindred; and as the pedigrees of none of the three persons concerned in this case can be traced back with certainty in all their branches up to the seventh generation, it is quite impossible to say what consanguinity there may or may not have been among them. The strong language of the Angevin chroniclers, however, seems to indicate no obscure and remote connexion, but a close and obvious one. There are two possibilities which present themselves at once. 1. We do not know at all who Geoffrey’s mother Hildegard was. 2. We are not perfectly sure who his grandmother Adela was. Hildegard may have been a daughter of Poitou, in which case her son would be akin to William; or a daughter of Burgundy, and then he would be akin to Agnes. Or again, if Adela of Chalon really was daughter to Robert of Troyes, and if she was also really Geoffrey’s grandmother, then William, Agnes and Geoffrey would be all cousins to each other—Agnes and William in the fifth degree, Geoffrey and William in the fourth, Geoffrey and Agnes in the third. The pedigree stands as follows:—

Herbert of Vermandois. |
| ｜ |

｜ | | ｜ |
Liutgard | = | Theobald the Trickster | Robert of Troyes
｜ | | ｜ |

Emma

=
｜

William
Fierabras

Lambert
of Autun

(1)=
｜

Adela

=(2)
｜

Geoffrey Greygown

| ｜ | | ｜ | | ｜ |

William the Great,
3d from Herbert.

Adalbert of Lombardy

=
｜

Gerberga

Fulk Nerra
｜

Otto William.

Geoffrey Martel,
4th from Herbert,
2d from Adela.

| | ｜ |

Agnes,
5th from Herbert,
3d from Adela.

Strictly speaking, this would make both Agnes’s marriages wrong; but the kindred in the case of the second would be much closer, and aggravated by that between Geoffrey and William; and a dispensation might very probably have been obtained for the first marriage, while for the second it is plain that none was even sought.

It is just possible that there was also a spiritual affinity. Agnes’s younger son bore the two names of Guy and Geoffrey; it is not clear which was his baptismal name; but the idea suggests itself that it may have been Geoffrey, and that he may have been godson to the Hammer of Anjou. The case would then be something like that of Robert and Bertha.

CHAPTER IV.
ANJOU AND NORMANDY.
1044–1128.

The history of Anjou during the sixty years comprised in our last chapter groups itself around the figure of Fulk the Black. The period on which we are now to enter has no such personal centre of unity; its interest and its significance lie in the drama itself rather than in its actors; yet the drama has a centre which is living to this day. The city of Le Mans still stands, as it stood in Geoffrey Martel’s day and had stood for a thousand years before him, on the long narrow brow of a red sandstone rock which rises abruptly from the left bank of the Sarthe and widens out into the higher ground to the north and east:—a situation not unlike that of Angers on its black rock above the Mayenne. The city itself and the county of Maine, of which it was the capital, both took their names from a tribe known to the Romans as Aulerci Cenomanni, a branch of the great race of the Aulerci who occupied central Gaul in its earliest recorded days. Alike in legend and in history the Cenomanni are closely linked to Rome. One branch of them formed, according to Roman tradition, a portion of a band of Gallic emigrants who in the mythical days of the Tarquins wandered down through the Alpine passes into the valleys and plains of northern Italy, made themselves a new home on the banks of Padus, where afterwards grew up the towns of Brixia and Verona,[440] and became devoted allies of Rome.[441] When the last struggle for freedom was over in Gaul, few spots took the impress of Rome more deeply or kept it more abidingly than the home of their Transalpine brethren, the “Aulerci Cenomanni whose city to the east is Vindinum.”[442] The remains of the walls and gates of a Roman castrum which succeeded the primeval hill-fortress of Vindinum or Le Mans are only now at last giving way to the destruction, not of time, but of modern utilitarianism. Far into the middle ages, long after Le Mans had outgrown its narrow Roman limits and spread down to a second line of fortifications close to the water’s edge, one part of the city on the height still kept the name of “Ancient Rome.”[443] The wondrous cathedral which now rises in the north-eastern corner of the city, towering high above the river and the double line of walls, stands, if we may trust its foundation-legend, on the very site of the prætorium; when the Cross followed in the train of the eagles, Defensor, the governor of the city, gave up his palace for the site of a church whose original dedication to the Blessed Virgin and S. Peter has long been superseded by the name of its founder S. Julian, a missionary bishop ordained and sent to Gaul by S. Clement of Rome.[444] Defensor is probably only a personification of the official defensor civitatis, the local tribune of the people under the later Roman Empire; but the state of things of which the legend is an idealized picture left its traces on the real relations of Church and state at Le Mans. After the Frankish conquest bishop and people together formed a power which more than matched that of the local lieutenant of the Merovingian kings; a decree of Clovis, confirmed by his grandson Childebert III., enacted that no count of Le Mans should be appointed without their consent.[445] Under the early Karolingians Le Mans seems to have held for a short time the rank afterwards taken by Angers as the chief stronghold of the Breton border; local tradition claims as its first hereditary count that “Roland, prefect of the Breton march,” who is more generally known as the hero of Roncevaux.[446] However this may be, the “duchy of Cenomannia” figures prominently in various grants of territory on the western border made to members of the Imperial house.[447] In the civil wars which followed the death of Louis the Gentle it suffered much from the ravages of Lothar;[448] and it underwent a far worse ordeal a few years later, when the traitor count Lambert of Anjou led both Bretons and northmen into the heart of central Gaul. The sack of Le Mans by Lambert and Nomenoë in 850[449] was avenged some years later when the traitor fell by the sword of Count Gauzbert of Maine;[450] but in 851 Charles the Bald was compelled to cede the western part of the Cenomannian duchy to the Breton king Herispoë;[451] the northern foes who had first come in the train of the Bretons swept over Maine again and again; and it was in making their way back to the sea after one of these raids by the old Roman road from Le Mans to Nantes that they entrapped Robert the Brave to his death at the bridge of Sarthe. The treaty of Clair-sur-Epte left Maine face to face with the northman settled upon her northern border; and in 924 a grant of the overlordship of the county was extorted by Hrolf from King Rudolf of Burgundy. In the hands of Hrolf’s most famous descendant the claim thus given was to become a formidable reality; at the moment however its force was neutralized by another grant made in the same year by Charles the Simple, which placed Maine together with the rest of Neustria under the jurisdiction of Hugh the Great.[452] In vain the counts of Le Mans strove to ignore or defy the house of France and that of Anjou, to which, as we have seen, the ducal claims over Maine were soon delegated. All their efforts were paralyzed by the opposing influence of that other officer in their state whose authority was of older date as well as loftier character than theirs, who held his commission by unbroken descent alike from the Cæsars and from the Apostles, and who had once at least been distinctly acknowledged as the equal, if not the superior, of his temporal colleague. The bishops were the nominees of the king, and therefore the champions of French and Angevin interests at Le Mans. In the last years of the tenth century and the early part of the eleventh, two of them in succession, an uncle and nephew named Sainfred and Avesgaud, were members of the house of Bellême who owned the borderlands of Perche, Séez and Alençon, between France and Normandy, who were never loyal to either neighbour, and whose name, as we have already seen, was one day to become a by-word for turbulent wickedness both in Normandy and in England. Sainfred was said to have owed his bishopric to Fulk Nerra’s influence with the king;[453] Avesgaud’s life was passed between building, hunting, and quarrelling with Count Herbert Wake-dog. Herbert’s military capacities, proved on the field of Pontlevoy, enabled him to stand his ground;[454] but very soon after his death Fulk’s dealings with Maine and its bishop began to bear fruit. Fulk survived both Herbert and Avesgaud. The count of Maine died in the prime of life in 1036,[455] leaving as his heir a son named Hugh, who, on pretext of his extreme youth, was set aside by a great-uncle, Herbert surnamed Bacco. Bishop Avesgaud, too, had died a few months before, and his office passed a second time from uncle to nephew in the person of his sister’s son, Gervase of Château-du-Loir.[456] The selection of a third prelate from the hated house of Bellême was in itself enough to excite the count’s wrath; Herbert Bacco moreover had a special reason for jealousy—the young nephew whose rights he had usurped was a godson of Gervase. For two years Herbert contrived to keep the new bishop out of Le Mans altogether; at the end of that time he admitted him, but no sooner were the rival rulers established side by side than their strife became as bitter and ceaseless as that of Herbert Wake-dog and Avesgaud. Gervase looked for help to the king, who, whether as king or as duke of the French, was patron and advocate of the see; but there was no help to be got from the feeble, selfish Henry I. of France. Despair hurried the bishop into a rasher step than any that his uncle had ever taken. Thinking that a less exalted protector, and one nearer to the spot and more directly interested, would be of more practical use, he besought King Henry to grant the patronage and advocacy of the see of Le Mans to Count Geoffrey of Anjou for his life.[457]

[440] Tit. Liv., l. v. c. 35; Polyb., l. ii. c. 17.

[441] Polyb., l. ii. cc. 23, 24, 32.

[442] Ptolem., l. ii. c. 7. On the Peutinger Table, however, the name is Subdinnum.

[443] “Ex parte vici de veteri Româ” is quoted by M. Voisin (Les Cénomans anciens et modernes, p. 86, note 3) from a document in the city archives.

[444] Acta Pontif. Cenoman., c. 1, in Mabillon, Vetera Analecta, pp. 239–241.

[445] Charter of Childebert III. a. 698, in Mabillon, Vet. Anal., p. 283.

[446] Eginhard, Vita Car. Magni, c. 9 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. v. p. 93).

[447] Charles the Great granted “ducatum Cenomannicum” to his son Charles in 790; Ann. Mettens. ad ann. (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. v. pp. 346, 347). “Ducatus Cenomannicus, omnisque occiduæ Galliæ ora inter Ligerim et Sequanam constituta,” formed the share of Charles the Bald in 838; Ann. Bertin. ad ann. (ib. vol. vi. p. 199).

[448] Ann. Bertin. a. 841 (ib. vol. vii. p. 60).

[449] Chron. Fontanell. a. 850 (ib. p. 42).

[450] The Chron. S. Maxent. (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 366), two Aquitanian chronicles (in Labbe, Nova Bibl., vol. i. pp. 291, 324) and Ademar of Chabanais (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. vii. p. 226) date this 852; Regino and the Ann. Mettens. (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. vii. p. 190) place it in 860.

[451] Above, p. 102. Part at least of this ceded territory must have been soon regained; for it extended “usque ad viam quæ a Lotitiâ Parisiorum Cæsarodunum Turonum ducit.” Ann. Bertin. a. 856 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. vii. p. 71).

[452] Frodoard. Chron. a. 924 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. viii. p. 181). See above, p. 124.

[453] Acta Pontif. Cenoman., c. 29 (Mabillon, Vet. Anal., p. 303).

[454] See the story of his struggles with Avesgaud in Acta Pontif. Cenoman., c. 30 (as above, pp. 303, 304).

[455] Necrol. S. Pet. de Culturâ (Le Mans), quoted in Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xi. p. 632. Ademar of Chabanais (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 161) seems to imply that he had contracted a mortal disease in his Angevin dungeon.

[456] Acta Pontif. Cenoman., c. 31 (Mabillon, Vet. Anal., pp. 305, 306). From the dates there given, Avesgaud must have died in October 1035, about five months before Herbert Wake-dog.

[457] Acta Pontif. Cenoman., as above (p. 305).

As soon as the grant was made, Gervase “took counsel with the people of the diocese and the brave men of the land,”[458] and headed a revolution by which Herbert Bacco was expelled and the boy Hugh set in his place. The bishop’s next step was to seek a wife for his godson. Twelve years before, a band of Bretons, called by Hugh’s father to aid him against Bishop Avesgaud and Fulk of Anjou, had made a raid upon Blois and carried off Count Odo’s daughter Bertha to become the wife of Duke Alan of Britanny.[459] It was this Bertha, now a widow and a fugitive from Rennes, whence she was driven by her brother-in-law after her husband’s death,[460] whom Gervase now wedded to Hugh. Such a choice was not likely to conciliate Geoffrey Martel; all the less if—as some words of a local historian seem to imply—the daughter of Odo of Blois was gifted with all the courage and energy that were lacking in her brothers.[461] By some of the usual Angevin arts Geoffrey entrapped Gervase into his power and cast him into prison,[462] where for the next seven years the luckless bishop was left to reflect upon the consequences of his short-sighted policy and to perceive that in striving to secure a protector against Herbert Bacco he had placed himself and his country at the mercy of an unscrupulous tyrant. During those years Maine, nominally ruled by the young Count Hugh, was really in the power of Geoffrey Martel, and it became the scene of a fierce warfare between Anjou and Normandy. In 1049 the Council of Reims threatened Geoffrey with excommunication unless he released the captive prelate,[463] and next year the excommunication was actually pronounced by the Pope;[464] but neither Council nor Pope could turn the Angevin from his prey. About 1051 Hugh died, and his death sealed the fate of Le Mans. Its count’s son was an infant, its bishop a captive in an Angevin dungeon; its citizens had no choice but to submit. The twice-widowed countess and her children were driven out at one gate as the Hammer of Anjou knocked at the other, and without striking a blow Geoffrey became acknowledged master of Maine from thenceforth till the day of his death.[465] Gervase, his spirit broken at last, purchased his release by the surrender of Château-du-Loir, and by a solemn oath never again to set foot in Le Mans so long as Geoffrey lived. He found a refuge at the court of Duke William of Normandy, till in 1057 he was raised to the metropolitan chair of Reims.[466] In his former episcopal city the oppressor triumphed undisturbed; but the day of retribution had already dawned.

- [458] “Concilium iniit cum parochianis et heroibus terræ.” Ibid.·/·Acta Pontif. Cenoman., c. 31 (Mabillon, Vet. Anal., p. 305). See Mr. Freeman’s note, Norm. Conq., vol. iii. p. 194, note 3.

- [459] Chron. Kemperleg. a. 1008 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 294). For the real date see above, p. 159, note 4{343}.

- [460] See below, p. 211.

- [461] The author of the Acta Pontif. Cenoman., c. 31 (Mabillon, Vet. Anal., p. 305), calls her “nobilissimam fœminam” and “uxorem fortissimam.”

- [462] Acta Pontif. Cenoman., as above.

- [463] Concil. Rem. in Labbe, Concilia (ed. Cossart), vol. xix. col. 742.

- [464] Chron. S. Maxent. a. 1050 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 398).

- [465] Acta Pontif. Cenoman. (as above, pp. 305, 306).

- [466] Acta Pontif. Cenoman., c. 31 (Mabillon, Vet. Anal., p. 306).

The tide of fortune which had borne Geoffrey Martel on from victory to victory spent its last wave in carrying him to the brow of the Cenomannian hill. The acquisition of Le Mans was the last outward mark of his success; the height of his real security had been passed three years before. The turning-point of Geoffrey’s life was the year 1044. The settlement of Poitou, the winning of Tours, the capture of Bishop Gervase, all followed close upon each other; and for the next four years the count of Anjou was beyond all question the second power in the kingdom. No one save the duke of Normandy could claim to stand on a level with the lord of the Angevin march, of Touraine and Saintonge, the step-father and guardian of the boy-duke of Aquitaine, the virtual master of Maine. It was with the duke of Normandy that Geoffrey’s last conquest now brought him into collision. His head had been turned by his easy and rapid successes; in 1048, on his return from an expedition to Apulia in company with his wife’s son-in-law the Emperor,[467] he set himself up against King Henry with a boastful insolence which threatened to disturb the peace of the whole realm.[468] Five years earlier, Henry had profited by the feud between Anjou and Blois to win Geoffrey’s help in putting down the rebellion of Theobald; now he profited by the jealousy which the state of Cenomannian affairs was just beginning to create between Anjou and Normandy to win the help of the Norman Duke William in putting down the rebellion of Geoffrey. The king’s own operations against Anjou seem to have extended no further than a successful siege of the castle of Moulinières;[469] after this his conduct towards William seems to have been copied from that of his parents towards Fulk the Black three and twenty years before. William, like Fulk, was left to fight the royal battles single-handed; and to William, as to Fulk, the task was welcome, for the battle was in truth less the king’s than his own. Geoffrey Martel, in the pride of his heart, had openly proclaimed his ambition to crown all his previous triumphs by an encounter with the only warrior whom he deigned to regard as a foeman worthy of his steel,[470] and had diligently used all the opportunities for provoking a quarrel with the Norman which the dependent position of Maine furnished but too readily. Either by force or guile, or that judicious mixture of both in which the Angevin house excelled, he had managed to get into his own hands the two keys of Normandy’s southern frontier, the castles of Alençon and Domfront, which guarded the valleys of the Sarthe and the Mayenne;[471] and thence, across the debateable lands of Bellême, he was now carrying his raids into undisputed Norman territory.[472]

- [467] See Art de vérifier les dates, vol. xiii. p. 54.

- [468] Henry was “contumeliosis Gaufredi Martelli verbis irritatus.” Will. Poitiers (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 180. “Vexavit idem [sc. Gaufredus] Franciam universam regi rebellans.” Ib. p. 182.

- [469] Will. Poitiers (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 180. Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iii. c. 230 (Hardy, p. 394).

- [470] Will. Poitiers (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 181.

- [471] Ib. p. 182. Wace, Roman de Rou, vv. 9380–9383 (Pluquet, vol. ii. p. 47).

- [472] Will. Jumièges, l. vii. c. 18. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 276). Cf. Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iii. c. 231 (Hardy, p. 396). These two writers ignore the king’s share in the quarrel, and make it arise solely from Geoffrey’s raids upon Normandy (“Brachium levabat in nos quo non leviter sese vulnerabat,” remarks W. Poitiers, as above). The Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 131) reverse the whole situation and assert that William attacked the count of Maine, whereupon Geoffrey, as the latter’s “auxiliator et tutor,” took up the quarrel, and did William a great deal of damage! Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 378) wisely limits himself to the statement that his uncle “had a war with William, duke of the Normans.”

In the autumn of 1048 William set out to dislodge the intruder from Domfront. It was no light undertaking. The ruined keep which still stands, a splendid fragment, on the top of a steep wall-like pile of grey rock, the last spur of a ridge of hills sweeping round from the east, with the town and the dark woods at its back and the little stream of Varenne winding close round its foot, may tell something of what the castle was when its walls stood foursquare, fresh from the builder’s hand, and manned by the fierce moss-troopers of Bellême, reinforced by a band of picked soldiers from Anjou.[473] The rock itself was an impregnable fortress of nature’s own making. To horsemen it was totally inaccessible; foot-soldiers could only scale it by two narrow and difficult paths. Assault was hopeless; William’s only chance lay in a blockade, and even this was an enterprise of danger as well as difficulty, for Domfront stood in the heart of a dense woodland amid which the Normans were continually exposed to the ambushes and surprises of the foe. To William however the forest was simply a hunting-ground through which he rode day after day, with hawk on wrist, in scornful defiance of its hidden perils, while the siege was pressed closer and closer all through the winter’s snows, till at last the garrison were driven to call upon Geoffrey Martel for relief.[474] What followed reads like an anticipation of the story of Prestonpans as told in Jacobite song. If we may trust the Norman tale, Geoffrey not only answered the call, but sent his trumpeter with a formal challenge to the young duke of the Normans to meet him on the morrow at break of day beneath the walls of Domfront. But when the sun rose on that morrow, Geoffrey and all his host were gone.[475] Duke William’s chaplain, who tells the tale, could see but one obvious explanation of their departure; and it is impossible to contradict him, for the whole campaign of 1048 is a blank in the pages of the Angevin chroniclers. The Hammer of Anjou stands charged with having challenged Duke William at eventide and run away from him before sunrise, and no Angevin voice seems ever to have been lifted to deny or palliate the charge. He had scarcely turned his back when Alençon fell; and its fall was quickly followed by that of Domfront. William carried away his engines of war to set them up again on undisputed Cenomannian ground, at Ambrières on the Mayenne: still Geoffrey made no movement; William laid the foundations of a castle on the river-bank at Ambrières, and leaving it securely guarded marched home unmolested to Rouen.[476]

- [473] Will. Poitiers (as above·/·Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 182.

- [474] Will. Poitiers (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 182. Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iii. c. 231 (Hardy, p. 396).

- [475] Will. Poitiers (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 183. Cf. Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iii. c. 231 (Hardy, pp. 396, 397).

- [476] Will. Poitiers, as above. Will. Jumièges, l. vii. c. 18 (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 276). Wace, Roman de Rou, vv. 9430–9635 (Pluquet, vol. ii. pp. 49–58).

So began the most momentous feud ever waged by the counts of Anjou. After the first burst of the storm came a lull of nearly seven years, one of which was marked, as we have seen, by Geoffrey’s final acquisition of Le Mans; but his power had sustained a shock from which it never wholly recovered. In the struggles with Normandy which fill the latter years of Henry I. of France, the king and the count of Anjou play an almost equally ignoble part. Henry, who had once courted the friendship of William to ward off the blows of the Angevin Hammer, no sooner perceived which was really the mightier of the two princes than he completely reversed his policy, gave an almost open support to the treasons in William’s duchy, and at length, in 1054, when these indirect attacks had failed, summoned all the princes of his realm to join him in a great expedition for the ruin of the duke of Normandy. They flocked to the muster at Mantes from all quarters save one; strangely enough, the count of Anjou was missing.[477] Only a few months ago the terror which clung around Martel’s name and the number of troops at his command had sufficed to make his stepson William of Aquitaine disband an army with which he was preparing to encounter him, and sue for peace at his mere approach;[478] yet it seems that not even with all the forces of king and kingdom at his side would Geoffrey risk an encounter with the man whom he had challenged and fled from at Domfront.

- [477] Will. Jumièges, l. vii. c. 24 (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 281) says he was there; but see Mr. Freeman’s remarks, Norm. Conq., vol. iii., p. 144.

- [478] Charter of William of Passavant, dated Montilliers, 1053, in Archives d’Anjou (Marchegay), vol. i. p. 271. Besly (Comtes de Poitou, preuves, p. 327) printed it with the date 1043, and it is apparently on this that the Art de vérifier les dates founds a war between Geoffrey and Peter-William in that year—an almost impossible thing.

By thus deserting the king at a moment when Henry had every reason to count upon his support, Geoffrey escaped all part in the rout of Mortemer; but the consequence was that when peace was made next year between the king and the duke, one of its clauses authorized William to make any conquests he could at the expense of the count of Anjou.[479] William at once sent warning to Geoffrey to expect him and all his forces at Ambrières within forty days. South of Ambrières, lower down in the valley of the Mayenne, stands the town which bears the same name as the river; its lord, Geoffrey, was the chief man of the district. He went in haste to his namesake and overlord and bitterly complained to him that if these Normans were left unhindered to work their will at Ambrières, the whole land would be at their mercy. “Cast me off as a vile and unworthy lord,” was Martel’s reply, “if thou seest me tamely suffer that which thou fearest!” But the boast was as vain as the challenge before Domfront. William completed without hindrance his fortifications at Ambrières; as soon as his back was turned Geoffrey laid siege to the place, in company with the duke of Aquitaine and Odo, uncle and guardian of the young duke of Britanny; but the mere rumour of William’s approach sufficed to make all three withdraw their troops “with wonderful speed, not to say in trembling flight.” Geoffrey of Mayenne, made prisoner and left to bear alone the whole weight of William’s wrath, took the count of Anjou at his word, and casting off the “vile and unworthy lord” whose desertion had brought him to this strait, owned himself the “man” of the Norman duke.[480]

- [479] Will. Poitiers (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 187. Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iii. c. 233 (Hardy, p. 399).

- [480] Will. Poitiers (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 187, 188.

Two castles in the heart of Maine thus acknowledged William for their lord. Three years passed away without further advance from either side; Geoffrey’s energies were frittered away in minor disputes which brought him neither gain nor honour. The old quarrel about Nantes woke up once more and was once more settled in 1057 under circumstances very discreditable to the count of Anjou. Duke Alan of Britanny died in 1040, leaving as his heir a boy three months old. The child was at once snatched from the care of his mother—Bertha of Blois—by his uncle Odo, who set himself up as duke of Britanny in his stead.[481] The duchy split up into factions, and for sixteen years all was confusion, aggravated, there can be little doubt, by the meddlesomeness of Geoffrey of Anjou, who seems to have taken the opportunity thus offered him for picking a quarrel with count Hoel of Nantes.[482] In 1056 or 1057, however, a party among the Breton nobles succeeded in freeing the young Conan, by whom Odo was shortly afterwards made prisoner in his turn.[483] On this Geoffrey, it seems, following the traditional policy of the Angevin house in Britanny, made alliance with his late enemy the count of Nantes; and Hoel, on some occasion which is not explained, actually ventured to intrust his capital to Geoffrey’s keeping, whereupon Geoffrey at once laid a plot for taking possession of it altogether. His treachery however met the reward which it deserved; he held Nantes for barely forty days, and then lost it for ever.[484] Troubles were springing up too in another quarter. Geoffrey’s marriage with the widowed countess of Poitou had failed to bring him the advantages for which he doubtless hoped when he carried it through in defiance of public opinion and his father’s will. He had been unable to keep any hold over his stepsons. Guy-Geoffrey fought and bargained with the rival claimant of Gascony till he had made himself sole master of the county: Peter-William, though he bears the surname of “the Bold,” seems to have kept his land in peace, for his reign is a blank in which the only break is caused by his quarrels with Anjou. The first of these, in 1053, came as we have seen to no practical consequence, and two years later William is found by Geoffrey’s side at Ambrières. But the tie between them was broken; Geoffrey and Agnes were no longer husband and wife,[485] and Geoffrey was married to Grecia of Montreuil. There are sufficient indications of Geoffrey’s private character to warrant the assumption that the blame of this divorce rested chiefly upon his shoulders,[486] and it may be that Peter-William acted as the avenger of his mother’s wrongs. The quarrel, whatever may have been its grounds, broke out afresh in the spring or early summer of 1058, when the duke of Aquitaine blockaded Geoffrey himself within the walls of Saumur. But before the end of August a sudden sickness drove William of Aquitaine home to Poitiers to die,[487] and set the Angevin count free for one last struggle with William of Normandy.

- [481] Chron. Brioc. ad ann. (Morice, Hist. Bret., preuves, vol. i. col. 35).

- [482] Fulk Rechin mentions among his uncle’s wars one “cum Hoello comite Nannetensi.” Marchegay, Comtes, p. 378.

- [483] Chron. S. Michael. a. 1056 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xi. p. 29). Chron. Kemperleg. a. 1057 (ib. p. 371).

- [484] Chronn. Vindoc. and S. Maxent. a. 1057 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 167, 399). The Chron. Britann. in Morice (Hist. Bret., preuves, vol. i. col. 101) records this affair under the year 1040; but on that chronicle’s own showing Hoel was not count of Nantes till 1051, while the Chron. Brioc. (ib. col. 36) places his succession in 1054.

- [485] The last charter signed by Agnes as countess of Anjou is dated 1050 (Mabille, Introd. Comtes, p. lxxxiii). From 1053 onwards she reappears at the court of her elder son—generally by the title of “mater comitum”—witnessing his charters, founding churches in Poitou, and in short holding her old place as duchess of Aquitaine, while her place as countess of Anjou is taken by Grecia, widow of Berlay of Montreuil, and mother of Eustachia, the wife of Agnes’s stepson William the Fat. See Hist. S. Flor. Salm. (Marchegay, Eglises), p. 293, and Besly, Comtes de Poitou, p. 89.

- [486] See a charter of our Lady of Charity (Ronceray) quoted in note to Hist. S. Flor. Salm. as above.

- [487] Chron. S. Maxent. a. 1058 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 400).

King Henry was now gathering up his strength for another invasion of the Norman duchy. This time Geoffrey did not fail him. Both had discovered, too late, who was really their most dangerous rival, and all old grudges between them were forgotten in the common instinct of vengeance upon the common foe. Early in 1058 Henry came to visit the count at Angers;[488] and the plan of the coming campaign was no doubt arranged during the time which they then spent together. It was to be simply a vast plundering-raid; neither king nor count had now any ambition to meet the duke in open fight. In August they set forth—Geoffrey, full of zeal, at the head of all the troops which his four counties could muster. The French and Angevin host went burning and plundering through the Hiesmois and the Bessin, the central districts of Normandy, as far as Caen. Half of the confederates’ scheme was accomplished; but as they crossed the Dive at the ford of Varaville they were overtaken at once by the inflowing tide and by the duke himself; the two leaders, who had been the first to cross, could only look helplessly on at the total destruction of their host, and make their escape from Norman ground as fast as their horses would carry them.[489] The wars of Henry and Geoffrey were over. The king died in the summer of 1060; in November he was followed by the count of Anjou. A late-awakened conscience moved Geoffrey to meet his end in the abbey of S. Nicolas which had been founded by his father and completed under his own care. One night he was borne across the river and received the monastic habit; next morning at the hour of prime he died.[490]

- [488] Henry was at Angers on March 1, 1058; charter in Epitome S. Nicolai, p. 9, referred to by Mabille, Introd. Comtes, pp. lxxxiii, lxxxiv. The Chronn. Vindoc. and S. Maxent. place this visit in 1057 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 167, 399).

- [489] Will. Poitiers (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 188. Will. Jumièges, l. vii. c. 28 (ib. p. 283). Wace, Roman de Rou, vv. 10271–10430 (Pluquet, vol. ii. pp. 87–94).

- [490] Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 379, gives the year and the day, November 14, 1060. The Chronn. Vindoc. and S. Maxent. (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 167, 402) agree with him; the Chron. S. Albin. (ib. p. 25) gives the same day, but a year later; the Chron. S. Serg. (ib. p. 137) dates the event in the right year, 1060, but places it on November 13 instead of 14; the Chron. S. Flor. Salm. (ib. p. 189) says nothing of Geoffrey’s death, but places both his assumption of the monastic habit and King Henry’s death a year too early, in 1059.

With him expired the male line of Fulk the Red. But there was no lack of heirs by the spindle-side. Geoffrey’s eldest nephew was his half-sister Adela’s son, Fulk “the Gosling,” to whom after long wrangling he had been compelled to restore the county of Vendôme.[491] He was bound by closer ties to the two sons of his own sister Hermengard, daughter of Fulk Nerra and Hildegard, and wife of Geoffrey count of the Gâtinais, a little district around Châteaulandon near Orléans.[492] Her younger son, Fulk, was but seventeen years old when at Whitsuntide 1060 he was knighted by Geoffrey Martel, invested with the government of Saintonge, and sent to put down a revolt among its people.[493] The elder, who bore his uncle’s name, was chosen by him for his heir.[494]

- [491] Origo Com. Vindoc., in Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xi., p. 31. Vendôme seems however to have counted thenceforth as a dependency of Anjou—and, for the most part, a loyal and useful one.

- [492] See note A at end of chapter.

- [493] Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 379. The revolt was headed by one “Petrus Didonensis.”

- [494] See note B at end of chapter.

The dominion which Geoffrey the Hammer thus bequeathed to Geoffrey the Bearded was no compact, firmly-knit whole; it was a bundle of four separate states, held on different tenures, and two of them burthened with a legacy of unsettled feuds. The real character of their union shewed itself as soon as Martel was gone. What had held them together was simply the terror of his name, and the dissolution, already threatening before his death, set in so rapidly that in less than three years afterwards two out of his four counties were lost to his successor. It was in fact only the dominions of Fulk the Black—Anjou and Touraine—that were thoroughly loyal to his son. Geoffrey’s last conquest, Maine, was only waiting till death should loose the iron grasp that choked her to recall her ancient line. His earliest conquest, Saintonge, lying further from the control of the central power, was already drifting back to its natural Aquitanian master. Young Count Fulk was still at his uncle’s death-bed when Saintes was surprised and captured by the duke of Aquitaine,—Guy-Geoffrey of Gascony, who had succeeded his twin-brother by the title of William VII. William seems to have justified his aggression on the plea that by the terms of the cession of 1036 Martel had no right to leave Saintonge to collateral heirs, and that on his death without children it ought to revert to the duke.[495] The city of Saintes itself however had been Angevin ever since Fulk Nerra’s days, and a strong party of citizens devoted to Anjou besought Geoffrey’s successor to come and deliver them. While the two brothers prepared to march into Poitou, William gathered an immense force to the siege of Chef-Boutonne, a castle on a rocky height above the river Boutonne, on the borders of Poitou and Saintonge. Thence, at the Angevins’ approach, he descended to meet them in the plain, on S. Benedict’s day, March 21, 1061. The duke’s army, including as it did the whole forces of Gascony and Aquitaine, must have far outnumbered that of the brother-counts; but there was treason in the southern ranks; the standard-bearers were the first to flee, and their flight caused the rout of the whole ducal host.[496] Saintes threw open its gates to the Angevin victor;[497] but its loss was only delayed. Next year the duke of Aquitaine blockaded the city till sword and famine compelled the garrison to surrender;[498] and from that moment Saintonge was lost to the count of Anjou.

- [495] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 126. See note C at end of chapter.

- [496] Chron. S. Maxent. a. 1061 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 402). Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 126–130. See note C at end of chapter.

- [497] Gesta Cons. (as above), p. 130.

- [498] Chron. S. Maxent. a. 1062 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 403).

Meanwhile a change fraught with far graver consequences had undone Geoffrey Martel’s work in the north. The conqueror of Le Mans was scarcely in his grave when Maine flung off the yoke and called upon the son of her late count Hugh to come home and enjoy his own again. It was however but a shadowy coronet that she could offer now; her independence had received a fatal shock; and, to increase the difficulty of his position, Herbert II. was still a mere boy, without a friend to guide and protect him except his mother, Bertha of Blois. Bertha saw at once that his only chance of saving his father’s heritage from the shame of subjection to Anjou was to throw himself on the honour of the duke of Normandy; to William therefore, as overlord, Herbert commended himself and his county, on the terms of the old grant made to Hrolf by King Rudolf.[499] The commendation was accompanied by an agreement that Herbert should in due time marry one of William’s daughters; but there seems to have been a foreboding that the boy-count’s life was not to be a long one, for it was further provided that if he died without children Maine should revert in full property to William;[500] and a marriage was also arranged between William’s eldest son Robert and Herbert’s sister Margaret, whereby in the next generation the rights of the “man” and his lord, of the house of Hrolf and the house of Herbert Wake-Dog, might be united.[501]

- [499] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 487). Will. Poitiers (ibid.), p. 189.

- [500] Will. Poitiers, as above.

- [501] Ord. Vit. as above.

In 1064 Herbert died, leaving neither child nor wife. By the treaty which had seemed so admirably planned to meet all possible contingencies, his county was now to revert to William; but there was more than one difficulty to be met before he could take possession of it. The first was a sudden revival of the Angevin claim. The indifference with which Geoffrey the Bearded seems to have viewed the transactions between Herbert and William may perhaps have been due to the pressure of the war in Saintonge. Far more puzzling than his tardiness in asserting his rights to the overlordship of Maine is the readiness with which, when he did assert them, they seem to have been admitted by William. Geoffrey did not indeed aspire to the actual possession of the county which his uncle had enjoyed; all that he claimed was its overlordship; and William, it seems, acknowledged his claim by permitting the little Robert to do him homage at Alençon and to receive from him a formal grant of Margaret’s hand together with the whole honour of Maine.[502] Geoffrey’s action is easily accounted for. His only reasonable course was to make a compromise with Normandy: the wonder is that he was allowed to make it on such favourable terms. If the story is correct, the truth probably is that compromise was at this moment almost as needful to William as to Geoffrey, for any Angevin intermeddling in Maine would have rendered his difficulties there all but insurmountable. One clause of the treaty of 1061—the marriage of Robert and Margaret—was still in the remote future, for the bridegroom cannot have been more than nine years old, and the bride was far away in what a Norman writer vaguely describes as “Teutonic parts.”[503] There being thus no security that the county would ever revert to the descendants of its ancient rulers, Cenomannian loyalty turned its hopes from Hugh’s young daughter to her aunts, the three daughters of Herbert Wake-the-dog, of whom the nearest to the spot was Biota, the wife of Walter of Mantes, sister’s son to Eadward the Confessor.[504] In his wife’s name Walter laid claim to the whole county of Maine, and a considerable part of it at once passed into his hands. The capital was held for him by Hubert of Sᵗᵉ-Suzanne and Geoffrey of Mayenne—that same Geoffrey who, deceived in his Angevin overlord, had yielded a compulsory homage to William, and now, casting off all foreign masters alike, proved the most determined champion of his country’s independence. It was between William and Geoffrey of Mayenne that the contest really lay; and again the duke proved victorious. The conqueror made his “joyous entry” into Le Mans, and sent for the little Margaret to be kept under his own protection until her marriage could take place. But before the wedding-day arrived she lay in her grave at Fécamp; Walter and Biota had already come to a mysterious end; and the one gallant Cenomannian who held out when Walter and all else had yielded—Geoffrey of Mayenne—was at length compelled to surrender.[505] Thenceforth William ruled Maine as its Conqueror, and as long as he lived, save for one brief moment, the homage due to Anjou was heard of no more.

- [502] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 532. The story is somewhat suspicious, because Orderic tells it not in its proper place, but in a sort of summary of Cenomannian history, introductory to the war of 1073; so that it looks very much like a confused anticipation of the treaty of Blanchelande (see below, p. 223). Still there is nothing intrinsically impossible in it, and I do not feel justified in rejecting it without further evidence.

- [503] Will. Poitiers (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 190.

- [504] On the pedigree of the house of Maine see note D at end of chapter.

- [505] Will. Poitiers (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 190, 191. Will. Jumièges, l. vii. c. 27 (ib. p. 283). Ord. Vit. (ibid.) pp. 487, 488.

The rapid decline of the Angevin power after Geoffrey Martel’s death was due partly to the reaction which often follows upon a sudden rise, partly to the exceptional greatness of the rival with whom the Angevin count had to deal in the person of William the Conqueror. But behind and beyond these two causes lay a third more fatal than either. The house of Anjou was divided against itself. From the hour of Martel’s death, a bitter dispute over his testamentary dispositions had been going on between his nephews. To young Fulk it seemed an unpardonable wrong that he was left without provision—for even Saintonge, as we have seen, had now slipped from his grasp—while his elder brother was in full possession not only of the paternal county of Gâtinais but also of their uncle’s heritage. In later days Fulk went so far as to declare that his uncle had intended to make him sole heir, to the complete exclusion of Geoffrey the Bearded.[506] Fulk is in one aspect a very interesting person. Almost the sole authority which we possess for the history of the early Angevin counts is a fragment written in his name. If it be indeed his work—and criticism has as yet failed to establish any other conclusion—Fulk Rechin is not merely the earliest historian of Anjou; he is well-nigh the first lay historian of the Middle Ages.[507] But in every other point of view he deserves nothing but aversion and contempt. His very surname tells its own tale; in one of the most quarrelsome families known to history, he was pre-eminently distinguished as “the Quarreller.”[508] With the turbulence, the greed, the wilfulness of his race he had also their craft and subtlety, their plausible, insinuating, serpent-like cleverness; but he lacked the boldness of conception, the breadth of view and loftiness of aim, the unflinching perseverance, the ungrudging as well as unscrupulous devotion to a great and distant end, which lifted their subtlety into statesmanship and their cleverness into genius. The same qualities in him degenerated into mere artfulness and low cunning, and were used simply to meet his own personal needs and desires of the moment, not to work out any far-reaching train of policy. He is the only one of the whole line of Angevin counts, till we reach the last and worst of all, whose ruling passion seems to have been not ambition but self-indulgence. Every former count of Anjou, from Fulk the Red to Geoffrey Martel, had toiled and striven, and sinned upon occasion, quite as much for his heirs as for himself: Fulk Rechin toiled and sinned for himself alone. All the thoroughness which they threw into the pursuit of their house’s greatness he threw simply into the pursuit of his own selfish desires. Had Geoffrey the Bearded possessed the highest capacities, he could have done little for his own or his country’s advancement while his brother’s restless intrigues were sowing strife and discontent among the Angevin baronage and turning the whole land into a hotbed of treason.[509] Geoffrey’s cause was however damaged by his own imprudence. An act of violent injustice to the abbey of Marmoutier brought him under the ban of the Church;[510] and from that moment his ruin became certain. From within and without, troubles crowded upon the Marchland and its unhappy count. The comet which scared all Europe in 1066 was the herald of evil days to Anjou as well as to the land with which she was one day to be linked so closely. In that very year a Breton invasion was only checked by the sudden death of Duke Conan just after he had received the surrender of Châteaugonthier.[511] Next spring, on the first Sunday in Lent, Saumur was betrayed by its garrison to Fulk Rechin;[512] on the Wednesday before Easter he was treacherously admitted into Angers, and Geoffrey fell with his capital into the clutches of his brother.[513] The citizens next day rose in a body and slew the chief traitors;[514] the disloyalty of Saumur was punished by the duke of Aquitaine, who profited by the distracted state of Anjou to cross the border and fire the town;[515] while the remonstrances of Pope Alexander II. soon compelled Fulk to release his brother.[516] Next year, however, Geoffrey was again taken prisoner while besieging Fulk’s castle of Brissac.[517] This time the king of France, alarmed no doubt by the revelation of such a temper among his vassals, took up arms for Geoffrey’s restoration, and he was joined by Count Stephen of Blois, the son of Theobald from whom Geoffrey Martel had won Tours. Fulk bought off both his assailants. Stephen, who was now governing the territories of Blois as regent for his aged father, was pacified by receiving Fulk’s homage for Touraine; the king was bribed more unblushingly still, by the cession of what was more undeniably Geoffrey’s lawful property than any part of the Angevin dominions—his paternal heritage of the Gâtinais.[518] It thus became Philip’s interest as well as Fulk’s to keep Geoffrey in prison. For the next twenty-eight years he lay in a dungeon at Chinon,[519] and Fulk ruled Anjou in his stead.

[506] See note B at end of chapter.

[507] “It needs some self-sacrifice to give up the only lay historian whom we have come across since the days of our own Æthelweard.” Freeman, Norm. Conq., 3d ed. vol. ii. p. 638.

[508] This seems to be the meaning of “Rechin.”

[509] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 138, 139.

[510] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 134–137. See also Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 664, note.

[511] Will. Jumièges, l. vii. c. 33 (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 286). Chron. Brioc. and Chron. Britann. a. 1066 (Morice, Hist. Bret., preuves, vol. i. cols. 36, 102). Chronn. Rain. Andeg., S. Serg. and Vindoc. a. 1067 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 12, 137, 168)—which, however, means 1066, as all these chronicles place both the comet and the conquest in the same year.

[512] Chron. S. Maxent. a. 1067 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 403, 404). This was February 25 (ibid.).

[513] Chronn. Rain. Andeg., S. Albin., S. Serg., Vindoc. a. 1067 (ib. pp. 12, 25, 137, 138, 168). Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 138, 139), antedated by a year.

[514] Chronn. Rain. Andeg., S. Albin. (as above); S. Serg. (ib. p. 138); Vindoc. (ib. pp. 168, 169).

[515] Chron. S. Maxent. a. 1067 (ib. p. 404).

[516] Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 379.

[517] Ib. pp. 379, 380. Chronn. Rain. Andeg., S. Albin., S. Serg. and Vindoc. a. 1068 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 12, 26, 138, 169).

[518] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 139. Chron. Turon. Magn. a. 1067 (Salmon, Chron. de Touraine, p. 125)—a date which must be at least a year too early.

[519] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 723, 818. He makes it thirty years, but the dates are undoubtedly 1068–1096.

That time was a time of shame and misery such as the Marchland had never yet seen. Eight years of civil war had fostered among the barons of Anjou and Touraine a spirit of turbulence and lawlessness which Fulk, whose own intrigues had sown the first seeds of the mischief, was powerless to control. Throughout the whole of his reign, all southern Touraine was kept in confusion by a feud among the landowners at Amboise;[520] and it can hardly have been the only one of its kind under a ruler who, instead of putting it down with a strong hand, only aggravated it by his undignified and violent intermeddling. Nor were his foreign relations better regulated than his home policy. For a moment, in 1073, an opportunity seemed to present itself of regaining the lost Angevin overlordship over Maine. Ten years of Angevin rule had failed to crush out the love of independence among the Cenomannian people; ten years of Norman rule had just as little effect. While their conqueror was busied with the settlement of his later and greater conquest beyond sea, the patriots of Maine seized a favourable moment to throw off the Norman yoke. Hugh of Este or of Liguria, a son of Herbert Wake-the-dog’s eldest daughter Gersendis, was received as count under the guardianship of his mother and Geoffrey of Mayenne. But Geoffrey, who in the hour of adversity ten years before had seemed little short of a hero, yielded to the temptations of power; and his tyranny drove the Cenomannians to fall back upon the traditions of their old municipal freedom and “make a commune”—in other words, to set up a civic commonwealth such as those which were one day to be the glory of the more distant Cenomannian land on the other side of the Alps. At Le Mans, however, the experiment was premature. It failed through the treachery of Geoffrey of Mayenne; and the citizens, in the extremity of despair, called upon Fulk of Anjou to save them at once from Geoffrey and from William. Fulk readily helped them to dislodge Geoffrey from the citadel of Le Mans;[521] but as soon as William appeared in Maine with a great army from over sea Fulk, like his uncle, vanished. Only when the conqueror had “won back the land of Maine”[522] and returned in triumph to Normandy did Fulk venture to attack La Flèche, a castle on the right bank of the Loir, close to the Angevin border, and held by John, husband of Herbert Wake-dog’s youngest daughter Paula.[523] At John’s request William sent a picked band of Norman troops to reinforce the garrison of La Flèche; Fulk at once collected all his forces and persuaded Hoel duke of Britanny to bring a large Breton host to help him in besieging the place. A war begun on such a scale as this might be nominally an attack on John, but it was practically an attack on William. He took it as such, and again calling together his forces, Normans and English, led them down to the relief of La Flèche. Instead, however, of marching straight to the spot, he crossed the Loir higher up and swept round to the southward through the territories of Anjou, thus putting the river between himself and his enemies. The movement naturally drew Fulk back across the river to defend his own land against the Norman invader.[524] The two armies drew up facing each other on a wide moor or heath stretching along the left bank of the Loir between La Flèche and Le Lude, and overgrown with white reindeer-moss, whence it took the name of Blanchelande. No battle however took place; some clergy who were happily at hand stepped in as mediators, and after a long negotiation peace was arranged. The count of Anjou again granted the investiture of Maine to Robert of Normandy, and, like his predecessor, received the young man’s homage to himself as overlord.[525] Like the treaty of Alençon, the treaty of Blanchelande was a mere formal compromise; William kept it a dead letter by steadily refusing to make over Maine to his son, and holding it as before by the right of his own good sword. A few years later Fulk succeeded in accomplishing his vengeance upon John of La Flèche by taking and burning his castle;[526] but the expedition seems to have been a mere border-raid, and so long as William lived neither native patriotism nor Angevin meddlesomeness ventured again to question his supremacy over Maine.

- [520] Gesta Amb. Domin. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 175 et seq.

- [521] Acta Pontif. Cenoman. c. 33 (Mabillon, Vet. Anal., p. 308).

- [522] Eng. Chron. a. 1074.

- [523] See note D at end of chapter.

- [524] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 533. See note E at end of chapter.

- [525] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 533.

- [526] Chron. S. Albin. a. 1081 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 26). See note E at end of chapter.

But on his death in 1087 the advantage really given to Anjou by the treaties of Alençon and Blanchelande at last became apparent. From the moment when Robert came into actual possession of the fief with which he had been twice invested by an Angevin count, the Angevin overlordship could no longer be denied or evaded. The action of the Cenomannians forced their new ruler to throw himself upon Fulk’s support. Their unquenchable love of freedom caught at the first ray of hope offered them by Robert’s difficulties in his Norman duchy and quarrels with his brother the king of England, and their attitude grew so alarming that in 1089 Robert, lying sick at Rouen, sent for the count of Anjou and in a personal interview besought him to use his influence in preventing their threatened revolt. Fulk consented, on condition that, as the price of his good offices, Robert should obtain for him the hand of a beautiful Norman lady, Bertrada of Montfort.[527] Fulk’s domestic life was as shameless as his public career. He had already one wife dead and two living; Hermengard of Bourbon, whom he had married in 1070[528] and who was the mother of his heir,[529] had been abandoned in 1075 without even the formality of a divorce for Arengard of Châtel-Aillon;[530] and Arengard was now set aside in her turn to make way for Bertrada.[531] These scandals had already brought Fulk under a Papal sentence of excommunication;[532] he met with a further punishment at the hands of his new bride. Bertrada used him simply as a stepping-stone to higher advancement; on Whitsun-Eve 1093 she eloped with King Philip of France.[533]

- [527] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 681.

- [528] Chron. Turon. Magn. a. 1070.

- [529] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 140.

- [530] According to a charter in Marchegay, Documents inédits sur l’Anjou, p. 96, Fulk married Arengard on Saturday the feast of S. Agnes (January 21) 1075—i.e. what we call 1076, as the year was usually reckoned in Gaul from Easter to Easter; see editor’s note 4, as above. The Art de vérifier les dates, however (vol. xiii. p. 62), refers to a document in Dom Huyne’s collection where the marriage is dated 1087.

- [531] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 681, seems to date Bertrada’s marriage about 1089. The Chron. Turon. Magn. puts it in 1091 (Salmon, Chron. Touraine, vol. i. p. 128); but a charter in Marchegay, Archives d’Anjou, vol. i. p. 365, shows that it had already taken place in April 1090.

- [532] Gregor. VII. Epp., l. ix. ep. 22. Fulk’s violence to the archbishop of Tours had also something to do with his excommunication; see ib. ep. 23; Chron. Turon. Magn. a. 1081 (Salmon, Chron. Touraine, vol. i. p. 126), and Narratio Controversiæ in Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 459. So too had his imprisonment of his brother; Rer. Gall. Scriptt. as above, p. 664, note.

- [533] Chron. Turon. Magn. a. 1093 (as above, p. 128).

By that time Maine was again in revolt. The leader of the rising was young Elias of La Flèche, a son of John and Paula; but his place was soon taken by the veteran Geoffrey of Mayenne, whose treasons seem to have been forgiven and forgotten, and who now once more installed Hugh of Este as count at Le Mans. Hugh proved however utterly unfit for his honourable but dangerous position, and gladly sold his claims to his cousin Elias.[534] For nearly six years the Cenomannians were free to rejoice in a ruler of their own blood and their own spirit. We must go to the historian of his enemies if we would hear his praises sung;[535] his own people had no need to praise him in words; for them he was simply the incarnation of Cenomannian freedom; his bright, warm-hearted, impulsive nature spoke for itself. The strength as well as the charm of his character lay in its perfect sincerity; its faults were as undisguised as its virtues. In the gloomy tale of public wrong and private vice which makes up the history of the time—the time of Fulk Rechin, Philip I. and William Rufus—the only figure which shines out bright against the darkness, except the figure of S. Anselm himself, is that of Count Elias of Maine.

- [534] Acta Pontif. Cenoman. c. 34 (Mabillon, Vet. Anal.), pp. 310–312. Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 683, 684.

- [535] Ord. Vit. (as above), pp. 768, 769.

During these years Anjou interfered with him as little as Normandy; Fulk was overwhelmed with domestic and ecclesiastical troubles. His excommunication was at length removed in 1094;[536] two years later Pope Urban II., on his way to preach the Crusade in western Gaul, was received by the count at Angers and consecrated the abbey church of S. Nicolas, now at length brought to completion.[537] From Angers Urban passed to Tours and Le Mans; and among the many hearts stirred by his call to take the cross there can have been few more earnest than that of Elias of Maine. Robert of Normandy was already gone, leaving his dominions pledged to his brother the king of England. Elias prepared to follow him; but when his request to William Rufus for the protection due to a crusader’s lands during his absence was met by a declaration of the Red King’s resolve to regain all the territories which had been held by his father, the count of Maine saw that he must fight out his crusade not in Holy Land but at home. The struggle had scarcely begun when he was taken prisoner by Robert of Bellême, and sent in chains to the king at Rouen.[538] The people of Maine, whose political existence seemed bound up in their count, were utterly crushed by his loss. But there was another enemy to be faced. Aremburg, the only child of Elias, was betrothed to Fulk Rechin’s eldest son, Geoffrey,[539] whose youthful valour had won him the surname of “Martel the Second;” Geoffrey hurried to save the heritage of his bride, and Fulk was no less eager to seize the opportunity of asserting once more his rights to the overlordship of Maine.[540] The Cenomannians gladly welcomed the only help that was offered them; and while Geoffrey reinforced the garrison of Le Mans, Fulk tried to effect a diversion on the border.[541] But meanwhile Elias had guessed his design, and frustrated it by making terms with the Norman.[542] If Maine must needs bow to a foreign yoke, even William Rufus was at least a better master than Fulk Rechin. To William, therefore, Elias surrendered his county as the price of his own release;[543] and to William he offered his services with the trustful frankness of a heart to which malice was unknown. The offer was refused. Then, from its very ashes, the spirit of Cenomannian freedom rose up once more, and for the second time Elias hurled his defiance at the Red King. An Angevin count in William’s place would probably have flung the bold speaker straight back into the dungeon whence he had come; the haughty chivalry of the Norman only bade him begone and do his worst.[544] In the spring Elias fought his way back to Le Mans, where the people welcomed him with clamorous delight; William’s unexpected approach, however, soon compelled him to withdraw;[545] and Maine had to wait two more years for her deliverance. It came with the news of the Red King’s death in August 1100. Robert of Normandy was too indolent, Henry of England too wise, to answer the appeal for succour made to each in turn by the Norman garrison of Le Mans; Elias received their submission and sent them home in peace;[546] and thenceforth the foreign oppressor trod the soil of Maine no more. When the final struggle for Normandy broke out between Robert and Henry, Elias, with characteristic good sense, commended himself to the one overlord whom he saw to be worthy of his homage.[547] Henry was wise enough loyally to accept the service and the friendship which Rufus had scorned; and he proved its value on the field of Tinchebray, where Elias and his Cenomannians decided the battle in his favour, and thus made him master of Normandy. On the other hand, the dread of Angevin tyranny had changed into a glad anticipation of peaceful and equal union. The long battle of Cenomannian freedom, so often baffled and so often renewed, was won at last. When next a duke of Normandy disputed the possession of Maine with a count of Anjou, he disputed it not with a rival oppressor but with the husband of its countess, the lawful heir of Elias; and the triumph of Cenomannia received its fitting crown when Henry’s daughter wedded Aremburg’s son in the minster of S. Julian at Le Mans.

[536] Letter of the legate, Archbishop Hugh of Lyons, dated S. Florence of Saumur, S. John Baptist’s day, 1094; Gallia Christiana, vol. iv., instrum. cols. 10, 11.

[537] Chronn. Rain. Andeg., S. Albin., S. Serg., a. 1095 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 14, 27, 140); Chron. S. Maxent. a. 1096 (ib. p. 411). This last is the right year; see the itinerary of Pope Urban in Gaul, in Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. pp. 3 note m, and 65 note d.

[538] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 769–771. Acta Pontif. Cenoman. c. 35 (Mabillon, Vet. Anal., p. 313). The exact date of the capture is April 20, 1098; Chron. S. Albin. ad ann. (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 28).

[539] Acta Pontif. Cenoman. c. 35 (Mabillon, Vet. Anal., p. 313). Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 142.

[540] “Quia capitalis dominus erat.” Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 772.

[541] Ibid. Acta Pontif. Cenoman., as above.

[542] Acta Pontif. Cenoman. (as above), p. 314.

[543] Ibid. Ord. Vit., as above.

[544] Ord. Vit. (as above), p. 773.

[545] Ib. pp. 774, 775. Acta Pontif. Cenoman., as above.

[546] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 784, 785.

[547] Ib. p. 822.

The union of Anjou and Maine did not, however, come to pass exactly as it had been first planned; Aremburg became the wife of an Angevin count, but he was not Geoffrey Martel the Second. That marriage, long deferred by reason of the bride’s youth, was frustrated in the end by the death of the bridegroom. His life had been far from an easy one. Fulk, prematurely worn out by a life of vice, had for some years past made over the cares of government to Geoffrey.[548] Father and son agreed as ill as their namesakes in a past generation; but this time the fault was not on the young man’s side. Geoffrey, while spending all his energies in doing his father’s work, saw himself supplanted in that father’s affection by his little half-brother, Bertrada’s child. He found a friend in his unhappy uncle, Geoffrey the Bearded, whose reason had been almost destroyed by half a lifetime of captivity; and a touching story relates how the imprisoned count in a lucid interval expressed his admiration for his nephew’s character, and voluntarily renounced in his favour the rights which he still persisted in maintaining against Fulk.[549] On the strength of this renunciation Geoffrey Martel, backed by Pope Urban, at length extorted his father’s consent to the liberation of the captive. It was, however, too late to be of much avail; reason and health were both alike gone, and all that the victim gained by his nephew’s care was that, when he died shortly after, he at least died a free man.[550] His bequest availed as little to Geoffrey Martel; in 1103, Fulk openly announced his intention of disinheriting his valiant son in favour of Bertrada’s child. A brief struggle, in which Fulk was backed by the duke of Aquitaine and Geoffrey by Elias, ended in Fulk’s abdication. For three years Geoffrey ruled well and prosperously,[551] till in May 1106, as he was besieging a rebellious vassal in the castle of Candé on the Loire, he was struck by a poisoned arrow and died next morning.[552] The bitter regrets of his people, as they laid him to sleep beside his great-uncle in the church of S. Nicolas at Angers,[553] were intensified by a horrible suspicion that his death had been contrived by Bertrada, and that Fulk himself condoned her crime.[554] It is doubtful whether her child, who now had to take his brother’s place, had even grown up among his own people; she had perhaps carried her baby with her, or persuaded the weak count to let her have him and bring him up at court; there, at any rate, he was at the time of Geoffrey’s death. Philip granted him the investiture of Anjou in Geoffrey’s stead, and commissioned Duke William of Aquitaine, who happened to be at court, to escort him safe home to his father. The Poitevin, however, conveyed him away into his own territories, and there put him in prison. Philip’s threats, Bertrada’s persuasions, alike proved unavailing, till the boy’s own father purchased his release by giving up some border-towns to Poitou, and after a year’s captivity young Fulk at last came home.[555] Two years later, on April 14, 1109, he was left sole count of Anjou by the death of Fulk Rechin.[556]

[548] Chron. Turon. Magn. a. 1098 (Salmon, Chron. Touraine, p. 130).

[549] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 141.

[550] Ibid. Chron. Turon. Magn. a. 1098 (Salmon, Chron. Touraine, p. 128). Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 723.

[551] Ord. Vit. (as above), p. 818. Chron. S. Albin. a. 1103–1105 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 30).

[552] Ord. Vit. as above. Chronn. Rain. Andeg., S. Albin., S. Serg., Vindoc., S. Flor. Salm., S. Maxent., a. 1106 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 15, 16, 30, 142, 171, 190, 423). The three first-named chronicles give the day as May 19, the Chron. S. Maxent. makes it May 26, and according to M. Marchegay’s note (as above, p. 171) the obituary of S. Maurice makes it June 1. This, however, might be owing to an accidental omission of the “xiv.” (or “vii.”) before Kal. Junii. The Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 142, places the death a year later.

[553] Ord. Vit. and Gesta Cons. as above.

[554] Gesta Cons. as above. Chron. Turon. Magn. a. 1108 (Salmon, Chron. Touraine, p. 130). See also a quotation from Le Pelletier’s Epitome S. Nicolai, in Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 486, note.

[555] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 818. Will. Tyr., l. xiv. c. 1, has a different version, which does not look authentic.

[556] Chron. Rain. Andeg., S. Albin., Vindoc., S. Flor. Salm. ad ann. (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 16, 31, 172, 190). The Chronn. S. Serg. and S. Maxent. (ib. pp. 143, 424), date it 1108.

“Ill he began; worse he lived; worst of all he ended.”[557] Such is the verdict of a later Angevin historian upon the man whom we should have been glad to respect as the father of Angevin history. Fulk Rechin’s utter worthlessness had well-nigh undone the work of Geoffrey Martel and Fulk the Black; amid the wreck of the Angevin power in his hands, the only result of their labours which seemed still to remain was the mere territorial advantage involved in the possession of Touraine. Politically, Anjou had sunk far below the position which she had held in the Black Count’s earliest days; she had not merely ceased to be a match for the greatest princes of the realm, she had ceased to be a power in the realm at all. The title of count of Anjou, for nearly a hundred years a very synonym of energy and progress, had become identified with weakness and disgrace. The black cloud of ruin seemed to be settling down over the marchland, only waiting its appointed time to burst and pour upon her its torrent of destruction. It proved to be only the dark hour before the dawn of the brightest day that Anjou had seen since her great Count Fulk was laid in his grave at Beaulieu—perhaps even since her good Count Fulk was laid in his grave at Tours.

- [557] Hist. Abbr. Com. Andeg. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 360.

Nearly nine months before the death of Fulk Rechin, Louis VI. had succeeded his father Philip as king of France.[558] His accession marks an era in the growth of the French monarchy. It is a turning-point in the struggle of the feudataries with the Crown, or rather with each other for control over the Crown, which lay at the root of the rivalry between Anjou and Blois, and which makes up almost the whole history of the first three generations of the kingly house founded by Hugh Capet. The royal authority was a mere name; but that name was still the centre round which the whole complicated system of French feudalism revolved; it was the one point of cohesion among the various and ill-assorted members which made up the realm of France, in the wider sense which that word was now beginning to bear. The duke or count of almost any one of the great fiefs—Normandy, Flanders, Burgundy, Aquitaine—was far more really powerful and independent than the king, who was nominally the lord paramount of them all, but practically the tool of each in turn. In this seemingly ignominious position of the Crown there was, however, an element of hidden strength which in the end enabled it to swallow up and outlive all its rivals. The end was as yet far distant; but the first step towards it was taken when Louis the Fat was crowned at Reims in August 1109. At the age of thirty-two he ascended the throne with a fixed determination to secure such an absolute authority within the immediate domains of the Crown as should enable him to become the master instead of the servant of his feudataries.

- [558] Hist. Franc. Fragm. (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii.), p. 7.

This policy led almost of necessity to a conflict with King Henry of England, who had now become master of Normandy by his victory at Tinchebray. Louis appears never to have received Henry’s homage for the duchy;[559] and it may have been to avoid the necessity of performing this act of subordination that Henry, as it seems, refrained from formally assuming the ducal title, at least so long as his captive brother lived.[560] Whatever may have been his motive, the fact aptly typifies his political position. Alike in French and English eyes, he was a king of England ruling Normandy as a dependency of the English Crown. Such a personage was far more obnoxious to Louis and his projects than a mere duke of the Normans, or even a duke of the Normans ruling England as a dependency of the Norman duchy. On the other hand, Henry, in the new position given him by his conquest, had every reason to look with jealousy and suspicion upon the growing power of France. The uncertain relations between the two kings therefore soon took an openly hostile turn. In 1110 a quarrel arose between them concerning the ownership of the great border-fortress of Gisors. They met near the spot, each at the head of an army; but they parted again after wasting a day in fruitless recriminations and empty challenges.[561] Their jealousy was quickened by a dispute, also connected with the possession of a castle, between Louis and Henry’s nephew Theobald count of Blois.[562] Uncle and nephew made common cause against their common enemy; but the strife had scarcely begun when a further complication destined to be of far weightier consequence, if not to France at least to England, arose out of the position and policy of the young count of Anjou.

- [559] See Freeman, Norm. Conq., vol. v. p. 193.

- [560] Freeman, Norm. Conq., vol. v. p. 180 and note 2.

- [561] Suger, Vita Ludov., c. 15 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. pp. 27, 28).

- [562] Ib. c. 18 (pp. 35, 36).

The accession of Fulk V., no less than that of Louis VI., began a new era for his country. The two princes were in some respects not unlike each other: each stands out in marked contrast to his predecessor, and in Fulk’s case the contrast is even more striking than in that of Louis, for if little good was to be expected of the son of Philip I., there might well be even less hope of the child of Fulk Rechin and Bertrada. As a ruler and as a man, however, young Fulk turned utterly aside from the evil ways of both his parents.[563] Yet he was an Angevin of the Angevins; physically, he had the ruddy complexion inherited from the first of his race and name;[564] while in his restless, adventurous temper, at once impetuous and wary, daring and discreet, he shows a strong likeness to his great-grandfather Fulk the Black. But the old fiery spirit breaks out in Fulk V. only as if to remind us that it is still there, to shew that the demon-blood of Anjou still flows in his veins, hot as ever indeed, but kept under subjection to higher influences; the sense of right that only woke now and then to torture the conscience of the Black Count seems to be the guiding principle of his great-grandson’s life. The evil influences which must have surrounded his boyhood, whether it had been passed in his father’s house, or, as seems more probable, in the court of Philip and Bertrada, seem, instead of developing the worse tendencies of his nature, only to have brought out the better ones into more active working by sheer force of opposition. Politically, however, there can be no doubt that the peculiar circumstances of his early life led to important results, by reviving and strengthening the old ties between Anjou and the Crown which had somewhat slackened in Fulk Rechin’s days. The most trusted counsellor of the new king, the devoted supporter and not unfrequently the instigator of his schemes of reform or of aggression, was Almeric of Montfort, the brother of Bertrada. She herself, after persecuting Louis by every means in her power so long as his father lived, changed her policy as soon as he mounted the throne and became as useful an ally as she had been a dangerous enemy. Almeric’s influence, won by his own talents, seems to have been almost all-powerful with the king; over the count of Anjou, far younger and utterly inexperienced, natural ties had given a yet more complete ascendency to him and his sister, Fulk’s own mother. Their policy was to pledge Anjou irrevocably to the side of the French crown by forcing it into a quarrel with Henry I.

- [563] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 143.

- [564] “Vir rufus, sed instar David.” Will. Tyr. l. xiv. c. 1.

The means lay ready to their hands. Aremburg of Maine, once the plighted bride of Geoffrey Martel, was still unwed; Fulk, by his mother’s counsel, sought and won her for his wife.[565] Her marriage crowned the work of Elias. The patriot-count’s mission was fulfilled, his task was done; and in that very summer he passed to his well-earned rest.[566] Fulk, as husband of the heiress, thus became count of Maine, and the immediate consequence was a breach with Henry on the long-vexed question of the overlordship of the county. Whether Elias had or had not recognized any right of overlordship in Fulk Rechin or Geoffrey Martel II. is not clear; he certainly seems to have done homage to Henry,[567] and their mutual relations as lord and vassal were highly honourable to both; but it was hardly to be expected that Fulk, whose predecessors had twice received the homage of Henry’s elder brother for that very county, should yield up without a struggle the rights of the count of Anjou. He refused all submission to Henry, and at once formed a league with the French Crown in active opposition to the lord of England and Normandy.

- [565] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 785, 818. Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 143. Will. Tyr., l. xiv. c. 1.

- [566] Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1110 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 31, 143). Eng. Chron. a. 1110. Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 785, 839.

- [567] “Eac thises geares forthferde Elias eorl, the tha Mannie of tham cynge Heanri geheold, and on cweow.” Eng. Chron. a. 1110. Nobody seems to know what “on cweow” means; Mr. Thorpe (Eng. Chron., vol. ii. p. 211) suggests that it may stand for “Angeow.”

The war began in 1111, and the danger was great enough to call Henry himself over sea in August and keep him on the continent for nearly two years. The leading part was taken by the count of Anjou, whose marriage enabled him to add the famous “Cenomannian swords” to the forces of Touraine and the Angevin March.[568] Moreover, treason was, as usual, rife among the Norman barons; and the worst of all the traitors was Robert of Bellême. One after another the lesser offenders were brought to justice; at last, in November 1112, Robert himself fell into the hands of his outraged sovereign, and, to the joy of all men on both sides of the sea, was flung into a lifelong captivity.[569] Then at last Henry felt secure in Normandy; the capture of Robert was followed by the surrender of his fortress of Alençon, and the tide of fortune turned so rapidly that Fulk and Louis were soon compelled to sue for peace. Early in Lent 1113 Fulk and Henry met at Pierre-Pécoulée near Alençon; the count submitted to perform the required homage for Maine, and his infant daughter was betrothed to Henry’s son, the little Ætheling William. In March the treaty was confirmed by the two kings at Gisors; and as the first-fruits of their new alliance there was seen the strange spectacle of a count of Anjou and a count of Blois fighting side by side to help the lord of Normandy in subduing the rebels who still held out in the castle of Bellême.[570]

- [568] Eng. Chron. a. 1111, 1112.

- [569] Eng. Chron. a. 1112. Ord. Vit. (as above·/·Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 841, 858. Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 398 (Hardy, p. 626).

- [570] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 841.

Henry’s next step was to exact, first from the barons of Normandy and then from the Great Council of England, a solemn oath of homage and fealty to his son William as his destined successor.[571] This ceremony, not unusual in France, but quite without precedent in England, was doubtless a precaution against the chances of the war which he foresaw must soon be renewed. This time indeed he was himself the aggressor; Louis had made no hostile movement, and Fulk was troubled by a revolt at home, whose exact nature is not clearly ascertained. The universal tendency of feudal vassals to rebel against their lord had probably something to do with it; but there seems also to have been another and a far more interesting element at work. “There arose a grave dissension between Count Fulk the Younger and the burghers of Angers.”[572] In this provokingly brief entry in one of the Angevin chronicles we may perhaps catch a glimpse of that new spirit of civic freedom which was just springing into life in northern Europe, and which made some progress both in France and in England during the reigns of Louis VI. and Henry I. One would gladly know what were the demands of the Angevin burghers, and how they were met by the son-in-law of Elias of Le Mans; but the faint echo of the dispute between count and citizens is drowned in the roar of the more imposing strife which soon broke out anew between the rival kings. Its ostensible cause was now Count Theobald of Blois, whose wrongs were made by his uncle a ground for marching into France, in company with Theobald himself and his brother Stephen, in the spring of 1116. Louis retaliated by a raid upon Normandy; the Norman barons recommenced their old intrigues;[573] and they were soon furnished with an excellent pretext. After the battle of Tinchebray, Duke Robert’s infant son William had been intrusted by his victorious uncle to the care of his half-sister’s husband, Elias of Saint-Saëns. Elias presently began to suspect Henry of evil designs against the child; at once, sacrificing his own possessions to Henry’s wrath, he fled with his charge and led him throughout all the neighbouring lands, seeking to stir up sympathy for the fugitive heir of Normandy, till he found him a shelter at the court of his kinsman Count Baldwin of Flanders.[574] At last the faithful guardian’s zeal was rewarded by seeing the cause of his young brother-in-law taken up by both Baldwin and Louis. In 1117 they leagued themselves together with the avowed object of avenging Duke Robert and reinstating his son in the duchy of Normandy; and their league was at once joined by the count of Anjou.[575]

- [571] Eng. Chron. a. 1115. Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 69. Eadmer, Hist. Nov. (Rule), p. 237.

- [572] “Facta est gravis dissensio inter Fulconem comitem Juniorem et burgenses Andecavenses.” Chron. S. Serg. a. 1116 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 143). The Chron. S. Albin. a. 1114 (ib. p. 32) has “Guerra burgensium contra comitem”; but M. Marchegay says in a note that two MSS. read “baronum” for “burgensium.”

- [573] See details in Suger, Vita Ludov. c. 21 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 43), and Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 843.

- [574] Ord. Vit. (as above), pp. 837, 838.

- [575] Eng. Chron. a. 1117. Hen. Huntingdon, l. vii. c. 29 (Arnold, p. 239).

The quarrel had now assumed an aspect far more threatening to Henry; but it was not till the middle of the following summer that the war began in earnest. Its first honours were won by the count of Anjou, in the capture of La Motte-Gautier, a fortress on the Cenomannian border.[576] In September the count of Flanders was mortally wounded in a skirmish near Eu;[577] Louis and Fulk had however more useful allies in the Norman baronage, whose chiefs were nearly all either openly or secretly in league with them. Almeric of Montfort, who claimed the county of Evreux, was the life and soul of all their schemes. In October the city of Evreux was betrayed into his hands;[578] and this disaster was followed by another at Alençon. Henry had granted the lands of Robert of Bellême to Theobald of Blois; Theobald, with his uncle’s permission, made them over to his brother Stephen; and Stephen at once began to shew in his small dominions the same incapacity for keeping order which he shewed afterwards on a larger scale in England. His negligence brought matters at Alençon to such a pass that the outraged citizens called in the help of the count of Anjou, admitted him and his troops by night into the town, and joined with him in blockading the castle.[579] Stephen meanwhile had joined his uncle and brother at Séez. On receipt of the evil tidings, the two young counts hurried back to Alençon, made an unsuccessful attempt to revictual the garrison, and then tried to surround the Angevin camp, which had been pitched in a place called “the Park.” A long day’s fighting, in which the tide seems to have been turned at last chiefly by the valour of Fulk himself, ended in an Angevin victory and won him the surrender of Alençon.[580]

- [576] Ord. Vit. (as above·/·Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 844. His chronology is all wrong.

- [577] Ib. p. 843. Suger, Vita Ludov., c. 21 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 45). Eng. Chron. a. 1118. Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 403 (Hardy, pp. 630, 631) substitutes Arques for Eu.

- [578] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 843, 846.

- [579] Ib. p. 847.

- [580] The details of this story—in a very apocryphal-looking shape—are in Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 145–150. The Angevin victory, however, comes out clearly in Ord. Vit. (as above).

The following year was for Henry an almost unbroken series of reverses and misfortunes, and in 1119 he was compelled to seek peace with Fulk. Their treaty was ratified in June by the marriage of William the Ætheling and Matilda of Anjou; Fulk made an attempt to end the Cenomannian difficulty by settling Maine upon his daughter as a marriage-portion,[581] and gave up Alençon on condition that Henry should restore it to the dispossessed heir, William Talvas.[582] Henry had now to face only the French king and the traitor barons. With the latter he began at once by firing the town of Evreux.[583] Louis, on receiving these tidings from Almeric of Montfort, assembled his troops at Etampes and marched upon Normandy. In the plain of Brenneville, between Noyon and Andely, he was met by Henry with the flower of his English and Norman forces. Louis, in the insane bravado of chivalry, disdained to get his men into order before beginning the attack, and he thereby lost the day. The first charge, made by eighty French knights under a Norman traitor, William Crispin, broke against the serried ranks of the English fighting on foot around their king; all the eighty were surrounded and made prisoners; and the rest of the French army was put to such headlong flight that, if the Norman tale can be true, out of nine hundred knights only three were found dead on the field. Louis himself, unhorsed in the confusion, escaped alone into a wood where he lost his way, and was finally led back to Andely by a peasant ignorant of his rank.[584] In bitter shame he went home to Paris to seek comfort and counsel of Almeric, who, luckily for both, had had no share in this disastrous expedition. By Almeric’s advice a summons was issued to all bishops, counts, and other persons in authority throughout the realm, bidding them stir up their people, on pain of anathema, to come and help the king. The plan seems to have had much the same result as a calling-out of the “fyrd” in England, and the host which it brought together inflicted terrible ravages upon Normandy. In October Louis sought help in another quarter. Pope Calixtus had come to hold a council at Reims; the ecclesiastical business ended, he had to listen to a string of appeals in all sorts of causes, and the first appellant was the king of France, who came before the Pope in person and set forth a detailed list of complaints against Henry. The archbishop of Rouen rose to defend his sovereign, but the council refused to hear him. Calixtus, however, was on too dangerous terms with Henry of Germany to venture upon anathematizing his father-in-law, Henry of England; and in a personal interview at Gisors, in November, the English king vindicated himself to the Pope’s complete satisfaction. The tide had turned once more. Almeric had been won over by a grant of the coveted honour of Evreux; and his defection from Louis was followed by that of all the other rebel Normans in rapid succession. William the Clito—as Duke Robert’s son is called, to distinguish him from his cousin William the Ætheling—was again driven into exile, with his faithful brother-in-law still at his side; a treaty was arranged between Henry and Louis; all castles were to be restored, all captives freed, and all wrongs forgiven and forgotten.[585]

- [581] Ord. Vit. (as above·/·Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 851. Eng. Chron. a. 1119. Suger, Vita Ludov. c. 21 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 45). Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 419 (Hardy, p. 652).

- [582] Ord. Vit. as above.

- [583] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 852.

- [584] Ib. pp. 853–855. See also Eng. Chron. a. 1119, Hen. Hunt., l. vii. c. 31 (Arnold, p. 241), and Suger, Vita Ludov., c. 21 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 45).

- [585] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 858, 859, 863–866. Cf. Eng. Chron. a. 1120.

We seem to be reading the story of Fulk Nerra over again as we are told how his great-grandson, as soon as peace seemed assured and he was reconciled to all his neighbours, desired also by penance for his sins to become reconciled to God, and leaving his dominions in charge of his wife and their two little sons, set out on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.[586] The “lord of three cities,”[587] however, could not leave his territories to take care of themselves as the Black Count seems to have done; the regency of his boys was merely nominal, for the eldest of them was but seven years old; and though their mother, the daughter of Elias, may well have been a wise and courageous woman, it was no light matter thus to leave her alone with the rival kings on each side of her. To guard against all dangers, therefore, Fulk again formally commended the county of Maine to King Henry as overlord during his own life, and bequeathed it to his son-in-law the Ætheling in case he should not return.[588] Two months before his departure, the cathedral of Le Mans, which had just been rebuilt, was consecrated in his presence and that of his wife. At the close of the ceremony he took up his little son Geoffrey in his arms and placed him on the altar, saying with tears: “O holy Julian, to thee I commend my child and my land, that thou mayest be the defender and protector of both!”[589] The yearning which drew him literally to tread in his great-grandfather’s steps was too strong to be repressed; but he went,[590] it is clear, with anxious and gloomy forebodings; and before he reached his home again those forebodings were fulfilled. The treaty that had promised so well was scattered to the winds on November 25, 1120, by the death of William the Ætheling in the wreck of the White Ship.[591]

- [586] Ord. Vit. (as above·/·Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 871.

- [587] “Trium urbium dominus.” I think it is Orderic who somewhere thus expressively designates the lord of Angers and Le Mans and Tours.

- [588] This seems to be the meaning of Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 419 (Hardy, p. 652); “Quin et Ierosolymam Fulco ire contendens, comitatum commendavit regi suum, si viveret; futurum profecto generi, si non rediret.” The “county” in question can only be Maine, of the gift of which to the Ætheling at his marriage William has just been speaking.

- [589] Acta Pontif. Cenoman. c. 35 (Mabillon, Vet. Anal., p. 318).

- [590] In company with Rainald, bishop of Angers, in 1120. Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Flor. Salm. ad ann. (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 32, 190).

- [591] Eng. Chron. a. 1120; Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 419 (Hardy, pp. 653, 654); Hen. Hunt., l. vii. c. 32 (Arnold, p. 242); Eadmer, Hist. Nov. (Rule), pp. 288, 289; Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 868, 869, etc.

In that wreck perished not merely Fulk’s hopes for the settlement of Maine, but Henry’s hopes for the settlement of England and Normandy. Setting aside the father’s personal grief for the loss of his favourite child, the Ætheling’s death was the most terrible political blow that could have fallen upon Henry. All his hopes for the continuance of his work were bound up in the life of his son. The toils and struggles of twenty years would be little more than lost labour unless he could guard against two dangers which had been the bane of both England and Normandy ever since the Conqueror’s death:—a disputed succession to the English throne, and a separation between the insular and the continental dominions of the ducal house. In the person of William the Ætheling both dangers seemed provided against; if Henry lived but a few years more, there was every reason to expect that William, and William alone among the Conqueror’s surviving descendants, would be able to mount the English throne without opposition. On any accepted principle, his only possible competitor would have been his cousin and namesake the Clito. Neither people nor barons would have been likely to think for a moment of setting aside the son of their crowned king and queen—a king born in the land and a queen who represented the ancient blood-royal of England—for a landless, homeless stranger whose sole claim rested on the fact that by strict rule of primogeniture he was the heir male of the Conqueror; and, once master of England, William might fairly be expected to keep his hold upon Normandy as his father had done. The shipwreck of November 1120, however, left Henry suddenly face to face with the almost certain prospect of being succeeded in all his dominions by his brother’s son, his enemy, the rival of his lost boy, the one person of all others whose succession would be most repugnant alike to his feelings and to his policy. As soon as Henry himself was gone, the Clito would have positively no competitor; for of all Henry’s surviving children, the only one who had any legal rights was a daughter. The future of Henry’s policy had hung upon the thread of a single life, and now the silver cord was loosed.

The Ætheling’s child-widow was in England: on that sad night she had crossed with her father-in-law instead of her husband, and thus escaped sharing the latter’s fate. Fulk at once sent to demand his daughter back;[592] but Henry was unwilling to part from her, and kept her constantly with him as if she were his own child, till the little girl herself begged to see her own parents again, and was allowed to return to Angers.[593] Henry seems really to have clung to her as a sort of legacy from his dead son; but, to Fulk’s great indignation, he kept her dowry as well as herself.[594] An embassy sent to England at Christmas 1122—apparently after her return to Anjou—came back without success after a delay of several months and a stormy parting from the king.[595] The most important part of the dowry however was still in Fulk’s own hands. His settlement of Maine upon William and Matilda and their possible posterity was annulled by William’s death; Fulk was once more free to dispose of the county as he would. Regarding all ties with Henry as broken, and urged at once by Almeric of Montfort and Louis of France, he offered it, with the hand of his second daughter Sibyl, to William the Clito.[596]

- [592] Eng. Chron. a. 1121.

- [593] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 875.

- [594] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 419 (Hardy, p. 655).

- [595] Eng. Chron. a. 1123.

- [596] Ord. Vit. (as above), pp. 838, 876. Eng. Chron. a. 1124. Will. Malm. as above (p. 654).

To the threatening attitude of France and Anjou was added, as a natural consequence, a conspiracy among the Norman barons, headed by the arch-plotter Almeric and the young Count Waleran of Meulan, a son of Henry’s own familiar friend. Their scheme, planned at a meeting held in September at the Croix-Saint-Leuffroy, was discovered by the king; he marched at once upon Waleran’s castle of Pontaudemer, and took it after a six weeks’ siege, during which he worked in the trenches as hard as any young soldier. This success was counterbalanced by the loss of Gisors, which was taken and sacked by Almeric; Henry retaliated by seizing Evreux. Advent and a stormy winter checked the strife; one battle in the spring put an end to it. On March 25, 1124, the rebels were met at Bourgthéroulde by Ralf of Bayeux, who commanded at Evreux for King Henry; despite their superior numbers, they were completely defeated, and Waleran was taken prisoner.[597] His capture was followed by the surrender of his castles; Almeric, who had as usual escaped, again made his peace with Henry; and the Clito’s cause, forsaken by his Norman partizans, was left almost wholly dependent on the support of Anjou.[598] Meanwhile Henry had found an ally in his son-in-law and namesake the Emperor, and in August France was threatened with a German invasion. Louis seized the consecrated banner—the famous Oriflamme—which hung above the high altar in the abbey of S. Denis, and hurried off with it, as Geoffrey Martel had once ridden forth with the standard of S. Martin of Tours, to meet the foe. But the invasion came to an unexpected end. For some reason which is not explained, the Emperor turned suddenly homeward without striking a blow.[599]

- [597] Eng. Chron. a. 1124. Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 876–880. Will. Jumièges Contin., l. viii. c. 21 (ib. p. 302). The date comes from the Chronicle; the continuator of Will. Jumièges makes it a day later.

- [598] Ord. Vit. (as above), pp. 880–882.

- [599] Suger, Vita Ludov., c. 21 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. pp. 49, 50).

The English king found a more useful friend in the Pope than in the Emperor. By dint of threats, promises and bribes, he persuaded the court of Rome to annul the marriage of Sibyl and the Clito on the ground of consanguinity.[600] Of their kinship there is no doubt;[601] but it was in exactly the same degree as the kinship between Henry’s own son and Sibyl’s sister, to whose marriage no objection had ever been raised. The Clito refused to give up his bride, and was thereupon excommunicated by the Pope;[602] Fulk publicly burnt the letter in which the legate insisted upon the dissolution of the marriage, singed the beards of the envoys who carried it, and put them in prison for a fortnight. The consequence was an interdict[603] which compelled him to submit; the new-married couple parted, and William the Clito became a wanderer once more.[604]

- [600] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 838.

- [601] They were descended, one in the fifth, the other in the sixth degree, from Richard the Fearless; Ord. Vit. as above, giving details of the pedigree.

- [602] Brief of Calixtus II., August 26 [1124], in D’Achéry, Spicilegium, vol. iii. p. 479.

- [603] Brief of Honorius II., April 12 [1125], ibid.

- [604] Ord. Vit. (as above), p. 882.

Next Christmas Henry struck his final blow at his nephew’s hopes of the succession. An old tradition which declared that whatsoever disturber of the realm of France was brought face to face with the might of S. Denis would die within a twelvemonth was fulfilled in the person of the Emperor Henry V.[605] His widow, the only surviving child of Henry of England and the “Good Queen Maude,” was summoned back to her father’s court.[606] She came not without regret, for she had dwelt from childhood among her husband’s people, and was held by them in great esteem. The dying Emperor had no child to take his place. He had committed his sceptre to his consort;[607] and some of the princes of Lombardy and Lorraine took this symbolical bequest in such earnest that they actually followed Matilda over sea to demand her back as their sovereign.[608] But King Henry had other plans for his daughter. At the midwinter assembly of 1126–1127 he made the barons and prelates of England swear that in case of his death without lawful son they would acknowledge her as Lady of England and Normandy.[609]

- [605] Suger, Vita Ludov., c. 21 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 52). Henry V. died in Whit-week, 1125; Ord. Vit. (as above)·/·(Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.) p. 882).

- [606] Will. Jumièges Contin., l. viii. c. 25 (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 304). Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 1 (Hardy, p. 689). She went to England with her father in September 1126. Eng. Chron. ad ann.

- [607] Ord. Vit. as above.

- [608] Will. Jumièges Contin. and Will. Malm. as above.

- [609] Eng. Chron. a. 1127. Will. Jumièges Contin., l. viii. c. 25 (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 304). Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. cc. 2, 3 (Hardy, pp. 690–692).

The first result of this unprecedented step was that the king of France set himself to thwart it by again taking up the cause of William the Clito, offering him, as compensation for the loss of Sibyl and Maine, a grant of the French Vexin and a bride whom not even Rome could make out to be his cousin—Jane of Montferrat, half-sister to Louis’s own queen.[610] Two months later the count of Flanders was murdered at Bruges. He was childless; the king of France adjudged his fief to William the Clito as great-grandson of Count Baldwin V., and speedily put him in possession of the greater part of the county.[611] Henry’s daring scheme now seemed all but hopeless. His only chance was to make peace with some one at least of his adversaries; and the one whom he chose was not the king of France, but the count of Anjou. He saw—and Fulk saw it too—that until the question about Maine was settled there could be no lasting security, and that it could only be settled effectually by the union of all conflicting claims in a single hand. For such an union the way was now clear. The heir of Anjou was growing up to manhood; the chosen successor of Henry was a childless widow. Regardless of his promise not to give his daughter in marriage to any one out of the realm[612]—regardless of the scorn of both Normans and English,[613] of the Empress’s own reluctance,[614] and also of the kindred between the houses of Normandy and Anjou—Henry sent Matilda over sea shortly after Pentecost 1127 under the care of her half-brother Earl Robert of Gloucester and Count Brian of Britanny, who were charged with instructions to the archbishop of Rouen to make arrangements for her marriage with Geoffrey Plantagenet, eldest son of the count of Anjou. In the last week of August the king himself followed them;[615] at the following Whitsuntide he knighted Geoffrey at Rouen with his own hand;[616] and eight days later Geoffrey and Matilda were wedded by the bishop of Avranches in the cathedral church of S. Julian at Le Mans.[617]

- [610] Eng. Chron. a. 1127. Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 884. Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 151.

- [611] Eng. Chron. a. 1127. Ord. Vit. (as above), pp. 884, 885. See the Flemish Chronicles in Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xiii.

- [612] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 3 (Hardy, p. 693).

- [613] Eng. Chron. a. 1127. “Hit ofthute nathema ealle Frencisc and Englisc.”

- [614] Will. Jumièges Contin. as above, l. viii. c. 25 (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 304).

- [615] Eng. Chron. a. 1127. Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 3 (Hardy, p. 692). Hen. Hunt., l. vii. c. 37 (Arnold, p. 247).

- [616] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 234–236.

- [617] Ib. p. 236. Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt.), p. 889. Acta Pontif. Cenoman., c. 36 (Mabillon, Vet. Anal., p. 321). On the date see note F at end of chapter.

It was a triumphant day for Fulk; but more triumphant still was the day when he and Geoffrey brought the new countess home to Angers. A large part of the barons and prelates who filled S. Julian’s minster on the wedding-day were Normans who in their inmost souls viewed with mingled rage and shame what they held to be the degradation of the Norman ducal house; a large part of the crowd who with their lips cheered the bridal procession as it passed through the streets of Le Mans were all the while cursing in their hearts the Angevin foe of Normandy.[618] But in Fulk’s own capital the rejoicings were universal and unalloyed. Many a brilliant match had been made by the house of Anjou, from that wedding with the heiress of Amboise which had been the beginning of its founder’s fortunes, down to Fulk’s own marriage, only seventeen years ago, with Aremburg of Maine; but never before had Black Angers welcomed such a bride as King Henry’s daughter. A writer of the next generation has left us a picture of Angers as it was in his days—days when the son of Geoffrey and Matilda was king of England and count of Anjou. In its main features that picture is almost as true a likeness now as it can have been seven hundred years ago, and by its help we can easily recall the scene of the bride’s homecoming. We can see the eager citizens swarming along the narrow, crooked streets that furrow the steep hill-side;—the clergy in their richest vestments assembling from every church in what is still, as it was then, emphatically a city of churches, and mustering probably on the very summit of the hill, in the open space before the cathedral—not the cathedral whose white twin spires now soar above all things around, the centre and the crown of Angers, but its Romanesque predecessor, crowned doubtless by a companion rather than a rival to the neighbouring dark tower of S. Aubin’s abbey, which now contrasts so vividly with the light pinnacles of S. Maurice. Thence, at a given signal, the procession streamed down with lighted tapers and waving banners to the northern gate of the city, and with psalms and hymns of rejoicing, half drowned in the shouting of the people and the clang of the bells overhead, led the new countess to her dwelling in the hall of Fulk the Black. It was Fulk who had made the first rude plans for the edifice of statesmanship which had now all but reached its last and loftiest stage. The unconscious praise of the Black Count was in every shout which beneath his palace-windows hailed in the person of his worthiest namesake and descendant the triumph of the house of Anjou.

- [618] I think this may be safely inferred from the English Chronicler’s words a. 1127 (above, p. 243, note 5{613}), and from a singularly suggestive passage in the account of the wedding festivities in Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (as above·/·Marchegay, Comtes), p. 237: “Clamatum est voce præconis ne quis indigena vel advena, dives, mediocris vel pauper, nobilis vel plebeius, miles vel colonus ex hâc regali lætitiâ se subtraheret; qui autem gaudiis nuptialibus minime interesset, regiæ procul dubio majestatis reus esset.”

There was no mother to welcome Geoffrey and his bride; Aremburg had not lived to see the marriage of her son;[619] and now the shadow of another coming separation fell over the mutual congratulations of Fulk and of his people. Another royal father besides Henry was seeking an Angevin bridegroom for his daughter and an Angevin successor to his throne. It was now just thirty years since the acclamations of the crusading host had chosen Godfrey of Bouillon king of Jerusalem. The crown, which he in his humility declined to wear, passed after his death to his brother Baldwin of Edessa, and then to another Baldwin, of the noble family of Réthel in Champagne. After a busy reign of ten years, Baldwin II., having no son, grew anxious to find a suitable husband for his eldest daughter and destined heiress, Melisenda. In the spring of 1128, with the unanimous approval of his subjects, he offered her hand, together with his crown, to Count Fulk of Anjou.[620] He could not have chosen a fitter man. Fulk was in the prime of life,[621] young enough to bring to his task all the vigour and energy needful to withstand the ever-encroaching Infidels, yet old enough to have learned political caution and experience; and if the one qualification was needed for defence against external foes, the other was no less so for steering a safe course amid the endless jealousies of the Frank princes in Palestine. Moreover, Fulk was known in the East by something more than reputation. Free of all connexion with the internal disputes of the realm, he was yet no utter stranger who would come thither as a mere foreign interloper. He had dwelt there for a whole year as a guest and a friend, and the memory of his visit had been kept alive in the minds of the people of the land, as well as in his own, by a yearly contribution which, amid all his cares and necessities at home, he had never failed to send to the Knights of the Temple for the defence of the Holy City.[622] Baldwin had thus every inducement to make the offer; and Fulk had equally good reasons for accepting it. His was clearly no case of mere vulgar longing after a crown. There may have been a natural feeling that it would be well to put Geoffrey’s father on a titular level with Matilda’s; if the prophecy said to have been made to Fulk the Good was already in circulation, there may have been also a feeling that it was rapidly approaching its fulfilment. But every recorded act of Fulk V. shews that he was too practical in temper to be dazzled by the mere glitter of a crown, without heeding the solid advantages to be gained with it or to be given up for its sake. He must have known that the sacred border-land of Christendom and Islam was a much harder post to defend than the marchland of France and Aquitaine had ever been; he must have known that the consort of the queen of Jerusalem would find little rest upon her throne. But this second Count Fulk the Palmer cared for rest as little as the first. It was work that he longed for: and work at home was at an end for him. The mission of the counts of Anjou, simply as such, was accomplished; when the heir of the Marchland wedded the Lady-elect of Normandy and England, he entered upon an entirely new phase of political existence. Fulk had in fact, by marrying his son to the Empress, cut short his own career, and left himself no choice but to submit to complete effacement or seek a new sphere of action elsewhere. Had Baldwin’s proposal come a year earlier, it might have caused a struggle between inclination and duty; coming as it did just after Henry’s, it extricated all parties from their last difficulty.

- [619] She died in 1126; Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Flor. Salm. ad ann. (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 33, 190). A story of her last illness, in Acta Pontif. Cenoman. c. 36 (Mabillon, Vet. Anal., p. 320), is very characteristic of Fulk, and indicates, too, that whether or not his marriage with her began in policy alone, it ended in real affection.

- [620] Will. Tyr., l. xiv. c. 1. Acta Pontif. Cenoman., c. 36 (Mabillon, Vet. Anal.) p. 321.

- [621] He cannot have been more than thirty-eight; he may have been only thirty-six.

- [622] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 871). Will. Tyr. as above.

Fulk could not, however, accept the proposal without the consent of his overlord King Louis and that of his own subjects.[623] Both were granted; his people had prospered under him, but they, too, doubtless saw that alike for him and for them it was time to part. On that same Whit-Sunday when young Geoffrey was knighted at Rouen by King Henry, his father, prostrate before the high altar in the cathedral church of Tours, took the cross at the hands of Archbishop Hildebert.[624] From the wedding festivities at Le Mans he came home to make his preparations for departure. It may be that once more in the old hall overlooking the Mayenne the barons of Anjou and Touraine gathered round the last Count Fulk, to be solemnly released from their allegiance to him, and to perform their homage to his successor. A more secluded spot was chosen for the last family meeting. A few miles south-east of Saumur, in the midst of dark woods and fruitful apple-orchards, a pious and noble crusader, Robert of Arbrissel, had founded in the early years of Fulk’s reign the abbey of Fontevraud, whose church has counted ever since among the architectural marvels of western Europe. An English visitor now-a-days feels as if some prophetic instinct must have guided its architect and given to his work that peculiar awe-striking character which so exactly fits it for the burial-place of the two Angevin kings of England whose sculptured effigies still remain in its south transept. The first of their race who wore a crown, however, came thither not for his last sleep, but only for a few hours of rest ere he started on his eastward journey. The monastery was a double one—half for men and half for women; in the latter Fulk’s eldest daughter, the widow of William the Ætheling, had lately taken the veil. The cloisters of Fontevraud offered a quiet refuge where father and children could all meet undisturbed to exchange their last farewells.[625] Before Whitsuntide came round again Fulk and Anjou had parted for ever.[626]

- [623] Gesta Amb. Domin. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 205.

- [624] Gesta Cons. (ibid.), p. 152.

- [625] “Ego Fulco junior Andegavensium comes, Fulconis comitis filius, ire volens Hierusalem, conventum sanctimonialium Fontis-Evraudi expetii. Adfuerunt etiam ibi filii mei Gaufridus et Helias, et filiæ meæ Mathildis et Sibylla, quarum una, id est Mathildis, paulo ante pro Dei amore se velari fecerat, etc. Acta charta apud Fontem-Ebraudi anno ab Incarnat. Dom. 1129” (Rer. Gall. Script., vol. xii. p. 736 note, from “Clypeum nascentis Fontis-Ebraldi”).

- [626] Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 153. Gesta Amb. Domin. (ibid.), p. 205. Will. Tyr., l. xiii. c. 24, l. xiv. c. 1. Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1129 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 33, 144).

It is not for us to follow him on his lifelong crusade.[627] The Angevin spirit of restless activity and sleepless vigilance, of hard-working thoroughness and indomitable perseverance, never, perhaps, shewed to better advantage than in this second half of the eventful life of Fulk of Jerusalem; but we have to trace its workings only as they influenced the history of our own land. Our place is not with the devoted personal followers who went with Fulk across land and sea, but with those who stayed to share the fortunes of his successor in Anjou. Our concern is with the father of the Angevin kings, not of Jerusalem, but of England.

- [627] Its history is in Will. Tyr., l. xiv. cc. 1–27.

Note A.
THE HOUSES OF ANJOU AND GÂTINAIS.

All historians are agreed that Geoffrey the Bearded and Fulk Rechin were sons of Geoffrey Martel’s sister and of a count (or viscount) of Gâtinais, or Châteaulandon, which is the same thing—the Gâtinais being a district on the north-eastern border of the Orléanais whereof Châteaulandon was the capital. But the names of both husband and wife differ in different accounts. Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 375) calls his mother Hermengard; R. Diceto (ib. p. 333; Stubbs, vol. i. p. 185) calls her Adela; in the Gesta Cons. no names are given. If we could be sure that Fulk really wrote the fragment which bears his name, his testimony would of course be decisive; as it is, we are left in doubt. The point is one of trifling importance, for whatever the lady’s name may have been, there is no doubt that she was the daughter of Fulk the Black and Hildegard. But who was her husband?

First, as to his name. The Gesta Cons. do not mention it. The Chron. S. Maxent. a. 1060 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 402), Hugh of Fleury (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 797), and R. Diceto (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 333; Stubbs, vol. i. p. 185) call him Alberic. Fulk Rechin (as above) calls him Geoffrey. None of them tell us anything about him. It seems in fact to be the aim of the Angevin writers to keep us in the dark as to the descent of the later counts of Anjou from the house of Gâtinais through the husband of Hermengard-Adela; but they try to make out a connexion between the two families six generations further back. One of the earliest legends in the Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 39–45) tells how Châteaulandon and the Gâtinais were given to Ingelger as a reward for his defence of his slandered godmother, the daughter and heiress of a Count Geoffrey of Gâtinais, and the alleged gift is coupled with a grant from the king of the viscounty of Orléans. What Ingelger may or may not have held it is impossible to say, as we really know nothing about him. But there is proof that the viscounty of Orléans at least did not pass to his descendants. The very first known charter of Fulk the Good, one dated May 942, is witnessed by Geoffrey viscount of Orléans; and Geoffrey Greygown’s charter for the reform of S. Aubin’s in 966 is witnessed by Alberic viscount of Gâtinais, whose signature has already appeared in 957, attached to a charter of Theobald the Trickster. This Alberic may very likely have been the son of his predecessor Geoffrey, but he cannot well have been the father of Fulk Nerra’s son-in-law; there is a generation dropped out, and of the man who should fill it the only trace is in Ménage (Hist. de Sablé), who says that Fulk Rechin’s father, Geoffrey count of Gâtinais, was the son of another Geoffrey and Beatrice, daughter of Alberic II. of Mâcon (Mabille, introd. Comtes, pp. lxxxv–lxxxvi). It seems probable that Orléans and Châteaulandon went together in fact as well as in Angevin legend. Assuming therefore that Ménage was copying a document now lost, the pedigree would stand thus:

Geoffrey,
viscount of Orléans 942

｜ |

Alberic,
viscount in 957 and 966

｜ |

Geoffrey,
viscount of Orléans and count of Gâtinais

｜ |

Alberic or Geoffrey

=
｜

Hermengard or Adela,
daughter of Fulk Nerra

| ｜ | ｜
| Geoffrey the Bearded. | Fulk Rechin.

If we might assume also, with M. Mabille, that the “Alberic” whose signature appears beside that of Fulk the Red in 886 (Mabille, introd. Comtes, p. lix, note 1) was the father of the first Geoffrey of Orléans, then the two names would stand alternate till we come to Hermengard’s husband. Is it just possible that (on a principle somewhat like that which made all the dukes of Aquitaine assume the name of William) this alternation of names grew into a family tradition, so that the son of Geoffrey II. and Beatrice having by some accident been christened by his father’s instead of his grandfather’s name, assumed the latter officially on succeeding to the title, and thus became known to outsiders as “Alberic,” while his own son (Fulk Rechin) spoke of him by his original and real name?

However this may be, he was most probably descended from the family who became viscounts of Orléans at about the same time that the house of Anjou was being founded. They make no figure in history, and the Angevin writers do their best to efface them altogether. Ralf de Diceto just names the father of the two young counts, and that is all; in the Gesta Cons. his very name is dropped, and the reader is left in utter darkness as to who and what Martel’s nephews were. They were Martel’s nephews, and that was all that anybody was intended to know about them. Fulk Rechin himself, or his representative, merges the Châteaulandon connexion almost completely in the Angevin, and regards himself simply as the grandson of Fulk Nerra. After all, they are right; it was Fulk Nerra’s blood that made his grandsons what they were; their father might have been anybody, or, as he almost appears, nobody, for all the influence he had on their characters or their destinies.

Note B.
THE HEIR OF GEOFFREY MARTEL.

Of the disposal of his territories made by Geoffrey Martel there are three versions.

1. The Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 131), R. Diceto (ib. p. 333; Stubbs, vol. i. p. 185) and Chron. Tur. Magn. (Salmon, Chron. Touraine, pp. 122, 123) say that Anjou and Saintonge were left to Fulk, Touraine and Gâtinais to Geoffrey.

2. A MS. representing the earliest form of the Gesta Cons. (ending in 1106) says just the opposite: Anjou and Saintonge to Geoffrey, Touraine and Gâtinais to Fulk (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 131, note 1. See Mabille, introd. Comtes, ib. pp. iv–viii).

3. Orderic (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 532) and Will. Poitiers (ib. pp. 188, 189) ignore Fulk and make Geoffrey sole heir.

The first version is easily disposed of. In three charters of S. Florence of Saumur, one of 1061 (Marchegay, Archives d’Anjou, vol. i. p. 259) and two whose dates must be between 1062 and 1066 (ib. p. 278), and in one of S. Maur, 1066 (ib. pp. 358–360), Geoffrey the Bearded is formally described as count of Anjou. The strongest proof of all is a charter of Fulk Rechin himself, March 11, 1068, setting forth how Geoffrey, nephew and heir of Geoffrey Martel, had made certain promises to S. Florence, which he, Fulk, having now got possession of Anjou, fulfilled (ib. p. 260).

The second version, though apparently not contradicted by any documentary proof, has nothing to support it, and contains an internal difficulty. For how could Martel leave the Gâtinais to Fulk? Surely it was not his to leave at all, but would pass as a matter of course to Geoffrey as Alberic’s (Geoffrey’s?) eldest son. The old confusion of the relations of the Gâtinais to Anjou peeps out again here.

The third account is that of foreign writers; but those writers are Orderic and William of Poitiers. And they are not unsupported. Geoffrey Martel’s last act, a charter granted to Marmoutier on his deathbed, is signed by his nephew and successor-designate Geoffrey, and by Fulk, who is described simply as the latter’s brother (Mabille, introd. Comtes, p. lxxxiv).

The conclusion to which all this leads is that Martel bequeathed the whole of his dominions to his elder nephew Geoffrey, and that all the conflicting stories of a division of territory were inventions to save the character of Fulk Rechin. It is possible that Martel did, as Fulk says, invest him with Saintonge, but even here it is evident that the elder brother’s rights were reserved, for it is Geoffrey, not Fulk, who fights for Saintonge with the duke of Aquitaine.

One portion of Martel’s dominions is named in none of these accounts, except Fulk’s; and that is Maine. Fulk coolly puts it into the list of his own possessions, and M. Mabille regards this as a blunder proving that the author of the Fragment was not what he professes to be. May it not rather tell the other way? A forger would have remembered that Maine was lost and not risked such a glaring falsehood; the count ignores its de facto loss because he holds himself its overlord de jure. We shall find Geoffrey the Bearded making his appearance as titular overlord of Maine in 1063. Did Martel feel about Maine as William the Conqueror seems to have felt about England?

Note C.
THE WAR OF SAINTONGE.

The account of this war between Geoffrey the Bearded and Guy-Geoffrey, alias William VII., of Aquitaine, has to be made out from one direct source and one indirect one. The first is the Chron. S. Maxent. a. 1061 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 402, 403): “Goffredus et Fulco habentes certamen cum Gaufredo duce propter Sanctonas, venientes cum magno exercitu, pugnaverunt cum eo in bello etiam in Aquitaniâ, ubi e contrario Pictavorum exercitus adunatus est; et ab utrisque partibus magnis animositatibus pugnatum est, sed traditores belli et ceteri signiferi, vexillis projectis, exercitum Pictavensium in fugam verterunt. Quapropter vulnerati multi sunt et plurimi occisi atque nonnulli capti; unde quidam versibus eam confusionem ita describit, dicens: Cum de Pictavis bellum sit et Andegavinis, Inque die Martis fuit et Sancti Benedicti, Circa forte Caput Wultonnæ contigit esse, Annus millenus tunc sexagesimus unus.”

That entry comprises all the direct information on the subject. The Angevin monastic chronicles and Fulk Rechin do not mention it at all. Neither do the Gesta Cons. in the right place; but they mix it up with the war between Geoffrey Martel and William the Fat in 1033. By the light of the Chron. S. Maxent., it seems possible to disentangle the two stories. It even seems possible to make sense of a passage in the Gesta which never can be sense as it stands, by understanding it as referring to Geoffrey the Bearded instead of his uncle: “Willelmus Pictavensium comes consulatum Sanctonicum suum esse volebat et vi preoccupatum tenebat, quia patrui sui fuerat. Martellus eumdem consulatum reclamabat quia avi sui fuerat, cujus heredes absque liberis mortui erant; et ideo ad heredes sororis avi sui debere reverti affirmabat” (Gesta Cons., Marchegay, Comtes, p. 126). This is the story by which the Gesta-writer professes to explain the cause of the war of Geoffrey Martel and William the Fat, of which he then gives an elaborate account, ending with William’s capture and the consequent surrender of Saintes to Geoffrey. But the story is utterly senseless; the claims of William and Martel as therein stated are alike devoid of all show of reason. In the account of the war itself, too, there are strong traces of confusion; Saintes is assumed to have passed back into the duke’s hands, of which there is no sign elsewhere; and to crown all, the scene of the battle in which William is taken is laid, not as by the Chron. S. Maxent. (a. 1032, Marchegay, Eglises, p. 392) and Fulk Rechin (Comtes, p. 378), at S. Jouin-de-Marne or Montcontour, but at Chef-Boutonne. The question then arises: Can this wild tale in the Gesta, which is quite impossible as an explanation of Martel’s war with William V., be interpreted so as to explain his successor’s war with William VII.?

“Willelmus [VII., alias Guy-Geoffrey] Pictavensium comes consulatum Sanctonicum suum esse volebat et vi præoccupatum tenebat [having presumably seized it on Martel’s death], quia patrui sui [for patrui read fratris—William the Fat—or patris, William the Great] fuerat. Martellus [Barbatus] eumdem consulatum reclamabat, quia avi sui [Fulconis Nerræ] fuerat, cujus hæredes [i.e. G. Martellus] absque liberis mortui essent; et ideo ad hæredes sororis avi sui [read avunculi sui—Martel’s sister, the Bearded one’s mother] debere reverti affirmabat.”

Read in this way, the story is quite reasonable and intelligible, and the rest of the Gesta’s account might stand almost intact, except the capture of the duke, which of course is dragged in from the earlier war. The confusion between the Williams of Aquitaine is easily accounted for, and so is that between the Geoffreys of Anjou, especially as all the Geoffreys after Martel occasionally took to themselves his cognomen.

Note D.
THE DESCENDANTS OF HERBERT WAKE-DOG.

Not the least puzzling matter connected with the Cenomannian wars is the genealogy of the sovereign house of Maine. The succession of the counts themselves—Hugh I. (or David), Herbert I. (Wake-dog), Hugh II., Herbert II.—is plain enough, as also that each was the son of his predecessor. But the filiation of the women of the family—Margaret, Gersendis, Paula and Biota—is far from being equally clear.

1. As to Margaret, there is no real doubt. Orderic does once (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 683) call her a daughter of Herbert [II.]; but his own statements in two other places (ib. pp. 487 and 532), as well as Will. Poitiers (ib. p. 190), shew that this is a mere slip. Margaret was clearly a daughter of Hugh II. and sister of Herbert II.

2. As to Biota. Orderic (as above, p. 487) calls her “Hugonis Cenomannensium comitis filiam”; in Will. Poitiers (ib. p. 189) she is “soror Hugonis”; and Mr. Freeman (Norm. Conq., 3d ed., vol. iii. p. 200, and note T, p. 676) adopts the latter version. Biota, then, was a daughter of Herbert Wake-dog and sister of Hugh II. But were Gersendis and Paula her sisters or her nieces?

3. The fullest and most distinct statement of the Cenomannian pedigree is that of Orderic in Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 532: “Hugo filius Herberti ... Bertam ... in conjugium accepit; quæ filium nomine Herbertum et tres filias ei peperit. Una earum data est Azsoni Marchiso Liguriæ. Alia nomine Margarita Rodberto filio Guillelmi Ducis Neustriæ desponsata est ... Tertia vero Joanni domino castri quod Flecchia dicitur nupsit.”

With regard to this last marriage, it is to be observed that in the speech which Orderic puts into the mouth of Elias of La Flèche, addressing Hugh of Este (ib. p. 684), he says nothing about his mother at all, but makes him trace his descent from Herbert Wake-dog through his grandmother, whom he calls Herbert’s daughter: “Filia Herberti comitis Lancelino de Balgenceio nupsit, eique ... Joannem meum genitorem peperit.” The name of John’s wife, Paula, comes from another passage of Orderic (ib. p. 768); but he there says nothing about her parentage, merely calling her son Elias “Hugonis Cenomannorum consulis consobrinus.” The houses of Le Mans and La Flèche cannot have intermarried twice in two succeeding generations; one of Orderic’s statements must be wrong; but which, I cannot decide.

The last point is the parentage of Gersendis, the wife of Azzo of Este; and as the whole tone of Elias’s speech (as above) implies that he and her son were related to the counts of Le Mans in the same degree, the solution of this question might almost be held to decide the previous one also. This seems to be Mr. Freeman’s opinion, and he regards Orderic’s statement quoted above as conclusive that Gersendis and Paula were both daughters of Hugh II., and sisters therefore of Margaret and Herbert II., in spite of the biographer of the bishops of Le Mans (Mabillon, Vet. Anal., p. 308), who expressly says that Gersendis was a daughter of Herbert Wake-dog, and the continuator of Will. Jumièges, who says:—“Cenomannenses ... consilium ineunt cum Heliâ filio Joannis de Flecâ ... ut filiam cujusdam comitis Langobardiæ, neptem videlicet Hereberti quondam Cenomannensis comitis ex primogenitâ filiâ, in matrimonium ducat.” Will. Jumièges, l. viii. c. 5 (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 294). This re-appears in R. Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. pp. 183, 184; Marchegay, Comtes, p. 334) in the following form:—“Helias, filius Johannis de Flecâ, Sibillam, filiam cujusdam comitis Longobardiæ, neptem scilicet Hereberti quondam Cenomannorum comitis, duxit uxorem, et cum eâ comitatum Cenomanniæ suscepit.” But this is certainly wrong; for the first wife of Elias was Matilda of Château-du-Loir, and the second was Agnes of Perche.

What Elias could have had to gain by the marriage thus proposed for him it is impossible to guess, as he himself certainly was quite as nearly related to the counts of Maine as this oddly-described bride could have been. Mr. Freeman (Norm. Conq., 3d ed., vol. iii., note T, p. 676), takes the description as favouring Orderic’s theory, and remarks: “The words could only have been written by one who looked on Gersendis as a sister of Herbert.” “Neptem Hereberti,” then, he interprets, “niece of Herbert [II].” But is it not a much simpler interpretation of the whole phrase—“neptem Hereberti ex primogenitâ filiâ”—to read it “granddaughter of Herbert [I.] through his eldest daughter”? In that case, we should have another witness on the side of the bishops’ biographer.

There is another curious bit of evidence which at first glance seems also to tell in his favour. I do not think that it really proves anything about the matter; but it is worth examining for other reasons. M. d’Arbois de Jubainville (Comtes de Champagne, vol. i. p. 392, note 5), declares it proved on documentary evidence that Stephen-Henry of Blois, the father of our King Stephen, was the son of Theobald III. by his first marriage with Gersendis of Maine. About the marriage itself there is no doubt, nor about the divorce which followed it; and the latter had taken place in 1049 at latest, for Theobald was excommunicated for that very cause by the Council of Reims. Most historians seem however to have supposed that Gersendis was then a mere child, and that the mother of Stephen, as well as of Theobald’s other children, was his second wife, Adela of Valois. M. de Jubainville, in support of his opinion, refers especially to two charters. One is in Gallia Christiana, vol. viii., instr. col. 548. It has no date, and says nothing about Stephen’s mother or his stepmother; I therefore cannot see its bearing on the question. The other is in Bernier, Histoire de Blois, preuves, pp. xiii–xiv. In it Stephen-Henry, in the year 1089, grants certain lands to Pontlevoy “pro animæ meæ et uxoris et Theobaldi patris mei et matris meæ Gandree ... remedio”; and has the grant confirmed “nomine ... Alæ uxoris meæ, Alæ uxoris Thebaudi comitis,” etc. This certainly seems to shew that Adela was not his mother, though it does not necessarily follow that “Gandree” represents Gersendis. If it does, Stephen-Henry must have been born in 1049 at latest, and therefore Gersendis cannot possibly have been a daughter of Hugh II., who was not married till 1040 at the very earliest.

The greatest puzzle in the whole matter, however, is this: If Stephen-Henry was really the eldest son of Gersendis of Maine, how does it happen that neither in 1073, nor in 1089, nor in any of the Cenomannian revolutions and wars, do we hear a single word about his claims upon the county? M. d’Arbois de Jubainville’s suggestion in fact opens a question much more important and much more obscure than that of the age and parentage of Gersendis. He certainly seems to have proved that Adela of Valois was not Stephen’s mother; but has he proved that Gersendis was? The only bit of evidence, direct or indirect, which it seems possible to bring to bear upon this matter is a passage in the Historia Pontificalis (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xx. p. 531) where it is said that the cause of our King Stephen was upheld by some of the Roman cardinals who claimed kindred with him “eo quod avia ejus Lumbarda fuerit.” Now, as the second husband of Gersendis was a Lombard, this may come from some confused idea about her. But it also suggests another possible solution of the whole question about Stephen-Henry’s mother. Theobald and Gersendis were divorced in 1049 at latest; the first record in which Adela appears as Theobald’s wife is dated 1061 (Jubainville, Comtes de Champagne, vol. i. p. 393, note 3). May not the mysterious “Gandrea” of the charter of 1089 have been an Italian lady who was married to Theobald, became the mother of his heir, and died, between those two dates?

Note E.
THE SIEGE OF LA FLÈCHE AND TREATY OF BLANCHELANDE.

There are two questionable points connected with these matters: 1. the date; 2. the geography.

1. The only original writer who gives a detailed account of both siege and treaty is Orderic, who carries his story straight on from the quelling of the revolt of Maine in 1073 to the siege of La Flèche, as if it had all happened in the same year, before William returned to England with his troops. On the other hand, none of the Angevin writers mention La Flèche under date 1073; but the Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Flor. Salm. (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 26, 189) have “Exercitus de Fissâ,” the former in 1077, the latter in 1078; and in the Art de vérifier les Dates these entries are interpreted as referring to the siege which was followed by the treaty of Blanchelande. M. Voisin (Les Cénomans, p. 414) dates the whole affair 1085; he gives no reason and seems to be quite unsupported. The choice lies therefore between Orderic’s date and that of the Angevin chronicles. Mr. Freeman (Norm. Conq., vol. iv. pp. 560–563) follows Orderic, and I have done the same.

2. As to the geography. Orderic (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 533) says that to meet William the Angevin and Breton host, leaving La Flèche, “Ligerim fluvium audacter pertransierunt.” Now this must be wrong, as the Loire is a long way south of La Flèche. It is clear that for Ligerim, “Loire,” we must read Liderim, “Loir,” as Mr. Freeman says (Norm. Conq., vol. iv. p. 562, note 2). Even crossing the Loir seems rather a strange proceeding; for La Flèche being on the right or north bank of that river, they must have crossed it to the southward—i.e. away from Normandy. How came it that William, marching against them out of Normandy, had gone so far down to the south of them?

There is however a further question as to the actual place of the treaty, which Mr. Freeman (as above, p. 562) places at Bruère in the Passais. If such was the case, Orderic’s story of the crossing of the river becomes quite hopeless, as Bruère is a long way north-west of La Flèche. But there is another version. J. Pesche in his Dictionnaire historique de la Sarthe, vol. i. p. 168, under “Blanchelande ou Blanche-bruyère,” says: “Vaste espace de terrain infertile, où croît abondamment le lichen des rennes, dont la blancheur lui aura fait donner son nom; situé entre La Flèche et Le Lude, côtoyé par la route qui conduit de l’une à l’autre de ces deux villes.” It is this which Pesche and, following him, M. Voisin (Les Cénomans, p. 414, note 1) mark as the scene of the treaty. So does M. Prévost in a note to Orderic, vol. ii. p. 258, and he adds that a farm there still in 1840 bore the name of Blanchelande. If this theory is correct, Orderic’s geography is quite right and clear; the besiegers of La Flèche, on the north side of the Loir, crossing over to its southern bank, would march straight upon the “white moor.” William must then have crossed higher up and made a circuit to the south-east of them. The only question remaining would be, what was his reason for this movement? To which there was doubtless a good military answer.

With regard to the second siege of La Flèche by Fulk Rechin, in 1081, there is a very strange story in the Chron. Rain. Andeg. (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 13). We are there told that Fulk not only took and burned the castle (as the Chron. S. Albin., ib. p. 26, also states under the same year) in revenge, for John’s rebellion against him, but also punished King William for his previous relief of the castle, by so worsting him in battle that he retreated after giving hostages for peace, among whom were his brother the count of Mortain and his own son! Mr. Freeman says nothing of this very apocryphal-looking story. Is it anything more than an Angevin travesty of Robert’s homage to Fulk at Blanchelande?

Note F.
THE MARRIAGE OF GEOFFREY AND MATILDA.

The date of this marriage is commonly given as 1127. A comparison of evidence seems however to lead to the conclusion that its true date is 1128.

1. The Angevin chronicles never mention the marriage at all. The Gesta Cons., Will. Jumièges and several other writers mention it without any kind of date. The English Chronicle, Sim. Durh., Will. Malm. and Hen. Hunt. give no distinct date, but imply that the proposal was immediately followed by the wedding. They speak as if Robert and Brian had taken Matilda over sea and married her to Geoffrey without more ado.

2. Orderic mentions the marriage in two places. In the first (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 763) he gives no clue to the date; in the second (ib. p. 889) he dates it 1129.

3. The Chron. Fiscannense (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 778) dates it 1127.

4. A charter of agreement between the bishop of Séez and the convent of Marmoutier (printed in Gilles Bry’s Hist. de Perche, p. 106) has “signum Henrici Regis quando dedit filiam suam Gaufredo comiti Andegavensi juniori.” It is dated “anno ab Inc. Dom. 1127, Indictione VI.”

5. The last witness is John of Marmoutier, the author of the Historia Gaufredi Ducis. From him we might have expected a distinct and authentic statement; but he does not mention the year at all. He says that Geoffrey was knighted on Whit-Sunday and married on its octave, and that he was then fifteen years of age (Hist. Gaufr. Ducis, Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 236, 233). Afterwards, in speaking of the birth of Henry Fitz-Empress, he says that it took place in the fourth year of his parents’ marriage (ib. pp. 277, 278). Henry was born on Mid-Lent Sunday, March 5, 1133; if therefore the writer reckoned backwards from the Whitsuntide of that year, his words ought to mean that the marriage was in 1129. But as he goes on to state that Matilda’s third son was born in the sixth year of her marriage, and that Henry I. died “anno eodem, ab Incarnatione videlicet Domini 1137,” it is impossible to say what he did mean. Whether he is collecting the traditions of the ancient counts or writing the life of his own contemporary sovereign, John’s chronology is pursued by the same fate; whenever he mentions a date by the year, he is almost certain to make it wrong. But that he should have done the like in his reckoning of days, or even of his hero’s age, by no means follows. To consider the latter point first: Geoffrey the Handsome was born on August 24, 1113 (Chron. S. Albin. ad ann., Marchegay, Eglises, p. 32). Therefore, if John meant that he was past fifteen at his marriage, it must have been in 1129. But if he only meant “in his fifteenth year,” it would be 1128. In that year the octave of Pentecost fell on June 17; Geoffrey then lacked but two months to the completion of his fifteenth year; and considering Matilda’s age, it is no wonder that the panegyrist tried to make her husband out as old as possible. It is in fact plain that such was his intention, for though he places Geoffrey’s death in the right year, 1151, he gives his age as forty-one instead of thirty-eight (Hist. Gaufr. Ducis, Marchegay, Comtes, p. 292).

The most important matter, however, is John’s statement that the wedding took place on the octave of Pentecost. The date in this case is not one casually slipped in by the writer in passing; it comes in a detailed account of the festivities at Rouen on the occasion of Geoffrey’s knighting, which is expressly said to have occurred at Pentecost, and to have been followed by his marriage on the octave. Now this leaves us on the horns of a dilemma fatal alike to the date in the Chron. Fiscann., 1127, and to that of Orderic, 1129. For, on the one hand, Will. Malm. (Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 3, Hardy, p. 692) says that Matilda did not go to Normandy till after Whitsuntide [1127]; and Hen. Hunt., l. vii. c. 37 (Arnold, p. 247), adds that the king followed her in August (Sim. Durh., ed. Arnold, vol. ii. pp. 281, 282, really witnesses to the same effect; for his chronology of the whole story is a year in advance). Consequently, as Mrs. Everett Green remarks, “the union could not have taken place before the spring of the following year, 1128” (Princesses of England, vol. i. pp. 107, 108). On the other hand, it is plain that Fulk was present at his son’s wedding; but before Whitsuntide 1129 Fulk was himself married to the princess of Jerusalem (Will. Tyr., l. xiii. c. 24).

From all this it results: 1. If Geoffrey and Matilda were married in 1127, it cannot have been earlier than September, i.e. at least three months after Whitsuntide. 2. If they were married in 1129, it must have been quite at the beginning of the year, and Orderic must, on this occasion at least, have made his year begin in English fashion, at Christmas. 3. If they were married at Whitsuntide, it can only have been in 1128.

We have in short to choose one out of three authorities: the Chronicle of Fécamp, Orderic and John of Marmoutier—for the Séez charter, as Mrs. Everett Green remarks (Princesses, vol. i. p. 108), proves nothing more than that the betrothal had taken place in 1127. Of these three, the first is certainly of least account. Orderic, on the other hand, is on most other subjects a far better authority than John. But his chronology is very little better than John’s, at any rate towards the close of his work; his whole account of Henry’s later years is sketchy and confused; while John is Geoffrey Plantagenet’s own special biographer, writing within sixty years of the event, from materials furnished by personal followers of his hero. I cannot but regard him as our primary authority on this subject, and believe on his testimony that the real wedding-day of Geoffrey and Matilda was the octave of Pentecost, June 17, 1128.

CHAPTER V.
GEOFFREY PLANTAGENET AND STEPHEN OF BLOIS.
1128–1139.

All the mental and bodily gifts wherewith nature had endowed the most favoured members of the Angevin house seemed to have been showered upon the eldest son of Fulk V. and Aremburg of Maine. The surname by which he is most generally known, and which an inveterate usage has attached to his descendants as well as to himself, is in its origin and meaning curiously unlike most historical surnames; it seems to have been derived simply from his boyish habit of adorning his cap with a sprig of “planta-genista,” the broom which in early summer makes the open country of Anjou and Maine a blaze of living gold. With a fair and ruddy countenance, lit up by the lightning-glance of a pair of brilliant eyes; a tall, slender, sinewy frame, made for grace no less than for strength and activity:—[628] in the unanimous opinion of his contemporaries, he was emphatically “Geoffrey the Handsome.” To this prepossessing appearance were added the charms of a gracious manner and a ready, pleasant speech;[629] and beneath this winning exterior there lay a considerable share of the quick wits of his race, sharpened and developed by such a careful education as was given to very few princes of the time. The intellectual soil was worthy of the pains bestowed upon it, and brought forth a harvest of, perhaps, somewhat too precocious scholarship and sagacity. Geoffrey’s fondness for the study of the past seems to have been an inheritance from Fulk Rechin; the historian-count might have been proud of a grandson who carried in his memory all the battles fought, all the great deeds done, not only by his own people but also in foreign lands.[630] Even Fulk the Good might have approved a descendant who when still a mere boy could shine in serious conversation with such a “lettered king” as Henry I.;[631] and Fulk the Black might not have been ashamed of one who in early youth felt the “demon-blood” within him too hot to rest content in luxury and idleness, avoided the corrupting influences of mere revelry, gave himself up to the active exercises of military life,[632] and, while so devoted to letters that he would not even go to war without a learned teacher by his side,[633] turned his book-learning to account in ways at which ruder warriors and more unworldly scholars were evidently somewhat astonished.[634] Like his ancestor the Black Count, Geoffrey was one of those men about whom their intimate associates have a fund of anecdotes to tell. The “History” of his life put together from their information, a few years after his death, is chiefly made up of these stories; and through the mass of trite moralizing and pedantic verbiage in which the compiler has imbedded them there still peeps out unmistakeably the peculiar temper of his hero. Geoffrey’s readiness to forgive those who threw themselves upon his mercy is a favourite theme of his biographer’s praise; but the instances given of this clemency indicate more of the vanity and display of chivalry in its narrower sense than of real tenderness of heart or generosity of soul. Such is the story of a discontented knight whose ill-will against his sovereign took the grotesque form of a wish that he had the neck of “that red-head Geoffrey” fast between the two hot iron plates used for making a wafer-cake called oublie. It chanced that the man whose making of oublies—then, as now, a separate trade—had suggested the wish of this knight at St.-Aignan shortly afterwards made some for the eating and in the presence of Count Geoffrey himself, to whom he related what he had heard. The knight and his comrades were presently caught harrying the count’s lands; and the biographer is lost in admiration at Geoffrey’s generosity in forgiving not only their depredations, but the more heinous crime of having, in a fit of ill-temper after dinner, expressed a desire to make a wafer of him.[635] On another occasion we find the count’s wrath averted by the charms of music and verse, enhanced no doubt by the further charm of a little flattery. Four Poitevin knights who had been taken captive in one of the skirmishes so common on the Aquitanian border won their release by the truly southern expedient of singing in Geoffrey’s hearing a rime which they had composed in his praise.[636] A touch of truer poetry comes out in another story. Geoffrey, with a great train of attendants and noble guests, was once keeping Christmas at Le Mans. From his private chapel, where he had been attending the nocturnal services of the vigil, he set out at daybreak at the head of a procession to celebrate in the cathedral church the holy mysteries of the festival. At the cathedral door he met a poorly-dressed young clerk, whom he flippantly saluted: “Any news, sir clerkling?”—“Ay, my lord, the best of good news!”—“What?” cried Geoffrey, all his curiosity aroused—“tell me quick!”—“‘Unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given!’” Abashed, Geoffrey asked the youth his name, bade him join the other clergy in the choir, and as soon as mass was over went straight to the bishop: “For the love of Him Who was born this day, give me a prebend in your church.” It was no sooner granted than taking his new acquaintance by the hand, he begged leave to make him his substitute, and added the further gift of a stall in his own chapel, as a token of gratitude to the poor clerk whose answer to his thoughtless question had brought home to him, perhaps more deeply than he had ever felt them before, the glad tidings of Christmas morning.[637] From another of these anecdotes Geoffrey seems, as far as we can make out, to have been the original hero of an adventure which has since, in slightly varying forms, been attributed to several other princes, from Charles the Great down to James the Fifth of Scotland, and which indeed may easily have happened more than once. Led away by his ardour in pursuit of the chase—next to literature, his favourite recreation—the count one day outstripped all his followers, and lost his way alone in the forest of Loches. At last he fell in with a charcoal-burner, who undertook to conduct him back to the castle. Geoffrey mounted his guide behind him; and as they rode along, the peasant, ignorant of his companion’s rank, and taking him for a simple knight, let himself be drawn into conversation on sundry matters, including a free criticism on the government of the reigning count, and the oppressions suffered by the people at the hands of his household officers. When they reached the gates of Loches, the burst of joy which greeted the wanderer’s return revealed to the poor man that he had been talking to the count himself. Overwhelmed with dismay, he tried to slip off the horse’s back; but Geoffrey held him fast, gave him the place of honour at the evening banquet, sent him home next day with a grant of freedom and a liberal gift of money, and profited by the information acquired from him to institute a thorough reform in the administration of his own household.[638]

- [628] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 233.

- [629] Ib. pp. 232, 233.

- [630] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 232.

- [631] Ib. p. 235.

- [632] Ib. p. 233.

- [633] Ib. p. 276.

- [634] See the story of the siege of Montreuil-Bellay, Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 286.

- [635] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 257–260.

- [636] Ib. pp. 253–256.

- [637] Ib. pp. 274–276.

- [638] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 240–250.

Such stories as these, while they help us to form some picture of the manner of man that Geoffrey was, set him before us in the romantic light in which he appears to the best advantage. When one turns from them to a survey of his life as a whole, one is struck with a sense of something wanting in him. The deficiency was in truth a very serious one; it was a lack of steady principle and of genuine feeling. The imaginative and impulsive vein which ran through all the more refined characters of his race lay in him very near the surface, but it did not go very deep. His imagination was sensitive, but his heart was cold; his impulses sprang from the play of a quick fancy, not from the passion of an ardent soul. One more story may furnish a slight, but significant, illustration of his temper. For some wrong done to the see of Tours Geoffrey was once threatened by the archbishop with excommunication. Either the earlier or the later Fulk of Jerusalem would have almost certainly begun by a reckless defiance of the threat, and the later one, at least, would almost as surely have ended by hearty penance. Geoffrey began and ended with a jest: “Your threats are vain, most reverend father; you know that the archbishop of Tours has no jurisdiction over the patrimony of S. Martin, and that I am one of his canons!”[639] In all the sterling qualities of a ruler and a man, the hasty, restless, downright Fulk V. was as superior to his clever charming son as Fulk the Black was superior to Geoffrey Martel. But it is only fair to bear in mind that Geoffrey Plantagenet’s life was to a great extent spoilt by his marriage. The yoke which bound together a lad of fifteen and a woman of twenty-five—especially such a woman as the Empress Matilda—could not fail to press heavily on both parties; but the one most seriously injured by it was probably the young husband. Even in a political point of view, to him personally his marriage was more of a hindrance than an advantage; it cut him off from all chance of striking out an independent career. The man himself was in fact sacrificed to his posterity. Chained down while his character was yet undeveloped to the irksome position of a mere appendage to King Henry’s heiress;—plunged suddenly, and for life, into a sphere of interests and duties alien from his own natural temper and inclinations:—weak, selfish, unprincipled as Geoffrey too plainly shewed himself to be, still it was well not only for him but for others that he had enough of the dogged Angevin thoroughness to carry him safely and successfully, if not always gloriously, through his somewhat dreary task till he could make it over to the freer, as well as stronger, hands of his son.

- [639] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 252.

The hope which inspired both the king of England and the count of Anjou when they planned their children’s marriage can only have been the hope of a grandson in whom the blood of both would be united, who would gather into his own person all conflicting claims, and in whom all feuds would have an end. On this depended all King Henry’s schemes for the future; on this were concentrated all his desires, on this were founded all his plans and arrangements during the last seven years of his reign. In the internal history of England those years are an almost complete blank; they are in fact simply seven more years of the administration of Bishop Roger of Salisbury, for Henry himself spent almost the whole of them upon the continent. His work was finished, and all that remained to do was to maintain the order of things which he had established so as to hand it on in full working to his successor. He must, however, have begun to doubt the success of his schemes when Geoffrey and Matilda separated little more than twelve months after their marriage. At first, everything had seemed to be turning in favour of Henry’s arrangements. Six weeks after the wedding, the death of William the Clito, wounded in a skirmish with a rival claimant of the county of Flanders,[640] removed the only competitor whom the king could deem likely to stand in the way of his plans for the descent of the crown. In the spring Fulk’s departure for Holy Land left the young couple sole masters at Angers. All things looked tranquil and secure when Henry returned to England in July 1129. He had, however, been there only a few days when he learned, to his great indignation, that his daughter had been sent away with scorn by her husband, and had betaken herself with a few attendants to Rouen.[641] There she remained for nearly two years, while Geoffrey was busy with a general revolt among his barons. East and west and south and north had all risen at once; the list of rebels includes the chief landowners in all parts of the Angevin dominions, from the old eastern outpost Amboise to Laval on the Breton border, and from Sablé on the confines of Anjou and Maine to Montreuil-Bellay, Thouars and Mirebeau in the Aquitanian territory of Loudun, and the yet more remote fief of Parthenay in Poitou.[642] It seems as if the disaffected barons, worsted in their struggle with Fulk, had only been waiting till he was out of the country, and now, when Geoffrey by his quarrel with his wife had deprived himself of all chance of help from his father-in-law, they closed in upon the boy-count with one consent, thinking to get him into their power and wring from him any concessions they pleased. They unintentionally did him an immense service, for by thus suddenly throwing him upon his own resources they made a man of him at once. No one knew better than Geoffrey Plantagenet that he was not the first count of Anjou who had been left to shift for himself in difficult circumstances at the age of fifteen; and he faced the danger with a promptitude and energy not unworthy of Fulk Nerra’s representative. One after another he besieged the rebel leaders in their strongholds; one after another was forced, tricked or frightened into submission. Once, while besieging Theobald of Blazon in the great fortress of Mirebeau, Geoffrey was blockaded in his turn by the count of Poitou, whom the traitors had called to their aid; even from this peril, however, his quick wit and youthful energy extricated him in triumph; and the revolt was finally crushed by a severe punishment inflicted on its most powerful leader, Lisiard of Sablé. Geoffrey ravaged the whole of Lisiard’s estates, razed his castle of Briolet, seized that of Suze and kept it in his own hands for the rest of its owner’s life; while to guard against further dangers from the same quarter, by the advice of his faithful barons he reared, for the express purpose of defence against incursions from Sablé, a fortress to which he gave the name of Châteauneuf, on the left bank of the Sarthe, just below the bridge made famous by the death of Count Robert the Brave.[643]

- [640] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 886, 887.

- [641] Sim. Durh. Gesta Reg. a. 1129.

- [642] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 263.

- [643] For the barons’ revolt, see Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 263–268. The strange and not very clear story of the double siege of Mirebeau is in pp. 265, 266. “Exercitus de Mirebello” is recorded in Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Flor. Salm. a. 1130 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 33, 191). The Chron. S. Albin. also records the building of Châteauneuf, a. 1131; the Hist. Gaufr. Ducis, p. 270, connects it with the revolt of a lord of Sablé, but apparently with the later revolt of Lisiard’s son Robert—which, however, the date in the chronicle shows to be a mistake.

King Henry had joined his daughter in Normandy in the summer of 1130; in July of the next year they returned to England together. They were soon followed by a message from Geoffrey, who was now becoming awake to his rights and duties as husband of King Henry’s heiress, and having made himself thoroughly master in his own dominions felt it time to demand the return of his wife. A great council held at Northampton on September 8 decided that his request should be granted;[644] and the assembled prelates and barons repeated their homage to Matilda as her father’s destined successor.[645] She then went back to her husband, by whom she was, if not warmly welcomed, at least received with all due courtesy and honour.[646] Fortunately for the ill-matched couple, they were both of that cold-blooded temperament to which intense personal affection is not a necessary of life. Henceforth they were content to work together as partners in political enterprise, and to find in community of worldly interests a sufficient bond of union. On Mid-Lent Sunday—March 5, 1133—the bond was made indissoluble by the birth of their son and heir. Most fittingly, the child to whom so many diverse nationalities looked as to their future sovereign[647] was born not in the actual home of either of his parents, but in that city of Le Mans which lay midway between Normandy and Anjou, which had so long been the ground of their strife, and had at last been made the scene of their union.[648] He was baptized in the cathedral church by the bishop of the diocese on Easter Eve, receiving the name of his grandfather Henry, and was then, by his mother’s special desire, solemnly placed under the protection of the local patron saint on the same altar where his father had been dedicated in like manner thirteen years before.[649]

- [644] Hen. Hunt., l. vii. c. 41 (Arnold, p. 252).

- [645] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 6 (Hardy, p. 698).

- [646] Hen. Hunt. as above.

- [647] “Quem multi populi dominum expectant.” Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 763.

- [648] Acta Pontif. Cenoman., c. 36 (Mabillon, Vet. Anal., p. 322). Cf. Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1133 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 33, 144, 145), Chron. S. Flor. Salm. a. 1133 (ib. p. 191, giving a wrong day), Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 277, 278, also wrongly dated.

- [649] Acta Pontif. Cenoman. as above.

To King Henry the birth of his grandson was the crowning of all his hopes. The greatest difficulty which had hitherto stood in the way of his scheme for the descent of the crown—the objection which was sure to be made against Matilda on account of her sex—would lose more than half its force now that she could be regarded as regent for her infant son; and Henry at once summoned another great council at which he again made the archbishops, bishops, earls and barons of his realm swear fealty to the Empress “and also to her little son whom he appointed to be king after him.”[650] All things seemed as safe as human foresight could make them when in the beginning of August he crossed over to Normandy.[651] Signs and wonders in earth and sky, related afterwards as tokens of coming evil, accompanied his voyage;[652] but nearly two years passed away before the portents were fulfilled. In the spring Matilda joined her father at Rouen, and there, shortly before Whitsuntide, her second son was born.[653] The old king’s pleasure in his two little grandchildren was great enough to keep him lingering on in Normandy with them and their mother, leaving England to the care of Bishop Roger, till the middle of the following year,[654] when there came tidings of disturbance on the Welsh border which made him feel it was time he should return.[655] His daughter however set herself against his departure. Her policy is not very clear; but it seems impossible to acquit her of playing a double game and secretly instigating her husband to attack her father while the latter was living with her in unsuspecting intimacy and confidence. Geoffrey now suddenly put forth a claim to certain castles in Normandy which he asserted had been promised to him at his marriage.[656] Henry denied the claim; the Angevin temper burst forth at once; Geoffrey attacked and burned the castle of Beaumont, whose lord was like himself a son-in-law of Henry, and altogether behaved with such insulting violence that the king in his wrath was on the point of taking Matilda, who was with him at Rouen all the while, back with him to England. But he now found it impossible to leave Normandy. The land was full of treason; many barons who only disguised their real feelings from awe of the stern old king had been gained over in secret to the Angevin cause; among those whose fidelity was most suspected were Roger of Toëny and William Talvas the lord of Alençon, who had been restored to the forfeited estates of his family at the intercession of Geoffrey’s father in 1119. Roger’s castle of Conches was garrisoned by the king; William Talvas was summoned to Rouen more than once, but the conscious traitor dared not shew his face; at last Henry again seized his estates, and then, in September, Talvas fled across the border to be received with open arms by the count of Anjou.[657] The countess pleaded warmly with her father for the traitor’s pardon, but in vain. When she found him inexorable, she suddenly threw off the mask and shewed on which side her real sympathies lay by parting from the king in anger and going home to her husband at Angers.[658] Father and daughter never met again. In the last week of November Henry fell sick while hunting in the Forest of Lions; feeling his end near, he sent for his old friend Archbishop Hugh of Rouen to receive his confession and give him the last sacraments. His son Earl Robert of Gloucester hurried to the spot at the first tidings of his illness; his daughter made no sign of a wish for reconciliation; yet when the earl and the primate asked for his final instructions concerning the succession to the crown, he remained true to his cherished purpose and once more bequeathed all his dominions on both sides of the sea to Matilda and her heirs for ever.[659] He died on the night of December 1, 1135.[660]

- [650] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 187.

- [651] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 8 (Hardy, p. 700).

- [652] Eng. Chron. a. 1135.

- [653] Chron. S. Albin. and Rob. Torigni, a. 1134.

- [654] Hen. Hunt., l. vii. c. 43 (Arnold, p. 253).

- [655] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 900.

- [656] This is the version of Orderic (as above); according to Rob. Torigni (a. 1135) the claim included a good deal more: “Erat et alia causa ipsius discordiæ major, quia rex nolebat facere fidelitatem filiæ suæ et marito ejus de omnibus firmitatibus Normanniæ et Angliæ.”

- [657] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 900.

- [658] Rob. Torigni, a. 1133. Will. Jumièges Contin., l. viii. c. 34 (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 310).

- [659] So says Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 8 (Hardy, p. 701). We shall see however that there were other versions of Henry’s final testamentary dispositions.

- [660] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 8 (Hardy, p. 700). Flor. Worc. Contin. a. 1135 (Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 95). Hen. Hunt., l. vii. c. 43 (Arnold, p. 254). Will. Jumièges Contin., l. viii. c. 33 (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 309). Ord. Vit. (ibid.), p. 901.

With him expired the direct male line of the Conqueror; for Duke Robert’s long captivity had ended a year before.[661] Of the nine children of William the Conqueror and Matilda of Flanders, the youngest and the last survivor was now gone, leaving as his sole representatives his daughter the countess of Anjou and her infant boys. By a thrice-repeated oath the barons of Normandy and England stood pledged to acknowledge her as their sovereign. Suddenly there sprang forth an unexpected competitor. A rivalry which had seemed dead for nearly a hundred years revived in a new form; and the house of Anjou, on the very eve of its triumph, found itself once more face to face with the deadliest of its early foes—the house of Blois.

- [661] Flor. Worc. Contin. a. 1134 (Thorpe, vol. ii. pp. 94, 95).

Since Geoffrey Martel’s victory over Theobald III. in 1044 the counts of Blois have ceased to play a prominent part in our story. Theobald himself accepted his defeat as final; he seems indeed to have been almost crushed by it, for he scarcely makes any further appearance in history, save at his brother Stephen’s death in 1047, when he requited the help which Stephen had given him against Anjou by turning his son out of Champagne and appropriating all his possessions. The injured heir took refuge in Normandy, married the Conqueror’s sister, and afterwards found in England such ample compensation for what he had lost that neither he nor his posterity ever made any attempt to regain their continental heritage. The reunion of Champagne thus helped to repair the fortunes of the elder line of Blois, so severely shattered by the blows of the Angevin Hammer; and the ill-gotten gain prospered so far that some thirty-five years later Theobald’s son and successor—the young Count Stephen-Henry who in 1069 received Fulk Rechin’s homage for Touraine—could venture on aspiring to the hand of King William’s daughter Adela.[662] In winning her he won a prize of which he was scarcely worthy. Stephen-Henry was indeed, in every way, a better man than either his father or his grandfather; but he had the nerveless, unstable temper which was the curse of his race. He went on the Crusade, and deserted before Antioch was won. He came home to bury his shame; his wife sent him out again to expiate it. Her burning words changed the coward into a martyr, and the stain was washed out in his life-blood beneath the walls of Ramah.[663] In the ordinary course of things, his successor in the counties of Blois, Chartres and Champagne would have been his eldest son William. But Stephen had left the entire control of his affairs, including the disposal of his territories, to his wife; and Adela knew that her firstborn was a youth of slow wit, quite unfit for public life. She therefore disinherited him, to his own complete satisfaction; for he had sense enough to be conscious of his incapacity for government, and gladly withdrew to the more congenial life of a simple country gentleman on the estates of his wife, the lady of Sully in Champagne, while the duties and responsibilities of the head of the family were laid on the abler shoulders of his next brother, Theobald. Of the two remaining brothers, the youngest had been from his infancy dedicated to the Church; the third, who bore his father’s name of Stephen, had been intrusted for education to his uncle the king of England.[664] Adela seems to have been Henry’s favourite sister; she was certainly, in all qualities both of heart and head, well worthy of his confidence and esteem; and she once at least did him a service which deserved his utmost gratitude, for it was she who contrived the opportunity for his reconciliation with S. Anselm. She was moreover the only one of his sisters who had children; and the relation between a man and his sister’s son was in the Middle Ages held as a specially dear and sacred tie. Its force was fully acknowledged by Henry in the case of the little Stephen. He had the child carefully brought up at his court with his own son; he knighted him with his own hand, and bestowed on him, in addition to ample estates in England, the Norman county of Mortain, which had been for several generations held by a near connexion of the ducal house, and entitled its possessor to rank as the first baron of the duchy. Finally, some few years before the second marriage of the Empress, he arranged a match between Stephen and another Matilda of scarcely less illustrious descent—the only daughter and heiress of Count Eustace of Boulogne and Mary of Scotland, sister to Henry’s own queen.[665] Stephen seems in fact to have been, next to William the Ætheling, the person for whom Henry cared most; and after the disaster of the White Ship—in which a lucky attack of illness saved him from sharing—he became virtually the king’s adoptive son, and the first layman in the kingdom. His position is illustrated by a dispute which occurred when the barons took the oath of homage and fealty to Matilda in the Christmas council of 1126. They swore in order of precedence. The first place among the lay peers belonged as an unquestioned right to the king of Scots; the second was claimed at once by Stephen and by the king’s son Earl Robert of Gloucester; the dignity of the nephew was held to outweigh the privilege of the son; and the second layman who swore on bended knee to acknowledge the Empress Matilda as her father’s successor was her cousin Count Stephen of Mortain and Boulogne.[666]

- [662] The story of this wooing is curious, and linked in a curious fashion to the old days when Fulk Nerra and Odo were fighting for Touraine. Gelduin, the “devil of Saumur,” when Odo’s mistaken tactics and his own loyal service had cost him the loss of his heritage, refused all the offers of compensation made to him by his penitent count, and merely asked him for a certain “bare hill” on the south bank of the Loire, half way between Amboise and Blois, where he built the castle afterwards known as Chaumont, and there remained as a perpetual thorn in the side of the Angevin lords of Amboise, till in 1035 he gave up his possessions to his son Geoffrey and went to end his days in peace in an abbey which he had founded on an estate of his own, hard by the battle-field of Pontlevoy. Geoffrey’s delicate beauty won him the surname of “the Maiden,” but beneath his girl-like face lay a spirit as manly and as noble as that of his father. In 1066 the hot northern blood in his veins drove him to give up his estates to his niece Dionysia (who married a son of Lisoy of Amboise) and join the host of adventurers who followed Duke William over sea. But after fifteen years of prosperity in England, his heart was still true to the race whom his father had served so loyally; and it was Geoffrey’s well-earned influence with the Conqueror which brought about, in 1082, the marriage between the son of his former lord and the daughter of his present one (Gesta Amb. Domin., Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 173, 174, 184). On the marriage see also Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 573. After the Conqueror’s death Geoffrey found the state of things in England no longer to his mind, made over his estates there to his nephew Savaric, and came home once more, to be received with open arms by the couple whom he had helped to marry. He dwelt at their court as an honoured guest for the rest of his days, lived to complete his hundredth year without the loss of a single faculty save the light of his still beautiful eyes, and was buried at last by his father’s side in the abbey of our Lady of Pontlevoy (Gesta Amb. Domin., Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 185, 197, 198).

- [663] On the flight from Antioch see Will. Tyr., l. v. c. 10, and all the historians of the first crusade. On Stephen’s second expedition and death see Ord. Vit. (as above), pp. 789 et seq.; Will. Tyr., l. x. c. 20; and Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iv. c. 384 (Hardy, pp. 593, 594).

- [664] “Nutriendum promovendumque.” Will. Newb., l. i. c. 4 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 31).

- [665] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 811. Will. Jumièges Contin., l. viii. c. 34 (ib. p. 310). Will. Newb., l. i. c. 4 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 31). Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 49 (Hardy, p. 750).

- [666] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 3 (Hardy, p. 692).

But for that council and its oath, the succession both to the English crown and to the Norman ducal coronet would have been at Henry’s death an open question. Had Matilda’s child been old enough to step at once into the place destined for him by his grandfather, there would most likely have been no question at all; Henry II. would have succeeded Henry I. without opposition, and England would have been spared nineteen years of anarchy. But Henry Fitz-Empress was not yet three years old. The practical choice at the moment lay between the surviving adult descendants of the Conqueror; and of these there were, besides the Empress, at least two others who might be considered quite as well qualified to represent him as she was. Independently of any special engagement, the barons would be fully entitled to choose between the daughter of William’s son and the sons of his daughter—between Matilda of Anjou, Theobald of Blois, and Stephen of Boulogne. Of the three, Matilda was on the whole the one who had least to recommend her. Her great personal advantage was that she, and she alone, was the child of a crowned king and queen, of the “good Queen Maude” in whose veins flowed the ancient royal blood of Wessex, and the king whom his English subjects revered after he was gone as “a good man,” who “made peace for men and deer.”[667] Matilda’s birth would be a valuable qualification in English eyes; but it would carry very little weight in Normandy. Old-English blood-royal went for nothing there; and King Henry’s good peace had been much less successfully enforced, and when enforced much less appreciated, in the duchy than in the kingdom. Personally, Matilda was almost a stranger in both countries. She had left her own people and her father’s house at the age of eight years, to be educated not as the daughter of the English king but as the child-wife of the Emperor. All her associations, all her interests, were in Germany; there she was known and respected, there she was at home. She had only returned to England very unwillingly for a couple of years, and then left it again to become the wife of a man known there only as the son of that “earl of Anjou” who had been King Henry’s most troublesome foe; while in Normandy the Angevin was known but too well, and hated with a mingled hate and scorn which had grown with the growth and strengthened with the strength of both county and duchy ever since the days of Geoffrey Martel. If the principle of female succession was to be admitted at all—if the Conqueror’s throne was to be filled by a stranger—one of his daughter’s sons might fill it at least as worthily as his son’s daughter and her Angevin husband. And if a sovereign was to be chosen for his personal qualifications, it would have been hard to find a better choice than Theobald the Great, count of Blois, Chartres and Champagne. He did not owe his historical epithet solely to his vast possessions; he was almost the only member of the house of Blois who shewed any trace of intellectual or moral greatness. His public life was one long series of vexations and disappointments; the misfortunes which his race were so apt to bring upon themselves by their own unsteadiness and self-will seemed to fall upon him without provocation on his part; it was as if his heritage had come to him charged with the penalties of all his forefathers’ errors. But it had not come to him charged with the heavier burthen of their fatal intellectual perversity and moral weakness. In its place he had the tact, the dignity, the stedfastness of his Norman mother; and the whole of his after-career fully justified the esteem of the Norman barons, grounded upon their acquaintance with his person and character during those wars against the king of France in which his cause had been inseparably bound up with that of his uncle Henry. In England, however, he could only be known by report, as the nephew and ally of the king, and the elder brother of Stephen. It was Stephen, not Theobald, who had been the king’s favourite and constant companion, lacking nothing of the rank of an adoptive son save the avowed prospect of the crown. Stephen had lived in England from his childhood; his territorial possessions, his personal interests, lay wholly in England and Normandy; his name and his face were almost as familiar there as those of Henry himself; he was the first baron of the duchy, the first layman of the kingdom; moreover, he was the husband of a lady who stood as near to the Old-English royal line and represented it, to say the least, as worthily as her imperial cousin and namesake. Lastly, his marriage gave him yet one more advantage, slight in itself, but of no small practical use at the moment. As count of Boulogne, he had immediate command of the shortest passage from the Continent to England.

- [667] Eng. Chron. a. 1135.

The tidings of Henry’s death soon reached Angers; and before the first week of December was out, Matilda presented herself in Normandy to take possession of her inheritance. The officer in charge of the border-territories, comprising the forfeited lands of William Talvas and the county of Hiesmes, at once surrendered them to her and received her as his liege lady;[668] but before she had time to secure the duchy, the kingdom was snatched from her grasp. Stephen set out at once from Wissant and crossed the Channel amid a storm so terrific that men on shore deemed it could bode nothing less than the end of the world.[669] It only boded the arrival at Dover of a candidate for the English crown.

- [668] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 903. The places specified, besides Hiesmes, are Argentan and Domfront. See also Chron. S. Albin. a. 1135 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 34), and Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 294, where Geoffrey gets the credit of winning them. Rob. Torigni, a. 1135, adds Ambrières, “Gorra” and Coulommiers.

- [669] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 11 (Hardy, p. 703).

Stephen’s promptitude served him as well as the promptitude of William Rufus and Henry had served them in a like case. But this time the part which had been played in 1087 by the primate and in 1100 by “the Witan who were there nigh at hand” was to be played by the citizens of London. Repulsed from Dover and Canterbury[670]—for the men of Kent had an hereditary grudge against any one coming from Boulogne—Stephen pushed on to London, where the well-known face of King Henry’s favourite nephew was hailed with delight by the citizens, vehemently declaring that they would have no stranger to rule over them.[671] They claimed to have inherited the right to a voice in the election of the sovereign which had once, in theory at least, belonged to the whole nation, and accordingly the “aldermen and wise folk”[672] came together to consider what provision should be made for the safety of the realm, and, for that end, to choose a king. A kingless land, said they, was exposed to countless perils; the first thing needful was to make a king as speedily as possible.[673] Of Matilda and her claims not a word seems to have been said; if any of the leading burgesses, as tenants-in-chief of the crown, had sworn fealty to her, they were in no humour to regard it now; and the citizens in general would doubtless not hold themselves bound by an oath which they had not personally taken. They claimed the right of election as their special prerogative, and exercising it without more ado in favour of the only person then at hand whose birth and character fitted him to undertake the defence of the kingdom, and who seemed to have been sent to them as by a special providence in their hour of need, they by common consent acknowledged Stephen as king. He hurried to Winchester to get possession of the treasury; the bishop—his own brother—came forth with the chief citizens to meet him; and the treasurer, who had refused to give up his keys to the bishop, surrendered them at once to the king-elect.[674]

- [670] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 94.

- [671] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 3, 4.

- [672] “Majores ... natu, consultuque quique provectiores.” Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 3.

- [673] Ib. pp. 3, 4.

- [674] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 4–6.

Thus far the two men who ought to have taken the lead in the national counsels—the primate and the justiciar—had stood looking passively on. Both now joined Stephen.[675] He lacked nothing to make him full king but the rite of coronation. This however depended on the primate, and when called upon to perform it William of Canterbury again drew back. He had scruples, first, about the oath which he himself, as well as Stephen and all the barons, had sworn to the Empress Matilda; and secondly, about the validity of an election so hastily made by a small part only of the nation. The second objection passed unheeded; to the first Stephen’s adherents answered that the oath had been extorted and was therefore not binding, and that several persons who were with Henry at his death had heard him openly express repentance for having forced it upon the barons.[676] Roger of Salisbury affirmed that it was annulled in another way; it had been sworn, by him at least, on condition of a promise from Henry that he would not give his daughter in marriage out of the realm without the consent of the Great Council—a promise which had been immediately broken.[677] Hugh Bigod, too, the late king’s seneschal, declared upon oath that Henry had in his presence solemnly absolved the barons from their engagement,[678] and had even formally disinherited Matilda and designated Stephen as his successor.[679] The argument which really prevailed, however, was the objection to a woman’s rule, and the urgent need of having a man to take the government, and to take it at once.[680] Henry had not yet been three weeks dead, and already England was in confusion. The first outcome of the reaction against his stern control had been a general raid upon the forests; and when men in their frantic vehemence had left themselves no more game to hunt, they turned their arms against each other and trampled all law and order under foot.[681] Such a state of things, resulting solely from the fact that England had been three weeks without a king, spoke more in Stephen’s favour than any amount of legal reasonings. The archbishop gave way; all that he demanded from Stephen was a promise to restore and maintain the liberties of the Church. Bishop Henry of Winchester offered himself as surety in his brother’s behalf, and thereby won him the crown.[682] He received it at Westminster,[683] probably either on the last Sunday in Advent or on Christmas day,[684] and he issued at the same time, by way of coronation-charter, a promise at once comprehensive and vague, to maintain the laws established by his predecessor.[685]

[675] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 11 (Hardy, pp. 703, 704). Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 6.

[676] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 6, 7.

[677] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 3 (Hardy, pp. 692, 693).

[678] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 94.

[679] Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. ii. p. 217. Cf. the speeches before the battle of Lincoln in Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 15 (Arnold, p. 270), and that of Stephen’s advocates at Rome in 1151, in Hist. Pontif. (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xx. p. 543). Gerv. Cant. (as above) does not name Hugh, but merely says “quidam ex potentissimis Angliæ.”

[680] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 8. R. Wend. as above.

[681] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 1, 2.

[682] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 11 (Hardy, p. 704).

[683] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 94. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 95).

[684] The date is variously given, as follows: December 15, Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 902.—December 20, Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above).—December 21, Ann. Waverl. a. 1136 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. p. 225).—December 22, Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 12 (Hardy, p. 704); Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 94; and Ann. Winton. Contin. a. 1135 (Liebermann, Ungedruckte Anglo-Norman. Geschichtsquellen, p. 79).—December 23, Ann. Cantuar. a. 1135 (Liebermann, as above, p. 5).—December 24, Ann. Margam, a. 1135 (Luard, as above, vol. i. p. 13).—December 25, Eng. Chron. a. 1135; Ric. Hexh. (Raine, Priory of Hexham, vol. i.) p. 70; Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 156; and Chron. Mort.-Mar. a. 1135 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 782).—December 26, Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 189; Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. ii. p. 217.—January 1, Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 113.— Will. Malm., the Contin. Flor. Worc., and the Ann. Margam all add that the day was a Sunday. This in 1135 would be right for William’s date, December 22; nothing can make it agree with that of Florence’s continuator, “xiii. kal. Jan.”; but the Margam annalist may very possibly have substituted ix. for xi., really meaning the same as William. The two extreme dates—Orderic’s and John of Hexham’s—seem equally impossible; unless we may take Orderic’s “xviii. kal. Jan.” to have simply an x too much, and then there would be another witness for Christmas-day.

[685] Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 119.

Thus the two great feuds which had hitherto influenced the political career of the Angevin house—the feud with Blois and the feud with Normandy—merged at last into one. The successors of Odo of Blois and those of William the Conqueror were now both represented, as against the successors of Fulk Nerra and Geoffrey Martel, by one and the same man, who yet was not, in strict law, the nearest representative of either. We shall see hereafter that some of the Normans entertained a project of making Theobald their duke; had they succeeded, the older quarrel would have revived almost in its original form, as a direct conflict between the heads of the two rival houses, only with Normandy instead of Touraine for its object and its battle-ground. Its original spirit was, however, more likely to be revived, on one side at least, by the substitution of Stephen for Theobald. Stephen had renounced all share in his father’s territories; but there was one paternal heir-loom which he could not renounce, and which descended to him, and him alone, among the sons of Stephen-Henry and Adela. This was the peculiar mental and moral constitution which the house of Blois inherited from Odo II. as surely as the Angevins inherited theirs from Fulk the Black. In the reigning Count Theobald, indeed, the type was fortunately almost lost, and in his youngest brother, Bishop Henry of Winchester, it was very greatly modified by the infusion of Norman blood derived from their mother. In Stephen, however, the Norman blood had but little influence on a nature which in its essence was that of the old counts of Blois. All the characteristic qualities and defects of the race were there, just as deeply rooted as in Odo of Champagne himself; the whole difference lay in this, that in Stephen the qualities lay uppermost and shewed themselves in their most attractive aspect, while the defects took a form so mild that till their fatal consequences were seen they appeared hardly more than amiable weaknesses. Gallant knight and courteous gentleman; warm-hearted, high-spirited, throwing himself eagerly into every enterprise; all reckless valour in the battle-field, all gentleness and mercy as soon as the fight was over; open-handed, generous, gracious to all, and apparently unstained by any personal vices:—it is easy to understand Henry’s affection for him, and the high hopes with which at the opening of his career he was regarded by all classes in the realm.[686] His good qualities were plainly visible; time and experience alone could reveal the radical defect which vitiated them all. That defect was simply the old curse of his race—lack of stedfastness; and it ruined Stephen as surely as it had ruined Odo. It was ingrained in every fibre of his nature; it acted like an incurable moral disease, mingling its subtle poison with his every thought and act, and turning his very virtues into weaknesses; it reduced his whole kingly career to a mere string of political inconsistencies and blunders; and it wrecked him at last, as it had wrecked his great-grandfather, on the rock of the Angevin thoroughness.

- [686] See sketches of his character in Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 12 (Hardy, p. 704), and Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 3.

For the moment, however, Stephen had outstripped his rival. The Angevin sagacity had been for once at fault. Steeped as were both Geoffrey and his wife in continental ideas and feelings, their first thought was of Normandy, and they had failed to see that in order to secure it their true policy was to secure England first; or rather, perhaps, they had failed to see that the mere will of the late king was not sufficient to give them undisputed possession of both. Stephen’s bold stroke, whether it resulted from a closer acquaintance with the relation between the two countries, or simply from a characteristic impulse to dash straight at the highest object in view, gained him kingdom and duchy at one blow. Geoffrey had followed his wife into Normandy at the head of an armed force, and accompanied by William Talvas, whose influence secured him a welcome at Séez and in all the territories of the house of Alençon. But the rival races were no sooner in actual contact than their old hatred burst uncontrollably forth. The Angevins, though they ostensibly came only to put their countess in peaceful possession of her heritage, could not yet bring themselves to look upon the Normans in any light but that of natural enemies; they treated the districts which had submitted to them as a conquered land, and went about harrying and plundering till the people rose and attacked them with such fury that they were compelled to evacuate the country.[687] The Norman barons now held at Neubourg a meeting at which they decided to invite Count Theobald of Blois to come and take possession of the duchy. Theobald came to Rouen, and thence to Lisieux, where on December 21 he had an interview with Matilda’s half-brother Earl Robert of Gloucester. They were interrupted by a messenger from England with the tidings of Stephen’s election as king.[688] The Norman barons then felt that the decision was taken out of their hands; since Stephen and England had been too quick for them, their best course now was to accept the accomplished fact, and acknowledged the king-elect as duke of Normandy.[689] To this Robert of Gloucester assented.[690] Theobald, despite his natural vexation, at once withdrew his claim, and made in his brother’s name a truce with Geoffrey to last from Christmas till the octave of Pentecost; and having thus done his best to secure the peace of the duchy till its own duke could come to it, he quietly returned to his own dominions.[691]

- [687] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 903.

- [688] Rob. Torigni, a. 1135. Cf. Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 902, 903.

- [689] Ord. Vit. (as above), p. 903.

- [690] Rob. Torigni, a. 1135.

- [691] Ord. Vit. as above. Cf. Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 294.

In England, meanwhile, Stephen was carrying all before him. The first public act in which he had to take part as king was the burial of his predecessor at Reading on the feast of the Epiphany;[692] the next was the defence of his realm against a danger which it had not known for more than forty years—a Scottish invasion. King David of Scotland, true to the oath which every one else seemed to have forgotten, arose as the champion of Matilda’s rights, led his troops into Northumberland, and partly conquered it in her behalf. Stephen met him near Durham, pacified him by a grant of the earldoms of Carlisle, Huntingdon and Doncaster to his son Henry,[693] and came back in peace, almost in triumph, to the Easter festival and the crowning of his queen.[694] Adherents now came flocking in; the splendour of the Easter court made up for the meagreness of the Christmas meeting.[695] Baron and knight, clerk and layman, rallied round the winning young sovereign who was ready to promise anything, to undertake anything, to please anybody. The only class who still held aloof were the “new men” of the last reign, men like Payne Fitz-John and Miles the sheriff of Gloucester, who owed everything to Henry, and who were bound alike by gratitude and by policy to uphold his daughter’s cause. But the chief of them all, Bishop Roger of Salisbury, had already joined Stephen, and the rest were soon persuaded to follow his example.[696] Shortly after Easter there came in a yet more important personage. Earl Robert of Gloucester, the eldest son of the late king, influential alike on both sides of the sea by his rank, his wealth and his character, was looked upon both in Normandy and in England as the natural leader of the baronage. The suddenness of Stephen’s accession had snatched the leadership out of his hands, and he lingered on in Normandy, watching the course of events without sharing in them, and meditating how to reconcile his own interest with his duty to his sister. Stephen, anxious to win him over, sent him repeated invitations to England; till at last he decided to let himself be won, at least in appearance, if only for the sake of gaining a footing in England which might enable him afterwards to work there in Matilda’s favour. The king’s son, however, made terms for himself more like a king than a mere earl. He came to Stephen’s court and did homage for his English estates; but he did it only on the express condition of being bound by it only so long as Stephen’s own promises to him were kept, and he himself was maintained in all his honours and dignities.[697] The first result of his submission—if submission it can be called—was seen in a great council at Oxford, where all the bishops swore fealty to the king, and the vague promise to maintain the “Laws of King Henry,” which Stephen had issued on his coronation-day, was amplified into a more detailed and definite charter.[698] Suddenly, a few weeks later, there went forth a rumour that the king was dead, and the barons at once broke into revolt. Baldwin of Redvers threw himself into Exeter; Hugh Bigod, who but a few months ago had been foremost among the supporters of Stephen, seized Norwich castle, and was only dislodged by the king in person.[699] He was apparently forgiven; another rebel, Robert of Bathenton,[700] was caught and hanged, and his castle forced to surrender. The great castle of Exeter, where Baldwin had shut himself up with his family and a picked band of young knights, all sworn never to yield, cost a long and troublesome siege; but the agonies of thirst at length drove the garrison to break their vow and ask for terms. Stephen let them all go out free; Baldwin requited his leniency by hastening to a castle which he possessed in the Isle of Wight, and there setting himself up as a sort of pirate-chief at the head of a band of men as reckless as himself. But when Stephen hurried to Southampton and began to collect a fleet, Baldwin suddenly took fright and surrendered. His lands were confiscated, and he went into exile in Anjou, where he was eagerly welcomed by the count, and added one more to the elements of strife already working in Normandy.[701] In England his defeat put an end to the revolt, and the Christmas court at Dunstable brought the first year of King Stephen to a tranquil close.[702]

[692] Ord. Vit. (as above·/·Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 901, 902. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 2 (Arnold, pp. 257, 258). Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 95. Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 13 (Hardy, p. 705).

[693] For the details of this Scottish expedition and treaty see Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 4 (Arnold, pp. 258, 289), Ric. Hexh. (Raine), p. 72, and Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), p. 114.

[694] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 96.

[695] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 2 (Arnold, p. 259).

[696] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 14–16.

[697] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 14 (Hardy, pp. 705–707). Cf. Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 9.

[698] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 15 (Hardy, pp. 707–709). Stubbs, Select Charters, pp. 119–121.

[699] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 4 (Arnold, p. 259).

[700] Or Bakington. In the Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 18, the name of the place is Batthentona, which Lappenberg and Mr. Freeman render by Bathenton in Devon. (Mr. Sewell, the editor of the Gesta Steph., rendered it Bath.) But while two MSS. of Hen. Hunt. have “Bathentun,” three others have “Bachentun” or “Bakentun” (Arnold, p. 259, note 6. In the index Mr. Arnold suggests “Bagington? Bathampton?”).

[701] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 18–29. Hen. Hunt. as above. Eng. Chron. a. 1135. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. pp. 96, 97.

[702] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 5 (Arnold, p. 260).

Yet already there were signs that those who had thought to find in Henry’s nephew such another king as Henry himself[703] were doomed to disappointment. It was no good omen for the fulfilment of the pledges embodied in his charters when Stephen broke the one which appealed most strongly to popular feeling—the promise to mitigate the severe forest laws—by holding a forest assize at Brampton after his triumph over Baldwin of Redvers in 1136.[704] Neither was it satisfactory that the accession of a king specially bound by the circumstances of his election to rule as a national sovereign proved to be the signal for a great influx of foreigners—not as in Henry’s time, honest industrious settlers who fled from their own unquiet homes to share “the good peace that he made in this land” and to become an useful element in the growing prosperity of the nation; but as in the Red King’s time, a rapacious and violent race of mercenary adventurers, chiefly from Britanny and Flanders; men to whom nothing was sacred, and who flocked to Stephen as they had flocked to Rufus, attracted by the report of his prodigality and the hope, only too well founded, of growing rich upon the spoils of England.[705] However much Henry may have provoked his subjects by his preference for ministers of continental birth, he had at least never insulted them by taking for his chief counsellor and confidant a mere foreign soldier of fortune like that William of Ypres who acted as the leader of Stephen’s Flemish mercenaries and whose influence over him excited the wrath of both the English and the Norman barons.[706] The peace of the country was probably all the better kept during the year 1137 because its preservation was left wholly to Bishop Roger and his nephews, while Stephen, accompanied by his Flemish friend, was well out of the way in Normandy, where he spent the year in concerting an alliance with his brother,[707] obtaining the French king’s sanction to his tenure of the duchy, for which his eldest son did homage in his stead,[708] and vainly endeavouring to secure it from the combined dangers of internal treason and Angevin intermeddling. No disturbance occurred in England during his absence; a Scottish invasion, threatened soon after Easter, was averted by Archbishop Thurstan of York, who persuaded the Scot king to accept a truce till Advent,[709] when Stephen was expected to return. He was no sooner back than David sent to demand for his son the earldom of Northumberland,[710] which had been, it was said, half promised to him a year before;[711] on the refusal of his demand,[712] early in January he led an army into England. An unsuccessful siege of the border fortress of Carham or Wark was followed by such a harrying of the whole land from Tweed to Tyne as had not been heard of since the wild heathenish days of Malcolm Canmore’s youth.[713] David, indeed, was not personally concerned in this horrible work; he had left it to the conduct of his nephew William Fitz-Duncan, while he himself with a strong body of troops took up his quarters at Corbridge.[714] Stephen marched against him early in February, whereupon he returned to the siege of Carham; dislodged thence by the English king, he buried himself and his troops in an almost inaccessible swamp near Roxburgh, bidding the townsfolk decoy the Southrons by a false show of friendliness and thus enable him to surround and despatch them.[715] Stephen however discovered the trap—apparently through the double treachery of some of his own barons who were concerned in it;[716] he crossed the Tweed, but instead of marching upon Roxburgh he turned south-westward and ravaged David’s territories till the lack of provisions forced him to return to the south.[717]

[703] “Hi uuendon thæt he sculde ben alsuic alse the eom wæs.” Eng. Chron. a. 1137.

[704] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 4 (Arnold, p. 260).

[705] “Sub Henrico rege multi alienigenæ, qui genialis humi inquietationibus exagitabantur, Angliam adnavigabant, et sub ejus alis quietum otium agebant; sub Stephano plures ex Flandriâ et Britanniâ, rapto vivere assueti, spe magnarum prædarum Angliam involabant.” Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 34. Cf. l. i. c. 14 (Hardy, pp. 731, 706).

[706] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 105. William of Ypres was son of Philip of Flanders, second son of Count Robert the Frisian. Although he had no legal place in the house of Flanders, he was one of the claimants of the county after the death of Charles of Denmark, against William the Clito and Theodoric of Alsace. After being the torment of his own country for nearly ten years, he was compelled to fly, and took service in England under Stephen. See Walter of Térouanne, Vita B. Caroli Com., in Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xiii. pp. 336, 342–347; Galbert of Bruges, Vita B. Car. (ibid.), pp. 354, 355, 359 et seq.; Geneal. Com. Flandr. (ibid.), pp. 412, 413; Joh. Ypr. Chron. Sith. (ibid.), 466, 468. The people’s hatred of William was justifiable enough; but it ill became the barons to cast stones at him. His evil-doings were not a whit greater than theirs, and the changeless devotion with which he—a mere hireling, bound to Stephen by no tie but that of a bargain which Stephen certainly cannot long have had means to fulfil—stuck to the king in adversity as firmly as in prosperity, might have put them all to shame.

[707] Theobald renounced all claims upon kingdom and duchy for two thousand marks of silver to be paid him annually by Stephen. Rob. Torigni, a. 1137.

[708] This was because William the Ætheling had done homage to Louis, and it was agreed that Stephen should hold Normandy on the same terms as his predecessor Henry. Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 909. Cf. Rob. Torigni, a. 1137, and Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 5 (Arnold, p. 260). This was in May. Ord. Vit. as above.

[709] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 76, 77. Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), p. 115.

[710] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), p. 77. Joh. Hexh. as above.

[711] Ric. Hexh. (Raine, p. 72) says that some who were present at the treaty made between Stephen and David in 1136 affirmed that Stephen had then promised that if ever he should contemplate bestowing the earldom of Northumberland upon any man, he would first cause to be fairly tried in his court the claims upon it which Henry of Scotland had inherited from his mother, the eldest daughter of the last old English earl, Waltheof.

[712] According to Orderic, Stephen had some ground for his refusal; for it seems that the form in which the lately expired truce reached him—at any rate, that in which it reached Orderic—was that of a plot made by “quidam pestiferi” to kill all the Normans in England on a certain day, and betray the realm to the Scots. Some of the plotters were said to have confessed to Bishop Nigel of Ely, who revealed the plot, and so it all came out. Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 912. This plot appears also in R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 253, but is there attributed solely to one Ralf, a clerk of Bishop Nigel’s, and nothing is said about the Scots.

[713] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 77–80. Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), pp. 115, 116. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 6 (Arnold, pp. 260, 261). The Scottish host was “coadunatus de Normannis, Germanis, Anglis, de Northanhymbranis et Cumbris, de Teswetadalâ, de Lodoneâ, de Pictis, qui vulgo Galleweienses dicuntur, et Scottis, nec erat qui eorum numerum sciret.” Ric. Hexh., p. 79.

[714] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), p. 79. Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), p. 116.

[715] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), p. 81. Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), p. 117.

[716] Joh. Hexh. as above.

[717] Ric. Hexh. and Joh. Hexh., as above. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 6 (Arnold, p. 261), and Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 102.

He had not long turned his back when David re-entered Northumberland and marched ravaging along the eastern coast till a mutiny among his soldiers compelled him to retreat to the border. Thence he sent William Fitz-Duncan to ravage the district of Craven, while he himself remained busy with the siege of Carham till he was dislodged by Count Waleran of Meulan.[718] The Empress meanwhile plied him with entreaties for support, both by her own letters and through her friends in the north, chief among whom was her father’s old minister Eustace Fitz-John,[719] lord of the mighty castles of Bamborough, Knaresborough, Malton and Alnwick. Eustace had already forfeited his best stronghold, Bamborough, through his plottings against Stephen;[720] in May 1138 he openly placed himself, his remaining castles and his men at the disposal of the Scot king. David hesitated no longer. Gathering up all the forces of his kingdom,[721] he joined Eustace in an unsuccessful attempt to regain Bamborough; thence the united host marched burning and harrying through the already thrice-wasted Patrimony of S. Cuthbert, crossed the Tees, and in the middle of August made its appearance in Yorkshire.[722]

- [718] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 81–84. Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), p. 117. The record of Waleran’s exploit is in Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above)·/·(Thorpe), vol. ii., p. 112.

- [719] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 35.

- [720] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 117. “De magnis proceribus Angliæ, regi quondam Henrico familiarissimus, vir summæ prudentiæ et in secularibus negotiis magni consilii, qui a rege Anglorum ideo recesserat quod ab eo in curiâ contra patrium morem captus, castra quæ ei Rex Henricus commiserat reddere compulsus est.” Æthelred Riev. De Bello Standardi (Twysden, X. Scriptt.), col. 343. On Eustace Fitz-John see also Walbran, Memor. of Fountains, p. 50, note 11.

- [721] The Hexham chroniclers reckon them at something over twenty thousand.

- [722] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 84, 85, 89. Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), p. 118.

There was no help to be looked for from the king. All through that summer the whole south and west of England had been in a blaze of revolt which was still unsubdued, and Stephen had neither time, thought, nor troops to spare for the defence of the north. But in face of such a danger as this the men of the north needed no help from him. When their own hearths and altars were threatened by the hereditary Scottish foe, resistance was a matter not of loyalty but of patriotism. The barons and great men of the shire at once organized their plans under the guidance of Archbishop Thurstan, whose lightest word carried more weight in Yorkshire than anything that Stephen could have said or done. Inspired by him, the forces of the diocese met at York in the temper of crusaders. Three days of fasting, almsgiving and penance, concluding with a solemn absolution and benediction from their primate, prepared them for their task. Worn out as he was with years and labours—so feeble that he could neither walk nor ride—Thurstan would yet have gone forth in his litter at the head of his men to encourage the host with his presence and his eloquence; but the barons shrank from such a risk. To them he was the Moses on whose uplifted hands depended their success in the coming battle; so they sent him back to wrestle in prayer for them within his own cathedral church, while they went forth to their earthly warfare against the Scot.[723]

- [723] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 86, 87. Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), pp. 118, 119.

Early in the morning of Tuesday, August 22, the English forces drew up in battle array upon Cowton Moor, two miles from Northallerton. In their midst was the “Standard” from which the fight afterwards took its name:—a cart into which was fixed a pole surmounted by a silver pyx containing the Host, and hung round with the consecrated banners of the local churches, S. Peter of York, S. John of Beverley, S. Wilfrid of Ripon.[724] Thurstan’s place as chief spiritual adviser of the army was filled by Ralf, bishop of the Orkneys;[725] their chief military adviser was Walter Lespec, the pious and noble founder of Kirkham and Rievaux—the very type and model of a Christian knight of the time. Standing upon the cart, with the sacred banners waving round his head, in a voice like a trumpet he addressed his comrades.[726] He appealed to the barons to prove themselves worthy of their race; he appealed to the English shire-levies to prove themselves worthy of their country; he pictured in glowing colours the wrongs which they all had to avenge, and the worse they would have to suffer if they survived a defeat; then, grasping the hand of William of Aumale, the new-made earl of York,[727] he swore aloud to conquer or die.[728] The unanimous “Amen!” of the English host was answered by shrill cries of “Albin! Albin!” as the Scots came charging on.[729] The glory of the first onset was snatched, much against David’s will, by the men of Galloway, who claimed it as their hereditary right.[730] The second division of the Scottish host comprised the Cumbrians and the men of Teviotdale, and the followers of Eustace Fitz-John. A third body was formed by the men of Lothian and of the western islands, and a fourth by the king’s household troops, a picked band of English and Norman knights commanded by David in person.[731] The English array was simple enough; the whole host stood in one compact mass clustered around the Standard,—the barons and their followers occupying the centre, the archers intermingled with them in front, and the general mass of less well-armed troops of the shire in the rear, with a small detachment of horse posted at a little distance; the main body of both armies fought on foot in the old English fashion. The wild Celts of Galloway dashed headlong upon the English front, only to find their spears and javelins glance off from the helmets and shields of the knights as from an iron wall, while their own half-naked bodies were riddled with a shower of arrows; their leader fell, and they fled in confusion.[732] The second line under the king’s son, Henry, charged with better success; but an Englishman lifted up a gory head upon a pole crying out that it was David’s; and like the English long ago in a like case at Assandun, the Scottish centre at once fled almost without waiting to be attacked.[733] David himself fought on well-nigh alone, till the few who stood around him dragged him off the field, lifted him on horseback, and fairly compelled him to retreat.[734] His scattered troops caught sight of the dragon on his standard,[735] and discovering that he was still alive, rallied enough to enable him to retreat in good order. Henry gathered up the remnants of the royal body-guard—the only mounted division of the army—and with them made a gallant effort to retrieve the day; but the horsemen charged in vain against the English shield-wall, and falling back with shattered spears and wounded horses they were compelled to fling away their accoutrements and escape as best they could.[736] Three days elapsed before Henry himself could rejoin his father at Carlisle.[737] Eleven hundred Scots were said to have been slain in the battle or caught in their flight through the woods and marshes and there despatched.[738] Out of two hundred armed knights only nineteen carried their mail-coats home again;[739] such of the rest as escaped at all escaped only with their lives; and the field was so strewn with baggage, provisions and arms, left behind by the fugitives, that the victors gave it the nickname of Baggamore.[740] The enthusiasm which had carried the Yorkshiremen through the hour of danger carried them also through the temptation of the hour of triumph. They sullied their victory by no attempt at pursuit or retaliation, but simply returned as they had come, in solemn procession, and having restored the holy banners to their several places with joy and thanksgiving, went quietly back every man to his own home.[741] Some three months later the garrison of Carham, having salted their last horse save one, were driven to surrender; but their stubborn defence had won them the right to march out free with the honours of war, and all that David gained was the satisfaction of razing the empty fortress.[742]

[724] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 90, 91. Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), p. 119. Cf. the description of the Milanese carroccio—“quod apud nos standard dicitur” as the German writer remarks—in 1162 (Ep. Burchard. Notar. Imp. de Excidio Mediolan., in Muratori, Rer. Ital. Scriptt., vol. vi. p. 917).

[725] On Ralf see Dixon and Raine, Fasti Eborac., vol. i. p. 168.

[726] So says Æthelred of Rievaux (De Bello Standardi, Twysden, X. Scriptt., cols. 338, 339), giving a charming portrait of Walter and a vivid picture of the scene. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 7 (Arnold, p. 262), attributes the speech to Bishop Ralf.

[727] “The the king adde beteht Euorwic.” Eng. Chron. a. 1138.

[728] Æthelred Riev., De Bello Standardi (as above), cols. 339–342.

[729] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 9 (Arnold, p. 263).

[730] Æthelred Riev. De Bello Stand. (Twysden, X. Scriptt.), col. 342. His account of the quarrel for precedence and its consequences makes one think of the Macdonalds at Culloden. Ric. Hexh. (Raine, p. 92), says the “Picti” were in the van; Joh. Hexh. (ib. p. 119), calls them “Scotti”—both meaning simply what at a later time would have been called “wild Highlanders,” i.e. in this case men of Galloway. Hen. Hunt. puts the Lothian men in front, but he is clearly wrong.

[731] Æthelred Riev. (as above), cols. 342, 343.

[732] Ib. col. 345. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 9 (Arnold, pp. 263, 264), who, however, turns the Galwegians into men of Lothian; see above, note 2{730}.

[733] Æthelred Riev. as above.

[734] Æthelred Riev. De Bello Stand. (Twysden, X. Scriptt.), col. 346. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 9 (Arnold, p. 264).

[735] “Regale vexillum, quod ad similitudinem draconis figuratum facile agnoscebatur.” Æthelred Riev. as above. Had S. Margaret’s son adopted the old royal standard of her West-Saxon forefathers?

[736] Æthelred Riev. and Hen. Hunt., as above. The two accounts do not seem to tally at first sight, but they are easily reconciled.

[737] Æthelred Riev. as above. Cf. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 112.

[738] Hen. Hunt. as above. Ric. Hexh. (Raine), p. 93.

[739] Flor. Worc. Contin. as above.

[740] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 120. Serlo (Twysden, X. Scriptt.), cols. 331, 332. According to this last, the scattered eatables consisted chiefly of bread, cheese and horseflesh, which, as well as other flesh, the Scots ate indifferently raw or cooked.—There is yet one other curious version of the Scottish rout and its cause: “Archiepiscopus cum militibus regis latenter occurrens super Cotowne more juxta Northallerton, fieri jussit in viis subterraneis quædam instrumenta sonos horribiles reddentia, quæ Anglicè dicuntur petronces; quibus resonantibus, feræ et cætera armenta quæ procedebant exercitum prædicti David regis in adjutorium, timore strepitûs perterriti, in exercitum David ferociter resiliebant.” (MS. Life of Abp. Thurstan, quoted by Mr. Raine, Priory of Hexh., vol. i. p. 92, note t). The primate’s share in the victory was so strongly felt at the time that in the Ann. Cicestr. a. 1138 (Liebermann, Geschichtsquellen, p. 95), the battle appears as “Bellum inter archiepiscopum Eboracensem et David.”

[741] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), p. 93. Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), p. 120.

[742] Ric. Hexh. (Raine), p. 100. Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), p. 118.

The defeat of the Scots was shared by the English baron who had brought them into the land. But Eustace Fitz-John was far from standing alone in his breach of fealty to the English king. All the elements of danger and disruption which had been threatening Stephen ever since his accession suddenly burst forth in the spring of 1138.[743] Between the king and the barons there had been from the first a total lack of confidence. It could not be otherwise; for their mutual obligations were founded on the breach of an earlier obligation contracted by both towards Matilda and her son. There could not fail to be on both sides a feeling that as they had all alike broken their faith to the Empress, so they might at any moment break their faith to each other just as lightly. But on one side the insecurity lay still deeper. Not only was the king not sure of his subjects; he was not sure of himself. How far Stephen was morally justified in accepting the crown after he had sworn fealty to another candidate for it is a question whose solution depends upon that of a variety of other questions which we are not bound to discuss here. Politically, however, he could justify himself only in one way: by proving his fitness for the office which he had undertaken. What he proved was his unfitness for it. Stephen, in short, had done the most momentous deed of his life as he did all the lesser ones, without first counting the cost; and it was no sooner done than he found the cost beyond his power to meet. A thoroughly unselfish hero, a thoroughly unscrupulous tyrant, might have met it successfully, each in his own way. But Stephen was neither hero nor tyrant; he was “a mild man, soft and good—and did no justice.”[744] His weakness shewed itself in a policy of makeshift which only betrayed his uneasiness and increased his difficulties. His first expedient to strengthen his position had been the unlucky introduction of the Flemish mercenaries; his next was the creation of new earldoms in behalf of those whom he regarded as his especial friends, whereby he hoped to raise up an aristocracy wholly devoted to himself, but only succeeded in provoking the resentment and contempt of the older nobility; while to indemnify his new earls for their lack of territorial endowment and give them some means of supporting their titular dignity, he was obliged to provide them with revenues charged upon that of the Crown.[745] But his prodigality had already made the Crown revenues insufficient for his own needs;[746] and the next steps were the debasement of the coinage[747] and the arbitrary spoliation of those whom he mistrusted for the benefit of his insatiable favourites.[748] They grew greedier in asking, and he more lavish in giving; castles, lands, anything and everything, were demanded of him without scruple; and if their demands were not granted the petitioners at once prepared for defiance.[749] He flew hither and thither, but nothing came of his restless activity;[750] he did more harm to himself than to his enemies, giving away lands and honours almost at random, patching up a hollow peace,[751] and then, when he found every man’s hand against him and his hand against every man, bitterly complaining, “Why have they made me king, only to leave me thus destitute? By our Lord’s Nativity, I will not be a king thus disgraced!”[752]

- [743] “Hi igitur duo anni [i.e. 1136 and 1137] Stephani regis prosperrimi fuerunt, tertius vero ... mediocris et intercisus fuit; duo vero ultimi exitiales fuerunt et prærupti.” Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 5 (Arnold, p. 260). By this reckoning it seems that after Stephen’s capture at the battle of Lincoln Henry does not count him king at all.

- [744] Eng. Chron. a. 1137.

- [745] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 18 (Hardy, p. 712).

- [746] “He hadde get his [Henry’s] tresor, ac he todeld it and scatered sotlice.” Eng. Chron. a. 1137.

- [747] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 34 (Hardy, p. 732).

- [748] See the first and fullest example in the story of the siege of Bedford, December 1138–January 1139; Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 30–32. Cf. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 6 (Arnold, p. 260). The sequel of the story is in Gesta Steph., p. 74.

- [749] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 18 (Hardy, p. 711).

- [750] “Modo hic, modo illic subitus aderat,” ibid. “Raptabatur enim nunc huc nunc illuc, et adeo vix aliquid perficiebat.” Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 105. Cf. R. Glaber’s description of Stephen’s ancestor Odo II. (above, p. 150).

- [751] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 18 (Hardy, pp. 711, 712).

- [752] Ib. c. 17 (p. 711).

Matters were made worse by his relations with Earl Robert of Gloucester. As son of the late king and half-brother of the Empress; as one of the greatest and wealthiest landowners in England—earl of Gloucester by his father’s grant, lord of Bristol and of Glamorgan by his marriage with the heiress of Robert Fitz-Hamon—all-powerful throughout the western shires and on the Welsh march—Robert was the one man who above all others could most influence the policy of the barons, and whom it was most important for Stephen to conciliate at any cost. Robert had followed the king back to Normandy in 1137; throughout their stay there William of Ypres strove, only too successfully, to set them at variance; a formal reconciliation took place, but it was a mere form;[753] and a few months after Stephen’s return to England he was rash enough to order the confiscation of the earl’s English and Welsh estates, and actually to raze some of his castles.[754] The consequence was that soon after Whitsuntide Robert sent to the king a formal renunciation of his allegiance, and to his vassals in England instructions to prepare for war.[755] This message proved the signal for a general rising. Geoffrey Talbot had already seized Hereford castle;[756] in the north Eustace Fitz-John, as we have seen, joined hands with the Scot king; while throughout the south and west the barons shewed at once that they had been merely waiting for Robert’s decision. Bristol under Robert’s own son;[757] Harptree under William Fitz-John;[758] Castle Cary under Ralf Lovel; Dunster under William of Mohun; Shrewsbury under William Fitz-Alan;[759] Dudley under Ralf Paganel;[760] Burne, Ellesmere, Whittington and Overton under William Peverel;[761] on the south coast, Wareham, another castle of Earl Robert’s, held by Ralf of Lincoln, and Dover, held by Walkelyn Maminot[762]:—all these fortresses, and many more, were openly made ready for defence or defiance; and Stephen’s own constable Miles, who as sheriff of Gloucester had only a few weeks before welcomed him into that city with regal honours,[763] now followed the earl’s example and formally renounced his allegiance.[764]

[753] Ib.·/·Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 17 (Hardy, p. 710).

[754] Ib. c. 18 (p. 713).

[755] Ib. p. 712; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 104. The grounds of the defiance were—1, the unlawfulness of Stephen’s accession; 2, his breach of his engagements towards Robert; 3, the unlawfulness of Robert’s own oath to him as being invalidated, like Stephen’s claim to the crown, by the previous oath to Matilda. (Will. Malm. as above.)

[756] At Ascension-tide. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 7 (Arnold, p. 261). There is also an account of the seizure of Hereford by Geoffrey Talbot in Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 69, where it seems to be placed in 1140. The writer has apparently confused the seizure by Geoffrey in 1138 with that by Miles of Gloucester in December 1139, and misdated both.

[757] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 7 (Arnold, p. 261). Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 917. Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 36.

[758] Ord. Vit. as above. Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 43.

[759] Hen. Hunt. and Ord. Vit. as above.

[760] “Paganellus [tenuit] castellum de Ludelaue,” says Hen. Hunt. (as above). But we shortly afterwards find Stephen, according to Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 110), marching against “castellum de Duddelæge, quod Radulf Paignel contra illum munierat.” As Henry makes no mention of Dudley at all, and the continuator of Florence makes no mention of Ludlow till 1139, when he says nothing of its commander, it seems plain that there has been some mistake between the two names, which indeed might easily get confounded. Mr. Eyton (Antiquities of Shropshire, vol. v. pp. 244, 245) rules that the Continuator is right, as there is no trace of any connexion between Ralf Paganel and Ludlow, which indeed he shews to have been in other hands at this time. See below, p. 301.

[761] Ord. Vit. as above.

[762] Hen. Hunt. and Ord. Vit. as above.

[763] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 105.

[764] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 104.

The full force of the blow came upon Stephen while he was endeavouring to dislodge Geoffrey Talbot from Hereford. After a siege of nearly five weeks’ duration the town caught fire below the bridge; the alarmed rebels offered terms, and Stephen with his usual clemency allowed them to depart free.[765] After taking the neighbouring castle of Weobly, and leaving a garrison there and another at Hereford,[766] he seems to have returned to London[767] and there collected his forces for an attack upon the insurgents in their headquarters at Bristol. Geoffrey Talbot meanwhile made an attempt upon Bath, but was caught and put in ward by the bishop. The latter however was presently captured in his turn by the garrison of Bristol, who threatened to hang him unless their friend was released. The bishop saved his neck by giving up his prize; Stephen in great indignation marched upon Bath, and was, it is said, with difficulty restrained from depriving the bishop of his ring and staff—a statement which tells something of the way in which the king kept his compact towards the Church. He contented himself however with putting a garrison into Bath, and hurried on to the siege of Bristol.[768]

- [765] Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above)·/·(Thorpe), vol. ii., p. 106. The writer adds that on the very day of Stephen’s departure (June 15) Geoffrey set fire to everything beyond the Wye; seven or eight Welshmen perished, but no English (ib. p. 107)—an indication that the part of Hereford beyond the Wye was then a Welsh quarter.

- [766] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 106.

- [767] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 36.

- [768] Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above), pp. 108, 109. In Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 37–39, 41, 42, the story is told at greater length, and the writer seems to defend the bishop and to consider his own hero rather ungrateful.

A survey of its environs soon convinced him that he had undertaken a very difficult task. Bristol with its two encircling rivers was a natural stronghold of no common order; and on the one side where nature had left it unprotected, art had supplied the deficiency. The narrow neck of land at the eastern end of the peninsula on which the town stood—the only point whence it could be reached without crossing the water—was in the Conqueror’s last days occupied by a castle which in the Red King’s reign passed into the hands of Robert Fitz-Hamon, famed alike in history and legend as the conqueror of Glamorgan; in those of his son-in-law and successor, Earl Robert of Gloucester,[769] it grew into a mighty fortress, provided with trench and wall, outworks and towers, and all other military contrivances then in use,[770] and surrounded on its exposed eastern side by a moat whose waters joined those of the Avon on the south.[771] Bristol was in fact Robert’s military capital, and under the command of his eldest son it had now become the chief muster-place of all his dispossessed partizans and followers, as well as of a swarm of mercenaries attracted thither from all parts of the country by the advantages of the place and the wealth and renown of its lord.[772] From this stronghold they sallied forth in all directions to do the king all the mischief in their power. They overran his lands and those of his adherents like a pack of hounds; wholesale cattle-lifting was among the least of their misdeeds; every wealthy man whom they could reach was hunted down or decoyed into their den, and there tortured with every refinement of ingenious cruelty till he had given up his uttermost farthing.[773] One Philip Gay, a kinsman of Earl Robert, specially distinguished himself in the contrivance of new methods of torture.[774] In his hands, and those of men like him, Bristol acquired the title of “the stepmother of all England.”[775] If Bristol could be reduced to submission, Stephen’s work would be more than half done. He held a council of war with his barons to deliberate on the best method of beginning the siege. Those who were in earnest about the matter urged the construction of a mole to dam up the narrow strait which formed the haven, whereby not only would the inhabitants be deprived of their chief hope of succour, but the waters, checked in their course and thrown back upon themselves, would swell into a mighty flood and speedily overwhelm the city. Meanwhile, added the supporters of this scheme, Stephen might build a tower on each side of the city to check all ingress and egress by means of the two bridges, while he himself should encamp with his host before the castle and storm or starve it into surrender. Another party, however, whose secret sympathies were with the besieged, argued that whatever material, wood or stone, was used for the construction of the dam would be either swallowed up in the depths of the river or swept away by its current; and they drew such a dismal picture of the hopelessness of the undertaking that Stephen gave it up, and with it all attempt at a siege of Bristol. Turning southward, he struck across the Mendip hills into the heart of Somerset, and besieged William Lovel in Castle Cary,[776] a fortress whose remains, in the shape of three grass-covered mounds, still overlook a little valley where the river Cary takes its rise at the foot of the Polden hills. According to one account, the place yielded to Stephen;[777] according to another,[778] he built over against it a tower in which he left a detachment of soldiers to annoy its garrison, and marched northward to another castle, Harptree, whose site is now buried in the middle of a lonely wood. Harptree was gained by a stratagem somewhat later on;[779] for the present Stephen left it to be harassed by the garrison of Bath, and pursued his northward march to Dudley. Here he made no attempt upon the castle, held against him by Ralf Paganel, but contented himself with burning and harrying the neighbourhood, and then led his host up the Severn to Shrewsbury.[780] The old “town in the scrub,” or bush, as its first English conquerors had called it, had grown under the care of its first Norman earl, Roger of Montgomery, into one of the chief strongholds of the Welsh border. The lands attached to the earldom, forfeited by the treason of Robert of Bellême, had been granted by Henry I. to his second queen, Adeliza; she and her second husband, William of Aubigny, had now thrown themselves into the party of her stepdaughter the Empress; and the castle built by Earl Roger on the neck of a peninsula in the Severn upon which the town of Shrewsbury stands was held in Matilda’s interest by William Fitz-Alan, who had married a niece of Robert of Gloucester.[781] William himself, with his wife and children, slipped out at the king’s approach, leaving the garrison sworn never to surrender. Stephen, however, caused the fosse to be filled with wood, set it on fire, and literally smoked them out.[782] The noblest were hanged; the rest escaped as best they could,[783] while Stephen followed up his success by taking a neighbouring castle which belonged to Fitz-Alan’s uncle Arnulf of Hesdin, and hanging Arnulf himself with ninety-three of his comrades.[784] This unwonted severity acted as a salutary warning which took effect at the opposite end of the kingdom. Queen Matilda, with a squadron of ships manned by sailors from her own county of Boulogne, was blockading Walkelyn Maminot in Dover, when the tidings of her husband’s victories in Shropshire induced Walkelyn to surrender.[785] This was in August.[786] When a truce had been patched up with Ralf Paganel,[787] the west of England might be considered fairly pacified, and Stephen was free to march into Dorsetshire against Earl Robert’s southernmost fortress, Wareham.[788] Nothing, however, seems to have come of this expedition; and Robert himself was still out of reach beyond sea. In the midland shires William Peverel, the lord of the Peak country, was still unsubdued, but he was now almost isolated, for in the north Eustace Fitz-John, as we have seen, had drawn his punishment upon himself from other hands than those of the king. Stephen’s successes in the west, his wife’s success at Dover, were quickly followed by tidings of the victory at Cowton Moor; and meanwhile a peacemaker had come upon the scene.

[769] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 3 (Hardy, p. 692).

[770] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 37.

[771] See plans and description in Seyer, Mem. of Bristol, vol. i. pp. 373 et seq.

[772] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 37.

[773] Ib. p. 40, 41. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 109. Both writers, however, seem to lay to the sole account of the Bristol garrison all the horrors which in the Eng. Chron. a. 1137, are attributed to the barons and soldiers in general throughout the civil war.

[774] Flor. Worc. Contin. as above.

[775] “Ad totius Angliæ novercam, Bristoam.” Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 41.

[776] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 43. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 110.

[777] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 43, 44.

[778] Flor. Worc. Contin. as above.

[779] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 44.

[780] Flor. Worc. Contin. as above. On Dudley see above, p. 295, note 4{760}.

[781] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 917.

[782] “Omnes infumigat et exfumigat.” Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 110.

[783] Ibid.

[784] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 917.

[785] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 7 (Arnold, p. 261).

[786] Ord. Vit. as above.

[787] Flor. Worc. Contin. as above.

[788] Ibid.

In the spring of 1138 a schism which had rent the Western Church asunder for seven years was ended by the death of the anti-pope Anacletus, and Pope Innocent II. profited by the occasion to send Alberic bishop of Ostia as legate into England—Archbishop William of Canterbury, who had held a legatine commission together with the primacy, having died in November 1136.[789] Alberic landed just as the revolt broke out, and Stephen had therefore no choice but to accept his credentials and let him pursue his mission, whatever it might be.[790] It proved to be wholly a mission of peace. Alberic made a visitation-tour throughout England,[791] ending with a council at Carlisle, whither the king of Scots, who had adhered to Anacletus, now came to welcome Innocent’s representative. There, on the neutral ground of young Henry’s English fief, the legate made an attempt to mediate between David and Stephen; but all that the former would grant was a truce until Martinmas, and a promise to bring to Carlisle and there set free all the captive Englishwomen who could be collected before that time, as well as to enforce more Christian-like behaviour among his soldiers for the future.[792] On the third Sunday in Advent the legate held a council at Westminster, when Theobald, abbot of Bec, was elected archbishop of Canterbury by the prior of Christ Church and certain delegates of the convent, in presence of the king and the legate.[793] Theobald’s consecration, two days after Epiphany, brought Alberic’s mission to a satisfactory close.[794]

- [789] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. pp. 97, 98. On Alberic see Ric. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 96, 97.

- [790] Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above), p. 106.

- [791] Ibid. The details of his movements in the north are in Ric. Hexh. (Raine), p. 98, and Joh. Hexh. (ibid.), p. 121.

- [792] Ric. Hex. (Raine), pp. 99, 100. Joh. Hexh. as above.

- [793] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 9 (Arnold, p. 265). Ric. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 101–103. Eng. Chron. a. 1140. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 107–109, and vol. ii. p. 384. Chron. Becc., in Giles, Lanfranc, vol. i. p. 207. Vita Theobaldi (ibid.), pp. 337, 338.

- [794] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 109.

In the work of mediation he had soon found that there was one who had the matter more nearly at heart, and who had a much better chance of success than himself. Queen Matilda was warmly attached to her Scottish relatives, and lost no opportunity of urging her husband to reconciliation with them. At last, on April 9, she and her cousin Henry met at Durham; David and Henry gave hostages for their pacific conduct in the future, and the English earldom of Northumberland was granted to Henry.[795] The treaty was ratified by Stephen at Nottingham;[796] the Scottish prince stayed to keep Easter with his cousins, and afterwards accompanied the king in an expedition against Ludlow. The castle of Ludlow, founded probably by Roger de Lacy in the reign of William Rufus, was destined in after-days to become a treasure-house alike for historian, antiquary and artist. Memories of every period in English history from the twelfth century to the seventeenth throng the mighty pile, in which almost every phase of English architecture may be studied amid surroundings of the most exquisite natural beauty. The site of the fortress, on a rocky promontory rising more than a hundred feet above the junction of the Corve and the Teme, was admirably adapted for defence. The northern and western walls of its outer ward rose abruptly from the steep slope of the rock itself; on the east and south it was protected by a ditch, crossed by a bridge which led to the inner ward and the keep, securely placed near the south-western angle of the enclosure.[797] The fief of Ludlow had escheated to the Crown soon after Stephen’s accession,[798] and he had apparently bestowed it upon one Joce or Joceas of Dinan,[799] who now, it seems, was holding it against him. The siege came to nothing, though it was made memorable by an incident which nearly cost the life of Henry of Scotland and furnished occasion for a characteristic display of Stephen’s personal bravery. A grappling-iron thrown from over the wall caught the Scottish prince, dragged him off his horse, and had all but lifted him into the castle, when the king rushed forward and set him free.[800] This adventure, however, seems to have cooled Stephen’s ardour for the assault, and after setting up two towers to hold the garrison in check, he again withdrew to London.[801] Early in the year he had taken Earl Robert’s castle of Leeds;[802] and altogether his prospects were beginning to brighten, when they were suddenly overclouded again by his own rashness and folly.

- [795] With the exception of Newcastle and Bamborough, and on condition that the local customs established by Henry I. should be maintained inviolate. Ric. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 105, 106. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 10 (Arnold, p. 265), has a very strange version of the way in which this treaty was brought about; see below, p. 302, note 3{802}.

- [796] Ric. Hexh. (as above), p. 106.

- [797] See plan and description in Clark, Mediev. Milit. Archit., vol. ii. pp. 273–290.

- [798] By the death of Payne Fitz-John. See Eyton, Antiqu. Shropshire, vol. v. p. 244.

- [799] This is Joceas’s surname according to the romantic History of Fulk Fitzwarine, and it is adopted by Mr. Eyton, who takes it as derived from Dinan in Britanny; see his account of Joceas, Antiqu. Shropsh., vol. v. pp. 244–247. According to this, the name of Dinham, now borne by the part of Ludlow which lies south and west of the castle, would be a corruption of Dinan, which the above-mentioned romance (a work of the reign of Henry III.) says was the name given to the whole place in Joceas’s time. Mr. Wright, however (Hist. Ludlow, pp. 13, 34), thinks that Dinham was the original name, afterwards superseded by Ludlow; in which case Joceas becomes simply “Joceas of Dinham,” with a surname derived not from a foreign birthplace, but from an English fief.

- [800] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 10 (Arnold, p. 265).

- [801] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 115.

- [802] Hen. Hunt. as above. This is Leeds in Kent. It is probably through mistaking it for its Yorkshire namesake that Henry was misled into his odd notion that Stephen himself was fighting in the north, and compelled the Scots to a pacification. See above, p. 300, note 7{800}.

The administrative machinery of the state was still in the hands of Bishop Roger of Salisbury and the disciples whom he had trained. Roger himself retained his office of justiciar; the treasurership was held by his nephew, Nigel bishop of Ely, and the chancellorship by one whom he also called his nephew, but who was known to be really his son. This latter was commonly distinguished as “Roger the Poor”—a nickname pointed sarcastically at the enormous wealth of the elder Roger, compared with which that of the younger might pass for poverty. Outwardly, the justiciar stood as high in Stephen’s favour as he had stood in Henry’s; whatever he asked—and he was not slack in asking—was granted at once: “I shall give him the half of my kingdom some day, if he demands it!” was Stephen’s own confession.[803] But the greediness of the one and the lavishness of the other sprang alike from a secret mistrust which the mischief-makers of the court did their utmost to foster. Stephen’s personal friends assured him that the bishop of Salisbury and his nephews were in treasonable correspondence with the Empress, that they were fortifying and revictualling their castles in her behalf, and that the worldly pomp and show, the vast retinue of armed followers, with which they were wont to appear at court, was really intended for the support of her cause.[804] How far the suspicion was correct it is difficult to decide. Roger owed his whole career to King Henry; he had broken his plighted faith to Henry’s child; it is no wonder if his heart smote him for the ungrateful deed. If, on the other hand, that deed had been done from a real sense of duty to the state, a sincere belief in the advantage of Stephen’s rule for England, then it is no wonder if he felt that he had made a grievous mistake, and sought to repair it by a return to his earlier allegiance. But whatever may be thought of the bishop’s conduct, nothing can justify that of the king. At Midsummer 1139 Stephen summoned Bishop Roger to come and speak with him at Oxford. Some foreboding of evil—possibly some consciousness of double-dealing—made the old man very unwilling to go;[805] but he did go, and with him went his son the chancellor, and his two nephews, the treasurer and Alexander bishop of Lincoln,[806] each accompanied by a train of armed knights. Stephen, equally suspicious, bade his men arm themselves likewise, to be ready in case of need. While he was conversing with the bishops in Oxford castle,[807] a dispute about quarters arose between their followers and those of the count of Meulan and Alan of Richmond;[808] a fray ensued, in which Alan’s nephew was nearly killed,[809] whereupon the two Rogers and the bishop of Lincoln were at once seized by the king. Nigel of Ely, who was lodging apart from the others outside the town,[810] escaped, threw himself into his uncle’s castle of Devizes, and prepared to stand a siege.[811]

- [803] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 32 (Hardy, p. 729).

- [804] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 46, 47.

- [805] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 107. (This writer puts the event a year too early, but afterwards corrects himself, ib. p. 116). Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 20 (Hardy, p. 717), says that he himself heard Roger’s expression of reluctance: “Per dominam meam S. Mariam (nescio quo pacto) reluctatur mens mea huic itineri! Hoc scio, quod ejus utilitatis ero in curiâ, cujus est equinus pullus in pugnâ.” This really seems to imply nothing more than that he was conscious of having lost all power to control or guide the king.

- [806] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 10 (Arnold, p. 265). Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 107.

- [807] “In castro Oxenfordiæ.” Ann. Oseney, a. 1139 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. iv. p. 23).

- [808] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 20 (Hardy, p. 717), lays the blame on the men of Alan of Richmond (or Britanny); the Gesta Steph. (Sewell, p. 49) on Waleran of Meulan. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 108, gives no name.

- [809] Will. Malm. as above. Cf. Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 124.

- [810] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 919.

- [811] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 108. Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 50.

The town of Devizes stands on a steep escarpment of greensand penetrated by two deep ravines which give it the form of a semicircle with a tongue projecting in the middle. On this tongue of rocky ground, five hundred feet above the level of the sea, the bishop of Salisbury had reared a castle unsurpassed in strength and splendour by any fortress in Europe.[812] At its gates Stephen soon appeared, bringing the two Rogers with him as captives. The elder he lodged in a cowshed, the younger he threatened to hang if the place was not surrendered at once. Its unhappy owner, in terror for his son’s life, vowed neither to eat nor drink till the castle was in the hands of Stephen;[813] but neither his uncle’s fasting nor his cousin’s danger moved Nigel to yield. The keep, however, was held by the chancellor’s mother, Matilda of Ramsbury, and the sight of a rope actually round her son’s neck overcame her resistance. She offered her own life in exchange for his, and the offer being refused, she surrendered. Nigel could only follow her example.[814] Roger’s other castles, Sherborne and Malmesbury, soon fell likewise into the king’s hands, and with them the enormous treasure collected by their owner.[815] Alexander of Lincoln was dragged to the gates of Newark and there kept starving till he induced his people to give up the place; and his other castle, Sleaford, was gained by the same means.[816]

- [812] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 10 (Arnold, p. 265).

- [813] Flor. Worc. Contin. as above. In Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 920, it is the king who vows to starve the bishop till the castle is won. Cf. Hen. Hunt. (as above) and Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 20 (Hardy, p. 718).

- [814] Ord. Vit. as above.

- [815] Hen. Hunt. and Will. Malm. Hist. Nov. as above. The Eng. Chron. tells the whole tale briefly under a wrong year (a. 1137).

- [816] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 11 (Arnold, p. 266).

Such an outrage as Stephen had committed could not pass unchallenged. His victims indeed were unpopular enough; but two of them were bishops, and the whole English Church was up in arms at once. And the English Church was no longer without a fully qualified spokesman and leader. That leader, however, was not the new-made primate. The legatine commission held by William of Corbeil was not renewed to his successor in the archbishopric: it was sent instead to the man who had long been the most influential member of the English episcopate—Henry, bishop of Winchester. For nearly four months Henry kept this all-powerful weapon lying idly in the scabbard;[817] now, at the call of duty, neither fear nor love hindered him from drawing it against his own brother. Having vainly dinned into Stephen’s ears, both privately and publicly, his entreaties for the restoration of the two bishops, he fell back upon his legatine powers and cited the king to answer for his conduct before a council at Winchester on August 29.[818]

- [817] Innocent’s commission bore date March 1, 1139. Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 22 (Hardy, p. 719).

- [818] Ib. c. 21 (p. 719).

The council sat for three days, and the case was argued out between Stephen’s advocate Aubrey de Vere, the bishop of Salisbury and the legate. Henry formally charged his brother with sacrilege, in having laid violent hands upon bishops, and appropriated their lands and goods to his own use. Stephen met the charge with the plea which had been used by the Conqueror against Odo of Bayeux—he had arrested the culprits not as bishops, but as unfaithful ministers and disloyal subjects; and the property which he had taken from them they had acquired as private men, in defiance of the canons of the Church. Roger retorted that all these accusations were false; both parties threatened an appeal to Rome, and swords were drawn almost in the council-chamber.[819] The legate and the primate intervened as peacemakers, and a compromise was arranged. It was decreed by the council that all prelates who held fortresses other than those which belonged to their sees should place them under the king’s control, and confine themselves henceforth to their canonical duties and rights.[820] On the other hand, Stephen’s act was solemnly condemned, and he had to lay aside his royal robes and come as an humble penitent to receive the censure of the Church.[821] This humiliation saved him from the ecclesiastical penalties of his misdeed; from its political consequences nothing could save him now. He had filled up the measure of his follies. When the obedience of the barons had been forfeited—when the trust of the people had been shaken—two forces still remained by whose help he might have recovered all that he had lost: the administration and the clergy. At a single blow he had destroyed the one and thrown the other into opposition.

- [819] Ib.·/·Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. cc. 22–28 (pp. 719–724).

- [820] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 116. Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 51.

- [821] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 51, 52.

His rivals saw that the hour for which they were vainly waiting in Normandy had struck at last in England. All Geoffrey’s attempts on Normandy had failed. At the expiration of his truce with Theobald of Blois in 1136 the barons of Anjou were again in revolt,[822] and it was not till the end of September that Geoffrey was free to invade the duchy. Its internal confusion was such that the twin earls of Meulan and Leicester (sons of King Henry’s friend Robert), who were trying to govern it for Stephen, had been obliged again to call Count Theobald to their aid; but at sight of the hated “Guirribecs,” as the Angevins were derisively called, the Normans forgot their differences and rose as one man against the common foe. On October 1 Geoffrey was wounded in the right foot while besieging the castle of Le Sap near Lisieux; that night his wife joined him with reinforcements; but the morning had scarcely dawned when, like another Geoffrey of Anjou ninety years earlier, he fled with all his host[823]—not, however, before the military fame of the Norman duke, but before the vengeance of the Norman people. Next spring he again ventured to attack the Hiesmois.[824] Stephen, who was now in Normandy and had just won its investiture from King Louis, prepared to meet the invader; but the jealousies between his Norman and his Flemish troops compelled him to abandon the attempt and make another truce for two years.[825] In April next the Angevins broke the truce;[826] in June Robert of Gloucester openly declared for them, and under his influence Bayeux and Caen surrendered to Geoffrey. The count of Anjou retired, however, before a threatened attack from Stephen’s cousin Ralf of Vermandois, in conjunction with Waleran of Meulan and William of Ypres.[827] Early in October he made an unsuccessful attempt upon Falaise.[828] In November he marched upon Toucques, then one of the most flourishing seaport towns of Normandy. The burghers were taken captive “seated in their own arm-chairs,” and in their comfortable houses the Angevins, after feasting to their heart’s content, settled themselves carelessly for the night. But their presence was known to William Trussebut, the governor of the neighbouring castle of Bonneville; and at dead of night a band of desperate characters, purposely chosen for a desperate deed, came by his orders from Bonneville to Toucques, dispersed silently throughout the town, and fired it in forty-five places. The Angevins, wakened by the cries of the watchmen and the roaring of the flames, fled headlong, leaving their arms, horses and baggage behind them. William Trussebut had come forth at the head of his men to intercept their flight, but the smoke and the darkness were such that neither party could distinguish friends from foes. Geoffrey, bewildered as he was, managed to bring some of his men to a stand in a cemetery; there the rest of the Angevin force gradually collected, and waited, in shame and trembling, for the day. At the first gleam of morning they fled, and never stopped till they had buried themselves and their disgrace safe within the walls of Argentan.[829] This time the Normans had taught Geoffrey a lesson which he did not soon forget; he did not venture to meddle with them again for more than two years. Neither he nor his wife made any movement at all till late in the following summer, when a prospect was opened for them beyond the sea by Stephen’s arrest of the two bishops. The council of Winchester broke up on the first of September;[830] on the thirtieth the Empress was in England.

- [822] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 268, 269. Cf. Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 903.

- [823] Ord. Vit. (as above), pp. 903–908. Rob. Torigni, a. 1136.

- [824] Ord. Vit. (as above), p. 909, says he was “stipendiarius conjugi suæ factus.”

- [825] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 910. Rob. Torigni, a. 1137, makes it three years. Stephen also promised an annual payment of two thousand marks of silver.

- [826] Ord. Vit. (as above), p. 916.

- [827] Ord. Vit. as above.

- [828] Ord. Vit. (as above), p. 918. Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1138 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 34, 145).

- [829] Ord. Vit. (as above), pp. 918, 919.

- [830] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 29 (Hardy, p. 724).

CHAPTER VI.
ENGLAND AND THE BARONS.
1139–1147.

On the last day of September 1139 Matilda sailed in company with her brother Robert and a hundred and forty knights;[831] they landed at Arundel, and were received into the castle by its owner, the ex-queen Adeliza.[832] Stephen hurried to besiege them there, but before he could reach the spot one of the travellers had left it. Earl Robert only stayed to place his sister in safety beneath her step-mother’s roof,[833] and then set off to arouse her friends in England with the tidings of her arrival. Stephen flew after him, but in vain. With an escort of only twelve knights he rode right across southern England, met Brian of Wallingford and told him the news, carried it on to Miles at Gloucester, and got safe to his journey’s end at Bristol.[834] The baffled king threw all his energies into the siege of Arundel, till his brother joined him and suggested another scheme. Bishop Henry argued that it was useless to besiege the Empress at one end of England while her brother was stirring up the other, and that it would be far wiser to get all the enemies collected in one spot by letting her follow him to Bristol.[835] That Stephen, having once made up his mind to this course, should not only give his rival a safe-conduct but should commission the count of Meulan and the bishop of Winchester himself to escort her till she reached her brother’s care,[836] was only what might have been expected from his chivalrous character. Of the wisdom of the proceeding it is difficult to judge. We can hardly imagine either of Stephen’s predecessors giving a safe-conduct to a competitor for his crown; but neither Rufus nor Henry had had to deal at once with a lady-rival and with her brother; and both had been, materially, politically and morally, in a much stronger position than Stephen. As matters then stood with him, what in itself looks like a piece of Quixotism may have been the best means of cutting an awkward knot; and both he and Matilda played their game so badly from beginning to end that it is hardly worth while to criticize single moves on either side.

- [831] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 29 (Hardy, p. 724). The Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 56, and Rob. Torigni, a. 1139, also name Arundel as the landing-place, but give no date. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 11 (Arnold, p. 266), says merely “statim,”—i.e. immediately after the council at Winchester. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. pp. 116, 117, says first “in October,” and afterwards “before S. Peter-in-chains,”—i.e. August 1; but he is clearly wrong in this as well as in saying they landed at Portsmouth.

- [832] Will. Malm. as above(p. 725).

- [833] Rob. Torigni, a. 1139, says he left her there “cum uxore suâ et aliis impedimentis.”

- [834] Will. Malm. as above. Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 56. Rob. Torigni, a. 1139.

- [835] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 56, 57.

- [836] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 29 (Hardy, p. 725). Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 117. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 11 (Arnold, p. 266).

The next seven years were a time such as England never saw before or since. For want of a better name, we call them the years of civil war and count them as part of the reign of Stephen; but the struggle was not worthy of the name of war, and the authority of the Crown, whether vested in Stephen or in Matilda, was a mockery and a shadow. The whole system of government established by King Henry had fallen with his ministers; the death of Bishop Roger in December 1139[837] was typical of the extinction of all law and order throughout the kingdom, nearly half of which had already slipped from Stephen’s grasp. While he kept his Christmas feast in Roger’s episcopal city,[838] Matilda was doing the like in regal state at Gloucester, receiving homage from the western shires, and distributing lands and honours at her will.[839] Of the Easter assembly there is no notice at all,[840] and by Whitsuntide matters had reached such a pass that Stephen held his court not at Westminster as usual but in the Tower, and only one bishop, and that one a foreigner, could be got to attend it.[841] “In those days,” wrote one who lived through them, “there was no king in the land, and every man did not only, as once in Israel of old, that which was right in his own eyes, but that which he knew and felt to be wrong.”[842] For the first and last time in English history, the feudal principle had full play, uncontrolled by any check either from above or from below, from regal supremacy or popular influence. England was at the mercy of the body of feudal nobles whose aim throughout the last seventy years had been to break through the checks placed upon their action by the Conqueror and his sons, and to master the power of the Crown and the control of the state for their own private interests, as the French feudataries had striven in an earlier time to master the Crown of France. This was the condition into which Normandy fell whenever its ducal coronet passed to a weak man or a child, and from which it had had to be forcibly rescued by almost every duke in succession, from Richard the Fearless to Henry the First. By their sternly repressive policy, by their careful adoption and dexterous use of all those safeguards and checks upon the power of the baronage which could be drawn from old English constitutional practice, by their political alliance with the nation against the disruptive tendencies of feudalism, and by their strict administrative routine, the Conqueror and his sons had hitherto managed to save England from such a catastrophe. The break-down of their system under Stephen revealed its radical defect: it rested, in the last resort, on a purely personal foundation—on the strong hand of the king himself. The “nineteen winters” that England “suffered for her sins” under the nominal reign of Stephen were a time of discipline which taught the people, the sovereign, and at last even the barons themselves, to seek a wider and more lasting basis for the organization and administration of the state. The discipline was a very bitter one. The English chronicler’s picture of it has been copied times out of number, yet whoever would paint that terrible scene can but copy it once again. “Every rich man made his castles and held them against the king, and filled the land with castles. They greatly oppressed the wretched men of the land with castle-work; and when the castles were made, they filled them with devils and evil men. They took the men who they weened had any goods, both by night and by day, men and women, and put them in prison for gold and silver, and tortured them with unspeakable torture; never were martyrs so tortured as they were.... When the wretched men had no more to give, they reaved and burned all the townships; and well thou mightest fare all a day’s journey and shouldst never find a man sitting in a township, or land tilled. Corn and cheese and butter were dear, for there was none in the land. Wretched men starved of hunger; some went about asking alms who once were rich men; some fled out of the land. Never was more wretchedness in a land, and never did heathen men worse than these did, for they forbore neither for church nor churchyard, but took all the goods that were therein and then burned church and all.... If two or three men came riding to a township, all fled from them, thinking they were reavers. The bishops and clerks were ever cursing them; but that was nought to them; for they were all accursed, and forsworn, and lost. Even if it was tilled, the earth bare no corn, for it was all undone with their deeds; and they said openly that Christ slept, and His holy ones. Such things, and more than we can say, did we thole nineteen winters for our sins.”[843]

- [837] Will. Malm. (as above)·/·Hist. Nov., l. ii., c. 32 (Hardy, p. 727). Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above),·/·(Thorpe), vol. ii., p. 113, under a wrong year.

- [838] Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above), p. 122.

- [839] Ib. p. 118. Will. Malm. (as above), cc. 29, 31 (pp. 725, 726).

- [840] The only allusion to it is in Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 12 (Arnold, p. 267); “Ubi autem ad Natale vel ad Pascha fuerit [sc. rex], dicere non attinet.” As to Christmas, however, see above, p. 310.

- [841] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. c. 37 (Hardy, p. 734). The bishop was John of Séez.

- [842] Will. Newb., l. i. c. 22 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 69).

- [843] Eng. Chron. a. 1137.

The military history of the struggle is scarcely worth following out in detail; for the most part it is but a dreary tale of raid and counter-raid, of useless marches and unfinished sieges, of towns and castles taken and retaken, plundered and burned, without any settled plan of campaign on either side.[844] By the close of the year 1140 the geographical position of the two parties may be roughly marked off by a line drawn from the Peak of Derbyshire to Wareham on the Dorset coast. Owing to the influence of Robert of Gloucester, Matilda was generally acknowledged throughout the western shires; but she was almost imprisoned in them, for the great highway of central England, the valley of the Thames, from Oxford to the sea, was still in Stephen’s hands; London was loyal to him, and so was Kent, although the archbishop as yet stood aloof from both parties, as did also the legate-bishop of Winchester and the bishops and clergy in general. North of Thames, the midland shires served as a wide battle-field where each of the combatants in turn gained and lost ground, without any decisive advantage on either side. In East-Anglia, Hugh Bigod was for the moment again professing obedience to Stephen, but he was simply watching the political tide to take it at the flood and use it for his own interest; and so were the chief men of central and northern England, the earls of Northampton, Derby and York, the lords of the Peak, of Holderness and of Richmond. In the north-west, between the Welsh march and the southern border of Cumberland, lay a district ruled by an almost independent chieftain whose action brought about the first crisis in the war.

- [844] The details of the first year’s fighting are in Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 58–69; Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. pp. 118–128; and Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. ii. cc. 30, 31, 34–37 (Hardy, pp. 726, 730–735).

Of all the great nobles, the one whom both parties were most anxious to win to their own interest was the earl of Chester. His earldom was no empty title, no mushroom creation of the last few years, but a great palatine jurisdiction inherited in regular succession from Hugh of Avranches, on whom it had been conferred by the Conqueror, and comprising the sole government and ownership of the whole of Cheshire. Within its limits the earl ruled supreme; every acre of land, save what belonged to the Church, was held under him; every man owed him suit and service; the king himself had no direct authority within the little realm of Chester, and could claim from its sovereign nothing but the homage due from vassal to overlord. The earl, in fact, as has been often said, “held Chester by the sword as freely as the king held England by the crown;” and as things now stood the earl’s tenure was by far the more secure of the two. The present ruler of this miniature kingdom, Ralf by name, had been married almost in his boyhood to a daughter of Robert of Gloucester.[845] All his father-in-law’s persuasions, however, had as yet failed to draw him to Matilda’s side. Stephen on the other hand was equally alive to the importance of securing Ralf’s adherence, and lavished upon him all the honours he could desire,[846] with one exception. That one was the earldom of Carlisle, which his father had held for a few years and then surrendered in exchange for that of his cousin Richard of Chester, who perished in the White Ship.[847] Ralf accordingly quarrelled for the possession of Carlisle with Henry of Scotland, of whose Cumbrian earldom it now formed a part. Henry appealed to Stephen, who could not but take his side,[848] yet for his own sake was anxious to satisfy Ralf. The mother of Ralf and of his elder half-brother William of Roumare was a great Lincolnshire heiress, daughter of Ivo Taillebois by his marriage with a lady of Old-English race whose family held considerable estates in that county, of which one of them had been sheriff under the Conqueror.[849] In consequence, no doubt, of this old connexion, Stephen at the close of the year 1140 contrived a meeting with the two brothers somewhere in Lincolnshire, and there bestowed great honour upon them both,[850] including, as it seems, a grant of the earldom of Lincoln to William of Roumare.[851] A mere empty title, however, satisfied neither of the brother-earls. Rather, as the English chronicler says of them and of all the rest, “the more he gave them the worse they were to him.”[852] His back was no sooner turned than they planned a trick, which their wives helped them to execute, for gaining possession of Lincoln castle.[853] There Ralf set himself up as lord and master of the city and the neighbourhood;[854] and we can want no more speaking witness to the character of such feudal tyranny as was represented in his person than the fact that not only the citizens, but Stephen’s late victim Bishop Alexander himself, sent the king an urgent appeal to come and deliver them from the intruder.[855]

- [845] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 38 (Hardy, p. 739).

- [846] “Noht forthi thæt he ne iaf him al thæt he cuthe axan him, alse he dide alle othre.” Eng. Chron. a. 1140.

- [847] On the earldoms of Carlisle and Chester, see Mr. Hodgson Hinde’s Introd. to Pipe Rolls of Cumberland, and his paper on the “Early History of Cumberland,” in Archæological Journal, vol. xvi. pp. 229, 230.

- [848] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 131, 132.

- [849] On the person, pedigree and connexions of Ralf’s mother, Countess Lucy, see Appendix P.P. to Mr. Freeman’s Norm. Conq., vol. iii. pp. 778, 779; and Mr. J. G. Nichols’s paper on the “Earldom of Lincoln,” in Proceedings of Archæological Institute, Lincoln, 1849, pp. 254–257.

- [850] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 38 (Hardy, p. 739).

- [851] See Nichols, “Earldom of Lincoln” (Proc. Archæol. Inst., Lincoln, 1849), p. 260.

- [852] Eng. Chron. a. 1140.

- [853] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 921.

- [854] “Cumque civibus et affinibus dira injungeret.” Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 70.

- [855] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 38 (Hardy, p. 739). Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 70. Ord. Vit. as above. The last alone mentions the bishop.

The news reached Stephen as he was keeping Christmas in London, and the peaceful gathering of the court changed into the muster of an armed host which set off at once for Lincoln, and, actively supported by the citizens and the bishop, sat down to besiege the castle.[856] The present polygonal keep of Lincoln castle appears to have been built by Ralf of Chester in the last years of Stephen’s reign. That which he now occupied stood on the same spot, on the south side of the enclosure, and was the original round shell built by the Conqueror upon a mound of still earlier date. Its base was surrounded by ditches, the outer fortifications on that side being on a lower level, and probably still consisting of nothing more than the old English rampart-mound and palisade; the other three sides of the enclosure, where there was no such steep natural incline, were protected by a curtain-wall raised upon the old mounds, and encircled by ditches wide and deep, but dry, for there was no means of contriving a moat on the top of that limestone crag. The brother-earls were not prepared for Stephen’s prompt and vigorous attack: their force was small, and they had their wives and children to protect. Ralf slipped out alone,[857] made his way to Chester to raise his followers there, and sent a message to his father-in-law offering his allegiance to the Empress if Robert would help the besieged at Lincoln out of their strait.[858] Even had his own daughter not been among them, Earl Robert was not the man to miss such a chance. At the head of the entire force of his party he answered Ralf’s appeal; but so keenly did he feel the importance of the crisis that he kept the real object of his expedition a secret from all but his own nearest friends; and the bulk of his host followed him all the way from Gloucester without any idea whither he was leading them, till they found themselves actually in sight of the foe.[859]

- [856] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 13 (Arnold, p. 268). Ord. Vit. as above·/·(Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 921. According to Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. cc. 38, 39 (Hardy, pp. 739, 740), the castle was closely invested all round, and a chief base of operations seems to have been the minster.

- [857] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 38 (Hardy, p. 740). Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 921.

- [858] Ord. Vit. as above.

- [859] Will. Malm. (as above), c. 39 (p. 741).

The two earls probably met at Claybrook in Leicestershire. At that point Ralf, coming down from Chester by the Watling Street, and Robert, marching up by a branch road from Gloucester, would both strike into the Foss-Way, and thence would follow its north-eastward course along the eastern side of the Trent valley. Between the road, the river and the promontory of Lincoln stretched a tract of low-lying marshy ground across which the Foss-Dyke ran from the Trent at Torksey into the Witham just above the bridge of Lincoln, thus connecting the two rivers and forming an outlet for the superfluous waters of the Trent, which in rainy seasons was only too apt, as it is even now, to overflow its banks and flood all the surrounding country. Against the storms of the winter of 1140 all precautions had failed; the surging stream had risen far above the level of the dyke, and the greater part of the ground between it and the south-western slope of the Lincoln hill was drowned in one vast sheet of water. The Foss-Way entered the city by a bridge over the Witham; the two earls, however, could not venture to take this route, and made instead for an ancient ford which crossed the river a little farther westward, nearer to its junction with the Foss-Dyke. Stephen was evidently expecting them and had anticipated their course, for he had posted a detachment of troops to guard the site of this ford.[860] All trace of the ford itself, however, was lost in the flood. “Even so would I have it,” cried the earl of Gloucester to his son-in-law, as in the dawn of Candlemas-day they reached the southern margin of the water; “once across, retreat will be impossible; we must conquer or die.” The two leaders plunged in, swam boldly across the fordless stream, and their whole host followed their example.[861] Stephen’s outpost fled or was overcome, and the earls apparently wound their way round the foot of the hill till they reached a tract of comparatively high and dry ground on its south-western side. On the eastern border of this tract, close under shelter of the ridge, a dark moving shadow might tell them that swift and secret as their march had been, Stephen was aware of it and had drawn out all his forces to meet them;[862] while on the height above there loomed out dimly, through the chill grey mist of the February morning, the outlines of the fortress which they had come to deliver.

- [860] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 71. See note at end of chapter.

- [861] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 40 (Hardy, p. 741). Cf. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 15 (Arnold, p. 268).

- [862] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 71. See note at end of chapter.

As they drew up in battle array on the marshy meadows there arose a momentary dispute for precedence. The fiery young earl of Chester pleaded that as the quarrel was his, so the foremost place of danger and of honour should be his likewise. But the quarrel was no longer Ralf’s alone. The flower of the army which had come to aid him consisted of the “Disinherited,” the men whom Stephen had deprived of their lands and honours to bestow them on his own favourites—the men whom Henry had raised up and whom Stephen had cast down[863]—and for them Earl Robert claimed the right of striking the first blow to avenge at once their own wrongs and those of King Henry’s heiress. While his eloquence was winding up their feelings to the highest pitch of excitement,[864] all was astir in the royal camp. There, too, crown and kingdom were felt to be at stake, and many of Stephen’s friends besought him not to risk everything in a pitched battle till he should have gathered a larger force—above all, not on that holy day, for it was Sexagesima Sunday as well as the feast of the Purification.[865] Sinister omens at the early mass—the breaking of the lighted taper in the king’s hand, the falling of the pyx upon the altar[866]—lent additional force to their entreaties; but Stephen was impatient for the crisis and would hear of no delay.[867] He drew up his host in three divisions; two on horseback, commanded respectively by Alan of Richmond and William of Ypres;[868] the third on foot around the royal standard, with the king himself in their midst.[869] In the opposing army the van was taken by the “Disinherited”; the men of Chester, who had first occupied it, now stood in the second line, under the command of their own earl, and on foot.[870] The third line was headed by Robert of Gloucester, and on the wings of the host was a crowd of half-savage Welshmen, drawn from the Welsh dependencies of the earldoms of Gloucester and Chester, and “better furnished with daring than with arms.”[871]

- [863] “Quos magnus rex Henricus erexit, iste dejecit—ille instruxit, iste destruxit.” Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 15 (Arnold, p. 270).

- [864] See Robert’s speech in Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 15 (Arnold, pp. 268–271); and cf. Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 922. What does Orderic mean by “Bassiani”?

- [865] Ord. Vit. (as above), p. 921.

- [866] Ib. p. 922. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 16 (Arnold, p. 271). There is another version of the story about the taper in Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 70, 71.

- [867] Ord. Vit. as above.

- [868] “Tres nimirum cohortes sibi Rex constituit.... In primâ fronte regalis exercitûs Flandritæ et Britones erant.” Ibid. Compared with the account of the actual battle in Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 18 (Arnold, pp. 273, 274), the meaning seems to be as given above.

- [869] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 16 (Arnold, p. 271).

- [870] Ord. Vit. (as above), p. 922. Cf. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 13 (Arnold, p. 268), and c. 18 (p. 273).

- [871] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 13 (Arnold, p. 268). Cf. Ord. Vit. as above.

In the midst of a spirited harangue addressed to the royal troops by Baldwin of Clare—for among all Stephen’s popular gifts, that of eloquence was lacking[872]—Earl Robert sounded his trumpets for the attack. The Disinherited charged the first line of the royal cavalry under the earls of Richmond, Meulan, Norfolk, Northampton and Surrey, with such vigour that it was scattered almost in a moment. The second line of Stephen’s cavalry—the Flemings under William of Ypres and the count of Aumale—were attacked in flank by the Welsh, whom they put to flight, but a charge of the men of Chester dispersed them in their turn, and the whole body of horsemen on the king’s side turned tail at once.[873] Even William of Ypres for once forsook his royal friend; and the hasty flight of the other leaders, with Alan of Richmond at their head, shewed how half-hearted was their attachment to the king.[874] Stephen and his foot-soldiers were left alone in the midst of the foe, who closed round them on all sides and set to work to assault them as if besieging a fortress. Again and again the horsemen dashed upon that living wall, each time leaving a ghastly breach, but each time driven back from the central point[875] where the king stood like a lion at bay,[876] cutting down every one who came within reach of his sword. The sword broke; but a citizen of Lincoln who stood at his side replaced it by a yet more terrible weapon—one of those two-handed Danish battle-axes which it seems had not yet gone quite out of use in the Danelaw.[877] Almost all his followers were taken or slain, yet still he fought on, with the rage of a wild beast[878] and the courage of a hero, alone against an army. At last Chester charged with all his forces straight at the king. Down upon his helmet came the axe, and Ralf, on his knees in the mire, learned that he was even yet no match for his deserted and outraged sovereign.[879] Most likely it was that blow, dealt at the traitor with all Stephen’s remaining strength, which broke the axe in his hands.[880] Then a stone, hurled no one knew whence, struck him on the head and he fell.[881] A knight, William of Kahaines, seized him by the helmet, shouting “Hither, hither! I have the king!”[882] Yet even then Stephen shook him off, and it was only to Robert of Gloucester in person that he deigned to surrender at last.[883] Baldwin of Clare and three other faithful ones were captured with him; all the rest of the gallant little band were already taken or slain.[884] The triumphant host marched into Lincoln and sacked the town under the royal captive’s eyes.[885] He was then conveyed to Gloucester and there presented, as a great prize, by Earl Robert to his sister, who straightway sent him to prison in Bristol castle.[886]

[872] “Tunc quia rex Stephanus festivâ carebat voce.” Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 16 (Arnold, p. 271).

[873] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 18 (Arnold, pp. 273, 274).

[874] “His men him suyken and flugæn.” Eng. Chron. a. 1140. Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 134, says Alan deserted before the battle began, but Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 18 (Arnold, p. 273), and Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 922, both name him as receiving the first charge. Orderic (as above) is loud in his denunciations of the traitors. He says that some of them had adopted a practice not unknown in the civil war of the seventeenth century, and still more largely followed in the Jacobite risings of the eighteenth—that of joining the king with a part of their men, and sending the remainder to his enemies.

[875] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 18 (Arnold, p. 274).

[876] “Stetit autem rex in acie quasi leo.” Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 135.

[877] Ibid. Hen. Hunt. (as above) says the axe was the first weapon, and the sword replaced it when broken, but John’s is far the more likely version. See also Ord. Vit. (as above) and Rob. Torigni, a. 1141.

[878] “Rugiens ut leo ... stridens dentibus, spumans ore, apri more.” Rob. Torigni, a. 1141.

[879] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 135.

[880] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 18 (Arnold, p. 274), says that both sword and axe broke.

[881] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 40 (Hardy, p. 742).

[882] Hen. Hunt. as above.

[883] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.) p. 922. Joh. Hexh. as above. For other accounts see Will. Malm. as above; Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 71; and Will. Newb., l. i. c. 8 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 39, 40). All agree in praise of Stephen’s valour.

[884] Ord. Vit. as above. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 18 (Arnold, pp. 274, 275).

[885] Will. Malm., Hen. Hunt. and Will. Newb.as above.

[886] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 41 (Hardy, p. 742). Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 19 (Arnold, p. 275). Will. Newb., l. i. c. 8 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 40). Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 72. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 129, giving the date, February 9 [1141].

Matilda’s day had come now. Within three weeks after the battle of Lincoln one of her adherents, Miles Beauchamp, regained Bedford castle from its titular earl Hugh the Poor;[887] William Peverel was forced to surrender Nottingham;[888] Hervey of Lions, Stephen’s son-in-law, was driven out of Devizes;[889] and Alan of Richmond, repenting of his treason and vainly striving to atone for it, was caught in a trap which he himself had laid for Ralf of Chester, flung into a dungeon, and compelled to make submission to the earl and the Empress both at once;[890] while voluntary offers of service and homage came flowing in to Gloucester from all quarters.[891] Still the clergy held aloof. The outrage of Midsummer 1139 had made it impossible for them to support the king; but he was still the Lord’s anointed, to whom their faith was pledged; and their leader, Henry of Winchester, was his own brother. Matilda, anxious above all things to gain Henry’s adhesion, bluntly sent him word that if he would join her, she would honour him as the chief among her counsellors; if not, she would lead “all the armies of England” against him at once. The legate, thus driven into a corner—for, at the moment, her words were by no means an empty threat—felt that even for his brother’s interest, let alone the interest of the Church, which was really dearer to him than all beside, his best course was to make terms with the victorious party.[892] The terms were arranged between him and his imperial cousin in person, on a rainy March morning in the plain before Winchester. Next day the old West-Saxon capital opened its gates to the Empress, and the legate himself, with a long train of bishops and abbots, clergy and people, led her in triumphal procession to the “Old Minster” where so many of her forefathers had been crowned and buried.[893]

- [887] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 74. Cf. ib. p. 32.

- [888] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 136.

- [889] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 74. Cf. ib. p. 69. Hervey, it must be noticed, was actually expelled not by Matilda’s partizans, but by the poor country folk whom his oppressions had exasperated. But it was Matilda who got the benefit of his expulsion.

- [890] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 136.

- [891] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 74.

- [892] Ib. p. 75.

- [893] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 42 (Hardy, pp. 743, 744). In Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 130, this entry into Winchester on March 3 is confused with Matilda’s formal election there in April. So it is also in Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 75.

In a few days the archbishop of Canterbury followed the legate’s example and swore fealty to the Empress at Wilton.[894] She next advanced to her father’s burial-place, Reading, and thence summoned Robert of Oilly, who had been her father’s constable, to surrender Oxford castle; the summons was obeyed,[895] and she held her Easter court at Oxford.[896] The key of the upper valley of the Thames being thus in her hands, she set herself to win its lower valley by advancing to S. Alban’s and thence opening negotiations with London.[897] A deputation of its citizens were at the same time invited by the legate-bishop to a great council at Winchester on the second Monday after Easter. The first day of the council was spent in a succession of private conferences; on the second Henry spoke out publicly. He set forth how, as vicar of the Apostolic see, he had summoned this assembly to consider of the best means of restoring order in the land; he contrasted its present wretched state with the good peace which it had enjoyed under King Henry; he recited how the crown had been promised to Matilda;—how, in consequence of her absence at her father’s death, it had seemed wiser to secure a king at once in the person of Stephen;—how he, the speaker, had stood surety for the maintenance of the new king’s promises to the Church and the nation:—and how shamefully those promises had been broken. He had tried to bring his brother to reason, but in vain; and now the matter had been decided by a higher Power. The judgment of the God of battles had delivered Stephen into the hand of his rival, and cast him down from his throne; the speaker’s duty was to see that throne filled at once. He had spent the previous day in consultation with the bishops and clergy to whom the right of election chiefly belonged; their choice had fallen upon the candidate to whom their faith had been plighted long ago; he called upon them now publicly to confirm their choice, and swear fealty to King Henry’s heiress as Lady of England and Normandy.

- [894] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 42 (Hardy, p. 744). Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 130.

- [895] Flor. Worc. Contin. as above.

- [896] Will. Malm. as above. The Contin. Flor. Worc. says she spent Easter at Wilton, and places the visits to Reading and Oxford between Easter and Rogation-tide; but his chronology is very confused, while that of Will. Malm. is especially careful just here. William’s account of all these matters is by far the best. The Gesta Steph. cuts them very short.

- [897] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 131.

Not a dissentient voice was raised save that of a clerk of the queen’s household, who ventured to read out a letter from his mistress to the legate, passionately entreating for her husband’s restoration. The deputation from London, who seem to have been the only laymen in the assembly, did not exactly oppose the decision of the majority; they merely pleaded for Stephen’s release, and carried back a report of the proceedings to their fellow-citizens, with a view to gaining their assent. It was not till just before midsummer that the Londoners were finally persuaded to forsake their own chosen king;[898] then, indeed, they opened their gates with the utmost humility;[899] and thus the Lady entered her capital and took up her abode at Westminster in triumph.[900]

- [898] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. cc. 43–48 (Hardy, pp. 744–749).

- [899] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 76, 77.

- [900] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 131.

The triumph did not last long. Matilda fell, just as her rival had fallen, by her own fault; only the faults of the two cousins were of a directly opposite nature. The Lady’s habitual temper was that of her grandfather the Conqueror—“very stern to all who withstood her will”; and her will was not, like his, kept under the control of sound policy and reason. Where Stephen had erred through his fatal readiness to listen to the most worthless counsellors, Matilda erred through her obstinate refusal to listen to any counsellors at all. She was no sooner in London than she began confiscating lands and honours and disposing of Church property more ruthlessly than ever Stephen had done; and neither the brother to whom she owed her victory, nor the legate to whom she owed her throne, nor the old king of Scots who came to share his niece’s triumph and give her the benefit of his mature wisdom, could succeed in bringing her to reason. Not a word of conciliation would she hear from any one. The queen appealed to her in behalf of her captive husband; some of the great nobles did the like; but she was deaf to their prayers. The bishop of Winchester besought her at least to secure to Stephen’s children the possessions which he had held before he became king; but she would not hear him either. The citizens of London besought her to give them back “the Laws of King Eadward”;[901] and that, too, she refused. She did worse; she summoned the richest burghers to her presence, demanded from them instant payment of a large sum of money, and when they respectfully remonstrated, drove them away with a torrent of abuse, utterly refusing all abatement or delay.[902] She was soon punished. All through the spring Matilda of Boulogne had been busy in Kent with the help of William of Ypres, rallying her husband’s scattered partizans, and gathering an army which she now led up, wasting, plundering, slaughtering all before them, almost to the gates of London. Her vigorous action determined that of the citizens. One day, as the Empress was quietly sitting down to dinner, the bells began to ring, the people came swarming out of their houses “like bees out of a hive”; the whole city flew to arms; and she and her friends were driven to flee, some one way, some another, as fast as their horses could carry them.[903] Earl Robert accompanied his sister as far as Oxford;[904] thence she hurried on to Gloucester to consult with her favourite Miles, the only person who seems to have had any real influence over her, and brought him back with her to Oxford to help in rallying her scattered forces.[905] Her cousin the queen meanwhile was in London at the head of an enthusiastic city, eager for the restoration of Stephen; from one end of England to the other the heroic wife was leaving no stone unturned in her husband’s interest, and her zeal was speedily rewarded by the re-conversion of the legate. Utterly disgusted at the result of his second attempt at king-making for the good of the Church, after one last warning to the Empress he met his sister-in-law at Guildford, reversed all the excommunications issued against Stephen’s party by the council of Winchester, and pledged himself to do henceforth all that in him lay for the restoration of the captive king.[906] Robert of Gloucester vainly sought to win him back;[907] then the Lady resolved to try her own powers of persuasion, and without a word of notice even to her brother, at the head of a strong body of troops she set off for Winchester.[908]

- [901] “Ut leges eis Regis Edwardi observari liceret, quia optimæ erant, non patris sui Henrici, quia graves erant.” Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 132.

- [902] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 77.

- [903] Ib. pp. 78, 79. Cf. Flor. Worc. Contin. as above, and Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 48 (Hardy, p. 749).

- [904] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 79.

- [905] Flor. Worc. Contin. as above.

- [906] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 49 (Hardy, p. 750).

- [907] Ib. c. 50 (p. 751).

- [908] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov. as above. Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 80. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 133) says this was just before August 1.

Of the two royal dwelling-places founded at Winchester by the Conqueror, only one now remained. He and his sons apparently found the castle at the western end of the city a more agreeable residence than the palace whose inconvenient proximity drove the monks of the New Minster to remove to Hyde. This palace was almost as great a nuisance to the Old Minster as to the New, and three years after King Henry’s death his nephew and namesake the bishop determined to get rid of it. Amid the gathering storms of the year 1138 Bishop Henry, in his turn, grew dissatisfied with his episcopal abode hard by the cathedral church, and resolved that he too would have a castle of his own. With an audacity characteristic alike of the man and of the time, he carried the stones of his grandfather’s deserted palace down to a clear space within the “soke” or “liberty” of the church, just within the eastern boundary of the city, and there set them up again in the shape of a mighty fortress[909] afterwards known as Wolvesey-house, some fragments of whose walls still stand, broken and overhung with ivy, in a green enclosure between the river-bank and the long, dark pile of the cathedral. As the Lady rode into Winchester by one gate the bishop rode out by another, to shut himself up in Wolvesey.[910] Matilda established herself without opposition in the castle,[911] and thence sent him a civil message requesting him to come and speak with her. He answered, “I will make me ready”;[912] and he did so, by despatching an urgent summons to all the partizans of the king.[913] The Empress, too, called up her friends; they hurried to her support, quartered themselves in the city with the goodwill of the inhabitants, and beset both the bishop’s palace and his fortress with all the troops they could muster.[914] But his summons was no less effectual than hers. It brought up all the barons who still held with Stephen; it brought up a troop of mercenaries;[915] best of all, it brought up, not only William of Ypres with his terrible Flemings,[916] but a thousand valiant citizens of London with Stephen’s own Matilda at their head.[917] The besiegers of Wolvesey found themselves beset in their turn by “the king’s queen with all her strength”;[918] the bishop himself ordered the town to be fired, and the wind, which saved the cathedral, carried the flames northward as far as Hyde abbey.[919] While he thus made a desert for the besiegers within the city, the queen was doing the like without. Under her directions the London contingent were guarding every approach from the west, whence alone the Lady’s troops could look for supplies: the convoys were intercepted, their escorts slain; and while eastward the roads were lined all the way to London with parties bringing provision for the bishop and his little garrison, his besiegers already saw famine staring them in the face.[920] At last they sent out a body of knights, three hundred strong, to Wherwell, intending there to build a castle as a cover for their convoys.[921] They had no sooner reached the spot than William of Ypres pounced upon them and captured the whole party.[922]

[909] “Hoc anno fecit Henricus episcopus ædificare domum quasi palatium cum turri fortissimâ in Wintoniâ.” Ann. Winton. a. 1138 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. p. 51). The story of the pulling down of the royal palace is in Girald. Cambr., Vita S. Remigii, c. 27 (Opera, ed. Dimock, vol. vii. p. 46).

[910] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 80. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 133.

[911] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 133. Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 50 (Hardy, p. 751).

[912] “Ego parabo me.” Will. Malm. as above.

[913] Ibid.

[914] “Castellumque episcopi, quod venustissimo constructum schemate in civitatis medio locârat, sed et domum illius quam ad instar castelli fortiter et inexpugnabiliter firmârat, validissimâ obsidione claudere præcepit” [sc. comitissa]. Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 80. The first-named “castellum” is clearly the old palace of the bishops; the “domus” is Wolvesey, where Henry now was. The list of Matilda’s followers is given in Gesta Steph., p. 81, and in Will. Malm. as above.

[915] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 82.

[916] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 19 (Arnold, p. 275).

[917] Gesta Steph. as above.

[918] “Tha com the kings cuen mid all hire strengthe and besæt heom.” Eng. Chron. a. 1140.

[919] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 50 (Hardy, p. 752). Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above), p. 133. The latter gives the date—August 2.

[920] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 50 (Hardy, pp. 751, 752). Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 83.

[921] Gesta Steph. as above. Joh. Hexh. (Raine, p. 138) says two hundred knights, commanded by John the Marshal and Robert, son of King Henry and Eda (i.e. Edith who married Robert of Oilly).

[922] Gesta Steph. and Joh. Hexh. as above.

Then Robert of Gloucester felt that the case was hopeless, and that, cost what it might, he must get his sister out. Suddenly, as he was marshalling his host to cut their way through at all risks,[923] on the evening of September 13, the city gates were opened, and peace was proclaimed in the bishop’s name.[924] Robert hereupon decided to march quietly out next morning. He took, however, the precaution of sending his sister out first of all, while he brought up the rear with a small band of men as dauntless as himself.[925] He did wisely. Matilda had but just ridden through the west gate when the bishop, doubtless from his tower at Wolvesey, gave the signal for attack. The whole host of the queen’s partizans rushed upon those of the Lady and routed them completely. Earl Robert succeeded in covering his sister’s retreat, and cut his own way out in another direction, but was overtaken at Stockbridge by William of Ypres and his Flemings, who surrounded and took him prisoner.[926] Miles of Gloucester (whom the Empress had made earl of Hereford), surrounded in like manner, threw down his arms and fled for his life, reaching Gloucester in disgrace, weary, alone, and almost naked.[927] King David, it is said, was thrice made prisoner, but each time bribed his captors to let him go,[928] and was hidden in safety at last by a certain David Holcfard, who happened to be his godson.[929] The archbishop of Canterbury and several other bishops who had accompanied the Empress were despoiled of their horses and even of their clothes. The Lady herself had escaped in company with the Breton lord of Wallingford, Brian Fitz-Count, who had long been her devoted friend and who never forsook her.[930] Their first halt was at Luggershall; urged by her friends, still in terror of pursuit, she mounted another horse and spurred on to Devizes; there, half dead with fatigue, she laid herself on a bier, and bound to it with ropes as if she had been a corpse, she was carried at last safe into Gloucester.

- [923] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 51 (Hardy, p. 753). Cf. Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 84.

- [924] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 134.

- [925] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 51 (Hardy, p. 753).

- [926] Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above), p. 135. Cf. Gesta Steph., Will. Malm. (as above), and Joh. Hexh. (as above)·/· (Raine, p. 138). The Geneal. Com. Flandr. (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xiii. p. 413) declares that this was the service for which Stephen rewarded William with the earldom of Kent.

- [927] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 135.

- [928] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 85.

- [929] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 138.

- [930] Gesta Steph. as above. Brian was a son of Alan Fergant, duke of Britanny (Eng. Chron. a. 1127). Together with Robert of Gloucester, he escorted Matilda over sea when she went to be married to Geoffrey, and he is said to have been one of the three persons with whom alone Henry consulted about the marriage. Eng. Chron. a. 1127; Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 3 (Hardy, p. 693). He was, all his life, a most loyal and useful member of the Angevin party. His father’s first wife was the Conqueror’s daughter Constance; the second was Fulk Rechin’s daughter Hermengard; Brian, however, had no kindred with the house which he served so well.

Earl Robert was brought back to Winchester to the feet of the queen, who sent him, under his captor’s charge, into honourable confinement in Rochester castle.[931] The next six weeks were spent in negotiations for his release and that of Stephen; for the party of the Empress found themselves helpless without Robert, and the chief aim of Matilda of Boulogne was to get her husband free. She proposed to Countess Mabel of Gloucester—for the Empress held sullenly aloof—that the two illustrious captives should simply be exchanged, and to this Mabel eagerly assented. Robert, however, protested that an earl was no equivalent for a king, and insisted that all those who had been captured with him should be thrown in to balance the crown. To this their various captors naturally demurred, and the project failed.[932] It was next proposed to settle the whole dispute by restoring Stephen to his throne and making Robert governor of England in his name;[933] but the earl would agree to nothing without his sister’s consent, and the Empress refused to modify her claims in any way.[934] The queen threatened that if Robert did not yield, she would send him over to Boulogne and keep him there in chains for the rest of his life; but he knew that if a hair of his head was touched his countess, whom he had left in command at Bristol, would at once ship off her royal captive to Ireland, and the threat produced no effect. Meanwhile the party of the Empress was falling to pieces so rapidly that her few genuine adherents grew alarmed for her personal safety, and besought Robert to accept freedom on any terms, as the sole chance of averting her ruin. The original proposition of a simple exchange was therefore revived, and accepted in the first days of November.[935]

- [931] Flor. Worc. Contin. (as above)·/·(Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 135, p. 134.

- [932] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 58 (Hardy, pp. 759, 760).

- [933] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 136. Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 59 (Hardy, p. 760).

- [934] Flor. Worc. Contin. as above. At this point we lose him.

- [935] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. cc. 51, 60–64 (Hardy, pp. 754, 760–762). Cf. Eng. Chron. a. 1140; Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 19 (Arnold, p. 275); and Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 85, 86.

The earl rejoined his sister at Oxford;[936] the king re-entered his capital amid general rejoicings.[937] His misfortunes, the heroism of his queen, the overbearing conduct of the Empress, all helped to turn the tide of popular feeling in his favour once more. Early in December the legate, with such daring indifference to the awkwardness of his own position as can surely have been due to nothing but conscious integrity of purpose, called a council at Westminster and formally undid the work which he had done at Winchester in the spring. After a solemn complaint had been lodged by Stephen against the vassals who had betrayed and captured him—the counterpart of the charge once made in a similar assembly against Stephen himself, of having been false to his duty as king—Henry rose and made his apology. He had acquiesced in the rule of the Empress, believing it a necessary evil; the evil had proved intolerable, and he was thankful to be delivered from its necessity. In the name of Heaven and its Roman representative he therefore once more proclaimed his brother as the lawfully-elected and apostolically-anointed sovereign to whom obedience was due, and denounced as excommunicate all who upheld the claims of the Angevin countess. The clergy sat in puzzled silence; but their very silence gave consent.[938]

- [936] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 51 (Hardy, p. 754).

- [937] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 85. Hen. Hunt. as above·/·, l. viii. c. 19 (Arnold, p. 275).

- [938] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. cc. 52–53 (Hardy, pp. 755, 756). The council met on December 7.

Throughout the winter both parties remained quiet, Stephen in London, Matilda in Oxford; both, in the present exhausted state of their forces, had enough to do in simply standing their ground, without risking any attack upon each other. In the spring Matilda removed to Devizes; there, at Mid-Lent, she held with her partizans a secret council which resulted in an embassy to Anjou, calling upon Geoffrey to come and help in regaining the English heritage of his wife and son. At Pentecost the answer came. Geoffrey, before he would accede to the summons, required to be certified of its reasonableness, and he would accept no assurance save that of the earl of Gloucester in person. Robert, knowing how closely his sister’s interest and even her personal safety was bound up with his presence at her side, was very unwilling to undertake the mission. A scheme was however contrived to satisfy him. Matilda returned to her old quarters at Oxford; the chief men of her party bound themselves by oath to keep within a certain distance of the city, and to guard her against all danger until her brother’s return. On this understanding he sailed from Wareham shortly before Midsummer. He was but just gone when Stephen, who since Easter had been lying sick at Northampton, swooped down upon Wareham so suddenly that the garrison, taken by surprise, yielded to him at once.[939] The king marched up to Cirencester, surprised and destroyed a castle lately built there by the Empress,[940] and thence turned westward to try conclusions with Matilda herself by attacking her headquarters at Oxford.

- [939] Ib.·/·Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. cc. 66–71 (Hardy, pp. 763–766).

- [940] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 87, 88.

Oxford was, from its geographical situation, one of the most important strategical posts in England. It stood at the very centre and crowning-point of the valley of the Thames, the great high-way which led from the eastern sea and the capital into the western shires, through the very heart of the land. So long as it remained loyal to Stephen, he was master of the whole Thames valley, and the Angevins, however complete might be their triumph in the west, were cut off from all direct communication with eastern England and even with the capital itself. The surrender of Oxford castle to Matilda in the summer of 1141 had reversed this position of affairs. It probably helped to determine—it was at any rate soon followed by—the surrender of London; and even when London was again lost to the Empress, her possession of Oxford still gave her command over the upper part of the river-valley and thus secured her main line of communication with her brother’s territories in the west, while Stephen in his turn was almost prisoned in the eastern half of his realm. For nearly eleven months he had seen her defying him from her father’s palace of Beaumont or from the impregnable stronghold of the castle, where the first Robert of Oilly, not content with raising a shell-keep on the old English mound, had built another tall square tower which still stands, on the western side of the enclosure, directly above the river.[941] Not until her brother had left her did the king venture to take up the challenge which her very presence there implied; then indeed he felt that the hour had come. Matilda, as if in expectation of his attack, had been employing her followers on the construction of a chain of forts intended to protect and keep open her communications with the west.[942] One by one Stephen broke the links of the chain—Cirencester, Bampton, Ratcot[943]—and from this last place, a little village in the midst of a marsh, half-way between Bampton and Farringdon, he led his host across the Isis and round by the meadows on its southern shore to the ford below S. Frideswide’s from which the city took its name. Matilda’s partizans no sooner discovered his approach—three days before Michaelmas[944]—than they streamed down to the bank of the river, across which they greeted him first with a torrent of abuse and then with a flight of arrows. The vanguard of the royal host, with Stephen himself at their head, sprang into the water, swam rather than waded across the well-known and time-honoured ford,[945] and by the fury of their onset drove their insulting enemies back to the city gates. The rest of the army quickly followed; Matilda’s adherents fled through the open gate, their pursuers rushed in after them, entered the town without difficulty, set it on fire, captured and slew all on whom they could lay their hands, and drove the rest to take shelter in the castle with their Lady.[946]

- [941] See above, p. 42, note 2{113}.

- [942] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 87, 88.

- [943] Ib. p. 88. “Apud viculum Ratrotam fluctibus inaccesse et paludibus obseptum.” Ib. p. 87. Ratcot is Anthony Wood’s rendering.

- [944] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 71 (Hardy, p. 766).

- [945] “Præmonstrato antiquo sed eximiæ profunditatis vado.” Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 89.

- [946] Ibid.

Stephen had doubtless not braved S. Frideswide’s wrath by entering Oxford, so to say, under her very eyes. His troops had won the city; his task was to win the castle, and that task he vowed never to abandon till both fortress and Empress should be in his hands. For nearly three months he blockaded the place, till its inhabitants were on the verge of starvation. The barons who had sworn to protect Matilda, bitterly ashamed of their failure, gathered at Wallingford ready to meet Stephen if he should chance to offer them battle; but he had no such intention, and they dared not attack him where he was.[947] At last a gleam of hope came with Earl Robert’s return, quickened, it seems, by tidings of his sister’s danger. Landing at Wareham with a force of some three or four hundred Normans, he regained the port and the village without difficulty, and as his force was too small to effect Matilda’s relief directly, he laid siege to the castle, hoping by this means to make a diversion in her favour.[948] The garrison of Wareham did in fact send a message to Stephen beseeching him to come and relieve them before a certain day, as if he did not, they must give up the place.[949] But the king was not to be drawn from his prey; he left Wareham to its fate, and after a three weeks’ siege it surrendered. Robert went on to Portland and Lulworth, took them both, and then summoned all the friends of the Empress to meet him at Cirencester, thence to set out with their united forces for the rescue of Matilda herself.[950] In Oxford castle the provisions were all but exhausted; the Lady despaired of succour.[951] Her faithful friend the lord of the castle, Robert of Oilly, had died a fortnight before the siege began.[952] Christmas was close at hand; the snow lay thick on the ground; the river was frozen fast. From the top of D’Oilly’s tall tower nothing was to be seen but one vast sheet of cold, dead white, broken only by the dark masses of Stephen’s host encamped round about upon the frozen meadows:—a dreary outlook, but the prospect within was drearier still. Matilda had gone through too many adventures to shrink from the risk of one more. One night four white-robed figures[953] dropped down by a rope[954] over the castle-wall upon the frozen river at its foot; they crossed dry-shod over the stream whose waters, a little lower down, had been almost over the heads of their enemies three months before; their footsteps fell noiseless upon the fresh snow, their white garments reflected its gleams and deceived the eyes of Stephen’s sentinels; in the stillness of the night, broken only by the bugle-call and the watchman’s cry, they stole through the besieging lines and across the very sleeping-quarters of the king—never caught, never discovered save by one man in all the host; and he, whether taking them for ghosts, or in chivalrous sympathy for their desperate venture, let them pass unchallenged and kept his story till the morrow.[955] Five miles they fled on foot “over snow and ice, over ditch and dale”; at Abingdon they took horse, and before the morning broke the Empress Matilda and her faithful comrades were safe under the protection of Brian Fitz-Count in his great fortress of Wallingford.[956]

- [947] Will. Malm. as above·/·Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 71 (Hardy, p. 766).

- [948] Ib. cc. 72, 73 (Hardy, pp. 767, 768). Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 91. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 124.

- [949] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 73 (Hardy, p. 768).

- [950] Ib. c. 74 (p. 768). Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 124, 125.

- [951] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 90.

- [952] Ann. Osen. a. 1142 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. iv. p. 24).

- [953] Gesta Steph. as above. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 124, makes them six.

- [954] Eng. Chron. a. 1140. Gerv. Cant. (as above) says “per posticium.”

- [955] Gesta Steph. as above.

- [956] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 90. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 124, 125. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 20 (Arnold, p. 276). Will. Newb., l. i. c. 10 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 43).

At Wallingford her brother came to meet her, accompanied not by her husband but by her son, a child nine years old whom Geoffrey, now absorbed in the conquest of Normandy, had sent to England in his stead.[957] The escape from Oxford was Matilda’s last exploit. The castle surrendered to Stephen as soon as she had left it;[958] she returned to her old quarters at Bristol or Gloucester; and thenceforth she ceased to figure prominently in the war which dragged languidly on for five more years. A battle between Stephen and Earl Robert near Wilton, on July 1st, 1143, in which the king was utterly routed and only escaped being made prisoner a second time by taking to headlong flight,[959] was the last real success of the Angevin party. The year closed with a severe blow to the Empress, in the death of her trusted friend Miles of Hereford, who was slain on Christmas Eve, not in fight, but by a chance shot in hunting.[960] Early in the next year Ralf of Chester again seized Lincoln castle;[961] but Ralf fought for his own hand rather than for the Empress; and so, too, did Hugh Bigod, Turgis of Avranches and Geoffrey of Mandeville, who kept all eastern England in ceaseless commotion.[962] Stephen’s energies were absorbed in a vain endeavour to reduce them to order, while Robert struggled almost as vainly against the anarchy of the western shires; in the north Ralf of Chester now ruled supreme from the Witham to the Dee; and the upper valley of the Thames was at the mercy of William of Dover, who had built a castle at Cricklade, from which he ravaged the whole country between Oxford and Malmesbury.[963]

- [957] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 70 (Hardy, p. 765). Rob. Torigni, a. 1142. Gerv. Cant. (as above),·/·(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 125.

- [958] Will. Malm. as above, c. 74 (p. 769. At this point he ends). Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 91. Hen. Hunt. as above·/·, l. viii. c. 20 (Arnold, p. 276).

- [959] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 92. Gerv. Cant. (as above), pp. 125, 126. Will. Newb. as above·/· l. i. c. 10 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 42).

- [960] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 101. Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 146.

- [961] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 22 (Arnold, p. 277).

- [962] On Hugh Bigod and Turgis see Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 109–111; on Geoffrey of Mandeville, ib. pp. 101–104; Will. Newb., l. i. c. 11 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 44–46); and Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 21 (Arnold, pp. 276, 277).

- [963] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 106, 107, 111.

Suddenly, after capturing the commandant of Malmesbury and sending him as a great prize to the Empress, the lord of Cricklade threw aside his evil work and went off to die for a nobler cause in Palestine.[964] Geoffrey de Mandeville, the worst of all the troublers of the land, who had accepted titles and honours from both the rival sovereigns and had never for one moment been true to either, met his death in the same summer of 1144 in a skirmish with the king’s troops; his fellow-sinner Robert of Marmion was soon afterwards slain by the earl of Chester’s men at the gates of the abbey of Bath which he had desecrated.[965] For a moment it seemed as if the cry which had long been going up from all the desolated sanctuaries of England—“Up, Lord, why sleepest Thou?”—had been heard and answered at last.[966] Philip of Gloucester, Earl Robert’s son, who had taken William of Dover’s place at Cricklade, was so hard pressed by the garrison of Oxford[967] that he called his father to his aid; Robert built a great castle at Farringdon, but the king besieged it with such vigour that its defenders were compelled to surrender.[968] From that moment the Angevin party fell rapidly to pieces. Young Philip of Gloucester himself went over to Stephen and turned his arms against his own father.[969] The earl of Chester came to meet the king at Stamford,[970] humbly apologized for his rebellion, and sought to prove the sincerity of his repentance by regaining Bedford for Stephen, by constantly accompanying him with a band of three hundred picked knights, and by helping him to build a fortress at Crowmarsh to keep the garrison of Wallingford in check.[971] As, however, he still refused to give up the castles which he had seized and to pay his dues to the royal treasury, he was naturally regarded with suspicion by the other barons and by the king himself.[972] In the summer of 1146 their mutual distrust came to a crisis at Northampton. Ralf besought Stephen’s help against the Welsh; the barons persuaded Stephen to let them answer in his name that he would not give it unless Ralf surrendered his castles and gave hostages for his fidelity; he refused indignantly; they accused him of plotting treason, laid hands upon him with one accord, and gave him in charge to the royal guards, by whom he was flung into prison.[973] As in the case of the seizure of the bishops, it is difficult to say how far Stephen was responsible, and how much justification he had, for this arrest. We can hardly get nearer to the truth than the English chronicler: “The king took him in Hamton through wicked rede, and did him in prison; and soon after he let him out again through worse rede, with the precaution that he swore on the halidom and found hostages that he should give up all his castles; some he gave up and some gave he not, and did then worse than before.”[974] But among the castles which Ralf did give up for the sake of regaining his freedom was that which Stephen valued most—Lincoln.[975] Then at last the king felt that his enemies were at his feet; and he resolved that the city which had beheld his worst overthrow should also behold his highest triumph. In defiance of an old superstition which forbade any English king to appear in regal state within the walls of Lincoln, he kept his midwinter feast there with a splendour which had been unknown for years, and wore his crown at high mass in the minster on Christmas-day.[976]

[964] Ib.·/·Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. p. 111.

[965] Will. Newb., l. i. cc. 11, 12 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 46–48). Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 104. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 22 (Arnold, p. 277).

[966] “Dicebaturque a laborantibus piis ‘Exsurge, quare obdormis, Domine?’ At postquam ... ‘excitatus est,’ ut ait propheta, ‘tanquam dormiens Dominus, et percussit inimicos Suos in posteriora.’” Will. Newb., l. i. c. 11 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 45). “Quia igitur improbi dixerunt Deum dormire, excitatus est Deus.” Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 22 (Arnold, p. 227)—two different interpretations of the Chronicler’s phrase, “men said openly that Christ slept, and His hallows.”

[967] Under William of Chamai, “civitatis Oxenefordiæ præses, regalisque militiæ dux et assignator.” Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 112. This seems to mean that he was the king’s constable—an office which had apparently gone with the command of Oxford castle ever since the Norman conquest.

[968] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 112–114. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 23 (Arnold, p. 278). Will. Newb., l. i. c. 13 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 48).

[969] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 116.

[970] Eng. Chron. a. 1140. The real date must be 1146, as given by Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 24 (Arnold, p. 279).

[971] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 115. Hen. Hunt. as above. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 129, 130.

[972] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 115, 116.

[973] Ib. pp. 121–123. Cf. Hen. Hunt. as above.

[974] Eng. Chron. a. 1140.

[975] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 123, 124. Hen. Hunt. as above. Will. Newb., l. i. c. 13 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 49).

[976] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 25 (Arnold, p. 279). Will. Newb., l. i. c. 18 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 57). Compare the different tone of the two writers.

The hour of Stephen’s exultation over Matilda in England was the hour of her husband’s complete triumph on the other side of the Channel. In the seven years which had gone by since they parted, the count of Anjou had really achieved far more than his wife. As soon as he heard of Stephen’s capture, early in 1141, Geoffrey again summoned the Norman barons to give up their castles and submit to his authority in peace. They held a meeting at Mortagne in the middle of Lent to consider their answer; despairing of Stephen, yet still unwilling to accept Geoffrey, they fell back upon their original scheme and once more besought Theobald of Blois to come and take possession of both duchy and kingdom. Theobald refused the impossible task; but, thinking like every one else that all was over with Stephen, he undertook to arrange terms with Geoffrey for the pacification of both countries. Stephen’s claims, as king and duke, were to be given up to the Angevins on condition that they should set him at liberty and secure to him and his heirs the honours which he had held during his uncle’s lifetime; while to Theobald, as the price of his services in negotiating this settlement, Geoffrey was to restore the county of Tours.[977] The treaty however remained a dead letter; for one of the contracting parties had reckoned without his brother and the other without his wife, both of whom refused their consent. But it served Geoffrey’s purpose nevertheless. The twin earls of Meulan and Leicester, hitherto Stephen’s most active partizans, and the former of whom was after Robert of Gloucester the most influential man in Normandy, at once accepted the proposed terms as final and made their peace with Anjou.[978] Nearly a third part of the duchy followed their example. Mortagne had submitted already; Verneuil and Nonancourt soon did the like; in the last week of Lent Lisieux was surrendered by its bishop;[979] Falaise yielded shortly after;[980] and in a few weeks more the whole Roumois—that is, the district between the Seine and the Rille—except the capital itself, acknowledged Geoffrey as its master.[981]

- [977] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 923.

- [978] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 923. Cf. Rob. Torigni, a. 1141.

- [979] Ord. Vit. as above. At this point we lose him.

- [980] Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1141 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 34, 145).

- [981] Rob. Torigni, a. 1141.

All this happened while the Empress was in full career of success in England. There, however, as we have seen, summer and autumn undid the work of spring; the news of Matilda’s triumph were quickly followed by those of her fall, of her brother’s capture, of his release in exchange for Stephen, and finally, at Whitsuntide 1142, by the visit of Earl Robert himself to entreat that Geoffrey would come and help his wife to reconquer her father’s kingdom. Geoffrey’s views of statecraft were perhaps neither very wide nor very lofty; but his political instinct was quicker and more practical than that of either his wife or her brother. He saw that they had lost their hold upon England; he knew that he had at last secured a hold upon Normandy; and he resolved that no temptation from over sea should induce him to let it go. Instead of helping Robert to conquer the kingdom, he determined to make Robert help him to conquer the duchy. He represented that it was impossible for him to leave matters there in their present unsatisfactory condition; if the earl really wanted him in England, he must first help him in bringing Normandy to order. Thereupon Robert, finding that he could get no other answer, agreed to join his brother-in-law in a campaign which occupied them both until the end of the year.[982] The central part of Normandy, from Nonancourt and Lisieux on the east to a line marked by the course of the Orne on the west, and from the Cenomannian border up to Caen, was already in Geoffrey’s power; he had in fact inserted a big wedge into the middle of the duchy. To gain its western side was the object of the present expedition. The brothers-in-law seem to have started from Robert’s native Caen, and their first success was probably the taking of Bastebourg—Bastebourg above the ford of Varaville, whose name recalls an earlier time and another Geoffrey of Anjou. Then the expedition moved south-westward from Caen through the diocese of Bayeux and up the left bank of the Orne to Villers, Aunay, Plessis and Vire, till it reached and won the already historic site of Tinchebray, on the north-eastern frontier of Stephen’s old county of Mortain.[983] The town and castle of Mortain, and the whole county, with the fortresses of Le Teilleul and St.-Hilaire, were speedily won.[984] Geoffrey marched on to Pontorson, the south-western outpost of the Norman duchy, close upon the Breton frontier, at the bottom of a sandy bay guarded by the Mont-St.-Michel; warned by the general experience, the whole population, men and women, townsfolk and garrison, streamed out to welcome the conqueror as soon as he made his appearance. Thence he turned northward again, to Cérences in the Avranchin; and this place, too, surrendered without striking a blow.[985]

- [982] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 70 (Hardy, p. 765).

- [983] The story of this campaign, as told by the historians of the time, is little more than a list of the places taken, put together evidently at random, just as the names happened to come into the writer’s mind. Its real order must however have been somewhat as suggested above. The fullest list is in Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 70 (Hardy, p. 765): Tinchebray, St. Hilaire, “Brichesart,” Aunay, Bastebourg, “Trivères,” Vire, “Plaiseiz,” Villers, Mortain. Bastebourg lies quite apart from all the rest, and must have been the object of a distinct expedition from Caen. The other places would follow in geographical order. “Plaiseiz” may be either Plessis-Grimoult or Placy; “Brichesart” and “Trivères” are still to be accounted for. There is a Trévières about half-way between Bayeux and Isigny, but this is even farther away from all the other places than Bastebourg, and in an opposite direction. From Rob. Torigni (a. 1142) we get another list: Aunay, Mortain, Tinchebray, Cérences, Le Teilleul, all in the county of Mortain. The Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 295) names only Mortain and St. Hilaire. The Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg., a. 1142 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 35, 145), say Geoffrey won “castella plurima,” but specify only Mortain.

- [984] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 295, 296. Rob. Torigni, a. 1142.

- [985] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (as above), pp. 296–298. The last-named place appears in Rob. Torigni, a. 1142, as “Cerences.” In the Hist. Gaufr. Ducis, as printed by M. Marchegay (p. 298), it is “Cerentias”; in the old editions it was “Carentias,” which the editors of Rer. Gall. Scriptt. rendered “Carentan.” “Cérences” is the rendering of M. Delisle (Rob. Torigni, vol. i. p. 226, note 2). It lies about half-way between Avranches and Coutances. There is a “Chérencé-le-Roussel” a few miles north-west of Mortain.

At this point the campaign of the count and the earl seems to have been interrupted by tidings of Stephen’s success and Matilda’s danger at Oxford. That Robert must go at once was clear; but that it would be wise for Geoffrey to accompany him was even more doubtful now than it had been six months ago. A substitute was found in the person of little Henry Fitz-Empress, who, if he could do nothing practically to help his mother’s cause and his own, at least ran no risk of damaging it by raising such a storm of ill-feeling as would probably have greeted the count of Anjou himself. While Robert and Henry sailed for England together, Geoffrey remained to finish his work in Normandy. Avranches, the next place which he threatened, made a ready submission; he took up his abode in the castle, and summoned the lords of all the fortresses in the Avranchin to come and do him homage, one after another. When they had all obeyed, he set himself to win the Cotentin. St.-Lô, which had been strongly fortified by the bishop of the diocese, surrendered after a three days’ siege. The victor advanced straight upon Coutances; the bishop was absent; no one else dared to offer resistance; Geoffrey simply marched into the city and took it. Thither, as at Avranches, he summoned the barons of the county to perform their homage, and they all obeyed except two brothers, Ralf and Richard of La Haye. Ralf was soon brought to submission; Richard flung himself with some two hundred knights into Cherbourg, a mighty fortress on a foundation of solid rock, guarded on one side by a belt of woodland full of wild beasts, and on the other by a bay whose advantages as a naval station have only been put to their full use in much later times. A siege of Cherbourg was likely to be a lengthy, troublesome and costly undertaking. But such a siege was of all military operations that in which Geoffrey most excelled and most delighted. He had little sympathy with the downright hand-to-hand fighting by which Fulk Nerra had won his spurs at Conquereux, or Fulk V. had repulsed Theobald and Stephen before Alençon, or Stephen had put his very captors to shame beneath the walls of Lincoln. Engineering was Geoffrey’s favourite science; in its developement he spared neither labour nor expense; and he now brought up against Cherbourg such a formidable array of machines that Richard thought it prudent to slip away by sea, intending to go to England and ask help of King Stephen. He was however overtaken by pirates and carried away “among strange peoples”; and a rumour of his fate reaching the garrison whom he had left behind, they lost heart and made submission to the Angevin.[986] The whole duchy south and west of the Seine was now his,[987] except the one town of Vaudreuil; before the close of the year this, too, was won, and the Angevin power even advanced beyond the river, for “Walter Giffard and all the people of the Pays de Caux made agreement with Count Geoffrey.”[988] The Norman capital now stood out alone against the Angevin conqueror of Normandy, as Tours had once stood out alone against the conqueror of Touraine. In January 1144 Geoffrey crossed the Seine at Vernon and pitched his camp at La Trinité-du-Mont, close to the walls of Rouen.[989] Next day the citizens opened their gates, and conducted him in solemn procession to the cathedral church.[990] The castle was still held against him by some followers of the earl of Warren;[991] the barons, headed by Waleran of Meulan, came to help him in besieging it, but neither their valour nor his machines were of any avail, and it was not till a three months’ blockade had reduced the garrison to the last straits of hunger that the citadel of Rouen was given up on S. George’s day.[992]

- [986] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 298–301. The year, 1143, is given by Rob. Torigni.

- [987] Chronn. S. Serg. and S. Albin. a. 1143 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 35, 146). The Chron. S. Flor. Salm. (ib. p. 191) ventures to say in 1142: “Goffredus Comes totam Normanniam adquirit hoc anno, iii. octabarum Paschæ, x. kalendas maii.” This is the true date for the Wednesday in Easter week, 1142, but the fact is placed two years too early.

- [988] Rob. Torigni, a. 1143.

- [989] Ib. a. 1144.

- [990] Chron. Rotom. a. 1144 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 785); Rob. Torigni, a. 1144. The former makes the day January 19; the latter, January 20.

- [991] Rob. Torigni, as above.

- [992] Chron. Rotom. a. 1144 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 785); Rob. Torigni, a. 1144.

Allies offered themselves readily now to help in the little that remained to be done; foremost among them was the overlord of Normandy, the young King Louis VII. of France. All was changed since the days when his father, Louis VI., had granted the investiture of Normandy to Stephen’s little son. The inveterate enmity between the house of Blois and the French Crown had broken out afresh, in a new and most disastrous form, between Count Theobald and the young king; Louis fell back upon the traditional policy of his forefathers and gladly embraced the Angevin alliance against all the branches of the house of Blois on both sides of the sea. Thus when Geoffrey, after composing matters as well as he could at Rouen, mustered his forces to subdue the few still outstanding castles, he was joined at once by his own brother-in-law Theodoric of Flanders and by the king of France. Driencourt was the first place won by their united hosts; then Lions-la-Forêt—the old hunting-seat where King Henry had died—was given up by Hugh of Gournay;[993] the rest of the castles beyond Seine were quickly won, and then Geoffrey was master of the whole Norman duchy,[994] save one fortress, Arques, which a Fleming called William the Monk held so pertinaciously for Stephen that the Angevin was obliged to leave a body of troops before the place and go home without waiting to finish the siege in person.[995] Next summer the “monk” was shot dead by a chance arrow, and the surrender of Arques completed Geoffrey’s conquest of Normandy.[996] He made no pretence of holding it in the name of either his wife or his son; it was his own by right of conquest, and that right was formally acknowledged by the king of France. Before they parted in 1144 Louis granted to Geoffrey the investiture of the whole Norman duchy, save one spot which he claimed as the price of his favour:—the old bone of contention, Gisors.[997]

- [993] Rob. Torigni, a. 1144. Driencourt is now known as Neufchâtel-en-Bray.

- [994] Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1144 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 35, 146); Chronn. S. Michael. and S. Steph. Cadom. a. 1144 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. pp. 773, 780).

- [995] Rob. Torigni, a. 1144. “Willermus Monachus Flandrensis”—can he have been really a monk?

- [996] Rob. Torigni, a. 1145.

- [997] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 282.

The Angevin conqueror had been called home by a revolt among his own barons.[998] The leader was, as before, Robert of Sablé;[999] but there was worse to come. Geoffrey’s brother Elias was persuaded by the rebels to put forth a claim to the county of Maine and uphold his pretension by force of arms. Geoffrey defeated him, took him prisoner, and put him in ward at Tours,[1000] where he remained five years, and whence he was released only to die of the effects of his imprisonment.[1001] The revolt failed as all previous revolts against Geoffrey had failed; the count swooped down upon Robert and his accomplices with such irresistible energy that they were utterly confounded and made submission at once.[1002] Undisputed master from the Poitevin border to the English Channel, Geoffrey once more cast his eyes across the sea, not with any thought of joining his wife in her desperate venture, but with an uneasy longing to get his heir safe out of the entanglement of a losing cause and bring him home to share in his own triumph. He therefore sent envoys to Earl Robert, begging that Henry might be allowed to come and see him, if only for a short time. The request was at once granted, and by Ascension-tide 1147 the boy was again at his father’s side.[1003] His uncle the earl of Gloucester had escorted him as far as Wareham;[1004] there they parted, as it turned out, for the last time. Robert caught a fever and died at Bristol early in the following November.[1005] Then at last the Empress herself felt that all was lost. Her last faint chance had expired with the wise and valiant brother whose patient devotion she had never fully appreciated until it was too late. In the early spring of 1148 she gave up the struggle and followed her son back to Normandy, to live thenceforth in peace by her husband’s side;[1006] while the knot which the sword had failed to cut was left to be slowly disentangled by more skilful hands which had long been preparing for their task.

- [998] Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1145 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 35, 146).

- [999] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (as above·/·Marchegay, Comtes), p. 269.

- [1000] Ibid. Gesta Cons. (ibid.), p. 155.

- [1001] Gesta Cons. as above. The Chron. Vindoc. (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 173), gives the date, 1150. Cf. Chron. Tur. Magn. a. 1110 (Salmon, Chron. Touraine, p. 131).

- [1002] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 270–272. It is here that the writer places the building of Châteauneuf-sur-Sarthe (see above, p. 267). In connexion with this affair he gives an amusing reason for the warlike habits of the Angevins: “Antiquitus nempe Andegavenses præliandi consuetudinem habebant, forsan, ut puto, a Deo sibi permissum, ne per otium pejoribus inimicis expugnarentur, moribus scilicet vitiosis.” Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (as above), pp. 270, 271.

- [1003] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 131. Rob. Torigni, a. 1147.

- [1004] Gerv. Cant. as above.

- [1005] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 131. Gervase is not clear about the year, which we learn from Ann. Tewkesb. a. 1147 (Luard, Ann. Monast. vol. i. p. 47), and from Ann. Cantuar. a. 1147 (Liebermann, Geschichtsquellen, p. 6). The place is given in Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 132.

- [1006] Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 133—dated a year too early.

Note.
THE TOPOGRAPHY OF THE BATTLE OF LINCOLN.

The topography of the battle of Lincoln is a very puzzling matter. We have two sources of information, and it seems impossible to make them agree. The questions to be solved are two: 1. Which way did Robert and Ralf approach the city? 2. Where was the battle actually fought?

1. The first question lies between William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon. William (Hist. Nov., l. iii. cc. 39, 40; Hardy, p. 741) says distinctly that the main army started from Gloucester; that Ralf and his troops joined them somewhere on the road; that Stephen, hearing of their approach, left off besieging the castle and went forth to meet them; and that on Candlemas day they arrived “ad flumen quod inter duos exercitus præterfluebat, Trenta nomine, quod et ortu suo et pluviarum profluvio tam magnum fuerat ut nullatenus vado transitum præberet.” He then gives the story of the crossing. Henry of Huntingdon (l. viii. c. 13; Arnold, p. 268) describes the crossing much in the same way, except that the “consul audacissimus” to whom he attributes the first plunge seems to be Ralf, whereas in William’s version Robert is the hero. But Henry makes no mention of the Trent; in his story the plunge is into “paludem pœne intransibilem.”

For both these versions there is something to be said. The authority of the two witnesses is very evenly balanced. Chronologically, both are equally near to their subject. Geographically, the archdeacon of Huntingdon is nearer than the librarian of Malmesbury; but he is not a whit more likely to have been personally present; and if Henry may have got his information from Bishop Alexander, William may just as probably have got his from Earl Robert himself. The question therefore becomes one of the intrinsic probability of the two stories. Here again there is something to be said for William; for although the most direct and obvious road from Gloucester to Lincoln would undoubtedly be the Foss-Way, along the eastern side of the Trent valley, yet it is possible that the earls might have chosen a more unusual route along its western side, just because it would seem less likely to their enemies. Yet we can hardly accept William’s version; for the fording of the Trent, especially in winter, and when its waters were—as he himself tells us—swollen with heavy rains, would be little short of a physical impossibility. At the origin of his mistake (or of Earl Robert’s, for it must surely have been Robert who told him the story) we may perhaps be able to guess. The writer of the Gesta Stephani (Sewell, p. 71) says nothing of either river or marsh; the only thing which he mentions is a ford, of whose whereabouts he gives no indication whatever. “Cumque fortissimam ... [Stephanus] præmississet cohortem in exitu cujusdam vadi eis ad obsistendum, illi ... cum violentiâ in ipsos irruentes vadum occupaverunt.” Now, if the earls had followed the Foss-Way quite up to Lincoln, it would have brought them not to any ford, but to the bridge over the Witham, leading directly into the city by the south gate. But the city was bitterly hostile to them; had they attempted to pass through it to reach the castle, they must have cut their way through a crowd of enemies. There was however another and a much more practicable route open to them. Some little distance to westward of the bridge, the Witham at its junction with the Foss-Dyke expands into a broad sheet of water known by the name of Brayford. The kindness of the Rev. Precentor Venables has enabled me to ascertain that half way between the bridge and Brayford Head (i.e. the eastern end of this sheet of water) there still exists in the bed of the river a well-paved ford road, probably of Roman origin. By this ford the army could cross the river and advance towards the castle without entering the town at all; and I feel little doubt that this was the ford at which Stephen posted the guard mentioned by his biographer, and across which the two earls swam with their followers. In that case William of Malmesbury’s mistake as to the name of the river is not surprising. The Foss-Dyke unites the Witham and the Trent; a medieval geographer could hardly be expected to know accurately where the one ended and the other began. Out of the three names so closely connected, he not unnaturally chose the one most generally known, and concluded the whole water-way under the comprehensive name of Trent; while on the other hand, the overflowing of dyke and river may quite sufficiently account for Henry of Huntingdon having described them and the flooded ground on each side of them all together as an “almost impassable marsh.”

2. Local tradition persists in asserting that the battle was fought to the north of the city, somewhere beyond the New Port. If this was so, Stephen must have led his troops out of the city by the old Roman way—the Ermine Street—through the New Port, and drawn them up on the plateau formed by the top of the range of hills whose southern extremity is occupied by the city itself; and his enemies, after crossing the water, must have marched all round the south-western foot of the hill, below the castle, and then climbed the western slope to meet Stephen on the top. Such a manœuvre is doubtless possible; but it hardly seems to agree with the indications—provokingly few and slight though they are—given us by the historians. None of them indeed tells us which way Stephen went forth; the nearest approach to a clear statement is that of his own biographer, who says “extra civitatem obvius eis audacter occurrit” (Gesta Steph. as above). Now marching up northward can hardly be called “going forth boldly to meet” an enemy who was coming from the south-west. The tradition in fact is in itself very improbable, and has no evidence to support it. In 1881 I made two attempts at a personal examination of the topography, with the help of indications kindly furnished me by Precentor Venables. The result was as follows: The western wall of the castle-enclosure does not stretch to the extreme edge of the hill; beyond it lies a part of the plateau, now occupied by the County Asylum, and marked by Stukeley as the site of Stephen’s encampment. Stukeley was probably misled by the circumstance that an adjoining bit of ground was called “Battle-piece”—a name which is now known to have been derived not from any battle fought there, but from the place having been set apart for trials by battle. But farther to the west there lies at the foot of the ridge a tract of comparatively level ground, rising slightly on the one side to join the slope of the hill, and on the other gradually sinking into the lower land which spreads to the bank of the Trent. This tract—part of it is now a race-course—seems to be really the only place in which it is possible for the two armies to have met. The ground immediately south of the castle, between its outer wall and the northern bank of the Foss-Dyke, is too steep to allow of anything like a pitched battle between two formally-arrayed armies. The earls after crossing the ford could hardly do anything but lead their troops round the foot of the hill, to draw them up at last on the western side of the level tract above described. Stephen, on the other hand, could hardly have chosen a better post for defence than its eastern side, with the ridge of the hill at his back.

CHAPTER VII.
THE ENGLISH CHURCH.
1136–1149.

The departure of the Empress was followed by a time of comparative quiet; but it was the quiet of exhaustion, not of rest. In the twelve years which had passed away since King Henry’s death all his work seemed to have been utterly undone. Every vestige of law and authority, order and peace, had been swept away by the torrent of destruction which in those twelve years had overwhelmed the whole country. When at last the waves began to subside, one ark of refuge was found to have escaped the general desolation; one vessel alone had been able to outride the storm. The state was a wreck; the Church remained.

The pilot of the sacred bark, during the first seven years of Stephen’s reign, had been the king’s brother Henry, bishop of Winchester. The youngest child of Stephen-Henry and Adela of Blois, devoted by his mother to the religious life, had been brought up in the famous abbey of Cluny; thence, in 1126, he was summoned by his uncle the king of England to become abbot of one of the most ancient and illustrious monasteries in Britain, that of Glastonbury; and three years later the young abbot—he cannot have been more than twenty-eight—was raised to the bishopric of Winchester.[1007] His rapid advancement was no doubt owing to the personal favour of his uncle; but none the less did it place in the important see of Winchester a prelate as different in temper as in origin from the crowd of low-born secular clerks who then filled the ranks of the English episcopate. Steeped in ecclesiastical and monastic traditions from his very cradle, Henry was before all things a churchman and a monk. It was to him and to men like him that the religious revival which sprang up in his uncle’s later years naturally looked for the guidance which it could not find either in the secular bishops or in the shy, irresolute primate; and the consequences appeared as soon as the king was dead, when the helm of the state and that of the Church—the one dropped by Roger of Salisbury, the other never firmly grasped by William of Canterbury—were both at once taken by the young bishop of Winchester. His personal influence sufficed to ensure his brother’s election to the throne; the legatine commission sent to him in 1139, overriding the claims of the new primate, made him the acknowledged leader of the English Church, and, coinciding as it did with the complete break-down of all secular government at Bishop Roger’s fall, practically vested in him and in the clerical synods which he convened the sole remnant of deliberative and legislative authority throughout the kingdom. Clergy and people followed him like a flock of sheep; yet he was never really trusted by either of the two political parties, because he never really belonged to either. His own political ideal was independent of all party considerations. It was the ideal of the ecclesiastical statesman in the strictest sense: to insure the well-being of the state by securing the rights and privileges and enforcing the discipline of the Church. In his eyes the whole machinery of secular government, including the sovereign, existed solely for that one end, and he carried out his theory to its logical result in the synods which deposed Stephen and Matilda each in turn, as each in turn broke the compact with the Church which had raised them to the throne. Of the use to be made in later days of the precedent thus created he and his brother-clergy never dreamed; they are, however, entitled to the credit of having been the only branch of the body-politic which made an organized effort to rescue England from the chaos into which she had fallen. The failure of their efforts hitherto was due partly to the overwhelming force of circumstances, partly to the character of Henry himself. His temper was like that of the uncle whose name he bore—the calm, imperturbable Norman temper which neither interest nor passion could throw off its balance or off its guard; and with the Norman coolness he had also the Norman tenacity, fearlessness and strength of will. But although the main elements of his nature were thus derived from his mother’s ancestors, he had not altogether escaped the doom of his father’s house. He was free from the worst defect of his race, their fatal unsteadiness of purpose; but he had his full share of their rashness, their self-will, and their peculiar mental short-sightedness. His policy really had a definite and a noble end, but his endeavours to compass that end were little more than a series of bold experiments. Moreover, his conception of the end itself was out of harmony with the requirements of the time. Churchman as he was to the core, his churchmanship was almost as unlike that of the rising generation, trained up under the influence of the new religious orders, as the downright worldliness of the Salisbury school with which some of them were, though most unjustly, half inclined to confound him. He belonged to a type of ecclesiastical statesmen, or rather political churchmen, who did not shrink from arraying the Church militant in the spoils of earthly triumph, and would fain elevate her above the world in outward pomp and majesty no less than in inward purity and holiness. This was the school of which Cluny had been, ever since the days of Gregory VII., the citadel and stronghold; and Henry was thus attached to it by all the associations of his youth as well as by his own natural disposition. But in the second quarter of the twelfth century this Cluniac school was losing its hold upon the finer and loftier spirits of the time, and the influence of Cluny was beginning to pale before the purer radiance diffused from S. Bernard’s “bright valley,” Clairvaux.

- [1007] Joh. Glaston. (Hearne), pp. 165, 166.

Henry’s legatine commission, too, which was a chief source of his strength, was really a source of moral and spiritual weakness to the English Church; for it set him over the head of the man who ought to have been her representative and leader, and placed in the hands of a mere diocesan bishop all, and more than all, the power and authority which belonged of right to the primate of all Britain.[1008] Until very recent times the English Church had been, by an unwritten but perfectly well-established privilege of immemorial antiquity, exempt from all legatine control; papal envoys were admitted only for special purposes, and exercised no authority within the province of the “transmarine Pope”—the primate of all Britain. In technical language, the archbishop of Canterbury, as successor of S. Augustine, was by virtue of his office legatus natus of the Holy See, and therefore not subject to the jurisdiction of a legatus a latere. During the reign of Henry I. three attempts had been made to break through this venerable tradition; on the third occasion, in 1125, the outrageous behaviour of the legate John of Crema roused Archbishop William to go and protest at Rome, whence he returned clothed in his own person with the functions of legatus a latere.[1009] This commission, granted by Honorius II., was renewed by Innocent,[1010] and William thus retained it until his death. When that event occurred Henry of Winchester must have felt himself, and must have been generally felt throughout the country, to be almost naturally marked out for William’s successor. It seems, indeed, that he was actually elected to the vacant primacy. There was however a difficulty which proved to be insuperable. The translation of a bishop from one see to another could only be effected by a special license from the Pope; and in this case the license was apparently refused.[1011] Driven thus to seek elsewhere for a primate, Stephen, or it may be Stephen’s wiser queen, sought him in the home of Lanfranc and Anselm, and brought over a third abbot of Bec to walk in the steps and sit on the throne of his sainted predecessors at Canterbury.[1012] Theobald came of a good Norman family, and was well reported of for learning, virtue and piety;[1013] further than that, the world as yet knew nothing of him; it was therefore not unnatural, though it was distinctly unfortunate, that when Pope Innocent II. determined to appoint a resident legate in England he appointed Henry instead of Theobald.

- [1008] See on this Ann. Winton. a. 1143 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. p. 53); Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 384; and Will. Newb. l. i. c. 10 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 43).

- [1009] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 84; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 381, 382.

- [1010] In 1132, it seems. See Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 7 (Hardy, p. 699).

- [1011] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 908.

- [1012] Queen Matilda’s share in the appointment seems distinctly implied in Vita Theobaldi (Giles, Lanfranc, vol. i.), p. 337; Chron. Becc. a. 1137 (ib. p. 207).

- [1013] See Vita Theobaldi (as above), pp. 337–339; Chron. Becc. (ibid.), p. 207.

For several years the archbishop bore his supersession quietly. His political sympathies appear to have always inclined to the side of the Empress, but his conduct shewed no trace of party spirit; no personal jealousy on his part ever thwarted Henry’s attempts at pacification. He doubtless felt that he could afford to wait; for his metropolitical rights, though kept in abeyance for a time, were inalienable and independent of all outward accidents, while the legatine authority was drawn solely from the commission of an individual Pope, and a change either of persons or of policy at Rome might at any moment reduce Henry of Winchester to the rank of a mere suffragan bishop. Henry himself was so conscious of this danger that he began to urge upon his patron Innocent a project for raising the see of Winchester to metropolitical rank and furnishing it with two (or, according to another account, seven) suffragan sees, to be carved out of the southern part of the province of Canterbury. This wild scheme was so far endorsed by Innocent that he actually sent Henry a pall, the emblem of archiepiscopal dignity, in 1142; so, at least, the story ran.[1014] As yet, however, the matter rested wholly between legate and Pope; if the archbishop knew anything of their plots against him, he was wise enough to let them plot undisturbed. Instead of trying to fish in the troubled waters of the present, he was looking to the open sea of the future and meditating how best to prepare himself, his Church and his adopted country for the voyage which lay before them. While the legate was making and unmaking sovereigns and plotting a revolution in the Anglican hierarchy, the primate was quietly gathering into his own household the choicest spirits of the time, drawing around him a group of earnest, deep-thinking students, of highly-cultured, large-minded, dispassionate politicians; in a word, making his palace the seminary and the training-college, the refuge and the home, of a new generation of English scholars and English statesmen.

- [1014] Ann. Winton. a. 1143 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. p. 53); R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 255.

Foremost among them stood Thomas the son of Gilbert Becket, ex-port-reeve of London. Troubles had fallen heavy upon Gilbert and his wife since the days when from their comfortable home in Cheapside their boy rode forth to his school at Merton or to his hawking excursions with Richer de l’Aigle. A series of disastrous fires had brought them down from affluence almost to poverty[1015] and compelled them to take their son away from school at an earlier age than the mother, at least, would have desired. She watched over his studies with the deepest interest and care,[1016] and it was probably her influence and good management which, after an interval of idleness at home, sent him off again to study for a short time in Paris.[1017] The boy learned quickly and easily, as he did everything to which he chose to put his hand and give his mind; but his heart was set upon riding and hawking and the sports and occupations of active life, far more than upon the book-learning to which he devoted himself chiefly for the sake of pleasing his mother; and when she died, in his twenty-second year,[1018] his studies came to an end. Her death broke up the home; Gilbert, worn out with age and grief, was powerless to guide or help his son; and Thomas soon found it impossible to make their scanty means sufficient to maintain them both.[1019] Irksome as the work must have been to such a temper as his, he took a situation as clerk in the counting-house of a kinsman, Osbern Huitdeniers, or “Eightpenny” as we might perhaps call him now.[1020] Osbern was a wealthy man, enjoying great consideration both in the city and at court;[1021] at this time—just after the outbreak of the civil war—he seems to have been one of the sheriffs of London, for we are told that Thomas himself held a subordinate civic post as clerk and accountant to those functionaries.[1022] For two or three years, the years of the personal struggle between Stephen and Matilda, Thomas endured the drudgery of the office as best he might,[1023] till at length a more congenial position was offered him, first in the household of his old friend Richer de l’Aigle[1024] and then in that of Archbishop Theobald. When the war-storm had partly subsided and the primate was beginning to organize his plans, some of his clerks who had been guests at the little house in Cheapside in its prosperous days remembered the bright boy whom they had often noticed there, and determined to enlist him in their own ranks. One of them, known to us only by his nickname of “Baille-hache” or the “Hatchet,” undertook to persuade the young man himself;[1025] two others, Baldwin the archdeacon and Eustace his brother, commended him and his father to the primate. It chanced that Gilbert, though he had been domiciled at Rouen before his emigration to England, was a native of Thierceville, close to the Bec-Herlouin. A chat with Thomas’s father over old times and old names around Bec made its former abbot all the more disposed to welcome Thomas himself, when he rode out to Harrow and let his friend Baille-hache present him to the archbishop.[1026] Before many months had passed he was admitted to the innermost circle of Theobald’s confidential counsellors. That circle consisted of three young men—John of Canterbury, Roger of Pont-l’Evêque and Thomas of London. Without consulting one or other of these three the archbishop rarely did anything;[1027] and in matters of special difficulty or delicacy he relied mainly upon Thomas.[1028]

[1015] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 8, 9; E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 359; Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 3.

[1016] Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 8.

[1017] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 14. The Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 21–25, has a curious and pretty legend of his stay in Paris.

[1018] Will. Cant. and Anon. I. as above. This brings Rohesia’s death to a date between December 21, 1138, and December 21, 1139; for although Mr. Magnusson (Preface to Thomas Saga, vol. ii. pp. c, ci) declares that Thomas was born “not as stated [ T.,” i.e. Thomas Saga, “i. 12] in 1117, but in 1118,” his own chronological argument infallibly leads to just the opposite conclusion.

[1019] E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 359.

[1020] “Tandem civi vice tabellionis adhæsit,” Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 3. “Ad quendam Lundrensem, cognatum suum,” Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 8. “Osbernus Octo-nummi cognomine,” E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 361. “Osbern Witdeniers,” Garnier (Hippeau), p. 9. In the Pipe Roll 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 146, among the London accounts, one of the sureties for the debts of Hugh Cordele is “Osbertus viii denarii”—clearly the same man.

[1021] E. Grim, Anon. I. and Garnier, as above.

[1022] “Reversus” [sc. Thomas a Parisiis], “receptus est in partem sollicitudinis reipublicæ Londoniensis, et vicecomitum clericus et rationalis effectus.” Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 14.

[1023] E. Grim, Anon. I. and Garnier, as above.

[1024] Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 31. It is not very clear whether Thomas’s stay with Richer should come after or before his stay with Osbern, which the Saga omits altogether.

[1025] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 10; E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 361; Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 9. None of them name the man; but he is clearly the one who ultimately introduced Thomas to the primate; and we know his nickname from the sneer of Roger of Pont-l’Evêque; Garnier (as above); E. Grim (as above), p. 362; Anon. I. (as above), p. 10.

[1026] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 15. “Thierrici-villa” is interpreted by M. Hippeau (Garnier, Vie de S. Thomas, introd. p. xxiv) “Probablement Thierceville, canton de Montfort, département de l’Eure.”

[1027] Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 4.

[1028] There is a curious and amusing account of their mutual relations in Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 37.

He had secured his services at the right moment; for the long impending crisis between himself and the legate was now fast drawing near. In purely secular politics Theobald had hitherto been content to follow Henry’s lead; on a question of ecclesiastical politics they had now come to a distinct severance. Archbishop Thurstan of York had died in February 1140;[1029] in January 1141 William, treasurer of the see, was appointed in his stead, and received the investiture of the temporalities from Stephen in the camp before Lincoln.[1030] The appointment had somewhat the look of a court job; for William was a nephew of the king and the legate;[1031] he had been brought up in wealth, luxury and idleness, and although of amiable and blameless character, was obviously not the man for such a post as the northern primacy. A minority of the York chapter therefore, supported by many of the most respected clergy of the province, chief among whom was Abbot Richard of Fountains, protested against the election as having been procured by undue influence, in the form of bribery on William’s own part and intimidation on that of William of Aumale, earl of York, acting on behalf of the king and the legate; and this view was shared by the southern primate. The legate, apparently shrinking from the responsibility of consecrating his nephew by his own sole authority (for Theobald absolutely refused to assist him), let the matter rest during the remainder of that troubled year and then sent the elect of York to plead his own cause at Rome. In Lent 1143 the Pope gave his decision: “If Dean William of York can swear that the chapter did not receive through the earl of Aumale a command from the king to elect his nephew: and if the archbishop-elect himself can swear that he did not seek his election by bribery:—then let him be consecrated.” A council met at Winchester in September to receive the two oaths and witness the consecration. The dean of York, however, was unable to attend; he had been elected to the bishopric of Durham, and was absorbed in struggling for the possession of his see with an intruder named William Cumin, who had been placed there by the king of Scots. The partizans of the archbishop-elect, foreseeing some obstacle of this kind, had procured the addition to the Pope’s decree of a saving clause whereby they were permitted to substitute “some other approved person” for the dean: such, at least, was their account of the matter. Ralf, bishop of Orkney, and two abbots therefore took the required oath in the place of William of Durham, and William of York was consecrated by his uncle the legate, three days before Michaelmas 1143.[1032] Theobald still refused his assent to the whole proceeding.[1033]

- [1029] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 130.

- [1030] Ib. pp. 133, 134.

- [1031] Apparently a son of their sister Emma by her marriage with a certain Count Herbert. See Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 149 and note v.

- [1032] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 139, 142–146. See also Thos. Stubbs (Twysden, X. Scriptt.), col. 1721, and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 123.

- [1033] Gerv. Cant. as above.

Henry was triumphant; but it was his last triumph. On that very day a new Pope, Celestine II., was chosen in place of Innocent, who had died two days before. The legatine commission expired with the Pope who had granted it; the bishop of Winchester became again a mere suffragan of Canterbury, and Theobald suddenly found himself primate in fact as well as in name. Everything now depended on the dispositions of the new Pope. Accordingly, early in November both Theobald and Henry set out for Rome.[1034] The latter soon learned that his journey was useless; Celestine was “a favourer of the Angevins”;[1035] and when Theobald and his confidant Thomas arrived at Rome they found no difficulty in persuading the Pope to transfer the legatine commission from the bishop of Winchester to the primate.[1036] Henry consoled himself by turning aside to Cluny and spending a quiet winter in the home of his boyhood. Next spring came another change; Celestine died on March 9, 1144, and was succeeded by Lucius II. To Lucius Henry went, and in his eyes he found at least so much favour that he was acquitted of sundry charges brought against him by emissaries from Anjou. But the legation was apparently left altogether in abeyance; if it was not renewed to Theobald—a point which is not quite clear—it was at any rate not restored to Henry.[1037]

- [1034] Will. Newb., l. i. c. 10 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 43). Cf. Ann. Waverl. a. 1143 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. p. 229).

- [1035] “Alumpnus Andegavensium.” Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 146.

- [1036] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 384.

- [1037] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 146, 147.

The tide which had borne both Henry and Stephen to their triumph was in truth now rising far above their heads. The religious movement of which Henry had once seemed destined to become a leader had gone sweeping on till it left him far behind. It was the one element of national life whose growth, instead of being checked, seems to have been actually fostered by the anarchy. The only bright pages in the story of those “nineteen winters” are the pages in the Monasticon Anglicanum which tell of the progress and the work of the new religious orders, and shew us how, while knights and barons, king and Empress, were turning the fairest regions of England into a wilderness, Templars and Hospitaliers were setting up their priories, Austin canons were directing schools and serving hospitals, and the sons of S. Bernard were making the very desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose. The vigour of the movement shewed itself in the diversity of forms which it assumed. Most of them were offshoots of the Order of S. Augustine. The Augustinian schools were the best in England; the “Black Canons” excelled as teachers; they excelled yet more as nurses and guardians of the poor. One of the most attractive features of the time is the great number of hospices, hospitals, or almshouses as we should call them now, established for the reception and maintenance of the aged, the needy and the infirm. Such were the two famous houses of S. Giles, Cripplegate, and S. Bartholomew, Smithfield; such was the Hospital of S. Katharine near the Tower, founded in 1148 by Stephen’s queen Matilda, and served by the canons of Holy Trinity at Aldgate, to whom the younger “good Queen Maude” was almost as devoted a friend as her aunt and namesake had been. Such, too, was another foundation whose white church, nestling amid a clump of trees in the meadows through which the little blue Itchen goes winding down to the sea, is the only unmutilated remnant that Winchester still retains of the handiwork of her legate-bishop Henry. There, before he built his own fortified house, Henry founded for thirteen poor old men the Hospital of the Holy Cross; and there, while the dwelling which he made so strong for himself has perished, the “Almshouse of noble Poverty” still stands—the hospital indeed rebuilt by a later bishop to whom it owes its poetical name, but the church unaltered since its founder’s days—a lasting memorial of that better, spiritual side of his character which the world least saw and least believed in. Another class of hospitals was destined for the reception of poor travellers, especially pilgrims. Such had been, in far-off Palestine, the original purpose of two societies of pious laymen which had now made their way back into Europe and even into England in the shape of two great military orders, the Hospitaliers or Knights of S. John and the Templars. They, too, lived by the rule of S. Austin. Another offshoot of the Augustinian order consisted of the White Canons or Premonstratensians (so called from their first establishment at Prémontré in the diocese of Laon), for whom, in the midst of the civil war, Peter de Gousla endowed a priory at Newhouse in Lincolnshire, while his wife founded a house at Brodholm in Nottinghamshire for sisters of the same order.[1038] “What shall we think,” exclaims an inmate of one of the great Augustinian houses of Yorkshire, William of Newburgh,—“what shall we think of all these religious places which in King Stephen’s time began more abundantly to arise and to flourish, but that they are God’s castles, wherein the servants of the true Anointed King do keep watch, and His young soldiers are exercised in warfare against spiritual evil? For indeed at that time, when the royal authority had lost all vigour, the mighty men of the realm, and whosoever was able, were all building castles either for their own protection or for their neighbours’ hurt; and thus while through King Stephen’s weakness, or rather through the malice of the Devil, who is ever a nourisher of strife, evils were swarming and abundant, there did yet more abound and more gloriously shine forth the wise and salutary providence of the Almighty King, Who at that very time did the more mightily confound the king of pride by raising up for Himself such fortresses as beseemed the King of Peace. For in the short while that Stephen reigned, or rather bore the title of king, there arose in England many more dwellings of the servants and handmaids of God than had arisen there in the course of the whole previous century.”[1039]

- [1038] The Augustinian houses are in Dugdale’s Monast. Angl., vol. vi. pt. 1; the hospitals, the military orders and the Premonstratensians in vol. vi. pt. 2.

- [1039] Will. Newb., l. i. c. 15 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 53).

It is significant that this enthusiastic outburst of the historian-canon of Newburgh is called forth by the contemplation not of his own order, but of three great Cistercian houses, Byland, Rievaux and Fountains. Buried in their lonely wildernesses, the Cistercians seem at first glance to have been intent only on saving their own souls, taking no part in the regeneration of society at large. But the truth is far otherwise. While the other orders were—if we may venture to take up the suggestive figure employed by William of Newburgh—the working, fighting rank and file of the spiritual army, the White Monks were at once its sentinels, its guides and its commanding officers; they kept watch and ward over its organization and its safety, they pointed the way wherein it should go, they directed its energies and inspired its action. For the never-ending crusade of the Church against the world had at this time found its leader in a simple Cistercian monk, who never was Pope, nor legate, nor archbishop, nor even official head of his own order—who was simply abbot of Clairvaux—yet who, by the irresistible, unconscious influence of a pure mind and a single aim, had brought all Christendom to his feet. It was to the “Bright Valley,” to Clairvaux, that men looked from the most distant lands for light amid the darkness; it was to S. Bernard that all instinctively turned for counsel and for guidance. The story of S. Gilbert of Sempringham may serve for an example. The father of Gilbert was a Norman holding property in Lincolnshire in the time of Henry I.; his mother was a woman of Old-English descent. The boy ran away from school and made his escape to France; there he repented of his idleness, threw himself zealously into the pursuit of letters, and after some years came home to set up in his native place a school for boys and girls. He taught them a great deal more than mere book-learning; his purity, sweetness and fervour won the very hearts and souls of all who came under his influence; and there was something in his lofty yet tender nature which made him seem peculiarly fitted for a spiritual director of women. Seven maidens first devoted themselves to the religious life under his guidance; others soon followed their example; several men did the like. A double monastery thus grew up at Sempringham, under the protection of Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, in the earliest years of Stephen’s reign. For some time it continued subject to no other rule than its founder’s own will. He saw, however, the necessity for a more lasting basis of organization; instead of trying to devise one himself, he applied to the general chapter of Cîteaux and besought them to take charge of his little flock. They, however, refused; since Gilbert had been inspired to found a new religious society, they would not presume to interfere with his mission; he must draw up a rule for his own spiritual children. He ended by working out his scheme into a composite institution which aimed at combining the excellencies of all earlier rules, but in which the Cistercian element strongly predominated. The Gilbertine priories, when fully constituted, consisted of four orders of persons: canons, who followed the rule of S. Austin; lay-brethren, nuns and lay-sisters, all bound by the rule of Cîteaux; while the whole community was held together by certain additional regulations specially devised by the founder. The new order spread rapidly through eastern England; and before S. Gilbert’s own life reached its close, he had the satisfaction of seeing his spiritual children take a highly honourable part in the great ecclesiastical struggle of which the foremost champion and victim was S. Thomas of Canterbury.[1040]

- [1040] On the Gilbertines and their founder see Dugdale, Monast. Angl., vol. vi. pt. 2, pp. iii*–lix*; and Will. Newb., l. i. c. 16 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 54, 55).

One sees in this story how instinctively the religious reformers of the day went to Cîteaux for a model and a guide; and one sees, too, how little the Cistercians were as yet inclined to abuse their influence by reaping where they had not sown. The extraordinary position of Bernard himself was not of his own seeking; the “care of all the churches” came upon him whether he would or not; as one of his biographers expresses it, all Christendom looked upon him as a divinely-appointed Moses of whom the ordained hierarchy and even the supreme pontiff himself were but subordinate mouthpieces and representatives.[1041] Like their prototype in the Old Testament, the Aarons of the time did not always understand the policy or appreciate the aims of their inspired brother, and the spiritual party in the Church sometimes found its worst stumbling-block within the walls of the Lateran. Year by year, however, its influence grew and spread, till on the death of Pope Lucius II. in February 1145 a Cistercian, Bernard abbot of S. Anastasius at Rome, was raised to the chair of S. Peter by the name of Eugene III. With him the anti-Bernardine party had no chance of a moment’s hearing; threats, flatteries or bribes were all alike thrown away upon a pontiff whose glory and whose strength lay in having no will of his own, in being simply the voice which proclaimed and the hand which executed the thoughts of his greater namesake at Clairvaux. “They say I am Pope, not you!” wrote S. Bernard to him,[1042] half playfully, half in gentle reproach, and Eugene gloried in the saying. A new departure in the policy of the Roman see was marked by the fulfilment of one of Bernard’s most cherished schemes, the preaching of a new crusade for the deliverance of the Holy Land, whence an imploring cry for help came from the widowed Queen Melisenda—for King Fulk of Anjou had been cut off suddenly in the midst of his labours, and his realm, left to the rule of a woman and a child, was rapidly falling a prey to the Infidels.[1043] At Vézelay, on Easter-day 1146, the young King Louis of France took the cross from S. Bernard’s own hands amid a scene of the wildest enthusiasm. The Emperor Conrad soon followed his example, and at Pentecost 1147 the expedition set out.

- [1041] Ern. Bonneval, Vita S. Bernardi, l. ii. c. 4 (S. Bern. Opp., ed. Mabillon, vol. ii. col. 1102).

- [1042] S. Bernard. Ep. ccxxxix (Opp., Mabillon, vol. 1. col. 235).

- [1043] On Fulk’s reign in Palestine see Will. Tyr., ll. xiv. and xv. The exact date of his death is doubtful; Will. Tyr., l. xv. c. 27, and l. xvi. c. 2, gives it as November 13, 1142, and says that Baldwin II. was crowned on the following Christmas-day. But in l. xvi. c. 4 he says that Edessa was lost in the interval between Fulk’s death and his son’s coronation, and it is known from other sources that Edessa was taken by the Infidels on Christmas-night 1144. Moreover there is in Paoli’s Codice Dipl. del S. Mil. Ord. Gerosol., vol. i. p. 29, a charter of Melisenda dated “1149, Indictione xii.,” which she calls the fifth year of her son’s reign. The Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 35, 146), Chron. Turon. Magn. (Salmon, Chron. Touraine, p. 134), Chron. Namnet. (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 558) and Ric. Poitiers (ib. p. 415) all date Fulk’s death 1143; the Chron. S. Flor. Salm. (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 191) places it in 1141, but couples it with the death of Pope Innocent, which certainly occurred in 1143. Fulk’s end was characteristic, being caused by his own impetuosity. He was thrown from his horse in dashing too hastily after a hare started by some children, as he was riding with Melisenda outside the walls of Acre (Will. Tyr., l. xv. c. 27). See the peculiar philosophizing of the Tours chronicler thereon (Salmon, as above).

As far as its direct object was concerned, this second crusade failed completely; yet it had not been projected in vain. As said a friend and biographer of S. Bernard: “If it was God’s will thereby to deliver, not the bodies of many eastern folk from the bondage of the heathen, but the souls of many western folk from the bondage of sin, who shall dare to ask why He has thus done?”[1044] If the movement did nothing for Palestine, it did something for England. Torn and exhausted with her internal divisions, she could take no part in it as a state; but nowhere was it more readily joined by individual volunteers. The preaching of the Crusade was a spark which kindled into flame, in the heart of more than one of the troublers of the land, the smouldering embers of a capacity for better things; it was a trumpet-call which roused more than one brave knight to forsake the miserable party-strife with which perhaps in his secret soul he had long been growing disgusted, and fling into a better cause the energies which he had been wasting upon his country’s ruin.[1045] But the movement did more for England than this. It brought to light among the English people a spirit whose existence at such a time could otherwise hardly have been suspected. The one success of the Crusade was achieved by a little independent squadron of one hundred and sixty-four ships which sailed from Dartmouth on May 23, six days before the feast of the Ascension, 1147. The expedition consisted of Germans, Flemings and Englishmen, the latter being the most numerous. Nearly all were men of low degree; they had no commander-in-chief; each nationality chose its own leader. The “men of the Empire”—a body of Low-Germans who, for some unknown reason, chose to be independent of the great Imperial host—followed Count Arnold of Aerschot, who seems to have been the only person of rank in the whole assemblage; the Flemings and the men of Queen Matilda’s county of Boulogne were led by Christian of Gistelles. The English grouped themselves according to the districts of their birth under the guidance of four marshals; Hervey of Glanville led the men of Norfolk and Suffolk; Simon of Dover[1046] commanded the ships of Kent; a man named Andrew was chief of the Londoners; and a miscellaneous contingent from other parts of the country was headed by Saher de Arcelles. The whole company bound themselves by vows almost as stringent as those of a religious order; they were pledged to eschew all fine clothes and personal indulgences, and to help and avenge one another in all things as sworn brethren; each ship had its own chaplain and its regular services, as if it were a parish; every man confessed and communicated once a week; and for the enforcement of all these rules two men were elected out of every thousand to form a body of sworn judges[1047] who should administer the common funds and assist the marshals in maintaining order. These warrior-pilgrims, sailing down the western coast of the Spanish peninsula on their way to the Mediterranean Sea, touched at Oporto; at the entreaty of the Portuguese King Alfonso and his people they exchanged their intended crusade in Holy Land for one which was perhaps more useful—a campaign for the deliverance of Christian Portugal from its Moorish oppressors. The Moors who occupied Lisbon were starved into surrender by a four months’ blockade; the crusaders entered the city in triumph; in the hour of temptation English discipline proved strong enough to control German greed,[1048] and renouncing all share in the fruit of their victory these single-hearted soldiers of the Cross made over the future capital of Portugal to its Christian sovereign and went home rejoicing that they, a few poor men of lowly birth and no reputation, had been counted worthy to strike a successful blow for the Faith, while its royal and imperial champions at the head of their countless hosts met with nothing but disaster and disgrace.[1049]

- [1044] Geoff. Clairvaux, Vita S. Bern., l. iii. c. 4 (S. Bern. Opp., Mabillon, vol. ii. col. 1120).

- [1045] See, in particular, the cases of William of Cricklade and Philip of Gloucester, Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 111, 119, 120.

- [1046] “Dorobernensis,” Osbern. De Expugn. Lyxbon. (prefixed to Itinerarium Regis Ricardi, Stubbs), p. cxliv. This ought to mean Canterbury; but is not Dover more likely in this case?

- [1047] “Qui judices et conjurati dicerentur.” Osbern (Stubbs, Itin. Reg. Ric.), p. cxliv.

- [1048] The characteristic way in which the Germans and the English acted when they got into the city should be noticed in Osbern (Stubbs, Itin. Reg. Ric.), pp. clxviii.–clxxx.

- [1049] Osbern (Stubbs, Itin. Reg. Ric.), pp. clxxxi, clxxxii. See also a letter in Martène and Durand, Ampliss. Coll., vol. i. cols. 800–802; another in Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xvii. p. 27; and Hen. Hunt. l. viii. c. 27 (Arnold, p. 281).

There was no need to despair of a country whose middle and lower classes could still produce men capable of an exploit such as this. When a spontaneous gathering of poor yeomen, common sailors and obscure citizens could reveal such a spirit, it was plain that all England wanted to rescue her from her misery was a competent leader. S. Bernard, watching over the fortunes of the English Church through the eyes of his brethren at Fountains and Rievaux, had seen this already; and he saw, too, that it was vain to look for such a leader in either the king or the king-maker, Henry of Winchester. Before the Church of England could rescue the state, she must be freed from the political entanglements into which she had been dragged by Henry’s impetuosity, and enabled to resume a position of spiritual independence under her rightful leader, the archbishop of Canterbury. With this view the whole Cistercian order in England, supported and directed by S. Bernard, had set their faces against William Fitz-Herbert’s appointment to the see of York, as an attempt of king and legate to override the constitutional rights of the southern primate and of the Church as a whole. “The bishop of Winchester and the archbishop of York do not walk in the same spirit with the archbishop of Canterbury, but go their own way in opposition to him; and this comes from the old quarrel about the legation”—thus Bernard summed up the case.[1050] Moreover the saving clause whereby William of Durham was allowed to swear by proxy in behalf of his namesake appears to have been interpolated by the latter’s friends into the Papal decree; for “One William has not sworn, yet the other is archbishop”[1051] was the burthen of S. Bernard’s cry to the Pope; and when in 1144 a cardinal-legate, Hicmar, came to England with a pall for William of York, he promised Bernard not to give it till he should have received the oath from the bishop of Durham in person.[1052]

- [1050] In a letter to Eugene III., S. Bern. Ep. ccxxxviii. (Opp. Mabillon, vol. i. col. 234).

- [1051] S. Bern. Epp. ccxxxv.–ccxxxvi., both to Celestine II. (as above, cols. 229–231).

- [1052] S. Bern. Ep. ccclx. (as above, cols. 324, 325)—to Abbot William of Rievaux. See also Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 149, and, for date, note u, ibid.

Neither prelate took any notice of Hicmar’s presence; but when he was recalled by the death of Pope Lucius and the accession of Eugene, the archbishop of York suddenly perceived what a blunder he had made, and hurried to Rome in quest of the pall about which he had hitherto been so indifferent. Instead of giving it, Eugene suspended him from all episcopal functions till such time as William of Durham should have taken the oath required by the sentence of Pope Innocent. The archbishop hereupon retired to Sicily and took up his abode there with his fellow-countryman the chancellor, Robert of Selby or Salisbury,[1053] under the protection of King Roger. As Roger was then at bitter feud with the Church, this step was not likely to mend William’s ecclesiastical reputation. His cause, bad from the first and made worse by his own carelessness, was presently ruined by his friends. The leaders of the opposition to him in England were the abbots of Rievaux and Fountains; the latter, Henry Murdac, was a native of Yorkshire who in Archbishop Thurstan’s time had given up houses and lands, home and kindred, to go out to Clairvaux at the call of S. Bernard. In 1135 he was sent thence to found the abbey of Vauclair;[1054] in 1143 he was appointed to succeed Abbot Richard II. of Fountains, who had died at Clairvaux while on his way to attend the general chapter of his order at Cîteaux.[1055] Henry Murdac went back to his native land charged with an implied commission to make Fountains an English Clairvaux and himself an English representative of S. Bernard, and he fulfilled his charge with true Cistercian zeal and fidelity.[1056] As soon as William’s suspension became known, his friends attributed it to the influence of Murdac, whom they sought to punish by making an armed raid upon his abbey. Plunder, of course, they got little or none in a freshly-reformed Cistercian house;[1057] so, after a hurried and unsuccessful search for Murdac himself, they set the place on fire. Every stone of it perished except the church, which escaped as by miracle; and the abbot escaped with it, for he had been lying all the while, unnoticed by the passion-blinded eyes of his foes, prostrate in prayer before the high altar. The energy of the monks and the sympathy of their neighbours soon enabled Fountains to rise from its ashes more glorious than before;[1058] but William’s day of grace was at once brought to a close by this outrage. At a council held in Paris in the spring of 1147, the abbot of Fountains and a deputation from the chapter of York once more formally presented to the Pope their charges against their primate, and Eugene deposed William from his episcopal office.[1059] On the eve of S. James the chapter of York, with the two suffragan bishops of the province—Durham and Carlisle—met in obedience to a papal mandate for the election of a new archbishop. The choice of the majority fell upon Henry Murdac. From Clairvaux, whither he had gone after the council, the abbot of Fountains was summoned to the papal court at Trier, and there, on the octave of S. Andrew, he received his consecration and his pall both at once from Pope Eugene’s own hand.[1060]

[1053] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 150–152. Robert was “oriundus in Angliâ, scilicet in Salesbiâ.” Mr. Raine renders this Selby; Twysden made it Salisbury; Bishop Stubbs (Lect. on Mediev. and Mod. Hist., p. 133), leaves the question undecided.

[1054] On the earlier life of Henry Murdac see Dixon and Raine, Fasti Ebor., pp. 210–213; and Walbran, Memor. of Fountains, vol. i. p. 84, note 3.

[1055] Walbran, Memor. of Fountains, vol. i. pp. 78, 81–83. S. Bern. Epp. cccxx, cccxxi (Opp. Mabillon, vol. i. cols. 297, 298).

[1056] Walbran, Memor. of Fountains, vol. i. pp. 84, 85.

[1057] “Ferentes secum spolia, parum quidem pecuniæ, sed plurimum dampnationis.” Walbran, Memor. of Fountains, vol. i. p. 102.

[1058] Ib. pp. 101, 102.

[1059] On the council of Paris see Labbe, Concilia (Cossart), vol. xxi., cols. 709, 710. As to the date, it appears from Jaffé (Regesta Pontif. Rom., pp. 626, 627) that Eugene reached Paris before Easter (April 20) and was there till June 11; so the council must fall in the interval. On William’s deposition see Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 134. “Hoc concilio” ought, by all logical and grammatical rules, to mean the council of Reims, held in March 1148, and of which Gervase has just been speaking. Accordingly most of his commentators (including the editors of the Fountains and Hexham books, and the compilers of the Fasti Eboracenses) say that William was deposed at the council of Reims; and then, as his successor was undoubtedly consecrated in December 1147, they are obliged to antedate the council of Reims by a year. But Gervase himself says, almost in the same breath, that the deposition took place in Paris. He has confused the two councils; see Pagi’s note to Baronius, Annales, vol. xix. pp. 7, 8; and cf. Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 154.

[1060] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 154, 155. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 135. Walbran, Memor. of Fountains, vol. i. p. 103. Will. Newb., l. i. c. 17 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 56). The Hist. Pontif. (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xx. p. 518) says Henry was consecrated at Auxerre, but this is incompatible with dates.

The subsequent conduct of Stephen and Henry of Winchester proved that their aim in securing the occupation of the northern primacy had been rightly understood by Eugene and Bernard. They had staked everything upon the success of their scheme, and when it failed not only the king but even the once cool and sagacious bishop completely lost his head. Upon William himself the papal sentence had the very opposite effect; it woke him from his dreams of easy dignity and worldly pride; from that moment the idle, showy, self-indulgent young ecclesiastic changed into an humble saint, and when he came home next year it was not to renew the strife but to turn away from the world and possess his soul in patience.[1061] But his uncles would not hear of submission; Henry took him to live in his own house, and there persisted in ostentatiously treating him with all the honours due to the archbishop of York;[1062] and when in the summer of 1148 the new archbishop also came back to England, Stephen demanded sworn security for his fidelity before he would let him set foot in the country.[1063] The citizens of York, instigated by the treasurer of the see, Hugh of Puiset, who like William was a nephew of the king, shut their gates in their primate’s face; he withdrew to Ripon, laid his diocese under interdict and excommunicated Hugh; but Hugh, strong in the support of his uncles, defied the interdict and was even impudent enough to return the excommunication.[1064]

- [1061] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 154.

- [1062] Ibid. Will. Newb. as above·/·, l. i. c. 17 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 56).

- [1063] Ibid. Oddly enough, this York affair is almost the only one in which William rather inclines to take the part of the king.

- [1064] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 158.

In the southern province matters had come to a still more dangerous crisis. Early in 1148 all the English bishops were summoned by the Pope to a council which was to meet at Reims on Mid-Lent Sunday. Three of them—Hereford, Chichester and Norwich—were sent by Stephen himself; but when the archbishop of Canterbury made the usual application for leave to quit the country, the king refused, set a watch at every port to stop his egress, and at his brother Henry’s instigation swore that if Theobald did go he should be banished on his return. Theobald however had made up his mind to go at any cost; he slipped away in an old broken boat with only two companions—Roger of Pont-l’Evêque and Thomas of London, the latter of whom had now been for several years the most trusted medium of intercommunication between the primate and the court of Rome. The daring voyagers reached their journey’s end in safety, and Theobald was triumphantly presented to the council by the Pope as one who had swum rather than sailed across the Channel for the sake of his duty to the Church.[1065] The bishops who had failed to attend were all suspended, Henry of Winchester being specially mentioned by name. His brother, however,—the good count of Blois who seems to have been at once the scapegoat and the peacemaker for all the sins of his family, and who was held in the deepest esteem by both Eugene and Bernard—made intercession on his behalf, and obtained a relaxation of the sentence against him on condition of his coming to Rome within six months.[1066] As for the king, Eugene would have excommunicated him at once; but for him the other Theobald stepped forward as mediator, like Anselm in a somewhat similar case, and procured him a respite of three months.[1067] The intercessor’s reward was the threatened sentence of banishment, issued as soon as he returned to Canterbury. He withdrew into France and appealed to the Pope, while Stephen seized the temporalities of the see and began playing the part of the Red King on a small scale. Eugene wrote to all the English bishops, severally and in a body, bidding them summon the king to restore the primate at once, lay all his dominions under interdict if he refused, and tell him that he should certainly be excommunicated by the Pope on Michaelmas day. The bishops however were all on the court-side; the interdict, duly published by Theobald, was unheeded save in his own diocese; and the king remained obstinate.[1068] But his wiser queen, aided by William of Ypres, who, however he may have sinned against others, was unquestionably Stephen’s truest friend, made an effort to restore peace; and at their request Theobald removed to St. Omer, as being a more accessible place for negotiation than his French retreat.[1069]

- [1065] Hist. Pontif. (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xx.), p. 519; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 134. Both accounts seem to be derived from a letter of S. Thomas (Ep. ccl., Robertson, Becket, vol. vi. pp. 57, 58). Thomas’s presence at the council is distinctly stated in Hist. Pontif. (as above), p. 522, and so is that of Roger of Pont-l’Evêque.

- [1066] Hist. Pontif. (as above), p. 520. Cf. Gilb. Foliot, Ep. lxxvi. (Giles, vol. i. p. 92).

- [1067] Hist. Pontif. (as above), p. 519.

- [1068] Hist. Pontif. (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xx.), pp. 530, 532.

- [1069] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 135.

Matilda of Boulogne doubtless saw what Theobald must have known full well, that the quarrel involved a great deal more than strictly ecclesiastical questions. The issue which the ordeal of battle had failed to decide was on its trial now in a different form and before another tribunal. The most curious symptom of this feeling, perhaps, was the action of Brian Fitz-Count, who, after having been for years Matilda’s most devoted and most successful champion in the field, suddenly exchanged the sword for the pen and brought out a defence of his Lady’s rights in the shape of a little treatise which gained the approval of one of the cleverest men and greatest scholars of the time, Gilbert Foliot, abbot of Gloucester.[1070] Geoffrey Plantagenet, with his Angevin quickness, was the first openly to proclaim the true position of affairs by sending to Stephen, through Bishop Miles of Térouanne, a formal challenge to give up his ill-gotten realm and submit to an investigation of his claims before the papal court. Stephen retorted by a counter-challenge, calling upon Geoffrey to give up his equally ill-gotten duchy before he would agree to any further proceeding in the matter.[1071] Geoffrey took him at his word, but in a way which he was far from desiring. He did give up the duchy of Normandy, by making it over to his own son, Henry Fitz-Empress.[1072]

- [1070] Gilb. Foliot, Ep. lxxix. (Giles, vol. i. pp. 94–102).

- [1071] Hist. Pontif. (as above), p. 531.

- [1072] Chron. S. Albin. a. 1149 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 36). But the story of Gilbert Foliot’s consecration shews that the cession must really have taken place in 1148.

The crisis was now close at hand; Stephen was at last face to face with his true rival. He appears to have consented, as if in desperation, to the proposed trial at Rome. It seems at first glance as if the envoys whom he sent to represent him there must indeed have been driven to their wits’ end for an argument in his behalf when they raked up again a scandal which S. Anselm had laid to rest half a century ago, as to the validity of the marriage between Matilda’s father and mother.[1073] Yet such was the argument publicly put forth by many voices against the legality of her claims to the crown; and though one account of the proceedings states that her adversaries were triumphantly confuted by Bishop Ulger of Angers,[1074] another, written by an eye-witness whose own opinions were wholly in her favour, declares that her advocates answered never a word.[1075] The trial seems to have ended without any decision;[1076] it was however quickly followed by a very significant event. The witness just referred to was Gilbert Foliot, a Cluniac monk who since 1139 had been abbot of Gloucester, and whose reputation for learning, wisdom and holiness had secured to him the confidence of the primate and the consideration of all parties alike in Church and state. He had reluctantly and after some delay obeyed Theobald’s summons to join him at the papal court; once there, he seems to have flung all his energies into the organization of the new policy of which Theobald was to be the leader.[1077] During the session of the council at Reims the bishop of Hereford died.[1078] The Pope at once appointed Gilbert Foliot vicar of the diocese;[1079] in September he was consecrated by Theobald at St. Omer, with the consent and approval of the young duke of the Normans, given on the express condition that he should do homage for the temporalities of his see to the duke and not to the king.

- [1073] Gilb. Foliot, Ep. lxxix. (Giles, vol. i. p. 101). Hist. Pontif. (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xx.), p. 543.

- [1074] Hist. Pontif. (as above), p. 544.

- [1075] Gilb. Foliot, Ep. lxxix. (as above).

- [1076] From the way in which this trial is brought into the Hist. Pontif., it would at first glance seem to have taken place in 1151. But the presence of Bishops Ulger of Angers and Roger of Chester, both of whom died in 1149, and the account of the proceedings written by Gilbert Foliot to Brian Fitz-Count clearly prove the true date to be 1148.

- [1077] Gilb. Foliot, Epp. vi., vii., lxxvi. (Giles, vol. i. pp. 13, 14, 92).

- [1078] Hist. Monast. S. Petr. Glocestr. (Hart), vol. i. p. 18.

- [1079] “G. gratiâ Dei abbas, et Herefordiensis ecclesiæ mandato Domini Papæ vicarius,” runs the salutation of his Ep. lxxviii. (Giles, vol. i. p. 93).

The very first thing Gilbert did was to break this promise;[1080] but that Theobald should have consecrated such a man on such terms was a sign of the times which Stephen could hardly fail to understand. Theobald himself soon afterwards ventured back to England; crossing from Gravelines, he landed at Gosford in the territories of Hugh Bigod, by whom he was hospitably received; the bishops of London, Chichester and Norwich, with several barons, came to meet him at Hugh’s castle of Framlingham; the king was reconciled, the primate restored, the interdict raised, and the suspended prelates, all save one, allowed to resume their functions.[1081] The exception was Henry of Winchester, who by neglecting to go to Rome within the prescribed six months had necessarily fallen under the sentence pronounced against him by Eugene at the council of Reims. Even to him, however, Theobald was willing at Stephen’s request to hold out the hand of fellowship and forgiveness.[1082] But Henry of Winchester’s days of king-making were over. It was time for another Henry to appear upon the political scene, to take his cause into his own hands and stand forth as the champion of his own claims against the man who had supplanted him on his grandfather’s throne.

- [1080] Hist. Pontif. (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xx.), pp. 532, 533.

- [1081] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 136, 137.

- [1082] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 152.

CHAPTER VIII.
HENRY DUKE OF THE NORMANS.
1149–1154.

No loving hands have done for the early life of Henry Fitz-Empress what they did for that of his contemporary, his friend, his opponent Thomas of London; we have no stories of his boyhood, no picture of his home. Home indeed, in the full sense of the word, he never had and never could have. That instinctive attachment to one particular spot, or at the least to one particular country, which is innate in most men, was to a child of Geoffrey and Matilda simply impossible. Geoffrey was the son of an Angevin count and a Cenomannian countess; Matilda was the daughter of a king born in England of a Norman father and a Flemish mother, and of a queen whose parents were the one a Scottish Celt, the other a West-Saxon with a touch of High-German blood. In the temper of the Empress the Norman element was undoubtedly the strongest; no trace can be seen in her of the gentle spirit of her mother; and it is clear that no lingering regrets for the land of her birth[1083] haunted the girl-bride of the Emperor in her palace at Aachen as they haunted the monk Orderic, from boyhood to old age, in his cell at Saint-Evroul. Yet when she came to Normandy in her twenty-third year, she came there unwillingly and as a complete stranger. If Henry was to inherit any national or patriotic feeling at all, it could not be from his mother; what she transmitted to him instead was a sort of cosmopolitanism which saved the future duke of Normandy and king of England from the too exclusive influence of the demon-blood of Anjou, not by making him a Norman, still less an Englishman, but by rendering his nationality a yet more insoluble problem than her own. Even in his father, too, there are signs of a divided national sentiment. The son of Aremburg of Maine, the grandson and heir of Elias, could not cling to the black rock of Angers with the exclusive attachment of its earlier counts; a share of his patriotic affection and pride must have been given to that other, red rock above the Sarthe which had held out so long and so bravely against both Normandy and Anjou, to that Cenomannian land of heroes which Norman and Angevin alike had counted it their highest glory to overcome and win. It may have been by chance, or it may have been of set purpose, that Geoffrey and Matilda were at Le Mans when their first child was born; no other spot could have been half so appropriate. The land which Normans and Angevins and even Englishmen[1084] had done their utmost to wipe out of the list of states, the land whose claim to a separate existence, ignored or denied by them all, had yet proved the insurmountable stumbling-block which forced them into union:—that land was the most fitting birth-place for the child who was to be neither Norman, nor Angevin, nor English, and yet was to be all three at once. The vengeance of Maine upon her conquerors formed a characteristic close to her national career. They had swallowed her up at last; but they had no sooner done it than she gave a master to them all.

- [1083] She was born in London: Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 13.

- [1084] Eng. Chron. a. 1073.

If, then, Normandy, England and Anjou had each a part in Henry, Le Mans had two parts, as being at once the home of his father’s mother and the scene of his own birth. His earliest recollections, however, must rather have been associated with Normandy. His first journey thither was made when he was about twelve months old, when he accompanied his mother on a visit to King Henry in the spring 1134. His brother Geoffrey was born at Argentan on June 1, and the two children narrowly escaped being left motherless under their grandfather’s care.[1085] Possibly this made them all the dearer to him; he certainly found in them his last earthly pleasure, of which he was finally deprived by a quarrel with their mother, who seems to have sent them back to Angers shortly before her own return thither in the autumn of 1135.[1086] For the next seven years little Henry can have seen nothing of his future duchy; and we have no means of knowing whether its stately capital, its people, its dialect, had left any impression upon him, or whether any dim personal remembrance was associated in his mind with that name of “my grandfather King Henry” to which he appealed so constantly in later life. His training, after his return to Angers as before, must have devolved chiefly upon Matilda; for Geoffrey during the next three years was too busy with unsuccessful fighting abroad in the interest of his wife and son to have much leisure for devoting himself to their society at home. It was not till the close of 1138 that his influence can have been seriously brought to bear upon his children, of whom there were now three, another son, named William, having been born in August 1136.[1087] After the disaster of Toucques the count appears to have spent his time until the beginning of 1141 for the most part quietly at home, where his wife’s departure over sea left him in his turn sole guardian of his boys. In one respect at least he did not neglect his paternal duty. “Unlettered king, crowned ass,” was a reproach which would have fallen with double disgrace upon the son of Geoffrey Plantagenet and the grandson of Henry I.; and Geoffrey took care that his firstborn should never be exposed to it. It may even be that in those two years when war and politics left him at leisure for the quieter enjoyments of his books, his hunting and his home, the young father himself took up the task, of which he was certainly quite capable, of instilling into his child the first rudiments of that book-learning which he loved so well. At any rate, it was he who chose the first teacher to whom Henry’s education was intrusted. As if on purpose to add one more to the varied influences already working in that young mind, the teacher was neither Angevin, nor Cenomannian, nor Norman. He was one Master Peter of Saintes, “learned above all his contemporaries in the science of verse.”[1088]

- [1085] Chron. S. Albin. a. 1134 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 33); Rob. Torigni, a. 1134. Cf. Will. Jumièges Contin., l. viii. cc. 27, 28 (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., pp. 305, 306).

- [1086] Will. Jumièges Contin., l. viii. c. 34 (as above, p. 310).

- [1087] Rob. Torigni, ad ann.

- [1088] “Hic [sc. Gaufridus] filium suum Enricum natu majorem ad erudiendum tradidit cuidam magistro Petro scilicet Xantonensi, qui in metris instructus est super omnes coætaneos suos.” Anon. Chron., Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 120.

Under Peter’s care the boy remained till the close of 1142, when, as we have seen, he was sent to England in company with his uncle Robert of Gloucester. Henry now entered upon a third phase of education. For the next four years his uncle took charge of him and kept him in his own household at Bristol under the care of one Master Matthew, by whom he was to be “imbued with letters and instructed in good manners, as beseemed a youth of his rank.”[1089] This arrangement may have been due to the Empress, or it may have originated with Geoffrey when he sent the boy over sea in the earl’s company; for much as they differed in other matters, on the subject of a boy’s training the two brothers-in-law could hardly fail to be of the same mind. A well-balanced compound of soldier, statesman and scholar was Earl Robert’s ideal no less than Count Geoffrey’s; an ideal so realized in his own person that he might safely be trusted to watch over its developement in the person of his little nephew. As far as the military element was concerned, the earl of Gloucester, with his matured experience and oft-proved valour, was no less capable than the count of Anjou of furnishing a model of all knightly prowess, skill and courtesy; and if Henry’s chivalry was to be tempered with discretion—if it was to be regulated by a wise and wary policy—if he was to acquire any insight into the principles of sound and prudent state-craft—Robert was certainly, among the group of adventurers who surrounded the Empress, the only man from whom he could learn anything of the kind. The boy was indeed scarce ten years old, and even for the heir of Anjou and England it was perhaps somewhat too early to begin such studies as these. For the literary side of his education, later years proved that Robert’s choice of a teacher was as good as Geoffrey’s had been; the seed sowed by Peter of Saintes was well watered by Matthew, and it seems to have brought forth in his young pupil’s mind a harvest of gratitude as well as of learning, for among the chancellors of King Henry II. there appears a certain “Master Matthew” who can hardly be any other than his old teacher.[1090]

- [1089] “Puer autem Henricus sub tutelâ Comitis Roberti apud Bristoviam degens, per quatuor annos traditus est magisterio cujusdam Mathæi, litteris imbuendus et moribus honestis ut talem decebat puerum instituendus.” Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs.), vol. i. p. 125.

- [1090] “The person meant was no doubt that Matthew who is called Henry’s chancellor in Foliot’s letters.” Stubbs, Gerv. Cant., vol. i. p. 125, note 2. (“Master Matthew, the chancellor,” is named in Gilb. Foliot, Ep. cli., Giles, vol. i. pp. 201, 202). In his Lect. on Med. and Mod. Hist., p. 120, Bishop Stubbs speaks of Matthew as the king’s “tutor, who was some time his chancellor, and who probably was identical with the Bishop of Angers, Matthew of London.” Bishop Matthew of Angers is described by the editors of Gall. Christ. (vol. xiv. col. 570) as a native of Loudun—“Losduni natus.” He was consecrated in 1155, which seems hardly to leave time for his chancellorship.

To teach the boy “good manners”—in the true sense of those words—must have been a somewhat difficult task amid his present surroundings. Bristol, during the years of Henry’s residence there, fully kept up its character as the “stepmother of all England”; he must have been continually seeing or hearing of bands of soldiers issuing from the castle to ravage and plunder, burn and slay, or troops of captives dragged in to linger in its dungeons till they had given up their uttermost farthing or were set free by a miserable death. It seems likely, however, that the worst of these horrors occurred during Robert’s absence and without his sanction, for even the special panegyrist of Stephen gives the earl credit for doing his utmost to maintain order and justice in the shires over which he ruled.[1091] It was not his fault if matters had drifted into such a state that his efforts were worse than useless; and his good intentions were at any rate not more ineffectual than those of the king. Within the domestic circle itself it is not unlikely that the child was better placed under the influence of Robert and Mabel than either in the household of his violent-tempered mother or in that of his refined but selfish father, whom he rejoined in the spring of 1147, a year before the return of the Empress. He was in his sixteenth year when Geoffrey ceded to him the duchy of Normandy. A boy of that age, especially in the house of Anjou, was counted a man, and expected to act as such. The cession was in fact intended and understood as a solemn proclamation both to friends and foes that henceforth they would have to deal with King Henry’s chosen heir no longer indirectly, but in his own person; that his rights were to be vindicated in future not by his parents but by himself.

- [1091] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 94.

He lost no time in beginning his work. In the middle of May 1149 Stephen, while endeavouring to put down a fresh revolt of the earls of Chester and Pembroke,[1092] was startled by news of Henry’s arrival in England. The young duke of the Normans landed we know not where, and made his way northward, recruiting a few of his mother’s old adherents as he went: his great-uncle King David welcomed him at Carlisle, and there knighted him on Whit-Sunday.[1093] Stephen evidently took this act as a challenge, for he immediately retorted by knighting his eldest son Eustace, thus pointedly setting up his own heir as a rival to his young kinsman.[1094] He then hastened with all his forces to York, but no hostilities took place.[1095] The intended campaign of David and Henry was frustrated by Ralf of Chester’s failure to keep his engagement with them;[1096] the two kings sat awhile, one at York and the other at Carlisle, each waiting for the other to strike, till David grew weary and retired to his own kingdom,[1097] taking his nephew with him; and in January Henry again withdrew beyond the sea.[1098] He saw that the political scales were as yet too evenly balanced to be turned by the mere weight of his maiden sword; and his work was being done for him, better than he could do it himself, by clerk and primate, abbot and Pope—most surely of all, by the blundering king himself.

- [1092] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 124–127, gives the details of this rising.

- [1093] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 140, 141. Cf. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 29 (Arnold, p. 282). Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 159. Rob. Torigni, a. 1149. The writer of Gesta Steph. (pp. 128, 129) has a most romantic account of Henry’s adventures. Henry, he says, came over with a very small force, and nothing to pay them with except promises. He made an attempt upon Bourton and Cricklade, and was repulsed; whereupon his troops all fell away and left him so helpless that he was obliged to ask his mother for some money. She had none to give him; he then asked his uncle Gloucester, but the latter, “suis sacculis avide incumbens,” refused. Then Henry in desperation appealed to the king, beseeching his compassion for the sake of their kindred blood; and Stephen at once sent him the needful sum. The trait is just what might be expected in Stephen; but it is hard to conceive Henry ever getting into such a plight; and the mention of Robert of Gloucester as still alive shews there must be something wrong in the story.

- [1094] Hen. Hunt. as above. Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 160. Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 130.

- [1095] Hen. Hunt. as above.

- [1096] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 159, 160. Ralf had agreed to give up his claims on Carlisle and accept instead the honour of Lancaster for himself and the hand of one of David’s granddaughters for his son; he promised on these conditions to join David and Henry in an attack upon Lancaster, but was, as usual, false to the tryst.

- [1097] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 29 (Arnold, p. 282).

- [1098] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 142.

A double chain connected English politics with those of the Roman court. The links of the one chain were S. Bernard and Henry Murdac; those of the other were Theobald of Canterbury and Thomas of London. What was the exact nature of those communications between the primate and the Pope of which Thomas was the medium—how much of the credit of Theobald’s policy is due to himself and how much to his confidential instrument and adviser—we have no means of determining precisely. The aim of that policy was to consolidate the forces of the English Church by deepening her intercourse and strengthening her connexion with the sister-Churches of the West, and thus bring the highest religious and political influences of Latin Christendom to bear upon the troubles of the English state. The way had been paved by Henry of Winchester in his legatine days. He and the councils which he convened had first suggested the possibility of finding a remedy for the lack of secular administration in an appeal to the authority of the canon law, now formulated as a definite code by the labours of a Bolognese lawyer, Gratian. The very strifes and jealousies which arose from Henry’s over-vigorous assertion of his authority tended to a like result; they led to more frequent appeals to Rome, to elaborate legal pleadings, to the drawing of subtle legal distinctions unknown to the old customary procedure of the land; as a contemporary writer expresses it, “Then were laws and lawyers first brought into England.”[1099] On the Continent the study of the civil jurisprudence of the Roman Empire had been revived together with that of the canon law; some members of Archbishop Theobald’s household resolved to introduce it into England, hoping thereby, as it seems, to sow amid the general confusion some seeds of a more orderly and law-abiding spirit. During the time of comparative quiet which intervened between his first journey to Rome in 1143 and his expedition with Theobald to the council of Reims in 1148, Thomas of London had spent a year at Bologna and Auxerre to perfect himself in the literary culture which he had somewhat neglected in his youth.[1100] The university of Bologna was the chief seat of the new legal learning; it may therefore have been through Thomas that a Lombard teacher, Vacarius, was induced to visit England in 1149 and open lectures at Oxford on the Roman law.[1101] Rich and poor flocked to hear him, and at the request of his poorer scholars he made an abridgement of the Code and Digests, sufficient for practical use, and more within reach of their scanty means than the heavy folios of Justinian.[1102] His lectures however were summarily brought to an end by order of the king; Stephen, scared by young Duke Henry’s presence in the north, jealous of the primate, jealous of the Church, jealous of everything in which he saw or thought he saw the least token of an influence which might be used against himself, at once silenced the teacher and ordered the students to give up their books. He gained as little as is usually gained by such a mode of proceeding in such cases. The study of the civil law only spread and prospered the more for his efforts to hinder it;[1103] and the law-school of the future university of Oxford may have sprung from a germ left in the cloisters of Oseney or S. Frideswide’s by the brief visit of the Lombard master, just as the divinity-school may have sprung from a germ left there sixteen years before by the lectures of Robert Pulein.

- [1099] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 384.

- [1100] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 17.

- [1101] Gerv. Cant. as above. Rob. Torigni, a. 1149. Joh. Salisb., Polycraticus, l. viii. c. 22 (Giles, vol. iv. p. 357), says that “domus venerabilis patris Theobaldi” brought the Roman law into England.

- [1102] Rob. Torigni, a. 1149.

- [1103] Joh. Salisb. as above.

Stephen had struck at the southern primate indirectly this time; with the northern one he was still at open feud. One use which he made of his stay in Yorkshire was to exact a heavy fine from the inhabitants of Beverley, as a punishment for having given shelter to Henry Murdac. After the king’s departure the archbishop at last succeeded in enforcing his interdict at York; Eustace hurried thither, insisted upon the restoration of the services, and drove out all who refused to take part in them; there was a great tumult, in which the senior archdeacon was killed by the followers of the king’s son.[1104] About the same time a cardinal-legate, John Paparo, on his way to Ireland, asked for a safe-conduct through the dominions of the English king; Stephen refused to give it unless he would promise to do nothing on his journey to the prejudice of the English realm. John went home highly indignant at such an insinuation against his honour and that of the Apostolic See.[1105] Meanwhile Archbishop Murdac was writing bitter complaints both to S. Bernard and to the Pope. They apparently determined to give Stephen a warning which even he could not fail to understand; and they did it by sending a commission as resident legate a latere for all Britain to the archbishop of Canterbury.[1106]

- [1104] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 160. Will. Newb., l. i. c. 17 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 56, 57).

- [1105] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 164. In the Hist. Pontif. (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xx. pp. 518, 519) this first legation of John Paparo seems to be dated some years earlier. But the Hist. Pontif. is very erratic in its chronology; and John of Hexham seems quite clear and consistent in his account of the matter.

- [1106] The date of Theobald’s legatine commission seems to be nowhere stated. He had certainly received it before Lent 1151; it was therefore in all probability granted some time in 1150, under the circumstances related above.

The warning took effect; Stephen changed his policy at once. He was weary of all his fruitless labour; his chief anxiety now was to secure the crown to his son; and he suddenly awoke to the necessity of setting himself right with the one power which alone could enable him to carry out his desire. Eustace himself was sent to act as mediator between his father and Henry Murdac; a reconciliation took place, and the archbishop was enthroned at York on S. Paul’s day 1151. Thence he went to keep Easter with the Pope, having undertaken, at Stephen’s request, to intercede for him with Eugene concerning the state of politics in England, and especially to obtain, if possible, the papal sanction to a formal acknowledgement of Eustace as heir to the crown.[1107] The southern primate meanwhile was beginning his legatine career with a Mid-Lenten council in London, at which Stephen, Eustace, and the principal barons of England were present. The main feature of this council was a crowd of appeals to Rome, whereof three were made by the bishop of Winchester.[1108] One of these appeals must have been against the suspension to which he had been sentenced at the council of Reims, and by which the Pope, less placable than the primate, still held him bound. Moreover, complaints against him were pouring into Rome from all quarters; so he carried his appeals in person, and went to clear himself before the supreme pontiff. He succeeded in obtaining absolution;[1109] his friends, of whom there were still many at the papal court, tried hard to win for him something more—either a renewal of the legation, or the accomplishment of his old scheme of a primacy over Wessex, or at least the exemption of his own see from the jurisdiction of Canterbury; but Eugene was inexorable. He believed that Stephen’s misconduct towards the Church was instigated by his brother; a very natural view, but somewhat unjust to the bishop.[1110] The truth seems rather to be that Henry, after vainly trying to rule the storm, had for awhile been swept away by its violence. Now he had emerged into the calm once more; and there henceforth he was content to remain. He consoled himself for the failure of his political hopes with a choice collection of antique statues purchased in Rome for the adornment of his palace at Winchester, and sailed quietly home with these treasures, stopping on his way to pay his devotions at the shrine of S. James at Compostella.[1111] At his request the Pope ordered Archbishop Murdac to absolve Hugh of Puiset, who was making himself useful at Winchester, not on clerical duty, but in taking charge of the bishop’s castles during his absence.[1112] With Hugh’s absolution the schism in the northern province came to an end, and the English Church was once again reunited.

- [1107] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 162.

- [1108] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 31 (Arnold, p. 282): “Totum illud concilium novis appellationibus infrenduit.” It is, however, rather too hard upon Henry of Winchester when he adds that appeals to Rome had not been used in England till that prelate in his legatine days “malo suo crudeliter intrusit.”

- [1109] Ann. Winton. a. 1151 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. pp. 54, 55).

- [1110] As the author of the Hist. Pontif. (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xx. p. 542) truly says: “Credebatur fratrem suum regem contra ecclesiam instigare; sed rex, quod manifesta declarant opera, nec illius nec sapientis alterius consilio agebatur.”

- [1111] Hist. Pontif. (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xx.), p. 542.

- [1112] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 158, 162. He places Hugh’s absolution in 1150, but on his own shewing it cannot have occurred before 1151.

For England and for Stephen alike the prospect seemed to be brightening. Stephen however was clearly beginning to feel that for him as well as for his Angevin rivals it was time to give place to a younger generation. It must have been chiefly for Eustace’s sake that he valued his crown; and in Eustace’s case, as in that of Henry Fitz-Empress, there were many circumstances which might make the pretensions of the child more generally acceptable than those of the parent. Eustace seems to have been about the same age as Henry, or probably a few years older; he was free from the personal obloquy and suspicion attaching to Stephen from the errors of the past; on the other hand, as the son of Matilda of Boulogne, he might reap the benefit of his mother’s well-earned personal popularity, as well as of her descent from the royal house of Wessex. Henceforth, therefore, Stephen showed a disposition to treat Henry Fitz-Empress as the rival less of himself than of his son, and to follow up every movement in Henry’s public life by a parallel step in the career of Eustace. And as Henry’s first independent act had been a sort of reconnoitring expedition to England, so the first retaliation was a visit made by Eustace to the king of France, with a view to ascertain his chances of support in an attempt to regain Normandy.

The existing phase of the rivalry between the houses of Anjou and Blois—their struggle for the dominion of Normandy and England—was a matter which concerned the interests of the French Crown almost as deeply as the earlier phase in which Fulk the Black and Odo of Champagne strove with each other for political mastery over their common lord paramount. Neither the accumulation of England, Normandy, Maine, Anjou and Touraine in a single hand, nor the acquisition of Normandy and England by a branch of the mighty and troublesome house which already held Blois, Chartres and Champagne, could be viewed by the French king without grave uneasiness. Either alternative had its dangers; to Louis VII., however, the danger would appear much less threatening than to his father. Shortly before the dying Louis VI. granted the investiture of Normandy to Stephen’s little son in 1137, the last of the old line of the dukes of Aquitaine—William IX., son of the gay crusader and troubadour whom the Red King had hoped to succeed—died on a pilgrimage at Compostella.[1113] His only son was already dead, and before setting out for his pilgrimage he did what a greater personage had done ten years before: with the consent of his barons, he left the whole of his dominions to his daughter. Moreover, he bequeathed the girl herself as wife to the young King Louis of France.[1114] This marriage more than doubled the strength of the French Crown. It gave to Louis absolute possession of all western Aquitaine, or Guyenne as it was now beginning to be called; that is, the counties of Poitou and Gascony, with the immediate overlordship of the whole district lying between the Loire and the Pyrenees, the Rhône and the ocean:—a territory five or six times as large as his own royal domain, and over which his predecessors had never been able to assert more than the merest shadow of a nominal superiority.[1115] To a man who was at once king of France and duke of Aquitaine it was comparatively no great matter whether the dominions of Henry I. were to be annexed to those of Geoffrey of Anjou or allied to those of Theobald of Blois. The truest interest of France, however, obviously was that England and Normandy should be divided, one of them being held by each of the two competitors; and it was doubtless with this view that Louis, while sanctioning and aiding Geoffrey’s conquest of the Norman duchy, still kept on peaceful terms with the English king, and held to a promise of marriage made some years before between his own sister and Stephen’s son Eustace.[1116]

- [1113] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 909. Hist. Franc. (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii.), p. 116. Anon. Chron. (ibid.) p. 119. Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Maxent. a. 1137 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 34, 432).

- [1114] Suger, Vita Ludov. (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii.) p. 62. Chron. Mauriniac. (ibid.) p. 83. Hist. Franc. (ibid.), p. 116. Ord. Vit. as above. See also Besly, Comtes de Poitou, p. 137.

- [1115] Perhaps the most striking indication of the importance of the duke of Aquitaine is the ceremony of the ducal crowning, which Louis, as husband of the duchess, underwent at Poitiers immediately after his marriage; Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 911. There was a special “Ordo ad benedicendum ducem Aquitaniæ” (printed in Besly, Comtes de Poitou, preuves, pp. 183 et seq., and Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. pp. 451–453), nearly as solemn as the office for the crowning of a king.

- [1116] Rob. Torigni, a. 1139. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 112. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 125.

At the time of Geoffrey’s final success Louis was at deadly strife with the count of Blois; a strife in which the king was wholly in the wrong, and for whose disastrous consequences he afterwards grieved so deeply that his penitence was the chief motive which induced him to go on crusade.[1117] Since then, Geoffrey in his turn had incurred the royal displeasure. There was a certain Gerald, lord of a castle called Montreuil-Bellay, near the southern border of Anjou—one of the fortresses raised by the great castle-builder Fulk Nerra in the earliest days of his warfare with Odo of Blois—whom an Angevin chronicler describes as an absolute monster of wickedness,[1118] but who had so won the favour of the king that he made him seneschal of Poitou. In 1147 this Gerald was the ring-leader of a fresh revolt of the Angevin barons against their count. The revolt was as usual soon put down: but it was not so easy to punish Gerald; for Montreuil was an almost impregnable fortress, with a keep of great strength and height, “lifting itself up to the stars,” surrounded by a double wall and rampart, and further protected by an encircling chasm, very deep and precipitous, which was called the “Valley of Judas,” and prevented any engines of war from coming within range of the castle.[1119] Some time in 1148 Geoffrey built three towers of stone in the neighbourhood of Montreuil, as a base for future operations against it.[1120] In the summer of 1150 an outrage committed by Gerald upon the abbot and monks of S. Aubin at Angers brought matters to a crisis;[1121] Geoffrey made the monks’ quarrel his own and at once set his engineers to level the ground all around Montreuil, in preparation for bringing up his machines to the assault. After nearly twelve months’ labour,[1122] however, the “Judas-Valley” still yawned between himself and his foes, till he ordered the annual fair usually held at Saumur to be transferred to Montreuil. In a fortnight the energies of the crowd who flocked to the fair, joined to those of his own soldiers, filled up the valley and made it into level ground.[1123] Geoffrey could now bring his engines within range, and he used them with such effect that at the first assault the outworks were destroyed and the garrison driven to take refuge in the keep. A summons to surrender was, however, scornfully rejected by Gerald, trusting in the strength of his tower and the expected help of the king.[1124]

- [1117] See Arbois de Jubainville, Comtes de Champagne, vol. ii. pp. 344 et seq.

- [1118] Chron. Mairom. (Marchegay, Eglises), p. 84.

- [1119] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 282–284. See also Chron. S. Serg. a. 1151 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 147).

- [1120] Rob. Torigni, a. 1149. As he himself, as well as the chronicles, makes the siege last altogether three years and end in 1151, he must mean 1148.

- [1121] See the whole curious story in Cartæ et Chronn. de Obedientiâ Mairomni (Marchegay, Eglises), pp. 65 et seq.

- [1122] Chron. Mairom. (as above), p. 87. Chron. S. Serg. a. 1151 (ib. p. 147).

- [1123] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (as above), p. 284.

- [1124] Ib. p. 285.

For Louis had now returned from Palestine;[1125] and so great was his wrath at Geoffrey’s treatment of his favourite that he consented to join Eustace in an attack upon the Norman duchy. Its defence was left to its young duke, then busy with the siege of Torigni on the Vire, held against him by his cousin Richard Fitz-Count—a son of Earl Robert of Gloucester.[1126] Louis and Eustace marched upon Arques; Henry led a force of Normans, Angevins and Bretons to meet them; but his “older and wiser” barons averted a battle,[1127] and nothing more came of the expedition. Geoffrey had never stirred from his camp before Montreuil. Despite a formidable array of engines,[1128] he made little progress; every breach made in the walls by day was mended by night with oaken beams, of which the besieged seemed to have a never-ending supply. Geoffrey was characteristically taking counsel with his books as to the best method of overcoming this difficulty when some monks of Marmoutier came to him on an errand for their convent. One of them took up the book which the count laid down— the treatise of Vegetius Renatus De Re Militari, then, and long after, the standard work on military engineering. It may have been some memory of bygone days when he, too, had worn helm and hauberk instead of cowl and scapulary that brought into the monk’s eyes a gleam which made Geoffrey exclaim, “Stay with me till to-morrow, good brother, and what you are now reading shall be put in action before you.” Next day a large red-hot iron vessel filled with boiling oil was launched from the beam of a mangonel against one of the timber insertions in the wall, and its bursting set the whole place on fire.[1129] Gerald, his spirit broken at last, came forth with his family and his garrison “like serpents crawling out of a cave,” as a hostile chronicler says,[1130] and surrendered to the mercy of the count, who sent him to prison at Angers. The keep was razed at once, save one fragment of wall, left by Geoffrey, and still standing at this hour, as a memorial of his victory and of the skill and perseverance by which it had been won.[1131]

- [1125] He returned in the autumn of 1149. See Rob. Torigni, ad ann., and M. Delisle’s note thereon, vol. i. p. 252, note 1.

- [1126] Rob. Torigni, a. 1151 and 1154.

- [1127] Rob. Torigni, a. 1151. See also Chronn. S. Albin. a. 1150 and S. Serg. a. 1151 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 36, 148).

- [1128] “Petroritas, fundibularias, mangonellos et arietes,” Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 285, and “sex tormenta quæ vulgo perreriæ vocantur.” Chron. S. Serg. (as above), p. 147.

- [1129] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (as above), pp. 286, 287. The monk is called “frater G.” M. Marchegay suggests that he may have been the “Gauterius Compendiensis,” monk of Marmoutier, whom the writer names among his authorities in the Proœmium to his Hist. Abbrev. (ib. p. 353). If so, this detailed account of the last scene at the siege of Montreuil is due to an eye-witness.

- [1130] Chron. Mairom. (Marchegay, Eglises), p. 87.

- [1131] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 287.

The count of Anjou now moved northward to help his son against the king. By the help of a brother of his old ally William Talvas he gained possession of La Nue, a castle belonging to the king’s brother Count Robert of Dreux.[1132] Louis and Robert avenged themselves by burning the town of Séez. Presently after, in August, Louis gathered together all his forces and brought them down the Seine to a spot between Meulan and Mantes. Geoffrey and Henry collected an opposing army on their side of the Norman border; but an attack of fever detained the king in Paris, and a truce was made until he should recover.[1133] The ostensible ground of the dispute was Geoffrey’s treatment of Gerald of Montreuil, which certainly seems to have been unjustly cruel. Not content with receiving his unconditional surrender, razing his castle, and forcing him to make full atonement to the injured monks of S. Aubin, Geoffrey still persisted in keeping in prison not only Gerald himself but also his whole family. The Pope anathematized him for his unchristianlike severity;[1134] but anathemas usually fell powerless upon an Angevin count. Geoffrey was in truth visiting upon Gerald his wrath at the double-dealing of Gerald’s royal master; for he was well aware that King Louis’s interference was prompted by far other motives than disinterested sympathy for his seneschal. Louis was, according to his wont, playing fast and loose with the rival claimants of Normandy, in such shameless fashion that his own chief minister, Suger, had been the first to reprove him in strong terms for his unwarrantable attack upon the Angevins, had stood firmly by Geoffrey all through the struggle, and was now endeavouring, through the mediation of the count of Vermandois and the bishop of Lisieux, to baffle the schemes of Eustace and his party and bring the king back to his old alliance with Anjou.[1135]

- [1132] Rob. Torigni, a. 1151 (Delisle, vol. i. p. 254; see the editor’s note 3, ib.)

- [1133] Rob. Torigni, a. 1151.

- [1134] Geoff. Clairv., Vita S. Bern., l. iv. c. 3 (S. Bern. Opp., Mabillon, vol. ii. col. 1135).

- [1135] Suger, Epp. cl., cliii., clxvii., clxviii., clxxv. (Migne, Patrologia, vol. 186, cols. 1418, 1419–1420, 1427–1429, 1432).

As soon as Louis was sufficiently recovered a meeting was held in Paris to discuss the possibility of a settlement, and the cause of peace was pleaded by no less an advocate than S. Bernard in person. But, almost for the first time, Bernard pleaded in vain; Geoffrey started up in the midst of the colloquy, and without a word of salutation to any one, sprang upon his horse and rode away. The assembly broke up in despair, and Gerald, who had been brought to hear its result, threw himself at the feet of S. Bernard to implore a last benediction before returning, as he thought, to lifelong captivity. “Fear not,” replied the saint, “deliverance is nearer than you think.” Scarcely had the prisoner turned away when his jailer reappeared.[1136] Geoffrey during his solitary ride had revolved the political situation in his mind and perceived that for his son’s sake he must make peace with the king. Matters in England had reached such a crisis that it was absolutely necessary to secure Henry’s tenure of Normandy, as he might at any moment be required to go beyond sea. To that end Geoffrey did more than give up his personal vengeance upon Gerald of Montreuil; he persuaded Henry to give up the Norman Vexin—the land between the Epte and the Andelle, so long the battle-ground of France and Normandy—to the king of France, in exchange for the investiture of the rest of the duchy. If we may believe the French chroniclers, the young duke made a yet further sacrifice and became the “liegeman” of the king—a form of homage to which none of his predecessors had ever stooped.[1137] Of the homage in some shape or other there is however no doubt;[1138] and it appears that the same opportunity was taken to secure for Henry, without waiting for his father’s death, the investiture of his father’s own dominions.[1139]

- [1136] Geoff. Clairv., Vita S. Bern., l. iv. c. 3 (S. Bern. Opp., Mabillon, vol. i. col. 1135).

- [1137] Hist. Ludov., Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 127; Chron. Reg. Franc. (ibid.), p. 213. Both these writers, however, tell an apocryphal story of Louis, at Geoffrey’s and Henry’s request, reconquering the duchy for them and receiving these concessions in return for his help.

- [1138] Rob. Torigni, a. 1151.

- [1139] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 291 (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 336).

Geoffrey was but just entering his thirty-ninth year, and one can hardly help speculating for a moment as to his plans for his own future. For him, now that his work in the west was done, there was no such brilliant opening in the east as there had been for Fulk V. when he, too, in the prime of manhood, had chosen to make way for a younger generation. But Geoffrey had begun public life at an earlier age than either his father or his son; and he seems to have had neither the moral nor the physical strength which had enabled one Angevin count to carry on for half a century, without break and without slackening, the work upon which he had entered before he was fifteen, and to die in harness at the very crowning-point of his activity and his success. Geoffrey Plantagenet was no Fulk Nerra; he was not even a Fulk of Jerusalem; and he may well have been weary of a political career which must always have been embittered by a feeling that he was the mere representative of others, labouring not for himself, hardly even for his country or his race, but only that the one might be swallowed up in the vast dominions and the other merged in the royal line of his ancestors’ Norman foe. He may have seriously intended to pass the rest of his days among his books; or he may have felt an inner warning that those days were to be very few. With a perversity which may after all have been partly the effect of secretly failing health, although he had now set Gerald at liberty he still refused to acknowledge that he had treated him with unjust severity, or to seek absolution from the Pope’s censure; and he even answered with blasphemous words to the gentle remonstrances of S. Bernard. “With what measure thou hast meted it shall be meted to thee again” said the saint at last as he turned away; one of his followers, more impetuous, boldly prophesied that Geoffrey would die within a year. He did die within a fortnight.[1140] On his way home from the king’s court,[1141] overcome with the heat, he plunged into a river to cool himself;[1142] a fever was the consequence; he was borne to Château-du-Loir, and there on September 7 he passed away.[1143] His last legacy to his son was a piece of good advice, given almost with his dying breath:—not to change the old customs of the lands over which he was called to rule, whether by bringing those of Normandy and England into Anjou, or by seeking to transfer those of the Angevin dominions into the territories which he inherited from his mother.[1144] Dying in the little border-fortress whence his grandfather Elias had gone forth to liberate Maine, Geoffrey was buried, by his own desire, not among his Angevin forefathers at Tours or at Angers, but in his mother’s home at Le Mans.[1145] A splendid tomb, bearing his effigy adorned with gold and gems, was raised over his remains in the cathedral church,[1146] whence it has disappeared to become a mere antiquarian curiosity in a museum. Geoffrey’s sole surviving monument is the one which he made for himself—the ruined, blackened fragment of his great ancestor’s keep at Montreuil.

- [1140] Geoff. Clairv., Vita S. Bern., l. iv. c. 3 (S. Bern. Opp., Mabillon, vol. ii. col. 1135).

- [1141] At Paris, says Rob. Torigni, a. 1151; on the frontier of Normandy and France, say the Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 156. But if it was the assembly at which Henry received his investiture, that was certainly in Paris; and there does not seem time enough for another.

- [1142] Gesta Cons. as above.

- [1143] Ibid. Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (ibid.), p. 292. Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1151 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 36, 37, 147). Rob. Torigni, a. 1151; etc.

- [1144] “Ne Normanniæ vel Angliæ consuetudines in consulatûs sui terram, vel e converso, variæ vicissitudinis altercatione permutaret.” Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (as above), pp. 292, 293.

- [1145] Chron. S. Serg. a. 1151 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 147); Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (as above), p. 292. “Inque solo materno sibi locum eligens sepulturæ.” R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 16 (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 341).

- [1146] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (as above), p. 293. “Hic solus omnium mortalium intra muros civitatis Cinomannicæ sepultus est,” says Rob. Torigni, a. 1151.

Stephen could not do what Geoffrey had done. His kingdom was no mere fief to be passed from hand to hand by a formal ceremony of surrender and investiture; the crowned and anointed king of England could not so easily abdicate in favour of his son. He might however do something to counterbalance Henry’s advancement by obtaining a public recognition of Eustace as his heir. In Lent 1152, therefore, he summoned a great council in London, at which all the earls and barons swore fealty to Eustace.[1147] Still the king felt that his object was far from being secured. He himself was a living proof how slight was the worth of such an oath when the sovereign who had exacted it was gone. There was, however, one further step possible, a step without precedent in England, but one which the kings of France had taken with complete success for several generations past: the solemn coronation and unction of the heir to the throne during his father’s lifetime. It was at this that Stephen had aimed when he sent Archbishop Henry of York to Rome. He took an unusually wise as well as a characteristically generous measure in intrusting his cause to a reconciled enemy; nevertheless the attempt failed. Pope Eugene by his letters absolutely forbade the primate to make Eustace king; therefore, when Stephen called upon Theobald and the other bishops to anoint and crown the youth, they one and all refused. Father and son were both equally vexed and angry. They shut up all the bishops in one house and tried to tease them into submission. A few, remembering that “King Stephen never had loved clerks,” and that it was not the first time he had cast bishops into prison,[1148] were so frightened that they gave way; the majority stood firm, and the primate himself escaped down the Thames in a fishing-boat, made his way to Dover, and thence retreated beyond sea.[1149] Without him there was nothing to be done, and of his yielding there was no chance whatever; for close at his side stood the real fount and source of the papal opposition—Thomas of London.[1150]

- [1147] Ann. Waverl. a. 1152 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. p. 234). Ann. Winton. Contin. a. 1152 (Liebermann, Geschichtsquellen, p. 82).

- [1148] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 32 (Arnold, p. 284).

- [1149] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 151. Vita Theobald. (Giles, Lanfranc, vol. i.), p. 338.

- [1150] Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 150.

Some of Henry’s partizans in England now thought it time for him to interfere, and despatched his uncle Reginald earl of Cornwall to urge him to come over at once.[1151] Soon after Easter a meeting of the Norman barons—already summoned by Henry in the previous autumn,[1152] but delayed by the unexpected catastrophe of his father’s death—was held at Lisieux to consider the matter.[1153] But whatever the result of their deliberations may have been, Henry found something else to do before he could cross the sea. King Louis VII. had been meditating a divorce from his wife, the Aquitanian duchess Eleanor, ever since their return from the crusade. The great obstacle to his scheme was his father’s and his own old friend and minister Suger, who saw the grave political danger of such a measure and opposed it with all the influence he possessed.[1154] But Suger was dying; and the king had made up his mind. He took the first step at Christmas 1151 by going with Eleanor into Aquitaine and withdrawing all his own garrisons from her territories.[1155] Suger’s death on January 13 recalled him to Paris,[1156] and at the same time set him free to accomplish his desire unopposed. A Church council was held under the presidency of Archbishop Hugh of Sens at Beaugency on the Tuesday before Palm Sunday;[1157] the king and queen were made out to be akin, and their union was dissolved.[1158] Eleanor set out for her own dominions; she had however some trouble in reaching them. She was young and beautiful; her personal charms were more than equalled by those of her two great duchies of Aquitaine and Gascony; and more than one ambitious feudatary was eager to seize the prize which his sovereign had thrown away. At her first halting-place, Blois, the young count Theobald—son and successor of Theobald the Great who had died two months before[1159]—sought to take her by force and make her his wife. She fled by night to Tours, and there narrowly escaped being captured with the same intention by a still more youthful admirer, Geoffrey of Anjou, Henry’s brother. The audacious boy laid a plot to catch her at Port-de-Piles, on the frontier of Touraine and Poitou; but she was warned in time and made her escape by another road safe into her own territory.[1160] Thence she at once wrote to offer herself and her lands to the husband of her own choice—Henry duke of the Normans. He set out to join her immediately, and at Whitsuntide they were married at Poitiers.[1161]

[1151] Rob. Torigni, a. 1152.

[1152] Ibid. a. 1151.

[1153] Rob. Torigni, a. 1152.

[1154] Vita Suger., l. i. c. 5 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 104).

[1155] Chron. Turon. Magn. a. 1152 (Salmon, Chron. Touraine, p. 135). Cf. Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 53 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 307; Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 437).

[1156] Vita Suger., l. iii. cc. 11, 13 (as above, pp. 111, 113).

[1157] Gesta Ludov., c. 29 (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. iv. p. 411). The Hist. Ludov. (ib. p. 415) makes it Friday (March 21) instead of Tuesday.

[1158] Gesta Ludov. and Hist. Ludov. as above. Chron. Turon. Magn. as above, etc.

[1159] In January 1152. See Arbois de Jubainville, Comtes de Champagne, vol. ii. p. 398, note 12.

[1160] Chron. Turon. Magn. a. 1152 (Salmon, Chron. Touraine, p. 135).

[1161] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 149. See also Will. Newb., l. i. c. 31 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 93); Chron. Turon. Magn. a. 1152 (as above); Hist. Ludov. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. iv. p. 413, and Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 127); Fragm. Chron. Com. Pictav. (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 410). This last gives the place; Rob. Torigni, a. 1152, gives the season. Whit-Sunday was May 18; and a charter referred to by M. Delisle in a note to Rob. Torigni ad ann. (vol. i. p. 260), proves that they were married before May 27. Gervase’s story is the fullest; according to him, they married for love, and Eleanor had herself procured the divorce for that object—such, at least, was the story which she wrote to her young lover. As to the question of consanguinity, that of Louis and Eleanor is not very clear; it was at any rate more remote than that of Eleanor and Henry, who certainly were within the forbidden degrees. One would like to know what S. Bernard, who had put a stop to a proposal of marriage between Henry and Eleanor’s daughter (S. Bern. Ep. ccclxxi., Opp., Mabillon, vol. i. col. 333), thought of the matter; a saint of the next generation, Hugh of Lincoln, thought and said plainly that it was the fatal sin which was visited upon the children of the guilty couple in the downfall of the Angevin empire. Magna Vita S. Hugonis, l. v. c. 16 (Dimock, p. 332). In his eyes, however, the sin lay in the fact not of the kindred between the parties, but of Eleanor’s divorce; and it is noteworthy that William of Newburgh, who did not live to see the final catastrophe or to know the worst crimes of Eleanor’s youngest son, took exactly the same view; l. iii. c. 26 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 281).

Suger’s worst fears were now realized. Aquitaine was lost to the king of France; it had gone to swell the forces of the prince who was already the mightiest feudatary of the realm, and who would probably be king of England ere long; and as Louis and Eleanor had no son, there was very little hope that even in the next generation it would revert to the French Crown. In feudal law, an heiress had no right to marry without the consent of her overlord. It seems that Louis accordingly summoned Henry to appear before the royal court and answer for his conduct in thus hastily accepting Eleanor’s hand. But Henry Fitz-Empress, duke of Normandy, count of Anjou, Touraine and Maine, and duke of Aquitaine—for, rightly or wrongly, he was married, and in full possession of his wife’s territories—master of more than half Gaul, from the Flemish to the Spanish March and from the Rhône to the ocean—could venture to defy a mere king of the French. He therefore refused to appear before the court or to acknowledge its jurisdiction in any way.[1162] Eustace seized the favourable moment to regain the French alliance; he came over to visit King Louis; his long-standing betrothal with Constance of France ended at last in marriage;[1163] and Henry, on the point of sailing from Barfleur, just after midsummer, was stopped by the discovery that Louis, Eustace, Robert of Dreux, Henry of Champagne,[1164] and his own brother Geoffrey had made a league to drive him out of all his possessions and divide them among themselves.[1165]

- [1162] “Qui citatus ad Curiam, venire noluit ad jus faciendum, vel capiendum in Regis præsentiâ Palatii judicium omnino respuit et contempsit.” Gesta Ludov., c. 28 (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. iv. p. 411). “Ante dominum suum Regem Ludovicum defecit a justitiâ.” Hist. Ludov. (ib. p. 414). This is related as a piece of shameful ingratitude for Louis’s supposed help towards the conquest of Normandy. The story then proceeds to relate that Louis in wrath besieged and took Vernon and Neufmarché, whereupon Henry humbly promised to be more obedient for the future, and Louis, accepting his assurances, restored the two castles. We are not told on what charge Henry had been cited to the court, and no hint is given that the quarrel was in any way connected with his marriage, which indeed is not mentioned till some time after. Yet I can find no indication of any ground for such a citation, except the marriage; and that, indeed, would be a most obvious pretext.

- [1163] Eng. Chron. a. 1140.

- [1164] Second son of Theobald the Great of Blois, and betrothed husband of the infant princess Mary, eldest child of Louis and Eleanor.

- [1165] Rob. Torigni, a. 1152. See also Chron. S. Albin. a. 1152 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 37).

Geoffrey by his father’s will had inherited Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau;[1166] with this vantage-ground he began operations against his brother’s authority in Anjou, while the other four princes crossed the Norman border and laid siege to Neufmarché. Henry set out from Barfleur on July 16 to relieve Neufmarché, but arrived too late to save it from surrender;[1167] Louis handed it over to Eustace,[1168] and proceeded to muster his forces near Chaumont in the French Vexin. Henry did the like on the banks of the Andelle, and began ravaging the country between that river and the Epte—the old Norman Vexin, so lately ceded to Louis as the price of his alliance. In August Louis brought his host across the Seine at Meulan; Henry crossed lower down, by the bridge of Vernon, and thinking that the king intended to attack Verneuil, was hurrying to reach it before him when a message from the lord of Pacy told him that this last place was the one really threatened. He turned and proceeded thither at such a pace that several of his horses fell dead on the road; Louis, finding himself outwitted, gave up the expedition and returned to Meulan. Henry next invaded the county of Dreux, burned Brézolles and Marcouville, took hostages from Richer de l’Aigle—Thomas Becket’s old friend—whose fidelity was doubtful, and burned his castle of Bonmoulins, which was said to be “a den of thieves”; he then planted a line of garrisons all along the Norman frontier, and at the end of August went down into Anjou. There he blockaded the rebel leaders congregated in the castle of Montsoreau on the Loire till most of them fell into his hands, and his brother gave up the useless struggle.[1169] Louis meanwhile profited by his absence to burn part of the town of Tillières and a village near Verneuil, and to make an attempt upon Nonancourt, in which however he failed.[1170] Immediately afterwards he fell sick of a fever; his army dissolved, and he was obliged to retire into his own domains[1171] and make proposals for a truce.[1172] Henry was ready enough to accept them; for he had just received another urgent summons from England, and he felt that this time it must be answered in person.

- [1166] Chron. Turon. Magn. a. 1152 (Salmon, Chron. Touraine, p. 136).

- [1167] Rob. Torigni, a. 1152.

- [1168] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 31 (Arnold, p. 283).

- [1169] Rob. Torigni, a. 1152. See also a shorter account in Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 149, 150, and a general summing-up of the result in Chron. S. Albin. a. 1152 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 37).

- [1170] Rob. Torigni, a. 1152.

- [1171] Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 150.

- [1172] Rob. Torigni, a. 1152.

Since the Empress’s departure, Stephen had made but little progress in reducing the castles of those barons who still, either in her name or in their own, chose to defy his authority. A revolt of Ralf of Chester and Gilbert of Pembroke in 1149 and two unsuccessful attempts made by the king to recover Worcester from Waleran of Meulan, to whom he had himself intrusted it in the days when Waleran was one of his best supporters,[1173] make up almost the whole military history of the last four years. Ralf of Chester’s obstinate claim upon Lincoln was at last disposed of by a compromise.[1174] There was however one fortress which throughout the whole course of the war had been, almost more than any other, a special object of Stephen’s jealousy. This was Wallingford, a castle of great strength seated on the right bank of the Thames some twelve miles south of Oxford, and held as a perpetual thorn in the king’s side by a Breton adventurer, Brian Fitz-Count, one of the most able and energetic as well as most faithful and persevering members of the Angevin party in England. Hitherto all Stephen’s attempts against Wallingford—even the erection of a rival fortress, Crowmarsh, directly over against it—had produced no effect at all. At last, in the winter of 1152, he built a strong wooden tower at the foot of the bridge over the Thames whereby alone the garrison of Wallingford obtained their supplies. Brian and his men saw their convoys hopelessly shut out; they knew that none of their friends in England were strong enough to relieve them; they therefore sent to their lord the young duke of the Normans, and begged that he would either give them leave to surrender with honour, or send help to deliver them out of their strait.[1175]

- [1173] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 30 (Arnold, p. 282).

- [1174] See the terms in Dugdale, Baronage, vol. i. p. 39.

- [1175] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 32 (Arnold, p. 284). Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 153.

Henry did not send; he came. Landing with a small force on the morning of the Epiphany,[1176] he entered a church to honour the festival with such brief devotion as a soldier could spare time for, and the first words that fell on his ear sounded like an omen of success: “Behold, the Lord the ruler cometh, and the kingdom is in his hand.”[1177] Before the week was out he had taken the town of Malmesbury and the outworks of the castle, and was blockading Bishop Roger’s impregnable keep. Stephen, warned by its commandant, hastened to its relief. On a bitter January morning king and duke, each at the head of his troops, met for the first time face to face, divided only by the river Avon—here at Malmesbury a mere streamlet in itself, but so swollen by the winter’s rains that neither party dared venture to cross it. A torrent of rain, sleet and hail was pouring down, drifting before a violent west wind, striking the Angevins in their backs, but beating hard in the faces of the king and his host; drenched, blinded, scarce able to hold their weapons, they stood shivering with cold and terror, feeling as if Heaven itself had taken up arms against them, till Stephen turned away in despair and led his dispirited forces back to London. Malmesbury surrendered as soon as he was gone.[1178] The young duke marched straight upon Wallingford, demolished Stephen’s wooden tower at the first assault, and revictualled the castle. He then laid siege to Crowmarsh. Stephen advanced to relieve it; again the two armies fronted each other in battle array, but again no battle took place. The barons, who were only anxious to maintain both the rival sovereigns as a check upon each other, and dreaded nothing so much as the complete triumph of either, took advantage of a supposed bad omen which befell the king[1179] to insist upon a parley, and proposed that Stephen and Henry in person should arrange terms with each other, subject to ratification by their respective followers.[1180] Yielding to necessity, and both fully aware of their advisers’ disloyal motives, the two leaders held a colloquy across a narrow reach of the Thames.[1181] For the moment a truce was arranged, on condition that Stephen should raze Crowmarsh at the end of five days.[1182] As the barons doubtless expected, however, no solution was reached on the main question at issue between the rivals, and with mutual complaints of the treason of their followers they separated once again.[1183]

- [1176] Rob. Torigni, a. 1153, says he came with thirty-six ships. Will. Newb., l. i. c. 29 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 88), gives the force as one hundred and forty horse and three thousand foot. From the sequel it seems that he landed on the Hampshire or Dorset coast.

- [1177] “Ecce advenit dominator Dominus, et regnum in manu ejus:”—first words of the introit for Epiphany. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 151, 152.

- [1178] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 34 (Arnold, pp. 285–287). See also Rob. Torigni, a. 1153.

- [1179] His horse reared and nearly threw him three times while he was marshalling his troops. Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 154.

- [1180] Ibid. Hen. Hunt. as above (p. 287).

- [1181] Gerv. Cant. as above. Cf. Hen. Hunt. as above (p. 288).

- [1182] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 34 (Arnold, p. 288). Rob. Torigni, a. 1153.

- [1183] Hen. Hunt. as above.

But there were others who, in all sincerity, were labouring hard for peace. Archbishop Theobald was in constant communication with the king in person and with the duke through trusty envoys, endeavouring to establish a basis for negotiations between them. He found an ally in Henry of Winchester, now eager to help in putting an end to troubles which he at last perceived had been partly fostered by his own errors.[1184] The once rival prelates, thus united in their best work, saw their chief obstacle in Eustace.[1185] Not only was it the hope of his son’s succession which made Stephen cling so obstinately to every jot and tittle of his regal claims; but Eustace’s character was such that the mere possibility of his rule could not be contemplated without dread; and to look for any self-renunciation on his part was far more hopeless than to expect it from Stephen. Eustace was in fact a most degenerate son, unworthy not only of his high-souled mother but even of his weak, amiable father. He had one merit—he was an excellent soldier;[1186] for the rest, his character was that of the house of Blois in its most vicious phase, unredeemed by a spark of the generous warmth and winning graciousness for which so much had been forgiven to Stephen.[1187] Even with his own party and his own father he could not keep at peace. The issue of the Crowmarsh expedition threw him into a fury; after loading his father with reproaches, he deserted him altogether and rode away to Canterbury, vowing to ravage the whole country from end to end, sparing neither the property of the churches nor the holy places themselves. He began with S. Edmund’s abbey. He was hospitably received there, but his demand for money was refused, and he ordered the crops to be destroyed. A century and a half before, the heathen Danish conqueror Swein had in like manner insulted East Anglia’s patron saint, and had been stricken down by a sudden and mysterious death. So too it was with Eustace. As he sat at table in the abbey, the first morsel of food choked him, and in the convulsions of raging madness he expired.[1188]

- [1184] Ib.·/·Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 37 (Arnold, p. 289).

- [1185] Will. Newb., l. i. c. 30 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 90).

- [1186] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 35 (Arnold, p. 288).

- [1187] Ibid. Eng. Chron. a. 1140, and all the contemporary writers are unanimous in their accounts of him—except the Gesta Steph. (Sewell, p. 130).

- [1188] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 155. Rob. Torigni, a. 1153, says the sacrilege was committed on S. Laurence’s day, and the punishment followed “circa octavas.” Cf. Joh. Salisb., Polycrat., l. viii. c. 21 (Giles, vol. iv. pp. 354, 355).

Eustace’s death was only one of a striking series. The roll had opened with Geoffrey of Anjou in September 1151. Suger and Theobald of Blois both died in January 1152. Politically as well as personally, the death of the good and wise brother who had stood by him so faithfully and so unselfishly through all his difficulties in Normandy and at Rome must have been a heavy blow to Stephen; but heavier still was the blow that fell upon him three months later, when on May 3 he lost the wisest, probably, of his counsellors as well as the truest and bravest of all his partizans in England—his queen, Matilda of Boulogne.[1189] She was followed in little more than a month by her cousin Henry of Scotland.[1190] Next year the list of remarkable deaths was longer still. On this side of the sea it included, besides Eustace, Ralf earl of Chester,[1191] Walter Lespec,[1192] and David king of Scots.[1193] Another person who had made some figure in the history of northern England, William bishop of Durham, had died in the previous November.[1194] The appointment of Hugh of Puiset to his vacant chair,[1195] being strongly opposed by Archbishop Murdac, nearly caused another schism in the province; the southern primate, however, doubtless feeling that it was no time now for ecclesiastical squabbles, took the case into his own hands and sent the elect of Durham to be consecrated at Rome by the Pope.[1196] But the Pope was no longer Eugene III. Rome lost her Cistercian bishop on July 9, 1153. Six weeks later Clairvaux itself became a valley of the shadow of death, as its light passed away with S. Bernard;[1197] and two months later still the metropolitan chair of York was again vacated, and the three great Cistercian fellow-workers were reunited in their rest, by the death of Henry Murdac.[1198] The generation which had been young with Stephen seemed to be rapidly passing away; the primate, the bishop of Winchester and the king himself were left almost alone, like survivors of a past age, in presence of the younger race represented by Henry of Anjou.

- [1189] Rob. Torigni, a. 1152. Chron. S. Crucis Edinb. a. 1152. Gerv. Cant. (as above)·/·(Stubbs), vol. i., p. 151.

- [1190] Chron. S. Cruc. Edinb. a. 1152.

- [1191] Ibid. a. 1153. Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 171. Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 155.

- [1192] Dugdale, Monast. Angl., vol. v. p. 280.

- [1193] Chron. S. Cruc. Edinb. as above. Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 168.

- [1194] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 166.

- [1195] On January 22, 1153; Ib. p. 167.

- [1196] See details in Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 167, and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 157, where the date is wrong.

- [1197] Rob. Torigni, a. 1153.

- [1198] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 171. Walbran, Memor. of Fountains, vol. i. p. 109.

With the life of Eustace ended the resistance of Stephen. He had other sons, but they were mere boys; it was hopeless to think of setting up even the eldest of them as a rival to Henry. The young duke was carrying all before him; Stamford, Nottingham,[1199] Reading, Barkwell, had yielded to him already, when Countess Gundrada of Warwick surrendered Warwick castle,[1200] and the adhesion of Earl Robert of Leicester placed more than thirty fortresses all at once at the young conqueror’s disposal.[1201] Henry was, however, fully alive to the wisdom of securing his kingdom by a legal settlement rather than by the mere power of the sword. At last a treaty was made, on November 6, in the place where it had been first projected—Wallingford.[1202] It was agreed that Stephen and Henry should adopt each other as father and son; that Stephen should keep his regal dignity for the rest of his life, Henry acting as justiciar and practical ruler of the kingdom under him; and that after his death Henry should be king.[1203] The details of the settlement have come down to us only in a poetical shape which expresses not so much what the contracting parties actually undertook to do as what needed to be done—what was the ideal at which the peace-makers aimed, and how far removed from it was the actual condition of the country. The rights of the Crown, which the nobles had everywhere usurped, were to be resumed; the “adulterine castles”—castles built during the anarchy and without the king’s leave, to the number of eleven hundred and fifteen—were to be destroyed; all property was to be restored to the lawful owners who had held it in King Henry’s time. The farms were again to be supplied with husbandmen; the houses which had been burnt down were to be rebuilt and filled with inhabitants; the woods were to be provided with foresters, the coverts replenished with game, the hill-sides covered with flocks of sheep and the meadows with herds of cattle. The clergy were to enjoy tranquillity and peace, and to be relieved from all extraordinary and exorbitant demands. The sheriffs were to be regularly appointed in accustomed places, and held strictly to their duties; they were not to indulge their greed, nor to prosecute any one out of malice, nor shew undue favour to their own friends, nor condone crimes, but to render to every man his due; some they were to influence by the threat of punishment, others by the promise of reward. Thieves and robbers were to be punished with death. Soldiers were to beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks; the Flemings were to quit the camp for the farm, the tent for the workshop, and render to their own masters the service which they had so long forced upon the English people; the country-folk were to dwell in undisturbed security, the merchants to grow rich through the revival of trade. Finally, one standard of money was to be current throughout the realm.[1204]

- [1199] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 36 (Arnold, p. 288).

- [1200] Rob. Torigni, a. 1153.

- [1201] Gerv. Cant. (as above)·/·(Stubbs), vol. i., pp. 152, 153.

- [1202] The date is given by Rob. Torigni and Chron. S. Cruc. Edinb. a. 1153; the place by Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. ii. p. 255.

- [1203] “ ... Ferden te ærceb. and te wise men betwux heom and makede th. sahte th. te king sculde ben lauerd and king wile he liuede, and æfter his dæi ware Henri king; and he helde him for fader and he him for sune; and sib and sæhte sculde ben betwyx heom and on al Engleland. This and te othre forwuuardes thet hi makeden suoren to halden the king and te eorl and te b. and te eorles and rice men alle.” Eng. Chron., a. 1140. The accounts of Will. Newb., l. i. c. 30 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 90, 91), R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 296, and Chron. Mailros, a. 1153, are to much the same effect. Rog. Howden (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 212) adds: “Rex vero constituit ducem justitiarium Angliæ sub ipso, et omnia regni negotia per ipsum terminabantur.” Stephen’s proclamation of the treaty is in Rymer’s Fœdera, vol. i. p. 18. Its date is Westminster, 1153, and it is in form of a writ addressed to the archbishops, bishops, barons, and all faithful subjects, proclaiming and notifying to them the treaty just made. The primary article, concerning the adoption of Henry as heir, is stated exactly as by the chroniclers. The remainder of the document relates entirely to details of homage done by prelates and barons to Henry, stipulations in behalf of Stephen’s son William, and arrangements for surrender of royal castles to Henry on Stephen’s death. Finally: “In negotiis autem regni ego consilio ducis operabor. Ego vero in toto regno Angliæ, tam in parte ducis quam in meâ, regalem justiciam exercebo.” By “the duke’s part” and “my part” Stephen probably meant simply the parts which each held at the moment; the whole clause seems to mean that the regal justice was to be exercised in his name and for his profit, but by Henry’s wisdom—which agrees very well with Rog. Howden’s statement.

- [1204] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 297. Concerning the coinage, Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 211, says: “Fecit [Henricus] monetam novam, quam vocabant monetam ducis; et non tantum ipse, sed omnes potentes, tam episcopi quam comites et barones, suam faciebant monetam. Sed ex quo dux ille venit, plurimorum monetam cassavit.” This however is placed under the year 1149.

The treaty was ratified in an assembly of bishops, earls and barons, held at Winchester at the end of the month.[1205] Stephen afterwards accompanied his adoptive son to London, where he was joyfully welcomed by the citizens.[1206] King and duke seem to have kept Christmas apart; Henry indeed set himself to his task of reform in such earnest that he could have little time to spare for mere festivities. On the octave of Epiphany another assembly was held at Oxford, where the nobles of England swore homage and fealty to the duke as to their lord, reserving only the faith due to Stephen as long as he lived. The next meeting, at Dunstable, was not quite so satisfactory. Henry, doing his share of the public work with true Angevin thoroughness, was irritated at finding that some of the builders of unlicensed castles had gained the king’s ear and persuaded him to exempt their fortresses from the sentence of universal destruction. Against this breach of faith the duke earnestly remonstrated; but he found it impossible to enforce his wishes without a quarrel which he was too prudent to risk.[1207] He therefore let the matter rest, and in Lent he accompanied Stephen to Canterbury and thence to a meeting with the count and countess of Flanders at Dover.[1208] There it was discovered that some of the Flemish mercenaries, to whom Henry and his good peace were equally hateful,[1209] were conspiring to kill him on his return to Canterbury. The shock of this discovery, added to that of an accident which befell Stephen’s eldest surviving son William, who is said to have been aware of the plot,[1210] was too much for the king’s overwrought nerves, and with a last benediction he hurried his adoptive son out of the country at once.[1211] Henry passed through Canterbury before the conspirators were ready for him, made his way to Rochester and London, and thence safe over sea to Normandy,[1212] where he landed soon after Easter.[1213]

- [1205] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 156. See also Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 37 (Arnold, p. 289).

- [1206] Hen. Hunt. as above. Eng. Chron. a. 1140.

- [1207] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 38 (Arnold, pp. 289, 290).

- [1208] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 158. The countess was Henry’s aunt, Sibyl of Anjou, once the bride of William the Clito, now the wife of his rival Theodoric.

- [1209] “Qui duci simul ac paci invidebant.” Ibid.

- [1210] Ibid.

- [1211] Will. Newb., l. i. c. 30 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 91, 92).

- [1212] Gerv. Cant. as above.

- [1213] Rob. Torigni, a. 1154.

Only fifteen months had passed since his arrival in England; only five had passed since the treaty of Wallingford; yet in that short time Henry had made, as the contemporary English chronicler says, “such good peace as never was here”[1214]—never, that is, since peace and order were buried with his grandfather, eighteen years before. So well was the work begun that even when he was thus obliged to leave it for a while in the weak hands of Stephen, it did not fall to pieces again. Stephen indeed, as was remarked by the writers of the day, seemed now at length for the first time to be really king.[1215] For eighteen years he had been king only in name; his regal dignity had never been truly respected, his regal authority had never been fully obeyed, till the last twelve months of his life, when he was avowedly only holding them in trust for the future sovereign whom “all folk loved,” because he did what Stephen had failed to do—“he did good justice and made peace.”[1216] After Henry was gone Stephen gathered up his failing strength for a campaign against some of the rebellious castles in the north. Sick and weary as he was, his youthful valour and prowess were even yet not altogether departed; castle after castle fell into his hands, the last and most important being that of Drax in Yorkshire.[1217] He then went southward again to hold another meeting with the count of Flanders at Dover.[1218] There his health finally gave way; and eight days before the feast of All Saints his nineteen years’ reign, with all its troubles and disappointments, its blunders and failures, its useless labours and hopeless cares, was ended by a quiet death.[1219]

- [1214] “And hit ward sone suythe god pais, sua th. neure was here.” Eng. Chron. a. 1140.

- [1215] Will. Newb. as above·/·, l. i. c. 30 (Howlett, vol. i. (p. 91). Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 39 (Arnold, p. 290). R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 297.

- [1216] Eng. Chron. a. 1140.

- [1217] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 39 (Arnold, p. 291). Will. Newb., l. i. c. 32 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 94). Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 213.

- [1218] Hen. Hunt. as above. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 159.

- [1219] Hen. Hunt. and Gerv. Cant. as above. The Ann. Winton. Contin. a. 1154 (Liebermann, Geschichtsquellen, p. 82) dates it a day later.

The primate and the nobles, while they laid him in Feversham abbey beside his wife and son,[1220] sent the news to the king-elect, begging him to come and take his crown without delay.[1221] The message reached Henry just as he was completing the suppression of a disturbance in Normandy. A series of desultory attacks made by the French king upon the duchy during Henry’s absence in 1153 had led to no direct result, but they probably helped to foster the turbulence of the Norman barons, who were fast getting into their old condition of lawless independence when at Easter 1154 the duke re-appeared in their midst. He began to assert his authority by resuming—not all at once, but gradually and cautiously—the demesne lands of the duchy, which his father had been compelled to alienate for a time in order to purchase the support of the nobles. A hurried visit to Aquitaine was followed in August by peace with the king of France; for Louis had at last come to see that his opposition was as vain as Stephen’s. Immediately afterwards the young duke was struck down by a severe illness. In October he was sufficiently recovered to join Louis in a campaign for the settlement of some disturbances in the Vexin; thence he went once more to besiege his rebellious cousin and vassal Richard Fitz-Count at Torigni. The place had apparently just surrendered when the tidings of Stephen’s death arrived. Henry took counsel first of all with his mother; then he summoned his brothers and the barons of Normandy to meet him at Barfleur; but when he arrived there with Eleanor the wind was so unfavourable that a whole month elapsed before they could venture to cross.[1222] Henry, however, could afford to wait; and England could wait for him. Three weeks without a king had been enough to throw the whole country into disorder when Henry I. had died leaving only a woman and an infant as his heirs; six weeks passed away without any disturbance now while Archbishop Theobald was guarding the rights of the Crown[1223] for one who had already proved himself King Henry’s worthy grandson. “No man durst do other than good, for the mickle awe of him.”[1224] At last, on December 8,[1225] he landed in Hampshire;[1226] first at Winchester, then in London, he received a rapturous welcome;[1227] and on the Sunday before Christmas Henry Fitz-Empress, duke of the Normans, count of Anjou and duke of Aquitaine, was crowned king of England in Westminster abbey.[1228]

- [1220] Hen. Hunt. as above·/·, l. viii. c. 39 (Arnold, p. 291). Eng. Chron. a. 1154. Will. Newb., l. i. c. 32 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 95).

- [1221] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 40 (Arnold, p. 291).

- [1222] Rob. Torigni, a. 1154.

- [1223] “Nutu divino et cooperante Theodbaldo Cantuariensi archiepiscopo.” Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 159.

- [1224] Eng. Chron. a. 1154. Cf. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 40 (Arnold, p. 291).

- [1225] Gerv. Cant. as above. Rob. Torigni, a. 1154, gives the date as December 7. Most likely the crossing was made, as seems to have been the usual practice with Henry at least, in the night.

- [1226] “Hostreham,” Gerv. Cant. as above. “Apud Noveforest,” Hen. Hunt. as above; which Mr. Arnold glosses in the margin “Lymington.”

- [1227] Hen. Hunt. and Gerv. Cant. as above.

- [1228] The Chron. S. Albin. a. 1154 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 38) says: “xiv kalendas januarii apud Wintoniam rex consecratur, et Natale Domini celebrans Londoniæ, cum uxore coronatur.” But the English writers mention only one crowning, at Westminster. The Eng. Chron. a. 1154, says Henry was “to king blessed in London on the Sunday before Midwinter-day.” Rob. Torigni ad ann., R. Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 299), Chron. de Bello (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 72), Ann. S. Aug. Cant. ad ann. (Liebermann, Geschichtsquellen, p. 82), all give the same date; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 159) makes it December 17, but as he also calls it the Sunday before Christmas, he evidently means 19. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 40 (Arnold, pp. 291, 292), greets the new king with some hexameter verses, and then adds: “Et jam regi novo novus liber donandus est.” But the book, if it was ever written, is lost.

CHAPTER IX.
HENRY AND ENGLAND.
1154–1157.

The Christmas-tide of the year 1154 was an epoch in English history almost as marked as that of 1066. The crowning of Henry Fitz-Empress was, scarcely less than that of William the Conqueror, the beginning of a new era; and—unlike many historical events whose importance is only realized long after they are past—it was distinctly recognized as such by the men of the period. For the first time since the Norman conquest, the new king succeeded to his throne without a competitor, and with the unanimous goodwill of all ranks and all races throughout his kingdom. Normans and English, high and low, cleric and lay, welcomed the young Angevin king as the herald of a bright new day which was to dispel the darkness that had settled down upon the land during the nineteen winters of anarchy, and to bring back all, or more than all, the peace and prosperity of England’s happiest ages. But if Henry’s subjects looked forward to the year which was just beginning with a hope such as no new year had brought them since his grandfather’s death, Henry himself may well have contemplated with an anxiety little short of despair the task which lay before him. It was nothing less than the resuscitation of the body politic from a state of utter decay. The legal, constitutional and administrative machinery of the state was at a deadlock; the national resources, material and moral, were exhausted. To bring under subjection, once for all, the remnant of the disturbing forces which had caused the catastrophe, and render them powerless for future harm:—to disinter from the mass of ruin the fragments of the old foundations of social and political organization, and build up on them a secure and lasting fabric of administration and law;—to bring order out of chaos, life out of decay:—this was the work which a youth who had not yet completed his twenty-second year now found himself called to undertake, and to undertake almost single-handed.

The call did not indeed take him by surprise. The last year which he had spent in England must have given him some knowledge of the state of things with which as king he would have to deal; and the prospect of having so to deal with it sooner or later had been constantly before his eyes from his very infancy. His qualifications for the work must however have been chiefly innate. The first nine years of his life spent under the care of mother and father alternately in Anjou; the next four, under his uncle Earl Robert at Bristol; then two years in Anjou again, followed by a year with King David of Scotland, three more spent in securing his continental heritage and that of his bride, a year occupied in securing England, and another busied with self-defence in Normandy:—such a training was too desultory to have furnished Henry with the knowledge or the experience necessary for the formation of anything like a matured theory of government; and he could have had no time to think out one for himself in a life so busy and so short. Yet in his very youth and inexperience there was an element of strength. He came trammelled by no preconceived political theories, no party-pledges, no local and personal ties; he came simply with his own young intellect unwarped by prejudice, unruffled by passion, unclouded by care; fresh with the untried vigour and elasticity of youth, and ready, whatever his hand should find to do, fearlessly to do it with his might.

Thus much, at least, those who crowded to welcome the new sovereign might read in his very face and figure. Henry of Anjou had no claim to the personal epithet universally bestowed upon his father; and yet, as one of his courtiers expressively said, his was a form which a soldier, having once seen, would hasten to look upon again.[1229] He was of moderate height,[1230] appearing neither gigantic among small men nor insignificant among tall ones;[1231] in later days it was remarked that he had hit the golden mean of stature which his sons had all either overshot or failed to attain.[1232] His frame was made for strength, endurance and activity;[1233] thick-set, square-shouldered, broad-chested:—with arms muscular as those of a gladiator;[1234] highly-arched feet which looked made for the stirrup;[1235]—a large, but not disproportionate head, round and well-shaped, and covered with close-cropped hair of the tawny hue which Fulk the Red seems to have transmitted to so many of his descendants:[1236] a face which one of his courtiers describes as “lion-like”[1237] and another as “a countenance of fire”[1238]—a face, as we can see even in its sculptured effigy on his tomb, full of animation, energy and vigour;—a freckled skin;[1239] somewhat prominent grey eyes, clear and soft when he was in a peaceable mood, but bloodshot and flashing like balls of fire when the demon-spirit of his race was aroused within him:—[1240] Henry, his people might guess almost at a glance, was no mirror of courtly chivalry and elegance, but a man of practical, vigorous and rapid action. He inherited as little of Geoffrey’s personal refinement as of his physical grace. When the young duke of the Normans had first appeared in England, his shoulders covered with a little short cape such as was then usually worn in Anjou, the English knights, who since his grandfather’s time had been accustomed to wear long cloaks hanging down to the ground, were struck by the novelty of his attire and nicknamed him “Henry Curtmantel.”[1241] When once the Angevin fashion was transferred to the English court, however, there was nothing in Henry’s dress to distinguish him from his servants, unless it were its very lack of display and elegance; his clothing and headgear were of the plainest kind; and how little care he took of his person was shewn by his rough coarse hands, never gloved except when he went hawking.[1242] In his later years he was accused of extreme parsimony;[1243] even as a young man, he clearly had no pleasure in pomp or luxury of any kind. He was very temperate in meat and drink;[1244] over-indulgence in that respect seems indeed never to have been one of the habitual sins of the house of Anjou; and whatever complex elements may have had a part in his innermost moral constitution, in temper and tastes Henry was an Angevin of the Angevins. His restlessness seems to have outdone that of Fulk Nerra himself. He was always up and doing; if a dream of ease crossed him even in sleep, he spurned it angrily from him;[1245] he gave himself no peace, and as a natural consequence, he gave none to those around him. When not at war, he was constantly practising its mimicry with hawk and hound; his passion for the chase—a double inheritance, from his father and from his mother’s Norman ancestors—was so great as to be an acknowledged scandal in all eyes.[1246] He would mount his horse at the first streak of dawn, come back in the evening after a day’s hard riding across hill, moor and forest, and then tire out his companions by keeping them on their feet until nightfall.[1247] His own feet were always swollen and bruised from his violent riding; yet except at meals and on horseback, he was never known to be seated.[1248] In public or in private, in council or in church, he stood or walked from morning till night.[1249] At church, indeed, he was especially restless; unmindful of the sacred unction which had made him king, he evidently grudged the time taken from secular occupations for attendance upon religious duties, and would either discuss affairs of state in a whisper[1250] or relieve his impatience by drawing little pictures all through the most solemn of holy rites.[1251] His English or Norman courtiers, unaccustomed to deal with the demon-blood of Anjou, vainly endeavoured to account for an activity which remained undiminished when they were all half dead with exhaustion, and attributed it to his dread of becoming disabled by corpulence, to which he had a strong natural tendency.[1252] A good deal of it, however, was probably due to sheer physical restlessness and superabundant physical energy; and a good deal more to the irrepressible outward working of an extraordinarily active mind.

[1229] “Vir ... quem miles diligenter inspectum accurrebant [accurrebat?] inspicere.” W. Map, De Nugis Curialium, dist. v. c. 6 (Wright, p. 227).

[1230] Ibid. Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 29 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 71). Peter of Blois, Ep. lxvi. (Giles, vol. i. p. 193).

[1231] Pet. Blois as above.

[1232] Gir. Cambr. as above.

[1233] W. Map as above.

[1234] Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 70). Pet. Blois as above.

[1235] Pet. Blois as above.

[1236] Ibid. Gir. Cambr. as above.

[1237] Pet. Blois as above.

[1238] Gir. Cambr. as above.

[1239] See how Merlin’s prophecy about “fortem lentiginosum” was applied to him, Gir. Cambr. Itin. Kambr., l. i. c. 6 (Dimock, vol. vi. p. 62).

[1240] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 29 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 70). Pet. Blois as above.

[1241] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 28 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 157).

[1242] Pet. Blois, Ep. lxvi. (Giles, vol. i. pp. 193, 194).

[1243] See Ralf Niger (Anstruther), p. 169. Ralf, however, was a bitter enemy. Gerald on the other hand seems to draw, and to imply that Henry drew, a distinction between official and personal expenditure: “Parcimoniæ, quoad principi licuit, per omnia datus.” De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 29 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 70). “Largus in publico, parcus in privato” (ib. p. 71).

[1244] Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 70). Pet. Blois as above (p. 195). W. Map, De Nug. Cur., dist. v. c. 6 (Wright, p. 231).

[1245] W. Map as above (p. 227).

[1246] Ibid. Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 71). Pet. Blois as above (p. 194).

[1247] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 29 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 71).

[1248] Ibid. Pet. Blois, Ep. lxvi. (Giles, vol. i. p. 194).

[1249] Pet. Blois as above.

[1250] Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 72).

[1251] “Oratorium ingressus, picturæ et susurro vacabat.” R. Niger (Anstruther), p. 169. It is only fair to add that some of the highest clergy of the day were just as unscrupulous as the king about talking business during mass. See, e.g., Chron. de Bello (Angl. Christ. Soc.), pp. 73, 74; and there are plenty of other examples.

[1252] W. Map, De Nug. Cur., dist. v. c. 6 (Wright, p. 227).

It was no light matter to be in attendance upon such a king. His clerks, some playfully, some in all seriousness, compared his court to the infernal regions.[1253] His habit of constantly moving about from one place to another—a habit which he retained to the very end of his life—was in itself sufficiently trying to those who had to transact business with him, and was made positively exasperating by his frequent and sudden changes of plan. “He shunned regular hours like poison.”[1254] “Solomon saith,” wrote his secretary Peter of Blois to him once, after vainly striving to track him across land and sea, “Solomon saith there be three things difficult to be found out, and a fourth which may hardly be discovered: the way of an eagle in the air; the way of a ship in the sea; the way of a serpent on the ground; and the way of a man in his youth. I can add a fifth: the way of a king in England.”[1255] In a letter to his old comrades of the court Peter gives a detailed account of the discomforts brought upon them by Henry’s erratic movements. “If the king has promised to spend the day in a place—more especially, if his intention so to do has been publicly proclaimed by a herald—you may be quite sure he will upset everybody’s arrangements by starting off early in the morning. Then you may see men rushing about as if they were mad, beating their packhorses, driving their chariots one into another—in short, such a turmoil as to present you with a lively image of the infernal regions. If, on the other hand, the king announces that he will set out early in the morning for a certain place, he is sure to change his mind; you may take it for granted that he will sleep till noon. Then you shall see the packhorses waiting with their burthens, the chariots standing ready, the couriers dozing, the purveyors worrying, and all grumbling one at another. Folk run to the women and the tent-keepers to inquire of them whither the king is really going; for this sort of courtiers often know the secrets of the palace. Many a time when the king was asleep and all was silent around, there has come a message from his lodging, not authoritative, but rousing us all up, and naming the city or town whither he was about to proceed. After waiting so long in dreary uncertainty, we were comforted by a prospect of being quartered in a place where there was a fair chance of accommodation. Thereupon arose such a clatter of horse and foot that hell seemed to have broken loose. But when our couriers had gone the whole day’s ride, or nearly so, the king would turn aside to some other place where he had perhaps one single house, and just enough provision for himself and none else. I hardly dare say it,” adds the sorely-tried secretary, “but I verily believe he took a delight in seeing the straits to which he put us! After wandering a distance of three or four miles in an unknown wood, and often in the dark, we thought ourselves lucky if we stumbled upon some dirty little hovel; there was often grievous and bitter strife about a mere hut; and swords were drawn for the possession of a lodging which pigs would not have deemed worth fighting for. I used to get separated from my people, and could hardly collect them again in three days. O Lord God Almighty! wilt Thou not turn the heart of this king, that he may know himself to be but man, and may learn to shew some grace of regal consideration, some human fellow-feeling, for those whom not ambition, but necessity, compels to run after him thus?”[1256]

- [1253] Ibid.·/·W. Map, De Nug. Cur., dist. i. c. 2 (pp. 5, 6); dist. v. c. 7 (p. 238). Pet. Blois, Ep. xiv. (Giles, vol. i. p. 50).

- [1254] R. Niger (Anstruther), p. 169.

- [1255] Pet. Blois, Ep. xli. (Giles, vol. i. p. 125). Arnulf of Lisieux makes a like complaint in a more serious tone: Arn. Lis., Ep. 92 (Giles, p. 247). See also the remark of Louis of France on Henry’s expedition to Ireland in 1172: R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 351.

- [1256] Pet. Blois, Ep. xiv. (Giles, vol. i. pp. 50, 51).

This bustling, scrambling, roving Pandemonium was very unlike the orderly, well-disciplined court of the first King Henry, where everything was done according to rule;—where the royal itinerary was planned out every month, and its stages duly announced and strictly adhered to, so that every man knew exactly when and where to find his sovereign, and his coming brought people together as to a fair:—where all the earls and barons of the realm were set down in a written list, according to which every one on his arrival at court was furnished with a certain allowance of bread, wine and candles for the term of his sojourn;[1257]—where the king’s own daily life was passed in a steady routine, holding council with his wise men and giving audiences until dinner-time, devoting the rest of the day to the society of the young gallants whom he drew from every country on this side of the Alps to increase the splendour of his household:—a court which was “a school of virtue and wisdom all the morning, of courtesy and decorous mirth all the afternoon.”[1258] Yet this hasty, impetuous young sovereign, in whose rough aspect and reckless ways one can at first glance discern so little either of regal dignity or of steady application to regal duty, was in truth, no less than his grandfather, an indefatigable worker and a born ruler of men. His way of doing business, apparently by fits and starts, bewildered men of less versatile intellect and less rapid decision; but they saw that the business was done, and done thoroughly, though they hardly understood when or how. They resigned themselves to be swept along in the whirl of Henry’s unaccountable movements, for they learned to perceive that those movements did not spring from mere caprice and perversity, but had always a motive and an object, inscrutable perhaps to all eyes save his own, but none the less definite and practical. When he dragged them in one day over a distance which should have occupied four or five, they knew that it was to forestall the machinations of some threatening foe. When he ran over the country from end to end without a word of notice, it was to overtake his officials at unawares and ascertain for himself how they were or were not attending to their duty.[1259] If he was never still, he was also never idle. He seemed to be specially haunted by that dread of the mischief attendant upon idle hands which an Angevin writer quaintly puts forth as an apology for the ceaseless warfare in which his race passed their lives.[1260] Henry’s hands were never idle; in the intervals of state business, when not laden with bow and arrows, they almost invariably held a book; for Henry was, to the very close of his life, the most learned crowned head in Christendom.[1261] He was a match for the best among his subjects in all knightly exercises and accomplishments; he was no less a match for the best, among laymen at least, in scholarship and mental culture. If we may believe one of his chaplains, Walter Map, he knew something of every language “from the bay of Biscay to the Jordan,” though he only spoke two, Latin and his native French;[1262] he evidently never learned to speak, and it is doubtful how far he understood, the natural tongue of the people of his island realm. He loved reading; he enjoyed the society of learned men; his delight was to stand amid a little group of clerks, arguing out some knotty point with them; not a day passed in his court without some interesting literary discussion.[1263] His habit of shutting himself up in his own apartments with a few chosen companions was a grievance to those who remembered his grandfather’s practice of coming forth in public at stated hours every day;[1264] yet Henry II. was never difficult of access; once, when the prior of Witham made a witty retort to the marshals who refused him admittance to the royal chamber, the king himself, overhearing the jest, opened the door with a peal of laughter;[1265] and a courier charged with important news from the north made his way to the sovereign’s bedside and woke him in the middle of the night without hesitation.[1266] When he did shew himself to the people, they thronged him without ceremony; they caught hold of him right and left, they pulled him this way and that, yet he never rebuked them, never gave them an angry look, but listened patiently to what each man had to say, and when their importunity became intolerable he simply made his escape without a word.[1267] Though not gifted with a good voice,[1268] he was a ready and pleasant speaker;[1269] and he had two other natural qualifications specially useful for a king. Unlike his grandfather Fulk V., who never could remember a face and constantly had to ask the names of his own familiar attendants,[1270] Henry never failed to recognize a man whom he had once looked at; and a thing once heard, if worth remembering, never slipped from his memory, which was consequently stored with a fund of historical and experimental knowledge ready for use at any moment.[1271]

- [1257] W. Map, De Nug. Cur., dist. v. c. 6 (Wright, pp. 224, 225).

- [1258] W. Map, De Nug. Cur., dist. v. c. 5 (Wright, p. 210).

- [1259] Pet. Blois, Ep. lxvi. (Giles, vol. i. p. 194).

- [1260] See above, p. 343, note 6{1002}.

- [1261] Pet. Blois as above.

- [1262] W. Map, De Nug. Cur., dist. v. c. 6 (Wright, p. 227).

- [1263] Pet. Blois, Ep. lxvi. (Giles, vol. i. p. 194).

- [1264] W. Map as above (p. 230).

- [1265] Ib. dist. i. c. 6 (p. 7).

- [1266] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 25 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 189).

- [1267] W. Map, as above, dist. v. c. 6 (Wright, p. 231).

- [1268] “Voce quassâ.” Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 29 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 70). This however refers to his later years.

- [1269] Ib. p. 71. Pet. Blois as above (p. 195).

- [1270] Will. Tyr., l. xiv. c. i.

- [1271] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 29 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 73).

His worst private vices only reached their full developement in later years; it is plain, however, that he was much less careful than his grandfather had been of the outward decorum of his household; and unluckily his consort was not a woman to control it by her influence or improve it by her example like the “good Queen Maude.” His wrath was even more terrific than the wrath of kings is proverbially wont to be.[1272] His passions were strong, and they were lasting; when once he had taken a dislike to a man, he could rarely be induced to grant him his favour; on the other hand, when his friendship and confidence were once given, he withdrew them with the utmost difficulty and reluctance;[1273] and he had the gift of inspiring in all who came in contact with him a love or a hatred as intense and abiding as his own. His temper was a mystery to those who had not the key to it; it was the temper of Fulk Nerra. He had the Black Count’s strange power of fascination, his unaccountable variations of mood, and his cool, clear head. Like Fulk, he was at one moment mocking and blaspheming all that is holiest in earth and heaven, and at another grovelling in an agony of remorse as wild as the blasphemy itself. Like Fulk, he was an indefatigable builder, constantly superintending the erection of a wall, the fortification of a castle, the making of a dyke, the enclosing of a deer-park or a fish-pond, or the planning of a palace;[1274] and all the while his material buildings were but types of a great edifice of statecraft which, all unseen, was rising day by day beneath the hands of the royal architect;—his ever-varying pursuits, each of which seemed to absorb him for the moment, were but parts of an all-absorbing whole;—and his seeming self-contradictions were unaccountable only because the most useful of all his Angevin characteristics, his capacity for instinctively and unerringly adapting means to ends, enabled him to detect opportunities and recognize combinations invisible to less penetrating eyes. This was the moral constitution which in Fulk III. and Fulk V. had made the greatness of the house of Anjou; its workings were now to be displayed on a grander scale and in a more important sphere.

- [1272] Pet. Blois, Ep. lxxv. (Giles, vol. i. p. 223).

- [1273] Pet. Blois, Ep. lxvi. (ib. p. 194). Gir. Cambr. as above·/·De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 29 (Angl. Christ. Soc., (p. 71).

- [1274] Pet. Blois as above (p. 195).

The young king saw at once that for his work of reconstruction and reform in England the counsellors who surrounded him in Normandy were of no avail; that he must trust solely to English help, and select his chief ministers partly from among those who had been in office under his predecessor, partly from such of his own English partizans as were best fitted for the task. First among the former class stood Richard de Lucy, who held the post of justiciar at the close of Stephen’s reign,[1275] who retained it under Henry for five-and-twenty years, and whose character is summed up in the epithet said to have been bestowed on him by his grateful sovereign—“Richard de Lucy the Loyal.”[1276] For thirteen years he shared the dignity and the duties of chief justiciar with Earl Robert of Leicester,[1277] who, after having been a faithful supporter of Stephen in his earlier and better days, had transferred his allegiance to Henry, and continued through life one of his most trusty servants and friends. The weight of Robert’s character was increased by that of his rank and descent; as head of the great house of Leicester, he was the most influential baron of the midland shires; while as son of Count Robert of Meulan, the friend of Henry I., he was a living link with that hallowed past which Henry II. was expected to restore, and a natural representative of its traditions of honour and of peace. Of the great ministers who had actually served under the first King Henry only one survived: the old treasurer, Nigel, bishop of Ely. We know not who took his place on his fall in 1139; but the treasurer in Stephen’s latter years can have had little more than an empty title; and when Nigel reappears in office, immediately after Henry’s accession, it is not as treasurer, but as chancellor.[1278] This, however, was a merely provisional arrangement; in a few weeks the bishop of Ely was reinstated in his most appropriate place, on the right side of the chequered table, gathering up the broken threads of the financial system which he had learned under his uncle of Salisbury;[1279] while the more miscellaneous work of the chancellor was undertaken by younger hands.

- [1275] At the peace he held the Tower of London and the castle of Windsor; Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 18: these were peculiarly in the custody of the justiciar; Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. i. p. 449, note 1.

- [1276] Jordan Fantosme, vv. 1540–1541 (Michel, p. 70).

- [1277] Robert appears as capitalis justicia in a charter of, apparently, 1155 (Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 3). In 1159–1160, John of Salisbury describes him as “illustris comes Legrecestriæ Robertus, modeste proconsulatum gerens apud Britannias” (Joh. Salisb. Polycrat., l. vi. c. 25; Giles, vol. iv. p. 65), and at his death in 1168 he is named in the Chron. Mailros (ad ann.) as “comes justus Leicestrie, et qui summa justitia vocatur.”

- [1278] A charter issued at Westminster, evidently soon after the coronation, is witnessed by “N. Epọ de Ely et Canc.” Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 2, note 2.

- [1279] Dial. de Scacc., l. i. c. 8 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 199).

Under the old English constitutional system, alike in its native purity and in the modified form which it assumed under the Conqueror and his sons, the archbishop of Canterbury was the official keeper of the royal conscience and the first adviser of the sovereign. Theobald had contributed more than any other one man to secure Henry’s succession; he saw in it the crowning of his own life’s work for England; while Henry saw in Theobald his most weighty and valuable supporter. It was therefore a matter of course that the primate should resume the constitutional position which he had inherited from Anselm and Lanfranc and their old-English predecessors. Theobald, however, was now in advanced age and feeble health; and when he fully perceived what manner of man it was to whom he was bound to act as spiritual father and political guide, he felt that to regulate these strong passions, to direct these youthful impulses, to follow these restless movements, was a task too hard for his failing strength. He feared the evil influences of the courtiers upon the young king, who seemed so willing to be led aright, and might for that very reason be so easily led astray;[1280] he feared for the English Church, through which there was already running a whisper of ill-omen concerning the Angevins’ known hostility to the rights of religion;[1281] he feared for his own soul, lest Henry should wander out of the right path for lack of guidance, and the sin should lie at the door of the incompetent guide.[1282] There was one man who, if he could but be placed at the young king’s side, might be trusted to manage the arduous and delicate task. So to place him could be no very difficult matter; for his own past services to Henry’s cause were far too great to be left unrewarded. Neither the recommendations of the bishops of Winchester,[1283] Bayeux and Lisieux,[1284] nor even those of the primate, could have as much weight as the known qualifications of the candidate himself in obtaining the office of chancellor for Thomas Becket.[1285]

- [1280] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 160.

- [1281] Vita S. Thomæ, Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 11.

- [1282] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 160.

- [1283] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 18.

- [1284] “Quorum consiliis rex in primordiis suis innitebatur.” Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 12.

- [1285] “Facile regi inspiratum est commendatum habere quem propria satis merita commendabant.” E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 363. I cannot attach any importance to the version of Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 45–47.

The chancellor’s duties were still much the same as they had been when first organized by Roger of Salisbury. He was charged with the keeping of the royal seal, the drawing-up of royal writs and charters, the conduct of the royal correspondence, the preservation of legal records, the custody of vacant fiefs and benefices, and the superintendence of the king’s chaplains and clerks;[1286]—in a word, the management of the whole clerical and secretarial work of the royal household and of the government. Officially, he seems to have been ranked below the chief ministers of state—the justiciar, or even the treasurer;[1287] personally, however, he was brought more than either of them into close and constant relations with his sovereign. The actual importance and dignity of the chancellorship depended in fact upon the capacity of individual chancellors for magnifying their office. Thomas magnified it as no man ever did before or since. In a very few months he became what the justiciar had formerly been, the second man in the kingdom;[1288] and not in the kingdom alone, but in all the lands, on both sides of the sea, which owned Henry Fitz-Empress for their sovereign.[1289] Theobald’s scheme far more than succeeded; his favourite became not so much the king’s chief minister as his friend, his director, his master.[1290] The two young men, drawn together by a strong personal attraction, seemed to have but one heart and one soul.[1291] Thomas was the elder by fifteen years; but the disparity of age was lost in the perfect community of their feelings, interests and pursuits. Thomas was now in deacon’s orders, having been ordained by Archbishop Theobald at the close of the previous year on his appointment to the archdeaconry of Canterbury,[1292] an office which was accounted the highest ecclesiastical dignity in England after those of the bishops and abbots.[1293] He felt, however, no vocation and no taste for the duties of sacred ministry, and was only too glad to “put off the deacon” and fling all his energies into the more congenial sphere of court life.[1294] Alike in its business and in its pleasures he was thoroughly at home. His refined sensibilities, his romantic imagination, revelled in the elegance and splendour which to Henry’s matter-of-fact disposition were simply irksome; he gladly took all the burthen of state ceremonial as well as of state business upon his own shoulders; and he bore it with an easy grace which men never wearied of admiring. One day he would be riding in coat of mail at the head of the royal troops, the next he would be dispensing justice in the king’s name;[1295] and his will was law throughout the land, for all men knew that his will and Henry’s were one.[1296]

[1286] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above·/·(Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 18. On the chancellor’s office see Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. i. pp. 352, 353.

[1287] Will. Fitz-Steph., as above, does indeed say “Cancellarii Angliæ dignitas est ut secundus a rege in regno habeatur”; but he had in his mind one particular chancellor. He also says “Cancellaria emenda non est”; but it seems that Thomas himself paid for his appointment (Gilb. Foliot, Ep. cxciv., Giles, vol. i. p. 268; Robertson, Becket, vol. v. Ep. ccxxv. pp. 523, 524), like the chancellors before and after him, and like the other great ministers of state.

[1288] “In regno secundus,” Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 169. “Secundus a rege,” Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 18. “Nullus par ei erat in regno, excepto solo rege,” Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 216. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 363, and the Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 49, liken his position to that of Joseph.

[1289] “Secundum post regem in quatuor regnis quis te ignorat?” writes Peter of Celle to Thomas (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. Ep. ii. p. 4).

[1290] “Regis amicus,” Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 169. “Regis rector et quasi magister,” ib. pp. 160 and 169.

[1291] Joh. Salisb., Ep. lxxviii. (Giles, vol. i. p. 109; Robertson, Becket, vol. v. Ep. ix. p. 13).

[1292] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 159, 160. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 213. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 4. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 17. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 168. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 11.

[1293] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above. He says it was worth a hundred pounds of silver.

[1294] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 173.

[1295] Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 12.

[1296] Ibid. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 364.

In outward aspect Thomas must have been far more regal than the king himself. He was very tall and elegantly formed,[1297] with an oval face,[1298] handsome aquiline features,[1299] a lofty brow,[1300] large, lustrous and penetrating eyes;[1301] there was an habitual look of placid dignity in his countenance,[1302] a natural grace in his every gesture, an ingrained refinement in his every word and action;[1303] the slender, tapering, white fingers[1304] and dainty attire of the burgher’s son contrasted curiously with the rough brown hands and careless appearance of Henry Fitz-Empress; the order, elegance and liberality of the chancellor’s household contrasted no less with the confusion and discomfort of the king’s. The riches that passed through Thomas’s hands were enormous; revenues and honours were heaped on him by the king; costly gifts poured in upon him daily from clergy and laity, high and low. But what he received with one hand he gave away with the other; his splendour and his wealth were shared with all who chose to come and take a share of them. His door was always open, his table always spread, for all men, of whatever race or rank, who stood in need of hospitality.[1305] Besides fifty-two clerks regularly attached to his household—some to act as his secretaries, some to take charge of the vacant benefices in his custody, some to serve his own numerous livings and prebends[1306]—he had almost every day a company of invited guests to dinner; every day the hall was freshly strewn with green leaves or rushes in summer and clean hay or straw in winter, amid which those for whom there was no room on the benches sat and dined on the floor. The tables shone with gold and silver vessels, and were laden with costly viands; Thomas stuck at no expense in such matters; but it was less for his own enjoyment than for that of his guests;[1307] and these always included a crowd of poor folk, who were as sumptuously and carefully served as the rich;[1308] the meanest in his house never had to complain of a dinner such as the noblest were often obliged to endure in King Henry’s court, where half-baked bread, sour wine, stale fish and bad meat were the ordinary fare.[1309] The chancellor’s hospitality was as gracious as it was lavish. He was the most perfect of hosts; he saw to the smallest details of domestic service; he noted the position of each guest, missed and inquired for the absent, perceived and righted in a moment the least mistake in precedence; if any man out of modesty tried to take a lower place than was his due, it was in vain; no matter in what obscure corner he might hide, Thomas was sure to find him out; he seemed to pierce through curtains and walls with those wonderful eyes whose glance brightened and cheered the whole table.[1310] No wonder that barons and knights sent their sons to be educated under his roof,[1311] and that his personal followers were far more numerous than those of the king.[1312]

[1297] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib.·/·Robertson, Becket vol. iii.), p. 17. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 327. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 3. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 29.

[1298] Herb. Bosh. as above.

[1299] Will. Fitz-Steph., Herb. Bosh., and Thomas Saga, as above.

[1300] Herb. Bosh. as above.

[1301] Ib. p. 229.

[1302] Will. Cant., Will. Fitz-Steph., and Thomas Saga, as above.

[1303] Anon. II. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 84.

[1304] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 327.

[1305] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 20, 21. Joh. Salisb., Entheticus in Polycraticum (Giles, vol. iii.) p. 3.

[1306] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above, p. 29.

[1307] Ib. pp. 20, 21.

[1308] Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 13.

[1309] Pet. Blois, Ep. xiv. (Giles, vol. i. p. 49).

[1310] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 229.

[1311] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 22.

[1312] E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 363. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 13.

Henry might have been jealous of his minister; but there was no thought of jealousy in his mind. He was constantly in and out at the chancellor’s house; half in sheer fun, half to see for himself the truth of the wonderful stories which he heard about it, he would come uninvited to dinner, riding up suddenly—often bow in hand, on his way to or from the chase—when Thomas was seated at table; sometimes he would take a stirrup-cup, nod to his friend and ride away; sometimes he would leap over the table, sit down and eat. When their work was over, king and chancellor played together like a couple of schoolboys, and whether it was in their private apartments, in the public streets, in the palace, or in church, made no difference at all. It was a favourite tale among their associates how as they rode together through the streets of London one winter’s day, the king, seeing a ragged shivering beggar, snatched at the chancellor’s handsome new mantle of scarlet cloth lined with vair, crying—“You shall have the merit of clothing the naked this time!” and after a struggle in which both combatants nearly fell off their horses, sent the poor man away rejoicing in his new and strangely acquired garment, while with shouts of applause and laughter the bystanders crowded round Thomas, playfully offering him their cloaks and capes in compensation for his loss.[1313]

- [1313] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 24, 25.

It is hardly possible to deny that such enormous wealth as passed through Thomas’s hands during his tenure of the chancellorship must have been acquired, in part at least, by means which in the case of a minister of the Crown in our own day would be accounted little less than scandalous. But in the twelfth century there was no scandal about the matter. Costly gifts of all kinds were showered at the feet of kings and great men openly and as matter of course, and kings and great men received them as openly, often without any idea of bribery on either side. Moreover it is to be remembered that Thomas’s position as chancellor gave him command over a considerable portion of the royal revenues, and that he was left free to draw upon them at his own discretion to meet an expenditure of which part was incurred directly in the king’s behalf, while the whole of it might be regarded as indirectly tending to the king’s glorification and benefit. The two friends in fact seem to have had but one purse as well as “one mind and one heart,” and not till many years later was there any thought of disentangling their accounts. Amid all the chancellor’s wild magnificence, there is no evidence of corruption; and there was certainly no arrogance. Thomas had nothing of the upstart in him; he never ignored his burgher-origin, he never dropped the friends of his boyhood; his filial submission to the primate remained unchanged;[1314] his gratitude to his early teachers at Merton was proved by his choice of a confessor from among them,[1315] and by his successful efforts to bring their house under the special patronage of the king.[1316] His tastes were those of the most refined aristocrat, but his sympathies were with the people from whose ranks he had sprung; his boundless almsgiving was doubled in value by the gracious considerateness with which it was bestowed; his tenderness for the poor was as genuine and as delicate as that of his mother the good dame Rohese, and he was quick alike to supply their needs and to vindicate their cause.[1317]

- [1314] Anon. I. (Robertson, Beckett, vol. iv.) p. 11.

- [1315] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 21. This confessor, Robert by name, was with him all through his exile; see Garnier (Hippeau), p. 137.

- [1316] Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 23.

- [1317] Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 13. Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 49, 55–57.

Like the king himself, Thomas was a standing marvel to his contemporaries; the strict stood aghast at his unclerical mode of life; the simple were half inclined to take him for a wizard.[1318] But his witchery was universal and irresistible; and after all it was only the magic of a winning personality, a vivid imagination, a dauntless spirit and a guileless heart. For the chancellor’s frivolity was all on the surface of his life; its inner depths were pure. Amid the countless temptations of a corrupt court, no stain ever rested upon his personal honour. He shared in all the king’s pursuits, except the evil ones; into them Henry tried to entrap him night and day, but in vain.[1319] The one thing he would not do, the one thing he would not tolerate, was evil; the one species of human being to whom his doors were inexorably closed was a man of known bad character.[1320] Coarseness, immorality, dishonesty, in word or deed, met with summary and condign punishment at his hands.[1321] Above all things, “lying lips and a deceitful tongue were an abomination unto him.”[1322] When in after-days a biographer of the martyred archbishop copied from the Epistle to the Ephesians the description of the spiritual armour in which his hero was supposed to have clothed himself at his consecration, he significantly omitted the first piece of the panoply;[1323] Thomas had no need then to put on the girdle of truth, for he had worn it all his life.

- [1318] Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 5.

- [1319] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 21. Cf. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.) p. 166; Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 303; Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 5, 6; Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 12, 13; Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 53–55.

- [1320]

- “Nota domus cunctis, vitio non cognita soli.”
“Huic, quæ sola placet, solâ virtute placebis.”

- Joh. Salisb., Enthet. in Polycrat. (Giles, vol. iii.) pp. 2, 3.

- [1321] Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 8. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 21.

- [1322] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 166.

- [1323] Ib. p. 198.

His position at court was no easy one; for a while envy, hatred and malice assailed him from all sides, and their attacks, added to an immense load of work, so overwhelmed him that he more than once declared to his friends and to the primate that he was weary of his life and would be thankful to end it, or at any rate to break away from the bondage of the court, if only he could do so with honour. But he was not the man to forsake a task which he had once undertaken;[1324] his nature was rather to do it, like the king himself, with all his might. In the after-years, when friends and foes alike could hardly look back upon any period of Thomas’s career save in the light of the martyr’s aureole, more than half the credit of Henry’s early reforms was bestowed upon the chancellor.[1325] Even at the time, he was described by no mean authority as the champion of all liberty,[1326] the defender of all rights, the redresser of all wrongs, the restorer of peace,[1327] the mediator who stood between king and people to soften the inflexibility of law and prevent justice from degenerating into legal wrong.[1328] It is certain that the brightest and happiest years of Henry’s reign were those during which Thomas held the foremost rank and took the foremost part in the administration of government. For the successful execution of Henry’s policy, therefore, Thomas is entitled to a large share of credit. But that he in any serious degree influenced and moulded the general scope of that policy is a theory opposed both to the evidence of actual events and to the inferences which must be drawn from the characters of the two men, as developed in their after-careers. Thomas may have suggested individual measures—we shall see that he did suggest one of very great importance;—he may have contrived modifications in detail; but Henry’s policy, as a whole, bears the clear stamp of one mind—his own. The chancellor’s true merit lies in this, that he was Henry’s best and most thorough fellow-worker—not so much his counsellor or minister as his second self. It is not hard to see why they were friends; nor to see, too, why they were to quarrel so fatally. The same characteristics which drew them together were fated to part them in the end. The king found in the burgher’s son a temper as energetic, a spirit as versatile and impetuous, a tongue as quick and sharp,[1329] a determination as resolute, dauntless and thorough as his own, with a much less subtle brain, a much more excitable imagination, and much more sensitive feelings. While they moved side by side in the same sphere, they had “but one heart and one soul”; when once their spheres became opposed, the friends could only change into bitter antagonists.

- [1324] Joh. Salisb. (ib.·/·Enthet. in Polycrat. (Giles, vol. ii.), p. 305. Cf. Anon. I. (ib.·/·Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 12; and Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 59.

- [1325] See Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 19.

- [1326] Joh. Salisb., Entheticus, v. 1357 (Giles, vol. v. p. 282).

- [1327] Joh. Salisb. Enthet. in Polycrat. (Giles, vol. iii.) p. 3.

- [1328]

- “Hic est qui regni leges cancellat iniquas,
Et mandata pii principis æqua facit.”

- Joh. Salisb., Enthet. in Polycrat. (Giles, vol. iii.) p. 2. This seems to be the earliest version of the jest about law and equity, and sums up, in a playful shape, the chancellor’s relation to both.

- [1329] Although Thomas was “slightly stuttering in his talk.” Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 29. The statement occurs in none of the extant Latin lives, but from its very strangeness can hardly be anything but a touch of genuine tradition. The impediment however can only have been a very slight one, and was most likely nothing more than the effect of his extreme impetuosity. It certainly did not hinder him speaking his mind fully and forcibly upon any important occasion when his feelings were deeply stirred.

Henry’s first manifesto was published before Thomas entered his service. Immediately after his coronation he issued a charter setting forth the broad principles of his intended policy:—the restoration and confirmation of all liberties and customs in Church and state as settled by his grandfather.[1330] The actual wording of the charter was hardly more explicit than that of Stephen’s; but the marked omission of all reference to Stephen was in itself a significant indication that the return to an earlier and better order of things was intended to be something more than a phrase. On Christmas-day the king held his court at Bermondsey, and with the counsel of the assembled barons set himself to enforce at once the provisions of the treaty of Wallingford which Stephen had proved incapable of executing. Peremptory orders were issued for the expulsion of the Flemish mercenaries and the demolition of the unlicensed castles.[1331] The effect was magical. The Flemings saw at once that their day was over, and vanished like an army of spectres, so suddenly that folk marvelled whither they could have gone.[1332] The razing of the castles was necessarily a less rapid process, but it was accomplished without delay and without disturbance.[1333] These preliminary obstacles being cleared out of the way, the next step was to re-assert the rights of the Crown by abolishing the fiscal earldoms[1334] and reclaiming the demesne lands and fortresses which had passed into private hands during the anarchy. Henry proclaimed his determination clearly and firmly; all alienations of royal revenue and royal property made during the late reign were declared null and void; all occupiers of crown lands and castles were summoned to surrender them at once, and the charters of donation from Stephen whereby they attempted to justify their occupation were treated simply as waste paper.[1335] There was one at least of the usurping barons to whom Henry knew that he must carry his summons in person if he meant it to be obeyed: William of Aumale, the lord of Holderness, whose father had once aspired to the crown, whom Stephen had made earl of York, and who ruled like an almost independent chieftain in Yorkshire, where he held the royal castle of Scarborough and was in no mind to give it up. As soon as the festival season was over Henry began to move northward; by the end of January he was at York, and William of Aumale was at his feet, making complete surrender of Scarborough and of all his other castles.[1336] Another great northern baron, William Peverel of the Peak, had been scared into a monastery by the mere rumour of the king’s approach;[1337] he had been concerned two years before in an attempt to poison Henry’s earliest English ally, Earl Ralf of Chester; he knew that he was a doomed man,[1338] and when the king turned southward again after receiving the surrender of Scarborough, he dared not trust even his monastic tonsure to save him from his doom, but fled the country and left all his fiefs to his sovereign’s mercy.[1339]

- [1330] Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 135.

- [1331] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 160.

- [1332] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 1 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 101, 102).

- [1333] Ib. p. 102. Gerv. Cant. as above.

- [1334] Rob. Torigni, a. 1155.

- [1335] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 2 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 103).

- [1336] Ib. cc. 2 and 3 (pp. 103, 104).

- [1337] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 161.

- [1338] See a charter of Henry, duke of the Normans, promising Peverel’s fief to Ralf on proof of the former’s guilt; Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 16. Ralf of Chester died in 1153; Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 171. Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 155. See above, p. 399.

- [1339] Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 161.

After such an exhibition of Henry’s powers of coercion on the two chief nobles of the north, lesser men were not likely to venture upon defiance; the occupiers of crown lands passed from rage to terror and dismay, and began sullenly to make restitution.[1340] The grantees of Stephen, however, soon proved to be the least part of the difficulty. Several of the royal fortresses were held by partizans of the Empress, who had won them either while warring against Stephen in her behalf, or by a grant from their imperial mistress in her brief day of power; and they not unnaturally resented the king’s attempt to deprive them of what they looked upon as the well-earned rewards of their service to his mother and himself. Henry, however, had made up his mind that there must be no distinction of parties or of persons; all irregularities, no matter whence they proceeded, must be suppressed; every root of rebellion must be cut off, and every ground of suspicion removed.[1341] Early in March he called another council in London,[1342] confirmed the peace and renewed the old customs of the realm,[1343] and again summoned all holders of royal castles to give an account of their usurpations.[1344] The two mightiest barons of the west revolted at once; Roger of Hereford, the son of Matilda’s faithful Miles, hurried away from court to fortify his castles of Hereford and Gloucester against the king, and made common cause with Hugh of Mortemer, the lord of Cleobury and Wigmore, who held the royal fortress of Bridgenorth. Roger was brought to reason in little more than a week by the persuasions of his kinsman Bishop Gilbert of Hereford;[1345] Hugh was suffered to complete his preparations for defiance while Henry kept the Easter feast and held a great council at Wallingford to settle the succession to the throne, first upon his eldest child William, and, in case of William’s death, upon the infant Henry, who was scarcely six weeks old.[1346] That done, the king marched with all his forces against Hugh of Mortemer. He divided his host into three parts; one division laid siege to Cleobury, another to Wigmore,[1347] and the third, commanded by Henry himself, sat down before Bridgenorth.[1348] On the spot where the spirit of feudal insubordination, incarnate in Robert of Bellême, had fought its last fight against Henry I., the same spirit, represented by Hugh of Mortemer, now fought against Henry II. The fight had been useless fifty years ago; it was equally useless now. One after another the three castles were taken, and on July 7 a great council met beneath the walls of Bridgenorth to witness Hugh’s surrender.[1349]

- [1340] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 2 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 103).

- [1341] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 161.

- [1342] Ibid. Chron. de Bello (Angl. Christ. Soc.), p. 72.

- [1343] Chron. de Bello as above.

- [1344] Gerv. Cant. as above.

- [1345] Ib. p. 162.

- [1346] Ibid. Rob. Torigni, a. 1155, giving the date—Sunday after Easter, i.e. April 10.

- [1347] Gerv. Cant. as above.

- [1348] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 4 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 105).

- [1349] Rob. Torigni, a. 1155. Chron. de Bello (Angl. Christ. Soc.), p. 75.

At the opposite side of the kingdom two great barons still remained to be dealt with. One was Hugh Bigod, the veteran turncoat who had been seneschal to Henry I., and who had (as the Angevin party believed) perjured himself to oust Matilda from her rights, yet whose hereditary and territorial influence had, it seems, been great enough to win from the young king a confirmation of his earldom of Norfolk,[1350] as well as to procure him a long day of grace before he was called upon to give up his many unlawfully-acquired castles. The other was William of Blois, Stephen’s eldest surviving son, by marriage earl of Warren and Surrey, to whom the treaty of Wallingford had assigned two royal castles, Pevensey and Norwich. The danger of leaving these important fortresses in William’s hands was increased by the position of Norwich, in the very midst of Hugh Bigod’s earldom; and after a year’s delay Henry determined to put an end to this state of things in East Anglia. Contrary to all precedent, he summoned the Whitsuntide council of 1157 to meet at Bury S. Edmund’s.[1351] This peaceful invasion of their territories sufficed to bring both earls to submission. William contentedly gave up his castles in exchange for the private estates which his father had held before he became king; Hugh surrendered in like manner,[1352] and was likewise taken back into favour, to have another opportunity of proving his ingratitude sixteen years later. This settlement of East Anglia completed the pacification of the realm. Even before this, however, as early as the autumn of 1155, peace and order were so far secured that Henry could venture to think of leaving the country. At Michaelmas in that year he laid before his barons a scheme for conquering Ireland as a provision for his brother William.[1353] The Pope, who was traditionally held to be the natural owner of all islands which had no other sovereign, had granted a bull authorizing the expedition;[1354] but the Empress, whose counsel was always deferentially sought by her royal son, disapproved of his project;[1355] and when he went over sea in January 1156 it was not to win a kingdom for his youngest brother in Ireland, but to put down a rebellion of the second in Anjou.[1356]

- [1350] Granted by Stephen before 1153; Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 18. In the Pipe Roll of 1157 there is a charge “in tercio denario comitatûs comiti Hugoni l. libras de anno et dimidio,” among the accounts “de veteri firmâ” of Norfolk, rendered by Hugh himself as ex-sheriff (Pipe Roll 3 Hen. II., Hunter, p. 75). As his successor in the sheriffdom renders an account “de firmâ dimidii anni” (ib. p. 76), the year and half above mentioned takes us back to the autumn of 1155. In the Pipe Roll of 1156, however, Hugh does not appear at all.

- [1351] Chron. de Bello (Angl. Christ. Soc.), p. 85. In the Winchester accounts for the year (Pipe Roll 3 Hen. II., Hunter, p. 107) is a charge of 22s. “pro portandis coronis regis ad S. Ædmundum.” “Coronis” looks as if Eleanor wore her crown also.

- [1352] Rob. Torigni, a. 1157.

- [1353] Rob. Torigni, a. 1155.

- [1354] Joh. Salisb. Metalog., l. iv. c. 42 (Giles, vol. v. pp. 205, 206).

- [1355] Rob. Torigni, a. 1155.

- [1356] Ib. a. 1156.

In England the year of his absence was a year without a history. Not a single event of any consequence is recorded by the chroniclers save the death of Henry’s eldest son, shortly before Christmas;[1357] and even this was a matter of no political moment; for, as we have seen, there was another infant to take his place as heir-apparent. The blank in the chronicles has to be filled up from the Pipe Roll which once again makes its appearance at Michaelmas 1156, and which has a special value and interest as being the most authoritative witness to the character of the young king’s efforts for the reorganization of the government, and to the results which they had already produced. The record itself is a mere skeleton, and a very imperfect one; the carefulness of arrangement, the fulness of detail, the innumerable touches of local and personal colour which make the one surviving Pipe Roll of Henry I. so precious and so interesting, are sadly wanting in this roll of the second year of Henry II.; yet between its meagre lines may be read a suggestive, almost a pathetic story. Its very imperfections, its lack of order and symmetry, its scantiness of information, its brief, irregular, confused entries, help us to realize as perhaps nothing else could how disastrous had been the break-down of the administrative machinery which we saw working so methodically five-and-twenty years ago, and how laborious must have been the task of restoration. Three whole shires, Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmoreland, send in no account at all, for they were still in the hands of the king of Scots; in almost every shire there are significant notices of “waste,” and a scarcely less significant charge for repair of the royal manors. The old items reappear—the Danegeld, the aids from the towns, the proceeds of justice, the feudal incidents; but the total product amounts to little more than a third part of the sum raised in 1130; and even this diminished revenue was only made up with the help of sundry “aids” and “gifts” (as they were technically called), and of a new impost specially levied upon some of the ecclesiastical estates under the name of scutage.

- [1357] Mat. Paris, Hist. Angl. (Madden), vol. i. p. 307.

The origin of this tax is implied in its title; it was derived from the “service of the shield” (scutum)—one of the distinguishing marks of feudal tenure—whereby the holder of a certain quantity of land was bound to furnish to his lord the services of a fully-armed horseman for forty days in the year. The portion of land charged with this service constituted a “knight’s fee,” and was usually reckoned at the extent of five hides, or the value of twenty pounds annually. The gradual establishment of this military tenure throughout the kingdom was a process which had been going on ever since the Norman conquest; the use of the word “scutage,” implying an assessment of taxation based on the knight’s fee instead of the old rating division of the hide, indicates that it was now very generally completed. The scutage of 1156 was levied, as we learn from another source,[1358] specially to meet the expenses of a war which Henry was carrying on with his rebel brother in Anjou. For such a purpose the feudal host itself was obviously not a desirable instrument. Ralf Flambard’s famous device of 1093, when he took a money compensation from the English levies and sent it over sea to pay the wages of the Red King’s foreign mercenaries, suggested a precedent which might be applied to the feudal knighthood as well as to the national host. Its universal application might be hindered at present by a clause in the charter of Henry I., which exempted the tenants by knight-service from all pecuniary charges on their demesne lands. It was, however, possible to make a beginning with the Church lands. These habitually claimed, with more or less success, immunity from military service except in the actual defence of the country; on the other hand, now that the bishops and abbots had been made to accept their temporalities on the same tenure as the lay baronies, there was a fair shew of reason for compelling them to compromise their claim by a money contribution assessed on the same basis as the personal service for which it was a substitute.[1359]

- [1358] Joh. Salisb. Ep. cxxviii. (Giles, vol. i. p. 178).

- [1359] On scutage and knight’s fees see Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. i. pp. 431–433, 581, 582, 590.

Such, it seems, was the origin of the great institution of scutage. Its full developement, which it only attained three years later, was avowedly the work of Thomas the chancellor; whether or not its first suggestion came from him is not so clear. At the moment no resentment seems to have been provoked by the measure; its ultimate tendency was not foreseen, the sum actually demanded was not great, and the innovation was condoned on the ground of the king’s lawful need and in the belief that it was only an isolated demand.[1360] A greater matter might well have been condoned in consideration of Henry’s loyal redemption of his coronation-pledges, to which the Pipe Roll bears testimony. If the king had been prompt in resuming his kingly rights, he had been no less prompt in striving to fulfil his kingly duties. The work of necessary destruction was no sooner accomplished than the work of reconstruction began in all departments of state administration. The machinery of justice was set in motion once again; the provincial visitations of the judges of the king’s court were revived; thirteen shires were visited by some one or more of them between Michaelmas 1155 and Michaelmas 1156. The person most extensively employed in this capacity was the constable, Henry of Essex:[1361] the chancellor also appears in the like character, twice in Henry’s company[1362] and once in that of the earl of Leicester.[1363] Nay, the supreme “fount of justice” itself was always open to any suitor who could be at the trouble and expense of tracking its ever-shifting whereabouts; not only was the chancellor, as the king’s special representative, constantly employed in hearing causes, but Henry himself was always ready to fulfil the duty in person; at the most inconvenient moments—in the middle of the siege of Bridgenorth, at the crisis of his struggle with the Angevin rebels—he found time and patience to give attentive hearing to a wearisome suit which had been going on at intervals for nearly six years between Bishop Hilary of Chichester and Walter de Lucy the abbot of Battle.[1364] Hand in hand with the revival of order and law went the revival of material prosperity. In the dry, laconic prose of the financial record we can find enough to bear out, almost to the letter, the historians’ poetical version of the work of Henry’s first two years. The wolves had fled or become changed into peaceable sheep; the swords had been beaten into ploughshares and the spears into pruning-hooks;[1365] and the merchants again went forth to pursue their business, the Jews to seek their creditors, in peace and safety as of old.[1366]

- [1360] Such was apparently the state of mind of John of Salisbury: “Interim scutagium remittere non potest [rex], et a quibusdam exactionibus abstinere, quoniam fratris gratia male sarta nequicquam coiit.” Joh. Salisb. Ep. cxxviii. (Giles, vol. i. p. 178).

- [1361] Pipe Roll 2 Hen. II. (Hunter), pp. 17, 31, 32, 47, 54, 57, 60, 65.

- [1362] Ibid. pp. 17, 65.

- [1363] Ibid. p. 26.

- [1364] Chron. de Bello (Angl. Christ. Soc.), pp. 75, 76.

- [1365] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.) p. 19. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 1 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 102).

- [1366] “Exeunt securi ab urbibus et castris ad nundinas negotiatores, ad creditores repetendos Judæi.” Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

Henry returned to England soon after Easter 1157.[1367] His first step, as we have seen, was to secure the obedience of East-Anglia. Having thus fully established his authority throughout his immediate realm, his next aim was to assert the rights of his crown over its Scottish and Welsh dependencies. The princes of Wales, who had long been acknowledged vassals of England, must be made to do homage to its new sovereign; the king of Scots owed homage no less, if not for his crown, at any rate for his English fiefs; moreover, his title to these was in itself a disputed question. Three English shires, Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmoreland, had been conquered by David, nominally in behalf of his niece the Empress Matilda, in the early years of Stephen’s reign; Stephen, making a virtue of necessity, had formally granted their investiture to David’s son Henry;[1368] and they were now in the hands of Henry’s son, the young king Malcolm IV. The story went that old King David, before he knighted his grand-nephew Henry Fitz-Empress in 1149, had made him swear that if ever he came to the English throne he would suffer the king of Scots to keep these shires in peace for ever.[1369] Henry does not seem to have denied his oath; he simply refused to keep it, on the ground that it ran counter to his duty as king. Acting on what his enemies declared to be his habitual principle, of choosing to do penance for a word rather than for a deed,[1370] he declared that the crown of England must not suffer such mutilation, and summoned his Scottish cousin to give back to him the territory which had been acquired in his name.[1371]

- [1367] Rob. Torigni, a. 1157. Cf. Chron. de Bello (Angl. Christ. Soc.), p. 84.

- [1368] Cumberland was granted to Henry of Scotland by Stephen in 1136 and Northumberland in 1139; see above, pp. 282, 300. Westmoreland seems to have counted as a dependency of Cumberland.

- [1369] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 211. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 4 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 105).

- [1370] “Quoties res in arctum devenerat, de dicto malens quam de facto pœnitere, verbumque facilius quam factum irritum habere.” Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ. dist. ii. c. 24 (Angl. Christ. Soc. p. 72).

- [1371] Will. Newb. as above.

Meanwhile, without waiting for Malcolm’s answer, Henry prepared for his first Welsh war. The domestic quarrels of the Welsh princes furnished him with an excellent pretext. Owen, prince of North-Wales, had confiscated the estates of his brother Cadwallader and banished him from the country; Cadwallader appealed to King Henry, and of course found a gracious reception.[1372] A council was held at Northampton on July 17,[1373] and thence orders were issued for an expedition into North-Wales. The force employed was the feudal levy, but in a new form; instead of calling out the whole body of knights to serve their legal term of forty days, Henry required every two knights throughout England to join in equipping a third[1374]—no doubt for a threefold term of service. By this expedient he obtained a force quite sufficient for his purpose, guarded against the risk of its breaking up before its task was accomplished—a frequent drawback in medieval warfare—and made the first innovation upon the strict rule of feudal custom in such a manner as to avoid all offence.

- [1372] Caradoc of Llancarvan (Llwyd), p. 159. Some grants of land in Shropshire to Cadwallader appear in the Pipe Rolls of 1156 and 1157 (Hunter, pp. 43 and 88).

- [1373] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 163.

- [1374] Rob. Torigni, a. 1157. See Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. i. pp. 455, 589.

The invasion was to be twofold, by land and sea.[1375] The host assembled near Chester,[1376] on Saltney marsh,[1377] and was joined by Madoc Ap Meredith, prince of Powys. Owen of North-Wales, with his three sons and all his forces, entrenched himself at Basingwerk.[1378] The king, with his youthful daring,[1379] set off at once by way of the sea-coast, hoping to fall upon the Welsh at unawares; Owen’s sons however were on the watch,[1380] and in the narrow pass of Consilt[1381] the English suddenly found themselves face to face with the foe. Entangled in the woody, marshy ground, they were easily routed by the nimble light-armed Welsh;[1382] and a cry that the king himself had fallen caused the constable, Henry of Essex, to drop the royal standard and fly in despair. Henry of Anjou soon shewed himself alive, rallied his troops, and almost, like his ancestor Fulk at Conquereux, turned the defeat into a victory;[1383] for he cut his way through the Welsh ambushes with such vigour that Owen judged it prudent to withdraw from Basingwerk and seek a more inaccessible retreat.[1384] Cutting down the woods and clearing the roads before him, Henry pushed on to Rhuddlan, and there fortified the castle.[1385] Meanwhile the fleet had sailed[1386] under the command of Madoc Ap Meredith.[1387] It touched at Anglesey and there landed a few troops whose sacrilegious behaviour brought upon them such vengeance from the outraged islanders[1388] that their terrified comrades sailed back at once to Chester, where they learned that the war was ended.[1389] Owen, in terror of being hemmed in between the royal army and the fleet, sent proposals for peace, reinstated his banished brother,[1390] performed his own homage to King Henry,[1391] and gave hostages for his loyalty in the future.[1392] As the South-Welsh princes were all vassals of North-Wales, Owen’s submission was equivalent to a formal acknowledgement of Henry’s rights as lord paramount over the whole country, and the young king was technically justified in boasting that he had subdued all the Welsh to his will.[1393]

[1375] Rob. Torigni, a. 1157. A charge in the year’s Pipe Roll—“In locandâ unâ nave ad portandum corredium regis usque Pembroc” (Winchester accounts, Pipe Roll 3 Hen. II., Hunter, p. 108) —looks as if Henry had meditated an attempt upon South as well as North Wales. But it also seems to imply that the attempt was not actually made.

[1376] Ann. Cambr. a. 1158. Brut y Tywysogion, a. 1156. (The chronology of these Welsh chronicles is hopelessly wrong).

[1377] Caradoc (Llwyd), p. 159.

[1378] Ann. Cambr., Brut y Tywys., and Caradoc as above.

[1379] Gir. Cambr. Itin. Kambr., l. ii. c. 10 (Opera, Dimock, vol. vi. p. 137), and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 165, make no scruple of calling it rashness.

[1380] Ann. Cambr. and Caradoc as above.

[1381] “In arcto silvestri apud Coleshulle, id est, Carbonis collem” (Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 7, p. 130) —that is, Consilt, near Flint. Cf. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 5 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 107).

[1382] Will. Newb. as above (pp. 107, 108). Brut y Tywys. a. 1156. Caradoc (Llwyd), p. 160. Gir. Cambr. Itin. Kambr., l. ii. c. 7 (Dimock, vol. vi. p. 130) and c. 10 (p. 137).

[1383] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 5 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 108). Cf. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 165. Caradoc (Llwyd, p. 160) has a totally different version of the battle, but it is incompatible with the undoubted facts about Henry of Essex.

[1384] Ann. Cambr. a. 1158. Caradoc (Llwyd), p. 160. Brut y Tywys. a. 1156.

[1385] Ibid.

[1386] Ann. Cambr. and Brut y Tywys. as above.

[1387] So says Caradoc (as above); but is it possible that Madoc, a Welsh prince and one whose territory lay wholly inland, should have been put in command of the English fleet?

[1388] Ann. Cambr. a. 1158. Brut y Tywys. a. 1158. Caradoc (Llwyd), p. 160. Gir. Cambr. Itin. Kambr., l. ii. c. 7 (Dimock, vol. vi. p. 130).

[1389] Caradoc as above.

[1390] Ann. Cambr., Brut y Tywys., and Caradoc, as above.

[1391] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 166. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 5 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 108, 109). Mat. Paris (Hist. Angl., Luard, vol. i. p. 308) says the homage was done at Snowdon; how could this be?

[1392] See reference to the hostages in Pipe Roll 4 Hen. II. (Hunter), p. 114.

[1393] “Subjectis ad libitum Walensibus,” Rob. Torigni, a. 1157. The only entries in this year’s Pipe Roll visibly relating to the Welsh war are: “Pro thesauro conducendo ad Waliam xxxi s. et viii d.” (Oxfordshire, Pipe Roll 3 Hen. II., Hunter, p. 82), and a payment of two marks of silver by the abbot of Abbotsbury “de Exercitu Wal.” (Dorset, ib. p. 99). In the next year’s roll there are several references to the matter; Pipe Roll 4 Hen. II. (Hunter) pp. 114, 170, 175. The first relates to the hostages, the second to payments made to Henry’s Welsh allies, and the last is a payment made to Ralf “vitulus” (cf. Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 73, Hardy, p. 767) of Winchester “de Itinere de Waliâ”—i.e. for the fleet.

It was doubtless on his triumphant return that the king of Scots came to meet him at Chester.[1394] Whichever of the royal kinsmen might have the better cause, Malcolm now clearly perceived that the power to maintain it was all on Henry’s side. He therefore surrendered the three disputed shires,[1395] with the fortresses of Newcastle, Bamborough and Carlisle,[1396] and acknowledged himself the vassal of the English king “in the same manner as his grandfather had been the man of King Henry the Elder.”[1397] The precise import of this formula is uncertain, and was probably not much less so at the time; the exact nature and grounds of the Scottish homage to England formed a question which both parties usually found it convenient to leave undetermined.[1398] For Henry’s present purpose it sufficed that, on some ground or other, the homage was done.

- [1394] Chron. Mailros, a. 1157.

- [1395] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 4 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 105, 106).

- [1396] Rob. Torigni, a. 1157.

- [1397] Chron. Mailros, a. 1157.

- [1398] The Scottish theory seems to be that Malcolm did homage for the earldom of Huntingdon, which had lapsed on his father’s death, and which Will. Newb. (as above, p. 106) and Rob. Torigni (a. 1157) say was now granted afresh to him. But, on the one hand, the treatise “De Judithâ uxore Waldevi comitis” in Chroniques Anglo-Normandes (Francisque Michel, vol. ii. p. 128) says that Huntingdon was not granted to Malcolm till 1159; and on the other, the terms of homage as stated by the Chron. Mailros exclude Huntingdon, which was granted to Henry of Scotland not by Henry I. but by Stephen. The truth probably lurks in another phrase of Rob. Torigni (a. 1157), which says that Malcolm surrendered, besides the three fortresses above-named, Edinburgh “et comitatum Lodonensem.” This can only mean that he made a surrender of Lothian, to receive its investiture again on the same terms as his forefathers—i.e. as a fief of the English Crown. Huntingdon appears in the Pipe Rolls of 1156, 1157 and 1158, but without mention of its third penny.

The closing feast of the year was celebrated with a brilliant gathering of the court at Lincoln. More cautious than his predecessor, Henry did not venture to defy local tradition by appearing in his regal insignia within the city itself; he wore his crown on Christmas day, not in the great minster on the hill-top, but in the lesser church of S. Mary in the suburb of Wigford beyond the river.[1399] Next Easter the king and queen went through this ancient solemnity of the “crown-wearing” together, and for the last time, in Worcester cathedral. When the moment came for making their oblations, they laid their crowns upon the altar and vowed never to wear them again.[1400] The motive for this renunciation was probably nothing more than Henry’s impatience of court pageantry; but the practice thus solemnly forsaken was not revived, save once under very exceptional circumstances in the middle of the next reign, till the connexion between England and Anjou was on the eve of dissolution; and as it happens, the abandonment of this custom of Old-English royalty marks off one of the lesser epochs in Henry’s career. He was about to plunge into a sea of continental politics and wars which kept him altogether away from his island-realm for six years, and from which he never again thoroughly emerged. This last crown-wearing at Worcester serves as a fitting point at which we may leave our own country for a while and glance once more at the history of the lands united with her beneath the sceptre of the Angevin king.

- [1399] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 9 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 117, 118). Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 216; it is he who gives the name of the suburb, “Wikeford.” Will. Newb. has a wrong date; the Pipe Roll 4 Hen. II. (Hunter), p. 136, settles that point.

- [1400] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 216; more briefly, R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 302; both with very confused dates, but again they are set right by the Pipe Roll 4 Hen. II. (Hunter), p. 175.

CHAPTER X.
HENRY AND FRANCE.
1156–1161.

Formidable as was the task of England’s internal reorganization, it was but a small part of the work which lay before Henry Fitz-Empress. His accession brought the English Crown into an entirely new relation with the world at large. The realm which for ages had been counted almost as a separate sphere, whose insularity had been strong enough to survive even the Norman conquest and to turn the conqueror’s own native land into a dependency of the conquered island, suddenly became an unit in a vast group of states gathered into the hands of a single ruler, and making up altogether the most extensive and important empire in Christendom. Among the earlier kings of England Cnut is the only one whose dominions were at all comparable in extent to those of Henry II. But the empire of Cnut and that of Henry differed widely in character and circumstances. Cnut’s northern empire was to a certain extent homogeneous; its members had at least one thing in common besides their common allegiance—they were all, geographically and politically, almost as completely severed from the rest of Europe as England herself. It was only as an indirect consequence partly of his territorial power, but still more of his personal greatness, that Cnut and his realms came into connexion with central and southern Europe. In Henry’s case, on the contrary, such a connexion was rendered inevitable by the geographical position of his continental territories. They lay in the very heart of western Christendom; they covered the largest and some of the fairest regions of Gaul; they positively surrounded on two sides the domains of the French Crown to which they owed a nominal homage; they touched the borders of Spain, and they went very near to those old Burgundian lands which formed the south-western march of Germany and the north-western march of Italy. Again, Cnut’s territories were all perfectly independent of any ruler save himself; no rival power disputed his claims to any one of them; no other sovereign had any pretension to receive homage from him. Henry, on the other hand, was by the possession of his Gaulish fiefs placed in direct personal connexion with the French king who was not merely his neighbour but also his overlord. A like connexion had indeed existed between the Norman kings of England and the French kings as overlords of Normandy. But Henry’s relations with France were far more complex and fraught with far weightier political consequences than those of his Norman predecessors. He held under the king of France not a single outlying province, but—at the lowest reckoning—not less than five separate fiefs, all by different titles and upon different tenures, which were yet further complicated by the intricate feudal and political relations of these fiefs one with another.

Normandy was the least puzzling member of the group; Henry had inherited it from his mother, and held it on the same tenure as all her ancestors from Hrolf downwards. About Anjou, again—the original patrimony of the heirs of Fulk the Red—there could hardly be any question; and the old dispute whether Maine should count as an independent fief of the Crown or as an underfief of Normandy or of Anjou was not likely to be of any practical consequence when the immediate ruler of all three counties was one and the same. Yet all these had to be treated as separate states; each must have its special mention in the homage done by Henry to Louis; each must be governed according to its own special customs and institutions. So, too, must the other appendage of Anjou—Touraine, for which homage was still owed to the count of Blois, and where he still possessed a few outlying lands which might easily be turned into bones of contention should he choose to revive the ancient feud. Lastly, over and above all this bundle of family estates inherited from his father and his mother, Henry’s marriage had brought him the duchy of Aquitaine:—that is, the immediate possession of the counties of Poitou and Bordeaux; the overlordship of a crowd of lesser counties and baronies which filled up the remaining territory between the Loire and the Pyrenees; and a variety of more or less shadowy claims over all the other lands which had formed part of the old Aquitanian kingdom, and whose feudal relations with each other, with Poitou and with the Crown of France were in a state of inextricable confusion:—added to which, there was a personal complication caused by the two marriages of Eleanor, whereby her second husband owed homage to the first for the territories which he held in her name. Without going further into the details of the situation, we can easily see that it was crowded with difficulties and dangers, and that it would require the utmost care, foresight and self-restraint on the part of both Henry and Louis to avoid firing, at some point or other, a train which might produce an explosion disastrous to both alike.

Henry’s chief assistant in the management of his continental affairs was his mother, the Empress Matilda. Still closer to his side, indeed, stood one who in after-years shewed herself gifted with far greater administrative sagacity, and who had already acquired considerable political experience as queen of France and duchess of Aquitaine. As yet, however, Henry was likely to derive less assistance from the somewhat dangerously quick wit of his wife than from the mature wisdom of his mother. Matilda had been a harsh, violent, impracticable woman; but there was in her character an element of moral and intellectual grandeur which even in her worst days had won and kept for her the devotion of men like Miles of Hereford and Brian Fitz-Count, and which now in her latter years had fairly gained the mastery over her less admirable qualities. She had inherited a considerable share of her father’s talents for government; she had indeed failed to use them in her own behalf, but she had learned from her failure a lesson which enabled her to contribute not a little, by warnings and suggestions, to the success of her son. In England, where the haughtiness of her conduct had never been forgiven, whatever was found amiss in Henry’s seems to have been popularly laid to her charge.[1401] In Normandy, however, she was esteemed far otherwise. From the time of her son’s accession to the English crown she lived quietly in a palace which her father had built hard by the minster of Notre-Dame-des-Prés, outside the walls of Rouen;[1402] taking no direct share in politics, but universally held in profound respect by reason of her dignified and pious life, and of the influence which she was known to exercise upon the mind and policy of the young duke. His first step on the tidings of Stephen’s death had been to hold a consultation with her; so long as she lived, her opinions and her wishes were an element never absent from his calculations before entering upon any serious undertaking; and if he did not formally leave her as regent of the Norman duchy, yet he trusted in great measure to her for the maintenance of its tranquillity and order during his own absence beyond the sea.

- [1401] “Nos autem illi doctrinæ [sc. maternæ] fidenter imputamus omnia quibus erat tædiosus” [rex]. W. Map. De Nug. Cur., dist. v. c. 6 (Wright, p. 227).

- [1402] Draco Norm., l. iii. cc. 1, 2, vv. 37–66 (Howlett, Will. Newb., vol. ii. pp. 712–714).

A personal visit was, however, necessary to make sure of his ground with the king of France. As soon, therefore, as matters in England were sufficiently composed, early in 1156 Henry went to Normandy;[1403] Louis came to meet him on the border, and shortly afterwards, at a second meeting, received a repetition of his homage for all his French fiefs, including the duchy of Aquitaine.[1404] It was time; for to every one of those fiefs, except Aquitaine and Normandy, there was a rival claimant in the person of his brother. The story went that Geoffrey Plantagenet as he lay dying at Château-du-Loir had made the bishops and barons around his bed promise that they would not suffer him to be laid in the grave till his eldest son had sworn to abide by the contents of a will which he had just executed. When they called upon Henry to take the oath, he hesitated a long while; at last, seeing no other means of getting his father buried in peace, with a burst of tears he swore as he was required. After the funeral the will was read; and Henry found himself thereby pledged to make over the whole of his patrimonial territories—Anjou, Touraine and Maine—to his brother Geoffrey, as soon as the addition of the English crown to his Norman coronet should put him in complete possession of his mother’s heritage. Till then Geoffrey was to be content with three castles, Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau. For the moment Henry dissembled his vexation; the contingency contemplated in the will was still in the unknown future. But before it came to pass Geoffrey, as we have seen, provoked his brother’s ill-will by using his three castles as a basis of rebellion. Henry on his part sought and obtained a papal absolution from the extorted oath, and flatly refused to keep it.[1405] Hereupon Geoffrey again began stirring up a revolt whose suppression was one of the chief objects of Henry’s visit to the continent in 1156. The brothers met at Rouen, but they could not agree; Geoffrey hurried back to fortify his three castles, and Henry followed to besiege them.[1406] The troops which he employed were, as we have already seen, mercenaries paid out of the proceeds of a scutage levied in England; and if the chancellor’s share in the matter amounted to nothing more than the suggestion of this contrivance, its perfect success in every way would be enough to justify the statement of a contemporary, that Henry “profited greatly by his assistance.”[1407] Loudun and Mirebeau were successively besieged and taken;[1408] and in July the fall of Geoffrey’s last and mightiest fortress, Chinon, brought him to complete surrender of all his claims, for which he accepted a compensation in money from his brother.[1409] Next month Queen Eleanor came over to share her husband’s triumph;[1410] she doubtless accompanied him in a progress through Aquitaine, where he received homage from the vassals of the duchy, took hostages for their fidelity,[1411] and kept Christmas at Bordeaux.[1412] Every part of his continental dominions was thus thoroughly secured before he returned to England in the spring of 1157.[1413]

- [1403] He was at Rouen on Candlemas day. Rob. Torigni, a. 1156.

- [1404] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 215. Between the two meetings with Louis came one with the count and countess of Flanders at Rouen. Rob. Torigni, a. 1156.

- [1405] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 7 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 112, 113).

- [1406] Rob. Torigni, a. 1156.

- [1407] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 162, says that Henry won his success “Thomæ cancellarii sui magno fretus auxilio.” It is not quite clear whether Thomas was with him in person; he was certainly in England part of this year, witness the Pipe Roll.

- [1408] Rob. Torigni, a. 1156.

- [1409] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 7 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 114). Rob. Torigni, a. 1156. Chron. S. Albin. a. 1156 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 38). The first states the compensation as “terram planam ex quo fructuum utilitas proveniret”; the second as a thousand pounds sterling and two thousand Angevin per annum. All say Geoffrey lost his castles, except Loudun, which Henry restored to him (Chron. S. Albin. as above). The date is from Rob. Torigni.

- [1410] She and Richard de Lucy were both with Henry at Saumur on August 29. Chron. de Bello (Angl. Christ. Soc.), p. 76.

- [1411] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 215.

- [1412] Anon. Chron., Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 121.

- [1413] Eleanor went back independently before Easter. “In corredio reginæ quando venit de Normanniâ” appears among the accounts “de veteri firmâ” of Hampshire, Pipe Roll 3 Hen. II. (Hunter), p. 107.

Henry and Eleanor had now two children living. The eldest, born in London on February 28, 1155,[1414] and baptized by his father’s name, had already been recognized as his heir; the second was a girl, born in 1156,[1415] and named after her grandmother the Empress Matilda. A third, Richard, was born at Oxford[1416] on September 8, 1157.[1417] Eleanor had moreover by her former marriage with Louis of France two daughters, Mary and Adela, betrothed to the brother-counts of Champagne and Blois;[1418] while the second marriage of Louis with Constance of Castille had given him one child, the infant princess Margaret.[1419] Early in 1158 Henry resolved to secure the hand of this little girl for his eldest son, and he sent his chancellor over sea to make the proposal to Louis.[1420]

- [1414] Rob. Torigni, a. 1155. Chron. S. Albin. a. 1155 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 38).

- [1415] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 302.

- [1416] Ibid.

- [1417] Chron. S. Albin. a. 1157 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 39).

- [1418] Gesta Ludov., c. 29 (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. iv. p. 411). Hist. Ludov. (ibid.) p. 415. Mary had once been proposed as wife for Henry Fitz-Empress, but S. Bernard put a stop to the scheme on the ground of consanguinity (see above, p. 393, note 2{1161})—an objection which, however, applied still more strongly to Henry’s marriage with her mother. Mary was betrothed to Henry of Champagne before the Crusade (Gesta Ludov., c. 18, as above, pp. 403, 404). Adela was born in 1149 or 1150, and apparently betrothed to Theobald of Blois in 1152 or soon after (ib. cc. 27, 29, as above, pp. 410, 411; Hist. Ludov., ib. pp. 414, 415). Neither couple was married till 1164.

- [1419] Gesta Ludov., c. 29 (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. iv.), p. 411. Hist. Ludov. (ibid.), p. 415.

- [1420] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 29. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 302.

Never, since Haroun-al-Raschid sent his envoys to Charles the Great, had such an embassy been seen in western Europe. Thomas made up his mind to display before the eyes of astonished France all the luxury and splendour which the wealth of the island-realm could procure, that King Henry might be glorified in his representative.[1421] The six ships with which he habitually crossed the Channel[1422]—the king himself had but one for this purpose, till his chancellor presented him with three more[1423]—can hardly have sufficed for the enormous train which he took with him on this occasion. It comprized, in the first place, some two hundred members of his household, knights, clerks, stewards, servants, squires, and young pages of noble blood, all provided with horses and fitted out with new and gay attire as beseemed their several degrees. Thomas himself had twenty-four changes of raiment, most of which he gave away in the course of his journey; besides a quantity of rich silks, rare furs, and costly cloths and carpets, “fit to adorn the sleeping-chamber of a bishop.” He had a right royal train of coursing-dogs and hawks of all kinds. Above all, he had eight mighty chariots, each drawn by five horses equal to war-chargers in beauty and strength; beside each horse ran a stalwart and gaily-clad youth, and each chariot had its special conductor. Two of these vehicles were laden with casks of ale, to be given to the French, who marvelled at the beverage, strange to them, which the English thought superior to wine. The other chariots bore the furniture of the chancellor’s chapel, of his private chamber, and of his kitchen; others again contained treasure, provisions for the journey, necessaries of the toilet, trappings and baggage of all kinds. Next, there were twelve sumpter-horses, of which eight were loaded with coffers containing the gold and silver vessels of the chancellor’s household, vases, ewers, goblets, bowls, cups, flagons, basins, salt-cellars, spoons, plates and dishes. Other chests and packages held the money for daily expenses and gifts, the chancellor’s own clothes, and his books. One pack-horse, which always went first, bore the sacred vessels, altar-ornaments and books belonging to the chapel. To each horse there was a well-trained groom; to each chariot was fastened a dog, large, strong and “terrible as a lion or a bear”; and on the top of every chariot sat a monkey. The procession travelled along the road in regular order; first came the foot-pages, to the number of about two hundred and fifty, in groups of six, ten or more, “singing together in their native tongue, after the manner of their country.” They were followed at a little distance by the coursing-dogs and hounds coupled and in leashes under the charge of their respective keepers. Next, the great chariots covered with hides came heavily rolling and rattling along; after them trotted the pack-horses, each with a groom; these again were followed by the squires, bearing the shields and leading the chargers of the knights; then came a crowd of other attendants, pages, and those who had charge of the hawks; then the sewers and other servants of the chancellor’s household; then his knights and his clerks, all riding two and two; and lastly, amid a select group of friends, the chancellor himself. In every town and village along the road the French rushed out to inquire the meaning of such a startling procession, and when told that it was the chancellor of the king of England coming on a mission to the king of France, exclaimed: “If this is the chancellor, what must his master be?”

- [1421] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above·/·(Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 29.

- [1422] Partly, it seems, for the sake of giving a free passage to any one who wanted to go. Ib. p. 23.

- [1423] Ibid. p. 26.

Immediately after landing Thomas notified his arrival to Louis; at Meulan he received an answer, fixing a day for an audience in Paris. It was the custom of the French kings to provide at their own expense for every man who came to their court during his sojourn there; Louis therefore issued a proclamation in Paris forbidding the sale of any article whatsoever to the chancellor or his attendants. Thomas however was resolved to decline the royal hospitality; he sent his caterers in disguise and under feigned names to all the fairs round about—Lagny, Corbeil, Pontoise, S. Denys—where they bought up such an abundance of bread, meat, fish and wine that when he reached his lodging at the Temple he found it stocked with three days’ provisions for a thousand men. One dish of eels, which had cost a hundred shillings sterling, was long remembered as an instance of the English chancellor’s prodigality. Every possible courtesy was interchanged between him and the French king. Every member of the court, were he count, baron, knight or serving-man, received some token of insular wealth and generosity; Thomas gave away all his gold and silver plate, all his costly raiment; to one a cloak, to another a fur cape, to another a pelisse, to another a palfrey or a destrier.[1424] The masters and scholars of the university came in for their share; the chancellor’s gracious reception of them, and of the citizens with whom the English scholars lodged,[1425] was a marked feature in his visit to Paris.[1426] The embassy was successful; Louis promised his daughter’s hand to the heir of England, and Thomas went home in triumph, having finished up his expedition by capturing and casting into prison at Neufmarché a certain Guy of Laval whose lawless depredations were a continual insult to King Henry and a continual terror to his subjects.[1427] Henry himself soon afterwards went over sea, partly, no doubt, to confirm the family alliance thus concluded with Louis. But there was also another reason which urgently required his presence in Gaul.

- [1424] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 29–33.

- [1425] “Cives scholarium Angligenarum creditores” (ib. p. 32) must mean something like this.

- [1426] Ibid.

- [1427] Ibid. p. 33.

A fresh opening had presented itself to the ambition of the Angevin house in a quarter where they seem to have had no dealings since the time of Geoffrey Martel, but which was intimately associated with their earliest traditions and with the very foundations of their power. The long rivalry between the counts of Nantes and of Rennes had ended, like that between the dukes of Normandy and the counts of Anjou, in a marriage, and for eighty-two years all Britanny had been united beneath the immediate and undisputed sway of the one ducal house, when in 1148 Duke Conan III. on his death-bed disavowed the young Hoel who had hitherto passed as his son and heir.[1428] The duchy split up into factions once again; the greater part accepted the rule of Count Eudo of Porhoët, who was married to Conan’s only daughter Bertha; the people of Nantes alone, fired with their old spirit of independence and opposition, opened their gates to Hoel and acknowledged him as their count. Hoel however proved unable to cope with the superior forces of his rival; at the end of eight years his people grew hopeless of maintaining their independence under him. Rather than give it up once more to those whom they looked upon as representatives of the hated supremacy of Rennes, they fell back upon their old traditional alliance with Anjou, and having driven out the unfortunate Hoel, offered themselves and their country to young Geoffrey Plantagenet.[1429] Geoffrey, smarting under the defeat which he had just sustained at his brother’s hands in Anjou, was naturally delighted with this new acquisition, and all the more as he had a fair prospect of enjoying it in peace; for Eudo at that very moment was suddenly confronted by another rival. Earl Conan of Richmond, Bertha’s son by a former marriage, being now grown to manhood, came over from England in this same summer of 1156 to claim the heritage which his stepfather had usurped;[1430] and during the struggle which ensued between them neither party had time or energy to spare for dislodging the Angevin intruder from Nantes, where he remained undisputed master for nearly two years.

- [1428] Chron. Britann. ad ann. (Morice, Hist. Bret., preuves, vol. i. col. 103).

- [1429] Ib. a. 1148, 1156, 1157 (as above). Chron. Brioc. (ibid.), col. 37.

- [1430] Chron. Brioc. as above. Rob. Torigni, a. 1156.

On July 26, 1158, Geoffrey died.[1431] The county of Nantes was at once seized by Conan and claimed by the king of England as heir to his childless brother;[1432] and on the eve of the Assumption Henry landed in Normandy to enforce his claim. Before resorting to arms, however, he deemed it prudent to secure the assent of the lord paramount of Britanny, King Louis of France, to his intended proceedings. The negotiations were again intrusted to the chancellor, and again with marked success. At a conference held on the last day of August[1433] Louis did far more than sanction Henry’s claim upon Nantes; he granted him a formal commission to arbitrate between the competitors for the dukedom of Britanny and settle the whole question in dispute as he might think good, in virtue of his office as grand seneschal of France.[1434] This office was now little more than honorary, and was held throughout the greater part of the reign of Louis VII. by the count of Blois; but the rival house of Anjou seems to have also put forth a claim to it, which Louis admitted for a moment, as on the present occasion, whenever it suited his own purposes.[1435] From Argentan, on September 8, Henry issued a summons to the whole feudal host of Normandy to assemble at Avranches on Michaelmas-day for an expedition into Britanny. He himself spent the interval in a visit to Paris, where he was entertained by Louis with the highest honours; the betrothal of little Henry and Margaret was ratified, and the baby-bride was handed over to the care of her future father-in-law, who intrusted her for education to a faithful Norman baron, Robert of Neubourg.[1436] The host gathered at Avranches on the appointed day, but only to witness Conan’s submission. He knew that he was no match for the king of England with the king of France at his back; so he put himself into Henry’s hands, and received his confirmation in the dukedom of Britanny in return for the surrender of Nantes.[1437] Henry, after a visit to the Mont-S.-Michel and a brief halt at Pontorson to restore the castle, proceeded to take formal possession of Nantes; he then went to besiege Thouars,[1438] whose lord was in rebellion against him. In November he met Louis at Le Mans,[1439] and thence conducted him on a triumphal progress through Normandy. After going through Pacy and Evreux to Neubourg, that the French king might see his little daughter, they were received with a solemn procession at Bec; they then visited the abbey of Mont-S.-Michel, where Louis had a vow to pay, and from Avranches Henry escorted his guest by way of Bayeux, Caen and Rouen safely and honourably back to his own dominions.[1440]

[1431] Contin. Becc. a. 1158 (Delisle, Rob. Torigni, vol. ii. p. 166). Chron. S. Albin. a. 1158 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 39).

[1432] Rob. Torigni, a. 1158. Chron. Brioc. (Morice, Hist. Bret., preuves, vol. i.), col. 37. Chron. Britann. a. 1158 (ib. col. 103).

[1433] Contin. Becc. a. 1158 (Delisle, Rob. Torigni, vol. ii. p. 167).

[1434] “Eo tempore, per industriam Thomæ cancellarii a Lundoniâ, rex Angliæ a rege Francorum Christianissimo, viro tamen nimis simplici, optinuit ut quasi senescallus regis Francorum intraret Britanniam, et quosdam ibidem inter se inquietos et funebre bellum exercentes coram se convocaret et pacificaret, et quem inveniret rebellum violenter coherceret.” Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 166.

[1435] On the office of seneschal of France see A. Luchaire, Hist. des Institutions Monarchiques sous les premiers Capétiens, vol. i. pp. 173–181. The treatise of Hugh of Clères “De senescalciâ et majoratu regni Franciæ” (printed in Marchegay, Comtes d’Anjou, pp. 387–394), which sets forth the Angevin claim in detail, is shown by M. Mabille to be a forgery (Introd., pp. xlix–li); and so too, it seems, is the only charter in which Henry appears as seneschal (ib. p. li, note). The treatise was, however, written between 1150 and 1168 (ib. p. li), and must therefore have been intended to support a claim made at that time. M. d’Arbois de Jubainville (Comtes de Champagne, vol. ii. pp. 270–274; vol. iii. pp. 96, 97) gives from charters a list of the seneschals of France from A.D. 1091 to A.D. 1163. No count of Anjou appears; and from 1154 to 1163 (inclusive) the seneschal each year is Theobald of Blois. That the Angevin claim was, however, not only made but occasionally admitted—doubtless for some special purpose—is shewn by the passage of Gerv. Cant. quoted above (note 3{1434}), and also by two passages in Robert of Torigni, none of which are noticed by M. Luchaire. In A.D. 1169 Robert tells us that the younger Henry did homage to Louis at Montmirail for the county of Anjou, “et concessit ei rex Francorum ut esset senescallus Franciæ, quod pertinet ad feudum Andegavense;” and he adds that at Candlemas young Henry officiated as seneschal to the king in Paris; after which he proceeds to abridge from the pseudo-Hugh de Clères the story of the origin of the dignity. In A.D. 1164 he says: “Comes Carnotensis Tedbaudus despondit filiam Ludovici regis Franciæ, et ideo rex ei concessit dapiferatum Franciæ, quem comes Andegavensis antiquitus habebat.” M. de Jubainville’s list shews that Theobald had been seneschal long before this; but the words shew that the Angevin claim was well known, at any rate in the Angevin dominions.

[1436] Rob. Torigni, a. 1158.

[1437] Ibid. Contin. Becc. a. 1158 (Delisle, Rob. Torigni, vol. ii. p. 169). Chron. Britann. (Morice, Hist. Bret., preuves, vol. i.), col. 104. This last dates the surrender “circa festivitatem S. Dionysii” [Oct. 9]; the two former make it Michaelmas. According to Rob. Torigni the actual cession comprised the city of Nantes and the northern half of the county, said to be worth sixty thousand shillings Angevin.

[1438] Rob. Torigni and Contin. Becc. as above. Chron. S. Albin. a. 1158 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 39). Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 166.

[1439] Gerv. Cant. as above.

[1440] Rob. Torigni, a. 1158. Contin. Becc. a. 1158 (Delisle, Rob. Torigni, vol. ii. pp. 169, 170). Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 166.

The county of Nantes was in itself a very trifling addition to the vast possessions of Henry Fitz-Empress; yet its acquisition was a more important matter than appears at first sight. Nantes, by its geographical position, commanded the mouth of the Loire; its political destinies were therefore of the highest consequence to the princes whose dominions lay along the course of that river. The carefully planned series of advances whereby Geoffrey Greygown and Fulk the Black had gradually turned the whole navigable extent of the Loire into a high-way through their own territories would have been almost useless had they not begun by securing the entrance-gate. To Henry, who as count of Poitou had command of the opposite shore of the estuary, there might have been less danger in the chance of hostility at Nantes; but the place was, for another reason, of greater value to him than it could ever have been to his ancestors. From the English Channel to the Pyrenees he was master of the entire western half—by far the larger half—of Gaul, with one exception: between his Norman and his Aquitanian duchy there jutted out the Breton peninsula. Britanny must have been in Henry’s eyes something like what Tours had been in those of Geoffrey Martel:—a perpetual temptation to his ambition, a fragment of alien ground which must have seemed to him destined almost by the fitness of things to become absorbed sooner or later into the surrounding mass from which it stood out in a sort of unnatural isolation. By his acquisition of Nantes he had gained a footing in the Breton duchy, somewhat as his forefathers had gained one in the city of Tours by their canonry at S. Martin’s; and as a grant of investiture from the French king had served as the final stepping-stone to Martel’s great conquest, so the privilege of arbitration conferred by Louis upon Henry might pave the way for more direct intervention in Britanny. The meaning of this autumn’s work is well summed up by Gervase of Canterbury: “This was Henry’s first step towards subduing the Bretons.”[1441] A week before the assembly at Avranches his fourth son had been born;[1442] the infant was baptized by the name of Geoffrey. It would indeed have been strange if the name made famous by Henry’s own father, as well as by so many of the earlier members of the family, had been allowed to drop out of use in the next generation. Yet by the light of after-events one may suspect that its revival at this particular moment had a special reference to the memory of the lately deceased Count Geoffrey of Nantes, and that the new-born child’s future destiny as duke of Britanny was already foreshadowed, however vaguely, in his father’s dreams.

- [1441] “Hic fuit primus ingressus ejus super Britones edomandos.” Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 166.

- [1442] On September 23; Rob. Torigni, a. 1158.

The year closed amid general tranquillity. So cordial was, or seemed to be, the alliance of the two kings, that they planned a joint crusade against the Moors in Spain, and wrote to ask the Pope’s blessing upon their undertaking;[1443] and a long-standing dispute between Henry and Theobald of Blois was settled before Christmas by the mediation of Louis.[1444] In England the year is marked by nothing more important than a new issue of coinage.[1445] The administration of the country was directed by the two justiciars, assisted, formally at least, by the queen,[1446] until shortly before Christmas, when she went over sea to keep the feast with her husband at Cherbourg.[1447] Unhappily, the beginnings of strife followed in her train.

- [1443] Letter of Adrian IV.—date, February 19 [1159]—in Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. iv. pp. 590, 591.

- [1444] Rob. Torigni, a. 1158. The quarrel had originated in Henry’s refusal, when he succeeded his father as count of Anjou, to do homage for Touraine. To this was added a dispute about Fréteval and Amboise. See details in Gesta Ambaz. Domin. (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 216, 222, 223.

- [1445] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 302. There are some references to this new coinage in the Pipe Roll of the year (4 Hen. II., Hunter, pp. 114, 181). Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 215, misdates it 1156.

- [1446] Richard de Lucy and Eleanor seem to share the regency during her stay in England; see Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., pp. 42, 43, and Palgrave, Eng. Commonwealth, vol. ii. pp. v, vi. After her departure her place seems to be taken by Robert of Leicester.

- [1447] Rob. Torigni, a. 1159.

The duchy of Aquitaine, or Guyenne, as held by Eleanor’s predecessors, consisted, roughly speaking, of the territory between the Loire and the Garonne. More exactly, it was bounded on the north by Anjou and Touraine, on the east by Berry and Auvergne, on the south-east by the Quercy or county of Cahors, and on the south-west by Gascony, which had been united with it for the last hundred years. The old Karolingian kingdom of Aquitania had been of far greater extent; it had in fact included the whole country between the Loire, the Pyrenees, the Rhône and the ocean. Over all this vast territory the counts of Poitou asserted a theoretical claim of overlordship by virtue of their ducal title; they had, however, a formidable rival in the house of the counts of Toulouse. These represented an earlier line of dukes of Aquitaine, successors of the dukes of Gothia or Septimania, under whom the capital of southern Gaul had been not Poitiers but Toulouse, Poitou itself counting as a mere underfief. In the latter half of the tenth century these dukes of Gothia or Aquitania Prima, as the Latin chroniclers sometimes called them from the old Roman name of their country, had seen their ducal title transferred to the Poitevin lords of Aquitania Secunda—the dukes of Aquitaine with whom we have had to deal. But the Poitevin overlordship was never fully acknowledged by the house of Toulouse; and this latter in the course of the following century again rose to great importance and distinction, which reached its height in the person of Count Raymond IV., better known as Raymond of St. Gilles, from the name of the little county which had been his earliest possession. From that small centre his rule gradually spread over the whole territory of the ancient dukes of Septimania. In the year of the Norman conquest of England Rouergue, which was held by a younger branch of the house of Toulouse, lapsed to the elder line; in the year after the Conqueror’s death Raymond came into possession of Toulouse itself; in 1094 he became, in right of his wife, owner of half the Burgundian county of Provence. His territorial influence was doubled by that of his personal fame; he was one of the chief heroes of the first Crusade; and when he died in 1105 he left to his son Bertrand, over and above his Aquitanian heritage, the Syrian county of Tripoli. On Bertrand’s death in 1112 these possessions were divided, his son Pontius succeeding him as count of Tripoli, and surrendering his claims upon Toulouse to his uncle Alfonso Jordan, a younger son of Raymond of St. Gilles.[1448] Those claims, however, were disputed. Raymond’s elder brother, Count William IV., had left an only daughter who, after a childless marriage with King Sancho Ramirez of Aragon,[1449] became the wife of Count William VIII. of Poitou.[1450] From that time forth it became a moot point whether the lord of St. Gilles or the lord of Poitiers was the rightful count of Toulouse. Raymond unquestionably bore the title and exercised its functions for some six years before his brother’s death and his niece’s second marriage,[1451] and one historian asserts that he had acquired the county by purchase from his brother.[1452] Another story relates that William of Poitou having married the heiress of Toulouse after her father’s death,[1453] immediately entered upon her inheritance, but afterwards pledged it to Raymond in order to raise money for the Crusade.[1454] The reckless, spendthrift duke, whose whole energies were given up to verse-making, discreditable adventures, and either defying or eluding the ecclesiastical authorities who vainly strove to check the scandals of his life, never found means to redeem his pledge; neither did his son William IX.,[1455] although it appears that he did at some time or other contrive to obtain possession of Toulouse.[1456] On his death, however, it immediately passed back into the hands of Alfonso Jordan.

- [1448] On the counts of Toulouse and St. Gilles see Vic and Vaissète, Hist. du Languedoc (new ed., 1872), vol. iii.

- [1449] Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 48 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 304).

- [1450] Ibid. Rob. Torigni, a. 1159. This second marriage took place in 1094: MS. Chron. quoted by Besly, Comtes de Poitou, preuves, p. 408.

- [1451] Vic and Vaissète, Hist. du Languedoc, vol. iii. pp. 452, 453.

- [1452] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iv. c. 388 (Hardy, p. 603).

- [1453] William IV. of Toulouse died in 1093. Vic and Vaissète, Hist. du Languedoc, vol. iii. p. 465.

- [1454] Rob. Torigni, a. 1159. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 10 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 121, 122). It will be remembered that Duke William sought to pledge his own Poitou to the Red King for the same purpose.

- [1455] Will. Newb. as above (p. 122).

- [1456] Geoff. Vigeois, as above, describes Eleanor’s father as “Guillelmus dux Aquitaniæ filius Guillermi et filiæ comitis Tholosani, qui jure avi sui urbem Tholosanam possedit.” Besly (Comtes de Poitou, p. 132) has an account of the matter, but I cannot find his authorities.

With all these shiftings and changes of ownership the kings of France had never tried to interfere. Southern Gaul—“Aquitaine” in the wider sense—was a land whose internal concerns they found it wise to leave as far as possible untouched. It was, even yet, a land wholly distinct from the northern realm whose sovereign was its nominal overlord. The geographical barrier formed by the river Loire had indeed been long ago passed over, if not exactly by the French kings, at least by the Angevin counts. But a wider and deeper gulf than the blue stream of Loire stood fixed between France and Aquitaine. They were peopled by different races, they belonged to different worlds. There was little community of blood, there was less community of speech, thought and temper, of social habits or political traditions, between the Teutonized Celt of the north and the southern Celt who had been moulded by the influences of the Roman, the Goth and the Saracen. Steeped in memories of the Roman Empire in its palmiest days, and of the Gothic kingdom of Toulouse which had inherited so large a share of its power, its culture and its glory, Aquitania had never amalgamated either with the Teutonic empire of the Karolings or with the French kingdom of their Parisian supplanters. Her princes were nominal feudataries of both; but, save in a few exceptional cases, the personal and political relations between the northern lord paramount and his southern vassals began and ended with the formal ceremonies of investiture and homage. In the struggle of Anjou and Blois for command over the policy of the Crown, in the struggle of the Crown itself to maintain its independence and to hold the balance between Anjou and Normandy, the Aquitanian princes took no part; the balance of powers in northern Gaul was nothing to them; neither party ever seriously attempted to enroll them as allies; both seem to have considered them, as they considered themselves, totally unconcerned in the matter. Whatever external connexions and alliances they cultivated were in quite another direction—in the Burgundian provinces which lay around the mouth of the Rhône and the western foot of the Alps, and on the debateable ground of the Spanish March, the county of Barcelona, which formed a link between Gascony and Aragon. The marriage of Louis and Eleanor, however, altered the political position of Aquitaine with respect not only to the French Crown but to the world at large. She was suddenly dragged out of her isolation and brought into contact with the general political system of northern Europe, somewhat as England had been by its association with Normandy. The union of the king and the duchess was indeed dissolved before its full consequences had time to work themselves out. Its first and most obvious result was a change in the attitude of the Crown towards the internal concerns of Aquitaine. Whether the count of Toulouse paid homage to the count of Poitou, or both alike paid it immediately to the Crown—whether Toulouse and Poitiers were in the same or in different hands—mattered little or nothing to the earlier kings whose practical power over either fief was all bound up in the mere formal grant of investiture. But to Eleanor’s husband such questions wore a very different aspect. To him who was in his own person duke of Aquitaine as well as its overlord, they were matters of direct personal concern; the interests of the house of Poitou were identified with those of the house of France. For his own sake and for the sake of his posterity which he naturally hoped would succeed him in both kingdom and duchy, it was of the utmost importance that Louis should strive to make good every jot and tittle of the Poitevin claims throughout southern Gaul.

Four years after his marriage, therefore, Louis summoned his host for an expedition against the count of Toulouse.[1457] It tells very strongly against the justice of the Poitevin claims in that quarter that one of his best advisers—Theobald of Blois—so greatly disapproved of the enterprize that he refused to take any part in it at all;[1458] and it may be that his refusal led to its abandonment, for we have no record of its issue, beyond the fact that Alfonso Jordan kept Toulouse for the rest of his life, and dying in 1148 was succeeded without disturbance by his son Raymond V.[1459] Four years later the duchy of Aquitaine passed with Eleanor’s hand from Louis VII. to Henry Fitz-Empress. Once again the king of France became its overlord and nothing more:—his chance of enforcing his supremacy fainter than ever, yet his need to enforce it greater than ever, since Aquitaine, far from sinking back into her old isolation, was now linked together with Anjou and Normandy in a chain which encircled his own royal domain as with a girdle of iron. In these circumstances the obvious policy of France and Toulouse was a mutual alliance which might enable them both to stand against the power of Henry. It was cemented in 1154 by the marriage of Raymond V. with Constance, widow of Eustace of Blois and sister of Louis VII.[1460] Four more years passed away; Henry’s energies were still tasked to the uttermost by more important work than the prosecution of a doubtful claim of his wife against the brother-in-law of her overlord and former husband. Whether the suggestion at last came from Eleanor herself, during the Christmas-tide of 1158, we cannot tell; we only know that early in 1159 Henry determined to undertake the recovery of Toulouse.

- [1457] At Midsummer 1141. Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 923.

- [1458] Alterius Roberti App. ad Sigebertum, Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xiii. p. 331.

- [1459] Rob. Torigni, a. 1159.

- [1460] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 10 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 122).

A summons to Raymond to give back the county to its heiress was of course met with a refusal.[1461] It was a mere formal preliminary, and so was also a conference between Henry and Louis at Tours, where they discussed the matter and failed to agree upon it,[1462] but parted, it seems, without coming to any actual breach; Henry indeed was evidently left under the impression that his undertaking would meet with no opposition on the part of France.[1463] Early in Lent he went to Poitiers and there held council with the barons of Aquitaine. The upshot of their deliberations was an order for his forces to meet him at Poitiers on Midsummer-day, ready to march against the count of Toulouse.[1464]

- [1461] Ib. (·/·Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 10 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 123).

- [1462] Contin. Becc. a. 1159 (Delisle, Rob. Torigni, vol. ii. p. 171).

- [1463] “Inde graves inimicitiæ inter ipsum” [sc. Ludovicum] “et regem Anglorum ortæ sunt, cum videret sibi regem Francorum nocere, de cujus auxilio plurimum confidebat” remarks Rob. Torigni on Louis’s arrival at Toulouse (a. 1159).

- [1464] Contin. Becc. a. 1159 (Delisle, Rob. Torigni, vol. ii. pp. 171, 172).

A question now arose of what those forces were to consist. The feudal levies of Eleanor’s duchy might fairly be called upon to fight for the supposed rights of their mistress; those of Anjou and Maine might perhaps be expected to do as much for the aggrandizement of their count; but to demand the services of the Norman knighthood for an obscure dynastic quarrel in southern Gaul—still more, to drag the English tenants-in-chivalry across sea and land for such a purpose—would have been both unjust and impolitic, if not absolutely impracticable. On the other hand, the knights of Aquitaine were of all Henry’s feudal troops those on whom he could least depend; and they would be moreover, even with the addition of those whom he could muster in his paternal dominions, quite insufficient for an expedition which was certain to require a large and powerful host, and whose duration it was impossible to calculate. In these circumstances the expedient which had been tentatively and in part adopted three years before was repeated, and its application this time was sweeping and universal. The king gave out that in consideration of the length and hardship of the way which lay before him, and desiring to spare the country-knights, citizens and yeomen, he would receive instead of their personal services a certain sum to be levied as he saw fit upon every knight’s fee in Normandy and his other territories.[1465] This impost, which afterwards came to be known in English history as the “Great Scutage,” was, as regards England, the most important matter connected with the war of Toulouse. It marks a turning-point in the history of military tenure. It broke down the old exemption of “fiefs of the hauberk” from pecuniary taxation, in such a way as to make the encroachment upon their privilege assume the shape of a favour. To the bulk of the English knighthood the boon was a real one; military service beyond sea was a burthen from which they would be only too glad to purchase their release; the experiment, so far as it concerned them, succeeded perfectly, and made a precedent which was steadily followed in after-years. From that time forth the word “scutage” acquired its recognized meaning of a sum paid to the Crown in commutation of personal attendance in the host; and the specially cherished privilege of the tenants-in-chivalry came to be not as formerly exemption from money-payment on their demesne lands, but, by virtue of their payment, exemption from service beyond sea.

- [1465] “Rex igitur Henricus ... considerans longitudinem et difficultatem viæ, nolens vexare agrarios milites nec burgensium nec rusticorum multitudinem, sumptis LX. solidis Andegavensium in Normanniâ de feudo uniuscujusque loricæ et de reliquis omnibus tam in Normanniâ quam in Angliâ, sive etiam aliis terris suis, secundum hoc quod ei visum fuit,” etc. Rob. Torigni, a. 1159.

The sums thus raised in 1159 are however entered in the Pipe Roll of the year not as scutage but under the vaguer and more comprehensive title of donum. The reason doubtless is that they were assessed, as the historians tell us and as the roll itself shews, not only upon those estates from which services of the shield were explicitly due, but also upon all lands held in chief of the Crown, and all Church lands without distinction of tenure:[1466]—the basis of assessment in all cases being the knight’s fee, in its secondary sense of a parcel of land worth twenty pounds a year. Whatever the laity might think of this arrangement, the indignation of the clergy was bitter and deep. The wrong inflicted on them by the scutage of 1156 was as nothing compared with this, which set at naught all ancient precedents of ecclesiastical immunity, and actually wrung from the Church lands even more than from the lay fiefs.[1467] Their wrath however was not directed solely or even chiefly against the king. A large share of the blame was laid at the chancellor’s door; for the scheme had his active support, if it was not actually of his contriving. Its effects on English constitutional developement were for later generations to trace; the men of the time saw, or thought they saw, its disastrous consequences in the after-lives of its originators. In the hour of Thomas’s agony Gilbert Foliot raked up as one of the heaviest charges against him the story of the “sword which his hand had plunged into the bosom of his mother the Church, when he spoiled her of so many thousand marks for the army of Toulouse”;[1468] and his own best and wisest friend, John of Salisbury, who had excused the scutage of 1156, sorrowfully avowed his belief that the scutage of 1159 was the beginning of all Henry’s misdoings against the Church, and that the chancellor’s share in it was the fatal sin which the primate had to expiate so bitterly.[1469]

- [1466] “Secundum ejus scutagium assisum pro eodem exercitu Walliæ” [this writer assigns a like object to the scutage of 1156, but in both cases he is contradicted by chronology and contemporary evidence] “reperies in rotulo anni quinti regis ejusdem inferius. Fuitque assisum ad duas marcas pro quolibet feodo, non solum super prælatos, verum tam super ipsos quam super milites suos, secundum numerum feodorum, qui tenuerunt de rege in capite; necnon et super residuos milites singulorum comitatuum in communi.” [Cf. Rob. Torigni as quoted above, p. 459, note 2.] “Intitulaturque illud scutagium, De Dono. Eâ quidem, ut credo, ratione, quod non solum prælati qui tenentur ad servicia militaria sed etiam alii, abbates utpote de Bello et de Salopesbirie et alii, tunc temporis dederunt auxilium.” Alex. Swereford (Liber Ruber Scacc.) quoted in Madox, Hist. Exchequer, vol. i. p. 626. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 167, calls it a scutage: “Scotagium sive scuagium de Angliâ accepit.” The references to it are in almost every page of the Pipe Roll 5 Hen. II. (Pipe Roll Soc.); the most important are collected by Madox, Hist. Exch., vol. i. pp. 626, 627. There are also a few notices in the next year; Pipe Roll 6 Hen. II. (Pipe Roll Soc.), pp. 3, 6, 24, 29, 30, 32, 51. There are a few entries of “scutage” by that name—from the abbot of Westminster (Pipe Roll 5 Hen. II., pp. 6, 24, 27; 6 Hen. II., pp. 11, 24, 28), the bishop of Worcester (5 Hen. II., p. 24), William of Cardiff (ibid.), the abbot of Evesham (ib. p. 25), and the earl of Warwick (ib. p. 26). Some of these pay “donum” as well. In reference to this matter some of the Northumbrian tenants-in-chivalry are designated by a title which is somewhat startling in the middle of the twelfth century: the sheriff of Northumberland renders an account “de dono militum et tainorum” (Pipe Roll 5 Hen. II., p. 14). What was the distinction between them?

The sum charged on the knight’s fee in Normandy was sixty shillings Angevin;[1470] in England it seems to have been two marks.[1471] The proceeds, with those of a similar tax levied upon Henry’s other dominions,[1472] amounted to some hundred and eighty thousand pounds,[1473] with which he hired an immense force of mercenaries.[1474] But his host did not consist of these alone. The great barons of Normandy and England, no less than those of Anjou, Aquitaine and Gascony, were eager to display their prowess under the leadership of such a mighty king. The muster at Poitiers was a brilliant gathering of Henry’s court, headed by the chancellor with a picked band of seven hundred knights of his own personal following,[1475] and by the first vassal of the English Crown, King Malcolm of Scotland,[1476] who came, it seems, to win the spurs which his cousin had refused to grant him twelve months ago, when they met at Carlisle just before Henry left England in June 1158.[1477] The other vassal state was represented by an unnamed Welsh prince;[1478] and the host was further reinforced by several important allies. One of these was Raymond Trencavel, viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne, a baron whom the count of Toulouse had despoiled, and who gladly seized the opportunity of vengeance.[1479] Another was William of Montpellier.[1480] The most valuable of all was the count of Barcelona, a potentate who ranked on an equality with kings.[1481] His county of Barcelona was simply the province which in Karolingian times had been known as the Spanish March—a strip of land with the Pyrenees for its backbone, which lay between Toulouse, Aragon, Gascony and the Mediterranean sea. It was a fief of the West-Frankish realm; but the facilities which every marchland in some degree possesses for attaching itself to whichever neighbour it may prefer, and so holding the balance between them as to keep itself virtually independent of them all, were specially great in the case of the Spanish March, whose rulers, as masters of the eastern passes of the Pyrenees, held the keys of both Gaul and Spain. During the last half-century they had, like the lords of another marchland, enormously strengthened their position by three politic marriages. Dulcia of Gévaudan, the wife of Raymond-Berengar III. of Barcelona, was heiress not only to her father’s county of Gévaudan, but also, through her mother, to the southern half of Provence, whose northern half fell to the share of Raymond of St.-Gilles. Her dower-lands were settled upon her younger son. He, in his turn, married an heiress, Beatrice of Melgueil, whose county lay between Gévaudan and the sea; and the dominions of the house of St.-Gilles were thus completely cut in twain, and their eastern half surrounded on two sides, by the territories of his son, the present count of Provence, Gévaudan and Melgueil.[1482] The elder son of Dulcia, having succeeded his father as Count Raymond-Berengar IV. of Barcelona, was chosen by the nobles of Aragon to wed their youthful queen Petronilla, the only child of King Ramirez the Monk. He had thus all the power of Aragon at his command, although, clinging with a generous pride to the old title which had come down to him from his fathers, he refused to share his wife’s crown, declaring that the count of Barcelona had no equal in his own degree, and that he would rather be first among counts than last among kings.[1483] A man with such a spirit, added to such territorial advantages, was an ally to be eagerly sought after and carefully secured. Henry therefore invited him to a meeting at Blaye in Gascony, and secured his co-operation against Toulouse on the understanding that the infant daughter of Raymond and Petronilla should in due time be married to Henry’s son Richard, and that the duchy of Aquitaine should then be ceded to the young couple.[1484]

[1467] Joh. Salisb. Ep. cxlv. (Giles, vol. i. p. 223; Robertson, Becket, vol. v. Ep. cxciv., p. 378).

[1468] Gilb. Foliot, Ep. cxciv. (Giles, vol. i. p. 269; Robertson, Becket, vol. v. Ep. ccxxv., p. 525).

[1469] Joh. Salisb. Ep. cxlv. (Giles, vol. i. pp. 223, 224).

[1470] See above, p. 459, note 2{1465}.

[1471] So says Alex. Swereford. See above, p. 460 note{1466}.

[1472] “De aliis vero terris sibi subjectis inauditam similiter censûs fecit exactionem.” Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 167. Cf. above, p. 459, note 2{1465}.

[1473] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 167. He makes this to be the proceeds of the scutage in England alone, but see Bishop Stubbs’s explanation, Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 457, note 4, and his remarks in the preface to Gesta Hen. Reg. (“Benedict of Peterborough”), vol. ii. pp. xciv–xcvi.

[1474] Rob. Torigni, a. 1159.

[1475] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 33.

[1476] Gerv. Cant. as above. Rob. Torigni, a. 1159.

[1477] Chron. Mailros, a. 1158.

[1478] “Quidam rex Gualiæ.” Gerv. Cant. as above.

[1479] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 10 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 125). He miscalls him William Trencavel.

[1480] Rob. Torigni, a. 1159.

[1481] “Vir magnus et potens, nec infra reges consistens.” Will. Newb. as above (p. 123).

[1482] On these marriages, etc., see Vic and Vaissète, Hist. du Languedoc, vol. iii.

[1483] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 10 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 123–125). Raymond’s speech, and the whole story of Raymond, Ramirez and Petronilla, as given in this chapter, form a charming romance, whose main facts are fully borne out by the more prosaic version of Rob. Torigni, a. 1159.

[1484] Rob. Torigni, a. 1159.

A last attempt to avert the coming struggle was made early in June; the two kings met near the Norman border, but again without any result.[1485] Immediately after midsummer, therefore, Henry and his host set out from Poitiers and marched down to Périgueux. There, in “the Bishop’s Meadow,” Henry knighted his Scottish cousin, and Malcolm in his turn bestowed the same honour upon thirty noble youths of his suite.[1486] The expedition then advanced straight into the enemy’s country. The first place taken was Cahors; its dependent territory was speedily overrun;[1487] and while in the south Raymond Trencavel was winning back the castles of which the other Raymond had despoiled him, Henry led his main force towards the city of Toulouse itself.[1488] Count and people saw the net closing round them; they had seen it drawing near for months past, and one and all—bishop, nobles and citizens—had been writing passionate appeals to the king of France, imploring him, if not for the love of his sister, at least for the honour of his crown, to come and save one of its fairest jewels from the greedy grasp of the Angevin.[1489] Louis wavered till it was all but too late; he was evidently, and naturally, most unwilling to quarrel with the king of England. He began to move southward, but apparently without any definite aim; and it was not till after another fruitless conference with Henry in the beginning of July[1490] that he at last, for very shame, answered his brother-in-law’s appeal by throwing himself into Toulouse almost alone, as if to encourage its defenders by his presence, but without giving them any substantial aid.[1491] Perhaps he foresaw the result. Henry, on the point of laying siege to the city, paused when he heard that his overlord was within it. Dread of Louis’s military capacity he could have none; personal reverence for him he could have just as little. But he reverenced in a fellow-king the dignity of kingship; he reverenced in his own overlord the right to that feudal obedience which he exacted from his own vassals. He took counsel with his barons; they agreed with him that the siege should be postponed till Louis was out of the city—a decision which was equivalent to giving it up altogether.[1492] The soldiers grumbled loudly, and the chancellor loudest of all. Thomas had now completely “put off the deacon,” and flung himself with all his might into the pursuit of arms. His knights were the flower of the host, foremost in every fight, the bravest of the brave; and the life and soul of all their valour was the chancellor himself.[1493] The prospect of retreat filled him with dismay. He protested that Louis had forfeited his claim to Henry’s obedience by breaking his compact with him and joining his enemies, and he entreated his master to seize the opportunity of capturing Toulouse, city, count, king and all, before reinforcements could arrive.[1494] Henry however turned a deaf ear to his impetuous friend. Accompanied by the king of Scots and all his host, he retreated towards his own dominions just as a body of French troops were entering Toulouse.[1495]

[1485] Contin. Becc. a. 1159 (Delisle, Rob. Torigni, vol. ii. p. 172).

[1486] Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 58 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 310). The Chron. Mailros, a. 1159, says Malcolm was knighted at Tours on the way back from Toulouse; Geoff. Vigeois implies that it was on the way out.

[1487] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 34. Rob. Torigni, a. 1159. Cf. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 10 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 126), who however has got the sequence of events wrong.

[1488] Will. Newb. as above.

[1489] Letters of Peter archbishop of Narbonne:—Hermengard viscountess of Narbonne:—“commune consilium urbis Tolosæ et suburbii”— Epp. xxxiii., xxxiv., ccccxiv., Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. iv. pp. 574, 575, 713. The archbishop curiously describes the threatening invader as “Dux Normanniæ.” The citizens make a pitiful appeal; the viscountess makes a spirited one, and wishes the king “Karoli regis magnanimitatem.”

[1490] Contin. Becc. a. 1159 (Delisle, Rob. Torigni, vol. ii. pp. 173, 174).

[1491] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 33. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 10 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 125).

[1492] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 33, Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 58 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 310), Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 10 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 125), the Draco Norm., l. i. c. 12, vv. 437–464 (ib. vol. ii. pp. 608, 609), and R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 303, attribute the retreat to Henry’s reverence for his overlord; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 167, seems to look upon it as a measure of necessity; but considering that Louis had brought almost nothing but himself to Raymond’s aid, one does not see what necessity there could be in the case. The Draco alone mentions Henry’s consultation with the barons—unless there is some allusion to it in the words of Will. Fitz-Steph., who describes Henry as “vanâ superstitione et reverentiâ tentus consilio aliorum.”

[1493] The English archdeacon’s unclerical doings in this war were however quite eclipsed by those of the archbishop of Bordeaux. See a letter from the citizens of Toulouse to King Louis; Ep. ccccxxv., Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. iv. p. 718.

[1494] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 34.

[1495] Ibid.

He had, however, conquered the greater part of the county,[1496] and had no intention of abandoning his conquests; but the task of protecting them against Raymond and Louis together, without the support of Henry’s own presence, was a responsibility which all his great barons declined. Two faithful ministers accepted the duty: Thomas the chancellor and Henry of Essex the constable.[1497] Thomas fixed his head-quarters at Cahors;[1498] thence, with the constable’s aid, he undertook to hold the country by means of his own personal followers,[1499] backed by Raymond of Barcelona, Trencavel, and William of Montpellier.[1500] He ruled with a high hand, putting down by proscription and even with the sword every attempt at a rising against Henry’s authority storming towns and burning manors without mercy in his master’s service;[1501] in helm and hauberk he rode forth at the head of his troops to the capture of three castles which had hitherto been considered impregnable.[1502] Henry’s “superstition” (as it was called by a follower of Thomas)[1503] about bearing arms against his overlord applied only to a personal encounter in circumstances of special delicacy; he had no scruples in making war upon Louis indirectly, as he had done more than once before, and was now doing not only through Thomas but also at the opposite end of France. The English and Scottish kings had retired from Toulouse to Limoges, where they arrived about Michaelmas.[1504] Meanwhile Count Theobald of Blois, now an ally of Henry, was despatched by him “to disquiet the realm of France”—that is, doubtless, to make a diversion which should draw off the attention of the French from Toulouse and leave a clear field to the operations of Thomas. The French king’s brothers, Henry, bishop of Beauvais, and Robert, count of Dreux, retaliated by attacking the Norman frontier with fire and sword.[1505] Thomas, having chased away the enemies across the Garonne and secured the obedience of the conquered territory, hurried northward to join his sovereign, whom he apparently followed into Normandy. There he undertook the defence of the frontier. Besides his seven hundred picked knights, he maintained at his own cost for the space of forty days twelve hundred paid horsemen and four thousand foot in his master’s service against the king of France on the marches between Gisors, Trie and Courcelles; he not only headed his troops in person, but also met in single combat a valiant French knight of Trie, Engelram by name; and the layman went down before the lance of the warlike archdeacon, who carried off his opponent’s destrier as the trophy of his victory.[1506] The king himself marched into the Beauvaisis, stormed Gerberoi, and harried the surrounding country till he gained a valuable assistant in Count Simon of Montfort, who surrendered to him all his French possessions, including the castles of Montfort, Rochefort and Epernon. As these places lay directly in the way from Paris to Etampes and Orléans, Louis found himself completely cut off from the southern part of his domain, and was compelled to ask for a truce. It was made in December, to last till the octave of Pentecost.[1507] Henry’s wife had now joined him; they kept Christmas together at Falaise,[1508] and Henry used the interval of tranquillity to make some reforms in the Norman judicature.[1509] When the truce expired the two kings made a treaty of peace,[1510] negotiated as usual by the indefatigable chancellor;[1511] the betrothal of little Henry and Margaret was confirmed, and the Vexin was settled upon the infant couple. As for the Aquitanian quarrel, Louis formally restored to Henry all the rights and holdings of the count of Poitou, except Toulouse itself; Henry and Raymond making a truce for a year, during which both were to keep their present possessions, and complete freedom of action was left to their respective allies.[1512]

[1496] Ibid.·/·Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 34. Rob. Torigni, a. 1159.

[1497] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 34.

[1498] Rob. Torigni, a. 1159.

[1499] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

[1500] Rob. Torigni, a. 1159.

[1501] E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 365. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 175, 176.

[1502] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 34.

[1503] Ib. p. 33. See above, p. 465, note 1{1485}.

[1504] Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 58 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 310).

[1505] Rob. Torigni, a. 1159.

[1506] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 34, 35.

[1507] Rob. Torigni, a. 1159.

[1508] Rob. Torigni, a. 1160.

[1509] Contin. Becc. a. 1160 (Delisle, Rob. Torigni, vol. ii. p. 180).

[1510] Rob. Torigni, a. 1160.

[1511] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 24 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 159).

[1512] The treaty is printed in Lyttelton’s Hen. II., vol. iv. pp. 173, 174. It has no date; we have to get that from Rob. Torigni—May 1160. The terms of the treaty are summarized by Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 218, who places it a year too late. He also introduces a second betrothal, between Richard and Adela, the second daughter of Louis and Constance. But the treaty printed by Lyttelton says nothing of this; and if it be the treaty mentioned by Rob. Torigni the clause is impossible, for Adela was not born till the autumn of 1160.

This imperfect settlement, as far as Toulouse was concerned, advanced no further towards completion during the next thirteen years. Henry’s expedition could hardly be called a success; and whatever advantage he had gained over Raymond was dearly purchased at the cost of a quarrel with Louis. There can be little doubt that Henry had fallen into a trap; Louis had misled him into lighting the torch of war, and then turned against him in such a way as to cast upon him the blame of the subsequent conflagration. The elements of strife between the two kings could hardly have failed to burst sooner or later into a blaze; the question was whose hand should kindle it. In spite of Henry’s Angevin wariness, Louis had contrived to shift upon him the fatal responsibility; and for the rest of his life the fire went smouldering on, breaking out at intervals in various directions, smothered now and then for a moment, but never thoroughly quenched; consuming the plans and hopes of its involuntary originator, while the real incendiary sheltered himself to the last behind his mask of injured innocence.

For six months all was quiet. In October the two kings held another meeting; the treaty was ratified, and little Henry, who had lately come over from England with his mother, was made to do homage to Louis for the duchy of Normandy.[1513] About the same time the queen of France died, leaving to her husband another infant daughter.[1514] Disappointed for the fourth time in his hopes of a son, Louis in his impatience set decency at defiance; before Constance had been a fortnight in her grave he married a third wife, Adela of Blois, daughter of Theobald the Great, and sister of the two young counts who were betrothed to the king’s own elder daughters.[1515] His subjects, sharing his anxiety for an heir, easily forgave his unseemly haste and welcomed the new queen, who in birth, mind and person was all that could be desired.[1516] It would, however, have been scarcely possible to find a choice more irritating to Henry of Anjou. On either side of the sea, the house of Blois seemed to be always in some way or other crossing his path; in their lives or in their deaths, they were perpetually giving him trouble. At that very time the death of Stephen’s last surviving son, Earl William of Warren,[1517] had led to a quarrel between the king and his dearest friend. William was childless, and the sole heir to his county of Boulogne was his sister Mary, abbess of Romsey. This lady was now brought out of her convent to be married by Papal dispensation to Matthew, second son of the count of Flanders.[1518] The scheme, devised by King Henry,[1519] was strongly opposed by the bridegroom’s father,[1520] and also by Henry’s own chancellor. Thomas, somewhat unexpectedly perhaps, started up as a vindicator of monastic discipline, remonstrated vehemently against the marriage of a nun, and used all his influence at Rome to hinder the dispensation; he gained, however, nothing save the enmity of Matthew, and a foretaste of that kingly wrath[1521] which was to burst upon him with all its fury three years later. Even without allowing for Henry’s probable frame of mind in consequence of this affair, the French king’s triple alliance with the hereditary rivals of the Angevin house would naturally appear to him in the light of a provocation and a menace. The chancellor seems to have made his peace by suggesting an answer to it.

- [1513] Rob. Torigni, a. 1160.

- [1514] Ibid. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 303. Hist. Ludov. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. iv.), p. 415. Constance died on October 4; Lamb. Waterloo, Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xiii. p. 517.

- [1515] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 303. Cf. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 167, and Rob. Torigni, a. 1160. Adela was crowned at Paris with her husband on S. Brice’s day (November 13); Hist. Ludov. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. iv.), p. 416.

- [1516] Hist. Ludov. as above.

- [1517] He died in October 1159, on the way home from Toulouse; Rob. Torigni, ad ann.

- [1518] Rob. Torigni, a. 1160. Lamb. Waterloo (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xiii.), p. 517. According to Matthew Paris, Hist. Angl. (Madden), vol. i. p. 314, the marriage took place in 1161.

- [1519] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 328.

- [1520] Lamb. Waterloo as above.

- [1521] Herb. Bosh. as above. Mat. Paris, Hist. Angl. (Madden), vol. i. pp. 314, 315.

One of Henry’s great desires was to recover the Vexin, which at his father’s suggestion he had ceded to Louis in 1151 as the price of the investiture of Normandy. By the last treaty between the two kings it had been settled that this territory should form the dowry of little Margaret; her father was to retain possession of it, and to place its chief fortresses in the custody of the Knights Templars, for the next three years, until she should be wedded to young Henry with the consent of Holy Church; whenever that should take place, Henry’s father was to receive back the Vexin. In other words, the dowry was not to be paid till the bride was married; and there was evidently a tacit understanding, at any rate on the French side, that this was not to be for three years at least.[1522] Later in the summer two cardinal-legates visited France and Normandy on business connected with a recent Papal election.[1523] Henry, apparently at the instigation of Thomas,[1524] persuaded them to solemnize the marriage of the two children on November 2 at Neubourg.[1525] The written conditions of the treaty were fulfilled to the letter—the babes were wedded with the consent of Holy Church, represented by the Pope’s own legates; and the castles of the Vexin were at once made over to Henry by the Templars,[1526] three of whom were present at the wedding.[1527] Louis found himself thoroughly outwitted. His first step was to banish the three Templars, who were cordially received by Henry;[1528] his next was to concert with the brothers of his new queen a plan of retaliation in Anjou. The house of Blois naturally resented a curtailment of the possessions of the crown which they now hoped one day to see worn by a prince of their own blood. Louis and Theobald accordingly set to work to fortify Chaumont, a castle which Gelduin of Saumur had long ago planted on the bank of the Loire as a special thorn in the side of the Angevin counts. Henry flew to the spot, put king and count to flight, besieged and took the castle of Chaumont together with thirty-five picked knights and eighty men-at-arms whom Theobald had sent to reinforce its garrison; he then fortified Fréteval and Amboise, and, secure from all further molestation, went to keep Christmas with Eleanor in his native city of Le Mans.[1529]

- [1522] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 24 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 159), distinctly states that the children were not to be married till they were of a fit age; and such was no doubt the intention of Louis; but it was by no means expressed in the treaty:—“Totum remanens Wilcassini” [i.e. all except three of its fiefs which were specially reserved to Henry] “regi Francie; hoc modo, quod ipse illud remanens dedit et concessit maritagium cum filiâ suâ filio regis Anglie habendum. Et eum unde seisiendum ab Assumptione B. Marie proximâ post pacem factam in tres annos, et si infra hunc terminum filia regis Francie filio regis Anglie desponsata fuerit, assensu et consensu Sancte Ecclesie, tunc erit rex Anglie seysitus de toto Wilcassino, et de castellis Wilcassini, ad opus filii sui.” Treaty in Lyttelton, Hen. II., vol. iv. p. 173. The question turned on the construing of “tunc.” Louis intended it to mean “then, when the three years are expired, if the children shall be wedded”; Henry and his friends the Templars made it mean “then, when the children are wedded, whether the three years are expired or not.”

- [1523] Gilb. Foliot, Ep. cxlviii. (Giles, vol. i. p. 197). Of their business we shall see more later.

- [1524] This must surely be the meaning of Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 175: “Quam industrie munitiones quinque munitissimas, in Franciæ et Normanniæ sitas confinio, domino suo regi, ad cujus tamen jus ab antiquo spectare dignoscebantur, a rege Francorum per matrimonium, sine ferro, sine gladio, absque lanceâ, absque pugnâ, in omni regum dilectione et pace revocaverit, Gizortium scilicet, castrum munitissimum, et alia quatuor.” Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 57, which seems however to refer rather to the drawing-up of the treaty.

- [1525] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 304. Cf. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 168, Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 218, and Rob. Torigni, a. 1160.

- [1526] Rog. Howden and Rob. Torigni, as above. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 24 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 159).

- [1527] Roger of Pirou, Tostig of S. Omer and Richard of Hastings; Rog. Howden as above.

- [1528] Ibid.

- [1529] Rob. Torigni, a. 1160.

A year of peace followed: Henry spent the greater part of it in Normandy, garrisoning the castles of the duchy, strengthening its newly-recovered border-fortresses, providing for the restoration of the old royal strongholds and the erection of new ones in all parts of his dominions, and superintending the repair of his palace at Rouen, the making of a park at Quévilly, and the foundation of an hospital for lepers at Caen.[1530] The chancellor was still at his side, and had lately, as a crowning mark of his confidence, been intrusted with the entire charge of his eldest son. Thomas received the child into his own household, to educate him with the other boys of noble birth who came to learn courtly manners and knightly prowess in that excellent school; he playfully called him his adoptive son, and treated him as such in every respect.[1531] Little Henry was now in his seventh year, and his father was already anxious to secure his succession to the throne. The conditional homage which he had received as an infant was, as Henry knew by personal experience, a very insufficient security. Indeed, the results of every attempt to regulate the descent of the crown since the Norman conquest tended to prove that the succession of the heir could be really secured by nothing short of his actual recognition and coronation as king during his father’s life-time. This was now becoming an established practice in France and Germany. In England, where the older constitutional theory of national election to the throne had never died out, such a step had never been attempted but once; and that attempt, made by Stephen in behalf of his son Eustace, had ended in signal failure. Discouraging as the precedent was, however, Henry had made up his mind to follow it; and in the spring of 1162 he sent his boy over sea and called upon the barons of England to do him homage and fealty, as a preliminary to his coronation as king.[1532]

- [1530] Ibid.·/·Rob. Torigni, a. 1161.

- [1531] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 22. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 176, 177.

- [1532] E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 366. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 13.

A matter so important and so delicate could be intrusted to no one but the chancellor. He managed it, like everything else that he took in hand, with a calm facility which astonished every one. He brought the child to England, presented him to the bishops and barons of the realm in a great council summoned for the purpose,[1533] knelt at his feet and swore to be his faithful subject in all things, reserving only the fealty due to the elder king so long as he lived and reigned;[1534] the whole assembly followed his example, and thus a measure which it was believed that Henry’s personal presence would hardly have availed to carry through without disturbance was accomplished at once and without a word of protest,[1535] save from the little king himself, who with childish imperiousness, it is said, refused to admit any reservation in the oath of his adoptive father.[1536] Henry probably intended that the boy’s recognition as heir to the crown should be speedily followed by his coronation.[1537] This, however, was a rite which could only be performed by the primate of all England; and the chair of S. Augustine was vacant. Once again it was to Thomas that Henry looked for aid; but this time he looked in vain. Thomas had done his last act in the service of his royal friend. The year which had passed away since Archbishop Theobald’s death had been, on both sides of the sea, a year of almost ominous tranquillity. It was in truth the forerunner of a storm which was to shatter Henry’s peace and to cost Thomas his life.

- [1533] Anon. I. as above·/·(Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 13. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 306.

- [1534] R. Diceto as above.

- [1535] Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 13.

- [1536] Mat. Paris, Hist. Angl. (Madden), vol. i. p. 316.

- [1537] Such an intention is distinctly stated by E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 366: ... “filio suo, jam tunc coronando in regem.”

CHAPTER XI.
THE LAST YEARS OF ARCHBISHOP THEOBALD.
1156–1161.

All Henry’s endeavours for the material and political revival of his kingdom had been regulated thus far by one simple, definite principle:—the restoration of the state of things which had existed under his grandfather. In his own eyes and in those of his subjects the duty which lay before him at his accession, and which he had faithfully and successfully fulfilled, was to take up the work of government and administration not at the point where he found it, but at the point where it had been left by Henry I. and Roger of Salisbury: to pull down and sweep away all the innovations and irregularities with which their work had been overlaid during the last nineteen years, and bring the old foundations to light once more, that they might receive a legitimate superstructure planned upon their own lines and built upon their own principles. In law, in finance, in general administration, there was one universal standard of reference:—“the time of my grandfather King Henry.”

But there was one side of the national revival, and that the most important of all, to which this standard could not apply. The religious and intellectual movement which had begun under Henry I., far from coming to a standstill at his death, had gone on gathering energy and strength during the years of anarchy till it had become the one truly living power in the land, the power which in the end placed Henry II. on his throne. It looked to find in him a friend, a fellow-worker, a protector perhaps; but it had no need to go back to a stage which it had long since overpassed and make a new departure thence under the guidance of a king who was almost its own creation. At the very moment of Henry’s accession, the hopes of the English Church were raised to their highest pitch by the elevation of an Englishman to the Papal chair. Nicolas Breakspear was the only man of English birth who ever attained that lofty seat; and the adventures which brought him thither, so far as they can be made out from two somewhat contradictory accounts, form a romantic chapter in the clerical history of the time. Nicolas was the son of a poor English clerk[1538] at Langley, a little township belonging to the abbey of S. Alban’s.[1539] The father retired into the abbey,[1540] leaving his boy, according to one version of the story, too poor to go to school and too young and ignorant to earn his bread; he therefore came every day to get a dole at the abbey-gate, till his father grew ashamed and bade him come no more; whereupon the lad, “blushing either to dig or to beg in his own country,” made his way across the sea.[1541] Another version asserts that Nicolas, being “a youth of graceful appearance, but somewhat lacking in clerkly acquirements,” sued to the abbot of S. Alban’s for admission as a monk; the abbot examined him, found him insufficiently instructed, and dismissed him with a gentle admonition: “Wait awhile, my son, and go to school that you may become better fitted for the cloister.”[1542] Whether stung by the abbot’s hint or by his father’s reproofs, young Nicolas found his way to Paris and into its schools, where he worked so hard that he out-did all his fellow-students.[1543] But the life there wearied him as it had wearied Thomas Becket; he rambled on across Gaul into Provence, and there found hospitality in the Austin priory of S. Rufus. His graceful figure, pleasant face, sensible talk and obliging temper so charmed the brotherhood that they grew eager to keep him in their midst,[1544] and on their persuasion he joined the order.[1545] It seems that he was even made superior of the house, but the canons afterwards regretted having set a stranger to rule over them, and after persecuting him in various ways appealed to the Pope to get rid of him. The Pope—Eugene III.—at first refused to hear them; but on second consideration he decided to give them over to their own evil devices and offer their rejected superior a more agreeable post in his own court.[1546] Nicolas, who had already twice visited Rome, proceeded thither a third time and was made cardinal[1547] and bishop of Albano.[1548] Shortly afterwards he was appointed legate to Norway and Denmark, an office which he filled with prudence and energy during some years.[1549] Returning to Rome about 1150, he apparently acted as secretary to Eugene III. until the latter’s death in July 1153.[1550] The next Pope, Anastasius III., reigned only sixteen months, and dying on December 2, 1154, was succeeded by the bishop of Albano, who took the name of Adrian IV.[1551]

[1538] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 6 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 109).

[1539] Gesta Abbat. S. Albani (Riley), vol. i. p. 112.

[1540] Will. Newb. as above. Probably he separated from his wife in consequence of some of the decrees against clerical marriage passed under Henry I.; that she was not dead is plain from John of Salisbury’s mention of her as still living in the days of his friendship with Nicolas. Joh. Salisb., Metalog., l. iv. c. 42 (Giles, vol. v. p. 205).

[1541] Will. Newb. as above (pp. 109, 110).

[1542] Gesta Abbat. as above. The abbot’s name is there given as Robert, but this must be wrong, as Robert did not become abbot till 1151, and by 1150, as we shall see, Nicolas was at Rome.

[1543] Gesta Abbat. (as above), pp. 112, 113.

[1544] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 6 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 110).

[1545] Ibid. Gesta Abbat. (Riley), vol. i. p. 113.

[1546] Will. Newb. as above (pp. 110, 111). The church of S. Rufus (diocese Valence) had between 1145 and 1151 an abbot named N.... The editors of Gall. Christ. (vol. xvi. cols. 359, 360) will not allow that this N. was Nicolas Breakspear, and of course the date will not agree with the version of his history in the Gesta Abbat.; but it agrees perfectly with that of Will. Newb.; while the Gesta’s dates are confuted by Nicolas’s undoubted signatures at Rome.

[1547] Gesta Abbat. as above.

[1548] Will. Newb. as above (p. 111). Rob. Torigni, a. 1154.

[1549] Will. Newb. as above.

[1550] “A partir de l’année 1150, on trouve la souscription de Nicolaus episcopus Albanensis au bas des bulles d’Eugène III.” Delisle, Rob. Torigni, vol. i. p. 288, note 2.

[1551] Will. Newb. as above (p. 111). Date from Cod. Vatic., Baronius, Annales (Pagi), vol. xix. p. 77.

The English Church naturally hailed with delight the accession of a pontiff who was at once one of her own sons and a disciple of Eugene, whom the leaders of the intellectual and spiritual revival in England had come to regard almost as their patron saint.[1552] Adrian indeed shared all their highest and most cherished aspirations far more deeply and intimately than Eugene himself could have done. It was in the cloisters of Canterbury that these aspirations were gradually taking definite shape under the guidance of Archbishop Theobald. There, beneath the shadow of the cathedral begun by Lanfranc and completed by S. Anselm, their worthy successor had been throughout the last ten or twelve years of the anarchy watching over a little sanctuary where all that was noblest, highest, most full of hope and promise in the dawning intellectual life of the day found a peaceful shelter and a congenial home. The Curia Theobaldi, the household of Archbishop Theobald, was a sort of little school of the prophets, a seminary into which the vigilant primate drew the choicest spirits among the rising generation, to be trained up under his own eyes in his own modes of thought and views of life, till they were fitted to become first the sharers and then the continuators of his work for the English Church and the English nation. Through his scholars had come the revival of legal and ecclesiastical learning in England; through them had come the renewal of intercourse and sympathy with the sister-Churches of the west; through them had been conducted the negotiations with Rome which had led to the restoration of order and peace; and in them, as Theobald hoped, the Church, having saved the state, would find her most fitting instruments for the work of reform and revival which still remained to be done within her own borders. One by one, as the occasion presented itself, he began to send them forth to take independent positions in the Church or in the world. Of the chosen three whom he specially trusted, the first who thus left his side was John of Canterbury, who in 1153 succeeded Hugh of Puiset as treasurer of York. Next year Theobald was able to place another of his disciples in the northern metropolis in a far more important capacity: he succeeded in obtaining the royal assent to the appointment of Roger of Pont-l’Evêque as archbishop of York, in succession to S. William, who had been restored by Pope Anastasius after Henry Murdac’s death, but died six weeks after his restoration.[1553]

- [1552] John of Salisbury frequently writes of him as “Sanctus Eugenius.”

- [1553] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 298, 299. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 158. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 26 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 80, 82). Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), pp. 10, 11.

Roger’s history before his entrance into the primate’s household is so completely lost that even the rendering of his surname is a matter of some doubt; it may have been derived from the English town of Bishopsbridge, and if so Roger was now going back as primate to his own native shire; it seems however more probable that he came from Pont-l’Evêque in Normandy.[1554] He was evidently some years older than Theobald’s other favourites, John of Canterbury and Thomas of London; for we find him and Gilbert Foliot quarrelling, apologizing, lecturing and forgiving each other with an outspoken freedom and familiarity possible only between two men of equal standing who have been friends from their youth.[1555] With Thomas Becket, on the other hand, Roger was never upon really friendly terms; jealous, no doubt, of the younger man who seemed likely to supersede him in the primate’s confidence, Roger lost no opportunity of teasing the “hatchet-clerk” (as he called Thomas, from the nickname of the man who had first introduced him to Theobald), and made his life so wretched that he was twice driven to quit the archbishop’s house and take refuge with Theobald’s brother, Walter, archdeacon of Canterbury, till the latter smoothed the way for his return.[1556] On Walter’s elevation to the see of Rochester in 1148 his archdeaconry was given to Roger;[1557] he also held some other preferments, all of which he was at one time in great danger of losing—most likely on account of his share in the famous “swimming-voyage” to Reims; but his friend Gilbert Foliot secured him the protection of the Pope;[1558] and the restoration of the archbishop would naturally involve that of the archdeacon. After six years’ tenure of his office at Canterbury Roger was called to go up higher. Theobald had more than one reason for desiring his archdeacon’s elevation. He wished it for Roger’s own sake; he wished it still more for the sake of his younger favourite, whom he longed to establish in a position of dignity and importance, yet close to his own side; above all, he wished it for the sake of the Church;[1559] for he naturally hoped that in leaving one of his own foremost disciples seated on the metropolitan chair of York, he would be leaving at least one prelate of the highest rank firmly pledged to those schemes of ecclesiastical policy and organization which he himself had most at heart. His confidence in Roger was over-great. After all the disputes about the canonical relations between Canterbury and York which had wasted the energies of Lanfranc and embittered the last days of S. Anselm, Theobald missed his opportunity of securing at last a full acknowledgement of Canterbury’s superior rights, and was rash enough to consecrate Roger without requiring from him a profession of obedience.[1560] The large-hearted primate evidently never dreamed that any question of obedience could arise between himself and one of his spiritual sons, or that Roger’s loyalty to him could fail to be extended to his successor. He never discovered his mistake; it was Roger’s old rival, and with him the English Church, who ultimately had to bear its unhappy consequences.

- [1554] There is a bit of evidence on this side in Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 40, where the writer calls him “Rogerum Nevstriensem.”

- [1555] Gilb. Foliot, Epp. cix.–cxi. (Giles, vol. i. pp. 135–145). This was after Roger became archbishop; the quarrel went so far that Roger appealed to Rome about it, and carried his appeal in person. (What can be the date of this?) Gilbert owns that he had let his sharp tongue run away with him; Roger lectures him soundly, but ends with “ecce jam in occursum vestrum vetus festinat amicus,” and a proposal to kill the fatted calf in celebration of his repentance (Ep. cx. p. 141).

- [1556] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 16. Cf. Anon I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 9, 10; E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 362; and Gamier (Hippeau), p. 10.

- [1557] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 133.

- [1558] “Clericus ... dilecti filii vestri domini Cantuariensis archiepiscopi Magister R. de Ponte Episcopi vestrum adit urgente necessitate præsidium ut ad tuenda ea quæ canonice possidet a vestrâ imploret serenitate patrocinium.” Gilb. Foliot, Ep. xvii (Giles, vol. i. p. 30). The salutation of the letter runs “Summo Dei gratiâ Pontifici E., frater G. Glocestriæ dictus abbas”; it looks very much as if written in the interval between the council of Reims and Gilbert’s consecration.

- [1559] Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 10.

- [1560] “Sed professionem non fecit” [Roger], significantly remarks R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 298. Roger was consecrated at Westminster on October 10, 1154; ibid. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 158.

Immediately after Roger’s consecration Thomas was raised by his primate to deacon’s orders and made archdeacon of Canterbury.[1561] A few months later the accession of Henry II. opened the way for his advancement in another direction. His appointment to the chancellorship involved a great self-sacrifice on the part of Theobald; for the chancellor’s duties—at least as conceived by Thomas, and as Theobald had intended him to conceive them—took him not only quite away from those of his archdeaconry and from his primate’s side, but very often out of the country altogether; so that Theobald in giving him up to the king had condemned himself to pass his declining years apart from the object of his warmest earthly affections. But the Curia Theobaldi was by no means deserted; though it had lost its most brilliant star, there was no lack of lesser lights to brighten the primate’s home-circle; there was one whose soft mild radiance, less dazzling than the glory of Thomas, was a far truer and steadier reflex of Theobald’s own calm and gentle spirit. Yet John of Salisbury had entered the archbishop’s household within a comparatively recent period. His father’s name seems to have been Reinfred;[1562] his family connexions were all in or around the city whence his surname was derived;[1563] but there is some indication that John himself may have been born in London.[1564] In the year after the death of Henry I. he went to study in Paris, and there received his first lessons in dialectics from the greatest scholar of the day—sitting at the feet of Peter Abelard, and eagerly drinking in, to the utmost capacity of his young mind, every word that fell from the master’s lips. Abelard departed all too soon, and John pursued his studies for about two years under his successors Alberic and Robert, of whom the latter, although commonly called “Robert of Melun” from having taught with distinction in that place, was an Englishman by birth, and will come before us again in later days as Gilbert Foliot’s successor in the bishopric of Hereford. It must have been precisely during those two years that Thomas of London also was in Paris for the first time, striving for his mother’s sake to overcome his dislike of books; and it was possibly there that the two young Englishmen, who must have been of nearly the same age, began to form an acquaintance which afterwards ripened into a lifelong friendship. And it can only have been about the same time, and in that same wonderful meeting-place where so many of the happiest and most fruitful associations of the time had their beginnings, that John of Salisbury first met with Nicolas of Langley.

- [1561] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 17. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 168. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 4. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 11. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 10. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 159. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 213, where he is called “Thomas Beket”—apparently for the first time.

- [1562] “Magister B. filius Reinfred peccator, fraterculus meus,” is named by Joh. Salisb. Ep. xc. (Giles, vol. i. p. 135).

- [1563] See his correspondence passim.

- [1564] There is among John’s letters a most enigmatical one— Ep. cxxx. (Giles, vol. i. p. 109) —without date, address, or writer’s name, but very much in the tone and style of John’s familiar letters—in which a Londoner, or rather a man who tried to make himself out to be such, is described as “concivis noster.” It looks very much as if written by John to Thomas.

Thomas went home to the plodding life of a city merchant’s clerk; Nicolas set out on the long course of wandering which was to bring him at last to the Papal chair; John, having as he says “steeped himself to the finger-tips in dialectics, and moreover learned to think his knowledge greater than it really was,” applied himself for the next three years to the schools of the grammarians William of Conches and Richard l’Evêque, with whom he went over again the whole course of his previous studies, penetrated somewhat deeper into those of the quadrivium which he had begun under the direction of a German named Hardwin, and improved some slight notions of rhetoric which he had acquired at the lectures of a certain Master Theodoric. His relatives were quite unable to maintain him all this while; like all poor students of the day, he earned his living and his college-fees by teaching others, and as he pleasantly says “What I learned was the better fixed in my mind, because I constantly had to bring it out for my pupils.” One of these pupils was William of Soissons, to whom he taught the elements of logic, “and who afterwards contrived, as his followers say, a method of breaking down the old strongholds of logic, producing unexpected consequences, and overthrowing the opinions of the ancients.” John however declined to believe in a “system of impossibilities,” for which he at any rate was clearly not responsible; for he had soon transferred his pupil to the care of one Master Adam, an English teacher deeply versed in Aristotelian lore. It seems just possible that this Master Adam, who was at this time helping John in his studies not as a teacher but as a friend,[1565] was the same who many years before had stood in a somewhat similar relation to Gilbert Foliot.[1566] He may, however, perhaps be more probably identified with Adam “du Petit-Pont”—so called from the place where he lectured in Paris—who in 1176 became bishop of S. Asaph’s.[1567] After a while John found that with all his efforts he could hardly earn enough to live upon in Paris; so by the advice of his friends he determined to set up a school elsewhere.[1568] While sitting at the feet of the “Peripatetic” doctors on the Mont-Ste.-Geneviève he had become acquainted with a young native of Champagne, Peter by name, who was studying in the school of S. Martin-des-Champs.[1569] The two friends, it seems, settled together at Provins in Peter’s native land, and there, under the protection of the good Count Theobald,[1570] laboured and prospered for three years.[1571] Long afterwards, from his anxious post at the side of the dying Archbishop Theobald, John’s thoughts strayed tenderly back to the days which he and his young comrade, with hearts as light as their purses, had spent among the roses of Champagne: “I am the same that ever I was,” he wrote to Peter, now abbot of Celle, “only I possess more than you and I had between us at Provins.”[1572] He returned to Paris, revisited his old haunts on the Mont-Ste.-Geneviève, and was amused to find his old school-companions just where and as he had left them. “They did not seem to have advanced an inch towards disposing of the old questions, nor to have added one new proposition.” He, in his three years of healthy meditation in the country, had discovered that their dialectics, however useful as a help to other studies, were in themselves but a fruitless and lifeless system; he therefore now gave himself up to the study of theology under a certain Master Gilbert, Robert “Pullus”—in whom one is tempted to recognize the Robert Pulein who had planted the seed of the first English University by his divinity-lectures at Oxford in 1133—and lastly, Simon of Poissy.

- [1565] Joh. Salisb. Metalog., l. ii. c. 10 (Giles, vol. v. pp. 78–80). Adam’s nationality appears in l. iii. c. 3 (p. 129), where he is described as “noster ille Anglus Peripateticus Adam.”

- [1566] See below, p. 492, 493.

- [1567] Wright, Biogr. Britt. Lit., vol. ii. pp. 245, 246.

- [1568] Joh. Salisb. Metalog., l. ii. c. 10 (Giles, vol. v. pp. 80, 81).

- [1569] On Peter of Celle see Migne, Patrologia, vol. ccii. cols. 399, 400, and Gall. Christ., vol. xii. col. 543.

- [1570] Cf. Joh. Salisb. Epp. lxxxii. and cxliii. (Giles, vol. i. pp. 114, 206); and see also Demimuid, Jean de Salisbury, pp. 26, 27.

- [1571] “Reversus itaque in fine triennii.” Joh. Salisb. Metalog. as above (p. 81).

- [1572] Joh. Salisb. Ep. lxxxii. (Giles, vol. i. p. 114).

John’s whole career in the schools, after occupying about twelve years,[1573] apparently came to an end shortly before the council of Reims. His old friend Peter had already retired into the peace of the cloister, and about this time became abbot of Celle, near Troyes. There John, who was utterly without means of living, found a shelter and a home, nominally, it seems, in the capacity of Peter’s “clerk” or secretary, but in reality as the recipient of a generous hospitality which sought for no return save the enjoyment of his presence and his friendship.[1574] Such a light as John’s, however, could not long remain thus hidden under a bushel. So felt Peter himself;[1575] and at that moment a better place for it was easily found. At the council of Reims, or during his exile after it, the archbishop of Canterbury probably met the abbot of Celle and his English “clerk”;[1576] he certainly must have met the abbot of Clairvaux; and S. Bernard, with his unerring instinct, had already discovered John’s merits. He named him to Theobald in terms of commendation; and it was he who furnished the letter of introduction,[1577] as it was Peter who furnished the means,[1578] wherewith John at last made his way to the archbishop’s court,[1579] of which he soon became one of the busiest and most valued members. So busy was he—so “distracted with diverse and adverse occupations,” as he himself said—that he complained of being scarce able to steal an hour for the literary and philosophical pursuits which he so dearly loved. Ten times in the next thirteen years[1580] did he cross the Alps, twice did he visit Apulia, on business with the Roman court for his superiors or his friends; besides travelling all over England and Gaul on a variety of errands, and fulfilling a crowd of home-duties which left him scarcely time to look after his own private affairs, much less to indulge in study.[1581] The greater part of the communications between Theobald and Eugene III. must have passed through his hands, either as messenger or as amanuensis; but his name never figures in their diplomatic history; his place therein was a subordinate one. It was not in his nature to take the foremost rank. Not that he was unfit for it:—with his gracious, genial temper; his calm clear judgement, generally sound because always disinterested; his delicate wit, his easy, elegant scholarship, and his wide practical experience of the world—John of Salisbury might have adorned far higher positions in either Church or state than any which he ever actually occupied. But his own position was a thing of which he seems never to have thought, save as a means of serving others. His apology for his unwilling neglect of literature—“I am a man under authority”[1582]—might have been the motto of his life. He left it to others to lead; if they led in the way of righteousness, they might be sure of one faithful adherent who would serve and follow them through good report and evil report, who would try to clear the path before them at any risk to himself; who would criticize their conduct and tell them of their errors with fearless simplicity, while striving to avert the consequence of those errors and to cover their retreat; who in poverty and exile, incurred for another’s sake, would make light of his own sufferings and be constantly endeavouring to relieve those of his fellow-sufferers, and who would always find or make a silver lining to the darkest cloud. This was what John did for the possible acquaintance of his early student-days whom he had now rejoined in the household of Archbishop Theobald. To the end of his life he was more than satisfied to count the friendship of Thomas Becket as his chief title of honour, and to let whatever share of lustre might have been his own go to brighten the aureole of his friend. It brightened it far more than he knew. When detractors and panegyrists have both done their worst, there remains this simple proof of the real worth of Thomas—that he inspired such devotion as this in a man such as John of Salisbury, and that he knew how to appreciate it as it deserved.

- [1573] Joh. Salisb. Metalog., l. ii. c. 10 (Giles, vol. v. p. 81).

- [1574] Joh. Salisb. Ep. lxxxv. (Giles, vol. i. p. 117). Pet. Cell. Epp. lxvii.–lxxv. (Migne, Patrol., vol. ccii. cols. 513–522).

- [1575] Pet. Cell. Ep. lxx. (as above, col. 516).

- [1576] The Historia Pontificalis, certainly the work of one who was present at this council, is attributed to John.

- [1577] S. Bern. Ep. ccclxi. (Mabillon, vol. i. col. 325).

- [1578] Joh. Salisb. Ep. lxxxv. (Giles, vol. i. p. 117).

- [1579] From the Prologue to the Polycraticus, l. i. (Joh. Salisb. Opp., Giles, vol. iii. p. 13), it appears that at the time of writing it John had been twelve years at the court. As the Polycraticus was written during the war of Toulouse, this takes us back to 1148. He must in fact have joined Theobald very soon after the council of Reims.

- [1580] He himself makes it twenty years (Joh. Salisb. Metalog., prolog. l. iii., Giles, vol. v. p. 113); but he cannot possibly have left Paris before 1147, and the Metalogicus was finished before Theobald’s death in 1161. Either there is something wrong in John’s reckoning, or in his copyist’s reading of it, or this passage was added some years after the completion of the book.

- [1581] Joh. Salisb. Metalog. as above.

- [1582] Joh. Salisb. Polycrat., prolog. l. vii. (Giles, vol. iv. p. 80).

It was however John’s friendship with Nicolas of Langley which in these years of his residence in the primate’s household made him so valuable to Theobald as a medium of communication with Rome. We can hardly doubt that this acquaintance, too, had begun in Paris; now, as the English cardinal-secretary and the envoy of the English primate discussed in the Roman court the prospects of their common mother-country and mother-Church, their acquaintance ripened into a friendship which no change of outward circumstances could alter or disturb. Nicolas cared more for John than for his own nearest relatives; he declared in public and in private that he loved him above all men living; he delighted in unburthening his soul to him. When he became Pope there was no change; a visit from John was still Adrian’s greatest pleasure; he rejoiced in welcoming him to his table, and despite John’s modest remonstrances insisted that they should be served from the same dish and flagon.[1583] King and primate were both alike quick to perceive and use such an opportunity of strengthening the alliance between England and Rome; while Adrian on his part was all the more ready to give a cordial response to overtures made to him from the land of his birth, when they came through the lips of his dearest friend. As a matter of course, it was John who very soon after the accession of Henry II. was sent to obtain a Papal authorization for the king’s projected conquest of Ireland.[1584] Naturally, too, it was John who now became Theobald’s private secretary and confidential medium of communication with Pope Adrian. A considerable part of the correspondence which goes under John’s name really consists of the archbishop’s letters, John himself being merely the amanuensis. This part of his work, however, was a relaxation which he only enjoyed at intervals; he was still constantly on active duty of some kind or other not only at the court of the primate but also at that of the king; and sorely did he long to escape from its weary trifling, to find rest for his soul in the pursuit of that “divine philosophy” which had been the delight of his youth.[1585] But obedience, not inclination, had brought him to court, and obedience kept him there. Thomas knew his worth and would not let him go; at last, to pacify his uneasiness, he bade him relieve his mind by pouring it out in a book. John protested he had scarce time to call his soul his own, much less his intellect or his hands.[1586] He was, however, set free by the removal of the court over sea for the expedition against Toulouse; and while Thomas was riding in coat of mail at the head of his troops against Count Raymond and King Louis, John was writing his Polycraticus in the quiet cloisters of Canterbury.[1587]

- [1583] Joh. Salisb. Metalog., l. iv. c. 42 (Giles, vol. v. p. 205).

- [1584] Joh. Salisb. Metalog., l. iv. c. 42 (Giles, vol. v. pp. 205, 206).

- [1585] Joh. Salisb. Polycrat., l. i. prolog. (Giles, vol. iii. p. 13).

- [1586] Ib. l. vii. prolog. (vol. iv. p. 80).

- [1587] Ib. l. i. prolog. (vol. iii. p. 16). Cf. ib. l. viii. c. 24 (vol. iv. p. 379).

This book of Polycraticus on the Triflings of Courtiers and the Foot-prints of Philosophers[1588] is a strange medley of moral and political speculations, personal experiences, and reflections upon men and things, old and new. Its greatest charm lies in the revelation of the writer’s pure, sweet, child-like character, shining unconsciously through the veil of his scholastic pedantries and rambling metaphysics; its historical value consists in the light which it throws on the social condition of England with respect to a crowd of matters which the chroniclers leave wholly in the dark. “Part of it,” says the author in his dedication, “deals with the trifles of the court; laying most stress on those which have chiefly called it forth. Part treats of the foot-prints of the philosophers, leaving, however, the wise to decide for themselves in each case what is to be shunned and what to be followed.”[1589] We need not weary ourselves with John’s meditations upon Aristotle and Plato and their scholastic commentators; they all come round to one simple conclusion—that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the love of Him the end of all true philosophy.[1590] It is in the light of this truth that he looks at the practical questions of the day, and reviews those “trifles of the court” which are really the crying abuses of the government, the ecclesiastical administration, and society at large. In the forefront of all he does not hesitate, although dedicating his book to the chancellor whose passion for hunting almost equalled that of the king himself, to set the inordinate love of the chase and the cruelties of the forest-law.[1591] The tardiness of the royal justice and the corruption of the judges—“justitiæ errantes, justices errant are they rightly called who go erring from the path of equity in pursuit of greed and gain”[1592]—was also, after seven years of Henry’s government, still a ground of serious complaint. So, too, was the decay of valour among the young knighthood of the day—a consequence of the general relaxation of discipline, first during the years of anarchy, and then in the reaction produced by the unbroken peace which England had enjoyed since Henry’s accession. Chivalry was already falling back from its lofty ideal; military exercises were neglected for the pleasures and luxury of the court; the making of a knight, in theory a matter almost as solemn as the making of a priest, was sinking into a mere commonplace formality;[1593] and the consequences were beginning to be felt on the Welsh border.[1594] John was moved to contrast the present insecurity of the marches with their splendid defence in Harold’s time,[1595] and to lament that William the Conqueror, in his desire to make his little insular world share the glories of the greater world beyond the sea, had allowed the naturally rich and self-sufficing island to be flooded with luxuries of which it had no need, and thus fostered rather than checked the indolent disposition which had helped to bring its people under his sway.[1596]

- [1588] Polycraticus de Nugis Curialium et Vestigiis Philosophorum.

- [1589] Joh. Salisb. Polycrat., l. i. prolog. (Giles, vol. iii. p. 13).

- [1590] This is the idea which runs through the whole of Polycraticus, and indeed through all John’s writings. It is neatly expressed in two lines of his Entheticus (vv. 305, 306, Giles, vol. v. p. 248):

- “Si verus Deus est hominum sapientia vera,
Tunc amor est veri philosophia Dei.”

- [1591] Joh. Salisb. Polycrat., l. i. c. 4 (Giles, vol. iii. pp. 19–32).

- [1592] Ib. l. v. c. 15 (p. 322). Cf. cc. 10, 11 (pp. 300–311). Pet. Blois, Ep. xcv. (Giles, vol. i. p. 297), makes a like play on the title of the judges.

- [1593] Joh. Salisb. Polycrat., l. vi. cc. 2, 3, 5, 8–10 (Giles, vol. iv. pp. 8–12, 15, 16, 20–23).

- [1594] Ib. cc. 6, 16 (pp. 16, 17, 39, 40).

- [1595] Ib. c. 6 (p. 18).

- [1596] Ib. l. viii. c. 7 (p. 238).

The ills of the state had each its counterpart in the Church; the extortions and perversions of justice committed by the secular judges were paralleled by those of the ecclesiastical officials, deans and archdeacons;[1597] and at the bottom of the mischief lay the old root of all evil. Simony was indeed no longer public; spiritual offices were no longer openly bought with hard cash; but they were bought with court-interest instead;[1598] the Church’s most sacred offices were filled by men who came straight from the worldly life of the court to a charge for which they were utterly unfit;[1599] although, in deference to public opinion, they were obliged to go through an elaborate shew of reluctance, and Scripture and hagiology were ransacked for examples of converted sinners, which were always found sufficient to meet any objections against a candidate for consecration and to justify any appointment, however outrageous.[1600] All the sins of the worldly churchmen, however, scarcely move John’s pure soul to such an outburst of scathing sarcasm as he pours upon the “false brethren” who sought their advancement in a more subtle way, by a shew of counterfeit piety:—the ultra-monastic, ultra-ascetic school, with their overdone zeal and humility, and their reliance on those pernicious exemptions from diocesan jurisdiction which the religious orders vied with each other in procuring from Rome, and which were destroying all discipline and subverting all rightful authority.[1601]

- [1597] Ib.·/·Joh. Salisb. Polycrat., l. v. c. 15 (vol. iii. pp. 327, 328).

- [1598] Ib. l. vii. c. 18 (vol. iv. pp. 149, 152).

- [1599] Ib. l. v. c. 15 (vol. iii. p. 329).

- [1600] Ib. l. vii. cc. 18, 19 (vol. iv. pp. 149–152, 156–158).

- [1601] Joh. Salisb. Polycrat., l. vii. c. 21 (Giles, vol. iv. pp. 169–178). It is to be noted that the two orders which John considers to be least infected with this hypocrisy are those of the Chartreuse and of Grandmont. Ib. c. 23 (pp. 180, 181).

Over against the picture of the world and the Church as they actually were, the disciple of Archbishop Theobald sets his ideal of both as they should be—as the primate and his children aimed at making them. For John’s model commonwealth, built up in a somewhat disjointed fashion on a foundation partly of Holy Writ and partly of classic antiquity, is not, like the great Utopia of the sixteenth century, the product of one single, exceptionally constituted mind; it is a reflection of the plans and hopes of those among whom John lived and worked, and thus it helps us to see something of the line of thought which had guided their action in the past and which moulded their schemes for the future. Like all medieval theorists, they began at the uppermost end of the social and political scale; they started from a definite view of the rights and duties of the king, as the head on which all the lower members of the body politic depended. The divine right of kings, the divine ordination of the powers that be, were fundamental doctrines which they understood in a far wider and loftier sense than the king-worshippers of the seventeenth century:—which they employed not to support but to combat the perverted theory that “the sovereign’s will has the force of law,” already creeping in through the influence of the imperial jurisprudence;[1602]—and which were no less incompatible with the principle of invariable hereditary succession. “Lands and houses and suchlike things must needs descend to the next in blood; but the government of a people is to be given only to him whom God has chosen thereto, even to him who has God’s Spirit within him and God’s law ever before his eyes.... Not that for the mere love of change it is lawful to forsake the blood of princes, to whom by the privilege of the divine promises and by the natural claims of birth the succession of their children is justly due, if only they walk according to right. Neither, if they turn aside from the right way, are they to be immediately cast off, but patiently admonished till it become evident that they are obstinate in their wickedness”[1603]—then, and then only, shall the axe be laid to the root of the corrupt tree, and it shall cumber the ground no more.[1604]

- [1602] Ib.·/·Joh. Salisb. Polycrat., l. iv. c. 7 (vol. iii. p. 241).

- [1603] Joh. Salisb. Polycrat., l. v. c. 6 (Giles, vol. iii. p. 278).

- [1604] Ib. l. iv. c. 12 (pp. 259, 260).

Such was the moral which the wisest and most thoughtful minds in England drew from the lessons of the anarchy. On a like principle, it was in the growth of a more definite and earnest sense of individual duty and responsibility, as opposed to the selfish lawlessness which had so long prevailed, that they trusted for the regeneration of society. They sought to teach the knights to live up to the full meaning of their vows and the true objects of their institution—the protection of the Church, the suppression of treason, the vindication of the rights of the poor, the pacification of the country;[1605] so that the consecration of their swords upon the altar at their investiture should be no empty form, but, according to its original intention, a true symbol of the whole character of their lives and, if need be, of their deaths.[1606] And then side by side with the true knight would stand the true priest:—both alike soldiers of the Cross, fighting in the same cause though with different weapons—figured, according to John’s beautiful application of a text which medieval reformers never wearied of expounding, by the “two swords” which the Master had declared “enough” for His servants, all the lawless undisciplined activity of self-seekers and false brethren being merely the “swords and staves” of the hostile multitude.[1607] Into a detailed examination of the rights or the duties of the various classes of the people no one in those days thought it necessary to enter; their well-being and well-doing were regarded as dependent upon those of their superiors, and the whole question of the relation between rulers and ruled—“head and feet,” according to the simile which John borrows from Plutarch—was solved by the comprehensive formula, “Every one members one of another.”[1608] To watch over and direct the carrying-out of this principle was the special work of the clergy; and the clerical reformers were jealous for the rights of their order because, as understood by them, they represented and covered the rights of the whole nation; the claims which they put forth in the Church’s name were a protest in behalf of true civil and religious liberty against tyranny on the one hand and license on the other.[1609] “For there is nothing more glorious than freedom, save virtue; if indeed freedom may rightly be severed from virtue—for all who know anything aright know that true freedom has no other source.”[1610]

- [1605] Ib.·/·Joh. Salisb. Polycrat., l. vi. c. 8 (vol. iv. p. 21).

- [1606] Ibid. c. 10 (p. 23). Cf. Pet. Blois, Ep. xciv. (Giles, vol. i. pp. 291–296).

- [1607] Joh. Salisb. Polycrat., l. vi. c. 8 (Giles, vol. iv. p. 21). John’s use of the text is perhaps only a generalization from S. Bernard’s application of it to Suger and the count of Nevers, left regents of France in 1149. Odo of Deuil, Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 93.

- [1608] Joh. Salisb. Polycrat., l. vi. c. 20 (as above, pp. 51, 52).

- [1609] Ib. l. vii. c. 20 (pp. 161–169).

- [1610] Ibid. c. 25 (p. 192).

How far these lofty views had made their way into the high places of the Church it was as yet scarcely possible to judge. The tone of the English episcopate had certainly undergone a marked change for the better during the last six years of Stephen’s reign. Theobald’s hopes must, however, have been chiefly in the rising generation. Of the existing bishops there was only one really capable of either helping or hindering the work which the primate had at heart; for Henry of Winchester, although his royal blood, his stately personality and his long and memorable career necessarily made him to his life’s end an important figure in both Church and state, had ceased to take an active part in the affairs of either, and for several years lived altogether away from England, in his boyhood’s home at Cluny.[1611] A far more weighty element in the calculations of the reforming party was the character and policy of the bishop of Hereford, Gilbert Foliot. From the circumstances in which we find Gilbert’s relatives in England,[1612] it seems probable that he belonged to one of the poorer Norman families of knightly rank who came over either in the train of the great nobles of the conquest or in the more peaceful immigration under Henry I. His youth is lost in obscurity; of his education we know nothing, save by its fruits. Highly gifted as he unquestionably was by nature, even his inborn genius could hardly have enabled him to acquire his refined and varied scholarship, his unrivalled mastery of legal, political and ecclesiastical lore, his profound and extensive knowledge of men and things, anywhere but in some one or other of the universities of the day. It is curious that although Gilbert’s extant correspondence is one of the most voluminous of the time—extending over nearly half a century, and addressed to persons of the most diverse ranks, parties, professions and nationalities—it contains not one allusion to the studies or the companions of his youth, not one of those half playful, half tender reminiscences of student-triumphs, student-troubles and student-friendships, which were so fresh in the hearts and in the letters of many distinguished contemporaries. Only from an appeal made to him, when bishop of London, in behalf of his old benefactor’s orphan and penniless children, do we learn that he had once been the favourite pupil, the ward, almost the adoptive son, of a certain Master Adam.[1613] It is tempting, but perhaps hardly safe, to conjecture that this Master Adam was the learned Englishman of that name who in like manner befriended another young fellow-countryman, John of Salisbury, when he too was studying in Paris.[1614] This, however, was not till Gilbert Foliot’s student-days had long been past. Wherever his youth may have been spent, wherever his reputation may have been acquired, the one was quite over and the other was fully established before 1139, when he had been already for some years a monk of Cluny, had attained the rank of prior in the mother-house, and had thence been promoted to become the head of the dependent priory of Abbeville.[1615]

- [1611] He went there in 1155 (Rob. Torigni, ad ann.), and does not reappear in England till March 1159 (Palgrave, Eng. Commonwealth, vol. ii. p. xii).

- [1612] See his letters passim.

- [1613] Gilb. Foliot, Epp. dxv., dxvii. (Giles, vol. ii. pp. 323, 324, 326). The writer of the first is “Ranulfus de Turri”; the second is anonymous. Both appeal earnestly to the bishop’s charity and gratitude in behalf of “J. filius A. magistri quondam vestri, procuratoris vestri, tutoris vestri.... Hæreat animo sanctitatis vestræ illa M. Adæ circa vos curarum gravitas, alimoniæ fœcunditas, diligentia doctrinæ, specialis impensa benivolentiæ. Quis hodie proprios liberos regit providentius, educat uberius, instruit attentius, diligit ferventius? Sic pæne amor ille modum excessit, ut vos diligeret non quasi excellenter, sed quasi singulariter ... qui vos aliquando pro filio adoptavit” (Ep. dxv.). “Tangat memoriam vestram illa M. Adæ circa vos curarum gravitas, doctrinæ profunditas, alimoniæ ubertas, postremo fervens, immo ardens caritas. Hæreat animo vestro quantâ curâ, quali amplexu, quam speciali privilegio, illa doctoris vestri, procuratoris, tutoris, diligens vigilantia vos non modo supra familiares, verum supra quoslibet mortales adoptaverit, qualiterque ejus spiritus in vestro, ut ita dicam, spiritu quieverit.” Ep. dxvii.

- [1614] See above, p. 482. In any case, Gilbert’s Master Adam is surely a somewhat interesting person, of whom one would like to know more. This was the condition of his eldest son, when commended to the gratitude of Gilbert: “Pater ejus cum fati munus impleret, filium reliquit ære alieno gravatum, fratrum numerositate impeditum, redituum angustiis constrictum, et quibusdam aliis nexibus intricatum.”

Gilb. Foliot, Ep. dxvii. (Giles, vol. ii. p. 326). “Onerant enim eum supra modum redituum angustiæ, debitorum paternorum sarcinæ, amicorum raritas, fratrum sororumque pluralitas et reliquæ sarcinæ parentelæ.” Ep. dxv. (ib. p. 323).

- [1615] Gilb. Foliot, Ep. cclxix. (Giles, vol. i. p. 366).

In 1139 the abbot of S. Peter’s at Gloucester died; Miles the constable, the lord of Gloucester castle and sheriff of the county, and the greatest man of the district after Earl Robert himself, secured the vacant office for Gilbert Foliot,[1616] who was a family connexion of his own.[1617] The abbey of S. Peter at Gloucester, founded as a nunnery in the seventh century, changed into a college of secular priests after the Danish wars, and finally settled as a house of Benedictine monks in the reign of Cnut, had risen to wealth and fame under its first Norman abbot, Serlo, some of whose work still survives in the nave of his church, now serving as the cathedral church of Gloucester. Gloucester itself, the capital of Earl Robert’s territories, was still, like Hereford and Shrewsbury, a border-city whose inhabitants had to be constantly on their guard against the thievery and treachery of the Welsh, who, though often highly useful to their English earl as auxiliary forces in war, were anything but loyal subjects or trustworthy neighbours. The position of abbot of S. Peter’s therefore was at all times one of some difficulty and anxiety; and Gilbert entered upon it at a specially difficult and anxious time. Stephen’s assent to his appointment can hardly have been prompted by favour to Miles, who had openly defied the king a year ago; he may have been influenced by fear of giving fresh offence to such a formidable deserter, or he may simply have been, as we are told, moved by the report of Gilbert’s great merits.[1618] The new abbot proved quite worthy of his reputation. His bitterest enemies always admitted that he was a pattern of monastic discipline and personal asceticism; and his admirable judgement, moderation and prudence soon made him a personage of very high authority in the counsels of the English Church. Holding such an important office in the city which was the head-quarters of the Empress’s party throughout the greater part of the civil war, he of course had his full share of the troubles of the anarchy, whereof Welsh inroads counted among the least. There is no doubt that in bringing him to England Miles had, whether intentionally or not, brought over one who sympathized strongly with the Angevin cause; but Gilbert’s sympathies led him into no political partizanship. During his nine years’ residence at Gloucester he consistently occupied the position which seems to have been his ideal through life: that of a churchman pure and simple, attached to no mere party in either Church or state, but ready to work with each and all for the broad aims of ecclesiastical order and national tranquillity. That these aims came at last to be identified with the success of the Angevin party was a result of circumstances over which Gilbert had no control. He was honoured, consulted and trusted by the most diverse characters among the bishops. Mere abbot of a remote monastery as he was, Nigel of Ely was glad to be recommended by him to Pope Celestine, Jocelyn of Salisbury to Lucius, and Alexander of Lincoln to Eugene III.[1619] He was treated almost as an equal not only by his own diocesan Bishop Simon of Worcester, by his neighbour Robert of Hereford, and by Jocelyn of Salisbury, but even by the archbishop of Canterbury and the legate Henry of Winchester; and he writes in the tone of a patron and adviser to Bishop Uhtred of Landaff and to the heads of the religious houses on the Welsh border.[1620] He seems indeed to have been the usual medium of communication between the Church in the western shires and its primate at far-off Canterbury, who evidently found him a trustworthy and useful agent in managing the very troublesome Church affairs of the Welsh marches during the civil war.

- [1616] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 114. Hist. Monast. S. Pet. Gloc. (Riley), vol. i. p. 18.

- [1617] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 162.

- [1618] Flor. Worc. Contin., a. 1139 (Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 114). Hist. S. Pet. Gloc. (Riley), vol. i. p. 18.

- [1619] Gilb. Foliot, Epp. v., xi., xxv. (Giles, vol. i. pp. 12, 22, 37).

- [1620] See his correspondence while abbot of Gloucester; Gilb. Foliot Opp. (Giles), vol. i. pp. 3–94.

When at last the storm subsided and a turn of the tide came with the spring of 1148, Theobald openly shewed his confidence in the abbot of Gloucester by commanding his attendance on that journey to Reims which the king had forbidden, and which was therefore looked upon as the grand proclamation of ecclesiastical independence, as well as of devotion to the house of Anjou. Gilbert, with characteristic caution, excused himself on the plea that the troubles of his house urgently required his presence at home;[1621] but he ended by going nevertheless,[1622] and when his friend Bishop Robert of Hereford—one of the three prelates whom Stephen had permitted to attend the council of Reims—died during its session, the Pope and the primate rewarded Gilbert with the succession to the vacant see.[1623] For his perjury in doing homage to Stephen for its temporalities after swearing to hold them only of Henry Fitz-Empress he may be supposed to have quieted his conscience with the plea that there was no other means of securing them for Henry’s benefit;—a plea which Henry, after some delay,[1624] found it wise to accept. The heads of the Angevin party knew indeed that Gilbert regarded all homage to Stephen as simply null and void; he had just written it plainly to Brian Fitz-Count, when criticizing Brian’s apology for the Empress, in a letter[1625] which, we may be very sure, must have been handed about and studied among her friends as a much more valuable document than the pamphlet which had called it forth.

- [1621] Gilb. Foliot, Epp. vi., vii. (ib. pp. 13, 14).

- [1622] He writes—evidently from the spot—a report of the council of Reims to Robert archdeacon of Lincoln; Gilb. Foliot, Ep. lxxvi. (as above, p. 92). In July he was at Arras with Theobald: Ep. lxxiii. (ib. p. 89).

- [1623] See above, pp. 370, 371.

- [1624] Gilb. Foliot, Epp. xc., cxxx. (as above, pp. 116, 170).

- [1625] Gilb. Foliot, Ep. lxxix. (Giles, vol. i. pp. 94–102); a most interesting and valuable letter, being a detailed review of the whole question of the succession, as well as of Brian’s “book.” The latter is unhappily lost.

The career of the new bishop of Hereford was but the natural continuation of that of the abbot of Gloucester. His more exalted office enabled him to be more than ever Theobald’s right hand in the direction of the western dioceses. In their secular policy he and Theobald were wholly at one; whether they really were equally so in their ideas of Church reform is a question which was never put to the test; but the tone of Gilbert’s mind, so far as it can be made out from his letters and from his course in after-years, does not seem to have altogether harmonized with that which prevailed in the primate’s household; and the one member of that household with whom Gilbert was on really intimate terms was precisely the one who, as afterwards appeared, had imbibed least of its spirit—Roger of Pont-l’Evêque. Gilbert’s character is not an easy one to read. Its inner depths are scarcely reflected in his letters, which are almost all occupied with mere business or formal religious exhortation; we never get from him such a pleasant little stream of unpremeditated, discursive talk as John of Salisbury or Peter of Blois delighted to pour out of the abundance of their hearts into the ears of some old comrade, or such a flood of uncontrolled passion as revealed the whole soul of Thomas Becket. Gilbert’s letters are carefully-balanced, highly-finished compositions; almost every one of them reads as if it had received as much polishing, in proportion to its length and importance, as the review of Earl Brian’s book, which, the abbot owns, occupied what should have been his hours of prayer during two days.[1626] A strong vein of sarcasm, very clever as well as very severe, is the only token of personal feeling which at times forces its way strangely, almost startlingly, through the veil of extreme self-depreciation with which Gilbert strove to cover it. The self-depreciation is even more disagreeable than the sarcasm; yet it seems hardly fair to accuse Gilbert of conscious hypocrisy. There was a bitter, sneering disposition ingrained in his innermost being, and he knew it. His elaborate expressions of more than monastic humility and meekness may have been the outcome of a struggle to smother what he probably regarded as his besetting sin; and if he not only failed to smother it, but drifted into a much more subtle and dangerous temptation, still it is possible that he himself never perceived the fact, and was less a deceiver than a victim of self-deception. During his episcopate at Hereford, at any rate, no shadow of suspicion fell upon him from any quarter; primate and Pope esteemed, trusted and consulted him as one of the wisest as well as most zealous doctors of the English Church; and when the young king came to his throne he did not fail to shew a duly respectful appreciation of Gilbert’s character and services.

- [1626] “Et biduo saltem ores pro me, quia biduo mihi est intermissa oratio ut literas dictarem ad te.” Gilb. Foliot, Ep. lxxix. (Giles, vol. i. p. 102).

The king’s own attitude towards the religious revival was as yet not very clearly defined. Henry was not without religious impulse; but it had taken a special direction which indeed might naturally be expected in a grandson of Fulk of Jerusalem:—a restless desire to go upon crusade. He had no sooner mounted his throne than he began to urge upon the English Pope, newly crowned like himself, the importance of giving special attention to the necessities of the Holy Land.[1627] Four years later he proposed to join Louis of France in a crusade against the Moors in Spain. Louis wrote to the Pope announcing this project and begging for his advice and support; Adrian in reply assured the two kings of his sympathy and goodwill, but though praising their zeal he expressed some doubt of its discretion, advised them to ascertain whether the Spaniards desired their help before thrusting it upon them unasked, and reminded Louis in plain terms of the disastrous issue of his former rash crusade.[1628] The warning was needless, for it was hardly written before the intending brothers-in-arms were preparing to fight against each other; and before the war of Toulouse was over the English Pope was dead.[1629]

- [1627] Pet. Blois, Ep. clxviii. (Giles, vol. ii. pp. 116–118). The letter is headed merely “Tali Papæ talis rex,” but there can be no doubt that they are Henry and Adrian. The king congratulates himself and his country—“noster Occidens”—on the elevation of a native thereof to the Papal chair, and makes suggestions to the Pope about the work which lies before him.

- [1628] Adrian IV. Ep. ccxli. (Migne, Patrol., vol. clxxxviii., cols. 1615–1617; Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. iv. pp. 590, 591). Date, February 18 [1159].

- [1629] Adrian died at Anagni on September 1, 1159. Alex. III. Ep. i. (Migne, Patrol., vol. cc., col. 70).

His death was a heavy blow to the Church of his native land; and it was followed by a schism which threatened disastrous consequences to all western Christendom. Two Popes were elected—Roland of Siena, cardinal of S. Mark and treasurer of the Holy See, and Octavian, cardinal of S. Cecilia, a Roman of noble birth. This latter, who assumed the name of Victor IV., was favoured by the Emperor, Frederic Barbarossa. After a violent struggle he was expelled from Rome and fled to the protection of his imperial patron, who thereupon summoned a general council to meet at Pavia early in the next year and decide between the rival pontiffs.[1630] Only the bishops of Frederic’s own dominions obeyed the summons, and only one of the claimants; for Alexander III. (as Roland was called by his adherents) disdained to submit to a trial whose issue he believed to have been predetermined against him. He was accordingly condemned as a rebel and schismatic, and Victor was acknowledged as the lawful successor of S. Peter.[1631] This decision, however, bound only the bishops of the Imperial dominions; and its general acceptance throughout the rest of Christendom, doubtful from the first, became impossible when Alexander and his partizans published their account of the mode by which it had been arrived at. Victor—so their story went—had actually placed his pontifical ring in the Emperor’s hands and received it back from him as the symbol of investiture.[1632] The Church at large could have no hesitation in deciding that a man who thus climbed into the sheepfold by surrendering, voluntarily and deliberately, the whole principle of spiritual independence whose triumph Gregory and Anselm had devoted their lives to secure, was no true shepherd but a thief and robber. Frederic however lost no time in endeavouring to obtain for him the adhesion of France and England; and in the last-named quarter he had great hopes of success. Henry had for several years past shewn a disposition to knit up again the old political ties which connected England with Germany; friendly embassies had been exchanged between the two countries;[1633] now that he had begun to quarrel with France, too, he was likely to be more inclined towards an imperial alliance. Moreover it might naturally be expected that Frederic’s bold and apparently successful attempt to revive the claims of his predecessor Henry IV. on the subject of ecclesiastical investitures would meet with sympathy from the grandson and representative of Henry I. Indeed, the official report of the council of Pavia declares that Henry had actually, by letters and envoys, given his assent to its proceedings.[1634] But nothing of the kind was known in Henry’s own dominions;[1635] and it seems that the Emperor was forestalled by a Norman bishop.

- [1630] Radevic of Freisingen, l. ii. cc. 43, 50–56 (Muratori, Rer. Ital. Scriptt., vol. vi. cols. 819, 823–834), largely made up of official letters. This is the Victorian or Imperialist version; for the Alexandrine see Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 9 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 118, 119), and Arn. Lisieux, Epp. 21, 22, 23 (Giles, pp. 108–122. Arnulf calls the antipope “Otto.”) It seems quite hopeless to reconcile them or decide between them.

- [1631] Rad. Freising., l. ii. cc. 64–72 (as above, cols. 838–853). Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 9 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 119, 120).

- [1632] Arn. Lisieux, Ep. 23 (Giles, p. 118).

- [1633] Pipe Roll 4 Hen. II. (Hunter), p. 112. Cf. Rad. Freising., l. i. c. 7 (Muratori, Rer. Ital. Scriptt., vol. vi. cols. 744, 745). Another embassy from Henry reached Frederic in Lombardy, in the winter of 1158–1159, immediately after one from Louis. The object of each king was to secure Frederic’s alliance against the other, in prospect of the coming war of Toulouse; Rad. Freising., l. ii. c. 22 (as above, col. 804).

- [1634] Report in Rad. Freising., l. ii. c. 70 (as above, col. 850). But the bishop of Bamberg, also an eye-witness, says: “Nuntius regis Francorum promisit pro eo neutrum se recepturum usque dum nuntios Imperatoris recipiat. Nuntius regis Anglorum idem velle et idem nolle promisit, tam in his quam in aliis” (ib. c. 71, col. 851); which leaves it doubtful whether the English envoy really echoed the decision of the council, or the answer of his French brother.

- [1635] Not even to Stephen of Rouen, the author of the Draco Normannicus, who has a long account of the schism, curious as proceeding from a Norman monk whose sympathies are wholly and openly on the opposite side to that which was formally adopted by his own sovereign, nation and Church. Draco Norm., l. iii. cc. 6–11, vv. 361–868 (Howlett, Will. Newb., vol. ii. pp. 724–739).

Arnulf of Lisieux came of a family which had for more than half a century been constantly mixed up in the diplomatic concerns of Normandy and Anjou. Arnulf himself had begun his career about 1130 by writing a treatise in defence of an orthodox Pope against an usurper;[1636] he had been chosen to succeed his uncle Bishop John of Lisieux[1637] shortly before Geoffrey Plantagenet’s final conquest of Normandy, and had bought at a heavy price his peace with the new ruler;[1638] and for the next forty years there was hardly a diplomatic transaction of any kind, ecclesiastical or secular, in England or in Gaul, in which he was not at some moment and in some way or other concerned. He had little official influence; he had indeed a certain amount of territorial importance in Normandy, for Lisieux was the capital of a little county of which the temporal as well as the spiritual government was vested in the bishop; but a Norman bishop, merely as such, had none of the political weight of an English prelate; and Arnulf never held any secular office. He was not exactly a busybody; he was a consummate diplomatist, of wide experience and far-reaching intelligence, with whose services no party could afford to dispense; and his extraordinary caution and sagacity enabled him to act as counsellor and guide of all parties at once without sacrificing his own reputation as a sound Churchman and a loyal subject. In his youth he had come in contact with most of the rising scholars and statesmen of the day in the schools of Paris; and as he was an indefatigable and accomplished letter-writer, he kept up through life a busy correspondence with men of all ranks and all schools of thought on both sides of the sea.[1639] During the quarrel between Louis VII. and Geoffrey Plantagenet concerning the affair of Montreuil-Bellay, Arnulf was intrusted by Suger with a chief part in the negotiations for the restoration of peace;[1640] the final settlement in 1151, whereby the investiture of Normandy was secured to Henry, was chiefly owing to his diplomacy;[1641] he accompanied Henry to England and was present at his crowning;[1642] and on all questions of continental policy he continued to be Henry’s chief adviser till he was superseded by Thomas Becket.

- [1636] See his Tractatus de Schismate in his “Works” (ed. Giles), pp. 43–79.

- [1637] In 1141. Gall. Christ., vol. xi. cols. 774, 775.

- [1638] Ib. col. 775.

- [1639] One of his fellow-students was Ralf de Diceto, the future historian and dean of S. Paul’s, to whom he writes affectionately in after-years, recalling vividly the memories of joy and sorrow which they had shared in their college days. Arn. Lis. Ep. 16 (Giles, pp. 100, 101). Another of his early friends was Robert Bloet, bishop of Lincoln, whose good offices he earnestly entreated in behalf of the young Duke Henry when the latter made his expedition to England in 1149. Ep. 4 (pp. 85, 86).

- [1640] Suger, Epp. clxvii., clxviii. (Migne, Patrol., vol. clxxxvi., cols. 1428, 1429).

- [1641] Arn. Lis. Ep. 5 (Giles, pp. 86, 87). One passage looks as if the demand for Henry’s investiture had come from England; it is described as “postulatio Anglorum.”

- [1642] Rob. Torigni, a. 1154.

To Arnulf there was nothing new or startling in a schism at Rome; his experiences of thirty years before enabled him to penetrate the present case at once, and as then with his pen, so now with his tongue, he proved the readiest and most powerful advocate of the orthodox pontiff. Fortunately, Henry was in Normandy; before any one else had time to gain his ear and bias his mind, before he himself had time to think of forming an independent judgement on the subject, Arnulf hurried to his side,[1643] and set forth the claims of Alexander with such convincing eloquence that the king at once promised to acknowledge him as Pope. He refrained however from issuing an immediate order for Alexander’s acceptance throughout his dominions, partly in deference to the Emperor,[1644] and partly to make sure of the intentions of the king of France. Louis, like Henry, had sent a representative to the council of Pavia, but he had taken care not to commit himself to any decision upon its proceedings.[1645] He was not naturally inclined to favour the Emperor’s views. The question of the investitures had never been as important in France as in Germany or in England, and had been settled by a kind of tacit concordat which the Most Christian King had no mind to forfeit his title by disturbing; France was always the staunchest upholder of the independence of the Apostolic see;[1646] and neither king nor clergy desired to change their attitude. They met in council at Beauvais some time in the summer of 1160; a similar gathering of the Norman bishops, in Henry’s presence, took place in July at Neufmarché; both assemblies resulted in the acknowledgement of Alexander.[1647] The formal assent of the Churches of England and Aquitaine had still to be obtained before either king would fully proclaim his decision.[1648] Archbishop Theobald’s anxious request for information and instructions concerning the schism[1649] was answered by an exhaustive and eloquent statement of the case from the pen of the indefatigable bishop of Lisieux;[1650] and in accordance with his directions the English bishops in council assembled unanimously declared their acceptance of Alexander III. as the lawful successor of S. Peter.[1651]

- [1643] Arn. Lis. Epp. 18 and 21 (Giles, pp. 103, 104, 111).

- [1644] Arn. Lis. Ep. 21 (Giles, p. 111).

- [1645] See above, p. 499, note 3{1634}.

- [1646] Arn. Lis. Ep. 23 (Giles, p. 120).

- [1647] Rob. Torigni, a. 1160.

- [1648] Arn. Lis. Epp. 23, 24 (Giles, pp. 120, 129).

- [1649] Joh. Salisb. Ep. xliv. (Giles, vol. i. pp. 45, 46).

- [1650] Arn. Lis. Ep. 23 (Giles, pp. 116–122). Cf. Gilb. Foliot, Ep. cxlviii. (Giles, vol. i. p. 197).

- [1651] Gilb. Foliot, Ep. cxlviii. (as above). Joh. Salisb. Ep. lxiv (Giles, vol. i. p. 79).

Alexander’s legates were already in Normandy;[1652] unluckily, however, the use which Henry made of their presence led as we have seen to a fresh rupture between him and Louis; and by this the Emperor and the anti-pope immediately sought to profit. Tempting as their overtures were to Henry, it does not appear that he ever seriously entertained them; but the leaders of the English Church, having now learned the circumstances of the case and grasped the full importance of the triumph insured to the reforming party by his acceptance of Alexander, were naturally alarmed lest he should be induced to change his mind. Their anxiety was increased by the enfeebled state of their own ranks. The struggles of Bishop Richard of London to clear off the debts incurred in raising a fine required by Stephen at his election seemed to have only aggravated the confusion of his affairs, which his friends the bishops of Hereford and Lincoln were engaged in a desperate effort to disentangle,[1653] while Richard himself, to complete his misfortunes, was stricken helpless by paralysis.[1654] Henry of Winchester had returned to his diocese, after nearly four years’ absence, in 1159;[1655] but by the spring of 1161 he again left the Church of England to her fate and went back to his beloved Cluny.[1656] The bishoprics of Chester (or Lichfield), Exeter and Worcester were vacant;[1657] and, worst of all, Archbishop Theobald was dying.

- [1652] Gilb. Foliot, Ep. cxlviii (as above).

- [1653] Gilb. Foliot, Ep. cxx. (Giles, vol. i. p. 158).

- [1654] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 304.

- [1655] See above, p. 492, note 1{1611}.

- [1656] R. Diceto, as above.

- [1657] Walter of Lichfield died December 7, 1160 (Stubbs, Registr. Sac. Ang., p. 30); Alfred of Worcester, July 31, 1160; and Robert of Exeter some time in the same year (ib. p. 31).

The primate’s letters during the last few months of his life shew him calmly awaiting his call to rest, yet anxiously longing to be assured of the future of those whom he was leaving behind, and to set in order a few things that were wanting before he could depart altogether in peace. Very touching are the expressions of his longing to “see the face of the Lord’s anointed once again”—to welcome the king back to his country and his home, safely removed from political temptations to break away from the unity of the Church.[1658] And there was another for whose return Theobald yearned more deeply still: his own long absent archdeacon—“the first of my counsellors, nay, my only one,” as he calls him, pleading earnestly with the king to let him come home.[1659] For a moment, indeed, Theobald was on the point of being left almost alone. Some rather obscure mischief-making in high places had caused John of Salisbury to be visited with the king’s severe displeasure; treated as a suspected criminal in England, forbidden to go and clear himself in Normandy, John found his position so unbearable that he contemplated taking refuge in France under the protection of his old friend Abbot Peter of Celle.[1660] He seems, however, to have ended by remaining in England under Theobald’s protection; before the winter of 1160, at any rate, he was again at Canterbury, watching over and tending the primate’s gradual decline;—almost overwhelmed with “the care of all the churches,” which Theobald had transferred to him;[1661]—characteristically finding relief from his anxieties in correspondence with old friends, and in the composition of another little philosophical treatise, called Metalogicus, whose chief interest lies in the sketch which it contains of its author’s early life.[1662] John’s disinterested affection and devoted services were fully appreciated by Theobald;[1663] but they could not make up for the absence of Thomas. Not only did the old man long to see his early favourite once more; not only were there grave matters of diocesan administration dependent on the archdeacon’s office and urgently requiring his personal co-operation:[1664]—it was on far weightier things than these that the archbishop desired to hold counsel with Thomas. In the hands of Thomas, as chief adviser and minister of the king, rested in no small degree the future of the English Church; Theobald’s darling wish was that it should rest in his hands as primate of all England.[1665]

- [1658] Joh. Salisb. Epp. lxiii, lxiv,* lxiv** (Giles, vol. i. pp. 77, 78, 80–82), all from Theobald to Henry.

- [1659] “Qui [sc. Thomas] nobis unicus est et consilii nostri primus.” Joh. Salisb. Ep. lxx. (ib. p. 93).

- [1660] Joh. Salisb. Epp. lxi., xcvi., cviii., cxii., cxiii., cxv., cxxi. (ib. pp. 74, 75, 141–144, 158, 160, 161, 164, 165, 169, 170). See Demimuid, Jean de Salisbury, pp. 183–188.

- [1661] Joh. Salisb. Metalog., prolog. (Giles, vol. v. pp. 8, 9), and l. iv. c. 42 (ib. p. 206).

- [1662] Ib. l. ii. c. 10 (pp. 78–81).

- [1663] Joh. Salisb. Ep. lxiv.* (Giles, vol. i. p. 80), from Theobald to Henry.

- [1664] Joh. Salisb. Epp. xlix., lxxi. (ib. pp. 51, 52, 94, 95), both from Theobald to Thomas. The initial in the address of lxxi. is clearly wrong. See Robertson, Becket, vol. v. p. 11, note a.

- [1665] This is distinctly stated by John of Salisbury:—

- “Ille Theobaldus qui Christi præsidet aulæ,
Quam fidei matrem Cantia nostra colit,
Hunc successurum sibi sperat et orat, ut idem
Præsulis officium muniat atque locum.”

- Entheticus, vv. 1293–1296 (Giles, vol. v. p. 280.)

Later writers dilate upon the startling contrast between Becket’s character and policy as chancellor and as archbishop. That contrast vanishes when we look at the chancellor through the eyes of the two men who knew him best; and we find that the real contrast lies between their view of him and that of the outside world which only saw the surface of his life and could not fathom its inner depths. Those who beheld him foremost in every military exercise and every courtly pastime, far outdoing the king himself in lavish splendour and fastidious refinement, devoting every faculty of mind and body to the service and the pleasure of his royal friend:—those who saw all this, and could only judge by what they saw, might well have thought that for such a man to become the champion of the Church was a dream to be realized only by miracle or by imposture. But Archbishop Theobald and John of Salisbury had known his inmost soul, better perhaps than he knew it himself, before ever he went to court; and they knew that however startling his conduct there might look, he was merely fulfilling in his own way the mission on which he had been sent thither:—making himself all things to all men, if thereby he might by any means influence the court and the king for good.[1666] Even his suggestion of the scutage for the war of Toulouse did not seriously shake their faith in him; they blamed him, but they believed that he had erred in weakness, not in wilfulness.[1667] In the middle of the war John dedicated the Polycraticus to him as the one man about the court to whom its follies and its faults could be criticized without fear, because he had no part in them.[1668] Thomas himself does not seem to have contemplated the possibility of removal from his present sphere. It was not in his nature at any time to look far ahead; and Henry seemed to find his attendance more indispensable than ever, declaring in answer to Theobald’s intreaties and remonstrances that he could not possibly spare him till peace was thoroughly restored.[1669]

- [1666] Joh. Salisb. Enthet., vv. 1435–1440 (Giles, vol. v. p. 285).

- [1667] Joh. Salisb. Ep. cxlv. (Giles, vol. i. pp. 223, 224).

- [1668] Joh. Salisb. Polycrat., prolog. (Giles, vol. iii. p. 13).

- [1669] Joh. Salisb. Ep. lxxviii. (Giles, vol. i. p. 106).

Thomas was in a strait. His first duty was to his dying spiritual father; but he could not go against the king’s will without running such a risk as Theobald would have been the first to disapprove. Thomas himself therefore at last suggested that the archbishop should try to move the king by summoning his truant archdeacon to return home at once on pain of deprivation.[1670] Theobald, unable to reconcile the contradictory letters of king and chancellor with the general reports of their wonderful unanimity, steered a middle course between severity and gentleness, from fear of bringing down the royal displeasure upon his favourite, whom he yet half suspected of being in collusion with the king. His secretary, John, had no such doubts; but he too was urgent that by some means or other Thomas should come over before the primate’s death.[1671] If he did go, it can only have been for a flying visit; and there is no sign that he went at all. One thing he did obtain for Theobald’s satisfaction: the appointment of Bartholomew archdeacon of Exeter to the bishopric of that diocese.[1672] In April Richard Peche, on whom the see of Chester had been conferred, was consecrated at Canterbury by Walter of Rochester, the archbishop being carried into the chapel to sanction by his presence the rite in which he was too feeble to assist.[1673] By the hand of the faithful secretary John he transmitted to King Henry his last solemn benediction and farewell, and commended to the royal care the future of his church and the choice of his successor.[1674] A few days later, on April 18, 1161, the good primate passed away.[1675]

- [1670] Ib.·/·Joh. Salisb. Ep. lxxviii. (Giles, vol. i. (p. 105).

- [1671] Joh. Salisb. Ep. lxxviii. (Giles, vol. i. pp. 105–107).

- [1672] Joh. Salisb. Epp. lxx., lxxi., lxxviii. (as above, pp. 94, 95, 106). On Bartholomew see also Ep. xc. (ib. pp. 132–136), where John addresses him as a personal friend.

- [1673] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 168.

- [1674] Joh. Salisb. Ep. liv. (Giles, vol. i. pp. 56–58). See the archbishop’s will in Ep. lvii. (ib. pp. 60–62).

- [1675] Gerv. Cant. as above.

ERRATA

Page050, line 08 from foot, insert “and” before “bore.”

” 158, ” 05, for “in” read “by.”

” 268, ” 18, dele “the following.”

” 274, ” 14 from foot, for “two” read “three.”

” 282, ” 14, insert “and” before “made.”

” 417, lines 3 and 4 from foot, for “husband ... heiress” read “head.”

” 438, note 5, line 8, for “David” read “Henry of Scotland.”

END OF VOL. I.

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh

VOLUME II

ENGLAND

UNDER

THE ANGEVIN KINGS

ENGLAND

UNDER

THE ANGEVIN KINGS

BY

KATE NORGATE

IN TWO VOLUMES—VOL. II.

WITH MAPS AND PLANS

London

MACMILLAN AND CO.

AND NEW YORK

1887

All rights reserved

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
| PAGE
Archbishop Thomas, 1162–1164 | 1
Note A.—The Council of Woodstock | 43
Note B.—The Council of Clarendon | 44
CHAPTER II
Henry and Rome, 1164–1172 | 46
CHAPTER III
The Conquest of Ireland, 795–1172 | 82
CHAPTER IV
Henry and the Barons, 1166–1175 | 120
CHAPTER V
The Angevin Empire, 1175–1183 | 169
CHAPTER VI
The Last Years of Henry II., 1183–1189 | 229
CHAPTER VII
Richard and England, 1189–1194 | 273
CHAPTER VIII
The Later Years of Richard, 1194–1199 | 332
CHAPTER IX
The Fall of the Angevins, 1199–1206 | 388
Note.—The Death of Arthur | 429
CHAPTER X
The New England, 1170–1206 | 431

LIST OF MAPS

III. | Ireland, A.D. 1172 | To face page | 82
IV. | Map to Illustrate the Rebellion of 1173–1174 | ” | 149
V. | France and Burgundy c. 1180 | ” | 185
VI. | Europe c. 1180 | ” | 189
VII. | France and the Angevin Dominions, 1194 | ” | 359

PLANS

VII. | Les Andelys and Château-Gaillard | To face page | 375
VIII. | Château-Gaillard | ” | 378

CHAPTER I.
ARCHBISHOP THOMAS.
1162–1164.

Somewhat more than a year after the primate’s death, Thomas the chancellor returned to England. He came, as we have seen, at the king’s bidding, ostensibly for the purpose of securing the recognition of little Henry as heir to the crown. But this was not the sole nor even the chief object of his mission. On the eve of his departure—so the story was told by his friends in later days—Thomas had gone to take leave of the king at Falaise. Henry drew him aside: “You do not yet know to what you are going. I will have you to be archbishop of Canterbury.” The chancellor took, or tried to take, the words for a jest. “A saintly figure indeed,” he exclaimed with a smiling glance at his own gay attire, “you are choosing to sit in that holy seat and to head that venerable convent! No, no,” he added with sudden earnestness, “I warn you that if such a thing should be, our friendship would soon turn to bitter hate. I know your plans concerning the Church; you will assert claims which I as archbishop must needs oppose; and the breach once made, jealous hands would take care that it should never be healed again.” The words were prophetic; they sum up the whole history of the pontificate of Thomas Becket. Henry, however, in his turn passed them over as a mere jest, and at once proclaimed his intention to the chancellor’s fellow-envoys, one of whom was the justiciar, Richard de Lucy. “Richard,” said the king, “if I lay dead in my shroud, would you earnestly strive to secure my first-born on my throne?” “Indeed I would, my lord, with all my might.” “Then I charge you to strive no less earnestly to place my chancellor on the metropolitan chair of Canterbury.”[1]

- [1] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 180, 182. Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 63–67.

Thomas was appalled. He could not be altogether taken by surprise; he knew what had been Theobald’s wishes and hopes; he knew that from the moment of Theobald’s death all eyes had turned instinctively upon himself with the belief that the future of the Church rested wholly in his all-powerful hands; he could not but suspect the king’s own intentions,[2] although the very suspicion would keep him silent, and all the more so because those intentions ran counter to his own desires. For twelve months he had known that the primacy was within his reach; he had counted the cost, and he had no mind to pay it. He was incapable of undertaking any office without throwing his whole energies into the fulfilment of its duties; his conception of the duties of the primate of all Britain would involve the sacrifice not only of those secular pursuits which he so keenly enjoyed, but also of that personal friendship and political co-operation with the king which seemed almost an indispensable part of the life of both; and neither sacrifice was he disposed to make. He had said as much to an English friend who had been the first to hint at his coming promotion,[3] and he repeated it now with passionate earnestness to Henry himself, but all in vain. The more he resisted, the more the king insisted—the very frankness of his warnings only strengthening Henry’s confidence in him; and when the legate Cardinal Henry of Pisa urged his acceptance as a sacred duty, Thomas at last gave way.[4]

- [2] Herb. Bosh. (as above·/·Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 180. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 14. Thomas Saga (as above)·/·(Magnusson), vol. i., p. 63.

- [3] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 25, 26.

- [4] Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 7, 8. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 18. Anon. II. (ib.), p. 86.

The council in London was no sooner ended than Richard de Lucy and three of the bishops[5] hurried to Canterbury, by the king’s orders, to obtain from the cathedral chapter the election of a primate in accordance with his will. The monks of Christ Church were never very easy to manage; in the days of the elder King Henry they had firmly and successfully resisted the intrusion of a secular clerk into the monastic chair of S. Augustine; and a strong party among them now protested that to choose for pastor of the flock of Canterbury a man who was scarcely a clerk at all, who was wholly given to hawks and hounds and the worldly ways of the court, would be no better than setting a wolf to guard a sheepfold. But their scruples were silenced by the arguments of Richard de Lucy and by their dread of the royal wrath, and in the end Thomas was elected without a dissentient voice.[6] The election was repeated in the presence of a great council[7] held at Westminster on May 23,[8] and ratified by the bishops and clergy there assembled.[9] Only one voice was raised in protest; it was that of Gilbert Foliot,[10] who, alluding doubtless to the great scutage, declared that Thomas was utterly unfit for the primacy, because he had persecuted the Church of God.[11] The protest was answered by Henry of Winchester in words suggested by Gilbert’s own phrase: “My son,” said the ex-legate, addressing Thomas, “if thou hast been hitherto as Saul the persecutor, be thou henceforth as Paul the Apostle.”[12]

[5] E. Grim (ib.·/·Robertson, Becket vol. ii.), pp. 366. The bishops were Exeter, Chichester and Rochester; Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 16, 17, Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), pp. 14–16, and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 169; this last alone names Rochester, and adds another envoy—Abbot Walter of Battle, Chichester’s old adversary and the justiciar’s brother.

[6] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 17. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), pp. 366, 367. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 183–185. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 16. Thomas Saga (Magnusson, vol. i. p. 73) has quite a different version of the result.

[7] Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 17. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 9. Garnier, as above. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 169. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 306.

[8] The Wednesday before Pentecost. R. Diceto (as above), p. 307.

[9] Garnier, Will. Cant., Anon. I., as above. R. Diceto (as above), p. 306. Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 170. All these writers either say or imply that the council represented, or was meant to represent, the entire clerus et populus of all England; except R. Diceto, who says: “clero totius provinciæ Cantuariorum generaliter Lundoniæ convocato” (p. 306). Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 73–77; Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 36; and Herb. Bosh. (ib.), p. 184.

[10] Garnier, Will. Cant., Will. Fitz-Steph. and Anon. I. as above. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 367. Will. Cant., E. Grim and the Anon. call him “bishop of London” by anticipation.

[11] “Destruite ad seinte Iglise.” Garnier, as above.

[12] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 18.

The election was confirmed by the great officers of state and the boy-king in his father’s name;[13] the consecration was fixed for the octave of Pentecost, and forthwith the bishops began to vie with each other for the honour of performing the ceremony. Roger of York, who till now had stood completely aloof, claimed it as a privilege due to the dignity of his see; but the primate-elect and the southern bishops declined to accept his services without a profession of canonical obedience to Canterbury, which he indignantly refused.[14] The bishop of London, on whom as dean of the province the duty according to ancient precedent should have devolved, was just dead;[15] Walter of Rochester momentarily put in a claim to supply his place,[16] but withdrew it in deference to Henry of Winchester, who had lately returned from Cluny, and whose royal blood, venerable character, and unique dignity as father of the whole English episcopate, marked him out beyond all question as the most fitting person to undertake the office.[17] By way of compensation, it was Walter who, on the Saturday in Whitsun-week, raised the newly-elected primate to the dignity of priesthood.[18]

- [13] Ibid.·/·Garnier (Hippeau), p. 18 Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 17. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 9. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 367. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 185.

- [14] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 170.

- [15] He died on May 4. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 306.

- [16] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 188.

- [17] Gerv. Cant., R. Diceto and Herb. Bosh. as above. MS. Lansdown. II. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 155. Cf. Anon. I. (ib.), p. 19. There was another claimant, a Welsh bishop, who asserted priority of consecration over all his brother-prelates; so at least says Gerv. Cant., but one does not see who he can have been.

- [18] R. Diceto, as above.

Early next morning the consecration took place. Canterbury cathedral has been rebuilt from end to end since that day; it is only imagination which can picture the church of Lanfranc and Anselm and Theobald as it stood on that June morning, the scarce-risen sun gleaming faintly through its eastern windows upon the rich vestures of the fourteen bishops[19] and their attendant clergy and the dark robes of the monks who thronged the choir, while the nave was crowded with spectators, foremost among whom stood the group of ministers surrounding the little king.[20] From the vestry-door Thomas came forth, clad no longer in the brilliant attire at which he had been jesting a few weeks ago, but in the plain black cassock and white surplice of a clerk; through the lines of staring, wondering faces he passed into the choir, and there threw himself prostrate upon the altar-steps. Thence he was raised to go through a formality suggested by the prudence of his consecrator. To guard, as he hoped, against all risk of future difficulties which might arise from Thomas’s connexion with the court, Henry of Winchester led him down to the entrance of the choir, and in the name of the Church called upon the king’s representatives to deliver over the primate-elect fully and unreservedly to her holy service, freed from all secular obligations, actual or possible. A formal quit-claim was accordingly granted to Thomas by little Henry and the justiciars, in the king’s name;[21] after which the bishop of Winchester proceeded to consecrate him at once. A shout of applause rang through the church as the new primate of all Britain was led up to his patriarchal chair; but he mounted its steps with eyes downcast and full of tears.[22] To him the day was one of melancholy foreboding; yet he made its memory joyful in the Church for ever. He began his archiepiscopal career by ordaining a new festival to be kept every year on that day—the octave of Pentecost—in honour of the most Holy Trinity;[23] and in process of time the observance thus originated spread from Canterbury throughout the whole of Christendom, which thus owes to an English archbishop the institution of Trinity Sunday.

- [19] See the list in Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 170.

- [20] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 188.

- [21] MS. Lansdown. II. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 154, 155. Cf. Anon. I. (ib.), pp. 17, 18; Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 9; E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 367; Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 185; Garnier (Hippeau), p. 19; and Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 81. All these place this scene in London, immediately after the consecration. The three first, however, seem to be only following Garnier; and the words of Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii. p. 36), though not very explicit, seem rather to agree with the MS. Lansdown. Garnier, Grim and the Anon. I. all expressly attribute the suggestion to Henry of Winchester.

- [22] Anon. I. (as above), p. 19.

- [23] Gerv. Cant. as above.

“The king has wrought a miracle,” sneered the sarcastic bishop of Hereford, Gilbert Foliot; “out of a soldier and man of the world he has made an archbishop.”[24] The same royal power helped to smooth the new primate’s path a little further before him. He was not, like most of his predecessors, obliged to go in person to fetch his pallium from Rome; an embassy which he despatched immediately after his consecration obtained it for him without difficulty from Alexander III., who had just been driven by the Emperor’s hostility to seek a refuge in France, and was in no condition to venture upon any risk of thwarting King Henry’s favourite minister.[25] The next messenger whom Thomas sent over sea met with a less pleasant reception. He was charged to deliver up the great seal into the king’s hands with a request that Henry would provide himself with another chancellor, “as Thomas felt scarcely equal to the cares of one office, far less to those of two.”[26]

- [24] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 36.

- [25] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 24, 25. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.) p. 9.

Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 189. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 172. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 307. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 91–95.

- [26] Will. Cant. (as above), p. 12. Cf. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 29, and R. Diceto as above.

Henry was both surprised and vexed. It was customary for the chancellor to resign his office on promotion to a bishopric; but this sudden step on the part of Thomas was quite unexpected, and upset a cherished scheme of the king’s. He had planned to rival the Emperor by having an archbishop for his chancellor, as the archbishops of Mainz and Cöln were respectively arch-chancellors of Germany and Italy;[27] he had certainly never intended, in raising his favourite to the primacy, to deprive himself of such a valuable assistant in secular administration; his aim had rather been to secure the services of Thomas in two departments instead of one.[28] To take away all ground of scandal, he had even procured a papal dispensation to sanction the union of the two offices in a single person.[29] Thomas, however, persisted in his resignation; and as there was no one whom Henry cared to put in his place, the chancellorship remained vacant, while the king brooded over his friend’s unexpected conduct and began to suspect that it was caused by weariness of his service.

- [27] R. Diceto (as above)·/·(Stubbs), vol. i., p. 308. The real work of the office in the Empire was, however, done by another chancellor, who at this time was a certain Reginald, of whom we shall hear again later on. “Cancellarius” plays almost as conspicuous and quite as unclerkly a part in the Italian wars of Barbarossa as in the French and Aquitanian wars of Henry.

- [28] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 29. Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 69–71.

- [29] Garnier, as above.

Meanwhile Thomas had entered upon the second phase of his strangely varied career. He had “put off the deacon” for awhile; he was resolved now to “put off the old man” wholly and for ever. No sooner was he consecrated than he flung himself, body and soul, into his new life with an ardour more passionate, more absorbing, more exclusive than he had displayed in pursuit of the worldly tasks and pleasures of the court. On the morrow of his consecration, when some jongleurs came to him for the largesse which he had never been known to refuse, he gently but firmly dismissed them; he was no longer, he said, the chancellor whom they had known; his whole possessions were now a sacred trust, to be spent not on actors and jesters but in the service of the Church and the poor.[30] Theobald had doubled the amount of regular alms-givings established by his predecessors; Thomas immediately doubled those of Theobald.[31] To be diligent in providing for the sick and needy, to take care that no beggar should ever be sent empty away from his door,[32] was indeed nothing new in the son of the good dame Rohesia of Caen. The lavish hospitality of the chancellor’s household, too, was naturally transferred to that of the archbishop; but it took a different tone and colour. All and more than all the old grandeur and orderliness were there; the palace still swarmed with men-at-arms, servants and retainers of all kinds, every one with his own appointed duty, whose fulfilment was still carefully watched by the master’s eyes; the bevy of high-born children had only increased, for by an ancient custom the second son of a baron could be claimed by the primate for his service—as the eldest by the king—until the age of knighthood; a claim which Thomas was not slow to enforce, and which the barons were delighted to admit. The train of clerks was of course more numerous than ever. The tables were still laden with delicate viands, served with the utmost perfection, and crowded with guests of all ranks; Thomas was still the most courteous and gracious of hosts. But the banquet wore a graver aspect than in the chancellor’s hall. The knights and other laymen occupied a table by themselves, where they talked and laughed as they listed; it was the clerks and religious who now sat nearest to Thomas. He himself was surrounded by a select group of clerks, his eruditi, his “learned men” as he called them: men versed in Scriptural and theological lore, his chosen companions in the study of Holy Writ into which he had plunged with characteristic energy; while instead of the minstrelsy which had been wont to accompany and inspire the gay talk at the chancellor’s table, there was only heard, according to ecclesiastical custom, the voice of the archbishop’s cross-bearer who sat close to his side reading from some holy book: the primate and his confidential companions meanwhile exchanging comments upon what was read, and discussing matters too deep and solemn to interest unlearned ears or to brook unlearned interruption.[33] Of the meal itself Thomas partook but sparingly;[34] its remainder was always given away;[35] and every day twenty-six poor men were brought into the hall and served with a dinner of the best, before Thomas would sit down to his own midday meal.[36]

- [30] MS. Lansdown. II. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 156.

- [31] Anon. I. (ibid.), p. 20. The Anon. II. (ibid.), p. 90, and Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 307, say that to this purpose he appropriated a tithe of all his revenues—a statement which reflects rather strangely upon the former archbishops.

- [32] Joh. Salisb. and Anon. I. as above. Anon. II. (as above), pp. 89, 90.

- [33] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 225–229. On the eruditi see ib. pp. 206, 207, 523–529.

- [34] Ib. pp. 231–236. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 37. Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 308. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 89.

- [35] Joh. Salisb. (as above), p. 307. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 20, 21.

- [36] Anon. II. (ib.), p. 89.

The amount of work which he had got through by that time must have been quite as great as in the busiest days of his chancellorship. The day’s occupations ostensibly began about the hour of tierce, when the archbishop came forth from his chamber and went either to hear or to celebrate mass,[37] while a breakfast was given at his expense to a hundred persons who were called his “poor prebendaries.”[38] After mass he proceeded to his audience-chamber and there chiefly remained till the hour of nones, occupied in hearing suits and administering justice.[39] Nones were followed by dinner,[40] after which the primate shut himself up in his own apartments with his eruditi[41] and spent the rest of the day with them in business or study, interrupted only by the religious duties of the canonical hours, and sometimes by a little needful repose,[42] for his night’s rest was of the briefest. At cock-crow he rose for prime; immediately afterwards there were brought in to him secretly, under cover of the darkness, thirteen poor persons whose feet he washed and to whom he ministered at table with the utmost devotion and humility,[43] clad only in a hair-shirt which from the day of his consecration he always wore beneath the gorgeous robes in which he appeared in public.[44] He then returned to his bed, but only for a very short time; long before any one else was astir he was again up and doing, in company with one specially favoured disciple—the one who tells the tale, Herbert of Bosham. In the calm silent hours of dawn, while twelve other poor persons received a secret meal and had their feet washed by the primate’s almoner in his stead, the two friends sat eagerly searching the Scriptures together, till the archbishop chose to be left alone[45] for meditation and confession, scourging and prayer,[46] in which he remained absorbed until the hour of tierce called him forth to his duties in the world.[47]

- [37] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 208.

- [38] Ib. p. 203.

- [39] Ib. p. 219.

- [40] Ib. p. 225.

- [41] Ib. pp. 236, 237.

- [42] Ib. p. 238.

- [43] Ib. p. 199. Cf. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 38, and Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 307.

- [44] On the hair-shirt see MS. Lansdown. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 154; Anon. I. (ibid.), p. 20; Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 10; Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 196, 199; Garnier (Hippeau), p. 23. On Thomas’s troubles about his dress and how he settled them see Garnier, pp. 19, 20, 23; Anon. I. (as above), p. 21; E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 368; Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 196. On his whole manner of life after consecration cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 95–111.

- [45] Herb. Bosh. (as above), pp. 202–205.

- [46] Anon. II. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 88.

- [47] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 205.

He was feverishly anxious to lose no opportunity of making up for his long neglect of the Scriptural and theological studies befitting his sacred calling. He openly confessed his grievous inferiority in this respect to many of his own clerks, and put himself under their teaching with child-like simplicity and earnestness. The one whom he specially chose for monitor and guide, Herbert of Bosham, was a man in whom, despite his immeasurable inferiority, one can yet see something of a temper sufficiently akin to that of Thomas himself to account for their mutual attraction, and perhaps for some of their joint errors. As they rode from London to Canterbury on the morrow of the primate’s election he had drawn Herbert aside and laid upon him a special charge to watch with careful eyes over his conduct as archbishop, and tell him without stint or scruple whatever he saw amiss in it or heard criticized by others.[48] Herbert, though he worshipped his primate with a perfect hero-worship, never hesitated to fulfil this injunction to the letter as far as his lights would permit; but unluckily his zeal was even less tempered by discretion than that of Thomas himself. He was a far less safe guide in the practical affairs of life than in the intricate paths of abstract and mystical interpretation of Holy Writ in which he and Thomas delighted to roam together. Often, when no other quiet time could be found, the archbishop would turn his horse aside as they travelled along the road, beckon to his friend, draw out a book from its hiding-place in one of his wide sleeves, and plunge into an eager discussion of its contents as they ambled slowly on.[49] When at Canterbury, his greatest pleasure was to betake himself to the cloister and sit reading like a lowly monk in one of its quiet nooks.[50]

- [48] Ib.·/·Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 186.

- [49] Ib. p. 206.

- [50] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib.), pp. 38, 39.

But the eruditi of Thomas, like the disciples of Theobald, were the confidants and the sharers of far more than his literary and doctrinal studies. It was in those evening hours which he spent in their midst, secluded from all outside interruption, that the plans of Church reform and Church revival, sketched long ago by other hands in the Curia Theobaldi, assumed a shape which might perhaps have startled Theobald himself. As the weeks wore quickly away from Trinity to Ember-tide, the new primate set himself to grapple at once with the ecclesiastical abuses of the time in the persons of his first candidates for ordination. On his theory the remedy for these abuses lay in the hands of the bishops, and especially of the metropolitans, who fostered simony, worldliness and immorality among the clergy by the facility with which they admitted unqualified persons into high orders, thus filling the ranks of the priesthood with unworthy, ignorant and needy clerks, who either traded upon their sacred profession as a means to secular advancement, or disgraced it by the idle wanderings and unbecoming shifts to which the lack of fit employment drove them to resort for a living. He was determined that no favour or persuasion should ever induce him to ordain any man whom he did not know to be of saintly life and ample learning, and provided with a benefice sufficient to furnish him with occupation and maintenance; and he proclaimed and acted upon his determination with the zeal of one who, as he openly avowed, felt that he was himself the most glaring example of the evils resulting from a less stringent system of discipline.[51]

- [51] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 238–247.

His next undertaking was one which almost every new-made prelate in any degree alive to the rights and duties of his office found it needful to begin as soon as possible: the recovery of the alienated property of his see. Gilbert Foliot, the model English bishop of the day, had no sooner been consecrated than he wrote to beg the Pope’s support in this important and troublesome matter.[52] It may well be that even fourteen years later the metropolitan see had not yet received full restitution for the spoliations of the anarchy. Thomas however set to work in the most sweeping fashion, boldly laying claim to every estate which he could find to have been granted away by his predecessors on grounds which did not satisfy his exalted ideas of ecclesiastical right, or on terms which he held detrimental to the interest and dignity of his church, and enforcing his claims without respect of persons; summarily turning out those who held the archiepiscopal manors in ferm,[53] disputing with the earl of Clare for jurisdiction over the castle and district of Tunbridge, and reclaiming, on the strength of a charter of the Conqueror, the custody of Rochester castle from the Crown itself. Such a course naturally stirred up for him a crowd of enemies, and increased the jealousy, suspicion and resentment which his new position and altered mode of life had already excited among the companions and rivals of his earlier days. The archbishop however was still, like the chancellor, protected against them by the shield of the royal favour; they could only work against him by working upon the mind of Henry. One by one they carried over sea their complaints of the wrongs which they had suffered, or with which they were threatened, at the primate’s hands;[54] they reported all his daily doings and interpreted them in the worst sense:—his strictness of life was superstition, his zeal for justice was cruelty, his care for his church avarice, his pontifical splendour pride, his vigour rashness and self-conceit:[55]—if the king did not look to it speedily, he would find his laws and constitutions set at naught, his regal dignity trodden under foot, and himself and his heirs reduced to mere cyphers dependent on the will and pleasure of the archbishop of Canterbury.[56]

- [52] Gilb. Foliot, Ep. lxxxvii. (Giles, vol. i., p. 113).

- [53] E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.) pp. 371, 372. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.) pp. 250, 251. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 117–121.

- [54] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 252. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 121.

- [55] Joh. Salisb. (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.) pp. 309, 310. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.) pp. 91, 92.

- [56] Joh. Salisb. (as above), p. 310. E. Grim (ibid.) p. 372. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 92. Cf. Arn. Lisieux, Ep. 34 (Giles, pp. 148, 149).

At the close of the year Henry determined to go and see for himself the truth of these strange rumours.[57] The negotiations concerning the papal question had detained him on the continent throughout the summer; in the end both he and Louis gave a cordial welcome to Alexander, and a general pacification was effected in a meeting of the two kings and the Pope which took place late in the autumn at Chouzy on the Loire. Compelled by contrary winds to keep Christmas at Cherbourg instead of in England as he had hoped,[58] the king landed at Southampton on S. Paul’s day.[59] Thomas, still accompanied by the little Henry, was waiting to receive him; the two friends met with demonstrations of the warmest affection, and travelled to London together in the old intimate association.[60] One subject of disagreement indeed there was; Thomas had actually been holding for six months the archdeaconry of Canterbury together with the archbishopric, and this Henry, after several vain remonstrances, now compelled him to resign.[61] They parted however in undisturbed harmony, the archbishop again taking his little pupil with him.[62]

- [57] Anon. II. as above·/·(ib. vol. iv.), p. 92.

- [58] Rob. Torigni, a. 1162.

- [59] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 252. The date is given by R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 308.

- [60] Herb. Bosh. (as above), pp. 252, 253. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 92. R. Diceto (as above) tells a different tale; but Herbert is surely a better authority on these personal matters. Cf. also Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 121–123.

- [61] R. Diceto, as above.

- [62] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 253.

The first joint work of king and primate was the translation of Gilbert Foliot from Hereford to London. Some of those who saw its consequences in after-days declared that Henry had devised the scheme for the special purpose of securing Gilbert’s aid against the primate;[63] but it is abundantly clear that no such thought had yet entered his mind, and that the suggestion of Gilbert’s promotion really came from Thomas himself.[64] Like every one else, he looked upon Gilbert as the greatest living light of the English Church; he expected to find in him his own most zealous and efficient fellow-worker in the task which lay before him as metropolitan, as well as his best helper in influencing the king for good. Gilbert was in fact the man who in the natural fitness of things had seemed marked out for the primacy; failing that, it was almost a matter of necessity that he should be placed in the see which stood next in dignity, and where both king and primate could benefit by his assistance ever at hand, instead of having to seek out their most useful adviser in the troubled depths of the Welsh marches. The chapter of London, to whom during the pecuniary troubles and long illness of their late bishop Gilbert had been an invaluable friend and protector, were only too glad to elect him; and his world-wide reputation combined with the pleadings of Henry to obtain the Pope’s consent to his translation,[65] which was completed by his enthronement in S. Paul’s cathedral on April 28, 1163.[66]

- [63] Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 46.

- [64] This is the statement of Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv. p. 98) and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 173), fully borne out by the letters of Thomas.

- [65] Epp. xvi.–xix. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 24–30). Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 255, 256. Cf. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 98.

- [66] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 309.

The king spent the early summer in subduing South-Wales; the primate, in attending a council held by Pope Alexander at Tours.[67] From the day of his departure to that of his return Thomas’s journey was one long triumphal progress; Pope and cardinals welcomed him with such honours as had never been given to any former archbishop of Canterbury, hardly even to S. Anselm himself;[68] and the request which he made to the Pope for Anselm’s canonization[69] may indicate the effect which they produced on his mind—confirming his resolve to stand boldly upon his right of opposition to the secular power whenever it clashed with ecclesiastical theories of liberty and justice. The first opportunity for putting his resolve in practice arose upon a question of purely temporal administration at a council held by Henry at Woodstock on July 31, after his return from Wales. The Welsh princes came to swear fealty to Henry and his heir; Malcolm of Scotland came to confirm his alliance with the English Crown by doing homage in like manner to the little king.[70] Before the council broke up, however, Henry met the sharpest constitutional defeat which had befallen any English sovereign since the Norman conquest, and that at the hands of his own familiar friend.

- [67] According to Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 173, and Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 14 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 135), it opened on Trinity Sunday, May 19; according to R. Diceto (as above), p. 310, on May 21. The Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 123–127, makes out that Thomas’s chief object in going there was to obtain confirmation of certain privileges of his see. Cf. also the account of this council in Draco Norm., l. iii. cc. 13–15, vv. 949–1224 (Howlett, Will. Newb., vol. ii. pp. 742–751).

- [68] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 253–255. Thomas Saga (as above), pp. 129, 131.

- [69] Ep. xxiii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. p. 35).

- [70] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 311.

The king had devised a new financial project for increasing his own revenue at the expense of the sheriffs. According to current practice, a sum of two shillings annually from every hide of land in the shire was paid to those officers for their services to the community in its administration and defence. This payment, although described as customary rather than legal,[71] and called the “sheriff’s aid,”[72] seems really to have been nothing else than the Danegeld, which still occasionally made its appearance in the treasury rolls, but in such small amount that it is evident the sheriffs, if they collected it in full, paid only a fixed composition to the Crown and kept the greater part as a remuneration for their own labours. Henry now, it seems, proposed to transfer the whole of these sums from the sheriff’s income to his own, and have it enrolled in full among the royal dues. Whether he intended to make compensation to the sheriffs from some other source, or whether he already saw the need of curbing their influence and checking their avarice, we know not; but the archbishop of Canterbury started up to resist the proposed change as an injustice both to the receivers and to the payers of the aid. He seems to have looked upon it as an attempt to re-establish the Danegeld with all the odiousness attaching to its shameful origin and its unfair incidence, and to have held it his constitutional duty as representative and champion of the whole people to lift up his voice against it in their behalf. “My lord king,” he said, “saving your good pleasure, we will not give you this money as revenue, for it is not yours. To your officers, who receive it as a matter of grace rather than of right, we will give it willingly so long as they do their duty; but on no other terms will we be made to pay it at all.”—“By God’s Eyes!” swore the astonished and angry king, “what right have you to contradict me? I am doing no wrong to any man of yours. I say the moneys shall be enrolled among my royal revenues.”—“Then by those same Eyes,” swore Thomas in return, “not a penny shall you have from my lands, or from any lands of the Church!”[73]

- [71] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 30. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 12. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 373. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 23.

- [72] “L’Aïde al Vescunte.” Garnier, as above.

- [73] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 30. Cf. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 12. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 374. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 23, 24.

How the debate ended we are not told; but one thing we know: from that time forth the hated name of “Danegeld” appeared in the Pipe Rolls no more. It seems therefore that, for the first time in English history since the Norman conquest, the right of the nation’s representatives to oppose the financial demands of the Crown was asserted in the council of Woodstock, and asserted with such success that the king was obliged not merely to abandon his project, but to obliterate the last trace of the tradition on which it was founded. And it is well to remember, too, that the first stand made by Thomas of Canterbury against the royal will was made in behalf not of himself or his order but of his whole flock;—in the cause not of ecclesiastical privilege but of constitutional right. The king’s policy may have been really sounder and wiser than the primate’s; but the ground taken by Thomas at Woodstock entitles him none the less to a place in the line of patriot-archbishops of which Dunstan stands at the head.[74]

- [74] On the different account of this affair given in the Thomas Saga, and the view which has been founded on it, see note A at end of chapter.

The next few weeks were occupied with litigation over the alienated lands of the metropolitan see. A crowd of claims put in by Thomas and left to await the king’s return now came up for settlement, the most important case being that of Earl Roger of Clare, whom Thomas had summoned to perform his homage for Tunbridge at Westminster on July 22. Roger answered that he held the entire fief by knight-service, to be rendered in the shape of money-payment,[75] of the king and not of the primate.[76] As Roger was connected with the noblest families in England,[77] king and barons were strongly on his side.[78] To settle the question, Henry ordered a general inquisition to be made throughout England to ascertain where the service of each land-holder was lawfully due. The investigation was of course made by the royal justiciars; and when they came to the archiepiscopal estates, one at least of the most important fiefs in dispute was adjudged by them to the Crown alone.[79]

- [75] “Publicis pensionibus persolvendis.” R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 311.

- [76] Ibid.

- [77] And had moreover “the fairest sister in the whole kingdom,” adds Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 43.

- [78] Ibid.

- [79] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 311.

Meanwhile a dispute on a question of church patronage arose between the primate and a tenant-in-chief of the Crown, named William of Eynesford. Thomas excommunicated his opponent without observing the custom which required him to give notice to the king before inflicting spiritual penalties on one of his tenants-in-chief.[80] Henry indignantly bade him withdraw the sentence; Thomas refused, saying “it was not for the king to dictate who should be bound or who loosed.”[81] The answer was indisputable in itself; but it pointed directly to the fatal subject on which the inevitable quarrel must turn: the relations and limits between the two powers of the keys and the sword.

- [80] Ib.·/·R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 311, 312. Will. Fitz-Steph. as above·/·(Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 43. The object of this rule—one of the avitæ consuetudines—was, as R. Diceto explains, to guard the king against the risk of unwittingly associating with excommunicates.

- [81] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

Almost from his accession Henry seems to have been in some degree contemplating and preparing for those great schemes of legal reform which were to be the lasting glory of his reign. His earliest efforts in this direction were merely tentative; the young king was at once too inexperienced and too hard pressed with urgent business of all kinds, at home and abroad, to have either capacity or opportunity for great experiments in legislation. Throughout the past nine years, however, the projects which floated before his mind’s eye had been gradually taking shape; and now that he was at last freed for a while from the entanglements of politics and war, the time had come when he might begin to devote himself to that branch of his kingly duties for which he probably had the strongest inclination, as he certainly had the highest natural genius. He had by this time gained enough insight into the nature and causes of existing abuses to venture upon dealing with them systematically and in detail, and he had determined to begin with a question which was allowed on all hands to be one of the utmost gravity: the repression of crime in the clergy.

The origin of this difficulty was in the separation—needful perhaps, but none the less disastrous in some of its consequences—made by William the Conqueror between the temporal and ecclesiastical courts of justice. In William’s intention the two sets of tribunals were to work side by side without mutual interference save when the secular power was called in to enforce the decisions of the spiritual judge. But in practice the scheme was soon found to involve a crowd of difficulties. The two jurisdictions were constantly coming into contact, and it was a perpetual question where to draw the line between them. The struggle for the investitures, the religious revival which followed it, the vast and rapid developement of the canon law, with the increase of knowledge brought to bear upon its interpretation through the revived study of the civil law of Rome, gave the clergy a new sense of corporate importance and strength, and a new position as a distinct order in the state; the breakdown of all secular administration under Stephen tended still further to exalt the influence of the canonical system which alone retained some vestige of legal authority, and to throw into the Church-courts a mass of business with which they had hitherto had only an indirect concern, but which they alone now seemed capable of treating. Their proceedings were conducted on the principles of the canon law, which admitted of none but spiritual penalties; they refused to allow any lay interference with the persons over whom they claimed sole jurisdiction; and as these comprised the whole clerical body in the widest possible sense, extending to all who had received the lowest orders of the Church or who had taken monastic vows, the result was to place a considerable part of the population altogether outside the ordinary law of the land, and beyond the reach of adequate punishment for the most heinous crimes. Such crimes were only too common, and were necessarily fostered by this system of clerical immunities; for a man capable of staining his holy orders with theft or murder was not likely to be restrained by the fear of losing them, which a clerical criminal knew to be the worst punishment in store for him; and moreover, it was but too easy for the doers of such deeds to shelter themselves under the protection of a privilege to which often they had no real title. The king’s justiciars declared that in the nine years since Henry’s accession more than a hundred murders, besides innumerable robberies and lesser offences, had gone unpunished because they were committed by clerks, or men who represented themselves to be such.[82] The scandal was acknowledged on all hands; the spiritual party in the Church grieved over it quite as loudly and deeply as the lay reformers; but they hoped to remedy it in their own way, by a searching reformation and a stringent enforcement of spiritual discipline within the ranks of the clergy themselves. The subject had first come under Henry’s direct notice in the summer of 1158, when he received at York a complaint from a citizen of Scarborough that a certain dean had extorted money from him by unjust means. The case was tried, in the king’s presence, before the archbishop of the province, two bishops, and John of Canterbury the treasurer of York. The dean failed in his defence; and as it was proved that he had extorted the money by a libel, an offence against which Henry had made a special decree, some of the barons present were sent to see that the law had its course. John of Canterbury, however, rose and gave it as the decision of the spiritual judges that the money should be restored to the citizen and the criminal delivered over to the mercy of his metropolitan; and despite the justiciar’s remonstrances, they refused to allow the king any rights in the matter. Henry indignantly ordered an appeal to the archbishop of Canterbury; but he was called over sea before it could be heard,[83] and had never returned to England until now, when another archbishop sat in Theobald’s place.

- [82] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 16 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 140).

- [83] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket), vol. iii. pp. 43–45.

That it was Thomas of London who sat there was far from being an indication that Henry had forgotten the incident. It was precisely because Henry in these last four years had thought over the question of the clerical immunities and determined how to deal with it that he had sought to place on S. Augustine’s chair a man after his own heart. He aimed at reducing the position of the clergy, like all other doubtful matters, to the standard of his grandfather’s time. He held that he had a right to whatever his ancestors had enjoyed; he saw therein nothing derogatory to either the Church or the primate, whom he rather intended to exalt by making him his own inseparable colleague in temporal administration and the supreme authority within the realm in purely spiritual matters—thus avoiding the appeals to Rome which had led to so much mischief, and securing for himself a representative to whom he could safely intrust the whole work of government in England as guardian of the little king,[84] while he himself would be free to devote his whole energies to the management of his continental affairs. He seems in fact to have hoped tacitly to repeal the severance of the temporal and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, and bring back the golden age of William and Lanfranc, if not that of Eadgar and Dunstan; and for this he, not unnaturally, counted unreservedly upon Thomas. By slow degrees he discovered his miscalculation. Thomas had given him one direct warning which had been unheeded; he had warned him again indirectly by resigning the chancellorship; now, when the king unfolded his plans, he did not at once contradict him; he merely answered all his arguments and persuasions with one set phrase:—“I will render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”[85]

- [84] Anon. II. (ib.·/·Robertson, Becket vol. iv.), pp. 92–94.

- [85] Ib. pp. 94, 95.

In July occurred a typical case which brought matters to a crisis. A clerk named Philip de Broi had been tried in the bishop of Lincoln’s court for murder, had cleared himself by a legal compurgation, and had been acquitted. The king, not satisfied, commanded or permitted the charge to be revived, and the accused to be summoned to take his trial at Dunstable before Simon Fitz-Peter, then acting as justice-in-eyre in Bedfordshire, where Philip dwelt. Philip indignantly refused to plead again in answer to a charge of which he had been acquitted, and overwhelmed the judge with abuse, of which Simon on his return to London made formal complaint to the king. Henry was furious, swore his wonted oath “by God’s Eyes” that an insult to his minister was an insult to himself, and ordered the culprit to be brought to justice for the contempt of court and the homicide both at once. The primate insisted that the trial should take place in his own court at Canterbury, and to this Henry was compelled unwillingly to consent. The charge of homicide was quickly disposed of; Philip had been acquitted in a Church court, and his present judges had no wish to reverse its decision. On the charge of insulting a royal officer they sentenced him to undergo a public scourging at the hands of the offended person, and to forfeit the whole of his income for the next two years, to be distributed in alms according to the king’s pleasure. Henry declared the punishment insufficient, and bitterly reproached the bishops with having perverted justice out of favour to their order.[86] They denied it; but a story which came up from the diocese of Salisbury[87] and another from that of Worcester[88] tended still further to shew the helplessness of the royal justice against the ecclesiastical courts under the protection of the primate; and the latter’s blundering attempts to satisfy the king only increased his irritation. Not only did Thomas venture beyond the limits of punishment prescribed by the canon law by causing a clerk who had been convicted of theft to be branded as well as degraded,[89] but he actually took upon himself to condemn another to banishment.[90] He hoped by these severe sentences to appease the king’s wrath;[91] Henry, on the contrary, resented them as an interference with his rights; what he wanted was not severe punishment in isolated cases, but the power to inflict it in the regular course of his own royal justice. At last he laid the whole question before a great council which met at Westminster on October 1.[92]

- [86] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 30–32. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), pp. 12, 13. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 374–376. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 45. Herb. Bosh. (ib.), pp. 265, 266. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 24, 25. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 313. There is another version in Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 145.

- [87] Herb. Bosh. (as above), pp. 264, 265. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 143.

- [88] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

- [89] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 45, 46.

- [90] Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 267.

- [91] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 46.

- [92] Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 266. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 95. Summa Causæ (ibid.), p. 201; this last gives the date.

The king’s first proposition, that the bishops should confirm the old customs observed in his grandfather’s days,[93] opened a discussion which lasted far into the night. Henry himself proceeded to explain his meaning more fully; he required, first, that the bishops should be more strict in the pursuit of criminal clerks;[94] secondly, that all such clerks, when convicted and degraded, should be handed over to the secular arm for temporal punishment like laymen, according to the practice usual under Henry I.;[95] and finally, that the bishops should renounce their claim to inflict any temporal punishment whatever, such as exile or imprisonment in a monastery, which he declared to be an infringement of his regal rights over the territory of his whole realm and the persons of all his subjects.[96] The primate, after vainly begging for an adjournment till the morrow, retired to consult with his suffragans.[97] When he returned, it was to set forth his view of the “two swords”—the two jurisdictions, spiritual and temporal—in terms which put an end to all hope of agreement with the king. He declared the ministers of the Heavenly King exempt from all subjection to the judgement of an earthly sovereign; the utmost that he would concede was that a clerk once degraded should thenceforth be treated as a layman and punished as such if he offended again.[98] Henry, apparently too much astonished to argue further, simply repeated his first question—“Would the bishops obey the royal customs?” “Aye, saving our order,” was the answer given by the primate in the name and with the consent of all.[99] When appealed to singly they all made the same answer.[100] Henry bade them withdraw the qualifying phrase, and accept the customs unconditionally; they, through the mouth of their primate, refused;[101] the king raged and swore, but all in vain. At last he strode suddenly out of the hall without taking leave of the assembly;[102] and when morning broke they found that he had quitted London.[103] Before the day was over, Thomas received a summons to surrender some honours which he had held as chancellor and still retained;[104] and soon afterwards the little Henry was taken out of his care.[105]

[93] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 32. Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), pp. 25, 26.

E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 376.

[94] Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 96.

[95] Ibid. Cf. Summa Causæ (ib.), p. 202, Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 266, and Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 148, 149.

[96] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 267.

[97] Summa Causæ (ib. vol. iv.), p. 202. Their discussion is given in Thomas Saga (as above), p. 151.

[98] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 268–272. Cf. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 22. The speech in Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 151–153, is much more moderate in tone, but grants no more in substance.

[99] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 32. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 13. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 376. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 273. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 97. Cf. Ep. ccxxv. (ib. vol. v. p. 527).

[100] For Hilary of Chichester’s attempt at evasion see Herb. Bosh. (as above), pp. 273, 274, and Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 155.

[101] Garnier, E. Grim, Herb. Bosh., Anon. II., as above. For this scene the Saga (as above), pp. 153–155, substitutes a wrangle between king and primate, which however comes to the same result.

[102] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 274.

[103] Ib. p. 275. Summa Causæ (ib. vol. iv.), p. 205. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 157.

[104] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 275.

[105] He was with his father at the council of Clarendon in January 1164. Summa Causæ (ib. vol. iv.), p. 208.

The king’s wrath presently cooled so far that he invited the primate to a conference at Northampton. They met on horseback in a field near the town; high words passed between them; the king again demanded, and the archbishop again refused, unconditional acceptance of the customs; and in this determination they parted.[106] A private negotiation with some of the other prelates—suggested, it was said, by the diplomatist-bishop of Lisieux—was more successful; Roger of York and Robert of Lincoln met the king at Gloucester and agreed to accept his customs with no other qualification than a promise on his part to exact nothing contrary to the rights of their order. Hilary of Chichester not only did the same but undertook to persuade the primate himself. In this of course he failed.[107] Some time before Christmas, however, there came to the archbishop three commissioners who professed to be sent by the Pope to bid him withdraw his opposition; Henry having, according to their story, assured the Pope that he had no designs against the clergy or the Church, and required nothing beyond a verbal assent for the saving of his regal dignity.[108] On the faith of their word Thomas met the king at Oxford,[109] and there promised to accept the customs and obey the king “loyally and in good faith.” Henry then demanded that as the archbishop had withstood him publicly, so his submission should be repeated publicly too, in an assembly of barons and clergy to be convened for that purpose.[110] This was more than Thomas had been led to expect; but he made no objection, and the Christmas season passed over in peace. Henry kept the feast at Berkhampstead,[111] one of the castles lately taken from the archbishop; Thomas at Canterbury, where he had just been consecrating the great English scholar Robert of Melun—one of the three Papal commissioners—to succeed Gilbert Foliot as bishop of Hereford.[112]

- [106] Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), pp. 27–29.

- [107] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 33, 34. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), pp. 14, 15. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 377, 378. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 30–31. Cf. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 276, and Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 159.

- [108] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 34, 35. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 15. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 378. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 31. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 161. All, except the Anon., seem to doubt the genuineness of the mission.

- [109] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 277. The Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 32, and Garnier (Hippeau), p. 35, say Woodstock.

- [110] Garnier, Will. Cant., Herb. Bosh. and Thomas Saga, as above. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 379. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 33, 34.

- [111] Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 66, from Pipe Roll a. 1164.

- [112] On December 22. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 176.

On S. Hilary’s day the proposed council met at the royal hunting-seat of Clarendon near Salisbury.[113] Henry called upon the archbishop to fulfil the promise he had given at Oxford and publicly declare his assent to the customs. Thomas drew back. As he saw the mighty array of barons round the king—as he looked over the ranks of his own fellow-bishops—it flashed at last even upon his unsuspicious mind that all this anxiety to draw him into such a public repetition of a scene which he had thought to be final must cover something more than the supposed papal envoys had led him to expect, and that those “customs” which he had been assured were but a harmless word might yet become a terrible reality if he yielded another step. His hesitation threw the king into one of those paroxysms of Angevin fury which scared the English and Norman courtiers almost out of their senses. Thomas alone remained undaunted; the bishops stood “like a flock of sheep ready for slaughter,” and the king’s own ministers implored the primate to save them from the shame of having to lay violent hands upon him at their sovereign’s command. For two days he stood firm; on the third two knights of the Temple brought him a solemn assurance, on the honour of their order and the salvation of their souls, that his fears were groundless and that a verbal submission to the king’s will would end the quarrel and restore peace to the Church. He believed them; and though he still shrank from the formality, thus emptied of meaning, as little better than a lie, yet for the Church’s sake he gave way. He publicly promised to obey the king’s laws and customs loyally and in good faith, and made all the other bishops do likewise.[114]

- [113] On the date see note B at end of chapter.

- [114] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 20–22, 36. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), pp. 16, 17. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 380–382. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 278, 279. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 33–36. Anon. II. (ibid.), p. 99. Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 163–167, and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 177, 178.

The words were no sooner out of their mouths than Thomas learned how just his suspicions had been. A question was instantly raised—what were these customs? It was too late to discuss them that night; next morning the king bade the oldest and wisest of the barons go and make a recognition of the customs observed by his grandfather and bring up a written report of them for ratification by the council.[115] Nine days later[116] the report was presented. It comprised sixteen articles, known ever since as the Constitutions of Clarendon.[117] Some of them merely re-affirmed, in a more stringent and technical manner, the rules of William the Conqueror forbidding bishops and beneficed clerks to quit the realm or excommunicate the king’s tenants-in-chief without his leave, and the terms on which the temporal position of the bishops had been settled by the compromise between Henry I. and Anselm at the close of the struggle for the investitures. Another aimed at checking the abuse of appeals to Rome, by providing that no appeal should be carried further than the archbishop’s court without the assent of the king. The remainder dealt with the settlement of disputes concerning presentations and advowsons, which were transferred from the ecclesiastical courts to that of the king; the treatment of excommunicate persons; the limits of the right of sanctuary as regarding the goods of persons who had incurred forfeiture to the Crown; the ordination of villeins; the jurisdiction over clerks accused of crime; the protection of laymen cited before the Church courts against episcopal and archidiaconal injustice; and the method of procedure in suits concerning the tenure of Church lands.

- [115] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 37. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 18. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 382. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 279. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 37. Anon. II. (ibid.), p. 102. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 178.

- [116] On the chronology see note B at end of chapter.

- [117] Will. Cant. (as above), pp. 18–23; Gerv. Cant, (as above), pp. 178–180; Stubbs, Select Charters, pp. 137–140.

The two articles last mentioned are especially remarkable. The former provided that if a layman was accused before a bishop on insufficient testimony, the sheriff should at the bishop’s request summon a jury of twelve lawful men of the neighbourhood to swear to the truth or falsehood of the charge.[118] The other clause decreed that when an estate was claimed by a clerk in frank-almoign and by a layman as a secular fief the question should be settled by the chief justiciar in like manner on the recognition of twelve jurors.[119] The way in which these provisions are introduced implies that the principle contained in them was already well known in the country; it indicates that some steps had already been taken towards a general remodelling of legal procedure, intended to embrace all branches of judicial administration and bring them all into orderly and harmonious working. In this view the Constitutions of Clarendon were only part of a great scheme in whose complete developement they might have held an appropriate and useful place.[120] But the churchmen of the day, to whom they were thus suddenly presented as an isolated fragment, could hardly be expected to see in them anything but an engine of state tyranny for grinding down the Church. Almost every one of them assumed, in some way or other, the complete subordination of ecclesiastical to temporal authority; the right of lay jurisdiction over clerks was asserted in the most uncompromising terms; while the last clause of all, which forbade the ordination of villeins without the consent of their lords, stirred a nobler feeling than jealousy for mere class-privileges. Its real intention was probably not to hinder the enfranchisement of serfs, but simply to protect the landowners against the loss of services which, being attached to the soil, they had no means of replacing, and very possibly also to prevent the number of criminal clerks being further increased by the admission of villeins anxious to escape from the justice of their lords. But men who for ages had been trained to regard the Church as a divinely-appointed city of refuge for all the poor and needy, the oppressed and the enslaved, could only see the other side of the measure and feel their inmost hearts rise up in the cry of a contemporary poet—“Hath not God called us all, bond and free, to His service?”[121]

- [118] Const. Clarend. c. 6 (Stubbs, Select Charters, pp. 138, 139).

- [119] Const. Clarend. c. 9 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 139).

- [120] It should be noticed that this was clearly understood, and full justice was done to Henry’s intentions, not only by the most impartial and philosophic historian of the time— William of Newburgh (l. ii. c. 16; Howlett, vol. i. p. 140) —but even by Thomas’s most ardent follower, Herbert of Bosham (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii. pp. 272, 273, 278, 280).

- [121]

- “Et Deus à sun servise nus a tuz apelez!
Mielz valt filz à vilain qui est preuz et senez,
Que ne fet gentilz hum failliz et debutez!”

- Garnier (Hippeau), p. 89. This, variously expressed, was the grand argument of the clerical-democratic party, and the true source of their strength. And they were not altogether wrong in attributing the action of their opponents, in part at least, to aristocratic contempt and exclusiveness—if we may trust Gervase of Canterbury’s report of a complaint said to have been uttered at a later time by the king: “Hi quoque omnes” [i.e. the religious orders] “tales sibi fratres associant, pelliparios scilicet et sutores, quorum nec unus deberet instante necessitate in episcopum vel abbatem salvâ conscientiâ nostrâ promoveri.” Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 540.

The discussion occupied six days;[122] as each clause was read out to the assembly, Thomas rose and set forth his reasons for opposing it.[123] When at last the end was reached, Henry called upon him and all the bishops to affix their seals to the constitutions. “Never,” burst out the primate—“never, while there is a breath left in my body!”[124] The king was obliged to content himself with the former verbal assent, gained on false pretences as it had been; a copy of the obnoxious document was handed to the primate, who took it, as he said, for a witness against its contrivers, and indignantly quitted the assembly.[125] In an agony of remorse for the credulity which had led him into such a trap he withdrew to Winchester and suspended himself from all priestly functions till he had received absolution from the Pope.[126]

- [122] See note B at end of chapter.

- [123] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 280–285. The answers to the Constitutions in Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 84–89, seem to be partly Thomas’s and partly his own.

- [124]

- “L’arcevesques respunt: Fei que dei Deu le bel,
Co n’ert, tant cum la vie me bate en cest vessel!”

- Garnier (Hippeau), p. 37. Cf. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 383, and Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 37.

- [125] Garnier, as above. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 23. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 383. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 37. Cf. Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 311; Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 288; Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 103, and Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 167–169. Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 48, 49, says that Thomas did set his seal to the constitutions; but his statement is at variance with those of all other authorities; and he himself afterwards recites two speeches made at Northampton, one by Thomas and one by Hilary of Chichester, both distinctly affirming that none of the bishops sealed. Ib. pp. 66, 67.

- [126] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 38. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 24. Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 312. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 383. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 49. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 289–292. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 37.

It was to the Pope that both parties looked for a settlement of their dispute; but Alexander, ill acquainted both with the merits of the case and with the characters of the disputants, and beset on all sides with political difficulties, could only strive in vain to hold the balance evenly between them. Meanwhile the political quarrel of king and primate was embittered by an incident in which Henry’s personal feelings were stirred. His brother William—the favourite young brother whom he had once planned to establish as sovereign in Ireland—had set his heart upon a marriage with the widowed countess of Warren; the archbishop had forbidden the match on the ground of affinity, and his prohibition had put an end to the scheme.[127] Baffled and indignant, William returned to Normandy and poured the story of his grievance into the sympathizing ears first of his mother and then, as it seems, of the brotherhood at Bec.[128] On January 29, 1164—one day before the dissolution of the council of Clarendon—he died at Rouen;[129] and a writer who was himself at that time a monk at Bec not only implies his own belief that the young man actually died of disappointment, but declares that Henry shared that belief, and thenceforth looked upon the primate by whom the disappointment had been caused as little less than the murderer of his brother.[130] The king’s exasperation was at any rate plain to all eyes; and as the summer drew on Thomas found himself gradually deserted. His best friend, John of Salisbury, had already been taken from his side, and was soon driven into exile by the jealousy of the king;[131] another friend, John of Canterbury, had been removed out of the country early in 1163 by the ingenious device of making him bishop of Poitiers.[132] The old dispute concerning the relations between Canterbury and York had broken out afresh with intensified bitterness between Roger of Pont-l’Evêque and the former comrade of whom he had long been jealous, and who had now once again been promoted over his head; the king, hoping to turn it to account for his own purposes, was intriguing at the Papal court in Roger’s behalf, and one of his confidential agents there was Thomas’s own archdeacon, Geoffrey Ridel.[133] The bishops as yet were passive; in the York controversy Gilbert Foliot strongly supported his own metropolitan;[134] but between him and Thomas there was already a question, amicable indeed at present but ominous nevertheless, as to whether or not the profession of obedience made to Theobald by the bishop of Hereford should be repeated by the same man as bishop of London to Theobald’s successor.[135]

[127] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.) p. 142. Isabel de Warren was the widow of Stephen’s son William, who of course was cousin in the third degree to William of Anjou.

[128]

“Hic” [i.e. Thomas] “regis fratrem pertæsum semper habebat,
Ne consul foret hic, obvius ille fuit:
Cum nata comitis comitem Warenna tulisset,
Nobilis hic præsul ne nocuisset ei.
Irâ permotus, nunquam rediturus, ab Anglis
Advenit is, matri nunciat ista piæ.
Hinc Beccum veniens fratrum se tradit amori.”

Draco Norm., l. ii. c. 8, vv. 441–447 (Howlett, Will. Newb., vol. ii. p. 676).

[129] Rob. Torigni, a. 1164. Draco Norm., l. ii. c. 8, vv. 448–450 (as above). The date is from the first-named writer.

[130] Draco Norm., l. ii. c. 8, vv. 453–456 (as above). Considering the abundance—one might almost say superabundance—of unquestionably authentic information which we already possess as to the origin and grounds of Henry’s quarrel with Thomas, I cannot attach so much importance as Mr. Howlett apparently does (ib. pref. pp. lxi–lxiii) to this new contribution from Stephen of Rouen. Stephen’s work is quasi-romantic in character and utterly unhistoric in style; and his view of the whole Becket controversy is simply ludicrous, for he ignores the clerical immunities and the Constitutions of Clarendon altogether, and attributes the quarrel wholly to two other causes—this affair about William, and Thomas’s supposed peculations while chancellor (ib. l. iii. c. 12, vv. 909–914, p. 741). That the domestic tragedy of which he gives such a highly-coloured account had some bearing upon the great political drama appears from the words of Richard le Breton to Thomas at his murder seven years later, “Hoc habeas pro amore domini mei Willelmi fratris regis” (Will. Fitz-Steph., Robertson, Becket, vol. iii. p. 142). But in these words there is no mention either of William’s death or of Henry’s feelings about it. Some allusion to either or both may have been in the speaker’s mind; but what he actually said implies nothing more than that he had been in William’s service, and had therefore resented the thwarting of his lord’s interests, and through them, it may be, of his own. Will. Fitz-Steph., after explaining what William’s grievance was, simply adds, “Unde Willelmus ... inconsolabiliter doluit; et omnes sui archiepiscopo inimici facti sunt.” Ibid.

[131] From a comparison of Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 46, with Ep. lv. (ib. vol. v. pp. 95–103), it appears that John was separated from Thomas before the council of Clarendon. After some months of wandering he found shelter at Reims, in the great abbey of S. Remigius of which his old friend Peter of Celle was now abbot, and there he chiefly dwelt during the next seven years.

[132] Will. Fitz-Steph., as above, says John was promoted for the purpose of getting him out of the way. He was consecrated by the Pope at the council of Tours; R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 311. It must be remembered that Henry had already had experience of John’s zeal for clerical immunities.

[133] Epp. xiii., xxvii., xxxvi., xli.–xliii., l., li., liii., liv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 21, 22, 44–46, 59, 60, 67–69, 85, 87, 88, 91, 94); Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 24; E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 384; Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 38, 39; Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 39, 40; Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 179–181; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 181.

[134] Ep. xxviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 46, 47).

[135] Epp. xxxv., lxvii. (ib. pp. 56, 57, 130, 131).

Thomas himself fully expected to meet the fate of Anselm; throughout the winter his friends had been endeavouring to secure him a refuge in France;[136] and early in the summer of 1164, having been refused an interview with the king,[137] he made two attempts to escape secretly from Romney. The first time he was repelled by a contrary wind; the second time the sailors put back ostensibly for the same reason, but really because they had recognized their passenger and dreaded the royal wrath;[138] and a servant who went on the following night to shut the gates of the deserted palace at Canterbury found the primate, worn out with fatigue and disappointment, sitting alone in the darkness like a beggar upon his own door-step.[139] Despairing of escape, he made another effort to see the king at Woodstock. Henry dreaded nothing so much as the archbishop’s flight, for he felt that it would probably be followed by a Papal interdict on his dominions,[140] and would certainly give an immense advantage against him to Louis of France, who was at that very moment threatening war in Auvergne.[141] He therefore received Thomas courteously, though with somewhat less than the usual honours,[142] and made no allusion to the past except by a playful question “whether the archbishop did not think the realm was wide enough to contain them both?” Thomas saw, however, that the old cordiality was gone; his enemies saw it too, and, as his biographer says, “they came about him like bees.”[143] Foremost among them was John the king’s marshal, who had a suit in the archbishop’s court concerning the manor of Pageham.[144] It was provided by one of Henry’s new rules of legal procedure that if a suitor saw no chance of obtaining justice in the court of his own lord he might, by taking an oath to that effect and bringing two witnesses to do the same, transfer the suit to a higher court.[145] John by this method removed his case from the court of the archbishop to that of the king; and thither Thomas was cited to answer his claim on the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. When that day came the primate was too ill to move; he sent essoiners to excuse his absence in legal form, and also a written protest against the removal of the suit, on the ground that it had been obtained by perjury—John having taken the oath not upon the Gospel, but upon an old song-book which he had surreptitiously brought into court for the purpose.[146] Henry angrily refused to believe either Thomas or his essoiners,[147] and immediately issued orders for a great council to be held at Northampton.[148] It was customary to call the archbishops and the greater barons by a special writ addressed to each individually, while the lesser tenants-in-chief received a general summons through the sheriffs of the different counties. Roger of York was specially called in due form;[149] the metropolitan of all Britain, who ought to have been invited first and most honourably of all, merely received through the sheriff of Kent a peremptory citation to be ready on the first day of the council with his defence against the claim of John the marshal.[150]

[136] Epp. xxxv., xxxvi., lv. (ib.·/·Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 57, 58, 97).

[137] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib.), vol. iii. p. 49.

[138] Cf. Will. Fitz-Steph. as above; Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 293; Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 104; and Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 325, with E. Grim (ibid.), pp. 389, 390; Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 29; Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 40; and Garnier (Hippeau), p. 49.

[139] Alan Tewkesb. as above.

[140] Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 29. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 390. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 40. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 50.

[141] Ep. lx. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v., p. 115).

[142] Ep. ccxxv. (ib. p. 530). Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 294.

[143] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 294, 295.

[144] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 50.

[145] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 51. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 31. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 41. On this proceeding see Glanville, De Legg. et Conss. Angl., l. xii. c. 7.

[146] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 51–53. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 30. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 390. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 50. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 41. Ep. ccxxv. (ib. vol. v.), pp. 530, 531.

[147] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

[148] Ib. p. 49. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 296. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 30. Ep. ccxxv. (ib. vol. v.), p. 531. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 50.

[149] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 313, 314.

[150] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 51.

The council—an almost complete gathering of the tenants-in-chief, lay and spiritual, throughout the realm[151]—was summoned for Tuesday October 6.[152] The king however lingered hawking by the river-side till late at night,[153] and it was not till next morning after Mass that the archbishop could obtain an audience. He began by asking leave to go and consult the Pope on his dispute with Roger of York and divers other questions touching the interests of both Church and state; Henry angrily bade him be silent and retire to prepare his defence for his contempt of the royal summons in the matter of John the marshal.[154] The trial took place next day. John himself did not appear, being detained in the king’s service at the Michaelmas session of the Exchequer in London;[155] the charge of failure of justice was apparently withdrawn, but for the alleged contempt Thomas was sentenced to a fine of five hundred pounds.[156] Indignant as he was at the flagrant illegality of the trial, in which his own suffragans had been compelled to sit in judgement on their primate, Thomas was yet persuaded to submit, in the hope of avoiding further wrangling over what seemed now to have become a mere question of money.[157] But there were other questions to follow. Henry now demanded from the archbishop a sum of three hundred pounds, representing the revenue due from the honours of Eye and Berkhampstead for the time during which he had held them since his resignation of the chancellorship.[158] Thomas remarked that he had spent far more than that sum on the repair of the royal palaces, and protested against the unfairness of making such a demand without warning. Still, however, he disdained to resist for a matter of filthy lucre, and found sureties for the required amount.[159] Next morning Henry made a further demand for the repayment of a loan made to Thomas in his chancellor days.[160] In those days the two friends had virtually had but one purse as well as “one mind and one heart,” and Thomas was deeply wounded by this evident proof that their friendship was at an end. Once more he submitted; but this time it was no easy matter to find sureties;[161] and then, late on the Friday evening, there was reached the last and most overwhelming count in the long indictment thus gradually unrolled before the eyes of the astonished primate. He was called upon to render a complete statement of all the revenues of vacant sees, baronies and honours of which he had had the custody as chancellor—in short, of the whole accounts of the chancery during his tenure of office.[162]

[151] Herb. Bosh. (ibid.) p. 296. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 390. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 41. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 313. Only two bishops were absent: Nigel of Ely, disabled by paralysis, and William of Norwich, who made an excuse to avoid sharing in what he knew was to come. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 185. From Alan Tewkesb. however (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii. p. 331), it seems that Norwich came after all—only, like Rochester (Will. Fitz-Steph., ib. vol. iii. p. 52), somewhat late.

[152] Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 50. Herb. Bosh. (ib. p. 296), says “hebdomadæ feria quinta, sexta ante B. Calixti ... diem”—a self-contradiction, for in 1164 October 9, the sixth day before the feast of S. Calixtus, was not Thursday but Friday. He makes, however, a similar confusion as to the last day of the council (ib. pp. 301, 304, 326); and as this was undoubtedly Tuesday October 13—not Wednesday 14, as he seems to make it in p. 304 —it is plain that his mistake lies in placing the feast of S. Calixtus a day too early, and that the day to which he really means to assign the opening of the assembly is Thursday October 8. This really agrees with Will. Fitz-Steph., for, as will be seen, the council did not formally meet till a day after that for which it was summoned, and did not get to business till a day later still. William gives the date for which it had been summoned; Herbert, that of its practical beginning. R. Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 313) has substituted the closing day for that of opening; the author of Thomas Saga (Magnusson, vol. i. p. 241), has done the same, with a further confusion as to the days of the week; while Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 182) has a date which agrees with nothing, and which must be altogether wrong.

[153] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

[154] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 52. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 391. Cf. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 42, and Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 51.

[155] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 51.

[156] Ibid. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 297. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 30. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 391. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 42. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 52. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 18. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 183. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 313. The actual sentence was forfeiture of all his moveable goods ad misericordiam—commuted according to custom; cf. Herb. Bosh. and Gerv. Cant., as above, with Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 62. Garnier makes the sum three hundred pounds; Will. Cant., fifty; E. Grim, the Anon. I. and R. Diceto, five hundred.

[157] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 52. E. Grim (as above), p. 391. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 43.

[158] This must be the meaning of Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 53, compared with R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 313, 314.

[159] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

[160] The demand is stated by Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.) as “de quingentis marcis ex causâ commodati in exercitu Tolosæ, et aliis quingentis marcis ex causâ fidejussionis regis pro eo erga quendam Judæum ibidem.” This would make the total amount £666: 3: 8. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 298, and the Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 189, make it five hundred pounds.

[161] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 298, 299.

[162] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 53. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 31. Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 312. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 392. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 54. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 299. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 43. Anon. II. (ibid.), p. 104. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 314. The total sum due was assessed in the end at thirty thousand pounds, according to Garnier (p. 65), Will. Cant. (p. 38), E. Grim (p. 396) and Anon. I. (p. 49). Herb. Bosh., however (as above), makes it thirty thousand marks (i.e. twenty thousand pounds). The Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 191, says thirty thousand marks “of burnt silver,” i.e. blanch; while Gilbert Foliot, when reciting the story to the Pope’s legates in 1167, is reported as stating it at forty-four thousand marks (£2933: 6: 8); Ep. cccxxxix. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi. p. 271). Herb. Bosh. (as above) places this demand on the Saturday morning, and the whole history of the three days, Friday-Sunday, October 9–11, is somewhat confused by the discordant notes of time given by the various biographers. I have followed Will. Fitz-Steph., who is the most self-consistent and apparently the most trustworthy.

At this crushing demand the archbishop’s courage gave way, and he threw himself at the king’s feet in despair. All the bishops did likewise, but in vain; Henry swore “by God’s Eyes” that he would have the accounts in full. He granted, however, a respite till the morrow,[163] and Thomas spent the next morning in consultation with his suffragans.[164] Gilbert of London advised unconditional surrender;[165] Henry of Winchester, who had already withstood the king to his face the night before,[166] strongly opposed this view,[167] and suggested that the matter should be compromised by an offer of two thousand marks. This the king rejected.[168] After long deliberation[169] it was decided—again at the suggestion of Bishop Henry—that Thomas should refuse to entertain the king’s demands on the ground of the release from all secular obligations granted to him at his consecration. This answer was carried by the bishops in a body to the king. He refused to accept it, declaring that the release had been given without his authority; and all that the bishops could wring from him was a further adjournment till the Monday morning.[170] In the middle of Sunday night the highly-strung nervous organization of Thomas broke down under the long cruel strain; the morning found him lying in helpless agony, and with great difficulty he obtained from the king another day’s delay.[171] Before it expired a warning reached him from the court that if he appeared there he must expect nothing short of imprisonment or death.[172] A like rumour spread through the council, and at dawn the bishops in a body implored their primate to give up the hopeless struggle and throw himself on the mercy of the king. He refused to betray his Church by accepting a sentence which he believed to be illegal as well as unjust, forbade the bishops to take any further part in his trial, gave them notice of an appeal to Rome if they should do so, and charged them on their canonical obedience to excommunicate at once whatever laymen should dare to sit in judgement upon him.[173] Against this last command the bishop of London instantly appealed.[174] All then returned to the court, except Henry of Winchester and Jocelyn of Salisbury, who lingered for a last word of pleading or of sympathy.[175] When they too were gone, Thomas went to the chapel of the monastery in which he was lodging—a small Benedictine house dedicated to S. Andrew, just outside the walls of Northampton—and with the utmost solemnity celebrated the mass of S. Stephen with its significant introit: “Princes have sat and spoken against me.” The mass ended, he mounted his horse, and escorted no longer by a brilliant train of clerks and knights, but by a crowd of poor folk full of sympathy and admiration, he rode straight to the castle where the council awaited him.[176]

[163] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 53, 54.

[164] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 300.

[165] Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 326, 327.

[166] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 54.

[167] Alan Tewkesb. (as above), p. 327.

[168] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 54.

[169] The speeches of the bishops—interesting for studies of character—are given at length by Alan Tewkesb. (as above), pp. 327, 328. Cf. the account in Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 193–199.

[170] Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 31. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 392. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 300. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 43. Anon. II. (ibid.), pp. 104, 105. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 328, 329, has a slightly different version; in this, and also in Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 199–201, Gilbert Foliot wins the respite by a daring misrepresentation of Thomas’s answer to the king. I have followed Herbert’s reckoning of the days here, as it fits in with that of Will. Fitz-Steph., who seems the best guide in this matter.

[171] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 55, 56. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 32. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.) pp. 329, 330. E. Grim (ibid.), pp. 392, 393. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 56. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 300, 301. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 44. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 203. Here again I follow Will. Fitz-Steph. and Herbert as to the day.

[172] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 56. Will. Cant. as above. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 393. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 44. Thomas Saga as above.

[173] Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 62. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 301–303. Thomas Saga (as above), pp. 205–207.

[174] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 303. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 207. Some of the other biographers place this scene later in the day, but we can hardly do otherwise than follow the two eye-witnesses, William and Herbert.

[175] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 303. Jocelyn’s after-conduct shewed that his sympathy with the primate was not very deep.

[176] Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), pp. 32, 34. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 330. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 393. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 56, 57. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 304. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 45. Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 56–60. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 207–209.

At the gate he took his cross from the attendant who usually bore it, and went forward alone to the hall where the bishops and barons were assembled.[177] They fell back in amazement at the apparition of the tall solitary figure, robed in full pontificals, and carrying the crucifix like an uplifted banner prepared at once for defence and for defiance; friends and opponents were almost equally shocked, and it was not till he had passed through their midst and seated himself in a corner of the hall that the bishops recovered sufficiently to gather round him and intreat that he would give up his unbecoming burthen. Thomas refused; “he would not lay down his standard, he would not part with his shield.” “A fool you ever were, a fool I see you are still and will be to the end,” burst out Gilbert Foliot at last, as after a long argument he turned impatiently away.[178] The others followed him, and the primate was left with only two companions, William Fitz-Stephen and his own especial friend, Herbert of Bosham.[179] The king had retired to an inner chamber and was there deliberating with his most intimate counsellors[180] when the story of the primate’s entrance reached his ears. He took it as an unpardonable insult, and caused Thomas to be proclaimed a traitor. Warnings and threats ran confusedly through the hall. The archbishop bent over the disciple sitting at his feet:—“For thee I fear—yet fear not thou; even now mayest thou share my crown.” The ardent encouragement with which Herbert answered him[181] provoked one of the king’s marshals to interfere and forbid that any one should speak to the “traitor.” William Fitz-Stephen, who had been vainly striving to put in a gentle word, caught his primate’s eyes and pointed to the crucifix, intrusting to its silent eloquence the lesson of patience and prayer which his lips were forbidden to utter. When he and Thomas, after long separation, met again in the land of exile, that speechless admonition seems to have been the first thing which recurred to the minds of both.[182]

- [177] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 60. Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 57. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 304. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 330. Thomas Saga (as above)·/·(Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 207–209, p. 209.

- [178] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 60, 61. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 34. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 330. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 394. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 57. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 305, 306. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 46, 47. Thomas Saga (as above), pp. 211–213.

- [179] Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 34. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 307. They only mention Herbert; William’s presence appears in the sequel.

- [180] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 61. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 35. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 394. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 305. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 47.

- [181] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 306–308.

- [182] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 59.

In the chamber overhead, meanwhile, Henry had summoned the bishops to a conference.[183] On receiving from them an account of their morning’s interview with Thomas, he sent down to the latter his ultimatum, requiring him to withdraw his appeal to Rome and his commands to the bishops as contrary to the customs which he had sworn to observe, and to submit to the judgement of the king’s court on the chancery accounts. Seated, with eyes fixed on the cross, Thomas quietly but firmly refused. His refusal was reported to the king, who grew fiery-red with rage, caught eagerly at the barons’ proposal that the archbishop should be judged for contempt of his sovereign’s jurisdiction in appealing from it to another tribunal, and called upon the bishops to join in his condemnation.[184] York, London and Chichester proposed that they should cite him before the Pope instead, on the grounds of perjury at Clarendon and unjust demands on their obedience.[185] To this Henry consented; the appeal was uttered by Hilary of Chichester in the name of all, and in most insulting terms;[186] and the bishops sat down opposite their primate to await the sentence of the lay barons.[187]

- [183] Ib.·/·Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 57. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 35. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 331. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 62.

- [184] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 65, 66. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), pp. 36–38. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 62–65. Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 213–217.

- [185] Will. Cant. (as above), p. 37. In the versions of E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 396, Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 308, and the Thomas Saga (as above), p. 217, they bluntly bargain to be let off from actually sitting in judgement on their primate in consideration of a promise to stand by the king against him for ever after.

- [186] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 65, 66. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 331, 332. According to Alan, Thomas answered but one word—“I hear”; according to William, he condescended to make a long speech. Cf. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 49.

- [187] Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 332.

What that sentence was no one outside the royal council-chamber ever really knew. It was one thing to determine it there and another to deliver it to its victim, sitting alone and unmoved with the sign of victory in his hand. With the utmost reluctance and hesitation the old justiciar, Earl Robert of Leicester, came to perform his odious task. At the word “judgement” Thomas started up, with uplifted crucifix and flashing eyes, forbade the speaker to proceed, and solemnly appealed to the protection of the court of Rome. The justiciar and his companions retired in silence.[188] “I too will go, for the hour is past,” said Thomas.[189] Cross in hand he strode past the speechless group of bishops into the outer hall; the courtiers followed him with a torrent of insults, which were taken up by the squires and serving-men outside; as he stumbled against a pile of faggots set ready for the fire, Ralf de Broc rushed upon him with a shout of “Traitor! traitor!”[190] The king’s half-brother, Count Hameline, echoed the cry;[191] but he shrank back at the primate’s retort—“Were I a knight instead of a priest, this hand should prove thee a liar!”[192] Amid a storm of abuse Thomas made his way into the court-yard and sprang upon his horse, taking up his faithful Herbert behind him.[193] The outer gate was locked, but a squire of the archbishop managed to find the keys.[194] Whether there was any real intention of stopping his egress it seems impossible to determine; the king and his counsellors were apparently too much puzzled to do anything but let matters take their course; Henry indeed sent down a herald to quell the disturbance and forbid all violence to the primate;[195] but the precaution came too late. Once outside the gates, Thomas had no need of such protection. From the mob of hooting enemies within he passed into the midst of a crowd of poor folk who pressed upon him with every demonstration of rapturous affection; in every street as he rode along the people came out to throw themselves at his feet and beg his blessing.

[188] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 67. Will. Cant. (as above·/·Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), pp. 38, 39. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 332, 333. E. Grim (ibid.), pp. 397, 398. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 67, 68. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 309, 310. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 50, 51. Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 221, where the altercation is longer, but comes to the same end.

[189] Anon. I. (as above), p. 51.

[190] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 68. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 39. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 398. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 51, 52. Cf. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 68.

[191] Garnier and Will. Cant. as above. Anon. I. (as above), p. 52.

[192] Anon. I. as above. Cf. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 310. There is a different version in Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 39, 40.

[193] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above. Of his own escape William says nothing; but we know from a passage later in the same page that he soon rejoined his primate.

[194] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 69. Cf. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 40; Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 333; Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 52; and Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 222.

[195] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 70. Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 69. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 399.

It was with these poor folk that he supped that night, for his own household, all save a chosen few, now hastened to take leave of him.[196] Through the bishops of Rochester, Hereford and Worcester he requested of the king a safe-conduct for his journey to Canterbury; the king declined to answer till the morrow.[197] The primate’s suspicions were aroused. He caused his bed to be laid in the church, as if intending to spend the night in prayer.[198] At cock-crow the monks came and sang their matins in an under-tone for fear of disturbing their weary guest;[199] but his chamberlain was watching over an empty couch. At dead of night Thomas had made his escape with two canons of Sempringham and a faithful squire of his own, named Roger of Brai. A violent storm of rain helped to cover their flight,[200] and it was not till the middle of the next day that king and council discovered that the primate was gone.

- [196] Alan Tewkesb. (as above·/·Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 333. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 399. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 310. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 52. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 40. Garnier, as above·/·(Hippeau), p. 70.

- [197] Alan Tewkesb. (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 334. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 69. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 312.

- [198] Alan Tewkesb. and Will. Fitz-Steph. as above. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 40. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 53. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 70. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 229.

- [199] Garnier, as above.

- [200] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 71. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 399. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 53, 54. Cf. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 40, Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 69, and Herb. Bosh. (ibid.) p. 312.

“God’s blessing go with him!” murmured with a sigh of relief the aged Bishop Henry of Winchester. “We have not done with him yet!” cried the king. He at once issued orders that all the ports should be watched to prevent Thomas from leaving the country,[201] and that the temporalities of the metropolitan see should be left untouched pending an appeal to the Pope[202] which he despatched the archbishop of York and the bishops of London, Worcester, Exeter and Chichester to prosecute without delay.[203] They sailed from Dover on All Souls day;[204] that very night Thomas, after three weeks of adventurous wanderings, guarded with the most devoted vigilance by the brethren of Sempringham, embarked in a little boat from Sandwich; next day he landed in Flanders;[205] and after another fortnight’s hiding he made his way safe to Soissons, where the king of France, disregarding an embassy sent by Henry to prevent him, welcomed him with open arms. He hurried on to Sens, where the Pope was now dwelling; the appellant bishops had preceded him, but Alexander was deaf to their arguments.[206] Thomas laid at the Pope’s feet his copy of the Constitutions of Clarendon; they were read, discussed and solemnly condemned in full consistory.[207] The exiled primate withdrew to a shelter which his friend Bishop John of Poitiers had secured for him in the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny in Burgundy.[208] On Christmas-eve, at Marlborough, Henry’s envoys reported to him the failure of their mission. On S. Stephen’s day Henry confiscated the whole possessions of the metropolitan see, of the primate himself and of all his clerks, and ordered all his kindred and dependents, clerical or lay, to be banished from the realm.[209]

[201] Anon. I. (as above·/·Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 55.

[202] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 70. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 322.

[203] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 79. Alan Tewkesb. (as above·/·Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 336. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 402. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 70. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 323. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 60, 61. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 261.

[204] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

[205] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 71–74. E. Grim (as above), pp. 399, 400. Alan Tewkesb. (ibid.), p. 335. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 70. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 323–325. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 54, 55. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 245. Here again there is a confusion about the date.

[206] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 74–81. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), pp. 42–46. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 335–341. E. Grim (ibid.), pp. 400–403. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 70–74. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 325–340. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 57–61. Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 265–289.

[207] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 82–84. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 46. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 341, 342. E. Grim (ibid.), pp. 403, 404. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 340–342. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 61–64. The formal record of these proceedings is the edition of the Constitutions included among the collected letters of S. Thomas—Ep. xlv. (ib. vol. v. pp. 71–79), in which there is appended to each article the Pope’s verdict—“Hoc toleravit” or “Hoc damnavit.” The tolerated articles are 2, 6, 11, 13, 14 and 16. Alan of Tewkesbury, who first collected the letters of S. Thomas, was for some years a canon of Benevento, and probably got this annotated copy of the Constitutions from Lombard, who had been in Thomas’s suite as one of his eruditi during this visit to Sens, and who was archbishop of Benevento at the time of Alan’s residence there.

[208] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 90. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 46. Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 313. Alan Tewkesb. (ibid.), p. 345. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 404. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 76. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 357. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 64. Anon. II. (ibid.), p. 109. Cf. Ep. lx. (ib. vol. v.), p. 114.

[209] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 91. Will. Cant. (as above), pp. 46, 47. Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 313, 314. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 404. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 75. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 359. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 65. The dates are from Will. Fitz-Steph. The Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 347–349, puts this banishment too late in the story.

Note A.
THE COUNCIL OF WOODSTOCK.

The usual view of the council of Woodstock—a view founded on contemporary accounts and endorsed by Bishop Stubbs ( Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 462)—has been disputed on the authority of the Icelandic Thomas Saga. This Saga represents the subject of the quarrel as being, not a general levy of so much per hide throughout the country, but a special tax upon the Church lands—nothing else, in fact, than the “ungeld” which William Rufus had imposed on them to raise the money paid to Duke Robert for his temporary cession of Normandy, and which had been continued ever since. “We have read afore how King William levied a due on all churches in the land, in order to repay him all the costs at which his brother Robert did depart from the land. This money the king said he had disbursed for the freedom of Jewry, and therefore it behoved well the learned folk to repay it to their king. But because the king’s court hath a mouth that holdeth fast, this due continued from year to year. At first it was called Jerusalem tax, but afterwards Warfare-due, for the king to keep up an army for the common peace of the country. But at this time matters have gone so far, that this due was exacted, as a king’s tax, from every house” [“monastery,” editor’s note], “small and great, throughout England, under no other name than an ancient tax payable into the royal treasury without any reason being shown for it.” Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 139. Mr. Magnusson (ib. p. 138, note 7) thinks that this account “must be taken as representing the true history of” the tax in question. In his Preface (ib. vol. ii. pp. cvii–cviii) he argues that if the tax had been one upon the tax-payers in general, “evidently the primate had no right to interfere in such a matter, except so far as church lands were concerned;” and he concludes that the version in the Saga “gives a natural clue to the archbishop’s protest, which thus becomes a protest only on behalf of the Church.” This argument hardly takes sufficient account of the English primate’s constitutional position, which furnishes a perfectly “natural clue” to his protest, supposing that protest to have been made on behalf of the whole nation and not only of the Church:—or rather, to speak more accurately, in behalf of the Church in the true sense of that word—the sense which Theobald’s disciples were always striving to give to it—as representing the whole nation viewed in a spiritual aspect, and not only the clerical order. Mr. Magnusson adds: “We have no doubt that the source of the Icelandic Saga here is Robert of Cricklade, or ... Benedict of Peterborough, who has had a better information on the subject than the other authorities, which, it would seem, all have Garnier for a primary source; but he, a foreigner, might very well be supposed to have formed an erroneous view on a subject the history of which he did not know, except by hearsay evidence” (ib. pp. cviii, cix). It might be answered that the “hearsay evidence” on which Garnier founded his view must have been evidence which he heard in England, where he is known to have carefully collected the materials for his work (Garnier, ed. Hippeau, pp. 6, 205, 206), and that his view is entitled to just as much consideration as that of the Icelander, founded upon the evidence of Robert or Benedict;—that of the three writers who follow Garnier, two, William of Canterbury and Edward Grim, were English (William of Canterbury may have been Irish by birth, but he was English by education and domicile) and might therefore have been able to check any errors caused by the different nationality of their guide:—and that even if the case resolved itself into a question between the authority of Garnier and that of Benedict or Robert (which can hardly be admitted), they would be of at least equal weight, and the balance of intrinsic probability would be on Garnier’s side. For his story points directly to the Danegeld; and we have the indisputable witness of the Pipe Rolls that the Danegeld, in some shape or other, was levied at intervals throughout the Norman reigns and until the year 1163, when it vanished for ever. On the other hand, the Red King’s “ungeld” upon the Church lands, like all his other “ungelds,” certainly died with him; and nothing can well be more unlikely than that Henry II. in the very midst of his early reforms should have reintroduced, entirely without excuse and without necessity, one of the most obnoxious and unjust of the measures which had been expressly abolished in “the time of his grandfather King Henry.”

Note B.
THE COUNCIL OF CLARENDON.

There is some difficulty as to both the date and the duration of this council. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 176) gives the date of meeting as January 13; R. Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 312) as January 25; while the official copy of the Constitutions (Summa Causæ, Robertson, Becket, vol. iv. p. 208; Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 140) gives the closing day as January 30 (“quartâ die ante Purificationem S. Mariæ”). As to the duration of the council, we learn from Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii. p. 279) and Gerv. Cant. (as above, p. 178) that there was an adjournment of at least one night; while Gilbert Foliot (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. Ep. ccxxv. pp. 527–529) says “Clarendonæ ... continuato triduo id solum actum est ut observandarum regni consuetudinum et dignitatum a nobis fieret absoluta promissio;” and that “die vero tertio,” after a most extraordinary scene, Thomas “antiquas regni consuetudines antiquorum memoriâ in commune propositas et scripto commendatas, de cætero domino nostro regi se fideliter observaturum in verbo veritatis absolute promittens, in vi nobis injunxit obedientiæ sponsione simili nos obligare.” This looks at first glance as if meant to describe the closing scene of the council, in which case its whole duration would be limited to three days. But it seems possible to find another interpretation which would enable us to reconcile all the discordant dates, by understanding Gilbert’s words as referring to the verbal discussion at the opening of the council, before the written Constitutions were produced at all. Gilbert does indeed expressly mention “customs committed to writing”; but this may very easily be a piece of confusion either accidental or intentional. On this supposition the chronology may be arranged as follows:—The council meets on January 13 (Gerv. Cant.). That day and the two following are spent in talking over the primate; towards evening of the third—which will be January 15—he yields, and the bishops with him (Gilb. Foliot). Then they begin to discuss what they have promised; the debate warms and lengthens; Thomas, worn out with his three days’ struggle and seeing the rocks ahead, begs for a respite till the morrow (Herb. Bosh.). On that morrow—i.e. January 16—Henry issues his commission to the “elders,” and the council remains in abeyance till they are ready with their report. None of our authorities tell us how long an interval elapsed between the issue of the royal commission and its report. Herbert, indeed, seems to imply that the discussion on the constitutions began one night and the written report was brought up next day. But this is only possible on the supposition that it had been prepared secretly beforehand, of which none of the other writers shew any suspicion. If the thing was not prepared beforehand, it must have taken some time to do; and even if it was, the king and the commissioners would surely, for the sake of appearances, make a few days’ delay to give a shew of reality to their investigations. Nine days is not too much to allow for preparation of the report. On January 25, then, it is brought up, and the real business of the council begins in earnest on the day named by R. Diceto. And if Thomas fought over every one of the sixteen constitutions in the way of which Herbert gives us a specimen, six days more may very well have been spent in the discussion, which would thus end, as the Summa Causæ says, on January 30.

CHAPTER II.
HENRY AND ROME.
1164–1172.

With the archbishop’s flight into France the struggle between him and the king entered upon a new phase. Its intrinsic importance was almost entirely lost, and it became simply an element in the wider questions of general European politics. In England Thomas’s departure left Henry sole master of the field; the Constitutions of Clarendon were put in force without delay and without difficulty; a year later they were followed up by an Assize, significantly issued from the same place, which laid the foundations of the whole later English system of procedure in criminal causes; and thenceforth the work of legal and judicial reform went on almost without a break, totally unaffected by the strife which continued to rage between king and primate for the next five years. The social condition of the country was only indirectly affected by it. The causes which had ostensibly given rise to it—the principle involved in the acceptance or rejection of the Constitutions—did not appeal strongly to the national mind, and had already become obscured and subordinated to the personal aspect which the quarrel had assumed at Northampton. As in the case of Anselm, it was on this personal aspect alone that popular feeling really fastened; and in this point of view the advantage was strongly on the archbishop’s side. Thomas, whose natural gifts had already made him a sort of popular idol, was set by the high-handed proceedings of the council in the light of a victim of regal tyranny; and the sweeping and cruel proscriptions inflicted upon all who were in the remotest way connected with him tended still further to excite popular sympathy for his wrongs and turn it away from his persecutor. But the sympathy was for the individual, not for the cause. The principle of the clerical immunities had no hold upon the minds of the people or even of the clergy at large. Even among the archbishop’s own personal friends, almost the only men who clave to it with anything like the same ardour as himself were his two old comrades of the Curia Theobaldi, Bishop John of Poitiers and John of Salisbury; and even the devotion of John of Salisbury, which is one of the brightest jewels in Becket’s crown, was really the devotion of friend to friend, of Churchman to primate, of a generous, chivalrous soul to what seemed the oppressed and down-trodden side, rather than the devotion of a partizan to party principle. Herbert of Bosham, the primate’s shadow and second self, who clave to his side through good report and evil report and looked upon him as a hero and a martyr from first to last, was nevertheless the author of the famous verdict which all the searching criticism of later times has never yet been able to amend: “Both parties had a zeal for God; which zeal was according to knowledge, His judgement alone can determine.”[210]

- [210] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.) p. 273. The whole passage from “O rex et o pontifex” to “judicium” (pp. 272, 273) should be compared with the admirable commentary of Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 16 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 140–141).

Cool, dispassionate thinkers like Gilbert Foliot, on the other hand, while inclining towards the cause which Thomas had at heart, recoiled from his mode of upholding it as little less than suicidal. In Gilbert’s view it was Thomas who had betrayed those “rights of his order” which he proclaimed so loudly, by forsaking the attitude of passive resistance which the bishops had adopted at Westminster and in which they were practically unassailable, and staking everything upon the king’s good faith, without security, in the meeting at Oxford and the council at Clarendon:—it was Thomas who by his subsequent conduct—his rash attempts at flight, his rapid changes of front at Northampton in first admitting and then denying the royal jurisdiction, his final insult to the king in coming to the council cross in hand, and his undignified departure from the realm—had frustrated the efforts whereby wiser and cooler heads might have brought the king to a better mind and induced him to withdraw the Constitutions:—and it was not Thomas, but his suffragans, left to bear the brunt of a storm which they had neither deserved nor provoked, who were really in a fair way to become confessors and martyrs for a Church brought into jeopardy by its own primate.[211] Gilbert in fact saw clearly that the importance of the point at issue between king and archbishop was as nothing compared to the disastrous consequences which must result from their protracted strife. It threatened nothing less than ruin to the intellectual and religious revival which Theobald had fostered so carefully and so successfully. The best hopes of the movement were bound up with the alliance between Church and state which had been cemented at Henry’s accession; that alliance was now destroyed; instead of the Church’s most valuable fellow-worker, the king had been made her bitter foe; and the work of revival was left to be carried on—if it could be carried on at all—in the teeth of the royal opposition and without a leader, while the man who should have directed it was only a perpetual stumbling-block in the path of those who had to supply as best they could the place left deserted by his flight. It was upon Gilbert of London that this burthen chiefly fell; and it is in Gilbert’s position that we may find a key to the subsequent direction of the controversy, as far as England was concerned.

- [211] Ep. ccxxv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 526 et seq.

For full twenty years before Becket’s rise to the primacy Gilbert Foliot had been one of the most respected members of the reforming party in the English Church. While Thomas was a worldly young subdeacon in the household of Archbishop Theobald, while as chancellor he was outshining the king in luxurious splendour or riding in coat of mail at the head of his troops, Gilbert was setting the pattern of ecclesiastical discipline and furnishing the steadiest and most valued assistance to the primate’s schemes of reform. Trained no less than Henry of Winchester in the old Cluniac traditions of ecclesiastical authority, his credit had never been shaken by rashness and inconsistency such as had marred Henry’s labours; and it would have been neither strange nor blameworthy if he had cherished a hope of carrying on Theobald’s work as Theobald’s successor. Gilbert, however, solemnly denied that he had ever sought after or desired the primacy;[212] and his conduct does not seem to furnish any just ground for assuming the falsehood of the denial. His opposition to the election of Thomas was thoroughly consistent with his position and known views; equally so was the support and co-operation which Thomas, as soon as he was fairly launched into his new course of action, anxiously sought to obtain from him, and which he for a while steadily gave. He had begun to find such co-operation difficult even before the question of the clerical immunities arose at the council of Westminster. On that question, in itself, the primate and the bishop of London were at one; but they differed completely in their way of treating it. To the impulsive, short-sighted, downright Thomas it was the one, sole, all-absorbing question of life and death; to the calm, far-seeing, cautious Gilbert it was a provoking hindrance—raised up partly by the primate’s own bad management—to the well-being of interests far too serious and too wide-reaching to be imperilled for a mere point of administrative detail. He took up his position definitely at the council of Northampton. The customs being once accepted, he held it the true Churchman’s duty to obey them, to make the best and not the worst of them, while desiring and labouring for their abrogation, but only by pacific means. A temporary submission was the least of two evils. It was infinitely safer to bend to the storm and trust to the influences of time and conciliation for turning the mind of the king, than to run the risk of driving him into irreconcileable hostility to the Church. For hostility to the Church meant something far worse now than in the days when William Rufus and Henry I. had set up their regal authority against primate and Pope. It meant a widening of the schism which was rending western Christendom in twain; it meant the accession of the whole Angevin dominions to the party of the Emperor and the anti-Pope, and the severance of all the ties between the English Church and her continental sisters which Theobald, Eugene and Adrian had laboured so diligently to secure.

- [212] Ep. ccxxv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 522, 523.

The dread of this catastrophe explains also the attitude of the Pope. In the long dreary tale of negotiation and intrigue which has to be traced through the maze of the Becket correspondence, the most inconsistent and self-contradictory, the most undecided and undignified, the most unsatisfactory and disappointing part of all is that played by Alexander III. It is however only fair to remember that, in this and in all like cases, the Pope’s part was also the most difficult one. No crown in Christendom pressed so sorely on its wearer’s brow as the triple tiara:—“It may well look bright,” Adrian IV. had been wont to say to his friend John of Salisbury, “for it is a crown of fire!” Adrian indeed, though his short reign was one of marked vigour and prosperity, declared that if he had had any idea of the thorns with which S. Peter’s chair was filled, he would have begged his bread in England or remained buried in the cloisters of S. Rufus to the end of his days sooner than thrust himself into such a thicket of troubles.[213] For it was not only “the care of all the churches” that rested upon a medieval Pope, but the care of all the states as well. The court of Rome had grown into the final court of appeal for all Christendom; the Pope was expected to be the universal referee, arbitrator and peacemaker of Europe, to hold the balance between contending parties, to penetrate and disentangle the intricacies of political situations which baffled the skill of the most experienced diplomatists, to exercise a sort of equitable jurisdiction on a vast scale over the whole range of political as well as social life. Earlier and later pontiffs may have voluntarily brought this burthen upon themselves; most of the Popes of the twelfth century, at any rate, seem to have groaned under it as a weight too heavy for any human strength to bear. Unprincipled as their policy often seemed, there was not a little justice in the view of John of Salisbury, that a position so exceptional could not be brought within the scope of ordinary rules of conduct, and that only those who had themselves felt its difficulties could be really competent to judge it at all.[214] Adrian’s energetic spirit was worn out by it in four years;[215] yet his position was easy compared to that of Alexander III. Alexander was a pontiff without a throne, the head of a Church in captivity and exile; dependent on the support of the most selfish and untrustworthy of living sovereigns; with Italy and Germany arrayed against him under the rule of a schismatic Emperor, and with the fidelity of the Angevin house hanging upon a thread which the least strain, the lightest touch, might break at any moment. Moreover Alexander was no Englishman like his predecessor. He had no inborn comprehension and no experience of the ways and tempers of the north; he had no bosom-friend, no John of Salisbury, to stand as interpreter between him and the Angevin king or the English primate; he understood neither of them, and he was almost equally afraid of both. His chief anxiety was to have as little as possible to do with them and their quarrel, and the fugitive archbishop was to him anything but a welcome guest.

- [213] Joh. Salisb. Polycrat., l. viii. c. 23 (Giles, vol. iv. p. 367).

- [214] Joh. Salisb., Polycrat., l. viii. c. 23 (Giles, vol. iv. p. 363).

- [215] Ibid. (pp. 366, 367). “Licet nihil aliud lædat, necesse est ut citissime vel solo labore deficiat [sc. Papa].... Dum superest, ipsum interroga.” This was written early in 1159, and in August Adrian died.

It was of course impossible for the Pope to withhold his sympathy and his support from a prelate who came to him as a confessor for the privileges of the Church. But it was equally impossible for him to run the risk of driving Henry and his dominions into schism by espousing Thomas’s cause as decisively as Thomas himself desired. Placed thus in what Adrian had once declared to be the ordinary position of a Roman pontiff—“between hammer and anvil”—Alexander drifted into a policy of shifts and contradictions, tergiversations and double-dealings, which irritated Henry and which Thomas simply failed to comprehend. If Gilbert Foliot and Arnulf of Lisieux could have succeeded in their efforts to induce the contending parties to accept a compromise, the Pope would have been only too glad to sanction it. But it was useless to talk of compromise where Thomas Becket was concerned. To all the remoter consequences, the ultimate bearings of the quarrel, he was totally blind. For him there was but one question in the world, the one directly before him; it could have but two sides, right and wrong, between which all adjustment was impossible, and with which considerations of present expediency or future consequences had nothing to do. All Gilbert’s arguments for surrender, his solemn warnings of the peril of schism, his pleadings that it was better for the English Church to become for a while a sickly member of the ecclesiastical body than to be cut off from it altogether,[216] Thomas looked upon, at best, as proposals for doing evil that good might come. After his humiliating experience at Clarendon he seems to have felt that he was no match for Henry’s subtlety; his flight was evidently caused chiefly by dread of being again entrapped into a betrayal of what he held to be his duty; and once, in an agony of self-reproach and self-distrust, he laid his archiepiscopal ring at the Pope’s feet and prayed to be released from the burthen of an office for which he felt himself unworthy and unfit.[217] Strong as was the temptation to pacify Henry thus easily, Alexander felt that the Church could not allow such a sacrifice of her champion; and Thomas never again swerved from his determination to be satisfied with nothing short of complete surrender on the part of the king. For this one object he laboured, pleaded, argued, censured, during the next six years without ceasing; his own suffragans, the monastic orders, Pope, cardinals, the Empress Matilda, the king of France, none of them had a moment’s peace from his passionate endeavours to press them into a service which he seemed to expect them all to regard as a matter of life and death not merely for England but for all Christendom. Doubtless it was a sad waste of energy and a sad perversion of enthusiasm; yet the enthusiasm contrasts pathetically, almost heroically, with the spirit in which it was met. There was something noble, if there was also something exasperatingly unpractical, in a man who, absorbed in his devotion to one mistaken idea, never even saw that he and his cause were becoming the pretexts and the tools of half the political intrigues of Europe, and whom the experience of a lifetime failed to teach that all the world was not as single-hearted as himself. Intellectually, a mind thus constituted must needs provoke and deserve the impatient scorn of a cool clear brain such as Gilbert Foliot’s; but its very intellectual weakness was the source of its true strength. It is this dogged adherence to one fixed idea, this simplicity of aim, which appeals to the average crowd of mankind far more strongly than the larger and more statesmanlike temper of men like Foliot, or like Henry himself. Whether or no the cause be worthy—whether or no the zeal be according to knowledge—it is the zealot, not the philosopher, who becomes the popular hero and martyr.

- [216] Ep. cviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), p. 207.

- [217] Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 46; Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 342, 343; E. Grim (ibid.), p. 403; Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 76; Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 305–313. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 16 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 140), gives this scene as having occurred, “ut dicitur,” at the council of Tours.

From the moment of Thomas’s arrival in France, then, little though he perceived it himself, the direct question at issue between him and the king became in every point of view save his own entirely subordinate to the indirect consequences of their quarrel; the ecclesiastical interest became secondary to the political, which involved matters of grave importance to all Europe. The one person to whom the archbishop’s flight was most thoroughly welcome was Louis of France. Louis and Henry were nominally at peace; but to Louis their alliance was simply a shield behind which he could plan without danger his schemes for undermining Henry’s power on the continent, and no better tool for this purpose could possibly have fallen into his hands than the fugitive archbishop of Canterbury. Thomas had indeed just enough perception of the state of affairs between the two kings—of which he must have acquired considerable experience in his chancellor days—to choose going to live on his own resources at Pontigny rather than accept the hospitality of his sovereign’s enemy.[218] This arrangement probably delighted Louis, for it furnished him with a safe answer to Henry’s complaints and remonstrances about harbouring the “traitor”—Thomas was in sanctuary in a Cistercian abbey in Burgundy, and France was not harbouring him at all; while the welcome which Louis gave to the primate’s exiled friends and the sympathy which he displayed for their cause heightened his own reputation for devotion to the Church and served as a foil to set off more conspicuously the supposed hostility of Henry. To Louis in short the quarrel was something which might turn to his own advantage by helping to bring Henry into difficulties; and he used it accordingly with a skill peculiar to himself, making a great shew of disinterested zeal and friendly mediation, and all the while taking care that the breach should be kept open till its healing was required for his own interest.

- [218] Anon. II. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 109.

With such an onlooker as this Henry knew that he must play his game with the utmost caution. He had been provoked by the personal opposition of his old friend into standing upon his regal dignity more stiffly than he would have thought it worth while to do so long as it remained unchallenged. On his side, too, there was a principle at stake, and he could not give it up unconditionally; but he might have been induced to accept a compromise, had not the obstinacy of Thomas forced him into a corresponding attitude of unbending determination. So keen was his sense of the danger attendant upon the fugitive archbishop’s presence in France that it led him to postpone once more the work which he had been planning in England and cross over to Normandy again early in 1165.[219] Lent was passed in fruitless attempts to bring about a triple conference between the two kings and the Pope; Henry refused to allow Thomas to be present; Thomas begged the Pope not to expose himself to Henry’s wiles without him who alone could help him to see through them; and Alexander, now busy with preparations for his return to Rome, was probably not sorry to escape by declaring that for a temporal prince to dictate who should or who should not form part of the Pope’s suite was a claim which had never been heard of before and which he could not possibly admit.[220] Immediately after Easter he set out on his journey homewards.

- [219] Rob. Torigni, a. 1165.

- [220] Alan Tewkesb. (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), pp. 346, 347; evidently taken from the Pope’s own letter, extant only in the Icelandic version, in Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 329.

The rival party saw their opportunity and seized it without delay. Their fortunes were now at a very low ebb; the antipope Victor had died in April; his chief supporter, Cardinal Guy of Crema, had succeeded him under the title of Paschal III.; but Italy had cast him off, and even in Germany the tide was turning against him. The Emperor, however, clung with unwavering determination to his original policy; and he at once saw in the English king’s quarrel with the Church a means of gaining for Paschal’s cause what would amply compensate for all that had been lost. Before Alexander was fairly out of the French kingdom an embassy from Germany came to Henry at Rouen, bringing proposals for an alliance to be secured by two marriages: one between the English princess Matilda, Henry’s eldest daughter, and the Emperor’s cousin Duke Henry of Saxony; the other between Henry’s second daughter and Frederic’s own little son. The chief ambassador was Reginald, archbishop-elect of Cöln, who from the time of Frederic’s accession—two years before that of Henry—had been his chancellor and confidential adviser, playing a part curiously like that of Thomas Becket, till in the very year of the English chancellor’s removal to Canterbury he was appointed to the see of Cöln. There the parallel with Thomas ended; for Reginald was the most extreme champion of the privileges not of the Church but of the Imperial Crown, and was even more closely identified with the schismatic party than Frederic himself. Henry sent him over to the queen, who had been left as regent in England, to receive from her a formal promise of her daughter’s hand to the duke of Saxony, in a great council convened at Westminster for that purpose. The old justiciar Earl Robert of Leicester refused the kiss of peace to the schismatic and caused the altars at which he had celebrated to be thrown down,[221] thereby saving Henry from the fatal blunder of committing himself publicly to the cause of the anti-pope, and England from the dangers of open schism. But he could not prevent the king from sending two clerks to a council which met at Würzburg on Whit-Sunday to abjure Pope Alexander and acknowledge Paschal; and although the fact was strenuously denied, it seems impossible to doubt that they did take the oath at the Emperor’s hands in their master’s name;[222] indeed, Reginald of Cöln boasted that Henry had promised to make all the bishops in his dominions do the same.

- [221] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 318. He mistakenly thinks that the king was at Westminster, and he also thinks the embassy came in 1167. Its true date, 1165, is shown by the letters referred to in next note.

- [222] Epp. xcviii.–ci. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 184–195). Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 52, 53. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 331.

A crisis seemed imminent, but Henry managed to avoid it. From the Emperor’s solicitations, from the Pope’s remonstrances, from all the pleadings of friends and all the intrigues of foes, he suddenly made his escape by flying back to England and plunging into a Welsh war which kept him all the summer safe out of their reach,[223] and furnished him with an excuse for postponing indefinitely the completion of his alliance with the schismatic party. Such an alliance would in fact have cost far more than it was worth. Alexander was once more safely seated upon S. Peter’s chair, and was urging Thomas to throw himself wholly on the protection of the king of France; Louis was in the highest state of triumph, rejoicing over the birth of his long-desired son; while the whole Angevin dominions, which Eleanor was governing in her husband’s absence, were full of suppressed disaffection and surrounded with threatening or intriguing foes.[224] In Lent 1166 therefore Henry hurried back to Normandy to hold a conference with Louis, and, if possible, to free his own hands for the work which lay before him.

- [223] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 197) says Henry went into Wales in 1165, “quo facilius domini Papæ vel etiam Cantuariensis archiepiscopi ... declinaret sententiam.”

- [224] “Movetur enim [rex] Francorum invidiâ, calumniisque Flandrensium, Wallensium improbitate, Scottorum insidiis, temeritate Britonum, Pictavorumque fœderibus, interioris Aquitaniæ sumptibus, Gasconum levitate, et (quod gravius est) simultate fere omnium quoscumque ditioni ejus constat esse subjectos.” Ep. clxii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 313, 314.

The work was in truth a vast and complex one. At the age of thirty-three Henry was already planning out an elaborate scheme for the future of his children and the distribution of his territories, in which the election of his eldest son as joint-king in England was but the first and least difficult step. Normandy and Anjou, as well as England, had to be secured for little Henry; Aquitaine was if possible to be settled upon Richard as his mother’s heir; for Geoffrey Henry was bent upon acquiring the Breton duchy.[225] Conan IV., whom Henry had in 1158 established as duke of Britanny, had but one child, a daughter, whose hand, together with the reversion of her father’s territories, the king was anxious to secure for his son. This however required the assent not only of Conan but of Louis of France, and also of the Breton barons, who bitterly resented the Norman interference which had set Conan as ruler over them, and were inclined to resist to the uttermost an arrangement which would bring them still more directly under the Norman yoke; while Louis was but too ready to encourage them in their resistance. A campaign in the summer of 1166, however, another in August 1167, and a third in the following spring so far broke their opposition[226] that in May 1169 Geoffrey was sent into Britanny to receive their homage as heir to the dukedom; three months later his father joined him,[227] and at Christmas they held their court together at Nantes,[228] whence they made a sort of triumphal progress through the duchy, receiving homage and fealty wherever they went.[229]

- [225] Will. Newb. l. ii. c. 18 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 145, 146).

- [226] On the Breton campaign of 1166 see R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 329, and Rob. Torigni ad ann. Henry was near Fougères on June 28 (Ep. ccix., Robertson, Becket, vol. v. p. 421); he was besieging Fougères itself on July 13–14 (Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 96). On the campaigns of 1167 and 1168 see Rob. Torigni ad ann., the meagre entries in a Breton chronicle, a. 1168–1169 (Morice, Hist. Bret., preuves, vol. i. col. 104; Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 560), and Chron. S. Albin. a. 1167 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 40), which tells of Louis’s share in the matter. See also the account of Henry’s correspondence with King Arthur in Draco Norm., l. ii. cc. 17–22, vv. 941–1282 (Howlett, Will. Newb., vol. ii. pp. 695–707). According to this writer, one of the Breton leaders—“Arturi dapifer, Rollandus, consul et idem tunc Britonum” (Mr. Howlett suggests that this may be Roland of Dinan, ib. p. 696 note) —wrote a letter to Arthur imploring his aid for Britanny, and received a reassuring answer; Henry also received a long epistle from the blameless king, to which, “subridens sociis, nil pavefactus,” (c. 21, v. 1218, p. 705) he returned a polite and diplomatic answer. Unluckily the good monk omits to say how the letters were conveyed, and gives us no light upon the postal arrangements between Britanny and Avalon—which by the way he places among “silvas ... Cornubiæ, proxima castra loco,” whatever that may mean (c. 20, vv. 1213, 1214, p. 705). It is quite possible that some of the Breton leaders did seek to rouse the spirit of their followers by publishing an imaginary correspondence with the mythic hero-king whose existence was to most of the common people in Britanny at that time almost as much an article of faith as any in the Creed; it is possible too that they were themselves so far carried away by the same illusion as to attempt to work upon Henry by similar means; and in that case it is extremely probable that Henry, with his Angevin tact and sense of humour, would meet the appeal pretty much as the Bec writer represents. But the letters given in the Draco must be the monk’s own composition. Neither Roland nor Henry can have been capable of stringing together such a quantity of pseudo-history, ancient and modern, as is therein contained.

- [227] Rob. Torigni, a. 1169.

- [228] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 337. Gesta Hen. [“Benedict of Peterborough”] (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 3. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 3.

- [229] Gesta Hen. as above.

It had proved easier to subdue Britanny than to hold Aquitaine. The half independent princes of the south, so scornful of a king beyond the Loire, were at least equally scornful of a king from beyond the sea; in November 1166 Henry was obliged to summon them to a conference at Chinon,[230] and to relieve Eleanor of her task of government by sending her to keep Christmas in England,[231] while he himself took her place at Poitiers.[232] His foes seized their opportunity to revive the vexed question of Toulouse; a meeting with Raymond at Grandmont and an attempt to assert Henry’s ducal authority over the count of Auvergne led to a fresh rupture with Louis;[233] and in the spring of 1168 the discontented barons of Aquitaine, secure of the French king’s goodwill, broke into open revolt. In the midst of a negotiation with Louis, Henry hurried away to subdue them.[234] Scarcely had he turned northward again when Earl Patrick of Salisbury, whom he had appointed to assist Eleanor in the government of the duchy, was murdered by one of the rebel leaders;[235] and Eleanor was once more left to stand her ground alone in Poitou, while her husband was fighting the Bretons, staving off the ecclesiastical censures which threatened him, and vainly endeavouring to pacify Louis, who now openly shewed himself as the champion of all Henry’s disaffected vassals, Breton, Poitevin, Scottish and Welsh,[236] as well as of the exiled archbishop.

[230] Ep. ccliii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), p. 74.

[231] Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., pp. 104, 108.

[232] Rob. Torigni, a. 1167. Cf. Ep. cclxxvii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), p. 131.

[233] Rob. Torigni, a. 1167. Cf. Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1166 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 40, 149).

[234] Rob. Torigni, a. 1168. Ep. ccccix. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), p. 408.

[235] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 205. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 331. Rob. Torigni, a. 1168. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 273, 274. This last writer states that the slayer was Guy of Lusignan, and that Guy fled to Jerusalem (of which he afterwards became king) to escape the punishment of this crime. This story has been generally adopted by modern historians. But its latter half is incompatible with the appearance of “Guy of Lusignan” among the rebels in Aquitaine in 1173, five years after the death of Patrick (Gesta Hen., Stubbs, vol. i. p. 46); and the whole of it seems to rest solely on Roger’s misunderstanding of the passage in the Gesta which he was copying. In that passage Guy is introduced as “Guido de Lezinan, frater Gaufridi de Lezinan, qui Patricium comitem Salesbiriensem tempore hostilitatis ... occiderat. Erat enim prædictus Guido,” etc.; then comes an account of his adventures in Palestine (Gesta Hen., Stubbs, vol. i. p. 343). Roger of Howden chose to make qui refer to Guido; but it might just as well, or even better, refer to Gaufridus. Guy comes upon the historical scene for the first time in 1173. It seems pretty clear that Geoffrey was his elder brother, and took a leading part in southern politics and warfare long before Guy was of an age to join in them. If Patrick was slain by either of the brothers, therefore, it was by Geoffrey and not by Guy. Admitting this much, however, there is still no ground for looking upon even Geoffrey as a murderer who had committed such a crime as to be obliged to fly from justice. For “Geoffrey of Lusignan” stood by the side of Guy among the rebels of 1173 (Gesta Hen., Stubbs, vol. i. p. 46); “Geoffrey of Lusignan” and his brothers claimed La Marche against King Henry between 1178 and 1180 (Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 70, Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 324); “Geoffrey of Lusignan” rose against Richard in 1188 (Gesta Hen., Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 34; Rog. Howden, Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 339; R. Diceto, Stubbs, vol. ii. pp. 54, 55); and it was not till after he had in this revolt slain a special friend of Richard, that he betook himself to Palestine, where he arrived in the summer of the same year (Itin. Reg. Ric., Stubbs, p. 26), and where, moreover, he and Richard afterwards became firm allies. Geoffrey may therefore enjoy the benefit of the plea which Bishop Stubbs (Itin. Reg. Ric., introd. p. cxxiv, note) puts forward for Guy, that “there is nothing to show that Patrick was not killed in fair fight.” But it seems pretty clear that for the heroic king of Jerusalem himself no such plea is needed at all.

[236] Rob. Torigni, a. 1168; Epp. ccccix., ccccxxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), pp. 408, 455, 456.

Henry meanwhile was endeavouring to strengthen his political position by alliances in more remote quarters; the marriage of his eldest daughter with the duke of Saxony had taken place early in 1168;[237] two years before, the hand of one of her sisters had been half promised to the marquis of Montferrat for his son, in return for his good offices with the Pope;[238] and a project was now on foot for the marriage of Henry’s second daughter, Eleanor, with the king of Castille—a marriage which took place in 1169;[239] while the infant Jane, who was scarcely four years old, was betrothed to the boy-king William of Sicily.[240] For Richard his father was now endeavouring to gain the hand of Adela of France, the younger daughter of Louis and Constance, as a sort of security for the investiture of Aquitaine; while at the same time Henry was on the one hand making interest with the Emperor’s Italian foes, the rising commonwealths of Lombardy and the jurisconsults of Bologna;[241] and on the other, Frederic was endeavouring to regain his alliance by an embassy headed by his own cousin, Henry’s new-made son-in-law, the duke of Saxony.[242]

- [237] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 205. From the Pipe Roll of the year, with Mr. Eyton’s comment (Itin. Hen. II., p. 109), it seems that Matilda and her mother crossed the sea together in September 1167, and that Matilda went on to Germany, where she was married early next year, while Eleanor returned to England before Christmas. Rob. Torigni, a. 1167.

- [238] Ep. cclii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), p. 68.

- [239] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 334. The original scheme seems to have been for marrying both Eleanor and Jane to Spanish sovereigns, among whom, however, Castille is not named. In a letter written in the summer of 1168 John of Salisbury speaks of “regum, Navariensis aut Aragonensis scilicet, quibus filias suas dare disponit [rex].” Ep. ccccxxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.) p. 457.

- [240] Ep. dxxxviii. (ib. vol. vii.) p. 26. Jane was born at Angers in October 1165; Rob. Torigni, ad ann.

- [241] Epp. dxxxviii., dxxxix. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), pp. 26, 30, 31.

- [242] Rob. Torigni, a. 1168. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 205. Draco Norm., l. iii. cc. 4, 5, vv. 191–360 (Howlett, Will. Newb., vol. ii. pp. 718–724).

All this political, ecclesiastical and diplomatic coil Henry had to unravel almost single-handed. Of the group of counsellors who had stood around him in his early years, Arnulf of Lisieux on one side of the sea and Richard de Lucy on the other were almost the sole survivors. He had lost the services of his constable Henry of Essex under very painful circumstances a few months before that council at Woodstock which saw the beginning of his quarrel with Thomas. The constable was accused by Robert de Montfort of having committed high treason six years before by purposely letting fall the standard and falsely proclaiming the king’s death at the battle of Consilt. Henry of Essex declared that he had dropped the standard in the paralysis of despair, really believing the king to be dead; and it is evident from the high commands which he held in the war of Toulouse and elsewhere that the king continued to treat him with undiminished confidence, and to regard him as one of his most valuable ministers and friends. The charge once made, however, could only be met by ordeal of battle. The encounter took place at Reading; Henry of Essex went down before his accuser’s lance; and all that his sovereign could do for him was to save his life by letting the monks of the neighbouring abbey carry his body off the field as if for burial, and when he proved to be still alive, suffering him to remain as a brother of the house, while his property was confiscated to the Crown and his services were lost to the state.[243] The king’s mother died in the autumn of 1167;[244] his old friend and adviser Earl Robert of Leicester passed away in 1168.[245] A desperate attempt was even made to part him from his wife, in order to get rid of his rights over Aquitaine;[246] while the man who had once been his most successful diplomatic agent and his unfailing helper against the wiles of all his enemies was now the most formidable tool in their hands.

- [243] Rob. Torigni, a. 1163. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 5 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 108). Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode, Camden Soc.), pp. 50–52. For date see Palgrave, Eng. Commonwealth, vol. ii. pp. xxii, xxiii.

- [244] Rob. Torigni, a. 1167. Draco Norm., l. iii. c. 1, vv. 1–12 (Howlett, Will. Newb., vol. ii. p. 711). Chron. S. Serg., a. 1167 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 150).

- [245] Rob. Torigni, a. 1168. Ann. Waverl. a. 1168 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. p. 239). Chron. Mailros, a. 1168.

- [246] See the Gradus cognationis inter regem et reginam (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi. p. 266). “Hanc computationem præsentaverunt Pictavenses cardinalibus quando S. Thomas exsulabat, sed non sunt auditi.” The “computation” as there stated is wrong; but the right one really does leave Henry and Eleanor within the forbidden degrees. (See above, vol. i. p. 393, note 2{1161}, and p. 445, note 11{1418}). They were cousins in the fifth degree, their common ancestress being Herleva of Falaise.

It was for his children’s sake that Henry at last bent his pride to do what he had vowed never to do again. At Montmirail, on the feast of Epiphany 1169, he renewed his homage to Louis, made full submission to him, and promised compensation to the Breton and Poitevin barons for their losses in the recent wars.[247] Next day young Henry did homage to the French king for the counties of Anjou and Maine,[248] and, as it seems, of Britanny, which his brother Geoffrey was to hold under him.[249] Richard did the like for Aquitaine, of which Louis granted him the investiture,[250] together with a promise of Adela’s hand.[251] Three weeks later young Henry, in his new capacity of count of Anjou, officiated in Paris as seneschal to the king of France;[252] he afterwards repeated his homage to Louis’s son and heir, and received that of his own brother Geoffrey for the duchy of Britanny.[253]

- [247] Ep. cccclxi. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), pp. 506, 507.

- [248] Ib. p. 507. Rob. Torigni a. 1169. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 208.

- [249] Rob. Torigni, a. 1169, and Gerv. Cant. (as above) say that young Henry did homage to Louis for Britanny; Normandy was not mentioned, the homage done for it by young Henry in 1160 being counted sufficient (ibid.). The elder king himself kept Touraine on the old terms of homage to Theobald of Blois (Ep. cccclxi. as above).

- [250] Ep. cccclxi., Rob. Torigni and Gerv. Cant. as above.

- [251] Gerv. Cant. as above.

- [252] Rob. Torigni, a. 1169.

- [253] Ibid.

One thing alone was now lacking to the completion of Henry’s scheme: the crowning of his heir. There can be no doubt that when he sent Thomas and the child to England together—the one to be chosen king and the other to be made primate—he intended the coronation to take place as soon as he himself could rejoin them. Its performance, delayed by his own continued absence on the continent, had however been made impossible by his quarrel with Thomas. That the archbishop of Canterbury alone could lawfully crown a king of England was a constitutional as well as an ecclesiastical tradition so deeply rooted in the minds of Englishmen that nothing short of absolute necessity had induced Henry I. to set it aside in his own case; and still less could Henry II. venture to risk such an innovation in the case of his son.[254] Yet the prospect of a reconciliation with the primate seemed at this moment further off than ever.

- [254] The historical arguments on this subject may be seen in Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 110, and Ep. dclxxxiv. (ib. vol. vii.), pp. 328–330. Henry was once said to have projected getting the Pope himself to crown the child; Ep. lv. (ib. vol. v.), p. 100. Against this, of course, Canterbury could have had nothing to say.

Thomas’s first impulse on entering Pontigny had been to give himself up to a course of study, devotion and self-discipline more severe than anything which he had yet attempted. He secretly assumed the habit of the “white monks,”[255] and nearly ruined his delicate constitution by a rash endeavour to practise the rigorous abstinence enjoined by the rules of the order.[256] He grew more diligent than ever in prayer, meditation, and study of Holy Scripture.[257] But his restless, impetuous nature could not rise to the serene heights of more than worldly wisdom urged upon him by John of Salisbury, who truly insisted that such occupations alone were worthy of a true confessor.[258] In spite of John’s warnings and pleadings, he still kept all his friends—John himself included—ceaselessly at work in his behalf; and while he sought out in every church and convent in Gaul every rare and valuable book that he could hear of, to be copied for his cathedral library, he was also raking together for the same collection all the privileges, old or new, that could be disinterred from the Roman archives or extorted from the favour of the Pope.[259] Until Easter 1166 Alexander restrained him from any direct measures against the king;[260] then, unable to keep silence any longer, Thomas again took the matter into his own hands and wrote to Henry himself, earnestly imploring him to consider his ways and to grant his old friend a personal interview.[261] Henry was inexorable; Thomas wrote again, this time a torrent of mingled warnings, intreaties and remonstrances,[262] and with just as little effect. Then, towards the end of May, as the king was holding council with his barons at Chinon, a barefooted monk came to him with a third letter from the primate.[263] Once again Thomas expressed his longing for a personal meeting; once again he set forth the doctrine of the divine rights and duties of kings, and charged Henry, by the solemn memory of his coronation-vows, to restore to the English Church her privileges and her chief pastor. Only in the last sentence came a significant warning: “If not, then know of a surety that you shall feel the severity of Divine vengeance!”[264] And there was no doubt about its meaning; for the Empress Matilda had already transmitted to her son a threat sent to her by Thomas in plain words, that unless she could bring him to acknowledge his error, “shortly, yea, very shortly” the “sword of the Spirit” should be drawn against his dominions and even against himself.[265]

- [255] Alan Tewkesb. (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 345. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 64. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 315.

- [256] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 126, 127. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), pp. 412, 413. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 376–379. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 317.

- [257] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 77. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 379.

- [258] Ep. lxxxv. (ib. vol. v.), pp. 163, 164.

- [259] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

- [260] Ep. xcv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 179, 180.

- [261] Ep. clii. (ib. pp. 266–268).

- [262] Ep. cliii. (ib. pp. 269–278), translated by Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 100–106.

- [263] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 106. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 419. Cf. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 383–385. Eyton (Itin. Hen. II., p. 93) dates this council June 1, but this cannot be reconciled with Thomas’s subsequent proceedings.

- [264] Ep. cliv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 278–282), translated by Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 109–111.

- [265] Ep. clxxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. p. 361).

Harassed by disaster and revolt, provoked by the primate’s former letters, Henry, upon reading this one and hearing the messenger’s comment upon it—for Thomas had charged him to say a good deal more than he wrote[266]—might well feel that he was standing on the brink of a volcano. He turned desperately upon the bishops around him, half imploring, half commanding them to help him out of his strait, abusing them for a pack of traitors who would not trouble themselves to rid him of this one unmanageable foe, and exclaiming with a burst of tears that the archbishop was destroying him soul and body together; for he naturally expected nothing less than an interdict on his dominions and an anathema against himself, and both sanctioned by the Pope. When Henry was thus at his wits’ end, the only one among his continental advisers who was likely to have any counsel to offer him was Arnulf of Lisieux. Once more Arnulf proved equal to the occasion; he suggested that the primate’s intended censures should be forestalled by an appeal to the Pope. The remedy was a desperate one, for, as John of Salisbury triumphantly remarked when he heard of it, the king was flying in the face of his own Constitutions and confirming that very right of appeal which he was so anxious to abolish, by thus having recourse to it for his own protection. But there was no other loophole of escape; so the appeal was made, a messenger was despatched to give notice of it in England, close the ports and cut off all communication with Thomas and with the Pope; while the bishops of Lisieux and Séez set out for Pontigny to bid the primate stay his hand till the octave of Easter next, which was fixed for the term of Henry’s appeal.[267]

- [266] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 385.

- [267] Ep. cxciv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 381, 382. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 393, confuses this appeal with a later one.

They were too late. No sooner had the barefooted messenger returned with his tidings of the king’s irreconcileable wrath than Thomas hurried to Soissons on a pilgrimage to its three famous shrines:—those of the Blessed Virgin, who had been the object of his special reverence ever since he learned the Ave Maria at his mother’s knee; of S. Gregory the Great, the patron of the whole English Church and more particularly of Canterbury and its archbishops; and of S. Drausius, who was believed to have the power of rendering invincible any champion who spent a night in prayer before his relics. Before each of these shrines Thomas, like a warrior preparing for mortal combat, passed a night in solemn vigil, the last night being that of the festival of S. Drausius, and also of Ascension-day.[268] On the morrow he left Soissons;[269] on Whitsun-eve[270] he reached Vézelay, a little town distant only a day’s journey from Pontigny, and made famous by its great abbey, which boasted of possessing the body of S. Mary Magdalene. Thomas found the place crowded with pilgrims assembled to keep the Whitsun feast on this venerated spot. He was invited by the abbot to celebrate High Mass and preach on the festival day;[271] his sermon ended, he solemnly anathematized the royal customs and all their upholders, and excommunicated by name seven persons whom he denounced as special enemies to the Church; the two first being Henry’s confidential envoys John of Oxford and Richard of Ilchester, who had been the medium of his communications with the Emperor; while a third, Jocelyn de Bailleul, was one of his chief advisers, and a fourth was no less a personage than the justiciar, Richard de Lucy.[272] Thomas had set out from Soissons in the full determination to excommunicate Henry himself at the same time; but on his way he learned that the king was dangerously ill; he therefore contented himself with a solemn warning publicly addressed to him by name, calling him to repentance for the last time, and in default, threatening him with immediate excommunication.[273]

- [268] It was also the anniversary of his own ordination to the priesthood—June 2.

- [269] Ep. cxciv. (Robertson, vol. v.), p. 382.

- [270] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 391, says “proximâ ante festum die,” and he makes the festival that of S. Mary Magdalene, the patron of the place. Tempting, however, as his version is—for it would explain at once Thomas’s otherwise rather unaccountable choice of Vézelay for the scene of his proceedings, and the great concourse of people who evidently were assembled there—it is quite irreconcileable with the minute chronological details of John of Salisbury’s letter (Ep. cxciv. as above), written within a few weeks of the events, while Herbert’s story was written from memory, many years after. On the other hand, R. Diceto’s date (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 318), Ascension-day, is more impossible still.

- [271] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 391.

- [272] The details of the sentence are in Thomas’s own letters, Epp. cxcv., cxcvi., cxcviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 386–391, 392–397. Cf. Ep. cxciv. (ibid.), p. 383. The other excommunicated persons were Ralf de Broc, Hugh of S. Clare and Thomas Fitz-Bernard. Their crime was invasion of Church property. Richard of Ilchester and John of Oxford were condemned for their dealings with the schismatics; Richard de Lucy and Jocelyn de Bailleul, as being the authors of the Constitutions.

- [273] Epp. cxciv., cxcvi., cxcviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 382, 383, 391, 396. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 391, 392.

The news of these proceedings reached Henry when, sick and anxious, he was trying to gather up strength and energy for a campaign against the Bretons. He instantly despatched another messenger to England, bidding Richard de Lucy call an assembly of the bishops and clergy and compel them to make a general appeal to the Pope against the authority and jurisdiction of their primate.[274] The meeting was held in London[275] at midsummer.[276] The appeal was made and sent to the Pope in the name of all the bishops and clergy of England; but it is tolerably clear that the main body were merely passive followers, more or less willing, of Gilbert of London and Jocelyn of Salisbury, the former of whom was almost certainly the writer of the letter which conveyed the appeal to the Pope, as well as of that which announced it to the primate.[277] The hand of Gilbert Foliot was indeed so plainly visible that Thomas’s reply was addressed with equal plainness to him personally.[278] The long and sarcastic letter with which he retorted[279] was answered in a yet more startling fashion at the opening of the next year. As Gilbert stood before the high altar of his cathedral church on the feast of its patron saint a paper was thrust into his hand; to his dismay it proved to be a papal brief granting to Archbishop Thomas a commission as legate for all England, and commanding the bishops to render him unqualified obedience and to resign within two months whatever confiscated church property had been placed in their charge by the king. In an agony of distress Gilbert, who himself had the custody of the Canterbury estates, sent this news to the king, imploring him to grant permission that the Pope’s mandate might be obeyed, at least till some method could be devised for escaping from a dilemma which now looked well-nigh hopeless.[280] Henry, absorbed in a struggle with the Bretons, had already been provoked into a vengeance as impolitic as it was mean. He threatened the Cistercian abbots assembled on Holy Cross day at the general chapter of their order that if Thomas were not immediately expelled from Pontigny, he would send all the White Monks in his dominions to share the primate’s exile.[281] When the abbot of Pontigny carried this message home, Thomas could only bid him farewell and betake himself to the sole protection left him—that of the king of France. He left Pontigny on S. Martin’s day[282] 1166, and took up his abode as the guest of Louis in the abbey of S. Columba at Sens.[283]

[274] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 200.

[275] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 200. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 56.

[276] Ep. ccix. (ib. vol. v.), p. 421.

[277] Epp. cciv., ccv. (ib. vol. v.), pp. 403–413. Cf. Ep. ccix. (ibid.), p. 241, and Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 56, 57. The bishop of Exeter consented to appeal, but in a fashion of his own, of which however there is no trace in the letter actually sent to the Pope. Two prelates were absent: Walter of Rochester, who pleaded illness, and Henry of Winchester, who wrote in excuse: “Vocatus a summo Pontifice, nec appello nec appellare volo.” The others thought he meant that the Pope had cited him; “ipse vero summum Pontificem, summum Judicem intelligebat, ad cujus tribunal jamjam trahebatur examinandus, tanquam qui in multis diebus processerat et vitæ metis appropinquaret.” So says Will. Cant.; but John of Salisbury says distinctly that the letter of appeal was sealed by London, Winchester and Hereford (Ep. cclii., Robertson, Becket, vol. vi. p. 65). Can William have founded his pretty story on the old confusion (which is perpetually breaking out in his favourite authority, Garnier, and in other writers who have less excuse for it) between Wincestre and Wirecestre—and was Roger of Worcester the real absentee? He certainly did not share in the obloquy which this appeal brought upon Robert of Hereford, with whom hitherto he had usually been coupled by Thomas; on the contrary, he and Bartholomew of Exeter are henceforth always coupled together as fellow-sufferers for their loyalty to the primate.

[278] Epp. ccxxiii., ccxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 490–520).

[279] The famous “Multiplicem nobis et diffusam.” Ep. ccxxv. (ib. pp. 521–544).

[280] Ep. ccviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 417, 418). The Pope’s brief is Ep. clxxii. (ib. pp. 328, 329); it is dated “Anagniæ, vii. Idus Octobris,” but its true date is Easter-day, April 24 (see editor’s note, p. 329) —the actual date of the letter whereby Alexander notified his act to the English bishops; Ep. clxxiii. (Robertson, as above, pp. 229–231). The diocese (not the province) of York was exempted from Thomas’s legatine jurisdiction—the reason being that Roger of York was legate for Scotland (Ep. cclxx., ib. vol. vi. p. 119). Thomas sent the brief over to his friends Robert of Hereford and Roger of Worcester, bidding them communicate it to their brethren, beginning with London (Ep. clxxix., ib. vol. v. pp. 344–346). Canon Robertson supposes this brief to have been delivered to Gilbert on the feast of the Commemoration of S. Paul, i.e. June 30, 1166. Gilbert himself says merely “die beati Pauli”; and his letter has no date. But it mentions “legatos qui diriguntur ad nos”; and there is no hint elsewhere of any talk about sending legates till late in the autumn, or even winter. There really seems to be no reason why we should not adopt a more obvious rendering of the date, as representing the greater and better-known festival of S. Paul’s Conversion. In that case, of course, the year must be 1167.

[281] Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 50. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 414.

Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 83. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 397. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 65. Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 371.

[282] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 201, 202.

[283] E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 415. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 403, 404; etc.

Henry saw his own blunder as soon as it was made, and endeavoured to neutralize its effects by despatching an embassy to the Pope, requesting that he would send a legatine commission to settle the controversy. One of his envoys was the excommunicate John of Oxford; to the horror of Thomas and the indignation of Louis, John came back in triumph, boasting not only that he had been absolved by the Pope, but that two cardinals, William and Otto—the former of whom was a determined opponent of Thomas—were coming with full powers to sit in judgement on the case between primate and king and decide it without appeal.[284] The first half of the boast was true, but not the second; the cautious Pope instructed his envoys to do nothing more than arbitrate between the contending parties, if they could.[285] They did not reach Normandy till the autumn of 1167; Thomas came to meet them on the French border on November 18; he refused to enter upon any negotiations till the property of the metropolitan see was restored;[286] the legates carried their report to the king at Argentan, and were dismissed with an exclamation of disappointment and disgust—“I wish I may never set eyes upon a cardinal again!”[287] Five of the English bishops whom Henry had summoned to advise him renewed their appeal,[288] its original term having expired six months ago; and the legates insisting that Thomas should respect the appeal,[289] another year’s delay was gained.

- [284] Epp. cclxxx., cclxxxiii., cclxxxv., ccxcii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), pp. 140, 146, 147, 151–153, 170, 171.

- [285] Ep. cccvii. (ibid.), p. 201. Cf. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 65, and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 202, 203.

- [286] Epp. cccxxxi., cccxxxii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), pp. 247–251, 256–258.

- [287] Ep. cccxxxix. (ibid.), pp. 269, 270.

- [288] Epp. cccxxxix., cccxli.–cccxlv. (ibid.), pp. 270–272, 276, 277, 283–288.

- [289] Ep. cccxliii. (ibid.), pp. 284, 285.

At last, when the two kings made their treaty at Montmirail at Epiphany 1169, Thomas, who had come to the spot under the protection of Louis, suddenly entered the royal presence and fell at Henry’s feet, offering to place himself unreservedly in his hands. All parties thought the struggle was over, till the archbishop added once again the words which had so exasperated Henry at Oxford and at Clarendon: “Saving God’s honour and my order.” The king burst into a fury, and the meeting broke up in confusion.[290] Three months later, on Palm Sunday, from the high altar of Clairvaux, Thomas excommunicated ten of his opponents, first among whom was Gilbert Foliot.[291] Gilbert, who knew that the sentence had been hanging over him for more than a year, had appealed against it before it was uttered;[292] the king, too, was forewarned, and at every seaport guards were set to catch and punish with the utmost rigour any messenger from the primate. It was not till Ascension-day that a young layman named Berengar made his way up to the altar of Gilbert’s cathedral church in the middle of High Mass and thrust into the hand of the celebrant the archbishop’s letter proclaiming the excommunication of the bishop.[293] On that very day Thomas issued another string of excommunications.[294] Gilbert, driven to extremity, renewed his appeal two days later; and he added to it a formal refusal to acknowledge the jurisdiction of a metropolitan to whom he had made no profession, and a declaration—so at least it was reported in Gaul—of his intention to claim the metropolitical dignity for his own see, as an ancient right of which it had been unjustly defrauded by Canterbury.[295] A storm of indignant protest and vehement denunciation arose from the archbishop’s party; and the terrified Pope checked further proceedings by despatching another pair of envoys, who as usual failed to agree either with the king, with the archbishop, or even with each other, and after wasting the summer in misunderstandings and recriminations left the case just where they had found it.[296] By this time king and primate were both weary of their quarrel, and still more weary of mediation. In November they had another personal interview at Montmartre, and the archbishop’s unconditional restoration was all but decided.[297] Thomas, however, rashly attempted to hasten the completion of the settlement by a threat of interdict;[298] and the threat stung Henry into an act of far greater rashness. He had met Louis, as well as Thomas, at Montmartre, and had gained his immediate object of restraining the French king yet a little longer from direct hostilities; the settlement of Britanny was completed at Christmas, that of Aquitaine was so far secure that its conclusion might safely be left to Eleanor’s care; in March 1170 Henry went to England[299] with the fixed determination of seeing his eldest son crowned there before he left it again.

[290] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 418–427. Epp. ccccli., cccclxi. (ib. vol. vi.), pp. 488, 489, 507–509. Cf. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 73, 74, and Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 427–433.

[291] Ep. cccclxxxviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi. pp. 558, 559). See also Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 87, and for date, R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 333.

[292] Ep. dxiii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), p. 614.

[293] Compare the account given by “Magister Willelmus” in Ep. dviii. (ibid.), pp. 603, 604, with that of Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 89, 90. They are clearly from the same hand.

[294] Epp. dii., dvii. (ib. vol. vi.), pp. 594, 601–603. For date cf. Ep. cccclxxxviii. (ib. pp. 558, 559).

[295] Ep. dviii. (ibid.), pp. 604–606 —a very circumstantial account, yet one can scarcely understand how a man so wise and so learned as Gilbert can really have made such an utterly unhistorical claim. He must have known that it had no shadow of foundation, the nearest approach to such a thing being S. Gregory’s abortive scheme for fixing the two archbishoprics at London and York. Gilbert’s opponents, on the other hand, declared that he derived his claim from the archpriests of Jupiter who had their seat in the Roman Londinium, and denounced him as their would-be representative and successor. Epp. dxxxv., dxlvi. (ib. vol. vii.), pp. 10, 41.

[296] On this legation of Gratian and Vivian see R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 335; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 212, 213; Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 441–445; Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 72, 73; Epp. ccccxci., ccccxcii. (ib. vol. vi.), pp. 563, 564, 567; dlx., dlxi., dlxiii.–dlxviii., dlxxxi., dlxxxiv., dci., dcii. (ib. vol. vii.), pp. 70–76, 78–92, 115, 116, 124, 125, 151–154, etc.

[297] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 97, 98; Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 445–451; Epp. dciv.–dcvii. (ib. vol. vii. pp. 158–168). Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 447. R. Diceto as above, pp. 335–337. Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 213.

[298] Epp. dlxxiii.–dlxxvii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 97–109), etc.

[299] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 3. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 3. Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 216.

Three years before, he had wrung from the Pope—then blockaded in Rome by the Imperial troops, and in the last extremity of peril—a brief authorizing young Henry’s coronation by the archbishop of York, in default of the absent primate of all England.[300] In face of a mass of earlier and later rescripts from Alexander’s predecessors and Alexander himself, all strenuously confirming the exclusive privileges of Canterbury, Henry had never yet ventured to make use of this document; like Adrian’s bull for the conquest of Ireland, it had been kept in reserve for a future day; and that day had now come. In vain did Thomas proclaim his threatened interdict;[301] in vain did the Pope ratify it;[302] in vain did both alike issue prohibitions to all the English bishops against the act which they knew to be in contemplation.[303] The vigilance of the justiciars, quickened by a fresh set of stringent injunctions sent over by the king in the previous autumn,[304] made the delivery of letters from either primate or Pope so difficult that Thomas at last could intrust it to no one but a nun, Idonea, whom he solemnly charged with the duty of presenting to Roger of York the papal brief in which the coronation was forbidden.[305] The ceremony was fixed for Sunday, June 14. A week before that date young Henry, who with his girl-bride Margaret of France had been left at Caen under the care of his mother and Richard of Hommet the constable of Normandy, was summoned to join his father in England.[306] On S. Barnabas’s day the bishops and barons assembled at Westminster in obedience to the royal summons;[307] on Saturday, the 13th, the Pope’s letter was at last forced upon the archbishop of York;[308] but none the less did he on the following morning crown and anoint young Henry in Westminster abbey; while Gilbert of London, who had managed to extort conditional absolution in the Pope’s name from Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen,[309] once more stood openly by his side in the foremost rank of the English bishops.[310]

[300] Ep. cccx. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi. pp. 206, 207). See the editor’s note as to the date.

[301] Epp. dclxxviii.–dclxxxiii. (ib. vol. vii. pp. 320–325).

[302] Epp. dcxxviii.–dcxxx. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 210–214).

[303] Epp. dcxxxii., dcxxxiii., dcxlviii.–dcli. (ib. pp. 216, 217, 256–264). Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 462, puts this interdict too late.

[304] The “ten ordinances”; Ep. dxcix. (ib. vol. vii. pp. 147–149); Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 53–55; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 214–216; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 231–236; on the date see Bishop Stubbs’s note at last reference.

[305] Ep. dclxxii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 307–309). See the editor’s note.

[306] Ep. dclxxiii. (ibid.), pp. 309, 312.

[307] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 5.

[308] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 103.

[309] Ibid. Epp. dclviii.–dclx. (ib. vol. vii. pp. 275–277).

[310] Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 103; Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 5; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs) vol. i. p. 219. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 338, Chron. Mailros, a. 1170, Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 4, Chron. S. Serg. a. 1169 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 150), all give different dates, and all wrong.

The elder king only waited to see the tenants-in-chief, with the king of Scots at their head, swear fealty to his new-made colleague ere he hurried back to Normandy to meet the fast-gathering storm.[311] Louis, incensed that his daughter’s husband should have been crowned without her, was already threatening war;[312] Thomas, seeing in the king’s action nothing but the climax of Canterbury’s wrongs, was overwhelming the Pope with complaints, reproaches, and intreaties for summary vengeance upon all who had taken part in the coronation; and the majority of the cardinals strongly supported his demands.[313] Henry saw that he must make peace at any price. Two days before the feast of S. Mary Magdalene he held a conference with Louis near Fréteval, on the borders of the Vendômois and the county of Chartres;[314] they were reconciled, and as they parted Henry said jestingly to the French king: “That rascal of yours, too, shall have his peace to-morrow; and a right good peace shall it be.”[315] At dawn on S. Mary Magalene’s day[316] he met Thomas in the “Traitor’s Meadow,”[317] close to Fréteval; they rode apart together, and remained in conference so long that the patience of their followers was all but exhausted, when at last Thomas was seen to dismount and throw himself at the king’s feet. Henry sprang from his horse, raised the archbishop from the ground, held his stirrup while he remounted, and rode back to tell his followers that peace was made, on terms which practically amounted to a complete mutual amnesty and a return to the state of affairs which had existed before the quarrel.[318]

- [311] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 6. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 220. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 83. Henry landed at Barfleur about Midsummer; Gesta Hen. as above.

- [312] Gesta Hen. as above.

- [313] Ep. dccvii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 373, 374).

- [314] “In limitibus suis inter Firmitatem, oppidum scilicet in pago Carnotensi, et Fretivalle, castrum videlicet in territorio Turonensi.” Ep. dclxxxv. (ibid.), p. 339. This Firmitas must be La Ferté-Villeneuil, and Turonensi should be Vindocinensi. Herb. Bosh., who lays the scene “in confinio Carnotusiæ et Cenomanniæ, inter duo castella quorum unum nominatur Viefui” [Viévy-le-Rayé] “et alterum Freteval” (ib. vol. iii. p. 466), is no nearer to the true geography.

- [315] “Et crastinâ die habebit pacem suam latro vester; et quidem bonam habebit.” Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 108.

- [316] Ep. dclxxxv. (ib. vol. vii.), p. 340.

- [317] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 466. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 461.

- [318] Epp. dclxxxiv., dclxxxv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), pp. 326–334, 340–342. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 108–111. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 466. Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 150, 151. Thomas Saga (as above), pp. 461–465.

Henry had no sooner returned to Normandy than he fell sick almost to death; on his recovery he went on a pilgrimage to the shrine of our Lady at Rocamadour in the Quercy,[319] and it was not until October that Thomas again saw him at Tours, on his way to a conference with Count Theobald of Blois at Amboise.[320] A difficulty had arisen about the restitution of the confiscated Church property and the absolution of the persons whom Thomas had excommunicated, each party insisting that the other should make the first step in conciliation.[321] There was also a difficulty about the kiss of peace, which Thomas required as pledge of Henry’s sincerity, but which Henry seemed desirous of postponing indefinitely.[322] Nevertheless, a letter from Henry to his son, announcing the reconciliation and bidding the young king enforce the restoration of the archiepiscopal estates, was drawn up in Thomas’s presence at Amboise and sent over to England by the hands of two of his clerks,[323] who presented it at Westminster on October 5.[324] The restoration was, however, not effected until Martinmas, and then it comprised little more than empty garners and ruined houses.[325] Thomas saw the king once more, at Chaumont,[326] and Henry promised to meet him again at Rouen, thence to proceed with him to England in person.[327] Before the appointed time came, however, fresh complications had arisen with the king of France; Henry was obliged to give up all thought of going not only to England but even to Normandy, and delegated the archbishop of Rouen and the dean of Salisbury to escort Thomas in his stead.

[319] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 6, 7.

[320] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.) pp. 468, 469. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 114. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 154. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 469. The writer of the Gesta Hen. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 8) gives the date of this meeting as Tuesday, October 12. But this must be quite ten days too late, for we shall see that a letter drawn up after the meeting was received in England on October 5.

[321] Ep. dclxxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), pp. 333–337.

[322] Henry alleged that he had publicly sworn never to give Thomas the kiss of peace, and could not face the shame of breaking his oath. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 150; Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 450; Ep. dcxxiii. (ib. vol. vii.) pp. 198, 199; Thomas Saga, as above, p. 449. See in Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 469, Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 115, and Thomas Saga (as above), p. 469, the contrivance by which he avoided it at Tours—or Amboise, in William’s version.

[323] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 156, 157. The letter, of which Garnier gives a translation, is Ep. dcxc. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.) pp. 346, 347; also in Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 85; Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 112; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 221; R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 339.

[324] Ep. dccxv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), p. 389.

[325] Ep. dccxxxiii. (ibid.), p. 402.

[326] Chaumont on the Loire, seemingly. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 470. Cf. Thomas Saga, as above, pp. 471–473.

[327] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 115, 116.

The duty finally devolved solely upon the dean, who was no other than Thomas’s old opponent John of Oxford.[328] Naturally enough, the primate was deeply hurt at being thus sent back to his see under the protection of a man who, as he truly said, ought to have been thankful for the privilege of travelling in his suite.[329] Thomas, however, was in haste to be gone, although fully persuaded that he was going to his death. He seems indeed to have been weary of life; the tone of his letters and of his parting words to the friends whom he was leaving in France indicates not so much a morbid presentiment of his fate as a passionate longing for it. Yet it can hardly have been from him alone that the foreboding communicated itself to so many other minds. Warnings came to him from all quarters; one voice after another, from the king of France[330] down to the very pilot of the ship in which he took his passage, implored him not to go; Herbert of Bosham alone upheld his resolution to the end.[331]

- [328] Ib.·/·Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 116. Epp. dccxxii., dccxxiii. (ib.·/·Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), pp. 400, 403. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 160.

- [329] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

- [330] Ib. p. 113.

- [331] Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 472–476.

We may put aside at once all the wild talk of the archbishop’s biographers about plots against his life in which the king had a share. Even if Henry’s sudden willingness for his return was really suggested by words said to have been uttered by one of his counsellors—“Why keep the archbishop out of England? It would be far better to keep him in it”—there is no need to assume that those words bore even in the speaker’s mind, far less in that of the king, the horrible meaning which they were afterwards supposed to have covered;[332] for they were true in the most literal sense. The quarrel of king and primate would have mattered little had it been fought out on English ground; it was the archbishop’s exile which rendered him so dangerous. Thomas had dealt his most fatal blow at Henry by flying from him, and Henry, as he now perceived, had made his worst blunder in driving Thomas into France. Of the infinitely greater blunder involved in the archbishop’s murder—setting the criminal aspect of the deed altogether aside—it is enough to say that Henry was wholly incapable. The same may be said of Roger of York and Gilbert of London, although, like the king himself, they were urged by dread of the archbishop into making common cause with men of a very different stamp:—men who hated the primate with a far more intense personal hatred, and who were restrained by no considerations either of policy or of morality:—men such as Ralf de Broc, a ruffian adventurer who had served as the tool of Henry’s vengeance upon the archbishop’s kinsfolk, had resumed the custody of the archiepiscopal estates when it was resigned by Gilbert Foliot, had been for the last four years at once fattening upon the property of Thomas and smarting under his excommunication, and was ready to commit any crime rather than disgorge his ill-gotten gains.[333] It was known that Thomas had letters from the Pope suspending all those bishops who had taken part in the coronation of the young king, and replacing Gilbert of London, Jocelyn of Salisbury, and all whom Thomas had excommunicated under the sentences from which they had been irregularly released by some of the Papal envoys.[334] Gilbert, Jocelyn and Roger of York now hurried to Canterbury, intending to proceed to Normandy as soon as Thomas set foot in England; while Ralf de Broc, Reginald de Warren and Gervase of Cornhill the sheriff of Kent undertook to catch him at the moment of landing, ransack his baggage, search his person, and seize any Papal letters which he might bring with him. Thomas, however was warned; he sent the letters over before him, and the three prelates at Canterbury read their condemnation before their judge quitted Gaul.[335] Next day he sailed from Wissant, and on the morning of December 1 he landed at Sandwich.[336] His enemies were ready to receive him; but at the sight of John of Oxford they stopped short, and John in the king’s name forbade all interference with the primate.[337] Amid the rapturous greetings of the people who thronged to welcome their chief pastor, he rode on to Canterbury; there some of the royal officials came to him in the king’s name, demanding the absolution of the suspended and excommunicate bishops. Thomas at first answered that he could not annul a Papal sentence; but he afterwards offered to take the risk of doing so, if the culprits would abjure their errors in the form prescribed by the Church. Gilbert and Jocelyn were inclined to yield; but Roger refused, and they ended by despatching Geoffrey Ridel to enlist the sympathies of the young king in their behalf, while they themselves carried their protest to his father in Normandy.[338]

[332] Will Fitz-Steph. as above, pp. 106, 107.

[333] On Ralf de Broc see Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 75;

Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 360; Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.) p. 65; E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 404; Epp. lxxviii. (ib. vol. v. p. 152), cccxli., ccccxcviii. (ib. vol. vi. pp. 278, 582), dccxviii., dccxxiii. (ib. vol. vii. pp. 394, 402). In the last place Thomas says that Ralf “in ecclesiam Dei ... per septem annos licentius debacchatus est”; and the writer of the Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 321, seems to have understood this as meaning that Ralf had had the stewardship of the Canterbury property throughout the archbishop’s exile. This, however, does not appear to have been the case. Ralf certainly had the stewardship for a short time at first; but it was, as we have seen, soon transferred to Gilbert Foliot, and only restored to Ralf when Gilbert resigned it early in 1167.

[334] Epp. dccxx., dccxxii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 397–399).

[335] Ep. dccxxiii., dccxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), pp. 403, 410. Cf. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 87–89; Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 117; Herb. Bosh.(ibid.), pp. 471, 472; Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 68; Anon. II. (ibid.), p. 123; Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 161, 163. The version in Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 483, seems founded on a confusion between the delivery of these Papal letters and that which Berengar delivered in S. Paul’s on the Ascension-day of the previous year.

[336] Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 118. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.) p. 476. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 68. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 164. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 339. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 222. Thomas Saga (as above), pp. 489–491. The date is from Will. Fitz-Steph., R. Diceto and the Saga; Gervase makes it November 30, and Herbert “two or three days after the feast of S. Andrew.”

[337] Will. Fitz-Steph. and Garnier, as above. Ep. dccxxiii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), pp. 403, 404. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 491.

[338] Ep. dccxxiii., dccxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), pp. 404–406, 411, 412. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 102–105. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 120, 121. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 480. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 497–501. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 172, erroneously thinks the censures on the bishops were not issued till Christmas-day.

The young king was preparing to hold his Christmas court at Winchester.[339] Thomas proposed to join it, but was stopped in London by a peremptory command to “go back and mind his own business at Canterbury.”[340] He obeyed under protest, and on Christmas-day again excommunicated the De Brocs and their fellow-robbers.[341] The elder king was keeping the feast at his hunting-seat of Bures near Bayeux.[342] There the three bishops threw themselves at his feet; Roger of York spoke in the name of all, and presented the Papal letters;[343] the courtiers burst into a confused storm of indignation, but not one had any counsel to offer. In his impatience and disappointment Henry uttered the fatal words which he was to rue all his life: “What a parcel of fools and dastards have I nourished in my house, that none of them can be found to avenge me of this one upstart clerk!”[344]

[339] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 166. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 106. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 126. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 342, says the young king was at Woodstock when Thomas sought for an interview; he was, however, certainly at Winchester at Christmas.

[340] “Fère vostre mestier à Cantorbire alez.” Garnier (Hippeau), p. 171. Cf. Ep. dccxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), p. 412; Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.) pp. 106–113; Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 121–123; Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 482, 483; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 13; Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 505–507.

[341] Will. Cant. (as above), p. 120. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 428. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 130. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 484, 485. R. Diceto (as above), p. 342. Thomas Saga (as above), pp. 511–513.

[342] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 481. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 175. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 11. Rob. Torigni, a. 1171.

[343] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 175–177. Will. Cant. (as above), pp. 122, 123. Cf. Thomas Saga (as above), pp. 501–503.

[344] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 175. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 121. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 429. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 487.

The words were hardly more than he had used at Chinon four years before, but they fell now upon other ears. Four knights—Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy, Reginald Fitz-Urse and Richard le Breton[345]—took them as a warrant for the primate’s death. That night—it was Christmas-eve[346]—they vowed to slay him, no matter how or where;[347] they left the court in secret, crossed to England by different routes,[348] and met again at Saltwood, a castle which the archbishop had been vainly endeavouring to recover from the clutches of Ralf de Broc, and where Ralf himself was dwelling amid a crowd of his kinsfolk and dependents. There the final plot was laid.[349] How it was executed is a tale which has been told so often that its details may well be spared here. On the evening of December 29, after a scene in his own hall scarcely less disgraceful than the last scene in the king’s hall at Northampton, the primate of all England was butchered at the altar’s foot in his own cathedral church.[350]

- [345] In Will. Cant. (as above·/·Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), pp. 128, 129, is a “descriptio spiculatorum,” in which the only point of interest is the English speech of Hugh de Morville’s mother.

- [346] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 177. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 123.

- [347] Garnier, as above. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 124. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 429. Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 128. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 487. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 517.

- [348] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 177. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.) p. 124, Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 130. Thomas Saga as above.

- [349] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above; cf. ib. p. 126. Thomas Saga, as above, pp. 517–519. Saltwood was mentioned, as a special subject for inquiry and restitution, in the king’s letter commending Thomas to his son.

- [350] Will. Cant. (as above), pp. 131–135. Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 319, 320.

E. Grim (ibid.), pp. 430–438. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 132–142. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 488 et seq. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 70–77. Anon. II. (ibid.), pp. 128–132. Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 179–195. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 343, 344. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 224–227. Thomas Saga as above, pp. 523–549.

The ill news travelled fast. It fell like a thunderbolt upon the Norman court still gathered round the king at Argentan,[351] whither the assembly had adjourned after the Christmas feast at Bures. Henry stood for a moment speechless with horror, then burst into a frenzy of despair, and shut himself up in his own rooms, refusing to eat or drink or to see any one.[352] In a few days more, as he anticipated, all Christendom was ringing with execration of the murder and clamouring for vengeance upon the king who was universally regarded as its instigator. The Pope ordered an interdict upon Henry’s continental dominions, excommunicated the murderers and all who had given or should henceforth give them aid, shelter or support, and was only restrained from pronouncing a like sentence upon the king himself by a promise that he would make compurgation and submit to penance.[353] Two cardinal-legates charged with the enforcement of these decrees were at once despatched to Normandy;[354] but when they arrived there, Henry was out of their reach. The death of Duke Conan in February had thrown Britanny completely into his hands; he only stayed to secure Geoffrey’s final establishment there as duke[355] before he called a council at Argentan and announced that he was going to Ireland.[356] He quitted Normandy just as the legates reached it,[357] leaving strict orders that the ports should be closed to all clerks and papal envoys, and that no one should dare to follow him without special permission.[358] Landing at Portsmouth in the first days of August,[359] he hurried to Winchester for a last interview with the dying Bishop Henry,[360] closed the English ports as he had closed those of Normandy,[361] then plunged once more into the depths of South Wales, and on October 16 sailed from Milford Haven for Waterford.[362]

[351] R. Diceto (as above)·/·(Stubbs), vol. i., p. 345. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 14.

[352] Ep. dccxxxviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), p. 438. Cf. MS. Lansdown. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 159, 160, and Gesta Hen. as above.

[353] Epp. dccl., dccli. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 471–478).

[354] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 233. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 346. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 24.

[355] Rob. Torigni, a. 1171. Conan died February 20; Chron. Kemperleg. ad ann. (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 563). The Chron. S. Serg. a. 1169 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 150), places the event two years too early. Cf. Chron. Britann. a. 1170, 1171 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 560; Morice, Hist. Bretagne, preuves, vol. i. col. 104).

[356] Rob. Torigni, a. 1171.

[357] MS. Lansdown. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 169. Gerv. Cant. (as above), pp. 233, 234. The Gesta Hen. (as above), and Rog. Howden (Stubbs, vol. ii. pp. 28, 29) seem to imply that they arrived just before Henry left; but they are rather confused about these legates. They make two pairs of them come to Normandy this summer—first, Vivian and Gratian, who come with hostile intent, and from whom Henry runs away (Gesta Hen., Stubbs, vol. i. p. 24; Rog. Howden, Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 29); and secondly, Albert and Theodwine, who apparently supersede them later in the year, and whom Henry hurries to meet (Gesta Hen. as above, p. 29; Rog. Howden as above, p. 34). But the MS. Lansdown. (which is the fullest account of all), Gerv. Cant. and R. Diceto distinctly make only one pair of legates, Albert and Theodwine. The confusion in Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. ii. pp. 31–33, is greater still.

[358] Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 24. Cf. Rog. Howden (as above), p. 29.

[359] Gesta Hen. as above, and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 234, say August 3; R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 347, says August 6.

[360] R. Diceto as above. Bishop Henry died on August 8; ibid.

[361] Gerv. Cant., Gesta Hen. and Rog. Howden, as above.

[362] Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 25.

The elements favoured his escape; for five months a persistent contrary wind hindered all communication to Ireland from any part of his dominions.[363] The bishops and the ministers were left to fight their own battles and make their own peace with the legates in Normandy until May 1172, when the king suddenly reappeared[364] to claim the papal absolution and offer in return not only his own spiritual obedience and that of his English and continental realms, but also that of Ireland, which he had secured for Rome as her share in the spoils of a conquest won with Adrian’s bull in his hand.[365] The bargain was soon struck. On Sunday May 21 Henry met the legates at Avranches, made his purgation for the primate’s death, promised the required expiation, and abjured his obnoxious “customs,” his eldest son joining in the abjuration.[366] To pacify Louis, young Henry and Margaret were sent over sea with the archbishop of Rouen and by him crowned together at Winchester on August 27;[367] and the Norman primate returned to join a great council of the Norman clergy assembled at Avranches to witness there, two days before Michaelmas, a public repetition of their sovereign’s purgation and his final absolution by the legates.[368]

- [363] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 350. Gir. Cambr., Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 36 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 284).

- [364] R. Diceto (as above), p. 351.

- [365] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 28.

- [366] Ep. dcclxxi.–dcclxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 513–522). MS. Lansdown. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 173, 174.

- [367] Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 31; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 34; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 237. R. Diceto (as above), p. 352, makes it August 21.

- [368] Gesta Hen. (as above), pp. 32, 33. Rog. Howden (as above), pp. 35–37. Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 238. These three are the only writers who mention this purgation in September, and they say nothing of the one in May. That it took place is however clear from the letter of the legates themselves (Ep. dcclxxiv. Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. p. 521), giving its date, “Vocem jucunditatis,” i.e. Rogation-Sunday. On the other hand, the MS. Lansdown. (ib. vol. iv. pp. 173, 174) mentions only one purgation, and this clearly is the earlier one, for it is placed before the re-crowning of young Henry. The explanation seems to be that this was a private ceremony between the king and the legates, with a few chosen witnesses; the legates say in their letter that Henry promised to repeat it publicly at Caen; he probably did so at Avranches instead. On the other hand, Rob. Torigni (a. 1172) says: “Locutus est cum eis primo Savigneii, postea Abrincis, tercio Cadomi, ubi causa illa finita est;” and seems to make the Michaelmas council at Avranches a mere ordinary Church synod, where moreover “obsistente regis infirmitate parum profecerunt.” To add to the confusion, Gir. Cambr. (Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 39; Dimock, vol. v. p. 289) says the purgation was made at Coutances.

CHAPTER III.
THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND.
795–1172.

Map III.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

It is in the history of the settlements formed on the Irish coast by the northern pirates in the ninth century that we must seek for the origin of those relations between England and Ireland which led to an English invasion of the latter country in the reign of Henry II. The earliest intercourse between the two islands had been of a wholly peaceful character; but it had come utterly to an end when Bishop Colman of Lindisfarne sailed back to his old home at Iona after the synod of Whitby in 664. From the hour when her missionary work was done, Ireland sank more and more into the isolation which was a natural consequence of her geographical position, and from which she was only roused at the opening of the ninth century by the coming of the wikings. In the early days of the northmen’s attack upon the British isles it was the tradition of Ireland’s material prosperity and wealth, and the fame of the treasures stored in her religious houses, that chiefly tempted the “white strangers” from the Norwegian fiords across the unknown perils of the western sea; and the settlement of Thorgils in Ulster and those of his fellow-wikings along the eastern and southern coasts of Ireland formed a chief basis for the operations of the northmen upon Britain itself. The desperate fighting of the Irish succeeded in freeing Ulster after Thorgils’s death; but by the middle of the ninth century the wikings were firmly established at four points on the Irish coast, Dublin, Waterford, Cork and Limerick.[369] Under the leadership of Olaf the Fair, Dublin became the head of a confederacy which served as a starting-point and furnished a constant supply of forces for the Danish conquests in England;[370] and for a hundred years afterwards, throughout the struggle of the house of Ælfred for the recovery of the Danelaw, the support given by the Ostmen or wikings of Ireland to their brethren across the channel was at once the main strength of the Northumbrian Danes and the standing difficulty of the English kings.[371]

- [369] On Thorgils and the wiking settlements in Ireland see Wars of the Gaedhil with the Gaill (Todd), and Green, Conquest of England, pp. 66, 67, 74, 76.

- [370] Green, Conquest of England, pp. 90, 91, 107.

- [371] Ib. pp. 213, 242, 252–254, 270–272.

To Ireland itself the results of the wiking invasions were far more disastrous than either to Britain or to Gaul. Owing to the peculiar physical character of their country, to their geographical remoteness from the rest of Europe, and to the political and social isolation which was a consequence of these, the Irish people had never advanced beyond the primitive tribal mode of life which had once been common to the whole Aryan race, but which every European branch of that race, except the Irish, had long since outgrown. In the time of Ecgberht and of Charles the Great Ireland was still, as at the very dawn of history, peopled by a number of separate tribes or septs whose sole bond of internal cohesion was formed by community of blood;—whose social and political institutions had remained purely patriarchal in character, unaffected by local and external influences such as had helped to mould the life of England or of Gaul:—who had never yet coalesced into any definite territorial organization, far less risen into national unity under a national sovereign. The provincial kings of Ulster, Connaught, Leinster and Munster were merely the foremost chieftains among the various groups of tribes over whom they exercised an ever-shifting sway; while the supremacy of the Ard-Righ or chief monarch, to whom in theory was assigned the overlordship of the whole island, was practically little more than a sort of honorary pre-eminence attached to certain chosen descendants of an early hero-king, Niall “of the Nine Hostages”; it carried with it little effective authority, and no territorial power; for the monarch’s traditional seat at Tara had long been a heap of ruins, and a tribal under-king had ousted him from the plain of Meath which in legal theory formed his royal domain.[372] Neither in the monarch himself nor in the provincial chieftains of a state thus constituted could there be found, when the storm-cloud from the north burst upon Ireland, a centre of unity even such as the peoples of Gaul found in their Karolingian sovereigns, far less such as the West-Franks found in the dukes of the French, or such as the English found in their kings of the house of Ecgberht. The stress of the northmen’s attack, which elsewhere gave a fresh impulse to the upgrowth of national life, crushed out all hope of its developement in Ireland. The learning and the civilization of ages perished when Columba’s Bangor, Bridget’s Kildare, Ciaran’s Clonmacnoise, Patrick’s own Armagh, shared the fate of Bæda’s Jarrow and Hild’s Streoneshealh, of Cuthbert’s Melrose and Aidan’s Lindisfarne; and in Ireland there was no Wessex and no Ælfred.

- [372] Maine, Early Hist. of Institutions, lect. i.–x.; O’Donovan, Introd. to Book of Rights; Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, with Mr. Kelly’s notes; O’Donovan, notes to Four Masters, vols. i. and ii.

On the other hand, the concentration of the wiking forces upon Britain had given to the Irish an advantage which enabled them to check the spread of wiking settlements in their country; and the failure of all attempts to establish a Scandinavian dominion in Britain destroyed all chance of a Scandinavian conquest of Ireland. The Ostmen never even gained such a footing in Ireland as the followers of Hrolf gained in Frankland: their presence never received the sanction of any Ard-Righ; they were not a compact body occupying the whole of an extensive and well-defined territory, but a number of separate groups settled here and there along the coast, and holding their ground only by sheer hard fighting against a ring of implacable foes. The long struggle may be said to have ended in a defeat of both parties. The Irish kings of Munster succeeded in establishing a more or less effective overlordship over the Scandinavian communities of Limerick and Waterford; and in 989 Malachi II., supreme monarch of Ireland, reaped his reward for nine years of desperate fighting in the submission of the Ostmen of Dublin. The city was blockaded and starved into surrender, and a yearly tribute was promised to Malachi and his successors.[373] Six years later “the ring of Tomar and the sword of Carl”—two heathen relics probably of ancient heroes, which seem to have been treasured as sacred emblems of sovereignty by the Ostmen[374]—were carried off by Malachi as trophies of another victory;[375] and in 999 or 1000 a renewal of the strife ended in a rout of the Ostmen and a great slaughter of their leaders, and Dublin was sacked and burnt by the victorious Irish.[376]

- [373] Tighernach, a. 989 (O’Conor, Rer. Hibern. Scriptt., vol. ii. pp. 264, 265).

- [374] See O’Donovan’s introduction to the Book of Rights, pp. xxxviii, xxxix.

- [375] Tighernach, a. 995 (as above, p. 267).

- [376] Ib. a. 998, 999 (p. 268). Wars of Gaedhil with Gaill (Todd), pp. 109–117.

Malachi’s triumph, however, was gained at the cost of a disruption of the monarchy. Malachi himself was displaced by a king of the rival house of Munster, his colleague in the sack of Dublin, the famous Brian Boroimhe;[377] Brian’s career of conquest ended in 1014 on the field of Clontarf, where he was slain in battle with the men of Leinster and the Ostmen;[378] and when Malachi, who now resumed his place, died in 1022,[379] the downfall of the Irish monarchy was complete.[380] The tradition which had so long linked it to the house of Niall had been shattered by Brian’s successes; and Brian had not lived to consolidate in his own house the forces which had begun to gather around himself. Thenceforth the Scandinavian colonies simply furnished an additional element to the strife of the Irish chieftains, and to the rivalry between the O’Briens of Munster and the O’Neills of Ulster for the possession of a shadowy supremacy, claimed by the one house as descendants of Brian Boroimhe and by the other as heirs of Malachi II. and of his great ancestor Niall.

- [377] Tighernach, a. 1000, 1001 (as above, pp. 269, 270). Wars of Gaedhil with Gaill (Todd), p. 119. Brian’s victory was won by the help of the Ostmen, with whom he stooped to ally himself for the sake of overcoming his rival; but the alliance was only momentary. On Brian’s reign see Wars of Gaedhil with Gaill, pp. 119–155.

- [378] Wars of Gaedhil with Gaill (Todd), pp. 155–211. Four Masters, a. 1013 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. pp. 773–781). Ann. Loch Cé, a. 1014 (Hennessy, vol. i. pp. 1–13).

- [379] Tighernach, a. 1022 (as above, p. 274). Four Masters, a. 1022 (as above, p. 800). Ann. Loch Cé, a. 1022 (as above, p. 23).

- [380] “From the death of Maelseachlainn II. the legitimate monarchy of all Ireland departed from all families during seventy-two years, until the joint reigns of Muircheartach O’Briain and Domhnall MacLochlainn; during that time no Feis or general assembly, so agreeable to the people, was held, because Ireland had no supreme king.” Quoted by Mr. Kelly, note to Cambrensis Eversus, vol. ii. p. 38, from Gilla-Modud, an Irish poet of the twelfth century.

The social and political system of Ireland was powerless either to expel or to absorb the foreign element thus introduced within its borders. Not only was such an union of the two peoples as had at last been effected in England simply impossible in Ireland; the Irish Danelaw was parted from its Celtic surroundings by barriers of race and speech, of law and custom and institutions, far more insuperable than those which parted the settlers in the “northman’s land” at the mouth of Seine from their West-Frankish neighbours. Even the Irish Church, which three hundred years before had won half England—one might add half Europe—to the Faith, had as yet failed to convert these pagans seated at her door. At the close of the tenth century the Ostmen were still for the most part heathens in fact if not in name, aliens from whatever culture or civilization might still remain in the nation around them. Meanwhile their relations with England had wholly altered in character. The final submission of the English Danelaw to Eadred carried with it the alliance of the Irish Danelaw; it seems that the Ostmen in their turn endeavoured to strengthen themselves against the attacks of the Irish princes by securing a good understanding with the English king, if not actually by putting themselves under his protection; for the fact that Eadgar coined money in Dublin[381] indicates that his authority must have been in some way or other acknowledged there. The years of the Ostmen’s struggle with Malachi and Brian Boroimhe were the years of England’s struggle with Swein and Cnut; but the two strifes seem to have been wholly unconnected; and throughout the long peace which lasted from Cnut’s final triumph until the coming of the Normans, new ties sprang up between the Ostmen and the sister-isle. Owing to their position on the sea-coast and to the spirit of merchant enterprise which was, quite as much as the spirit of military enterprise, a part of the wiking-heritage of their inhabitants, the towns of the Irish Danelaw rose fast into importance as seats of a flourishing trade with northern Europe, and above all with England through its chief seaports in the west, Bristol and Chester. The traffic was chiefly in slaves, bought or kidnapped in England to be sold to the merchants of Dublin or Waterford, and by these again to their Irish neighbours or to traders from yet more distant lands.[382] Horrible as this traffic was, however, even while filling the Irish coast-towns with English slaves it helped to foster a more frequent intercourse and a closer relation between Ostmen and Englishmen; and the shelter and aid given to Harold and Leofwine in 1151 by Dermot Mac-Maelnambo,[383] a prince of the royal house of Leinster who had acquired the sovereignty over both Leinstermen and Danes, shews that the political alliance established in Eadgar’s day had been carefully renewed by Godwine.

- [381] Green, Conquest of England, p. 323.

- [382] Green, Conquest of England, pp. 440, 443, 444.

- [383] See Freeman, Norm. Conq., vol. ii. pp. 154.

To these commercial and political relations was added soon afterwards an ecclesiastical tie. The conversion of the Ostmen to Christianity, completed in the early years of the eleventh century, was probably due to intercourse with their Christianized brethren in England rather than to the influence of the Irish clergy, whose very speech was strange to them; and their adoption of their neighbours’ creed, instead of drawing together the hostile races, soon introduced a fresh element into their strife. About the year 1040 the Ostmen of Dublin set up a bishopric of their own. Their first bishop, Donatus, was probably Irish by consecration if not by birth.[384] But when he died, in 1074,[385] the Ostmen turned instinctively towards the neighbouring island with which they had long been on peaceful terms, where the fruits of the warfare waged by generation after generation of wikings upon the shores of Britain were being reaped at last by Norman hands, where William of Normandy was entering upon the inheritance alike of Ælfred and of Cnut, and where Lanfranc was infusing a new spirit of discipline and activity into the Church of Odo and Dunstan. The last wiking-fleet that ever sailed from Dublin to attack the English coast—a fleet which Dermot Mac-Maelnambo, true to his alliance with their father, had furnished to the sons of Harold—had been beaten back six years before.[386] Since then Dermot himself was dead;[387] the Ostmen were once more free, subject to no ruler save one of their own choice and their own blood; with the consent of their king, Godred,[388] they chose a priest named Patrick to fill Donatus’s place, and sent him to be consecrated in England by the archbishop of Canterbury.[389] No scruples about infringing the rights of the Irish bishops were likely to make Lanfranc withhold his hand. At the very moment when the Ostmen’s request reached him, he had just been putting forth against the archbishop of York a claim to metropolitical jurisdiction over the whole of the British isles, founded on the words of S. Gregory committing “all the bishops of the Britains” to S. Augustine’s charge.[390] He therefore gladly welcomed an opportunity of securing for the authority of his see a footing in the neighbour-isle. He consecrated Patrick of Dublin and received his profession of obedience;[391] and for the next seventy-eight years the bishops of Dublin were suffragans not of Armagh but of Canterbury. When in 1096 the Ostmen of Waterford also chose for themselves a bishop, they too sought him beyond the sea; an Irishman, or more probably an Ostman by birth, a monk of Winchester by profession, Malchus by name, he was consecrated by S. Anselm and professed obedience to him as metropolitan.[392]

[384] That is, he was certainly not consecrated in England; Lanigan, Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iii. pp. 433–436. But might he not have been consecrated by some of the bishops in Scotland and the Isles, with which the Ostmen were in constant intercourse and alliance?

[385] Tighernach, a. 1074 (O’Conor, Rer. Hibern. Scriptt.), vol. ii. p. 309. Four Masters, a. 1074 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 907).

[386] Eng. Chron. (Worc.) a. 1067, 1068; Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 2; Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 513; Will. Jumièges, l. vii. c. 41 (ib. p. 290); Freeman, Norm. Conq., vol. iv. pp. 225–227, 243–245, 788–790.

[387] He fell in battle with the king of Meath in 1072, according to the Four Masters ad ann. (O’Donovan, vol. ii. pp. 901–903), and the Ann. Loch Cé (Hennessy, vol. i. p. 67). The Chron. Scot. (Hennessy, p. 291) places his death in 1069; Mr. Freeman (as above, p. 245) adopts this date.

[388] At the time of Donatus’s appointment in 1040, one Sihtric ruled in Dublin (see Lanigan, Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iii. pp. 434, 435)—doubtless under the overlordship of Dermot. On Dermot’s death the Ostmen flung off the Irish supremacy and took for their king, first a jarl named Godred, who died in 1072, and then another of the same name, who seems to have been already king of Man.

(Freeman, as above, p. 528 and note 5). Lanfranc addresses this Godred as “King of Ireland” (Lanfranc, Ep. 43, Giles, vol. i. p. 61); and no other prince is mentioned in connexion with Patrick’s consecration. But it is plain from Lanfranc’s correspondence, if from nothing else, that Terence O’Brien was acknowledged overlord of Dublin for some time before his death (see Lanfranc, Ep. 44, ib. p. 62; and Lanigan, as above, p. 474 et seq.); and he died in 1086.

[389] Lanfranc, Ep. 43 (as above, p. 61). Eng. Chron. Winch., Appendix (Thorpe, vol. i. p. 387). Cf. Lanigan, as above, pp. 457, 458.

[390] Lanigan, Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iii. pp. 464–466.

[391] Ib. p. 458. Eng. Chron. Winch., Appendix (Thorpe, vol. i. p. 387).

[392] Eadmer, Hist. Nov. (Rule), pp. 76, 77. Cf. Lanigan, as above, vol. iv. pp. 15, 16.

Through the medium of these Irish suffragans the archbishops of Canterbury endeavoured to gain a hold upon the Irish Church by cultivating the friendship of the different Irish princes who from time to time succeeded in winning from the Ostmen an acknowledgement of their overlordship. In the struggles of the provincial kings for the supreme monarchy of Ireland it was always the Ostmen who turned the scale; their submission was the real test of sovereignty. The power which had been wielded by Dermot Mac-Maelnambo passed after his death first to Terence or Turlogh O’Brien, king of Munster,[393] a grandson of Brian Boroimhe, and then to Terence’s son Murtogh.[394] Both were in correspondence with the successive English primates, Lanfranc and Anselm,[395] and both were recognized as protectors and patrons, in ecclesiastical matters at least, by the Ostmen,[396] whose adherence during these years enabled the O’Briens to hold their ground against the advancing power of Donnell O’Lochlainn, king of Aileach or western Ulster,[397] a representative of the old royal house of the O’Neills which had fallen with Malachi II. On Murtogh’s death in 1119[398] a new aspirant to the monarchy appeared in the person of the young king of Connaught, Terence or Turlogh O’Conor. A year before, Terence had won the submission of the Ostmen of Dublin;[399] in 1120 he celebrated the fair of Telltown,[400] a special prerogative of the Irish monarchs; and from the death of Donnell O’Lochlainn next year[401] Terence was undisputed monarch till 1127, when a joint rising of Ostmen and Leinstermen enabled both to throw off his yoke.[402] Meanwhile Murtogh O’Lochlainn, a grandson of Donnell, was again building up a formidable power in Ulster; at last, in 1150, all the provincial kings, including Terence, gave him hostages for peace;[403] and Terence’s throne seems to have been only saved by a sudden change in the policy of the Ostmen, whose independent action enabled them for a moment to hold the balance and act as arbitrators between northern and southern Ireland.[404] Four years later, however, they accepted Murtogh as their king,[405] and two years later still he was left sole monarch by the death of Terence O’Conor.[406]

[393] Four Masters, a. 1073–1086 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. pp. 905–927).

[394] Ib. a. 1087–1119 (pp. 929–1009).

[395] Lanfranc, Ep. 44 (Giles, vol. i. pp. 62–64); Anselm, Epp. l. iii., Epp. cxlii., cxlvii. (Migne, Patrol., vol. clix., cols. 173, 174, 178–180); Lanigan, as above, vol. iii. pp. 474 et seq., vol. iv. pp. 15, 19, 20.

[396] Samuel of Dublin in 1095 and Malchus of Waterford in 1096 were both elected under Murtogh’s sanction and sent to England for consecration with letters of commendation from him. Eadmer, Hist. Nov. (Rule), pp. 73–76; Lanigan, as above, vol. iv. pp. 12–15.

[397] Four Masters, a. 1083–1119 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. pp. 921–1009). Cf. Ann. Loch Cé, a. 1083–1119 (Hennessy, vol. i. pp. 73–111).

[398] Four Masters, a. 1119 (as above, p. 1009). Ann. Loch. Cé, a. 1119 (as above, p. 111).

[399] Lanigan, Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iv. p. 48, says: “The Annals of Innisfallen have at A. 1118, ‘Turlogh O’Conor became king of the Danes of Dublin.’” (This passage does not occur in either of the two editions of Ann. Inisfal. printed by O’Conor.) The Four Masters, a. 1118 (as above, p. 1007), say that Terence took hostages from the Ostmen in that year. He was, at any rate, acknowledged as their overlord by 1121, for it was he who in that year sent Gregory, bishop-elect of Dublin, to England for consecration. Lanigan, as above, p. 47.

[400] Four Masters ad ann. (as above, p. 1011).

[401] Ib. a. 1121 (p. 1013). Ann. Loch Cé, a. 1121 (as above, p. 113).

[402] Ann Loch Cé, a. 1127 (p. 123).

[403] Four Masters, a. 1150 (as above, p. 1093).

[404] Something of this kind must be meant by the phrase of the Four Masters (ib. p. 1095): “The foreigners made a year’s peace between Leath-Chuinn and Leath-Mhogha.” This is in 1150, after Murtogh’s appearance as “King of Ireland” and the Ostmen’s submission to Terence (II.) O’Brien, whom his namesake of Connaught had set up as king in Munster.

[405] Four Masters, a. 1154 (as above, p. 1113).

[406] Four Masters, a. 1156 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1119).

The anarchy of the Irish state was reflected in that of the Church. If Lanfranc, when he consecrated Patrick of Dublin, knew anything at all of the ecclesiastical condition of Ireland, he may well have thought that it stood in far greater need of his reforming care than England itself. The Irish Church had never felt the organizing hand of a Theodore; its diocesan and parochial system was quite undeveloped; it had in fact scarcely advanced beyond the primitive missionary stage. Six centuries after S. Patrick’s death, the Irish clergy were still nothing but a band of mission-priests scattered over the country or gathered together in vast monastic establishments like Bangor or Durrow or Clonmacnoise; the bishops were for the most part merely heads of ever-shifting mission-stations, to whose number there was no limit; destitute of political rank, they were almost equally destitute of ecclesiastical authority, and differed from the ordinary priesthood by little else than their power of ordination. At the head of the whole hierarchy stood, as successor and representative of S. Patrick, the archbishop of Armagh. But since the death of Archbishop Maelbrigid in 927 the see of Armagh had been in the hands of a family of local chieftains who occupied its estate, usurped its revenues, handed on its title from father to son, and were bishops only in name.[407] The inferior members of the ecclesiastical body could not escape the evil which paralyzed their head. The bishops and priests of the Irish Church furnished a long roll of names to the catalogue of saints; but they contributed little or nothing to the political developement of the nation, and scarcely more to its social developement. The growth of a class of lay-impropriators ousted them from the management and the revenues of their church-lands, reduced them to subsist almost wholly upon the fees which they received for the performance of their spiritual functions, stripped them of all political influence, and left them dependent solely upon their spiritual powers and their personal holiness for whatever share of social influence they might still contrive to retain.[408] The Irish Church, in fact, while stedfastly adhering in doctrinal matters to the rest of the Latin Church, had fallen far behind it in discipline; to the monastic reforms of the tenth century, to the struggle for clerical celibacy and for freedom of investiture in the eleventh, she had remained an utter stranger. The long-continued stress of the northern invasions had cut off the lonely island in the west from all intercourse with the world at large, so completely that even the tie which bound her to Rome had sunk into a mere vague tradition of spiritual loyalty, and Rome herself knew nothing of the actual condition of a Church which had once been her most illustrious daughter.

- [407] S. Bernard, Vita S. Malach., c. 10 (Mabillon, vol. i. col. 667). Cf. Lanigan, Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iii. p. 382.

- [408] On these lay impropriators, “comorbas” and “erenachs,” see Lanigan, Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iv. pp. 79–86.

But it was the northmen, too, who were now to become the means of knitting up again the ties which had been severed by their fathers’ swords. The state of things in Ireland, as reported to Canterbury from Dublin and Waterford, might well seem to reforming churchmen like Lanfranc and Anselm too grievous to be endured. Lanfranc had urged upon Terence O’Brien the removal of two of its worst scandals, the neglect of canonical restraints upon marriage and the existence of a crowd of titular bishops without fixed sees;[409] Anselm used all his influence with Murtogh O’Brien for the same end;[410] at last, finding his efforts unavailing, he seems to have laid his complaints before the Pope. The result was that, for the first time, a papal legate was appointed for Ireland. The person chosen was Gilbert, who some two or three years before Anselm’s death became the first bishop of the Ostmen of Limerick. Gilbert seems, like the first Donatus of Dublin, to have been himself an Irish prelate; he lost no time, however, in putting himself in communication with Canterbury,[411] and displayed an almost exaggerated zeal for the Roman discipline and ritual.[412] In 1118 he presided over a synod held at Rathbreasil, where an attempt was made to map out the dioceses of Ireland on a definite plan.[413] Little, however, could be done till the metropolitan see was delivered from the usurpers who had so long held it in bondage; and it was not until 1134 that the evil tradition was broken by the election of S. Malachi.

- [409] Lanfranc, Ep. 44 (Giles, vol. i. p. 63).

- [410] Anselm, Epp. l. iii., Epp. cxlii., cxlvii. (Migne, Patrol., vol. clix., cols. 173, 174, 178–180).

- [411] On Gilbert’s relations with Anselm see Lanigan, Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iv. pp. 23–26.

- [412] Ib. pp. 26–29.

- [413] Ib. pp. 38, 40–43.

Malachi was the wisest and most enlightened as well as the most saintly Irish prelate of his time; he had already been labouring for nearly ten years at the reform of the diocese of Connor; in that of Armagh itself he had earlier still, as vicar to Archbishop Celsus, laid the foundations of a similar work which he now took up again as primate.[414] After a successful pontificate of three years he again retired to the humbler position of a diocesan bishop at Down;[415] but he still continued to watch over the interests of the whole Irish Church; and in 1139 he went to Rome specially to lay its necessities before the Pope, and if possible to obtain from him the gift of a pallium for the archbishop of Armagh, and another for the bishop of Cashel as metropolitan of southern Ireland.[416] The pallium was now generally regarded as an indispensable note of metropolitical rank, but it had never been possessed by the successors of S. Patrick.[417] Innocent II. refused to grant it save at the request of the Irish clergy and people in council assembled; he sanctioned, however, the recognition of Cashel as metropolis of southern Ireland, and moreover he transferred to Malachi himself the legatine commission which Gilbert of Limerick had just resigned.[418] Gilbert seems to have died shortly afterwards: his successor in the see of Limerick went to Theobald of Canterbury for consecration; but his profession of obedience was the last ever made by an Irish bishop to an English metropolitan.[419] In 1148 a synod held at Inispatrick by Archbishop Gelasius of Armagh, with Malachi as papal legate, decided upon sending Malachi himself to the Pope once more, charged with a formal request for the two palls, in the name of the whole Irish Church. Malachi died on the way, at Clairvaux;[420] but he left his commission in safe hands. Nine years before, when on his first journey to Rome he had passed through the “bright valley,” its abbot had recognized in him a kindred spirit.[421] From that moment S. Bernard’s care of all the churches extended itself even to the far-off Church of Ireland; and if it was not he who actually forwarded his dying friend’s petition to Eugene III., there can be little doubt that Eugene’s favourable reception of it was chiefly owing to his influence. The result was the mission of John Paparo as special legate to Ireland. Stephen’s refusal to let John pass through his dominions caused another year’s delay;[422] but at the close of 1151 John made his way through Scotland safe to his destination.[423] In March 1152 he held a synod at Kells, in which the diocesan and provincial system of the Irish Church was organized upon lines which remained unaltered till the sixteenth century. The episcopal sees were definitely fixed, and grouped under not two but four archbishoprics. The primacy of all Ireland, with metropolitical authority over Ulster and Meath, was assigned to Armagh; Tuam became the metropolis of Connaught, Cashel of Munster; while the rivalry of Armagh and Canterbury for the spiritual obedience of the Ostmen was settled by the grant of a fourth pallium, with metropolitical jurisdiction over the whole of Leinster, to Bishop Gregory of Dublin himself.[424]

- [414] For S. Malachi see his Life by S. Bernard, Vita S. Malach., c. 10 (Mabillon, vol. i. col. 667), and Lanigan, as above·/·Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iv., pp. 59 et seq.

- [415] S. Bern., Vita S. Malach., c. 14 (Mabillon, vol. i. cols. 671–672).

- [416] Ib. c. 15 (col. 672).

- [417] Ibid. Cf. Lanigan’s note, Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iv. pp. 110, 111.

- [418] S. Bern., Vita S. Malach., c. 16 (as above, col. 674). Lanigan, as above, p. 112.

- [419] Lanigan, Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iv. pp. 114, 115, 116.

- [420] S. Bern., Vita S. Malach., cc. 30, 31 (Mabillon, vol. i. cols. 687–692). Lanigan, as above, pp. 129, 130.

- [421] S. Bern., Vita S. Malach., c. 16 (as above, cols. 673, 674).

- [422] See above, vol. i. p. 380.

- [423] Four Masters, a. 1151 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1095).

- [424] On the synod of Kells see Four Masters, a. 1152 (as above, p. 1101); Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 212; and Lanigan, as above, pp. 139–151.

It is plain that Bernard and Eugene aimed at applying to Ireland’s troubles the same remedy which they were at that very time applying to those of England. They hoped to build up an united nation and a strong national government on the basis of a free and united national Church. But the foundation-stone of their work for Ireland was scarcely laid at Kells when both the wise master-builders were called away. On the other hand, their labours for England were crowned by the accession of the young Angevin king, whose restless temper, before he had been nine months on his throne, was already seeking for another sphere of activity still further beyond the sea; overwhelming the newly-crowned, English-born Pope with suggestions of work and offers of co-operation in every quarter of Christendom,[425] and proposing to begin at once with the reduction of Ireland to political, ecclesiastical and social order after the pattern of England and Normandy.[426] Adrian IV. would have needed a wisdom and a foresight greater than those of S. Bernard himself to enable him to resist the attractions of such an offer. The so-called “Donation of Constantine”—a donation which is now known to be forged, but whose genuineness no one in Adrian’s day had ever thought of doubting—vested the ultimate sovereignty of all islands in the Papacy.[427] The best and greatest Popes, from S. Gregory down to Adrian himself, seem to have interpreted this as making them in a special way responsible for the welfare of such outlying portions of Christendom, and bound to leave no means untried for providing them with a secure and orderly Christian government.[428] The action of Alexander II. in sanctioning the Norman conquest of England was a logical outcome of this principle, applied, however unwisely or unjustly, to a particular case. But there was infinitely greater justification for applying the same principle, in the same manner, to the case of Ireland. Neither the labours of S. Malachi, nor the brief visit of John Paparo, nor the stringent decrees passed at the synod of Kells, could suffice to reform the inveterate evils of Ireland’s ecclesiastical system, the yet more inveterate evils of her political system, or the intellectual and moral decay which was the unavoidable consequence of both. On the Pope, according to the view of the time, lay the responsibility of bringing order out of this chaos—a chaos of whose very existence he had but just become fully conscious, and which no doubt looked to him far more hopeless than it really was. In such circumstances Henry’s proposal must have sounded to Adrian like an offer to relieve him of a great weight of care—to cut at one stroke a knot which he was powerless to untie—to clear a path for him through a jungle-growth of difficulties which he himself saw no way to penetrate or overcome. John of Salisbury set forth the plan at Rome, in Henry’s name, in the summer of 1155; he carried back a bull which satisfied all Henry’s demands. Adrian bade the king go forth to his conquest “for the enlargement of the Church’s borders, for the restraint of vice, the correction of morals and the planting of virtue, the increase of the Christian religion, and whatsoever may tend to God’s glory and the well-being of that land;”[429] and he sent with the bull a gold ring, adorned with an emerald of great price, as a symbol of investiture with the government of Ireland.[430]

- [425] Pet. Blois, Ep. clxviii. (Giles, vol. ii. pp. 116–118). See above, vol. i. p. 497.

- [426] “Significâsti siquidem nobis, fili in Christo carissime, te Hiberniæ insulam, ad subdendum illum populum legibus et vitiorum plantaria inde exstirpanda, velle intrare; et de singulis domibus annuam unius denarii beato Petro velle solvere pensionem; et jura ecclesiarum illius terræ illibata et integra conservare.” Bull of Adrian IV. to Henry (“Laudabiliter”), in Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. ii. c. 5 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 317), etc.

- [427] “Nam omnes insulæ, de jure antiquo, ex donatione Constantini qui eam fundavit et dotavit, dicuntur ad Romanam ecclesiam pertinere.” Joh. Salisb. Metalog., l. iv. c. 42 (Giles, vol. v. p. 206).

- [428] “Sane Hiberniam et omnes insulas, quibus sol justitiæ Christus illuxit, et quæ documenta fidei Christianæ ceperunt, ad jus beati Petri et sacrosanctæ Romanæ ecclesiæ, quod tua etiam nobilitas recognoscit, non est dubium pertinere. Unde tanto in eis libentius plantationem fidelem et germen gratum Deo inserimus quanto id a nobis interno examine districtius prospicimus exigendum.” Bull “Laudabiliter,” Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. ii. c. 5 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 317).

- [429] Bull “Laudabiliter,” Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. ii. c. 5 (Dimock, vol. v. pp. 317, 318); R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 300, 301; Pet. Blois, Ep. ccxxxi. (Giles, vol. ii. pp. 201, 202); Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 19; etc. Its authenticity has been fiercely disputed, but is now admitted by all Irish scholars. See proofs in Lanigan, Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iv. pp. 165, 166, and O’Callaghan’s edition of Macariæ Excidium (Irish Archæol. Soc.), pp. 242, 245, where it is reprinted from Baronius’s copy, found by him in the Vatican archives.

- [430] Joh. Salisb. Metalog., l. iv. c. 42 (Giles, vol. v. p. 206).

This strange crusade was postponed for the moment, as we have seen, in deference to objections made by the Empress Matilda.[431] Adrian’s bull and ring were stored up in the English chancery, and there, long after Adrian was dead, they still lay,[432] unused and, as it seemed, forgotten amid an ever-increasing throng of more urgent cares and labours which even Henry found to be quite as much as he was capable of sustaining. At last, however, the course of political events in Ireland itself took a turn which led almost irresistibly to a revival of his long-forsaken project. Two years before Henry’s accession Dermot Mac-Murrough, king of Leinster, had made a raid upon the district of Breffny in Connaught, on the borders of Ulster and Meath, and carried off Dervorgil, the wife of its chieftain Tighernan O’Ruark.[433] From that hour Tighernan’s vengeance never slept. During the next fourteen years, while Murtogh O’Lochlainn was striving for the mastery first against the veteran Terence O’Conor and after Terence’s death with his son Rory or Roderic, the swords of the men of Breffny were thrown alternately into either scale, as their chieftain saw a hope of securing the aid of either monarch to avenge him of his enemy.[434] In 1166 the crisis came. Murtogh drew upon himself the wrath of his people by blinding the king of Uladh, for whose safety he was pledged to the archbishop of Armagh; Ulster, Meath, Leinster and Dublin rose against him all at once; he was defeated and slain in a great battle at the Fews; the Ostmen of Dublin acknowledged Roderic as their king, and all the princes of southern Ireland followed their example. Dermot’s submission, however, was in vain; the first act of the new monarch was to banish him from the realm.[435] The Leinstermen forsook him at once, for their loyalty had long been alienated by his harsh government and evil deeds.[436] Left alone to the justice of Roderic and the vengeance of O’Ruark, he fled to Cork and thence took ship to Bristol. Here he found shelter for a while in the priory of S. Augustine, under the protection of its founder Robert Fitz-Harding;[437] at the close of the year he made his way to Normandy, and thence, with some difficulty, tracked Henry’s restless movements into the depths of Aquitaine,[438] where he at last laid his appeal for succour at the feet of the English king.

[431] Rob. Torigni, a. 1155. See above, vol. i. p. 431.

[432] Joh. Salisb. Metalog., l. iv. c. 42 (Giles, vol. v. p. 206).

[433] Four Masters, a. 1152 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1103). Cf. Gir. Cambr., Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 1 (Dimock, vol. v. pp. 225, 226), and the elaborately romantic account in the Anglo-Norman Poem on the Conquest of Ireland, edited by M. Francisque Michel, pp. 2–6. The two last-named authorities represent this affair as the immediate cause of Dermot’s overthrow, and of all the consequent troubles. Chronology shews this to be mere romance; yet, notwithstanding the criticisms of some modern writers, there still seems to be some ground for the earlier view which looked upon Dervorgil as a sort of Irish Helen. If we follow carefully the thread of the story in the Four Masters from 1153 to 1166 we can hardly avoid the conclusion that throughout those years the most important personage in Irish politics, the man whose action turned the scale in nearly all the ups and downs of fortune between Murtogh of Ulster and the kings of Connaught, was the border-chieftain whose position made him the most dangerous of foes and the most indispensable of allies—Tighernan O’Ruark; and we can hardly help seeing in Dermot’s banishment the vengeance less of Roderic O’Conor himself than of a supporter whom Roderic could not afford to leave unsatisfied. On the other hand, it is perfectly true that the opportunity for executing that vengeance was given by the disaffection of Dermot’s own subjects—and, as usual, more especially by the rising of the Ostmen of Dublin.

[434] See Four Masters, a. 1153–1166 (as above, pp. 1107–1159).

[435] Four Masters, a. 1166 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1159–1163).

[436] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 1 (Dimock, vol. v. pp. 225, 226). For specimens of his misdeeds see Four Masters, a. 1141 (as above, p. 1065), and Ann. Clonmacnoise, a. 1135 (ib. p. 1051, note f).

[437] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 12.

[438] “In remotis et transmarinis Aquitannicæ Galliæ partibus.” Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 227). Henry was in Aquitaine from December 1166 till May 1167; see Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., pp. 103–106. The chase which he characteristically led the Irish king is amusingly described in the Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 13:

“Bien est, seignurs, ke jo vus die
Cum Dermod va par Normandie;
Li rei Henri va dunc quere,
A munt, à val, avant, arere;
Tant ad mandé et enquis
Que trové ad li rei Henris,
A une cité l’ad trové,
Que seignur esteit clamé.”

On the last line the editor (notes, p. 168) remarks: “Seignur (seigñ, MS.)? Is it not: of which he was called lord?” One feels tempted to suggest that it might be meant for the name of the place; but if so, what can it be? Saintes?

At the crisis of his struggles with Thomas of Canterbury, with Louis of France and with the rebel barons of Poitou, all that Henry could do was to accept Dermot’s offer of homage and fealty,[439] promise to send him help as soon as possible,[440] and furnish him with a letter authorizing any loyal English, Norman, Welsh, Scottish or Angevin subjects who might be so disposed to join the standard of the Irish prince, as of a faithful vassal of their sovereign.[441] Another stay of some weeks in Bristol[442] convinced Dermot that his best chance of aid lay beyond the Severn. Wales was still in the main a Celtic land, ruled in primeval Celtic fashion by native princes under little more than nominal subjection to the king of England. The Norman conquest of Wales, so far as Wales could be said to have been conquered at all, had been effected not by the royal power but by the daring and prowess of individual adventurers who did, indeed, seek the royal sanction for their tenure of the lands which they had won, but who were scarcely more amenable to the royal authority than their Welsh neighbours, with whom they not unfrequently made common cause against it. It was Robert of Bellême’s connexion with Wales, through his border-earldom of Shrewsbury and his brother’s lordship of Pembroke, which had made him so formidable to Henry I.; it was Robert of Gloucester’s tenure of the great Welsh lordship of Glamorgan, even more than his English honours, which had enabled him to act as an independent potentate against Stephen. Another border-chieftain who played some part in the civil war was Gilbert de Clare, whose father had received a grant of Cardigan from Henry I. in 1107,[443] and upon whom Stephen in 1138 conferred the title of earl of Pembroke.[444] His son Richard appears under the same title among the witnesses to Stephen’s proclamation of the treaty of Wallingford in 1153;[445] the writers of the time, however, usually describe him as earl of Striguil, a fortress which seems to have occupied the site whence the ruins of Chepstow castle now look down upon the Wye. His earldom of Pembroke, indeed, as one of Stephen’s fictitious creations, must have been forfeited on Henry’s accession; but the lord of Striguil was still a mighty man on the South-Welsh border when in the spring of 1167 he promised to bring all the forces which he could muster to aid in restoring Dermot, who in return offered him his daughter’s hand, together with the succession to his kingdom.[446] A promise of the town of Wexford and its adjoining territory won a like assurance of aid from two half-brothers in whose veins the blood of Norman adventurers was mingled with the ancient royal blood of South-Wales: Maurice Fitz-Gerald, a son of Gerald constable of Pembroke by his marriage with Nest, aunt of the reigning prince Rees Ap-Griffith, and Robert Fitz-Stephen, son of the same Nest by her second husband, Stephen constable of Cardigan.[447] Another Pembrokeshire knight, Richard Fitz-Godoberd, volunteered to accompany Dermot at once with a little band of Norman-Welsh followers.[448] With these Dermot returned to Ireland in August 1167;[449] he was defeated in a pitched battle with Roderic O’Conor and Tighernan O’Ruark;[450] but in his own hereditary principality of Kinsellagh[451] he was safe; there throughout the winter he lay hid at Ferns,[452] and thence, when spring returned, he sent his bard Maurice Regan to claim from his Welsh allies the fulfilment of their promises.[453]

[439] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 1 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 227). Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 15.

[440] Anglo-Norm. Poem, as above.

[441] Gir. Cambr. as above (pp. 227, 228).

[442] Ib. c. 2 (p. 228). He was at Bristol “quinzein u un meins”; Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 16.

[443] Brut y Tywys., a. 1107 (Williams, p. 105).

[444] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 917.

[445] Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 18. Richard de Clare became known to later generations by the nickname of “Strongbow.” Its use is convenient, as helping to avoid confusion with the other Richards of the period; but it seems to have no contemporary authority. See Mr. Dimock’s note, Gir. Cambr., vol. v. p. 228, note 4.

[446] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 2 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 228). Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 17.

[447] Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 229). The circumstances of Fitz-Stephen’s enlistment illustrate the condition of South-Wales at this time. He had been cast into prison three years before by his cousin Rees, and at the moment of Dermot’s arrival had just been released on condition of joining Rees in an attack upon England. His Norman blood, however, was loyal enough to revolt against the fulfilment of the condition; and Rees, who had warmly espoused Dermot’s interest, was persuaded to allow its exchange for service in Ireland. Ibid.; cf. Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 19, 20. For pedigree of Nest’s descendants see Mr. Dimock’s edition of Gir. Cambr. Opp., vol. v. App. B. to pref., pp. c, ci.

[448] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 21.

[449] About August 1, according to Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 2 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 229).

[450] Four Masters, a. 1167 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. pp. 1165–1167). Among the slain they mention “the son of the king of Britain, who was the battle-prop of the island of Britain, who had come across the sea in the army of Mac Murchadha.” This can only mean a son or brother of Rees; but neither Gerald nor the Welsh chronicles make any mention of such a person in Ireland.

[451] The modern county of Wexford, or rather the diocese of Ferns. The Four Masters (as above, p. 1165) say that Dermot “returned from England with a force of Galls, and he took the kingdom of Ui-Ceinnsealaigh.”

[452] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 2 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 230).

[453] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 21.

In the first days of May[454] Robert Fitz-Stephen landed at Bannow, between Wexford and Waterford, with thirty picked knights of his own immediate following, and a body of auxiliaries to the number of sixty men-at-arms and three hundred archers.[455] With him came three of his nephews, Meiler Fitz-Henry, Miles Fitz-David[456] and Robert de Barri;[457] and also a ruined knight called Hervey of Mountmorris, uncle of Richard de Clare.[458] Next day an independent adventurer, Maurice de Prendergast, arrived from Milford with ten more knights and a band of archers.[459] Dermot himself came to meet them with some five hundred Irishmen. The united force marched upon Wexford, and took it in two days;[460] they then established their head-quarters at Ferns,[461] and thence made an expedition into Ossory, whose chieftain was specially hostile to Dermot. In spite of overwhelming odds, through all the difficulties of an unknown country full of woods and marshes, and traps laid against them by their skilful foes, the Norman-Welsh knights and archers made their way into the heart of Ossory; and a great battle ended in the rout of the Irish and the bringing of two hundred heads to Dermot’s feet in his camp on the banks of the Barrow.[462] A successful raid upon Offaly was followed by one upon Glendalough, and a third upon Ossory again,[463] till in the following year the state of affairs in Leinster had become threatening enough to drive all the Irish princes and the Ostmen of Dublin into a confederacy under Roderic O’Conor for the expulsion of the intruders.[464] Dermot pledged himself to acknowledge Roderic as monarch of Ireland, and was in his turn acknowledged by Roderic as king of Leinster on condition that he should dismiss his foreign allies.[465] The agreement was however scarcely made when Maurice Fitz-Gerald landed at Wexford with some hundred and forty men;[466] these at once joined Dermot in an expedition against Dublin, and harried the surrounding country till the citizens were reduced to promise obedience.[467] Early in the next year Dermot’s son-in-law Donell O’Brien, king of Limerick or Northern Munster, succeeded by the help of Robert Fitz-Stephen in throwing off the authority of Roderick O’Conor.[468] Encouraged by these successes, Dermot now began to aspire in his turn to the monarchy of all Ireland;[469] but his auxiliaries were numerically insufficient; and the one from whom he had expected most had as yet failed to appear at all.

[454] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 3 (as above·/·Dimock, vol. v. p. 230). All the later Irish historians, as well as Lord Lyttelton and Mr. Dimock (ib. margin) date the arrival of Fitz-Stephen in May 1169. The reason apparently is that, as far as Dermot and his English auxiliaries are concerned, the year 1168 is a blank in the Four Masters, while under 1169 they say: “The fleet of the Flemings came from England in the army of Mac Murchadha, i.e. Diarmaid, to contest the kingdom of Leinster for him; they were seventy heroes clad in coats of mail.” But seeing that in the following year, 1170, they for the first time mention Robert Fitz-Stephen, and represent him as coming over with Richard of Striguil (O’Donovan, vol. ii. pp. 1173–1175), it is by no means evident that the foregoing entry has any reference to him. It may just as well apply to Maurice Fitz-Gerald, who certainly followed him after an interval of some months at least. Gerald (as above, c. 2, p. 229) says that Fitz-Stephen and Fitz-Gerald both promised, in the summer of 1167, to join Dermot “cum zephyris et hirundine primâ.” Maurice undoubtedly made a long delay; but there is not a word to shew that Robert did otherwise than fulfil his engagement to the letter. Nay, Gerald pointedly introduces him (ib. c. 3, p. 230) as “nec promissionis immemor nec fidei contemptor.” He also tells us (c. 2, ibid.) that Dermot had wintered at Ferns. Why then are we to assume that by “wintered” he means “wintered, summered, and wintered again”? What could Dermot possibly have been doing there for more than twenty months?

[455] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 3 (p. 230). For account of Fitz-Stephen himself see ib. c. 26 (pp. 271, 272).

[456] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 22. On Meiler see Gir. Cambr. as above, l. ii. c. 9 (pp. 324, 325); and for pedigree, Mr. Dimock’s App. B. to pref. (ib. pp. c., ci.).

[457] Gir. Cambr. as above, l. i. c. 3 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 232). Cf. App. B. to pref., ib. p. c.

[458] Gir. Cambr. as above, l. i. c. 3 (p. 230). See also l. ii. c. 11 (pp. 327, 328).

[459] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 3 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 232).

[460] Ibid. (pp. 232, 233). Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 24, 25.

[461] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 25, 26.

[462] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 4 (p. 234). Cf. the long account in Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 27–38.

[463] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 42–51.

[464] Roderic, in 1169, met the northern chieftains at Tara, thence marched to Dublin, and afterwards proceeded into Leinster; and Tighernan O’Ruark, Dermot king of Meath, and the Ostmen of Dublin “went to meet the men of Munster, Leinster and Osraigh” [Ossory], “and they set nothing by the Flemings.” Four Masters, a. 1169 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1173).

[465] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 10 (p. 244).

[466] Ten knights, thirty “arcarii” or mounted archers, and about a hundred “sagittarii pedestres.” Ib. c. 11 (pp. 244, 245).

[467] Ibid. (p. 245).

[468] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 11 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 245). The date, 1170, comes from the Four Masters (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1175), who however do not mention Fitz-Stephen’s share in the matter.

[469] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 12 (p. 246).

The history of Richard of Striguil is far from clear. From the number of troops which eventually accompanied him to Ireland it is evident that he had been during these two years actively preparing for his expedition; and it may even be that the extent of his preparations had drawn upon him the suspicions of King Henry. We only know that, for some cause or other, he was now a ruined man; his lands were forfeited to the Crown;[470] and he seems to have lingered on, absorbed in a desperate effort to regain Henry’s favour, and clinging to his lost home with a feeling that if he once turned his back upon it, he would never be allowed to see it again. A letter from Dermot, telling of the successes of his party in Leinster and renewing his former offers, forced him into action.[471] He made a last appeal to the king, intreating either for restoration of his lands or for the royal license to go and repair his fortunes elsewhere. Henry ironically bade him go, and he went.[472] On S. Bartholomew’s eve, 1170, he landed at Waterford with twelve hundred men;[473] next day he was joined by Raymond “the Fat,” a young warrior whom he had sent over three months before[474] with ten knights and seventy archers, and who with this small force had contrived to beat back an assault of three thousand Irishmen of Decies and Ostmen of Waterford upon his camp of wattle and thatch, hastily thrown up on the rocky promontory of Dundonulf.[475] On August 25 Richard and Raymond attacked Waterford; three assaults in one day carried both town and citadel;[476] seven hundred citizens were slaughtered,[477] and the officers of the fortress, whose names tell of northern blood, were made prisoners.[478] A few days later Richard was married at Waterford to Dermot’s daughter Eva.[479] He then joined his father-in-law in a circuitous march across the hills and through Glendalough,[480] whereby they avoided a great host which Roderic had gathered at Clondalkin to intercept them, and arrived in safety on S. Matthew’s day beneath the walls of Dublin.[481] Dermot sent his bard to demand the instant surrender of the town, with thirty hostages for its fidelity. A dispute arose, probably between the Irish and Danish inhabitants, as to the selection of the hostages;[482] Archbishop Laurence was endeavouring to compose the difficulty,[483] and Hasculf Thorgils’ son, a chieftain of northern blood who commanded the citadel, had actually promised to surrender it on the morrow,[484] when a sudden attack made by Raymond the Fat on one side and by a knight called Miles Cogan on the other carried the town before the leaders of either party knew what had happened.[485] A second rush won the citadel; Hasculf escaped by sea and took refuge in the Orkneys;[486] Dublin was sacked,[487] and left throughout the winter under the command of Miles Cogan,[488] while Richard of Striguil was guarding Waterford against the men of Munster,[489] and Dermot, from his old head-quarters at Ferns,[490] was making raid after raid upon Meath and Breffny.[491]

[470] The cause of Richard’s disgrace seems to be nowhere stated, except by William of Newburgh. He has (l. ii. c. 26; Howlett, vol. i. pp. 167, 168), as usual, an independent version of the whole affair. According to him, Richard’s chief motive for going to Ireland was to escape from his creditors, he being deep in debt; he went in defiance of an express prohibition from Henry, and it was on hearing of his victories—i.e. some time in the latter part of 1170—that Henry confiscated his estates. Dugdale (Baronage, vol. i. p. 208) gives 1170 as the date of the forfeiture, on the authority of a MS. in the Bodleian library. But this is irreconcileable with the very circumstantial story of Gerald. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 234, dates the forfeiture three years before Henry’s visit to Ireland, i.e. 1168.

[471] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 12 (as above, pp. 246, 247).

[472] Ib. cc. 12, 13 (pp. 247, 248). Cf. Gerv. Cant. as above.

[473] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 16 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 254). Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 72. The latter gives the number of troops as fifteen hundred; Gerald makes them two hundred knights and a thousand foot-men.

[474] So says Gerald, as above, c. 13 (p. 248); but Mr. Dimock (ib. note 2) thinks this too early.

[475] Ibid. (pp. 248, 249). There is however a less heroic version of this affair in the Anglo-Norman Poem (Michel), pp. 68–70. We are there told that Raymond and his men had provided themselves with food by “lifting” all the cattle in the neighbourhood and penning them within the camp. At the sound of arms these creatures rushed out in a wild stampede, and it was this which put the assailants to flight. On the site of Dundonulf see Mr. Dimock’s Glossary to Gir. Cambr., vol. v. p. 421.

[476] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 16 (ib. pp. 254, 255).

[477] Four Masters, a. 1170 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1177).

[478] Ragnald and “the two Sihtrics”; Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 255). The Four Masters (as above) give to the commandant of the citadel—which Gerald calls “Ragnald’s tower”—the name of Gillemaire. In the Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 72, we read that “les plus poanz de la cité” were Regenald and “Smorch.”

[479] Gir. Cambr. as above. Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 73. Four Masters, a. 1170 (as above).

[480] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 17 (p. 256).

[481] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 75–78. Cf. Gir. Cambr. and Four Masters as above. The latter say that “there was a challenge of battle between them” (i.e. between Roderic and the foreigners) “for three days, until lightning burned Ath-Cliath” [Dublin].

[482] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 79, 80.

[483] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 17 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 256).

[484] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 80. He is there called “Hesculf”; in p. 79, “Mac Turkil Esculf.” In the Four Masters, a. 1170 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1177), he is “Asgall, son of Raghnall, son of Turcaill.” Gir. Cambr. (as above) calls him simply “Hasculphus.”

[485] Gir. Cambr. as above (pp. 256, 257). Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 80, 81.

[486] Four Masters, as above. Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 257).

[487] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 81, 82.

[488] Gir. Cambr. as above. Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 82.

[489] “A victory was gained by the son of Cormac, grandson of Carthach, and the people of Desmond, over the knights who were left to defend Port Lairge” [i.e. Waterford]. Four Masters, as above. Earl Richard returned thither early in October; Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 82.

[490] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 83.

[491] Four Masters, a. 1170 (as above, pp. 1177, 1179).

In vain did the Irish clergy meet in synod at Armagh and strive to avert the wrath which seemed to have been revealed against their country by a solemn decree for the liberation of the English slaves with whom, even yet, the houses of the Irish chieftains were filled.[492] One sentence from an Irish record of the next year may serve to illustrate the condition of the country: “Seven predatory excursions were made by the Ui-Maine into Ormond from Palm Sunday till Low Sunday.”[493] It made but little difference when at Whitsuntide Dermot, “by whom a trembling sod was made of all Ireland,” died at Ferns “of an insufferable and unknown disease—without a will, without penance, without the Body of Christ, without unction, as his evil deeds deserved.”[494] At that very moment a wiking fleet gathered from all the lands where the old sea-rovers’ life still lingered—Norway, the Hebrides, Orkney, Man—appeared in Dublin bay under the command of Hasculf, the exiled leader of the Ostmen, and of a northern chief whose desperate valour won him the title of “John the Furious”—in the English speech of that day, John the Wode.[495] Something of the spirit of the old northern sagas breathes again in the story of this, the last wiking-fight ever fought upon the soil of the British isles. Bard and historian alike tell of the mighty strokes dealt by the battle-axes of John and his comrades,[496] and how they had almost hewed their way into Dublin once more, when a well-timed sally of the besieged caught them at unawares in the rear;[497]—how an Irish chief named Gillamocholmog, whom Miles Cogan had posted on a neighbouring hill, chivalrously bidding him watch the course of the battle and join the winning side, rushed down with his followers at the critical moment and helped to complete the rout of the Ostmen;[498]—how John the Wode fell by the hand of Miles Cogan;[499]—how Hasculf was taken prisoner by Miles’s brother Richard and brought back to be reserved for ransom, and how his hot wiking-blood spoke in words of defiance which goaded his captors to strike off his head.[500] Fifteen hundred northmen fell upon the field; five hundred more were drowned in trying to regain their ships.[501] From the shores of Ireland, as from those of England, the last northern fleet was driven away by Norman swords.

- [492] Gir. Cambr. as above,·/·Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 18 (p. 258).

- [493] Four Masters, a. 1171 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1185). The Ui-Maine were a tribe in south-eastern Connaught.

- [494] Ibid. (p. 1183). Cf. Ann. Loch Cé, a. 1171 (Hennessy, vol. i. p. 145). The date, “circa Kalendas Maiæ,” is given by Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 20 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 263).

- [495] “Duce Johanne agnomine the Wode,” Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 21 (p. 264). “Johan le Devé,” Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 108. It is there added that, “solum les Yrreis,” he was a nephew of the king of “Norwiche,” i.e. Norway. The Four Masters, a. 1171 (as above, p. 1185) describe him as “Eoan, a Dane from the Orkney Islands.”

- [496] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 116. Gir. Cambr. as above.

- [497] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 111–114. Gir. Cambr. as above.

- [498] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 109–111, 115.

- [499] Ib. p. 117.

- [500] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 117, 118. (On his captor cf. ib. p. 111). Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 21 (Dimock, vol. v. pp. 264, 265).

- [501] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 116, 118. The date of this siege is given by Gir. Cambr. (as above, p. 263) as “eâdem fere tempestate” (i.e. about the time of Dermot’s death), “circa Pentecosten.” This would be at the beginning of May. In the Poem it comes much later in the year. There seems however no reason to upset Gerald’s arrangement of events. See Mr. Dimock’s remarks, Gir. Cambr. as above, note 2.

The garrison of Dublin fought in truth even more desperately than their assailants; for they were fighting for their all. A remonstrance addressed by some of the Irish princes to the king of England against the aggressions of his subjects[502] can hardly have been needed to open Henry’s eyes to the danger gathering for him and his realm beyond the western sea. This little band of adventurers, almost all bound together by the closest ties of kindred,[503] were conquering Leinster neither for its native sovereign nor for their own, but were setting up a new feudal state independent of all royal control, under the leadership of a disgraced English baron. Such a state, if suffered to grow unhindered, would soon be far more dangerous to England than to Ireland, for it would be certain to play in every struggle of the feudal principle against the royal authority in England the part which the Ostmen had played of old in the struggles of the Danelaw. At the beginning of the year 1171 therefore Henry issued an edict prohibiting all further intermeddling of his subjects in Ireland, and bidding those who were already there either return before Easter or consider themselves banished for life.[504] Not a man went back; Richard of Striguil sent Raymond over to Normandy with a written protest to the king, pleading that his conquests had been undertaken with the royal sanction and that he was ready to place them at the king’s disposal;[505] but the “Geraldines,” as the kindred of Maurice Fitz-Gerald called themselves, seem to have at once accepted their sentence of exile and resolved to hold by their swords alone the lands which those swords had won.[506]

- [502] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 234, 235.

- [503] The close kindred of these Norman-Welsh settlers in Ireland is a very remarkable feature of their settlement. Robert Fitz-Stephen and Maurice Fitz-Gerald were half-brothers (Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 2, p. 229); the two Fitz-Henrys, Raymond the Fat, Miles Fitz-David and Robert de Barri were their nephews (ib. cc. 4, 13, and l. ii. c. 10, pp. 234, 248, 335); Richard of Striguil was nephew to Hervey of Mountmorris (ib. l. i. c. 3, p. 230), who afterwards married a daughter of Maurice Fitz-Gerald, while Maurice’s eldest son married Richard’s daughter Alina (ib. l. ii. c. 4, p. 314); another daughter of Richard married his constable Robert de Quincy (Anglo-Norm. Poem, Michel, p. 130); and his sister Basilea became the wife of Raymond the Fat (ib. p. 145, and Gir. Cambr. as above, l. ii. c. 3, pp. 312, 313).

- [504] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 19 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 259).

- [505] Ibid. Cf. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 235. Raymond was back again in time to share in the defence of Dublin against Roderic O’Conor—i.e. by the end of May or beginning of June. Gerald says he had to seek the king in “Aquitanic Gaul,” but this time the phrase cannot be taken literally. Eyton’s Itinerary shews plainly that throughout 1171 Henry never was further south than the Norman, or, at the utmost, the Breton border.

- [506] This seems to be the key-note of a speech which Gerald puts into Maurice’s mouth; Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 23 (as above, pp. 266, 267).

The hostility of the Ostmen had apparently ended with Hasculf’s defeat; thenceforth they seem to have made common cause with the new-comers in whom they were perhaps already beginning to recognize the stirrings of kindred blood. But, on the other hand, the position of Earl Richard and his comrades had been seriously weakened by Dermot’s death. The king of Leinster’s devise of his kingdom to his son-in-law was, like the grants which he had made to the Geraldines and like his own homage to King Henry, void in Irish law. In Irish eyes his death removed the last shadow of excuse for the presence of the strangers on Irish soil; their allies rapidly fell away;[507] and by midsummer the whole country rose against them as one man. Roderic O’Conor mustered the forces of the north; Archbishop Laurence of Dublin, whose family occupied an influential position in Leinster, called up the tribes of the south; while a squadron of thirty ships was hired from Jarl Godred of Man.[508] The aim of the expedition was to blockade Dublin, whither Earl Richard had now returned, and where almost all the leaders of the invasion, except Robert Fitz-Stephen and Hervey of Mountmorris, were now gathered together. The whole Irish land-force amounted to sixty thousand men; half of these were under the immediate command of Roderic, encamped at Castle-Knock;[509] Mac-Dunlevy, the chieftain of Uladh, planted his banner on the old battle-field of Clontarf;[510] Donell O’Brien, the king of North Munster, posted himself at Kilmainham; and Murtogh Mac-Murrough, a brother of Dermot, whom Roderic had set up as king of Leinster in 1167, took up his position at Dalkey.[511] To these were added, for the northern division, the men of Breffny and of East Meath under Tighernan O’Ruark, those of Oiriel or southern Ulster under Murtogh O’Carroll,[512] and those of West Meath under Murtogh O’Melaghlin; while the archbishop’s call had brought up the whole strength of Leinster except the men of Wexford and Kinsellagh;[513] and even these, as the sequel proved, were preparing to fight the same battle on other ground.

- [507] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 83.

- [508] Gir. Cambr. as above, cc. 22, 24 (pp. 265, 266, 269). This is the archbishop afterwards canonized as S. Laurence O’Toole.

- [509] Cf. Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 84, with Gerald’s reckoning of Roderic’s own forces at thirty thousand. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 24 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 268).

- [510] “A Clontarf ficha sa banere.” Anglo-Norm. Poem, as above.

- [511] Ibid.

- [512] Four Masters, a. 1171 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1185). Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 24 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 269).

- [513] Gir. Cambr. as above.

For nearly two months[514] the English knights were thus blockaded in Dublin. Their sole hope of relief was in Robert Fitz-Stephen, who had been left in command at Wexford. They were all but starving when Donell Kavanagh, a half-brother of Eva Mac-Murrough and a devoted adherent of her husband, slipped into the city with tidings that Wexford had risen; Robert Fitz-Stephen was blockaded in the little fort of Carrick by the townsfolk and the men of Kinsellagh, to the number of three thousand; unless he could be succoured within three days, all would be over with him and his men.[515] Earl Richard at once called a council of war. It comprised nearly all the leaders of the English and Welsh forces in Ireland:—Richard of Striguil himself; Maurice Fitz-Gerald with three of his gallant nephews, Meiler Fitz-Henry, Miles Fitz-David and Raymond the Fat; Miles Cogan, the captor of Dublin and its chief defender in the recent siege; Maurice de Prendergast,[516] who two years before had thrown up the adventure and gone home in disgust at the faithlessness of his allies,[517] but had returned, it seems, in Earl Richard’s train, and was yet to leave, alone of all the invading band, an honoured memory among the Irish people;[518] and some fourteen others.[519] They decided upon sending Maurice de Prendergast and Archbishop Laurence to Roderic with an offer of surrender on condition that Richard of Striguil should hold the kingdom of Leinster under Roderic as overlord. Roderic rejected the proposal with scorn; the knights might hold what the earlier pirates had held—Dublin, Waterford and Wexford; not another rood of Irish land should be granted to the earl and his company; and if they refused these terms, Dublin should be stormed on the morrow.[520] That afternoon the little garrison—scarce six hundred in all[521]—sallied forth and surprized Roderic’s camp while he and his men were bathing; Roderic himself escaped with great difficulty; fifteen hundred Irishmen were slain, many of them perishing in the water; while at sunset the victors returned, after a long pursuit, with scarcely a man missing, and laden with provisions enough to supply all Dublin for a year.[522] The rest of the besieging army dispersed at once, and the very next morning Earl Richard was free to set out for the relief of Robert Fitz-Stephen.[523]

- [514] Ib.·/·Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 22 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 266). This would bring the beginning of the siege to Midsummer at latest, for it was certainly over by the middle of August. The Four Masters (as above)·/·, a. 1171 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1185) make it last only a fortnight.

- [515] Gir. Cambr. as above. The Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 85, 86, gives a very hasty and confused sketch of this Wexford affair.

- [516] Earl Richard, Meiler, the two Mileses and Maurice Prendergast are mentioned in the Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 86, 87. Raymond is named by

Gerald, Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 22 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 266), as “a curiâ jam reversus”; his presence also appears later in the Poem. Gerald alone mentions the presence of Maurice Fitz-Gerald, whom the Poem never names throughout the siege; while Gerald never names Maurice de Prendergast. Is it possible that he has transferred to his own uncle the exploits of his namesake? But if so, where can Fitz-Gerald have been?

- [517] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 51–67.

- [518] Ib. pp. 97–103.

- [519] The Poem (as above), p. 87, reckons them at twenty in all, and names four besides those already mentioned, viz., Robert de Quincy, Walter de Riddlesford, Richard de Marreis and Walter Bluet.

- [520] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 87–90.

- [521] The Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 90, 91, describes the force as composed of three divisions, each consisting of forty knights, sixty archers and a hundred “serjanz.” Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 24 (p. 268), makes the three bands of knights contain respectively twenty, thirty and forty, each accompanied by as many archers and citizens as could be spared from guarding the walls.

- [522] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 24 (Dimock, vol. v. pp. 268, 269). Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 90–94. Cf. the brief account in Four Masters, a. 1171 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1185).

- [523] Gir. Cambr. as above (pp. 269, 270). Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 95.

He was however already too late. Three thousand men of Wexford and Kinsellagh, finding that they could make no impression by fair means upon Robert Fitz-Stephen shut up in the fort of Carrick with five knights and a handful of archers, at length had recourse to fraud. Two bishops and some monks were made to stand under the walls of the fort and swear upon relics brought for the purpose that Dublin was taken, the earl and his comrades slain, and Roderic on the march to Wexford at the head of his victorious host. On a promise of liberty to escape to Wales[524] Robert in his despair surrendered, only to see his little band of humbler followers slaughtered to a man, and himself and his five knights cast into chains. The men of Wexford then fired their town and took refuge with their captives on the neighbouring island of Beg-Erin,[525] whence they sent word to Richard of Striguil that if he dared to approach them he should immediately receive the heads of his six friends.[526] Notwithstanding this disaster at Wexford, and the failure of a plot to entrap the chief of Ossory—a well-deserved failure, due to the loyalty of Maurice de Prendergast[527]—the invaders were rapidly gaining ground. The king of North Munster, who was married to Eva’s sister, again forsook Roderic and made alliance with his English brother-in-law;[528] an attempt made by Tighernan O’Ruark to renew the siege of Dublin ended in failure;[529] and at last Murtogh of Kinsellagh was reduced to make a surrender of his principality into Richard’s hands and accept a re-grant of it from him as overlord, while Donell Kavanagh was invested on like terms with the remaining portion of Leinster.[530]

- [524] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 25 (pp. 270, 271).

- [525] Ibid. (p. 271). Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 85, 97.

- [526] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 28 (p. 273).

- [527] See the story in Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 97–103.

- [528] Ib. pp. 97, 98.

- [529] Four Masters, a. 1171 (as above, pp. 1185–1187). Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 29 (p. 274).

- [530] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 103.

The earl’s triumphs, however, met with an abrupt check from over sea. His uncle Hervey of Mountmorris, who had gone to plead his cause with the king after the failure of Raymond’s mission, returned to Waterford[531] with tidings that Henry himself was on his way to Ireland and required the self-styled earl of Leinster to go and speak with him without delay. Richard hurried over to Wales,[532] met Henry on the border,[533] and was forgiven on condition that he should surrender Dublin and the other coast towns absolutely into the king’s hands and do him homage and fealty for the rest of Leinster;[534] he then accompanied Henry into Pembrokeshire;[535] where the royal fleet was assembling in Milford Haven. It consisted of four hundred ships,[536] carrying a force of about four thousand men, of whom some five hundred were knights and the rest archers, mounted and unmounted.[537] The king embarked on the evening of Saturday, October 16, and landed next day at Croch, eight miles from Waterford.[538] On the morrow, S. Luke’s day, he entered the town of Waterford;[539] there he was met by his seneschal William Fitz-Aldhelm, his constable Humfrey de Bohun, Hugh de Lacy, Robert Fitz-Bernard, and some other officers of his household whom he had sent over to prepare for his coming.[540] The Irish of the district and the Ostmen of the town, in the person of their chieftain Ragnald, made submission to him as their sovereign;[541] while Richard of Striguil formally surrendered the place into the king’s hands and did homage to him for the earldom of Leinster.[542] The men of Wexford now, according to an agreement which they had made with Henry while he was waiting for a wind at Pembroke,[543] brought their captive Robert Fitz-Stephen to his sovereign’s feet, to be by him dealt with as a rebel and a traitor. Henry loaded him with reproaches and imprisoned him afresh, but his anger was more assumed than real, and the captive was soon released.[544] The submission of the English adventurers was followed by that of the Irish princes. Dermot MacCarthy, king of Cork or South Munster, was the first of them who came to Henry’s feet at Waterford, swore him fealty, gave hostages and promised tribute.[545] On November 1[546] Henry advanced to Lismore, and thence, two days later, to Cashel, where at the passage of the Suir he was met by the king of Limerick or of Northern Munster, Donell O’Brien, with offers of tribute and obedience. The lesser chieftains of southern Ireland followed the example of the two kings; in three weeks from his arrival all Munster was at his feet, and its coast-towns, Wexford, Waterford, Limerick and Cork, were all in the custody of his own officers.[547] At Martinmas he reached Dublin;[548] before Christmas he received hostages from all the princes of Leinster and Meath, from Tighernan O’Ruark of Breffny, from O’Carroll of Oiriel, and from the king of Uladh or eastern Ulster;[549] his new vassals built him a dwelling of wattle or wicker-work, after the manner of their country, outside the walls of Dublin, and there in their midst he held his Christmas court.[550]

[531] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 28 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 273). Hervey must have gone before Midsummer; he was clearly not in Dublin during the second siege, and returned shortly after its conclusion.

[532] Ibid. Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 105, 106.

[533] At Newnham in Gloucestershire, according to Gerald (as above). The Anglo-Norm. Poem (p. 106), however, says they met at Pembroke. This would make a difference of at least ten days in the date. From the account of Henry’s movements in the Brut y Tywys., a. 1171 (William, pp. 211–213), it seems that he crossed the border about September 8 and reached Pembroke on September 20.

[534] Gir. Cambr. as above. Cf. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 26 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 168, 169).

[535] Brut y Tywys., a. 1171 (Williams, p. 215).

[536] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 25; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 29; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 235. The Four Masters, a. 1171 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1187), and Ann. Loch. Cé, a. 1171 (Hennessy, vol. i. p. 145), give the number as two hundred and forty.

[537] Gerald (Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 30, Dimock, vol. v. p. 275) reckons five hundred knights, with “arcariis [var. satellitibus equestribus] quoque et sagittariis multis.” The Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 123, makes the knights four hundred, and a few lines later sums up the whole force as “quatre mil Engleis.”

Mr. W. Lynch (View of Legal Inst. in Ireland under Hen. II., p. 2) argues from the payments for arms, provisions, shipping, etc. recorded in the Pipe-Rolls for 1171, that the army must have numerically “far exceeded the force described in our printed historians.” He gives a few details of these payments, extracted from the Pipe-Roll in question (17 Hen. II., a. 1171); some more, from this and the next year’s roll, maybe seen in Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., pp. 161, 163. The host was no doubt composed almost wholly of English tenants-in-chivalry; but whatever may have been its numbers, there was a large proportion of these tenants who had nothing to do with it except by paying its expenses next year with a great scutage. See in Madox, Hist. Exch., vol. i. pp. 629–632, the extracts from Pipe Roll 18 Hen. II. “de scutagio militum qui nec abierunt in Hyberniam nec denarios” (in some cases “nec milites nec denarios”) “illuc miserunt.”

[538] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 25; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 29. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 348, makes October 16 the day of Henry’s arrival in Ireland; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 235, makes it “about S. Calixtus’s day” (October 16 would be two days after). Gerald, Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 30 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 275) makes him reach Waterford “circa kalendas Novembris, die videlicet S. Lucæ.” The Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel, p. 123) turns this into “à la Tusseinz”; the Four Masters, a. 1171 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1187) record his coming without any date at all; and the Brut y Tywys. a. 1171 (Williams, p. 217), absurdly says he sailed on Sunday, November 16. The Anglo-Norman poet seems to have taken Croch—“à la Croiz” as he calls it—for the place of embarkation.

[539] Gesta Hen., Rog. Howden and Gir. Cambr. as above.

[540] Gesta Hen. and Rog. Howden, as above. Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 124.

[541] Gesta Hen. as above. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 30.

[542] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 124.

[543] See the curious story of their envoy’s arrival and reception at Pembroke, ib. pp. 119–123.

[544] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. cc. 31, 32 (Dimock, vol. v. pp. 276, 277, 278). Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 125, 126.

[545] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 31 (p. 277).

[546] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 30, says he stayed at Waterford fifteen days.

[547] Gir. Cambr. as above, cc. 31, 32 (pp. 277, 278). He adds that Henry returned to Waterford, where he released Robert Fitz-Stephen, and thence proceeded to Dublin. The Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 126, 127, places this progress through Cashel and Lismore in inverse order, after Henry’s first visit to Dublin, and says nothing of a second visit to Waterford. Its account is however much less circumstantial than Gerald’s. The Gesta Hen. and Rog. Howden only name two places where Henry stayed—Waterford and Dublin; and as they both say he reached the latter at Martinmas, while Roger says he left Waterford when he had been there a fortnight (i.e. on November 1), Gerald’s story fills up the interval very well.

[548] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 28. Rog. Howden (as above), p. 32.

[549] Gerald (as above, c. 33, p. 278) enumerates the princes who submitted at Dublin as follows: “Machelanus Ophelan [O’Phelan], Machtalewi, Otuetheli [O’Toole], Gillemoholmoch [Gillamocholmog of Fingal by Dublin—see above, p. 106], Ocathesi [O’Casey], Ocaruel Urielensis [O’Carroll of Oiriel], et Ororicius Medensis [O’Ruark]”. He then relates the half-submission of Roderic of Connaught (of which more later), and adds: “sic itaque, præter solos Ultonienses, subditi per se singuli.” (Ib. p. 279.) He need not however have excepted the Ulstermen; for the Ann. Loch Cé, a. 1171 (Hennessy, vol. i. p. 145) —copying, it seems, the old Annals of Ulster (see Four Masters, O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1187, note c, and O’Kelly’s note to Lynch’s Cambr. Evers., vol. ii. p. 472, note d)—say that Henry while at Dublin received hostages from “Leinster, Meath, Breffny, Oiriel and Uladh.” This leaves only Connaught and Aileach unsubdued. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 235) and the Gesta Hen. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 25) lump all these submissions together, and the latter seems to place them all, as well as the submission of the bishops, during Henry’s stay in Waterford.

Rog. Howden (Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 30) not only does the same still more distinctly, but he does worse; he places the submission of the bishops first, and then says that the lay princes submitted “exemplo clericorum.” It is he, not Gerald or any one else, who is responsible for this misrepresentation, which the champions of the Irish Church have been justly denouncing ever since Dr. Lynch’s time.

[550] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 28, 29. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 32. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 236. Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 33 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 279).

Early in November two royal chaplains had been despatched to summon the Irish bishops to a council and claim their submission.[551] We hear not a word of Pope Adrian’s bull; but we can hardly doubt that its existence and its contents were in some way or other certified to the Irish prelates before, in response to the royal mandate, they met in council at Cashel in the first weeks of 1172.[552] The archbishop of Armagh absented himself on the plea of extreme age and infirmity;[553] all his episcopal brethren, however, made full submission to Henry, pledged themselves to conform in all things to the pattern of the English Church,[554] gave written promises to support the English king and his heirs as lawful sovereigns of Ireland,[555] and joined with him in sending to Rome a report of his proceedings and their own.[556]

- [551] Gesta Hen. (as above),·/·(Stubbs) vol. i. p. 28. Rog. Howden (as above),·/·(Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 31. The messengers were Nicolas, a chaplain of the king, and Ralf archdeacon of Landaff. They were sent out “circa festum S. Leonardi” (November 6). Gesta Hen. as above.

- [552] The Gesta Hen. and Rog. Howden as above, both place this council before Christmas 1171. Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 35 (p. 281), and R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 351, date it 1172. It seems better to follow them, for though Gerald is certainly no chronologist, he is the only writer who gives a detailed and rational account of this synod; and the summary given by R. Diceto also shews a fair knowledge of the subject, though he makes the synod meet at Lismore instead of Cashel.

- [553] Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 283). He adds that the primate afterwards went to Dublin and there submitted to Henry; but see Dr. Lanigan’s comment, Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iv. pp. 205, 206.

- [554] Gir. Cambr. as above. R. Diceto (as above), pp. 350, 351.

- [555] They sent him “litteras suas in modum cartæ extra sigillum pendentes:” Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 26. Cf. Rog. Howden (as above), pp. 30, 31. This is however placed by both writers some time before the council. See above, p. 114, note 6{549}.

- [556] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 31, says that Henry sent copies of the bishops’ letters of submission to Rome. Dr. Lanigan (Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iv. pp. 217, 218) objects that this can only have been done some time later, as Henry’s communications were cut off by the weather. But this is not borne out either by the words of R. Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 350) or by those of Gerald (Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 36, Dimock, vol. v. p. 284). They both say distinctly that a persistent contrary wind hindered all communication from England to Ireland. For communication in the opposite direction such a wind would surely be most favourable. Moreover, it is quite certain that the Pope did, some time before September 20, 1172, receive reports of Henry’s proceedings in Ireland both from Henry himself and from the Irish bishops, for he says so in three letters—one addressed to Henry, another to the kings and bishops of Ireland, and the third to the legate, Christian bishop of Lismore—all dated Tusculum, September 20, and all printed in Hearne’s Liber Niger, vol. i. pp. 42–48, as well as in the notes to Macariæ Excidium (O’Callaghan), pp. 255–262.

In all Ireland the king of Connaught was now the only ruler, spiritual or temporal, who had not submitted to Henry.[557] Trusting to the inaccessible nature of his country,[558] Roderic had at first refused all dealings with the invader, declaring that he himself was the sole rightful monarch of Ireland.[559] It seems however that he afterwards came to a meeting with William Fitz-Aldhelm and Hugh de Lacy by the banks of the Shannon, on the frontier of Connaught and Meath, and there promised tribute and fealty like his fellow-kings.[560] The promise was however worthless until confirmed by his personal homage; and this Henry soon perceived was only to be extorted at the sword’s point. The impossibility of fighting to any advantage in the wet Irish winter compelled him to postpone the attempt until the spring;[561] and when spring came he found that his intended campaign must be abandoned altogether. From the day when he left Milford he had received not one word of tidings from any part of his dominions.[562] This total isolation, welcome at first as a relief from the load of cares which indeed he had purposely left behind him,[563] became at the end of nineteen weeks a source of almost unbearable anxiety. On March 1 he removed from Dublin to Wexford;[564] there for nearly a month he remained eagerly watching for a ship from England; none came until after Mid-Lent,[565] and then it was laden with such ill news that he could only take such hasty measures as were possible at the moment for maintaining his hold upon Ireland, and prepare to hurry out of it as soon as the wind would carry him.[566] Richard of Striguil was suffered to remain at Kildare[567] as earl of Leinster; the general direction of government and administration throughout the king’s Irish domains was intrusted to Hugh de Lacy,[568] who had already received a grant of Meath in fee,[569] and who was also left in command of the citadel of Dublin,[570] with a garrison of twenty knights, among whom were Maurice Fitz-Gerald[571] and Robert Fitz-Stephen.[572] The grants of territory made by Dermot to the half-brothers were of course annulled; Waterford and Wexford were both garrisoned and placed in charge of an officer appointed by the king;[573] and in each of these towns a fortress was either erected or repaired by his orders.[574]

[557] Perhaps we should add the chief of Aileach; see above, p. 114, note 6{549}.

[558] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 348.

[559] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 25, 26. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 235.

[560] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 33 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 279). See Dr. Lanigan’s refutation of Gerald’s comment on the legal effect of this transaction, Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iv. pp. 203, 204.

[561] Gesta Hen. (as above), pp. 26, 29.

[562] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 36 (p. 284). R. Diceto as above, p. 350.

[563] See Gervase of Canterbury’s account of his motives for going to Ireland (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 235).

[564] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 29; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 33.

[565] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 37 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 285).

[566] Ib. c. 37 (pp. 285, 286). In the Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 128, 129, Henry is made to receive the bad news before leaving Dublin, which is obviously too soon. Cf. Gesta Hen. as above, and Rog. Howden (as above), pp. 33, 34.

[567] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 132.

[568] “Constituit eum justitiarium Hyberniæ.” Rog. Howden (as above), p. 34.

[569] Ibid. Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 30. Gir. Cambr. (as above), c. 38 (p. 286). Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 130. See the charter of donation in Lyttelton, Hen. II., vol. iv. p. 295.

[570] Gir. Cambr., Gesta Hen. and Rog. Howden, as above. Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 129.

[571] Gir. Cambr. as above.

[572] Anglo-Norm. Poem, as above—adding Meiler Fitz-Henry and Miles Fitz-David.

[573] Gesta Hen., Rog. Howden and Gir. Cambr. as above.

[574] Gesta Hen. and Rog. Howden, as above. If we may believe the Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel, p. 130) Henry furthermore made a grant of Ulster to John de Courcy—“si à force la peust conquere.”

A better mode of securing his authority in Dublin was probably suggested to him by the ravages which war and famine had made among its population. Eight years before he had taken the burghers of Bristol, so long the medium of trading intercourse between England and Ireland, under his especial patronage and protection.[575] He now granted to them the city of Dublin, to colonize and to hold of him and his heirs by the same free customs which they enjoyed in their own town of Bristol.[576] It is plain that Henry was already aiming at something far other than a mere military conquest of Ireland; and the long and varied list of English names, from all parts of the country, which is found in a roll of the Dublin citizens only a few years later,[577] shews how willingly his plans were taken up, not only at Bristol but throughout his realm, by the class to which he chiefly and rightly trusted for aid in their execution. Unluckily, they were scarcely formed when he was obliged to leave their developement to other hands; and the consequence was a half success which proved in the end to be far worse than total failure. On Easter night[578] he sailed from Wexford;[579] next day he landed at Portfinnan, hard by S. David’s;[580] before the octave was out he had hurried through South Wales to Newport;[581] in a few days more he was at Portsmouth;[582] and before Rogation-tide he was once more in Normandy, ready to face the bursting of a storm whose consequences were to overshadow all his remaining years and to preclude all chance of his return to complete his conquest of Ireland.

[575] In January 1164 “he granted a short charter of privileges to the burghers of Bristol, whom as sovereign lord he calls his burgesses, although they were then under the lordship of the earl of Gloucester. This charter contains only an exemption from toll and passage and other customary payments for themselves and their goods through the king’s own lands, with a confirmation of their existing privileges and liberties” (Seyer, Mem. of Bristol, vol. i. p. 494, with a reference to “Charters of Bristol, No. 1”).

[576] Charter printed in Gilbert, Hist. and Munic. Documents of Ireland, p. 1.

[577] Ib. p. 3 et seq.

[578] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 351, says at sunset on Easter day (April 16); the Ann. Loch Cé, a. 1172 (Hennessy, vol. i. p. 147), say on Easter day “after Mass.” Gerald, Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 38 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 286), the Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 30, and Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 34, say he sailed early on the Monday morning, the two latter adding a reason—he would not travel on the feast-day, though he had suffered his household to do so. Most probably he sailed at midnight, as seems to have been often done. The Brut y Tywys. a. 1172 (Williams, p. 217), makes him reach Pembroke on Good Friday, but this is impossible.

[579] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 30. Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 131. The household had sailed from Croch to Milford; ibid. Cf. Rog. Howden as above, p. 34.

[580] Gesta Hen. and Rog. Howden, as above. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 351. The name of the place, Portfinnan, is given only in the Anglo-Norm. Poem (as above).

[581] See the itinerary in Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. cc. 38–40 (Dimock, vol. v. pp. 286–291), compared with Brut y Tywys. a. 1172 (Williams, pp. 217–219).

[582] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 30. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 34. It is Porchester in R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 351.

CHAPTER IV.
HENRY AND THE BARONS.
1166–1175.

For the last eight years Henry had been literally, throughout his English realm, over all persons and all causes supreme. From the hour of Thomas’s flight, not a hand, not a voice was lifted to oppose or to question his will; England lay passive before him; the time seemed to have come when he might work out at leisure and without fear of check his long-cherished plans of legal, judicial and administrative reform. In the execution of those plans, however, he was seriously hampered by the indirect consequences of the ecclesiastical quarrel. One of these was his own prolonged absence from England, which was made necessary by the hostility of France, and which compelled him to be content with setting his reforms in operation and then leave their working to other hands and other heads, without the power of superintending it and watching its effects with his own eyes, during nearly six years. He had now to learn that the enemy with whom he had been striving throughout those years was after all not the most serious obstacle in his way;—that the most threatening danger to his scheme of government still lay, as it had lain at his accession, in that temper of the baronage which it had been his first kingly task to bring under subjection. The victory which he had gained over Hugh Bigod in 1156 was real, but it was not final. The spirit of feudal insubordination was checked, not crushed; it was only waiting an opportunity to lift its head once more; and with the strife that raged around S. Thomas of Canterbury the opportunity came.

Henry’s attitude towards the barons during these years had been of necessity a somewhat inconsistent one. He never lost sight of the main thread of policy which he had inherited from his grandfather: a policy which may be defined as the consolidation of kingly power in his own hands, through the repression of the feudal nobles and the raising of the people at large into a condition of greater security and prosperity, and of closer connexion with and dependence upon the Crown, as a check and counterpoise to the territorial influence of the feudataries. On the other hand, his quarrel with the primate had driven him to throw himself on the support of those very feudataries whom it was his true policy to repress, and had brought him into hostility with the ecclesiastical interest which ought to have been, and which actually had been until now, his surest and most powerful aid. If it was what we may perhaps venture to call the feudal side of the ecclesiastical movement—its introduction of a separate system of law and jurisdiction, traversing and impeding the course of his own uniform regal administration—which roused the suspicions of the king, it was its anti-feudal side, its championship of the universal rights and liberties of men in the highest and widest sense, that provoked the jealousy of the nobles. This was a point which Henry, blinded for the moment by his natural instinct of imperiousness, seems to have overlooked when at the council of Northampton he stooped to avail himself of the assistance of the barons to crush the primate. They doubtless saw what he failed to see, that he was crushing not so much his own rival as theirs. The cause of the Church was bound up with that of the people, and both alike were closely knit to that of the Crown. Sceptre and crozier once parted, the barons might strive with the former at an advantage such as they had never had while Lanfranc stood beside William and Anselm beside Henry I., such as they never could have had if Thomas had remained standing by the side of Henry II.[583]

- [583] “The government party was made up of two elements—the higher order of the Clergy, who joined the king out of cowardice, having more at stake than they could make up their minds to lose; and the higher order of the Laity, who in this instance sided with the king against the Church, that when they had removed this obstacle they might afterwards fight him single-handed.” (R. H. Froude, Remains, vol. iv. p. 30). Which is just what Arnulf of Lisieux saw from the first (Ep. clxii., Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 309, 310), and what Henry learned to his cost in 1173.

As yet, however, there was no token of the strife to come. In February 1166, two years after the publication of the Constitutions of Clarendon, Henry assembled another council at the same place and thence issued an ordinance[584] for carrying out a reform in the method of bringing to justice criminals in general, similar to that which he had in the Constitutions sought to apply to criminals of one particular class. By the Assize of Clarendon it was enacted that the king’s justices and the sheriffs should in every shire throughout the kingdom make inquiry concerning all crimes therein committed “since our lord the king was king.”[585] The method of their investigations was that of inquest by sworn recognitors chosen from among the “lawful men” of each hundred and township, and bound by oath to speak the truth according to their knowledge of the fact in question. This mode of legal inquiry had been introduced into England by William the Conqueror for fiscal purposes, such as the taking of the Domesday survey, and its employment for similar objects was continued by his successors. Henry II. had in the early years of his reign applied the same principle to the uses of civil litigation by an ordinance known as the “Great Assize,” whereby disputes concerning the possession of land might, if the litigants chose, be settled before the justices of the king’s court by the unanimous oath of twelve lawful knights chosen according to a prescribed form from among those dwelling in the district where the land lay, and therefore competent to swear to the truth or falsehood of the claim.[586] This proceeding seems to be assumed as already in use by the ninth Constitution of Clarendon, which ordains its application to disputes concerning Church lands.[587] The Assize of Clarendon aimed at bringing criminals to justice by the help of the same machinery. It decreed that in every hundred of every shire inquest should be made by means of twelve lawful men of the hundred and four from each township, who should be sworn to denounce every man known in their district as a robber, thief or murderer, or a harbourer of such; on their presentment the accused persons were to be arrested by the sheriff, and kept by him in safe custody till they could be brought before the itinerant justices, to undergo the ordeal of water and receive legal punishment according to its results.[588] The inquest was to be taken and the session of the justices held in full shire-court; no personal privileges of any kind were to exempt any qualified member of the court from his duty of attendance and of service on the jury of recognitors if required;[589] and no territorial franchise or private jurisdiction, whether of chartered town or feudal “honour,” was to shelter a criminal thus accused from the pursuit of the sheriffs on the authority of the justices.[590]

- [584] On the date see Bishop Stubbs’ preface to Gesta Hen., vol. ii. pp. lix.–lxi. The Assize is printed in an appendix to same preface, pp. cxlix–cliv, and in Select Charters, pp. 143–146.

- [585] Assize of Clarendon, c. 1 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 143).

- [586] Glanville, De legibus Angliæ, l. ii. c. 7 (ib. p. 161). Cf. Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 616.

- [587] Constit. Clar. c. 9 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 139). See above, pp. 26, 27.

- [588] Assize Clar. cc. 1, 2, 4, 6 (as above, pp. 143, 144).

- [589] Ib. c. 8 (p. 144).

- [590] Ib. cc. 9–11 (as above).

As was the case with most of Henry’s reforms, none of the methods of procedure adopted in this Assize were new inventions. Not only had the inquest by sworn recognitors been in use for civil purposes ever since the Norman conquest; it may even be that the germ of a jury of presentment in criminal cases, which in its modern shape appears for the first time in the Assize of Clarendon, is to be traced yet further back, to an ordinance of Æthelred II., whereby the twelve senior thegns in every wapentake were made to swear that they would “accuse no innocent man nor conceal any guilty one.”[591] The mission of itinerant justices—derived in principle from the early days of English kingship, when the sovereign himself perambulated his whole realm, hearing and deciding whatever cause came before him as he passed along—had been employed by Henry I., and revived by Henry II. immediately after his accession. A visitation of the greater part of England had been made by two of the chief officers of the Curia Regis in the first year of his reign, and again in the second; another circuit seems to have been made in 1159 by William Fitz-John; and in 1163 Alan de Neville held pleas of the forest in Oxfordshire, while the justiciar himself, Richard de Lucy, made a journey into Cumberland to hold the pleas of the Crown there, for the first time since the district had passed into the hands of the king of Scots.[592] From the date of the Assize of Clarendon, however, these journeys became regular and general,[593] and the work of the judges employed on them became far more extensive and important.

- [591] Laws of Æthelred II., l. iii. c. 3 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 72). See Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. pp. 103, 115, 396, 611, 614.

- [592] Stubbs, Gesta Hen., vol. ii., pref. p. lxiv.

- [593] Ib. pp. lxiii, lxiv.

The first visitation under the assize was at once begun by Richard de Lucy and Geoffrey de Mandeville, earl of Essex;[594] and the Pipe Roll of the year furnishes some indications of its immediate results. The sums credited to the treasury for the pleas of the Crown reach a far greater amount than in the earlier rolls, and its receipts are further swelled by the goods and chattels of criminals condemned under the assize,[595] which were explicitly declared forfeit to the king.[596] The clause binding all qualified persons to be ready to serve on the juries was strictly enforced; one attempt to evade it was punished with a fine of five marks.[597] Another clause, enjoining upon the sheriffs the construction and repair of gaols for the detention of criminals, was carried into effect with equal vigour.[598] The work of the two justiciars was apparently not completed till the summer of 1167.[599] In that year pleas of the forest were held throughout the country by Alan de Neville; and in 1168 seven barons of the Exchequer made a general visitation of the shires for the collection of an aid on the marriage of the king’s eldest daughter.[600] This last was primarily a fiscal journey; the aid itself was a strictly feudal impost, assessed at one mark on every knight’s fee.[601] It was however levied in a remarkable manner. The Domesday survey, which by a few modifications in practice had been made to serve as the rate-book of the whole kingdom for eighty years, was at last found inadequate for the present purpose. A royal writ was therefore addressed to all the tenants-in-chief, requiring from them an account of the knights’ fees which they held and the services due upon them, whether under the “old infeoffment” of the time of Henry I., or under the “new infeoffment” since the resettlement of the country by his grandson.[602] The answers were enrolled in what is known as the Black Book of the Exchequer[603] and the aid was levied in accordance with their contents. The whole process occupied a considerable time; the preparations seem to have begun shortly after Matilda’s betrothal, for we hear of the purchase of “a hutch for keeping the barons’ letters concerning their knights” as early as 1166,[604] yet the collection of the money was not finished till the summer of 1169,[605] a year and a half after her marriage. The labours of the barons employed in it were however not confined to this one end; as usual, their travels were turned to account for judicial purposes,[606] and the system begun by the assize of Clarendon was by no means suffered to fall into disuse.

[594] Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 470. Gesta Hen., vol. ii., pref. pp. lxiv, lxv.

[595] See Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 471.

[596] Ass. Clar., c. 5 (Stubbs, Select Charters, pp. 143, 144).

[597] “Homines de Tichesoura debent v marcas quia noluerunt jurare assisam regis.” Pipe Roll a. 1166, quoted in Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 470, note 1.

[598] “The expenses of gaols at Canterbury, Rochester, Huntingdon, Cambridge, Sarum, Malmesbury, Aylesbury and Oxford are accounted for in the Roll of 1166.” Ib. p. 471, note 5.

[599] Stubbs, Gesta Hen., vol. ii., pref. pp. lxiv, lxv and note 1.

[600] Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 471 and note 6.

[601] Ib. p. 472. Madox, Hist. Exch., vol. i. p. 572.

[602] The tenour of the king’s writ is shewn by a typical answer, printed by Bishop Stubbs in his Select Charters, p. 146, from Hearne’s Liber Niger Scaccarii (2d ed.), vol. i. pp. 148, 149.

[603] Liber Niger Scaccarii, edited by Hearne. A roll of the Norman tenants-in-chivalry was compiled in the same manner in 1172; see Stapleton, Magni Rotuli Scaccarii Normanniæ, vol. i., Observations, p. xxxiv.

[604] Madox, Hist. Exch., vol. i. p. 576, and Stubbs, Constit. Hist., p. 471, note 7, from Pipe Roll a. 1166.

[605] Stubbs, as above, p. 472, and Gesta Hen., vol. ii. pref. p. lxv and note 2. Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 117.

[606] Stubbs, Gesta Hen., vol. ii., pref. p. lxv, note 2.

It was too soon as yet for the beneficial results of these measures to become evident to the people at large; but it was not too soon for them to excite the resentment of the barons. The stringency with which in the assize of Clarendon every claim of personal exemption or special jurisdiction was made to give way before the all-embracing authority of the king’s supreme justice shewed plainly that Henry still clave to the policy which had led him to insist upon the restoration of alienated lands and the surrender of unlicensed castles in England, to lose no opportunity of exercising his ducal right to seize and garrison the castles of his vassals in Normandy[607]—in a word, to check and thwart in every possible way the developement of the feudal principle. The assessment of the aid for his daughter’s marriage seems indeed at first glance to have been based on a principle wholly favourable to the barons, for it apparently left the determination of each landowner’s liabilities wholly in his own hands. But the commissioners who spent nearly two years in collecting the aid had ample power and ample opportunity to check any irregularities which might have occurred in the returns; and the impost undoubtedly pressed very heavily upon the feudal tenants as a body. Its proceeds seem, however, not to have come up to Henry’s expectations, and the unsatisfactory reports which reached him from England of the general results of his legal measures led him to suspect some failure in duty on the part of those who were charged with their execution.

- [607] Stubbs, Gesta Hen., vol. ii. pref. p. xlvii, note.

A large share of responsibility rested with the sheriffs; and the sheriffs were still for the most part, as they had been in his grandfather’s days, the chief landowners in their respective shires, men of great local importance, and only too likely to have at once the will and the power to defeat the ends of the very measures which by their official position they were called upon to administer. Henry therefore on his return to England at Easter 1170 summarily deposed all sheriffs of counties and bailiffs of royal demesnes, pending an inquisition into all the details of their official conduct since his own departure over sea four years ago. The inquiry was intrusted not to any of the usual members of the King’s Court and Exchequer, but to a large body of commissioners specially chosen for the purpose from the higher ranks of both clergy and laity.[608] These were to take pledges of all the sheriffs and bailiffs that they would be ready to appear before the king and make redress on an appointed day; an oath was also to be exacted from all barons, knights and freemen in every shire that they would answer truthfully and without respect of persons to all questions put to them by the commissioners in the king’s name.[609]

- [608] The list of commissioners for seven of the southern shires is in Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 216. See also Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 473 and note 2.

- [609] Inquest of sheriffs, Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 148. Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 217.

The subject-matter of these inquiries, as laid down in the king’s instructions, embraced far more than the conduct of the sheriffs. Not only were the commissioners to examine into all particulars of the sums received by the sheriffs and bailiffs in the discharge of their functions, and the manner and grounds of their acquisition,[610] and into the disposal of all chattels and goods forfeited under the assize of Clarendon; they were also to ascertain whether the collection of the aid pour fille marier had been honestly conducted; they were at the same time to investigate the administration of the forests[611] and the condition of the royal demesnes;[612] to find out and report any persons who had failed to do homage to the king or his son;[613] and they were moreover to make inquisition into the proceedings of all the special courts of the various franchises, whether held by archbishop or bishop, abbot, earl or baron, as fully and minutely as into those of the ordinary hundreds.[614] Only two months were allowed to the commissioners for their work, which nothing but their great number can have enabled them to execute in the time. Unhappily, the report which they brought up to the king on S. Barnabas’s day is lost, and we have no record of its results save in relation to one point: out of twenty-seven sheriffs, only seven were allowed to retain their offices. The rest, who were mostly local magnates owing their importance rather to their territorial and family influence than to their connexion with the court, were replaced by men of inferior rank, and of whom all but four were officials of the Exchequer.[615]

- [610] Inquest of sheriffs, cc. 1, 4, 9, 10 ( as above·/· Stubbs, Select Charters, pp. 148–150).

- [611] Ib. cc. 5, 6, 7 (p. 149).

- [612] Ib. c. 12 (p. 150).

- [613] Ib. c. 11 (p. 150).

- [614] Ib. cc. 2, 3 (pp. 148, 149).

- [615] See the list, and Bishop Stubbs’s analysis of it, in his preface to Gesta Hen., vol. ii. p. lxvii, note 3.

This significant proof of Henry’s determination to pursue his anti-feudal policy was followed up next year by the last step in that resumption of alienated demesnes which in England had been virtually completed thirteen years ago, but which had been enforced only by slower degrees on the other side of the channel. In 1171 Henry ordered a general inquisition into the extent and condition of the demesne lands and forests held by his grandfather in Normandy, and into the encroachments since made upon them by the barons; and we are told that the restitution which resulted from the inquiry almost doubled his ducal revenue.[616] The endurance of the barons was now almost at an end; and moreover, their opportunity had now come. From that same council at Westminster whence the decree had gone forth for the inquest of sheriffs, there had gone forth also the summons for the crowning of the young king; that other assembly which on S. Barnabas’s day saw the deposition of the delinquent officers saw also, three days later, the new and dangerously suggestive spectacle of two kings at once in the land. When, six months later still, the first consequences of that coronation appeared in the murder of S. Thomas, the barons could not but feel that their hour was at hand. His regal dignity no longer all his own, but voluntarily shared with another—his regal unction washed out in that stream of martyr’s blood which cut him off from the support of the Church—Henry seemed to be left alone and defenceless in the face of his foes. The year which he spent in conquering Ireland was a breathing-space for them as well as for him. They used it to adapt to their purposes the weapon which he had so lately forged for his own defence; they found a rallying-point and a pretext for their designs against him in the very son whom he had left to cover his retreat and supply his place at home.

- [616] Rob. Torigni, a. 1171.

The younger Henry had passed over to Normandy just before his father quitted it, in July 1171.[617] There he apparently stayed with his mother and her younger children till the opening of the next year, when he and his wife went to England, and there remained as titular king and queen until his father’s return from Ireland.[618] The youth’s kingship, however, was scarcely more than nominal; in his presence no less than in his absence, the real work of government in England was done by the justiciars; and his own personal interests lay chiefly beyond the sea. The influences which surrounded him there were those of his father’s open or secret foes:—of his wife’s father, King Louis of France, of his own mother, Queen Eleanor, her kindred and her people; and Eleanor had ceased to be a loyal vice-gerent for the husband who had by this time forfeited his claims to wifely affection from her. She seems to have taken for her political confidant her uncle, Ralf of Faye[619]—one of the many faithless barons of Poitou; and it is said to have been at her instigation that Ralf and an Angevin baron, Hugh of Ste.-Maure, profited by Henry’s absence in Ireland to whisper to her eldest son that a crown was worthless without the reality of kingly power, and that it was time for him to assert his claim to the substance of which his father had given him only the shadow.[620] Young Henry, now seventeen years old, listened but too readily to such suggestions; and it was a rumour of his undutiful temper, coupled significantly with a rumour of growing discontent among the barons, that called Henry back from Ireland[621] and made him carry his son with him to Normandy[622] in the spring of 1172. After the elder king’s reconciliation with the Church, however, and the second coronation of the younger one, the danger seemed to have subsided; and in November Henry, to complete the pacification, allowed his son to accompany his girl-wife on a visit to her father, the king of France.[623] When they returned,[624] the young king at once confronted his father with a demand to be put in possession of his heritage, or at least of some portion of it—England, Normandy, or Anjou—where he might dwell as an independent sovereign with his queen.[625] The father refused.[626] He had never intended to make his sons independent rulers of the territories allotted to them; Richard and Geoffrey indeed were too young for such an arrangement to be possible in their cases; and the object of the eldest son’s crowning had been simply to give him such an inchoate royalty as would enable his father to employ him as a colleague and representative in case of need, and to feel assured of his ultimate succession to the English throne. The king’s plans for the distribution of his territories and for the establishment of his children had succeeded well thus far. He had secured Britanny in Geoffrey’s name before he quitted Gaul in 1171; and a month after his return, on Trinity Sunday (June 10) 1172, Richard was enthroned as duke of Aquitaine according to ancient custom in the abbot’s chair in the church of S. Hilary at Poitiers.[627] One child, indeed, the youngest of all, was still what his father had called him at his birth—“John Lackland.”[628] Even for John, however, though he was scarcely five years old,[629] a politic marriage was already in view.

[617] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 24, note 2.

[618] Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., pp. 162, 166. He kept Christmas at Bures; Rob. Torigni, a. 1172 (i.e. 1171).

[619] Ep. ciii., Robertson, Becket, vol. v. p. 197. Cf. Ep. cclxxvii., ib. vol. vi. p. 131.

[620] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 350.

[621] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 37 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 285). Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 128, 129.

[622] Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 30.

[623] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 34. This writer says they went over—young Henry much against his will—about All Saints’ day, and were sent to the king of France both together. Rob. Torigni, a. 1172, says they crossed at Martinmas, and paid their visits to Louis separately, Henry at Gisors, Margaret at Chaumont.

[624] Summoned, it seems, by Henry, “timens fraudem et malitiam regis Franciæ, quas sæpe expertus fuerat.” Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 35.

[625] Ib. p. 41. Cf. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 242. The Gesta say the demand was made “per consilium regis Francorum, et per consilium comitum et baronum Angliæ et Normanniæ, qui patrem suum odio habebant.”

[626] Gesta Hen. and Gerv. Cant. as above.

[627] Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 67 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 318).

[628] “Quartum natu minimum Johannem Sine Terrâ agnominans.” Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 18 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 146).

[629] There is some doubt as to the date of John’s birth. Rob. Torigni (ad ann.) places it in 1167; R. Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 325) in 1166. The prose addition to Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle (Hearne, vol. ii. p. 484) says that he was born at Oxford on Christmas Eve. As Eleanor seems to have been in England at Christmas-tide in both years, this gives us no help. Bishop Stubbs (Introd. to W. Coventry, vol. ii. p. xvii, note 3) adopts the later date.

One of the many branches of Henry’s continental policy was the cultivation of an alliance with those small but important states which lay on the border-land between Italy, Germany, and that old Aquitanic Gaul over which he claimed dominion in his wife’s name. The most important of these was the county of Maurienne, a name which in strictness represents only a small mountainous region encircled to east and south by the Graian and Cottian Alps, and to west and north by another chain of mountains bordering the outermost edges of two river-valleys, those of the Isère and the Arc, which again are severed from each other by a line of lesser heights running through the heart of the district. In the southern valley, that of the Arc, stood the capital of the county, S. Jean-de-Maurienne, the seat of a bishopric from the dedication of whose cathedral church the town itself took its name. In the northern valley, at the foot of the Little S. Bernard, some few miles above the source of the Isère, the counts of Maurienne were advocates of the abbey of S. Maurice, which long treasured the sacred symbol of the old Burgundian royalty, the spear of its patron saint. The power of the counts of Maurienne, however, was not bounded by the narrow circle of hills which stood like an impregnable rampart round about their native land. On the shore of the lake of Bourget they held Chambéry, guarding the pass of Les Echelles, through which southern Gaul communicated with the German lands around the lake of Geneva; the county of Geneva itself was almost surrounded by their territories, for on its western side their sway extended from Chambéry across the valley of the Rhône northward as far as Belley, while eastward they held the whole southern shore of the lake. To north-east of Maurienne, again, the great highway which led from Geneva and from the German lands beyond it into Italy, through the vale of Aosta by the passes of the Pennine Alps or up the valley of the Isère by S. Maurice under the foot of the Little S. Bernard, was in their hands; for Aosta itself and the whole land as far as Castiglione on the Dora Baltea belonged to them. Across the Graian Alps, their possession of the extreme outposts of the Italian border, Susa and Turin, gave them the title of “Marquises of Italy,”[630] and the command of the great highway between Italy and southern Gaul by the valley of the Durance and through the gap which parts the Cottian from the Maritime Alps beneath the foot of the Mont Genèvre; while yet further south, on either side of the Maritime Alps where they curve eastward towards the Gulf of Genoa, Chiusa, Rochetta and Aspromonte all formed part of their territories.[631] In one word, they held the keys of every pass between Italy and north-western Europe, from the Great S. Bernard to the Col di Tenda. Nominally subject to the Emperor in his character of king of Burgundy, they really possessed the control over his most direct lines of communication with his Imperial capital; while the intercourse of western Europe with Rome lay almost wholly at their mercy;[632] and far away at the opposite extremity of Aquitania the present count Humbert of Maurienne seems to have claimed, though he did not actually hold, one of the keys of another great mountain-barrier, in the Pyrenean county of Roussillon on the Spanish March.[633]

- [630] “Comes Maurianensis et Marchio Italiæ” is Count Humbert’s style in the marriage-contract of his daughter with John: Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 36.

- [631] All these places are named in the marriage-contract of John and Alice of Maurienne; Gesta Hen. (as above), pp. 36–40.

- [632] As says Rob. Torigni, a. 1171: “Nec aliquis potest adire Italiam, nisi per terram ipsius” [sc. comitis].

- [633] Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 37. Humbert “concedit eis” [i.e. to John and Alice, in case he himself should have a son who must oust them from Maurienne] “in perpetuum et hæredibus eorum Russillun cum toto mandato suo sive pertinentiis suis omnibus,” as if he actually had it in his own hands. I have however failed to discover any connexion between Roussillon and Maurienne.

In 1171[634] Henry’s diplomatic relations with the Alpine princes bore fruit in a proposal from Humbert of Maurienne for the marriage of his eldest daughter with the king’s youngest son. Humbert himself had no son, and by the terms of the marriage-contract his territories, Alpine and Pyrenean, were to be settled upon his daughter and her future husband,[635] in return for five thousand marks of English silver.[636] The contract was signed and ratified before Christmas 1172,[637] and soon afterwards Henry summoned his eldest son to join him in a journey into Auvergne for a personal meeting with Humbert. They reached Montferrand before Candlemas, and were there met not only by Humbert and his daughter but also by the count of Vienne,[638] the count of Toulouse and the king of Aragon.[639] How high the English king’s influence had now risen in these southern lands may be judged by the fact that not only King Alfonso of Aragon, a son of his old ally Raymond-Berengar, but also his former enemy Raymond of Toulouse, could agree to choose him as arbiter in a quarrel between themselves.[640] Raymond in truth saw in Henry’s alliances with Aragon and Maurienne a death-blow to his own hopes of maintaining the independence of Toulouse. Hemmed in alike to south and east by close allies of the English king whose own duchy of Aquitaine surrounded almost the whole of its north-western border, the house of St.-Gilles felt that it was no longer possible to resist his claim to overlordship over its territories. Henry carried his guests back with him to Limoges; there he settled the dispute between Raymond and Alfonso; and there Raymond did homage to the two Henrys for Toulouse,[641] promising to do the like at Whitsuntide to Richard as duke of Aquitaine, and pledging himself to military service and yearly tribute.[642]

- [634] Rob. Torigni ad ann.

- [635] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 36–40.

- [636] Ib. p. 36.

- [637] Rog. Howden (Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 44), in copying from the Gesta Hen. (as above, p. 40) an account of the ratification of the contract, heads the paragraph “De adventu nunciorum comitis Mauriensis in Angliam.” If he is right, it must have taken place in April; but he may mean only “to the king of England.”

- [638] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 353.

- [639] Ibid. Gesta Hen. (as above), pp. 35, 36.

- [640] This seems to be the meaning of Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 36: “Venerunt etiam illuc ad regem rex Arragoniæ et comes de S. Ægidio, qui inimici erant ad invicem, et rex duxit eos secum usque Limoges, et ibi pacem fecit inter eos.”

- [641] Ibid. Rog. Howden (as above), p. 45. R. Diceto, as above, says only “fecit homagium regi Anglorum Henrico patri regis Henrici.” Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 67 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 319), gives the date, the first Sunday in Lent, February 25.

- [642] Gesta Hen. as above. “Sed quia Ricardus dux Aquitaniæ, cui facturus esset homagium comes S. Egidii, præsens non erat, usque ad octavas Pentecostes negotii complementum dilationem accepit,” says R. Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. pp. 353, 354). The Gesta and Rog. Howden make Raymond do homage to the two Henrys and to Richard all at once. They alone give full details of the services promised.

The infant heiress of Maurienne was now placed under the care of her intended father-in-law;[643] Henry’s political schemes seemed to have all but reached their fulfilment, when suddenly Count Humbert asked what provision Henry intended to make for the little landless bridegroom to whom he himself was giving such a well-dowered bride.[644] That question stirred up a trouble which was never again to be laid wholly to rest till the child who was its as yet innocent cause had broken his father’s heart. Henry proposed to endow John with the castles and territories of Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau.[645] But the Angevin lands, with which the younger Henry had been formally invested, could not be dismembered without his consent; and this he angrily refused.[646] The mere request, however, kindled his smouldering discontent into a flame[647] which seems to have been fanned rather than quenched by the suggestions of Eleanor; yet so blind was the indulgent father that, if we may venture to believe the tale, nothing but a warning from Raymond of Toulouse opened his eyes to the danger which threatened him from the plots of his own wife and children. Then, by Raymond’s advice, he started off at once with a small escort, under pretence of a hunting-party,[648] and carried his son back towards Normandy with the utmost possible speed. They reached Chinon about Mid-Lent; thence young Henry slipped away secretly by night to Alençon; his father flew after him, but when he reached Alençon on the next evening the son was already at Argentan; and thence before cock-crow he fled again over the French border, to the court of his father-in-law King Louis.[649] Henry in vain sent messengers to recall him: “Your master is king no longer—here stands the king of the English!” was the reply of Louis to the envoys.[650]

- [643] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 36.

- [644] Ib. p. 41.

- [645] Ibid. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 242, turns these into “tria castella in Normanniâ.”

- [646] Ibid.

- [647] According to Rob. Torigni, a. 1173, the young king was further offended because his father removed from him some of his favourite counsellors and friends, Hasculf of St. Hilaire and some other young knights.

- [648] Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 67 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 319).

- [649] Gesta Hen. (as above), pp. 41, 42. R. Diceto (as above), p. 355. The chronology is here in great confusion. The Gesta tell us that the two kings reached Chinon just before Mid-Lent (which in 1173 was on March 16), that young Henry was next day at Alençon, the day after that at Argentan, and that on the third night, “circa gallicantum,” he went off again, “octavâ Idus Martii, feriâ quintâ ante mediam Quadragesimam.” (In the printed edition by Bishop Stubbs—vol. i. p. 42— the word mediam has been accidentally omitted; see note to his edition of R. Diceto, vol. ii. pref. p. xxxvi, note 6). It is of course impossible to make anything of such a contradiction as this. On the other hand, R. Diceto gives only one date, that of the young king’s flight from Argentan, which he places on March 23. Now in 1173 March 23 was the Friday after Mid-Lent Sunday. Reckoning backwards from this—i.e. from the night of Thursday-Friday, March 22–23, for it is plain that the flight took place before daybreak—we should find the young king at Alençon on Wednesday, March 21, and at Chinon on Tuesday, March 20; that is, four days after Mid-Lent. It looks very much as if the author or the scribe of the Gesta had written “ante” instead of “post” twice over.

- [650] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 27 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 170).

Henry at once made a circuit of his Norman fortresses, especially those which lay along the French border, put them in a state of defence, and issued orders to all his castellans in Anjou, Britanny, Aquitaine and England, to do the like.[651] Before Lent had closed the old prophecy which Henry’s enemies were never weary of casting in his teeth was fulfilled: his own “lion-cubs” were all openly seeking to make him their prey.[652] Whether sent by their mother, with whom they had been left behind in Aquitaine, or secretly fetched by their eldest brother in person,[653] both Richard and Geoffrey now joined him at the French court.[654] Eleanor herself was caught trying to follow them disguised as a man, and was by her husband’s order placed in strict confinement.[655] Louis meanwhile openly espoused the cause of the rebels; in a great council at Paris he and his nobles publicly swore to help the young king and his brothers against their father to the utmost of their power, while the three brothers on their part pledged themselves to be faithful to Louis, and to make no terms with their father save through his mediation and with his consent.[656] Young Henry at once began to purchase allies among the French feudataries and supporters among the English and Norman barons, by making grants of pensions and territories on both sides of the sea: grants for which the recipients did him homage and fealty,[657] and which he caused to be put in writing and sealed with a new seal made for him by order of Louis[658]—his own chancellor, Richard Barre, having loyally carried back the original one to the elder king who had first intrusted it to his keeping.[659]

- [651] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 42.

- [652] See the quotation from Merlin’s prophecy, and the comment on it, ib. pp. 42, 43.

- [653] The first is the version of the Gesta Hen. (as above); the second that of Will. Newb. (as above·/·, l. ii. c. 27 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 170, 171).

- [654] Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 42. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 355. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 242.

- [655] Gerv. Cant. as above. He adds a comment: “Erat enim prudens femina valde, nobilibus orta natalibus, sed instabilis.”

- [656] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 44.

- [657] See the list, ib. pp. 44, 45; and cf. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 243.

- [658] Gesta Hen. (as above), pp. 43 and 45.

- [659] Ib. p. 43.

Nearly three months passed away before war actually broke out; but when the outburst came, the list of those who were engaged in it shews that the whole Angevin empire had become a vast hotbed of treason; though, on the other hand, it shews also that the treason was almost entirely confined to one especial class. Its local distribution, too, is significant. The restless barons of Aquitaine, still smarting under their defeat of 1169, were but too eager, at the instigation of their duchess and their newly-crowned duke, to renew their struggle against the king. Foremost among them were, as before, the count of Angoulême,[660] the nobles of Saintonge, and Geoffrey of Lusignan, beside whom there stood this time his young brother Guy, now to begin in this ignoble strife a career destined to strange vicissitudes in far-off Palestine.[661] The heart of the old Angevin lands, Anjou itself, was in the main loyal; we find there the names of only five traitors; and three of these, Hugh, William and Jocelyn of Ste.-Maure, came of a rebellious house, and were only doing over again what their predecessors had done in the days of Geoffrey Plantagenet’s youth.[662] The same may be said of Henry’s native land, Maine; this too furnished only seven barons to the traitor’s cause; and five of these again are easily accounted for. It was almost matter of course that in any rising against an Angevin count the lord of Sablé should stand side by side with the lord of Ste.-Maure. Brachard of Lavardin had a fellow-feeling with undutiful sons, for he was himself at strife with his own father, Count John of Vendôme, a faithful ally of Henry II.; the same was probably the case of Brachard’s brother Guy.[663] Bernard of La Ferté represented a family whose position in their great castle on the Huisne, close to the Norman border, was almost as independent as that of their neighbours the lords of Bellême, just across the frontier. Hugh of Sillé bore a name which in an earlier stage of Cenomannian history—in the days of the “commune,” just a hundred years before—had been almost a by-word for feudal arrogance; and whether or not he inherited anything of his ancestor’s spirit, he had a personal cause for enmity to the king if, as is probable, he was akin to a certain Robert of Sillé, whose share in the southern revolt of 1169 was punished by Henry, in defiance of treaties, with an imprisonment so strict and cruel that it was speedily ended by death.[664]

- [660] Ib.·/·Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 47.

- [661] Ib. p. 46. The other Aquitanian rebels, besides the count of Angoulême and the two Lusignans, were Geoffrey of Rancogne, the lords of Coulonges and Rochefort in Saintonge, of Blaye (“Robertus de Ble”—this might possibly be Blet in Berry) and Mauléon in Gascony, and of Chauvigny in Poitou, with Archbishop William of Bordeaux and Abbot Richard of Tournay (ib. pp. 46, 47); to whom we may add Ralf of Faye.

- [662] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 46, 47. The other Angevin rebels are Vivian and Peter of Montrévault: to whom may be added John of Lignières and Geoffrey of La Haye in Touraine. Ibid. p. 46.

- [663] Ib. pp. 47, 63.

- [664] “Robertum de Selit quâdam occasione captum rex Henricus crudeliter ferro indutum, pane arcto atque aquâ breve cibavit donec defecit.” Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 66 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 318). “Robertus de Silliaco redeat in mentem ... quem nec pacis osculum publice datum, nec fides corporaliter regi Francorum præstita, fecit esse securum.” Ep. dcx., Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. p. 178. Cf. Epp. dcvi., dcxliv., ib. pp. 165, 247. The other Cenomannian rebels are Gwenis of Palluau and Geoffrey of Brulon; Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 46.

Across the western border of Maine, in Geoffrey’s duchy, Ralf of Fougères was once more at the head of a band of discontented Breton nobles, chiefly, it seems, belonging to that old seed-plot of disturbance, the county of Nantes.[665] The true centre and focus of revolt, however, was as of old the duchy of Normandy. Almost all the great names which have been conspicuous in the earlier risings of the feudal baronage against the repressive policy of William and of Henry I. re-appear among the partizans of the young king. The house of Montfort on the Rille was represented by that Robert of Montfort[666] whose challenge to Henry of Essex ten years before had deprived the king of one of his most trusty servants. The other and more famous house of Montfort—the house of Almeric and of Bertrada—was also, now as ever, in opposition in the person of its head, Count Simon of Evreux.[667] He, like his fellow-traitor the count of Eu,[668] to whom, as after-events shewed, may be added the count of Aumale, represented one of those junior branches of the Norman ducal house which always resented most bitterly the determination of the dukes to concentrate all political power in their own hands. The counts of Ponthieu[669] and of Alençon[670] inherited the spirit as well as the territories of Robert of Bellême. Count Robert of Meulan[671] was the son of Waleran who in 1123 had rebelled against Henry I., and the head of the Norman branch of the great house of Beaumont, which for more than half a century had stood in the foremost rank of the baronage on both sides of the sea. The chief of the English Beaumonts was his cousin and namesake of Leicester, soon to prove himself an unworthy son of the faithful justiciar who had died in 1168; while the countess of Leicester, a woman of a spirit quite as determined and masculine as her husband’s, was the heiress of the proud old Norman house of Grandmesnil[672]—a granddaughter of that Ivo of Grandmesnil who had been banished by Henry I. for trying to bring into England the Norman practice of private warfare. Of the other English rebels, Hugh of Chester[673] was a son of the fickle Ralf, and had at stake besides his palatine earldom in England his hereditary viscounties of Bayeux and Avranches on the other side of the Channel. Hugh Bigod, the aged earl of Norfolk, untaught by his experiences of feudal anarchy in Stephen’s day and undeterred by his humiliation in 1157, was ready to break his faith again for a paltry bribe offered him by the young king.[674] Earl Robert of Ferrers, Hamo de Massey, Richard de Morville, and the whole remnant of the great race of Mowbray—Geoffrey of Coutances, Roger de Mowbray and his two sons—were all men whose grandfathers had “come over with the Conqueror,” and determined to fight to the uttermost for their share in the spoils of the conquest. All these men were, by training and sympathy, if not actually by their own personal and territorial interests, more Norman than English; and the same may probably be said of the rebels of the second rank, among whom, beside the purely Norman lords of Anneville and Lessay in the Cotentin, of St.-Hilaire on the Breton frontier, of Falaise, Dives, La Haye and Orbec in Calvados, of Tillières, Ivry and Gaillon along the French border, we find the names of Ralf of Chesney, Gerald Talbot, Jordan Ridel, Thomas de Muschamp, Saher de Quincy the younger, Simon of Marsh, Geoffrey Fitz-Hamon, and Jocelyn Crispin, besides one which in after-days was to gain far other renown—William the Marshal.[675]

[665] Hardwin of Fougerai, Robert of Tréguier, Gwiounon of Ancenis, Joibert of La Guerche; Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 46, 47. To these we afterwards find added several others; ib. pp. 57, 58.

[666] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 45.

[667] Ib. p. 47.

[668] Ib. p. 45.

[669] Ibid.

[670] Called simply “William Talvas” in the Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 46, and “John count of Sonnois” by R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 371. John was his real name.

[671] Gesta Hen. and R. Diceto, as above.

[672] Rob. Torigni, a. 1168.

[673] R. Diceto, as above.

[674] Young Henry promised him, and received his homage for, the hereditary constableship of Norwich castle; Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 45. This writer adds the honour of Eye; Rog. Howden, however ( Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 46), says this was granted to Matthew of Boulogne.

[675] All these names are given in the list of the young king’s partizans in Gesta Hen. (as above), pp. 45–48. The remaining names are: William de Tancarville the chamberlain of Normandy, of whom more presently; Eudo, William, Robert, Oliver and Roland Fitz-Erneis (see Liber Niger, Hearne, pp. 142, 295, and Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., pp. 186 and 251); Robert of Angerville (he seems to have been the young king’s steward or seneschal—see quotations from Pipe Roll a. 1172 in Eyton, as above, pp. 166, 167, 168); Solomon Hostiarius (probably also an attendant of young Henry); Gilbert and Ralf of Aumale: “Willelmus Patricius senior” (he appears in Pipe Rolls 3 Hen. II., Hunter, p. 81, 4 Hen. II., p. 118—Berks and Wilts); William Fitz-Roger (Pipe Roll 4 Hen. II., p. 172, Hants); Robert “de Lundres” (is this some mighty London citizen?); Peter of St.-Julien (may be either St.-Julien in Gascony, in eastern Touraine, or in the county of Nantes); Hugh “de Mota” (La Mothe on the lower Garonne, La Motte Archard in the county of Nantes, or La Motte de Ger in Normandy); Robert of Mortagne (possibly the Norman Mortagne, possibly a place of the same name in Anjou close to the Poitevin border); William of “Tibovilla” (probably Thiberville in the county and diocese of Lisieux); John and Osbert “de Praellis” (possibly Pradelles in Auvergne, more likely Préaux in Normandy); Almeric Turel, Robert Bussun, Guy of Curtiran, Fulk Ribule, Adam de Ikobo, Robert Gerebert, William Hagullun, Baldric of Baudemont, Geoffrey Chouet, “Bucherius,” and William de Oveneia, whom I cannot identify.

One other rebel there was who stood indeed on a different footing from all the rest, and whose defection had a wider political significance. The king of Scots—William the Lion, brother and successor of Malcolm IV.—had long been suspected of a secret alliance with France against his English cousin and overlord. The younger Henry now offered him the cession of all Northumberland as far as the Tyne for himself, and for his brother David confirmation in the earldom of Huntingdon,[676] with a grant of the earldom of Cambridge in addition, in return for the homage and services of both brothers:—offers which the king of Scots accepted.[677] Only three prelates, on either side of the sea, shewed any disposition to countenance the rebellion; in the south, William, the new-made archbishop of Bordeaux;[678] in the north, Arnulf of Lisieux[679] and Hugh of Durham. Arnulf’s influence at court had long been on the wane; all his diplomacy had failed, as far as his personal interest with King Henry was concerned; but he possessed the temporal as well as the spiritual lordship of his see; and the man’s true character now shewed itself at last, justifying all Henry’s suspicions, in an attempt to play the part of a great baron rather than of a bishop—to use his diplomatic gifts in temporizing between the two parties, instead of seeking to make peace between them or to keep his straying flock in the path of loyalty as a true pastor should. He did but imitate on a smaller scale and under less favourable conditions the example set by Hugh of Puiset in his palatine bishopric of Durham, where he had been throughout his career simply a great temporal ruler, whose ecclesiastical character only served to render almost unassailable the independence of his political position. It was the pride of the feudal noble, not the personal sympathies of the churchman, that stirred up both Hugh and Arnulf to their intrigues against Henry. Personal sympathies indeed had as yet little share in drawing any of the barons to the side of the boy-king. What they saw in his claims was simply a pretext and a watchword which might serve them to unite against his father. Young Henry himself evidently relied chiefly on his foreign allies—his father-in-law, the counts of Flanders and Boulogne, and the count of Blois, the last of whom was bribed by a promise of an annual pension and the restitution of Château-Renaud and Amboise; while to Philip of Flanders was promised the earldom of Kent with a pension in English gold, and to Matthew of Boulogne the soke of Kirton-in-Lindsey and the Norman county of Mortain.[680]

- [676] To which, as will be seen later, there was a rival claimant who adhered to Henry II.

- [677] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 45. Jordan Fantosme, vv. 268, 269 (Michel, p. 14) adds Carlisle and Westmoreland to the young king’s offers, and relates at great length how William hesitated before accepting them, how he sent envoys to the elder king begging for a new cession of Northumberland from him, and only upon Henry’s defiant refusal, and after long debate with his own barons, entered upon the war. Ib. vv. 372–426 (pp. 14–22).

- [678] “Willelmus archiepiscopus.” Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 47. This can be no one else than William, formerly abbot of Reading, appointed to Bordeaux in February 1173; Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 67 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 319); but I find no further account of his political doings.

- [679] Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 51, note 4.

- [680] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 44, 45. Roger of Howden, as has been said above (p. 139, note 1), adds the honour of Eye to Matthew’s intended possessions.

The first hostile movement was made directly after Easter by a body of Flemings who crossed the Seine at Pacy; but they had no sooner touched Norman soil than they were driven back by the people of the town, and were nearly all drowned in attempting to recross the river.[681] Henry meanwhile, after spending Easter at Alençon,[682] had established his head-quarters at Rouen, where he remained till the end of June, apparently indifferent to the plots that were hatching around him, and entirely absorbed in the pleasures of the chase.[683] In reality however he was transacting a good deal of quiet business, filling up vacant sees in England;[684] appointing a new chancellor, Ralf of Varneville, to the office which had been in commission—that is, virtually, in the hands of Geoffrey Ridel—ever since S. Thomas had resigned it ten years before;[685] and writing to all his continental allies to enlist their sympathies and if possible their support in the coming struggle.[686] One of them at least, his future son-in-law William of Sicily, returned an answer full of hearty sympathy;[687] neither he nor his fellow-kings, however, had anything more substantial to give. The only support upon which Henry could really depend was that of a troop of twenty thousand Brabantine mercenaries, who served him indeed bravely and loyally, but by no means for nothing;[688] and if we may trust a writer who, although remote from the present scene of action, seems to have had a more intimate acquaintance than most of his fellow-historians with all matters connected with the Brabantines, Henry’s finances were already so exhausted that he was obliged to give the sword of state used at his coronation in pledge to these men as security for the wages which he was unable to pay them.[689] Yet he could trust no one else in Normandy; and as yet he scarcely knew his own resources in England.

- [681] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 367. He says they were drowned because the bridge was “a quâdam mulierculâ effractus.”

- [682] Gesta Hen. (as above)·/·(Stubbs), vol. i., p. 45.

- [683] “Rex pater eo tempore morabatur Rothomagi, ut populo videbatur æquo animo ferens quæ fiebant in terrâ; frequentius solito venatui totus indulgens” [see extracts from Pipe Roll 1173 illustrating this, in Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 173]; “venientibus ad se vultum hylaritatis prætendens, aliquid extorquere volentibus patienter respondens.” R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 373, 374. Cf. Jordan Fantosme, vv. 118, 119 (Michel, p. 6).

- [684] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 366–368. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 243, 245.

- [685] R. Diceto (as above), p. 367.

- [686] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 47. He says Henry wrote “imperatoribus et regibus,” which we must take to include the Eastern Emperor.

- [687] Letter in Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 55, note 2; Rog. Howden (as above), p. 48.

- [688] Rog. Howden (as above), p. 47. Cf. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 27 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 172). The latter does not mention their number; Jordan Fantosme, v. 67 (Michel, p. 4) makes it only ten thousand; the Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 51, says “plus quam decem millia.”

- [689] I suppose this to be the meaning of Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 67 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 319): “Adeo Rex multis thesauris exhaustis nauseatus est, ut Brabantionibus qui ei parebant pro mercede Spatham regiæ coronæ in gagium mitteret.”

Early in June Robert of Leicester and William of Tancarville, the high-chamberlain of Normandy, sought license from the justiciars in London to join the king at Rouen. Immediately on landing, however, they hastened not to Henry II., but to his son.[690] The justiciar himself, Richard de Lucy, was in such anxiety that he seems to have had some thoughts of going in person to consult with the king.[691] The consultation however was to be held not in Normandy but in England. In the last days of June or the first days of July, while the counts of Flanders and Boulogne were easily overcoming the mock resistance of Aumale and Driencourt, and Louis of France was laying siege to Verneuil,[692] Henry suddenly crossed the sea, made his way as far inland as Northampton, where he stayed four days, collected his treasure and his adherents, issued his instructions for action against the rebels, and was back again at Rouen so quickly that neither friends nor foes seem ever to have discovered his absence.[693]

- [690] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 370. He gives no date; but it must have been quite in the beginning of June, for Mr. Eyton says (Itin. Hen. II., p. 172, note 5): “The Dorset Pipe Roll of Michaelmas 1173 shews that the Earl of Leicester’s manor of Kingston (now Kingston Lacy) had been confiscated four months previously (Hutchins, iii. 233).”

- [691] “Et in liberacione ix navium quæ debuerunt transfretare cum Ricardo de Luci, et Ricardo Pictaviæ archidiacono, et Gaufrido Cantuariensi archidiacono et aliis baronibus, precepto Regis £13: 15s. per breve Ricardi de Luci.” Pipe Roll a. 1173 (Southampton), quoted by Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 174. See Mr. Eyton’s comment, ib. note 4, which points to the conclusion that the ships made the voyage—doubtless with the other passengers—but that Richard “probably thought it wise to adhere to his post of viceroy.”

- [692] R. Diceto (as above), pp. 373, 374. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 49. Rob. Torigni, a. 1173.

- [693] “Et item in liberacione Esnaccæ quando transfretavit in Normanniam contra Regem £7: 10s. per breve Regis. Et in liberacione xx. hominum qui fuerunt missi de cremento in Esnacchâ 40s. per breve Regis. Et in liberacione iv. navium quæ transfretaverunt cum Esnacchiâ £7: 10s. per idem breve. Et pro locandis carretis ad reportandum thesaurum de Hantoniâ ad Wintoniam duabus vicibus 9s. Et pro unâ carretâ locandâ ad portandas Bulgas Regis ad Winton. 9d.” Pipe Roll a. 1173 (Southampton), quoted in Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 173. “Et in corredio Regis apud Norhanton per iv dies £32: 6: 5 per breve Regis.” Northampton, ibid. “Et in soltis per breve Regis ipsi vicecomiti [of Northamptonshire] £72: 11: 9, pro robbâ quam invenit Regi.” Ibid. On the Southampton entries Mr. Eyton remarks: “The above charges, from their position on the roll, would seem to have been incurred after July 15.” But surely if Henry had been in England during the siege of Leicester, which lasted from July 3 to July 28, we must have had some mention of his presence; and there is scarcely time for it later, between the capture of Leicester and his own expedition to Conches on August 7. Is it not much more natural to conclude that the visit took place earlier—at the end of June—and that the orders for the Leicester expedition, which Rog. Wend. (Coxe, vol. ii. p. 372) expressly says were given by the king, were issued to Richard de Lucy in a personal interview?

Hurried, however, as was the king’s visit to England, it did its work in bracing up the energies and determining the action of the vassals who were faithful to him there. In personal and territorial importance indeed these were very unequally matched with the rebels. The fidelity of the Welsh princes, David Ap-Owen and Rees Ap-Griffith,[694] could not balance the hostility of the King of Scots. Among the loyal English barons, the most conspicuous were a group of the king’s immediate kinsmen, none of whom however ranked high among the descendants of the ducal house of Normandy:—his half-brother Earl Hameline of Warren, his uncle Reginald of Cornwall, his cousin William of Gloucester;[695] besides Earl William of Arundel the husband of his grandfather’s widow Queen Adeliza, his son William, and his kinsman Richard of Aubigny. The earl of Essex, William de Mandeville, was a son of that Geoffrey de Mandeville who had accepted the earldom of Essex from both Stephen and Matilda, and who had been one of the worst evil-doers in the civil war; but the son was as loyal as the father was faithless; he seems indeed to have been a close personal friend of the king, and to have well deserved his friendship.[696] The loyalty of Earl Simon of Northampton may have been quickened by his rivalry with David of Scotland for the earldom of Huntingdon. That of William of Salisbury was an inheritance from his father, Earl Patrick, who had earned his title by his services to the Empress, and had fallen honourably at his post of governor of Aquitaine in the rising of 1168. The loyal barons of lesser degree are chiefly representatives of the class which half a century before had been known as the “new men”—men who had risen by virtue of their services in the work of the administration, either under Henry himself or under his grandfather. Such were the justiciar Richard de Lucy and the constable Humfrey de Bohun; William de Vesci, son of Eustace Fitz-John, and like his father a mighty man in the north; his nephew John, constable of Chester;—the whole house of Stuteville, with Robert de Stuteville the sheriff of Yorkshire at its head;[697]—and Ralf de Glanville,[698] sheriff of Lancashire, custodian of the honour of Richmond,[699] and destined in a few years to wider fame as the worthy successor of Richard de Lucy. The Glanvilles, the Stutevilles and the de Vescis now wielded in Yorkshire as the king’s representatives the influence which had been usurped there by William of Aumale before his expulsion from Holderness; while in Northumberland a considerable share of the power formerly exercised by the rebellious house of Mowbray had passed to servants of the Crown such as Odelin de Umfraville[700] and Bernard de Bailleul,[701] whose name in its English form of Balliol became in after-times closely associated with that borne by two other loyal northern barons—Robert and Adam de Bruce.[702] To the same class of “new men” belonged Geoffrey Trussebut, Everard de Ros, Guy de Vere, Bertram de Verdon, Philip de Kime and his brother Simon.[703]

- [694]In Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 51, note 4, the names are given as “David et Evayn reges Walliæ”—a blunder probably caused by the writer’s greater familiarity with David, owing to his later family alliance with the English king. In the present war, however, Rees proved the more active ally of the two, as we shall see later.

- [695] It will however appear later that Gloucester’s fidelity was somewhat doubtful.

- [696] William de Mandeville is constantly found, throughout his life, in the king’s immediate company. See Eyton, Itin. Hen. II. passim.

- [697] All these names are in the list in the Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 51, note 4.

- [698] Ib. p. 65. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 60. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 33 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 184).

- [699] Escheated on the death of Duke Conan of Britanny.

- [700] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 51, note 4, 66.

- [701] Ib. pp. 65, 66. Will. Newb. as above.

- [702] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 51, note 4.

- [703] Ibid. The Trussebuts, de Roses and de Veres appear under Henry I. Bertram de Verdon and Philip de Kime were employed in the Curia Regis and Exchequer under Henry II.; see Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., pp. 185, 76, 130, etc. Another name among the loyalists in the Gesta Hen. (as above) —that of Richard Louvetot—seems to have got in by mistake; cf. ib. p. 57, where he appears among the rebels at Dol.

Some half-dozen of the king’s English adherents—William of Essex, William of Arundel, Robert de Stuteville and the elder Saher de Quincy, besides two who had lately come over from Ireland, Richard of Striguil and Hugh de Lacy—either returned with him to Rouen or had joined him there already,[704] thus helping to swell the little group of loyalists who surrounded him in Normandy. That group contained no Norman baron of the first rank, and consisted only of a few personal friends and ministers:—Richard of Hommet the constable of the duchy, with all his sons and brothers;[705] William de Courcy the seneschal;[706] Richard Fitz-Count, the king’s cousin;[707] Hugh de Beauchamp[708] and Henry of Neubourg,[709] sons of the loyal house of Beauchamp which in England looked to the earl of Warwick as its head; Richard de Vernon and Jordan Tesson;[710]—while two faithful members of the older Norman nobility, Hugh of Gournay and his son, had already fallen prisoners into the hands of the young king.[711] It was in truth Henry’s continental dominions which most needed his presence and that of all the forces which he could muster; for the two chief English rebels, the earls of Leicester and Chester, were both beyond the Channel, and their absence enabled the king’s representatives to strike the first blow before the revolt had time to break forth in England at all. On July 3 the town of Leicester was besieged by Richard de Lucy and Earl Reginald of Cornwall at the head of “the host of England.”[712] After a three weeks’ siege and a vast expenditure of money and labour,[713] the town was fired, and on July 28 it surrendered.[714] The castle still held out, its garrison accepting a truce until Michaelmas; the gates and walls of the city were at once thrown down; the citizens were suffered to go out free on payment of a fine of three hundred marks;[715] but it was only by taking sanctuary in the great abbeys of S. Alban or S. Edmund that their leaders could feel secure against the vengeance of the king.[716]

- [704] Essex and Arundel had both been with him since the very beginning of the year, for they witnessed the marriage-contract of John and Alice of Maurienne; Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 39. Robert de Stuteville and Saher de Quincy seem to have been with him in the summer of 1173 (Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 174). Hugh de Lacy was at Verneuil, defending it for the king in July (Gesta Hen., vol. i. p. 49); and Richard of Striguil was of the party which went to its relief in August (R. Diceto, Stubbs, vol. i. p. 375).

- [705] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 51, note 4.

- [706] Ib. p. 39. Cf. Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., pp. 170, 177.

- [707] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 51.

- [708] Ib. p. 49.

- [709] Ib. p. 52.

- [710] Ib. pp. 51, 52.

- [711] Hugh of Gournay and his son, with eighty knights, fell into the young king’s hands, “non tam inimicorum virtuti quam insidiis intercepti,” quite early in the war; R. Diceto (as above), p. 369.

- [712] “Cum exercitu Angliæ,” i.e. the national not the feudal host. Gesta Hen. as above, p. 58. The date comes from R. Diceto (as above), p. 376.

- [713] See some illustrations in the Pipe Roll of 1173, as quoted by Eyton (as above), p. 175.

- [714] R. Diceto (as above), p. 376. He seems to make the fire accidental, and the surrender a consequence of it. In the Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 58, the victors seem to fire the town after they have captured it.

- [715] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 376.

- [716] Mat. Paris, Chron. Maj. (Luard), vol. ii. p. 289.

Three days before the capture of Leicester, an arrow shot by one of Henry’s Brabantine cross-bowmen gave Matthew of Boulogne his death-wound, and thereby caused the break-up of the Flemish expedition against Normandy.[717] A fortnight later Henry set out at the head of all his available forces to the relief of Verneuil, which Hugh de Lacy and Hugh de Beauchamp were defending against the king of France. By a double treachery Louis, under cover of a truce, gained possession of the town, set it on fire, and retreated into his own domains before Henry could overtake him.[718] Henry marched back to Rouen, taking Gilbert of Tillières’s castle of Damville on the way,[719] and thence despatched his Brabantines to check the plundering operations which Hugh of Chester and Ralf of Fougères were carrying on unhindered throughout the border district which lay between Fougères and Avranches. The interception of an important convoy and the slaughter of its escort by the Brabantines drove the rebel leaders to retire into the fortress of Dol. Here they were blockaded by the Brabantines, backed by the populace of the district of Avranches,[720] who clearly had no sympathy with the treason of their viscount. The siege began on August 20; on the morrow Henry received tidings of it at Rouen; on the 23d he appeared in the midst of his soldiers; and on the 26th Dol and its garrison, with Ralf of Fougères and Hugh of Chester at their head, surrendered into his hands.[721] This blow crushed the Breton revolt; the rest of the duchy submitted at once.[722] Louis of France was so impressed by Henry’s success that he began to make overtures for negotiation, while Henry was holding his court in triumph at Le Mans. Shortly before Michaelmas a meeting took place near Gisors; Henry shewed the utmost anxiety to be reconciled with his sons, offering them literally the half of his realms in wealth and honours, and declaring his willingness virtually to strip himself of everything except his regal powers of government and justice.[723] That, however, was precisely the reservation against which the French king and the disaffected barons were both alike determined to fight as Henry himself had fought against S. Thomas’s reservation of the rights of his order. The terms were therefore refused, and the earl of Leicester in his baffled rage not only loaded his sovereign with abuse, but actually drew his sword to strike him. This outrage of course broke up the meeting.[724] Leicester hurried through Flanders, collecting troops as he went, to Wissant, whence he sailed for England on Michaelmas day.[725] Landing at Walton in Suffolk, he made his way to Hugh Bigod’s castle of Framlingham; here the two earls joined their forces; and they presently took and burned the castle of Haughley, which Ralf de Broc held against them for the king.[726]

[717] R. Diceto as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 373. He alone gives the date, attributes the wound to a shot “a quodam marchione,” and places the scene on the invaders’ march from Driencourt to Arques. The Gesta Hen. as above, p. 49, Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 246, and Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 28 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 173) make it occur during the siege of Driencourt (William calls it by its more modern name, “Neufchâtel”), but as the former has told us that this siege began about July 6 and was ended within a fortnight, this is irreconcileable with the date given by R. Diceto. Gervase says Matthew was shot “a quodam arcubalistâ.”

[718] See the details of the story, and the disgraceful conduct of Louis, in Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 51–54; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 50; R. Diceto as above, p. 375; and another version in Will. Newb. as above (pp. 174, 175).

[719] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 56.

[720] Rob. Torigni, a. 1173. “Itaque obsessa est turris Doli a Brebenzonibus et militibus regis et plebe Abrincatinâ.”

[721] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 378; Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 57, 58; Rob. Torigni, a. 1173; Will. Newb. l. ii. c. 29 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 176). The Gesta Hen. gives the date, and a list of the captured. According to Rob. Torigni, Ralf of Fougères escaped to the woods, and his two sons were taken as hostages. The Chron. S. Albin. a. 1173 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 42), says he was taken, together with Hugh (whom the Angevin monk transforms into “comitem Sceptrensem”) and a hundred knights.

[722] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 52.

[723] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 59. Rog. Howden as above, p. 53.

[724] Rog. Howden as above, p. 54.

[725] R. Diceto as above, p. 377. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 246, and Gesta Hen. as above, p. 60, say he came over about S. Luke’s day; but this is irreconcileable with R. Diceto’s careful and minute chronology of the subsequent campaign. R. Niger (Anstruther), p. 175, says “in vigiliâ S. Mauricii,” i.e. September 20.

[726] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 60, 61, with an impossible date; see ib. p. 60, note 12. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 246. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 377, gives the correct date of the capture of Haughley, October 13.

Map IV.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

At the moment of Leicester’s arrival the representatives of the king were far away on the Scottish border. At the close of the summer William of Scotland had gathered his motley host of Lowland knights and wild Galloway Highlanders, marched unhindered through the territories of the see of Durham, and was just beginning to ravage Yorkshire after the manner of his forefathers when Richard de Lucy and Humfrey de Bohun hastily reassembled their forces and marched against him with such promptitude and vigour that he was compelled to retreat not merely into Lothian but into the safer shelter of the Celtic Scotland beyond it. The English host overran Lothian,[727] and had just given Berwick to the flames when tidings reached them of Earl Robert’s doings in Suffolk. The king of Scots was begging for a truce; the English leaders readily consented, that they might hurry back to their duties in the south.[728] Richard de Lucy returned to his post of viceroy, and the supreme military command was left to the constable Humfrey de Bohun, assisted by the earls of Cornwall and Gloucester and by Earl William of Arundel,[729] who had now come to give the help of his sword in England as he had already given it in Normandy. The constable and the three earls, with three hundred paid soldiers of the king, posted themselves at S. Edmund’s, ready to intercept Earl Robert on his way from Framlingham to join the garrison of Leicester.[730] He made a circuit to the northward to avoid them, but in vain. They marched forth from S. Edmund’s beneath the banner of its patron saint, the famous East-Anglian king and martyr, overtook the earl in a marsh near the church of S. Geneviève at Fornham,[731] and in spite of overwhelming odds defeated him completely. His Flemish mercenaries, who had gone forth in their insolent pride singing “Hop, hop, Wilekin! England is mine and thine,”[732] were cut to pieces not so much by the royal troops as by the peasantry of the district, who flocked to the battle-field armed with forks and flails, with which they either despatched them at once or drove them to suffocation in the ditches.[733] His French and Norman knights were all made prisoners;[734] he himself took to flight, but was overtaken and captured;[735] and his wife, who had accompanied him throughout his enterprise, was made captive with him.[736] The victors followed up their success by posting bodies of troops at S. Edmund’s, Ipswich and Colchester, hoping that Hugh Bigod, thus confined within his own earldom, would be unable to provide for the large force of Flemish mercenaries still quartered in his various castles, and that these would be starved into surrender. The approach of winter however disposed both parties for a compromise; a truce was arranged to last till the octave of Pentecost, Hugh consenting to dismiss his Flemings, who were furnished with a safe-conduct through Essex and Kent and with ships to transport them from Dover back to their own land.[737]

[727] R. Diceto as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 376. Cf. Gesta Hen. as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 61.

[728] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 61. R. Diceto as above, p. 376. Jordan Fantosme, vv. 478–838 (Michel, pp. 22–38), has a long account of this first Scottish invasion, but it is far from clear, and some parts of it, e.g. the statement that Warkworth was taken by the Scots, seem incompatible with after-events.

[729] Gesta Hen. as above.

[730] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 377. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 61. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 54.

[731] Gesta Hen. as above. Rog. Howden (as above), p. 55. The date, according to R. Diceto (as above, p. 378) is October 17; the Gesta (as above, p. 62) make it October 16.

[732] Mat. Paris, Hist. Angl. (Madden), vol. i. p. 381. “Hoppe, hoppe, Wilekin, hoppe, Wilekin, Engelond is min ant tin.”

[733] Jordan Fantosme, vv. 1086–1091 (Michel, p. 50).

[734] R. Diceto as above, pp. 377, 378. Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 61, 62. Rog. Howden as above, p. 55. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 246. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 30 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 179). The number of Robert’s Flemish troops is surely exaggerated by all these writers; still, even at the lowest computation, the odds seem to have been, as R. Diceto says, at least four to one.

[735] Gerv. Cant. as above.

[736] Will. Newb. as above. R. Diceto as above, p. 378. She had been with her husband in France, and returned with him to England; ib. p. 377. According to Jordan Fantosme, vv. 980–992 (Michel, p. 46), it was she who urged him to the march which led to his ruin, in defiance of his own dread of the royal forces. See also in Jordan, vv. 1070–1077 (Michel, p. 50) the story of her trying to drown herself in a ditch to avoid being captured; and that in Mat. Paris, as above, of her throwing away her ring. This latter seems to be only another version of Jordan’s; cf. his v. 1072.

[737] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 378. He gives the number of these Flemings as fourteen hundred.

The earl and countess of Leicester were sent over to Normandy by the king’s orders, there to be shut up in company with Hugh of Chester in prison at Falaise.[738] Their capture filled the French king and the rebel princes with dismay, and none of them dared to venture upon any opposition against Henry when at Martinmas he led his Brabantines into Touraine, forced some of its rebellious barons into submission,[739] reinstated his ally Count John of Vendôme in his capital from which he had been expelled by his own son,[740] and returned to keep the Christmas feast at Caen.[741] An attack upon Séez, made at the opening of the new year by the young king and the counts of Blois, Perche and Alençon, was repulsed by the townsfolk,[742] and led only to a truce which lasted till the end of March.[743] The truce made by Richard de Lucy with the king of Scots was prolonged to the same date—the octave of Easter—by the diplomacy of Bishop Hugh of Durham, who took upon himself to purchase this delay, apparently without authority and for his own private ends, by a promise of three hundred marks of silver to be paid to the Scot king out of the lands of the Northumbrian barons.[744]

- [738] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 62. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 55. See also quotations from Pipe Roll a. 1173 on this matter, in Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 177.

- [739] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 62, 63. The chief rebels were Geoffrey of La Haye—apparently that same La Haye which had formed part of the dower-lands of the first countess of Anjou, and is known now as La Haye Descartes—and Robert of “Ble” (see above, p. 136, note 6{661}) who held Preuilly and Champigny. A list of the garrisons of these castles is given; two names are worth noting—“Hugo le Danais” and “Rodbertus Anglicus.”

- [740] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 63.

- [741] Ibid. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 246. According to Rob. Torigni, however (a. 1174—i.e. 1173 in our reckoning) he kept it at Bures.

- [742] R. Diceto as above, p. 379.

- [743] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 63, 64.

- [744] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 64. King and bishop met in person at “Revedale”—or, as Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 56, 57, says, “in confinio regnorum Angliæ et Scotiæ apud Revedene.”

The issue proved that Hugh’s real object was simply to gain time for the organization of a general rising in the north; and in this object he succeeded. The old isolation of Yorkshire was not yet a thing of the past; and its few lines of communication with southern England were now all blocked, at some point or other, by some stronghold of rebellion. Earl Hugh’s Chester, Hamo de Massey’s Dunham[745] and Geoffrey of Coutances’ Stockport commanded the waters of the Dee and the Mersey. South of the Peak, in the upper valley of the Trent, the earl of Ferrers held Tutbury and Duffield; further to south-east, on the opposite border of Charnwood Forest, lay the earl of Leicester’s capital and his castles of Groby and Mount Sorrel.[746] By the time that the truce expired Roger de Mowbray had renewed the fortifications of Kinardferry in the Isle of Axholm,[747] thus linking this southern chain of castles with those which he already possessed at Kirkby Malzeard, or Malessart, and Thirsk;[748] and Bishop Hugh had done the like at Northallerton.[749] Further north stood the great stronghold of Durham; while all these again were backed, far to the north-westward, by a double belt of fortresses stretching from the mouths of the Forth and the Tweed to that of the Solway:—Lauder, held by Richard de Morville; Stirling, Edinburgh, Berwick, Jedburgh, Roxburgh, Annan and Lochmaben, all in the hands of the king of Scots.[750]

- [745] Gesta Hen. as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 48. Hamo de Massey had another castle called Ullerwood; where was this?

- [746] Ibid.

- [747] Ib. p. 64. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 379.

- [748] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 48.

- [749] Rog. Howden as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 57.

- [750] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 48. Annan and Lochmaben belonged to Robert de Bruce; ibid. No doubt William had seized them when Bruce joined Henry.

Between this northern belt of rebel strongholds, however, and the southern one which stretched from Chester to Axholm, there lay along the river-valleys of Cumberland and Northumberland a cluster of royal castles. Nicolas de Stuteville held Liddell, on the river of the same name. Burgh[751] stood on the Solway Firth, nearly opposite Annan; the whole valley of the Eden was guarded by Carlisle, whose castellan was Richard de Vaux,[752] and Appleby, which like Burgh was held by Robert de Stuteville for the king.[753] The course of the Tyne was commanded by Wark, under Roger de Stuteville,[754] Prudhoe, under Odelin de Umfraville,[755] and by the great royal fortress of Newcastle, in charge of Roger Fitz-Richard;[756] further north, between the valleys of the Wansbeck and the Coquet, stood Harbottle, also held by Odelin, with Roger Fitz-Richard’s Warkworth[757] and William de Vesci’s Alnwick[758] at the mouths of the Coquet and the Alne. This chain of defences William of Scotland, when at the expiration of the truce he again marched into England, at once set himself to break. While his brother David went to join the rebel garrison of Leicester,[759] he himself began by laying siege to Wark. This fortress, held in the king’s name by Roger de Stuteville—apparently a brother of the sheriff of Yorkshire—occupied a strong position in the upper valley of the Tyne, on the site of an earlier fortress which under the name of Carham had played a considerable part in the Scottish wars of Stephen’s time, and had been finally taken and razed by William’s grandfather King David in 1138.[760] William himself had already in the preceding autumn besieged Wark without success;[761] he prospered no better this time, and presently removed his forces to Carlisle,[762] where he had also sustained a like repulse six months before.[763] Carlisle, as well as Wark, was in truth almost impregnable except by starvation; and William, while blockading it closely, detached a part of his host for a series of expeditions against the lesser fortresses, Liddell, Burgh, Appleby, Harbottle and Warkworth, all of which fell into his hands.[764] His brother’s arrival at Leicester, meanwhile, seemed to have revived the energies of its garrison; under the command of Earl Robert of Ferrers they sallied forth very early one morning, surprised and burned the town of Nottingham, made a great slaughter of its citizens, and went home laden with plunder and prisoners.[765]

[751] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 65.

[752] Ib. p. 64.

[753] Ib. p. 65. Jordan Fantosme, v. 1467 (Michel, p. 66), gives us the name—a very interesting one—of the acting commandant—“Cospatric le fiz Horm, un viel Engleis fluri.”

[754] Jordan Fantosme, vv. 478–483 (Michel, pp. 22–24).

[755] Ib. vv. 594–603 (p. 28), Gesta Hen. as above.

[756] Jordan Fantosme, vv. 566, 567 (Michel, p. 26).

[757] Ib. vv. 562–565 (p. 26). Gesta Hen. as above, p. 65. See above, p. 149, note 3{728}.

[758] Jordan Fantosme, vv. 538, 539 (as above).

[759] Gesta Hen. as above. Cf. Jordan Fantosme, vv. 1113–1136 (Michel, p. 52).

[760] See above, vol. i. pp. 287, 292.

[761] Jordan Fantosme, vv. 478–530 (Michel, pp. 22, 26).

[762] Ib. vv. 1191–1351 (pp. 54–62).

[763] Jordan Fantosme, vv. 610–760 (pp. 28–36).

[764] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 64, 65. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 60. Will. Newb., l. ii. cc. 30, 31 (Hewlett, vol. i. pp. 177, 180), seems to have confused this campaign with that of the preceding autumn; and so has, apparently, Jordan Fantosme, vv. 1145–1511 (Michel, pp. 52–68). “Banesburc” in v. 1158 (p. 54), though it looks like Bamborough, surely ought to be Burgh.

[765] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 69. Nottingham was commanded by Reginald de Lucy; what relation to the justiciar?

Meanwhile the king’s representatives in the south were not idle. Knowing however that he was powerless to rescue the north, Richard de Lucy made an attempt to draw off in another direction the forces both of the Scot king and of his brother by laying siege to David’s castle of Huntingdon.[766] Huntingdon had been held ever since 1136 either by the reigning king of Scots or by one of his nearest kinsmen, in virtue of their descent from Waltheof, the last Old-English earl of Huntingdon and Northampton, through his daughter Matilda, the wife of King David. In each case, however, the fief seems to have been held not as an hereditary possession but by a special grant made to the individual holder for his life. The house of Northampton, sprung from an earlier marriage of the same Matilda, were thus enabled to maintain a claim upon it which had never been entirely barred, and which Earl Simon of Northampton now seized his opportunity to urge upon the king.[767] Henry answered that Simon might keep Huntingdon if he could win it;[768] thus securing for Richard de Lucy his support and co-operation in the siege, which began on May 8.[769] Three days before this, however, a severe blow had been dealt at the northern rebels. The king’s eldest son Geoffrey, who a year before had been appointed to the bishopric of Lincoln, gathered up the forces of Lincolnshire, led them into Axholm and laid siege to Kinardferry. Robert of Mowbray, who was commanding there, seeing his garrison threatened with the want of water, slipped out to seek aid of his friends at Leicester, but was surrounded and made prisoner by the country-folk at Clay.[770] On May 5 Kinardferry surrendered; after razing it, Geoffrey marched northward to York; here he was joined by the forces of the archbishop and of the shire; with this united host he took Mowbray’s castle of Malessart,[771] closely menaced that of Thirsk by erecting a rival fortification at Topcliff, and having intrusted the former to Archbishop Roger and the latter to William de Stuteville, marched back to Lincoln in triumph.[772] His victory was scarcely won when a new peril arose in East-Anglia. Three days after Pentecost some three hundred Flemish soldiers, forerunners of a great host with which Count Philip of Flanders had sworn to invade England at Midsummer on behalf of the young king, landed at the mouth of the Orwell.[773] Hugh Bigod, whose truce with the king’s officers, made when he dismissed his other Flemish troops in the preceding autumn, expired four days later, at once received them into his castles.[774] For a whole month, however, no further movement was made save by the garrison of Leicester, who after the close of Whitsun-week made a successful plundering raid upon the town of Northampton.[775] On June 18 Hugh Bigod and his Flemings marched upon Norwich, took it by assault, committed a vast slaughter of men and women, and finally sacked and fired the city.[776] They seem to have returned to Framlingham by way of Dunwich, which was still a flourishing seaport, of sufficient wealth to tempt their greed; but its stout fisher-folk met them with such a determined front that they were compelled to retire.[777]

[766] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 384.

[767] See the story in the tract “De Judithâ uxore Waldevi comitis,” in M. F. Michel’s Chroniques Anglo-Normandes, vol. ii. pp. 128, 129.

[768] Gesta Hen. as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 71. The case seems to have been tried in the Curia Regis; ibid., and Chron. Anglo-Norm., as above.

[769] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 384.

[770] “A rusticis del Clay.” Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 68. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 58, alters “rusticis” into “hominibus.” The place is perhaps Clay Cross in Derbyshire.

[771] Kirkby or Kirby Malzeard, near Ripon.

[772] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 68, 69. Cf. R. Diceto as above, and Gir. Cambr., Vita Galfr. Archiep., l. i. cc. 2, 3 (Dimock, vol. iv. pp. 364–367).

[773] “Apud Airewellam.” R. Diceto (as above), p. 381.

[774] Ibid. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 247.

[775] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 68.

[776] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 68. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 381 (to whom we owe the date). Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 248.

[777] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 30 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 178). “Insignum vicum maritimum, variis opibus refertum, qui dicitur Donewich,” he calls it. He gives an account of the entire East-Anglian campaign, but he has mixed up the doings of this summer of 1174 with those of the preceding autumn. Jordan Fantosme, vv. 845–897 (Michel, pp. 40–42), has done the same. He explains, however, the otherwise unaccountable facility with which Norwich was taken, by telling us that “Uns traïtres Lohereng la trahi, pur ço si fud surprise.”

Richard de Lucy was all this while busy with the siege of Huntingdon. Provoked apparently by a vigorous assault which he made upon it at midsummer,[778] the garrison set fire to the town; Richard then built a tower to block their egress from the castle, and left the completion of the siege to the earl of Northampton.[779] For himself it was time once more to lay down the knightly sword and resume that of justice. While the justiciar’s energies were absorbed in warfare with the barons, the burgher-nobles of the capital had caught from their feudal brethren the spirit of lawlessness and misrule, and London had become a vast den of thieves and murderers. Young men, sons and kinsmen of the noblest citizens, habitually went forth by night in parties of a hundred or more, broke into rich men’s houses and robbed them by force, and if they met any man walking in the streets alone, slew him at once. Peaceable citizens were driven in self-defence to meet violence with violence. One man, expecting an attack, gathered his armed servants around him in a concealed corner, surprised his assailants in the act of breaking into his house with crowbars, struck off with a blow of his sword the right hand of their leader Andrew Bucquinte, and raised an alarm which put the rest to flight. Bucquinte was captured and delivered next morning to the justiciar; on a promise of safety for life and limb he gave up the names of his accomplices; some fled, some were caught, and among the latter was one of the noblest and richest citizens of London, John Oldman,[780] who vainly offered five hundred marks of silver to the Crown to purchase his escape from the gallows.[781] The revelation of such a state of things in the capital apparently drove Richard de Lucy and his colleagues almost to desperation. They had already sent messenger after messenger to intreat that the king would return; getting however no certain answer, they now determined that one of their number should go to Normandy in person to lay before him an authentic account of the desperate condition of his realm.[782]

- [778] “Appropinquante autem nativitate S. Johannis Baptistæ, Ricardus de Luci magnum congregavit exercitum et obsedit castellum de Huntendoniâ.” Gesta Hen. as above, p. 70. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 60, substitutes for the first words “in festo Nativitatis S. Johannis.” This is the first time that either writer mentions the siege, but see R. Diceto as above, p. 376.

- [779] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 71.

- [780] “Johannes Senex.”

- [781] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 155, 156. The story is there told in connexion with that of the murder of a brother of the earl of Ferrers in 1177, and said to have happened “three years before.” The wording of the latter part, where it is said that John “obtulit quingentas marcas argenti domino regi ... sed ... noluit denarios illos accipere, et præcepit ut judicium de eo fieret,” seems to imply that the king himself came to England between the capture of Bucquinte and the execution of John. In that case the date of the affair would be about June or July 1174. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 131, mentions the hanging of John Oldman, but puts it after the murder of De Ferrers in 1177 and omits the whole story which in the Gesta intervenes, thereby also omitting to shew the true sequence of events and chronology.

- [782] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 381.

Henry had spent the spring in a successful progress through Maine and Anjou to Poitiers, where he kept the Whitsun feast. He had just rescued Saintes from a band of rebels who had seized it in Richard’s name[783] when he was called northward again by a rumour of the Flemish count’s scheme for the invasion of England. By S. Barnabas’s day he was back again on the borders of Britanny and Anjou; he took and fortified Ancenis, and then, leaving Anjou to the charge of a faithful baron, Maurice of Craon,[784] went to meet the castellans of the Norman border in a council at Bonneville on Midsummer-day. Their deliberations were interrupted by the appearance of Richard of Ilchester—now bishop-elect of Winchester—on his errand from England to recall the king.[785] Richard’s pleadings however were scarcely needed. Henry knew that his eldest son was at that very moment with the count of Flanders at Gravelines, only awaiting a favourable wind to set sail for the invasion of England,[786] and that, whatever might be the risk to his continental realms, he must hasten to save the island.[787] He at once took measures for the security of the Norman castles and for the transport of those prisoners and suspected persons whom he dared not venture to leave behind him—his queen,[788] the earl and countess of Leicester, the earl of Chester,[789] the young queen Margaret,[790] and the affianced brides of his three younger sons; besides the two children who were still with him, Jane and John.[791] The wind which thwarted the designs of his foes was equally unfavourable to him; it was not till July 7 that he himself embarked at Barfleur, and even then the peril of crossing seemed so great that the sailors were inclined to put back. Henry raised his eyes to heaven: “If I seek the peace of my realm—if the heavenly King wills that my return should restore its peace—He will bring me safe into port. If He has turned away His Face from me and determined to scourge my realm, may I never reach its shores!” By nightfall he was safe[792] at Southampton.[793]

[783] Ib.·/·R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 380. Cf. Gesta Hen. as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 71, and Chron. S. Albin. a. 1174 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 43).

[784] R. Diceto and Gesta Hen. as above.

[785] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 381, 382. Cf. Jordan Fantosme, vv. 1530–1633 (Michel, pp. 70–74).

[786] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 72. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 61.

[787] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 248. Cf. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 32 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 181).

[788] R. Diceto as above, p. 382. Gesta Hen. as above.

[789] R. Diceto (as above) has “comitem Cestrensem, Legecestrensem comitissam”; Mat. Paris, Chron. Maj. (Luard), vol. ii. p. 292, turns this into “comitem Legecestrensem et comitissam.” We may surely combine the two versions.

[790] R. Diceto and Gesta Hen. as above.

[791] R. Diceto as above, p. 382. “Uxores filiorum suorum” must mean Adela of France, Constance of Britanny and Alice of Maurienne, all of whom are known to have been in Henry’s custody.

[792] R. Diceto as above, pp. 382, 383.

[793] Ib. p. 383. Gesta Hen. as above. Cf. Pipe Roll a. 1173, quoted by Itin. Hen. II., p. 180. R. Niger (Anstruther), p. 176, puts the voyage two days later.

His first care was to bestow his prisoners and hostages in safe custody.[794] That done, he set off at once on a pilgrimage to the grave of his former friend and victim at Canterbury. Travelling with the utmost speed, and feeding only on bread and water, he reached Canterbury on July 12; before the church of S. Dunstan, outside the west gate, he dismounted, exchanged his kingly robes for the woollen gown of a pilgrim, and made his way with bare and bleeding feet along the rough-paved streets to the cathedral church. Here, surrounded by a group of bishops and abbots who seem to have come with him, as well as by the monks of the cathedral chapter and a crowd of wondering lay-folk, he threw himself in an agony of penitence and prayer on the martyr’s tomb, which still stood in the crypt where his body had been hastily buried by the terrified monks immediately after the murder. The bishop of London now came forward and spoke in the king’s name, solemnly protesting that he had never sought the primate’s death, and beseeching absolution from the assembled prelates for the rash words which had occasioned it. The absolution was given; the king then underwent a public scourging at the hands of the bishops and monks; he spent the whole night in prayer before the shrine; early on the morrow he heard mass and departed, leaving rich gifts in money and endowments, and rode back still fasting to London, which he reached on the following morning.[795] The next few days were spent in collecting forces, in addition to a large troop of Brabantines whom he had brought over with him,[796] and in despatching a part of these into Suffolk against Hugh Bigod; Henry himself lingering another day or two to recover from his excitement and fatigue.[797]

- [794] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 72. Eleanor was placed at Salisbury (Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 67; Labbe, Nova Bibl., vol. ii. p. 319) in charge of Robert Mauduit; the younger queen “and the hostages” were sent to Devizes under the care of Eustace Fitz-Stephen. (Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 180, from Pipe Roll a. 1173.)

- [795] For accounts of the penance see R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 383; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 248, 249; Gesta Hen. as above; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 61, 62; Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 35 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 18); E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), pp. 445–447; Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 545–547.

- [796] R. Diceto as above, p. 382. Gesta Hen. as above. Rob. Torigni, a. 1174.

- [797] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 35 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 189), says he stayed in London in order to be bled.

In the middle of the night of July 17 a courier from the north came knocking wildly for admittance at the palace-gate. The porters remonstrated with him in vain; he bore, he said, good news which the king must hear that very night. He hurried to the door of the king’s chamber, and, despite the expostulations of the chamberlains, made his way to the bedside and woke the king from his sleep. “Who art thou?” demanded Henry. “A servant of your faithful Ralf de Glanville, and the bearer of good tidings from him to you.” “Is he well?” “He is well; and lo! he holds your enemy the king of Scots in chains at Richmond castle.” Not till he had seen Ralf’s own letters could Henry believe the tidings; then he burst into thanksgivings for the crowning triumph which had come to him, as he now learned, almost at the moment when his voluntary humiliation at Canterbury was completed.[798] The garrison of Carlisle had pledged themselves to surrender to the Scot king at Michaelmas if not previously relieved. In the interval William laid siege to Odelin de Umfraville’s castle of Prudhoe on the Tyne.[799] Here he was rejoined by Roger de Mowbray, who came to intreat the Scot king’s aid in the recovery of his lost castles.[800] Meanwhile, however, the king’s return had apparently brought with it the return of the sheriff of Yorkshire, Robert de Stuteville. Under his leadership and that of his son William the whole military forces of the shire, with those of William de Vesci, Ralf de Glanville, Bernard de Balliol and Odelin de Umfraville, and Archbishop Roger’s men under his constable Ralf de Tilly, gathered and marched northward to oppose the Scots.[801] They reached Newcastle on July 12[802]—the day of Henry’s penitential entry into Canterbury—but only to find that on the rumour of their approach William the Lion had retired from Prudhoe, and was gone to besiege Alnwick with his own picked followers, while the bulk of his host, under the earls of Fife and Angus and the English traitor Richard de Morville, dispersed over all Northumberland to burn, plunder and slay in the old barbarous Scottish fashion which seems hardly to have softened since the days of Malcolm Canmore.[803] The English leaders now held a council of war. Their forces consisted only of a few hundred knights, all wearied and spent with their long and hurried march, in which the foot had been unable to keep up with them at all. The more cautious argued that enough had been done in driving back the Scots thus far, and that it would be madness for a band of four hundred men to advance against a host of eighty thousand. Bolder spirits, however, urged that the justice of their cause must suffice to prevail against any odds; and it was decided to continue the march to Alnwick. They set out next morning before sunrise; the further they rode, the thicker grew the mist; some proposed to turn back. “Turn back who will,” cried Bernard de Balliol, “if no man will follow me, I will go on alone, rather than bear the stain of cowardice for ever!” Every one of them followed him; and when at last the mist cleared away, the first sight that met their eyes was the friendly castle of Alnwick. Close beside it lay the king of Scots, carelessly playing with a little band of some sixty knights. Never dreaming that the English host would dare to pursue him thus far, he had sent out all the rest of his troops on a plundering expedition, and at the first appearance of the enemy he took them for his own followers returning with their spoils. When they unfurled their banners he saw at once that his fate was sealed. The Scottish Lion, however, proved worthy of his name, and his followers proved worthy of their leader. Seizing his arms and shouting, “Now it shall be seen who are true knights!” he rushed upon the English; his horse was killed, he himself was surrounded and made prisoner, and so were all his men.[804] Roger de Mowbray and Adam de Port, an English baron who had been outlawed two years before for an attempt on King Henry’s life, alone fled away into Scotland;[805] not one Scot tried to escape, and some even who were not on the spot, when they heard the noise of the fray, rode hastily up and almost forced themselves into the hands of their captors, deeming it a knightly duty to share their sovereign’s fate.[806]

[798] Ib.·/·Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 35 (Howlett, vol. i. (pp. 189, 190). On the coincidence of time see Mr. Howlett’s note 3, p. 188. Cf. the more detailed, but far less vivid version of the story in Jordan Fantosme, vv. 1956–2029 (Michel, pp. 88–92). In the Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 72, Henry is said to have received the news on July 18. Taken in conjunction with the story given above, this must mean the night of July 17–18.

[799] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 65. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 60. Cf. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 32 (as above, p. 182); and Jordan Fantosme, vv., 1640–1650 (Michel, p. 74).

[800] Will. Newb. as above.

[801] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 65, 66. Cf. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 60.

[802] “Sexta Sabbati.” Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 33 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 183).

[803] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 66. Cf. Rog. Howden as above; Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 32 (as above, pp. 182, 183), and Jordan Fantosme, vv. 1671–1729 (Michel, pp. 76–78). On the Scottish misdoings see also R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 376; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 247; and Gesta Hen. as above, p. 64; this latter writer can find no better way of describing them than by copying Henry of Huntingdon’s account of the Scottish invaders of 1138 (Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 6, Arnold, p. 261).

[804] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 33 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 183–185). Jordan Fantosme, vv. 1731–1839 (Michel, pp. 78–84). Cf. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 67; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 63; and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 249.

[805] Jordan Fantosme, vv. 1841–1849 (Michel, p. 84). Will. Newb. as above (p. 185). On Adam de Port (whose presence on this occasion is mentioned by Jordan only) see Gesta Hen. as above, p. 35 and note 2, and Stapleton, Magn. Rot. Sacc. Norm. (Soc. Antiq.), vol. i., Observ., p. clxi.

[806] Will. Newb. as above.

The capture of William the Lion almost put an end to the rebellion. A body of Flemings summoned by Bishop Hugh of Durham landed the same day at Hartlepool; but at the tidings of the Scottish disaster, Hugh thought it safest to pay them their forty days’ wages and send them home again at once.[807] On the same day, too, the young king, weary of waiting for a wind at Gravelines, left the count of Flanders there alone and proceeded to Wissant with a body of troops whom he succeeded in despatching from thence into England, under the command of Ralf of La Haye, to the assistance of Hugh Bigod.[808] In London, meanwhile, the news brought by Ralf de Glanville’s courier raised to the highest pitch the spirits both of Henry and of his troops. On that very day he set out for Huntingdon,[809] whose titular earl had already fled back to Scotland;[810] at Huntingdon Geoffrey of Lincoln came to meet him with a force of seven hundred knights;[811] and three days later the garrison surrendered at discretion.[812] The king then marched to S. Edmund’s; here he divided his host, sending half against Hugh Bigod’s castle of Bungay, while he himself led the other half to Framlingham, where Hugh was entrenched with five hundred knights and his Flemish men-at-arms. The number of these, however, had dwindled greatly; when the royal host encamped on July 24 at Sileham, close to Framlingham, Hugh felt himself unable to cope with it; and next morning he surrendered.[813] By the end of the month the whole struggle was over. One by one the king’s foes came to his feet as he held his court at Northampton. The king of Scots was brought, with his feet tied together under his horse’s body, from his prison[814] at Richmond.[815] On the last day of July Bishop Hugh of Durham came to give up his castles of Durham, Norham and Northallerton. On the same day the earl of Leicester’s three fortresses were surrendered by his constables;[816] and Thirsk was given up by Roger of Mowbray.[817] Earl Robert de Ferrers yielded up Tutbury and Duffield;[818] the earl of Gloucester and his son-in-law Richard de Clare, who were suspected of intriguing with the rebels, came to offer their services and their obedience to the king;[819] and a like offer came from far-off Galloway, whose native princes, Uhtred and Gilbert, long unwilling vassals of the king of Scots, had seized their opportunity to call home their men, drive out William’s bailiffs, destroy his castles and slaughter his garrisons, and now besought his victorious English cousin to become their protector and overlord.[820] In three weeks from Henry’s landing in England all the royal fortresses were again in his hands, and the country was once more at peace.[821]

[807] Gesta Hen. as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 67.

[808] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 381. Cf. ib. p. 385.

[809] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 72.

[810] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 37 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 195).

[811] See Henry’s remark at their meeting in Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. i. c. 3 (Dimock, vol. iv. p. 368).

[812] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 73. Cf. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 384.

[813] Gesta Hen. as above. R. Diceto as above, pp. 384, 385.

[814] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 64.

[815] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 33 (as above, p. 185).

[816] Gesta Hen. as above. R. Diceto as above, p. 384, dates the surrender of these three castles July 22—i.e. just as Henry was leaving Huntingdon for Suffolk. The chronology of the Gesta seems much more probable. See in Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 37 (as above, pp. 194, 195), how Henry frightened the constables into submission. Jordan Fantosme, vv. 2039–2046 (Michel, p. 92), has a different story about Leicester. He makes David of Huntingdon its commandant, and says that as soon as Henry received the news of the Scot king’s capture, he forwarded it to David with a summons to surrender; whereupon David gave up Leicester castle and himself both at once.

[817] Gesta Hen. as above. R. Diceto (as above), p. 385.

[818] Gesta Hen. as above. Tutbury was being besieged by a host of Welshmen under Rees Ap-Griffith; R. Diceto (as above), p. 384.

[819] R. Diceto as above, p. 385.

[820] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 63.

[821] Ib. p. 65. Rob. Torigni, a. 1174.

When England was secured, it was comparatively a light matter to secure the rest. Louis of France was so dismayed at the sudden collapse of the rebellion in England—a collapse which necessarily entailed a like fate upon the rebellion in Normandy, since the leaders were the same men in both cases—that he at once recalled the young king and the count of Flanders from their project of invasion. As a last resource, all three concentrated their forces upon the siege of Rouen.[822] Its garrison held out gallantly until Henry had time to recross the sea with his Brabantines and a thousand Welshmen[823] who had already done good service under Rees Ap-Griffith at the siege of Tutbury.[824] On August 11, three days after landing, he entered Rouen;[825] a successful raid of his Welshmen upon some French convoys, followed by an equally successful sally of Henry himself against the besieging forces, sufficed to make Louis ask for a truce, under cover of which he fled with his whole host back into his own dominions.[826] Some three weeks later[827] he and Henry met in conference at Gisors and arranged a suspension of hostilities until Michaelmas on all sides, except between Henry and his son Richard, who was fighting independently against his father’s loyal subjects in Poitou.[828] Henry marched southward at once; Richard fled before him from place to place, leaving his conquests to fall back one by one into the hands of their rightful owner; at last he suddenly returned to throw himself at his father’s feet, and a few days before Michaelmas Henry concluded his war in Poitou[829] by entering Poitiers in triumph with Richard, penitent and forgiven, at his side.[830]

- [822] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 73. Rog. Howden as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 64. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 36 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 190). Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 249. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 386.

- [823] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 74.

- [824] See R. Diceto as above, p. 384. It seems most likely that these were the same. The Pipe Roll of 1174 (Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 183) has a charge of £4: 18: 11 “in corredio Reis et aliorum Walensium qui venerunt ad regem in expedicionem.”

- [825] R. Diceto as above, p. 385. Gesta Hen. as above. Rog. Howden as above, p. 65.

- [826] See the details of Louis’s disgraceful conduct in Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 74–76, Rog. Howden as above, pp. 65, 66, R. Diceto as above, pp. 386, 387, Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 250, and Will. Newb., l. ii. cc. 36 and 37 (as above, pp. 192–196).

- [827] On September 8. Gesta Hen. as above, p. 76.

- [828] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 76. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 66. Rob. Torigni, a. 1174.

- [829] “Et sic finivit rex gwerram suam in Pictaviâ,” comments the writer of the Gesta Hen. (as above) on the reconciliation.

- [830] Rog. Howden as above, p. 67.

On the last day of September the two kings and all the princes met in conference between Tours and Amboise.[831] Henry’s three elder sons accepted the endowments which he offered them; in return, the young king gave his assent to a provision for John. A general amnesty was agreed upon; all prisoners on both sides, except the king of Scots, the earls of Leicester and Chester and Ralf of Fougères, were released at once; all the rebels returned to their allegiance, and were fully forgiven; Henry claimed nothing from any of them save the restoration of their castles to the condition in which they had been before the war, and the right of taking such hostages and other security as he might choose.[832] These terms of course did not apply to England; while, on the other hand, the king of Scots and his fellow-captives, whom Henry had brought back with him to Normandy and replaced in confinement at Falaise,[833] were excluded from them as prisoners of war. It was at Falaise, on October 11, that Henry and his sons embodied their agreement in a written document.[834] A few weeks later William of Scotland, with the formal assent of the bishops and barons of his realm, who had been allowed free access to him during his captivity, submitted to pay the price which Henry demanded for his ransom. The legal relations between the crowns of England and Scotland had been doubtful ever since the days of William the Conqueror and Malcolm Canmore, if not since the days of Eadward the Elder and Constantine; henceforth they were to be doubtful no longer. William the Lion became the liegeman of the English king and of his son for Scotland and for all his other lands, and agreed that their heirs should be entitled to a like homage and fealty from all future kings of Scots. The castles of Roxburgh, Jedburgh, Berwick, Edinburgh and Stirling were required by Henry as security; and as soon as the treaty had been ratified at Valognes[835] William was sent over sea in a sort of honourable custody to enforce their surrender and thereby complete his own release.[836]

- [831] Ibid.·/·Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 67. Gesta Hen. as above·/·(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 76. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 250. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 394. On the date given by this last see below, note 7{834}.

- [832] Treaty given at length in Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 77–79, and Rog. Howden as above, pp. 67–69; abridged in R. Diceto as above, pp. 394, 395.

- [833] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 74.

- [834] The treaty, as given in Gesta Hen. and Rog. Howden (see above, note 5{832}), is printed also in Rymer’s Fœdera, vol. i. p. 30, with the addition of a date—Falaise—and the signatures of twenty-eight witnesses. Among the latter is Geoffrey, bishop elect of Lincoln. Now we know from R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 393, that Geoffrey came over from England to Normandy on October 8. R. Diceto (ib. p. 394) gives the date of the meeting at which the treaty was made as October 11. Is it not probable that he has substituted for the date of the making of the treaty that of its formal ratification at Falaise?

- [835] This treaty, as given in Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 96–99, and Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 80–82 (and from them in Rymer’s Fœdera, vol. i. pp. 30, 31), is dated at Falaise. R. Diceto, however (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 396), who gives an abridgement of it, says it was made at Valognes, on December 8. Now there is in Hearne’s Liber Niger, vol. i. pp. 36–40, a copy of the treaty, differing from the former ones in having eighteen more witnesses (one cannot help noting the name of the last—“Roger Bacun”) and in its date, which is “Valognes.” No doubt the Falaise copy was made first, and this is the ratification of it.

- [836] R. Diceto as above, p. 398.

By the terms of Henry’s treaty with France, all the English barons who held lands on both sides of the sea were to be at once re-instated in their continental possessions, except the castles over which the king resumed his ancient rights of garrison or of demolition. Their English estates however were wholly at his mercy; but he made a very gentle use of his power over them. He took in fact no personal vengeance at all; he exacted simply what was necessary for securing his own authority and the peace of the realm—the instant departure of the Flemish mercenaries[837] and the demolition of unlicensed fortifications—and for defraying the expenses of the war. This was done by a tax levied partly on the royal demesnes, partly on the estates of the rebels throughout the country, on the basis of an assessment made for that purpose during the past summer by the sheriffs of the several counties, assisted by some officers of the Exchequer.[838] No ruinous sums were demanded; even Hugh Bigod escaped with a fine of a thousand marks, and lost none of the revenues of his earldom save for the time that he was actually in open rebellion; the third penny of Norfolk was reckoned as due to him again from the third day after his surrender, and its amount for two months was paid to him accordingly at Michaelmas.[839] Even the earls of Leicester and Chester seem to have been at once set free;[840] and in little more than two years they were restored to all their lands and honours, except their castles, which were either razed or retained in the king’s hands.[841]

- [837] Hugh Bigod’s Flemings and the knights sent over by the young king were all sent out of the country immediately after Hugh’s surrender, and the former were made to swear that they would never set a hostile foot in England again. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 385.

- [838] This is the “Assiza super dominica regis et super terras eorum qui recesserunt.” Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., pp. 184, 185.

- [839] See extract from Pipe Roll 20 Hen. II. [a. 1174], and Mr. Eyton’s comment upon it, Itin. Hen. II., p. 181, note 2.

- [840] Hugh of Chester was probably released at the same time with the king of Scots, for he signs among the witnesses to the treaty of Falaise. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 99. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 82.

- [841] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 134, 135. Rog. Howden as above, p. 118.

This very clemency was in itself at once the strongest proof of the completeness of Henry’s victory and the surest means of retaining the hold which he had now gained over the barons. The struggle whose course we have been trying to follow has a special significance: it was the last struggle in English history in which the barons were arrayed against the united interests of the Crown and the people. That feudal pride which had revolted so often and so fiercely against the determination of William the Conqueror and Henry I. to enforce justice and order throughout their realm stooped at last to acknowledge its master in Henry II. In the unbroken tranquillity, the uninterrupted developement of reform in law and administration, the unchecked growth of the material and social prosperity of England during the remaining fifteen years of his reign, Henry and his people reaped the first-fruits of the anti-feudal policy which he and his predecessors had so long and so steadily maintained. Its full harvest was to be reaped after he was gone, not by the sovereign, but by the barons themselves, to whom his strong hand had at last taught their true mission as leaders and champions of the English people against a king who had fallen away from the traditions alike of the Norman and of the Angevin Henry.

CHAPTER V.
THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE.
1175–1183.

In the seven years which followed the suppression of the barons’ revolt Henry’s prosperity reached its height. The rising in which all his enemies had united for his destruction had ended in leaving him seated more firmly than ever upon the most securely-established throne in Europe. Within the four seas of Britain he was master as no king had ever been master before him. The English people had been with him from the first, and was learning year by year to identify its interests more closely with his; the Church, alienated for nearly ten years, was reconciled by his penance; feudalism was beaten at last, and for ever. The Welsh princes were his obedient and serviceable vassals; the Scot king had been humbled to accept a like position; a new subject-realm was growing up on the coast of Ireland. The great external peril which had dogged Henry’s footsteps through life, the hostility of France, was for a while paralyzed by his success. Other external foes he had none; the kings of Spain and of Sicily, the princes of the Western and even of the Eastern Empire, vied with each other in seeking the friendship, one might almost say the patronage, of the one sovereign in Europe who, safe on his sea-girt throne, could afford to be independent of them all. Within and without, on either side of the sea, all hindrances to the full and free developement of Henry’s policy for the government of his whole dominions were thus completely removed.

In England itself the succeeding period was one of unbroken tranquillity and steady prosperous growth, social, intellectual, political, constitutional. Henry used his opportunity to make a longer stay in the island than he had ever made there before, save at the very beginning of his reign. He was there from May 1175 to August 1177; in the following July he returned, and stayed till April 1180; he came back again in July 1181, and remained till March 1182. Each of these visits was marked by some further step towards the completion of his judicial and administrative reforms. Almost as soon as he set foot in the country, indeed, he took up his work as if it had never been interrupted. The king and his eldest son went to England together on May 9, 1175;[842] on Rogation Sunday they publicly sealed their reconciliation with each other and with the Church in a great council which met at Westminster[843] under the presidence of a new archbishop of Canterbury, Richard, formerly prior of Dover, who after countless troubles and delays had been chosen just before the outbreak of the rebellion to fill S. Thomas’s place,[844] and had come back from Rome in triumph, with his pallium and a commission as legate for all England, just as Henry was returning to Normandy from his success against Hugh Bigod.[845] From the council the two kings and the primate went all together on a pilgrimage to the martyr’s tomb at Canterbury;[846] at Whitsuntide the kings held a court at Reading,[847] and on S. Peter’s day they met the Welsh princes in a great council at Gloucester.[848] Two days later the process, begun two years before, of filling up the vacant bishoprics and abbacies which had been accumulating during Thomas’s exile was completed in another council at Woodstock.[849] Thence, too, was issued an edict for the better securing of order throughout the realm, and particularly around the person of the king; all his opponents in the late war were forbidden, on pain of arrest as traitors, to come to the court without special summons, and, under any circumstances, to come before sunrise or stay over night; and all wearing of arms, knife, bow and arrows, was forbidden on the English side of the Severn. These prohibitions however were only temporary;[850] and they were, with one exception, the only measure of general severity taken by Henry in consequence of the rebellion. That exception was a great forest-visitation, begun by Henry in person during the summer of 1175 and not completed by his ministers, it seems, till Michaelmas 1177, and from which scarcely a man throughout the kingdom, baron or villein, layman or priest, was altogether exempt. In vain did Richard de Lucy, as loyal to the people as to the king, shew Henry his own royal writ authorizing the justiciars to throw open the forests and give up the royal fish-ponds to public use during the war, and protest against the injustice of punishing the people at large for a trespass to which he had himself invited them in the king’s name and in accordance, as he had understood it, with the king’s expressed will. The license had probably been used to a far wider extent than Henry had intended; the general excitement had perhaps vented itself in some such outburst of wanton destructiveness as had occurred after the death of Henry I.; at any rate, the Norman and the Angevin blood in Henry II. was all alike stirred into wrath at sight of damage done to vert and venison; the transgressors were placed, in technical phrase, “at the king’s mercy,” and their fines constituted an important item in the Pipe Roll of 1176.[851]

- [842] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 83, 84. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 399.

- [843] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 84. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 250. R. Diceto as above, pp. 399–401.

- [844] On the Canterbury troubles and Richard’s election see Gerv. Cant. as above, pp. 239–242, 243–245, 247.

- [845] Ib. p. 249. R. Diceto as above, p. 391. Gesta Hen. as above, p. 74.

- [846] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 91. Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 256. R. Diceto as above, p. 399.

- [847] Gesta Hen. as above.

- [848] Ib. p. 92.

- [849] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 93. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 78, 79.

- [850] Gesta Hen. as above. “Sed hæc præcepta parvo tempore custodita sunt.”

- [851] On the “misericordia regis pro forestâ,” as it is called in the Pipe Rolls, see Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 92, 94; Rog. Howden as above, p. 79; R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 402; Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 483; and the extracts from the Pipe Rolls 22 and 23 Hen. II. (i.e. 1176 and 1177) in Madox, Hist. Exch., vol. i. pp. 541, 542.

In the beginning of that year the king assembled a great council at Northampton,[852] and thence issued an Assize which forms another link in the series of legal enactments begun at Clarendon just ten years before. The first three clauses and the twelfth clause of the Assize of Northampton are substantially a re-issue of those articles of the Assize of Clarendon which regulated the presentment, detention and punishment of criminals and the treatment of strangers and vagabonds.[853] The experience of the past ten years had however led to some modifications in the details of the procedure. The recognition by twelve lawful men of every hundred and four of every township, to be followed by ordeal of water, was re-enacted; but the presentment was now to be made not to the sheriff, but direct to the king’s justices. The punishments, too, were more severe than before; the forger, robber, murderer or incendiary who under the former system would have suffered the loss of a foot was now to lose a hand as well, and to quit the realm within forty days.[854] The remaining articles dealt with quite other matters. The fourth declared the legal order of proceeding with regard to the estate of a deceased freeholder, in such a manner as to secure the rights of his heir and of his widow before the usual relief could be exacted by the lord; and it referred all disputes between the lord and the heir touching the latter’s right of inheritance to the decision of the king’s justices, on the recognition of twelve lawful men[855]—a process which, under the name of the assize of mort d’ancester, soon became a regular part of the business transacted before the justices-in-eyre. Some of the other clauses had a more political significance. They directed the justices to take an oath of homage and fealty to the king from every man in the realm, earl, baron, knight, freeholder or villein, before the octave of Whit-Sunday at latest, and to arrest as traitors all who refused it:[856]—to investigate and strictly enforce the demolition of the condemned castles;[857] to ascertain and report by whom, how and where the duty of castle-guard was owed to the king;[858] to inquire what persons had fled from justice and incurred the penalty of outlawry by failing to give themselves up at the appointed time, and to send in a list of all such persons to the Exchequer at Easter and Michaelmas for transmission to the king.[859] The tenth article was aimed at the bailiffs of the royal demesnes, requiring them to give an account of their stewardship before the Exchequer;[860] and two others defined the justices’ authority, as extending, in judicial matters, over all pleas of the Crown, both in criminal causes and in civil actions concerning half a knight’s fee or less; and in fiscal matters, over escheats, wardships, and lands and churches in royal demesne.[861]

- [852] On January 26. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 404. Cf. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 107, and Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 87. The Gesta date it merely “circa festum Conversionis S. Pauli”; Roger turns this into “in festo,” etc., and adopts the reading “Nottingham” instead of “Northampton.” Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 257, 258, confounds the Assize of Clarendon with the Constitutions.

- [853] Cf. articles 1–3, 12 of Ass. Northampton (Stubbs, Select Charters, pp. 150, 151, 152), with Ass. Clarendon, cc. 1–4, 13, 15, 16 (ib. pp. 143, 144, 145). The Assize of Northampton is given in the Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 108–110, and by Rog. Howden as above, pp. 89–91.

- [854] Ass. North., c. 1 (Stubbs, as above, p. 151).

- [855] Ib. c. 4 (pp. 151, 152).

- [856] Ass. North., c. 6 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 152).

- [857] Ib. c. 8 (as above).

- [858] Ib. c. 11 (ibid.)

- [859] Ib. c. 13 (pp. 152, 153).

- [860] Ib. c. 10 (p. 152).

- [861] Ib. cc. 7 and 9 (ibid.).

The visitations of the justices by whom this assize was carried into effect were arranged upon a new plan, or rather upon a modified form of the plan which had been adopted two years before for the assessment of a tallage upon the royal demesnes, to meet the cost of the expected war. It was at that terrible crisis, when most men in Henry’s place would have had no thought to spare for anything save the military necessities and perils of the moment, that he had first devised and carried into effect the principle of judicial circuits which with some slight changes in detail has remained in force until our own day. This tallage was levied by nineteen barons of the Exchequer, distributed into six companies, each company undertaking the assessment throughout a certain district or group of shires.[862] The abandonment of this scheme in the assizes of the two following years was probably necessitated by the disturbed state of the country. But at the council of Northampton the kingdom was again definitely mapped out into six divisions, to each of which three justices were sent.[863] In the report of their proceedings in the Pipe Roll of the year they are for the first time since the Assize of Clarendon[864] officially described by the title which they had long borne in common speech, “justitiæ itinerantes” (or “errantes”), justices-in-eyre; and it is from this time that the regular institution of itinerant judges is dated by modern legal historians.[865]

- [862] See the lists in Stubbs, Gesta Hen., vol. ii., pref. p. lxv, note 5, and Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 176; from the Pipe Roll 19 Hen. II. (a. 1173).

- [863] See lists in Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 107, 108.

- [864] Ass. Clar., c. 19 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 145).

- [865] Stubbs, Gesta Hen., vol. ii. pref. pp. lxix, lxx and notes.

This first distribution of circuits however was soon altered. In the very next year the same eighteen officers made, in addition to their judicial circuits, a general visitation of the realm for fiscal purposes, in four companies instead of six;[866] and on Henry’s return to England in the summer of 1178 he made what at first glance looks like a sweeping change in the organization of the Curia Regis. “The king,” we are told, “made inquiry concerning his justices whom he had appointed in England, whether they treated the men of the realm with righteousness and moderation; and when he learned that the country and the people were sore oppressed by the great multitude of justices—for they were eighteen in number—by the counsel of the wise men of the realm he chose out five, two clerks and three laymen, who were all of his private household; and he decreed that those five should hear all the complaints of the realm, and do right, and that they should not depart from the king’s court, but abide there to hear the complaints of his men; so that if any question came up among them which they could not bring to an end, it should be presented to the king’s hearing and determined as might please him and the wise men of the realm.”[867] From the mention of the number eighteen it appears that the persons against whom were primarily directed both the complaint of the people and the action of the king were the justices-in-eyre of the last two years; and this is confirmed by the fact that of all these eighteen, only six were among the judges who went on circuit in 1178 and 1179, while from 1180 onwards only one of them reappears in that capacity, though many of them retained their functions in the Exchequer. In 1178 and 1179 moreover the circuits were reduced from six to two, each being served by four judges.[868] The enactment of 1178, however, evidently touched the central as well as the provincial judicature, and with more important results. It took the exercise of the highest judicial functions out of the hands of the large body of officers who made up the Curia Regis as constituted until that time, and restricted it to a small chosen committee. This was apparently the origin of a limited tribunal which, springing up thus within the Curia Regis, soon afterwards appropriated its name, and in later days grew into the Court of King’s Bench. At the same time the reservation of difficult cases for the hearing of the king in council points to the creation, or rather to the revival, of a yet higher court of justice, that of the king himself in council with his “wise men”—a phrase which, while on the one hand it carries us back to the very earliest form of the Curia Regis, on the other points onward to its later developements in the modern tribunals of equity or of appeal, the courts of Chancery and of the Privy Council in its judicial capacity.[869]

- [866] Ib.·/·Stubbs, Gesta Hen., vol. ii. pref. p. lxx and note 3.

- [867] Ib. vol. i. pp. 207, 208.

- [868] Stubbs, Gesta Hen., vol. ii., pref. p. lxxi and note 2.

- [869] Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. pp. 486, 487, 601–603; Gesta Hen., vol. ii. pref. pp. lxxi, lxxiv–lxxvii.

All these changes in the circuits and in the Curia Regis had however another motive. The chief obstacle to Henry’s judicial and legal reforms was the difficulty of getting them administered according to the intention of their author. It was to meet this difficulty that Henry, as a contemporary writer says, “while never changing his mind, was ever changing his ministers.”[870] He had employed men chosen from every available class of society in turn, and none of his experiments had altogether brought him satisfaction. Feudal nobles, court officials, confidential servants and friends, had all alike been tried and, sooner or later, found wanting.[871] There was only one who had never yet failed him in a service of twenty-five years’ duration—Richard de Lucy “the loyal”; but in the summer of 1179 Richard de Lucy, to his master’s great regret, resigned his office of justiciar and retired to end his days a few months later as a brother of an Augustinian house which he had founded at Lesnes in Kent to the honour of S. Thomas of Canterbury.[872] Henry in this extremity fell back once more upon a precedent of his grandfather’s time and determined to place the chief administration, for the moment at least, again in clerical hands. Instead of a single justiciar-bishop, however, he appointed three—the bishops of Winchester, Ely and Norwich;[873] all of whom, under their earlier appellations of Richard of Ilchester, Geoffrey Ridel and John of Oxford, had long ago acquired ample experience and shewn ample capacity for the work of secular administration.[874]

- [870] “Sic animum a proposito non immutans, circa personas mutabiles immutabilem semper sæpe mutavit sententiam.” R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 434—part of a long passage which sets forth very fully the motives and the general aims and results of Henry’s administrative changes.

- [871] R. Diceto as above, pp. 434–435.

- [872] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 238. Cf. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 190.

- [873] R. Diceto as above, p. 435.

- [874] Richard of Ilchester is well known as an active official of the Exchequer; see below, pp. 193, 194. Geoffrey Ridel seems to have acted as vice-chancellor throughout S. Thomas’s primacy and exile; see Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 174, note 1. As for John of Oxford, his diplomatic talents are only too notorious.

This arrangement was however only provisional. The number of judicial circuits was again raised to four, and to each of the three southern circuits was despatched one of the justiciar-bishops, with a royal clerk and three laymen to act as his subordinate assistants. The fourth circuit, which took in the whole district between the Trent and the Scottish border, was intrusted to six justices, of whom only two were clerks; one of these, Godfrey de Lucy the archdeacon of Richmond, a brother of the late chief justiciar, stood nominally at the head of the commission; but there can be little doubt that its real head was one of his lay colleagues—Ralf de Glanville,[875] the faithful sheriff of Lancashire and castellan of Richmond to whom William the Lion had given up his sword at Alnwick in 1174;[876] and these six were appointed to form the committee for hearing the complaints of the people, apparently in succession to the five who had been selected in the previous year.[877] All four bodies of judges brought up a report of their proceedings to the king at Westminster on August 27,[878] and it seems to have been the most satisfactory which he had yet received. When he went over sea in the following April, he left Ralf de Glanville to represent him in England as chief justiciar.[879] Ralf’s business capacities proved to be at least as great, and his honesty as stainless, as those of his predecessor; and from that time forth the management of the entire legal and judicial administration was left in his hands. Circuits, variously distributed, continued to be made from year to year and for divers purposes by companies of judges, ranging in total numbers from three to twenty-two;[880] while the King’s Court and the Exchequer pursued their work on the lines already laid down, without further interruption, till the end of Henry’s reign.

- [875] See the lists in Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 238, 239; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 190, 191.

- [876] Jordan Fantosme, v. 1811 (Michel, p. 82).

- [877] “Isti sex sunt justitiæ in curiâ regis constituti ad audiendum clamores populi.” Gesta Hen. as above, p. 239. See on this Stubbs, Gesta Hen., vol. ii. pref. p. lxxiii, and Constit. Hist., vol. i. pp. 601, 602.

- [878] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 436.

- [879] Rog. Howden as above, p. 215.

- [880] See notices of the circuits and of the sessions of the Curia Regis and Exchequer in Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., pp. 236, 237, 243, 244, 247, 248, 249, 251, 253, 258, 259, 265, 272, 273, 281, 291.

The last of Henry’s great legal measures, with the exception of a Forest Assize issued in 1184, was an ordinance published in the autumn of 1181 and known as the Assize of Arms. Its object was to define more fully and exactly the military obligations of the people at large in the service of the king and the defence of the country;—in a word, to put once again upon a more definite footing the old institution of the “fyrd,” which was the only effective counterpoise to the military power of the barons, and whose services in 1173 and 1174 had proved it to be well worthy of the royal consideration and encouragement. The Assize of 1181 declared the obligation of bearing arms at the king’s command to be binding upon every free layman in the realm. The character of the arms with which men of various ranks were required to provide themselves was defined according to a graduated scale, from the full equipment of the knight down to the mail-coat, steel-cap and spear of the burgher and the simple freeman.[881] The justices were directed to ascertain, through the “lawful men” of the hundreds and towns, what persons fell under each category, to enroll their names, read out the Assize in their presence, and make them swear to provide themselves with the proper accoutrements before S. Hilary’s day.[882] Every man’s arms were to be carefully kept and used solely for the royal service; they were not to be taken out of the country, or alienated in any way;[883] at their owner’s death they were to pass to his heir;[884] if any man possessed other arms than those required of him by the Assize, he was to dispose of them in such a manner that they might be used in the king’s service;[885] and all this was enforced by a stern threat of corporal punishment upon defaulters.[886]

- [881] Ass. Arms, cc. 1–3 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 154; from Gesta Hen., vol. i. pp. 278–280. The Assize is also given by Rog. Howden, vol. ii. pp. 261, 262).

- [882] Ib. cc. 9 and 4 (Stubbs as above, pp. 155, 156, 154).

- [883] Ib. cc. 4, 8 (pp. 154, 155).

- [884] Ib. c. 5 (p. 155).

- [885] Ib. cc. 6, 7 (as above).

- [886] Ib. c. 10 (p. 156).

The freemen who were armed under this Assize had little occasion to use their weapons so long as King Henry lived. Within the four seas of Britain there was almost unbroken peace till the end of his reign. The treaty with Scotland was ratified by the public homage of William the Lion to Henry and his son at York on August 10, 1175;[887] and thenceforth Henry’s sole trouble from that quarter was the necessity of arbitrating between William and his unruly vassals in Galloway,[888] and of advising him in his ecclesiastical difficulties with the Roman see. The western border of England was less secure than the northern; yet even in Wales the authority of the English Crown had made a considerable advance since Henry’s accession. His first Welsh war, directed against the princes of North Wales in 1157, had little practical result. A second expedition marched in 1163 against Rees Ap-Griffith, prince of South Wales, and a lucky incident at the outset insured its success. Directly in the king’s line of march from Shrewsbury into South Wales, between Wenlock and Newport, there ran a streamlet called Pencarn—a mountain-torrent passable only at certain points. One of these was an ancient ford concerning which a prophecy attributed to the enchanter Merlin declared: “When ye shall see a strong man with a freckled face rush in upon the Britons, if he cross the ford of Pencarn, then know ye that the might of Cambria shall perish.” The Welsh guarded this ford with the utmost care to prevent Henry from crossing it; he, ignorant of the prophecy, sent his troops over by another passage, and was about to follow them himself, when a loud blast from their trumpets on the opposite bank caused his horse to rear so violently that he was obliged to turn away and seek a means of crossing elsewhere. He found it at the fatal spot, and as the Welsh saw him dash through the stream their hearts sank in despair.[889] He marched unopposed from one end of South Wales to the other, through Glamorgan and Carmarthen as far as Pencader;[890] here Rees made his submission;[891] and Rees himself, Owen of North Wales, and several other Welsh princes appeared and swore allegiance to King Henry and his heir in that famous council of Woodstock where the first quarrel arose between Henry and Thomas of Canterbury.[892]

- [887] Gesta Hen. (as above), pp. 94–96. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 79.

Cf. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 38 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 198).

- [888] On the Galloway affair see Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 67, 68, 79, 80, 99, 126, 313, 336, 339, 348, 349; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 63, 69, 105, 299, 309.

- [889] Gir. Cambr. Itin. Kambr. l. i. c. 6 (Dimock, vol. vi. pp. 62, 63).

- [890] Ib. l. ii. c. 10 (p. 138).

- [891] Ann. Cambr. a. 1164 (Williams, p. 49). Brut y Tywys., a. 1162 (Williams, p. 199). Both dates are self-evidently wrong; the only possible one is the intermediate year.

- [892] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 311.

Next year Rees, provoked as he alleged by Henry’s non-fulfilment of his promises and also by the shelter given to the slayer of his nephew by Earl Roger of Clare, harried the whole border and roused all Wales to fling off the yoke of the “Frenchmen,” as the Welsh still called their Norman conquerors.[893] Henry was obliged to delay his vengeance till the following summer, when it furnished him with an excellent pretext for escaping from his ecclesiastical and political entanglements on the continent.[894] He set out from Oswestry[895] at the head of a vast army drawn from all parts of his dominions, both insular and continental, and reinforced by Flemish and Scottish allies.[896] All the princes of Wales were arrayed against him, and both parties intended the campaign to be decisive. But the wet climate of the Welsh hills proved a more dangerous foe than the mountaineers themselves; and after remaining for some time encamped at Berwen, Henry was compelled to beat an ignominious retreat, completely defeated by the ceaseless rain,[897] and venting his baffled wrath against the Welsh in a savage mutilation of their hostages.[898] For six years after this, as we have seen, he never had time to visit his island realm at all, and the daring “French” settlers in Wales or on its borders, such as the Geraldines or the De Clares, were free to fight their own battles and make their own alliances with the Welsh just as they chose; it was not till Henry in 1171 followed them to their more distant settlement in Ireland that he again entered South Wales. Then he used his opportunity for a series of personal interviews with Rees,[899] which ended in a lasting agreement. Rees was left, in the phrase of his native chronicler, as the king’s “justice” over all South Wales.[900] How far he maintained, along the border or within his own territories, the peace and order whose preservation formed the main part of an English justiciar’s duty, may be doubted; but in the rebellion of 1174 he shewed his personal loyalty to the king by marching all the way into Staffordshire to besiege Tutbury for him, and some of his followers did equally good service in the suppression of the Norman revolt.[901] David of North Wales, too, if he did nothing to help the king, at least resisted the temptation of joining his enemies; and the war was no sooner fairly over than, anxious that some reflection of the glories of English royalty should be cast over his own house, he became an eager suitor for the hand of Henry’s half-sister Emma—a suit which Henry found it politic to grant.[902] A few months later, in June 1175, the king made an attempt to secure the tranquillity of the border by binding all the barons of the district in a sworn mutual alliance for its defence.[903] The attempt was not very successful; the border-warfare went on in much the same way as of old; but it was not till the summer of 1184 that it grew serious enough to call for Henry’s personal intervention, and then a march to Worcester sufficed to bring Rees of South Wales once more to his feet.[904]

- [893] Ann. Cambr. a. 1165 (Williams, pp. 49, 50). Brut y Tywys., a. 1163 (Williams, p. 199).

- [894] See above, p. 56, note 3{223}.

- [895] Ann. Cambr. a. 1166 (i.e. 1165; Williams, p. 50). Brut y Tywys., a. 1164 (Williams, p. 201). Gir. Cambr. Itin. Kambr., l. ii. c. 10 (Dimock, vol. vi. p. 138). According to the Brut (as above) Henry first “moved an army with extreme haste, and came to Rhuddlan, and purposed to erect a castle there, and stayed there three nights. After that he returned into England, and collected a vast army,” etc. Following this, Mr. Bridgeman (Princes of S. Wales, p. 48) and Mr. Eyton (Itin. Hen. II., pp. 79, 82) divide the Welsh campaign of 1165 into two, one in May and the other in July. Neither the Ann. Cambr. nor Gerald, however, make any mention of the Rhuddlan expedition.

- [896] Ann. Cambr. and Brut y Tywys. as above.

- [897] Brut y Tywys., a. 1164 (Williams, pp. 201, 203).

- [898] Ibid. (p. 203). Chron. Mailros a. 1165.

- [899] See Brut y Tywys., a. 1171, 1172 (Williams, pp. 213–219).

- [900] Ib. a. 1172 (p. 219).

- [901] See above, p. 164.

- [902] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 397, 398.

- [903] At the council held at Gloucester on June 29. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 92.

- [904] Ib. p. 314.

It was the latest-won dependency of the English crown which during these years gave the most trouble to its wearer. If Henry found it hard to secure fit instruments for the work of government and administration in England, he found it harder still to secure them for the same work in Ireland. At the outbreak of the barons’ revolt he had at once guarded against all danger of the rebels finding support in Ireland by recalling the garrisons which he had left in the Irish coast-towns and summoning the chief men of the new vassal state, particularly Richard of Striguil and Hugh de Lacy, to join him personally in Normandy.[905] Richard served him well in the war as commandant of the important border-fortress of Gisors;[906] and it may have been as a reward for these services that he was sent back to Ireland as governor in Hugh’s stead[907] at the close of the year. For the next two years, while the king had his hands full in Normandy and England, matters in Ireland went much as they had gone before his visit there; the Norman-English settlers pursued their strifes and their alliances with their Irish neighbours or with each other, and granted out to their followers the lands which they won, entirely at their own pleasure.[908] But the lesson which Henry was meanwhile teaching their brethren in England was not thrown away upon them; and at the close of 1175 it was brought home to them in another way. Roderic O’Conor, moved as it seems by the fame of Henry’s successes, and also perhaps by two papal bulls—Adrian’s famous “Laudabiliter,” and another from the reigning Pope Alexander—which Henry had lately caused to be published at Waterford,[909] at last bent his stubborn independence to send three envoys to the English king with overtures for a treaty of peace. The treaty was signed at Windsor on October 6. Roderic submitted to become Henry’s liegeman, and to pay him a yearly tribute of one hide “pleasing to the merchants” for every ten head of cattle throughout Ireland; on these conditions he was confirmed in the government and administration of justice over the whole island, except Leinster, Meath and Waterford, and authorized to reckon upon the help of the royal constables in compelling the obedience of his vassals and collecting from them their share of the tribute.[910]

- [905] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 136–141. Cf. above, p. 145.

- [906] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 137.

- [907] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 44 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 298).

- [908] For the history of these years in Ireland see Four Masters, a. 1173–1175 (O’Donovan, vol. iii. pp. 9–23); Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. ii. cc. 1–4 (Dimock, vol. v. pp. 308–314); Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 142 to end.

- [909] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 5 (pp. 315–319).

- [910] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 101–103. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 83, 84.

This scheme might perhaps have answered at least as well as a similar plan had answered during a few years in South Wales, had it not been for the disturbed condition of the English settlement. The death of Richard of Striguil in 1176[911] left the command in the hands of his brother-in-law and constable, Raymond the Fat, who for some years had been not only the leader of his forces, but also his chief adviser and most indispensable agent in all matters political and military.[912] A jealous rival, however, had already brought Raymond into ill repute at court,[913] and the king’s seneschal William Fitz-Aldhelm was sent to supersede him.[914] William appears to have been a loyal servant of the king, but his tact and wisdom did not equal his loyalty. At the moment of landing his suspicions were aroused by the imposing display of armed followers with which Raymond came to meet him; the muttered words which he incautiously suffered to escape his lips—“I will soon put an end to all this!”—were enough to set all the Geraldines against him at once; and the impolitic haste and severity with which he acted upon his suspicions, without waiting to prove their justice,[915] drove the whole body of the earlier settlers into such a state of irritation that early in the next year Henry found it necessary to recall him.[916] Meanwhile the aggressive spirit of the English settlers had made Henry’s treaty with Roderic almost a dead letter. In defiance of the rights which that treaty reserved to the Irish monarch, they had profited by the mutual dissensions of the lesser native chieftains to extend their own power far beyond the limits therein laid down. A civil war in Munster had ended in its virtual subjugation by Raymond and his Geraldine kinsfolk;[917] a like pretext had served for an invasion of Connaught itself by Miles Cogan;[918] John de Courcy was in full career of conquest in Ulster.[919] Henry could scarcely have put a stop to all this, even had he really wished to do so; and by this time he was probably more inclined to encourage any extension of English power in Ireland, for he had devised a new scheme for the government of that country.

- [911] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. ii. c. 14 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 332). R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 407. Four Masters, a. 1176 (O’Donovan, vol. iii. p. 25). Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 125.

- [912] Gir. Cambr. as above, cc. 1–3 (pp. 308–313).

- [913] Ib. cc. 10, 11 (pp. 327, 328).

- [914] Gesta Hen. as above. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 100.

- [915] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 15 (pp. 334–337).

- [916] Ib. c. 20 (p. 347). Gerald gives no date for the recall of William; but it seems to have been before the nomination of John as king of Ireland in May 1177; see below, p. 184.

- [917] Gir. Cambr. as above, cc. 7, 12, 13 (pp. 320–323, 329–332).

- [918] Four Masters, a. 1177 (O’Donovan, vol. iii. p. 35). Ann. Loch Cé, a. 1177 (Hennessy, vol. i. p. 155). Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. ii. c. 19 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 346).

- [919] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 17 (pp. 338–343). Four Masters, as above, pp. 29–33. Ann. Loch Cé, as above, pp. 155–157. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 137, 138. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 120.

The bride of John “Lackland,” Alice of Maurienne, had died within a year of her betrothal.[920] The marriage-contract indeed provided that in case of such an event her sister should take her place; but the connexion had begun too inauspiciously for either Henry or Humbert to have any desire of renewing it; and Henry now saw a possibility of more than repairing within his insular dominions the ill-luck which had befallen his plans of advancement on the continent for his favourite child. In the autumn of 1176 John was betrothed to his cousin Avice, the youngest of the three daughters of Earl William of Gloucester, and Avice was made heiress to the whole of the vast estates in the west of England and South Wales which her father had inherited from his parents, Earl Robert of Gloucester and Mabel of Glamorgan.[921] But a mere English earldom, however important, was not enough to satisfy Henry’s ambition for his darling. In his scheme Avice’s wealth was to furnish her bridegroom with the means of supporting a loftier dignity. He had now, it was said, obtained Pope Alexander’s leave to make king of Ireland whichever of his sons he might choose. On the strength of this permission he seems to have reverted to his original scheme of conquering the whole island.[922] In May 1177 he publicly announced his intention of bestowing the realm of Ireland upon his youngest son John, and parcelled out the southern half of the country among a number of feudal tenants, who did homage for their new fiefs to him and John in a great council at Oxford.[923] As however John was too young to undertake the government in person, his father was again compelled to choose a viceroy. He fell back upon his earliest choice and re-appointed Hugh de Lacy;[924] and with the exception of a temporary disgrace in 1181,[925] it was Hugh who occupied this somewhat thankless office during the next seven years. With the internal history of Ireland during his administration and throughout the rest of Henry’s reign we are not called upon to deal here; for important as are its bearings upon the history of England, their importance did not become apparent till a much later time than that of the Angevin kings.

- [920] Art de vérifier les Dates, vol. xvii. p. 165.

- [921] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 124. Rog. Howden as above, p. 100. Cf. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 415.

- [922] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 161.

- [923] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 162–165. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 133–135.

- [924] The Gesta Hen. as above, p. 161, seem to imply that the appointment was given to Hugh of Chester. After relating the earl’s restoration to his lands and honours, they add: “Et postea præcepit ei [rex] ut iret in Hiberniam ad subjiciendum eam sibi et Johanni filio suo ... et præcepit prædicto comiti ut debellaret reges et potentes Hiberniæ qui subjectionem ei facere noluerunt.” Hugh de Lacy is named simply in the general list of those who were to accompany him. But Gerald (Expugn. Hibern., l. ii. c. 20, Dimock, vol. v. p. 347), says that Hugh de Lacy was re-appointed viceroy at this time. That he acted as such for the next seven years is certain, while there is, as far as I know, no indication that his namesake of Chester ever was in Ireland at all. It seems therefore that either the earl refused the office—or the king changed his mind—or the author of the Gesta, confused by the identity of Christian names, has substituted one Hugh for another.

- [925] When he was superseded for about half a year by John de Vesci (the constable of Chester) and Richard de Pec. Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 23 (pp. 355, 356). Gesta Hen. as above, p. 270.

Map V.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

It is during these years of prosperity and peace that we are able to get the clearest view of the scope and aims of Henry’s general scheme of home and foreign policy. That policy, when fully matured in its author’s mind, formed a consistent whole; it was however made up of two distinct parts, originating in the twofold position of Henry himself. His empire extended from the western shores of Ireland to the Cévennes, and from the northernmost point of the mainland of Britain to the Pyrenees. But this empire was composed of a number of separate members over which his authority differed greatly in character and degree. These members, again, fell into two well-marked groups. Over the one group Henry ruled as supreme head; no other sovereign had ever claimed to be his superior, none now claimed to be even his equal, within the British Isles. In the other group, however, he had at least a nominal superior in the king of France. It was impossible to deal with these two groups of states on one and the same principle; and Henry had never attempted to do so. The one group had its centre in England, the other in Anjou. As a necessary consequence, Henry’s policy had also two centres throughout his reign. The key to it as a whole lies in its blending of two characters united in one person, yet essentially distinct: the character of the king of England and supreme lord of the British Isles, and the character of the head of the house of Anjou. Henry himself evidently kept the two characters distinct in his own mind. His policy as king of England, however little it may have been consciously aimed at such a result—and we should surely be doing a great injustice to Henry’s sagacity if we doubted that it was so aimed, at least in some degree—certainly tended to make England a strong and independent national state, with its vassal states, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, standing around it as dependent allies. If he had ever for a moment dreamed of reducing his insular dominions to a mere subject-province of the empire which he was building up in Gaul, when he thought of intrusting their government to his boy-heir under the guardianship of Thomas, that dream had been broken at once and for ever by the quarrel which deprived the child of his guardian and the king of his friend. But, on the other hand, Henry certainly never at any time contemplated making his continental empire a mere dependency of the English crown. It was distinctly an Angevin empire, with its centre in the spot whence an Angevin count had been promised of old that the sway of his descendants should spread to the ends of the earth. Henry in short had another work to carry on besides that of Cnut and William and Henry I. He had to carry on also the work of Fulk the Black and Geoffrey Martel and Fulk V.; and although to us who know how speedy was to be its overthrow that work looks a comparatively small matter, yet at the time it may well have seemed equally important with the other in the eyes both of Henry and of his contemporaries. While what may be called the English thread in the somewhat tangled skein of Henry’s life runs smoothly and uneventfully on from the year 1175 to the end, it is this Angevin thread which forms the clue to the political and personal, as distinguished from the social and constitutional, interest of all the remaining years of his reign. And from this interest, although its centre is at Angers, England is not excluded. For the whole continental relations of Henry were coloured by his position as an English king; and the whole foreign relations of England, from his day to our own, have been coloured by the fact that her second King Henry was also head of the Angevin house when that house was at the height of its continental power and glory.

The prophecy said to have been made to Fulk the Good was now literally fulfilled. The dominions of his posterity reached to the uttermost ends of the known world. In the far east, one grandson of Fulk V. ruled over the little strip of Holy Land which formed the boundary of Christendom against the outer darkness of unexplored heathendom. In the far west, another of Fulk’s grandsons was, formally at least, acknowledged overlord of the island beyond which, in the belief of those days, lay nothing but a sea without a shore. Scarcely less remarkable, however, was the fulfilment of the prediction in a narrower sense. The whole breadth of Europe and the whole length of the Mediterranean sea parted the western from the eastern branch of the Angevin house. But in Gaul itself, the Angevin dominion now stretched without a break from one end of the land to the other. The Good Count’s heir held in his own hands the whole Gaulish coast-line from the mouth of the Somme to that of the Bidassoa, and he could almost touch the Mediterranean Sea through his vassal the count of Toulouse. Step by step the lords of the little Angevin march had enlarged their borders till they enclosed more than two-thirds of the kingdom of France. Fulk Nerra and Geoffrey Martel had doubled their possessions by the conquest of Touraine to the south-east; Fulk V. had tripled them by the annexation of Maine to the northward; Geoffrey Plantagenet’s marriage with the heiress of Normandy had brought him to the shores of the English Channel. The whole series of annexations and conquests whereby his son expanded his continental dominions to the extent which they covered thirty years after Geoffrey’s death resulted simply from a continuation of the same policy which, a century and a half before, had laid the foundations of the Angevin empire. Count Henry Fitz-Empress stood in a figure, like Count Fulk the Black, upon the rock of Angers, looked around over his marchland and its borders, noted every point at which those borders might be strengthened, rounded off or enlarged, and set himself to the pursuit of Fulk Nerra’s work in Fulk Nerra’s own spirit. For such a survey indeed he needed a more wide-reaching vision than even that of the Black Falcon. The work had altered vastly in scale since it left the “great builder’s” hands; but it had not changed in character. Henry’s policy in Gaul was essentially the same as Fulk’s—a policy of consolidation, rather than of conquest. He clearly never dreamed, as a man of less cautious ambition might well have done in his place, of pitting the whole strength of his continental and insular dominions against that of the French Crown in a struggle for the mastery of Gaul; he seems never to have dreamed even of trying to free himself from his feudal obedience to a sovereign far inferior to him in territorial wealth and power; he never, so far as we can see, aspired to stand in any other relation to the French king than that which had been held by his forefathers. He aimed in fact simply at compacting and securing his own territories in Gaul, and maintaining the rank of the head of the Angevin house, as the most influential vassal of the Crown. If he ever saw, on a distant horizon, a vision of something greater than this, he kept his dream to himself and, like Fulk of old, left his successors to attempt its fulfilment.

Map VI.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

An ambition so moderate as this entailed no very complicated schemes of foreign diplomacy. As a matter of fact, Henry was at some time or other in his reign in diplomatic relations with every state and every ruler in Christendom, from Portugal to Norway, and from the count of Montferrat to the Eastern and Western Emperors. But these relations sprang for the most part from his insular rather than from his continental position; or, more exactly, they arose from his position as a king of England, but a king far mightier than any who had gone before him. It was the knowledge that Henry had at his back all the forces of the island-crown which roused in Louis VII. such a restless jealousy of his power in Gaul; and it was the jealousy of Louis which drove Henry into a labyrinth of diplomacy and of war, neither of which was a natural result of Henry’s own policy. A very brief glance at Henry’s foreign relations will suffice to shew that they concerned England far more than Anjou. A considerable part of them arose directly out of his quarrel with the English primate. Such was the case with his German and Italian alliances, designed to counterbalance the French king’s league with the Pope. The alliances formed through the marriages of his daughters were all strictly alliances made by the English Crown. The immediate occasion of Matilda’s marriage with Henry of Saxony was her father’s quarrel with S. Thomas; in another point of view, this union was only a natural continuation of a policy which may be traced through the wedding of her grandmother with Henry V. and that of Gunhild with Henry III. back to the wedding of Æthelstan’s sister Eadgifu with Charles the Simple. The marriages of Eleanor and Jane were first planned during the same troubled time; in each case the definite proposal came from the bridegroom, and came in the shape of an humble suit to the king of England for his daughter’s hand; and in the case of all three sisters, the proposal was laid before a great council of the bishops and barons of England, and only accepted after formal deliberation upon it with them, as upon a matter which concerned the interests of England as a state.[926] When Jane went to be married to the king of Sicily in 1176, the details of her journey to her new home and of the honours which she received on her arrival there were recorded in England as matters of national interest and national pride.[927] When in the following year her sister Eleanor’s husband, Alfonso of Castille, submitted a quarrel between himself and his kinsman the king of Navarre to his father-in-law’s arbitration, the case was heard in an assembly of the English barons and wise men at Westminster.[928] Henry’s daughters in short were instruments of his regal, his national, his English policy; for the carrying out of his Angevin, his family policy, he looked to his sons.

- [926] On the marriages of Matilda and Eleanor see above, pp. 55, 59, 60, and the references there given; on that of Jane, Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 116, 117; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 94; R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 408; Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 32.

- [927] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 414, 415, 418; Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 120, 127, 157, 158, 169–172; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 95–98; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 263–265.

- [928] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 139–154; Rog. Howden as above, pp. 120, 131.

The arrangement by which he endeavoured to make them carry it out is however not very easy to understand or to account for. He had long since abandoned his early scheme of devoting himself entirely to continental politics and making England over to the hands of his eldest son. That scheme, indeed, had been frustrated in the first instance by his quarrel with Thomas; although it seemed to have been revived in 1170, it was as a mere temporary expedient to meet a temporary need; and the revolt of 1173 put an end to it altogether, by proving clearly to Henry that he must never again venture to delegate his kingly power and authority to any one, even for a season. But, on the other hand, it is not easy at once to see why, during the years which followed, he persistently refused to give to his eldest son as much real, though subordinate, power on the continent as he was willing to give to the younger ones—why young Henry was not suffered to govern Anjou and Normandy as Richard was suffered to govern Aquitaine and Geoffrey to govern Britanny, so soon as they were old enough, under the control of their father as overlord. So far as we can venture to guess at the king’s motives, the most probable reason seems to be that he could not part with any share of authority over his ancestral dominions without parting at the same time with his ancestral dignities. From a strictly Angevin or Cenomannian point of view, Aquitaine and Britanny were both simply appendages, diversely acquired, to the hereditary Angevin and Cenomannian dominions. Nay, from a strictly Norman point of view, England itself was but an addition to the heritage of the Norman ducal house. Henry might make over all these to his sons as under-fiefs to govern in subjection to him, and yet retain intact his position as head of the sovereign houses of Normandy and Anjou. But to place his mother’s duchy and his father’s counties in other hands—to reduce them to the rank of under-fiefs, keeping for himself no closer connexion with them than a mere general overlordship—would have been, in principle, to renounce his birthright; while in practice, it would probably have been equivalent to complete abdication, as far as his continental empire was concerned. Henry would have had as little chance of enforcing his claim to overlordship without a territorial basis on which to rest it, as a German Emperor without his hereditary duchy of Saxony or Franconia or Suabia, or a French king without his royal domain. In short, when Henry found it impossible to give England to his eldest son, he had nothing else to give him, unless he gave him all; and Henry Fitz-Empress was no more inclined than William the Conqueror had been to “take off his clothes before he was ready to go to bed.” All his schemes for the distribution of his territories, therefore, from 1175 onwards, were intended solely to insure a fair partition among his sons after his own death; his general aim being that young Henry should step into exactly his own position as king of England, duke of Normandy and count of Anjou, and overlord of Britanny, Aquitaine, and all other dependencies of the Angevin and Norman coronets or of the English crown.

None of the holders of these dependencies, however, had as yet entered into full enjoyment of their possessions. At the close of their first revolt, in 1175, the young king was but just entering his twentieth year; Richard was in his eighteenth and Geoffrey in his seventeenth year; and although the one had been titular duke of Aquitaine and the other titular duke of Britanny since 1169, the real government of both duchies, as well as that of Normandy and Anjou, had been until now in the hands of their father. For the purposes of our story there is only one part of these continental possessions of our Angevin king into whose internal concerns we need enter at any great length; a very slight sketch may suffice for the others. The part which lay nearest to England, and which politically was most closely connected with it—the duchy of Normandy—was also associated with it in many of Henry’s legal, constitutional and administrative reforms. A comparison of dates indeed would almost suggest that Henry, when contemplating a great legal or administrative experiment in England, usually tried it first in Normandy in order to test its working there upon a small scale before he ventured on applying it to his island realm. An edict issued at Falaise in the Christmas-tide of 1159–1160, ordaining “that no dean should accuse any man without the evidence of neighbours who bore a good character, and that in the treatment of all causes, the magistrates of the several districts at their monthly courts should determine nothing without the witness of the neighbours, should do injustice to no man and inflict nothing to the prejudice of any, should maintain the peace, and should punish all robbers summarily,”[929] seems to contain a foreshadowing at once of some of the Constitutions of Clarendon which created such excitement in England four years afterwards, and of the Assize which followed two years later still. A commission of inquiry into the administration of the Norman episcopal sees and viscounties in 1162[930] was a sort of forerunner of the great inquest into the conduct of the English sheriffs in 1170. This again was followed next year, as we have seen, by an inquiry into the state of the ducal forests and demesnes,[931] which has its English parallels in the great forest assize of 1176 and in an inquest into the condition of the royal demesnes ordered in the spring of 1177.[932] On the other hand, a roll of the Norman tenants-in-chivalry compiled in 1172 seems to have been modelled upon the English “Black Book” of 1168;[933] and when Henry determined to institute a thorough reform in the whole Norman administration, it was at the English exchequer-table that he found his instrument for the work. In 1176 William de Courcy, the seneschal of Normandy, died. In his stead the king appointed Richard of Ilchester. Richard, to judge by his surname, must have been an Englishman by birth; from the second year of Henry’s reign he was employed as a “writer” in the royal treasury;[934] about 1163 he was made archdeacon of Poitiers, but his archidiaconal functions sat as lightly upon him as upon a contemporary whose name is often associated with his, Geoffrey Ridel, archdeacon of Canterbury and vice-chancellor; and throughout the struggle with Archbishop Thomas he was one of the most active agents of Henry’s foreign diplomacy.[935] Unlike his colleagues Geoffrey Ridel and John of Oxford, he contrived, notwithstanding the ecclesiastical disgrace in which he became involved through his dealings with the schismatic Emperor and the antipope, to retain the general respect of all parties among his fellow-countrymen.[936] Throughout the same period, when not absent from England on some diplomatic mission, he frequently appears as an acting justice of the King’s Court and baron of the Exchequer.[937] He continued to fulfil the same duties after his elevation to the see of Winchester in 1174; and the estimation in which he was held is shewn by the fact that on his return from Normandy, where he was replaced at the end of two years by William Fitz-Ralf,[938] a special seat was assigned to him at the exchequer-table between the presiding justiciar and the treasurer, “that he might diligently examine what was written on the roll.”[939] He was evidently invested with far more authority in Normandy than that which usually appertained to a Norman seneschal—authority, in fact, more like that of an English justiciar; indeed, he is actually called justiciar, and not seneschal, by contemporary English writers.[940] His work in the duchy seems to have been moreover specially connected with finance;[941] and we may perhaps venture to see a trace of his hand in the organization of the Norman Court of Exchequer, which first comes distinctly to light in Henry’s latter years, its earliest extant roll being that of the year 1180.[942] The earlier stages of the legal and administrative organization of Normandy are, however, so lost in obscurity that neither constitutional lawyers in Henry’s day nor constitutional historians in our own have been able to determine the exact historical relation of the Norman system to that of England;[943] and the speedy severance of the political connexion between them makes the determination of the question, after all, of little practical moment.

[929] Contin. Becc. (Delisle, Rob. Torigni, vol. ii. p. 180). Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. pp. 459, 460.

[930] Rob. Torigni, a. 1162.

[931] Rob. Torigni, a. 1171. See above, p. 128.

[932] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 138.

[933] See above, p. 125.

[934] Pipe Roll 2 Hen. II., pp. 30, 31; 4 Hen. II., pp. 121, 122 (Hunter); 5 Hen. II., p. 20; 6 Hen. II., p. 57; 7 Hen. II., p. 48; 8 Hen. II., p. 21 (Pipe Roll Soc.)

[935] See the Becket correspondence, passim.

[936] Except, of course, the immediate personal friends of the archbishop, to whom he seems to have been even more obnoxious than the “archidiabolus” Geoffrey Ridel—that is, supposing Mr. Eyton to be right in his theory that Richard of Ilchester is the person designated in the private letters of Thomas and his friends as “Luscus.” Canon Robertson, however, took “Luscus” to mean Richard de Lucy; but the other interpretation seems on the whole more probable.

[937] Madox, Formulare Anglic., p. xix (a. 1165). Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 130 (a. 1168, 1169). He was one of two custodians of the temporalities of the see of Lincoln during the vacancy caused by Bishop Robert’s death in 1167; ib. p. 99, note 5, from Pipe Roll 12 Hen. II.

[938] See Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 100, and the editor’s note 3.

[939] Dialog. de Scacc., Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 178; cf. ib. p. 184.

[940] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 124. “Curiâ sibi totius Normanniæ deputatâ” says R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 415.

[941] R. Diceto as above.

[942] Edited by Mr. Stapleton for the Society of Antiquaries—Magni Rotuli Scaccarii Normanniæ, vol. i.

[943] Dial. de Scacc. as above, p. 176. Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 438.

Even more obscure than the internal history of Normandy under Henry II. is that of Anjou and of the two dependencies which may now be reckoned as one with it, Touraine and Maine. There is in his time throughout the whole of his dominions, with the marked exception of England, a dearth of historical records. Normandy cannot boast of a single historian such as those of the preceding generation, Orderic or William of Jumièges; the only Norman chronicle of any importance is that of Robert of Torigny, commonly known as “Robert de Monte,” from the Mont-St.-Michel of which he was abbot; and even his work is nothing more than a tolerably full and accurate chronicle of the old-fashioned type, arranged on the annalistic plan “according to the years of our Lord” which William of Malmesbury had condemned long ago. The Breton chronicles, always meagre, grow more meagre still as the years pass on; the same may be said of the chronicles of Tours; the “Acts of the bishops of Le Mans,” our sole native authority for the history of Maine, cease to record anything save purely ecclesiastical details. In Anjou itself the recent aggrandizement of the Angevin house stirred up in Henry’s early years a spirit of patriotic loyalty which led more than one of his subjects to collect the floating popular traditions of his race, as the ballads and tales of old England had been collected by Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury, and weave them into a narrative which passed for a history of the Angevin counts; and one of these writers supplemented his work with a special memoir of Henry’s father, Geoffrey duke of the Normans. But the reign of Henry himself found no historian in the Marchland; and indeed the half-blank pages of the few monastic chronicles which still dragged out a lingering existence in one or two of the great Angevin abbeys shew us that under Count Henry Fitz-Empress Anjou was once more, as of old under Count Fulk the Good, happy in having no history.

Yet it is there, and there alone, that we can catch a glimpse of one side of his character which, if we saw him only in England or in Normandy, we should hardly have discerned at all. Strange as it seems to us who know him in his northern realms only as the enterprising and somewhat unscrupulous politician, the stern and vigorous ruler, the hard-headed statesman, the uncompromising opponent of the Church’s claims, Henry is yet the one Angevin count who completely reproduced in his Marchland, as a living reality, the ideal which was represented there by the name of the good count-canon of Tours. Fulk the Black and Fulk the Fifth had both tried to reproduce it, each according to his lights, during those few years when the pressure of external politics and warfare left them free to devote their energies for a while to their country’s internal welfare. But Henry’s whole reign was, for his paternal dominions, a reign of peace. If we drew our ideas of him solely from the traces and traditions which he has left behind him there, we could never have guessed that he was a greater warrior than Fulk Nerra; we should rather have taken him for a quiet prince who, like Fulk the Good, “waged no wars.” These traces and traditions lie scattered over the soil of Anjou, Touraine and Maine as thickly as the traces and the traditions of the Black Count himself. Henry is in fact the only one of the later Angevin counts who made upon the imagination of his people an impression even approaching in vividness to that left by Fulk the Black, and of whose material works there remains anything which can be compared with those of the “great builder” of the preceding century. But the memory which Anjou has retained of Henry differs much in character from that which she has kept of Fulk; and it differs more widely still from that which Henry himself has left in his island-realm. In English popular tradition he appears simply as the hero of a foolish and discreditable romance, or as the man who first caused the murder of S. Thomas and then did penance at his grave; and material traces of him there are literally none, for of his English dwelling-places not one stone is left upon another, and not a single surviving monument of public utility, secular or ecclesiastical, is connected with his name. In the valley of the Loire it was far otherwise. There the two great Angevin builders share between them the credit of well-nigh all the more important monuments which give life to the medieval history of the land—except the military constructions, which belong to Fulk alone. It is not in donjons such as that of Loches or Montrichard, but in palaces and hospitals, bridges and embankments, that we see our Angevin king’s handiwork in his own home-lands. Almost every one of his many local capitals was adorned during his reign with a palace of regal dimensions and magnificence, reared by him in place of the lowlier “halls” which had served for the dwelling of the merely local rulers whom he succeeded. The rebuilding of the ducal palace at Rouen was begun in 1161;[944] that of Caen was nearly finished in 1180; its hall, which still exists, is the traditional seat of the Norman Exchequer.[945] At Tours a round tower which still stands in the barrack-yard is the sole surviving fragment of a castle which Henry is said to have built. His favourite abode in Touraine, however, was not at Tours but at Chinon, where the little fortress above the Vienne which had been the last conquest of Fulk Nerra and the lifelong prison of Geoffrey the Bearded grew under Henry’s hands into a royal retreat of exquisite beauty and splendour—a gem, even now in its ruin, worthy of its setting in the lovely valley of the Vienne, with the background of good greenwood which to Henry was probably its greatest charm. Angers, again, almost put on a new face in the course of Henry’s lifetime. In the year before his birth it had been visited by a fire which reduced to almost total ruin its whole south-western quarter, including the palace of the counts,[946] of which nothing but the great hall seems to have remained. The work of reconstruction, begun no doubt by Geoffrey Plantagenet, was completed on a regal scale by his son, and before the close of Henry’s reign a visitor from England, Ralf de Diceto, could gaze in admiration at the “vast palace,” with its “newly-built apartments, adorned with splendour befitting a king,” which rose at the foot of the vine-clad hills above the purple stream of Mayenne.[947]

- [944] Rob. Torigni, a. 1161.

- [945] Mag. Rot. Scacc. Norm. (Stapleton), vol. i. p. 56. Ib. Observ. pp. xxvii–xxviii.

- [946] Chron. S. Serg. a. 1132 (Marchegay, Eglises d’Anjou, p. 144).

- [947] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 292 (Hist. Com. Andeg., Marchegay, Comtes d’Anjou, p. 337).

But the count-king did not build for himself alone. It was, above all, with works of public usefulness that he delighted to adorn his realms. His beneficence indeed took a different shape from that of his predecessors. Church-building and abbey-founding met with little sympathy from him; throughout his whole dominions, only six religious houses, in the strict sense, could claim him as their founder; and even one of these was as much military as religious, for it was a commandery of knights Templars.[948] But no sovereign was ever more munificent in providing for the sick and needy. Not only do the Norman Exchequer-rolls contain frequent mention of sums set apart out of the ducal revenues for the support of lazar-houses and hospitals in the chief towns of the several bailiwicks;[949] nineteen years before the completion of his own palace at Caen, he had founded an hospital for lepers outside the walls of the town;[950] and a park and hunting-lodge which he had made for himself in the same year, 1161, at Quévilly by Rouen[951] were shortly afterwards given up by him to a colony of monks from Grandmont in Aquitaine, to be converted under their care into another great asylum for victims of the same disease.[952] At his own native Le Mans, the great hall of an almshouse or hospital outside the north-eastern boundary of the city, said to have been reared by him for the reception of its poor and sick folk, is still to be seen, though long since perverted to other uses. At Angers, on the other hand, it is only within the last half-century that the sick and disabled poor have exchanged for a more modern dwelling the shelter provided for them by Henry Fitz-Empress. Some time in the quiet years which followed the barons’ revolt, Stephen,[953] the seneschal of Anjou, bought of the abbess and convent of our Lady of Charity at Angers a plot of ground which lay between their abbey and the river, and on which he designed to build an hospice for the poor. In the last days of 1180 or the first days of 1181 the count-king took under his own care the work which his seneschal had begun, granted to the new hospital a rich endowment in lands and revenues, exempted it from secular charges and imposts, and won from Pope Alexander a confirmation of its spiritual independence.[954] Four priests were appointed to minister to the spiritual needs of its inmates; the care of their bodies was undertaken at first, it seems, by some pious laymen bound by no special rule; some years later, however, the hospital became, like most other establishments of the kind, affiliated to the Order of S. Augustine.[955] The pretty little chapel—dedicated to S. John the Baptist, and still standing,—the cloisters and the domestic offices were all finished before Henry’s death;[956] while of the two great pillared halls which now form the chief architectural glory of the suburb, one, the smaller and simpler, is clearly of his building; and the other, more vast and beautiful, is in all probability the last legacy of his sons to the home which was soon to be theirs no longer.[957]

[948] Founded in 1173, at Vaubourg in the forest of Roumare—an old hunting-seat of his Norman grandfather; Stapleton, Mag. Rot. Scacc. Norm., vol. i., Observ., p. cxli. Of the other houses, three were Austin priories: S. Laurence at Beauvoir in the forest of Lions, founded while Henry was still only duke of Normandy (ib. p. cxiv); Newstead, in Sherwood Forest, founded before 1174 (its foundation-charter, dated at Clarendon, has no mention of day or year, but is witnessed by “Geoffrey archdeacon of Canterbury,” who in 1174 became a bishop; Dugdale, Monast. Angl., vol. vi. pt. i. p. 474); and the priory “B. Mariæ Mellinensis,” near La Flèche, founded in 1180 (Gall. Christ., vol. xiv. col. 600. I cannot identify this place). The other two were Carthusian houses, Witham in the forest of Selwood and Le Liget in that of Loches, founded respectively in 1174 and 1175. (The date of Le Liget is traditional; I cannot find any mention of the place in Gall. Christ.) Of all these, Witham is the only one of any consequence; and the importance of even Witham lies chiefly in its connexion with S. Hugh. (For its history see Magna Vita S. Hugonis, Dimock, pp. 52 et seq.) The insignificance of the others is shewn by Gerald’s account of Henry’s religious foundations, in De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 7 (Angl. Christ. Soc., pp. 27, 28)—an account, however, which is by no means fair. Henry on his absolution for S. Thomas’s death, in 1172, promised to go on a crusade of three years’ duration (Rog. Howden, Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 37); this undertaking he was afterwards allowed to exchange for a promise that he would build three religious houses in his dominions. According to Gerald, he managed one of these by turning the nuns out of Amesbury and putting a colony from Fontevraud in their place (see Gesta Hen., Stubbs, vol. i. pp. 134–136, 165), and another by turning the secular canons out of Waltham and putting regulars in their place (ib. pp. 134, 135, 173, 174, 316, 317. Both these transactions took place in 1177.) “Tertium vero,” says Gerald (as above) “vel nullum, vel simile prioribus sibique prorsus inutile fecit; nisi forte domum conventualem ordinis Cartusiensis de Witham, s. modicis sumptibus et exilem, ad hoc fecisse dicatur.” No doubt Witham was one of the three. But the other two are easily found; they were Newstead and Vaubourg or Le Liget. R. Niger (Anstruther, p. 168) is as unjust to Henry in this matter as Gerald; but so he is on most others also.

[949] See Stapleton, Mag. Rot. Scacc. Norm., vol. i., Observ., pp. lix., lxi., lxvii.

[950] Ib. p. ci. Rob. Torigni, a. 1161.

[951] Rob. Torigni, a. 1161.

[952] See Stapleton as above, pp. cxlvi–cxlvii.

[953] Of Marçay—or Matha—or Turnham; authorities differ so much as to his identity that I dare not venture upon adopting either surname.

[954] C. Port, Cartulaire de l’Hopital St. Jean d’Angers, pp. 2–10, ii–vi.

[955] Ib. pp. 11–13.

[956] Ib. p. xiv.

[957] On the hospital-buildings see an article by M. D’Espinay in Revue de l’Anjou, vol. xii. (1874), pp. 264–273.

This Hospice of S. John formed a third with Fulk Nerra’s abbey of S. Nicolas and Hildegard’s nunnery of our Lady of Charity in the group of pious and charitable foundations round which there gathered, on the meadows that bordered the right bank of the Mayenne, the suburb now known as Ronceray or La Doutre,—a suburb which even before the close of Henry’s reign had grown almost as populous as Angers itself, and was actually preferred to it as a residence by Ralf de Diceto.[958] Twice in Henry’s reign the bridge which linked it to the city was destroyed by fire;[959] the present “Grand-Pont” probably owes its erection to him. Fire was, however, by no means the most destructive element in the valleys of the Loire and its tributaries. “Well-nigh disappearing in summer, choked within their sandy beds,” these streams were all too apt, as Ralf de Diceto says of the Mayenne, to “rage and swell in winter like the sea;”[960] and the greatest and most lasting of all Henry’s material benefactions to Anjou was the embankment or “Levée”—a work which he seems characteristically to have planned and executed in the very midst of his struggle with the Church[961]—which stretches along Loire-side, from Ponts-de-Cé, just above the junction of the Mayenne and the Loire, some thirty miles eastward to Bourgueil. Further south, in the valley of the Vienne, the legend of the “Pont de l’Annonain” illustrates the curious but not altogether unaccountable confusion which grew up in popular imagination between the two great builders of Anjou. The “bridge,” a long viaduct which stretched from Chinon across river and meadow south-westward to the village of Rivière, was in reality built by Henry to secure a safe transit from Chinon into Poitou across the low ground on the south bank of the Vienne, which in rainy seasons was an all but impassable swamp. Later ages, however, connected it with a dim tradition, which still lingered in the district, of the wonderful night-ride across Loire and Vienne whereby Fulk Nerra had won Saumur, and in the belief of the peasantry the Pont de l’Annonain became a “devil’s bridge,” built in a single night by the Black Count’s familiar demon[962]—a demon who is but a popular personification of that spirit of dauntless enterprise and ceaseless activity which, alike in their material and in their political workmanship, was the secret of Henry’s success no less than of Fulk’s.

- [958] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 292 (Hist. Com. Andeg., Marchegay, Comtes d’Anjou, p. 337).

- [959] In 1167 and 1177. Chron. S. Serg. a. 1167 and 1177, Chron. S. Albin. a. 1177 (Marchegay, Eglises d’Anjou, pp. 149, 151, 44).

- [960] R. Diceto as above.

- [961] It was certainly made before 1169; see Rob. Torigni ad ann.

- [962] See Salies, Foulques-Nerra, note civ., pp. 429, 430.

One portion, however, of Henry’s continental dominions has during these years a political and military history of its own, which is not without a bearing upon that of our own land. Geographically remote as it was from England, still more remote in the character of both country and people, Aquitaine yet concerns us more than any other part of Henry’s Gaulish possessions. For not only was it a chief source of the political complications which filled the closing years of his life; it was the only one of those possessions whose connexion with England survived the fall of the Angevin house. The heritages of Geoffrey and Matilda were lost by their grandson; the heritage of Eleanor remained, in part at least, in the hands of her descendants for more than two hundred years.

It was in truth a dower at once valuable and burdensome that Henry had received with his Aquitanian wife. She had made him master of a territory whose extent surpassed that of all his Norman and Angevin dominions put together, and was scarcely equalled by that of England—a territory containing every variety of soil and of natural characteristics, from the flat, rich pastures of Berry and the vineyards of Poitou and Saintonge to the rugged volcanic rocks and dark chestnut-woods of Auvergne, the salt marshes, sandy dunes, barren heaths and gloomy pine-forests of the Gascon coast, and the fertile valleys which open between the feet of the Pyrenees:—a territory whose population differed in blood and speech from their fellow-subjects north of Loire almost as widely as Normans and Angevins differed from Englishmen; while in temper and modes of thought and life they stood so apart from the northern world that in contradistinction to them Angevins and Normans and English might almost be counted, and indeed were almost ready to count themselves, as one people. It was a territory, too, whose political relations varied as much as its physical character, and were full of dangers which all Henry’s vigilance and wisdom were powerless to guard against or overcome. Setting aside, for the moment, the internal difficulties of Aquitaine, its whole eastern frontier, from the banks of the Cher to the Pyrenees, was more or less in dispute throughout his reign. The question of Toulouse, indeed, was settled in 1173; thenceforth the county of Toulouse, with its northern dependencies Rouergue and Alby, became a recognized underfief of the Poitevin duchy of Aquitaine, to which its western dependency, Quercy or the county of Cahors, had been already annexed after the war of 1160. The north-eastern portions of the older Aquitania, Berry and Auvergne, were sources of more lasting trouble. Berry had long ago been split into two unequal portions, of which the larger had remained subject to the dukes of Aquitaine, while the smaller northern division formed the viscounty of Bourges, and was an immediate fief of the French Crown. Naturally, the king was disposed to use every opportunity of thwarting the duke in the exercise of his authority over southern Berry; and Henry was equally desirous to lose no chance of re-asserting his ducal rights over Bourges.[963] The feudal position of Auvergne was a standing puzzle which king and duke, count, clergy and people, all in vain endeavoured to solve. During the struggle for supremacy in southern Gaul between the houses of Poitiers and Toulouse, Auvergne, after fluctuating for nearly a hundred years between the rival dukedoms, had virtually succeeded in freeing itself from the control of both, and in the reign of Louis VI. it seems to have been regarded as an immediate fief of the French Crown, to which however it proved a most unruly and troublesome possession. But the dukes of Aquitaine had never relinquished their claim to its overlordship; and when a quarrel broke out between two rival claimants of the county, it was naturally followed by a quarrel between Henry and Louis VII. as to their respective rights, as overlord and as lord paramount, to act as arbiters in the strife.[964] During five-and-twenty years it was a favourite device of Louis and of his successor, at every adverse crisis in Henry’s fortune, to despatch a body of troops into Auvergne to occupy that country and threaten Aquitaine through its eastern marches,[965] just as they habitually threatened Normandy through the marches of the Vexin.

- [963] His first attempt to do so was made in 1170, when a pretext was given him by the declaration said—whether truly or falsely—to have been made by the dying archbishop Peter of Bourges, that his see belonged of right to Aquitaine. Nothing, however, came of the attempt. See Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 10, 11.

- [964] See Rob. Torigni, a. 1167.

- [965] E.g. in 1164 (Ep. lx., Robertson. Becket, vol. v. p. 115), 1167 (above, p. 58; Rob. Torigni ad ann.), 1170 (Will. Fitz-Steph., Robertson, Becket, vol. iii. p. 116; Ep. dccxxii., ib. vol. vii. p. 400), and again in 1188.

Such a threat implied a far more serious danger in the south than in the north. The Aquitanian border was guarded by no such chain of strongly-fortified, stoutly-manned ducal castles as girt in the Norman duchy from Gisors to Tillières; and Henry’s hold over his wife’s dominions was very different from his grasp of the heritage of his mother. Twenty years of Angevin rule, which for political purposes had well-nigh bridged over the channel that parted England from Gaul, seem to have done nothing towards bridging over the gulf that parted Aquitaine from France and Anjou. If our Angevin king sometimes looks like a stranger amongst us, he was never anything but a stranger among the fellow-countrymen of his wife. Nowhere throughout his whole dominions was a spirit of revolt and insubordination so rife as among the nobles of Poitou and its dependencies; but it was a spirit utterly unlike the feudal pride of the Norman baronage. The endless strife of the Aquitanian nobles with their foreign duke and with each other sprang less from political motives than from a love of strife for its own sake; and their love of strife was only one phase of the passion for adventure and excitement which ran through every fibre of their nature and coloured every aspect of their social life. The men of the south lived in a world where the most delicate poetry and the fiercest savagery, the wildest moral and political disorder, and the most refined intellectual culture, mingled together in a confusion as picturesque as it was dangerous. The southern warrior was but half a knight if the sword was his only weapon—if he could not sing his battles as well as fight them. From raid and foray and siege he passed to the “Court of Love,” where the fairest and noblest women of the land, from the duchess herself downwards, presided over contests of subtle wit, skilful rime and melodious song, conducted under rules as stringent and with earnestness as deep as if life and death were at stake upon the issue; and in truth they sometimes were at stake, for song, love and war all mingled together in the troubadour’s life in an inextricable coil which the less subtle intellects of the north would have been powerless to unravel or comprehend. The sirvente or poetical satire with which he stung his enemies into fury or roused the slumbering valour of his friends often wrought more deadly mischief than sharp steel or blazing firebrand. The nature of the men of the south was like that of their country: it was made up of the most opposite characteristics—of the lightest fancies, the stormiest passions, the most versatile capabilities of body and mind, the most indolent love of ease and pleasure, the most restless and daring valour, the highest intellectual refinement and the lowest moral degradation. It was a nature which revolted instinctively from constraint in any direction,—whose impetuosity burst all control of law and order imposed from without upon its restless love of action and adventure, just as it overflowed all conventional bounds of thought and language with its exuberant play of feeling and imagination in speech or song.[966] We may see a type of it in the portrait, drawn by almost contemporary hands, of one who played an important part both in the social and in the political history of Aquitaine throughout the closing years of Henry II. and the reign of his successor. “Bertrand de Born was of the Limousin, lord of a castle in the diocese of Périgueux, by name Hautefort. He had at his command near a thousand men. And all his time he was at war with all his neighbours, with the count of Périgord, and the viscount of Limoges, and with his own brother Constantine—whom he would have liked to disinherit, had it not been for the king of England—and with Richard, while he was count of Poitou. He was a good knight, and a good warrior, and a good servant of ladies, and a good troubadour of sirventes; he never made but two songs, and the king of Aragon assigned the songs of Guiraut de Borneil as wives to his sirventes; and the man who sang them for him was named Papiol. And he was a pleasant, courteous man, wise and well-spoken, and knew how to deal with good and evil. And whenever he chose, he was master of King Henry and his sons; but he always wanted them to be at war among themselves, the father and the sons and the brothers one with another; and he always wanted the king of France and King Henry to be at war too. And if they made peace or a truce, he immediately set to work to unmake it with his sirventes, and to shew how they were all dishonoured in peace. And he gained much good by it, and much harm.”[967]

- [966] As John of Salisbury says—“auctor ad opus suum”:—

- “De Pictavorum dices te gente creatum,
Nam licet his linguâ liberiore loqui.”

- (Enthet. ad Polycrat., Giles, vol. iii. p. i.)

- [967] From the two old Provençal sketches of the life of Bertrand de Born, printed and translated into French by M. Léon Clédat in his monograph Du rôle historique de Bertrand de Born, pp. 99–101.

Until the dukedom of Aquitaine passed to a woman, as were the vassals, so was their sovereign. Eleanor’s grandfather the crusader-duke William VIII. and her father William IX. were simply the boldest knights, the gayest troubadours and the most reckless adventurers in their duchy. There can be no doubt that the submission of Aquitaine to Louis VII., so far as it ever did submit to him, was due to Eleanor’s influence; and it was the same influence which chiefly contributed to preserve its obedience to her second husband during those earlier years of their married life when, at home and abroad, all things had seemed destined to prosper in his hands. But at the first symptom of a turn in the tide of his fortunes, southern Gaul at one rose against its northern master. Eleanor’s tact and firmness, Henry’s wariness and vigour, were all taxed to the uttermost in holding it down throughout the years of his struggle with the Church; and when Eleanor herself turned against him in 1173, the chances of a good understanding between her subjects and her husband became very nearly desperate. Henry himself seems to have long ago perceived that a duke of Aquitaine, to be thoroughly sure of his ground, needed a different apprenticeship from that which might befit a king of England, a duke of Normandy or Britanny, or a count of Anjou. The very first step in his plans for the future of his children—a step taken several years before he seems even to have thought of crowning his eldest son—was the designation of the second as his mother’s destined colleague and ultimate heir. Richard had been trained up ever since he was two years old specially for the office of duke of Aquitaine. After long diplomacy, and at the cost of a betrothal which became the source of endless mischief and trouble, the French king’s sanction to the arrangement had been won; and on Trinity-Sunday 1172 Richard, in his mother’s presence, had been formally enthroned at Poitiers. He was probably intended to govern the duchy under her direction and advice; if so, however, the plan was frustrated by Eleanor’s own conduct and by the suspicions which it aroused in her husband. She was one of the very few captives whom at the restoration of peace in 1175 he still retained in confinement. Richard, on the other hand, had been like his brothers fully and freely forgiven; and while his father and eldest brother went to seal their reconciliation in England, he was sent into Poitou charged with authority to employ its forces at his own discretion, and to take upon himself the suppression of all disturbance and disorder in Aquitaine.[968]

- [968] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 81.

What had been the precise nature of Richard’s training for his appointed work—what proportion of his seventeen years’ life had been actually spent in Aquitaine, what opportunities he had had of growing familiar with the people over whom he was now set to rule—we have no means of determining. By his own natural temper, however, he was probably of all Eleanor’s sons the one least fitted to gain the goodwill of the south. The “Cœur-de-lion” of tradition, indeed—the adventurous crusader, the mirror of knightly prowess and knightly courtesy, the lavish patron of verse and song, the ideal king of troubadours and knights-errant—looks at first glance like the very incarnation of the spirit of the south. But it was only in the intellectual part of his nature that his southern blood made itself felt; the real groundwork of his character was made of sterner stuff. The love of splendour and elegance, the delight in poetry and music,[969] the lavish generosity, the passion for adventure, which contrasted so vividly with his father’s practical businesslike temper, came to him without doubt from his mother. The moral deficiencies and evil tendencies of his nature he himself charged, somewhat too exclusively, upon the demon-blood of the Angevin counts.[970] But we need not look either to an ancestress so shadowy and so remote as the demon-countess, nor to a land so far distant from us as Poitou, for the source of Richard’s strongest characteristics both of body and of mind. In him alone among Henry’s sons can we see a likeness to the Norman forefathers of the Empress Matilda. His outward aspect, his lofty stature, his gigantic strength—held in check though it was by the constantly-recurring ague which “kept him, fearless, in a tremor as continual as the tremor of fear in which he kept the rest of the world”[971]—his blue eyes and golden hair, all proclaimed him a child of the north. And although he spent the chief part of his life elsewhere, the slender share of local and national sympathies which he possessed seems to have lain in the same direction. The “lion-heart” chose its own last earthly resting-place at Rouen, not at Poitiers;[972] and the intimate friend and comrade whose name is inseparably associated with his by a tradition which, whatever its historical value, is as famous as it is beautiful, was no Poitevin or Provençal troubadour, but a trouvère from northern France.[973] The influence of his northman-blood shewed itself more vividly still when on his voyage to Palestine, having lived to be more than thirty years old without possessing a skiff that he could call his own, or—unless indeed in early childhood he had gone a cruise round his father’s island-realm—ever making a longer or more adventurous voyage than that from Southampton to Barfleur or Wissant, he suddenly developed not only a passionate love of the sea, but a consummate seamanship which he certainly had had no opportunity of acquiring in any way, and which can only have been born in him, as an inheritance from his wiking forefathers. When scarcely more than a boy in years, Richard was already one of the most serious and determined of men. His sternness to those who “withstood his will” matched that of the Conqueror himself; and Richard’s will, even at the age of seventeen, was no mere caprice, but a fixed determination which overrode all obstacles between itself and its object as unhesitatingly as the old wiking-keels overrode the billows of the northern sea. He went down into Aquitaine fully resolved that the country should be at once, and once for all, reduced to submission and order. He set himself “to bring the shapeless into shape, to reduce the irregular to rule, to cast down the things that were mighty and level those that were rugged; to restore the dukedom of Aquitaine to its ancient boundaries and its ancient government.”[974] He did the work with all his might, but he did it with a straightforward ruthlessness untempered by southern craft or Angevin caution and tact. He would not conciliate; he could not wait. “He thought nothing done while anything still remained to do; and he cared for no success that was not reached by a path cut by his own sword and stained with his opponent’s blood. Boiling over with zeal for order and justice, he sought to quell the audacity of this ungovernable people and to secure the safety of the innocent amid these workers of mischief by at once proceeding against the evil-doers with the utmost rigour which his ducal authority could enable him to exercise upon them.”[975] In a word, before Richard had been six months in their midst, the Aquitanians discovered that if their Angevin duke had chastised them with whips, the son of their own duchess was minded to chastise them with scorpions.

- [969] See R. Coggeshall’s description of Richard’s love of church music: “clericos sonorâ voce modulantes donis et precibus ad cantandum festivius instimulabat, atque per chorum huc illucque deambulando, voce ac manu ut altius concreparent excitabat.” R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 97.

- [970] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 27 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 154).

- [971] Ib. c. 8 (p. 105).

- [972] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 84.

- [973] That is, if the Blondel of tradition is to be identified with Blondel of Nesle.

- [974] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 8 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 104).

- [975] Ibid. (p. 105).

He set off at once upon a furious campaign against the strongholds of the unruly barons. “No mountain-side however steep and rugged, no tower however lofty and impregnable, availed to check his advance, as skilful as it was daring, as steady and persevering as it was impetuous.”[976] By midsummer the castles of Poitou itself were mostly in his hands, and the young conqueror was busy with the siege of Castillonnes-sur-Agen, which surrendered to him in the middle of August.[977] Before the winter was over he was master of Périgueux, and had, in the phrase of a local writer, well-nigh “disinherited” the barons of Périgord, the Quercy and the Limousin. But in the spring their smouldering resentment was kindled into a blaze by the incitements of Bertrand de Born, whose brother Constantine, expelled by him from the castle of Hautefort which the two brothers had inherited in common, had appealed to Richard for succour; the signal for revolt, given by Bertrand in a vigorous sirvente, was answered by all the malcontents of the district,[978] and at the opposite end of Poitou by the count of Angoulême; and at Easter Richard found his position so difficult that he went to seek advice and reinforcements from his father in England.[979] Geoffrey of Britanny arrived at the same time on a like errand. Henry bade his eldest son go to the help of the younger ones; the young king complied,[980] somewhat unwillingly, and went to collect forces in France while Richard hurried back into Poitou. The peril was urgent; in his absence Count Vulgrin of Angoulême had invaded Poitou at the head of a host of Brabantines. The invaders were however met and defeated with great slaughter at Barbezieux by Richard’s constable Theobald Chabot and Bishop John of Poitiers.[981] By Whitsuntide Richard had gathered a sufficient force of loyal Poitevins and stipendiaries from the neighbouring lands to march against Vulgrin and his Brabantines and defeat them in a battle near the border of the Angoumois and Saintonge. He then turned upon the viscount of Limoges, besieged and took his castle of Aixe, and thence advanced to Limoges itself, which he captured in like manner. At midsummer he was rejoined at Poitiers by his elder brother, and the two led their combined forces against Vulgrin of Angoulême.[982] A fortnight’s siege had however scarcely made them masters of Châteauneuf on the Charente when the young king—seduced, it was said, by some evil counsellor whom we may probably suspect to have been Bertrand de Born[983]—suddenly abandoned the campaign and withdrew again to France. Richard, undaunted by his brother’s desertion, pushed on to Moulin-Neuf and thence to Angoulême itself, where all the leaders of the rebellion were gathered together. A six days’ siege sufficed to make Vulgrin surrender himself, his fellow-rebels, his city and five of his castles to the mercy of the duke and the English king. Richard sent over all his prisoners to his father in England; Henry, however, sent them back again, and Richard put them in prison to await their sentence till the king should return to Gaul.[984]

- [976] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 8 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 105).

- [977] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 101.

- [978] See Clédat, Bertrand de Born, pp. 29, 30.

- [979] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 114, 115.

- [980] Ib. p. 115. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 93.

- [981] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 407. He adds: “Sicque salus in manu clericorum data satis evidenter ostendit plerisque non animos deesse sed arma.”

- [982] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 120, 121.

- [983] See Clédat, Bertrand de Born, p. 35.

- [984] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 121.

Northern Aquitaine, or Guyenne, was now for the moment subdued. As soon as Christmas was over Richard proceeded to the reduction of Gascony. Dax, held against him by its viscount Peter and by the count of Bigorre, and Bayonne, defended by its viscount Ernald Bertram, submitted each after a ten days’ siege; S. Pierre-de-Cize, on the Spanish frontier, fell in one day; the Basques and Navarrese were compelled to promise peace; the plunderings habitually inflicted by the border-folk upon pilgrims to the shrine of S. James at Compostella were suppressed; and from his court at Poitiers on Candlemas-day Richard triumphantly reported to his father that he had pacified the whole country.[985] But the peace did not last long. Trouble was already threatening at the opposite end of the duchy. Ralf of Déols, the wealthiest baron in Berry, had lately died leaving as his heir an infant daughter. She was of course, according to feudal law, a ward of her overlord, King Henry; but her relatives seized both her and her estates, and refused to give up either.[986] Henry, probably feeling that the boy-duke of Aquitaine had already more than enough upon his hands, charged his eldest son with the settlement of this affair, bidding him take possession of all Ralf’s lands without delay, and significantly adding: “While I governed my realms alone, I lost none of my rightful possessions; it will be shame to us all if aught of them be lost now that we are several to rule them.” The young king took the hint, marched with all his Norman and Angevin forces into Berry, and laid siege to Châteauroux;[987] but he seems to have had no success;[988] and there was no chance of help from Richard, for not only was the Limousin again plunged in civil war,[989] but all southern Aquitaine was in danger of a like fate—an attempt of Count Raymond of Toulouse to exert his authority as overlord of Narbonne with greater stringency than its high-spirited viscountess Hermengard was disposed to endure having stirred up against him a league of all the princes of Septimania and the Spanish border, under the leadership of Hermengard herself and of Raymond’s hereditary rivals, the king of Aragon and his brothers.[990] The way in which Raymond prepared to meet their attack supplies a vivid illustration of southern character and manners. He sought an ally in Bertrand de Born, and he appealed to him in his character not of knight but of troubadour. He sent a messenger to Hautefort to state his cause and to ask Bertrand, not to fight for it, but simply to publish it to the world in a sirvente. Bertrand answered readily to the appeal; he was only too glad of any excuse for a sirvente which should “cause dints in a thousand shields, and rents in a thousand helms and hauberks.” “I would fain have the great barons ever wroth one with another!” is the characteristic exclamation with which he ends his war-song.[991]

- [985] Ib.·/·Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 131, 132.

- [986] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 127.

- [987] Ib. p. 132.

- [988] The Gesta Hen., as above, say Châteauroux was surrendered to him at once; but we hear nothing more of it till the autumn, and then we find that the elder king has to besiege it himself; so if the younger one ever did win it, he must have lost it again as quickly.

- [989] Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. cc. lxix., lxx. (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. pp. 322, 323).

- [990] See Vic and Vaissète, Hist. du Languedoc (new ed.), vol. vi. pp. 69, 70; and the terms of the league, ib. vol. viii. cols. 325, 326.

- [991] Clédat, Bert. de Born, pp. 38, 39.

The strife thus begun for the mastery in Septimania was continued at intervals between the houses of Toulouse and Aragon for many years to come. The overlord of Toulouse, however, seems to have taken no part in it as yet; and indeed, it had scarcely more than begun when Richard was summoned away to meet his father in Normandy. Three times in the course of that spring and summer had King Henry collected his host in England for the purpose of going over sea to the help of his sons; twice had he remanded it,[992] for the sake, as it seems, of continuing his legal and administrative work in England. By midsummer however the tidings from Gaul were such that he dared not further prolong his absence. Geoffrey wanted his help in Britanny; Richard wanted it almost as much in Aquitaine; the young king’s unaccountable lack of vigour in their support, and in the prosecution of the war in Berry, was justly raising suspicions of his loyalty to the family cause; and the treaty made with Louis of France at the close of the last war was proving, as such treaties too often did prove, only a source of fresh disputes. Henry summoned Louis to fulfil his part of the agreement by handing over the Vexin to the young king and the viscounty of Bourges to Richard, according to his promise, as the dowries of their brides;[993] Louis insisted that Henry should first complete his share of the engagement by allowing Adela, who had been in his custody ever since the treaty was signed, to be wedded to her promised bridegroom, Richard. At last, in July, he succeeded in bringing the matter to a crisis by extorting from a papal legate who had been sent to deal with a heresy that had arisen in southern Gaul a threat of laying all Henry’s dominions under interdict unless Richard and Adela were married at once.[994] The English bishops appealed against the threat;[995] while Henry hurried over to Normandy,[996] met first his two elder sons,[997] then the legate,[998] then the French king,[999] and once again contrived to stave off the threatening peril. At Nonancourt, on September 25, the two kings made a treaty containing not one word of marriages or dowries, but consisting of an agreement to bury all their differences under the cross. They pledged themselves to go on crusade together, to submit to arbitration the questions in dispute between them about Auvergne and Berry, and to lay aside all their other quarrels at once and for ever.[1000] Such a treaty was in reality a mere temporary expedient; but it served Henry’s purpose by securing him against French interference while he marched against the rebels in Berry. As usual, he carried all before him; Châteauroux surrendered without a struggle; the lord of La Châtre, who had stolen the little heiress of Déols and was keeping her fast in his own castle, hurried to make his peace and give up his prize.[1001] Henry used his opportunity to advance into the Limousin and exert his authority in punishing its turbulent barons;[1002] soon after Martinmas he and Louis met at Graçay and made another ineffectual attempt to settle the vexed question of Auvergne;[1003] a month later he was again in Aquitaine, purchasing the direct ownership of one of its under-fiefs, the county of La Marche, from the childless Count Adalbert who was purposing to end his days in Holy Land;[1004] and at Christmas he was back at Angers, where he kept the feast with his three elder sons amid such a gathering of knights as had never been seen at his court except at his own crowning or that of the young king.[1005]

[992] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 138, 160, 167, 168.

[993] Ib. p. 168.

[994] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 180, 181. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 143. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 271.

[995] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 181.

[996] In the night of August 17–18. Gesta Hen. as above, p. 190. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 421.

[997] Rob. Torigni, a. 1177.

[998] On September 11. Gesta Hen. as above, p. 190.

[999] September 21. Ibid. Cf. Rog. Howden and Gerv. Cant. as above.

[1000] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 191–194. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 144–146; Gerv. Cant. as above, pp. 272–274; shorter in R. Diceto as above, pp. 421, 422. The place and date are from this last authority.

[1001] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 195, 196. Cf. R. Diceto as above, p. 425.

[1002] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 196.

[1003] The proceedings on this occasion are worth notice. Henry, it seems, tried to substitute for the arbitration of three prelates and three laymen on each side (which had been agreed upon at Nonancourt) his own favourite plan of sworn inquest. He called together the barons of Auvergne, and required them to certify what rights his predecessors the dukes of Aquitaine had enjoyed in their country. They answered that by ancient right all Auvergne pertained to the ducal dominions, except the bishopric (Clermont), which was dependent on the French Crown. To this definition Louis would not agree; so they fell back upon the former scheme of arbitration—which, however, seems never to have got any further. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 196. This was apparently the last meeting (except the one in England; see below, p. 216) between Henry and Louis, and must therefore be the one of which a curious account is given by Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 1 (Angl. Christ. Soc., pp. 85, 86).

[1004] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 197. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 147, 148. Rob. Torigni, a. 1177. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 425, under a wrong year. Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 70 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 324). Henry received the homage of the under-tenants of La Marche (Gesta Hen. as above); but he did not really get what he paid for, as will be seen later.

[1005] Rob. Torigni, a. 1178.

For six months there was peace, and in July the king ventured to return to England.[1006] He knighted his son Geoffrey at Woodstock on August 6,[1007] and when the lad hurried over sea, eager to flesh his maiden sword and emulate the prowess of his brothers, he could find no more serious field in which to exercise his warlike energies than a succession of tournaments on the borders of France and Normandy.[1008] Richard however was again busy with more earnest fighting. The rivalry between the houses of Aragon and Toulouse had stirred up the petty chieftains of southern Gascony, whom the king of Aragon was seeking to enlist in his service; and Richard was obliged to undertake a campaign against the count of Bigorre in particular, which seems to have occupied him till the end of the year. The defiant attitude of the nobles of Saintonge and the Angoumois, and especially of a powerful baron, Geoffrey of Rancogne, called him back at Christmas to Saintes; as soon as the feast was over he laid siege to Geoffrey’s castle of Pons; after spending more than three months before the place, he left his constables to continue the blockade while he himself went to attack the other rebel castles. Five of them were taken and razed between Easter and Rogation-tide,[1009] and then Richard gathered up all his forces to assault Geoffrey of Rancogne’s mightiest stronghold, Taillebourg. It stood a few miles north of Saintes, on the crest of a lofty rock, three of whose sides were so steep as to defy any attempt to scale them, while the fourth was guarded by a triple ditch and rampart. Three lines of wall, built of hewn stone and strengthened with towers and battlements, encircled the keep, which was stored with provisions and arms offensive and defensive, and crowded with picked men-at-arms who laughed to scorn the rashness of the young duke in attempting to besiege a fortress which all his predecessors had looked upon as well-nigh unapproachable. But he cleared its approaches with a ruthless energy such as they little expected, cutting down vineyards, burning houses, levelling every obstacle before him, till he pitched his tents close to the castle walls under the eyes of the astonished townsfolk. A sally of the latter only resulted in making a way for Richard’s entrance into the town; three days later the castle surrendered, and Geoffrey himself with it.[1010] Ten days’ more fighting brought all the rebels to submission and reduced Vulgrin of Angoulême himself to give up his capital city and his castle of Montignac in Périgord;[1011] and at Whitsuntide Richard went to report his success with his own lips to his delighted father in England.[1012]

- [1006] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 206, 207. R. Diceto as above, p. 426.

- [1007] R. Diceto as above.

- [1008] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 207.

- [1009] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 212, 213.

- [1010] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 431, 432. Cf. Gesta Hen. as above, p. 213, and Rob. Torigni, a. 1179.

- [1011] Gesta Hen. as above.

- [1012] Ibid. R. Diceto as above, p. 432.

He returned shortly before Michaelmas,[1013] to witness the opening of a new phase in the relations between the Angevin house and the French Crown. Philip of France, the only son of Louis VII., was now fourteen years old, and his father was desirous to have him crowned king. Before the appointed day arrived, however, he fell sick almost to death.[1014] Louis, half wild with anxiety, dreamed that the martyr of Canterbury required him to visit his shrine as a condition of the boy’s recovery.[1015] He hurried across the Channel; Henry met him at Dover and conducted him to Canterbury, where they both spent three days in fasting and prayer before the shrine; and on the fourth day after his landing Louis re-entered his own country, to find that his prayers were answered.[1016] His brief visit was long remembered in England, where no king of France had ever been seen before,[1017] or was ever seen again save when John the Good was brought there as a prisoner in the days of Edward III. Scarcely, however, had Philip recovered when Louis himself was stricken down by paralysis.[1018] This calamity made him all the more anxious for his son’s coronation, which took place at Reims on All Saints’ day. The archbishop of the province—a brother of Queen Adela—performed the rite, assisted by nearly all the bishops of Gaul; all the great vassals of the kingdom were present, among them the young King Henry, who in his capacity of duke of Normandy carried the crown before his youthful overlord in the procession to and from the cathedral church, as Count Philip of Flanders carried the sword of state.[1019] Like the crowning of young Henry himself, the crowning of Philip Augustus proved to be a beginning of troubles. His father’s helpless condition left the boy-king to fall under the influence of whatever counsellor could first get at his ear. That one happened to be his godfather, Philip of Flanders; and the policy of Flanders was to get the boy entirely under his own control by setting him against all his father’s old friends,[1020] and even against his mother, whom he tried to rob of her dower-lands and persecuted to such a degree that she was compelled to leave his domains and fly to her brothers for the protection which her husband was powerless to give her.[1021] The united forces of Flanders and of the Crown—for the latter were now wholly at Philip’s command[1022]—were, however, more than a match for those of Champagne and Blois; and the house of Blois was driven to seek help of the only power which seemed capable of giving it—the power of their old rivals of Anjou.[1023]

[1013] So it appears from an entry in the Pipe Roll of 1179; Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 227.

[1014] Gesta Hen. as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 240. According to Rob. Torigni, a. 1179, Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v. p. 5), and Will. Armor., Philippis, l. i. (ib. pp. 99, 100), the boy’s sickness was the effect of a fright caused by an adventure in the forest of Compiègne, very like that of Geoffrey Plantagenet at Loches.

[1015] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 240–241. Cf. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 192.

[1016] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 241, 242; Rog. Howden, as above, pp. 192, 193; Will. Armor., Philipp., l. i. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.) pp. 100, 101. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 432, 433, relates the pilgrimage without any mention of its motive; while Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), p. 293, seems to think Louis came for the benefit of his own health, not his son’s.

[1017] R. Diceto, as above, p. 433.

[1018] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 243.

[1019] Ib. p. 242. Rog. Howden as above, pp. 193, 194. R. Diceto as above, p. 438. It is Roger who says that Henry bore the crown officially—“de jure ducatûs Normanniæ.” Ralf explains away the matter as a mere act of courtesy and friendship.

[1020] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 244. Rog. Howden as above, p. 196.

[1021] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 196. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 6. Cf. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 294.

[1022] He had stolen his father’s royal seal, to prevent all further exercise of authority on the part of Louis. R. Diceto, as above.

[1023] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 244. Rog. Howden as above.

The days were long gone by when it had been a chief part of the Angevin interest and policy to set the French king and the house of Blois at variance with each other. If Henry had needed any proof that the rivalry of Blois was no longer to be feared, he would have found it in the appeal for succour thus sent to him by Queen Adela and her brothers, and supported by his own eldest son, who at Mid-Lent 1180 went over to England purposely to consult with him on the state of affairs in France. Before Easter father and son both returned to Normandy, and there held a personal meeting with the French queen, her brothers Theobald of Blois and Stephen of Sancerre, and several other victims of young Philip’s tyranny. Pledges of good faith were exchanged, and summons were issued for a general levy of all Henry’s forces, on both sides of the sea, ready to attack Philip after Easter.[1024] Before the attack could be made, however, Philip had got himself into such difficulties as to render it needless. As soon as Lent was over he went into Flanders and there married a niece of its count, Elizabeth, daughter of the count of Hainaut.[1025] He then summoned all the princes of his realm to meet him at Sens on Whit-Sunday for the coronation of himself and his queen. The marriage had, however, given such offence that Philip of Flanders, in dread of opposition to his niece’s crowning, persuaded the young king to anticipate the ceremony and have her crowned together with himself at S. Denis, early in the morning of Ascension-day, by the archbishop of Sens.[1026] The wrath of the great vassals knew no bounds; and the wrath of the archbishop of Reims was almost more formidable still, for the exclusive right to crown the king of France was a special prerogative of his see, and he at once forwarded to Rome an indignant protest against the outrage done to him by his royal nephew.[1027] Philip of France and Guy of Sens had in fact put themselves into a position which might easily have become almost as full of peril as that into which Henry of England and Roger of York had put themselves by a somewhat similar proceeding ten years before. As, however, William of Reims was not a Thomas of Canterbury, the consequences were less tragic; and Henry himself must have been tempted to smile at the turning of the tables which suddenly placed in his hands the task of shielding Philip from the consequences of his rashness, and reconciling him to the outraged Church and the offended people.

- [1024] Gesta Hen. as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 245. Rog. Howden as above·/·(Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 196.

- [1025] Ibid. R. Diceto as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 5. Gerv. Cant. as above·/·(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 294. Rob. Torigni, a. 1181 (a year too late). The bride is called Elizabeth by her husband’s panegyrist, Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v. p. 7), and Isabel by another of his biographers (ib. p. 258). R. Diceto calls her Margaret.

- [1026] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 245, 246. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 197. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 5. Rob. Torigni, a. 1181. This last writer, whose chronology has now become extremely confused, puts the event a year too late. So does Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 7. Rigord indeed gives an account of the matter so different from that of the English writers—e.g. he represents it as taking place publicly, amid a great concourse of spectators—that one might almost suppose he was relating a second coronation, performed in the following year. But there seems no other record of any such thing; and there are some details in his story which point to a different conclusion. Not only does he, too, name the archbishop of Sens as the consecrator—an outrage upon Reims which could not possibly have been repeated—but he betrays his own confusion by giving the date as June 1, 1181, and then describing the day as Ascension-day, which in 1181 fell on May 14, but which really was the day of the crowning in 1180 (May 29). The truth is that the panegyrists of Philip Augustus are obliged to slur over this first disgraceful year of his reign as rapidly and confusedly as they can.

- [1027] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 246. Rog. Howden as above.

There was a story that young Henry of Anjou, standing close behind his brother-in-law Philip on his first coronation-day in Reims cathedral, had bent forward to hold the crown upon the boy’s head, and thus relieve him of its weight and keep it safely in its place.[1028] The little act of brotherly kindness and protecting care may be taken as typical of the political attitude which Henry’s father actually assumed towards the boy-king of the French, and which he faithfully maintained until Philip himself rendered its maintenance impossible. It was in truth no new thing for a count of Anjou to act as the protector of a king of France. But we may fairly question whether this traditional function of the Angevin house had ever been fulfilled so honestly and unselfishly as it was by Henry during the first two years of Philip’s reign. It was Henry alone who, by his personal influence and tact, brought Philip himself to reason and the count of Flanders to submission.[1029] Next year, when Philip had been left sole king of France by the death of Louis VII.,[1030] it was Henry whose mediation checked an attempt of the Flemish count to avenge by force of arms the loss of his influence at court;[1031] and when a few months later the house of Blois, with characteristic inconstancy, made common cause with Flanders against France, it was the prompt and vigorous action of Henry’s sons which alone saved the royal domain from invasion on all sides at once, and enabled their young sovereign to hold out against his assailants till Henry himself came over to patch up another settlement in the spring of 1182.[1032]

- [1028] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 439. Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 5, tells the same story more briefly, and it is amusing to see how differently he colours it.

- [1029] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 246, 247. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 6.

- [1030] September 18, 1180; Gesta Hen. as above, p. 250; R. Diceto as above, p. 7; Will. Armor., Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 72. Rigord (ib.), p. 7, makes a confusion about the year.

- [1031] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 277. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 260.

- [1032] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 284–286. R. Diceto as above, pp. 9–11. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 297, 300. Gir. Cambr., De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. cc. 15, 16 (Angl. Christ. Soc., pp. 42–47). Rob. Torigni, a. 1182.

Other needs, however, than those of the French Crown were once more calling for Henry’s presence in Gaul. The condition of Aquitaine only grew more unsatisfactory, in spite or in consequence of Richard’s efforts to improve it. Henry’s bargain with Adalbert of La Marche had failed to secure him the possession of that county; the brother-lords of Lusignan claimed it as next-of-kin to Adalbert as soon as the king’s back was turned, and made good their claim by forcible occupation.[1033] The Limousin was again threatening revolt; the town-walls of Limoges were razed by Richard’s order at midsummer 1181.[1034] Almost at the same moment the death of Count Vulgrin of Angoulême opened a fresh source of strife; his two brothers laid claim to his inheritance against his only daughter, whom Richard of course took into wardship as a feudal heiress, and on Richard’s refusal to admit their claims they made common cause with Ademar of Limoges.[1035] The mischief however did not end here. Richard’s unbending resolve to bridle Aquitaine had gradually stirred up against him the bitter hatred of the whole people—a hatred for which his stern rule is quite sufficient to account, without admitting the blacker charges brought against him by the reckless tongues of the south.[1036] The voice of Bertrand de Born had once more given the signal for a general rising. A sirvente which went forth from Hautefort in 1181 rang like a trumpet-call in the ears of the lords of Ventadour and Comborn and Périgord and Dax, of Angoulême and Pons and Taillebourg.[1037] But even this was not all. Years before, it seems, there had flashed through the troubadour’s quick brain a possibility of stirring up strife in higher quarters than among the petty princes of his native land. Now he distinctly saw the possibility of finding for the Aquitanian resistance to Richard a rallying-point and a leader in Richard’s own brother.

- [1033] Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 70 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 324).

- [1034] Ib. c. 72 (p. 326).

- [1035] Ibid. He was their half-brother, the only son of their mother’s first marriage.

- [1036] Cf. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 292, with Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 303, and Gir. Cambr., De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 8 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 105).

- [1037] Clédat, Bert. de Born, pp. 44, 45.

One of the most puzzling figures in the history of the time is that of the younger Henry of Anjou—the “young king,” as he is usually called. From the day of his crowning to that of his death not one deed is recorded of him save deeds of the meanest ingratitude, selfishness, cowardliness and treachery. Yet this undutiful, rebellious son, this corrupter and betrayer of his younger brothers, this weak and faithless ally, was loved and admired by all men while he lived, and lamented by all men after he was gone.[1038] The attraction exercised by him over a man so far his superior as William the Marshal[1039] is indeed well-nigh incomprehensible. But the panegyrics of the historians, unaccountable as they look at first glance, do throw some light on the secret of young Henry’s gift of general fascination. It was a gift which indeed, in varying degrees, formed part of the hereditary endowments of the Angevin house. But the character which it took in Fulk Nerra or Henry Fitz-Empress was very different from that which it assumed in Henry’s eldest son. The essence of the young king’s nature was not Angevin. He had little either of the higher talents or of the stronger and sterner qualities of the Angevin race; he had still less of the characteristics of the Norman. It is by studying his portrait as drawn in contrast to that of Richard by a hand equally favourable to both that we can best see what he really was. “The first was admired for his mildness and liberality; the second was esteemed for his seriousness and firmness. One was commendable for graciousness, the other for stateliness. One gained praise for his courtesy, the other for his constancy. One was conspicuous for mercy, the other for justice. One was the refuge and the shield of vagabonds and evil-doers, the other was their scourge. One was devoted to the sports of war, the other to war itself; one was gracious to strangers, the other to his own friends—one to all men, the other only to good men.”[1040] Henry in fact was at bottom what Richard never was but on the surface—a careless, pleasure-loving, capricious, but withal most gracious and winning child of the south. The most philosophic English historian of the day was reduced to account for the young king’s popularity by the simple and comprehensive explanation that “the number of fools is infinite.”[1041] But it was not folly, it was a shrewd perception of their own interest, which led the Aquitanians writhing under Richard’s iron rule to see in his elder brother a prince after their own hearts.[1042]

- [1038] Except the ever-independent William of Newburgh; see his l. iii. c. 7 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 233, 234).

- [1039] See Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 279.

- [1040] Gir. Cambr., De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 8 (Angl. Christ. Soc. p. 106).

- [1041] “Quia ut scriptum est, Stultorum infinitus est numerus.” Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 7 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 234). The quotation is from the Vulgate version of Ecclesiastes i. 15; the English A. V. conveys a wholly different idea.

- [1042] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 303. See also Gerald’s other account of young Henry, De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 9 (Angl. Christ. Soc., pp. 31, 32).

It was not the first time that Bertrand de Born had sought to kindle in the young king’s mind the sparks of jealousy and discontent which were always latent there.[1043] Now, he fed the flames with an unsparing hand. In words of bitter satire he ridicules the position of the young king, who bears the titles of a great sovereign, but has no authority in his own land, and cannot even claim the tolls upon the traffic along its roads: “Barons of Aquitaine, are we not all of us better than a carter who leaves his cart to go as it may, and counts his dues, if he counts any at all, with trembling fingers?” “I prize a tiny tract of land with honour above a great empire with disgrace!”[1044] Richard, meanwhile, was playing into his enemies’s hands by an encroachment upon territory which in name at least belonged to his brother. He had built a castle at Clairvaux, between Loudun and Poitiers, but on the Angevin side of the frontier. If the thought of resentment did not occur to Henry, Bertrand took care to suggest it: “Between Poitiers and Ile-Bouchard and Mirebeau and Loudun and Chinon some one has dared to rear, at Clairvaux, a fair castle in the midst of the plain. I would not have the young king see it or know of it, for it would not be to his taste; but its walls are so white, I doubt he will catch sight of their gleam from Mateflon!”[1045] The troubadour’s shafts were well aimed, and they rankled. When King Henry returned to Normandy in the spring of 1182 the Aquitanian rising was in full career; as soon as he had composed matters in France he hurried to the help of Richard, who was fighting the rebels in the Limousin; at Whitsuntide the counts of Angoulême and Périgord and the viscount of Limoges came to confer with him at Grandmont, but nothing came of the negotiations; Henry then went to attack Pierre-Buffière, while Richard returned to the siege of Excideuil. At midsummer the king was back at Grandmont, and Geoffrey of Britanny with him; thence they went to rejoin Richard, who was now busy with the siege of Périgueux.[1046] Matters were in this stage when the young king at last made up his mind to advance into Aquitaine. He was joyfully welcomed at Limoges on the festival of its patron S. Martial—the last day of June. On the morrow, however, he joined his father and brothers before Périgueux, and within a week peace was made; Périgueux surrendered, its count and the viscount of Limoges submitted to Richard, and only the brother-counts of Angoulême still remained in arms against him.[1047]

- [1043] See Clédat, Bert. de Born, p. 36.

- [1044] Ib. p. 44.

- [1045] Ibid.

- [1046] Strictly, of its suburb Puy-St.-Front.

- [1047] Geoff. Vigeois, l. ii. cc. 1, 2 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. pp. 330, 331).

Peace, however, never lasted long either in Aquitaine or in King Henry’s family. His eldest son now again grew importunate for a definite and immediate share in the family heritage. When this was refused, he fled to the court of France, and was only recalled by a promise of an increased pecuniary allowance for himself and his queen.[1048] Aquitaine, as soon as Henry had left it, drifted into a state of anarchy more frightful than any that had ever been known there before; the sudden conclusion of the war had let loose all over the country a crowd of mercenaries—commonly known as “Brabantines,” but really the off-scouring of every land from Flanders to Aragon—who wrought, as a local writer says, such havoc as had never been seen since the days of the heathen northmen.[1049] The evil in some measure brought its own remedy with it, for it drove the common people to take into their own hands the maintenance of peace and order. A poor Auvergnat carpenter, urged by a vision of the Blessed Virgin, set forth under the protection of the diocesan bishop to preach the cause of peace in his native district of Le Puy. Those who were like-minded with him, no matter what their rank or calling, enrolled themselves in a society bound together by solemn pledges for mutual support in adherence to right and resistance to wrong in every shape; and in a few years these “Caputii,” as they were called from the linen capes or hoods which they always wore in fight, proved more than a match for the Brabantines.[1050]

- [1048] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 289, 291. Cf. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 266, 267.

- [1049] Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 73 (as above, p. 328).

- [1050] Geoff. Vigeois, l. ii. c. 22 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 339). Rob. Torigni, a. 1183. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 300, 301. Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), pp. 11, 12.

Meanwhile, however, the warlike barons of Aquitaine were exasperated at the failure of their league against Richard; and their anger reached its height when at the conclusion of the Christmas festivities held by King Henry and his sons at Caen, the young king of his own accord renewed his oath of allegiance to his father, confessed his secret alliance with Richard’s enemies, and offered to abandon it and make peace with his brother if his father would but insist upon the surrender of Clairvaux. Richard, after some hesitation, gave up to his father the fortress in dispute.[1051] The incident apparently opened Henry’s eyes to the necessity of clearly defining his sons’ political relations with each other; and while Bertrand de Born was giving a voice to the wrath of his fellow-barons at the young king’s desertion of their cause,[1052] Henry led his three sons back to Angers, made them all take an oath of obedience to him and peace with each other,[1053] and then called upon the two younger to do homage to the eldest for their fiefs.[1054] Geoffrey obeyed;[1055] Richard indignantly refused, declaring it was utterly unreasonable that there should be any distinction of rank between children of the same parents, and that if the father’s heritage belonged of right to the eldest son, the mother’s was equally due to the second.[1056] The young king, on the other hand, was on account of his entanglements with the Aquitanian barons almost as unwilling to receive the homage as Richard was to perform it.[1057] The end of the discussion was that Richard quitted the court, “leaving behind him nothing but threats and insults,” and hurried into Poitou to prepare for defence and defiance.[1058]

- [1051] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 291, 294, 295.

- [1052] Clédat, Bert. de Born, p. 47.

- [1053] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 295. Cf. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 18.

- [1054] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 291. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 273.

- [1055] Ibid. R. Diceto as above.

- [1056] R. Diceto (as above), pp. 18, 19. Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 292. Cf. Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 303.

- [1057] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 18. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 292. The two accounts do not exactly agree, Ralf placing at this point the young king’s confession of his dealings in Aquitaine; while the story in the Gesta is extremely confused, because it is told twice over, in different forms (pp. 291, 292 and 294, 295).

- [1058] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 292.

In the first burst of his anger Henry bade the other two brothers go and “subdue Richard’s pride” by force of arms.[1059] Immediately afterwards, however, he summoned all three, together with the aggrieved barons of Aquitaine, to meet him in conference at Mirebeau.[1060] But the young king had already marched into Poitou and received a warm welcome there;[1061] Geoffrey, to whom his father had intrusted his summons to the barons, led a motley force of Bretons, Brabantines and mercenaries of all kinds to Limoges;[1062] soon afterwards young Henry joined him; with the viscount’s help they threw themselves into the citadel,[1063] and set to work to raise the whole country against Richard. He, in his extremity, appealed to his father;[1064] and Henry at once hurried to the rescue. For six weeks he laid siege to the citadel of Limoges;[1065] twice he was personally shot at, and narrowly escaped with his life; twice the young king came to him with offers of submission, and each time he was welcomed with open arms, but each time the submission was a mere feint, designed to keep Henry quiet and give the barons time to wreak their vengeance upon Richard.[1066] By Easter matters were so far advanced that Bertrand de Born was openly calling for aid upon Flanders, France and Normandy;[1067] and the dread of a rising in this last-named quarter prompted Henry to send orders for the arrest of those barons, both in Normandy and England, who had been most conspicuous in the rebellion of 1173.[1068]

- [1059] R. Diceto as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 19.

- [1060] Gesta Hen. as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 295.

- [1061] Ib. p. 292.

- [1062] Ib. pp. 293, 295. Geoff. Vigeois, l. ii. c. 6 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 332).

- [1063] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 293, 296. Geoff. Vigeois as above. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 304.

- [1064] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 274.

- [1065] From Shrove Tuesday—March 1—to Easter. Geoff. Vigeois, l. ii. cc. 12, 16 (as above, pp. 334, 336).

- [1066] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 296–298. Cf. Geoff. Vigeois, l. ii. c. 7 (as above, pp. 332, 333).

- [1067] Clédat, Bert. de Born, p. 52.

- [1068] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 294.

The young king at the same time quitted Limoges to make a diversion at Angoulême. On his return, however, he found it impossible to re-enter Limoges; its townsfolk had by this time so fully awakened to his real character and to their own best interests that they drove him from their walls with a volley of stones, shouting “We will not have this man to reign over us!”[1069] He had already robbed them of their wealth and stripped the shrine of their patron saint to provide wages for his Brabantines;[1070] and the insult goaded him to yet more unsparing plunder and yet more reckless sacrilege. From the castle of Aixe, which he took on the Monday in Rogation-week, he advanced to Grandmont, a religious house whose inmates enjoyed, amid the now general decay of monastic sanctity, an almost unique reputation for piety and virtue, and were known to be held by his father in especial reverence and esteem. He wrung from them all the treasure they possessed, and forcibly carried off a golden pyx, his father’s gift, from the high altar itself. He then proceeded to Uzerches, where the duke of Burgundy and the count of Toulouse met him with reinforcements on Ascension-day; from Uzerches he moved southward to Donzenac and Martel, and thence to Rocamadour.[1071] Rocamadour was the most famous of the holy places of Aquitaine; besides the tomb of the hermit from whom its name was derived, it boasted of a statue of the Virgin which attracted as many pilgrims as the shrine of S. James at Compostella; and among the treasures of its church, which was said to have been founded by Zacchæus the publican, was a sword traditionally believed to be the famous “Durandal”—the sword of the Paladin Roland, devoted by him to the Blessed Virgin on the eve of his last campaign, and carried to her shrine at Rocamadour after the disaster of Roncevaux. Heedless alike of paladins and of saints, the young king stripped the shrine of S. Amadour[1072] as he had stripped that of S. Martial; and local tradition declares that he also carried off the hallowed sword, leaving his own dishonoured brand in its place.

- [1069] Geoff. Vigeois, l. ii. c. 16 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 336). Gesta Hen. as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 299.

- [1070] Geoff. Vigeois, l. ii. cc. 13, 14 (pp. 335, 336).

- [1071] Ib. c. 16 (p. 336).

- [1072] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 278.

He had been ailing ever since he left Uzerches;[1073] now, on his return to Martel, his baffled rage threw him into a fever, to which other complications were soon added.[1074] Conscience awoke as death drew near. From the blacksmith’s cottage[1075] where he lay awaiting his end he sent a message to Limoges, imploring his father to come and speak with him once more.[1076] Henry would have gone, but his friends, in their natural dread of another trick, prevented him;[1077] he sent, however, a bishop charged with a message of love and pardon,[1078] and as a token of the genuineness of the commission, a precious ring, said to be an heirloom from Henry I.[1079] The messenger was only just in time. On the Tuesday in Whitsun-week the young king called together the bishops and religious men who had gathered round him at the tidings of his sickness, confessed his sins first privately, then publicly, before all his followers, was absolved and received the Holy Communion.[1080] For three more days he lingered, long enough to receive his father’s message of forgiveness and to dictate a letter to him, pleading that the same clemency might be extended to his mother the captive Queen Eleanor, to his own young Queen Margaret, and to all his servants, friends, adherents and allies;[1081] beseeching also that his father would make atonement in his stead for the sacrileges which he had committed against the holy places of Aquitaine, and would cause his body to be buried at Rouen in the cathedral church of our Lady.[1082] In the early twilight of S. Barnabas’s day he repeated his confession, after which he begged to be wrapped once more in his cloak, marked with the cross which he had taken at Limoges in petulance rather than in piety. Now, however, he was in earnest, and when the sacred symbol had rested for a moment on his shoulder he gave it to his best-beloved knight, William the Marshal, charging him to bear it to the Holy Sepulchre and thus fulfil his vow in his stead.[1083] He then caused his attendants to strip him of his soft raiment, clothe him in a hair-shirt and put a rope round his neck; with this he bade the assembled clergy drag him out of bed and lay him on a bed of ashes strewed for the purpose. There, lying as if already in his grave, with a stone at his head and another at his feet, he received the last sacraments;[1084] and there, an hour after nones,[1085] kissing his father’s ring he died.[1086]

[1073] Geoff. Vigeois, l. ii. c. 16 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 336).

[1074] Ibid. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 300. Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 7 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 233, 234).

[1075] “In domo Stephani cognomine Fabri.” Geoff. Vigeois, l. ii. c. 19 (as above, p. 337). Is this to be taken literally, or can it be merely a punning nickname applied to the lord of Martel?

[1076] Gesta Hen. as above. Will. Newb. as above (p. 234).

[1077] Will. Newb. as above. Geoff. Vigeois, l. ii. c. 17 (as above, p. 337).

[1078] Gesta Hen. as above.

[1079] “Annulum preciosum ... qui Henrici munifici Regis olim extitisse narratur.” Geoff. Vigeois as above. Cf. Will. Newb. as above, and Th. Agnellus, De Morte Hen. Reg. jun. (Stevenson, R. Coggeshall), pp. 265, 266.

[1080] Geoff. Vigeois as above.

[1081] Geoff. Vigeois, l. ii. c. 24 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 339). Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 300, 301.

[1082] Geoff. Vigeois as above.

[1083] Ib. c. 17 (p. 337). Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 279. On young Henry’s vow of crusade see Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 297, 298.

[1084] Rog. Howden as above.

[1085] Geoff. Vigeois, l. ii. c. 19 (as above, p. 338).

[1086] Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 7 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 234).

CHAPTER VI.
THE LAST YEARS OF HENRY II.
1183–1189.

The unexpected death of the young king was a catastrophe almost equally overwhelming to both parties in the war. Henry himself, when the news was brought to him by the prior of Grandmont, whither the body had been taken to be prepared for burial,[1087] went almost out of his mind with grief.[1088] For a moment indeed friends and foes alike seemed incapable of anything but mourning. Hero or saint could scarcely have won a more universal tribute of affection and regret than was showered upon this young king who, so far as we can see, had done so little to deserve it. Stern voices like that of Bertrand de Born, accustomed only to the bitterest tones of sarcasm, insult and angry strife, melted suddenly into accents of the deepest tenderness and lamentation.[1089] Sober-minded churchmen and worldly-wise courtiers, though they could not deny or excuse the dead man’s sins, yet betrayed with equal frankness their unreasoning attachment to his memory.[1090] As his body, arrayed in the linen robe which he had worn at his coronation—its white folds, hallowed by the consecrating oil, made to serve for a winding-sheet—was borne on an open bier upon the shoulders of his comrades-in-arms from Grandmont northward through Anjou, the people streamed forth from every castle and town and village along the road to meet it with demonstrations of mourning and tears;[1091] and at Le Mans, where it was deposited for a night in the cathedral church, the bishops and citizens forcibly took possession of it, refused to give it up, and buried their beloved young king then and there by the side of his grandfather Geoffrey Plantagenet.[1092].

- [1087] Geoff. Vigeois, l. ii. c. 20 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 338).

- [1088] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 301. Cf. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 279, and Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 8 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 30).

- [1089] See Bertrand de Born’s two elegies on the young king, Clédat, Bert. de Born, pp. 53, 54.

- [1090] See Pet. Blois, Ep. ii.(Giles, vol. i. pp. 3–5); Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 9 (pp. 31, 32); W. Map, De Nug. Cur., dist. iv. c. i. (Wright, pp. 139, 140); and Th. Agnellus (Stevenson, R. Coggeshall), pp. 265–273. The tone of the real historians of the time is however somewhat different. The Gesta Hen. is perfectly colourless, and even on the young king’s death the writer adds not a word of comment, good or bad. Rog. Howden, on the other hand (Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 279), openly gives vent to a feeling which may be expressed by “So perish all the enemies of King Henry,” and grows almost impatient with Henry’s grief. R. Diceto (Stubbs, vol. ii. pp. 19, 20) is as usual very cautious in the expression of his personal opinions, but they also appear to be somewhat opposed to the popular sentiment. The point of view taken by Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 305) is probably unique. The one really judicial commentator on the whole affair is William of Newburgh (l. iii. c. 7—Howlett, vol. i. pp. 233, 234).

- [1091] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 20. Cf. Th. Agnellus (Stevenson, R. Coggeshall), p. 268.

- [1092] R. Diceto as above. Th. Agnellus (as above), p. 269. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 303.

The political tide, however, turned as soon as he was gone. The Aquitanian league suddenly found itself without a head; for Geoffrey of Britanny, although the wiliest and most plausible of all the king’s sons, was also the most generally distrusted and disliked.[1093] The league broke up at once; on Midsummer-day Ademar of Limoges surrendered his citadel and made his peace;[1094] and most of the other rebels soon followed his example. By the end of the month Henry, having razed the walls of Limoges and garrisoned with his own troops the castles which had submitted to him, could venture to set out for Normandy;[1095] while King Alfonso of Aragon, who had come to the help of his father’s old ally, found nothing left for him to do but to join Richard in an expedition against the one baron who still persisted in his rebellion—Bertrand de Born.[1096] If Bertrand’s story may be believed, it was Alfonso’s treachery which, after a week’s siege, compelled him to surrender Hautefort.[1097] What followed shewed plainly that the Aquitanian revolt was at an end. Richard made over Hautefort to Constantine de Born, the troubadour’s brother and lifelong rival;[1098] Bertrand, instead of calling his fellow-barons to avenge him as of old, threw himself upon the generosity of his conqueror, and addressed Richard in a sirvente entreating that his castle might be restored to him. Richard referred him to his father; Bertrand then hastened to the king, who greeted him sarcastically with an allusion to one of his own earlier sirventes: “You were wont to boast of possessing more wits than you ever needed to use—what has become of them now?” “Sire, I lost them on the day that you lost your son.” Henry burst into tears; Bertrand was forgiven, indemnified for the losses which he had sustained during the siege, and dismissed with a charter securing to him from that time forth the sole possession of Hautefort.[1099] As a natural consequence, his lyre and his sword were thenceforth both alike at the service of the ducal house to whom he had hitherto been such a troublesome and dangerous foe.

- [1093] See Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 11 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 35). The author of the Gesta Hen. seems to look upon Geoffrey as the instigator of all his brothers’ misdoings, and scarcely ever mentions his name without an epithet of abuse.

- [1094] Geoff. Vigeois, l. ii. c. 18 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 337). Gesta Hen. as above, p. 302. The date comes from Geoffrey.

- [1095] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 303.

- [1096] Geoff. Vigeois, l. ii. c. 18 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 337).

- [1097] On the story of this siege see Clédat, Bert. de Born, pp. 55–57, and Geoff. Vigeois as above.

- [1098] Geoff. Vigeois as above.

- [1099] Clédat, Bert. de Born, pp. 57, 58.

On his northward march Henry met with no opposition. The young king had drawn to himself followers from all parts of the Angevin dominions, as well as from those of the French Crown;[1100] but they had all been drawn by a purely personal attraction, or by the hope of gain; their action had no political significance; and the greater barons, warned by their experience of ten years before, had remained entirely aloof from the whole movement. On reaching Le Mans, indeed, Henry found the old jealousy between Normandy and Maine on the point of breaking out over his son’s dead body; the clergy and people of Rouen, indignant at being defrauded of their young king’s dying bequest, were threatening to come and destroy the city of Le Mans and carry off his body by force. Henry was obliged to cause it to be disinterred and conveyed to Rouen for re-burial,[1101] while he himself returned to Angers to meet Richard and to receive Geoffrey’s submission.[1102] The quarrel between the Cenomannians and the citizens of Rouen was however only the smallest part of the troubles which arose from the young king’s death. As Margaret’s only child had died in infancy, her brother Philip of France at once demanded the restoration of her dowry, and especially the fortress of Gisors. Henry refused to give it up; conference after conference was held without result;[1103] at last, in December, a compromise was made, Henry consenting to do homage to Philip for all his transmarine dominions and to pay a money-compensation for Gisors, which was to be left in his hands henceforth as the dowry not of Margaret, but of her sister Adela, Richard’s affianced bride.[1104]

- [1100] W. Map, De Nug. Cur., dist. iv. c. i. (Wright, p. 139).

- [1101] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 303, 304. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 280. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 20. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 305. Th. Agnellus (Stevenson, R. Coggeshall), pp. 269–272.

- [1102] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 304.

- [1103] Ib. pp. 304, 305. Cf. Rog. Howden as above, pp. 280, 281. According to the Gesta, one of Henry’s contrivances for avoiding the restitution of the dower-lands was to declare that he had bestowed them upon his own wife; and he set her at liberty and made her go through the said lands to demonstrate the fact. If so, however, she was soon put in prison again.

- [1104] Ib. p. 306. Cf. Rog. Howden, as above, pp. 281, 284.

But a far worse difficulty remained. All Henry’s schemes for the distribution of his territories were upset by the death of his heir, and it was necessary to devise some new arrangement. It really seems as if Henry’s first thought about the matter was that now at last he could provide as he chose for his darling “Lackland”; for he at once bade the English justiciar Ralf de Glanville bring John over to meet him in Normandy. As soon as they arrived he sent for Richard and unfolded his plan. Richard was now the eldest son; if he lived, he must in due time succeed his father as head of the Angevin house. Henry had clearly no mind to venture a second time upon the dangerous experiment of crowning his heir during his own life. But, although we have no actual statement of his intentions, it seems plain that he did intend to place Richard, in every respect short of the coronation, in the same position which had been held by the young king. Under these circumstances, if the continental dominions of the Angevin house were to be redistributed among the three surviving brothers, there was only one possible mode of redistribution. Geoffrey could not give up Britanny, for he was now actually married to its duchess;[1105] but Richard, in consideration of his prospects as future king of England, duke of Normandy and count of Anjou, might fairly be asked to surrender to his youngest brother the duchy of Aquitaine. So at least it seemed from Henry’s point of view. Richard however saw the matter in another light. Not because he loved Aquitaine, but because he hated it—because for eight years he had fought unceasingly to crush it beneath his feet—now that it lay there prostrate, he could not let it escape him. Richard was generous; but to give up to other hands the reaping of a harvest which he had sown with such unsparing labour and watered with such streams of blood, was a sacrifice too great for his generosity in his six-and-twentieth year. He met his father’s demand with a request for time to think it over; that evening he mounted his horse and rode straight for Poitou; and thence he sent back a message that so long as he lived, no one but himself should ever hold the duchy of Aquitaine.[1106]

- [1105] Geoffrey and Constance were married in 1181; see a document in Morice, Hist. Bret., preuves, vol. i. col. 687. Rob. Torigni dates the marriage a year too late (Delisle, vol. ii. p. 104 and note 4).

- [1106] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 308.

After threatening and beseeching him by turns all through the winter, Henry so far lost patience that he gave permission to John—now fifteen years old—to lead an army into his brother’s territories and win an heritage for himself if he could.[1107] It does not appear, however, that any such attempt was actually made till after Henry himself had gone back to England in June 1184.[1108] As soon as his back was turned, his two younger sons joined to harry the lands of the eldest; Richard retaliated by pushing across the Angevin border and making a raid upon Britanny; and in November Henry found it necessary to check the lawless doings of all three by summoning them to rejoin him in England.[1109] On S. Andrew’s day a sort of public reconciliation of the whole family took place in a great council at Westminster; Eleanor was suffered to resume her place as queen, and the three sons were compelled formally at least to make peace among themselves.[1110] Geoffrey was at once sent back to Normandy;[1111] Richard and John stayed to keep the Christmas feast with their father and mother amid a brilliant gathering of the court at Windsor.[1112] Soon afterwards Richard also returned to his troublesome duchy;[1113] for Henry had now abandoned all idea of transferring it to John. Falling back upon his earlier plans for his youngest child, on Mid-Lent Sunday 1185 he knighted John at Windsor, and thence despatched him as governor to Ireland.[1114]

- [1107] Ib.·/·Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 311.

- [1108] Ib. p. 312. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 21.

- [1109] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 319.

- [1110] Ib. pp. 319, 320. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 288. Eleanor had been released in June in order that she might welcome her daughter, the duchess of Saxony; Gesta Hen. as above, p. 313.

- [1111] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 320.

- [1112] Ib. p. 333.

- [1113] Ib. p. 334.

- [1114] Ib. p. 336. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 34. John sailed from Milford on April 24 and landed next day at Waterford. Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. ii. c. 32 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 380).

Meanwhile the king himself was again called over sea by fresh troubles in Gaul. The king of France and the count of Flanders had been quarrelling for the last two years over the territories of the latter’s deceased wife, the counties of Amiens and Vermandois;[1115] Henry’s last act before he left Normandy had been to arrange a truce between them.[1116] Two months later—in August 1184—while Philip of Flanders was away in England on a pilgrimage to the martyr’s tomb at Canterbury, Philip of France broke the truce by stirring up his father-in-law the count of Hainaut to attack Flanders in his behalf: Philip of Flanders appealed for help to his other overlord the Emperor Frederic; the archbishop of Cöln, who had been his fellow-pilgrim, at once joined him in a counter-invasion of Hainaut;[1117] and the incalculable dangers of a war between France and Germany were only averted by Frederic’s wise reluctance to interfere, strengthened, we may perhaps suspect, by the influence of the English king. It seemed indeed as if nothing but Henry’s presence could avail to keep order in Gaul. When he returned thither, in April 1185,[1118] his first task was to pacify another quarrel between his own sons. This time the elder one seems to have been the aggressor; and Henry grew so angry that he once more summoned Richard to give up Aquitaine altogether, not, however, to either of his brothers, but to its own lawful lady, his mother, Queen Eleanor. Despite all her faults, Eleanor was reverenced by her sons; Richard especially treated her throughout his life with the utmost respect and affection; and the demand thus made in her behalf met with immediate submission.[1119] For nine months Henry’s dominions were quiet, and his hands were free to deal with the quarrels of France and Flanders. But before he had succeeded in pacifying them, a further complication was added. King Bela of Hungary made suit to Philip of France for the hand of his sister the widowed Queen Margaret,[1120] and this at once re-opened the question about her dower; for the agreement made two years before had been conditional upon Richard’s marriage with Adela, and as this event seemed as far off as ever, Philip again laid claim to the whole dowry, including Gisors. He was however too much in need of Henry’s assistance in his dispute with Flanders over the dower-lands of Isabel of Vermandois to risk a quarrel with him about those of the young queen; and by Henry’s tact and diplomacy both questions were settled in a conference at Gisors itself early in 1186.[1121] The count of Flanders gave up Vermandois to Philip Augustus,[1122] while Philip and Margaret again consented, in return for a money-compensation from Henry, to make Gisors over to him on the old condition—that Richard should marry Adela without further delay.[1123] The condition however remained unfulfilled. Richard was again despatched into Aquitaine, not indeed as its duke—for Henry had placed all its fortresses under officers of his own appointment[1124]—but still as his father’s representative, charged in his name with the maintenance of obedience and order.[1125] As for Eleanor, Henry had clearly never intended again to intrust her with any real authority; and in April he carried her back with him to England.[1126]

[1115] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 311, 312. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 309. On this quarrel cf. Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), pp. 12, 13, and Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 2 (Angl. Christ. Soc., pp. 88–90). This last version is extremely confused in its chronology. The main facts of the case are these: Philip of Flanders and Isabel his wife had no children, and they had quarrelled (Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 99, 100). Philip’s heir-presumptive was his sister Margaret, wife of Count Baldwin of Hainaut, and after her, her son, another Baldwin. In 1180, however, Philip proposed, instead of leaving all his dominions to his sister and her son, to settle the southern half of them, comprising Vermandois and Flanders south of the river Lys, upon her daughter Elizabeth, whom he had just given in marriage to Philip of France. (Ib. p. 245.) He meant to leave them to her on his own death; but when his wife died, in 1182 (ib. p. 285), Philip Augustus laid claim to her two counties as lapsed fiefs. King and count went on quarrelling till 1186, when, as we shall see, the matter was settled by the immediate cession of Vermandois to Philip Augustus, who thereupon agreed to wait for the rest till the Flemish count’s death.

[1116] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 312. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 309.

[1117] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 321, 322. Cf. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 288, and R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 32.

[1118] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 337. R. Diceto as above, p. 34.

[1119] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 337, 338. Cf. Rog. Howden as above, p. 304.

[1120] Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 20. Will. Armor., Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 73. According to the Gesta Hen. as above, p. 346, Bela’s first suit was to Henry, for the hand of his granddaughter Matilda of Saxony; but Henry, “ut mos suus erat,” was so slow in answering that Bela, tired of waiting, transferred his proposals to Margaret. On the other hand, Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 336, 337, charges Henry with having contrived Margaret’s marriage with Bela on purpose to get her to a safe distance, whence neither she nor her husband could reclaim the dowry.

[1121] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 343. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 40. The last gives the date as March 10; the Gesta make it just before Mid-Lent, which was February 26.

[1122] Cf. Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 13, with R. Diceto as above.

[1123] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 344. Cf. R. Diceto as above.

[1124] R. Diceto as above.

[1125] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 345.

[1126] Ibid. R. Diceto as above.

England was now his only refuge. In these closing years of his reign, when the whole interest of the story centres round the person of the king, the character of those few incidents which take place on English ground is in striking contrast with the state of affairs which occupied him in Gaul. While the Angevin dominions on the continent were threatening disruption under their owner’s very eyes, each of his visits to England was marked by some fresh indication of the firm hold which he had gained upon his island realm and its dependencies, or of the lofty position which England under him had acquired among the powers of the world. Of the internal affairs of England itself, indeed, we hear absolutely nothing save a few ecclesiastical details, and of Wales and Scotland scarcely more. Henry’s first business after his landing in 1184 had been to lead an army against South Wales;[1127] but at the mere tidings of his approach Rees hurried to make submission at Worcester.[1128] William of Scotland was in still greater haste to meet the English king with a suit for the hand of his granddaughter Matilda of Saxony,[1129] who was now in England with her parents. The project was foiled by the Pope’s refusal to grant a dispensation,[1130] without which such a marriage was impossible, owing to the descent of both parties from Malcolm III. and Margaret. Henry, however, on his next visit to England in 1186, proposed that William should wed in Matilda’s place her kinswoman Hermengard of Beaumont.[1131] Hermengard stood even nearer than Matilda in descent from Henry I., but there was no obstacle to her marriage with the king of Scots; he therefore willingly embraced the offer; and before the year closed the alliance between the two kings was doubly cemented, first at Carlisle by the final submission of Galloway to Henry, William himself standing surety for its obedience;[1132] and afterwards, at Woodstock on September 5, by the marriage of Hermengard and William, to whom Henry restored Edinburgh castle as his contribution to the dowry of the bride.[1133]

- [1127] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 314. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 309.

- [1128] Gesta Hen. as above.

- [1129] Ib. p. 313.

- [1130] Ib. p. 322.

- [1131] Ib. p. 347.

- [1132] Ib. pp. 348, 349.

- [1133] Ib. p. 351.

Henry is said to have received in the course of the same year another proposal, from a more distant quarter, for his granddaughter’s hand. According to one writer, Bela of Hungary had at first desired the young Saxon princess for his queen, and it was only Henry’s long delay in answering his suit which provoked him to transfer it to Margaret.[1134] Both Matilda’s suitors must have been attracted solely by the ambition of forming a family connexion with her grandfather King Henry; and that attraction must have been a very strong one, for at the time of William’s suit, if not at the time of Bela’s, it had to counterbalance the fact that Matilda herself, her parents, and all their other children, were landless and penniless exiles. To Henry’s load of family cares there had been added since 1180 that of the troubles of his eldest daughter and her husband, Duke Henry the Lion of Saxony. During the retreat of the Imperial forces from Italy in 1179 the duke fell under the displeasure of his cousin the Emperor; next year he was deprived of all his estates and placed under the ban of the Empire. In the summer of 1182 he and his family made their way to the sole refuge left them, the court of his father-in-law; and there for the most part they remained during the next two years. Towards the close of 1184 the English king’s influence in Germany prevailed to obtain the duke’s restoration to his patrimonial duchy of Brunswick;[1135] and another token of the eagerness with which Henry’s alliance was sought may be seen in the fact that among the conditions demanded by Frederic was the betrothal of one of his own daughters to Richard of Poitou.[1136] This condition, which might have added considerably to Henry’s difficulties in France, was annulled by the speedy death of the intended bride.[1137] On the other hand, the restoration of the exiled duke was far from complete; Brunswick was only a small part of the vast territories which he had formerly possessed; although he returned to Germany in 1185,[1138] it was as a suspected and ruined man; and before Henry’s reign closed another sentence of banishment drove him and his wife again to seek the shelter of her father’s court.

- [1134] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 346. See above, p. 235, note 5{1120}.

- [1135] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 249, 287, 288, 318, 319, 322, 323; cf. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 199–201, 269, 288, 289.

- [1136] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 319.

- [1137] Ib. p. 322.

- [1138] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 38.

Early in 1185 came a crowning proof of the estimation in which the English king was held both at home and abroad. King Baldwin III. of Jerusalem, the eldest son and successor of Queen Melisenda and Fulk of Anjou, had died in 1162, the year of Thomas Becket’s appointment to the see of Canterbury. He was succeeded by his brother Almeric, who died while Henry was struggling with his rebellious barons in 1173. During the twelve years which had passed since then, Almeric’s son, another Baldwin, had fought on bravely against overwhelming odds to keep out the Infidel foe. But the struggle grew more hopeless year by year and day by day. The young king himself was in natural temper as gallant a knight as ever sprang from the blood of Anjou; but he was crippled physically, socially and politically by a disease which made his life a burthen—he was a leper; his kingdom was torn by the mutual jealousies of the kinsmen on whom he was compelled to rely for its government and defence; while the political and military power of the Turks was growing to a height such as it had never before attained, under their famous leader Saladin.[1139] If the necessities of Palestine had been grievous when King Baldwin II. had called upon Fulk to protect Melisenda on her perilous throne—if they had been grievous when Melisenda sought the aid of the western princes for her infant son Baldwin III.—they were far more grievous now. But times were changed in the west since Melisenda had been obliged to rest content with a general appeal addressed to Latin Christendom through the abbot of Clairvaux. Independent of the claim of the king of Jerusalem to the sympathy and the succour of all Christian princes, Baldwin had a direct personal claim upon one prince, and that one well-nigh the mightiest of all. He himself represented one branch of the race whose power had spread from the black rock of Angers to the ends of the earth; the other, the elder branch, was represented by Henry Fitz-Empress. As Baldwin’s nearest kinsman, as the foremost descendant alike of Fulk the King and of Fulk the Canon, as head of the whole Angevin race on both sides of the sea, it was to the Angevin king of England that the Angevin king of Jerusalem appealed, as a matter of right and almost of duty, for succour in his extremity.[1140] And he threw his appeal into a shape which made it indeed irresistible. Henry was at Nottingham, on his way northward to York, in the last days of January 1185, when he was stopped by tidings that two of the highest dignitaries of the Latin Church in the east, Heraclius the Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Grand Master of the Hospital, had arrived at Canterbury on a mission from Holy Land.[1141] He at once changed his course and hurried southward again to meet them at Reading.[1142] With a burst of tears Heraclius laid at the feet of the English king the royal standard of Jerusalem, the keys of the city, those of the Tower of David and of the Holy Sepulchre itself, beseeching him in Baldwin’s name to carry them back at the head of his crusading host.

- [1139] Will. Tyr., ll. xix.–xxii. l. xxi.; containing a most moving account of Baldwin. See also Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 10 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 240–247), and Bishop Stubbs’s elucidation of the whole story and its significance in his introduction to Itin. Reg. Ric., pp. lxxxi. et seq.

- [1140] “Sicut ab eo ad cujus nutum regnum Jerosolymitanum de jure hæreditario prædecessorum suorum spectabat.” Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 328.

- [1141] Ib. p. 335. They had come through France, and had been received in Paris by Philip on January 16; Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 14. They were at Canterbury on January 29, and it seems that even the Patriarch of Jerusalem, with the very keys of the Sepulchre itself in his hands, thought it well to stop and pay his devotions at the martyr’s tomb; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 325. A third envoy, the Grand Master of the Temple, had died on the way at Verona; Gesta Hen. as above, p. 331; R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 32.

- [1142] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 335; cf. R. Diceto as above. Gir. Cambr., De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 24 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 59) places the meeting at Winchester.

The whole assembly wept with the Patriarch; and the king himself was deeply moved.[1143] How many of his earlier projects of going on crusade—now to Spain, now to Holy Land, now alone, now with the king of France—had been mere political expedients, we cannot tell; there may have been more sincerity in them than one is at first disposed to imagine. Little as Henry cared for either war or adventure merely for its own sake, still there flowed in his veins, no less than in those of his young cousin Baldwin, the blood of Angevin pilgrims and crusaders. The lifelong dream of Fulk Nerra and Fulk V. may have been also the dream of Henry, although none of the three was a man to let his dreams influence his conduct until he saw a clear possibility of realizing them. Whether there was such a possibility now, however, was a question whose decision did not rest with Henry alone. If he was to head a crusade, he must head it not merely as count of Anjou but as king of England, with all England’s powers and resources, material and moral, at his back; and this could only be if England sanctioned his undertaking. The “faithful men of the land”—the bishops and barons, the constitutional representatives of the nation—were therefore gathered together in council at Clerkenwell on March 18; Henry bade them advise him as they thought best for his soul’s health, and promised to abide by their decision. After deliberation, they gave it as their unanimous judgement that he must remain at home and not venture to abandon, for the sake of giving his personal assistance in the east, the work to which he was pledged by his coronation-oath, of keeping his own realms in peace and order and securing them from external foes.[1144] Whether or not the decision thus arrived at was wise for the interests of Christendom at large—whether or not it redounds altogether to the honour of England—it was surely the highest tribute she could pay to her Angevin king. A ruler from whom his people were so unwilling to part had clearly some better hold over them than that of mere force. That they shrank with such dread from any interruption of his kingly labours is the best proof how greatly they had benefited by those labours during the past thirty years.

- [1143] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 335, 336. R. Diceto as above, pp. 32, 33. Cf. Gir. Cambr. as above (pp. 59, 60).

- [1144] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 33, 34. The author of Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 336, dates the council eight days earlier than Ralf, and finds nothing more to say about it than “cum diu tractâssent de itinere Jerosolimitanæ profectionis, tandem placuit regi et consiliariis consulere inde Philippum regem Franciæ.” But the totally independent versions of Henry’s answer to the Patriarch given by

Gir. Cambr., De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 27 (Angl. Christ. Soc., pp. 64, 65), and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 32, both distinctly support Ralf thus far, that they represent the king’s refusal as grounded on the difficulty of reconciling the proposed expedition with the fulfilment of his duty to his own realms.

The Patriarch was bitterly disappointed, and vented his disappointment upon Henry in unmeasured terms. In vain did he intreat that at least John, the only one of the king’s sons then in England, might be sent to infuse some new life into the rapidly-dying stock of the Angevin house in Palestine. John himself, it is said, was eager to go,[1145] but the king refused his consent, and six weeks later, as we have seen, despatched him as governor to Ireland. This mission failed completely, through John’s own fault. He was received with every demonstration of loyalty both by the native princes and by the English settlers; but in a very few months he contrived to set them all against him. He treated the English leaders with the most overbearing insolence; he insulted the Irish chieftains who came to bring him their loyal greetings at Waterford more brutally still, mocking at their dress and manners, and even pulling their beards;[1146] he sent the mercenaries who had accompanied him from England to make a raid upon North Munster, in which they were repulsed with great loss,[1147] and then exasperated them to mutiny by keeping them penniless while he spent their wages upon his own pleasure.[1148] By September he had brought matters to such a pass that his father was obliged to recall him and bid John de Courcy undertake the government of Ireland in his place.[1149] Henry however was far from abandoning his cherished scheme. Blinded by his fatal partiality for his youngest child, he was willing to attribute John’s failure to any cause except the true one; he determined that the lad should return to his post, but clothed with fuller powers and loftier dignity. Taking advantage of a change in the Papacy, he at once applied to the new Pope, Urban III., for leave to have his son anointed and crowned as king of Ireland. Urban not only gave his consent, but accompanied it with a gift of a crown made of peacock’s feathers set in gold.[1150] Next summer there came to England news that “a certain Irishman had cut off the head of Hugh de Lacy”;[1151] Henry, seeing in this event an opportunity of recovering for the Crown Hugh’s vast estates in Ireland, hurried John off thither at once[1152] without waiting to have him crowned, or possibly intending that the coronation should take place in Dublin. But before John had sailed, he was recalled by tidings of another death which touched his father more nearly.

- [1145] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 27 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 65).

- [1146] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. ii. c. 36 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 389).

- [1147] Four Masters, a. 1185 (O’Donovan, vol. iii. p. 67).

- [1148] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 339.

- [1149] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern. as above (p. 392).

- [1150] Gesta Hen. as above. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 306, 307.

- [1151] Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 350. Cf. ib. p. 361; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 309; Four Masters, a. 1186 (O’Donovan, vol. iii. pp. 71–75); Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. ii. c. 35 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 387); and R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 34. This last gives the day, July 25, but places the event a year too early.

- [1152] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 350.

Geoffrey of Britanny had gone to visit the French king in Paris; there, on August 19, he died.[1153] No one regretted him, unless it was his father, and Philip of France, who caused him to be buried with regal honours in the cathedral church of our Lady in Paris, and followed him to the grave with every demonstration of mourning.[1154] If report spoke true, Philip’s grief was as sincere as it was selfish; for Geoffrey had been cut off in the midst of a plot whereby he proposed, out of spite against his father and elder brother, to withdraw from them his homage for Britanny and become Philip’s liegeman, receiving in return the title of grand seneschal which in the year of his own birth had been conferred upon his father as a warrant for intervention in the affairs of the Breton duchy.[1155] Faithful servants of the English king were inclined to see in Geoffrey’s sudden end a divine judgement upon this undutiful scheme.[1156] Philip however saw a means of making his own profit out of Geoffrey’s death, quite as readily as out of his life. He at once claimed, as overlord, the wardship of the infant heiress-presumptive of Britanny—Eleanor, the only child of Geoffrey and Constance[1157]—and with it the administration of her duchy till she should be old enough to be married. Henry tried to temporize,[1158] but the longer the negotiations lasted the more complicated they became, as Philip kept increasing his demands. First Aquitaine was dragged into the dispute. Its northern portion was just now in a state of unwonted tranquillity, for at the close of the year we find Bertrand de Born complaining that he had witnessed neither siege nor battle for more than twelve months.[1159] Richard was in fact busy in the south, at war with the count of Toulouse.[1160] Against this Philip remonstrated, as an unjust aggression upon a loyal vassal of the French Crown;[1161] he added to his remonstrance a demand for Richard’s homage to himself for Aquitaine, and also—all prospect of Adela’s marriage being now apparently at an end—for the definite restitution of Gisors.[1162] While the two kings were negotiating, actual hostilities broke out between some of their constables on the border; the warlike zeal of both parties, however, died down at the approach of Christmas;[1163] Henry lingered in England to receive two papal legates who were coming to crown John as king of Ireland,[1164] but the crowning never took place; and at last, on February 17, 1187, king and legates sailed together for Normandy.[1165]

[1153] R. Diceto as above, p. 41. Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 20. Will. Armor., Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 73. The accounts of the cause of death are very conflicting. Rigord, Will. Armor. and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs, vol. i. 336) say he died of some malady not specified. Gir. Cambr., De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 10 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 34), makes him die “eodem quo et frater antea morbo acutissimo, sc. febrili calore.” The Gesta Hen. as above, and Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 309, attribute his death to injuries received in a tournament; but the Gesta, as we shall see, have an alternative version.

[1154] Gir. Cambr., Rigord and Will. Armor. as above.

[1155] Cf. Gir. Cambr. as above (pp. 33, 34), with Gesta Hen. as above, and Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 7 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 235).

[1156] Gesta Hen. as above.

[1157] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 41, says they had two daughters; but I can find no trace of a second.

[1158] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 353, 354.

[1159] Clédat, Bert. de Born, pp. 68, 69.

[1160] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 345.

[1161] R. Diceto as above, pp. 43, 44.

[1162] Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 23. Will. Armor., Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), pp. 73, 74; Philipp., l. ii. (ibid.), p. 118.

[1163] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 354, 355. R. Diceto as above, p. 44.

[1164] Cardinal Octavian and Hugh of Nonant, bishop-elect of Chester; Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 3, 4; R. Diceto (as above), p. 47. They landed at Sandwich on Christmas-eve and kept the feast at Canterbury. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 346.

[1165] The Gesta Hen. as above, p. 4, and Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 317, say they crossed together; R. Diceto as above, p. 47, to whom we owe the date of Henry’s crossing, seems to think the legates had preceded him.

When the two kings met at the Gué-St.-Rémy on April 5,[1166] little Eleanor was no longer heiress of Britanny. On Easter-day Constance had become the mother of a son, whom the Bretons, in defiance of his grandfather’s wish to bestow upon him his own name, insisted upon calling after the legendary hero of their race, Arthur[1167]—thus at once claiming him as the representative of their national existence and rights. The child’s birth made little difference in the political situation; Philip claimed the wardship of the heir of Britanny just as he had claimed that of its heiress; the conference broke up, and both parties prepared for war. Henry distributed his forces in four divisions; one of these was commanded by his eldest son, Geoffrey the chancellor, who as bishop-elect of Lincoln had given good proof of his military capacities in the revolt of 1174;—another was intrusted to the king’s faithful friend Earl William de Mandeville; the other two were commanded respectively by Richard and John, and it seems that both of these were at once sent down into Berry, where Philip was expected to begin his attack. Soon after Whitsuntide Philip advanced upon Berry,[1168] took Issoudun and Graçay, and laid siege to Châteauroux.[1169] Henry now followed his sons; the three together marched to the relief of Châteauroux, and Richard apparently succeeded in making his way into the place, where John afterwards rejoined him.[1170] For nearly a fortnight the two kings remained encamped on opposite sides of the Indre, drawing up their forces every morning for battle;[1171] but each day the battle was averted by some means or other. Now it was the mediation of the French bishops in Philip’s camp, or of the Roman legates in that of Henry;[1172] now it was a miraculous judgement upon a sacrilegious Brabantine in the French host, which scared Philip into dismissing his mercenaries;[1173] now it was the count of Flanders who, as soon as his peace with France was made, turned against the peace-maker and sought to stir Richard up to play over again the part of the young king; now it was Henry himself who opened negotiations for a truce.[1174] Finally, on Midsummer-eve,[1175] a truce was made for two years.[1176] According to Bertrand de Born, it was wrung from Philip by the discovery that the troops of Champagne, which formed a considerable part of his army, had been bought over by the English king.[1177] Its actual negotiator was Richard;[1178] and when Richard, instead of returning to his father, rode away in the closest companionship with the king of France, Henry naturally grew suspicious of the terms on which it had been won. His suspicions were confirmed when Richard, under pretence of obeying his summons to return, made his way to Chinon and there seized the contents of the Angevin treasury, which he immediately applied to the fortification of his own castles in Poitou.[1179] A partizan of Richard tells us that Philip had communicated to him a letter in which Henry proposed to make peace by marrying Adela to John and constituting the latter heir to all his dominions except England and Normandy.[1180] If this scheme really existed, it was foiled by Philip’s own act; and when Henry and his elder son met soon afterwards at Angers, their differences were apparently settled for the moment by Richard’s reinstatement in the dukedom of Aquitaine; for we are told that he not only returned to his duty, but publicly renewed his homage to the king.[1181]

[1166] Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 5.

[1167] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 48. Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 7 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 235). Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 358, 361. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 315. These two latter make the year 1186, which is nonsense, as they both expressly say that the child was posthumous.

[1168] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 6.

[1169] Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 23; Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 74; Philipp., l. ii. (ibid.), p. 119.

[1170] Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 5. Cf. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 369.

[1171] See Clédat, Bert. de Born, p. 71.

[1172] Ibid. Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 6, 7.

[1173] Cf. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 369, 370; Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), pp. 23, 24; Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 14 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 248); and Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 2 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 92).

[1174] Gerv. Cant. as above, pp. 371–373.

[1175] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 49.

[1176] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 7; R. Diceto and Gir. Cambr. as above; Rigord (as above), p. 23. Will. Armor., Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 75, and Philipp., l. ii. (ibid.), p. 120, turns the truce into an abject submission of Henry and Richard. Gerald says that one of the conditions of the truce was that Auvergne, which Philip had conquered, should remain in his hands during the period. But none of the other authorities mention Auvergne at all at this time; and Gerald’s statement seems incompatible with the French accounts of Philip’s attack upon Auvergne, as if upon a hostile country, in 1188 (Rigord, as above, p. 27; Will. Armor., ibid., pp. 74, 122). Gerald and Rigord are however almost equally untrustworthy for details, and especially for chronology.

[1177] See Clédat, Bert. de Born, pp. 71, 72.

[1178] Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 373.

[1179] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 9.

[1180] Gir. Cambr. as above (pp. 91, 92).

[1181] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 9.

All these western quarrels again sank into the background before the tidings which came from Holy Land as the year drew to a close. Heraclius had gone home from his unsuccessful mission to find Baldwin IV. delivered out of all his troubles, and his throne occupied by his infant nephew, the child of his sister Sibyl. The little king soon followed his uncle to the grave; and Sibyl, on whom the representation of the royal house thus devolved, at once bestowed her crown upon the man who had already been for six years the bravest and most successful defender of the distracted realm—her husband, Guy of Lusignan.[1182] Guy sprang from a faithless race whom the Angevins had little cause to love or trust in their western home; but in Palestine he was hated simply because he had deservedly won the affection and the confidence of both Baldwin and Sibyl. Thwarted, baffled, deserted, betrayed by envious rivals, left almost alone to face the Infidel foes whose advance grew more threatening day by day, Guy fought on till in a great battle at Tiberias, in July 1187, he was made prisoner by the Turks; the Christians were totally defeated, and the relic of the Cross, which they had carried with them to the fight, fell with the king into the hands of the unbelievers.[1183] The tidings of this disaster, when they reached Europe in October, gave the death-blow to Pope Urban III.[1184] His successor, Gregory VIII., opened his pontificate with an impassioned appeal to all Western Christendom for the rescue of the Holy Land.[1185] The first response came from the young duke of Aquitaine; without waiting to consult his father, at the earliest tidings of the catastrophe Richard took the cross at the hands of the archbishop of Tours.[1186] Henry himself was so thunderstruck at the news that for four days he suspended all state business and refused to see any one.[1187] He was in Normandy, and with him was Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, who had taken the cross two years before with the archbishop of Rouen, the veteran warrior-bishop Hugh of Durham, the justiciar Ralf de Glanville, and a crowd of other dignitaries of both Church and state, none of whom, however, had as yet actually started on their crusade. It was not King Henry who hindered them; he had given every facility for the preaching of the crusade throughout his dominions;[1188] and even in Richard’s case, although reproving the hastiness of the vow, he made no attempt to thwart its fulfilment, but on the contrary promised his son every assistance in his power.[1189] Richard’s project, however, roused up the king of France to insist once more upon his immediate marriage with Adela, or, failing this, the restitution of Gisors; and Henry, on his way to England in January 1188, was recalled by tidings that Philip had gathered his host and was threatening to invade Normandy unless his demands were granted at once. The kings met at the old trysting-place between Gisors and Trie;[1190] but their conference had scarcely begun when it was interrupted by another messenger from Palestine, charged with news of a catastrophe more awful than even that of Tiberias. Three months after Guy’s capture, in October 1187, Jerusalem itself had fallen into the hands of the Infidels;[1191] and the archbishop of Tyre now came to tell with his own lips the sad and shameful story.

[1182] Ib.·/·Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 358, 359.

[1183] According to the pathetic story in Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), p. 15, it was rather the king who fell with the Cross, in a desperate effort to save it. See also Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 13, 22, 37; R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 21; Expugn. Terræ Sanctæ (ibid.), pp. 209–227.

[1184] Cf. Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 21 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 267), and Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 24.

[1185] Will. Newb. as above. See also Gesta Hen. as above, p. 15, and Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 322.

[1186] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 50. Cf. Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 23 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 271). Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 5 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 98).

[1187] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 389.

[1188] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 302.

[1189] Will. Newb. as above.

[1190] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 29. Rog. Howden as above, p. 334. R. Diceto as above, p. 51. Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 406. Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 24. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 74. The date is either S. Hilary’s day, January 13 (Rigord and Will. Armor.), or that of S. Agnes, January 21 (Gesta Hen., Rog. Howden and R. Diceto). Gerv. Cant. makes it “about S. Vincent’s day” (January 22).

[1191] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 24. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 22, 23. Expugn. Terræ Sanctæ (ibid.), pp. 241–248. Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 20–22.

In his presence the selfish quarrel of the two kings was shamed into silence. The king of France took the cross at once, and the king of England followed his example, this time without waiting for his people’s consent; the archbishops of Reims and Rouen, the counts of Flanders, Burgundy, Blois and Champagne, and a crowd of French and Norman barons did the like.[1192] The two kings set up a wooden cross, afterwards replaced by a church, to mark the spot, which they called the “Holy Field”;[1193] then they separated to make their preparations. Henry at once sent to request a safe-conduct for himself and his troops through the dominions of the king of Hungary and those of the Western and Eastern Emperors.[1194] Before the end of the month he issued from Le Mans an ordinance known as that of the “Saladin tithe,” requiring every man in his dominions to give towards the expenses of the crusade a tithe of all his personal property, excepting only the necessary outfit of a knight or a priest.[1195] This was accompanied by eight other ordinances also relating to the crusade,[1196] and was imitated two months later in France by Philip Augustus.[1197] On January 30 Henry returned to England;[1198] on February 11 he met the bishops and barons in council at Geddington near Northampton, to obtain their assent to the Saladin tithe and make arrangements for its collection.[1199] It was chiefly to superintend this that the king remained in England, while the archbishop of Canterbury went to preach the crusade in Wales.[1200]

- [1192] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 51. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 30. Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 23 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 272). Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 406. Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 25.

- [1193] Rigord, as above.

- [1194] R. Diceto as above, pp. 51–54.

- [1195] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 31. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 335, 336. Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 160.

- [1196] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 31, 32. Rog. Howden as above, pp. 336, 337. These latter ordinances were issued in all Christian realms by the Pope’s desire; see Will. Newb. as above (pp. 273, 274).

- [1197] Rigord (as above), pp. 25, 26.

- [1198] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 33. Gerv. Cant. as above.

- [1199] Gerv. Cant. as above, pp. 409, 410 (we are indebted to him for place and date). Gesta Hen. as above.

- [1200] Henry seems to have intended going to Wales himself, but to have given it up and sent the archbishop instead—an exchange which Baldwin gladly accepted, as he was at feud with his chapter, and greatly relieved to get away from it. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 419–421.

Meanwhile Richard was eager to start without delay; but his father refused his consent, insisting that their expedition should be made in common. The impatient “Lion-heart,” however, was not to be thus restrained, and in his father’s absence he made all his preparations and wrote to bespeak the aid of his brother-in-law William of Sicily for the voyage which he was determined to begin as soon as the summer should arrive.[1201] But his plans were checked by a fresh rising of the Poitevin barons, headed as usual by the count of Angoulême, Geoffrey of Rancogne and Geoffrey of Lusignan.[1202] This last was the worst offender, having treacherously slain a personal friend of Richard’s.[1203] But, like Richard himself, he had taken the cross; and it was doubtless owing to this protection that, before the summer was over, he was suffered to make his escape to the realm of his hapless brother in Palestine.[1204] The other rebels were scarcely put down when Raymond of Toulouse seized and cruelly maltreated some Poitevin merchants who were passing through his territory. Richard at once avenged this outrage by an armed raid upon the frontier-districts of Toulouse, and presently managed to catch and imprison the count’s chief adviser Peter Seilun, who was said to have instigated the seizure of the merchants. Raymond retaliated by capturing two knights attached to the household of the English king, Robert Poer and Ralf Fraser, on their way back from a pilgrimage to Compostella; and neither Richard’s protest against the sacrilege of keeping pilgrims in prison, nor even the express command of the king of France for their liberation out of reverence to S. James, could induce him to give them up on any condition save the release of Peter Seilun, which Richard firmly refused.[1205] A heavy ransom offered by the two English captives themselves shortly afterwards changed Raymond’s determination;[1206] but this was of course no satisfaction to Richard, and after Whitsuntide he again invaded Toulouse with fire and sword; castle after castle fell into his hands, till at last he began to threaten the capital itself.[1207]

- [1201] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 7 (Angl. Christ. Soc., pp. 102, 103).

- [1202] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 34.

- [1203] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 54.

- [1204] Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), p. 26.

- [1205] Gesta Hen. (as above), pp. 34, 35. Cf. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 339, 340. The date of this expedition of Richard’s against Toulouse seems to have been about April; see Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 74.

- [1206] Rog. Howden. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 340.

- [1207] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 36. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 55. This last writer says that Richard took seventeen castles, but he must be counting in those which had been taken in the spring. The date of this second expedition comes from Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 27, who places it between Pentecost and midsummer. The new editors of Vic and Vaissète, Hist. du Languedoc, vol. vii. p. 22, charge Rigord with false chronology here, and insist upon following (as they suppose) that of Will. Armor., who tells us that Richard began his campaign against Toulouse “modico elapso tempore” after the Mid-Lenten council at Paris (Gesta Phil. Aug., Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v. p. 74). If, however, they had read the English authorities more carefully, they would have seen that there were really two campaigns, and that while Will. Armor. speaks of the first, Rigord is speaking of the second.

In Aquitaine even more than elsewhere, the beginning of strife was like the letting-out of water. This time the strife of Richard and Raymond led to the outbursting of a flood which ended by overspreading the whole Angevin dominions and sweeping away Henry Fitz-Empress himself. If Richard’s story was true, neither he nor Raymond was the real originator of the mischief; it was Philip of France who had secretly urged him to the attack;[1208] while another rumour, which Richard was only too ready to believe, accused Henry himself of stirring up the count of Toulouse and the Aquitanian rebels against his son, in order to prevent him from starting on the Crusade.[1209] Little as we can credit such a tale, it is easy to imagine how dexterously Philip would use it to sow dissensions between father and son and entangle the impetuous Richard in a coil such as only the sword could cut. Openly, meanwhile, Philip was taking the part of Toulouse, and peremptorily insisting that Henry should put a stop to his son’s aggressions in that quarter.[1210] Without waiting for Henry’s reply, he marched upon Berry and laid siege to Châteauroux, which surrendered to him on June 16.[1211] It was now Henry’s turn to remonstrate against this breach of truce, all the more flagrant because committed against a brother-crusader. He knew however that nothing but his own presence could make his remonstrances of any avail; sending John over before him, on the night of July 10 he hurried across the sea to Barfleur, and thence went to muster his forces at Alençon.[1212] They consisted of the feudal levies of England and Normandy, and a multitude of Welsh under the command of Ralf de Glanville,[1213] together with some Bretons and Flemish mercenaries,[1214] and apparently some Angevins and Cenomannians.[1215] Henry was however very unwilling to resort to force; his old scruple about making war upon his overlord seems not to have been yet quite extinguished, and moreover he shrank alike from the bloodshed and the expense of war. During some weeks his forces were still kept idle, save for an occasional plundering-raid across the French border.[1216] Philip meanwhile was carrying all before him in Berry, and having conquered nearly the whole district, made a dash upon Auvergne.[1217] Richard seized the opportunity for an attempt to regain Châteauroux, in which however he failed, and was only saved from capture or death by the help of a friendly butcher.[1218] His advance however had been enough to make Philip retire into his own domains.[1219] Soon afterwards the approach of the vintage-season compelled the French king to disband a part of his forces; the remainder, under command of the bishop of Beauvais, went to ravage the Norman frontier-lands. Henry demanded reparation, and threatened to cast off his allegiance in default of it; Philip retorted that he would not cease from the warfare which he had begun till all Berry and the Vexin were in his hands.[1220] At last, in the middle of August, the two kings met in person once more between Gisors and Trie; but the meeting broke up in anger; and when they parted, Philip in his rage cut down the great elm tree under which the conferences between the rulers of France and Normandy had so long been held, vowing that no conference should ever be held there again.[1221]

[1208] Rog. Howden as above·/·(Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 340. Cf. Gesta Hen. as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 39.

[1209] R. Diceto as above·/·(Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 55. Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 7 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 103).

[1210] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 36.

[1211] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 55. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 432, seems to have confused this siege of Châteauroux with an earlier one. Cf. Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 25 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 276), Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 27, and Will. Armor., Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 74.

[1212] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 40. Cf. Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 433.

R. Diceto (as above) dates the king’s crossing “circa festum S. Jacobi,” but this is clearly wrong.

[1213] Gesta Hen. as above.

[1214] R. Diceto as above.

[1215] Rog. Howden (Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 343) adds some troops “from his other lands.”

[1216] Gerv. Cant. as above, pp. 433, 434.

[1217] Rigord as above. Will. Armor. as above; Philipp., l. iii. (ibid.), p. 122. Both these writers however throw some suspicion upon their account of Philip’s successes by saying that Henry was flying before him all the while, and was finally chased back by him into Normandy—which in reality it seems plain that he had never quitted.

[1218] Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 434.

[1219] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 45.

[1220] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 45, 46.

[1221] According to R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 55, the conference began on August 16 and lasted three days. The Gesta Hen. as above, p. 47, place it after September 1, but this is impossible. Will. Armor., Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 74, and Philipp., l. iii. (ibid.) pp. 123, 124, tells the story of the tree in a very odd shape. He says the English were sitting comfortably under its shade, while the French were broiling in the sun, and the French grew so envious of the more agreeable situation of their foes that they made a dash at them, put them to flight, and then cut down the tree, which Henry had caused to be carefully enclosed, as a sort of symbol of his ownership in the soil. R. Diceto, however, says that the ground on which the tree stood was French.

Richard had now rejoined his father,[1222] and at his instigation an attack was made by their united forces upon Mantes, which was occupied by a small French force under William des Barres, lately the commandant of Châteauroux. Richard succeeded in avenging his recent mishap at Châteauroux by taking William prisoner, but he made his escape immediately, and nothing was gained by the expedition.[1223] Richard again went into Berry; Henry lingered on the Norman border, where soon afterwards he received from Philip a demand for another conference. It took place at Châtillon on October 7, but again without result. Philip now followed Richard, who thereupon opened negotiations on his own account, offering to submit his quarrel with Toulouse to the judgement of the French king’s court;[1224] but this also came to nothing. Still the negotiations went on, and Henry’s difficulties were increasing. Chief among them was the want of money to pay his soldiers. His realms had been almost drained for the Saladin tithe; his own treasury was exhausted; his troops, seeing no prospect of either wages or plunder, began to slip away; and at last he was obliged to disband his mercenaries and send his Welsh auxiliaries back to their own country.[1225] Philip meanwhile was secretly in communication with Richard;[1226] and Richard was growing eager to bring matters to a crisis. The insidious whispers of France and Flanders had done their work in his too credulous mind. To the end of his life Richard was but little of a statesman and less of a diplomatist; it is therefore no wonder that he failed on the one hand to fathom the subtle policy of his father, and on the other to see through the wiles of Philip. His fault lay in this—that while Henry’s servants were content to trust him where they could not understand him, his own son was ready to find a ground of suspicion in every word and action of his father’s for which his own intelligence was incapable of accounting, and to credit every calumny reported to him by his father’s enemies. More than a year ago they had contrived, as has been seen, to awaken in his mind an idea that he was in danger of being disinherited in favour of his youngest brother; and it was with a determination to ascertain once for all the extent of this danger that he brought the two kings to a meeting with each other and with himself near Bonmoulins on November 18.[1227]

- [1222] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 10 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 111), makes them meet before Châteauroux. He has confused this campaign with that of the previous year.

- [1223] Cf. Gesta Hen. as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 46, with Will. Armor. Philipp., l. iii. (as above·/·Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), pp. 124–132.

- [1224] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 46, 48, 49.

- [1225] Ib. p. 50. Cf. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 434, 435.

- [1226] Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 435.

- [1227] Ibid. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 57. Gesta Hen. as above.

The conference lasted three days; and each day the prospect of peace grew fainter.[1228] Philip proposed that all parties should return to the position which they had occupied before taking the cross; Henry was ready to close with this proposition, but Richard rejected it, as it would have compelled him to give up his conquests won from Toulouse and worth a thousand marks or more as demesne lands, in exchange for Châteauroux and a few other castles over which he would have had only a precarious overlordship.[1229] As far as the two kings were concerned, the meeting ended in a simple truce between them, to last till S. Hilary’s day. No sooner however was this settled than Philip offered to restore all his conquests on condition that Henry should cause his subjects to do homage to Richard as his heir, and should allow his marriage with Adela to take place immediately. Henry refused.[1230] The two kings were standing, with Richard and the archbishop of Reims, in the midst of a crowded ring of spectators. Richard himself now suddenly turned to his father, and demanded to be distinctly acknowledged as heir to all his dominions. Henry tried to put him off; he repeated his demand with the same result. “Now,” he exclaimed, “I believe what hitherto seemed to me incredible.” Ungirding his sword, he stretched out his hands to the king of France and offered him his homage and fealty for the whole continental heritage of the Angevin house; an offer which Philip readily accepted, promising in return to give back to Richard his recent conquests in Berry.[1231] Henry drew back, speechless with amazement and consternation; the crowd, seeing the two kings thus separated, rushed in between them, and the duke of Aquitaine rode away in company with the French king, leaving Henry alone with his recollections of all the evils which had come of his eldest son’s alliance with Louis VII., and his forebodings of worse mischief to come from this new alliance with Philip, who, as he well knew, was far more dangerous than Louis had ever been; for he had more brains and even fewer scruples.[1232]

- [1228] Gerv. Cant. as above.

- [1229] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 58.

- [1230] Ibid. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 435. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 50.

- [1231] Gerv. Cant. as above, pp. 435, 436. R. Diceto and Gesta Hen. as above. Cf. Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 27, and Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 10 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 111).

- [1232] Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 436.

What little could be done to ward off the impending danger Henry did without delay. He sent the only one of his sons on whom he could really depend, Geoffrey the chancellor, to secure the fortresses of Anjou; he himself went to do the like in Aquitaine,[1233] whence he returned to keep Christmas at Saumur. The feast must have been a dreary one, even if both Geoffrey and John were with him; yet, deserted as he was, he managed to collect, for the last time, some semblance of the old regal state.[1234] When the truce expired, however, he postponed his intended meeting with Philip, on the plea of illness, first to Candlemas-day, and then till after Easter. He hoped to make use of the delay for winning Richard back; but Richard turned a deaf ear to every message of conciliation.[1235] He had in fact joined Philip in an attack upon Henry’s territories as soon as the truce was expired; and the ever-discontented Bretons had been induced to lend their aid.[1236] After Easter Richard was at length brought to a meeting with his father, on the borders of Anjou and Maine; but nothing came of the interview.[1237] In vain did the Pope, fearing that these quarrels in Gaul would put a stop to the crusade, send two legates in succession to make peace. The first, Henry of Albano, who was sent early in 1188 to mediate between Henry and Louis, unintentionally became the indirect cause of a further addition to Henry’s troubles. Thinking it safer to postpone his mediation till the meeting of the two kings should take place, he in the meantime went to preach the crusade in Germany and there persuaded the Emperor himself to take the cross.[1238] By May 1189 Frederic was ready to start;[1239] but before doing so he took a stern and summary measure to secure the peace of the Empire during his absence. He ordered all those princes and nobles whose loyalty he suspected either to accompany him or to quit the country and take an oath not to set foot in it again till his return. Among those who thus incurred banishment was Henry the Lion. For the second time he and his wife sought shelter in England; not finding the king there, they crossed over to Normandy in search of him,[1240] but it does not appear that they ever reached him where he lay, sick and weary, at Le Mans.[1241] Meanwhile Henry of Albano, after anathematizing Richard for his disturbance of the peace, had withdrawn to Flanders and there died.[1242] His mission was taken up with a somewhat firmer hand by another legate, John of Anagni. Reaching Le Mans at Ascension-tide 1189,[1243] John at once excommunicated all troublers of the peace except the two kings themselves, who were made to promise that they would submit their quarrels to his arbitration and that of the archbishops of Reims, Bourges, Canterbury and Rouen, and were threatened with excommunication if they should fail to redeem their promise.[1244]

- [1233] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 436.

- [1234] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 60, 61.

- [1235] Gerv. Cant. as above, pp. 438, 439.

- [1236] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 61.

- [1237] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 13 (Angl. Christ. Soc., pp. 116, 117).

- [1238] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 355, 356.

- [1239] He took the cross at Mainz on March 27, 1188, and started on May 10, 1189. Ansbert (Dobrowsky), pp. 18, 21.

- [1240] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 62.

- [1241] The duchess died in that very summer, seven days after her father according to R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 65, or nine days before him according to the Chron. Stederburg (Leibnitz, Scriptt. Rer. Brunswic., vol. i. p. 861).

- [1242] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 51, 55, 56. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 355.

- [1243] Epp. Cant. cccvii. (Stubbs), p. 290.

- [1244] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 61.

On the basis of this agreement a conference was held on Trinity Sunday, June 4, at La Ferté-Bernard. There were present, besides the two kings, Richard, and the legate, the four archbishops who were to assist him as arbitrators, most of the Norman bishops, those of Angers and Le Mans, four English and several French prelates, and a crowd of French, English and Norman barons.[1245] Philip began by again demanding that Adela and Richard should be married at once; that Richard should have security given him for his succession to his father’s dominions; and that John should be made to take the cross and accompany his brother to Palestine.[1246] Richard repeated these demands for himself.[1247] Henry refused, and made a counter-proposition to Philip—the same which he was said to have made at Châteauroux two years ago, for Adela’s marriage with John; but this Philip rejected in his turn.[1248] The legate now interposed with a threat to Philip that unless he would come to terms, his domains should be laid under interdict; Philip defied the threat, and charged the legate with having been bribed by English gold.[1249] This explosion of course broke up the meeting.[1250] Henry went back to Le Mans, whence neither bishop nor archbishop, servant nor friend, could persuade him to move,[1251] although Philip and Richard with their united forces were overrunning Maine at their will. In five days the principal castles of its eastern portion were in their hands; one of the most important, Ballon, only fifteen miles from Le Mans, fell on June 9. There the conquerors paused for three days;[1252] and there, probably, they received the submission of the chief nobles of the western border—Geoffrey of Mayenne, Guy of Laval, Ralf of Fougères.[1253] But while the barons were false, the citizens were true. Le Mans still clung with unswerving loyalty to the count whom she looked upon as her own child; and Henry clung with equal attachment to the city which held his father’s grave and had held his own cradle.[1254] He had little else to cling to now. Where John was it is impossible to say; he was clearly not at Le Mans; and it is certain that, wherever he may have been, his proceedings were wholly unknown to Henry.[1255] Geoffrey the chancellor was still at his father’s side, and so were some half-dozen faithful barons, as well as Archbishop Bartholomew of Tours.[1256] Beyond these the king had nothing but a small force of mercenaries wherewith to defend either himself or Le Mans. The citizens were however willing to stand a siege for his sake, and he in return had promised never to desert them.[1257]

[1245] Ib.·/·Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 66. The English bishops were Lincoln, Ely, Rochester and Chester.

[1246] Ibid. Rog. Howden as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 362.

[1247] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 447.

[1248] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 363.

[1249] Ibid. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 66.

[1250] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 62, says there were two meetings at La Ferté “after Easter.” There seems to be no other notice of the second; but Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 446, 447, has an account of a conference at Le Mans on June 9, which agrees almost to the letter with the report given in the Gesta Hen. and Rog. Howden of the proceedings at La Ferté on June 4. It seems most unlikely that either Philip or Richard would go to a conference at Le Mans itself; and June 9 is an impossible date, for by that time, as we shall see, the war was in full career, and Philip and Richard were actually besieging Ballon. Gervase has probably mistaken both place and date.

[1251] R. Diceto as above, p. 63.

[1252] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 67.

[1253] R. Diceto as above.

[1254] Gesta Hen. as above.

[1255] Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 25 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 277), says, after the king’s retreat from Le Mans, “Tunc Johannes filius ejus minimus, quem tenerrime diligebat, recessit ab eo.” But it is almost impossible that all the contemporary historians should have failed to mention John’s presence with his father if he had really been there; and Henry’s horrified surprise at the final discovery of John’s treachery shews that there had been no open desertion such as William seems to imply.

[1256] Besides Bartholomew (whom most of the English writers of the time call William) there had been with him throughout the spring the archbishops of Canterbury and Rouen; Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 13 (Angl. Christ. Soc., pp. 115, 116). It is clear that Bartholomew stayed with him to the end, for he buried him. But we hear nothing more of either Baldwin of Canterbury or Walter of Rouen, except that Baldwin was at Rouen two or three days before Henry’s death; Epp. Cant. cccxi. (Stubbs), p. 296. See Bishop Stubbs’s preface to Rog. Howden, vol. ii. p. lxi, note 1. Of the laymen more later.

[1257] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 67.

On S. Barnabas’s day—Sunday, June 11—Philip and Richard appeared with their host before Le Mans. They made a feint of passing on in the direction of Tours; but next morning Philip suddenly drew up his forces under the walls and prepared for an assault. The defenders, conscious of the overwhelming odds against them, adopted the desperate remedy of setting fire to the suburbs. Unhappily, the wind carried the flames not into the enemy’s lines but into the city itself.[1258] The French saw their opportunity and rushed at the bridge; a gallant, though unsuccessful, attempt to break it down was made by some of Henry’s troops, headed by a Cenomannian knight, Geoffrey of Brulon, who thus honourably wiped out the memory of his rebellion of sixteen years before; after a desperate fight, Geoffrey was wounded and made prisoner with a number of his comrades, and the rest were driven back into the city, the French rushing in after them.[1259] Then at last Henry felt that he could not keep his promise to the citizens of Le Mans, and with some seven hundred knights he took to flight.[1260] The French hurried in pursuit, but they did not carry it far. It may be that Geoffrey of Brulon’s effort to break down the bridge saved the king although it could not save the city; for the French are said to have been checked in their pursuit by the impossibility of fording the river,[1261] and one can scarcely help conjecturing that the fugitives had crossed by the half-undermined bridge, and that it fell as soon as they had passed over it.[1262]

- [1258] Ibid.·/·Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 67 R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 63. Gir. Cambr. as above,·/· De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 24 (Angl. Christ. Soc. p. 137). Cf. Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 25 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 277).

- [1259] Gesta Hen. as above.

- [1260] Ibid. Cf. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 447; R. Diceto and Will. Newb. as above; Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 138); Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 28; and Will. Armor., Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 75.

- [1261] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 68.

- [1262] This is suggested by Bishop Stubbs’s remark about “the breaking down of the bridge.” Rog. Howden, vol. ii. pref. p. lxii.

Geoffrey however was not the only baron who after siding with Henry’s enemies in his prosperous days had learned to stand by him in his last hour of need. Besides his one faithful son, Geoffrey the chancellor, his old friend Earl William de Mandeville, and William Fitz-Ralf the seneschal of Normandy, Henry was accompanied in his flight by an English baron, William the Marshal. William’s father, John, who seems to have been marshal successively to Henry I. and to Stephen, had married a sister of Patrick of Salisbury and, like his brother-in-law, espoused the cause of the Empress in the civil war.[1263] William himself first appears in history at the age of about six years, in 1152, when he was placed as a hostage in the hands of Stephen. Twice his life was forfeited by his father’s defiance of the king, and twice it was saved by the unconscious fearlessness of the child, which so won Stephen’s heart that he ended by making himself the little fellow’s playmate instead of his slayer.[1264] John’s services to the Empress were rewarded on Henry’s accession by his reinstatement in the office of marshal; he afterwards became notorious through his quarrel with Thomas of Canterbury, which formed one of the pretexts for the archbishop’s condemnation at Northampton.[1265] After John’s death his title and office seem to have been shared by his two sons.[1266] The second, William, we find in 1173 among the partizans of the young king’s rebellion; ten years later he appears as the young king’s best-beloved knight, and as charged by him with the last office of friendship, the accomplishment in his stead of the crusading vow which he had not lived to fulfil.[1267] Six years afterwards, however, William was still in Europe, ready to stand to the last by another perishing king, and to take the post of honour as well as of danger among the little band of faithful servants who watched over the last days of Henry Fitz-Empress. It was William who brought up the rear of the little force which covered Henry’s retreat from Le Mans. Turning round as he heard the pursuers close behind him, he suddenly found himself face to face with Richard, and levelled his spear at him without hesitation. “God’s feet, marshal!” cried Richard with his wonted oath, “slay me not! I have no hauberk.” “Slay you! no; I leave that to the devil,” retorted William, plunging his spear into the horse’s body instead of the rider’s.[1268] Richard was of course compelled to abandon the chase, and at a distance of some two miles from Le Mans the king felt himself sufficiently out of danger to pause on the brow of a hill whence he could look back for the last time upon his native city. As he saw its blazing ruins words of madness burst from his lips: “O God, Thou hast shamefully taken from me this day the city which I loved most on earth, in which I was born and bred, where lies the body of my father and that of his patron saint—I will requite Thee as I can; I will withdraw from Thee that thing in me for which Thou carest the most.”[1269] Another eighteen miles’[1270] ride brought the fugitives at nightfall to La Frênaye,[1271] whose lord, the viscount of Beaumont, was a kinsman of Henry, and the father of Hermengard whose marriage with the king of Scots had been arranged three years ago by Henry’s influence. The king found shelter in the castle; his followers, already sadly diminished in number in consequence of the overpowering heat and fatigue of the day’s ride, quartered themselves in the little town as best they could; the chancellor would have remained with them to keep guard himself, but his father would not be parted from him, and made him come in to sup and spend the night. Geoffrey, whose baggage had been all left in Le Mans, was glad to exchange his travel-stained clothes for some which his father was able to lend him; Henry, with characteristic disregard of such details, persisted in lying down to rest just as he was, with his son’s cloak thrown over him for a coverlet.[1272]

- [1263] See extracts from Hist. de Guillaume le Maréchal, vv. 23–398, in Romania, vol. xi. (1882), pp. 47–52.

- [1264] Hist. de Guill. le Mar., vv. 399–654 (as above, pp. 52–55).

- [1265] See above, pp. 32, 33.

- [1266] They seem to have both officiated at the crowning of Richard. Gesta Ric. (Stubbs, “Benedict of Peterborough,” vol. ii.), p. 81.

- [1267] See above, pp. 139 and 228.

- [1268] P. Meyer, in Romania, vol. xi. pp. 62, 63, from Hist. de Guill. le Mar., vv. 8833–8836. This is clearly the incident recorded briefly and without a name by Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 25 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 140).

- [1269] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 24 (p. 138). He makes the distance two miles from Le Mans; in the Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 67, the pursuit is said to have extended to three miles.

- [1270] Will. Armor. Philipp., l. iii. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 132, makes the day’s ride twenty miles altogether; but he carries it as far as Alençon. See, however, Bishop Stubbs’s pref. to Rog. Howden, vol. ii. pp. lxii, lxiii and notes.

- [1271] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 25 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 140); Vita Galfr., l. i. c. 4 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 369). See Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. ii. pref. p. lxiii, note 5.

- [1272] Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr. as above.

From La Frênaye another day’s ride would have brought the king to the Norman border. His first intention on leaving Le Mans had evidently been to fall back upon Normandy and there rally his forces—doubtless also to summon help from England—to renew the struggle with Philip; and this was the course to which his followers still urged him on the Tuesday morning. He, however, had changed his plans in the night. He seems to have made up his mind that his end was near; and in consequence, he had also made up his mind to go back to the Angevin lands. Since he had been compelled to leave his own birthplace in the enemy’s power, he would at any rate stand to the last by the old home of his father’s house, and die at his hereditary post as count of Anjou. He made William Fitz-Ralf and William de Mandeville swear that they would surrender the castles of Normandy to no one save John; he bade Geoffrey take the command of the troops, escort the barons with them as far as Alençon, and then come back to rejoin him in Anjou. Geoffrey, whose dominant feeling clearly was anxiety for his father’s personal safety, only stayed in Alençon long enough to secure the place and collect a fresh force of a hundred picked knights, and with these set off southward again to overtake his father. Henry meanwhile had started for Anjou almost alone. His son rejoined him at Savigny[1273]—whether it was the village of that name near Chinon, or one of several others further north, there is no means of deciding; but it is certain that by the end of the month Henry and his son were both safe at Chinon.[1274] Whether the king had made his way alone, or whether he had been at once the leader and the guide of the little Norman force, through the Angevin woodlands which as a hunter he had learned to know so well, and where he was now in danger of being hunted down in his turn—in either case this sick and weary man had achieved an adventure equal in skill and daring to those of Fulk Nerra’s most romantic days, or of his own youth. Once safe out of the enemy’s reach, he made no further movement until Philip, having possessed himself of the citadel of Le Mans[1275] and the remnant of the Cenomannian strongholds, and made his way southward by Chaumont and Amboise as far as Roche-Corbon,[1276] sent him a proposal for a meeting to be held at Azay on the last day of June.[1277] Henry apparently advanced from Chinon to Azay; but on that very day an attack of fever was added to the malady from which he was already suffering, and he was unable to attend the conference.[1278] It seems probable that he sent representatives to whom Philip and Richard made their propositions, and who may possibly have accepted them in his name.[1279] Certainly, however, no truce was made; for that same day Philip marched up to the southern bank of the Loire and drew up his host opposite the gates of Tours.[1280] Next day he forded the river—an easy exploit when it was half dried up by the summer’s heat[1281]—established his headquarters in the “borough of S. Martin” or Châteauneuf,[1282] and began to invest the city.[1283] Henry, it seems, had now gone to Saumur;[1284] there on the Sunday—July 2—he was visited, according to one account at his own request, by the archbishop of Reims, the count of Flanders and the duke of Burgundy, endeavouring to arrange terms of peace.[1285] The visit was a failure; it could not be otherwise, for the peacemakers were acting without Philip’s sanction, and in spite of a distinct warning from him that, whatever tidings they might bring back, he would assault Tours next morning.[1286] The morning came; the assault was made; the walls which had kept out Fulk Nerra and Geoffrey Martel could not avail to keep out Philip Augustus, enabled as he was by his possession of Châteauneuf and by the lack of water in the Loire to bring up his machines against their weakest side; and in a few hours he was master of Tours.[1287]

[1273] Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. i. c. 4 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 369). See Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. ii. pref. pp. lxiv, lxv and notes.

[1274] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 68.

[1275] Some of Henry’s troops had thrown themselves into the citadel, and held out there for three days after his flight. Gesta Hen. as above. Another body of troops in a tower by the north gate (this must be the Conqueror’s Mont-Barbet—the “citadel” being the old palace or castle of the counts, near the cathedral) held out for a week longer still. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 63.

[1276] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 69.

[1277] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 25 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 140). R. Diceto, as above, p. 64, makes the day June 28; Bishop Stubbs (Rog. Howden, vol. ii. pref. p. lxv) follows Gerald.

[1278] Gir. Cambr. as above.

[1279] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 365, 366, gives, with the date “circa festum apostolorum Petri et Pauli, ad colloquium inter Turonim et Azai,” a treaty identical with that which the Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 69, 70, give without any date at all, but after Philip’s capture of Tours, and which we know to have been finally made at Colombières on July 4 (see below, p. 265). R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 63, also gives the substance of the treaty, adding (p. 64): “Facta sunt autem hæc in vigiliâ Apostolorum Petri et Pauli, scilicet inter Turonim et Azai.” It seems possible that the terms were arranged at Azay between Philip and Henry’s representatives, subject to ratification by Henry himself. See Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. ii. pref. p. lxv.

[1280] On the date see Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. ii. pref. p. lxvi and note.

[1281] This is the English account; Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 69, copied by Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 364. But the French writers turn it into something very like a miracle. See Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 28; Will. Armor., Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 75, and Philipp., l. iii. (ibid.), p. 133.

[1282] Gesta Hen. as above.

[1283] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., l. iii. c. 25 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 140) says the investment began on the morrow of the Azay conference.

[1284] Gesta Hen. as above. See Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. ii. pref. p. lxvi and note.

[1285] Gesta Hen. as above. Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 141). For the duke of Burgundy Gerald substitutes the count of Blois. Bishop Stubbs (Rog. Howden, as above) adopts the former version.

[1286] Gesta Hen. as above.

[1287] Ibid. Cf. Rigord and Will. Armor. as above, and Philipp. l. iii. (ibid.), pp. 133, 134.

The tidings were carried at once to Henry, with a final summons to meet the conqueror at Colombières, half-way between Tours and Azay.[1288] Henry, at his wits’ end, consulted William the Marshal as to whether or not he should respond to the summons; William recommended him to follow the counsel of his barons; they advised that he should go, and he went. Most of his followers went with him; Geoffrey, however, feeling that he could not endure to see his father’s humiliation, besought and obtained permission to remain where he was.[1289] Henry found a lodging in a small commandery of Knights Templars at Ballan,[1290] close to Colombières; but he had no sooner reached it than he was seized with racking pains in every limb and every nerve. He again called for William the Marshal, who did his best to soothe him, and persuaded him to go to bed. Philip and Richard had always refused to believe that his sickness was anything but a feint, and despite the pleadings of his friends they still insisted that the conference should take place[1291] on the following day.[1292] When they saw him, however, they were compelled to admit the truth of his excuse; his sternly-set and colourless face shewed but too plainly how acutely he was suffering. So evident was his weakness that they offered him a seat—on a cloak spread upon the ground—but he refused it; he had not come there, he said, to sit down with them; he had come simply to hear and see what the French king demanded of him, and why he had taken away his lands.[1293] Philip formulated his demands with brutal bluntness; he required that Henry should put himself, as a conquered enemy, entirely at his mercy before he would discuss any terms at all.[1294] Henry could not at once bring himself to submit. Suddenly, amid the breathless stillness of the sultry July morning, a clap of thunder was heard, and the excited bystanders thought they actually saw a stroke of lightning fall out of the cloudless blue sky, directly between the two kings. Both started back in terror; after a while they rode forward again, and immediately there was a second peal of thunder. Henry’s shattered nerves gave way completely; he nearly fell from his horse, and at once placed himself wholly at Philip’s mercy.[1295] Then the terms were dictated to him. He was made to do homage to Philip, and to promise that Adela should be placed under guardians chosen by Richard, who was to marry her on his return from Palestine;—that Richard should receive the fealty of all the barons of the Angevin dominions, on both sides of the sea, and that all who had attached themselves to Richard’s party in the late war should be suffered to remain in his service and released from their obligations to his father, at any rate until the latter should be ready to set forth on the crusade;—that he would be thus ready, and would meet Philip and Richard at Vézelay, thence to start with them at Mid-Lent;[1296]—that he would renounce all claims upon Auvergne,[1297] and pay Philip an indemnity of twenty thousand marks.[1298] As security for the fulfilment of the treaty, Philip and Richard were to hold in pledge either three castles on the Norman border or two in Anjou, with the cities of Tours and Le Mans; and all Henry’s barons were to swear that they would hold their allegiance to him contingent only upon his fulfilment of these conditions.[1299] Finally, he was compelled to acknowledge himself reconciled with Richard, and to give him the kiss of peace. The kiss was indeed given; but it was accompanied by a whisper which Richard did not scruple to repeat for the amusement of the French court when the conference was over—“May I only be suffered to live long enough to take vengeance upon thee as thou deservest!”[1300]

[1288] Hist. de Guill. le Mar., vv. 8935–8944 (Romania, vol. xi. p. 64). The name of Colombières is given only by Will. Armor., Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 75, and Philipp., l. iii. (ibid.), p. 134.

[1289] Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. i. c. 5 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 370).

[1290] Hist. de Guill. le Mar., vv. 8947–8958 (as above). M. Meyer (ib. p. 69) supplies the name of the commandery.

[1291] Ib. vv. 8960–8997 (as above, p. 64).

[1292] Will. Armor. Philipp., l. iii. (as above), gives the date by saying Henry died “post triduum.”

[1293] Hist. de Guill. le Mar., vv. 9013–9028 (as above, p. 65).

[1294] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 25 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 141).

[1295] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 366.

[1296] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 70.

[1297] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 64.

[1298] Ib. p. 63. Gesta Hen. as above.

[1299] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 70, 71.

[1300] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 26 (Angl. Christ. Soc., pp. 149, 150).

One thing alone Henry asked and obtained in return for all this humiliation; a written list of those among his subjects whose services were transferred to Richard.[1301] The list was promised,[1302] and Henry was carried back, worn out with fatigue, suffering and shame, to the favourite home of his brighter days at Chinon.[1303] By the time he reached it he was too ill to do anything but lie down never to rise again. He sent back his vice-chancellor, Roger Malchat,[1304] to fetch the promised list of traitors; and on Roger’s return he bade him sit down beside his bed and read him out the names. With a sigh Roger answered: “Our Lord Jesus Christ help me, sire! the first written down here is Count John, your son.”[1305] The words gave Henry his death-blow. “Say no more,”[1306] he faltered, turning away his face.[1307] Yet the tale seemed too horrible to be true, and he started up again: “Can it be? John, my darling child, my very heart, for love of whom I have incurred all this misery—has he indeed forsaken me?” It could not be denied; he sank back again and turned his face to the wall, moaning: “Let things go now as they will; I care no more for myself or for the world.”[1308]

- [1301] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 366. Hist. de Guill. le Mar., v. 9035 (Romania, vol. xi. p. 65).

- [1302] Rog. Howden says that it was given, and implies that it was read, then and there, but we shall see that he is wrong.

- [1303] Rog. Howden as above. Hist. de Guill. le Mar., v. 3639 (as above). Bishop Stubbs (Rog. Howden, vol. ii. pref. p. lxviii) says “he returned to Azai,” and makes the reading of the fatal list take place there, before Henry went on to Chinon (ib. p. lxx). This seems to be the meaning of Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 25 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 148). But Gerald evidently thought Henry had been at Azay ever since the Friday, just as William of Armorica (Philipp., l. iii., Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v. p. 134) thought he had been all the while at Chinon; whereas the Gesta and Roger shew that both are wrong in this. On the other hand, the Life of William the Marshal seems distinctly to shew that the place where Henry went to lodge before the meeting at Colombières was not Azay, but Ballan; and it also tells us that he went straight back from Colombières to Chinon, and there read the list. In the absence of further elucidations, I venture to follow this version.

- [1304]

- “... Mestre Roger Malchael,
Qui lores portout son seel.”

- Hist. de Guill. le Mar., vv. 9051–9052 (as above, p. 65). See M. Meyer’s note, ib. p. 69.

- [1305] Hist. de Guill. le Mar., vv. 9040–9076 (as above, p. 65).

- [1306] “Asez en avez dit.” Ib. v. 9083 (as above).

- [1307] Ib. v. 9084 (p. 66).

- [1308] Gir. Cambr. as above.

All through that day and the next he lay there, trembling from head to foot, sometimes appearing to see and hear nothing, and to be conscious of nothing but pain, murmuring broken words which no one could understand.[1309] At other times his delirium shewed itself in frenzied curses upon himself and his sons, which the attendant bishops vainly besought him to revoke.[1310] It was Geoffrey who at length managed to bring him to a somewhat calmer frame both of body and of mind. With his head on his son’s shoulder and his feet on the knees of a faithful knight, Henry at last seemed to have fallen asleep. When he opened his eyes again and saw Geoffrey patiently watching over him and fanning away the flies which buzzed around his head, he spoke in accents very different from any that he had used for some days past. “My dearest son! thou, indeed, hast always been a true son to me. So help me God, if I recover of this sickness, I will be to thee the best of fathers, and will set thee among the chiefest men of my realm. But if I may not live to reward thee, may God give thee thy reward for thy unchanging dutifulness to me!” “O father, I desire no reward but thy restoration to health and prosperity” was all that Geoffrey could utter, as the violence of his emotion so overcame his self-control that he was obliged to rush out of the room.[1311] The interval of calmness passed away, and the ravings of delirium were heard again; “Shame, shame upon a conquered king!” Henry kept muttering over and over again, till the third morning broke—the seventh day of the fever[1312]—and brought with it the lightning before death. Once more Geoffrey, stifling his own distress, came to his father’s side; once more he was rewarded by seeing Henry’s eyes open and gaze at him with evident recognition; once more the dying king recurred wistfully to his plans, not this time of vengeance upon his rebellious sons, but of advancement for the loyal one, faintly murmuring in Geoffrey’s ear how he had hoped to see him bishop of Winchester, or better still, archbishop of York;[1313] but he knew that for himself all was over. He took off a gold finger-ring, engraved with a leopard[1314]—the armorial device of the Angevin house—and handed it to Geoffrey, bidding him send it to the king of Castille, the husband of his daughter Eleanor; he also gave directions that another precious ring which lay among his treasures should be delivered to Geoffrey himself, and gave him his blessing.[1315] After this he was, by his own desire, carried into the chapel of the castle and laid before the altar; here he confessed his sins to the attendant bishops and priests, was absolved, and devoutly made his last Communion. Immediately afterwards he passed away.[1316]

- [1309] Hist. de Guill. le Mar., vv. 9085–9094 (Romania, vol. xi. p. 66).

- [1310] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 366.

- [1311] Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. i. c. 5 (Brewer, vol. iv. pp. 370, 371).

- [1312] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., l. iii. c. 26 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 150).

- [1313] Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr. as above (p. 371).

- [1314] “Pantera.” “The word is doubtful,” notes Mr. Brewer (Gir. Cambr., vol. iv. p. 371); Bishop Stubbs (Rog. Howden, vol. ii. pref. p. lxxi) renders it “panther.”

- [1315] Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. i. c. 5 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 371).

- [1316] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 367. Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 28 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 156), says there were no bishops with him at his death; any way, there were two at his burial. The date of death—July 6—is given by many authorities: Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 71; Rog. Howden as above; R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 64; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 450, etc.

Then followed one of those strange scenes which so often occurred after the death of a medieval king. The servants who should have laid out the body for burial stripped it and left it naked on the ground; and as during the three days that he lay dying they had plundered him of everything on which they could lay their hands, the few friends who were shocked at the sight could not find a rag wherewith to cover the dead king, till one of his knights, William de Trihan, took off his own cloak for the purpose.[1317] All this, however, was speedily set right by William the Marshal. He at once took the command of the little party—a duty for which Geoffrey was evidently unfitted by the violence of his grief—sent to call as many barons as were within reach to attend the funeral, and gave directions for the proper robing of the corpse.[1318] It was no easy matter to arrange within four-and-twenty hours, and utterly without resources, anything like a regal burial for this fallen king.[1319] William, however, managed to do it; and next day Henry Fitz-Empress, robed as if for his coronation, with a crown of gold upon his head, a gold ring on his finger, sandals on his feet, and a sceptre in his gloved right hand,[1320] was borne upon the shoulders of his barons down from his castle on the rock of Chinon, across the viaduct which he himself had built over the swampy meadows beneath, and thence northward along the left bank of the silvery, winding Vienne to his burial-place at Fontevraud.[1321] He had wished to be buried at Grandmont;[1322] but this of course was impossible now. “He shall be shrouded among the shrouded women”—so ran the closing words of a prophecy which during the last few months had been whispered throughout Henry’s dominions as a token of his approaching end. It was fulfilled now to the letter, as he lay in state in the abbey-church of Fontevraud, while the veiled sisters knelt by night and day murmuring their prayers and psalms around the bier.[1323]

- [1317] Hist. de Guill. le Mar., vv. 9027–9161 (Romania, vol. xi. p. 66). Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., as above (pp. 156, 157), tells the same story, more highly coloured, but with less verisimilitude, as he has lost the name of William de Trihan and turned him into “puer quidam.”

- [1318] Hist. de Guill. le Mar., vv. 9165–9172, 9215–9220 (as above, pp. 66, 67).

- [1319] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 28 (Angl. Christ. Soc., pp. 157, 158).

- [1320] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 71. How hard it was to manage all this we learn from Gerald: “Vix annulus digito, vix sceptrum manu, vix capiti corona sicut decuit, quia de aurifrigio quodam veteri inventa fuit, vix ulla prorsus insignia regalia nisi per emendicata demum suffragia, eaque minus congruentia suppetiere.” De Instr. Princ. as above (p. 158). The chronicle of Laon, a. 1187, quoted in note (ibid.), adds that the gold fringe of which the crown was made came off a lady’s dress.

- [1321] Hist. de Guill. le Mar., vv. 9071–9223 (Romania, vol. xi. p. 67). See a curious incident at the setting out of the funeral train, in vv. 9173–9214.

- [1322] He had given solemn directions to that effect, when he thought himself dying at La Motte-de-Ger, in 1170. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 7.

- [1323] Hist. de Guill. le Mar., vv. 9229–9244 (as above). For the prophecy and its application see Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 55, and Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 356, 367.

None of the dead king’s friends had thought it necessary to wait for any instructions from his heir. The marshal, however, had sent to apprise Richard of his father’s death, and delayed the burial long enough to give him an opportunity of attending it if he chose to do so. The other barons were in great dread of meeting the future king against whom they had been in arms; and several of them were even more anxious for the marshal than for themselves, for they could not but imagine that Richard’s heaviest vengeance would fall upon the man who had unhorsed and all but killed him at Le Mans. More than one of them offered to place himself and all his possessions at the service of the comrade whom they all held in such reverence, if thereby anything could be done to save him from Richard’s wrath. But he only answered quietly: “Sirs, I do not repent me of what I did. I thank you for your proffers; but, so help me God, I will not accept what I cannot return. Thanks be to Him, He has helped me ever since I was made a knight; I doubt not He will help me to the end.”[1324] Before nightfall Richard overtook them.[1325] He came, it seems, alone. Vainly did the bystanders seek to read his feelings in his demeanour; he shewed no sign of either grief or joy, penitence or wrath; he “spoke not a word, good or bad,”[1326] but went straight to the church and into the choir, where the body lay.[1327] For awhile he stood motionless before the bier;[1328] then he stepped to the head, and looked down at the uncovered face.[1329] It seemed to meet his gaze with all its wonted sternness; but there were some who thought they saw a yet more fearful sight—a stream of blood which flowed from the nostrils, and ceased only on the departure of the son who was thus proclaimed as his father’s murderer.[1330] Richard sank upon his knees; thus he remained “about as long as one would take to say the Lord’s Prayer;”[1331] then he rose and, speaking for the first time, called for William the Marshal. William came, accompanied by a loyal Angevin baron, Maurice of Craon. Richard bade them follow him out of the church; outside, he turned at once to the marshal: “Fair Sir Marshal, you had like to have slain me; had I received your spear-thrust, it would have been a bad day for both of us!” “My lord,” answered William, “I had it in my power to slay you; I only slew your horse. And of that I do not repent me yet.” With kingly dignity Richard granted him his kingly pardon at once;[1332] and on the morrow they stood side by side while Henry Fitz-Empress was laid in his grave before the high altar by Archbishop Bartholomew of Tours.[1333]

[1324] Hist. de Guill. le Mar., vv. 9245–9290 (Romania, vol. xi. pp. 67, 68).

[1325] The Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 71, make Richard meet the corpse on its way; and Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 367, follows the Gesta. But the Hist. de Guill. le Mar. and Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 28 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 157) both distinctly say that he met it at Fontevraud. The other version is intrinsically most improbable, for Richard can hardly have been coming from anywhere else than Tours, and in that case he could not possibly meet the funeral train on its way from Chinon to Fontevraud. That he should reach Fontevraud some hours after it, on the other hand, is perfectly natural; and this is just what Gerald and the French Life imply; for they both tell us that the funeral started from Chinon on the day after the death—i.e. Friday, July 7—and Gerald (as above, p. 158) implies that the actual burial took place the day after Richard’s arrival, while in the Vita Galfr., l. i. c. 5 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 372), he seems to place it on the Saturday, July 8. See Bishop Stubbs’s preface to Rog. Howden, vol. ii. p. lxix, note 1. One of the MSS. of Mat. Paris, Chron. Maj. (Luard, vol. ii. p. 344, note 8) has a curiously different version of Richard’s behaviour on the occasion.

[1326] Hist. de Guill. le Mar., vv. 9294–9298, 9300 (p. 68).

[1327] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ. as above.

[1328] Hist. de Guill. le Mar., vv. 9299, 9300 (as above).

[1329] Ib. v. 9301. Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ. and Vita Galfr. as above.

[1330] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 28 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 157); Vita Galfr., l. i. c. 5 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 372). Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 71.

[1331] Gir. Cambr. as above.

[1332] Hist. de Guill. le Mar., vv. 9304–9344 (Romania, vol. xi. pp. 68, 69).

[1333] The day is given by Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ. as above (p. 158), and Vita Galfr. as above; the name of the officiating prelate by R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 65. Bartholomew was assisted by Archbishop Fulmar of Trier (ibid.)

CHAPTER VII.
RICHARD AND ENGLAND.
1189–1194.

All doubts as to the destination of Henry’s realms after his death were settled at once by the discovery of John’s treason. Throughout the Angevin dominions not a voice was raised to challenge the succession of Richard. The English marshal and the Angevin barons gathered at Fontevraud received him unquestioningly as their lord, and were at once accepted as loyal subjects. One of them indeed, the seneschal of Anjou, Stephen of Turnham or of Marçay, was flung into prison for failing to surrender the royal treasure;[1334] but the reason of his failure seems to have been simply that the treasury was empty.[1335] According to one contemporary historian, Richard sealed his forgiveness of William the Marshal by at once despatching him to England with a commission to hold the country for him—in effect, to act as justiciar—till he could proceed thither himself.[1336] In all probability, however, William was authorized to do nothing more than set Eleanor at liberty; it was she who, by her son’s desire, undertook the office of regent in England,[1337] which she fulfilled without difficulty for the next six weeks. Geoffrey the chancellor resigned his seal into his half-brother’s hands as soon as the funeral was over.[1338] The promise of the Norman castellans to Henry that they would surrender to no one but John was of course annulled by later events. John himself hastened to join his brother; Richard gave him a gracious welcome, and they returned to Normandy together.[1339] At Séez the archbishops of Canterbury and Rouen came to meet them, and absolved Richard from the excommunication[1340] laid on him by the legate John of Anagni. Thence they all proceeded to Rouen. On July 20 Richard went in state to the metropolitan church, where Archbishop Walter girded him with the ducal sword and invested him with the standard of the duchy.[1341] On the same day he received the fealty of the Norman barons,[1342] and held his first court as duke of Normandy, and also, it seems, as king-elect of England, although there had been no formal election. He at once made it clear that the abettors of his revolt had nothing to hope from him—three of the most conspicuous had been deprived of their lands already[1343]—and that his father’s loyal servants had nothing to fear, if they would transfer their loyalty to him. He shewed indeed every disposition to carry out his father’s last wishes; he at once nominated Geoffrey for the see of York, and confirmed Henry’s last grant to John, consisting of the Norman county of Mortain and four thousand pounds’ worth of land in England;[1344] at the same time he bestowed upon William the Marshal the hand of Isabel de Clare, daughter and heiress of Earl Richard of Striguil, and upon the son of the count of Perche a bride who had already been sought by two kings—his niece, Matilda of Saxony.[1345]

- [1334] Gesta Ric. (“Benedict of Peterborough,” Stubbs, vol. ii.), p. 71. Cf. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 6.

- [1335] See Hist. de Guill. le Mar., vv. 9198, 9199 (Romania, vol. xi. p. 67).

- [1336] Ib. vv. 9347–9354 (p. 69).

- [1337] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 67.

- [1338] Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. i. c. 5 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 372).

- [1339] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 72.

- [1340] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 67. How had the archbishops power to cancel a legatine sentence?

- [1341] Ibid. Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 73. (The date is from this last).

- [1342] Gesta Ric. as above.

- [1343] Ib. p. 72.

- [1344] Ib. p. 73. Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 3 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 301). On John and Mortain see Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 6 and note 2, and preface to vol. iii. p. xxiv, note 1.

- [1345] Gesta Ric. as above.

This last match was evidently intended to secure the attachment of the important little border-county of Perche in case of a rupture with France, which seemed by no means unlikely. The alliance of Philip and Richard had expired with King Henry; now that Richard stood in his father’s place, Philip saw in him nothing but his father’s successor—the head of the Angevin house, whose policy was to be thwarted and his power undermined on every possible occasion and by every possible means. This was made evident at a colloquy held on S. Mary Magdalene’s day to settle the new relations between the two princes; Philip greeted his former ally with a peremptory demand for the restitution of the Vexin.[1346] Richard put him off with a bribe of four thousand marks, over and above the twenty thousand promised by Henry at Colombières; and on this condition, accompanied, it seems, by a vague understanding that Richard and Adela were to marry after all,[1347] Philip agreed to leave Richard in undisturbed possession of all his father’s dominions, including the castles and towns which had been taken from Henry in the last war,[1348] except those of Berry and Auvergne.[1349] Thus secured, for the moment at least, in Normandy, Richard prepared to take possession of his island realm. He had paved the way for his coming there by empowering Eleanor to make a progress throughout England, taking from all the freemen of the land oaths of fealty in his name, releasing captives, pardoning criminals, mitigating, so far as was possible without upsetting the ordinary course of justice, the severe administration of the late king. Richard himself now restored the earl of Leicester and the other barons whom Henry had disseized six years before.[1350] The next step was to send home the archbishop of Canterbury and three other English prelates who were with him in Normandy.[1351] On August 12 they were followed by Richard himself.[1352]

- [1346] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 73, 74. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 3, 4.

- [1347] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 74.

- [1348] Rog. Howden as above, p. 4.

- [1349] Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 29. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ib.), p. 75. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 450.

- [1350] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 74, 75.

- [1351] Ib. p. 75.

- [1352] Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 457. The Gesta Ric., as above, give a confused date—“Idus Augusti, die dominicâ post Assumptionem B. Mariæ.”

His politic measures of conciliation, executed by his mother with characteristic intelligence and tact, had secured him a ready welcome. It was only by slow degrees, and with the growing experience of years, that the English people learned how much they owed to the stern old king who was gone. At the moment they thought of him chiefly as the author of grievances which his son seemed bent upon removing.[1353] Richard’s mother, with a great train of bishops and barons, was waiting to receive him at Winchester;[1354] there, on the vigil of the Assumption, he was welcomed in solemn procession;[1355] and there, too, he came into possession of the royal treasury, whose contents might make up for the deficiencies in that of Anjou.[1356] So complete was his security that instead of hastening, as his predecessors had done, to be crowned as soon as possible, he left Eleanor nearly three weeks in which to make the arrangements for that ceremony,[1357] while he went on a progress throughout southern England,[1358] coming back at last to be crowned by Archbishop Baldwin at Westminster on September 3.[1359] No charter was issued on the occasion. The circumstances of the new king’s accession were not such as to make any special call for one; they were sufficiently met by a threefold oath embodied in the coronation-service, pledging the sovereign to maintain the peace of the Church, to put down all injustice, and to enforce the observance of righteousness and mercy.[1360] In the formal election by clergy and people which preceded the religious rite,[1361] and in the essentials of the rite itself, ancient prescription was strictly followed. The order of the procession and the details of the ceremonial were, however, arranged with unusual care and minuteness; it was the most splendid and elaborate coronation-ceremony that had ever been seen in England, and it served as a precedent for all after-time.[1362] Richard had none of his father’s shrinking from the pageantries and pomps of kingship; he delighted in its outward splendours almost as much as in its substantial powers.[1363] He himself, with his tall figure, massive yet finely-chiselled features, and soldierly bearing, must have been by far the most regal-looking sovereign who had been crowned since the Norman Conqueror; and when Archbishop Baldwin set the crown upon his golden hair, Englishmen might for a moment dream that, stranger though he had been for nearly thirty years to the land of his birth, Richard was yet to be in reality what he was in outward aspect, a true English king.

- [1353] Cf. Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 75, 76; and Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 1 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 293).

- [1354] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 453, 454.

- [1355] Ib. p. 457. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 67. Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 74.

- [1356] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 76, 77.

- [1357] “Mater comitis Alienor regina de vocatione comitum, baronum, vicecomitum, uit sollicita.” R. Diceto as above, p. 68.

- [1358] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 77. Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 457, says he went to check the depredations of the Welsh.

- [1359] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 78, 79. Gerv. Cant. and R. Diceto as above. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 5. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 26, 27. Will. Newb. as above (p. 294).

- [1360] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 81, 82. R. Diceto as above. This last was an eye-witness, for, the see of London being vacant, the dean had to fulfil in his bishop’s stead the duty of handing the unction and chrism to the officiating primate. Ib. p. 69.

- [1361] R. Diceto as above, p. 68.

- [1362] See details in Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 80–83; and Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 9–12.

- [1363] We see this in the descriptions of his magnificent dress, brilliant armour, etc. in the Itinerarium Regis Ricardi.

Such dreams however were soon to be dispelled. On the second day after his crowning Richard received the homage of the bishops and barons of his realm;[1364] he then proceeded into Northamptonshire, and on September 15 held a great council at Pipewell.[1365] His first act was to fill up the vacant sees, of which there were now four besides that of York. The appointments were made with considerable judgement. London, whose aged bishop Gilbert Foliot had died in 1187,[1366] was bestowed upon Richard Fitz-Nigel,[1367] son of Bishop Nigel of Ely, and for the last twenty years his successor in the office of treasurer; while Ely, again vacated scarcely three weeks ago by the death of Geoffrey Ridel,[1368] rewarded the past services and helped to secure the future loyalty of Richard’s chancellor, William of Longchamp.[1369] Winchester, vacated nearly a year ago by the death of Richard of Ilchester,[1370] was given to Godfrey de Lucy, a son of Henry’s early friend and servant Richard de Lucy “the loyal”;[1371] Salisbury, which had been without a bishop ever since November 1184,[1372] was given to Hubert Walter,[1373] a near connexion of the no less faithful minister of Henry’s later years, Ralf de Glanville. This last appointment had also another motive. Hubert Walter was dean of York; he stood at the head of a party in the York chapter which had strongly disputed the validity of Geoffrey’s election in the preceding August, and some of whom had even proposed the dean himself as an opposition candidate for the primacy.[1374] Hubert’s nomination to Salisbury cleared this obstacle out of Geoffrey’s way, and no further protest was raised when Richard confirmed his half-brother’s election in the same council of Pipewell.[1375]

[1364] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 84.

[1365] Ib. p. 85. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 69. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 458.

[1366] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 5. R. Diceto as above, p. 47.

[1367] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 85. R. Diceto as above, p. 69. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 9.

[1368] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 78. R. Diceto as above, p. 68.

[1369] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 85. R. Diceto as above, p. 69. Ric. Devizes as above.

[1370] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 58. R. Diceto as above, p. 58.

[1371] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 84. R. Diceto as above, p. 69. Ric. Devizes as above.

[1372] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 32. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 320.

[1373] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 84. R. Diceto as above, p. 69. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 9.

[1374] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 77, 78. Cf. Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. i. c. 6 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 373). Hubert had indeed been proposed for the see as far back as 1186; Gesta Hen. as above, p. 352. See also Bishop Stubbs’s preface to Rog. Howden, vol. iv. pp. xxxix–xlvi.

[1375] Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 374).

When, however, the king turned from the settlement of the Church to that of the state, it became gradually apparent that his policy in England had only two objects:—to raise money for the crusade, and to secure the obedience of his realm during his own absence in the East. These objects he endeavoured to effect both at once by a wholesale change of ministers, sheriffs and royal officers in general, at the council of Pipewell or during the ten days which elapsed between its dissolution and the Michaelmas Exchequer-meeting. The practice of making a man pay for the privilege either of entering upon a public office or of being released from its burthen was, as we have seen, counted in no way disgraceful in the days of Henry I., and by no means generally reprobated under Henry II. Richard however carried it to a length which clearly shocked the feelings of some statesmen of the old school,[1376] if not those of the people in general. The first to whom he applied it was no less a person than the late justiciar, Ralf de Glanville. Ralf was, like Richard himself, under a vow of crusade, which would in any case have rendered it impossible for him to retain the justiciarship after the departure of the English host for Palestine.[1377] The king, however, insisted that his resignation should take effect at once,[1378] and also that it should be paid for by a heavy fine—a condition which was also required of the Angevin seneschal, Stephen of Turnham, as the price of his release from prison.[1379] Worn out though he was with years and labours,[1380] Ralf faithfully kept his vow.[1381] If all the intending crusaders had done the same, it would have been no easy matter to fill his place or to make adequate provision for the government and administration of the realm. Both king and Pope, however, had learned that for eastern as well as western warfare money was even more necessary than men; Richard had therefore sought and obtained leave from Clement III. to commute crusading vows among his subjects for pecuniary contributions towards the expenses of the war.[1382] By this means he at once raised a large sum of money, and avoided the risk of leaving England deprived of all her best warriors and statesmen during his own absence. Instead of Ralf de Glanville he appointed two chief justiciars, Earl William de Mandeville and Bishop Hugh of Durham;[1383] under these he placed five subordinate justiciars, one of whom was William the Marshal.[1384] The bishop-elect of London, Richard Fitz-Nigel, was left undisturbed in his post of treasurer, where his services were too valuable for the king to venture upon the risk of forfeiting them; but the bishop-elect of Ely, although a favourite servant and almost a personal friend of Richard, had to pay three thousand pounds for his chancellorship. On the other hand, Richard proved that in this instance he was not actuated solely by mercenary motives, by refusing a still higher bid from another candidate.[1385] All the sheriffs were removed from office; some seven or eight were restored to their old places, five more were appointed to shires other than those which they had formerly administered;[1386] the sheriffdom of Hampshire was sold to the bishop-elect of Winchester,[1387] that of Lincolnshire to Gerard de Camville, those of Leicestershire, Staffordshire and Warwickshire to Bishop Hugh of Chester;[1388] and the earldom of Northumberland was granted on similar terms to the justiciar-bishop of Durham.[1389]

[1376] This appears from the tone in which his sales of office, etc., are described by Richard Fitz-Nigel in the Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 90, 91, and by Roger of Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 13.

[1377] He had taken the cross in 1185; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 302. The Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 87, and Will. Newb. l. iv. c. 4 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 302) say distinctly that Ralf himself wished to resign in order to fulfil his vow.

[1378] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 90. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 7, says he even put him in ward.

[1379] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), pp. 6, 7.

[1380] Ib. p. 9.

[1381] He died at the siege of Acre before October 21, 1190. Epp. Cant. ccclvi. (Stubbs, p. 329).

[1382] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 17.

[1383] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 87. Hugh paid a thousand marks for the remission of his crusading vow, to enable him to undertake the office. Ib. p. 90.

[1384] Rog. Howden as above, p. 16.

[1385] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 9.

[1386] Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iii. pref. p. xxix.

[1387] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 10.

[1388] Stubbs as above, pp. xxviii, xxix, and Madox, Hist. Exch., vol. i. p. 458, from Pipe Roll 2 Ric. I.

[1389] Pipe Roll 2 Ric. I. (Stubbs, as above, p. xxviii, note 3). Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 90. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 8. Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 5 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 304). Geoff. Coldingham, c. 9 (Script. Dunelm. III., Raine, p. 14). The grant itself, dated November 25, is in Scriptt. Dunelm. III., App. p. lxii.

Two other matters had to be dealt with before Richard’s preparations for departure were completed. To guard his realm from external disturbance, he must secure the fealty of the vassal-rulers of Scotland and Wales. To guard it against internal treason, he must, if such a thing were possible, secure the loyalty of the brother whom he was leaving behind him. The first was at once the less important and the easier matter of the two. Rees of South Wales had indeed profited by the change of rulers in England to break the peace which he had been compelled to maintain with King Henry, and after the council of Pipewell Richard sent John against him at the head of an armed force. The other Welsh princes came to meet John at Worcester and made submission to him as his brother’s representative;[1390] Rees apparently refused to treat with any one but the king in person, and accordingly he came back with John as far as Oxford, but Richard would not take the trouble to arrange a meeting, and was so unconcerned about the matter that he let him go home again without an audience, and, of course, in a state of extreme indignation.[1391] His threatening attitude served as an excuse for raising a scutage, nominally for a Welsh war;[1392] but the expedition was never made. The king of Scots was otherwise dealt with. Early in December, while Richard was at Canterbury on his way to the sea, William the Lion came to visit him, and a bargain was struck to the satisfaction of both parties. Richard received from William a sum of ten thousand marks, and his homage for his English estates, as they had been held by his brother Malcolm; in return, he restored to him the castles of Roxburgh and Berwick, and released him and his heirs for ever from the homage for Scotland itself, enforced by Henry in 1175.[1393]

- [1390] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 87, 88.

- [1391] Ib. p. 97.

- [1392] Madox, Hist. Exch., vol. i. p. 664, from Pipe Roll 2 Ric. I.

- [1393] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 98. Richard’s charter of release to William is in Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 30; Gesta Ric. as above, pp. 102, 103; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 25, 26. It is dated (in Rymer’s copy) December 5. On this transaction see also R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 72, and Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 5 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 304).

Richard’s worst difficulty however was still unsolved: how to prevent John from trying to supplant him in his absence. Richard knew that this lad, ten years younger than himself, had been his rival ever since he was of an age to be a rival to any one; and he knew his brother’s character as, perhaps, no one else did know it as yet—for their mother had scarcely seen her youngest child since he was six years old. In the light of later history, it is impossible not to feel that Richard’s wisest course, alike for his own sake and for England’s, would have been to follow the instinct which had once prompted him to insist that John should go with him to the crusade. In this case however he was now led astray by the noblest feature in his character, his unsuspecting confidence and generosity. From the hour of their reconciliation after their father’s death, Richard’s sole endeavour respecting John was to gain his affection and gratitude by showering upon him every honour, dignity and benefit of which it was possible to dispose in his favour. The grant of the county of Mortain made him the first baron of Normandy, and it was accompanied by a liberal provision in English lands. To these were added, as soon as the brothers reached England, a string of “honours”—Marlborough, Luggershall, Lancaster, each with its castle; the Peak, Bolsover, and the whole honour of Peverel; those of Wallingford and Tickhill, and that of Nottingham, including the town; and the whole shire of Derby;[1394] besides the honour of Gloucester, which belonged to John’s betrothed bride Avice, and which Richard secured to him by causing him to be married to her at Marlborough on August 29,[1395] in spite of Archbishop Baldwin’s protests against a marriage between third cousins without dispensation from the Pope. Baldwin at once laid all the lands of the young couple under interdict; but John appealed against him, and a papal legate who came over in November to settle Baldwin’s quarrel with his own monks confirmed the appeal and annulled the sentence of the primate.[1396] At the same time Richard bestowed upon his brother four whole shires in south-western England—Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Dorset—with the ferms and the entire profits of jurisdiction and administration.[1397] More than this even Richard could not give; if more was needed to hold John’s ambition in check, he could only trust to the skilful management of Eleanor. She was left, seemingly without any formal commission, but with the practical authority of queen-regent, and with the dowries of two former queens in addition to her own.[1398]

- [1394] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 78. See also Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iii., pref. p. xx.

- [1395] Gesta Ric. as above, p. 78.

- [1396] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 72, 73.

- [1397] Gesta Ric. as above, p. 99. Stubbs as above, p. xxv. Cf. Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 3 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 301), and his comments on the subject (ib. p. 302).

- [1398] Gesta Ric. as above.

One important part of Richard’s administrative arrangements was however already upset: William de Mandeville, having gone to Normandy on business for the king, died there on November 14.[1399] Earl of Essex by grant of Henry II., count of Aumale by marriage with its heiress, William had been through life one of Henry’s most faithful friends; he was honoured and esteemed by all parties on both sides of the sea; there was no one left among the barons who could command anything like the same degree of general respect; and Richard for the moment saw no means of filling his place. He therefore left Bishop Hugh of Durham as sole chief justiciar; but he made a change in the body of subordinate justiciars appointed at Pipewell. Two of them were superseded; one was replaced by Hugh Bardulf, and the other, it seems, by the chancellor William of Longchamp, who, in addition to the office which he already held, was put in charge of the Tower of London, and intrusted with powers which virtually made him equal in authority to the chief justiciar.[1400]

- [1399] R. Diceto as above, p. 73. Gesta Ric. as above, p. 92. The day comes from Ralf. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 26, makes it December 12.

- [1400] On these appointments cf. Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 101; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 28; Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), pp. 8, 11; Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 5 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 306); and Bishop Stubbs’s note, pref. to Rog. Howden as above, p. xxx.

None of these appointments was in itself unwise; but two worse-matched yokefellows than the justiciar and the chancellor it would have been difficult to find. Hugh of Puiset—or “Pudsey,” as his English flock called him—had stood high in both Church and state ever since the days of the civil war. Through his mother he was a great-grandson of the Conqueror, and thus cousin in no remote degree to Henry Fitz-Empress and Richard Cœur-de-Lion, as well as to Philip of France. We saw him more than forty years ago, as archdeacon and treasurer of York, meeting the ecclesiastical censures of his metropolitan with a retort on equal terms, and wielding not unsuccessfully the weapons both of spiritual and temporal warfare in the cause of his cousin William of York and his uncle Henry of Winchester. Since 1153 he had been bishop of Durham; certainly not an ideal successor of S. Cuthbert; yet his appointment had been sanctioned by the saintly archbishop Theobald; and throughout his long episcopate he shewed himself by no means ill-fitted, on the whole, for his peculiar position. That position, it must be remembered, had more than that of any other English bishop an important political side. The bishop of Durham was earl palatine of his shire; its whole administration, secular as well as ecclesiastical, was in his hands. His diocesan jurisdiction, again, extended over the whole of Northumberland, and thus brought him into immediate contact with the Scots across the border. His diocese was in fact a great marchland between England and Scotland; he was the natural medium of communication or negotiation between the two realms; and on him depended in no small degree the security of their relations with each other. For such a post it was well to have a strong man, in every sense of the words; and such a man was Hugh of Puiset. His strength was not based solely upon an unscrupulous use of great material and political resources. He was a popular man with all classes; notwithstanding his unclerical ways, he never fell into any ecclesiastical disgrace except with his own metropolitan, for whom he was generally more than a match; and he was one of the very few prelates who managed to steer their way through the Becket quarrel without either damaging their reputation as sound churchmen or forfeiting the confidence of Henry II. His intrigues with the Scot king and the rebel barons in 1174 failed so completely and so speedily that Henry found it scarcely worth while to punish them in any way; and on the other hand, Hugh’s position was already so independent and secure that he himself never found it worth while to renew them. In his own diocese, whatever he might be as a pastor of souls, he was a vigorous and on the whole a beneficent as well as magnificent ruler; the men of the county palatine grumbled indeed at his extravagance and at the occasional hardships brought upon them by his inordinate love of the chase, but they were none the less proud of his splendid buildings, his regal state, and his equally regal personality. His appearance and manners corresponded with his character and his rank; he was tall in stature, dignified in bearing, remarkably attractive in look, eloquent and winning in address.[1401] Moreover, he had lived so long in England, and all his interests had so long been centred there, that for all practical purposes, social as well as political, he was a thorough Englishman—certainly far more of an Englishman than his young English-born cousin, King Richard. For the last eight years, indeed, he had held in the north much the same position as had belonged in earlier times to the archbishops of York; for the northern province had been without a metropolitan ever since the death of Roger of Pont-l’Evêque in November 1181,[1402] and the supreme authority, ecclesiastical as well as secular, had thus devolved upon the bishop of Durham. He was now threatened with the loss of this pre-eminence; but he had no intention of giving it up without a struggle, in which his chances of success were at least as good as those of his rival the archbishop-elect; and whatever the result might be with respect to his ecclesiastical independence, he had secured a formidable counterpoise to the primate’s territorial influence by his purchase of Northumberland, which made him sole head, under the Crown, of the civil administration of the whole country between the Tweed and the Tees.

- [1401] On Hugh of Durham see Will. Newb., l. v. c. 10 (Howlett, vol. ii. pp. 436–438),

Geoff. Coldingham, cc. 1, 4, 11, 14 (Script. Dunelm. III., Raine, pp. 4, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14), and Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iii. pref. pp. xxxiii.–xxxvii.

- [1402] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 283. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 10. Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 5 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 225).

Alike in himself and in his antecedents Hugh of Puiset was the very antithesis to William of Longchamp. William had nothing of the stately presence and winning aspect which distinguished the bishop of Durham; on the contrary, he laboured under personal disadvantages which should have entitled him to sympathy, but which one of his political opponents was heartless enough to caricature, after his fall, in order to make him an object of vulgar contempt and disgust. His stature was diminutive, his countenance swarthy and ill-favoured, his figure mis-shapen, and he was moreover very lame.[1403] His origin was as lowly as his person. His father was a certain Hugh of Longchamp who in 1156 received from the king a grant of lands in Herefordshire,[1404] and about the time of the barons’ revolt was fermor of the honour of Conches in Normandy.[1405] His grandfather was said to have been a French serf who had fled from the justice of his lord and found a refuge in the Norman village whence his descendants took their name.[1406] In Henry’s latter years Hugh of Longchamp was deep in debt and disgrace,[1407] and his six sons had to make their way in the world as best they could under the shadow of the king’s displeasure.[1408] William, whose physical infirmities must have shut him out from every career save that of a clerk, first appears under the patronage of Geoffrey the chancellor, as his official in one of his many pieces of Church preferment, the archdeaconry of Rouen.[1409] The king, however, remonstrated strongly with his son on the danger of associating with a man whom he declared to be “a traitor, like his father and mother before him.”[1410] The end of his remonstrances was that, shortly before the last outbreak, William fled from Geoffrey to Richard, and, according to one account, became the chief instigator of Richard’s rebellion.[1411] However this may be, it is certain that Richard, while still merely duke of Aquitaine, employed William as his chancellor,[1412] and that he was not only so well satisfied with his services as to retain him in the same capacity after his accession to the crown, but had formed such a high opinion of his statesmanship and his fidelity as to make him his chief political adviser and confidant. Richard, like his father, was constant in his friendships, and very unwilling to discard those to whom he had once become really attached; his trust in William remained unshaken to the end of his life, and in some respects it was not misplaced. William seems to have been thoroughly loyal to his master, and his energy and industry were as unquestionable as his loyalty. As Richard’s most intimate companion, confidential secretary, and political adviser in foreign affairs, William was in his right place; but he was by no means equally well fitted to be Richard’s representative in the supreme government and administration of England. He had the primary disqualification of being a total stranger to the land, its people and its ways. Most likely he had never set foot in England till he came thither with Richard in 1189; he was ignorant of the English tongue;[1413] his new surroundings were thoroughly distasteful to him; and as he was by no means of a cautious or conciliatory temper, he expressed his contempt and dislike of them in a way which was resented not only by the people, but even by men whose origin and natural speech were scarcely more English than his own.[1414] He had in short every qualification for becoming an extremely unpopular man, and he behaved as if he desired no other destiny. The nation at large soon learned to return his aversion and to detest him as a disagreeable stranger; his colleagues in the administration despised him as an upstart interloper; the justiciar, in particular, keenly resented his own virtual subordination to one whom he naturally regarded as his inferior in every way.[1415] It was sound policy on Richard’s part to place a check upon Hugh of Durham; and it was not unnatural that he should select his chancellor for that purpose. The seven happiest years of Henry Fitz-Empress had been the years during which another chancellor had wielded a power almost as great as that which Richard intrusted to William of Longchamp. But, on the other hand, any one except Richard might have seen at a glance that of all statesmen living, William of Longchamp was well-nigh the least fitted to reproduce the career of Thomas of London.

[1403] Cf. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 11, with the horrible caricature in Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. ii. c. 19 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 420).

[1404] Pipe Roll 2 Hen. II. (Hunter), p. 51.

[1405] Mag. Rot. Scacc. Norm. (Stapleton), vol. i. p. 74. Cf. Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iii. pref. p. xxxviii.

[1406] Letter of Hugh of Nonant, in Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 216 (also in Rog. Howden, Stubbs, vol. iii. p. 142). Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. ii. c. 18 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 418).

[1407] Mag. Rot. Scacc. Norm. (Stapleton), vol. i. p. 74. Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iii. pref. pp. xxxviii, xxxix and notes.

[1408] Stubbs, as above, pp. xxxix, xl.

[1409] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 1 (p. 388).

[1410] Ibid. Cf. c. 19 (pp. 420, 421). It does not seem to be known exactly who William’s mother was; but she brought to her husband in dower a knight’s fee in Herefordshire under Hugh de Lacy. See Lib. Nig. Scacc. (Hearne), p. 155, and Stubbs, as above, p. xxxviii, note 4.

[1411] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 19 (p. 421).

[1412] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 6.

[1413] Letter of Hugh of Nonant in Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 219.

[1414] See Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. ii. c. 19 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 424).

[1415] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 101. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 29.

The king left England on December 11.[1416] William was consecrated, together with Richard Fitz-Nigel, on December 31,[1417] and on the feast of the Epiphany he was enthroned at Ely.[1418] Immediately afterwards he began to assert his temporal authority. At a meeting of the Court of Exchequer the bishop of Durham was turned out by the chancellor’s orders; presently after he was deprived of his jurisdiction over Northumberland. Soon after this, Bishop Godfrey of Winchester was dispossessed not merely of his sheriffdom and castles, but even of his own patrimony.[1419] For this last spoliation there is no apparent excuse; that a man should hold a sheriffdom together with a bishopric was, however, contrary alike to Church discipline and to sound temporal policy; and the non-recognition of Hugh’s purchase of Northumberland might be yet further justified by the fact that the purchase-money was not yet paid.[1420] In February 1190 Richard summoned his mother, his brothers and his chief ministers to a final meeting in Normandy;[1421] the chancellor, knowing that complaints against him would be brought before the king, hurried over in advance of his colleagues, to justify himself before he was accused,[1422] and he succeeded so well that Richard not only sent him back to England after the council with full authority to act as chief justiciar as well as chancellor,[1423] but at the same time opened negotiations with Rome to obtain for him a commission as legate[1424]—an arrangement which, the archbishop of Canterbury being bound on crusade like the king, would leave William supreme both in Church and state.

- [1416] Gesta Ric. as above·/·(Stubbs), p. 101. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 73, makes it December 14.

- [1417] R. Diceto as above, p. 75. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 11.

- [1418] R. Diceto as above.

- [1419] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 11.

- [1420] See Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iii. pref. p. xxxi. and note 3.

- [1421] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 105, 106.

- [1422] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 12.

- [1423] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 106. Cf. Ric. Devizes as above, and Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 14 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 331).

- [1424] Gesta Ric. as above.

The new justiciar’s first act on his return was to fortify the Tower of London;[1425] his next was to punish a disturbance which had lately occurred at York. During the last six months the long-suppressed hatred which the Jews inspired had broken forth into open violence. The first pretext had been furnished by a misunderstanding on the coronation-day. Richard, who had some very strict ideas about the ceremonials of religion, had given orders that no Jew should approach him on that solemn occasion; in defiance or ignorance of the prohibition, some rich Jews came to offer gifts to the new sovereign; the courtiers and the people seized the excuse to satisfy at once their greed and their hatred; the unwelcome visitors were driven away, robbed, beaten, some even slain;[1426] and the rage of their enemies, once let loose, spent itself throughout the night in a general sack of the Jewish quarter. Richard, engaged at the coronation-banquet, knew nothing of what had happened till the next day,[1427] when he did his best to secure the ringleaders, and punished them severely.[1428] When he was gone, however, the spark thus kindled burst forth into a blaze in all the chief English cities in succession, Winchester being almost the sole exception.[1429] Massacres of Jews took place at Norwich on February 6, at Stamford on March 7, at S. Edmund’s on March 18, Palm Sunday.[1430] A day before this last, a yet worse tragedy had occurred at York. The principal Jews of that city, in dread of a popular attack, had sought and obtained shelter in one of the towers of the castle, under the protection of its constable and the sheriff of Yorkshire.[1431] Once there, they refused to give it up again; whereupon the constable and the sheriff called out all the forces of city and shire to dislodge them. After twenty-four hours’ siege the Jews offered to ransom themselves by a heavy fine; but the blood of the citizens was up, and they rejected the offer. The Jews, in desperation, resolved to die by their own hands rather than by those of their Gentile enemies; the women and children were slaughtered by their husbands and fathers, who flung the corpses over the battlements or piled them up in the tower, which they fired.[1432] Nearly five hundred Jews perished in the massacre or the flames;[1433] and the citizens and soldiers, baulked of their expected prey, satiated their greed by sacking and burning all the Jewish houses and destroying the bonds of all the Jewish usurers in the city.[1434] At the end of April or the beginning of May[1435] the new justiciar came with an armed force to York to investigate this affair. The citizens threw the whole blame upon the castellan and the sheriff; William accordingly deposed them both.[1436] As the castle was destroyed, he probably thought it needless to appoint a new constable until it should be rebuilt; for the sheriff—John, elder brother of William the Marshal—he at once substituted his own brother Osbert.[1437] Most of the knights who had been concerned in the tumult had taken care to put themselves out of his reach; their estates were, however, mulcted and their chattels seized;[1438] and the citizens only escaped by paying a fine[1439] and giving hostages who were not redeemed till three years later, when all thought of further proceedings in the matter had been given up.[1440] Even the clergy of the minster had their share of punishment, although for a different offence: William, though his legatine commission had not yet arrived, claimed already to be received as legate, and put the church under interdict until his claim was admitted.[1441]

[1425] Ibid.·/·Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 106.

[1426] The Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 83, lay the blame on “curiales”; with Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 12, the source of the mischief is “plebs superbo oculo et insatiabili corde”; R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 69, is so ashamed of the whole business that he tries to shift the responsibility off all English shoulders alike—“Pax Judæorum, quam ab antiquis temporibus semper obtinuerant, ab alienigenis interrumpitur.” Cf. the very opposite tone of R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 28, and the judicial middle course characteristically steered by Will. Newb., l. iv. cc. 1 and 9 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 297, 298, 316, 317).

[1427] R. Diceto as above.

[1428] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 84. Rog. Howden as above. Both take care to assure us that Richard’s severity was owing not to any sympathy for the Jews, but to the fact that in the confusion a few Christians had suffered with them. Cf. a slightly different version in Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 1 (as above, pp. 297–299).

[1429] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 5.

[1430] R. Diceto as above, p. 75. Cf. Will. Newb., l. iv. cc. 7, 8 (as above, pp. 308–312), who adds Lynn to the series.

[1431] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 107, and a more detailed account in Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 9 (as above, pp. 312–314). From him we learn that the Jews of Lincoln did the same, and with a more satisfactory result.

[1432] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 107. For date—March 16—see R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 75.

[1433] R. Diceto as above.

[1434] Gesta Ric. as above. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 34. Cf. the somewhat different version of Will. Newb., l. iv. cc. 9, 10 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 314–322), and also R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 27, 28.

[1435] The Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 108, say merely “post Pascha”; Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 11 (as above, p. 323), says “circa Dominicæ Ascensionis solemnia,” which fell on May 4.

[1436] Gesta Ric. as above.

[1437] Rog. Howden as above.

[1438] Will. Newb. as above (p. 323). Cf. Pipe Roll 2 Ric. I., quoted in Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iii. pref. pp. xliv., notes 4, 5, xlv., note 1.

[1439] Will. Newb. as above.

[1440] Pipe Roll 5 Ric. I. in Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iii. pref. p. xliv., note 7. Will. Newb., as above (p. 324), says that nothing further was ever done in the matter.

[1441] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 108, 109.

For the moment William’s power was undisputed even in the north; for Hugh of Durham was still in Gaul. Now, however, there came a notice from the king that he was about to send Hugh back to England as justiciar over the whole country north of the Humber.[1442] Hugh himself soon afterwards arrived, and hurried northward, in the hope, it seems, of catching the chancellor on the further side of the Humber and thus compelling him to acknowledge his inferiority.[1443] In this hope he was disappointed; they met at Blyth in Nottinghamshire.[1444] Hugh, impetuous in old age as in youth, talked somewhat too much as the chancellor had acted—“as if all the affairs of the realm were dependent on his nod.”[1445] At last, however, he produced the commission from Richard upon which his pretensions were founded;[1446] and William, who could read between the lines of his royal friend’s letters, saw at once that he had little to fear.[1447] He replied simply by expressing his readiness to obey the king’s orders,[1448] and proposing that all further discussion should be adjourned to a second meeting a week later at Tickhill. There Hugh found the tables turned. The chancellor had reached the place before him; the bishop’s followers were shut out from the castle; he was admitted alone into the presence of his rival, who, without giving him time to speak, put into his hands another letter from Richard, bidding all his English subjects render service and obedience to “our trusty and well-beloved chancellor, the bishop of Ely,” as they would to the king himself. The letter was dated June 6—some days, if not weeks, later than Hugh’s credentials;[1449] and it seems to have just reached William together with his legatine commission, which was issued on the previous day.[1450] He gave his rival no time even to think. “You had your say at our last meeting; now I will have mine. As my lord the king liveth, you shall not quit this place till you have given me hostages for the surrender of all your castles. No protests! I am not a bishop arresting another bishop; I am the chancellor, arresting his supplanter.”[1451] Hugh was powerless; yet he let himself be dragged all the way to London before he would yield. Then he gave up the required hostages,[1452] and submitted to the loss of all his lately-purchased honours—Windsor, Newcastle, Northumberland, even the manor of Sadberge which he had bought of the king for his see[1453]—everything, in short, except his bishopric. For that he set out as soon as he was liberated; but at his manor of Howden he was stopped by the chancellor’s orders, forbidden to proceed further, and again threatened with forcible detention. He promised to remain where he was, gave security for the fulfilment of his promise, and then wrote to the king his complaints of the treatment which he had received.[1454] All the redress that he could get, however, was a writ commanding that Sadberge should be restored to him at once and that he should suffer no further molestation.[1455]

- [1442] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 109. This appointment is mentioned (ib. p. 106) among those made at the council of Rouen, where William himself was appointed; but it seems plain that it was not ratified till some time later.

- [1443] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 12.

- [1444] Gesta Ric. as above, p. 109.

- [1445] Ric. Devizes as above.

- [1446] Ib. p. 13. Gesta Ric. as above.

- [1447] Ric. Devizes as above.

- [1448] Gesta Ric. as above.

- [1449] Cf. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 83, with Ric. Devizes as above.

- [1450] R. Diceto as above.

- [1451] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 13.

- [1452] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 109. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 35, places the submission at Southwell.

- [1453] Gesta Ric. as above. On Sadberge see Rog. Howden as above, p. 13.

- [1454] Gesta Ric., pp. 109, 110.

- [1455] The Gesta Ric., p. 110, say Richard ordered the restitution of Newcastle and Sadberge; for Newcastle Rog. Howden, as above, p. 38, substitutes “comitatum Northumbriæ”; but the king’s letter, given by Roger himself (ib. pp. 38, 39), mentions nothing except Sadberge. For its date see ib. pp. 37 note 1, 39 note 3, and Gesta Ric. as above, p. 112, note 1.

The chancellor’s first rival was thus suppressed; but already he could see other stumbling-blocks arising in his path, not a few of them placed there by the shortsighted policy of his royal master. Richard’s reckless bestowal of lands and jurisdictions would, if left undisturbed, have put the administration of at least ten whole shires practically beyond the control of the central government. The bishops of Durham, Winchester and Coventry or Chester would have had everything their own way, in temporal matters no less than in spiritual, throughout their respective dioceses. To this state of things William had summarily put an end in the cases of Northumberland and Hampshire; in those of Leicestershire, Staffordshire and Warwickshire the primate had been induced to remonstrate with Hugh of Coventry upon the impropriety of a bishop holding three sheriffdoms, and Hugh had accordingly given up two of them, though he managed to get them back after Baldwin’s death at the close of 1190.[1456] There were however still four shires in the south-west and one in Mid-England over which the king’s justiciar was not only without practical, but even without legal jurisdiction. In these, and in a number of “honours” scattered over the midland shires from Gloucester to Nottingham, the whole rights and profits of government, administration and finance belonged solely to John; for his exercise of them he was responsible to no one but the king; and thus, as soon as Richard was out of reach, John was to all intents and purposes himself king of his own territories. For the present indeed he was unable to set foot in his little realm: Richard in the spring had made both his brothers take an oath to keep away from England for three years.[1457] It was however easy enough for John to govern his part of England, as the whole of it had often been governed for years together, from the other side of the Channel. He had his staff of ministers just like his brother—his justiciar Roger de Planes,[1458] his chancellor Stephen Ridel,[1459] his seneschal William de Kahaines, and his butler Theobald Walter;[1460] the sheriffs of his five counties and the stewards or bailiffs of his honours were appointed by him alone, and exercised their functions solely for his advantage, without reference to the king’s court or the king’s exchequer.[1461] It is evident that, even though as yet the sea lay between them, John had already the power to make himself, if he were so minded, a serious obstacle to the chancellor’s plans of governing England for Richard. Moreover, before Richard finally quitted Gaul, his mother persuaded him to release John from his oath of absence;[1462] and William of Longchamp himself, in his new character of legate, was obliged to confirm the release with his absolution.[1463] In view of the struggle which he now saw could not be far distant, William began to marshal his political forces and concert his measures of defence. On August 1 he held a Church council at Gloucester, in the heart of John’s territories;[1464] on October 13 he held another at Westminster;[1465] and he seems to have spent the winter in a sort of half legatine, half vice-regal progress throughout the country, for purposes of justice and finance and for the assertion of his own authority. This proceeding stirred up a good deal of discontent. Cripple though he was, William of Longchamp seems to have been almost as rapid and restless a traveller as Henry II.; one contemporary says he “went up and down the country like a flash of lightning.”[1466] It may be however that these words allude to the disastrous effects of the chancellor’s passage rather than to its swiftness and suddenness; for he went about in such state as no minister except Henry’s first chancellor had ever ventured to assume. His train of a thousand armed knights, besides a crowd of clerks and other attendants, was a ruinous burthen to the religious houses where he claimed entertainment; and the burthen was made almost unbearable by the heavy exactions, from clerk and layman alike, which he made in his master’s name.[1467]

- [1456] See R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 77, 78, and Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iii. pref. p. xxxi. and note 5.

- [1457] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 106. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 15.

- [1458] R. Diceto as above, p. 99.

- [1459] Gesta Ric. as above, p. 224.

- [1460] Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 55.

- [1461] See Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iii. pref. pp. xxxiii and lii.

- [1462] Gesta Ric. and Ric. Devizes as above.

- [1463] Gir. Cambr. De rebus a se gestis, l. ii. c. 23 (Brewer, vol. i. p. 86). Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 15, says the arrangement was that John “in Angliam per cancellarium transiens staret ejus judicio, et ad placitum illius vel moraretur in regno vel exularet.” But with Eleanor in England to back her son, William could really have no choice in the matter.

- [1464] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 83. On the version of this in Ric. Devizes (as above, pp. 13, 14), see Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iii. pref. p. xlix.

- [1465] R. Diceto as above, p. 85. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 488, makes it October 16.

- [1466] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 14.

- [1467] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 214. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 72. Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 14 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 333, 334).

That master was now with Philip of France at Messina,[1468] preparing for his departure from Europe. When he would come back—whether he ever would come back at all—was felt by all parties to be doubtful in the extreme. With his ardent zeal, rash valour and peculiar health, he was little likely to escape both the chances of war and the effects of the eastern climate;[1469] and the question of the succession was therefore again becoming urgent. There was indeed not much latitude of choice; the male line of Anjou, already extinct in Palestine, had in Europe only three representatives—Richard himself, John, and their infant nephew Arthur of Britanny. By the strict feudal rule of primogeniture, Arthur, being Geoffrey’s son, would have after Richard the next claim as head of the Angevin house. By old English constitutional practice, John, being a grown man and the reigning sovereign’s own brother, would have a much better chance of recognition as his successor than his nephew, a child not yet four years old. Neither alternative was without drawbacks. Richard himself had made up his mind to the first; early in November 1190 he arranged a marriage for Arthur with a daughter of King Tancred of Sicily, on a distinct understanding that in case of his own death without children Arthur was to succeed to all his dominions;[1470] while at the same time William of Longchamp was endeavouring to secure the Scot king’s recognition of Arthur as heir-presumptive to the English crown.[1471] The queen-mother was unwilling to contemplate the succession of either Arthur or John; she was anxious to get Richard married. Knowing that he never would marry the woman to whom he had been so long betrothed, she took upon herself to find him another bride. Her choice fell upon Berengaria, daughter of King Sancho VI. of Navarre;[1472] it was accepted by Richard; early in February 1191[1473] she went over to Gaul; there she met her intended daughter-in-law, whom she carried on with her into Italy, and by the end of March they were both with Richard at Messina.[1474] On the very day of their arrival Philip had sailed.[1475] After long wrangling with him, Richard had at last succeeded in freeing himself from his miserable engagement to Adela;[1476] he at once plighted his troth to Berengaria; and when his mother, after a four days’ visit, set out again upon her homeward journey,[1477] his bride remained with him under the care of his sister the widowed queen Jane of Sicily[1478] till the expiration of Lent and the circumstances of their eastward voyage enabled them to marry. The wedding was celebrated and the queen crowned at Limasol in Cyprus on the fourth Sunday after Easter.[1479]

[1468] Richard was there from September 23, 1190, to April 10, 1191. Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 125, 162; R. Diceto as above·/·(Stubbs), vol. ii., pp. 84, 91.

[1469] See Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 5 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 306).

[1470] Treaty in Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 133–136, and Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 61–64. It is dateless, but on November 11 Richard wrote to the Pope telling him of its provisions and asking for his sanction. Gesta Ric. as above, pp. 136–138; Rog. Howden as above, pp. 65, 66.

[1471] Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 14 (as above, pp. 335, 336). William represents this as an unauthorized proceeding of the chancellor’s, contrived in his own interest as against John. He seems to place it at a later date.

[1472] “Puella prudentior quam pulchra” says Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 25; but he seems to be contrasting her with Eleanor. On the other hand, Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 19 (as above, p. 346), calls her“famosæ pulchritudinis et prudentiæ virginem.” According to the Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), p. 175, this had been Richard’s own choice for many years past.

[1473] Richard sent ships to meet her at Naples before the end of that month. Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 157.

[1474] They arrived on March 30. Gesta Ric. as above, p. 161.

[1475] Ibid.

[1476] Gesta Ric. as above, pp. 160, 161. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 99. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 86. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 26. The actual treaty between Richard and Philip, of which more later, is in Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 54.

[1477] She sailed on April 2. Gesta Ric. as above, p. 161. Cf. R. Diceto as above.

[1478] Ibid. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 28.

[1479] Gesta Ric. as above, pp. 166, 167. Ric. Devizes, p. 39. Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 195, 196.

On her way home Eleanor stopped to transact some diplomatic business at Rome, and she seems to have remained in Gaul until the beginning of the next year. Long before she returned to England there were evident tokens that when Richard had proposed to keep John out of it, he had for once been wiser than his mother. Early in the year John, profiting by the liberty which her intercession had procured him, came over to England and there set up his court in such semi-regal state as to make it a source of extreme irritation, if not of grave anxiety, to the chancellor.[1480] Eleanor’s departure thus left William of Longchamp face to face with a new and most formidable rival; while about the same time he saw his power threatened on another side. In March 1191 tidings came that Archbishop Baldwin had died at Acre in the foregoing November.[1481] If a new primate should be appointed, it was to be expected as a matter of course that the bishop of Ely would lose the legation; he could hope to retain it only by persuading Richard either to nominate him to the primacy, or to keep it vacant altogether. Richard’s notions of ecclesiastical propriety were however too strict to admit the latter alternative; from the former he would most likely be deterred by his father’s experiences with another chancellor; so, to the astonishment of everybody, he nominated for the see of Canterbury a Sicilian prelate, one of his fellow-crusaders, William archbishop of Monreale.[1482] Meanwhile John and the chancellor were quarrelling openly; popular sympathy, which William had alienated by his arrogance and his oppressions, was on the side of John; even the subordinate justiciars, who had stood by William in his struggle with Hugh of Durham,[1483] were turning against him now; from one and all complaints against him were showering in upon the king;[1484] till at the end of February Richard grew so bewildered and so uneasy that he decided upon sending the archbishop of Rouen to investigate the state of affairs in England and see what could be done to remedy it.[1485]

- [1480] See Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iii. pref. pp. li., lii.

- [1481] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 488, 490.

- [1482] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 493, 494; date, January 25 [1191].

- [1483] See Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), pp. 11, 12.

- [1484] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 158. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 95, 96.

- [1485] Gesta Ric. as above. Rog. Howden as above, p. 96. We get the date approximately from Richard’s letter in R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 90.

The archbishop of Rouen—Walter of Coutances—was a man of noble birth and stainless character who had been successively archdeacon of Oxford, treasurer of Rouen cathedral and vice-chancellor to Henry II.;[1486] in this last capacity he had for eight years done the whole work of head of the chancery for his nominal chief Ralf of Varneville,[1487] till Ralf was succeeded in 1182 by the king’s son Geoffrey, and next year the vice-chancellor was promoted to the see of Lincoln, which Geoffrey had resigned. A year later Walter was advanced to the primacy of Normandy.[1488] He was now with Richard, on his way to Holy Land, but commuted his vow to serve the king.[1489] He was a very quiet, unassuming person, and certainly not a vigorous statesman; but his integrity and disinterestedness were above question;[1490] and the position in which he was now placed was one in which even a Thomas Becket might well have been puzzled how to act. The only commission given him by Richard of which we know the date was issued on February 23;[1491] but it was not till April 2 that he was allowed to leave Messina;[1492] and during the interval Richard, in his reluctance to supersede the chancellor, seems to have been perpetually changing his mind and varying his instructions, some of which were sent direct to England and some intrusted to Walter, till by the time the archbishop started he was laden with a bundle of contradictory commissions, addressed to himself, to William and to the co-justiciars, and apparently accompanied by a verbal order to use one, all or none of them, wholly at his own discretion.[1493]

- [1486] Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. ii. c. 10 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 408).

- [1487] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 367.

- [1488] Ib. vol. ii. pp. 10, 14, 21.

- [1489] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 27—very unfairly coloured.

- [1490] Cf. Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. ii. c. 10 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 408), and Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 15 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 336). In this place William calls Walter “virum prudentem et modestum”; but in l. iii. c. 8 (ib. p. 236) he displays a curiously bitter resentment against him for his abandonment of the see of Lincoln for the loftier see of Rouen.

- [1491] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 90. Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 6 (p. 401), gives the date as February 20.

- [1492] He and Eleanor left Messina together. Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), p. 176.

- [1493] This seems the only possible explanation at once of Walter’s conduct and of the conflicting accounts in R. Diceto as above, pp. 90, 91; Gir. Cambr. as above (pp. 400, 401); Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 158; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 96, 97; Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), pp. 27–29; and Will. Newb. as above. See Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iii. pref. pp. lx., lxi., note 1.

Before he reached England John and the chancellor were at open war. On Mid-Lent Sunday they met at Winchester to discuss the payment of John’s pensions from the Exchequer and the possession of certain castles within his territories.[1494] The discussion clearly ended in a quarrel; and this served as a signal for revolt against the unpopular minister. Gerard de Camville, sheriff of Lincolnshire by purchase from the king, was also constable of Lincoln castle in right of his wife Nicolaa de Haye. He was accused of harbouring robbers in the castle, and when summoned before the king’s justices he refused to appear, declaring that he had become John’s liegeman and was answerable only to him.[1495] At the opposite end of England Roger de Mortemer, the lord of Wigmore—successor to that Hugh de Mortemer who had defied Henry II. in 1156—was at the same moment found to be plotting treason with the Welsh. Against him the chancellor proceeded first, and his mere approach so alarmed Roger that he gave up his castle and submitted to banishment from the realm for three years.[1496] William then hurried to Lincoln; but before he could reach it Gerard and Nicolaa had had time to make their almost impregnable stronghold ready for a siege, and John had had time to gain possession of Nottingham and Tickhill[1497]—two castles which the king had retained in his own hands, while bestowing upon his brother the honours in which they stood. Nicolaa was in command at Lincoln, and was fully equal to the occasion; her husband was now with John, and John at once sent the chancellor a most insulting message, taunting him with the facility with which the two castles had been betrayed,[1498] and threatening that if the attempt upon Lincoln was not at once given up, he would come in person to avenge the wrongs of his liegeman.[1499] William saw that John was now too strong for him; he knew by this time that Pope Clement was dead,[1500] and his own legation consequently at an end; he must have known, too, of the mission of Walter of Rouen; he therefore, through some of his fellow-bishops,[1501] demanded a personal meeting with John, and proposed that all their differences should be submitted to arbitration. John burst into a fury at what he chose to call the impudence of this proposal,[1502] but he ended by accepting it, and on April 25 the meeting took place at Winchester. The case was decided by the bishops of London, Winchester and Bath, with eleven lay arbitrators chosen by them from each party. Their decision went wholly against the chancellor. He was permitted to claim the restitution of Nottingham and Tickhill, but only to put them in charge of two partizans of John; his right to appoint wardens to the other castles in dispute was nominally confirmed, but made practically dependent upon John’s dictation; he was compelled to reinstate Gerard de Camville, and moreover to promise that in case of Richard’s death he would do his utmost to secure the crown for John.[1503]

- [1494] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 26.

- [1495] Cf. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 30, with Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 242, 243, and Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 16 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 337, 338), and see Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iii. pref. pp. lvi., lvii.

- [1496] Ric. Devizes as above.

- [1497] Ibid. Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 207. Will. Newb. as above (p. 338).

- [1498] Ric. Devizes as above.

- [1499] Ibid. Gesta Ric. as above.

- [1500] He died on the Wednesday before Easter—April 10—and his successor Celestine III. was elected on Easter-day. Gesta Ric. as above, p. 161.

- [1501] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 31, makes Walter of Rouen the mediator, but we shall see that this is chronologically impossible.

- [1502] Ibid.

- [1503] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), pp. 32, 33. On the date see Bishop Stubbs’s notes to Gesta Ric., p. 208, and Rog. Howden, vol. iii. p. 134, and pref. to latter, pp. lviii., lix.

Two days later Walter of Rouen landed at Shoreham.[1504] He was evidently not wanted now to act as a check upon William of Longchamp; he might almost expect to be soon wanted as a check upon John; but meanwhile, he could only stand aside and watch the effect of the new arrangements. His passive attitude gave, however, an indirect support to the chancellor; after midsummer, therefore, the latter ventured to repudiate the concessions wrung from him at Winchester; he again advanced upon Lincoln, and formally deprived Gerard of the sheriffdom, which he conferred upon William de Stuteville.[1505] Once more the other bishops interposed, backed now by the Norman primate. Another assembly met at Winchester on July 28,[1506] and here a fresh settlement was made. Gerard was reinstated in the sheriffdom of Lincolnshire, pending his trial in the king’s court; William and John were both bound over to commit no more forcible disseizures; the disputed castles were to be again put in charge for the king, but through the medium of the archbishop of Rouen instead of the chancellor, and John was allowed no voice in the selection of the castellans, who were chosen by the assembly then and there. If the chancellor should infringe the agreement, or if the king should die, these castles were to be given up to John; but all reference to his claims upon the succession to the throne was carefully omitted.[1507] The contest almost seemed to have ended in a drawn battle. It was strictly a contest between individuals, involving no national or constitutional interests. The barons, as a body, clearly sided with John; but, just as clearly, they sided with him from loyal motives. The authority of the Crown was never called in question; the question was, who was fittest to represent and uphold it—the king’s chancellor, or his brother. Of treason, either to England or to Richard, there was not a thought, unless—as indeed is only too probable—it lurked in the mind of John himself.

- [1504] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 497, says he landed about midsummer, and the printed text of R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 90, makes the date June 27; but see note in latter place. Bishop Stubbs (Rog. Howden, vol. iii. pref. p. lix.) adopts the earlier date.

- [1505] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 207.

- [1506] The date comes from Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 32, who however misapplies it. See Bishop Stubbs’s notes to Gesta Ric., p. 208, and Rog. Howden, vol. iii. p. 134.

- [1507] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 135–137.

A drawn battle, however, could not possibly be the end of a struggle between two such men as John of Mortain and William of Longchamp. In the autumn a new element was added to the strife by the return of Archbishop Geoffrey of York. For thirty-five years Geoffrey had been the eldest living child, if indeed he was not actually the first-born, of Henry Fitz-Empress;[1508] but of the vast Angevin heritage there fell to his share nothing, except the strong feelings and fiery temper which caused half the troubles of his life. As a child he had been brought up at court almost on equal terms with his half-brothers;[1509] he seems indeed to have been his father’s favourite, till he was supplanted by the little John. When he grew to manhood, however, Henry could see no way of providing for him except by forcing him into a career for which he had no vocation. At an early age he was put into deacon’s orders and made archdeacon of Lincoln;[1510] in 1173, when about twenty years of age, he was appointed to the bishopric of the same place.[1511] The Pope, however, demurred to the choice of a candidate disqualified alike by his youth and his birth; and when the former obstacle had been outlived and the latter might have been condoned, Geoffrey voluntarily renounced an office in which he would have been secure for life, but which he had never desired and for which he felt himself unfit,[1512] in order to become his father’s chancellor and constant companion during the last eight years of his life. It was Henry’s last regret that this son, the only one of his sons whose whole life had been an unbroken course of perfect filial obedience, had to be left with his future entirely at the mercy of his undutiful younger half-brother. Richard received him with a brotherly welcome;[1513] when, however, he nominated him to the see of York, he was indeed carrying out their father’s last wishes, but certainly not those of Geoffrey himself. Richard seems to have thought that he was held back by other motives than those of conscience or of preference for a secular life; he suspected him of cherishing designs upon the crown.[1514] It can only be said that Geoffrey, so far as appears, never did anything to justify the suspicion, but shewed on the contrary every disposition to act loyally towards both his brothers, if they would but have acted with equal loyalty towards him. As soon however as the tonsure had marked him irrevocably for a priestly life,[1515] Richard’s zeal for his promotion cooled. The bishop of Durham, who was striving to make his see independent of the metropolitan,[1516] and a strong party in the York chapter with whom Geoffrey had quarrelled on a point of ecclesiastical etiquette, easily won the king’s ear;[1517] it was not till the very eve of Richard’s departure from England that Geoffrey was able to buy his final confirmation both in the see of York and in the estates which his father had bequeathed to him in Anjou;[1518] and in March he was summoned over to Normandy and there, like John, made to take an oath of absence from England for three years.[1519]

[1508] In the first chapter of his Life by Gerald (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 363), we are told that Geoffrey was scarcely twenty when elected to Lincoln, i.e. in 1173. But in l. i. c. 13 (ib. p. 384), Gerald says that he was consecrated to York “anno ætatis quasi quadragesimo,” in 1191. These two dates, as is usual with Gerald in such cases, do not agree, and neither of them pretends to be more than approximate. Still it seems plain that Geoffrey’s birth must fall somewhere between 1151 and 1153. Even if we adopt the latest date, he must have been born in the same year as Eleanor’s first son—the baby William who died in 1156—and must have been at least two years older than the young king, four years older than Richard, and fourteen years older than John.

[1509] Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. i. c. 1 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 363).

[1510] Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. i. c. 1 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 363).

[1511] Ib. p. 364. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 22 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 154).

[1512] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 271, 272. Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 4 (p. 368). The resignation was formally completed at Epiphany 1182. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 10.

[1513] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 5 (p. 372).

[1514] Ib. c. 8 (p. 379). In c. 7 (p. 374) Gerald actually represents Geoffrey as entertaining some hope of surviving and succeeding both his younger brothers; but this is a very different thing from plotting against them during their lives. See Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iii. pref. p. lxvi. As it turned out, the first part, at any rate, of this dream of Geoffrey’s was not so mad as it seemed, for he died only four years before John.

[1515] He was ordained priest September 23, 1189. Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 88.

[1516] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 146. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 74.

[1517] Gesta Ric. as above, pp. 88, 91, 99. Rog. Howden as above, pp. 17, 18, 27. Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. i. c. 8 (Brewer, vol. iv. pp. 377, 378).

[1518] Gesta Ric. as above, p. 100. Cf. Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 379).

[1519] Gir. Cambr. as above. Gesta Ric. as above, p. 106. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 15.

According to Geoffrey’s own account, he followed his brother as far as Vézelay, and there won from him a remission of this vow.[1520] It is certain that by April 1191 Richard had so far changed his mind again as to be desirous of Geoffrey’s speedy consecration. The Pope’s consent was still lacking; and the negotiations for obtaining this were undertaken by the person who, from Geoffrey’s very birth, had been his most determined enemy—Queen Eleanor. When she went from Messina to Rome to plead his cause with Clement III. or his successor Celestine,[1521] it is plain that natural feeling gave way to motives of policy. She could now see that an archbishop of York might become very useful in England, in holding the balance between Hugh of Durham and William of Ely. His canonical authority and personal influence might furnish, not indeed a counterpoise, but at least a check to the now unlimited powers of the legate. On the other hand, it was the long vacancy of York which more than anything else had tended to Hugh’s exaltation. For ten years the bishop of Durham, with no metropolitan over him, had virtually been himself metropolitan of northern England. He strongly resented the filling of the vacant see, and had actually obtained from Clement III. a privilege of exemption from its jurisdiction.[1522] If the archbishop of York could be reinstated in his proper constitutional position, his own interests would lead him to use it for those of the kingdom and the king.

- [1520] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 11 (p. 382).

- [1521] Rog. Howden as above, p. 100. The change in the Papacy must have occurred while she was there.

- [1522] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 146.

Geoffrey’s qualifications and disqualifications for such a task may be very easily summed up. He had the Angevin fearlessness, energy, persistence and thoroughness, with a fair share of the versatile capabilities of the family; he had all their impetuosity, but very little of their wariness and tact. Mingled with the Angevin fire, there seems to have run in his veins the blood, and with it the spirit, of a totally different race. If we may credit on such a point the gossip of his father’s court, Geoffrey was through his mother a child of the people—seemingly the English people—and of its very lowest class.[1523] This consideration has more interest at a later stage of Geoffrey’s career, when he stands forth as a champion of constitutional liberty. Until then, there is, so far as we can see, no evidence of any special sympathy between him and the English people. Yet the plebeian and probably English element in him existed, or was believed to exist; and if it did not become, as it easily might have done, an important element in his political career, it was at any rate not unlikely to have exercised some influence upon his character.

- [1523] W. Map, De Nugis Cur., dist. v. c. 6 (Wright, pp. 228–235). Walter is the only writer who tells us anything about Geoffrey’s mother; as he does not say she was a foreigner, it seems most probable that he looked upon her as an Englishwoman. The name which he gives to her—“Ykenai” or “Hikenai”—tells nothing either way, in itself. But Mr. Dimock (in his preface to the seventh volume of Gerald’s works, p. xxxvii) throws doubt upon Walter’s whole account of her except her name, and suggests that she may have belonged to a knightly family of Akeny (i.e. Acquigny) in Normandy. This, however, is a question to be investigated by a biographer of Geoffrey or a student of his later political career rather than by an historian of the Angevin kings. The doubts which W. Map tries to throw upon his connexion with them are probably affected, and clearly unfounded. Few specimens of the Angevin race are more unmistakeable than Geoffrey; one might perhaps add, few more creditable.

Eleanor’s mission to Rome succeeded. Geoffrey’s election and his claim to the obedience of the bishop of Durham were both confirmed by Pope Celestine;[1524] he was consecrated at Tours by Archbishop Bartholomew on August 18, and received his pall on the same day.[1525] He at once put himself in communication with John, to secure a protector on his return to his see;[1526] for William of Longchamp, having had no notice from Richard of the remission of Geoffrey’s vow of absence, refused to believe in it,[1527] and had not only issued orders for the archbishop’s arrest as soon as he should land in England,[1528] but had agreed with the countess of Flanders that no Flemish ship should be allowed to give him a passage. The countess, however, evaded her agreement by letting him sail from Wissant in an English boat.[1529] He landed at Dover on Holy Cross day,[1530] having changed his clothes to avoid recognition.[1531] The constable of Dover, Matthew de Clères, was absent; his wife Richenda was a sister of William of Longchamp; her men-at-arms surrounded the archbishop the moment he touched the shore, recognized him in spite of his disguise, and strove to arrest him, but he managed to free himself from their hands and make his way to the priory of S. Martin, just outside the town. Here for five days Richenda’s followers vainly endeavoured to blockade and starve him into surrender.[1532] On the fifth day a band of armed men rushed into the priory-church, and in the chancellor’s name ordered Geoffrey to quit the country at once. Geoffrey, seated by the altar, clad in his pontifical robes and with his archiepiscopal cross in his hand, set them and their chancellor at defiance.[1533] They dragged him out of the church by the hands and feet; and as nothing would induce him to mount a horse which they brought for him, they dragged him on, still in the same array, still clinging to his cross and excommunicating them as they went, all through the town to the castle, where they flung him into prison.[1534]

[1524] Gesta Ric. as above·/·(Stubbs), p. 209. See Celestine’s letter (date, May 11) in Monasticon Angl., vol. vi. pt. iii. col. 1188, and Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iii. pref. p. lxvii, note 2.

[1525] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 96. Cf. Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 209; Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. i. c. 13 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 384). Will. Newb., always hostile to Geoffrey, declares that “ordine præpostero” he got his pallium before he was consecrated; l. iv. c. 17 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 339, 340).

[1526] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 34.

[1527] His disbelief was evidently shared by Roger of Howden (Stubbs, vol. iii. p. 138); but Roger’s authority, the treasurer, does not commit himself to any opinion on the subject. Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 210.

[1528] See the chancellor’s writ—dated Preston, July 30—in R. Diceto as above, and

Gir. Cambr. as above, l. ii. c. 1 (p. 389); and cf. Ric. Devizes and Gesta Ric. as above.

[1529] Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 388). Cf. Gesta Ric. as above. The countess—Isabel of Portugal, second wife of Count Philip—was governing her husband’s territories during his absence on crusade, where he died.

[1530] R. Diceto as above, p. 97. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 504.

[1531] Gesta Ric. as above.

[1532] Gir. Cambr. as above (pp. 388–390). Cf. R. Diceto and Gesta Ric. as above, and Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 17 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 340).

[1533] Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. ii. c. 1 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 391).

[1534] Ibid. (pp. 391, 392). Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), pp. 35, 36. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 97. Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 111. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 505. Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 17 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 340).

This outrage roused up all parties alike in Church and state. England had had quite enough of persecuted and martyred archbishops. Protests and remonstrances came pouring in upon the chancellor from the most opposite quarters:—from the treasurer and bishop of London, Richard Fitz-Nigel[1535]—from the aged bishop of Norwich, John of Oxford,[1536] and from the Canterbury chapter,[1537] both of whom had had only too much experience, in different ways, of the disasters which might result from such violence to an archbishop. The most venerated of living English prelates, S. Hugh of Lincoln, at once excommunicated Richenda, her husband and all her abettors, with lighted candles at Oxford.[1538] John remonstrated most vehemently of all,[1539] and his remonstrances procured Geoffrey’s release,[1540] but only on condition that he would go straight to London and there remain till the case between him and the chancellor could be tried by an assembly of bishops and barons.[1541] This of course satisfied nobody. John had no mind to lose his opportunity of crushing his enemy once for all. From Lancaster, where he was laying his plans with the help of Bishop Hugh of Coventry—a nephew of the old arch-plotter Arnulf of Lisieux—he hurried to Marlborough, and thence sent out summons to all the great men whom he thought likely to help him against the chancellor. He was not disappointed. The co-justiciars hastened up from the various shires where they were apparently busy with their judicial or financial visitations—William the Marshal from Gloucestershire, William Bruère from Oxfordshire, Geoffrey Fitz-Peter from Northamptonshire; the bishops were represented by Godfrey of Winchester and Reginald of Bath, and the sovereign himself by Walter of Rouen; S. Hugh of Lincoln joined the train as it passed through Oxford to Reading. From Reading John sent to call his half-brother to his side. Geoffrey, who was beginning to be looked upon and to look upon himself as something like another S. Thomas, had made a sort of triumphal progress from Dover to London; tied by his parole, he was obliged to ask the chancellor’s consent to his acceptance of John’s invitation, and only gained it on condition of returning within a given time.[1542]

- [1535] R. Diceto as above·/·(Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 97. Gir. Cambr. as above,·/·Vita Galfr., l. ii., c. 2 (Brewer, vol. iv. pp. 393, 394).

- [1536] Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 394).

- [1537] Gerv. Cant. as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 505, 506.

- [1538] Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 393).

- [1539] Ibid. (p. 394). Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 211. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 139.

- [1540] On September 26; R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 97. Cf. Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 4 (p. 395), Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 507, and Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 36.

- [1541] Gir. Cambr. as above.

- [1542] Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. ii. cc. 4, 5 (Brewer, vol. iv. pp. 395–397).

The chancellor meanwhile was at Norwich;[1543] and thither John and the justiciars had already sent him a summons to appear before them and answer for his conduct towards both Geoffrey of York and Hugh of Durham, at an assembly to be held at the bridge over the Lodden, between Reading and Windsor, on Saturday October 5.[1544] William retorted by a counter-summons to all who had joined the count of Mortain to forsake him as an usurper and return to their obedience to the king’s chosen representative.[1545] He hurried, however, to Windsor in time for the proposed meeting; but when the Saturday morning came, the earls of Arundel, Warren and Norfolk appeared at the trysting-place in his stead, pleading ill-health as an excuse for his absence.[1546] As Saturday was accounted an unlucky day for contracts or settlements of any kind,[1547] no one regretted the delay; John and the barons, sitting amid a ring of spectators in the meadows by the Lodden, spent the day in discussing all the complaints against the chancellor, and also, apparently, in looking through such of the Norman primate’s bundle of royal letters as he chose to shew them, and deliberating which would be most appropriate to the present state of affairs. On one point all were agreed; the chancellor must be put down at once.[1548] Early next morning he tried to bribe John into reconciliation, but in vain.[1549] At the high mass in Reading parish church the whole body of bishops lighted their candles and publicly excommunicated all who had been, whether by actual participation, command or consent, concerned in Archbishop Geoffrey’s arrest;[1550] and at nightfall the chancellor was compelled to swear that, come what might, he would be ready to stand his trial at the bridge of Lodden on the morrow.[1551]

- [1543] Ib.·/·Vita Galfr., l. ii., cc. 2, 5 (Brewer, vol. iv. pp. 393, 394, 397).

- [1544] Ib. c. 5 (p. 397). Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 37, giving the date, which is confirmed by one of the summons—that addressed to the bishop of London—given by R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 98. Cf. also Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 212.

- [1545] Gir. Cambr. as above.

- [1546] Ib. c. 6 (p. 398). Cf. R. Diceto, Ric. Devizes and Gesta Ric. as above.

- [1547] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 98.

- [1548] Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. ii. c. 6 (Brewer, vol. iv. pp. 398–401).

- [1549] Ib. c. 7 (p. 402).

- [1550] Ibid. R. Diceto as above.

- [1551] Gir. Cambr. as above.

Scarcely had he set out on the Monday morning when he was met by a report that his enemies were marching upon London.[1552] The report was true in substance; John and the barons, instead of waiting for him at the Lodden bridge, crossed it, and then divided their forces into two bodies; the smaller, consisting of the bishops and barons with John himself, proceeded towards Windsor to meet the chancellor; the larger, comprising the men-at-arms and the servants in charge of the baggage, was sent on by the southern road to Staines.[1553] Such a movement was quite enough to justify William in hurrying back to Windsor and thence on to London as fast as horses could carry him.[1554] Before he could reach it he met John’s men-at-arms coming up by the other road from Staines; a skirmish took place, in which John’s justiciar Roger de Planes was mortally wounded, but his followers seem to have had the best of the fight,[1555] although they could not prevent the chancellor from making his way safe into London. Here he at once called a meeting of the citizens in the Guildhall, and endeavoured to secure their support against John.[1556] He found, however, a strong party opposed to himself. On the last day of July[1557]—three days after the second award between John and William at Winchester—the citizens of London had profited by the king’s absence and his representative’s humiliation to set up a commune. They knew very well that, as a contemporary writer says, neither King Henry nor King Richard would have sanctioned such a thing at any price;[1558] and they knew even better still that Richard’s chancellor would never countenance it for a moment. With John they might have a chance, and they were not disposed to lose it by shutting their gates in his face at the bidding of William of Longchamp. William, seeing that his cause was lost in the city, shut himself up in the Tower.[1559]

- [1552] Ibid.·/·Vita Galfr., l. ii., c. 8 (Brewer, vol. iv. pp. 402, 403). Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 37. Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 212.

- [1553] Cf. Gir. Cambr. as above (pp. 403, 404), and R. Diceto as above, p. 99. Ric. Devizes, as above, says plainly what the other writers leave us to guess, that these followers were meant to go on to London.

- [1554] Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 403). Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 38. R. Diceto and Gesta Ric. as above. Cf. Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 17 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 341, 342).

- [1555] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 99. Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 212. Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. ii. c. 8 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 404).

- [1556] Gir. Cambr. as above. Cf. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 38.

- [1557] “Ipsâ die”—the day on which Philip of France set out homeward from Acre. Ric. Devizes, p. 53.

- [1558] Ib. pp. 53, 54. Yet Richard had once said that he would sell London altogether, if he could find anybody who would give him his price for it. Ib. p. 10, and Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 5 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 306).

- [1559] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 38. R. Diceto as above. Gesta Ric. as above, pp. 212, 218. Will. Newb. as above, c. 17 (p. 342).

By this time John and his companions were at the gates; a short parley ended in their admittance.[1560] Next morning barons and citizens came together in S. Paul’s.[1561]. One after another the chancellor’s victims, with the archbishop of York at their head, set forth their grievances.[1562] Archbishop Walter of Rouen and William the Marshal then produced the king’s letter of February 20, addressed to the Marshal, and accrediting Walter to him and his fellow-justiciars, and bidding them, in case of any failure of duty on the chancellor’s part, follow Walter’s direction in all things.[1563] John and the barons agreed to act in accordance with these instructions; they won the assent of the citizens by swearing to maintain the commune;[1564] the whole assembly then swore fealty to Richard, and to John as his destined successor.[1565] According to one account they went a step further: they appointed John regent of the kingdom, and granted him the disposal of all the royal castles except three, which were to be left to the chancellor.[1566] Upon the latter they now set out to enforce their decision at the sword’s point. His forces were more than sufficient to defend the Tower; they were in fact too numerous; they had had no time to revictual the place, they were painfully overcrowded, and before twenty-four hours were over they found their position untenable.[1567] On the Wednesday William tried to bribe John into abandoning the whole enterprise, and he very nearly succeeded; Geoffrey of York and Hugh of Coventry, however, discovered what was going on, and remonstrated so loudly that John was obliged to drop the negotiation and continue the siege.[1568] In the afternoon, at the chancellor’s own request, four bishops and four earls went to speak with him in the Tower.[1569] Five days of intense excitement had so exhausted his feeble frame that when they told him what had passed at the meeting on the previous day, he dropped senseless at their feet, and when brought to himself could at first do nothing but implore their sympathy and mediation.[1570] The brutal insolence of Hugh of Coventry,[1571] however, seems to have stung him into his wonted boldness again. With flashing eyes he told them that the day of reckoning was yet to come, when they and their new lord would have to account for their treason with Richard himself; and he sent them away with a positive refusal to surrender either his castles or his seal.[1572] Late at night, however, as he lay vainly endeavouring to gain a little rest, his friends came and implored him to abandon the useless struggle with fate; and at last his brother Osbert and some others wrung from him an unwilling permission to go and offer themselves as hostages for his submission on the morrow.[1573]

[1560] Gir. Cambr. as above (·/·Vita Galfr., l. ii. c. 8 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 404).

[1561] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 38, says “in ecclesiâ S. Pauli”; R. Diceto as above·/·(Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 99, “in capitulo”; the Gesta Ric. as above,·/·(Stubbs), p. 213, and Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 140, say “in atrio.”

[1562] Ric. Devizes as above. Gesta Ric. as above, pp. 213, 218.

[1563] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 213, 218.

[1564] Ib. p. 213. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 99.

[1565] Gesta Ric. as above, p. 214.

[1566] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), pp. 37, 38.

[1567] Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 17 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 342).

[1568] Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. ii. c. 9 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 406).

[1569] Gerald (ib. p. 405), says “quartâ vero feriâ.” Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 39, says “Dies ille nefastus declinabat ad vesperam,” which, taken in connexion with what precedes, ought to mean Tuesday evening; but he seems to have lost count of the days just here. It is he alone who mentions the earls; while it is Gerald alone who gives the names of the bishops—London, Lincoln, Winchester and Coventry.

[1570] Cf. Ric. Devizes as above, and Gir. Cambr. as above, who tries to colour this scene differently.

[1571] Gir. Cambr. as above (pp. 405, 406).

[1572] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 39.

[1573] Ib. p. 40. Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. ii. c. 9 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 406).

On the Thursday morning the barons assembled in the fields east of the Tower,[1574] and there William of Longchamp went forth to meet them. The instant he appeared Hugh of Coventry stepped forward, recited the whole indictment against him, and pronounced with brutal bluntness the sentence of the assembly.[1575] William was to be deposed from all secular authority, to keep nothing but his bishopric and the castles of Dover, Cambridge and Hereford; he must give hostages for his future good behaviour; then let him begone wherever he would. The assembly broke into a chorus of approval which seemed intended to give William no chance of reply; but his dauntless spirit had by this time regained its mastery over his physical weakness; he stood quietly till they had all talked themselves out, and then they had to listen in their turn. He denied every one of the charges against him; he refused to recognize either the moral justice or the legal validity of his deposition; he agreed to surrender the castles, because he no longer had power to hold them, but he still lifted up his protest, as King Richard’s lawful chancellor and justiciar, against all the proceedings and the very existence of the new ministry.[1576] Walter of Rouen was at once proclaimed justiciar in his stead.[1577] The keys of the Tower and of Windsor castle, and the hostages, were delivered up next morning, and William was then allowed to withdraw to Bermondsey, whence on the following day he proceeded to Dover.[1578] Thence, apparently in a desperate hope that his men might yet be able to hold the castles till he could gather means to relieve them, he twice attempted to escape over sea, first in the disguise of a monk, then in that of a pedlar-woman. His lameness, however, and his ignorance of English were fatal to his chances of flight; he was detected, dragged back into the town, and shut up in prison till all the castles were surrendered. Then he was set at liberty, and sailed for Gaul on October 29.[1579]

- [1574] Ric. Devizes (as above)·/·(Stevenson), p. 39. Gir. Cambr. as above·/·Vita Galfr., l. ii. c. 9 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 406). R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 100.

- [1575] Ric. Devizes as above.

- [1576] Ib. pp. 40–42. Cf. Gir. Cambr. and R. Diceto as above; Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 214; and Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 17 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 341).

- [1577] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 213. Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 18 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 344).

- [1578] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 100. Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. ii. c. 9 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 407). Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 42.

- [1579] Ric. Devizes as above. R. Diceto as above, pp. 100, 101. Gir. Cambr. as above, cc. 12, 13 (pp. 410–413). Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 219, 220. Will. Newb. as above, c. 17 (p. 343). The date comes from R. Diceto.

His opponents, however, were not rid of him yet. The king was now practically out of reach of his remonstrances and appeals for succour;[1580] but the Pope was not. William was a bishop; and the harshness with which he had been treated enabled him now to pose in his turn as a consecrated victim of profane violence. Celestine III. warmly took up his cause; he distinctly acknowledged him as legate, whether with or without a formal renewal of his commission;[1581] and on December 2 he issued a brief addressed to the English bishops, bidding them excommunicate all who had taken part in William’s deposition, and put their lands under interdict till he should be reinstated.[1582] William, as legate, followed this up by excommunicating twenty-six of his chief enemies by name, with the archbishop of Rouen at their head, and, with the Pope’s sanction, threatening to treat John in like manner, if he did not amend before Quinquagesima.[1583] The bishops, however, took no notice of his letters, and the justiciars retorted by sequestrating his see;[1584] they all held him bound by the sentences pronounced against him at Reading and at London for his persecution of Geoffrey of York, and their view was upheld by the suffragans of Rouen, who all treated him as excommunicate.[1585] Geoffrey was now the highest ecclesiastical authority in England; but he was not the man to rule the English Church. He had more than enough to do in ruling his own chief suffragan. As soon as he was enthroned at York,[1586] he summoned Hugh of Durham to come and make his profession of obedience; Hugh, who having been reinstated in his earldom of Northumberland[1587] felt himself again more than a match for his metropolitan, ignored the summons, whereupon Geoffrey excommunicated him.[1588] This did not deter John from keeping Christmas at Howden with the bishop; in consequence of which John himself was for a while treated as excommunicate by his half-brother.[1589] The momentary coalition, formed solely to crush the chancellor, had in fact already split into fragments. The general administration, however, went on satisfactorily under the new justiciar’s direction, and his influence alone—for Eleanor was still on the continent[1590]—sufficed to keep John out of mischief throughout the winter.

- [1580] He had written to complain of John’s insubordination, but Richard did not get the letter till six months after the writer’s fall. Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), p. 333.

- [1581] See Epp. Cant. (Stubbs), introd. p. lxxxiii, note 1.

- [1582] Letter of Celestine III. in Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 221, 222.

- [1583] Letter of William “bishop of Ely, legate and chancellor,” ib. pp. 222–224; and Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 152–154.

- [1584] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 225.

- [1585] Ib. p. 221. Cf. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 43.

- [1586] On All Saints’ day [1191]. Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. ii. c. 11 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 410).

- [1587] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 39.

- [1588] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 225. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 168, 169. See the excellent summary of this affair in Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 27 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 371, 372).

- [1589] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 235, 236.

- [1590] She kept Christmas at Bonneville. Ib. p. 235. Rog. Howden as above, p. 179.

Richard’s continental dominions had thus far been at peace—a peace doubly secured by the presence of Eleanor and the absence of Philip of France. Shortly before Christmas 1191, however, Philip returned to his kingdom.[1591] In January 1192 he called the seneschal and barons of Normandy to a conference, and demanded from them, on the strength of a document which he shewed to them as the treaty made between himself and Richard at Messina, the restitution of his sister Adela and her dower-castles in the Vexin, as well as the counties of Eu and Aumale. The seneschal, rightly suspecting the paper to be a forgery, answered that he had no instructions from Richard on the subject, and would give up neither the lands nor the lady.[1592] Philip threatened war, and all Richard’s constables prepared for defence.[1593] Meanwhile, Philip offered to John the investiture of all Richard’s continental dominions, if he would accept Adela’s hand with them.[1594] That John had a wife already was an obstacle which troubled neither the French king nor John himself. He was quite ready to accept the offer; but meanwhile it reached his mother’s ears, and she hurried to England to stop him.[1595] Landing at Portsmouth on Quinquagesima Sunday,[1596] she found him on the point of embarking; the archbishop of Rouen and the other justiciars gladly welcomed her back to her former post of regent, and joined with her in forbidding John to leave the country, under penalty of having all his estates seized in the king’s name.[1597] They then held a series of councils, at Windsor, Oxford, London and Winchester;[1598] in that of London the barons renewed their oath of fealty to the king, but to pacify John they were obliged to do the like to him as heir,[1599] and the immediate consequence was that he persuaded the constables of Windsor and Wallingford to surrender their castles into his hands.[1600] William of Longchamp thought his opportunity had come. He managed to gain Eleanor’s ear and to bribe John;[1601] both connived at his return to Dover, and thence he sent up his demand for restoration to a council gathered in London towards the close of Lent.[1602] It seems plain that he had won the favour of the queen; for the justiciars, whose original purpose in meeting had been to discuss the misdoings of John, now saw themselves obliged to fetch John himself from Wallingford to support them, as they expected, in their resistance to the chancellor’s demands. To their dismay John told them plainly that he was on the point of making alliance with his old enemy for a consideration of seven hundred pounds.[1603] They saw that their only chance was to outbid William. They gave John two thousand marks out of the royal treasury;[1604] Walter of Rouen helped to persuade the queen-mother,[1605] and the chancellor was bidden to depart out of the land.[1606]

[1591] Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 76.

[1592] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 236. Cf. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 56. It is certain that Philip told and acted a downright lie; for the treaty of Messina is extant, and its main provisions are these: Richard shall be bound to surrender Adela only within one month after his own return to Gaul, and the whole Norman Vexin, including its castles, shall remain to him and his heirs male for ever. Only in case of his death without male heir is it to revert to the French Crown; and as for Aumale and Eu, there is not a word about them. Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 54.

[1593] Gesta Ric. as above. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 55.

[1594] Gesta Ric. as above.

[1595] Ibid. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 57.

[1596] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 55. This was February 11 [1192].

[1597] Gesta Ric. as above, p. 237.

[1598] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 57.

[1599] Gesta Ric. as above. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 187.

[1600] Ric. Devizes as above. In Rog. Howden (as above), p. 204, the betrayal of these castles is placed a year later. Roger’s account of the first few months of 1193 has, however, somewhat the look of a repetition of the history of 1192, and his story is much less consistent and circumstantial than Richard’s, which I have therefore ventured to follow.

[1601] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 239. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 188. Cf. Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. ii. c. 14 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 413); Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 56; and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 512.

[1602] Gir. Cambr., as above, says he landed about April 1, i.e. the Wednesday before Easter. But the other writers seem to place this council soon after Mid-Lent. Gerv. Cant., as above, says the chancellor came “mediante mense Martio.”

[1603] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), pp. 58, 59.

[1604] “2000 marks, £500 of which were to be raised from the chancellor’s estates” is Bishop Stubbs’s interpretation (Rog. Howden, vol. iii. pref. p. xc.) of Gesta Ric., p. 239, and Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 59.

[1605] Gesta Ric. as above.

[1606] Ibid. Ric. Devizes as above. Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 415). Cf. Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 18 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 345, 346). According to the first authority, William sailed again on Maunday Thursday, April 2.

Shortly afterwards, two cardinal-legates arrived in France to settle his dispute with the archbishop of Rouen. When they attempted to enter Normandy, the seneschal refused them admittance and shut the gates of Gisors in their faces, pleading that the subjects of an English king were forbidden by ancient custom to admit legates into any part of his dominions without his consent. The legates on this excommunicated the seneschal and laid all Normandy under interdict.[1607] William had done the same to his own diocese before leaving England.[1608] Archbishop Walter, the English justiciars, even the queen-mother, were all at their wits’ end: Philip was openly threatening to invade the Norman duchy; the obstacle which had prevented him until now—the unwillingness of the French barons to attack the territories of a crusader[1609]—would be considerably lessened by the interdict; the only person who could be found in England capable of undertaking a negotiation with the legates was Hugh of Durham; but Hugh declined to go till his own quarrel with his metropolitan was settled,[1610] and this was not accomplished till the middle of October.[1611] Then indeed he went to France, and succeeded in obtaining the removal of the interdict.[1612] But in other quarters the prospect grew no brighter. Aquitaine, held in check for a while by the presence of its duchess, had risen as soon as she was out of reach. Count Ademar of Angoulême marched into Poitou with a large body of horse and foot; taken prisoner by the Poitevins, he appealed to the French king for deliverance.[1613] A revolt of the Gascon barons was with difficulty suppressed by the seneschal, assisted by young Sancho of Navarre,[1614] brother of Richard’s queen; and the victors rashly followed up their success by a raid upon Toulouse, which, though it went unpunished for the moment, could only lead to further mischief.[1615] In England John was still defying the justiciars; and they dared not proceed to extremities with him, for they now saw before them an imminent prospect of having to acknowledge him as their king.

- [1607] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 246, 247. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), pp. 43, 44.

- [1608] Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. ii. c. 15 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 414). Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), pp. 42, 43, puts this in the previous October.

- [1609] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 236. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 187.

- [1610] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 247.

- [1611] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 513. Rog. Howden as above, pp. 170 note, 172.

- [1612] Gesta Ric. as above, p. 250.

- [1613] Chron. S. Albin. a. 1192 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 50). The sequel of this story, however, clearly belongs to the following year; so it may be that the whole of it is antedated.

- [1614] Rog. Howden as above, p. 194.

- [1615] Ibid. Cf. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 55.

Richard’s adventures in the East lie outside the sphere of English history. The crusade of which he was the chief hero and leader had indirectly an important effect upon English social life; but it was in no sense a national undertaking; every man in the host was, like the king himself, simply a volunteer, not sent out by his country or representing it in any way. Richard’s glory is all his own; to us, the practical interest of the crusade in which he won it consists in the light which it throws upon his character, and on his political relations with the other princes who took part in the enterprise. The story, as it comes out bit by bit, oddly intermingled with the dry details of home affairs, in the English historians of the time, and as it is told at full length in the “Itinerary” composed by one of his fellow-crusaders, reads more like an old wiking-saga than a piece of sober history, and its hero looks more like a comrade of S. Olaf or Harald Hardrada than a contemporary of Philip Augustus. Nothing indeed except Richard’s northman-blood can account for the intense love of the sea, and the consummate seamanship, as sound and practical as it was brilliant and daring, which he displayed on his outward voyage. No sea-king of old ever guided his little squadron of “long keels” more boldly, more skilfully and more successfully through a more overwhelming succession of difficulties and perils than those through which Richard guided his large and splendid fleet on its way from Messina to Acre.[1616] Not one had ever made a conquest at once as rapid, as valuable and as complete as the conquest of Cyprus, which Richard made in a few days, as a mere episode in his voyage, in vengeance for the ill-treatment which some of his ship-wrecked sailors had met with at the hands of the Cypriots and their king.[1617] But it was a mere wiking-conquest; Richard never dreamed of permanently adding this remote island to the list of his dominions; within a few months he sold it to the Templars,[1618] and afterwards, as they failed to take possession, he made it over to the dethroned king of Jerusalem who had helped him to conquer it, Guy of Lusignan.[1619] The same love of adventure for its own sake colours many of his exploits in the Holy Land itself. But there we learn, too, that his character had yet another and a higher aspect. We find in him, side by side with the reckless northern valour, the northern endurance, patience and self-restraint, coupled with a real disinterestedness and a self-sacrificing generosity for which it would be somewhat hard to find a parallel among his forefathers on either side.[1620] Alike in a military, a political and a moral point of view, Richard is the only one among the leaders of the crusading host, except Guy, who comes out of the ordeal with a character not merely unstained, but shining with redoubled lustre. And this alone would almost account for the fact that, before they separated, nearly every one of them, save Guy, had become Richard’s open or secret foe.

- [1616] See the details of the voyage in Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 177–209; Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 162–169; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 105–112.

- [1617] Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 188–204. Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 163–168. Rog. Howden as above, pp. 105–112. Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), pp. 47–49. Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 20 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 350, 351).

- [1618] Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 35.

- [1619] Ibid. Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), p. 351. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 36.

- [1620] It is impossible to give illustrations here; the whole Itinerarium, from his arrival at Acre (p. 211) onwards, is in fact one long illustration.

Envy of a better man than themselves was however not the sole cause of their hostility. The office of commander-in-chief of the host fell to Richard’s share in consequence of a catastrophe which altered the whole balance of political parties in Europe. That office had been destined for the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa, who for more than thirty years had stood as high above all other Christian princes in political capacity, military prowess, and personal nobility of character, as in titular dignity and territorial power. Frederic set out for Palestine as early as May 1189;[1621] he fought his way through the treacheries of the Greek Emperor and the ambushes of the Turkish sultan of Iconium, only to be drowned in crossing a little river in Asia Minor on June 10, 1190.[1622] These tidings probably met Richard on his arrival at Messina in September. There he had to deal with the consequences of another death which had occurred in the previous November, that of his brother-in-law King William of Sicily.[1623] William was childless; after a vain attempt to induce his father-in-law Henry II. to accept the reversion of his crown,[1624] he had bequeathed it to his own young aunt Constance, who was married to Henry of Germany, the Emperor’s eldest son.[1625] It was, however, seized by Tancred, a cousin of the late king.[1626] Richard’s alliance with Tancred, though on the one hand absolutely necessary to secure the co-operation of Sicily for the crusade, was thus on the other a mortal offence to the new king of Germany, who moreover had already a grudge against England upon another ground:—Henry the Lion had in this very summer extorted from him almost at the sword’s point his restoration to his forfeited estates.[1627] Thus when Richard at last reached Acre in June 1191,[1628] he was already in ill odour with the leaders of the German contingent, the Emperor’s brother Duke Frederic of Suabia and his cousin Duke Leopold of Austria.

- [1621] Ansbert (Dobrowsky), p. 21. Most of the English writers give a wrong date.

- [1622] See the story of Frederic’s expedition and death in Ansbert (Dobrowsky), p. 21 et seq.; Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 43–55; Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 56, 61, 62, 88, 89; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 358; Monach. Florent., vv. 245–330 (ib. vol. iii. app. to pref. pp. cxiv.–cxvii.).

- [1623] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 101, 102.

- [1624] “Vidimus, et præsentes fuimus, ubi regnum Palæstinæ, regnum etiam Italiæ patri vestro aut uni filiorum suorum, quem ad hoc eligeret, ab utriusque regni magnatibus et populis est oblatum.” Pet. Blois, Ep. cxiii. (Giles, vol. i. p. 350—to Geoffrey of York). Bishop Stubbs (Rog. Howden, vol. ii. pref. p. xciii.) interprets “regnum Italiæ” as representing Sicily.

- [1625] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 102, 202. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 29, 164 and note.

- [1626] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 102.

- [1627] See ibid. p. 145 and note.

- [1628] Ib. p. 169.

This, however, was not all. Isaac, the tyrant of Cyprus, whom Richard had brought with him as a captive, was also connected with the Suabian and Austrian houses;[1629] his capture was another ground of offence. Next, when the siege of Acre, which the united forces of eastern and western Christendom had been pressing in vain for nearly two years, came to an end a month after Richard joined it,[1630] Richard and Leopold quarrelled over their shares in the honour of the victory; Leopold—so the story goes—set up his banner on the wall of the conquered town side by side with that of the English king, and Richard tore it down again.[1631] Besides all this, as Richard’s superior military capacity made him an object of perpetual jealousy to the other princes, so his policy in Holy Land was in direct opposition to theirs. Since the death of Queen Sibyl in October 1189,[1632] they had one and all aimed at transferring the crown from her childless widower Guy of Lusignan to the lord of Tyre, Conrad, marquis of Montferrat. Montferrat was an important fief of the kingdom of Italy; Conrad’s mother was aunt both to Leopold of Austria and to Frederic Barbarossa;[1633] he thus had the whole Austrian and imperial influence at his back; and that of Philip of France was thrown into the same scale, simply because Richard had espoused the opposite cause. Guy of Lusignan, with a fearlessness which speaks volumes in his favour as well as in Richard’s, had thrown himself unreservedly on the generosity and justice of the prince against whom all his race had for so many years been struggling in Aquitaine; his confidence was met as it deserved, and from the hour of their meeting in Cyprus to the break-up of the crusade, Richard and Guy stood firmly side by side. But they stood alone amid the ring of selfish politicians who supported Conrad, and whose intrigues brought ruin upon the expedition. Philip, indeed, went home as soon as Acre was won, to sow the seeds of mischief in a field where they were likely to bring forth a more profitable harvest for his interests than on the barren soil of Palestine. But the whole body of French crusaders whom he left behind him, except Count Henry of Champagne, made common cause with the Germans and the partizans of Conrad in thwarting every scheme that Richard proposed, either for the settlement of the Frank kingdom in Palestine or for the reconquest of its capital. Twice he led the host within eight miles of Jerusalem, and twice, when thus close to the goal, he was compelled to turn away.[1634] Conrad fell by the hand of an assassin in April 1192;[1635] but Guy’s cause, like that of Jerusalem itself, was lost beyond recovery; all that Richard could do for either was to compensate Guy with the gift of Cyprus,[1636] and sanction the transfer of the shadowy crown of Jerusalem to his own nephew, Henry of Champagne.[1637] Harassed by evil tidings from England and forebodings of mischief in Gaul, disappointed in his most cherished hopes and worn out with fruitless labour, sick in body and more sick at heart, he saw that his only chance of ever again striking a successful blow either for east or west was to go home at once. After one last brilliant exploit, the rescue of Joppa from the Turks who had seized it in his absence,[1638] on September 2 he made a truce with Saladin for three years;[1639] on October 9 he sailed from Acre.[1640]

[1629] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 59. Ansbert (Dobrowsky), p. 114.

[1630] On July 12, 1191. Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 232, 233. Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 178, etc.

[1631] See the different versions of this story in Otto of S. Blaise, c. 36 (Wurstisen, Germ. Hist. Illustr., vol. i. p. 216); Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 514; R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 59; Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 52; Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 35; and Mat. Paris, Chron. Maj. (Luard), vol. ii. p. 384.

[1632] Epp. Cant. cccxlvi. (Stubbs, p. 329).

[1633] Frederic’s father and Leopold’s father were half-brothers, sons of the two marriages of Agnes of Franconia, daughter of the Emperor Henry IV. Conrad’s mother, Judith, was a child of Agnes’s second marriage with Leopold, marquis of Austria. Conrad’s father was the Marquis William of Montferrat who had been one of Henry II.’s allies in his struggle with the Pope (see above, p. 60); and his elder brother had been the first husband of Queen Sibyl. On his own iniquitous marriage, if marriage it is to be called, with her half-sister and heiress, Isabel—an affair which seems to have actually broken the heart of Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury—see Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 119–124; Expugn. Terræ Sanctæ (Stevenson, R. Coggeshall), p. 256; Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 141; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 70, 71. Conrad’s antecedents are told by Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 320, 321. Considering, however, the case of Guy of Lusignan, it is perhaps hardly safe to admit a charge of homicide against any claimant to the throne of Palestine on Roger’s sole authority.

[1634] Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 285–312, 365–396; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 174, 175, 179; R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 37–40. See also the characteristic and pathetic account of Richard’s distress at the last turning-back, in Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), pp. 75–77.

[1635] Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 339, 340. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 104. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 35. Rog. Howden (as above), p. 181. Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 24 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 363).

[1636] Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 35, makes it a sale; but it is hard to conceive where poor Guy could have found money for the purchase.

[1637] Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 342, 346, 347. R. Diceto and Rog. Howden as above. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 35, 36. Will. Newb. as above, c. 28 (p. 374). Henry of Champagne was son of Count Henry “the Liberal” and Mary, daughter of Louis VII. and Eleanor.

[1638] Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 403–424. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 41–51. This is really the most splendid of all Richard’s wiking exploits.

[1639] Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), p. 249. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 52. Rog. Howden (as above), p. 184.

[1640] Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 441, 442. R. Diceto (as above), p. 106. Rog. Howden (as above), p. 185, makes it a day earlier.

Stormy winds had again parted the king’s ship from the rest of his fleet when, within three days’ sail of Marseille, he learned that Count Raymond of Toulouse was preparing to seize him on his landing,[1641] no doubt in vengeance for the attack made upon Toulouse a few months before by the seneschal of Gascony. Capture by Raymond meant betrayal to Philip of France, and Richard knew Philip far too well to run any needless risk of falling into his hands. Under more favourable conditions, he might have escaped by sailing on through the strait of Gibraltar direct to his island realm; but contrary winds made this impossible, and drove him back upon Corfu, where he landed about Martinmas.[1642] Thence, in his impatience, he set off in disguise with only twenty followers[1643] on board a little pirate-vessel[1644] in which, at imminent risk of discovery, he coasted up the Adriatic till another storm wrecked him at the head of the Gulf of Aquileia.[1645] By this time his German enemies were all on the look-out for him, and whatever his plans on leaving Corfu may have been, he had now no resource but to hurry through the imperial dominions as rapidly and secretly as possible. His geographical knowledge, however, seems to have been at fault, for he presently found himself at Vienna, whither Leopold of Austria had long since returned. In spite of his efforts to disguise himself, Richard was recognized, captured and brought before the duke;[1646] and three days after Christmas the Emperor sent to Philip of France the welcome tidings that their common enemy was a prisoner in Leopold’s hands.[1647]

[1641] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 53.

[1642] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 106. Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), p. 442. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 185. R. Coggeshall as above. The two first supply the dates.

[1643] Rog. Howden as above. The Itin. Reg. Ric. (as above) says four, but there were at least nine with him after his landing. See Rog. Howden (as above), p. 195.

[1644] Itin. Reg. Ric. as above. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 53–54, gives some details highly characteristic of Richard. The pirates began by attacking the king’s ship, whereupon he, “for their praiseworthy fortitude and boldness,” made friends with them, and took his passage in their company. This is authentic, for the writer had it from one of Richard’s companions, the chaplain Anselm. Ib. p. 54.

[1645] This is the Emperor’s account, given in a letter to Philip of France; Rog. Howden (as above), p. 195. Cf. Ansbert (Dobrowsky), p. 114; Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 31 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 383); Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), p. 42; R. Diceto as above; R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 54; and Rog. Howden (as above), p. 185 and note 7.

[1646] He was captured December 20, 1192; Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), p. 443; R. Diceto (as above), p. 107. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 56, makes it a day later. Otto of S. Blaise, c. 38 (Wurstisen, Germ. Hist. Illustr., vol. i. p. 217), gives the most detailed account of the capture—an account which looks too characteristic not to be true. According to him, Richard stopped to dine at a little inn just outside Vienna, and to avoid recognition, set to work to broil some meat for himself. He was holding the spit with his own hands, utterly forgetful that one of them was adorned with a magnificent ring, when a servant of the duke chanced to look in, noticed the incongruity, then recognized the king whom he had seen in Palestine, and hurried off to report his discovery; whereupon the duke came in person and seized his enemy on the spot, in the middle of his cooking. The story of R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 55, 56, is somewhat more dignified. Cf. also Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 31 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 383); Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 186, 195; and Ansbert (Dobrowsky), p. 114.

[1647] The letter is in Rog. Howden (as above), pp. 195, 196. “Gratissimum illi super aurum et topazion ... nuntium destinavit,” says Will. Newb. as above, c. 32 (p. 384).

Philip at once forwarded the news to John, with a renewal of the proposal which he had made to him a year before. John hurried over sea and formally did homage to the French king for all his brother’s continental dominions; but the seneschal and barons of Normandy refused to acknowledge the transaction, and he hastened back again to try his luck in England.[1648] There he met with no better success. He called the justiciars to a council in London, assured them that the king was dead, and demanded their homage; they refused it; he withdrew in a rage to fortify his castles, and the justiciars prepared to attack them.[1649] Before Easter a French fleet sailed to his assistance, but was repulsed by the English militia assembled at the summons of Archbishop Walter.[1650] While the justiciars laid siege to Windsor, Geoffrey of York fortified Doncaster for the king, and thence went to help his gallant old suffragan and rival, Hugh of Durham, who was busy with the siege of Tickhill.[1651] The castles had all but fallen, and John was on the eve of submission, when the victorious justiciars suddenly grew alarmed at their own success. Richard’s fate was still so uncertain that they dared not humiliate his heir; and at Eleanor’s instigation they made a truce with John, to last until All-Saints’ day.[1652]

- [1648] Rog. Howden (as above)·/·(Stubbs), vol. iii., p. 204. Cf. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 106. John’s treaty with Philip is in Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 57; date, February 1193.

- [1649] Rog. Howden (as above), pp. 204, 205. Cf. Will. Newb. as above, c. 34 (p. 390).

- [1650] Rog. Howden (as above), p. 205. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 514, 515.

- [1651] Rog. Howden (as above), pp. 206, 208.

- [1652] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 207. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 516, says Michaelmas.

The six months of tranquillity thus gained were spent in negotiations for the king’s release. As soon as the justiciars heard of his capture they had despatched Bishop Savaric of Bath to treat with the Emperor, and the abbots of Boxley and Robertsbridge to open communications, if possible, with Richard himself;[1653] this however was a difficult matter, for of the place of his confinement nothing was known except that it was somewhere in the Austrian dominions, and these were to most Englishmen of that day a wholly undiscovered country. How the captive was first found history does not say. Tradition filled the blank with the beautiful story of the minstrel Blondel, wandering through Europe till he reached a castle where there was said to be a prisoner whose name no one could tell—winning the favour of its lord and thus gaining admittance within its walls—peering about it on every side in a vain effort to catch a glimpse of the mysterious captive, till at last a well-known voice, singing “a song which they two had made between them, and which no one knew save they alone,” fell upon his delighted ear through the narrow prison-window whence Richard had seen and recognized the face of his friend.[1654] It may after all have been Blondel who guided the two abbots to the spot; we only know that they met Richard at Ochsenfurt on his way to be delivered up on Palm Sunday to the Emperor Henry at Speyer.[1655] Thenceforth the negotiations proceeded without intermission; but it took nearly a year to complete them. Personal jealousy, family interest, and pride at finding himself actually arbiter of the fate of the most illustrious living hero in Christendom, all tempted Henry VI. to throw as many obstacles as possible in the way of his captive’s release. Taking advantage of his own position as titular head of western Christendom, he demanded satisfaction for all the wrongs which the various princes of the Empire had received, or considered themselves to have received, at Richard’s hands, and for all his alleged misdoings on the Crusade, from his alliance with Tancred to the death of Conrad of Montferrat, in which it was suggested that he had had a share.[1656] Not one of the charges would bear examination; but they served Henry as an excuse for playing fast and loose with Richard on the one side and Philip of France on the other, and for making endless changes in the conditions required for Richard’s liberation. These were ultimately fixed at a ransom of a hundred and fifty thousand marks, the liberation of Isaac of Cyprus, and the betrothal of Eleanor of Britanny to a son of the Austrian duke.[1657]

- [1653] Rog. Howden (as above)·/·(Stubbs), vol. iii., pp. 197, 198.

- [1654] Récits d’un ménestrel de Reims (ed. N. de Wailly, Soc. de l’Hist. de France), cc. 77–81 (pp. 41–43).

- [1655] Rog. Howden (as above), p. 198.

- [1656] The charges are summed up in R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 58, 59. On the death of Conrad see Stubbs, Itin. Reg. Ric., pref. pp. xxii, xxiii.

- [1657] Treaty in Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 215, 216. Roger dates it S. Peter’s day; ib. p. 215. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 110, makes it July 5.

Cf. Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 37 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 398).

The duty of superintending the collection of the ransom and the transmission of the hostages required by the Emperor for its payment had been at first intrusted by Richard to his old friend and confidant, the chancellor William of Longchamp. William, however, found it impossible to fulfil his instructions; before the justiciars would allow him to set foot in England at all, they made him swear to meddle with nothing outside his immediate commission; when compelled to meet him in council at S. Albans, Walter of Rouen refused him the kiss of peace, and the queen-mother and the barons all alike refused to trust him with the hostages.[1658] Prompt and vigorous measures were however taken for raising the money. An “aid for the king’s ransom” was one of the three regular feudal obligations, which in strict law fell only upon the tenants-in-chivalry; but all the knights’ fees in Richard’s whole dominions would have been unable to furnish so large a sum as was required in his case. In addition therefore to an aid of twenty shillings on the knight’s fee, the justiciars imposed a wholly new tax: they demanded a fourth part of the revenue and of the moveable goods of every man, whether layman or clerk, throughout the realm. Severe and unprecedented as was this demand, it provoked no opposition, even from the clergy;[1659] it had indeed the active co-operation of the bishops, under the direction of a new primate—Hubert Walter, the bishop of Salisbury, who had been one of Richard’s fellow-crusaders, and was now at Richard’s desire elected to the see of Canterbury.[1660] The nation seems to have responded willingly to the demands made upon it; yet the response proved inadequate, and the deficiency had to be supplied partly by a contribution from the Cistercians and Gilbertines of a fourth part of the wool of the flocks which were their chief source of revenue, and partly by confiscating the gold and silver vessels and ornaments of the wealthier churches.[1661] Similar measures were taken in Richard’s continental dominions, and they were so far successful that when the appointed time arrived for his release, in January 1194, the greater part of the ransom was paid.[1662] For the remainder hostages were given, of whom one was Archbishop Walter of Rouen.[1663] This selection left the chief justiciarship of England practically vacant, and accordingly Richard, before summoning the Norman primate to Germany, superseded him in that office by bestowing it upon the new archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter.[1664]

- [1658] Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. ii. c. 17 (Brewer, vol. iv. pp. 415, 416). Cf. Rog. Howden as above, pp. 211, 212.

- [1659] Except at York, where the resistance was prompted by spite against the archbishop. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 222.

- [1660] Elected May 29, 1193; R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 108, 109. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 518.

- [1661] On the ransom, and how it was raised, see Rog. Howden as above, pp. 210, 211, 222, 225; R. Diceto as above, p. 110; Will. Newb. l. iv. c. 38 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 399, 400); and Bishop Stubbs’s explanations of the matter, in his preface to Rog. Howden, vol. iv. pp. lxxxii–lxxxvi, and Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 501.

- [1662] Rog. Howden as above, p. 225.

- [1663] Ib. p. 233. Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 41 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 404), and R. Diceto as above, p. 113. According to this last, another of the hostages was William the chancellor; but his name does not appear in Rog. Howden’s list. One MS. of Ralf has in its place that of Baldwin Wake. As Baldwin certainly was a hostage on this occasion, perhaps William was selected first, and Baldwin afterwards substituted for him. One at least of the hostages was released before the whole ransom was paid: Archbishop Walter came back to England on May 19. R. Diceto as above, p. 115.

- [1664] Rog. Howden as above, p. 226. R. Diceto as above, p. 112. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 523.

The new justiciar immediately had his hands full of trouble. At the prospect of Richard’s return John grew half frantic with rage and dismay. As early as July 1193, when it became known that Richard and the Emperor had come to terms, Philip had sent warning to John—“Beware, the devil is loose again!” and John, without stopping to reflect that the “devil” could not be really loose till his ransom was paid, had hurried over sea to seek shelter from his brother’s wrath under the protection of the French king. Richard, however, at once made overtures of reconciliation to both;[1665] the terms which he offered to John were indeed so favourable that the Norman constables refused to execute them, and thereby put an end to the negotiation.[1666] In January Philip and John made a last effort to bribe the Emperor either to keep Richard in custody for another year, or actually to sell him into their hands.[1667] When this failed, John in the frenzy of desperation sent a confidential clerk over to England with letters to his adherents there, bidding them make all his castles ready for defence against the king. The messenger’s foolish boasting, however, betrayed him as he passed through London; he was arrested by order of the mayor, his letters were seized, and a council was hurriedly called to hear their contents. Its prompt and vigorous measures were clearly due to the initiative of the new justiciar-archbishop. John was excommunicated and declared disseized of all his English tenements, and the assembly broke up to execute its own decree by force of arms. The old bishop of Durham returned to his siege of Tickhill; the earls of Huntingdon, Chester and Ferrers led their forces against Nottingham; Archbishop Hubert himself besieged Marlborough, and took it in a few days; Lancaster was given up to him by its constable, who happened to be his own brother; and S. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall—a monastery whose site, not unlike that of its great Norman namesake, had tempted one of John’s partizans to drive out the monks and fortify it in his interest—surrendered on the death of its commander, who is said to have died of terror at the news of the king’s approach.[1668] Richard had been set free on February 4.[1669] After a slow progress through Germany and the Low Countries, he embarked at Swine, near Antwerp, and landed at Sandwich on March 13.[1670] Following the invariable practice of his father, he hastened first to the martyr’s shrine at Canterbury;[1671] next day he was met by the victorious archbishop hastening to welcome him home,[1672] and three days later he was solemnly received in London.[1673] As soon as the defenders of Tickhill were certified of his arrival they surrendered to the bishop of Durham.[1674] As Windsor, Wallingford and the Peak had been in the queen-mother’s custody since the truce of May 1193,[1675] only Nottingham now remained to be won. Richard at once marched against it with all his forces; the archbishop followed, Hugh of Durham brought up his men from Tickhill; in three days the castle surrendered, and Richard was once again undisputed master in his realm.[1676]

- [1665] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 216–220.

- [1666] Ib. pp. 227, 228.

- [1667] Ib. p. 229. Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 40 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 402).

- [1668] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 236–238.

- [1669] Ib. p. 233. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 112, 113. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 62, dates it February 2.

- [1670] Rog. Howden as above, p. 235; R. Coggeshall as above. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 524, dates it March 12, and R. Diceto as above, p. 114, March 20.

- [1671] Gerv. Cant. as above. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 63.

- [1672] Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 524.

- [1673] R. Diceto and R. Coggeshall as above.

- [1674] Rog. Howden as above, p. 238.

- [1675] Ib. p. 207.

- [1676] Ib. pp. 238–240. R. Diceto and R. Coggeshall as above. Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 42 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 407, 408).

It must have seemed, to say the least, an ungracious return for the sacrifices which England had made in his behalf, when the king at once demanded from the English knighthood the services of a third of their number to accompany him into Normandy, from the freeholders a contribution of two shillings on every carucate of land, and from the Cistercians the whole of their wool for the current year.[1677] In view of a war with France, of which it was impossible to calculate either the exigencies or the duration, Richard undoubtedly needed money; but his needs pressed heavily upon a country which had already been almost drained to provide his ransom. In justice to him, it must however be added that the “carucage,” as the new land-tax came to be called, seems to have been levied not for his personal profit, but as a supplement to the measures taken by the justiciars in the previous year, to complete the sum still due to Henry VI. It was in reality an old impost revived under a new name, for the carucate or ploughland was in practice reckoned as equivalent to the ancient hide,[1678] and the sum levied upon it was precisely that which the hide had furnished for the Danegeld of earlier times.[1679] Its re-imposition in these circumstances, under a new appellation and for the payment of what the whole nation regarded as a debt of honour, met with no resistance. The Cistercians, however, remonstrated so strongly against the demand for their wool that they were allowed to escape with a money-compensation.[1680] The taxes were imposed in a great council held at Nottingham at the end of March and beginning of April,[1681] where measures were also taken for the punishment of the traitors and the reconstruction of the administrative body. These two objects were accomplished both at once, and both were turned to account for the replenishment of the royal coffers. Except John, Bishop Hugh of Chester, and Gerard de Camville, who were cited before the king’s court on a charge of high treason,[1682] none of the delinquents were even threatened with any worse punishment than dismissal from office. This was inflicted upon most of those who had taken part in the proceedings against the chancellor. Several of the sheriffs indeed were only transferred from one shire to another;[1683] but Gerard de Camville was ejected without compensation from the sheriffdom of Lincolnshire, and Hugh Bardulf, one of the subordinate justiciars who had joined the party of John, from those of Yorkshire and Westmoreland. These three offices Richard at once put up for sale, and, with a strange inconsistency, William of Longchamp, whose well-grounded resistance to the accumulation of sheriffdoms in episcopal hands had been the beginning of his troubles, now sought to buy the two former, and also that of Northamptonshire, for himself. He was however outbid by Archbishop Geoffrey of York, who bought the sheriffdom of Yorkshire for three thousand marks and a promise of a hundred marks annually as increment.[1684] This purchase made Geoffrey the most influential man in the north, for Hugh of Durham, apparently finding himself powerless to hold Northumberland, had resigned it into the king’s hands.[1685] William of Scotland immediately opened negotiations with Richard for its re-purchase, as well as for that of Cumberland, Westmoreland, Lancaster, and the other English lands held by his grandfather David. The barons, however, before whom Richard laid the proposal in a council at Northampton, resented it strongly; Richard’s own military instinct led him to refuse the cession of the castles, and as William would not be satisfied without them, the scheme came to nothing.[1686]

- [1677] Rog. Howden as above, p. 242. Cf. Will. Newb., l. v. c. 1 (vol. ii. pp. 416, 417).

- [1678] That it was so in the reign of Henry I. seems plain from Orderic’s story about Ralf Flambard re-measuring for William Rufus “omnes carrucatas, quas Angli hidas vocant” (Ord. Vit., Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 678)—a statement which, whether the story itself be correct or not, shews that Orderic himself was accustomed to hear carucates and hides identified. The settlement of the carucates at a hundred acres in 1198 points to the same identification.

- [1679] And seemingly, to the “dona” which took the place of the Danegeld after its abolition eo nomine in 1163. On the carucage of 1194 see Stubbs, pref. to Rog. Howden, vol. iv. pp. lxxxii–lxxxiv and notes, lxxxvi. See also the account of it given by Will. Newb., l. v. c. i (Howlett, vol. ii. p. 416).

- [1680] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 242.

- [1681] March 30–April 2. Ib. pp. 240–243.

- [1682] Ib. pp. 241, 242. Cf. the account of John’s condemnation in Ann. Margam, a. 1199 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. i. p. 24).

- [1683] Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 503.

- [1684] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p, 241.

- [1685] Ib. p. 249. Will. Newb., l. v. c. 1 (Howlett, vol. ii. p. 416).

- [1686] Rog. Howden as above, pp. 243–245, 249, 250.

Richard meanwhile had been making a progress through Mid-England,[1687] similar to that which he had made before his crowning in 1189, and ending at Winchester, where he solemnly “wore his crown” in the cathedral church on the first Sunday after Easter.[1688] This ceremonial was in itself merely a revival of the old regal practice which Henry II. had formally abandoned in 1158; but its revival on this occasion was prompted by other motives than Richard’s love of pomp and shew. As a concession to the Emperor’s vanity—for we can scarcely conceive any other motive—Richard had accepted from Henry VI. the investiture of the kingdom of Burgundy; “over which,” says a contemporary English writer, “be it known that the Emperor had really no power at all,” but for which, nevertheless, he had received Richard’s homage.[1689] The homage was, of course, as empty as the gift for which it was due; but insular pride, which had always boasted that an English king, alone among European sovereigns, had no superior upon earth, was offended by it none the less; and although the story that Richard had formally surrendered England itself into Henry’s hands and received it back from him as a fief of the Empire[1690] may perhaps be set down as an exaggeration, still it seems to have been felt that the majesty of the island-crown had been so far dimmed by the transactions of his captivity as to require a distinct re-assertion.[1691] As he stood in his royal robes, sceptre in hand and crown on head,[1692] amid the throng of bishops and barons in the “Old Minster” where so many of his English forefathers lay sleeping, past shame was forgotten, and England was ready once again to welcome him as a new king.[1693] But the welcome met with no response. On May 12—just two months after his landing at Sandwich—Richard again sailed for Normandy;[1694] and this time he went to return no more.

- [1687] Ib.·/·Rog. Howden as above, pp. 243–246.

- [1688] Ib. p. 247. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 114. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 64. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 524, 525. Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 42 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 408).

- [1689] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 226.

- [1690] Ib. pp. 202, 203. He seems to be the only writer who mentions it.

- [1691] See R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 113; and on the whole question of this coronation, Bishop Stubbs’s note to Rog. Howden, vol. iii. p. 247, and his remarks in Constit. Hist., vol. i. pp. 504, 561, 562. Richard himself seems to have resented the popular view, for R. Coggeshall (Stevenson, p. 64) says he went through the ceremony “aliquantulum renitens.”

- [1692] Rog. Howden (as above), p. 247. See the details of the ceremony in Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 524–526.

- [1693] “Detersâ captivitatis ignominiâ quasi rex novus apparuit.” Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 42 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 408).

- [1694] Rog. Howden as above, p. 251. R. Diceto as above, p. 114. Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 527.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE LATER YEARS OF RICHARD.
1194–1199.

The political history of England during the four years which followed Richard’s departure over sea is simply the history of the administration of Hubert Walter. Richard never again interfered in the concerns of his island realm, save for the purpose of obtaining money from it; and even the method whereby the money was to be raised he left, like all other details of administration, wholly to the justiciar’s discretion. Hubert in fact, as justiciar and archbishop, wielded during these years a power even more absolute than that which William of Longchamp had wielded during the king’s absence on crusade. But Richard’s second experiment in governing England by deputy succeeded far otherwise than the first. It was, indeed, attended with far less risk; for the king himself was never really out of reach, and could at any moment have returned to take up the reins of government in person, had there been any need to do so. Moreover, the man whom he now left as viceroy had far other qualifications for the office than William of Longchamp.

Hubert Walter had been trained under the greatest constitutional lawyer and most successful administrator of the age, Ralf de Glanville. He was nephew to Ralf’s wife,[1695] and had been a clerk or chaplain in Ralf’s household until 1186, when he was appointed dean of York.[1696] A few months later he was one of five persons nominated by the York chapter in answer to a royal mandate for election to the vacant see.[1697] King Henry, however, refused all five, and Hubert remained dean of York for three years longer. He seems to have held, besides his deanery, an office at court, either as protonotary or as vice-chancellor under Geoffrey; for during the last few months of Henry’s life he is found in Maine attending upon the king, and apparently charged with the keeping of the royal seal.[1698] Consecrated to Salisbury by Archbishop Baldwin on October 22, 1189,[1699] he immediately afterwards set out with him for Palestine; there he won universal esteem by the zeal and ability with which he exerted himself to relieve the wants of the poorer crusaders;[1700] on Baldwin’s death Hubert virtually succeeded to his place as the chief spiritual authority in the host;[1701] and after Richard’s arrival he made himself no less useful as the king’s best adviser and most trusty diplomatic agent in Palestine.[1702] It was Hubert who headed in Richard’s stead the first body of pilgrims whom the Turks admitted to visit the Holy Sepulchre;[1703] and it seems to have been he, too, who led back the English host from Palestine to Europe after Richard’s departure. He hastened as early as possible to visit the king in his captivity;[1704] and Richard lost no time in sending him to England to be made archbishop, and to help the justiciars in collecting the ransom.[1705] They had refused the help of William of Longchamp, but they could not reject that of Hubert; for they knew that, as a contemporary historian says, “the king had no one so like-minded with himself, whose fidelity, prudence and honesty he had proved in so many changes of fortune.”[1706] Hubert was one of the commissioners appointed to have the custody of the ransom;[1707] and there can be little doubt that the scheme by which it was raised was in part at least devised by his financial genius, and carried into execution by his energy and skill—qualities which he displayed no less effectively in dealing with the revolt which was finally quelled by the return of Richard himself.

[1695] Hubert’s mother and Ralf’s wife were sisters; cf. the Glanville family history in Dugdale, Monast. Angl., vol. vi. pt. i., p. 380, and the foundation-charter of Arklow, given by Hubert’s brother Theobald, ib. pt. ii. p. 1128. Hubert and his brothers seem to have been brought up by their aunt and her husband; Hubert, when dean of York, founded a Premonstratensian house at West Dereham “pro salute aniniæ meæ, et patris, et matris meæ, et domini Ranulphi de Glanvillâ, et dominæ Bertriæ uxoris ipsius, qui nos nutrierunt.” Ib. vol. vi. pt. ii. p. 899.

[1696] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. 360. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 310.

[1697] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 352.

[1698] See Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iv. pref. p. xli. note 1.

[1699] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 71.

[1700] Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 134–137. Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 145.

[1701] R. Diceto as above, p. 88. The Patriarch Heraclius had become discredited in the eyes of all the right-minded crusaders by his share in the divorce and remarriage of Queen Isabel, which broke Baldwin’s heart.

[1702] Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 29 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 378).

[1703] Ibid. Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 437, 438.

[1704] Will. Newb. as above, c. 33 (p. 388). Cf. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 209.

[1705] Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 33 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 388). Cf. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 516, 517.

[1706] Will. Newb. as above.

[1707] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 212.

Hubert entered upon his vice-royalty—for it was nothing less—under more favourable conditions than William of Longchamp. He came to it not as an upstart stranger, but as an Englishman already of high personal and official standing, thoroughly familiar and thoroughly in sympathy with the people whom he had to govern, intimately acquainted with the principles and the details of the system which he was called upon to administer; his qualifications were well known, and they were universally acknowledged. Moreover, there was now no one capable of heading any serious opposition to his authority, at least in secular affairs. William of Longchamp was still chancellor; but like the royal master to whose side he clave for the rest of his life, he had left England for ever. From John there was also nothing to fear. His intended trial never took place, for he threw himself at Richard’s feet at the first opportunity, and was personally forgiven; but the king was wise enough to leave untouched the sentence of forfeiture passed by the justiciar, and to keep his brother at his own side, a dependent upon his royal bounty, for nearly twelve months;[1708] and then he restored to him nothing but the counties of Mortain and Gloucester and the honour of Eye, but without their castles, giving him in compensation for the latter and for his other estates a yearly pension of eight thousand pounds Angevin.[1709] Even John’s capacities for mischief-making were so far paralyzed by this arrangement that he seems to have made no further attempt to meddle in English politics so long as Richard lived. The one man in whom Hubert saw, or fancied he saw, a possible rival on personal and ecclesiastical grounds, he swept roughly out of his path. The two primates had already quarrelled over the privileges of their respective sees, and nothing but the king’s presence had availed to keep peace between them.[1710] The northern one had been at feud with his own chapter ever since his appointment, and they were now prosecuting an appeal against him at Rome. In June 1194, backed, it can hardly be doubted, by Hubert’s influence, they obtained from the Pope a sentence which practically condemned Geoffrey without trial;[1711] and before these tidings reached England in September, a committee of royal justices, sent by Hubert to deal with the case in its temporal aspect, had already punished Geoffrey’s refusal to acknowledge their jurisdiction by confiscating all his archiepiscopal estates except Ripon.[1712] He went over sea and appealed to the king, but in vain;[1713] and for the next five years there was again but one primate in the land. One northern bishop, however, was still ready to defy Hubert as he had defied William of Longchamp and his own metropolitan. When the newly appointed sheriff of Northumberland, Hugh Bardulf, sought to enter upon his office shortly after Richard’s departure, he found that Hugh of Durham had already made a fresh bargain with the king, whereby he was to retain the county on a payment of two thousand marks. He tried, however, as before, to evade the necessity of payment, and was in consequence forcibly disseized by Richard’s orders.[1714] Still he was unwilling to give up the game; and in the spring of 1195 he made another attempt to regain the territorial influence in the north which Geoffrey’s fall seemed to have placed again within his reach. The story went in Yorkshire that he actually succeeded in once more obtaining from Richard—of course on Richard’s usual terms—a commission as co-justiciar with Hubert.[1715] Such a commission can hardly have been given otherwise than in mockery; yet the aged bishop, untaught by all his experience of the king’s shifty ways, once again set out from York, where he had just been excommunicating some of Geoffrey’s partizans,[1716] to publish his supposed triumph in London. Sickness, however, overtook him on the way; from Doncaster he was compelled to turn back to his old refuge at Howden, and there on March 3 he died.[1717] His palatinate was of course taken into the custody of the royal justiciars.[1718] A fortnight later Celestine III. sent to Archbishop Hubert a commission as legate for all England;[1719] and thenceforth he was undisputed ruler alike in Church and state.

- [1708] Cf. Rog. Howden as above, pp. 252 and 286, and also R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 64.

- [1709] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 286.

- [1710] Ib. pp. 246, 247, 250; vol. iv. pref. pp. lix, lx.

- [1711] Ib. vol. iii. pp. 272, 273, 278–286; vol. iv. pref. pp. lxii, lxiv.

- [1712] Ib. vol. iii. pp. 261, 262; vol. iv. pref pp. lxi, lxii.

- [1713] Richard in November ordered his restoration, but the order was not carried out; the brothers went on quarrelling, and next year Richard again declared the archiepiscopal estates forfeited, and this time finally. Ib. vol. iii. pp. 273, 287; vol. iv. pref. pp. lxiv, lxix.

- [1714] Ib. vol. iii. pp. 260, 261; cf. p. 249.

- [1715] Will. Newb., l. v. c. 10 (Howlett, vol. ii. pp. 438, 439).

- [1716] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 284.

- [1717] Ibid. Will. Newb. as above (p. 439).

- [1718] Rog. Howden as above, p. 285.

- [1719] Dated March 18 [1195]. Ib. pp. 290–293. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 125–127.

Like most of the higher clergy of Henry’s later years, Hubert was distinctly more of a statesman than a churchman. His pontificate left no mark on the English Church; as primate, his chief occupation was to quarrel with his chapter. No scruples such as had moved Archbishop Thomas to resign the chancellorship, or had made even Bishop Roger of Salisbury seek a papal dispensation before he would venture to undertake a lay office,[1720] held back Hubert Walter from uniting in his own person the justiciarship and the primacy of all England. He was, however, a statesman of the best school of the time, steeped in the traditions of constitutional and administrative reform which had grown up during Henry’s later years under the inspiration of the king himself and the direction of Ralf de Glanville. The task of developing their policy, therefore, could not have fallen to more competent hands; and as Richard was totally destitute of his father’s business capacities, it was well that Hubert was left to fulfil it according to his own judgement and on his own sole responsibility for nearly four years.

- [1720] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 408 (Hardy, p. 637).

The justiciar’s first act after his sovereign’s departure was to despatch the judges itinerant upon their annual visitation-tour with a commission[1721] which struck the key-note of his future policy. It was the note which had been struck by Henry II. in the Assizes of Clarendon and Northampton; but the new commission shewed a great advance in the developement of the principles which those measures embodied. The jurisdiction of the justices is defined with greater fulness and extended over a much wider sphere. The “pleas of the Crown” with which they are empowered to deal include, besides those formerly recognized under this head, such various matters as the number and condition of churches in the king’s gift,[1722] escheats, wardships and marriages;[1723] forgers[1724] and defaulters;[1725] the harbouring of malefactors;[1726] the arrears of the ransom;[1727] the use of false measures;[1728] the debts of the murdered Jews; the fines due from their slayers,[1729] from the adherents of John, and from his debtors, as well as from his own forfeited property;[1730] the disposal of the chattels of dead usurers, and also of crusaders who had died before setting out on their pilgrimage;[1731] and the taking of recognitions under the Great Assize concerning land worth not more than five pounds a year.[1732] In all these proceedings the chief object evidently was to procure money for the royal treasury; a tallage which the judges were also directed to assess upon all cities, towns and royal demesnes[1733] being deemed insufficient to supply its needs. The details of this multifarious business are however of less historical importance than the method employed for its transaction. Every item of it was to be dealt with on the presentment of what may now be called the “grand jury”—the jury of sworn recognitors in every shire, whose functions, hitherto confined to the presentment of criminals, were thus extended to all branches of judicial work. This growth in the importance of the jury was marked by the introduction of a new ordinance for its constitution. The Assizes of Clarendon and Northampton simply ordered that the jury should consist of twelve lawful men of every hundred and four of every township, without specifying how they were to be selected. Most probably they were nominated by the sheriff.[1734] The recognitors employed in the civil process known as the Great Assize, however, were from the first appointed in a special manner prescribed in the Assize itself. Four knights of the shire were summoned by the sheriff, and these four elected the twelve recognitors.[1735] By the “Form of proceeding in the pleas of the Crown” delivered to the justices-errant in 1194, this method of election was applied to the jury of presentment in all cases, with a modification which removed the choice yet one step further from the mere nomination of the sheriff. Four knights were first to be chosen out of the whole shire; these were to elect two out of every hundred or wapentake, and these two were to choose ten others, who with them constituted the legal twelve.[1736] Whether or not the choice of the first four was actually, as seems most probable, transferred from the sheriff to the body of the freeholders assembled in the county-court,[1737] still this enactment shews a distinct advance in the principles of election and representation, as opposed to that of mere nomination by a royal officer. Another step in the same direction was the appointment of three knights and a clerk to be “elected in every shire to keep the pleas of the Crown.”[1738] This was the origin of the office afterwards known as that of coroner. It had the effect of depriving the sheriff of a considerable part of his judicial functions; and his importance was at the same time yet further limited by an order that no sheriff should act as justiciar in his own shire, nor in any shire which he had held at any time since the king’s first crowning.[1739] The difficulty of checking the abuse of power in the hands of the sheriffs, which Henry had been unable to overcome, had certainly not been lessened by Richard’s way of distributing the sheriffdoms in his earlier years. It had indeed become so serious that in this very year either the new justiciar, or possibly the king himself, proposed an inquisition similar to that made by Henry in 1170, into the administration of all servants of the Crown, whether justices, sheriffs, constables, or foresters, since the beginning of the reign. When the king was gone, however, it seems to have been felt that such an undertaking would add too heavily to the labours of the judges-errant; and the inquiry was accordingly postponed for an indefinite time by the archbishop’s orders.[1740]

[1721] “Forma qualiter procedendum est in placitis Coronæ Regis.” Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 262–267; Stubbs, Select Charters, pp. 259–263.

[1722] Forma procedendi, c. 4 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 259).

[1723] Ib. cc. 3, 5, 6, 23 (pp. 259, 260, 261).

[1724] Ib. c. 8 (p. 260).

[1725] Ib. c. 19 (as above).

[1726] Ib. c. 7 (as above).

[1727] Ib. c. 10 (as above).

[1728] Ib. c. 16 (as above). Richard had at the beginning of his reign caused all weights and measures to be reduced to one standard; Mat. Paris, Chron. Maj. (Luard), vol. ii. p. 351.

[1729] Forma proced., c. 9 (as above).

[1730] Ib. cc. 11–14 (as above).

[1731] Ib. cc. 15, 17 (as above).

[1732] Ib. c. 18 (as above).

[1733] Ib. c. 22 (p. 261).

[1734] Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iv. pref. pp. xcvi, xcvii.

[1735] R. Glanville, De Legg. Angl., l. xiii. c. 3.

[1736] Forma proced., introductory chap., Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 259; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 262.

[1737] Stubbs, Rog. Howden, as above, pp. xcvii–xcix.

[1738] Forma proced., c. 20 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 260).

[1739] Ib. c. 21 (as above).

[1740] Ib. c. 25 (p. 263).

The principle of co-operation between the government and the people for maintaining order and peace, which underlies all Henry’s reforming measures, and of which the new regulations for election of the grand jury are a further recognition, was again enunciated yet more distinctly in the following year. An edict was published requiring every man above the age of fifteen years to take an oath that he would do all that in him lay for the preservation of the king’s peace; that he would neither be a thief or robber, nor a receiver or accomplice of such persons, but would do his utmost to denounce and deliver them to the sheriff, would join to the uttermost of his power in the pursuit of malefactors when hue and cry was raised against them, and would deliver up to the sheriff all persons who should have failed to perform their share in this duty.[1741] The obligation binding upon every member of the state to lend his aid for the punishment of offences against its peace had been declared, in words which are almost echoed in this edict, as long ago as the reign of Cnut.[1742] The difficulty of enforcing it caused by the disorganized condition of society which had grown up during the civil war was probably the reason which led Henry, in framing his Assizes of Clarendon and Northampton, at once to define it more narrowly and to lay the responsibility of its execution upon a smaller body of men specially appointed for the purpose in every shire. The completeness of organization which the system introduced by these Assizes had now attained, however, gave scope for a wider application of the principle through one of those revivals of older custom in which the enduring character of our ancient national institutions and their capacity for adaptation to the most diverse conditions of national life are so often and so strikingly displayed. The edict of 1195 forms a link between the usage of Cnut’s day and that of modern times. It directed that the oath should be taken before knights assigned for the purpose in every shire; out of the office thus created there seems to have grown that of conservators of the peace; and this again developed in the fourteenth century into that of justices of the peace, which has retained an unbroken existence down to our own age.[1743]

- [1741] Edictum Regium. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 299, 300; Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 264.

- [1742] “And we will that every man above xii years make oath that he will neither be a thief nor cognizant of theft.” Cnut, Secular Dooms, c. 21, Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 74.

- [1743] Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 263; Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 507; pref. to Rog. Howden, vol. iv. pp. c, ci.

The same year was marked by the only important ecclesiastical act of Hubert’s pontificate. Having received in the spring his commission as legate, he made use of it to hold a visitation of the northern province—now, by Geoffrey’s absence and Hugh of Puiset’s death, deprived of both its chief pastors—and a council in York minster at which fifteen canons were passed[1744] to remedy the general relaxation of Church discipline which had been growing ever since Thomas’s flight. At the close of the year Hubert was again at York, upon a different errand: the negotiation of a fresh treaty with Scotland, on the basis of a marriage between the Scot king’s eldest daughter and Richard’s nephew Otto of Saxony.[1745] The marriage never took place, but the alliance of which it was to be the pledge lasted throughout Richard’s reign; and it is a noteworthy proof at once of the growth of friendly relations between the two countries, and of the success of Hubert’s recent ordinance for the preservation of peace and order in England, that in the following year a similar edict, evidently modelled upon the English one, was issued in Scotland by William the Lion.[1746]

- [1744] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 293–298. Cf. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 146–148, and Will. Newb., l. v. c. 12 (Howlett, vol. ii. p. 442).

- [1745] William the Lion had been sick almost to death, and having no son, had proposed to leave his crown to his eldest daughter, under the protection of Richard, whose nephew he wished her to marry. The opposition of his barons, and the restoration of his own health, caused him to drop the scheme of bequest (Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 298, 299). That of the marriage however was still pursued, and accepted by Hubert in Richard’s name, on somewhat singular conditions: Lothian, as the bride’s dowry, was to be given over to Richard’s custody, while Northumberland and the county of Carlisle were to be settled upon Otto and made over to the keeping of the king of Scots. The negotiation, however, dragged on for a year, and was again checked by the hope of an heir to the Scottish crown (ib. p. 308); and the fulfilment of this hope in August 1198 led to its abandonment. Ib. vol. iv. p. 54.

- [1746] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 33. He says William issued his proclamation “de bono sumens exemplum.”

Neither the renewal of order in the Church, nor the securing of the external tranquillity of the realm by alliance with its neighbour-states, nor the organization of justice and police within its own borders, was however the most laborious part of Hubert’s task. One thing only was required of him by his royal master; but that was precisely the one thing which cost him the most trouble to obtain. From a country which must, as it seems, have been almost drained of its financial resources over and over again during the last ten years, he was perpetually called upon to extract supplies of money such as had never been furnished before to any English king. That he contrived to meet Richard’s ceaseless demands year after year without either plunging the nation into helpless misery or provoking it to open revolt, is the strongest proof not only of his financial genius and tact, but also of the increase in material prosperity and national contentment which had been fostered by Henry’s rule, and of the success of Hubert’s own efforts in carrying out the policy which Henry had begun. By Michaelmas 1194 it seems that the whole of the complicated accounts for the ransom, including the carucage imposed in the spring, were closed.[1747] In the same year the country had borne the additional burthen of a tallage upon the towns. This, however, added to the sums raised by sales of office during the king’s visit and to the proceeds of the judges’ visitation, failed to satisfy the wants of Richard. He therefore resorted to two other methods of raising money, both apparently of his own devising, and both harmonizing very ill with the constitutional policy of his justiciar. Save during the disorderly reign of Stephen, the practice of tournaments had been hitherto unknown in England. Both Henry I. and Henry II. were too serious and practical-minded to encourage vain shews of any kind, far less to countenance the reckless waste of energy and the useless risk of life and limb which these entertainments involved, which had moved Pope after Pope to denounce them as perilous alike to body and soul,[1748] and, in spite of a characteristic protest from Thomas Becket, to exclude those who were slain in them from the privileges of Christian burial.[1749] The Church had indeed been unable to check this obnoxious practice in Gaul; backed, however, by the authority of the Crown, she had as yet succeeded in keeping it out of England. But in 1194 a fresh prohibition, issued by Pope Celestine in the previous year,[1750] was met by Richard with a direct defiance. On August 20 he issued a license for the holding of tournaments in England, on condition that every man who took part in them should pay to the Crown a specified sum, varying according to his rank. Five places were appointed where tournaments might be held, and no one was allowed to enter the lists until he had paid for his license.[1751] The collection of this new item of revenue was evidently looked upon as an important matter, for it was intrusted to the justiciar’s brother Theobald Walter.[1752] Whatever may have been Hubert’s share in this measure, he was clearly in no way responsible for the other and yet more desperate expedient to which Richard, almost at the same time, resorted for the replenishment of his treasury. On pretext of a quarrel with his chancellor, he took away the seal from him, ordered another to be made, and declared all acts passed under the old one to be null and void, till they should have been brought to him for confirmation:[1753] in other words, till they should have been paid for a second time.

- [1747] See Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iv. pref. pp. lxxxii–lxxxiv and notes.

- [1748] Will. Newb., l. v. c. 4 (Howlett, vol. ii. pp. 422, 423).

- [1749] Ep. xxiv., Robertson, Becket, vol. v. p. 36.

- [1750] Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 56.

- [1751] Writ in Rymer, as above, p. 65, and in Stubbs, R. Diceto, vol. ii., app. to pref. pp. lxxx, lxxxi; this latter copy is dated August 22. Cf. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 268, Will. Newb., l. v. c. 4 (Howlett, vol. ii. pp. 422, 423), and R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 120.

- [1752] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 268.

- [1753] Ib. p. 267. Cf. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 93. Rog. Howden’s very confused account of the seals is made clear by Bishop Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 506 note.

In the following spring a fit of characteristic Angevin penitence—fervent and absorbing while it lasted, but passing away all too soon—moved the king to make some amends for his extortions as well as for his other sins; he began to replace the church-plate which had been given up for his ransom;[1754] no fresh tax was imposed till late in the year, and then it was only a scutage of the usual amount—twenty shillings on the knight’s fee—for the war in Normandy.[1755] Next year, however, the king’s mood again changed. He was now resolved to carry into effect, with or without Hubert’s assent, the inquiry into the financial administration which Hubert had postponed in 1194. For this purpose he sent over to England Robert, abbot of S. Stephen’s at Caen, who, notwithstanding his monastic profession, had acquired great experience as a clerk of the Norman exchequer, and seems to have there enjoyed a high reputation for knowledge and skill in all matters of finance.[1756] The abbot, accompanied by the bishop-elect of Durham, Philip of Poitiers,[1757] reached London in Lent 1196, and demanded Hubert’s co-operation in fulfilling the royal orders. The justiciar, though displeased and hurt, had no choice but to comply, and an order was issued in the king’s name bidding all sheriffs and officers of the Crown be ready to give an account of their stewardship in London on a certain day—apparently the day of the usual Exchequer-meeting in Easter-week.[1758] Before Easter came, the abbot of Caen himself was gone to his last account; he was seized with illness while dining with Archbishop Hubert on Passion Sunday, and five days later he died.[1759] The intended inquisition never took place; but the mere proposal to conduct it thus through the medium of a stranger from over sea was a direct slight offered to the justiciar by the king;[1760] and it coincided with a disturbance which warned Hubert of a possible danger to his authority from another quarter.

- [1754] Rog. Howden as above, p. 290. Cf. Itin. Reg. Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 449, 450.

- [1755] See Madox, Hist. Exch., vol. i. pp. 637, 638. That it was imposed late in the year seems implied by so much of it not being accounted for till the next year; see Stubbs, pref. to Rog. Howden, vol. iv. p. lxxxviii and note 3.

- [1756] Will. Newb., l. v. c. 19 (Howlett, vol. ii. p. 464). Cf. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 5.

- [1757] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 5. He seems to imply that Philip shared in the abbot’s commission; but he evidently made no attempt to act upon it after Robert’s death.

- [1758] Will. Newb., l. v. c. 19 (Howlett, vol. ii. p. 465).

- [1759] Rog. Howden as above. “Nec cum eis quos evocaverat post Pascha positurus, sed ante Pascha rationem superno Judici de propriis actibus redditurus.” Will. Newb. as above.

- [1760] On April 15, four days after the abbot’s death, Richard wrote a sort of apology to the justiciar. See Stubbs, R. Diceto, vol. ii. app. to pref. pp. lxxix, lxxx.

Strive as he might to equalize the burthens of taxation, he could not prevent them from pressing upon the poorer classes with a severity which grew at last well-nigh intolerable. The grievance was felt most keenly in London. The substitution of the “commune” for the older shire-organization of London in 1191 was a step towards municipal unity, and thus indirectly towards local independence and self-government; but it had done nothing for the poorer class of citizens. It had placed the entire control of civic administration, including the regulation of trade and the assessment of taxes, in the hands of a governing body consisting of a mayor and aldermen, one of whom presided over each of the wards into which the whole city was divided, the head of them all being the mayor.[1761] This corporation was the representative of the merchant-gild, which had thus absorbed into itself all the powers and privileges of the earlier ruling class of territorial magnates, in addition to its own. As might be expected, the rule of this newly-established oligarchy over the mass of its unenfranchized fellow-citizens was at least as oppressive as that of the sheriffs and “barons of the city” which had preceded it; and it was less willingly borne, owing to the jealousy which always existed between the craftsmen and the merchant-gild. As the taxes grew more burthensome year by year, a suspicion began to spread that they were purposely assessed in such a manner as to spare the well-filled pockets of the assessors, and wring an unfair proportion of the required total from the hard-earned savings of the poor.[1762] Whether the injustice was intentional or not, the grievance seems to have been a real one; and it soon found a spokesman and a champion. William Fitz-Osbert—“William with the Long Beard,” as he was commonly called—was by birth a member of the ruling class in the city.[1763] He seems to have shared with a goldsmith named Geoffrey the leadership of a band of London citizens who in 1190 formed part of the crusading fleet, and did good service, not indeed, so far as we know, in Holy Land, but like their brethren forty-three years earlier, in helping to drive the Moors out of Portugal.[1764] Since his return, whether fired by genuine zeal for the cause of the oppressed, or, as some of his contemporaries thought, moved by the hope of acquiring power and influence which he found unattainable by other means,[1765] he had severed himself from his natural associates in the city to become the preacher and leader of another sort of crusade, for the deliverance of the poorer classes from the tyranny of their wealthy rulers. At every meeting of the governing body he withstood his fellow-aldermen to the face, remonstrating continually against their corrupt fiscal administration. They could not silence and dared not expel him, for they knew that his whispers were stirring up the craftsmen; and although the rumour that he had more than fifty thousand sworn followers at his back must have been an exaggeration, yet there could be no doubt of the existence of a conspiracy sufficiently formidable to excuse, if not to justify, the terror of the civic rulers.[1766] When after a visit to Normandy William began openly to boast of the king’s favour and support, the justiciar thought it time to interfere. He called the citizens together, endeavoured to allay their discontent by reasonings and remonstrances, and persuaded them to give hostages for their good behaviour.[1767] William however set his authority at defiance. Day after day, in the streets and open spaces of the city, and at last even in S. Paul’s itself,[1768] this bold preacher with the tall stately form, singular aspect and eloquent tongue gathered round him a crowd of eager listeners to whom he proclaimed himself as the “king and saviour of the poor.” One of his audience afterwards reported to a writer of the time his exposition of a text from Isaiah: “With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of the Saviour.”[1769] “I,” said William, “am the saviour of the poor. Ye poor who have felt the heavy hand of the rich, ye shall draw from my wells the water of wholesome doctrine, and that with joy, for the time of your visitation is at hand. For I will divide the waters from the waters. The people are the waters; and I will divide the humble and faithful people from the proud and perfidious people. I will divide the elect from the reprobate, as light from darkness.”[1770]

[1761] In the Liber de Antiquis Legibus (a chronicle of the mayors and sheriffs of London, compiled in 1274, and edited by Mr. Stapleton for the Camden Soc.), p. 1, the first mayor, Henry Fitz-Aylwine, is said to have been appointed “anno gratie Mº centesimo lxxxviii, anno primo regni Regis Ricardi;” and the document known as Fitz-Aylwine’s Assize (ib. p. 206) purports to have been issued “Anno Domini Mº Cº lxxxix, scilicet primo anno regni illustris Regis Ricardi, existente tunc Henrico filio Aylewini Maiore, qui fuit primus Maiorum Londoniarum.” On this however Bishop Stubbs remarks: “It is improbable that London had a recognized mayor before 1191, in which year the communa was established ... and there is I believe no mention of such an official in a record until some three years later.” Introd. to Annales Londonienses (“Chronicles of Ed. I. and Ed. II.”), p. xxxi.

[1762] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 5. Mat. Paris, Chron. Maj. (Luard), vol. ii. p. 418. Will. Newb., l. v. c. 20 (Howlett, vol. ii. p. 466).

[1763] “Willelmus cum Barbâ,” Rog. Howden as above, pp. 5, 6; “agnomen habens a barbâ prolixâ,” Will. Newb. (as above); “cognomento cum-Barbâ,” “dictus Barbatus vel Barba,” Mat. Paris (as above), pp. 418, 419. Will. Newb. thinks he wore the unusual appendage simply to make himself conspicuous; Mat. Paris explains “cujus genus avitum ob indignationem Normannorum radere barbam contempsit,” on which see Freeman, Norm. Conq., vol. v. p. 900.

[1764] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), pp. 116–118.

[1765] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. pp. 5, 6, and Mat. Paris, Chron. Maj. (Luard), vol. ii. pp. 418, 419, represent the former view; Will. Newb., l. v. c. 20 (Howlett, vol. ii. pp. 467, 468), and R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 143, the latter.

[1766] Will. Newb. as above (p. 468).

[1767] Ib. (pp. 468, 469).

[1768] R. Diceto as above.

[1769] “Of salvation,” A. V.; “de fontibus Salvatoris,” Vulg. Is. xii. 3.

[1770] Will. Newb., l. v. c. 20 (Howlett, vol. ii. p. 469).

Powerless to deal with these assemblies within the city, Hubert determined at least to check the spread of such teaching as this, and issued orders that any citizen of the lower class found outside the walls should be arrested as an enemy to king and kingdom. Some chapmen from London were accordingly arrested at Mid-Lent at Stamford fair.[1771] A day or two afterwards—the justiciar’s fears being perhaps quickened by the arrival of the abbot of Caen, which William might easily interpret as the effect of his own remonstrances with the king—an attempt was made to call William himself to account for his seditious proceedings. The bearer of the summons found him surrounded by such a formidable array of followers that he dared not execute his commission, and a forcible arrest was decided on. Guided by two citizens who undertook to catch him at unawares, a party of armed men was sent to seize him;[1772] one of the guides was felled with a blow of a hatchet by William himself, the other was slain by his friends; William, with a few adherents, took sanctuary in the church of S. Mary-at-Bow. The justiciar, after surrounding the church with soldiers, ordered it to be set on fire,[1773] and William, driven out by the smoke and the flames, was stabbed on the threshold by the son of the man whom he had killed an hour before.[1774] The wound however was not immediately fatal; the soldiers seized him and carried him to the Tower for trial before the justiciars, who at once condemned him to death; he was stripped, tied to a horse’s tail, thus dragged through the city, and hanged with eight of his adherents.[1775] The rest of the malcontents were so overawed by this spectacle that they at once made complete submission.[1776] The justiciar had triumphed; but his triumph was dearly bought at the cost of what little still remained to him of personal popularity and ecclesiastical repute. The common people persisted in reverencing William Longbeard as a martyr;[1777] the clergy were horrified at the sacrilege involved in the violation of the right of sanctuary and the firing of a church, a sacrilege all the more unpardonable because committed by an archbishop; while his own chapter seized upon it as the crowning charge in the already long indictment which they were preparing against their primate.[1778] Thus overwhelmed with obloquy on all sides, Hubert in disgust for a moment threw up the justiciarship, but resumed it as soon as he was once more assured of Richard’s confidence.[1779] For two more years he toiled on at his thankless task. The budget of 1196 was made up by the safe expedient of another scutage.[1780] Next year the sole legislative act ventured upon by the justiciar was an attempt to enforce uniformity of weights and measures throughout the kingdom by means of an Assize,[1781] whose provisions however turned out to be so impracticable that, like a similar ordinance issued earlier in the reign, it seems to have remained inoperative, and six years later was abolished altogether.[1782] In the autumn Hubert went over to Normandy, where he was occupied for some weeks in diplomatic business for the king.[1783] A month after his return the crisis came.

[1771] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 6.

[1772] Will. Newb. as above (p. 470).

[1773] Ibid. Rog. Howden as above; Mat. Paris, Chron. Maj. (Luard) vol. ii. p. 419. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 143, makes William himself fire the church, but this seems nonsense, as he clearly had no intention of dying in it.

[1774] Will. Newb. as above. Cf. Rog. Howden as above.

[1775] Will. Newb., l. v. c. 20 (Howlett, vol. ii. p. 471) says nine. Eight is the number given by Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 6. Cf. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 143; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 533, 534; and Mat. Paris, Chron. Maj. (Luard), vol. ii. p. 419. Gervase calls the place of execution “ad ulmos,” Mat. Paris “ad Ulmetum” [“the Elms in Smithfield” notes Mr. Luard in the margin]. R. Diceto calls it Tyburn; the other writers give it no name at all. We are indebted to Gervase (as above, p. 533) for the date of this affair; Saturday, April 6—the day before the abbot of Caen fell sick; see above, p. 344.

[1776] Rog. Howden and R. Diceto, as above.

[1777] See Will. Newb. as above, c. 21 (pp. 471, 472). Mat. Paris (as above) heartily shared in their opinion.

[1778] Rog. Howden as above, p. 48.

[1779] Ib. pp. 12, 13.

[1780] Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iv. pref. p. lxxxviii and note 3. Madox, Hist. Exch., vol. i. pp. 637, 638.

[1781] Rog. Howden as above, pp. 33, 34.

[1782] Ib. p. 172. Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 509.

[1783] R. Diceto as above, p. 158. Gerv. Cant. as above, pp. 544, 545. The dates do not exactly agree.

Richard, at the height of his struggle with Philip of France, found himself short not only of money but of men,[1784] at any rate of men whom he could trust. He called upon Hubert to send him over from England either a force of three hundred knights to serve him at their own charges for a year, or a sum which would enable him to enlist the same number of mercenaries for the same period, at the rate of three English shillings a day.[1785] For some reason or other it seems that Hubert, somewhat unwisely, at once decided to ignore the second alternative; in a great council held at Oxford on December 7[1786] he simply proposed, in his own name and that of his colleagues in the government, that the barons of England, among whom the bishops were to be reckoned, should come to the rescue of their distressed sovereign by supplying him with three hundred knights to serve him at their own cost for a year. Hubert himself, in his character of archbishop, declared his readiness to take his share of the burthen; so did the bishop of London, Richard Fitz-Nigel the treasurer. The bishop of Lincoln, Hugh of Avalon, was then asked for his assent. “O ye wise and noble men here present,” said the Burgundian saint, “ye know that I came to this land as a stranger, and from the simplicity of a hermit’s life was raised to the office of a bishop. When therefore my inexperience was called to rule over the church of our Lady, I set myself carefully to learn its customs and privileges, its duties and burthens; and for thirteen years I have not strayed from the path marked out by my predecessors, in preserving the one and fulfilling the other. I know that the church of Lincoln is bound to do the king military service, but only in this land; outside the boundaries of England she owes him no such thing. Wherefore I deem it meeter for me to go back to my native land and my hermit’s cell, rather than, while holding a bishopric here, to bring upon my church the loss of her ancient immunities and the infliction of unwonted burthens.”[1787]

- [1784] Magna Vita S. Hugonis (Dimock), p. 248.

- [1785] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 40.

- [1786] Cf. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 549, and Mag. Vita S. Hug. (Dimock), p. 251.

- [1787] Mag. Vita S. Hug. (Dimock), pp. 249, 250.

Hugh of Lincoln was the universally-acknowledged leader of the English Church in all matters of religion and morals; he had exercised in Henry II.’s later years such an influence over the king as no one, except perhaps Thomas Becket, had ever possessed; the whole Church and nation reverenced him as it had never reverenced any man since the death of S. Anselm. When he took up the position of Thomas and Anselm as a champion of constitutional liberty, the victory was sure. Strangely enough, his action seems to have taken the primate completely by surprise. For a moment Hubert stood speechless; then he turned to Bishop Herbert of Salisbury, and with quivering lips asked what he was minded to do for the king’s assistance. As a son of Richard of Ilchester and a kinsman of the great ministerial house founded by Roger of Salisbury,[1788] Herbert represented the traditions of an old and venerated political school, as Hugh represented those of the best school of ecclesiastics. The statesman’s reply was an echo of the saint’s: “It seems to me that, without grievous wrong to my church, I can neither do nor say aught but what I have heard from my lord of Lincoln.” The justiciar, hurling a torrent of reproaches at Hugh, broke up the assembly, and wrote to the king that his plan had been foiled through Hugh’s opposition.[1789] Richard in a fury ordered the property of the two recalcitrant bishops to be confiscated; in the case of Salisbury this was done, but no Englishman dared lay a finger on anything belonging to the saint of Lincoln, “for they feared his curse like death itself.” In vain did the king reiterate his command, till at last his own officers begged Hugh to put an end to the scandal by making his peace, for their sakes if not for his own; Hugh therefore went to seek Richard in Normandy, and literally forced him into a reconciliation on S. Augustine’s day. Herbert, on the other hand, had to purchase his restoration at a heavy price;[1790] but the king and his justiciar were none the less completely beaten. The death of Rees Ap-Griffith and a dispute between his sons for the succession in South Wales gave Hubert an opportunity of renewing his fading laurels by a brilliant expedition to the Welsh marches, where he succeeded in restoring tranquillity and securing the border-fortresses for the king.[1791] He had however scarcely had time to recover from his political defeat before he was overwhelmed by the bursting of an ecclesiastical storm which had long been hanging over his head. Pope Celestine died on January 8, 1198. On the morrow the cardinals elected as his successor a young deacon named Lothar, who took the name of Innocent III., and began at once to sweep away the abuses of the Roman court and to vindicate the rights of his see against the Roman aristocracy with a promptness and vigour which were an earnest of his whole future career.[1792] The monks of Canterbury lost no time in sending to the new Pope their list of grievances against their primate; and at the head of the list they set a charge which, in the eyes of such a pontiff as Innocent, could admit of no defence. Hubert, said they, had violated the duties and the dignity of his order by becoming the king’s justiciar, acting as a judge in cases of life and death, and so entangling himself in worldly business that he was incapable of paying due attention to the government of the Church. Innocent immediately wrote to the king, charging him, if he valued his soul’s health, not to suffer either the archbishop of Canterbury or any other priest to continue in any secular office; and at the same time he solemnly forbade the acceptance of any such office by any bishop or priest throughout the whole Church. Discredited as Hubert now was in the eyes of all parties, he had no choice but to resign, and this time Richard had no choice but to accept his resignation.[1793]

- [1788] On Herbert’s antecedents and connexions see Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iv. pref. p. xci, note 4.

- [1789] Mag. Vita S. Hug. (Dimock), p. 250. Cf. the brief account in Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 40.

- [1790] Mag. Vita S. Hug. (Dimock), p. 251.

- [1791] On Rees’s death his two sons quarrelled over the succession, and Hubert had to go to the “fines Gwalliæ” and make peace between them. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 21. At Christmas he was at Hereford, where he took the castle into his own hands, turning out its custodians and putting in new ones, “ad opus regis”; he did the same at Bridgenorth and Ludlow. Ib. p. 35. See also Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 543, Gerald’s letter to Hubert after his victory, and Hubert’s reply: Gir. Cambr. De Rebus a se gestis, l. iii. cc. 5, 6 (Brewer, vol. i. pp. 96–102).

- [1792] Rog. Howden as above, pp. 41–44.

- [1793] Ib. pp. 47, 48.

The last few months of his justiciarship were however occupied with the projection, if not the execution, of a measure of great constitutional importance. Early in the spring he had, in his master’s name, laid upon England a carucage to the amount of five shillings upon every carucate or ploughland. The great increase in the rate of taxation, as compared with that of 1194, was not unjustifiable; for since that year the socage-tenants, on whom the impost fell, had paid no direct taxes at all, while two scutages had been exacted from the tenants-in-chivalry. But a far more important change was made in the assessment of the new impost. Until now, the carucate, like the hide, had been a term of elastic significance. It represented, as the literal meaning of the word implied, the extent of land which could be cultivated by a single plough; and this of course varied in different parts of the country according to the nature of the soil, and the number and strength of the plough-team. In general, however, a hundred acres seem to have been reckoned as the average extent both of the carucate and of the hide. In order to avoid the endless complications and disputes which under the old system had made the assessment of the land-tax a matter of almost more trouble than profit, Hubert Walter adopted this average as a fixed standard, and ordered that henceforth, for purposes of taxation, the word “carucate” should represent a hundred acres. It followed as a necessary consequence that the whole arable land of England must be re-measured. The old customary reckoning of hides, based upon the Domesday survey, would no longer answer its purpose: the venerable rate-book which had been in use for more than a hundred years, partially superseded since 1168 by the Black Book of the Exchequer, was now to be superseded entirely. Hubert therefore issued in the king’s name a commission for what was virtually a new Domesday survey. Into every shire he sent a clerk and a knight, who, together with the sheriff and certain lawful men chosen out of the shire, were, after swearing that they would do the king’s business faithfully, to summon before them the stewards of the barons of the county, the lord or bailiff of every township and the reeve and four lawful men of the same, whether free or villein, and two lawful knights of the hundred; these persons were to declare upon oath what ploughlands there were in every township—how many in demesne, how many in villenage, how many in alms, and who was responsible for these last. The carucates thus ascertained were noted in a roll of which four copies were kept, one by each of the two royal commissioners, one by the sheriff, and the other divided among the stewards of the local barons. The collection of the money was intrusted to two lawful knights and the bailiff of every hundred; these were responsible for it to the sheriff; and the sheriff had to see that it agreed with his roll, and to pay it into the Exchequer. Stern penalties were denounced against witnesses, whether free or villein, who should be detected in trying to deceive the commissioners. No land was to be exempted from the tax, except the free estates belonging to the parish churches, and lands held of the king by serjeanty or special service; even these last, however, were to be included in the survey, and their holders were required to come and prove their excuses at its conclusion, in London at the octave of Pentecost.[1794]

- [1794] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. pp. 46, 47.

This was Hubert’s last great administrative act, and it had a far more important significance than he himself probably knew. In form, the application of the process of jury-inquest to the assessment of an impost on the land was only a return to the precedent of Domesday itself. In reality, however, it was something much more important than this. The jury-inquest had been introduced by the Conqueror in 1086 under exceptional circumstances, and for an exceptional purpose which could be attained by no other means. So far as its original use was concerned, the precedent had remained a wholly isolated one for more than a hundred years. But during those years the principle which lay at the root of the jury-inquest had made its way into every branch of legal, fiscal and judicial administration. It had been applied to the purposes of private litigation by the Great Assize, to the determination of individual liability to military duty by the Assize of Arms, to the assessment of taxation on personal property by the ordinance of the Saladin tithe; it had penetrated the whole system of criminal procedure through the Assizes of Clarendon and Northampton; and it had gained a yet fuller recognition in the judicial ordinances of 1194. Viewed in this light, its application to the assessment of taxation on real property was another highly important step in the extension of its sphere of work. But this was not all. The chief value of the jury-system lay in its employment of the machinery of local representation and election, whereby it was a means of training the people to the exercise of constitutional self-government. The commission of 1198 shews that, although doubtless neither rulers nor people were conscious of the fact, this training had now advanced within measurable distance of its completion. The machinery of the new survey was not identical with that used in 1086. The taxpayers were represented, not only by the witnesses on whose recognition the assessment was based, but by the “lawful men chosen out of the shire” who took their place side by side with the king’s officers as commissioners for the assessment, and by the bailiff and two knights of the hundred who were charged with the collection of the money. The representative principle had now reached its furthest developement in the financial administration of the shire. Its next advance must inevitably result in giving to the taxpayers a share in the determination, first of the amount of the impost, and then of the purposes to which it should be applied, by admitting them, however partially and indirectly, to a voice in the great council of the nation.[1795]

- [1795] On this “Great Carucage” see Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. pp. 510, 511, and pref. to Rog. Howden, vol. iv. pp. xci–xcv.

We must not credit Hubert Walter with views so lofty or so far-reaching as these. The chief aim of his policy doubtless was to get for his master as much money as he could, although he would only do it by what he regarded as just and constitutional methods. Unluckily the commissioners’ report is lost, and there is not even any proof that it was ever presented; for before Whitsuntide the new Pope’s views had become known, and on July 11 a royal writ announced Hubert’s retirement from the justiciarship and the appointment of Geoffrey Fitz-Peter in his stead.[1796] Like Hubert, Geoffrey Fitz-Peter came of a family which had long been engaged in administrative work. His elder brother Simon had in Henry’s early years filled the various offices of sheriff, justice-in-eyre, and king’s marshal.[1797] Geoffrey himself had been sheriff of Northampton throughout the last five years of Henry’s reign, and had during the same period acted occasionally as an ordinary justice of assize, and more frequently as a judge of the forest-court.[1798] In 1189 Richard appointed him one of the assistant-justiciars, and in this capacity he supported Walter of Rouen in the affair of William of Longchamp’s deposition.[1799] In the early days of William’s rule, however, Geoffrey had made use of the latter’s influence to secure for himself the whole English inheritance of the earl of Essex, William de Mandeville, upon which his wife had a distant claim.[1800] Such a man was likely to be controlled by fewer scruples, as well as hampered by fewer external restraints, than those which had beset the justiciar-archbishop; and in truth, before the year was out, both clergy and people had cause to regret the change of ministers. Some of the religious orders refused to pay their share of the carucage; their refusal was met by a royal edict declaring the whole body of clergy, secular as well as monastic, incapable of claiming redress for any wrongs inflicted on them by the laity, while for any injury done by a clerk or a monk to a layman satisfaction was exacted to the uttermost farthing. The archbishop of Canterbury could hardly have published what was virtually a decree of outlawry against his own order; the new justiciar published it seemingly without hesitation, and the recalcitrant monks were compelled to submit.[1801] This act was followed by a renewal of the decree requiring all charters granted under the king’s old seal to be brought up for confirmation under the new one[1802]—a step which seems to imply that Richard’s former command to this effect had not been very strictly enforced by Hubert. Meanwhile three justices-errant, acting on a set of instructions modelled upon those of 1194, were holding pleas of the Crown in the northern shires;[1803] “so that,” says King Henry’s old chaplain Roger of Howden, “with these and other vexations, just or unjust, all England from sea to sea was reduced to penury. And these things were not yet ended when another kind of torment was added to confound the men of the kingdom, through the justices of the forest,” who were sent out all over England to hold a great forest-assize, which was virtually a renewal of that issued by Henry in 1184.[1804]

- [1796] Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 71.

- [1797] He was sheriff of Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire from 1156 till 1160, and of Northamptonshire again from Michaelmas 1163 till Easter 1170. See the list of sheriffs in index to Eyton’s Itin. Hen. II., pp. 337, 339. He appears as marshal in 1165 (Madox, Form. Angl., p. xix), and as justice-errant in Bedfordshire, A.D. 1163, in the story of Philip de Broi (above, p. 21).

- [1798] Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., list of sheriffs, p. 339; ib. pp. 265, 273, 281, 291, 298. Pipe Roll I. Ric. I. (Hunter) passim.

- [1799] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 16, 28, 96, 153.

- [1800] Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iii., pref. p. xlviii, note 6.

- [1801] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 66.

- [1802] Ibid. Mat. Paris, Chron. Maj. (Luard), vol. ii. p. 451. Ann. Waverl. a. 1198 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. p. 251).

- [1803] Instructions in Rog. Howden (as above), pp. 61, 62. The judges were Hugh Bardulf, Roger Arundel and Geoffrey Hacket; they held pleas in Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Northumberland, Westmoreland, Cumberland and Lancashire.

- [1804] Rog. Howden (as above), pp. 62–66.

Stern and cruel, however, as was the administration of the last eight months of Richard’s reign, it was still part of a salutary discipline. The milder chastenings which Richard’s English subjects had endured from Hubert Walter, the scorpion-lashes with which he chastised them by the hands of Geoffrey Fitz-Peter, were both alike stages in the training which Richard’s predecessor had begun, and whose value they were to learn when left face to face with the personal tyranny of his successor. For nearer at hand than they could dream was the day when English people and Angevin king were to stand face to face indeed, more closely than they had ever stood before. The nine generations of increasing prosperity promised to Fulk the Good were all numbered and fulfilled, and with their fulfilment had come the turn of the tide. The power of the Angevins had reached its destined limit, and had begun to recede again. From the sacred eastern land all trace of it was already swept away; in the west it was, slowly indeed as yet, but none the less surely falling back. Five years were still to pass before the tide should be fairly out; then it was to leave the Good Count’s heir stranded, not on the black rock of Angers, but on the white cliffs of England.

Richard had spent the first half of his reign in fighting for a lost cause in Palestine; he spent the other half in fighting for a losing cause in Gaul. The final result of the long series of conquests and annexations whereby the Angevin counts, from Fulk the Red to Henry Fitz-Empress, had been enlarging their borders for more than two hundred years, had been to bring them into direct geographical contact and political antagonism with an enemy more formidable than any whom they had yet encountered. In their earliest days the king of the French had been their patron; a little later, he had become their tool. Now, he was their sole remaining rival; and ere long he was to be their conqueror. Since the opening of the century, a great change had taken place in the political position of the French Crown; a change which was in a considerable measure due to the yet greater change in the position of the Angevin house. When Louis VI. came to the throne in 1109, he found the so-called “kingdom of France” distributed somewhat as follows. The western half, from the river Somme to the Pyrenees, was divided between four great fiefs—Normandy, Britanny, Anjou and Aquitaine. Four others—Champagne, Burgundy, Auvergne and Toulouse—covered its eastern portion from the river Meuse to the Mediterranean Sea; another, Flanders, occupied its northernmost angle, between the sources of the Meuse, the mouth of the Scheld, and the English Channel. The two lines of great fiefs were separated by an irregular group of smaller territories, amid which lay, distributed in two very unequal portions, the royal domain. Its northern and larger half, severed from Flanders by the little counties of Amiens and Vermandois, was flanked on the east by Champagne and on the north-west by Normandy, while its south-western border was ringed in by the counties of Chartres, Blois and Sancerre, which parted it from Anjou, and which were all linked together with Champagne under the same ruling house. Southward, in the upper valleys of the Loire and the Cher, a much smaller fragment of royal domain, comprising the viscounty of Bourges and the territory afterwards known as the Bourbonnais, lay crowded in between Auvergne, the Aquitanian district of Berry, and the Burgundian counties of Mâcon and Nevers and that of Sancerre, which parted it from the larger royal possessions north of the Loire. The whole domains of the Crown thus covered scarcely more ground than the united counties of Anjou, Touraine and Maine, scarcely so much as the duchy of Normandy. Within these limits, however, Louis VI. had in his twenty-nine years’ reign contrived to establish his absolute authority on so firm a basis that from thenceforth the independence of the Crown was secured. To destroy that of the great feudataries, and to bring them one by one into a subjection as absolute as that of the royal domain itself, was the work which he bequeathed to his successors.

Map VII.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

We may set aside the temporary annexation of Aquitaine through the marriage of Louis VII. and Eleanor as forming no part of this process of absorption. In the plans of Louis VI. it was doubtless meant to be a very important part; but as a matter of fact, its historical importance proved to be of a wholly different kind. The marriage of Louis and Eleanor contributed to the final acquisition of Guienne and Gascony by the French Crown not a whit more than the marriage of Geoffrey Martel and Agnes had contributed to their acquisition by the house of Anjou. The Parisian king, like his Angevin follower of old, had work to do on his own side of the Loire before he might safely attempt the conquest of the south. By the middle of the century, the map of Gaul had undergone a marked transformation. Its eastern and central portions indeed remained unchanged; but the western half was utterly metamorphosed. Its four great divisions had been virtually swept away, and the whole land had become Angevin. In face of this altered state of things, the remaining powers of northern Gaul were of necessity driven into union, as a counterpoise to this enormous growth of Anjou; and the only possible centre of union, alike in a political and a geographical point of view, was the king of the French. He alone could claim to match in rank and dignity the crowned masters of the west; and under his leadership alone was it possible to face them all along the line from the mouth of the Somme to the source of the Cher with a front as unbroken as their own. The old Angevin march had ceased to be a marchland at all; its original character was now transferred to the counties of Chartres and Blois; while to north and south of these, from Nonancourt to Aumale and along the whole course of the Cher above Vierzon, the royal domain itself was the sole bulwark of north-eastern Gaul against the advancing power of Anjou. To secure Chartres and Blois was the first necessity for the king: but their counts needed his protection even more than he needed their fidelity, for the whole width of his domains parted them from Champagne, where the bulk of their strength lay. Accordingly Louis VII., by the matrimonial alliances which he formed first for his daughters and lastly for himself with the house of Blois and Champagne, easily succeeded in binding them to a community of personal interests with the royal house of France, whereby their subservience to the French Crown was for the future secured. The chain was too strong to be broken by the boyish wilfulness of Philip Augustus; and from the moment of his reconciliation with his mother and uncles in 1180, the whole military and political strength of Blois, Chartres and Champagne may be reckoned at his command as unreservedly as that of his own immediate domains.

Since that time, the royal power had made an important advance to the northward. At the opening of Philip’s reign the dominions of the count of Flanders stretched from the Channel to the borders of Champagne, covered the whole northern frontier of the royal domain, and touched that of Normandy at its junction with Ponthieu. Twelve years later, more than half this territory had passed, either by cession or by conquest, into the hands of the king. Vermandois was given up to him in 1186; and in 1191 the death of the Flemish count Philip made him master of all Flanders south of the river Lys, which had been promised to him as the dowry of his first queen, Elizabeth of Hainaut, niece of the dead count and daughter of his successor.[1805] This was in several respects a most valuable acquisition. Not only did it bring to the Crown a considerable accession of territory, including the whole upper valley of the Somme, the famous fortress of Péronne, and the flourishing towns of Amiens and Arras; but the power of Flanders, which a few years before had threatened to overshadow every other power in northern Gaul, was completely broken; and the effect upon the political position of Normandy was more important still. While Vermandois and Amiens were in Flemish hands, a league between the Flemish count and the ruler of Normandy would at any moment not only place the whole north-western border of France at their mercy, but would enable them to call in the forces of the imperial Crown to a junction which the French king could have no power to hinder, and which must almost certainly lead to his ruin. Now, on the other hand, such a junction was rendered well-nigh impossible; the whole territory between Normandy, Ponthieu and the German border was in the king’s own hands, and all that was left of Flanders lay in almost complete isolation between the Lys and the sea. In fine, as the dukes of Burgundy had for several generations been obedient followers of their royal kinsmen, now that Blois, Champagne and Vermandois were all secured, the power and influence of the French Crown north of the Loire was fully a match in territorial extent for that of the house of Anjou. South of the Loire the balance was less equal. The extensive possessions of the house of S. Gilles may indeed be left out of both scales; their homage for Toulouse was now secured to the dukes of Aquitaine, but it was a mere formality which left them practically still independent of both their rival overlords. It was indeed at the expense of Toulouse that the Angevin rulers of Poitou had made their last conquest, that of the Quercy. But since then the French king, too, had been gaining territory in Aquitaine; and his gains were made at the expense of the Poitevin duke. Richard had found it needful to buy Philip’s assent to his peaceful entrance upon his ancestral heritage after his father’s death by a renunciation of all claims upon Auvergne and a cession of two important lordships in Berry, Graçay and Issoudun.[1806] The sacrifice was trifling in itself, but it was significant. It marked Richard’s own consciousness that a turning-point had come in the career of his house. Hitherto they had gone steadily forward; now it was time to draw back. The aggressive attitude which had been habitual to the counts of Anjou for nearly three hundred years must be dropped at last. Henceforth they were to stand on the defensive in their turn against the advance of the French Crown.

- [1805] See above, p. 234, note 7{1115}.

- [1806] Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.) p. 29. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 75.

It was not the strength of that advance itself which made it so formidable to Richard; it was the knowledge that, side by side with the process of consolidation in France, there had been and still was going on in the Angevin dominions a process of disintegration which his father had been unable to check, and against which he himself was well-nigh helpless. The French monarchy was built up around one definite centre, a centre round which all the subordinate parts of the structure grouped themselves unquestioningly as a matter of course. Paris and its king, even when his practical authority was at the lowest ebb, had always been in theory the accepted rallying-point of the whole kingdom, the acknowledged head of the body politic, none of whose members had ever dreamed of establishing any other in its place. But the empire of Richard Cœur-de-Lion had no centre; or rather, it had three or four rival ones. In Angevin eyes its centre was Angers; in Norman eyes it was Rouen; to the men of the south, it was Poitiers. Even Henry Fitz-Empress had felt at times the difficulty of fulfilling two such opposite parts as those of duke of Normandy and count of Anjou without rousing the jealous resentment of either country against himself as the representative of the other; while as for Britanny and Aquitaine, he had only been able to keep an uncertain hold over them by sheer force, until Britanny was appeased by the marriage of Constance, and Aquitaine subdued by the vigour of Richard. But for Richard in his father’s place the difficulty was far greater. Chafe as they might against the yoke which bound them together—dispute as they might over their respective shares in their common ruler and their respective claims upon him—neither Angevin nor Norman could fail to recognize his own natural sovereign and national representative in the son of Geoffrey and Matilda. But the chances of this recognition being extended to the next generation expired with the young king. If the two Henrys were strangers in Britanny and in Aquitaine, yet on the banks of the Seine, the Loire and the Mayenne they were felt to be at home. But Richard was at home nowhere, though he was master everywhere, from the Solway to the Pyrenees. His Aquitanian subjects for the most part, if they counted him as a fellow-countryman, counted him none the less as an enemy; his subjects north of Loire counted him as a southern stranger. Normans and Angevins still saw in him, as they had been taught to see in him for the first twenty-six years of his life, the representative not of Hrolf and William or of Fulk the Red and Geoffrey Martel, but simply of his mother’s Poitevin ancestors. The Bretons saw in him the son of their conqueror, asserting his supremacy over them and their young native prince only by the right of the stronger. As Suger had laid it down as an axiom, more than half a century ago, that “Englishmen ought not to rule over Frenchmen nor French over English,” so now we begin to discern growing up in Richard’s continental dominions a feeling that Normans should not rule over Angevins, nor Angevins over Normans, nor either over Bretons and Poitevins, nor Poitevins over any of the rest; and that if one and all must needs submit to the loss of their ancient independence, it would be more natural and less humiliating to lay it down at the feet of the prince who had always been acknowledged in theory as the superior of all alike, the king of the French.

This feeling, however, had scarcely come into existence, much less risen to the surface of politics, when Philip Augustus came home from the Crusade at Christmas 1191. It is scarcely probable that any plan of actual conquest had as yet taken shape in Philip’s mind. But the very audacity of the demand which he made upon the credulity of the Norman constables when in the following spring he asked them to believe that Richard had ceded to him not only the whole Vexin, but also the counties of Aumale and Eu—a cession for which there was not a shadow of reason either in past history or in present circumstances, and which if carried into effect would have cut off the Norman communications with Ponthieu and Flanders, and given him at once a foothold upon the Channel and an invaluable coign of vantage for an attempt upon Rouen—seems to indicate that he was already forming some more definite design against the Angevins’ power than the simple system of lying in wait to steal from them any territorial or political advantage that could be stolen with impunity, with which he, like his father, had hitherto been content. The terms of his treaty with John in the following year point still more strongly in the same direction. As the price of John’s investiture with the rest of his brother’s dominions, Philip reserved to himself the whole Norman territory on the right bank of the Seine, except the city of Rouen; on the left bank, nearly half the viscounty of Evreux, including the castles of Vaudreuil, Verneuil and Ivry; and from the older Angevin patrimony, all that was most worth having in Touraine—Tours itself, Azay, Montbazon, Montrichard, Amboise and Loches—besides the transfer of the Angevin fiefs in the Vendômois from the count of Anjou to the count of Blois.[1807] Owing to the disorganized state of Richard’s dominions caused by his captivity, Philip’s endeavours to carry this bargain into effect by conquering Normandy in John’s interest and his own met for a while with considerable success. His first attempt at invasion was indeed repulsed by the Norman barons under the leadership of Earl Robert of Leicester;[1808] but a few weeks later treason opened to him the gates of Gisors and Neaufle; the rest of the Vexin was easily won,[1809] and secured thus against attack in his rear, he marched northward to the capture of Aumale and Eu.[1810] Thence he turned back to besiege Rouen, but soon retreated again into his own territories,[1811] taking Pacy and Ivry on his way.[1812] In July, finding that, according to his own phrase, the Angevin demon was after all to be let loose upon him once more, he thought it advisable to accept Richard’s overtures of peace; and Richard on his part—being still in prison—deemed it wise for the moment to sanction the French king’s recent conquests in Normandy and the liberation of Ademar of Angoulême, and also to let Philip have temporary possession of Loches, Châtillon-sur-Indre, Driencourt and Arques, as pledges for the payment of twenty thousand marks, due within two years of his own release.[1813]

- [1807] Treaty in Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 57.

- [1808] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 205.

- [1809] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 206. Will. Newb., l. iv. c. 34 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 389, 390). Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 36. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 77.

- [1810] Will. Newb. as above (p. 390).

- [1811] Ibid. Rog. Howden, as above. Cf. Chron. Rothom., a. 1193 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. i. p. 369).

- [1812] Will. Newb. as above.

- [1813] Rog. Howden as above, pp. 217–220. These were apparently the twenty thousand marks promised in 1189 and not yet paid.

Whether he intended to keep or to break these engagements is practically no matter; for, if he meant to break them, Philip took care to anticipate him. Seven months after the treaty was signed he again crossed the Norman border, took Evreux,[1814] which he handed over to John’s custody,[1815] and marched up by way of Neubourg and Vaudreuil, both of which he captured, to besiege Rouen. Thence, however, he again retired—scared, it may be, by tidings of Richard’s approach—and hurrying back to the southern border laid siege to Verneuil on May 10.[1816] Two days later Richard landed at Barfleur,[1817] and by the end of another fortnight he was encamped at L’Aigle,[1818] within a few miles of Verneuil. His presence there, coupled with the defection of John who had contrived to join him on the road,[1819] and the surprise and slaughter of the French garrison of Evreux by a body of Norman troops,[1820] alarmed Philip so much that on Whitsun Eve, May 28, he again fled into his own dominions.[1821] Richard was busy strengthening the walls of Verneuil when tidings came to him that “the Angevins and Cenomannians” were besieging Montmirail,[1822] a castle on the borders of Perche and Maine, famous as the scene of a stormy conference between Henry II. and S. Thomas. Who the besiegers actually were, or what was the ground of their hostility either to William of Montmirail[1823] or to his overlord King Richard, must remain undecided. It is plain, however, that in Richard’s ears the tidings sounded as a warning of disaffection in his patrimonial dominions. He hurried to the relief of Montmirail, but found it levelled with the ground.[1824] He wasted no time in pursuit of its destroyers, but pushed on direct to Tours, took up his quarters in Châteauneuf,[1825] and shewed his suspicions concerning the origin of the new mischief by driving the canons of S. Martin out of the abbey where they dwelt under the special protection of the French king.[1826] The burghers, on the other hand, made proof of their loyalty by a free-will offering of two thousand marks.[1827] Determined now to redeem his pledges to Philip not with gold but with steel, Richard marched on to Beaulieu,[1828] to join a body of Navarrese and Brabantines, sent by his brother-in-law Sancho of Navarre, in blockading the castle of Loches;[1829] a few days after his arrival, on June 13, it was surrendered by its French garrison.[1830] He was however standing between two fires. Bertrand de Born was again stirring up the south, singing and fighting ostensibly in Richard’s interest against his disaffected neighbours in the Limousin, but in reality kindling into a fresh blaze all the reckless passions and endless feuds which had been smouldering too long for the warrior-poet’s pleasure.[1831] Philip meanwhile was again threatening Rouen;[1832] the Norman archbishop and seneschal attempted to negotiate with him in Richard’s name, but without result;[1833] and at the end of the month he marched southward to meet Richard himself. On July 4 the two kings were within a few miles of each other—Richard at Vendôme, Philip at Fréteval.[1834] What followed is told so diversely by the English and French historians of the time that it seems impossible to reconcile the rival accounts or to decide between them. All that we know for certain is that Philip suddenly struck his tents and withdrew into the territories of the count of Blois; that Richard set off in pursuit, missed Philip himself, but fell at unawares upon the troops who were convoying his baggage towards Blois, routed them, and captured all the French king’s most precious possessions, including his royal seal and the treasury-rolls of the whole kingdom, besides a number of valuable horses, an immense quantity of money and plate, and—what would be scarcely less useful to Richard for political purposes—the charters of agreement between Philip and all the Norman, Angevin and Poitevin rebels who had plotted treason with him and John against their lord.[1835]

[1814] Will. Newb. as above·/·l. iv., c. 40 (p. 403). Rigord (as above)·/·(Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 37. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. as above·/·(ibid.), p. 77; Philipp., l. iv. (ibid.) p. 143.

[1815] Will. Armor. Philipp. as above.

[1816] Rigord as above. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. as above. Cf. Philipp. as above; Rog. Howden (as above), pp. 251, 252; R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 114, 115; and Will. Newb., l. v. c. 2 (Howlett, vol. ii. p. 418). The date of the siege of Verneuil comes from Rog. Howden.

[1817] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 251. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 114.

[1818] Will. Newb., l. v. c. 2 (Howlett, vol. ii. p. 418).

[1819] Rog. Howden (as above), p. 252. R. Diceto, as above, says they met “apud Bruis.”

[1820] This is all that Rigord says about the disaster (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v. p. 37). In the hands of the poet William of Armorica it becomes a horrible romance, wherein John, as commandant of Evreux, invites the unsuspecting Frenchmen to a banquet, and then brings in his “armed Englishmen” to massacre them (Philipp., l. iv., ib. p. 143; Gesta Phil. Aug., ib. p. 77). John has so many undoubted crimes to answer for that it probably seemed a mere trifle to add one more to the list, but for that very reason one cannot admit it on the sole testimony of the poet-historiographer. The English writers say nothing of the whole matter.

[1821] Rog. Howden and Will. Newb. as above. R. Diceto (as above), p. 115.

Cf. Rigord and Will. Armor. as above.

[1822] “Andegavenses et Cenomannenses” says Rog. Howden as above. R. Diceto (as above), p. 116, has “Andegavenses” only; the Chron. S. Albin. a. 1192 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 49), has “Andegavenses et alii.”

[1823] William “Gohet” as R. Diceto calls him; i.e. (see Bishop Stubbs’s note, ibid.), “William of Perche Gouet, Goeth, or le petit Perche.”

[1824] Rog. Howden as above. R. Diceto as above, p. 117. Cf. Chron. S. Albin. a. 1192 (as above).

[1825] R. Diceto as above.

[1826] Rigord (Duchesne), Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v. p. 38.

[1827] “Dono spontaneo,” Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 252; “nullâ coactione præmissâ,” R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 117. The “burgenses” in question, as appears from R. Diceto, were those of Châteauneuf, not the cives of Tours proper.

[1828] R. Diceto as above.

[1829] Rog. Howden (as above), pp. 252, 253.

[1830] Ib. p. 253 (with the date). R. Diceto as above. Cf. Chron. S. Albin. a. 1192 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 49).

[1831] Clédat, Bert. de Born, pp. 83, 84.

[1832] Rog. Howden as above, p. 253. R. Diceto, p. 116.

[1833] Rog. Howden as above, pp. 253–255.

[1834] R. Diceto as above.

[1835] Cf. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 255, 256; R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 117, 118; Will. Newb., l. v. c. 2 (Howlett, vol. ii. p. 419); Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 38; Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 77; Philipp., l. iv. (ibid.), p. 144; and Chron. S. Albin. a. 1192 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 49). Rog. Howden alone mentions the charters, and Will. Armor. the treasury-rolls and seal.

The repairing of this disaster gave Philip sufficient occupation for the rest of the year, and Richard was free to march upon the Aquitanian rebels. Sancho of Navarre was already wasting the lands of the ringleaders, Geoffrey of Rancogne and Ademar of Angoulême;[1836] and by July 22 Richard was able to report to his justiciar in England that he was master of all the castles of the Angoumois and all the lands of Geoffrey.[1837] From Angoulême he marched northward again, took measures for the security of Anjou and Maine,[1838] and then returned to Normandy, where he found that his representatives, headed by the chancellor, had just concluded a truce with the French king to last till All Saints’ day[1839]—a proceeding which served him as the pretext for that withdrawal of the seal from William and repudiation of all engagements made under it, which has been mentioned already.[1840] No further movement was however made by either party until the spring. Then the wearisome story of fruitless negotiations alternating with indecisive warfare begins again, and goes on unceasingly for the next four years. Save for an occasional attempt to make a diversion in Berry, the actual fighting between the two kings was confined to the Norman border.[1841] Normandy was the chief object of Philip’s attack, partly no doubt because, owing to its geographical position, he could invade it with more ease and less risk than any other part of Richard’s dominions, but also because it was the key to all the rest. A French conquest of Normandy would sever Richard’s communications not only with Flanders and Germany, but also with England; and the strength of the Angevins in Gaul now rested chiefly upon the support of their island-realm. Neither assailant nor defender, however, was able to gain any decisive advantage in the field. The armed struggle between them was in fact of less importance than the diplomatic rivalry which they carried on side by side with it; and in this, strangely enough, Richard, who had hitherto shewn so little of the far-sighted statecraft and political tact of his race, proved more than a match for his wily antagonist.

- [1836] R. Diceto as above·/·(Stubbs), vol. ii., p. 117. Will. Newb. as above·/·, l. v. c. 2 (Howlett, vol. ii. p. 419).

- [1837] Letter of Richard to Hubert Walter (date, Angoulême, July 22) in Rog. Howden as above, pp. 256, 257. Cf. R. Diceto as above, pp. 118, 119. Will. Newb. as above (p. 420).

- [1838] “Rediit in Andegaviam, et redemit omnes baillivos suos, id est, ad redemptionem coegit. Similiter fecit in Cenomanniâ.” Rog. Howden as above, p. 267. At Le Mans “convocavit magnates omnes suæ jurisdictioni subpositos,” and apparently tried to shame them into more active loyalty—or more liberal gifts—by eulogy of their English brethren: “ubi fidem Anglorum in adversitate suâ semper sibi gratiosam, integram et probabilem plurimum commendavit.” R. Diceto as above, p. 119.

- [1839] Rog. Howden as above, pp. 257–260. Cf. R. Diceto as above, p. 120, and Will. Newb., l. v. c. 3 (as above). This last gives a wrong date; that of the document in Rog. Howden is July 23.

- [1840] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 267. See above, p. 343.

- [1841] It may be followed in Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 301–305, vol. iv. pp. 3–7, 14, 16, 19–21, 24, 54–61, 68, 78–81; Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), pp. 38–40, 42; Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), pp. 78, 79; Philipp., l. v. (ib.), pp. 146–154.

That the foes in Richard’s own household should league themselves against him with Philip, as he had done in earlier days against his own father, was, so far as Richard himself is concerned, no more than retributive justice. Philip’s alliance with John had proved a failure; but it was not long before he saw a chance of securing a more useful tool in the person of little Arthur of Britanny. English historians tell us that when Richard and Philip made their treaty at Messina in March 1191 Richard obtained a formal acknowledgement of his rights, as duke of Normandy, to the overlordship of Britanny and the liege homage of its duke.[1842] The text of the treaty of Messina, however, contains not a word on this subject; the agreement, if made at all, must have been drawn up in a separate form; and it seems to have remained a dead letter, like another agreement made at the same place a few months earlier—the treaty with Tancred whereby Richard had engaged to recognize Arthur of Britanny as his successor in default of direct heirs. Although after five years of marriage Queen Berengaria was still childless, no such recognition had yet been made. Richard on his return to Europe probably perceived that Arthur’s succession would be impossible in England, and in Gaul would be fatal to the independence of the Angevin house. Accordingly, he was once more doing all in his power to win the attachment of John; and John, having at length discovered that his own interests could be better served by supporting his brother than by intriguing against him, proved an active and useful ally in the war against Philip.[1843] On the other hand, Richard seems never to have received Arthur’s homage for Britanny; and those who had the control of political affairs in that country were determined that he never should. The dispute between Henry and Philip for the wardship of the two children of Geoffrey and Constance had apparently ended in a compromise. Eleanor, the elder child, was now under the care of her uncle Richard;[1844] but Constance seems to have succeeded in keeping her infant boy out of the reach of both his would-be guardians, and, moreover, in governing her duchy without any reference to either of them, for nearly seven years after the death of her father-in-law King Henry. She had been given in marriage by him, when scarcely twelve months a widow, to Earl Ralf of Chester,[1845] son and successor of Earl Hugh who had been one of the leaders in the revolt of 1173. As the earls of Chester were hereditary viscounts of the Avranchin—the border-district of Normandy and Britanny—this marriage would have furnished an excellent means of securing the Norman hold upon the Breton duchy, if only Ralf himself could have secured a hold upon his wife. In this however he completely failed. Safe in her hereditary dominions, with her boy at her side, and strong in the support of her people rejoicing in their newly-regained independence, Constance apparently set Ralf, Richard and Philip all alike at defiance, till in 1196 Richard summoned her to a conference with himself in Normandy, and she set out to obey the summons. Scarcely had she touched the soil of the Avranchin at Pontorson when she was caught by her husband and imprisoned in his castle of S. James-de-Beuvron.[1846] It is hard not to suspect that Richard and Ralf had plotted the capture between them; for Richard, instead of insisting upon her release, at once renewed his claim to the wardship of Arthur, and prepared to enforce it at the sword’s point. The Bretons first hurried their young duke away to the innermost fastnesses of their wild and desolate country under the care of the bishop of Vannes,[1847] and then, after a vain attempt to liberate his mother, intrusted him to the protection of the king of France,[1848] who of course received him with open arms, and sent him to be educated with his own son.[1849]

- [1842] Gesta Ric. (Stubbs), p. 161. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 99, 100.

- [1843] See e.g. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. pp. 5, 16, 60; Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 38; Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 77.

- [1844] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 275, 278.

- [1845] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 29.

- [1846] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 7.

- [1847] Will. Armor. Philipp., l. v. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 149. Will. Newb., l. v. c. 18 (Howlett, vol. ii. pp. 463, 464).

- [1848] Rog. Howden as above.

- [1849] Will. Armor. as above.

Philip had now got the old Angevin patrimony between two fires; but the Bretons were so little accustomed to act in concert even among themselves, far less with any other power, that he found it impossible to make any real use of them as allies either for military or political purposes. The independent warfare which they carried on with Richard across the south-western border of Normandy[1850] had little effect upon that which Richard and Philip were carrying on along its eastern border; and upon the Angevin lands which lay directly between Britanny and France the Breton revolt had no effect at all. To the end of Richard’s life, we hear of no further troubles in Maine or Anjou. Nay more, we hear of no further troubles in Aquitaine. If Philip had in some sense turned Richard’s flank in the west, Richard had turned Philip’s flank far more effectually in the south. The unwonted tranquillity there may indeed have been partly due to the fact that one of the chief sources of disturbance was removed in 1196 by the withdrawal of Bertrand de Born into a monastery;[1851] but it was also in great measure owing to Richard’s quickness in seizing an opportunity which presented itself, in that same eventful year, of forming a lasting alliance with the house of Toulouse. His old enemy Count Raymond V. was dead;[1852] he now offered the hand of his own favourite sister, the still young and handsome Queen Jane of Sicily, to the new Count Raymond VI.;[1853] and thenceforth the eastern frontier of his Aquitanian duchy was as secure under the protection of his sister’s husband as its southern frontier under that of his wife’s brother, the king of Navarre.

- [1850] Will. Newb. as above,·/·, l. v. c. 30 (p. 491). Rog. Howden as above·/·(Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 7.

- [1851] Clédat, Bert. de Born, p. 92.

- [1852] In 1194, according to Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 38.

- [1853] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 13. Will. Newb., l. v. c. 30 (Howlett, vol. ii. p. 491). R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 70.

Nor were Richard’s alliances confined within the boundaries of Gaul. His year of captivity in Germany had not been all wasted time. When he parted from his imperial jailor in the spring of 1194, they were, at any rate in outward semblance, close political allies; and at the same time Richard had succeeded in gaining over his bitterest foe, Leopold of Austria, by an offer of his niece Eleanor of Britanny as wife to Leopold’s son.[1854] The marriage-contract was however not yet executed when the Austrian duke met with a fatal accident and died in agony, owning with his last breath that his miserable end was a just retribution for his conduct towards the English king.[1855] The impression made by this event deepened the feeling of respect and awe which the captive lion had already contrived to inspire in the princes of the Empire. Meanwhile Henry VI. had made himself master of Sicily;[1856] and now the old dream by which the German Emperors never quite ceased to be haunted, the dream of re-asserting their imperial supremacy over Gaul, was beginning to shape itself anew in his brain. In the summer of 1195 he sent to Richard a golden crown and a message charging him, on his plighted faith to the Emperor and on the very lives of his hostages, to invade the French kingdom at once, and promising him the support and co-operation of the imperial forces. Richard, suspecting a trap, despatched William of Longchamp to inquire into the exact nature, extent and security of Henry’s promised assistance; Philip vainly tried to intercept the envoy as he passed through the royal domains;[1857] and the negotiations proved so far effectual that Henry remitted seventeen thousand marks out of the ransom, as a contribution to Richard’s expenses in his struggle with Philip.[1858] When, on Michaelmas Eve 1197, Henry VI. died,[1859] the use of that homage on Richard’s part which his English subjects had resented so bitterly was made apparent to them at last. While the English king was holding his Christmas court at Rouen there came to him an embassy from the princes of Germany, summoning him, as chief among the lay members of the Empire[1860] by virtue of his investiture with the kingdom of Arles, to take part with them in the election of a new Emperor at Cöln on February 22.[1861] Richard himself could not venture to leave Gaul; but the issue proved that his presence at Cöln was not needed to secure his interests there. He wished that the imperial crown should be given to his nephew Duke Henry of Saxony, eldest son and successor of Henry the Lion. This scheme, however, when laid before the other electors by the envoys whom he sent to represent him at Cöln, was rejected on account of the duke’s absence in Holy Land.[1862] The representatives of the English king then proposed Henry’s brother Otto, for whom Richard had long been vainly endeavouring to find satisfactory provision on either side of the sea,[1863] and who seems really to have been his favourite nephew. The result was that, on the appointed day, Otto was elected Emperor of the Romans,[1864] and on July 12 he was crowned king of the Germans at Aachen by the archbishop of Cöln.[1865]

- [1854] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 273. See above, p. 325.

- [1855] Rog. Howden as above, pp. 276, 277. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 124. Will. Newb. as above·/·l. v., c. 8 (pp. 431–434). R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 65, 66.

- [1856] In the autumn of 1194. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 268–270. Cf. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 123, 124.

- [1857] Rog. Howden (as above), pp. 300, 301.

- [1858] Ib. pp. 303, 304.

- [1859] Ib. vol. iv. p. 31.

- [1860] “Sicut præcipuum membrum imperii.” Ib. p. 37.

- [1861] Ibid.

- [1862] Ib. pp. 37, 38.

- [1863] He appointed him earl of York in 1190, but as the grant was made after the king left England, some of the Yorkshire folk doubted its genuineness, and Otto never succeeded in obtaining possession. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 86. The elaborate scheme for his endowment in the north, projected in 1195, has already been mentioned (above, p. 341). This having also failed, Richard in 1196 gave him the investiture of Poitou. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 7; cf. ib. vol. iii. p. 86, and R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 70.

- [1864] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. pp. 37–39. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 163.

- [1865] R. Diceto as above.

For a moment, at the mere prospect of beholding a grandson of Henry Fitz-Empress seated upon the imperial throne of the west, there had flashed across the mind of at least one friend of the Angevin house a fancy that the world-wide dominion which seemed to be passing away from the heirs of Fulk the Good was to be renewed for yet one more generation.[1866] There was indeed an opposition party in Germany, who set up a rival Emperor in the person of Philip of Suabia, a brother of Henry VI.;[1867] and he at once made common cause with his French namesake.[1868] This Suabian alliance, however, and the support of the count of Ponthieu—purchased two years before with the hand of the unhappy Adela, whom Richard had at last restored to her brother[1869]—could not much avail Philip Augustus against such a league as was now gathering around the English king. The vast sums which Hubert Walter had been sending, year after year, to his royal master over sea were bringing a goodly interest at last. Flanders, Britanny, Champagne, had all been secretly detached from the French alliance and bought over to the service of Richard;[1870] the Flemish count had already drawn Philip into a war in which he narrowly escaped being made prisoner;[1871] and in the summer of 1198, when the imperial election was over, not only Baldwin of Flanders, Reginald of Boulogne, Baldwin of Guines, Henry of Louvain, Everard of Brienne, Geoffrey of Perche and Raymond of Toulouse, but even the young count Louis of Blois and the boy-duke Arthur of Britanny himself, one and all leagued themselves in an offensive and defensive alliance with Richard against the French king.[1872] The immediate consequence was that Philip begged Hubert Walter, who being just released from his justiciarship had rejoined his sovereign in Normandy, to make peace for him with Richard; and he even went so far as to offer the surrender of all the Norman castles which he had won, except Gisors. Richard however would listen to no terms in which his allies were not included.[1873] At last, in November, a truce was made, to last till the usual term, S. Hilary’s day.[1874] When it expired the two kings held a colloquy on the Seine between Vernon and Les Andelys, Richard in a boat on the river, Philip on horseback on the shore;[1875] this meeting was followed by another, where, by the mediation of a cardinal-legate, Peter of Capua, who had lately arrived in Gaul, they were persuaded to prolong their truce for five years.[1876]

Plan VII.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

[1866] R. Diceto tells the story of the prophecy made to Fulk the Good in two places; in the Abbreviationes Historiarum (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 149) and in the

Opuscula (vol. ii. pp. 267, 268). In the latter place he adds: “Quod quondam probavit regnum Jerosolimitanum; quod adhuc ostendit regnum Anglorum; quod suo tempore declarabit Romanum imperium.” This, as Bishop Stubbs notes, “looks like an anticipation of the election of Otto IV. to the empire.... As Bishop Longchamp died in 1197, before which date we must suppose MS. R to have been written” [the MS. from which the Opuscula are printed, and which begins with a dedication to William of Longchamp], “it can scarcely be a prophecy after the event.” As William of Longchamp died January 31, 1197 (R. Diceto, vol. ii. p. 150; February 1 according to Gerv. Cant., Stubbs, vol. i. p. 543), it seems indeed to shew that the possibility of one or other of Richard’s nephews becoming Emperor at the next vacancy was already in contemplation more than eight months before the death of Henry VI. Or was Ralf dreaming rather of a transfer of the imperial crown to Richard himself? for it is to be observed that Otto can be included within the “nine generations” only by excluding from them Fulk the Good himself; but this mode of computing would fail if applied to the eastern branch of the Angevin house, where it would give only eight generations, so that we can hardly suppose it to have been adopted by Ralf. According to R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 88, and Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 545, a party among the electors actually did choose Richard, and—much more strangely—another party chose Philip of France.

[1867] Rog. Howden as above, p. 39.

[1868] Treaty in Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 70; date, June 29 [1197].

[1869] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. p. 303. Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 38. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.) p. 77.

[1870] Cf. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 19, R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 77, and Will. Newb., l. v. c. 32 (Howlett, vol. ii. p. 495). Richard’s treaty with Flanders is in R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 152, 153, and Rymer, as above, pp. 67, 68; it has no date, but as R. Diceto (as above, p. 158) tells us that it was drawn up by Hubert Walter, and also that Hubert was in Gaul from September 14 (or 28, according to Gerv. Cant., Stubbs, vol. i. p. 574) to November 8 [1197], it must fall in that interval.

[1871] Rog. Howden as above, pp. 20, 21. Will. Newb. as above. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 77, 78.

[1872] Rog. Howden as above, p. 54.

[1873] Ib. p. 61.

[1874] Ib. p. 68.

[1875] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. pp. 79, 80.

[1876] Ib. p. 80. Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 42.

Yet all the while, there lurked in Richard’s heart a misgiving that, in the last resort, his diplomacy would prove to have been in vain; that, strive as he might to turn away the tide of war from his own borders by stirring up north and east and south to overwhelm the Crown of France, still, after all, the day must come when the Angevins would have to stake their political existence solely upon their own military resources, and to stand at bay, unaided, unsupported, alone, behind whatever bulwark they might be able to devise by their own military genius. It was the genius and the foresight of Richard himself which insured that when the crisis came, the bulwark was ready, even though it were doomed to prove unavailing in the end. The last and mightiest of the many mighty fortresses reared by Angevin hands since the first great builder of the race had begun his castle-building in the Loire valley was the Château-Gaillard, the “saucy castle” of Richard the Lion-heart. He “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.”[1877] Some three-quarters of a league from the right bank of the river, in a valley opening upon it from the eastward and watered by the little stream of Gambon, stood the town of Andely. Between the town and the river stretched a lake, or rather perhaps a marsh,[1878] through which the Gambon and another lesser rivulet descending from the hills to the north of Andely found their way by two separate issues into the Seine, nearly opposite two islets, of which the larger and more northerly was known as the Isle of Andely.[1879] The space enclosed between the three rivers and the marsh seems to have been a tract of waste land, occupied only by a toll-house for the collection of dues from the vessels passing up and down the Seine[1880]—dues which formed one of the most important items in the revenue of the archbishop of Rouen, to whom Andely and its neighbourhood belonged.[1881] Over against this spot, on the southern bank of the Gambon, in the angle formed by its junction with the Seine, a mass of limestone crag rose abruptly to the height of three hundred feet. Its western side, almost perpendicular, looked down upon the great river, the northern, scarcely less steep, over the Gambon and the lake beyond; to the north-east and south-west its rocky slopes died down into deep ravines, and only a narrow neck of land at its south-eastern extremity connected it with the lofty plateau covered with a dense woodland known as the Forest of Andely, which stretches along the eastern side of the Seine valley between Andely and Gaillon. One glance at the site was enough to rivet a soldier’s gaze. If, instead of the metropolitan church of Normandy, a lay baron had owned the soil of Andely, we may be sure that long ago that lofty brow would have received its fitting crown; if the power of Fulk the Builder had reached to the banks of the Seine, we may doubt whether the anathemas of the Norman primate would not have availed as little to wrest such a spot from his grasp as those of the archbishop of Tours had availed to wrest from him the site of Montrichard. But a greater castle-builder than Fulk Nerra himself was the architect of Château-Gaillard.

- [1877] I copy Mr. Green’s picture, Hist. of the English People, vol. i. p. 187.

- [1878] Now dried up. See Deville, Hist. du Château-Gaillard, pp. 27, 28.

- [1879] “Est locus Andelii qui nunc habet insula nomen.” Will. Armor. Philipp., l. vii. v. 29 (Deville, Château-Gaillard, p. 126; Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v. p. 169).

- [1880] See a charter of Archbishop Malger (11th century) and one of Pope Eugene III., a. 1148, quoted in Deville as above, p. 26, note 2.

- [1881] The archbishops seem to have looked upon Andely as their most profitable territorial possession; Rotrou called it his “unicum vivendi subsidium” (Rotr. Ep. xxiv., Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xvi. p. 632); Walter called it “patrimonium ecclesiæ solum et unicum” (R. Diceto, Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 148).

Richard’s historical connexion with the “rock of Andely” has its ill-omened beginning in a ghastly story of the fate of three French prisoners whom he flung from its summit into the ravine below, in vengeance for the slaughter of some Welsh auxiliaries who had been surprised and cut to pieces by the French king’s troops in the neighbouring valley.[1882] By the opening of 1196, however, he had devised for it a more honourable use. In a treaty with Philip, drawn up in January of that year, the fief of Andely was made the subject of special provisions whereby it was reserved as a sort of neutral zone between the territories of the two kings, and a significant clause was added: “Andely shall not be fortified.”[1883] As by the same treaty the older bulwarks of Normandy—Nonancourt, Ivry, Pacy, Vernon, Gaillon, Neufmarché, Gisors—were resigned into Philip’s hands, this clause, if strictly fulfilled, would have left the Seine without a barrier and Rouen at the mercy of the French king. The agreement in short, like all those which bore the signatures of Philip and Richard, was made only to be broken; both parties broke it without delay; and while Philip was forming his league with the Bretons for the ruin of Anjou, Richard was tracing out in the valley of the Gambon and on the rock of Andely the plan of a line of fortifications which were to interpose an insurmountable barrier between his Norman capital and the French invader. His first act was to seize the Isle of Andely.[1884] Here he built a lofty octagonal tower, encircled by a ditch and rampart, and threw a bridge over the river from each side of the island, linking it thus to either shore.[1885] On the right, beyond the eastern bridge, he traced out the walls of a new town, which took the name of the New or the Lesser Andely,[1886] a secure stronghold whose artificial defences of ramparts and towers were surrounded by the further protection of the lake on its eastern side, the Seine on the west, and the two lesser rivers to north and south, a bridge spanning each of these two little streams forming the sole means of access from the mainland.[1887] The southern bridge, that over the Gambon, linked this New Andely with the foot of the rock which was to be crowned with the mightiest work of all. Richard began by digging out to a yet greater depth the ravines which parted this rock from the surrounding heights, so as to make it wholly inaccessible save by the one connecting isthmus at its south-eastern extremity. On its summit, which formed a plateau some six hundred feet in length and two hundred in breadth at the widest part, he reared a triple fortress. The outer ward consisted of a triangular enclosure; its apex, facing the isthmus already mentioned, was crowned by a large round tower,[1888] with walls ten feet in thickness; the extremities of its base were strengthened by similar towers, and two smaller ones broke the line of the connecting curtain-wall. This was surrounded by a ditch dug in the rock to a depth of more than forty feet, and having a perpendicular counterscarp. Fronting the base of this outer fortress across the ditch on its north-western side was a rampart surmounted by a wall ninety feet long and eight feet thick, also flanked by two round towers; from these a similar wall ran all round the edges of the plateau, where the steep sides of the rock itself took the place of rampart and ditch. The wall on the south-west side—the river-front—was broken by another tower, cylindrical without, octagonal within; and its northern extremity was protected by two mighty rectangular bastions. Close against one of these stood a round tower, which served as the base of a third enclosure, the heart and citadel of the whole fortress. Two-thirds of its elliptical outline, on the east and south, were formed by a succession of semicircular bastions, or segments of towers, seventeen in number, each parted from its neighbour by scarcely more than two feet of curtain-wall—an arrangement apparently imitated from the fortress of Cherbourg, which was accounted the greatest marvel of military architecture in Normandy, until its fame was eclipsed by that of Richard’s work.[1889] This portion of the enclosure was built upon a rampart formed by the excavation of a ditch about fifteen to twenty feet in width; the counterscarp, like that of the outer ditches, was perpendicular; and a series of casemates cut in the rock ran along on this side for a distance of about eighty feet. On the western side of the citadel stood the keep, a mighty circular tower, with walls of the thickness of twelve feet, terminating at an angle of twenty feet in depth where it projected into the enclosure; it had two or perhaps three stages,[1890] and was lighted by two great arched windows, whence the eye could range at will over the wooded hills and dales of the Vexin, or the winding course of the river broadening onward to Rouen. Behind the keep was placed the principal dwelling-house, and under this a staircase cut out of the rock gave access to an underground passage leading to some outworks and a tower near the foot of the hill, whence a wall was carried down to the river-bank, just beyond the northern extremity of a long narrow island known as the “isle of the Three Kings”—doubtless from some one of the many meetings held in this district by Louis VII. or Philip Augustus and the two Henrys.[1891] The river itself was barred by a double stockade, crossing its bed from shore to shore.[1892]

Plan VIII.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

[1882] Will. Armor. Philipp., l. v. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 151.

[1883] Treaty in Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 66. For date see Rigord (Duchesne as above), p. 39.

[1884] Letter of Walter of Rouen (a. 1196), R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 148, 149. Cf. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 14, and Will. Newb., l. v. c. 34 (Howlett, vol. ii. p. 499).

[1885] Will. Armor. Philipp., l. vii. vv. 29–43 (Deville, Château-Gaillard, p. 126; Duchesne as above, p. 169).

[1886] A poet of the thirteenth century, William Guiart, calls it “le Nouvel-Andeli.” It is known now as “le Petit-Andely.” Deville as above, p. 26.

[1887] Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 81. Deville, Château-Gaillard, p. 27.

[1888] Now known as “tour de la Monnaie.” Deville as above, p. 30, note 1.

[1889] See Deville, Château-Gaillard, p. 34, and the passage there quoted from Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes d’Anjou, p. 300).

[1890] See Deville as above, p. 38, note 2.

[1891] Ib. p. 36. The island is now joined to the mainland; ib. note 1.

[1892] For description see Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 81; Philipp., l. vii. vv. 48–85 (ib. pp. 169, 170; Deville as above, pp. 126, 127), and Deville as above, pp. 25–40.

All this work was accomplished within a single year.[1893] Richard, who had watched over its progress with unremitting care, broke into an ecstasy of delight at its completion; he called his barons to see “how fair a child was his, this child but a twelvemonth old”;[1894] he called it his “saucy castle,” “Château-Gaillard,”[1895] and the name which he thus gave it in jest soon replaced in popular speech its more formal title of “the Castle on the Rock of Andely.”[1896] The hardness of the rock out of which the fortifications were hewn was not the sole obstacle against which the royal builder had had to contend. Richard had no more thought than Fulk Nerra would have had of asking the primate’s leave before beginning to build upon his land; the work therefore was no sooner begun than Archbishop Walter lifted up his protest against it; obtaining no redress, he laid Normandy under interdict and carried his complaint in person to the Pope.[1897] Richard at once sent envoys to appeal against the interdict and make arrangements for the settlement of the dispute.[1898] Meanwhile, however, he pushed on the building without delay. Like Fulk of old, the seeming wrath of Heaven moved him as little as that of its earthly representatives; a rain of blood which fell upon the workmen and the king himself, though it scared all beside, failed to shake his determination; “if an angel had come down out of the sky to bid him stay his hand, he would have got no answer but a curse.”[1899] He had now, however, made his peace with the Church; in the spring of 1197 he offered to the archbishop an exchange of land on terms highly advantageous to the metropolitan see; and on this condition the Pope raised the interdict in May of the same year.[1900] The exchange was carried through on October 16,[1901] and ratified by John in a separate charter, a step which seems to indicate that John was now recognized as his brother’s heir.[1902]

[1893] That is, the castle on the rock, built 1197–1198. See the story of the rain of blood in May 1198 (R. Diceto, Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 162), which fixes its completion after that date. The tower on the island and the Nouvel-Andely were the work of the previous year, 1196–1197.

[1894] “Ecce quam pulcra filia unius anni!” J. Bromton, Twysden, X. Scriptt., col. 1276.

[1895] “Totamque munitionem illam vocavit Gaillardum, quod sonat in Gallico petulantiam.” Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 81.

[1896] “Castrum” or “castellum de Rupe Andeleii” or “Andeliaci,” it is called in the charters of Richard and John. The first document in which it appears as “Château-Gaillard” is a charter of S. Louis, “actum in Castro nostro Gaillard,” A.D. 1261; Deville, Château-Gaillard, p. 40. Will. Armor. however uses the name, and other writers soon begin to copy him.

[1897] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 14. Cf. Will. Newb., l. v. c. 28 (Howlett, vol. ii. pp. 487, 488), R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 70, and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 544.

[1898] The envoys were William of Longchamp, William bishop of Lisieux and Philip elect of Durham; Rog. Howden (as above), pp. 16, 17. They must have started early in 1197, for William of Longchamp died on the journey, at Poitiers, on January 31 or February 1; see above, p. 373, note 4{1866}.

[1899] Will. Newb., l. v. c. 34 (as above, p. 500). This is William’s last sentence. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 162, also tells of the portent, and gives its date, May 8, 1198.

[1900] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. pp. 17–19. Will. Newb., l. v. c. 34 (Howlett, vol. ii. pp. 499, 500).

[1901] Richard’s charter, of which Deville gives a fac-simile in his Château-Gaillard, p. 18, and a printed copy in his “pièces justificatives,” ib. pp. 113–118, is also in R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 154–156. According to this last writer (ib. pp. 158, 159), and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 544), the settlement was due to the mediation of Archbishop Hubert.

[1902] See Deville, as above, pp. 21, 22. John’s charter is in the “pièces justificatives,” ib. pp. 119–123.

It was probably about the same time that the treaty with Flanders, the corner-stone of the league which Richard was forming against the king of France, was signed within the walls of the new fortress.[1903] Yet, as has been already seen, the coalition was not fully organized till late in the following summer; and even then the complicated weapon hung fire. Want of money seems to have been Richard’s chief difficulty, now as ever—a difficulty which after Hubert Walter’s defeat in the council at Oxford and his resignation in the following July must have seemed well-nigh insurmountable. At last, however, in the spring of 1199, a ray of hope came from a quarter where it was wholly unexpected. Richard was leading his mercenaries through Poitou to check the viscount of Limoges and the count of Angoulême in a renewal of their treasonable designs[1904] when he was met by rumours of a marvellous discovery at Châlus in the Limousin. A peasant working on the land of Achard, the lord of Châlus, was said to have turned up with his plough a treasure[1905] which popular imagination pictured as nothing less than “an emperor with his wife, sons and daughters, all of pure gold, and seated round a golden table.”[1906] In vain did Achard seek to keep his secret and his prize to himself. Treasure-trove was a right of the overlord, and it seems to have been at once claimed by the viscount Ademar of Limoges, as Achard’s immediate superior. His claim, however, had to give way to that of his own overlord, King Richard; but when he sent to the king the share which he had himself wrung from Achard, Richard indignantly rejected it, vowing that he would have all. This Achard and Ademar both refused, and the king laid siege to Châlus.[1907]

- [1903] R. Diceto (as above)·/·(Stubbs), vol. ii., p. 153.

- [1904] Rog. Howden as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 80, says merely that Richard was on his way to Poitou. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 94, says he was marching against the viscount of Limoges, to punish him for a treasonable alliance with the French king. The writer of the Mag. Vita S. Hug. (Dimock), p. 280, says “expeditionem direxerat adversus comitem Engolismensem”; and that Angoulême had some share in the matter appears also from the confused story of Gerv. Cant. (as above)·/·(Stubbs, vol. i., pp. 592, 593), who makes Richard receive his death-wound while besieging “castrum comitis Engolismi, quod Nantrum erat appellatum.” A joint rebellion of the lords of Limoges and Angoulême would be very natural, for they were half-brothers. On the other hand, the two men were very likely to be confounded by historians, for they both bore the same name, Ademar. See above, p. 220 and note 3{1035}.

- [1905] Will. Armor. Philipp., l. v. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 155. Rigord (ib. p. 42) describes the finder as a soldier.

- [1906] “Qui posteris, quo tempore fuerant, certam dabant memoriam,” adds Rigord (as above), p. 43. Is it possible that the thing can have been a real relic of some of the old Gothic kings of Aquitania?

- [1907] This seems to be the only way of reconciling the different accounts in Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 82, Rigord (as above), p. 42, Will. Armor. as above, and R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 94.

This place, not far from the western border of the Limousin, is now represented by two villages, known conjointly as Châlus-Chabrol, and built upon the summits of two low hills, at whose foot winds the little stream of Tardoire. Each hill is crowned by a round tower of late twelfth-century work; the lower one is traditionally said to be the keep of the fortress besieged by Richard with all his forces at Mid-Lent 1199.[1908] In vain did Achard, who was utterly unprepared to stand a siege, protest his innocence and offer to submit to the judgement of the French king’s court, as supreme alike over the duke of Aquitaine and over his vassals; in vain did he beg for a truce till the holy season should be past; in vain, when the outworks were almost wholly destroyed and the keep itself undermined,[1909] did he ask leave to surrender with the honours of war for himself and his men. Richard was inexorable; he swore that he would hang them all.[1910] With the courage that is born of despair, Achard, accompanied by six knights and nine serving-men, retired into the keep, determined to hold it until death.[1911] All that day—Friday, March 26[1912]—Richard and his lieutenant Mercadier, the captain of his mercenaries,[1913] prowled vainly round the walls, seeking for a point at which they could assault them with safety.[1914] Their sappers were all the while undermining the tower.[1915] Its defenders, finding themselves short of missiles, began throwing down beams of wood and fragments of the broken battlements at the miners’ heads.[1916] They were equally short of defensive arms; one of the little band stood for more than half the day upon a turret, with nothing but a frying-pan for a shield against the bolts which flew whistling all around him, yet failed to drive him from his post.[1917] At last the moment came for which he had been waiting so long and so bravely. Just as Richard, unarmed save for his iron head-piece, paused within bow-shot of the turret, this man caught sight of an arrow which had been shot at himself from the besieging ranks—seemingly, indeed, by Richard’s own hand—and had stuck harmlessly in a crevice of the wall within his reach. He snatched it out, fitted it to his cross-bow, and aimed at the king.[1918] Richard saw the movement and greeted it with a shout of defiant applause; he failed to shelter himself under his buckler; the arrow struck him on the left shoulder, just below the joint of the neck, and glancing downwards penetrated deep into his side.[1919] He made light of the wound,[1920] gave strict orders to Mercadier to press the assault with redoubled vigour,[1921] and rode back to his tent as if nothing was amiss.[1922] There he rashly tried to pull out the arrow with his own hand.[1923] The wood broke off, the iron barb remained fixed in the wound; a surgeon attached to the staff of Mercadier was sent for, and endeavoured to cut it out; unluckily, Richard was fat like his father, and the iron, buried deep in his flesh, was so difficult to reach that the injuries caused by the operator’s knife proved more dangerous than that which had been inflicted by the shaft of the hostile crossbow-man.[1924] The wounded side grew more swollen and inflamed day by day; the patient’s constitutional restlessness, aggravated as it was by pain, made matters worse;[1925] and at last mortification set in.[1926]

[1908] Will. Armor. (as above)·/·Philipp., l. v. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 155 says the treasure was discovered after Mid-Lent. But Rog. Howden (as above,·/·(Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 84), Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 593), R. Coggeshall (Stevenson, p. 95), and the Ann. of Margam, Winton. and Waverl. a. 1199 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. i. p. 24, vol. ii. pp. 71, 251), all tell us that Richard received his death-wound on March 26—Friday, the morrow of Mid-Lent—and R. Coggeshall adds that this was the third day of the siege, which must therefore have begun on Wednesday, March 24.

[1909] Will. Armor. Philipp., l. v. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 155.

[1910] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 82. Cf. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 593.

[1911] Will. Armor. as above.

[1912] See above, p. 382, note 4{1908}.

[1913] On this man’s history see an article by H. Géraud—“Mercadier; les Routiers au xiiiᵉ siècle”—in Bibl. de l’Ecole des Chartes, ser. i. vol. iii. pp. 417 et seq. The writers of his own time call him “Marcadeus,” “Mercaderius,” in every possible variety of spelling; in a charter of his own, printed by Géraud (as above, p. 444), his style is “ego Merchaderius”; it seems best therefore to adopt the form “Mercadier,” which Géraud uses. He was a Provençal by birth (Mat. Paris, Chron. Maj., Luard, vol. ii. p. 421). He makes his first historical appearance in 1183, in Richard’s service, amid the disorders in Aquitaine after the death of the young king (Geoff. Vigeois, l. ii. c. 25, Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 340). He reappears by Richard’s side at Vendôme in 1194 (Rog. Howden, Stubbs, vol. iii. p. 256); about this time Richard endowed him with the lands of Bainac in Périgord (see his own charter, a. 1195, as referred to above, and Géraud’s comments, ib. pp. 423–427). He played a considerable part in Richard’s wars with Philip (see authorities collected by Géraud, as above, pp. 428–431), remained, as we shall see, with Richard till his death, and afterwards helped Eleanor to regain Anjou for John. He was slain at Bordeaux in April 1200 (Rog. Howden, Stubbs, vol. iv. p. 114).

[1914] Rog. Howden (as above), p. 82.

[1915] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 94.

[1916] Ibid. Will. Armor. as above.

[1917] R. Coggeshall, p. 95.

[1918] Will. Armor. Philipp., l. v. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 156. Cf. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 82.

[1919] “Percussitque regem super humerum sinistrum juxta colli spondilia, sicque arcuato vulnere telum dilapsum est deorsum ac lateri sinistro immersum.” R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 95. See also the briefer accounts of the scene and the wound in Rog. Howden and Will. Armor. as above, and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 593.

[1920] R. Coggeshall as above.

[1921] Rog. Howden as above.

[1922] Ibid. R. Coggeshall as above.

[1923] R. Coggeshall as above. Rog. Howden (as above), p. 83, lays the blame of this unskilful operation upon the doctor.

[1924] Rog. Howden and R. Coggeshall as above.

[1925] The English writers—Rog. Howden and R. Coggeshall—try to shift the blame of their king’s death as much as possible upon the foreign surgeon. Will. Armor. (as above) attributes it wholly to Richard’s disregard of the doctor’s orders; and even R. Coggeshall (Stevenson, p. 96) is obliged to add at last “rege ... præcepta medicorum non curante.” Rog. Wendover. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 135, says the arrow was poisoned, but this seems to be only an inference from the result.

[1926] R. Coggeshall as above.

Then Richard, face to face with death, came to his better self once more, and prepared calmly and bravely for his end. Until then he had suffered no one to enter the chamber where he lay save four barons whom he specially trusted, lest the report of his sickness should be bruited about,[1927] to discourage his friends or to rejoice his foes. Now, he summoned all of his followers who were within reach to witness his solemn bequest of all his dominions to his brother John, and made them swear fealty to John as his successor.[1928] He wrote to his mother, who was at Fontevraud, requesting her to come to him;[1929] he bequeathed his jewels to his nephew King Otto, and a fourth part of his treasures to be distributed among his servants and the poor.[1930] By this time Châlus was taken and its garrison hung, according to his earlier orders—all save the man who had shot him, and who had apparently been reserved for his special judgement. Richard ordered the man to be brought before him. “What have I done to thee,” he asked him, “that thou shouldest slay me?” “Thou hast slain my father and two of my brothers with thine own hand, and thou wouldst fain have killed me too. Avenge thyself upon me as thou wilt; I will gladly endure the greatest torments which thou canst devise, since I have seen thee upon thy death-bed.” “I forgive thee,” answered Richard, and he bade the guards loose him and let him go free with a gift of a hundred shillings.[1931] The story went that Richard had not communicated for nearly seven years, because he could not put himself in charity with Philip.[1932] Now, on the eleventh day after his wound—April 6, the Tuesday in Passion-week[1933]—he made his confession to one of his chaplains, and received the Holy Communion. His soul being thus at peace, he gave directions for the disposal of his body. It was to be embalmed; the brain and some of the internal organs were to be buried in the ancient Poitevin abbey of Charroux; the heart was to be deposited in the Norman capital, where it had always found a loyal response; the corpse itself was to be laid, in token of penitence, at his father’s feet in the abbey-church of Fontevraud.[1934] Lastly, he received extreme unction; and then, “as the day drew to its close, his day of life also came to its end.”[1935] His friends buried him as he had wished. S. Hugh of Lincoln, now at Angers on his way to protest against a fresh spoliation of his episcopal property, came to seal his forgiveness by performing the last rites of the Church over this second grave at Fontevraud,[1936] where another Angevin king was thus “shrouded among the shrouded women”—his own mother, doubtless, in their midst.[1937] He was laid to sleep in the robes which he had worn on his last crowning-day in England, five years before.[1938] His heart was enclosed in a gold and silver casket, carried to Rouen, and solemnly deposited by the clergy among the holy relics in their cathedral church;[1939] and men saw in its unusual size[1940] a fit token of the mighty spirit of him whom Normandy never ceased to venerate as Richard Cœur-de-Lion.

[1927] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 96.

[1928] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 83. And this, although he and John had parted on bad terms shortly before. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 99. Mag. Vita S. Hug. (Dimock), p. 287.

[1929] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 96.

[1930] Rog. Howden as above.

[1931] Ibid. Cf. the different account of the captive’s demeanour in Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 593. It seems impossible to make out who this man really was. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 166, the Ann. Margam, a. 1199 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. i. p. 24), the anonymous continuator of Geoff. Vigeois (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 342) and Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 135, call him Peter Basilius or Basilii. Gervase calls him John Sabraz; Rog. Howden, Bertrand de Gourdon; and Will. Armor. Philipp., l. v. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v. p. 156), Guy, without any surname at all. But as Géraud proves (art. “Mercadier,” in Bibl. de l’Ecole des Chartes, ser. i. vol. iii. pp. 433, 434, 442), it cannot have been Bertrand de Gourdon; for the only man who is known to have borne that name was still living in 1231, while Rog. Howden himself tells us that Richard’s pardon did not avail to save the life of his slayer. Mercadier detained the man till the king was dead, and then had him flayed and hanged; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 84;—or, according to another account, he sent him to Jane, and it was she who took this horrible vengeance for her brother’s death. Ann. Winton. a. 1199 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. p. 71).

[1932] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 96. This must be, at any rate, an exaggeration; for Richard had certainly communicated upon at least one occasion within the last five years—at his crowning at Winchester in April 1194. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 526.

[1933] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 166; Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 593; Rog. Howden as above; Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 136; Ann. Winton. and Waverl. a. 1199 (Luard as above, pp. 71, 251); Geoff. Vigeois Contin. (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii.), p. 342. R. Coggeshall as above, and the Chron. S. Flor. Salm. a. 1199 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 194), make it April 7; on the part of R. Coggeshall, however, this is clearly a mere slip, for he rightly places the death on the eleventh day after the wound. Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 42, and the Chron. S. Serg. a. 1199 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 151), date it April 8, and the Ann. Margam, a. 1199 (Luard, as above, vol. i. p. 24), April 10.

[1934] Rog. Howden as above. Cf. Rog. Wend. as above.

[1935] “Cum jam dies clauderetur, diem clausit extremum.” R. Coggeshall as above.

[1936] Mag. Vita S. Hug. (Dimock), p. 286. The funeral was on Palm Sunday; ibid.

[1937] She seems not to have got his letter in time to see him alive. Berengaria was at Beaufort in Anjou, whither S. Hugh turned aside to visit and comfort her on his way from Angers to Fontevraud; and the state of intense grief in which he found her supplies another proof of Richard’s capacity for winning love which he did not altogether deserve. Mag. Vita S. Hug. (Dimock), p. 286.

[1938] Ann. Winton. a. 1199 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. p. 71).

[1939] Will. Armor. Philipp., l. v. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 157.

[1940] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 593. According to the Ann. Winton. as above, it was “paulo majus pomo pini.”

CHAPTER IX.
THE FALL OF THE ANGEVINS.
1199–1206.

“In the year 1199,” says a contemporary French writer, “God visited the realm of France; for King Richard was slain.”[1941] Richard’s death was in truth the signal for the break-up of the Angevin dominions to the profit of the French Crown. John, who was at the moment in Britanny, hurried southward as soon as he heard the news. Three days after the funeral—on April 14, the Wednesday before Easter—he arrived at Chinon, the seat of the Angevin treasury; the wardens of the castle[1942] welcomed him as their lord in his brother’s stead; the household of the late king came to meet him and acknowledged him in like manner, after receiving from him a solemn oath that he would carry out Richard’s testamentary directions and maintain the customs of the lands over which he was called to rule.[1943] On this understanding the treasury was given up to him by the Angevin seneschal, Robert of Turnham.[1944] After keeping Easter at Beaufort,[1945] he proceeded into Normandy; here he was received without opposition, and on the Sunday after Easter was invested with the sword, lance and coronet of the duchy by Archbishop Walter at Rouen.[1946] As the lance was put into his hands he turned with characteristic levity to join in the laughing comments of the young courtiers behind him, and in so doing let the symbol of his ducal authority fall to the ground. His irreverent behaviour and refusal to communicate on Easter-day had already drawn upon him a solemn warning from S. Hugh; and this fresh example of his profane recklessness, and its consequence, were noted as omens which later events made but too easy of interpretation.[1947] For the moment, however, the Normans were willing to transfer to Richard’s chosen successor the loyalty which they had shewn towards Richard himself; and so, too, were the representatives of the English Church and baronage who happened to be on the spot, Archbishop Hubert and William the Marshal.[1948] But in the Angevin lands Philip’s alliance with the Bretons, fruitless so long as Richard lived, bore fruit as soon as the lion-heart had ceased to beat. While Philip himself invaded the county of Evreux and took its capital,[1949] Arthur was at once sent into Anjou with a body of troops;[1950] his mother, released or escaped from her prison, joined him at the head of the Breton forces;[1951] they marched upon Le Mans, whence John himself only escaped the night before it fell into their hands;[1952] Angers was given up to them by its governor, a nephew of the seneschal Robert of Turnham;[1953] and on Easter-day,[1954] while John was actually holding court within fifteen miles of them at Beaufort, the barons of Anjou, Touraine and Maine held a council at which Arthur was unanimously acknowledged as lawful heir to his uncle Richard according to the customs of the three counties, and their capital cities were surrendered to him at once.[1955] At Le Mans he met the French king and did homage to him for his new dominions, Constance swearing fealty with him.[1956] Shortly afterwards, at Tours, Constance formally placed her boy, who was now twelve years old, under the guardianship of Philip; and Philip at once took upon himself the custody and the administration of all the territories of his ward.[1957]

[1941] Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 80.

[1942] “A proceribus quibusdam Anglorum castrum ipsum servantibus.” Mag. Vita S. Hug. (Dimock), p. 287.

[1943] Ibid.

[1944] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 86. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 99.

[1945] Rog. Howden as above, p. 87.

[1946] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 166. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. pp. 87, 88. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 99. Mag. Vita S. Hug. (Dimock), p. 293.

[1947] Mag. Vita S. Hug. (Dimock), pp. 291–294.

[1948] Rog. Howden as above, p. 86.

[1949] Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 43. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 80. Cf. R. Coggeshall as above.

[1950] Rigord as above.

[1951] Cf. R. Coggeshall as above, and Mag. Vita S. Hug. (Dimock), p. 296, with Rog. Howden as above, p. 87.

[1952] Mag. Vita S. Hug. as above.

[1953] Rog. Howden as above, p. 86.

[1954] Chron. S. Albin. a. 1199 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 50).

[1955] Rog. Howden as above, pp. 86, 87. Cf. R. Coggeshall as above.

[1956] Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 43.

[1957] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 87. The Chron. S. Albin. a. 1200 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 51) places this a year later.

Neither in personal influence nor in political skill, however, was Constance a match for her mother-in-law. Eleanor was, as has been seen, at Fontevraud when Richard died. Feeling and policy alike inclined her to favour the cause of his chosen successor, her own only surviving son, rather than that of a grandson whom most likely she had never even seen. She therefore effected a junction with Mercadier and his Brabantines as soon as they had had time to march up from Châlus, and the whole band of mercenaries, headed by the aged queen and the ruthless but faithful Provençal captain, overran Anjou with fire and sword to punish its inhabitants for their abandonment of John.[1958] Having given this proof of her undiminished energy, Eleanor, to take away all pretext for French intermeddling in the south, went to meet Philip at Tours and herself did homage to him for Poitou.[1959] By this means Aquitaine was secured for John. John himself had made a dash into Maine and burned Le Mans in vengeance for the defection of its citizens.[1960] He could, however, venture upon no serious attempt at the reconquest of the Angevin lands till he had secured his hold upon Normandy and England; and for this his presence was now urgently needed on the English side of the Channel.

- [1958] Rog. Howden as above, p. 88.

- [1959] Rigord as above.

- [1960] Rog. Howden as above, p. 87. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 99.

Archbishop Hubert and William the Marshal had already returned to England charged with a commission from John to assist the justiciar Geoffrey Fitz-Peter in maintaining order there until the new king should arrive.[1961] The precaution was far from being a needless one. The news of Richard’s death reached England on Easter Eve; and its consequences appeared the very next morning, when some of the nobles and knights went straight from their Easter feast to begin a course of rapine and depredation which recalls the disorders after the death of Henry I., and which was only checked by the return of the primate. Hubert at once excommunicated the evil-doers,[1962] and, in concert with the Marshal, summoned all the men of the realm to swear fealty and peaceable submission to John, as heir of Henry Fitz-Empress. The peace, however, was not so easy to keep now as it had been during the interval between Henry’s death and Richard’s coronation. Since then John himself had set an example which those whom he now claimed as his subjects were not slow to follow. All who had castles, whether bishops, earls or barons, furnished them with men, victuals and arms, and assumed an attitude of defence, if not of defiance; and this attitude they quitted only when the archbishop, the marshal and the justiciar had called all the malcontents to a conference at Northampton, and there solemnly promised that John should render to all men their rights, if they would keep faith and peace towards him. On this the barons took the oath of fealty and liege homage to John. The king of Scots refused to do the like unless his lost counties of Northumberland and Cumberland were restored to him, and despatched messengers charged with these demands to John himself; the envoys were, however, intercepted by the archbishop and his colleagues, and the Scot king was for a while appeased by a promise of satisfaction when the new sovereign should arrive in his island-realm.[1963]

- [1961] Rog. Howden as above, p. 86.

- [1962] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 98.

- [1963] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. pp. 88, 89.

On May 25 John landed at Shoreham; next day he reached London;[1964] on the 27th—Ascension-day—the bishops and barons assembled for the crowning in Westminster abbey.[1965] John’s coronation is one of the most memorable in English history. It was the last occasion on which the old English doctrine of succession to the crown was formally asserted and publicly vindicated, and that more distinctly than it had ever been since the Norman conquest. In the midst of the crowded church the archbishop stood forth and spoke: “Hearken, all ye that are here present! Be it known unto you that no man hath any antecedent right to succeed another in the kingdom, except he be unanimously chosen by the whole realm, after invocation of the Holy Spirit’s grace, and unless he be also manifestly thereunto called by the pre-eminence of his character and conversation, after the pattern of Saul the first anointed king, whom God set over his people, although he was not of royal race, and likewise after him David, the one being chosen for his energy and fitness for the regal dignity, the other for his humility and holiness; that so he who surpassed all other men of the realm in vigour should also be preferred before them in authority and power. But indeed if there be one of the dead king’s race who excelleth, that one should be the more promptly and willingly chosen. And these things have I spoken in behalf of the noble Count John here present, the brother of our late illustrious King Richard, now deceased without direct heir; and forasmuch as we see him to be prudent and vigorous, we all, after invoking the Holy Spirit’s grace, for his merits no less than his royal blood, have with one consent chosen him for our king.” The archbishop’s hearers wondered at his speech, because they could not see any occasion for it; but none of them disputed his doctrine; still less did they dispute its immediate practical application. “Long live King John!” was the unanimous response;[1966] and, disregarding a protest from Bishop Philip of Durham against the accomplishment of such an important rite in the absence of his metropolitan Geoffrey of York,[1967] Archbishop Hubert proceeded to anoint and crown the king. A foreboding which he could not put aside, however, moved him to make yet another significant interpolation in the ritual. When he tendered to the king-elect the usual oath for the defence of the Church, the redressing of wrongs and the maintenance of justice, he added a solemn personal adjuration to John, in Heaven’s name, warning him not to venture upon accepting the regal office unless he truly purposed in his own mind to perform his oath. John answered that by God’s help he intended to do so.[1968] But he contrived to omit the act which should have sealed his vow. For the first and last time probably in the history of Latin Christendom, the king did not communicate upon his coronation-day.[1969]

- [1964] Ib.·/·Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 89.

- [1965] Ib. pp. 89, 90. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 166. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 99, 100.

- [1966] Mat. Paris, Chron. Maj. (Luard), vol. ii. pp. 454, 455.

- [1967] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 90.

- [1968] Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 140.

- [1969] Mag. Vita S. Hug. (Dimock), p. 293.

On that very day he made his arrangements for the government of the realm which he was already anxious to leave as soon as he could do so with safety. Geoffrey Fitz-Peter was confirmed in his office of justiciar, William in that of marshal, and both were formally invested with the earldoms whose lands and revenues they had already enjoyed for some years—Geoffrey with the earldom of Essex, William with that of Striguil. At the same time, in defiance alike of precedent, of ecclesiastical propriety, and of the warnings of an old colleague in the administration, Hugh Bardulf, Archbishop Hubert undertook the office of chancellor.[1970] Next day John received the homage of the barons, and went on pilgrimage to S. Alban’s abbey;[1971] he afterwards visited Canterbury and S. Edmund’s,[1972] and thence proceeded to keep the Whitsun feast at Northampton.[1973] An interchange of embassies with the king of Scots failed to win either the restitution of the two shires on the one hand, or the required homage on the other; William threatened to invade the disputed territories if they were not made over to him within forty days; John retorted by giving them in charge to a new sheriff, the brave and loyal William de Stuteville, and by appointing new guardians to the temporalities of York, as security for the defence of the north against the Scots,[1974] while he himself hurried back to the sea, and on June 20 sailed again for Normandy.[1975]

- [1970] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. pp. 90, 91.

- [1971] Rog. Wend. as above.

- [1972] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 166.

- [1973] Ibid. Rog. Howden as above, p. 91, says Nottingham; but John was at Northampton on Whit-Monday according to Sir T. D. Hardy’s Itin. K. John, a. 1 (Introd. Pat. Rolls).

- [1974] Rog. Howden as above, pp. 91, 92.

- [1975] Ib. p. 92. R. Diceto (as above) says June 19, but Sir T. D. Hardy’s Itinerary, a. 1 (as above), shews John at Shoreham on the 20th.

On Midsummer-day he made a truce with Philip for three weeks.[1976] At its expiration the two kings held a personal meeting; John’s occupation of his brother’s territories without previous investiture from and homage to Philip was complained of by the latter as an unpardonable wrong; and John was required to expiate it by the cession of the whole Vexin to Philip in absolute ownership, and of Poitou and the three Angevin counties for the benefit of Arthur. This John refused.[1977] His fortunes were not yet so desperate as to compel him to such humiliation. He had already secured the alliance of Flanders;[1978] his nephew Otto, now fully acknowledged by the Pope as Emperor-elect, was urging him to war with France and promising him the aid of the imperial forces;[1979] and his refusal of submission to Philip was at once followed by offers of homage and mutual alliance from all those French feudataries who had been in league with Richard against their own sovereign.[1980] The war began in September, with the taking of Conches by the French king; this was followed by the capture of Ballon. Philip, however, chose to celebrate these first successes by levelling Ballon to the ground. As the castle stood upon Cenomannian soil, it ought, according to the theory proclaimed by Philip himself, to have been handed over by him to Arthur; Arthur’s seneschal William des Roches therefore remonstrated against its demolition as an injury done to his young lord. Philip retorted that “he would not for Arthur’s sake stay from dealing as he pleased with his own acquisitions.” The consequence was a momentary desertion of all his Breton allies. William des Roches not only surrendered to John the city of Le Mans, which Philip and Arthur had intrusted to him as governor, but contrived to get the boy-duke of Britanny out of Philip’s custody and bring him to his uncle, who received him into seeming favour and peace.[1981] That very day, however, a warning reached Arthur of the fate to which he was already doomed by John; and on the following night he fled away to Angers with his mother and a number of their friends. Among the latter was the viscount Almeric of Thouars, who had just been compelled to resign into John’s hands the office of seneschal of Anjou and the custody of the fortress of Chinon, which he held in Arthur’s name; and it seems to have been shortly afterwards that Constance, apparently casting off Ralf of Chester without even an attempt at divorce, went through a ceremony of marriage with Almeric’s brother Guy.[1982]

- [1976] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 93.

- [1977] Ib. pp. 94, 95.

- [1978] The count of Flanders did homage to John at Rouen on August 13 [1199]. Ib. p. 93.

- [1979] Ib. pp. 95, 96.

- [1980] Ib. p. 95.

- [1981] Ib. p. 96. This must have been on September 22; see Hardy, Itin. K. John, a. 1 (Intr. Pat. Rolls).

- [1982] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. pp. 96, 97. The marriage of Guy and Constance must however have been legalized somehow, for their child was ultimately acknowledged as heiress of Britanny.

The year’s warfare again ended in a truce, made in October to last till S. Hilary’s day.[1983] Its author was that Cardinal Peter of Capua[1984] who had negotiated the last truce between Philip and Richard, and who now found another occupation in punishing the matrimonial sins of the French king:—Philip having sent away his queen Ingebiorg of Denmark immediately after his marriage with her in 1193, and three years later taken as his wife another princess, Agnes of Merania.[1985] At a Church council at Dijon on December 6, 1199, the legate passed a sentence of interdict upon the whole royal domain, to be publicly proclaimed on the twentieth day after Christmas[1986]—the very day on which Philip’s truce with John would expire. It was no doubt the prospect of this new trouble which moved Philip, when he met John in conference between Gaillon and Les Andelys,[1987] to accept terms far more favourable to the English king than those which he had offered six months before. As a pledge of future peace and amity between the two kings, Philip’s son Louis was to marry John’s niece Blanche, a daughter of his sister Eleanor and her husband King Alfonso of Castille; John was to bestow upon the bride, by way of dowry, the city and county of Evreux and all those Norman castles which had been in Philip’s possession on the day of Richard’s death; he was also to give Philip thirty thousand marks of silver, and to swear that he would give no help to Otto for the vindication of his claim to the Empire. The formal execution of the treaty was deferred till the octave of midsummer; and while the aged queen-mother Eleanor went to fetch her granddaughter from Spain, John at the end of February took advantage of the respite to make a hurried visit to England,[1988] for the purpose of raising the thirty thousand marks which he had promised to Philip. This was done by means of a carucage or aid of three shillings on every ploughland.[1989] As a scutage of a most unusual amount—two marks on the knight’s fee—had already been levied since John’s accession, this new impost was a sore burthen upon the country. The abbots of some of the great Cistercian houses in Yorkshire withstood it as an unheard-of infringement of their rights, to which they could not assent without the permission of a general chapter of their order. John in a fury bade the sheriffs put all the White Monks outside the protection of the law. The remonstrances of the primate compelled him to revoke this command; but he rejected all offers of compromise on the part of the monks, and “breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord” went over sea again at the end of April.[1990] As France had been suffering the miseries of an interdict ever since January,[1991] Philip was now growing eager for peace. He therefore met John at Gouleton, between Vernon and Les Andelys, on May 22, and there a treaty was signed. Its solid advantages were wholly on the side of John. In addition to the concessions made in January, he did indeed resign in favour of Blanche and her bridegroom his claims upon the fiefs of Berry; but the thirty thousand marks due to Philip were reduced to twenty thousand; Arthur was acknowledged as owing homage to his uncle for Britanny; and John was formally recognized by the French king as rightful heir to all the dominions of his father and his elder brother.[1992] On the morrow Louis and Blanche were married, by the archbishop of Bordeaux, and on Norman soil, in consequence of the interdict in France;[1993] and on the same day, at Vernon, John received in Philip’s presence Arthur’s homage for Britanny,[1994] Philip having already accepted that of John for the whole continental dominions of the house of Anjou.[1995]

[1983] Ib.·/·Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 97. Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.) p. 43, says S. John’s day.

[1984] Rog. Howden as above.

[1985] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 224, 306, 307. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 111. Rigord (as above), pp. 36, 37, 40, 42. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), pp. 77, 78. “Merania” is Moravia. Rigord and William both call the lady Mary, but all scholars seem agreed that Agnes was her real name.

[1986] Rigord (as above), p. 43. Will. Armor. (as above), p. 80. Cf. R. Diceto (as above), pp. 167, 168.

[1987] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 106.

[1988] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. pp. 106, 107. John crossed on February 24; Ann. Winton, a. 1200 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. p. 73).

[1989] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 101. Rog. Howden as above, p. 107.

[1990] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 102, 103. The date of John’s crossing lies between April 28 and May 2. Hardy, Itin. K. John, a. 1 (Intr. Pat. Rolls).

[1991] Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 43; Rog. Howden as above, p. 112. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 168, says only since Mid-Lent.

[1992] Treaty in Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 79, and Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. pp. 148–151. Its date is not quite clear; the document itself bears only “mense Maii”; Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v. p. 43) says it was made on Ascension-day (May 18); Rog. Howden (as above, p. 114) begins by placing it at the date for which it had been originally fixed—the octave of S. John Baptist—but in the next page corrects this into “xi kalendas Junii, feria secunda,” i.e. Monday, May 22. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 103, believed the thirty thousand marks to have been paid in full. The remission of ten thousand of them clearly made no difference to England; they were pocketed by John.

[1993] Rog. Howden as above, p. 115. He says it was at Portmort, on the morrow of the treaty—i.e. according to his reckoning, on Tuesday, May 23. Rigord however (as above), p. 44, dates it “at the same place, on the Monday after [Ascension],” i.e. Gouleton, May 22. Hardy’s Itinerary, a. 2, shews John at La Roche-Andelys (Château-Gaillard) daily from May 17 to May 25. The places however are all close together.

[1994] Rog. Howden as above.

[1995] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 101.

The next six weeks were spent by John in a triumphant progress southward, through Le Mans, Angers, Chinon, Tours and Loches, into Aquitaine, where he remained until the end of August.[1996] While there, he received the homage of his brother-in-law Count Raymond of Toulouse for the dower-lands of Jane,[1997] who had died in the preceding autumn.[1998] Of all these successes, however, John went far to cast away the fruit by a desecration of the marriage-bond almost as shameless and quite as impolitic as that which had brought upon Philip the wrath of Rome. He persuaded the Aquitanian and Norman bishops to annul his marriage with his cousin Avice of Gloucester, apparently by making them believe that the dispensation granted by Clement III. had been revoked by Innocent.[1999] Instead however of restoring to Avice the vast heritage which had been settled upon her at her betrothal, he gave her county of Gloucester to her sister’s husband Count Almeric of Evreux as compensation for the loss of his Norman honour,[2000] and apparently kept the remainder of her estates in his own hands. These proceedings were enough to excite the ill-will of a powerful section of the English baronage. John’s next step was a direct challenge to the most active, turbulent and troublesome house in all Aquitaine. He gave out that he desired to wed a daughter of the king of Portugal, and despatched an honourable company of ambassadors, headed by the bishop of Lisieux, to sue for her hand; after these envoys had started, however, and without a word of notice to them, he suddenly married the daughter of Count Ademar of Angoulême.[2001] Twenty-nine years before, Richard, as duke of Aquitaine, had vainly striven to wrest Angoulême from Ademar in behalf of Matilda, the only child of Ademar’s brother Count Vulgrin III. Matilda was now the wife of Hugh “the Brown” of Lusignan, who in 1179 or 1180 had in spite of King Henry made himself master of La Marche,[2002] and whose personal importance in southern Gaul was increased by the rank and fame which his brothers Geoffrey, Guy and Almeric had won in the kingdoms of Palestine and Cyprus. His son by Matilda—another Hugh the Brown—had through Richard’s good offices been betrothed in boyhood to his infant cousin Isabel, Ademar’s only child; the little girl was educated with her future husband, and it was hoped that in due time their marriage would heal the family feud and unite the lands of Angoulême and La Marche without possibility of further dissension. No sooner however did Count Ademar discover that a king wished to marry his daughter than he took her away from her bridegroom; and at the end of August she was married to John at Angoulême by the archbishop of Bordeaux.[2003]

- [1996] See Hardy, Itin. K. John, a. 2 (Intr. Pat. Rolls).

- [1997] Rog. Howden as above, p. 124.

- [1998] Ib. p. 96.

- [1999] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 103, says the divorce was made “per mandatum domini Papæ ... propter consanguinitatis lineam.” But R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 167, says it was made because John was “sublimioris thori spe raptatus,” and adds: “unde magnam summi pontificis, scilicet Innocentii tertii, et totius curiæ Romanæ indignationem incurrit.” He dates it 1199, and attributes it to the Norman bishops; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 119, places it in 1200, and names only the archbishop of Bordeaux and the bishops of Poitiers and Saintes.

- [2000] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 101.

- [2001] R. Diceto as above, p. 170.

- [2002] See above, p. 220.

- [2003] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. pp. 119, 120. Cf. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 103. No one gives a date; but John was at Angoulême on August 26 (Hardy, Itin. K. John, a. 2, Intr. Pat. Rolls); and “his settlement on Isabella is dated Aug. 30. Rot. Chart., p. 75” (Stubbs, Rog. Howden, vol. iv. p. 168, note 1). Rog. Howden and R. Coggeshall both say this marriage was advised by Philip.

Heedless of the storm which this marriage was sure to raise in Aquitaine, John in the first days of October carried his child-queen with him to England, and on the 8th was crowned with her at Westminster.[2004] His first business in England was to renew his persecution of the Cistercians;[2005] the next was to arrange a meeting with the king of Scots. This took place in November at Lincoln, where John, defying the tradition which his father had carefully observed, ventured to present himself in regal state within the cathedral church.[2006] The two kings held their colloquy on a hill outside the city; William performed his long-deferred homage,[2007] although his renewed demand for the restitution of the northern shires was again put off till Whitsuntide.[2008] Next day the king of England helped with his own hands to carry the body of the holy bishop Hugh to its last resting-place in the minster which he had himself rebuilt.[2009] Some haunting remembrance of Hugh’s saintlike face, as he had seen it in London only a few weeks before the good bishop’s death,[2010] may have combined with a sense that the White Monks were still too great a power in the land to be defied with impunity, and moved John on the following Sunday to make full amends to the Cistercian abbots, promising to seal his repentance by founding a house of their order[2011]—a promise which he redeemed by the foundation of Beaulieu abbey, in the New Forest.[2012] After keeping Christmas at Guildford[2013] he came back again to Lincoln, and quarrelled with the canons about the election of a new bishop.[2014] He thence went northward, accompanied by his queen, through Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Northumberland and Cumberland, taking fines everywhere for offences against the forest-law. At Mid-Lent he was at York,[2015] and on Easter-day he and Isabel wore their crowns at Canterbury.[2016] A few days later, rumours of disturbances in Normandy and in Poitou paused him to issue orders for the earls and barons of England to meet him at Portsmouth at Whitsuntide, ready with horses and ships to accompany him over sea. The earls however held a meeting at Leicester, and thence by common consent made answer to the king that they would not go with him “unless he gave them back their rights.” It is clear that they already looked upon personal service beyond sea as no longer binding upon them without their own consent, specially given for a special occasion. John retorted by demanding the surrender of their castles, beginning with William of Aubigny’s castle of Beauvoir, which William was only suffered to retain on giving his son as a hostage.[2017] This threat brought the barons to Portsmouth on the appointed day; but the quarrel ended in a compromise. After despatching his chamberlain Hubert de Burgh, with a hundred knights, to act as keeper of the Welsh marches, and sending William the Marshal and Roger de Lacy, each with a hundred mercenaries, to resist the enemies in Normandy, John took from the remainder of the host a scutage in commutation of their services, and bade them return to their own homes.[2018] On Whit-Monday the queen crossed to Normandy, and shortly afterwards her husband followed.[2019]

[2004] Rog. Howden as above,·/·, vol. iv. p. 139. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 170. R. Coggeshall as above·/·(Stevenson), p. 103, with a wrong date.

[2005] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 103, 104.

[2006] Rog. Howden as above, pp. 140, 141.

[2007] Ib. p. 141.

[2008] Ib. p. 142.

[2009] Ibid. R. Diceto as above, p. 171. Mag. Vita S. Hug. (Dimock), pp. 370, 371.

[2010] Rog. Howden as above, pp. 140, 141.

[2011] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 107–110. Mag. Vita S. Hug. (Dimock), pp. 377, 378.

[2012] On Beaulieu see R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 147; Ann. Waverl. a. 1204 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. p. 256); and Dugdale, Monast. Angl., vol. v. pp. 682, 683.

[2013] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 172. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 156.

[2014] Rog. Howden as above.

[2015] Ib. p. 157. See details of his movements in Hardy, Itin. K. John, a. 2 (Intr. Pat. Rolls).

[2016] Rog. Howden as above, p. 160. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 172.

[2017] Rog. Howden as above, pp. 160, 161.

[2018] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 163.

[2019] Ib. p. 164.

After a friendly meeting near the Isle of Andelys,[2020] Philip invited John to Paris, where he entertained him with the highest honours, vacating his own palace for the reception of his guest, and loading him with costly gifts.[2021] From Paris John went to meet his sister-in-law, Richard’s queen Berengaria, at Chinon,[2022] where he seems to have chiefly spent the rest of the summer. He came back to Normandy in the autumn,[2023] and the Christmas feast at Argentan[2024] passed over in peace; but trouble was fast gathering on all sides. Philip was at last free of his ecclesiastical difficulties, for Agnes of Merania was dead, and he had taken back his wife.[2025] John was now in his turn to pay the penalty for his unwarrantable divorce and his lawless second marriage. As if he had not already done enough to alienate the powerful house of Lusignan by stealing the plighted bride of its head,[2026] he had now seized the castle of Driencourt, which belonged to a brother of Hugh the Brown, while its owner was absent in England on business for the king himself;[2027] and he had further insulted the barons of Poitou by summoning them to clear themselves in his court from a general charge of treason against his late brother and himself, by ordeal of battle with picked champions from England and Normandy. They scorned the summons,[2028] and appealed to the king of France, John’s overlord as well as theirs, to bring John to justice for their wrongs.[2029] On March 25 Philip met John at Gouleton,[2030] and peremptorily bade him give up to Arthur all his French fiefs, besides sundry other things, all of which John refused.[2031] Hereupon Philip sent, through some of the great French nobles,[2032] a citation to John, as duke of Aquitaine, to appear in Paris fifteen days after Easter at the court of his lord the king of France, to stand to its judgement, to answer to his lord for his misdoings, and to undergo the sentence of his peers.[2033] John made no attempt to deny Philip’s jurisdiction; but he declared that, as duke of Normandy, he was not bound to obey the French king’s citation to any spot other than the traditional trysting-place on the border. Philip replied that his summons was addressed to the duke of Aquitaine, not to the duke of Normandy, and that his rights over the former were not to be annulled by the accidental union of the two dignities in one person.[2034] John at length yielded so far as to promise that on the appointed day he would present himself before the court in Paris, and would give up to Philip the two castles of Tillières and Boutavant as security for his abiding by the settlement then to be made. The day however came and went without either the surrender of the forts or the appearance of John.[2035] The court of the French peers condemned him by default, and sentenced him to be deprived of all his lands.[2036]

[2020] Ibid.·/·Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 164. John was at the Isle June 9–11, and again June 25–27 [1201]. Hardy, Itin. K. John, a. 3 (Intr. Pat. Rolls).

[2021] Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 44. Rog. Howden as above; on the date see Bishop Stubbs’s note 1, ibid.

[2022] Rog. Howden as above. The purpose was to settle with her about her dowry; ibid., and p. 172 and note 2.

[2023] See Hardy as above.

[2024] Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 167.

[2025] Rigord as above. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 81. Rog. Howden as above, pp. 146–148.

[2026] Strictly speaking, its future head. The elder Hugh, father of Isabel’s bridegroom, lived till 1206.

[2027] Will. Armor. Philipp., l. vi. (Duchesne, as above), p. 159. This was Ralf of Issoudun, a brother of the elder Hugh, and count of Eu in right of his wife.

[2028] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 176.

[2029] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 135. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 81; Philipp., l. vi. (ibid.) p. 159.

[2030] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 174.

[2031] Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 167.

[2032] “Per proceres regni Francorum.” R. Coggeshall as above.

[2033] Ib. pp. 135, 136. The date fixed for the trial—April 29 [1202]—is from Rigord (Duchesne as above), p. 44. This writer and Will. Armor. (Gesta Phil. Aug. as above) give a version somewhat different from Ralf’s, saying that Philip summoned John to do right to Philip himself for the counties of Anjou, Touraine and Poitou. William however in the Philipp. (as above) substantially agrees with the English writer as to the ground of Philip’s complaint.

[2034] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 136.

[2035] Will. Armor. as above, pp. 81, 161.

[2036] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 136.

Philip at once marched upon Normandy to execute the sentence by force of arms. He began by taking Boutavant[2037] and Tillières;[2038] thence he marched straight up northward by Lions,[2039] Longchamp, La Ferté-en-Bray,[2040] Orgueil and Mortemer,[2041] to Eu;[2042] all these places fell into his hands. Thus master of almost the whole Norman border from the Seine to the sea, he turned back to lay siege on July 8 to Radepont on the Andelle, scarcely more than ten miles from Rouen. Dislodged at the end of a week by John,[2043] he again withdrew to the border. The castle of Aumale and the rest of its county were soon in his hands.[2044] Hugh of Gournay alone, the worthy bearer of a name which for generations had been almost a synonym for loyalty to the Norman ducal house, still held out in his impregnable castle; Philip however, by breaking down the embankment which kept in the waters of a reservoir communicating with the river and the moat, let loose upon the castle a flood which undermined its walls and almost swept it away, thus compelling its defenders to make their escape and take shelter as best they could in the neighbouring forest.[2045] At Gournay Philip bestowed upon Arthur the hand of his infant daughter Mary,[2046] the honour of knighthood,[2047] and the investiture of all the Angevin dominions except the duchy of Normandy,[2048] which he evidently intended to conquer for himself and keep by right of conquest.

[2037] Ibid.·/·R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 136. Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 168. Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 45. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 81; Philipp., l. vi. (ibid.), p. 161. Boutavant was a small fortress built by Richard in 1198, on the Seine, four miles above Château-Gaillard, on the border-line between Normandy and France (Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. as above. Rog. Howden, Stubbs, vol. iv. p. 78). Philip had retorted by building hard by it a rival fortress which he called Gouleton (Rog. Howden as above)—the scene of his treaty with John in May 1202; see above, p. 396.

[2038] Will. Armor. as above.

[2039] Rog. Wend. and Will. Armor. Philipp. as above.

[2040] Will. Armor. as above.

[2041] Ibid. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 81. Rigord (ibid.), p. 45.

[2042] Rog. Wend. as above.

[2043] Ibid. p. 167; he says Philip besieged Radepont for eight days. John got there on July 15; Hardy, Itin. K. John, a. 4 (Intr. Pat. Rolls).

[2044] R. Coggeshall as above.

[2045] Rog. Wend. as above, pp. 167, 168. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. as above; Philipp. (ibid.), pp. 161, 162.

[2046] Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. as above, p. 82; Philipp. (ibid.), p. 162. Cf. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 137. Mary (or Jane, as Rigord calls her) was one of the two children of Agnes of Merania, legitimatized by Innocent III.; cf. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 81, and Rigord (ibid.), p. 44.

[2047] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 137. Rigord as above, p. 45; Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 82; Philipp. (ibid.), p. 162. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 94, says that Arthur was knighted by Philip when he first did him homage in 1199.

[2048] Rigord as above. The order of the campaign above described is not easy to make out, for no two contemporary writers name the castles in the same order. Taking geography for a guide, it would at first glance seem more natural that Philip should have gone to Radepont from Tillières, and that the whole northward expedition should come afterwards. But it is certain that the siege of Radepont happened July 8–15 (see above, p. 403, note 8{2043}); and on the one hand, the northern campaign, or at any rate part of it, seems needed to fill up the interval between the breaking-out of the war at the beginning of May and July 8; while on the other, it seems impossible to crowd in the whole campaign between July 15 and the knighting of Arthur, which clearly took place before that month had expired. Lions, however, was not taken till after May 29, for on that day John was there; Hardy, Itin. K. John, a. 4 (Intr. Pat. Rolls).

What John had been doing all this time it is difficult to understand. Between the middle of May and the end of June he had shifted his quarters incessantly, moving through the whole length of eastern Normandy, from Arques to Le Mans; throughout July he was chiefly in the neighbourhood of Rouen;[2049] but, except in the one expedition to Radepont, he seems to have made no attempt to check the progress of his enemies. After the knighting of Arthur at Gournay, however, he tried to make a diversion by sending a body of troops into Britanny. With their duchess dead[2050] and their young duke absent, the Bretons were in no condition for defence; Dol and Fougères were taken by John’s soldiers, and the whole country ravaged as far as Rennes.[2051] This attack stung Arthur into an attempt at independent action which led to his ruin. He and Philip divided their forces; while the French king led the bulk of his army northward to the siege of Arques,[2052] Arthur with two hundred knights[2053] moved southward to Tours,[2054] sending forward a summons to the men of his own duchy and those of Berry to meet him there for an expedition into Poitou.[2055] At Tours he was met by the disaffected Aquitanian chiefs:—the injured bridegroom young Hugh of La Marche, and two of his uncles, Ralf of Issoudun the dispossessed count of Eu, and Geoffrey of Lusignan, the inveterate fighter who had taken a leading part in every Aquitanian rising throughout the last twenty-two years of Henry’s reign, who after being Richard’s bitterest foe at home had been one of his best supporters in Palestine, and who had come back, it seems, to join in one more fight against his successor. The three kinsmen, however, brought together a force of only seventy-five knights; to which a Gascon baron, Savaric of Mauléon, added thirty more, and seventy men-at-arms.[2056] Arthur, mere boy of fifteen though he was, had enough of the hereditary Angevin wariness to shrink from attempting to act with such a small force, and in accordance with Philip’s instructions proposed to wait for his expected allies.[2057] But the Poitevins would brook no delay; and a temptation now offered itself which was irresistible alike to them and to their young leader. On her return from Castille with her granddaughter Blanche in the spring of 1200, Queen Eleanor, worn out with age and fatigue, had withdrawn to the abbey of Fontevraud,[2058] where she apparently remained throughout the next two years. The rising troubles of her duchy, however, seem to have brought her forth from her retirement once more, and she was now in the castle of Mirebeau, on the border of Anjou and Poitou. All John’s enemies knew that his mother was, in every sense, his best friend. She was at once his most devoted ally and his most sagacious counsellor, at least in all continental affairs; moreover, in strict feudal law, she was still duchess of Aquitaine in her own right, a right untouched by the forfeiture of John; and she therefore had it in her power to make that forfeiture null and void south of the Loire, so long as she lived to assert her claims for John’s benefit.[2059] To capture Eleanor would be to bring John to his knees; and with this hope Arthur and his little band laid siege to Mirebeau.[2060]

[2049] See Hardy, as above·/·Itin. K. John, a. 3, 4 (ibid.·/·Intr. Pat. Rolls).

[2050] Constance died September 3 or 4, 1201. Chronn. Britt. ad ann. (Morice, Hist. Bret., preuves, vol. i. cols. 6, 106).

[2051] Will. Armor. Philipp. as above·/·(Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 163. In the Gesta Phil. Aug. (as above)·/·(Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 82 he places this after Arthur’s capture. In both works he says that John did all this in Britanny; but Hardy’s Itinerary (as above) shews that John did it vicariously.

[2052] Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 45. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 138. Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 169.

[2053] Rog. Wend., as above, p. 168.

[2054] Will. Armor. Philipp., l. vi. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 162. Rigord as above.

[2055] Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne as above), p. 82. To the Bretons and the men of Berry he adds “Allobroges.” What can they have had to do in the case, or what can he mean by the name?

[2056] Will. Armor. Philipp. as above. He says Geoffrey brought twenty picked knights, Ralf forty, and Hugh fifteen. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 137, makes the total force of Arthur and the Poitevins together two hundred and fifty knights.

[2057] Will. Armor, as above, p. 163.

[2058] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 114.

[2059] On the relations of Eleanor, John, and Aquitaine see Bishop Stubbs’s note to W. Coventry, vol. ii., pref. p. xxxiv, note 1. His conclusion is that “certainly the legal difficulties were much greater than Philip’s hasty sentences of forfeiture could solve.”

[2060] Will. Armor. Philipp., l. vi. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 164; Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 82. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 137. Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 168.

John, however, when once roused, could act with all the vigour and promptitude of his race. On July 30, as he was approaching Le Mans, he received tidings of his mother’s danger; on August 1 he suddenly appeared before Mirebeau.[2061] The town was already lost, all the gates of the castle save one were broken down, and Eleanor had been driven to take refuge in the keep; the besiegers, thinking their triumph assured, were surprised and overpowered by John’s troops, and were slain or captured to a man, the Lusignans and Arthur himself being among the prisoners.[2062] Philip, who was busy with the siege of Arques, left it and hurried southward on hearing of this disaster;[2063] John however at once put an end to his hopes of rescuing Arthur by sending the boy to prison at Falaise;[2064] and Philip, after taking and burning Tours,[2065] withdrew into his own domains.[2066] John in his turn then marched upon Tours, and vented his wrath at its capture by completing its destruction.[2067] Shortly afterwards he had the good luck to make prisoner another disaffected Aquitanian noble, the viscount of Limoges.[2068] It was however growing evident that he would soon have nothing but his own resources to depend upon. His allies were falling away; the counts of Flanders, Blois and Perche and several of the other malcontent French barons had taken the cross and abandoned the field of western politics to seek their fortunes in the East;[2069] he had quarrelled with Otto of Germany;[2070] William des Roches, after pleading in vain for Arthur’s release, was organizing a league of the Breton nobles which some of the Norman border-chiefs were quite ready to join, and by the end of October the party thus formed was strong enough to seize Angers and establish its head-quarters there.[2071] It was probably the knowledge of all this which in the beginning of 1203 made John transfer his captive nephew from the castle of Falaise to that of Rouen.[2072] Sinister rumours of Arthur’s fate were already in circulation, telling how John had sent a ruffian to blind him at Falaise, how the soldiers who kept him had frustrated the design, and how their commandant, John’s chamberlain Hubert de Burgh, had endeavoured to satisfy the king by giving out that Arthur had died of wounds and grief and ordering funeral services in his memory, till the threats of the infuriated Bretons drove him to confess the fraud for the sake of John’s own safety.[2073] How or when Arthur really died has never yet been clearly proved. We only know that at Easter 1203 all France was ringing with the tidings of his death, and that after that date he was never seen alive. In his uncle’s interest an attempt was made to suggest that he had either pined to death in his prison, or been drowned in endeavouring to escape across the Seine;[2074] but the general belief, which John’s after-conduct tends strongly to confirm, was that he had been stabbed and then flung into the river by the orders, if not actually by the hands, of John himself.[2075]

[2061] These dates are given by John himself in a letter to the barons of England, inserted by R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 137, 138. Hardy’s Itin. K. John, a. 4 (Intr. Pat. Rolls), shews John at Bonport on July 30, and then gives no further indication of his whereabouts till August 4, when he appears at Chinon.

[2062] R. Coggeshall as above. Rog. Wend., as above, p. 169. Cf. Rigord (Duchesne as above), p. 45; Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. as above; and Philipp, (ibid.), pp. 164, 165. According to this last, John got into Mirebeau by night, by a fraudulent negotiation with William des Roches.

[2063] Rog. Wend., Rigord, and Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug., as above.

[2064] Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. pp. 169, 170. Will. Armor. Philipp., l. vi. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 165.

[2065] Rigord (Duchesne, as above), p. 45. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 82.

[2066] Rog. Wend. (as above), p. 170. He adds “residuum anni illius imbellis peregit.”

[2067] Rigord as above. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. as above. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 138.

[2068] Rigord as above. This was Guy, son and successor to Ademar, who had been slain in 1199 by Richard’s son Philip in vengeance for the quarrel which had led to Richard’s death. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 97.

[2069] Rigord and Will. Armor, as above.

[2070] In 1200 Otto had demanded the lands and the jewels bequeathed to him by Richard; John had refused to give them up. Rog. Howden as above, p. 116.

[2071] Chron. S. Albin. a. 1202 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 51). R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 139. The former gives the date, Wednesday before All Saints’ day.

[2072] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 143. Rog. Wend., as above. Will. Armor. Philipp. as above, p. 166.

[2073] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 139–141.

[2074] Mat. Paris, Hist. Angl. (Madden), vol. ii. p. 95.

[2075] On Arthur’s death see note at end of chapter.

The fire which had been smouldering throughout the winter in Britanny now burst into a blaze. The barons and prelates of the duchy, it is said, held a meeting at Vannes, and thence sent to the king of France, as overlord alike of Arthur and of John, their demand for a judicial inquisition before the peers of the realm—that is, before the supreme feudal court of France—into John’s dealings with their captive duke.[2076] A citation was accordingly sent to John, as duke of Normandy, either to present Arthur alive,[2077] or to come and stand his trial before the French king’s court on a charge of murder. John neither appeared nor sent any defence; the court pronounced him worthy of death, and sentenced him and his heirs to forfeiture of all the lands and honours which he held of the Crown of France.[2078] The trial seems to have been held shortly after Easter. The legal force of the sentence need not be discussed here.[2079] Its moral justice can hardly be disputed, so far as John himself is concerned; and Philip’s action did little more than precipitate the consequences which must sooner or later have naturally resulted from John’s own deed. John in committing a great crime had committed an almost greater blunder. Arthur’s death left him indeed without a rival in his own house. It left him sole survivor, in the male line, alike of the Angevin and Cenomannian counts and of the ducal house of Normandy. Even in the female line there was no one who could be set up against him as representative of either race. Eleanor of Britanny, the only remaining child of his brother Geoffrey, was a prisoner in her uncle’s keeping. The sons of his sister Matilda had cast in their lot with their father’s country and severed all ties with their mother’s people; the children of his sister Eleanor were still more complete strangers to the political interests of northern Gaul, and the only one of them who was known there at all was known only as the wife of the heir to the French crown. But these very facts set John face to face with a more dangerous rival than any of the ambitious kinsmen with whom the two Williams or the two Henrys had had to contend. They drove his disaffected subjects to choose between submission to him and submission to Philip Augustus. The barons of Anjou, of Maine, of Britanny or of Normandy had no longer any chance of freeing themselves from the yoke of the king from over-sea who had become a stranger to them all alike, save by accepting in its stead the yoke of the king with whom they had grown familiar through years of political and personal intercourse, and whom, in theory at least, even their own rulers had always acknowledged as their superior. Anjou, Maine and Britanny had all resolved upon Richard’s death that they would not have John to rule over them; Normandy was now fast coming to the same determination. Under the existing circumstances it would cost them little or no sacrifice to accept their titular overlord as their real and immediate sovereign. So long as Arthur lived, Philip had been compelled to veil his ambition under a shew of zeal for Arthur’s rights; now he could fling aside the veil, and present himself almost in the character of a deliverer. If the barons did not actually hail him as such, they were at any rate for the most part not unwilling to leave to him the responsibility of accomplishing their deliverance, and to accept it quietly from his hands.

- [2076] Le Baud, Hist. de Bretagne, pp. 209, 210, with a reference to Robert Blondel, a writer of the fifteenth century. On the value of this account see Bishop Stubbs, pref. to W. Coventry, vol. ii. p. xxxii, note 3.

- [2077] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 143–145.

- [2078] Proclamation of Louis of France, a. 1216, in Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 140. Ann. Margam, a. 1204 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. i. p. 27). Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 373. Le Baud as above, p. 210. Stubbs, W. Coventry, vol. ii. pref. p. xxxii.

- [2079] Bishop Stubbs’s remark (W. Coventry, vol. ii. pref. p. xxxiv, note 1), quoted above, p. 406, note 1{2058}, applies to this case also. On the vexed question as to the composition of the court I do not feel bound to enter here at all.

Philip took the field as soon as the forfeiture was proclaimed. Within a fortnight after Easter he had taken Saumur[2080] and entered Aquitaine; there he seems to have spent some weeks in taking sundry castles, with the help of the Bretons and the malcontent Poitevin nobles.[2081] One great Norman baron, the viscount of Beaumont, had already openly joined the league against John;[2082] and as Philip turned northward again, the count of Alençon formally placed himself and all his lands at the disposal of the French king.[2083] Thus secure of a strong foothold on the southern frontier of Normandy, and already by his last year’s conquests master of its north-eastern border from Eu to Gisors, Philip set himself to win the intervening territory—the remnant of the viscounty of Evreux. One by one its castles—Conches,[2084] Vaudreuil[2085] and many others—fell into his hands. Messenger after messenger came to John as he sat idle in his palace at Rouen,[2086] all charged with the same story: “The king of France is in your land as an enemy, he is taking your castles, he is binding your seneschals to their horses’ tails and leading them shamefully to prison, and he is dealing with your goods according to his own will and pleasure.” “Let him alone,” John answered them all alike; “I shall win back some day all that he is taking from me now.” The barons who still clave to him grew exasperated as they watched his unmoved face and heard his unvarying reply; some of them began to attribute his indifference to the effects of magic; all, finding it impossible to break the spell, turned away from him in despair. One by one they took their leave and withdrew to their homes, either passively to await the end, or actively to join Philip. Even Hugh of Gournay, who had held out so bravely and so faithfully a year ago, now voluntarily gave up his castle of Montfort.[2087] Not till near the middle of August did John make any warlike movement; then he suddenly laid siege to Alençon; but at Philip’s approach he fled in a panic;[2088] an attempt to regain Brezolles ended in like manner,[2089] and John relapsed into his former inactivity. That the conqueror did not march straight to the capture of Rouen, that he in fact made no further progress towards it for six whole months, was owing not to John but to his predecessor. Richard’s favourite capital was safe, so long as it was sheltered behind the group of fortifications crowned by his “saucy castle” on the Rock of Andely.

- [2080] Chron. S. Albin. a. 1203 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 52).

- [2081] Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 46. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 82; both under a wrong year, viz. 1202 instead of 1203.

- [2082] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 139.

- [2083] Rigord and Will. Armor. as above.

- [2084] Rigord as above.

- [2085] Ibid. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 143.

- [2086] John was not literally there all the while; but he only quitted it for short excursions, never going further than Moulineaux, Pont-de-l’Arche, Orival or Montfort, from the middle of May till the beginning of August, when he suddenly went as far west as Caen, and thence as suddenly south again to Falaise and Alençon. Hardy, Itin. K. John, a. 5 (Intr. Pat. Rolls).

- [2087] Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. pp. 171, 172.

- [2088] Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 82. John was at Alençon August 11–15; Hardy, Itin. K. John, a. 5 (Intr. Pat. Rolls).

- [2089] Will. Armor. as above.

Upon the winning of Château-Gaillard, therefore, Philip now concentrated all his energies and all his skill. There was no hope of voluntary surrender here; John had given the fortress in charge to Roger de Lacy the constable of Chester, an English baron who had no stake in Normandy, whose private interests were therefore bound up with those of the English king, and who was moreover a man of dauntless courage and high military capacity.[2090] The place was only to be won by a regular siege. Crossing the Seine higher up, perhaps at Vernon, Philip led his troops along its left bank, and encamped in the peninsula formed by the bend of the river just opposite Les Andelys. The garrison of the fort in the Isle of Andely no sooner beheld his approach than they destroyed the bridge between the island and the left bank. Philip was thus deprived of the means not only of reaching them, but also of opening communications with the opposite shore; for this could only be done with safety at some point below Château-Gaillard, and the transport of the materials needful for the construction of a bridge or pontoon was barred by the stockade which crossed the river-bed directly under the foot of the castle-rock. The daring of a few young Frenchmen, however, soon cleared this obstacle away. While the king brought up his engines close to the water’s edge and kept the garrison of the island-fort occupied with the exchange of a constant fire of missiles, a youth named Gaubert of Mantes with a few bold comrades plunged into the water, each with an axe in his hand, and, regardless of the stones and arrows which kept falling upon them from both sides, hewed at the stockade till they had made a breach wide enough for boats to pass through in safety. A number of the broad flat-bottomed barges used for transport were then hastily collected from the neighbouring riverside towns, and moored side by side across the stream; these served as the foundation of a wooden bridge, which was further supported with stakes and strengthened with towers, and by means of which Philip himself, with the larger part of his host, crossed the river to form a new encampment under the walls of the Lesser Andely. The garrison of the Isle were thus placed between two fires;[2091] and the whole Vexin was laid open as a foraging-ground for the besieging army, while the occupants of the Lesser Andely and of Château-Gaillard itself found their communications and their supplies cut off on all sides.[2092]

- [2090] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 144. Rog. Wend. as above,·/·(Coxe), vol. iii. p. 180.

- [2091] Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), pp. 82, 83; Philipp., l. vii. vv. 86–131 (ib. p. 170; Deville, Château-Gaillard, pp. 127–129).

- [2092] Will. Armor. Philipp., l. vii. vv. 132–139 (Duchesne, p. 170; Deville, p. 129).

John was now again hovering about at a safe distance in the neighbourhood.[2093] To the peril of Château-Gaillard his fatuous indifference was at last beginning to yield. A year ago he had shewn some appreciation of his brother’s work, by making an addition to the buildings in the second ward;[2094] and he had shewn his sense of the military importance of the place yet more significantly, by appointing Roger de Lacy as its commander. He now gathered up all his remaining forces—still, it seems, a formidable array[2095]—with the apparent intention of dislodging the French from Les Andelys. As Philip’s biographer remarks, however, John feared and hated the light; he resolved, according to his wont, upon a night attack; and even that attack he did not lead in person.[2096] He intrusted its command indeed to a far braver man than himself, but a man who was better fitted for action in the light of day than for such deeds of darkness as John delighted in. William the Marshal, the favourite comrade-in-arms of the younger King Henry, the faithful friend and servant of the elder one even unto death, the honoured minister of Richard, still clave to the last survivor of the house which he had loved so long and so well. To him John confided his plan for the relief of Les Andelys. The marshal was to lead a force of three hundred knights, three thousand mounted serving-men and four thousand foot, with a band of mercenaries under a chief called Lupicar,[2097] along the left bank of the Seine, and to fall under cover of darkness upon the French camp in the peninsula. Meanwhile seventy transport-vessels, constructed by Richard to serve either for sea or river-traffic, and as many more as could be collected, were to be laden with provisions for the besieged garrison of the Isle, and convoyed up the river by a flotilla of small war-ships, manned by pirates[2098] under a chief named Alan, and carrying, besides their own daring and reckless crews, a force of three thousand Flemings. Two hundred strokes of the oar, John reckoned, would bring these ships to the French pontoon; they must break it if they could; if not, they could at least co-operate with the land-forces under the Marshal in cutting off the northern division of the French army from its comrades and supplies on the left bank, and throw into the island-fort provisions enough to save it from the necessity of surrender till John himself should come to its relief.

- [2093] “Non multum distabat a loco illo” says Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne, as above·/·Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 83. The date must fall between August 16, when John was at Alençon, and September 5, when he was at Bonneville. His whereabouts during the interval vary between Chambrai, Trianon, Montfort and Rouen. Hardy, Itin. K. John, a. 5 (Intr. Pat. Rolls).

- [2094] Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 84; Philipp., l. vii. vv. 737–746 (ib. p. 181; Deville, Château-Gaillard, p. 145).

- [2095] “Maximum congregaverat exercitum.” Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug., as above, p. 83.

- [2096] Ibid.; Philipp., l. vii. vv. 140–143, 188–194 (ib. pp. 170, 171; Deville as above, pp. 129, 130).

- [2097] On this man see Géraud, Les Routiers (Bibl. de l’Ecole des Chartes, ser. i. vol. iii. p. 132). In his native tongue he was called “Lobar”; in Latin he appears as “Lupicarius,” “Lupescarus,” “Lupatius.” M. Géraud calls him in French “Louvart”; the name was doubtless an assumed one, meaning “wolf.” He was a fellow-countryman and old comrade-in-arms of Mercadier; Mat. Paris introduces them both at once, in 1196, as “natione Provinciales”—“qui duces fuerunt catervæ quam ruttam vocamus, militantes sub comite Johanne regis fratre.” Chron. Maj. (Luard), vol. ii. p. 421. Lupicar however had made his first historical appearance some years earlier than Mercadier, as a leader of the Brabantines in the Limousin, about 1177. See Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 70 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 324).

- [2098] It seems a strange return to long-past times to hear of “pirates” sailing up the Seine to attack a king of the French. Of what nationality are these men likely to have been?

The flower of the French host, as John knew, had crossed the river with its king. Those who remained in the peninsula were hampered by the presence of a crowd of unwarlike serving-men, sutlers and camp-followers, many of whom, after spending the day in drunken revelry, were lying asleep in the fields outside the camp. The night was drawing to its close—for the cock had crowed thrice—when the Marshal’s troops fell upon these sleepers and slew more than two hundred of them as they lay. The soldiers within the camp quickly caught the alarm; in their terror they rushed to the pontoon in such numbers that it broke under their weight, and they sought safety in swimming across the river to join their comrades on the opposite shore. These however had now been aroused by the tumult; the bravest of the French knights, headed by William des Barres, confronted the fugitives with indignant reproaches for their cowardice, and drove them back across the stream. By the light of torches and fires, hastily kindled, the whole host was soon got under arms, the bridge repaired, and the Marshal’s troops, surprised in their turn while groping about in the darkness of the deserted camp, were routed with heavy loss. The victors, thinking the fight was over, went back to their sleeping-quarters, but had scarcely reached them when they were roused up again, to see, in the dim light of the August sunrise, the hostile fleet bearing down upon them. In a few minutes the two river-banks and the pontoon were lined with armed Frenchmen. Still the boats held on their course till the foremost of them touched the bridge; and despite a ceaseless shower of arrows from either shore, and of stones, iron missiles, and boiling oil and pitch from the engines mounted on the wooden turrets of the bridge, the crews began to hew at the cables and stakes in a desperate effort to break it down, and kept its defenders at bay till the Seine ran red with blood. At last an enormously heavy oaken beam fell directly upon the two foremost ships and sank them. The rest, stricken with sudden terror, rowed away in disorder as fast as oars could move them. Gaubert of Mantes and three other gallant French sailors sprang each into a little boat, set off in pursuit, and succeeded in capturing two of the fugitive ships, which they brought back in tow, with their stores and all of their crews who survived.[2099] The delay in the arrival of the fleet, caused by the difficulties of navigation in the Seine,[2100] had ruined John’s plan for the relief of the Isle of Andely. The fate of its garrison was soon decided; and again the hero of the day was Gaubert of Mantes. The fort was encircled by a double palisade or rampart of wood, outside the walls. Gaubert tied a rope round his waist, took in his hand two iron vessels coated with pitch and filled with burning charcoal,[2101] swam to the easternmost point of the island, which the garrison, trusting to the proximity of Château-Gaillard on this side, had ventured to leave unguarded, and threw these missiles against the palisade. The wood instantly caught fire; the wind carried the flames all round the ramparts and into the fort itself. Some of the garrison made their escape by swimming or on rafts; some were stifled in the cellars and galleries in which they sought a refuge from the fire; the rest surrendered to the French king. Philip lost no time in repairing and garrisoning the fort and rebuilding the bridge on its western side. At the sight of his success the whole population of the Lesser Andely fled in a body to Château-Gaillard; Philip entered the town in triumph, sent for new inhabitants to fill the places of the fugitives, and intrusted its defence to two companies of mercenaries, whose strength may be estimated from the statement that the leader of one of them, Cadoc by name, received from the royal treasury a thousand pounds daily for himself and his men.[2102]

- [2099] Will. Armor. Philipp., l. vii. vv. 144–335 (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v. pp. 171–174; Deville, Château-Gaillard, pp. 129–134). Cf. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne as above), p. 83.

- [2100] Will. Armor. as above, vv. 206, 207 (Duchesne as above, p. 172; Deville as above, p. 131).

- [2101] See Deville’s note, Château-Gaillard, p. 66.

- [2102] Will. Armor., Philipp., l. vii. vv. 336–398 (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v. pp. 174, 175; Deville, Château-Gaillard, pp. 134–136). Cf. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne as above), p. 83.

Philip’s mastery of the river was still precarious and incomplete without the reduction of Château-Gaillard. For an attack upon the Saucy Castle itself, however, his courage seems as yet to have failed; and striking north-westward by the road which leads from Les Andelys into the valley of the Andelle, on the last day of August he again sat down before Radepont. In two or three weeks it surrendered.[2103] This time John made no attempt to save it, but fled away to the depths of his own old county of Mortain,[2104] leaving Rouen to its fate. Philip however dared not advance upon Rouen with Château-Gaillard still unconquered in his rear; and at the opening of the vintage-season he moved back to Les Andelys and girded himself up for his task. A brief survey of the Rock convinced him that assault was well-nigh hopeless; his best chance was in a blockade. On the north the Lesser Andely occupied by his mercenaries, on the west the river commanded by his troops in the island-fort, sufficed to imprison the garrison. The next step was to dig out a double trench two hundred feet deep, starting from the brow of the hill over against the south-eastern extremity of the castle-rock, extending northward to the margin of the lake of Andely and westward to the bank of the Seine, and completely enclosing the two ravines which furrowed the sides of the rock. Each line of entrenchment was garnished with seven bretasches or wooden forts, placed at regular intervals, each surrounded by a ditch of its own, furnished with a wooden draw-bridge, and filled with as many soldiers as it could hold. The rest of the army took up their quarters in the trenches, where they built themselves little huts of wood and thatch for a shelter against the wet and cold of the coming winter—shelter against other foes they needed none, for they were out of bowshot from the castle[2105]—and whiled away their time in jesting and making songs in mockery of the straits to which the Saucy Castle was reduced—“So many thousands girt about with a single girdle,”—“The eyrie overcrowded with nestlings, who will have to turn out when the spring comes.”[2106] The greater part of the “nestlings” were turned out before the spring came. The blockade once formed, Roger de Lacy soon perceived the terrible blunder he had made in admitting within his walls the townsfolk of the Lesser Andely. According to one computation, the number of these non-combatants now huddled within the castle-enclosure was no less than two thousand two hundred souls; at the lowest reckoning, they seem to have amounted to fourteen hundred—all, in a military point of view, simply useless mouths, devouring in a few weeks the stores of food that should have furnished rations for a year and more to the little garrison which was amply sufficient to hold the castle for John. One day, therefore, Roger opened the castle-gate and turned out five hundred of the oldest and weakest. They were suffered to pass unmolested through the blockading lines, and were followed a few days later by five hundred more. Philip however, who meanwhile had returned to his own dominions, no sooner heard what was going on than he issued strict orders that every man, woman or child, of whatever age or condition, who might issue from the castle should be driven back again without mercy. A large number still remained of whom Roger was as eager to be rid as Philip was anxious that he should be obliged to keep them. He took account of his stores, and found that he had enough to feed the regular garrison for a whole year. Hereupon he called together all the remaining non-combatants, and sent them forth, as they thought, to rejoin their families and friends. To their horror, as soon as they approached the French lines, they were overwhelmed with a volley of arrows. They rushed back to the castle-gate, only to find it closed against them. For three months this multitude of people dragged out a wretched existence in the ravines around the fortress, with no shelter against the wet and the cold but what they might find in the clefts of the rock, and no food but the dry leaves and scant herbage which they could pick up at its foot, and the flesh of the dogs which the garrison soon let loose for the purpose of yet further economizing their rations. This last resource was exhausted, and the horrors of cannibalism were already reached, when Philip came back to see how the siege was progressing. As he was crossing the bridge to the island-fort these unhappy beings caught sight of him and lifted up their voices in agonizing appeal; the king, moved with a tardy compassion, and perhaps also by fear of the not improbable outbreak of a pestilence which might easily have spread into his own entrenchments, ordered that immediate relief should be given to all who survived. These however amounted to no more than half of the original number, which seems to have been something over four hundred; and most of them had been so long without food that their first meal proved fatal.[2107]

- [2103] Rigord (Duchesne as above·/·, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 47, says the siege of Radepont began on the last day of August and lasted fifteen days. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 82, makes it last three weeks; in Philipp., l. vii. vv. 399, 400 (ib. p. 175; Deville, Château-Gaillard, p. 136), he extends its duration to a month.

- [2104] He went to Falaise on September 13—the day after the fall of Radepont, according to Rigord’s reckoning. Thence he went on the 17th to Mortain, on the 19th to Dol, and back to Mortain again on the 22d. Hardy, Itin. K. John, a. 5 (Intr. Pat. Rolls).

- [2105] Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), pp. 83, 84; Philipp., l. vii. vv. 414–450 (ib. pp. 175, 176; Deville, Château-Gaillard, pp. 136, 137).

- [2106] Will. Armor. Philipp., l. vii. vv. 451–456 (Duchesne, p. 176; Deville, p. 137).

- [2107] Cf. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 84, and Philipp., l. vii. vv. 467–606 (ib. pp. 176–179; Deville, Château-Gaillard, pp. 138–142).

The last act of this tragedy must have taken place soon after Christmas. For three months the whole military power of the French Crown had been concentrated on the investment of Château-Gaillard; and in all this time John had done absolutely nothing. From his expedition to the Breton border he had indeed returned to Rouen for a few days in the beginning of October. Not a hand did he lift, however, to check the progress of the blockade which was being formed almost before his eyes. Soon he was again far away in the Bessin; thence he suddenly moved across the duchy to Verneuil, and in the second week of November he was once more at Rouen.[2108] It was probably during one of these visits to the capital that he wrote to Roger de Lacy: “We thank you for your good and faithful service, and desire that, as much as in you lies, you will persevere in the fealty and homage which you owe us, that you may receive a worthy meed of praise from God and from ourselves, and from all who know your fidelity to us. If, however, which God forbid, you should find yourselves in such straits that you can hold out no longer, then do whatsoever our trusty and well-beloved Peter of Préaux, William of Mortemer and Hugh of Howels our clerk shall bid you in our name.”[2109] Whether this letter ever found its way through the blockading lines into the castle it is scarcely worth while to inquire. If it did, it failed to shake the courage or the loyalty of the garrison, although it must have proved to them what they doubtless guessed already, that their sovereign had forsaken them, and that they were serving him for nought. Of the crowning proof of his desertion they probably remained unconscious until all was over for them. After dismantling Pont-de-l’Arche, Moulineaux and Montfort,[2110] John, on November 12, again left Rouen; for three weeks he flitted aimlessly up and down the country, from Bonneville and Caen to Domfront and Vire, and back again to Barfleur and Cherbourg;[2111] on December 6 he quitted Normandy altogether;[2112] and while the burghers of the Lesser Andely were starving and freezing to death in the valleys round Château-Gaillard, and the garrison of the castle were anxiously reckoning how much longer their provisions would enable them to hold out for his sake, he was keeping his Christmas feast at Canterbury at the expense of Archbishop Hubert.[2113]

- [2108] Hardy, Itin. K. John, a. 5 (Intr. Pat. Rolls).

- [2109] Letter in Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., p. 1059.

- [2110] Will. Armor. Philipp., l. vii. vv. 826–828 (Deville, Château-Gaillard, pp. 147, 148; Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v. p. 182).

- [2111] Hardy as above.

- [2112] Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 173, says he landed at Portsmouth on S. Nicolas’s day. The Itinerary (as above) shews him at Barfleur on December 5 and at Portsmouth on the 7th.

- [2113] “H. archiepiscopo omnia necessaria festivitati regiæ ministrante.” Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 174.

By the end of February 1204[2114] Philip grew impatient of the blockade of Château-Gaillard, and probably also uneasy lest John should return from England with an overwhelming force for its relief. He therefore resolved to try whether it could not, after all, be taken by assault. He himself took up his station at the central point of the entrenchment, on the crest of the hill, facing the narrow neck of land by which it was joined to the castle-rock. This isthmus, the only direct approach to the castle itself, he caused to be levelled and widened till he could erect upon it a wooden gallery or covered way leading from his own lines up to the edge of the outermost ditch of the fortress. When, with considerable difficulty and loss of life, this was accomplished, he caused a beffroy or wooden tower on wheels to be carried through the gallery, set up when it reached the further end, and moved along the edge of the fosse, the cross-bowmen with whom it was filled doing deadly execution upon the soldiers on the ramparts, who however made a gallant defence. Meanwhile, the French were bringing through their covered way earth, wood, stones, turf, everything they could find to fill up the ditch. Before it was half full they lost patience and adopted a quicker method of approach. They dropped down the perpendicular counterscarp by means of their scaling-ladders, and set these up again on the sloping inner side of the ditch, under the foot of the great round tower which formed the head of the first ward. The ladders were too short for the ascent; but despite a heavy fire of stones and arrows from the tower, the storming-party scrambled up, crawling on hands and knees, or using their swords and daggers by way of Alpine-staves, till the base of the wall was reached. Then, while a shower of missiles rattled down upon the shields held over them by their comrades, the sappers dug and hewed at the foundations till the tower was undermined; the fuse was inserted and fired, and the miners had just had time to withdraw when a large portion of the wall fell crashing into the ditch. The French rushed to the breach; Roger de Lacy, seeing that the first ward was lost, ordered the wooden buildings within it to be fired; he and his men withdrew across the drawbridge into the second ward, and when the fire died down, they saw the ruined fragment of the tower crowned by the banner of Cadoc.[2115]

- [2114] “Superveniente cathedrâ S. Petri” (February 22). Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 47.

- [2115] Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 84; Philipp., l. vii. vv. 612–726 (ib. pp. 179–181; Deville, Château-Gaillard, pp. 142–145).

The French were one step nearer to the goal; but the next step looked as impracticable as ever. Between them and the besieged there yawned another ditch as wide and deep, there rose another rampart as mighty and as inaccessible as the first. In vain they prowled about the edge of the fosse seeking for a point at which they could venture upon an attack, till a young squire or man-at-arms, by name Peter, but more commonly known in the camp as “Bogis” or “Snub-nose,” caught sight of a little window just above the wall at the south-eastern corner of the rampart.[2116] This window was the sole external opening in John’s new building, which was otherwise accessible only on the inner side, by two doors, one leading into the storehouse which formed the lower story, one into the chapel above it, and both opening towards the courtyard. Bogis at once communicated his discovery to a few trusty comrades; they reconnoitred the ditch till they found a somewhat shallower place on its southern side, where it was possible to scramble down; thence they crawled along the bottom till they were directly under the window, and then clambered up the sloping side to the foot of the wall. By standing on the shoulders of a comrade Bogis managed to reach the window; he found it unbarred, unguarded, and wide enough for his body to pass through; he sprang in, let down to his companions a rope which he had brought for the purpose, and drew them up one by one till they were all safe inside the building, which proved to be the storehouse under the chapel.[2117] Finding the door locked, they began to hammer at it with the hilts of their daggers. This noise and the shouts with which they accompanied it soon alarmed the garrison. They, thinking that the French had entered the new building and occupied it in force, hastily set it on fire; unhappily, the wind caught the flames and spread them in a few minutes over the whole enclosure. The garrison fled to their sole remaining refuge, the citadel; Bogis and his companions escaped out of the blazing ruins into the casemates; the bulk of the French host, anxiously watching the scene from the opposite side of the ditch, thought they had all perished; but when the flames died down and the smoke began to clear away, Bogis himself appeared at the gate and let down the drawbridge for the army to pass over in triumph.[2118]

- [2116] I cannot understand M. Deville’s idea of this window. In his plan of the castle he marks it about the middle of the south-western side of John’s building—the side looking towards the river. But Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (as above·/·Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 85, says it was “in latere orientali.” And if it had not been there, how could Bogis, from the foot of the rampart of the first ward, ever have seen it at all?

- [2117] So says M. Deville (Château-Gaillard, p. 82), following the Philippis; but in the Gesta Phil. Aug. William makes it the chapel, i.e. the upper instead of the lower story. One would naturally expect the solitary window to be in the chapel rather than in the storehouse under it.

- [2118] Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 85; Philipp., l. vii. vv. 727–791 (ib. pp. 181, 182; Deville, Château-Gaillard, pp. 145–147).

Philip’s engines and their own too hastily-kindled fires had made havoc among the besieged garrison; they were now reduced to a hundred and eighty fighting-men.[2119] Even this small number, however, might have sufficed to hold for an indefinite time the remains of Richard’s matchless fortress, but for one strange error on the part of the royal architect. Richard had indeed taken the precaution of making the sole gate of his citadel open not directly towards the courtyard of the second ward, but at a much less accessible point to the north-eastward, where only a narrow strip of ground intervened between the counterscarp of the ditch and the outer rampart. Most unaccountably, however, instead of furnishing this gate with a drawbridge, he left a portion of the rock itself to serve as a natural passage over the ditch hollowed out beneath it. Across this immovable bridge a machine known by the name of “cat”—a sort of tent upon wheels, moved by the men inside it—was, as the epic bard of the siege expresses it, “made to crawl” close up to the gate, which the sappers, hidden under this shelter, at once began to undermine. Roger de Lacy, alarmed no doubt by the fate of the first tower which had been thus dealt with, tried the effect of a countermine, which was so far successful that the French were for a moment compelled to retire; but the “cat” was speedily replaced by a mighty engine discharging heavy stones with immense force. At the third discharge, the wall, undermined as it was from both sides, suddenly fell in. The French troops poured through the breach; Roger and his little band were quickly surrounded, and it was no fault of theirs that they were not slaughtered to a man, for every one of them refused to yield, and was only disarmed by main force. The hundred and twenty men-at-arms and thirty-six knights who still remained were, however, made prisoners without further bloodshed; and thus, on March 6, 1204, Philip became master of Château-Gaillard.[2120]

- [2119] Will. Armor. Philipp., l. vii. v. 775 (Duchesne as above, p. 181; Deville, p. 146).

- [2120] Will. Armor. Philipp., l. vii. vv. 792–811 (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v. p. 182; Deville, Château-Gaillard, p. 147). Cf. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne as above), p. 85. The date is from Rigord (ibid.), p. 47 (who, however, puts it under a wrong year, 1202), and Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 180. This last writer has a wholly different version of the capture, but it is not worthy of consideration. The number of prisoners is stated by Will. Armor. in the Gesta Phil. Aug. as forty knights, a hundred and twenty men-at-arms, “and many others.” (By his own account in Philipp., l. vii. v. 775, these “many” cannot have been more than twenty. See above, p. 422). Rigord speaks only of the knights, whom he reduces to thirty-six, saying that four had been slain during the siege.

On that March day the king of England really lost not only his Saucy Castle, but his whole continental dominions north of Loire. Thenceforth all resistance in Normandy was at an end; and in three months the whole duchy laid itself without a struggle at the victor’s feet. Soon after John’s departure over sea Philip had opened negotiations with the citizens of the chief Norman towns, representing to them that the king of England had deserted them, that he himself was their rightful overlord and sovereign, and bidding them either receive him as such, or prepare to be all hanged or flayed alive when he should have overcome their resistance by force. After some discussion they made a truce with him for a year, promising that if no succour came from England within that time, they would submit to him without reserve.[2121] On the fall of Château-Gaillard they all, together with the constables of the remaining fortresses throughout John’s trans-marine dominions, sent messages to John setting forth the difficulties of their position and remonstrating earnestly with him on his tardiness in coming to their aid. He bade them look for nothing from him, but do each of them whatsoever they might think good.[2122] A few weeks later he despatched the bishops of Norwich and Ely with the earls of Pembroke and Leicester to see if there was any possibility of coming to terms with the king of France.[2123] But it was too late. Philip sarcastically retorted that the first preliminary to peace must be the restoration of Arthur;[2124] and on the Sunday after Easter he marched again into Normandy. Falaise surrendered after a week’s siege;[2125] Domfront, Séez, Lisieux, Caen, Bayeux, Barfleur, Cherbourg, Coutances,[2126] opened their gates at his mere approach. Meanwhile Guy of Thouars, who had been governing Britanny since Arthur’s death,[2127] with four hundred knights and an immense host of Bretons attacked and burned the Mont-St.-Michel, sacked Avranches, and marched ravaging and burning through the Bessin to join the king at Caen. Philip sent them back again, together with the count of Boulogne, William des Barres, a large body of French knights, and a troop of John’s mercenaries who had changed sides after the surrender of Falaise, to finish the subjugation of Mortain and the Avranchin,[2128] while he himself returned to complete his conquest of eastern Normandy. Only three important places were still unsubdued there: Arques on the northern coast, Verneuil on the southern border, and Rouen itself. The three bodies of soldiers and townsfolk came to a mutual understanding whereby those of the capital, on the Tuesday in Rogation-week—June 1—made a truce with Philip for thirty days, stipulating that their brethren at Arques and Verneuil should receive the same benefit if they applied for it within a certain time, and promising in the name of all alike that if no succour came from John within the specified interval, they would give themselves up unreservedly to the king of France.[2129] None of them, however, waited for the expiration of the truce. On midsummer-day Rouen opened its gates;[2130] Arques and Verneuil followed its example,[2131] and Normandy was won.

- [2121] Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. pp. 173, 174.

- [2122] Ib. pp. 180, 181.

- [2123] “Post mediam Quadragesimam,” i.e. in the beginning of April. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 144. The earl of Pembroke (or Striguil), it will be remembered, was William the Marshal.

- [2124] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 145.

- [2125] Ibid. Will. Armor. Philipp., l. viii. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v. p. 183); Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 85. Rigord (ibid.), p. 47. The dates come from the two last, both of whom however make the year 1203 instead of 1204.

- [2126] Cf. Rigord as above; Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. as above; Philipp. l. viii. (ibid.), pp. 183, 184; and R. Coggeshall as above.

- [2127] As guardian of his own daughter by Constance, the infant Alice, whom the Bretons and the French recognized as heiress of Britanny, in place of her half-sister Eleanor, who was in the custody of John.

- [2128] Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 85. Philipp., l. viii. (ibid.), pp. 184, 185.

- [2129] Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., pp. 1057–1059.

- [2130] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 146. Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 47, giving the date. Cf. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 85, and Philipp., l. viii. (ibid.), p. 186.

- [2131] R. Coggeshall as above.

Cadoc and his mercenaries had established their head-quarters at Angers;[2132] the whole of Anjou and Touraine, except the strongholds of Chinon and Loches, was already secured; Aquitaine alone still remained to be conquered. This, indeed, was likely to prove a more difficult task; for however bitterly the men of the south might hate their Norman or Angevin rulers, their chances of regaining or preserving their independence under a sovereign who must henceforth be parted from them by the whole width of the Bay of Biscay would be obviously so much better than under one whose direct sway now stretched all along the northern bank of the Loire from its mouth almost to its source, that they were certain to veer round at once to the side of John, simply for the purpose of keeping Philip out. Such was in fact the result throughout the whole country south of the Dordogne; Savaric of Mauléon, lately John’s enemy and prisoner, at once became his most energetic and devoted champion;[2133] while Angoulême was secured for John as the heritage of his queen Isabel. But the link which had bound Guyenne to the Angevin house was broken at last; Queen Eleanor had died on April 1.[2134] There was no longer any legal obstacle to the execution of the sentence of forfeiture passed two years ago; and on S. Laurence’s day Philip assembled his host for the conquest of Poitou.[2135] Robert of Turnham, John’s seneschal,[2136] did what he could in its defence, but he was powerless against the indifference of the people and the active hostility of William des Roches and the Lusignans.[2137] Poitiers was soon taken; and in a few weeks all Poitou, except La Rochelle, Niort and Thouars, submitted to Philip as its liege lord.[2138] At the approach of winter Philip returned to his own dominions, leaving a body of troops to blockade Chinon, which was held for John by Hubert de Burgh, and another to form the siege of Loches, no less bravely defended by Gerald of Atie.[2139] At Easter 1205 the king marched with a fresh host upon Loches and took it by assault.[2140] On midsummer-eve Chinon fell in like manner.[2141] Robert of Turnham had already been made prisoner by the French;[2142] the viscount of Thouars now made his submission to Philip, and received from him the seneschalship of Poitou in Robert’s stead;[2143] Niort and La Rochelle were left alone in their resistance to the French king.

[2132] Will. Armor. as above, pp. 86 and 188.

[2133] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 146.

[2134] Ann. Waverl. a. 1204 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. p. 256). R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 144, and Mat. Paris, Hist. Angl. (Madden), vol. ii. pp. 102, 103, give the same year; the latter takes occasion to describe Eleanor as “admiribalis domina pulchritudinis et astutiæ,” and says she died at John’s newly-founded abbey of Beaulieu. The Chron. S. Albin. (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 53) places her death a year earlier, and at Poitiers.

[2135] Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 47.

[2136] Brother of Stephen of Turnham, and apparently seneschal of Anjou at the close of Richard’s reign; transferred to Poitou in 1201. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. pp. 86, 142, 176.

[2137] R. Coggeshall as above.

[2138] Ibid. Rigord as above. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 86. Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 181.

[2139] R. Coggeshall and Rigord as above. Will. Armor. as above; Philipp., l. viii. (ibid.), pp. 189, 190.

[2140] Rigord (as above), pp. 47, 48, and Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. as above; both under a wrong year. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 152.

[2141] Rog. Wend. (Coxe, vol. iii.), pp. 182, 183; R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 154, 155; cf. Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 48; Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 86; and Chron. S. Albin. a. 1203 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 54).

[2142] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 152.

[2143] Will. Armor. as above.

John, however, was now at last threatening an attack from over sea. Three weeks after his return to England, in January 1204, he had held a council at Oxford and compelled all the tenants-in-chief, including the bishops and abbots, to promise a scutage of two marks and a half on the knight’s fee,[2144] and a contribution, from which even the parish churches were not exempt, of a seventh of all moveable goods;[2145] all under the plea of gathering a great host for the recovery of his lost dominions.[2146] In May he held a council at Northampton,[2147] which resulted in a summons to the fleet and the host to meet him at Porchester at Whitsuntide, prepared to accompany him over sea. When all was ready, however, the expedition was countermanded, at the urgent entreaty, it was said, of Archbishop Hubert and William the Marshal, the latter of whom had lately returned from Gaul, and might therefore be supposed to know the condition of affairs there better than the king could know it himself. John, after a great shew of resistance, yielded to their entreaties; the soldiers and sailors were made to pay a fine in commutation of their services, and dismissed, grumbling bitterly, to their homes.[2148] The king gained a considerable sum of money by the transaction; and the primate and the marshal, in their boundless loyalty, were content to take upon themselves the burthen of its shame, which John felt, or affected to feel, so keenly that he actually put to sea with a small escort several days after the dispersion of the fleet. He landed again, however, at Wareham on the third day,[2149] and contented himself with sending his half-brother Earl William of Salisbury and his own son Geoffrey with a body of knights to reinforce the garrison of La Rochelle.[2150] A year later he again assembled his fleet at Portsmouth;[2151] and this time he led it in person direct to La Rochelle. He landed there on June 7,[2152] and marched to Montauban, which he besieged and captured;[2153] the fickle viscount of Thouars, being now in revolt against Philip, speedily joined him;[2154] they advanced to Angers together, won it on September 6,[2155] ravaged Anjou with fire and sword, and were doing the like in south-eastern Britanny[2156] when Philip again crossed the Loire and harried the viscounty of Thouars under their very eyes.[2157] John at once proposed a truce; the terms were formally drawn up at Thouars on October 26;[2158] but when the English king’s signature was required, he was no longer to be found. He had slipped away the night before, and was out of reach at La Rochelle;[2159] and thence, on December 12, he sailed for England once more.[2160]

[2144] Rog. Wend. as above·/·(Coxe, vol. iii.), p. 175.

[2145] Mat. Paris, Chron. Maj. (Luard), vol. ii. p. 483.

[2146] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 144.

[2147] Ibid. Date, May 21–25; Hardy, Itin. K. John, a. 7 (Intr. Pat. Rolls).

[2148] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 152, 153. Cf. Rog. Wend. as above, p. 183.

[2149] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 154. Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii., p. 183. This happened June 13–15; see note 1 to R. Coggeshall as above, and Hardy, Itin. K. John, a. 7 (Intr. Pat. Rolls).

[2150] R. Coggeshall as above.

[2151] Rog. Wend. (as above), p. 186. John was at Porchester from Whit-Monday, May 22, to Friday, May 26. Hardy, Itin. K. John, a. 8 (Intr. Pat. Rolls).

[2152] He crossed from Stoke to Yarmouth on Trinity Sunday, May 28, and thence to La Rochelle on Wednesday, June 7; cf. Hardy, as above, with Rog. Wend. as above, who has twice written “Julii” for “Junii.”

[2153] On August 1, after fifteen days’ siege, says Rog. Wend. (as above), p. 187; but see Hardy as above.

[2154] Rigord (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.), p. 48. Will. Armor. Gesta Phil. Aug. (ibid.), p. 86.

[2155] Ibid. Date from Chron. S. Albin. a. 1206 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 54, 57).

[2156] Will. Armor. as above.

[2157] Rigord (ibid.), p. 48. Chron. S. Albin. a. 1206 (as above, pp. 56, 57).

[2158] Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 95.

[2159] Will. Armor. as above. He was at La Rochelle on October 25; Hardy as above.

[2160] Rog. Wend. as above, p. 188.

Of the two devoted English ministers who had stood by him through so much obloquy, only the Marshal was now left. A month after the humiliating scene at Porchester in 1205, Archbishop Hubert died.[2161] “Now for the first time am I truly king of England!” was the comment of his ungrateful master upon the tidings of his death.[2162] The words were words of ill omen for John himself, even more than for his people. He was indeed king of England, and of England alone. The prophecy of Merlin, which had been working itself out for a hundred years in the history of the Norman and Angevin houses, was fulfilled in yet one more detail: “the sword was parted from the sceptre.”[2163] The sword of Hrolf the Ganger and William the Conqueror, of Fulk the Red and Fulk the Black, had fallen from the hand of their unworthy descendant. The sceptre of his English forefathers was left to him. But the England over which he had to wield it was no longer the exhausted and divided country which had been swallowed up almost without an effort in the vast dominions of the young Count Henry of Anjou. It was an England which was once more able to stand alone—a new England which had been growing up under the hands of Henry himself, of his ministers, and of the ministers of his successor, silently and imperceptibly, they themselves knew not when or how; and between this new England and its stranger-king the day of reckoning was now to come.

- [2161] Ib.·/·Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii., p. 183. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 156.

- [2162] Mat. Paris, Hist. Angl. (Madden), vol. ii. p. 104.

- [2163] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 146.

Note.
THE DEATH OF ARTHUR.

Only two contemporary writers even pretend to give a circumstantial account of Arthur’s death: the Annalist of Margam and William of Armorica. The former tells us that John, “post prandium, ebrius et dæmonio plenus” [did John, as well as Richard, make the demon-blood answerable for his sins?], slew Arthur with his own hand, and having tied a great stone to the body, flung it into the Seine; thence it was drawn up in a fisherman’s net, recognized, and buried secretly, “propter metum tyranni,” in Notre-Dame-des-Prés (Ann. Margam, a. 1204; Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. i. p. 27). William allows the murderer no such excuse, if excuse it be, but works up the story into a long and horrible romance, in which John deliberately and of set purpose takes Arthur out alone with him by night in a boat on the Seine, plunges a sword into his body, and then rows along for three miles before he flings the corpse overboard (Will. Armor. Philipp., l. vi.; Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v. pp. 166, 167). Both these writers place the scene at Rouen. The Chron. Brioc. (Morice, Hist. Bret., preuves, vol. i. col. 39) transfers it to Cherbourg: “Apud Cæsaris-burgum duxit, et ibi proditorie et tyrannice eum in mare submersit.” Rigord says not a word of the matter. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson, p. 145) only speaks of it incidentally, saying that Philip “sæviebat ... permaxime pro nece Arthuri, quem in Sequanâ submersum fuisse audierat.” Rog. Wend. (Coxe, vol. iii. p. 170) says merely “subito evanuit.” Mat. Paris in Chron. Maj. (Luard, vol. ii. p. 480) copies this, and adds: “modo fere omnibus ignorato; utinam non ut fama refert.” In Hist. Angl. (Madden, vol. ii. p. 95) he gives three stories as currently reported: accidental drowning, death from grief, and the third, “ipsum manibus vel præcepto regis Johannis fuisse peremptum”—this last being the assertion of the French, “quibus propter hostilitatem plena fides non est adhibenda.” But his own words in the Chron. Maj. shew that he could not wholly reject the unavoidable conclusion of John’s guilt.

The date of Arthur’s disappearance or death is given only by the Margam annalist. He places it on Maunday Thursday; but unluckily he has damaged his own authority on chronological matters by putting the whole affair a year too late, viz. in 1204 instead of 1203. Will. Armor., on the other hand, tells us that for three days before the murder John was at Moulineaux, near Rouen. These two chronological indications do not exactly agree, for in 1203 Maunday Thursday was April 3, and the Itin. K. John, a. 4 (Hardy, Intr. Pat. Rolls), shews that the king was at Moulineaux on Wednesday, April 2, but on the two preceding days he was at Rouen. It is however plain from the after-history that the deed must have been done shortly before Easter.

CHAPTER X.
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,·/·Howlett, vol. i. 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
Alexander II., Pope, i. 220
Alexander III., Pope, i. 498;
acknowledged in France and England, 502;
grants the pall to Thomas, ii. 6;
meets Henry and Louis at Chouzy, 13;
holds a council at Tours, 14;
relation to the Becket quarrel, 29, 50–52;
condemns Constitutions of Clarendon, 42;
returns to Rome, 55;
appoints Thomas legate, 67;
sends commissioners to mediate between Henry and Thomas, 69, 70;
authorizes Roger of York to crown young Henry, 71;
forbids him, 72;
interdicts the Angevin dominions and excommunicates the murderers of S. Thomas, 79;
sends envoys to Henry, 80

Alexander, bishop of Lincoln, i. 83, 94, 303, 304

Alfhun, master of S. Bartholomew’s hospital, i. 67

Alfonso II., king of Aragon, ii. 133;
helps Richard in Aquitaine, 230, 231

Alfonso VIII., king of Castille, marries Eleanor, daughter of Henry II., ii. 60;
submits his quarrel with Navarre to Henry’s arbitration, 190

Alfonso Jordan, count of Toulouse, i. 455, 456, 458

Alfred of Beverley, ii. 445, 446

Alice of Maurienne betrothed to John Lackland, ii. 132–134;
dies, 184

Almeric of Montfort, i. 232, 236, 237, 238, 241

Almeric, viscount of Thouars, ii. 395, 427, 428

Alnwick, ii. 161
Amboise, i. 105, 106;
house of the Angevin counts at, 151;
Odo’s last attack on, 163.
See Lisoy, Sulpice
Ambrières, i. 209, 211
Anagni, see John
Andegavi, i. 97
Andely, Isle of, ii. 376, 377;
besieged by Philip, 411, 412;
John’s attempt to relieve it, 413–415;
taken, 416
Andely, Nouvel or Petit, ii. 377;
taken by Philip, 416;
fate of its townsfolk, 417, 418
Andes, i. 97, 130
Andrew of London, i. 363
Angareth, wife of William de Barri, ii. 453
Angers (Juliomagus), i. 98;
its position as a border-fortress, 101;
seized by northmen, 103;
relieved by Charles the Bald, ib., 104;
its aspect in tenth century, 108;
palace of the counts, 109, 132–134, 165;
of the bishops, 133;
fires at, ib., 152;
R. Diceto’s description of, 134;
Henry I. of France at, 213;
betrayed to Fulk Rechin, 220;
Urban II. at, 225;
burghers of, revolt against Fulk V., 234;
Fulk Nerra’s buildings at, 165;
abbeys of S. Aubin and S. Sergius at, 98;
our Lady of Charity (Ronceray), 165;
S. Nicolas, ib., 172, 214, 225, 228;
Henry II.’s buildings at, ii. 197, 199, 200;
Henry and his sons at, 224;
given up to Arthur, 389;
seized by his friends, 407;
retaken by John, 428;
bishops, see Albinus, Dodo, Rainald, Raino, Ulger

Angevin March, the, i. 101;
its extent, 130
Angevins, see Anjou
Angoulême, disputed succession, ii. 220.
See Ademar, Isabel, Matilda, Vulgrin, William

Anjou, its geographical position and character, i. 97;
political position, 106, 107;
its character as a marchland, 107;
its golden age, 113;
sources of its history, 126, 127;
county of, “bipartite,” 128, 129, 130;
its extent, 97, 130;
dependence on the duchy of France, 130;
condition at Fulk Rechin’s death, 229;
placed under interdict, 242;
revolts of the barons, 266–267, 343;
rebels in (1173), ii. 136;
condition under Henry II., 194–196;
John acknowledged in, 388;
accepts Arthur, 389;
submits to Philip, 425;
counts of, their origin, i. 105;
character, 108;
palace at Angers, 109, 132–134, 165;
burial-place, 117, note 3{263};
claims upon Nantes, 116, 117;
upon Maine, i. 124, 140–142;
the demon-countess, 143;
house at Amboise, 151;
rivalry with Blois, 145, 150, 188, 271, 279;
extinction of the male line, 214;
decline after Martel’s death, 215, 218;
relations with France, 164; ii. 357;
growth of their power, 187, 188;
career in Palestine, 239;
their work for England, 490, 492.

See Elias, Fulk, Geoffrey, Guy, Henry, Hermengard, Ingelger, Lambert, Matilda, Odo, Robert, Sibyl, William

Annonain, Pont de l’, ii. 200, 201

Anselm, S., archbishop of Canterbury, i. 8, 9;
his struggle with Henry I., 15–18;
consecrates Malchus to Waterford, ii. 89;
dies, i. 63;
proposal to canonize him, ii. 14

Aquitaine, its relations with France, i. 123, 145, 383, 456, 457; ii. 202;
extent and history, i. 454;
granted to Richard, ii. 62;
rebels in (1173), 136;
country and people, 201, 203–205;
its importance for England, 201;
relations with Henry II., 203, 205;
risings in, 58, 109, 220;
submits, 230;
proposal to give it to John, 233;
restored to Richard, 247.
See Eleanor, Odo, Richard, William
Aquitania, i. 99, 454
Aragon, see Alfonso, Ramirez, Petronilla
Arcelles, see Saher

Archambald, brother of Sulpice of Amboise, i. 194

Architecture, English, in twelfth century, i. 55

Aremburg of Maine, betrothed to Geoffrey Martel II., i. 226;
marries Fulk V., 232;
dies, 245
Argentan, i. 373; ii. 79, 80

Aristotle, study of, in the middle ages, ii. 466, 467

Arles, see Bertha, Burgundy, Provence, William

Armagh, synod at, ii. 105.
See Malachi
Arms, Assize of, ii. 177, 178
Arnold, count of Aerschot, i. 362
Arnulf, bishop of Lisieux, i. 500;
persuades Henry II. to acknowledge Pope Alexander, 501;
advises Henry to appeal against Thomas, ii. 65;
rebels, 140
Arques, i. 342; ii. 405, 406, 425
Arthur, King, i. 33;

Henry II.’s correspondence with, ii. 57 note 2{226}, 447;
invention and translation of, 447, 448;
romances of, 448, 449

Arthur, son of Geoffrey and Constance of Britanny, born, ii. 245;
recognized by Richard as his heir, 295;
in custody of Philip, 370;
joins Richard, 374;
acknowledged in Anjou, Touraine and Maine, 389;
does homage to Philip, 390;
quarrels with Philip and goes to John, 394;
flies, 395;
does homage to John, 397;
knighted, 404;
meets the Lusignans at Tours, 405;
besieges Mirebeau, 406;
captured, ib.;
imprisoned, 407;
death, 408, 429, 430;
its consequences, 409
Arundel, i. 10, 309.
See William
Assize of Arms, ii. 177, 178;
of Clarendon, 122, 123;
of the Forest, 177;
Great, 122;
Henry Fitz-Aylwine’s, 485;
of Measures, 348;
of Mort d’ancester, 172;
of Northampton, 172, 173;
later developements, 338–340
Aubigny, see William
Aubrey de Vere, i. 305
Augustinians, see Canons
Aulerci Cenomanni, i. 201, 202
Aumale, see William
Austin canons, see Canons
Austria, see Leopold
Autun, see Lambert
Auvergne, its feudal relations, ii. 202, 203;
attacked by Philip, 252;
Richard gives up his claims upon, 361
Auxerre, Thomas Becket studies at, i. 379

Avesgaud, bishop of Le Mans, i. 159 note 4{343}, 204, 205

Avice of Gloucester betrothed to John Lackland, ii. 184;
married, 282;
divorced, 398
Avranches, ii. 81
Axholm, ii. 152, 155
Azay, conference at, ii. 263
Baggamore, i. 291
“Baille-hache,” i. 353, 354
Bailleul, see Bernard, Jocelyn
Baldwin II., king of Jerusalem, i. 246
Baldwin III., king of Jerusalem, ii. 239
Baldwin IV., king of Jerusalem, ii. 239, 247

Baldwin, archbishop of Canterbury, takes the cross, ii. 248;
preaches the crusade in Wales, 249;
opposes John’s marriage, 282;
dies, 296, 297;
his proposed college, 437
Baldwin, count of Flanders, i. 235
Baldwin of Clare, i. 318, 320
Baldwin of Redvers, i. 284
Balliol, see Bernard, Jocelyn
Ballon, ii. 394
Bamborough, i. 288
Bar, i. 167
Barcelona, county of, i. 462.
See Raymond-Berengar
Barnwell priory, ii. 463
Barri, see Gerald, William
Bartholomew, bishop of Exeter, i. 506
Bath, i. 35, 296.
See Adelard
Bayeux, i. 11, 307.
See Ralf
Baynard’s Castle, i. 44
Beauchamp, see Miles
Beaugency, council at, i. 392
Beaulieu abbey (Hants), ii. 400
Beaulieu abbey (Touraine), i. 154, 155, 168
Beaumont, see Hermengard
Beauvais, council at, i. 502
Becket, see Gilbert, Rohesia, Thomas
Bedford, i. 320

Bela III., king of Hungary, marries Margaret of France, ii. 235

Bellême, house of, i. 204.

See Robert

Benedictines contrasted with the Cistercians, i. 73

“Bene-work,” i. 57

Berengaria of Navarre, wife of Richard I., ii. 295, 296

Bermondsey, council at, i. 427
Bernard, S., abbot of Clairvaux, i. 70, 72;
his influence, 359;
relations with Rome, 360, 361;
with S. Malachi, ii. 94;
plans for England, i. 364;
pleads for Gerald of Montreuil, 388;
recommends John of Salisbury to Abp. Theobald, 483;
death, 400
Bernard de Balliol, ii. 145, 161
Berry, its feudal relations, ii. 202;
war in, 245, 251, 252

Bertha of Arles, widow of Odo I. of Blois, marries King Robert, i. 149;
separated, ib.

Bertha, daughter of Odo of Blois, wife of Alan of Britanny, i. 205;
of Hugh II. of Maine, 206

Bertha, daughter of Conan III. of Britanny, i. 449

Bertrada of Montfort, marries Fulk Rechin, i. 223, 224;
elopes with King Philip, 224;
suspected of contriving her stepson’s death, 228;
her policy, 232
Bertrand de Born, ii. 204, 205;
stirs up revolt in Aquitaine, 209, 220, 366;
his sirvente for Toulouse, 211, 212;
sets the young king against Richard, 222;
submits, 231;
enters a monastery, 371

Bertrand, count of Toulouse and Tripoli, i. 455

Beverley, i. 30, 37, 38.
See Alfred
Béziers, see Raymond
Bigod, see Hugh
Biota of Maine, i. 217, 218, 254

Bishops, English, their political position, i. 20;
appeal against Thomas, ii. 67.

See Church

Blanche of Castille, daughter of Alfonso and Eleanor, ii. 395, 397

Blanche, see Adelaide
Blanchelande, i. 223, 257
Bloet, see Robert

Blois, counts of, their rivalry with Anjou, i. 145, 150, 188;
their character, 150.

See Adela, Bertha, Henry, Odo, Stephen, Theobald, William

Blondel, ii. 324
Bodmin, gild at, ii. 469
“Bogis,” Peter, ii. 421, 422
Bohun, see Humfrey
Bologna, university of, ii. 460;
S. Thomas at, i. 379
Bonmoulins, conference at, ii. 254, 255
Bonneville, i. 307;
council at, ii. 157
“Boon-work,” i. 57
Bordeaux, see William
Born, see Bertrand
Bosham, see Herbert
Boulogne, see Matilda, Matthew, Mary, William
Bourbon, see Hermengard
Bourges, its feudal relations, ii. 202
Bourgthéroulde, battle of, i. 241
Brabantines, ii. 223
Breakspear, see Nicolas
Breffny, ii. 97
Brenneville, battle of, i. 237
Brian Boroimhe, king of Munster, ii. 85
Brian Fitz-Count, i. 243, 328, 396;
his “book,” 369
Bridgenorth, sieges of, i. 10, 429, 430
Brissarthe, i. 103
Bristol, i. 33, 34, 295, 296;
its slave-trade, 35, ii. 87;
Stephen’s attempt on, i. 296, 297;
ill-doings of its garrison, 297;
Dermot of Leinster at, ii. 98, 99;
Henry II.’s charters to, 118
Britanny, i. 99;
its extent under Herispoë, 102 note 1{236}, 130;
civil wars in, 115;

Geoffrey Martel’s dealings with, 211, 212;
claimed by Eudo of Porhoët and Conan of Richmond, 449;
granted by Henry II. to Conan, 451;
Henry’s designs on, 452, 453;
conquered by Henry, ii. 57, 58;
rebels in (1173), 137;
barons of, appeal to Philip against John, 408.

See Alan, Arthur, Conan, Constance, Eleanor, Geoffrey, Herispoë, Hoel, Juhel, Nomenoë, Odo, Solomon

Broc, see Ralf
Bruce, see Adam, Robert
Brulon, see Geoffrey
Burchard, count of Vendôme, i. 149, 189

Burgundy, kingdom of, granted to Richard I., ii. 331.

See Hugh, Robert, Rudolf.

Cadoc, ii. 416, 421, 425

Cadwallader, brother of Owen of North Wales, i. 435

Caen, surrendered to Henry I., i. 11;
to Geoffrey Plantagenet, 307;
to Philip, ii. 424;
hospital, i. 471; ii. 198;
palace, ii. 196, 197.
See Robert
Cæsarodunum, see Tours
Cahors, i. 464, 466
Calixtus II., Pope, i. 237
Cambridge, ii. 462, 463
Camville, see Gerard
Candé, i. 228

Canons, Austin or Augustinian, their origin, i. 64, 65;
character, 43, 66, 357;
in England, 66–69.

See Aldgate, Barnwell, Carlisle, Chiche, Kirkham, Nostell, Oseney, Oxford, Smithfield

Canons, White, i. 357
Canon law, its effects in England, ii. 18
Canterbury, canons of Laon visit, i. 30;
plot to kill Henry Fitz-Empress at, 403;
Thomas elected at, ii. 3;
privilege of the archbishop to crown the king, 62;

S. Thomas slain at, 79;
Henry II.’s penance at, 159;
Louis VII. at, 216;
Philip of Flanders at, 235;
Richard at, 328;
John crowned at, 400.

See Anselm, Baldwin, Geoffrey, Hubert, John, Ralf, Richard, Roger, Theobald, Thomas, Walter, William

Capua, see Peter
Caputii, ii. 223, 224
Carcassonne, see Raymond Trencavel
Carham, i. 286, 287, 292.
See Wark
Carlisle, i. 36, 37;
S. Godric at, 76;
council at, 300;
Henry Fitz-Empress knighted at, 377;
meeting of Henry and Malcolm IV. at, 462;
besieged by William the Lion, ii. 153, 154;
meeting of William and Henry at, 237;
earldom of, granted to Henry of Scotland, i. 282;
claimed by Ralf of Chester, 314;
see of, 37, 69
Carrick, ii. 109, 111
Carthusians, ii. 435, 436 note 1{2171}
Carucage of 1194, ii. 328, 329, 342;
the Great, 352–354
Carucate, ii. 352
Cashel, metropolis of Munster, ii. 94;
council at, 115

Castille, see Alfonso, Blanche, Constance, Eleanor

Castle Cary, i. 295, 298
Celestine II., Pope, i. 355, 356
Celestine III., Pope, ii. 303, 304, 312, 351
Celle, see Peter
Cenomanni (Aulerci), i. 201, 202
Cenomannia, see Maine
Châlus, ii. 382, 385
Champagne, see Henry, Odo, Stephen, Theobald
Chancellor, the, his office, i. 22, 419.

See Geoffrey, Matthew, Nigel, Ralf, Robert, Roger, Waldric, William

Charles the Bald, Emperor, i. 99, 102, 103, 105

Charles the Fat, king of West-Frankland and Emperor, i. 104

Charles the Simple, king of West-Frankland, i. 104

Charter of Henry I., i. 8;
Henry II., 427;
Stephen, 279, 284
Chartres, see Blois
Château-Gaillard, ii. 375–380;
siege, 416–423;
John’s buildings at, 413, 421, 422
Châteaudun, i. 156.
See Landry
Châteaulandon, see Gâtinais
Château-du-Loir, i. 390.
See Gervase
Châteauneuf-sur-Sarthe, i. 267
Châteauneuf, see Tours
Châteauroux, ii. 211, 213, 245, 251
Châtillon, conference at, ii. 253
Chaumont-sur-Loire, i. 272 note 1{662}, 471
Chef-Boutonne, battle of, i. 215, 252, 253
Cherbourg, siege of, i. 340
Chester, i. 36;
its slave-trade, ib., ii. 87;
meeting of Henry II. and Malcolm IV. at, i. 438;
privileges granted to its burghers at Dublin, ii. 484;
earldom of, its peculiar character, i. 313, 314.

See Hugh, Ralf
Chiche, priory of S. Osyth at, i. 68, 80
Chichester, see Hilary
Chinon won by Fulk Nerra, i. 167;
Geoffrey the Bearded imprisoned at, 221;
bequeathed to Geoffrey Plantagenet II., 394, 444;
councils at, ii. 58, 64;
Henry II.’s buildings at, 197, 200;
treasury at, plundered by Richard, 246;
Henry II. at, 263, 267;
given up to John, 388, 395;
taken by Philip, 426
Chouzy, conference at, ii. 13
Christchurch or Twinham, i. 32
Chrodegang of Metz, rule of, i. 65
Chronicle, English, i. 81, 82
Church, English, under Henry I., i. 63;
the Augustinian revival, 64–69;
the Cistercian revival, 69–74;
new sees, 68, 69;
its national character, 80;
political position of the bishops, 20;
condition during the anarchy, 347–360;
relations with Rome, 378;
position at accession of Henry II., 474;
vacant sees (1161), 503;
Henry’s schemes of reform, ii. 17–20;
question of the “two swords,” ib. 22, 23;
quarrel of Henry and Thomas, its effects, 46–50;
course of the revival after Theobald’s death, 432;
condition in Henry II.’s later years, 433–438.

See Clergy

Church, Irish, its early glory, ii. 82, 86;
condition in eleventh and twelfth centuries, 91–93;
settlement at Synod of Kells, 94;
submits to Henry II., 115
Circuits, see Justices
Cirencester, i. 330, 333

Cistercians or White Monks, their origin, i. 69, 70;
in England, 71;
work and influence, 74, 358, 359;
quarrel with John, ii. 396, 399, 400;
fall, 434, 435.

See Cîteaux, Clairvaux, Fountains, Newminster, Pontigny, Rievaux, Tintern, Waverley

Cîteaux, i. 70
Clairvaux (abbey), i. 70; ii. 70, 94
Clairvaux (castle), ii. 222, 224

Clare, see Baldwin, Gilbert, Isabel, Richard, Roger, Walter

Clarendon, council of, ii. 25–28, 44, 45;
Constitutions of, 26, 27;
condemned by the Pope, 42;
Assize of, 46, 122, 123
Cleobury, i. 429

Clergy, their position under Henry I., i. 63, 64;
regular and secular, 64, 65;
attitude in the civil war, 321;
criminal clerks, ii. 19.
See Church
Clerkenwell, council at, ii. 241
Clontarf, battle of, ii. 85
Cogan, see Miles
Coinage, debasement under Stephen, i. 293;
new, in 1149, 402 note 1{1204};
in 1158, 453
Colechurch, see Peter

Cöln, gildhall of its citizens in London, ii. 485.

See Reginald
Colombières, conference at, ii. 265, 266
Commune of Le Mans, i. 222;
Gloucester, ii. 469;
London, 309, 310, 344;
York, 469

Conan the Crooked, count of Rennes and duke of Britanny, i. 121;
his war with Geoffrey Greygown, 122, 137–139;
with Fulk the Black, 146–148
Conan II., duke of Britanny, i. 211, 212, 220
Conan III., duke of Britanny, i. 449

Conan, earl of Richmond, claims Britanny, i. 449;
duke, 451;
dies, ii. 80
Conquereux, first battle of, i. 122, 138;
second, 147, 148
Connaught invaded by Miles Cogan, ii. 184.
See Roderic, Terence
Conrad III., Emperor, i. 361
Conrad, marquis of Montferrat, ii. 320, 321
Consilt, battle of, i. 436
Constables, see Henry, Humfrey

Constance of Arles, wife of Robert I. of France, i. 155;
her parents, 190, 192;
her policy, 160, 164

Constance of Britanny, daughter of Conan IV., betrothed to Geoffrey, son of Henry II., ii. 57;
married, 233;
marries Ralf of Chester, 369;
imprisoned, 370;
joins Arthur in Anjou, 389;
does homage to Philip, 390;
marries Guy of Thouars, 395;
dies, 404, note 4{2050}

Constance of Castille, second wife of Louis VII. of France, i. 446, 468

Constance of France, daughter of Louis VI., betrothed to Stephen’s son Eustace, i. 384;
marries him, 394;
marries Raymond V. of Toulouse, 458
Constance, heiress of Sicily, ii. 319
Constantine, Donation of, ii. 95
Constitutions of Clarendon, ii. 26, 27;
condemned by the Pope, 42
Corbeil, see William
Cork, its origin, ii. 83.
See Dermot
Cornwall, see Reginald, William
Coroners, their origin, ii. 338, 339

Councils, see Argentan, Armagh, Beaugency, Beauvais, Bermondsey, Bonneville, Carlisle, Cashel, Clarendon, Clerkenwell, Chinon, Geddington, Gloucester, Inispatrick, Kells, Lisieux, London, Neufmarché, Northampton, Nottingham, Oxford, Pavia, Pipewell, Poitiers, Rathbreasil, Tours, Wallingford, Westminster, Woodstock, Würzburg, York

Council, the Great, its character, i. 20
Courcy, see John, William
Coutances, see Walter
Coventry, see Hugh
Cowton Moor, i. 289
Cricklade, i. 335
Cross, S., see Winchester
Crowmarsh, i. 336, 396
Crown, pleas of the, ii. 337
Crusade, the second, i. 361–363;
in Spain, proposed by Louis VII. and Henry II., 453, 497;
the third, ii. 318–321
Curia Regis, see King’s Court
Customs, “paternal,” i. 16;
royal, ii. 22, 26, 27;
of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, i. 37
Cyprus, ii. 317, 321
Danegeld, i. 25;
abolished, ii. 16, 44
David I., king of Scots, i. 95;
invades England, 282, 286, 287, 288;
defeated at Cowton Moor, 289–291;
treaties with Stephen, 282, 300;
joins the Empress in London, 323;
escapes from Winchester, 328;
knights Henry Fitz-Empress, 377;
dies, 399

David, prince of North-Wales, marries Henry II.’s sister Emma, ii. 181

David, bishop of S. David’s, ii. 454

David, brother of William of Scotland, ii. 140, 153;
claims on Huntingdon and Northampton, 154
David or Hugh, count of Maine, i. 124, 140
David’s, S., bishops of, see David, Peter
Defensor of Le Mans, i. 202
Denis, S., see Suger
Denmark, see Ingebiorg
Déols, ii. 211

Dermot Mac-Carthy, king of Cork or South Munster, ii. 114

Dermot Mac-Maelnambo, king of Leinster, ii. 87, 88

Dermot Mac-Murrough, king of Leinster, ii. 97;
seeks aid of Henry II., 98;
returns to Ireland, 100;
successes in Ossory etc., 102;
summons Richard of Striguil, 103;
dies, 106
Dervorgil, wife of Tighernan O’Ruark, ii. 97
Devizes, i. 304, 321, 330
Dialogus de Scaccario, i. 26
Diceto, see Ralf
Dinan, see Joceas
Dodo, bishop of Angers, i. 109, 133
Dol, ii. 148
Domfront, i. 6, 208, 209
Donatus, bishop of Dublin, ii. 87

Doncaster, earldom of, granted to Henry of Scotland, i. 282

Donell O’Brien, king of Limerick or North Munster, ii. 102, 103, 109, 111, 114

Donell O’Lochlainn, king of Aileach, ii. 90
Donell Kavanagh, ii. 109, 112
Dorchester, see Remigius
Dover, i. 295, 299;
chief mart of the wool trade, 52;
Geoffrey of York arrested at, ii. 305, 306.
See Simon, William
Drausius, S., ii. 65
Dress, English, in twelfth century, i. 56
Dreux, see Robert

Drogo of Nantes, son of Alan Barbetorte, i. 115, 116

Dublin, its origin, ii. 83;
metropolis of Leinster, 94;
taken by Dermot etc., 105;
attacked by wikings, 106;
blockaded by Roderic O’Conor, 109;
Henry II. at, 114, 115;
colonized by Henry, 118;
privileges of the Chester merchants at, 484.

See Donatus, Godred, Gregory, Laurence, Patrick

Dudley, i. 295, 298
Dulcia of Gévaudan, i. 463
Dunstan, S., lives of, i. 80
Dunster, i. 295
Durham, S. Godric at, i. 77;
cathedral, 80;
treaty made at, 300;
customs of the bishop’s estates in 1183, ii. 478–480.

See Hugh, Ralf, Simeon, William
Eadgyth or Edith, S., i. 33
Eadgyth, see Matilda
Eadmer, i. 80, 88

Eadward the Confessor, king of England, his prophecy, i. 1;
his laws demanded by the citizens of London, 324

Eadwulf, prior of Nostell and confessor to Henry I., i. 68;
bishop of Carlisle, 69
Ealdhelm, S., i. 84, 86, 90;
life by Faricius, 81
Earldoms created by Stephen, i. 293
Edith, see Eadgyth
Edmund’s, S., Henry II. at, i. 430;
massacre of Jews at, ii. 289;
its customs, 473, 474;
merchant-gild, 481;
dispute with Ely, 482, 483

Eleanor of Aquitaine, daughter of William IX., marries Louis VII. of France, i. 383;
divorced, 392;
marries Henry, 393;
claims on Toulouse, 457, 458;
attempt to divorce her from Henry, ii. 61;
turns against him, 129;
imprisoned, 135;
Richard gives up Aquitaine to, 235;
regent for Richard, 273, 282;
arranges his marriage, 295, 296;
negotiates at Rome, 303;
returns to England, 314;
ravages Anjou, and does homage to Philip, 390;
goes to Spain, 396;
retires to Fontevraud, 405;
besieged in Mirebeau, 406;
dies, 426

Eleanor, daughter of Henry II., marries Alfonso of Castille, ii. 60, 189

Eleanor of Britanny, daughter of Geoffrey and Constance, ii. 244, 325, 371

Elias, count of Maine, i. 224, 225;
war with William Rufus, 225, 226;
Le Mans surrendered to, 227;
relations with Henry I., 11, 227, 233;
marriages,255;
death, 233
Elias of Anjou, son of Fulk V., i. 343
Elias of Saint-Saëns, i. 235

Elizabeth of Hainaut, first wife of Philip Augustus, ii. 217, 234, note 7{1115}

Elizabeth of Vendôme, first wife of Fulk Nerra, i. 152

Ely, see of, founded, i. 68;
quarrel with S. Edmund’s, ii. 482, 483.
See Geoffrey, Nigel

Emma, daughter of Geoffrey Plantagenet, ii. 181

Emperors, see Charles, Conrad, Frederic, Henry, Otto

Engelram of Trie, i. 467
England under the Angevins, i. 1–3;
relations with Rome, 15;
with Normandy, 23, 24;
invaded by Robert Curthose, 9;
journey of canons of Laon in, 30–35;
its peace under Henry I., 48;
Flemings settle in, 52;
town life in twelfth century, 54, 55;
rural life, 56–62;
revival under Henry I., 64–95;
religious revival during the anarchy, 356–358;
effects of the second Crusade, 362;
rebels in (1173), ii. 138, 139;
loyal barons in, 144, 145;
rebel castles in the north, 152;
royal strongholds, 153;
condition of rural population under the Angevins, 473–480;
fusion of races, 489;
growth of national feeling, 489.

See Church, Literature, Towns, Trade.

See also Eadward, Eleanor, Henry, John, Jane, Matilda, Richard, Stephen, William

“English” and “French,” i. 24

“English” and “Normans,” different meanings of, i. 23, 24

English and Normans, fusion of, i. 24, 48, 49; ii. 489, 490

Englishry, presentment of, abolished, ii. 489
Essex, see Geoffrey, Henry, William
Este, see Hugh
Euclid, Adelard of Bath’s version of, ii. 95
Eudo, count of Porhoët, i. 449
Eugene III., Pope, i. 361;
deposes S. William and consecrates Henry Murdac, 366;
suspends Henry of Winchester and threatens Stephen, 368;
makes Abp. Theobald legate, 380;
forbids the crowning of Eustace, 391;
dies, 400

Eustace, son of Stephen, king of England, does homage to Louis VI. for Normandy, i. 286;
knighted, 377;
goes to York, 380;
his prospects, 382;
goes to France, 383;
betrothed to Constance, 384;
attacks Normandy, 385;
receives homage, 391;
proposal to crown him, ib.;
marriage, 394;
character, 398;
death, 399
Eustace Fitz-John, i. 72, 288
Eva, daughter of Dermot Mac-Murrough, ii. 104
Evreux ceded to Henry I., i. 11, 62;
betrayed to Almeric of Montfort, 236;
fired by Henry I., ib., 237;
granted to Almeric, 238;
taken by Philip Augustus, ii. 389;
ceded to him, 396.
See Simon
Exchequer, court of, i. 21;
organization under Bishop Roger, 25–27;
headquarters, 31;
Black Book of, ii. 125;
the Norman Exchequer, 194, 197
Exeter, i. 32, 284.
See Bartholomew
Eynesford, see William
Falaise besieged by Henry I., i. 11;
attacked by Geoffrey Plantagenet, 307;
submits, 338;
treaties at, ii. 165, 166;
Arthur imprisoned at, 407;
submits to Philip, 424

Faricius, abbot of Abingdon, i. 68 note 1{187}, 81

Farringdon, i. 335
Faye, see Ralf
Ferm of the shire, i. 25;
of towns, 29
Ferrers, see Robert
Ferté-Bernard, La, conference at, ii. 257
Finchale, i. 77, 78
Fitz-Alan, see William
Fitz-Aldhelm, see William
Fitz-Aylwine, see Henry
Fitz-Count, see Brian, Richard
Fitz-David, see Miles
Fitz-Duncan, see William
Fitz-Gerald, see Maurice
Fitz-John, see Eustace, William
Fitz-Osbert, see William
Fitz-Peter, see Geoffrey, Simon
Fitz-Ralf, see William
Fitz-Stephen, see Robert, William
Fitz-Urse, see Reginald
Flambard, see Ralf

Flanders granted to William the Clito, i. 243;
trade with England, 30, 51, 52.
See Baldwin, Matthew, Philip, Theodoric
Flèche, La, i. 222, 223, 256, 257

Flemings, their settlements in England and Wales, i. 52, 53;
in England under Stephen, 285;
plot to kill Henry, 403;
expelled, 427;
land in Suffolk, ii. 155;
at Hartlepool, 162
Fleury, abbey, i. 112
Florence, S., of Saumur, i. 162
Florence of Worcester, i. 82, 88, 89, 90
Foliot, see Gilbert
Folkmoot of London, i. 45
Fontevraud, i. 248;
Henry II. buried at, ii. 270–272;
Richard buried at, ii. 386;
Eleanor at, 385, 405
Forest, assizes of, i. 285; ii. 171, 177, 356
Fornham, battle at, ii. 150
Foss-Dyke, i. 40
Foss-Way, i. 38
Fougères, see Ralf
Fountains abbey, i. 71–73;
burnt, 366
France, duchy of, see French

France, kingdom of, character of its early history, i. 144;
condition under Hugh Capet, 145;
under Louis VI., 230;
relations with Normandy, 24, 111;
with Toulouse, 457, 458;
with Rome, 501, 502;
union with Aquitaine, 383;
its developement, ii. 357–361.

See Adela, Constance, Henry, Hugh, Louis, Margaret, Mary, Odo, Philip, Robert

Frankland, West, northmen in, i. 100.

See Charles, Lothar, Louis, Odo, Robert, Rudolf

Frederic Barbarossa, Emperor, supports antipope Victor IV., i. 498;
relations with Henry II., 499; ii. 55, 60, 238;
banishes Henry the Lion, 238, 257;
takes the cross, 256;
dies, 318

French, dukes of the, extent of their duchy, i. 103, 105;
underfiefs, 105;
claims upon Maine, 124.
See Hugh, Odo, Robert
“French and English,” i. 24
Fréteval, ii. 73, 366
Fritheswith or Frideswide, S., i. 43.
See Oxford
Fulk the Red, first count of Anjou, i. 106;
his neighbours, 109;
political position, 109, 110;
marriage, 110;
death, 113;
chronology of his life, 128, 129, 132
Fulk II. the Good, count of Anjou, i. 113;
his rule, 113, 115;
canon of S. Martin’s, 114;
letter to Louis IV., ib.;
marriages, 116;
claims upon Nantes, ib.;
death, 117;
vision of S. Martin, 118;
prophecy made to, ib.;
its fulfilment, ii. 187, 373

Fulk III., the Black, count of Anjou, his mother, i. 136;
surnames, 143, note 2{294};
character, 144;
significance of his life, 145, 146, 169;
war with Conan of Rennes, 146, 147;
regains Anjou west of Mayenne, 148;
attacks Blois, 149;
rivalry with Odo II., 150;
castle-building, 151;
seizure of the water-ways, 151–152;
first marriage, 152;
first pilgrimage, 153, 192;
founds Beaulieu abbey, 153–155;
marries Hildegard, 154;
second pilgrimage, 156, 192–195;
his oath, 155;
contrives the death of Hugh of Beauvais, ib.;
sacks Châteaudun, 156;
alliance with Maine, ib.;
victory at Pontlevoy, 157, 158;
subdues Hugh of Maine, 159;
imprisons Herbert of Maine, ib.;
invested with Saintes, ib., 173;
fortifies Montboyau, 161;
takes Saumur, 162;
besieges Montbazon, 163;
treaty with Odo, ib.;
his policy and its success, 164;
makes peace between Constance and her son, ib.;
joins King Henry’s expedition against Sens, ib.;
his home, 165;
buildings at Angers, ib.;
third pilgrimage, 166, 195, 196;
rebellion of his son, 166, 195;
wins Chinon, 167;
fourth pilgrimage, 167, 168;
quarrels with his son, 172, 175;
death, 168;
his tomb, ib.;
his work, 169, 188

Fulk IV. Rechin, son of Geoffrey of Gâtinais and Hermengard of Anjou, invested with Saintonge, i. 214;
his character, 219;
intrigues against his brother, ib.;
wins Saumur and Angers, 220;
captures Geoffrey, ib.;
does homage for Touraine, 221;
cedes Gâtinais to France, ib.;
his rule, ib.;
drives Geoffrey of Mayenne from Le Mans, 222;
besieges La Flèche, ib., 223, 257;
receives Robert’s homage for Maine, 223;
his marriages, 224;
excommunicated, ib.;
absolved, 225;
quarrels with his eldest son, 227, 228;
dies, 229;
his reign and its results, ib.;
his Angevin history, 127
Fulk V., count of Anjou, i. 229;
character and policy, 231, 232;
marries Aremburg, 232;
quarrel with Henry I. and alliance with France, 233;
homage to Henry, 234;
revolt of the burghers against, ib.;
joins league against Henry, 235;
wins Alençon, 236;
treaty with Henry, ib.;
goes to Jerusalem, 238;
quarrel with Henry, 240;
offers Maine to Clito, ib.;
imprisons the legate’s envoys, 242;
marries Melisenda and becomes king of Jerusalem, 246–248;
dies, 361
Fulk the Gosling, count of Vendôme, i. 214
Gaimar, see Geoffrey
Galloway, ii. 164, 179, 237

Gandrea, wife of Theobald III. of Blois, i. 255, 256

Gascony, Richard’s campaign in, ii. 214;
revolt in, 316.
See Guy-Geoffrey, Odo
Gatian, S., bishop of Tours, i. 179
Gâtinais, county of, i. 129;
ceded to France, 221;
counts, 249, 250
Gaubert of Mantes, ii. 415
Geddington, council at, ii. 249
Gelduin of Saumur, i. 161, 162
Geoffrey I. Greygown, count of Anjou, i. 118;
his character, 119;
joins invasion of Lorraine, 120;
his marriages, 121, 134–136;
relations with Britanny, 121, 122, 137–139;
with Maine, 124, 140–142;
war with Poitou, 123, 137, 139;
wins Loudun, 123, 124, 139;
founds church of our Lady at Loches, 153;
dies at siege of Marson, 125

Geoffrey II. Martel, son of Fulk the Black, born, i. 154;
nursed at Loches, ib.;
count of Vendôme, 172;
quarrel with Fulk, ib., 175;
marries Agnes, 136, 174, 197, 199;
war with Poitou, 173–175;
wins Saintonge, 174;
rebels, 166, 195, 196;
count of Anjou, 169;
his character, 170–172;
invested with Tours, 178;
besieges it, 184;
victory at Montlouis, 186;
treaty with Theobald, 187;
its significance, 188;
advocate of see of Le Mans, 205;
imprisons Bp. Gervase, 206;
master of Maine, ib.;
excommunicated, ib.;
revolts, 207;
wins Alençon and Domfront, 208;
challenges William and retires, 209;
war with Aquitaine, 210;
besieges Ambrières, 211;
dealings with Nantes, 211, 212;
marries Grecia, 212;
blockaded in Saumur, 213;
joins invasion of Normandy, ib., 214;
loses Vendôme, 214;
dies, ib.;
break-up of his dominions, 215;
dispute over them, 218;
his heirs, 251–252

Geoffrey III. the Bearded, count of Anjou, i. 214;
victory at Chef-Boutonne, 215, 252, 253;
receives Robert’s homage for Maine, 217;
wrongs Marmoutier, 220;
captured by Fulk, ib.;
imprisoned at Chinon, 221;
released and dies, 228

Geoffrey Martel II. of Anjou, son of Fulk Rechin, betrothed to Aremburg of Maine, i. 226;
joins Henry I., 11;
quarrel with Fulk, 227, 228;
slain, 228

Geoffrey V. Plantagenet, son of Fulk V. and Aremburg, knighted by Henry I., i. 244;
marriage, ib., 258–260;
his person and character, 261–265;
quarrels with his wife, 266;
with Henry, 269, 270;
invades Normandy, 281, 306, 307;
revolts against, 266, 267, 306, 343, 384;
summoned to England, 330;
treaty with Theobald, 337;
conquers Normandy, 338–342;
recalls his son, 343;
challenge to Stephen, 369;
cedes Normandy to his son, ib., 377;
his siege of Montreuil, 384, 386;
treatment of Gerald, 387;
cedes the Vexin to Louis, 388;
death, 389, 390;
burial, 390;
will, 444

Geoffrey of Anjou, second son of Geoffrey and Matilda, born, i. 373;
seeks to marry Eleanor, 393;
rebels against Henry, 394, 395, 444, 445;
count of Nantes, 449;
dies, ib.
Geoffrey I., duke of Britanny, i. 137, 148

Geoffrey, fourth son of Henry II. and Eleanor, born, i. 453;
acknowledged heir to Britanny, ii. 58;
duke, 80;
revolts, 135;
knighted, 214;
joins young Henry, 225;
submits, 232;
marries Constance, 233;
dies, 243

Geoffrey, son of Henry II., bishop-elect of Lincoln, ii., 155;
takes Kinardferry etc., ib.;
chancellor, 245;
secures castles of Anjou, 256;
with Henry at Le Mans, 258, 259, 260;
at La Frênaye, 262;
goes to Alençon, ib.;
rejoins Henry, 263;
his devotion to Henry, 268;
appointed archbishop of York, 274, 278, 302;
early life, 301, 302;
character, 304;
consecrated, 305;
returns to England, ib.;
arrested, ib.;
released, 306;
joins John, 307;
enthroned, 313;
quarrel with Hugh of Durham, ib., 316;
buys sheriffdom of Yorkshire, 330;
driven from England, 335;
redeems the Lincoln church-plate, 487

Geoffrey (Alberic), count of Gâtinais, marries Hermengard of Anjou, i. 214, 249, 250

Geoffrey of Brulon, ii. 259
Geoffrey of Chaumont, i. 272, note 1{662}
Geoffrey Fitz-Peter, justiciar, ii. 355, 356;
earl of Essex, 393
Geoffrey Gaimar, ii. 446

Geoffrey of Lusignan, ii. 59 note 1{235}, 136, 250, 405

Geoffrey of Mandeville, i. 334, 335

Geoffrey de Mandeville, earl of Essex, ii. 124

Geoffrey of Mayenne, i. 211;
holds Le Mans for Walter of Mantes, 218;
submits to William, ib.;
revolts, 221, 222, 224
Geoffrey of Monmouth, ii. 445, 448
Geoffrey of Rancogne, ii. 214, 250, 367

Geoffrey Ridel, archdeacon of Canterbury, ii. 30, 77;
vice-chancellor, 142;
bishop of Ely, 176;
dies, 277
Geoffrey Talbot, i. 294, 296

Gerald de Barri (“Giraldus Cambrensis”), ii. 452–460

Gerald of Montreuil-Bellay, i. 384, 385, 386, 388

Geraldines, the, ii. 108, 183

Gerard de Camville, ii. 280, 298, 299, 300, 329

Gerard la Pucelle, ii. 449

Gerberga, wife of Fulk the Good, i. 116, note 1{258}

Germany, English trade with, under the Angevins, ii. 484, 485

Gersendis of Maine, i. 221, 254–256

Gervase of Château-du-Loir, bishop of Le Mans, i. 205;
imprisoned by Geoffrey Martel, 206;
released, ib.;
archbishop of Reims, 207

Gesta Consulum Andegavensium, its authorship and character, i. 126, 127

Gévaudan, see Dulcia
Gilbert of Sempringham, S., i. 359, 360
Gilbert Becket, i. 50

Gilbert Foliot, abbot of Gloucester, i. 369, 370, 493;
bishop of Hereford, 371, 495;
his earlier history, 492, 493;
career as abbot, 494, 495;
relations with Abp. Theobald and with Henry II., 495, 496;
with Roger of Pont-l’Evêque, 478, 479;
character, 496, 497;
remarks on Thomas’s election, ii. 3, 6;
translated to London, 13, 14;
relations with Thomas, 13, 31, 49;
at council of Northampton, 35, 36, 37, 39;
his attitude in the Becket quarrel, 47–49;
his share in the bishops’ appeal, 67;
excommunicated, 70;
denies the primate’s jurisdiction, ib.;
absolved, 72;
dies, 277
Gilbert, bishop of Limerick, ii. 92;
legate in Ireland, ib., 93

Gilbert de Clare, earl of Pembroke, i. 377, 395, 396; ii. 99

Gilds, i. 29;
under Henry II. and Richard, ii. 469, 470;
leather-sellers’, i. 30;
merchant, i. 29, 36, 40, 43; ii. 481;
weavers’, i. 30, 52; ii. 481
Gildhall, i. 129;
of German merchants, ii. 485
Gilles, St., see Raymond
Giraldus Cambrensis, see Gerald
Gisors, i. 231, 234, 343;
meeting of Henry I. and Pope Calixtus at, 237, 238;
of Louis VII. and Henry II. at, ii. 148, 165;
claimed by Philip, 232, 236
Glanville, see Hervey, Ralf

Glastonbury, invention of Arthur at, ii. 447, 448

Gleeman, the, i. 90
Gloucester, i. 35, 36;
abbey and city, 493, 494;
council at, ii. 170;
commune at, 469.

See Avice, Gilbert, Miles, Philip, Robert, William

Godfrey de Lucy, bishop of Winchester, ii. 277, 288

Godfrey, abbot of Malmesbury, i. 84, 85
Godred, king of Dublin, ii. 88
Godric, S., i. 74–79
“Goliath, Bishop,” ii. 452
Gouleton, ii. 396, 402
Gournay, ii. 403.
See Hugh
Graçay, ii. 213, 361
Grandmesnil, see Ivo, Petronilla
Grandmont, ii. 58, 226;
order of, 435
Gratian, his work on canon law, i. 378

Grecia of Montreuil, second wife of Geoffrey Martel, i. 212

Gregory, archbishop of Dublin, ii. 94
Gregory, bishop of Tours, i. 181
Gué-St.-Rémy, ii. 244

Guerech, bishop and count of Nantes, i. 121, 122, 146

Guimund, prior of S. Frideswide’s, Oxford, i. 43

“Guirribecs,” i. 306

Guy of Anjou (son of Fulk the Red), bishop of Soissons, i. 112, 113

Guy of Anjou, son of Fulk the Good, i. 119
Guy of Crema, see Paschal
Guy, viscount of Limoges, ii. 407
Guy of Lusignan, ii. 59 note 1{235}, 136;
king of Jerusalem, 247;
Cyprus, 317, 321;
ally of Richard, 318, 320
Guy of Thouars, ii. 395, 424
Guy-Geoffrey, count of Gascony, i. 176, 212.
See William VII. of Aquitaine
Hackington, college at, ii. 437
Hainaut, see Elizabeth

Hameline, earl of Warren, son of Geoffrey Plantagenet, ii. 40, 144

Hamo de Massey, ii. 139
Hans-house, i. 29;
at York, 36

Harding or Stephen, founder of Cîteaux, i. 69, 70

Harptree, i. 295, 298
Hasculf Thorgils’ son, ii. 105, 106
Hautefort, ii. 204, 231
Haye, La, see Richard

Henry I., son of William the Conqueror, his early life, i. 4–6;
character, 6, 7;
election and coronation, 7;
charter, 8;
marriage, 1, 8, 9;
treaty with Robert, 9;
proceedings against traitors, 10;
Norman campaigns, 11;
victory at Tinchebray, 12, 13;
policy, 13–15, 19;
struggle with Anselm, 15–18;
character of his reign, 19;
his work, 19, 20;
love of “foreigners,” 23;
his ministers, ib.;
called “the Lion of Justice,” 26;
charter to York, 30, 36;
to Norwich, 41;
London, 45, 46;
palace at Woodstock, 44, 94;
court at Oxford, 44;
his “good peace,” 30 note 4{58}, 48, 95;
settles Flemings in Pembroke, 52;
dealings with the Church, 63;
results, 64;
founds see of Ely, 68;
Carlisle, 69;
revival of literature under, 80–95;
relations with Maine, 227;
with France, 230, 231;
wars with France and Anjou, 233, 235;
treaties with Fulk, 234, 236;
victory at Brenneville, 237;
meets Calixtus at Gisors, ib., 238;
treaty with Louis, 238;
wreck of his hopes, 239, 240;
quarrel with Fulk, 240;
quells revolt in Normandy, 241;
alliance with Henry V., ib.;
proclaims Matilda his heiress, 243;
last years, 268–270;
death, 271;
possible successors, 274–275;
state of England after his death, 279;
burial, 282;
his court, 413
Henry II. Fitz-Empress born, i. 268;
Eadward’s prophecy fulfilled in, 1;
Witan swear fealty to, 269;
his early life, 372–374;
tutors, 375, 376;
goes to England, 334;
returns to Anjou, 343;
duke of Normandy, 369, 377;
goes to England, 377;
knighted, ib.;
returns, 378;
besieges Torigni, 386, 405;
does homage to Louis, 388;
marries Eleanor, 393;
ignores Louis’s jurisdiction, 394;
war with Louis and Geoffrey, 395;
lands in England, 396;
besieges Malmesbury, 397;
colloquy at Wallingford, ib.;
treaty with Stephen, 400, 401;
receives homage, 402;
plot to kill him, 403;
returns to Gaul, ib.;
effects of his visit to England, ib.;
resumes Norman demesnes, 404;
peace with Louis, 405;
comes to England, ib.;
crowned, ib.;
his work, 407;
person and character, 408–411, 414–417;
court, 411–413;
first ministers, 417, 418;
relations with Becket, 420, 423–427;
charter, 427;
settlement of the country, ib.;
of the succession, 429;
subdues William of Aumale, 428;
and Hugh of Mortemer, 429;
holds court at S. Edmund’s, 430;
goes to Anjou, 431;
scheme for conquering Ireland, ib., ii. 95;
effects of his first two years’ work in England, i. 431–434;
returns, 434;
demands Northumberland etc., 435;
receives Malcolm’s homage, 438;
wears his crown at Wigford, ib., 439;
at Worcester, 439;
his position compared with Cnut’s, 2, 440, 441;
relations with France, 441, 442;
does homage, 443;
subdues Geoffrey, 444, 445;
proposes for Margaret as wife for his son, 446;
seneschal of France, 450;
grants Britanny to Conan and obtains Nantes, 451;
designs on Britanny, 452, 453;
claims Toulouse, 458;
great scutage, 459–461;
his allies, 462, 463;
knights Malcolm, 464;
takes Cahors and threatens Toulouse, ib.;
withdraws, 465;
treaty, 467;
quarrel with Thomas, 469;
drives Louis from Chaumont, 471;
principle of his reforms, 474;
projects of crusade, 453, 497;
attitude towards the religious revival, 497;
relations with Adrian IV., ib.;
with Germany, 499, 502;
acknowledges Alexander III. as Pope, 502;
appoints Thomas archbishop, ii. 1;
meets Alexander and Louis, 13;
goes to England, ib.;
receives homage of Welsh princes at Woodstock, 14;
quarrel with Thomas, 15, 16;
plans of reform in criminal legislature, 17–20;
propounds his grandfather’s customs at Westminster, 22;
meets Thomas at Northampton, 23;
at Oxford, 24;
publishes constitutions of Clarendon, 26;
meets Thomas at Woodstock, 31, 32;
council of Northampton, 32–40;
sends envoys to the Pope, 41;
confiscates the primate’s estates and banishes his friends, 42;
effects of the quarrel, 46–49;
goes to Normandy, 54;
receives envoys from the Emperor, 55, 60;
plans for his children, 57, 60;
conquers Britanny, 57, 58;
correspondence with Arthur, 57 note 2{226}, 447;
meets Raymond, 58;
attempt to divorce him from Eleanor, 61;
does homage at Montmirail, ib., 62;
holds council at Chinon, 64;
appeals to Rome, 65;
drives Thomas from Pontigny, 68;
meets him at Montmirail, 69;
meets Louis and Thomas at Montmartre, 71;
at Fréteval, 73;
meets Thomas at Tours and Chaumont, 74;
goes to Rocamadour, ib.;
rash words at Bures, 78;
absolved, 81;
promises help to Dermot, 99;
forbids the war in Ireland, 108;
summons Richard of Striguil to Wales, 112;
goes to Ireland, 80, 113;
his fleet, 112;
Irish princes submit to, 114;
settlement of Ireland, 117;
of Dublin, 118;
goes to Normandy, 119;
relations with the barons, 120, 121, 126, 128;
legal and administrative reforms, 122–127;
inquest on Norman demesnes, 128;
alliance with Maurienne, 131;
receives homage of Toulouse, 133;
quarrel with young Henry, 134, 135;
revolt against, 141;
visits England, 143;
his adherents, 144–146;
takes Dol, 148;
meets Louis, ib.;
subdues rebels in Touraine, 151;
regains Saintes, 157;
returns to England, 158;
pilgrimage to Canterbury, 159;
receives news of William’s capture, 160;
takes Huntingdon and subdues Hugh Bigod, 163;
relieves Rouen, 164;
subdues Poitou, 165;
reconciled with his sons, ib.;
treaty with William the Lion, 166;
treatment of the rebels, 167;
end of the struggle, 166, 168;
his position after it, 169;
administrative work in England, 170–178;
his forest visitations, 171;
receives homage for Scotland, 178;
dealings with Wales, i. 435–437; ii. 179–181, 237, 453, 455;
treaty with Roderic O’Conor, ii. 182;
appoints John king of Ireland, 184;
character of his empire, 185–187;
continental policy, 188–191;
arbitrates between Castille and Navarre, 190;
administration in Normandy, 192–194;
buildings, 196, 197;
religious foundations, 197 and note 4{948};
hospitals, 198, 199;
Levée, 200;
bridges, ib.;
relations with Aquitaine, 203, 205;
quarrel with Louis, 212;
treaty, 213;
takes Châteauroux, ib.;
buys La Marche, 214;
house of Blois seek his help, 217;
makes peace in France, ib., 219;
tries to make peace among his sons, 224;
summons a conference at Mirebeau, 225;
besieges Limoges, ib.;
arrests rebel leaders of 1173, 226;
forgives young Henry, 227;
Aquitaine submits to, 230;
interview with Bertrand de Born, 231;
homage to Philip, 232;
proposes to transfer Aquitaine to John, 233, 242;
makes John governor of Ireland, 234;
mediates between France and Flanders, 235;
receives submission of Galloway, 237;
receives the patriarch Heraclius, 240;
meets Philip, 244;
marches into Berry, 245;
truce, 246;
reinstates Richard in Aquitaine, 247;
meets Philip, 248;
takes the cross, 249;
musters his forces in Normandy, 252;
meets Philip, 253;
conference at Bonmoulins, 254;
goes into Aquitaine, 256;
meets Richard, ib.;
goes to Le Mans, 257;
conference at La Ferté, ib.;
flies, 259–262;
returns to Anjou, 262;
goes to Chinon and Azay, 263;
submits to Philip at Colombières, 265, 266;
learns John’s treason, 267;
last days, 268;
death, 269;
burial, 270, 272;
points out Arthur’s tomb, 447;
grants trading privileges to Chester, 484;
grants burial-grounds to the Jews, 486

Henry, second son of Henry II. and Eleanor, born, i. 429, 445;
betrothal, 446, 448;
does homage for Normandy, 468;
marriage, 470;
intrusted to Thomas for education, 471, 472;
recognised heir to the crown, 472, 473;
receives homage of Malcolm IV., ii. 15;
withdrawn from Thomas, 23;
homage at Montmirail, 62;
receives Geoffrey’s homage for Britanny, ib.;
officiates as seneschal and does homage to Philip, ib.;
crowned, 72;
crowned again, 81;
rebels, 129, 130;
flies to France, 134;
threatens to invade England, 158, 162;
reconciled, 165;
receives homage of William the Lion, 178;
joins Richard in Aquitaine, 209, 210;
besieges Châteauroux, 211;
at crowning of Philip Augustus, 216, 218, 219;
character, 221;
quarrel with Richard, 222;
enters Aquitaine, 223;
confesses his league with the Poitevins, 224;
holds Limoges against his father, 225;
driven thence, 226;
plunders Grandmont, ib.;
and Rocamadour, 227;
death, ib., 228;
burial, 230, 232
Henry III., Emperor, i. 176
Henry V., Emperor, i. 241, 242

Henry VI., Emperor, his claims on Sicily, ii. 319;
demands for Richard’s ransom, 324, 325;
negotiates with Philip and John, 327;
grants Burgundian kingdom to Richard, 331;
conquers Sicily, 371, 372;
stirs up Richard against France, 372;
dies, ib.

Henry I., king of France, joins Odo II. against Fulk Nerra, i. 163;
tries to drive Odo from Sens, 164;
revolt against, 177, 178;
grants Tours to Geoffrey Martel, 178;
relations with Normandy and Anjou, 207, 210;
visits Angers, 213;
invades Normandy, ib.;
defeated at Varaville, ib., 214;
dies, 214

Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester, his early life, i. 347;
supports Stephen, 277, 279;
legate, 305;
summons Stephen before a council at Winchester, 305;
advice at siege of Arundel, 309;
escorts Matilda to Bristol, 310;
receives her at Winchester, 321;
holds council there, 322;
again declares for Stephen, 324, 325;
his fortress of Wolvesey, 325;
besieged, 326;
fires the city, ib.;
holds council at Westminster and again proclaims Stephen, 329, 330;
his Church policy, 348;
character, 349;
position as legate, ib., 350;
elected to Canterbury, 350;
rivalry with Theobald, 351;
loses the legation, 356;
goes to Rome, ib.;
founds S. Cross, 357;
suspended, 368;
appeals, 381;
absolved, ib.;
consecrates S. Thomas, ii. 5;
at council of Northampton, 35, 36, 37, 41;
dies, 80

Henry the Liberal, count of Champagne, joins invasion of Normandy, i. 394;
betrothed to Mary of France, 445

Henry II., count of Champagne, king of Jerusalem, ii. 321

Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, betrothed to Matilda, daughter of Henry II., ii. 55;
married, 59, 60;
exiled 238, 257;
regains his lands, 319

Henry, son of David king of Scots, made earl of Carlisle and Huntingdon, i. 282;

Northumberland promised to, 286;
at battle of the Standard, 290, 291;
earl of Northumberland, 300;
at siege of Ludlow, 301, 302;
dies, 399
Henry of Albano, legate, ii. 256, 257
Henry of Essex, constable, i. 434;
drops standard at Consilt, 436, 437;
present in war of Toulouse, 466;
defeated in ordeal of battle, ii. 61
Henry Fitz-Aylwine, mayor of London, ii. 472;
his assize, 485
Henry of Huntingdon, i. 82, 83, 94
Henry Murdac, abbot of Fountains, i. 365;
opposes S. William, ib.;
archbishop of York, 366;
his troubles in Yorkshire, 367, 380;
reconciled to the king and enthroned, 381;
goes to Rome, ib.;
opposes election of Hugh of Puiset to Durham, 399, 400;
death, 400
Henry of Pisa, cardinal, ii. 2
Heraclius, patriarch of Jerusalem, ii. 240

Herbert I. Wake-dog, count of Maine, saves Fulk at Pontlevoy, i. 157, 158;
his surname, 159;
imprisoned by Fulk, ib.;
quarrels with Bp. Avesgaud, ib. note 4{343}, 204;
death, 204;
daughters, 254, 255
Herbert II., count of Maine, i. 216

Herbert Bacco usurps the county of Maine, i. 204;
quarrels with Bishop Gervase, 205;
expelled, ib.

Herbert Lozinga, bishop of Thetford, removes his see to Norwich, i. 41

Herbert, bishop of Salisbury, withstands Hubert Walter, ii. 350

Herbert of Bosham, ii. 9, 10, 38, 40, 75;
verdict on the Becket quarrel, 47
Hereford, i. 36;
castle seized by Geoffrey Talbot, 294;
yields to Stephen, 295.
See Gilbert, Miles, Robert, Roger
Herispoë, king of Britanny, i. 130, 203

Hermengard of Anjou, daughter of Geoffrey Greygown and wife of Conan of Rennes, i. 121, 135

Hermengard (Adela) of Anjou, daughter of Fulk Nerra, wife of Geoffrey of Gâtinais, i. 214, 249

Hermengard of Anjou, daughter of Fulk Rechin, marries Alan Fergant, duke of Britanny, i. 328 note 4{930}

Hermengard of Beaumont, wife of William the Lion, ii. 237

Hermengard of Bourbon, second wife of Fulk Rechin, i. 224

Hervey of Glanville, i. 362
Hervey of Lions, i. 321
Hervey of Mountmorris, ii. 101, 112
Hicmar, legate, i. 364
Higra, the, i. 34
Hilary, bishop of Chichester, ii. 24, 39

Hildegard, wife of Fulk III. of Anjou, i. 154, 165, 168

Historia Comitum Andegavensium, its authorship and character, i. 126, 127

History, English, under Henry I., i. 81–83, 87–91;
decay during the anarchy, ii. 438;
new school of, under Henry II., 439–445;
romantic school, 445, 449
Hoel, duke of Britanny, i. 222
Hoel I., count of Nantes, i. 117, 121
Hoel II., count of Nantes, i. 212
Hoel of Rennes, count of Nantes, i. 449
Holy Land, see Jerusalem
Hommet, see Richard
Hospitaliers, i. 357
Hospitals founded in Stephen’s reign, i. 357;
Henry II., ii. 198, 199

Houses, English, in twelfth century, i. 54, 55

Howden, see Roger
Hrolf the Ganger, i. 111, 124, 203
Hubert Walter, dean of York, ii. 278;
bishop of Salisbury, ib., 333;
elected to Canterbury, 326;
justiciar, ib.;
suppresses revolt, 327;
early life, 332, 333;
rivals, 334–336;
legate, 336;
his policy, ib.;
administration, 337–341, 348, 352–354;
fires Bow church and hangs William Fitz-Osbert, 347;
defeated in council at Oxford, 349, 350;
expedition to Wales, 351;
resigns the justiciarship, ib., 354, 355;
negotiates with Philip, 374;
regent for John, 390, 391;
crowns him, 392;
chancellor, ib.;
persuades John to dismiss the host, 427;
dies, 428;
his proposed college, 437
Hubert de Burgh, ii. 400, 407, 408, 426

Hugh, S., bishop of Lincoln, excommunicates the De Clères, ii. 306;
withstands Hubert Walter, 349;
buries Richard, 386;
dies, 399

Hugh of Nonant, bishop of Chester or Coventry, ii. 280, 293, 306, 310, 329;
his scheme of “new foundation,” 436

Hugh of Puiset, treasurer of York, excommunicated, i. 367;
absolved, 382;
bishop of Durham, 399, 400;
rebels, ii. 140, 141;
makes a truce with the Scots, 151;
fortifies Northallerton, 152;
calls in the Flemings, 162;
submits, 163;
takes the cross, 248;
justiciar, 279;
earl of Northumberland, 280;
character and antecedents, 283–285;
quarrels with the chancellor, 288, 291, 292;
relations with York, 303, 304;
quarrel with Geoffrey, 313, 316;
mission to France, 316;
besieges Tickhill, 323, 327, 328;
resigns Northumberland, 330;
tries to regain it, 335;
dies, 336;
his Boldon Buke, 478–480
Hugh, duke of Burgundy, i. 103, 104

Hugh the Great, duke of the French, i. 112, 123, 124, 204

Hugh Capet, duke of the French, i. 120, 124, 141, 142;
king, 125
Hugh I. count of Maine, i. 124;
subdued by Fulk the Black, 159;
dies, 156

Hugh II. count of Maine, set aside by Herbert Bacco, i. 204;
restored, 205;
marriage and death, 206
Hugh of Este, count of Maine, i. 221, 224
Hugh the Poor, earl of Bedford, i. 320
Hugh Bigod, i. 278;
revolts against Stephen, 284;
earl of Norfolk, 430;
revolts against Henry, ii. 139;
takes Norwich, 155;
submits, 163;
his punishment, 167

Hugh, earl of Chester, rebels against Henry II., ii. 138;
taken prisoner, 148;
restored, 167
Hugh Bardulf, ii. 283, 330, 335
Hugh of Beauvais, seneschal of France, i. 155
Hugh of Gournay, ii. 146, 403
Hugh de Lacy, ii. 113, 116;
governor in Ireland, 117;
with Henry in Normandy, 145, 147;
viceroy again, 185;
slain, 242, 243
Hugh IX., the Brown, of Lusignan, ii. 398
Hugh X. of Lusignan, ii. 398, 405
Hugh of Ste.-Maure, ii. 129, 136
Hugh of Mortemer, i. 429, 430
Hugh de Morville, ii. 78
Hugh of Sillé, ii. 137
Huitdeniers, see Osbern

Humbert, count of Maurienne, ii. 132, 133, 134

Humfrey de Bohun, constable, ii. 113, 145, 149

Hungary, see Bela
Huntingdon, siege of, ii. 154, 156;
surrenders, 163;
earldom of, i. 282, ii. 154;
weavers at, i. 30, 52.
See Henry, Simon
Hyde abbey, i. 31
Ilchester, see Richard

Ingebiorg of Denmark, second wife of Philip Augustus, ii. 395

Ingelger, son of Tortulf, i. 105, 114, 128–131, 182

Ingelger, son of Fulk the Red, i. 112
Inispatrick, synod at, ii. 94
Innocent II., Pope, i. 299, 351, 355; ii. 93
Innocent III., Pope, ii. 351
Inquest, see Jury
Investitures, i. 15–18

Ireland, English trade with, i. 32, 35, ii. 87;
northmen in, ii. 82–86;
civil wars in, 89–91;
Henry II.’s proposal to conquer, 95, 431;
plans of Eugene III. and S. Bernard for, 95;
bull for its conquest, i. 431, 486, ii. 96;
Henry II. in, ii. 113–118;
condition in his later years, 181–185;
John made governor of, 234;
John in, 242;
Gerald’s treatises on, 457, 458.

See Brian, Dermot, Donell, Malachi, Murtogh, Niall, Roderic, Terence.

See also Church
Isaac, king of Cyprus, ii. 317, 319
Isabel of Angoulême, ii. 398;
married to John, 399

Isabel de Clare, wife of William the Marshal, ii. 274

Isabel de Warren, ii. 29
Issoudun, ii. 361.
See Ralf
Ivo of Grandmesnil, i. 10

Jane, third daughter of Henry II., betrothed to William II. of Sicily, ii. 60;
marries him, 189, 190;
marries Raymond VI. of Toulouse, 371;
dies, 397

Jane of Montferrat, wife of William the Clito, i. 243

Jerusalem, kingdom of, condition under the Angevin kings, ii. 239;
taken by Saladin, 247.

See Baldwin, Fulk, Guy, Henry, Melisenda, Sibyl

Jews in England, i. 27, 46, 53;
under Henry II., ii. 486;
burial-grounds granted to, ib.;
massacres of, 289, 290;
relations with the Christians, 487, 488;
ordinance for their bonds, 488, 489
Joceas of Dinan, i. 301
Jocelyn, bishop of Salisbury, ii. 37, 67, 76
Jocelyn de Balliol, ii. 66

John “Lackland,” son of Henry II. and Eleanor, born, ii. 130;
betrothed to Alice of Maurienne, 132–134;
to Avice of Gloucester, 184;
appointed king of Ireland, ib.;
proposal to give him Aquitaine, 233;
knighted and sent to Ireland, 234;
his misconduct in Ireland, 242;
recalled, ib.;
proposal to crown him, ib., 244;
his treason discovered, 267;
reconciled to Richard, 274;
treats with Rees, 280;
his lands in England, 282;
marries Avice, ib.;
his power in England, 293;
quarrels with the chancellor, 297–301;
calls up the barons against him, 307;
enters London, 309;
appointed regent, 310;
alliance with Philip, 314, 323;
its terms, 363;
acknowledged heir by the English barons, 314;
negotiates with the chancellor, 315;
struggle with the justiciars, 323;
truce, 324;
charged with treason, 329;
reconciled to Richard, 334;
helps him against Philip, 369;
acknowledged in Anjou, 388;
invested as duke of Normandy, ib., 389;
burns Le Mans, 390;
goes to England, 391;
crowned, 391–393;
administrative arrangements, 393;
quarrel with Philip, 394;
treaty, 395, 397;
visits England, 396;
receives Arthur’s homage, 397;
Raymond’s, ib.;
does homage to Philip, ib.;
divorces Avice, 398;
marries Isabel, 398, 399;
crowned with her, 399;
meets the Scot king at Lincoln, ib.;
founds Beaulieu abbey, 400;
crowned at Canterbury, ib.;
summons the barons to Portsmouth, ib.;
goes to Paris, 401;
seizes Driencourt, ib.;
charges the Poitevin barons with treason, ib., 402;
cited to the French king’s court, 402;
condemned to forfeiture, 403;
sends troops into Britanny, 404;
relieves Mirebeau and captures Arthur, 406;
destroys Tours, 407;
quarrels with Otto, ib.;
cited by Philip for murder, 408;
condemned, ib.;
his apathy, 410;
plan for relief of Les Andelys, 413, 414;
letter to garrison of Château-Gaillard, 419;
goes to England, ib., 420;
sends ambassadors to Philip, 424;
summons the host and dismisses it, 427;
sails to La Rochelle, 428;
takes Angers, ib.;
flies back to England, ib.;
comment on Hubert Walter’s death, 428, 429;
charter to London, 471, 472
John of Anagni, legate, ii. 257, 258
John of Canterbury, i, 354;
treasurer of York, 477; ii. 19;
bishop of Poitiers, ii. 30, 209
John de Courcy, ii. 184, 242
John of La Flèche, i. 222
John of Marmoutier, i. 126, 127
John the Marshal, ii. 32, 33, 260
John Oldman, ii. 157
John of Oxford excommunicated, ii. 66;
negotiations at Rome, 68;
escorts Thomas to England, 75, 77;
bishop of Norwich, 176

John Paparo, cardinal, legate to Ireland, i. 380; ii. 94

John of Salisbury, his studies and early life, i. 480–483;
enters Abp. Theobald’s household, 483;
becomes his secretary, 484;
character, 484, 485;
relations with Adrian IV., 485, 486;
with Theobald, 486, 504;
Polycraticus, 486–191;
Metalogicus, 504;
exiled, ii. 30;
brings bull “Laudabiliter,” 96
John Scotus, i. 86, 87
John, count of Vendôme, ii. 137, 151
John the Wode, ii. 106
John, S., knights of, see Hospitaliers
Jouin-de-Marne, S., battle of, i. 174
Judges, see Justices
Judicaël, bishop and count of Nantes, i. 148
Juhel Berenger, count of Rennes, i. 116
Julian, S., of Le Mans, i. 202
Juliomagus, see Angers
Jury, the grand, ii. 338
Jury-inquest, ii. 122, 123, 353, 354
Justices itinerant under Henry I., i. 26;
under Henry II., 433, 434; ii. 124, 125, 173–177;
commission of 1194, 337;
circuit of 1198, 356
Justiciar, the, his office, i. 21.

See Hubert, Hugh, Ralf, Richard, Robert, Roger, Walter, William

Kavanagh, see Donell
Kells, synod at, ii. 94
Ketel of S. Edmund’s, ii. 472
Kinardferry, ii. 152, 155
King’s Court, the, i. 20, 21;
its judicial work, 25;
Henry II.’s changes in, ii. 174, 175
Kinsellagh, ii. 100
Kirkham priory, i. 67
Lacy, see Hugh, Roger
L’Aigle, see Richer

Lakenheath, dispute about market at, ii. 482, 483

Lambert, count of the Angevin march, i. 101, 130

Lambert, count of Autun, i. 121, 134, 135
Lambeth, college at, ii. 437
Landry of Châteaudun, i. 156, 193, 194

Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury, consecrates Patrick to Dublin, ii. 89

Langley, see Nicolas

Laon, canons of, their journey in England, i. 30–35

Laurence, archbishop of Dublin, ii. 105, 108, 110

Law, canon, introduced into England, i. 378;
Roman civil, 379;
study of, in the schools, ii. 466
Layamon, ii. 491, 492
Leather-sellers’ gild at Oxford, i. 30
Legates in England, i. 350.

See Alberic, Gilbert, Henry, Hicmar, John, Malachi, Peter, Theobald, Thomas, William

Leia, see Peter
Leicester, siege of, ii. 146, 147.
See Robert, Petronilla
Leinster, see Dermot
Leopold, duke of Austria, ii. 319, 371
Lespec, see Walter
Levée, the, on the Loire, ii. 200
Liber Niger Scaccarii, ii. 125
Liber Niger, see Peterborough
Lichfield, i. 40
Lidford, gild at, ii. 469
Lidorius, S., bishop of Tours, i. 179
Limerick, ii. 83.
See Donell, Gilbert
Limoges besieged by Henry II., ii. 225;
plundered by the young king, 226;
surrenders, 230.
See Ademar, Guy
Lincoln, i. 38–40;
weavers at, 30, 52;
merchant gild, 40;
castle seized by Ralf of Chester, 315;
besieged by Stephen, ib.;
battle of, 316–320, 344–346;
sacked by Earl Robert, 320;
castle again seized by Ralf, 334;
given up to Stephen, 336;
Stephen at, 337;
Henry II. at, 438;
castle besieged by William of Longchamp, ii. 299;

John at, 399;
minster-library, 464, 465;
Richard’s charter to, 470.

See Aaron, Alexander, Geoffrey, Hugh, Remigius, Robert, William

Lions, see Hervey
Lisbon won by English crusaders, i. 363
Lisieux, council at, i. 392.
See Arnulf

Lisoy of Bazogers, commandant of Amboise and Loches, i. 157, 184, 185;
advice to Geoffrey Martel, 185;
captures Theobald, 186

Literature, revival of, under Henry I., i. 80–95;
under the Angevins, ii. 439–460, 491–492
Loches, i. 110, 153;
treaty of, 187;
pledged to Philip, ii. 364;
taken by Richard, 366;
taken by Philip, 426.
See Lisoy, Thomas
Lodden, conferences at the, ii. 307, 308
Lombard, see Peter
London, its growing importance, i. 31;
walls and castles, 44;
cathedral, folkmoot, portreeve, sheriffs, 45;
fires, ib., 55;
weavers, 30, 52, ii. 481;
constitution under William I., i. 45;
under Henry I., ib., 46;
Jews in, 46;
suburbs, ib., 47;
schools, 47;
character of its citizens, 47, 48;
Normans in, 48, 49;
trade, 49;
claim of its citizens to elect the king, 277;
loyal to Stephen, 313;
submits to the Empress, 323;
expels her, 324;
citizens at siege of Winchester, 326;
hospitals in, 357;
councils at, 381, 390, 429; ii. 314;
tumults in (1173), ii. 156–157;
meeting of barons at, 309, 310, 311;
the commune, 309, 310, 344;
rising under William Fitz-Osbert, 345–347;
gilds in, 469;
constitution under Henry II., Richard and John, 471, 472;
foreign commerce, 485;
gildhall of German merchants, ib.;
stone bridge, ib., 486.

See Andrew, Gilbert, Henry, Richard, Serlo, Thomas, Westminster

Longchamp, see William

Lorraine, i. 120

Lothar, king of West-Frankland, i. 119, 120, 122

Lothar, see Innocent III.
Lotharingia, i. 120
Loudun, i. 123, 124, 139, 394, 444

Louis the Gentle, Emperor, partition of his realms, i. 98, 99

Louis From-beyond-sea, King of West Frankland, i. 112, 113;

Fulk’s letter to, 114;
dies, 119

Louis the Lazy (Fainéant), King of West Frankland, i. 123;
marriage, 191;
death, 125

Louis VI., King of France, his policy, i. 230;
supports William Clito, 235;
defeated at Brenneville, 237;
treaty with Henry, 238;
marches against the Emperor, 241;
grants Flanders to Clito, 243

Louis VII., King of France, his quarrel with Blois and alliance with Anjou, i. 342;
helps Geoffrey to conquer Normandy, ib.;
grants him its investiture, 343;
takes the cross, 361;
marries Eleanor, 383;
strife with Blois, 384;
attacks Normandy, 385;
dealings with Geoffrey and Eustace, 386, 387;
grants Normandy etc. to Henry, 388, 389;
divorces Eleanor, 392;
cites Henry to his court, 393;
war in Normandy, 395;
receives Henry’s homage, 443;
marries Constance, 446;
makes Henry seneschal, 450;
proposed crusade in Spain, 453, 497;
claims on Toulouse, 457;
throws himself into Toulouse, 464;
attacks Normandy, 466;
treaty, 467;
marries Adela, 468;
alliance with Blois, 469, 471;
driven from Chaumont, 471;
acknowledges Alexander III. as Pope, 502;
meets Alexander and Henry at Chouzy, ii. 13;
threatens war in Auvergne, 31;
welcomes Thomas, 42;
his view of the Becket quarrel, 53, 54;
receives homage of the two Henrys and grants Aquitaine to Richard, 62;
meets Henry at Montmartre, 71;
Fréteval, 73;
supports young Henry’s revolt, 135, 136;
attacks Normandy, 143;
burns Verneuil, 147;
meets Henry II. at Gisors, 148;
besieges Rouen, 164;
truce, 165;
renewed quarrel, 212;
treaty, 213;
pilgrimage to Canterbury, 216;
dies, 219
Louis, son of Philip Augustus, ii. 395, 397
Lucius II., Pope, i. 356, 360
Lucy, see Richard
Ludlow, i. 301
Lupicar, ii. 413
Lusignan, see Geoffrey, Guy, Hugh

Mabel of Glamorgan, wife of Robert, earl of Gloucester, i. 294, 328

MacCarthy, see Dermot

MacMurrough, see Dermot, Eva, Murtogh

Madoc Ap-Meredith, prince of Powys, i. 436, 437

Maidulf, founder of Malmesbury, i. 83
Maine (Cenomannia), duchy of, i. 203;
county, 106, 107;
its defiance of the house of France, 109;
claims of Normandy and France upon, 124, 203, 204;
granted to Geoffrey Greygown, 124, 140–142;
subject to Geoffrey Martel, 206;
relations with Normandy and Anjou, 216, 217, 222, 223;
conquered by William, 218;
revolts, 221, 222;
revolts against Robert, 223, 224;
condition under Elias, 224, 225;
won back by William Rufus, 3, 226;
Henry I. overlord of, 227, 233, 234;
united with Anjou, 233;
settled on William and Matilda, 236, 238;
on Sibyl and Clito, 240;
pedigree of the counts, 253–256;
rebels in (1173), ii. 137.

See Aremburg, Biota, David, Elias, Gersendis, Herbert, Hugh, Margaret, Paula, Roland

Maine, river, see Mayenne
Malachi, S., ii. 93, 94
Malachi II., king of Ireland, ii. 85
Malchus, bishop of Waterford, ii. 89

Malcolm IV., king of Scots, his claims on Northumberland etc., i. 435;
submits to Henry II., 438;
at war of Toulouse, 462;
homage to young Henry, ii. 14, 15
Malmesbury abbey, i. 83–87;
castle surrendered to Stephen, 304;
taken by Henry, 397.

See Ealdhelm, Godfrey, Maidulf, Turold, Warin, William

Maminot, see Walkelyn
Mandeville, see Geoffrey, William
Manorbeer, ii. 452

Mans, Le, (Vindinum), its early history, i. 201–203;
cathedral, 202, 238;
bishop, people and count, 202, 204;
advocacy of the see granted to Geoffrey Martel, 205;
taken by William, 218;
“commune” of, 222;
surrendered to Elias, 227;
marriage of Geoffrey and Matilda at, 244;
Henry Fitz-Empress born at, 268;
Geoffrey buried at, 390;
the young king buried at, ii. 230;
Henry II. at, 257, 258;
taken by Philip, 259, 263;
submits to Arthur, 389;
burnt by John, 390;
given up to John, 394;
hospital, 198.
See Avesgaud, Gervase, Julian, Sainfred
Mantes, see Gaubert, Walter
Map, see Walter
March, Spanish, see Barcelona
Marche, La, bought by Henry II., ii. 214

Margaret of France, daughter of Louis VII. and Constance, i. 446;
betrothed to young Henry, 448;
intrusted to Henry II., 451;
Vexin settled upon her, 467;
married, 470;
crowned, ii. 81;
quarrels over her dowry, 232, 236;
marries Bela of Hungary, 235
Margaret of Maine, i. 216, 254
Marmion, see Robert
Marmoutier, abbey of, i. 181
Marshal, see John, William
Marson, i. 125
Martel, ii. 227

Martin, S., bishop of Tours, his life, i. 179–181;
appearance to Fulk the Good, 118;
“reversion,” 128, 131, 182;
“subvention,” 182, 187;
abbey, see Tours
Martin-le-Beau, S., i. 187

Mary of Boulogne, daughter of Stephen and Matilda, i. 469

Mary of France, daughter of Louis VII. and Eleanor, i. 445

Massey, see Hamo

Matilda (Eadgyth) of Scotland, first wife of Henry I., i. 9, 17, 93, 94;
called “good queen Maude,” 66

Matilda, daughter of Henry I. of England, widow of Emperor Henry V., i. 242;
acknowledged as Henry’s heiress, 243, 268, 269, 274;
marries Geoffrey, 243, 244, 258–260;
leaves him, 266;
goes to England, 268;
returns, ib.;
quarrels with Henry, 270;
qualifications for the throne, 274, 275;
enters Normandy, 276;
lands at Arundel, 309;
goes to Bristol and Gloucester, 310;
negotiates with the legate, 321;
in London, 323, 324;
besieges the legate at Winchester, 325, 326;
blockaded by the queen, 326;
escapes, 327, 328;
goes to Oxford, 329;
sends for Geoffrey, 330;
besieged at Oxford, 332;
escapes, 333;
returns to Gaul, 344;
trial of her claims at Rome, 370;
later years, 442, 443;
death, ii. 61
Matilda of Boulogne marries Stephen, i. 273;
crowned, 283;
blockades Dover, 299;
mediates between Stephen and David, 300;
drives the Empress from London, 324;
wins over the legate, ib.;
besieges Winchester, 326;
negotiates for Stephen’s release, 328;
founds S. Katharine’s Hospital, 357;
tries to reconcile Stephen and Theobald, 369;
dies, 399

Matilda, eldest daughter of Henry II. and Eleanor, born, i. 445;
betrothed to Henry the Lion, ii. 55;
married, 59–60, 189;
aid for her marriage, 125;
death, ii. 257 note 2{1241}

Matilda of Anjou, daughter of Fulk V., betrothed to William the Ætheling, i. 234;
married, 236;
quarrel over her dowry, 240;
nun at Fontevraud, 248

Matilda of Angoulême, wife of Hugh IX. of Lusignan, ii. 398

Matilda of Saxony, daughter of Henry the Lion, her suitors, ii. 237;
marriage, 274

Matilda of Ramsbury, i. 304

Matthew, son of Theodoric count of Flanders, marries Mary of Boulogne, i. 469;
dies, ii. 147
Matthew, tutor to Henry Fitz-Empress, i. 375;
chancellor, 376
Maude, “Good Queen,” i. 66.
See Matilda
Mauléon, see Savaric

Maurice, son of Geoffrey Greygown, i. 134, 135;
regent of Anjou, 153, 156, 194
Maurice Fitz-Gerald, ii. 100, 102
Maurice de Prendergast, ii. 102, 110, 111
Maurienne, ii. 131, 132.
See Alice, Humbert
Mayenne or Maine, river, i. 97
Mayenne, see Geoffrey
Measures, Assize of, ii. 348
Meiler Fitz-Henry, ii. 101
Melgueil, i. 463
Melisenda, queen of Jerusalem, i. 246, 361
Melun, i. 149, 189, 190
Merania, see Agnes
Mercadier, ii. 383, 390
Merlin’s prophecy, its fulfilment, ii. 429
Merton priory, i. 51, 67
Messina, Richard at, ii. 294–296;
treaty of, 368, 369
Metalogicus, i. 504
Metz, see Chrodegang
Metz (in Gâtinais?), i. 168
Meulan, see Robert, Waleran
Middle Kingdom, i. 99, 120
Middlesex, sheriffs of, i. 46
Miles Beauchamp, i. 320
Miles Cogan, ii. 105, 106, 184
Miles Fitz-David, ii. 101
Miles of Gloucester defies Stephen, i. 295;
joins the Empress at Oxford, 324;
earl of Hereford, 327;
slain, 334

Mirebeau, castle built by Fulk Nerra, i. 139, 151;
siege of, by Geoffrey Plantagenet, 267;
bequeathed to Geoffrey Plantagenet II., 394, 444;

Eleanor besieged in, ii. 406;
Arthur captured at, ib.
Mohun, see William
Molêmes, abbey of, i. 69, 70
Monmouth, see Geoffrey
Montbazon, i. 151, 163
Montboyau, i. 161, 163

Montcontour or St. Jouin-de-Marne, battle of, i. 174

Montferrat, see Conrad, Jane, William

Montfichet’s Castle, i. 44

Montfort, see Almeric, Bertrada, Robert, Simon

Montlouis, battle of, i. 186
Montmartre, conference at, ii. 71
Montmirail, conference at, ii. 61, 62, 69;
razed, 365
Montpellier, see William
Montrésor, i. 151
Montreuil-Bellay, siege of, i. 384–387.
See Gerald, Grecia
Montrichard, i. 151
Mont-St.-Michel, siege of, i. 5.
See Robert
Moorfields, i. 47
Mort d’ancester, ii. 172
Mortain, see John, Stephen, William
Mortemer, see Hugh, Roger
Morville, see Hugh, Richard
Mountmorris, see Hervey
Mowbray, see Robert, Roger
Munster conquered by the Geraldines, ii. 183.
See Brian, Donell, Murtogh, Terence
Murdac, see Henry
Murtogh Mac-Murrough, ii. 109, 111
Murtogh O’Brien, king of Munster, ii. 89, 90

Murtogh O’Lochlainn, king of Aileach, ii. 90, 97, 98

Nantes, i. 101;
ceded to the Bretons, 102;
Angevin claims on, 116, 117;
attacked by Normans, 117;
counts and bishops, 121, 122;
seized by Conan, 146;
won by Fulk, 148;
Geoffrey Martel’s dealings with, 212;
union with Rennes, 449;
again independent, ib.;
seized by Conan IV. and claimed by Henry II., 450;
surrendered to Henry, 451;
significance of its acquisition, 452, 453;
Henry and Geoffrey at, ii. 58.

See Alan, Drogo, Geoffrey, Guerech, Hoel, Judicaël

Nest, daughter of Rees Ap-Tewdor, ii. 100, 453

Neubourg, i. 282, 470
Neufmarché, council at, i. 502
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, i. 37
Newark, i. 304
Niall of the Nine Hostages, ii. 84

Nicolas Breakspear or of Langley, i. 475, 476, 481.

See Adrian
Nigel, bishop of Ely and treasurer, i. 302;
defends Devizes, 304;
chancellor, 418;
treasurer again, ib.
Nomenoë, king of Britanny, i. 101
Nonancourt, treaty at, ii. 213
Nonant, see Hugh
Norfolk, see Hugh Bigod
Normandy, duchy of, i. 111;
confusion under Robert Curthose, 11;
campaigns of Henry I. in, 11–13;
relations with England, 13, 23, 24;
with France, 24;
invaded by Henry of France, 210, 213;
claimed by Matilda, 276;
invaded by Geoffrey, 281, 306–308;
offered to Theobald of Blois, 282, 337;
Stephen in, 286;
granted to his son, ib.;
conquered by Geoffrey, 338–342;
ceded to Henry Fitz-Empress, 369, 377;
attacked by Louis VII. and Eustace, 385, 386, 394;
inquest on ducal demesnes, ii. 128;
rebels in (1173), 138, 139;
attacked by Louis etc., 143;
loyal barons in (1173), 146;
Henry’s administration in, 192–194;
laid under interdict, 315, 380;
submits to Philip, 424, 425;
dukes of, their claims upon Maine, i. 124, 203, 216.

See Geoffrey, Henry, Hrolf, John, Richard, Robert, William

Normans destroy Fleury, i. 112;
attack Nantes, 117;
fusion of Normans and English, 24, 48, 49; ii. 489, 490

“Normans” and “English,” different meanings of, i. 23, 24

Northallerton, i. 289

Northampton, Ralf of Chester seized at, i. 336;

Henry II. at, ii. 23, 143;
priory of S. Andrew at, 37;
meeting of justiciars and barons at, 391;
Assize of, 172, 173;
councils at, i. 136; ii. 32–40, 172, 427.
See David, Simon

Northmen, their work in Frankland and in England, i. 100;
enter the Loire, 101;
sack Nantes, ib.;
attack Toulouse, Paris, Bordeaux, 102;
defeated at Aclea, ib.;
sack Tours, ib.;
seize Angers, 103;
driven out, 104;
besiege Paris, ib.;
defeated by Rudolf, 115;
attacks on Tours, 181, 182.
See Ostmen
Northumberland, Scottish claims upon, i. 286
Norwich, i. 40, 41;
sacked, ii. 155, 156;
massacre of Jews at, 289;
castle, i. 284, 430.
See Herbert, John
Nostell priory, i. 68
Nottingham, i. 320;
council at, ii. 329

O’Briens, their rivalry with the O’Neills, ii. 86.

See Donell, Murtogh, Terence
O’Conor, see Roderic, Terence
Octavian, cardinal, see Victor IV.
Odelin de Umfraville, ii. 145, 153, 160

Odo, count of Paris, duke of the French and king of West-Frankland, i. 104

Odo, count of Anjou, i. 109, 133

Odo I., count of Blois, Chartres and Tours, i. 145

Odo II., count of Blois etc., seizes Melun, i. 149, 189;
character, 150;
defeated at Pontlevoy, 157, 158;
count of Champagne, 160;
besieges Montboyau, 161;
Saumur, 163;
attacks Amboise, ib.;
seizes Sens, 164;
aims at the Empire, 166;
death, 167

Odo, count of Gascony and duke of Aquitaine, i. 174, 175

Odo, son of Robert II. of France, i. 177, 178
Odo of Britanny, i. 211, 212
Oilly, see Robert
O’Lochlainn, see Donell, Murtogh

O’Neills, their rivalry with the O’Briens, ii. 86

Orderic, i. 24
Orkneys, see Ralf
Orléans, viscounts of, i. 249, 250
O’Ruark, see Tighernan
Osbern Huitdeniers, i. 353
Oseney priory, i. 43
Ossory, ii. 102
Ostia, see Alberic

Ostmen, their settlements in Ireland, ii. 82–84;
relations with England, 83, 86, 87;
struggle with Malachi and Brian, 85;
ecclesiastical relations, 87–89;
share in Irish politics, 89, 90
Otto I., Emperor, i. 119
Otto II., Emperor, i. 119, 120

Otto of Saxony, son of Henry the Lion, his proposed marriage, ii. 341;
chosen Emperor, 372, 373;
quarrel with John, 407
Otto, cardinal, ii. 69
Oundle, i. 60

Owen, prince of North Wales, i. 435, 436, 437; ii. 179

Oxford, i. 41–44;
Robert Pulein at, 43;
Henry I. at, 44;
bishops seized at, 303, 304;
Matilda at, 322, 331–333;
military advantages, 331;
taken by Stephen, 332;
Vacarius at, 379;
Richard I. born at, 445;
Henry and Thomas meet at, ii. 24;
Gerald de Barri at, 460;
councils at, i. 283, 402; ii. 349–350, 427;
castle, i. 41, 331–334;
gilds, 30, 43, 52;
S. Frideswide’s priory, 42;
Port-meadow, 43;
schools, ib.; ii. 462.
See John
Paganel, see Ralf
Pageham, ii. 32
Palestine, see Jerusalem
Paparo, see John
Paris attacked by northmen, i. 102, 104;
capital of the duchy of France, 105;
university of, ii. 461.
See Odo
Paschal III., antipope, ii. 55
Patrick, bishop of Dublin, ii. 88, 89

Patrick, earl of Salisbury, governor of Aquitaine, ii. 58, 59

Paula of Maine, i. 222, 254
Pavia, council at, i. 498, 499.
See William

Peace, edict for preservation of, ii. 339, 340;
conservators of, their origin, 340
Pembroke, Flemings in, i. 52.
See Gilbert, Richard, William
Pencarn, ii. 179
Périgueux, ii. 223
Périgord, see Adalbert
Peter, duke of Aquitaine, see William VI.
Peter “Bogis,” ii. 421, 422
Peter of Capua, cardinal-legate, ii. 375, 395
Peter of Celle, i. 482, 483
Peter of Colechurch, ii. 486

Peter de Leia, bishop of S. David’s, ii. 455, 456

Peter Lombard, ii. 461, 467

Peter of Saintes, tutor to Henry Fitz-Empress, i. 375

Peterborough, “Black Book” of, i. 58;
chronicle, 81

Petronilla, queen of Aragon, wife of Raymond-Berengar IV. of Barcelona, i. 463

Petronilla, wife of Tertullus, i. 128

Petronilla of Grandmesnil, countess of Leicester, ii. 138, 150

Pevensey, i. 430
Peverel, see William
Philip I., king of France, i. 220, 221, 224

Philip Augustus, son of Louis VII. of France, born, ii. 56;
receives young Henry’s homage, 62;
crowned, 216;
quarrels with Blois, 217;
marries Elizabeth, ib.;
crowned again, 218;
succeeds Louis, 219;
demands Margaret’s dowry, 232, 236;
quarrel with Flanders, 234;
plots with Geoffrey, 243;
claims wardship of Eleanor of Britanny, ib.;
of Arthur, 245;
attacks Berry, ib.;
truce, 246;
takes the cross, 249;
takes Châteauroux, 251;
attacks Auvergne, 252;
negotiates with Richard, 253, 254;
receives his homage, 255;
takes Le Mans, 259;
Tours, 264;
treaty with Richard, 275;
policy in Palestine, 320;
returns to France, 313;
demands the Vexin etc., ib., 314;
alliance with John, 314, 323, 363;
attacks Normandy, 363, 364;
routed at Fréteval, 366, 367;
secures Arthur, 370;
war with Flanders, 374;
truce with Richard, 375;
takes Evreux, 389;
receives homage of Arthur, 390;
of Eleanor, ib.;
razes Ballon, 394;
divorces Ingebiorg, 395;
treaty with John, 395–397;
takes Ingebiorg back, 401;
cites John to his court, 402, 408;
conquers eastern Normandy, 403;
besieges Arques, 405, 406;
burns Tours, 407;
takes Saumur and enters Poitou, 410;
successes in Normandy, ib.;
takes Isle of Andely, 411–416;
Petit-Andely, 416;
Radepont, ib.;
Château-Gaillard, 416–423;
Normandy submits to, 424–425;
conquers Poitou, 426;
takes Loches and Chinon, ib.;
marches against John, 428

Philip, count of Flanders, joins young Henry, ii. 141;
threatens to invade England, 155, 158;
his policy in France, 216;
quarrels with France, 234, 235;
pilgrimage to Canterbury, 235
Philip de Broi, ii. 21
Philip Gay, i. 297
Philip of Gloucester, i. 335, 336
Philip de Thaun, i. 94
Pierre-Pécoulée, treaty of, i. 234
Pipe Rolls, i. 26, 431–432
Pipewell, council at, ii. 277
Pisa, see Henry

Poitiers stormed by Adalbert of Périgord, i. 145;

Henry and Eleanor married at, 393;
council at, 458;
Richard enthroned at, ii. 130;
taken by Philip, 426.
See John
Poitou granted to Hugh the Great, i. 123;
barons of, appeal to Philip against John, ii. 402;
conquered by Philip, 426.
See Aquitaine
Polycraticus, i. 486–491
Pontaudemer, siege of, i. 241
Pontigny, abbey of, i. 70;
S. Thomas at, ii. 42, 54
Pont-l’Evêque, see Roger
Pontlevoy, battle of, i. 157, 158

Popes, see Adrian, Alexander, Calixtus, Celestine, Eugene, Innocent, Lucius, Paschal, Urban

Porhoët, see Eudo
Port, see Adam
Portmannimot of Oxford, i. 43
Port-meadow at Oxford, i. 43
Port-reeve, i. 29;
of London, 45.
See Gilbert Becket
Portsmouth, ii. 400, 427
Premonstratensians, i. 357, 358
Prendergast, see Maurice
Provence, i. 454, 463.
See William
Provins, i. 482
Pucelle, see Gerard
Puiset, see Hugh
Pulein, see Robert
Pullus, see Robert
Quévilly, i. 471; ii. 198
Radepont, ii. 403, 416

Rahere, founder of S. Bartholomew’s hospital, i. 67

Rainald, bishop of Angers, i. 193
Raino, bishop of Angers, i. 131, 132
Ralf, bishop of the Orkneys, i. 289, 355

Ralf, bishop of Rochester, made archbishop of Canterbury, i. 68

Ralf, earl of Chester, his marriage, i. 314;
claims Carlisle, ib.;
seizes Lincoln castle, 315;
brings Robert to relieve it, 316;
at battle of Lincoln, 317, 320;
again seizes the castle, 334;
joins Stephen, 336;
imprisoned, ib.;
gives up Lincoln, ib.;
revolts again, 377, 395;
dies, 399

Ralf, earl of Chester, second husband of Constance of Britanny, ii. 369, 370

Ralf of Bayeux, i. 241
Ralf de Broc, ii. 39, 76, 79, 149
Ralf de Diceto, dean of S. Paul’s, ii. 439;
his Angevin History, i. 127
Ralf of Faye, ii. 129

Ralf Flambard, justiciar, i. 8, 9, 21, 32, 432;
bishop of Durham, 80
Ralf of Fougères, ii. 137, 147, 148, 258
Ralf de Glanville, ii. 145, 160;
justiciar, 177;
takes the cross, 248;
resigns and dies, 279
Ralf of Issoudun, ii. 401, 405
Ralf Paganel, i. 295, 298

Ralf of Varneville, chancellor to Henry II., ii. 142, 297

Ralf of Vermandois, i. 307
Ramirez the Monk, king of Aragon, i. 463
Ramsbury, see Matilda
Rancogne, see Geoffrey
Rathbreasil, synod of, ii. 93

Raymond-Berengar III., count of Barcelona, i. 463

Raymond-Berengar IV., count of Barcelona, i. 463, 466

Raymond of St. Gilles, count of Toulouse, i. 454, 455

Raymond V., count of Toulouse, his marriage, i. 458;
war with Henry II., 464–467;
meets Henry at Grandmont, ii. 58;
does him homage, 133;
struggle with Aragon, 211;
quarrel with Richard, 244, 250, 251;
death, 371

Raymond VI., count of Toulouse, marriage, ii. 371;
homage to John, 397

Raymond Trencavel, viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne, i. 462, 464, 466

Raymond the Fat, ii. 104, 108, 183
Reading, i. 282, 322; ii. 61, 240, 308
Redvers, see Baldwin

Rees Ap-Griffith, prince of South Wales, his dealings with Henry II., ii. 164, 179–181, 237;
with John and Richard, 280;
death, 351

Reginald, earl of Cornwall, i. 391; ii. 144, 146

Reginald, chancellor to Frederic Barbarossa, and archbishop of Cöln, ii. 55

Reginald Fitz-Urse, ii. 78
Reims, councils at, i. 206, 237, 367, 368.
See Gervase, William

Remigius, bishop of Dorchester, moves his see to Lincoln, i. 39

Rennes united with Nantes, i. 449.

See Conan, Hoel, Juhel

Richard, third son of Henry II. and Eleanor, born, i. 445;
first betrothal, 463;
invested with Aquitaine and betrothed to Adela, ii. 62;
enthroned at Poitiers, 130;
revolts, 135;
submits, 165;
his character, 206–208;
fights the barons in Aquitaine, 209, 210, 214, 215, 220, 223;
refuses homage to his brother, 224;
takes Hautefort, 231;
refuses to give up Aquitaine, 233;
war with Geoffrey and John, ib.;
reconciled, 234;
gives up Aquitaine to Eleanor, 235;
wars with Toulouse, 244, 250, 251;
negotiates a truce, 246;
seizes the Angevin treasure, ib.;
reinstated in Aquitaine, 247;
takes the cross, 248;
tries to regain Châteauroux, 252;
negotiates with Philip, 253, 254;
meets Henry and Philip at Bonmoulins, 254;
homage to Philip, 255;
encounter with William the Marshal, 261;
scene with Henry at Colombières, 266;
comes to Fontevraud, 271;
reconciled with the Marshal, 272;
recognized as Henry’s successor, 273;
duke of Normandy, 274;
treaty with Philip, 275;
goes to England, ib.;
crowned, 276;
fills vacant sees, 277, 278;
his policy, 278;
appoints justiciars, 279, 283;
sells sheriffdoms etc., 280;
dealings with Wales, ib.;
with Scotland, 281;
with John, 281–282;
goes to Normandy, 287;
holds council there, 288;
possible successors, 295;
treaty with Tancred, ib.;
marriage, 296;
names William of Monreale for the primacy, 297;
sends Walter of Rouen to England, 297, 298;
his voyage, 317;
conquers Cyprus, ib.;
alliance with Guy of Lusignan, 318, 320;
reaches Acre, 319;
quarrel with Leopold of Austria, ib.;
relations with other crusaders, 319–321;
truce with Saladin, 321;
homeward voyage, 322;
wrecked and captured, ib.;
given up to the Emperor, 324;
his ransom, 325, 326;
negotiates with Philip and John, 327;
returns to England, 328;
imposes taxes, ib., 329;
negotiates with Scotland, 330;
crowned at Winchester, ib., 331;
king of Burgundy, 331;
leaves England, ib.;
forgives John, 334;
gives license for tournaments, 342;
annuls his charters, 343, 356;
sends the abbot of Caen to England, 343;
quarrel with S. Hugh, 350;
edict against the clergy, 355;
cessions to Philip, 361;
difficulties in Gaul, 361, 362;
treaty with Philip, 364;
goes to Normandy, 365;
to Tours, 365, 366;
regains Loches, 366;
routs Philip at Fréteval, ib., 367;
claims wardship of Arthur, 370;
alliance with Toulouse, 371;
with Henry VI., 372;
called to elect an emperor, ib.;
league against Philip, 374;
truce, 375;
builds Château-Gaillard, 375–380;
quarrel with Abp. Walter, 380, 381;
lays siege to Châlus, 382;
wounded, 384;
dies, 385, 386;
burial, 386, 387;
his encouragement of municipal life, 470;
grant to merchants of Cöln, 485

Richard, archbishop of Canterbury, ii. 170, 434

Richard I., bishop of London, i. 45

Richard II., bishop of London, i. 502, 503

Richard Fitz-Nigel, treasurer and bishop of London, ii. 277;
his Gesta Henrici, 439
Richard of Ilchester, ii. 66;
bishop of Winchester, 158, 176;
work in the Exchequer, 193, 194;
seneschal of Normandy, 193;
death, 277

Richard de Clare, earl of Pembroke or Striguil, ii. 99, 100;
goes to Ireland, 103;
takes Waterford, 104;
marriage, ib.;
blockaded in Dublin, 109, 110;
summoned by Henry, 112;
does homage for Leinster, 113;
in Normandy with Henry, 145, 182;
governor of Ireland, 182;
death, 183
Richard le Breton, ii. 78

Richard Fitz-Count, son of Robert of Gloucester, i. 386, 405; ii. 146

Richard Fitz-Godoberd, ii. 100

Richard of La Haye, i. 340, 341

Richard of Hommet, constable of Normandy, ii. 146

Richard de Lucy, justiciar, his character, i. 417;
his share in election of Thomas, ii. 1–3;
excommunicated, 66;
takes Leicester, 146;
marches against the Scots, 149;
besieges Huntingdon, 154, 156;
protests against the forest visitation, 171;
retires to a monastery, 176
Richard de Morville, ii. 139, 161

Richenda de Clères, sister of William of Longchamp, ii. 305

Richer de l’Aigle, i. 51, 395
Richmond, see Alan
Ridel, see Geoffrey
Rievaux abbey, i. 71
Robert I., king of France, i. 149, 164
Robert the Brave, count of Anjou, i. 102;
duke of the French, 103

Robert the Magnificent, or the Devil, duke of Normandy, i. 166

Robert, son of William the Conqueror, betrothed to Margaret of Maine, i. 216;
homage to Geoffrey the Bearded, 217;
to Fulk Rechin, 223;
seeks Fulk’s help in Maine, ib.;
sells the Cotentin to Henry, 4;
wars with his brothers, 5, 6;
pledges Normandy to Rufus, 3;
crusade, ib.;
invades England, 9;
war with Henry, 11;
taken prisoner, 13;
dies, 271

Robert Bloet, chancellor, justiciar and bishop of Lincoln, i. 22

Robert II., bishop of Lincoln, ii. 24
Robert I., bishop of Hereford, i. 370, 495
Robert of Melun, i. 481;
bishop of Hereford, ii. 24

Robert of Bellême, count of Alençon etc., i. 6;
banished, 10;
sues for peace, 11;
flies at Tinchebray, 13;
captures Elias, 225;
imprisoned, 233
Robert, count of Burgundy, i. 178
Robert, count of Dreux, i. 394
Robert, earl of Ferrers, ii. 139, 163

Robert, earl of Gloucester, son of Henry I., friend of William of Malmesbury, i. 92, 94;
escorts Matilda over sea, 243;
at Henry’s death, 270;
dispute for precedence with Stephen, 274;
joins Stephen, 283;
defies him, 294;
comes to England, 309;
marches to Lincoln, 316, 317;
receives Stephen’s surrender, 320;
made prisoner, 327;
exchanged, 329;
goes to fetch Geoffrey, 330;
returns, 332;
besieges Wareham, ib.;
takes Portland and Lulworth, 333;
meets his sister at Wallingford, 334;
routs Stephen at Wilton, ib.;
builds a castle at Farringdon, 335;
helps Geoffrey in Normandy, 338, 339;
dies, 343, 344

Robert I., earl of Leicester and count of Meulan, i. 16, 54, 56

Robert II., earl of Leicester, joins Henry, i. 400;
justiciar, 417;
at council of Northampton, ii. 39;
refuses the kiss of peace to Reginald of Cöln, 55, 56;
dies, 61

Robert III., earl of Leicester, rebels, ii. 138, 142;
goes to England, 148;
made prisoner, 150;
restored, 167;
repulses Philip from Normandy, 363
Robert II., count of Meulan, ii. 138
Robert de Barri, ii. 101
Robert de Bruce, ii. 145
Robert, abbot of Caen, ii. 343, 344
Robert Fitz-Stephen, ii. 100;
goes to Ireland, 101;
blockaded in Carrick, 109;
made prisoner, 111;
released, 113
Robert of Marmion, i. 335

Robert de Montfort defeats Henry of Essex in ordeal, ii. 60;
rebels, 138
Robert of Mowbray, ii. 155
Robert I. of Oilly, i. 41, 42, 331

Robert II. of Oilly founds Oseney priory, i. 43;
gives up Oxford to the Empress, 322;
death, 332
Robert Pulein, i. 43, 44
Robert Pullus, i. 483
Robert of Sablé, i. 343
Robert of Selby, chancellor of Sicily, i. 365
Robert of Sillé, ii. 137
Robert de Stuteville, ii. 145, 153, 160
Robert of Torigny or de Monte, ii. 194

Robert of Turnham, seneschal of Anjou, ii. 388, 389;
of Poitou, 426;
prisoner, 427
Rocamadour, ii. 74, 226, 227
Rochelle, La, ii. 428
Roches, see William
Rochester, see Ralf, Walter
Roderic O’Conor, king of Connaught, ii. 97;
of Ireland, 98;
treaty with Dermot,102;
gathers a host against him, 104;
blockades Dublin, 109, 110;
routed, 110, 111;
promises tribute to Henry II., 116;
treaty, 182
Roger, king of Sicily, i. 365
Roger of Pont-l’Evêque, i. 354, 368;
archbishop of York, 477;
earlier career, 478, 479;
accepts the royal customs, ii. 24;
dispute with S. Thomas, 30;
crowns young Henry, 72;
appeals to the king, 78;
dies, 285

Roger, chaplain to Henry I., chancellor, bishop of Salisbury and justiciar, i. 22;
his administration, 25, 26;
called the “Sword of Righteousness,” 26;
his Church policy, 63;
joins Stephen, 278;
his family, 302;
relations with Stephen and with the Empress, ib., 303;
seized at Oxford, 303, 304;
death, 310
Roger, earl of Clare, ii. 12, 16, 180
Roger, earl of Hereford, i. 429
Roger of Howden, i. 82; ii. 439
Roger de Lacy, ii. 400, 401;
at Château-Gaillard, 411, 417, 418, 423
Roger of Montrésor, i. 151
Roger de Mortemer, ii. 299
Roger de Mowbray, ii. 139, 152, 160, 162, 163
Roger “the Poor,” chancellor, i. 302, 303
Rohesia, wife of Gilbert Becket, i. 50, 352
Roland, count of Maine, i. 203
Roland of Siena, cardinal, see Alexander III.

Rome, relations of William and Lanfranc with, i. 15;
trial of Stephen’s and Matilda’s claims at, 370;
schism at, 498

Ronceray, i. 165 note 3{363}, 166; ii. 200

Roscilla of Loches, wife of Fulk the Red, i. 110

Rotrou, archbishop of Rouen, ii. 72, 81

Rouen surrenders to Geoffrey Plantagenet, i. 341, 342;
besieged by Louis VII., ii. 164;
palace, 196;
young Henry buried at, 232;
Richard’s heart buried at, 387;
Arthur imprisoned at, 407;
submits to Philip, 425.
See Rotrou, Walter
Rouergue, i. 454
Roumare, see William
Roxburgh, i. 287

Rudolf of Burgundy, king of West-Frankland, i. 111, 115

Rufus, S., priory of, i. 476
Saher de Arcelles, i. 363
Sainfred, bishop of Le Mans, i. 204
Saintes granted to Fulk Nerra, i. 159, 173;
taken by William VII. of Aquitaine, 215;
regained and lost again, 216.
See Peter
Saintonge ceded to Geoffrey Martel, i. 174;
granted to Fulk Rechin, 214;
war of, 215, 216, 252, 253
Saint-Saëns, see Elias

Saints, Old-English, revived veneration for, i. 33, 80

Saladin tithe, ii. 249

Salisbury, i. 32–33.

See Herbert, Hubert, Jocelyn, John, Patrick, William

Saltwood, ii. 79

Sancho VI., king of Navarre, submits to Henry II.’s arbitration, ii. 190

Sancho VII., king of Navarre, suppresses revolt in Gascony and attacks Toulouse, ii. 316;
helps Richard, 366, 367
Saumur, i. 161;
taken by Fulk Nerra, 162;
blockaded by William of Poitou, 213;
betrayed to Fulk Rechin, 220;
burnt, ib.;
Henry II. at, ii. 256;
taken by Philip, 410;
abbey of S. Florence, i. 162, 163.
See Gelduin
Savaric of Mauléon, ii. 405, 426
Saxony, see Henry, Matilda, Otto
Scarborough, i. 428
Schools, Augustinian, i. 43;
at Oxford, ib., ii. 462;
London, i. 47;
Malmesbury, 84, 85.
See Universities
Scotland, its relations with Henry I., i. 96.
See David, Henry, Matilda, William
Scutage, i. 432, 433;
the Great, 459–461;
of 1195, ii. 343;
1196, 348
Sees, removal of, i. 40
Selby, see Robert
Sempringham, order of, i. 359, 360;
helps S. Thomas, ii. 41
Seneschal of France, office of, i. 450
Sens, i. 164; ii. 42, 68
Serfdom in twelfth century, i. 61, 62
Serlo the Mercer, mayor of London, ii. 472
Severn, valley of, i. 35
Sherborne castle, i. 304
“Sheriff’s Aid,” ii. 15
Sheriffs of London, i. 45; ii. 471;
Middlesex, i. 46;
inquest on (1170), ii. 126, 127
Shrewsbury, i. 295, 298, 299
Sibyl, queen of Jerusalem, ii. 247, 320

Sibyl of Anjou, daughter of Fulk V., i. 240, 241

Sicily conquered by Henry VI., ii. 371, 372.
See Constance, Jane, Roger, Tancred, William
Sillé, see Hugh, Robert
Simeon of Durham, i. 81, 82
Simon, count of Montfort, i. 467
Simon de Montfort, count of Evreux, ii. 138
Simon, earl of Northampton, ii. 144;
claim to Huntingdon, 154
Simon of Dover, i. 363
Simon Fitz-Peter, ii. 21
Sleaford, i. 304
Smithfield, i. 47;
S. Bartholomew’s priory and hospital, 67
Soissons, ii. 42, 65.
See Guy, William
Solomon, king of Britanny, i. 103
Spain, proposed crusade in, i. 453, 497
Standard, battle of the, i. 289–291
Stephen Harding, S., i. 69, 70

Stephen of Blois, son of Stephen-Henry and Adela, i. 235, 236;
his “Lombard grandmother,” 256;
brought up by Henry I., 273;
count of Mortain, ib.;
marriage, ib.;
relations with Henry, 274;
oath to Matilda, ib.;
goes to England, 276;
gains the treasury, 277;
crowned, 279;
first charter, ib.;
character, 280, 281;
treaty with Scotland, 282;
early successes, 283;
second charter, 284;
revolt against him, ib.;
holds forest assize, 285;
goes to Normandy, 286;
invades Scotland, 287;
relations with the barons, 292, 293;
with Earl Robert, 294;
revolt in the west, 295–299;
grants Northumberland to Henry of Scotland, 300;
besieges Ludlow, 301, 302;
takes Leeds, 302;
seizes Roger of Salisbury and his nephew, 303, 304;
summoned before a council at Winchester, 305;
penance, 306;
truce with Geoffrey, 307;
besieges Arundel, 309;
sends Matilda to Bristol, 310;
keeps Whitsuntide in the Tower, 311;
besieges Lincoln castle, 315;
exploits at battle of Lincoln, 319, 320;
prisoner, 320;
exchanged, 329;
takes Wareham and Cirencester, 330;
Oxford, 332;
besieges the castle, 332, 333;
routed at Wilton, 334;
takes Farringdon, 335;
builds Crowmarsh, 336;
imprisons Ralf of Chester, ib.;
wears his crown at Lincoln, 337;
banishes Abp. Theobald, 368;
trial of his claims at Rome, 370;
reconciled to Theobald, 371;
knights Eustace, 377;
drives Vacarius from Oxford, 379;
refuses a safe-conduct to John Paparo, 380;
proposes to crown Eustace, 381, 390;
imprisons the bishops, 391;
meets Henry, 397;
treaty, 400;
last days, 403;
death, 404
Stephen I., count of Champagne, i. 160
Stephen II., count of Champagne, i. 177;
rebels, 177, 178;
defeated, 178, 186;
dies, 271

Stephen-Henry, count of Blois, Chartres and Champagne, receives Fulk Rechin’s homage, i. 221;
his parents, 255, 256;
marriage, 271, 272;
crusade and death, 272

Stephen of Turnham, seneschal of Anjou, ii. 273, 279

Stockbridge, i. 327
Striguil, see Richard, William
Strongbow, ii. 99 note 7{445}
Stuteville, see Robert, William

Suger, abbot of S. Denis, his views on “Frenchmen and Englishmen,” i. 24;
policy, 387, 388;
opposes divorce of Louis VII., 392;
death, ib., 399
Sulpice of Amboise, i. 156, 157, 194
Synods, see Councils
Taillebourg, ii. 215
Talbot, see Geoffrey
Tallage of 1174, ii. 173; 1194, 337, 342
Talvas, see William
Tancarville, see William
Tancred, king of Sicily, ii. 295
Tara, ii. 84
Taxation, i. 25, 26, 27;
of towns, 29;
“Sheriff’s Aid,” ii. 15;
aid pour fille marier, 125, 126;
Saladin tithe, 249;
tax on moveables, 325;
taxes in 1194, 328, 329, 337, 342;
1195, 343;
1198, 352;
in London, 344, 345
Templars, i. 357
Terence O’Brien, king of Munster, ii. 89

Terence O’Conor, king of Connaught, ii. 90, 91

Tertullus, i. 127, 128

Theobald, abbot of Bec, archbishop of Canterbury, i. 300, 351;
joins the Empress, 321;
his policy, 351, 352, 378;
household, 352, 354, 379, 477;
legate, 356, 380;
“swimming-voyage” to Reims, 368;
banished, ib.;
consecrates Gilbert Foliot, 371;
returns, ib.;
holds a council, 381;
imprisoned, 391;
escapes, ib.;
relations with Henry II., 418;
consecrates Roger of York, 479;
last days, 503–504;
death, 506

Theobald I. the Trickster, count of Blois, Chartres and Tours, i. 106, 115, 116

Theobald III., count of Blois, Chartres and Tours, i. 177;
rebels, 177, 178;
marches to relieve Tours, 184, 185;
prisoner, 186;
cedes Tours to Geoffrey Martel, 187;
his marriages, 255, 256;
seizes Champagne, 271

Theobald IV. the Great, count of Blois, Chartres and Champagne, i. 273;
character, 275, 276;
alliance with Henry I., 231;
wars with Louis VI., ib., 235;
invited to Normandy, 282, 337;
treaties with Geoffrey, ib.;
with Stephen, 286;
opposes Louis VII.’s attempt on Toulouse, 457;
quarrel with Louis, 384;
death, 392, 399

Theobald V., count of Blois etc., seeks to marry Eleanor, i. 392;
betrothed to Adela, 445;
ally of Henry II., 466
Theobald Walter, ii. 293, 343
Theodoric, count of Flanders, i. 342
Thierceville, i. 354

Thomas of London, son of Gilbert Becket, his boyhood, i. 50, 51;
studies in Paris, 352;
clerk to Osbern Huitdeniers, 353;
enters Theobald’s household, 353, 354;
goes with him to Rome, 356;
to Reims, 368;
studies at Bologna and Auxerre, 379;
opposes crowning of Eustace, 391;
chancellor, 418;
archdeacon of Canterbury, 420, 479, 480;
his person, 421;
life as chancellor, 421–425;
relations with Henry, 423, 425–427;
embassy to France, 446–448;
exploits in war of Toulouse, 465, 466;
combat with Engelram of Trie, 467;
opposes marriage of Mary of Boulogne, 469;
takes charge of young Henry and procures his recognition as heir, 471–473;
relations with Roger of Pont-l’Evêque, 478;
with John of Salisbury, 485;
character as chancellor and as primate, 504, 505;
archbishop of Canterbury, ii. 1–3;
consecrated, 4–5;
institutes Trinity-Sunday, 5;
receives his pall and resigns the chancellorship, 6;
life as archbishop, 7–10;
his eruditi, 8;
plans of Church reform, 11;
reclaims alienated lands, 11, 12;
dispute with Roger of Clare, 12, 16;
with William of Eynesford, 17;
resigns archdeaconry, 13;
relations with Gilbert Foliot, ib., 31;
at council of Tours, 14;
resists Henry at Woodstock, 15, 16;
refuses the “customs,” 22, 23;
young Henry taken from him, 23;
meets Henry at Northampton, ib.;
consecrates Robert of Melun, 24;
accepts the customs, ib.;
swears to them at Clarendon, 25;
rejects the constitutions of Clarendon, 28;
forbids marriage of William of Anjou, 29;
dispute with Roger of York, 30;
attempts flight, 31;
meets Henry at Woodstock, 31, 32;
dispute with John the marshal, 32, 33, 34;
at council of Northampton, 33–40;
flight, 41;
goes to Soissons and Sens, 42;
effects of the quarrel in England, 46–49;
resigns his ring to the Pope, 52;
goes to Pontigny, 42, 54;
life there, 63;
writes to Henry, 63, 64;
pilgrimage to Soissons, 65;
excommunications at Vézelay, 66;
legate, 67;
goes to Sens, 68;
meets Henry at Montmirail, 69;
excommunications at Clairvaux, 70;
meets Henry at Montmartre, 71;
proclaims interdict, 71;
forbids crowning of young Henry, 72;
meets Henry at Fréteval, 73;
Tours and Chaumont, 74;
his estates restored, 74;
returns to England, 77;
excommunicates the De Brocs, 78;
slain, 79;
canonized, 431;
results of his life and death, 431–433;
lives of, 439

Thomas Pactius, prior of Loches, i. 126, 127, 153, note 3{318}

Thorgils, ii. 82

Thouars, see Almeric, Guy

Thurstan, archbishop of York, his charter to Beverley, i. 30, 38;
protects Fountains, 71;
makes truce with the Scots, 286;
organizes defence of Yorkshire, 288, 289;
dies, 354
Tiberias, battle of, ii. 247
Tickhill, ii. 282, 291, 299, 323, 328

Tighernan O’Ruark, chief of Breffny, ii. 97, 109, 111, 114

Tinchebray, battle of, i. 12, 13, 227
Tintern abbey, i. 71
Tithe, the Saladin, ii. 249
Torigni, 386, 405.
See Robert

Tortulf the Forester (Torquatius), i. 105, 127, 128

Totnes, gild at, ii. 469
Toucques, i. 307
Toulouse, relations with France, i. 457, 458;
war of Henry II. against, 464–466;
its results, 468;
attacked by Sancho of Navarre and the seneschal of Gascony, ii. 316;
counts, i. 454–456.
See Alfonso, Bertrand, Raymond, William
Touraine, i. 107;
ceded to Geoffrey Martel, 187, 188
Tournaments authorized by Richard I., ii. 342

Tours (Cæsarodunum) sacked by northmen, i. 102;
early history, 178–183;
granted to Geoffrey Martel, 178;
siege, 184;
ceded by Theobald, 187;
council at, ii. 14;
taken by Philip, 264;
Richard at, 365, 366;
meeting of Arthur and the Lusignans at, 405;
burnt by Philip, 407;
destroyed by John, ib.;
S. Martin’s abbey, i. 102, 113, 114, 181–183;
its banner, 186;
Châteauneuf, 183, ii. 264, 366.

See Adaland, Gatian, Gregory, Lidorius, Martin, Odo, Theobald

Towns, English, their origin and character, i. 27–29;
taxation, 25, 29;
firma burgi, 29;
condition under Henry I., 30–54;
fusion of races in, 48, 49;
progress under the Angevins, ii. 468–472
Tracy, see William
Trade, English, with Flanders, i. 30, 52;
with Ireland, 32, 34, 35; ii. 87;
of Winchester, i. 32;
Bristol, 34, 35; ii. 87;
Chester, i. 36; ii. 87;
Lincoln, i. 39, 40;
Norwich, 40;
London, 49;
under the Angevins, ii. 481–485
Treasurers, see Nigel, Richard
Trencavel, see Raymond
Trent, river, i. 40, 344, 345
Trèves (near Saumur), i. 162
Trie, see Engelram
Trinity Sunday instituted, ii. 5
Trussebut, see William
Tuam, metropolis of Connaught, ii. 94
Tunbridge, ii. 12, 16
Turlogh, see Terence
Turnham, see Robert, Stephen
Turold, abbot of Malmesbury, i. 84
Turones or Turoni, i. 179
Twinham or Christchurch, i. 32
Ulger, bishop of Angers, i. 370
Ulster invaded by John de Courcy, ii. 184
Umfraville, see Odelin
Universities, ii. 460–468.
See Bologna, Cambridge, Oxford, Paris
Urban II., Pope, i. 225
Urban III., Pope, ii. 242, 247
Ursus or Ours, S., i. 110
Vacarius, i. 379
Varaville, i. 213
Varneville, see Ralf

Vegetius Renatus, his book De Re Militari, i. 386

Vendôme, abbey of Holy Trinity at, i. 172.

See Adela, Burchard, Elizabeth, Fulk, Geoffrey, John

Verdun, treaty of, i. 98
Vere, see Aubrey
Vermandois, ii. 360.
See Ralf
Verneuil, ii. 364, 365, 425

Vexin, the French, granted to William Clito, i. 243

Vexin, the Norman, ceded to Louis VII., i. 388;
settled on Margaret, 467, 471;
seized by Henry II., 470
Vézelay, S. Thomas at, ii. 66
Victor IV., antipope, i. 498, 499; ii. 55
Vienna, Richard I. captured at, ii. 322
Villeins in twelfth century, i. 57–62

Vulgrin, count of Angoulême, invades Poitou, ii. 209;
submits to Richard, 210, 215;
dies, 220
Wace, ii. 446
Walbrook, i. 46

Waldric or Gualdric, chancellor of England and bishop of Laon, i. 22, 30

Waleran, count of Meulan, rebels, i. 241;
raises siege of Carham, 287;
escorts the Empress to Bristol, 310;
submits to Geoffrey, 337, 338
Wales, Flemish settlers in, i. 52;
Henry I.’s dealings with, 96;
condition in twelfth century, ii. 99;

Henry II.’s wars in, i. 435–437; ii. 179–181, 237;
crusade preached in, ii. 249;

Gerald’s books on, 458.

See Cadwallader, David, Madoc, Nest, Owen, Rees

Walkelyn Maminot, i. 295, 299
Wallingford, the Empress at, i. 334;
blockaded by Stephen, 396;
relieved by Henry, 397;
treaty of, 400;
council at, 429;
granted to John, ii. 282;
taken from him, 323, 328

Walter of Coutances, archbishop of Rouen, ii. 297;
sent to England, 298, 300;
supports John against W. Longchamp, 308, 309;
justiciar, 311, 312;
hostage for Richard’s ransom, 326;
quarrel with Richard, 380, 381;
invests John as duke, 389
Walter, archdeacon of Canterbury, i. 478;
bishop of Rochester, ib., 506; ii. 4
Walter, count of Mantes, i. 217, 218
Walter de Clare, i. 71
Walter Lespec founds Kirkham priory, i. 67;
Rievaux, 71;
at battle of the Standard, 289;
death, 399
Walter Map, ii. 449–452
Walter, see Hubert
Wareham, i. 295, 299, 330, 332, 333
Warin, abbot of Malmesbury, i. 84
Wark, ii. 153.
See Carham
Warren, see Isabel, Hameline, William
Waterford, its origin, ii. 83;
taken by Richard of Striguil, 104;
Henry II. at, 113;
bull “Laudabiliter” published at, 182.
See Malchus
Waverley abbey, i. 71
Weavers, gilds of, i. 30, 52; ii. 481
“Week-work,” i. 57
Weobly, i. 296
Westminster, i. 46;
coronations at, i. 279, 405; ii. 72, 276, 391, 399;
councils at, i. 300, 329, 330; ii. 3, 22, 23, 190

Wexford, ii. 102, 109, 111, 117
Wherwell, i. 327
White Ship wrecked, i. 239
Wigford, i. 439
Wigmore, i. 429

William, S., archbishop of York, i. 354, 355, 364–367, 478

William the Conqueror, king of England and duke of Normandy, his ecclesiastical customs, i. 16;
charter to London, 45;
shelters Bp. Gervase of Le Mans, 206;
helps King Henry against Geoffrey Martel, 207;
besieges Domfront, 208, 209;
regains Alençon and fortifies Ambrières, 209;
challenges Geoffrey, 211;
treaty with Herbert of Maine, 216;
conquers Maine, 218;
Maine revolts against, 221, 222;
treaty with Anjou, 223;
death, ib.

William II. Rufus, king of England, regains Maine, i. 3;
restores Carlisle, 36;
his palace at Westminster, 46;
war with Elias, 225, 226;
death, 3, 226

William the Lion, king of Scots, does homage to young Henry, ii. 72;
joins his rebellion, 140;
invades England, 149, 153, 154;
his border castles, 152;
prisoner, 161, 162;
does homage for his crown, 166, 178;
marriage, 237;
negotiations with Richard, 281, 330, 341;
with John, 391, 393;
homage to John, 399

William II. the Good, king of Sicily, betrothed to Jane, daughter of Henry II., ii. 60;
marriage, 189;
death, 318

William the Ætheling, son of Henry I., betrothed to Matilda of Anjou, i. 234;
receives homage, ib.;
marriage, 236;
drowned, 239

William, eldest son of Henry II. and Eleanor, i. 429, 431

William of Corbeil, prior of Chiche, archbishop of Canterbury, i. 68;
joins Stephen, 278;
crowns him, 279;
dies, 299, 300
William, archbishop of Bordeaux, ii. 140

William I. Shockhead (Tête-d’Etoupe), count of Poitou and duke of Aquitaine, i. 123

William II. Fierabras, duke of Aquitaine, i. 123, 139, 173

William IV. the Great, duke of Aquitaine, i. 159, 173

William V. the Fat, duke of Aquitaine, i. 173, 174

William VI. (Peter) the Bold, duke of Aquitaine, i. 176;
relations with Geoffrey Martel, 210–213;
death, 213

William VII. (Guy-Geoffrey), duke of Aquitaine, i. 215;
war with Anjou, ib., 252, 253;
regains Saintonge, 216

William VIII., duke of Aquitaine, offers his duchy in pledge to William Rufus, i. 3;
imprisons Fulk of Anjou, 229;
marriage, 455

William IX., duke of Aquitaine, bequeaths his daughter to Louis VII. of France, i. 383;
claims on Toulouse, 455

William Longsword, duke of Normandy, i. 111

William of Longchamp, bishop of Ely and chancellor, ii. 277, 279;
character and antecedents, 285–287;
justiciar, 288;
proceedings at York, 290;
quarrel with Hugh of Durham, 291;
legate, ib.;
his difficulties, 292, 293;
his rule, 294;
quarrels with John, 298–301;
struggle with Geoffrey of York, 305, 306;
with John etc., 307–311;
his fall, 311, 312;
appeals to the Pope and excommunicates his enemies, 312;
negotiates with Eleanor and John, 315;
goes to England for Richard’s ransom, 325;
makes truce with Philip, 367;
mission to Germany, 372;
death, 373, note 4{1866}
William, dean of York, i. 355;
bishop of Durham, ib.;
death, 399
William Giffard, chancellor, i. 22;
bishop of Winchester, 71

William I., count of Arles or Provence, i. 190, 191

William, count of Angoulême, ii. 136

William IV. count of Toulouse, i. 455

William of Aubigny, earl of Arundel, i. 298; ii. 144, 145, 149

William of Aumale, earl of York, i. 289

William of Blois, chancellor of Lincoln, ii. 456, 461

William, earl of Gloucester, ii. 144, 163, 184

William de Mandeville, earl of Essex, ii. 144;
supports Henry II., 145, 260;
justiciar, 279;
death, 282

William the Marshal rebels against Henry II., ii. 139;
relations with the young king, 228;
early history, 260;
encounter with Richard, 261;
arranges Henry’s funeral, 269, 270;
meeting with Richard, 272;
marriage, 274;
co-justiciar, 279;
regent for John, 390, 391;
earl of Striguil, 393;
sent to Normandy, 400, 401;
goes to relieve Les Andelys, 413;
ambassador to Philip, 424;
persuades John to dismiss the host, 427
William, marquis of Montferrat, ii. 60

William of Mortain, earl of Cornwall, i. 11, 13

William of Roumare, i. 314;
earl of Lincoln, 315
William, earl of Salisbury, ii. 144

William Longsword, earl of Salisbury, son of Henry II., ii. 428

William, earl of Warren and count of Mortain and Boulogne (son of Stephen), i. 430, 469

William of Anjou, third son of Geoffrey and Matilda, born, i. 374;
proposal to conquer Ireland for him, 431;
death, ii. 29
William de Barri, ii. 453

William the Clito, son of Robert of Normandy, i. 235, 238;
betrothed to Sibyl of Anjou, 240;
marriage annulled, 241;
excommunicated, 242;
Flanders granted to, 243;
marriage, ib.;
death, 266

William de Courcy, seneschal of Normandy, ii. 146, 193

William of Dover, i. 335
William of Eynesford, ii. 17
William Fitz-Alan, i. 295, 298

William Fitz-Aldhelm, seneschal to Henry II., ii. 113, 116;
governor of Ireland, 183
William Fitz-Duncan, i. 287
William Fitz-John, i. 295

William Fitz-Ralf, seneschal of Normandy, ii. 194, 260

William Fitz-Osbert or Long-beard, ii. 345–347

William Fitz-Stephen, ii. 38
William of Malmesbury, i. 83–93;
his account of the Angevins, 196
William of Mohun, i. 295
William “the Monk,” i. 342
William, lord of Montpellier, i. 462, 466
William of Newburgh, ii. 441–445
William Peverel, i. 295, 299, 320, 428
William of Pavia, cardinal, ii. 69
William, archbishop of Reims, ii. 218
William des Roches, ii. 394, 407, 426
William of Soissons, i. 481
William de Stuteville, ii. 160, 393

William Talvas, lord of Alençon, i. 236, 270, 281

William of Tancarville, chamberlain of Normandy, ii. 142

William de Tracy, ii. 78
William Trussebut, i. 307
William de Vesci, ii. 145, 160
William of Ypres, i. 285, 294;
at battle of Lincoln, 318, 319;
helps the queen in Kent, 324;
at siege of Winchester, 326;
captures Earl Robert, 327;
tries to reconcile Stephen and Abp. Theobald, 369

Wilton, i. 33;
battle at, 334
Winchester, i. 31;
treaty of, 9;
fair, 32;
Stephen received at, 277;
Matilda received at, 321;
palace, 325;
siege, 326;
Matilda’s escape from, 327, 328;
councils at, 305, 322, 402;
hospital of S. Cross, 357;
coronations at, ii. 81, 330;
meetings of John and W. of Longchamp at, 298, 299, 300.

See Henry, Richard, William
Windsor, ii. 182, 314, 323, 328
Witham, river, i. 38, 40
Wolvesey-house, i. 325
Woodstock, Henry I. at, i. 44, 94;
Henry II. and Thomas at, ii. 31, 32;
Welsh princes at, 14, 179;
council at, 14–16, 43, 44
Wool-trade, Flemish and English, i. 30, 52
Worcester, i. 35;
its historical school, 81, 82;
Henry II. at, 439
Würzburg, council at, ii. 56
York, i. 36;
Henry I.’s charter to, ib.;
S. Mary’s abbey, 71;
dispute for the primacy, 354, 355, 364–366;
tumults at, 380;
Henry Murdac enthroned at, 381;
end of the schism, 382;
Henry II. and William the Lion at, ii. 178;
massacre of Jews at, 289, 290;
council at, 340;
commune at, 469.

See Geoffrey, Henry, Hubert, Hugh, John, Roger, Thurstan, William

Yorkshire, its condition under Henry I., i. 36, 38

ERRATA

Page071, line 3, for “the two kings” read “they.”

” 081, line 3 from foot, for “Caen” read “Avranches.”

” 081, note 6, line 11, for “doubtless” read “probably.”

” 147, note 3, line 6, for “Châteauneuf” read “Neufchâtel.”

” 152, line 16, for “Robert” read “Roger.”

” 155, line 8, dele “in person.”

” 157, line 7, for “thousand” read “hundred.”

” 160, line 22, for “Robert” read “Roger.”

” 160, lines 22, 23, dele “had ... now.”

” 163, line 5, from foot, for “Robert” read “Roger.”

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Transcriber’s Note

The Errata have been moved to the end of each volume of the book, the corrections listed in them have been applied to this transcription.

Footnotes have been renumbered and moved to the end of paragraphs.

All references to footnote numbers (i.e. page and note number) are followed by the footnote number used here in braces e.g. {386}.

Some formatting and punctuation in citations and the index have been standardized.

Variant spelling, inconsistent hyphenation and inconsistent spelling of people’s names are retained, as are inconsistent punctuation after roman numerals (e.g. “i.” and “i” both occur) and inconsistent use of italics, however a few palpable printing errors have been corrected.

Volume I

“Guib. Noviog. Opp. Opp.” has been changed to “Guib. Noviog. Opp.” in all the footnotes it occurs.

In footnote 727 (originally Page 289 Footnote 5) “The the king” is quoted correctly.

In footnote 1040 (originally Page 360 Footnote 1) “xcix*” has been changed to “lix*” in “see Dugdale, Monast. Angl., vol. vi. pt. 2, pp. iii*–lix*”.

In footnote 1229 “De Nugis Curialibus” has been changed to “De Nugis Curialium”

In footnote 1291 The closing bracket has been moved:
“Joh. Salisb., Ep. lxxviii. (Giles, vol. i. p. 109; Robertson, Becket, vol. v. Ep. ix. p. 13).”
has been changed to
“Joh. Salisb., Ep. lxxviii. (Giles, vol. i. p. 109); Robertson, Becket, vol. v. Ep. ix. p. 13.”

Footnotes have been renumbered and moved to the end of paragraphs. Now the abbreviations “ib.” and “ibid.” are used to refer to the same work as a previous reference on the same page, as is “as above”. Moving footnotes to the end of paragraphs, has meant that occasionally these abbreviations refer to citations in a previous paragraph’s footnotes, so the transcriber has replaced these with the citation to which they refer, the replaced text is shown ·/·thus.

“Ib.” has been replaced in footnotes: 83, 87, 224, 753, 819, 939, 964, 1184, 1461, 1597, 1602, 1605 and 1670.

“ib.” has been replaced in footnotes: 1297 (1st citation), 1324 (1st citation) and 1324 (2nd citation).

“Ibid.” has been replaced in footnotes: 458 (1st citation), 1253 (1st citation), 1496 (1st citation) and 1530.

“ibid.” has been replaced in footnote 427.

“as above” has been replaced in footnotes: 41 (3rd citation), 279, 473, 569 (2nd citation), 576, 581 (1st citation), 586, 614, 618 (2nd citation), 692 (1st citation), 813 (1st citation), 856 (2nd citation), 937, 947, 958 (3rd citation), 959 (3rd citation), 999, 1062 (2nd citation), 1215 (1st citation), 1220 (1st citation), 1273 (2nd citation), 1286 (1st citation), 1421 (1st citation) and 1533 (1st citation).

“(as above)” has been replaced in footnotes: 605 (2nd citation), 718 (3rd citation), 765 (1st citation), 837 (1st citation), 837 (2nd citation), 931, 957 (3rd citation), 1189 (3rd citation) and 1201.

In footnote 926 “(as above)”originally refered to both the 2nd and 3rd citations.

Volume II

The anchor for footnote 177, originally footnote 3 on page 37, was missing. It has been placed by the transcriber.

Footnote 924 (originally page 185 footote 2) “whose” has been changed to “those” in “the general list of those were to accompany him”.

Page 382 “that” changed to “than” in “nothing less than”.

Page 462 “Norman” changed to “Normans” in “at the coming of the Normans”.

Page 503 in the index entry for Henry I. his “good peace,” “30 note 1 changed to “30 note 4{58}”

An index entry for William of Reims has been added.

The following have been left as printed:

Footnote 959 (originally page 200 footnote 2), the references to page 149, 151 and 44 of the Chronicals of S. Albin. in Eglises d’Anjou, have been left in the order they were printed.

Page 205 “at one” in “southern Gaul at one rose against its northern master” might be either “at once” or “as one”.

Footnote 2130 (originally page 425 footnote 5) It is possible that “Will. Armor. as above, pp. 86 and 188.” should read “Will. Armor. as above, pp. 86, Philipp., l. viii. (ibid), p. 188.”

Footnotes have been renumbered and moved to the end of paragraphs. Now the abbreviations “ib.” and “ibid.” are used to refer to the same work as a previous reference on the same page, as is “as above”. Moving footnotes to the end of paragraphs, has meant that occasionally these abbreviations refer to citations in a previous paragraph’s footnotes, so the transcriber has replaced these with the citation to which they refer, the replaced text is shown ·/·thus.

“Ib.” has been replaced in footnotes: 48, 80 (1st citation), 183 (1st citation), 328 (1st citation), 514 (1st citation), 660, 783 (1st citation), 798 (1st citation), 866, 985, 1107, 1182, 1245, 1543, 1687, 1964, 1983 (1st citation), 2161 (1st citation).

“ib.” has been replaced in footnotes: 5 (1st citation), 84, 136, 328 (2nd citation).

“Ibid.” has been replaced in footnotes: 13 (1st citation), 831 (1st citation), 1258 (1st citation), 1425, 1552 (1st citation), 2020 (1st citation), 2037 (1st citation),

“ibid.” has been replaced in footnote 2049.

“as above” has been replaced in footnotes: 2 (1st citation), 57, 80 (2nd citation), 188 (2nd citation), 196 (1st citation), 196 (6th citation), 201, 203 (2nd citation), 345, 414 (1st and 2nd citations), 454 (1st citation), 492, 610, 717 (1st citation), 727 (1st citation), 727 (2nd citation), 745, 749, 768 (1st citation), 783 (2nd citation), 807, 822 (2nd citation), 831 (2nd citation), 1014 (1st citation), 1024 (1st citation), 1024 (2nd citation), 1025 (2nd citation), 1025 (3rd citation), 1059, 1060, 1069 (2nd citation), 1208 (1st citation), 1208 (2nd citation), 1209 (1st citation), 1223 (1st citation), 1223 (2nd citation), 1246 (2nd citation), 1258 (3rd citation), 1416 (1st citation), 1468 (2nd citation), 1524 (1st citation), 1535 (1st citation), 1535 (2nd citation), 1537, 1560, 1561 (2nd citation), 1561 (3rd citation), 1574 (2nd citation), 1814 (1st citation), 1814 (3rd citation), 1836 (1st citation), 1836 (2nd citation), 1850 (1st citation), 1850 (2nd citation), 1855 (3rd citation), 1904 (1st citation), 2004 (1st citation), 2004 (3rd citation), 2049, 2051 (1st citation), 2090 (2nd citation), 2093 (1st citation), 2103 (1st citation), 2116 (1st citation), 2144, 2169 (1st citation).

“(as above)” has been replaced in footnotes: 2 (3rd citation), 27, 177 (5th citation), 351 (1st citation), 514 (2nd citation), 551 (1st citation), 551 (2nd citation), 653 (2nd citation), 682, 1574 (1st citation), 1648 (1st citation), 1653, 1814 (2nd citation), 1903, 1904 (4th citation), 1908 (1st citation), 1908 (2nd citation), 2051 (2nd citation).

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Table of Contents

- ENGLAND UNDER THE ANGEVIN KINGS

- VOLUME I

- PREFACE
- CONTENTS
- LIST OF MAPS
- PLANS
- CHAPTER I THE ENGLAND OF HENRY I

- CHAPTER II THE BEGINNINGS OF ANJOU

- Note A. ON THE SOURCES AND AUTHENTICITY OF EARLY ANGEVIN HISTORY.

- Note B. THE PALACE OF THE COUNTS AT ANGERS.

- Note C. THE MARRIAGES OF GEOFFREY GREYGOWN.

- Note D. THE BRETON AND POITEVIN WARS OF GEOFFREY GREYGOWN.

- Note E. THE GRANT OF MAINE TO GEOFFREY GREYGOWN.

- CHAPTER III ANJOU AND BLOIS

- Note A. THE SIEGE OF MELUN.

- Note B. THE PARENTS OF QUEEN CONSTANCE.

- Note C. THE PILGRIMAGES OF FULK NERRA.

- Note D. GEOFFREY MARTEL AND POITOU.

- CHAPTER IV ANJOU AND NORMANDY

- Note A. THE HOUSES OF ANJOU AND GÂTINAIS.

- Note B. THE HEIR OF GEOFFREY MARTEL.

- Note C. THE WAR OF SAINTONGE.

- Note D. THE DESCENDANTS OF HERBERT WAKE-DOG.

- Note E. THE SIEGE OF LA FLÈCHE AND TREATY OF BLANCHELANDE.

- Note F. THE MARRIAGE OF GEOFFREY AND MATILDA.

- CHAPTER V GEOFFREY PLANTAGENET AND STEPHEN OF BLOIS

- CHAPTER VI ENGLAND AND THE BARONS

- Note. THE TOPOGRAPHY OF THE BATTLE OF LINCOLN.

- CHAPTER VII THE ENGLISH CHURCH
- CHAPTER VIII HENRY DUKE OF THE NORMANS
- CHAPTER IX HENRY AND ENGLAND
- CHAPTER X HENRY AND FRANCE

- CHAPTER XI THE LAST YEARS OF ARCHBISHOP THEOBALD

- VOLUME II

- CONTENTS
- LIST OF MAPS
- PLANS

- CHAPTER I ARCHBISHOP THOMAS

- Note A. THE COUNCIL OF WOODSTOCK.

- Note B. THE COUNCIL OF CLARENDON.

- CHAPTER II HENRY AND ROME
- CHAPTER III THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND
- CHAPTER IV HENRY AND THE BARONS
- CHAPTER V THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE
- CHAPTER VI THE LAST YEARS OF HENRY II
- CHAPTER VII RICHARD AND ENGLAND
- CHAPTER VIII THE LATER YEARS OF RICHARD

- CHAPTER IX THE FALL OF THE ANGEVINS

- Note. THE DEATH OF ARTHUR.

- CHAPTER X THE NEW ENGLAND
- INDEX
- MESSRS. MACMILLAN & CO.’S PUBLICATIONS.

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE