Henry the Second - Mrs. J. R. Green
The triumph of the Angevin conqueror was now complete. The baronage lay
crushed at his feet. The Church was silent. The royal authority had been
pushed, at least in name, to the utmost limits of the island. The close
of this first work of settlement was marked by a royal progress between
September 1157 and January 1158 through the whole length of England from
Malmesbury to Carlisle. It was the king's first visit to the northern
shires which he had restored to the English crown; he visited and
fortified the most important border castles, and then through the bitter
winter months he journeyed to Yorkshire, the fastnesses of the Peak,
Nottingham, and the midland and southern counties. The progress ended at
Worcester on Easter Day, 1158. There the king and queen for the last
time wore their crowns in solemn state before the people. A strange
ceremony followed. In Worcester Cathedral stood the shrine of St.
Wulfstan, the last of the English bishops, the saint who had preserved
the glory of the old English Church in the days of the Confessor, and
carried it on through the troubled time of the Conquest, to whose
supernatural resources the Conqueror himself had been forced to yield,
and who had since by ever-ready miracle defended his city of Worcester
from danger. On this shrine the king and Queen now laid their crowns,
with a solemn vow never again to wear them. To the people of the West
such an act may perhaps have seemed a token that Henry came among them
as heir of the English line of kings, and as defender of the English
Church and people.
From England Henry was called away in August 1158, by the troubles of
his dominions across the sea. The power of Anjou had been built up by
centuries of tyranny, treason, and greed. Nantes had been robbed from
Britanny, Tours had been wrested from Blois, the southern borderland
from Poitou. A hundred years of feud with Maine could not lightly be
forgotten. Normandy still cherished the ancient hatred of pirate and
Frenchman. To the Breton, as to the Norman and the Gascon, the rule of
Anjou was a foreign rule; and if they must have a foreign ruler, better
the King of France than these upstart Counts. Henry held his various
states too by wholly different titles, and to every one of them his
right was more or less disputed. To add to the confusion, his barons in
every province held under him according to different customs and laws of
feudal tenure; and many of them, moreover, owed a double allegiance, and
did homage for part of their estates to Henry and for part to the King
of France. In the general uncertainty as to every question of succession,
or title, or law, or constitution, or feudal relations, the authority
which had been won by the sword could be kept only by sheer military
force. The rebellious array of the feudal nobles, eager to spring to arms
against the new imperial system, could count on the help of the great
French vassals along the border, jealous of their own independence, and
ever watching the Angevin policy with vigilant hostility. And behind
these princes of France stood the French king, Henry's suzerain lord and
his most determined and restless foe, from whom the Angevin count had
already taken away his wife and half his dominions, a foe to whom,
however, through all the perplexed and intermittent wars of thirty years,
he was bound by the indissoluble tie of the feudal relation, which
remained the dominant and authoritative fact of the political morality of
that day. For twenty years to come the two kings, both of them hampered
by overwhelming difficulties, strove to avoid war each after his own
fashion: Henry by money lavishly spent, and by wary diplomacy; Louis
more economically by a restless cunning, by incessant watching of his
adversary's weak points, by dexterously using the arms of Henry's
rebellious subjects rather than those of Frenchmen.
Henry's first care was to secure his ill-defined and ill-defended
frontier, and to recover those border fortresses which had been wrested
from Geoffrey by his enemies. In Normandy the Vexin, which was the true
military frontier between him and France, and commanded the road to
Paris, had been lost. In Anjou he had to win back the castles which had
fallen to the House of Blois. His brother Geoffrey, Earl of Nantes, was
dead, and he must secure his own succession to the earldom. Two rival
claimants were disputing the lordship of Britanny, but Britanny must at
all costs be brought into obedience to Henry. There were hostile forces
in Angoumois, La Marche, Saintonge, and the Limousin, which had to be
finally destroyed. And besides all this, it was necessary to enforce
Eleanor's rights over Berri, and her disputed claims to supremacy over
Toulouse and Auvergne. Every one of these projects was at once taken in
hand. Henry's chancellor, Thomas Becket, was sent from England in 1158
at the head of a splendid embassy to the French court, and when Henry
landed in France the success of this mission was declared. A marriage
was arranged between his little son Henry, now three years old, and
Louis' daughter Margaret, aged six months; and the Vexin was to be
restored to Normandy as Margaret's dowry. The English king obtained from
Louis the right to judge as lord of Anjou and seneschal of France
between the claimants to Britanny; his first entry into that province
was with full authority as the officer of France, and the whole army of
Normandy was summoned to Avranches to enforce his judgment. Conan was
made Duke of Britanny under Henry's lordship, and Nantes was given up
into his hands. He secured by treaty with the House of Blois the
fortresses which had fallen into their hands, and before the year was
out he thus saw his inheritance in Anjou and Normandy, as he had before
seen his inheritance in England, completely restored. In November he
conducted the King of France on a magnificent progress through Normandy
and Britanny, not now as a vassal requiring his help, but with all the
pomp of an equal king.
Meanwhile Henry had been preparing an army to assert his sovereignty
over Toulouse--a sovereignty which would have carried his dominions to
the Mediterranean and the Rhone. The Count of St. Gilles, to whom it had
been pledged by a former Duke of Aquitaine, and who had eighteen years
before refused to surrender it on Eleanor's first marriage, now resisted
the claims of her second husband also, and he was joined by Louis, who
under the altered circumstances took a different view of the legal
rights of Eleanor's husband to suzerainty. To France, indeed, the
question was a matter of life and death. The success of Henry would have
left her hemmed in on three sides by the Angevin dominions, cut off from
the Mediterranean as from the Channel, with the lower Rhone in the hands
of the powerful rival that already held the Seine, the Loire, and the
Garonne. When, therefore, Henry's forces occupied the passes of the
province, and in September 1159 closed round Toulouse itself, Louis
threw himself into the city. Henry, profoundly influenced by the feudal
code of honour of his day, inheriting the traditional loyalty of his
house to the French monarchy, too sagacious lightly to incur war with
France, too politic to weaken in the eyes of his own vassals the
authority of feudal law, and possibly mindful of the succession to the
French throne which might yet pass through Margaret to his son Henry,
refused to carry on war against the person of his suzerain. He broke up
the siege in spite of the urgent advice of his chancellor Thomas; and
for nearly forty years the quarrel lingered on with the French monarchy,
till the question was settled in 1196 by the marriage of Henry's
daughter Joanna to Count Raymond VI. Thomas, who had proved himself a
mighty warrior, was left in charge of the newly-conquered Cahors, while
Henry returned to Normandy, and concluded in May a temporary peace with
Louis. His enemies, however, were drawn together by a common fear, and
France became the battle-ground of the rival ambitions of the Houses of
Blois and Anjou. Louis allied himself with the three brothers of the
House of Blois--the Counts of Champagne, of Sancerre, and of Blois--by a
marriage with their sister only a month after the death of his own queen
in September; and a joint attack was planned upon Henry. His answer was
rapid and decisive. Margaret was in his keeping, and he at once married
her to his son, took the Vexin into his own hands and fortified it with
castles. His position in fact was so strong that the forced his enemies
to a truce in June 1161.
The political complications with which Henry was surrounded were still
further confused by a new question which now arose, and which was to
threaten the peace of Europe for eighteen years. On the death of the
English Pope, Hadrian IV., on the 1st of September 1159, two rivals,
Alexander III. and Victor IV., disputed the see of Rome, and the strife
between the Empire and the Papacy, now nearly one hundred years old,
broke out afresh on a far greater scale than in the time of Gregory.
Frederick Barbarossa asserted the imperial right of judging between the
rivals, and declared Victor pope, supported by the princes of the Empire
and by the kings of Hungary, Bohemia, and Denmark. Alexander claimed the
aid of the French king--the traditional defender of the Church and
protector of the Popes; and after the strife had raged for nearly three
years, he fled in 1162 to France. In the great schism Henry joined the
side of Louis in support of Alexander and of the orthodox cause; the two
kings met at Chouzy, near Blois, to do honour to the Pope; they walked
on either side of his horse and held his reins. The meeting marked a
great triumph for Alexander; the union of the Teutonic nations against
the policy of Rome was to be delayed for three centuries and a half. It
marked, too, the highest point of Henry's success. He had checked the
Emperor's schemes; he had won the gratitude of both Louis and the Pope;
he had defeated the plots of the House of Blois, and shown how easily
any alliance between France and Champagne might be broken to pieces by
his military power and his astute diplomacy. He had rounded off his
dominions; he had conquered the county of Cahors; he had recovered the
Vexin and the border castles of Freteval and Amboise; the fiefs of
William of Boulogne had passed into his hands on William's death; he was
master of Nantes and Dol, and lord of Britanny; he had been appointed
Protector of Flanders.
At this moment, indeed, Henry stood only second to the Emperor among the
princes of Christendom, and his aim seems to have been to rival in
some sort the Empire of the West, and to reign as an over-king, with
sub-kings of his various provinces, and England as one of them, around
him. He was connected with all the great ruling houses. His eldest son
was married to the daughter of the King of France; the baby Richard,
eighteen months old, was betrothed during the war of Toulouse to a
daughter of the King of Aragon. He was himself a distant kinsman of the
Emperor. He was head of the house of the Norman kings in Sicily. He was
nearest heir of the kings of Jerusalem. Through his wife he was head of
the house of Antioch, and claimed to be head of the house of Tripoli.
Already in these first years of his reign the glory of the English king
had been acknowledged by ambassadors from the Emperor, from the King of
Jerusalem, from Norway, from Sweden, from the Moorish kings of Valencia
and Murcia, bearing the gifts of an Eastern world--gold, silk, horses,
and camels. England was forced out of her old isolation; her interest in
the world without was suddenly awakened. English scholars thronged the
foreign universities; English chroniclers questioned travellers,
scholars, ambassadors, as to what was passing abroad. The influence of
English learning and English statecraft made itself felt all over
Europe. Never, perhaps, in all the history of England was there a time
when Englishmen played so great apart abroad. English statesmen and
bishops were set over the conduct of affairs in Provence, in Sicily, in
Gascony, in Britanny, in Normandy. English archbishops and bishops and
abbots held some of the highest posts in France, in Anjou, in Flanders,
in Portugal, in Italy, in Sicily. Henry himself welcomed trained men
from Normandy or Sicily or wherever he could find them, to help in his
work of administration; but in England foreigners were not greatly
welcomed in any place of power, and his court was, with but one or two
exceptions, made up of men who, of whatever descent they might be,
looked on themselves as Englishmen, and bore the impress of English
training. The mass of Englishmen meanwhile looked after their own
affairs and cared nothing about foreign wars fought by Brabancon
mercenaries, and paid for by foreign gold. But if they had nothing to
win from all these wars, they were none the less at last drawn into the
political alliances and sympathies of their master. Shut out as she was
by her narrow strip of sea from any real concern in the military
movements of the continental peoples, England was still dragged by the
policy of her Angevin rulers into all the complications of European
politics. The friendships and the hatreds of her king settled who were
to be the allies and who the foes of England, and practically fixed the
course of her foreign policy for seven hundred years. A traditional
sympathy lingered on from Henry's days with Germany, Italy, Sicily, and
Spain; but the connection with Anjou forced England into a hostility
with France which had no real ground in English feeling or English
interests; the national hatred took a deeper character when the feudal
nobles clung to the support of the French king against the English
sovereign and the English people, and "generation handed on to generation
an enmity whose origin had long been forgotten." From the disastrous
Crusade of 1191, "from the siege of Acre," to use the words of Dr.
Stubbs, "and the battle of Arsouf to the siege of Sebastopol and the
battles of the Crimea, English and French armies never met again except
as enemies."
CHAPTER III
THE GOVERNMENT OF ENGLAND
The building up of his mighty empire was not the only task which filled
the first years of Henry's reign. Side by side with this went on another
work of peaceful internal administration which we can but dimly trace in
the dearth of all written records, but which was ultimately to prove of
far greater significance than the imperial schemes that in the eyes of his
contemporaries took so much larger proportions and shone with so much
brighter lustre.
The restoration of outward order had not been difficult, for the anarchy
of Stephen's reign, terrible as it was, had only passed over the surface
of the national life and had been vanquished by a single effort. But the
new ruler of England had to begin his work of administration not only
amid the temporary difficulties of a general disorganization, but amid
the more permanent difficulties of a time of transition, when society was
seeking to order itself anew in its passage from the medieval to the
modern world; and his victory over the most obvious and aggressive forms
of disorder was the least part of his task. Through all the time of
anarchy powerful forces had been steadily at work with which the king had
now to reckon. A new temper and new aspirations had been kindled by the
troubles of the last years. The deposition of Stephen, the elections of
Matilda and of Henry, had been so many formal declarations that the king
ruled by virtue of a bargain made between him and his people, and that if
he broke his contract he justly forfeited his authority. The routine of
silent and submissive councils had been broken through, and the earliest
signs of discussion and deliberation had discovered themselves, while the
Church, exerting in its assemblies an authority which the late king had
helplessly laid down, formed a new and effective centre of organized
resistance to tyranny in the future Even the rising towns had seized the
moment when the central administration was paralysed to extend their own
privileges, and to acquire large powers of self-government which were to
prove the fruitful sources of liberty for the whole people.
We see everywhere, in fact, signs of the great contest which in one form
or another runs through the whole of the twelfth century, and gives its
main interest in our eyes to the English history of the time,--the
struggle between the iron organization of medieval feudalism and those
nascent forces of modern civilization which were fated in the end to
shatter and supersede it. In spite of the cry of lamentation which the
chroniclers carry down to us over the misery of a land stricken by plague
and famine and rapine, it is still plain that even through the terrible
years of Stephen's reign England had its share in the universal movement
by which the squalor and misery of the Middle Ages were giving place to a
larger activity and a better order of things A class unknown before was
fast growing into power,--the middle class of burghers and traders, who
desired above all things order, and hated above all things the medieval
enemy of order, the feudal lord. Merchant and cultivator and wool-grower
found better work ready to their hand than fighting, and the appearance
of mercenary soldiers marked everywhere the development of peaceful
industries. Amid all the confusion of civil war the industrial activities
of the country had developed with bewildering rapidity; while knights and
barons led their foreign hirelings to mutual slaughter, monks and canons
were raising their religious houses in all the waste places of the land,
and silently laying the foundations of English enterprise and English
commerce. To the great body of the Benedictines and the Cluniacs were
added in the middle of the twelfth century the Cistercians, who founded
their houses among the desolate moorlands of Yorkshire in solitary places
which had known no inhabitants since the Conqueror's ravages, or among
the swamps of Lincolnshire. A hundred and fifteen monasteries were built
during the nineteen years of Stephen's reign, more than had been founded
in the whole previous century; a hundred and thirteen were added to these
during the reign of Henry. In half a century sixty-four religious houses
were built in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire alone. Monastery and priory, in
which the decorated Romanesque was giving way to the first-pointed
architecture, towered above the wretched mud-hovels in which the whole of
the population below the class of barons crowded; their churches were
distinguished by the rare and novel luxury of glass windows, which, as
they caught the red light of the setting sun, startled the peasant with
omens of coming ill. Multitudes of men were busied in raising the vast
pile of buildings which made up a religious house,--cloisters, dormitories,
chapels, hospitals, granaries, barns, storehouses, whose foundations when
all else is gone still show in the rugged surface of some modern field.
Regular and secular clergy were alike spurred on in their work by jealous
rivalry. Archbishop Roger of York was at the opening of Henry's reign
building his beautiful church at Ripon, of whose rich decoration traces
still remain, while he gave scant sympathy and encouragement to the
Cistercian monks still busy with the austere mass of buildings which
they had raised at Fountains almost within sight of the Ripon towers.
We may gain some faint idea of the amazing stir and industry which the
founding of these monasteries implied by following in our modern farms
and pasture lands the traces which may even now be seen of the toil of
these great preachers of labour. The whole water supply of a countryside
for miles round was gathered up by vast drainage works; stagnant pools
were transformed into running waters closed in by embankments, which
still serve as ditches for the modern farmer; swamps were reclaimed that
are only now preserved for cultivation by maintaining the dykes and
channels first cut by medieval monks; mills rose on the banks of the
newly-created streams; roads were made by which the corn of surrounding
villages might be carried to the central mill and the produce of the land
brought to the central storehouse. The new settlers showed a measureless
cunning and industry in reclaiming worthless soil; and so eager were they
for land at last, that the Cistercians were even said to desecrate
churchyards, and to encroach on the borders of royal forests. They grew
famous for the breeding of horses according to the exacting taste of the
day, learned in the various species of palfreys and sumpter horses and
knight's chargers and horses for ambling or for trotting. They thanked
Heaven for the "blessings of fatness and fleeces," as foreign weavers
sought their wool and the gold of Flanders was poured into their
treasure-houses. The same enterprise and energy which in modern days made
England the first manufacturing country of the world was then, in fact,
fast pressing her forward to the place which Australia now holds towards
modern Europe,--the great wool-growing country, the centre from whence
the raw material for commerce was supplied. In vain the Church by its
canons steadily resisted the economic changes of a time when wealth began
to gather again and capital found new uses, and bitterly as it declaimed
against usury and mortgages, angry complaints still increased "that many
people laying aside business practised usury almost openly."
Nor were the towns behindhand in activity. As yet, indeed, the little
boroughs were for the most part busy in fighting for the most elementary
of liberties--for freedom of trade within the town, for permission to hold
a market, for leave to come and go freely to some great fair, for the right
to buy and sell in some neighbouring borough, for liberty to carry out
their own justice and regulate the affairs of their town. They were buying
from the lord, in whose "demesne" they lay, permission to gather wood in
the forest, right of common in its pasture, the commutation of their
services in harvest-time for "reap-silver," and of their bondage to the
lord's mill for "multure-penny." Or they were fighting a sturdy battle with
the king's justices to preserve some ancient privilege, the right of the
borough perhaps to "swear by itself,"--that is, to a jury of its own or its
freedom from the general custom of "frank-pledge." As trade advanced
commercial bodies grew up in the boroughs and formed themselves into gilds;
and these gilds gradually drew into their own hands the government of the
town, which in old days had been decided by the general voice of the whole
body of its burghers--that is, of those who held land within its walls.
The English borough began, in fact, to resemble the foreign "Commune."
Gilds of bakers, of weavers, of mercers, of fullers, of butchers,
goldsmiths, pepperers, clothiers, and pilgrims appeared in London, York,
Gloucester, Nottingham, even in little boroughs such as that of St.
Edmunds; while in distant Cornwall, Totnes, Lidford, and Bodmin set up
their gilds. How Henry regarded the movement it is hard to say. The gilds
had to pay, as everything had to pay, to the needy Treasury; but otherwise
they were not interfered with, and went on steadily increasing in power and
numbers.
Prosperity brought with it the struggle for supremacy, and the history of
nations was rehearsed on a petty stage, with equal passions if with less
glory. A thriving village or township would begin to encroach on the
common land of its weaker neighbours, would try to seize some of its
rights of pannage in the forest, or fishing in the stream. But its most
strenuous efforts were given to secure the exclusive right of trading.
Free trade between village and village in England was then, in fact, as
much unknown as free trade at this day between the countries of modern
Europe. Producer, merchant, manufacturer saw in "protection" his only
hope of wealth or security. Jealously enclosed within its own borders,
each borough watched the progress of its neighbours "with anxious
suspicion." If one of them dared defiantly to set up a right to make and
sell its own bread and ale, or if it bought a charter granting the right
to a market, it found itself surrounded by foes. The new market was
clearly an injury to the rights of a neighbouring abbot or baron or town
gild, or it lessened the profits of the "king's market" in some borough
on the royal demesne. Then began a war, half legal, half of lawless
violence. Perhaps the village came off victorious, and kept its new
market on condition that it should never change the day without a royal
order (unless in deference to the governing religious feeling of the
time, it should change it from Sunday to a week day). Perhaps, on the
other hand, it saw its charter vanish, and all the money it had cost with
it, its butchers' and bakers' stalls shattered, its scales carried off,
its ovens destroyed, the "tumbril" for the correction of fraudulent baker
or brewer destroyed. Of such a strife we have an instance in the fight
which the burghers of Wallingford carried on with their neighbours. They
first sought to crush the rising prosperity of Abingdon by declaring that
its fair was an illegal innovation, and that in old days nothing might be
sold in the town save bread and ale. Oxford, which had had a long quarrel
with Abingdon over boat cargoes and river tolls, readily joined in the
attack, but ultimately by the king's judgment Abingdon was declared to
have had right to a "full market", and Wallingford was discomfited. A
little later its wrath was kindled afresh by the men of Crowmarsh, who,
instead of coming to the Wallingford market, actually began to make their
own bread and ale--by what warrant no one knew, said the Wallingford
bakers and brewers. Crowmarsh held out through the later years of Henry's
reign and Richard's, had a sore struggle under John, and at last under
Henry III. saw the officers of justice come down upon them a second time,
and make a general wreck of ovens and "tumbril," while the weights were
carried off to triumphant Wallingford.