King and baronage (A. D. 1135-1327)

Front matter

UC-NRLF

^® CING AND ARONAGE l>c»Vi(~W:k>cVie£WMii

THE OXFORD MANUALS

Contents

Chap.

I. Feudal Anarchy, 1135-1154,

Page

Chapter I. Feudal Anarchy, 1135-1154

With the reign of Henry I. the immediate results of the Norman Conquest appeared to have been worked out. The new race of English kings had Jesuits of taken their place among the great powers of the Norman Europe in right of their island kingship no ^°'^^"®^*- less than of their continental lands. The church as well as the state of England had become less insular. For good or ill the pope's hand was felt in the land even while his claims were checked and resisted. Society, influenced both by church and baronage, felt the change, and literature reflected it. Language was changing under the new relation with foreigners, and art was rapidly growing into vigorous life under the wider horizon. The old English law had passed away, or been transformed into a new thing, in which the feudal customs of the Normans were predominant. Lastly, the men who lived on English soil were a different, and a mixed, race.

Such was the England which Henry L left behind him. There was much of change in the old England, but there was not yet much of union. The English folk had learnt to look to church and king to aid them against their new masters the barons, who were still half enemies. The barons were not yet content to lie down under the iron rule of a king w^ho taught them that fixed feudal service was included in a still wider demand, the universal obli-

8 ' * * the' HOUSE. OF ANJOU.

gatiOii bf aJlegiance iTom every man that trod the English soil to the king that sat upon the English throne. While he lived, the stern Henry (as the English Chronicle itself records) made peace for man and beast. " Stark man he was, and there was great awe of him. The highways were safe while he ruled, and the island was not vexed with war. Whoso followed his business and bare his burden, be it gold or silver, no man durst say unto him aught but good." In words such as these could the English remember him who gave them peace. Now he had, so his foreign counsellor the Archbishop of Rouen hoped, the peace he had loved in his lifetime. But England plunged again into the distractions of civil war. "There was soon", says the Chronicle, "tribulation in the land, for every man that could soon robbed another."

Henry I. died at Rouen on the night of December i, 1 135. Of his lawful children only his daughter Matilda The Empress survivcd him. She had been wife to the Matilda. Empcror Henry V., and was now married to

Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, the heir of the traditional rivals of the Norman house. From this union sprang the great house of Anjou, which was to have so vast an influence on English history. The counts who ruled over the little state in central Gaul on the banks of the lower Loire and the Maine, — the borderland between France, Aquitaine and Brittany, — had long been a stalwart, stark, and sturdy race, whom their neighbours had learnt to fear. Fulk the Black, Geoffrey Martel, and Fulk V. were great men, who raised a small state into prominence; but there was a grim impressiveness about the race that seemed to come from another source. Legends rose which traced the line back to a count who had married a spouse of unearthly origin. "What wonder if we lack the natural affections of mankind — we who come from the devil and must needs go back to him!" So Richard L is recorded to have said.

Geoffrey, the young Count of Anjou, was the son of Fulk v., and had married the widowed Empress Matilda when he was but a lad of fifteen. Five years later, on March 5,

THE TWO CLAIMANTS. 9

1 1 33, the son was born who was to become the first of the Angevin house in England, and to inherit all the fierce tenacity and the strong resolution of the families from which he was sprung. It seemed then to the great Henry I. that his throne would happily pass to his daughter and her son; and to make the succession still surer, he made his lords and bishops swear fealty to the empress, and "also to her little son, whom he appointed to be king after him". But no sooner was he dead than the oath was forgotten. The magnates, Norman and half English, cared not for Matilda, who had only spent two years in England since she was eight years old; and her husband was the hereditary foe of the barons who traced their descent from the great vassals of the Conqueror. Thus it was that when Henry died, the barons in England and in Normandy vowed that no one of the false race of the Angevins should be their king. They held themselves as mighty as any such southern lord, and both in the island they had conquered and in their own land they rejected the dead king's daughter and her handsome spouse. "We will not have a foreigner to reign over us"; so they spoke of the Count Geoffrey.

There was another claimant to the throne, who, if he was no more Norman than Matilda, yet would not bring the Normans under an alien house. The Stephen of conqueror's daughter Adela had married the Biois. Count of Blois, a house at rivalry with Anjou but not unfriendly to the Normans. Their third son Stephen had been brought up at the court of his uncle, King Henry. He was a bold, hearty man, with the instincts, it seemed, of a baron rather than a king. From him the barons in England could look for at least something of the independence which they still chafed at losing. England, it was said, had never been ruled by a woman, and now a strong man, the great Conqueror's own grandson, stood for the throne. No wonder the barons were unmindful of their oaths. The church followed the lead of the claimant's brother Henry, who was bishop of the royal city of Winchester. But a stronger voice than lO THE FIGHT FOR THE CROWN.

either was found at the moment in the citizens of London. They met Stephen with acclamations, and in their folkmoot, which King Henry had recognized as possessing wide powers over the great city, they, speaking in His corona- the name of the people of the land, chose tion. hini to be lord and king. "Elected by clergy

and people", as he himself phrased it. King Stephen was crowned on S. Stephen's Day, 1135.

For the time it seemed as if the new reign might be peaceful as the last. Even Robert of Gloucester, the natural son of Henry I., submitted to the king, and Normandy followed the English example. Stephen issued charters promising good government, the freedom of the church, the suppression of wrongs wrought by greedy officials, the surrender of the forests which the late king had made. He soon crushed a rising in Normandy; he made his power felt against unruly barons at Exeter and at Norwich ; and he brought David, King of Scots, Matilda's uncle, to agree to a truce.

So passed the years 11 36 and 1137. In 1138 the scene suddenly changed, and war was begun which was The fight for o^ly to end when the new king himself was the crown. j^^ar his death. Stephen's own imprudence, even more than his dangerous enemies, brought about his woeful fall. Early in the year Robert of Gloucester renounced his allegiance. The king seized some of his lands, but was unable to capture his strong castle of Bristol. The King of Scots, with a wild horde of halfsavage soldiers, overran the northern shires. Then the church stood forth to defend the peace of her children; and the good Thurstan, Archbishop of York, who had been to the people of his vast diocese a great and liberal ruler, called together the fyrd (the host of the people) to withstand the foe. The two armies met on the moor of Northallerton. The English folk took with them the banners of their own native saints, S. Cuthbert of Durham and S. Wilfrid of Ripon, as well as S. Peter of York and S. John of Beverley — together with the king's standard. After a fierce fight the invaders fled back towards

THE SEIZURE OF THE BISHOPS. II

Carlisle. Thus, on August 22, 11 38, was won the English people's victory for their Norman king, to which was given the name of the Battle of the Standard. Yet at no very long time after, Stephen ceded Cumberland and Northumberland to the Scottish king to buy off his further attacks. They were to be held as an earldom dependent on the English crown.

But the danger was not yet over. There were risings all over England, which the king could with difficulty put down. The barons began to fortify great The seizure of castles, and the king foolishly to grant them ^^^ bishops, new privileges, to endow them with crown rights, to give them shares in the fines levied in the law courts, and to encourage their independence just where he should have curbed their power. The great churchmen took alarm. Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, and his family were men whom Henry I. had raised from mere poor clerks to be the founders of an administration, the organizers and agents of a great system of justice and finance. In their hands lay the secrets of government, the rules by which the king acted, the knowledge of the ways in which he made his power felt in distant shires. When Roger of* Salisbury, who was justiciar, his son Roger, who was chancellor, and his nephews, Nigel, Bishop of Ely, the treasurer, and Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, had given their support to the new king, they had secured to him the smooth working of the administrative machinery which had been in their hands for thirty years. They were haughty and ostentatious; they had great castles and large armed forces; but they were men of business, and to anger them was an act of suicidal folly. Yet Stephen in June 1 138 arrested the justiciar, the chancellor, and the Bishop of Lincoln, and deprived the Bishop of Ely of his see. From that moment the government was at an end, for there were none to administer affairs, and the clergy as well as the officials were turned against the king.

War now broke out in earnest. On September 30, II 39, the Empress Matilda landed at Portsmouth with her half-brother, Robert of Gloucester. The battles

12 THE EVIL DAYS OF CIVIL WAR.

fought were but a small part of the misery that ensued. Everywhere the barons built castles and freed themselves The Civil f^om royal control. " They put the wretched ^ar- country-folk to sore toil with their castle build-

ing", says the English Chronicle; "and when the castles were made, they filled them with devils and evil men. Then they took all those that they deemed had any goods, both by night and by day, men and women alike, and put them in prison to get their gold and silver, and tortured them with tortures unspeakable. . . . Many thousands they slew with hunger. I cannot tell all the horrors and all the tortures that they laid on wretched men in this land; and it lasted full nineteen winters." Then Stephen brought in foreign hired men to fight for him, and they were without pity, and men "said openly that Christ and His saints slept ". They spared neither churches nor poor man's land, they cared for no law of church or state. And the horrors of famine were added to the horrors of war; a day's journey might be taken The Horrors without Seeing a field that was tilled. " Corn of the time. ^^^^ checsc and butter were dear, for there was none in the land. Wretched men starved for hunger; some went about asking alms who were once rich men; some fled out of the land. Never was more wretchedness in a land, and never did heathen men worse than these did, for they forbore neither church nor churchyard, but took all the goods that were therein, and then burned church and all. ... If two or three men came riding to a township, all fled from them thinking they were reavers (marauders). The bishops and clerks were ever cursing them (i.e. excommunicating them); but that was nought to them, for they were all accursed, and forsworn and lost." Thus the English chronicler bewails the miseries of his time, and it is with such words that the earliest English history in the English tongue, kept up through so many centuries of peril and change, at last ends.

It was a time of unchecked feudal anarchy : every man did that which was right in his own eyes — "nay", says a chronicler, "that which was wrong also". The peaceful matilda's successes. 13

monks, who saw and recorded these horrors, bethought them of the days when there was no king in Israel, and of the fearful time when Jerusalem was compassed about with armies. Through all the years of war the tide of success fluctuated continually. ''The king was alternately a prisoner and a conqueror, but was never able to restore the administrative machinery; the empress had her turns of good and evil fortune, but was never able to make good her title to the crown."

Matilda dwelt first at Bristol, then at Gloucester, while Earl Robert took the field against King Stephen, and was joined by Ralph, Earl of Chester, with whom the king had quarrelled. Stephen was besieging Lincoln Castle early in 1141 when the two earls attacked him. A great flood had overflowed the banks of the old Foss-dyke and the little river Witham, and the city was protected by the fordless stream. But the army of the * disinherited ' lords whom Stephen had driven from their lands to bestow them on his own men, under the bold leadership of Earl Robert, plunged into the stream and swam across. A fierce battle followed, and Stephen fought in the thickest of the fray, till outnumbered and surrounded capture of he yielded at last to Earl Robert himself. He Stephen, was imprisoned in the Castle of Bristol. On February 2 Bishop Henry of Winchester, who had in vain tried to make peace between the two parties, and who was the pope's legate as well as a great churchman high in favour with monks and clergy, now met the empress and made compact with her (March 2, 1141). On April 8 she was elected Lady of England and Normandy at Winchester, and took from the treasury the royal crown. She went on to London, where she began to oppress the citizens; but they rose against her "like a swarm of bees", and she was soon obliged to fly back to Winchester. There also she managed to disgust her supporters. Bishop Henry of Winchester took up the cause of his brother Stephen, whose wife, Matilda of Boulogne, was aided by the Londoners. Matilda of Boulogne was a heroic woman, who gathered troops, confirmed waverers, and had the patience which

14 STEPHEN'S RECOVERY OF POWER.

the rivals so much lacked. In her Henry of Winchester saw hope for the reunion of England and the restoration of peace. He reversed all the excommunications he had pronounced against Stephen's party, and pledged himself to do all he could to restore Stephen. Having again changed sides, he was proof against all attempts of Robert or the empress to win him over ; and, with his adhesion, the tide soon turned in favour of his brother. The empress was then besieged in Winchester, whence she fled on September 14, 1141. Soon after this her strongest supporter. Earl Robert of Gloucester, was taken prisoner. On November i he was exchanged for Stephen, and the war reopened under more equal terms. The empress soon had to seek refuge in Oxford. Stephen pursued her from Cirencester. He entered Oxford on September 26, 1 142, fired the town, and besieged the empress in the strong Norman castle. For three months the siege continued, till on December 20, when the Thames was frozen Flight of ^^^^ ^^^ ^^^ ground thickly covered with Matilda from snow, the cmpress was let down from the Ox ord. tower clad all in white, and escaped with four

knights on foot to Abingdon, whence she sought safety at Wallingford and Gloucester.

For the next few years there was grievous misery, but little close fighting. Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, the worst of the barons, who had sold himself alternately to both sides and fought chiefly on his own account, died under the curse of the church while beleaguering a tower belonging to the monastery of Ramsey. The brave Earl Robert died too; and then the empress retired to Normandy.

For a while, from 1145, Stephen reigned without control. His brother, Henry of Winchester, stood by him, The last and together they drove Theobald, Arch-

years, bishop of Canterbury, into exile. In 1147

many turbulent spirits left England to go on crusade. The Earl of Chester was reduced to submission. But Theobald returned, and he and the other bishops refused to crown Stephen's son, Eustace, as joint king and heir to

DEATH OF STEPHEN. 1 5

his father. Then came Henry, the empress's son, whom his uncle, David King of Scots, supported, and the war was renewed in England. At length, when Eustace died, it was agreed between Stephen and the young Henry that the king should hold the crown while he lived, and then Henry should succeed him. Good peace was promised, and the restoration of justice and good laws. The Peace of This was done at Wallingford on November waiiingford. 6, 1 153. Henry for a while was Stephen's justiciar in England. But the king died on October 25, 1154, and then Henry of Anjou, the empress's son, came peaceably to the throne.

So the "nineteen winters" ended. They taught men to seek to be ruled rather than to do what was right in their own eyes, and they made people and barons weary of strife. So Henry II. was the first king since the Conquest who came to the throne in peace and without a struggle.

Chapter II. The Reign Of Henry II. 1154-1189

Besides its anarchy and bloodshed, the first feature that strikes us about the reign of King Stephen is the strength of the church. This strength was due to the ^, ^, ,

, _ „ - o . , The Church

weakness of all other powers m the state, under There was no administration and no justice. ^*^p^^"- The rivals for the throne could not establish their power, and the barons could only fight for their independence. Thus men looked to the church for guidance. It was Henry of Winchester who first held the balance between the parties, and then gave to Stephen's side what strength it acquired. It was Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, who more than any other man mediated peace between Stephen and Henry, and so gave England a time of rest and then a strong ruler.

While all was confusion elsewhere, the church courts l6 THE church's strength.

Still were in working, and there men could get justice, when they could find it nowhere else. Thus gradually many suits which belonged naturally to the state came to be tried in church courts, and when Henry II. came to the throne he found that the lay courts needed to be restored from the foundation.

Church councils, too, had chosen between the claimants to the throne, and each in turn had submitted to legate and bishops and clergy. Nor was the church's power to be seen only in politics and law. The reign of Stephen was a period of revival in the religious life. The growth During those nineteen years of strife, more ofthemon- monasteries were built than in any other astenes. period of the same length. The northern

shires, which had lain waste since the great harrying by William the Conqueror, were now recolonized by bodies of hardy ascetics, who chose out the desolate parts and made them the homes of agriculture and industry. Twenty houses were built in Yorkshire, nineteen in Lincolnshire, and many more in the eastern and southern shires, while Stephen was king. In them the stern rule which Henry of Winchester favoured, and which the great S. Bernard had done so much to revive, was observed. The chief houses were of the Cistercian order, which had been founded by an Englishman, Stephen Harding. A new order, too, was in this reign founded in England itself by an Englishman, Gilbert of Sempringham, which admitted both sexes to separate houses, and which began the teaching and training of women. Thus, while the barons' castles were in building, there arose, too, says the chronicler, " God's castles, in which there watch the servants of the true anointed King, and where the young are exercised in war against spiritual wickedness ".

The church then had spiritual as well as material powers, and the church was the strongest estate with which Henry of Anjou had to deal; but first he must turn to the most pressing needs of his people.

Henry II. was born at Le Mans on March 5, 1133. He had much of the spirit of his Angevin forefathers.

HENRY OF ANJOU. 1 7

He was passionate and hasty, cunning and relentless, licentious and faithless. But still he was a wise man, and in many ways a good if stern king. He Henry of loved justice in others, though he did not ^"Jo"- always do it himself. He knew law and statecraft as few of his time knew them. He saw what the land needed, and he knew how to give it. With all his faults he was, for his day, a merciful man. And above all, he was a hard and constant worker.

Henry was crowned on December 19, 1154, when he was not yet twenty-one. From his earliest years he had learnt how to fight for himself, and to snatch Henry's marat every advantage. In 1151 Louis, the King "^s:e, 1151. of the French, had divorced his wife Eleanor, who was the Duchess of Aquitaine, and possessor of nearly all the lands that lay between the Loire and the Pyrenees. Henry at once married her, and thus, when he obtained the English crown, held a far larger part of France than did Louis its king. In the year of his marriage his father died. Thus in 11 54 Henry found himself king of the English, with an overlordship of Wales and Scotland, Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou and of Maine and Touraine, and in the south Count of Poitou and Duke of Aquitaine, a title which, under different rights, gave sway over lands extending from the Creuse to the Adour, and from Lyons to the Bay of Biscay. England under his rule was part of a great continental empire.

Henry's father, Geoffrey, had been called Plantagenet, because he used to wear a sprig of broom {planta genista) in his cap, and the name has been given to his descendants, who were so long in direct line to give kings to the English.

Henry lost no time in setting about the work to which he was called. In the charter he issued at his coronation he made no mention of Stephen. He pro- Early reforms, fessed from the first to be the heir of Henry I., "54-58. and to intend the restoration of the firm government that his grandfather had set up. His accession was welcomed by the people and their chroniclers as the beginning of henry's early reforms. 19

a new age of peace and justice. First, he gave peace by removing the causes of war. He drove out all the foreign mercenaries who under Stephen had vexed the land with their manifold cruelties. He forced all those who held crown lands, or had seized royal towns, to yield them up to him, and he made no account of the grants which Stephen, in recklessness or in fear, had lavished away. He restored the coinage to its proper weight. He set the law courts to work anew, and himself assisted at their sittings. Again sheriifs were appointed to do justice and collect dues in the counties; again justices were sent round to hear cases in the shire courts. And now at length a harsh law of the Conqueror's was removed, and by his Grand Assize Henry II. ordered that suits concerning land should be decided not by wager of battle, but by the inquest of twelve sworn freeholders who could witness to the facts.

Henry was as fortunate abroad as at home. His brother Geoffrey, who withstood him in Anjou, soon submitted, and the King of Scots did homage and yielded up the earldoms of Northumberland and Cumberland. He was able to obtain the help of men who had learnt how to govern in the school of Henry I., and of others whom Archbishop Theobald had trained to be learned clerks and men of business. Chief among these was Thomas Becket, Archdeacon of Canterbury, who was in 11 54 appointed to the office of chancellor, head of the king's clerks or secretaries, a dignity reckoned second after the king in all his realms. Robert, Earl of Leicester, was given the higher office of justiciar, but soon the chancellor was found to be the king's real adviser and chief friend.

Thomas Becket was the son of a Norman merchant who had settled in London, and been port-reeve of the city. He had himself been trained in a Thomas knightly household, and also in a business Becket the office, and had studied at Paris and Bologna. He was learned in church law, and he had also a good knowledge of practical affairs. Henry soon saw his great ability, he admired his pure, unsullied life, and the two

20 BECKET THE CHANCELLOR.

became friends and fellow-workers. "When business was over," writes William Fitz-Stephen, Becket's friend who stayed with him to the last hour in the cathedral at Canterbury, "they would play together like boys of an age; in hall, in church, they sat together, or together they rode out. . . . Sometimes the king rode on horseback into the hall where the chancellor sat at meat; sometimes he came bow in hand returning from hunting, or on his way to the chase. Sometimes he would drink and depart when he had seen the chancellor; sometimes jumping over the table he would sit down and eat with him. Never in Christian times were two men more of a mind or better friends." Thomas was at the king's side when he began his great legal reforms. He was sent, too, on an embassy to Paris to arrange a marriage between King Louis's daughter Margaret and Henry's eldest boy. Through this there was peace for a while between England and France, but in 1 159 Henry claimed Toulouse in right of his wife, and The Toulouse this led to a ncw war. Here Becket served war, 1159. [y^ ^j^g f^gi(j ^j|-j^ jQQ knights, and himself did

bold deeds. During this war Henry made his barons pay a scufage, or tax on shields, instead of serving themselves with their retainers, thus freeing himself from the untrained feudal soldiery, who were often a danger rather than a help, and using mercenary troops instead. The struggle was not brought to any conclusion, because, when King Louis opposed him, Henry would not fight against the lord of whom he held feudally his lands in France.

On November 2, 11 60, Henry married his son to the little Margaret and took possession of the Vexin, a district on the Norman border which had been named for her dowry. Louis had never intended that the wedding should take place while his daughter was still a child, and bitterly resented the trick by which he was made to lose the land so early. War broke out, and continued fitfully for many years, though the two kings, in spite of their quarrels and fightings, agreed in recognizing Alexander IH. as pope, when the emperor supported another claimant who called himself Victor IV. Thus

BECKET THE ARCHBISHOP. 21

Henry was constantly engaged in foreign complications. Before long he was to have troubles in England as well.

When Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, died, it seemed to the king that he could have no better successor than one who would act harmoniously with gg^ket the crown in the work of church and state. Archbishop, Accordingly, on May 24, 1162, Thomas ^^^^' Becket was elected archbishop. He was then only a deacon, though he held much church preferment. On the Saturday after Whitsunday he was ordained priest, and next day was consecrated archbishop. The festival of Trinity Sunday was instituted by the new archbishop : it has ever since been observed in England on that day, and before long spread to the church abroad. But it was soon seen that Thomas could no longer work with the king as he had done. He resigned the chancellorship and devoted himself to the work of his diocese, reclaiming the property of his see, ministering to the poor and sick, and purifying the church wherever he could. He began to work as an ecclesiastical reformer. Unfortunately the king desired to work on different lines.

It seemed to Henry that the time had come to reduce the power of the church. He soon found that he must first break the power of the archbishop.

The two strong men first came into conflict at a council at Woodstock, on July i, 1163. The Danegeld, first levied by Ethelred the Redeless, as a bribe to keep off the Danes, had since the Norman conquest been collected by the sheriffs for the defence of the shires. Henry demanded that the whole sum collected should be paid direct into the royal treasury. Becket re- ^j^^ council sisted this as an unjust exaction, and the atwoodking was forced for the time to yield. The ^*°''^' "^^• strife then turned to the main question at issue between church and state, — the extent of the immunities of the clergy. In a council held at Westminster in October 1 163 Henry claimed that all clergymen (the title included those in ^ minor orders', and those who held many