III. THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND…

III. THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND

795–1172.

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, and Lanigan, as above, 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). 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, 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. c. 22 (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) 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), p. 28. Rog. Howden (as above), 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.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

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, 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, 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. 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), 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, 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.

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, p. 376. Cf. Gesta Hen. as above, 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, 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, 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, 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. p. 380. Cf. Gesta Hen. as above, 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. (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, 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, 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. Gesta Hen. as above. 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.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us