 Preface for England in the Middle Ages. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. England in the Middle Ages by Elizabeth O'Neill. Preface. The period from the Norman conquest to the end of the 15th century may be conveniently and aptly named medieval. Rich and varied as were the phases of its life, it has a certain homogeneity which walks it clearly off from the days before the conquest and from the Tudor period. Differ as by the England of the close of the period from the England which William won, it differed still more from the England of the Renaissance and the Reformation. The four centuries following the conquest saw much growth and change, otherwise they would have little interest. But the end as the beginning was medieval in its simplicity, its romance, its crudeness and its color, and all that goes essentially to make up the idea of the Middle Ages. In this period, feudalism proper grew and decayed. Constitutional government had a wonderful genesis and a temporary failure. Religion and its orthodox form flourished exceedingly and triumphed over eager and spasmodic heresy. The period saw infinite possibilities of empire building by English kings which dwindled as the years wore on and determined the political individuality of England. A traditional feud with France was the method of this determination and affected some of the greatest issues of the period. Economic forces of immense significance transformed the land, but the form of society at the end of the period as in the beginning was medieval. It is the object of this little book to trace the essential features of medieval England. End of Preface Chapter 1 of England in the Middle Ages. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org England in the Middle Ages by Elizabeth O'Neill The Norman Settlement 1066-1100 The crowning of William the Norman on midwinter day 1066 marks a definite crisis in English history. The Saxon system in its strength and weakness, its dirtiness and its insularism gave way to a new order which by way of experiment and with some sacrifice was to be the way of progress. The weight of the conqueror's hand was to be felt in a conscious readjustment of the national institutions. The process carried out with a passion for legal definition which ignored fine shades of custom and tradition in which in so far was brutal. As a set off to this prime fact it must be remembered that now for the first time England was brought into touch and ultimately into line with European civilization. In this set the outset of a period whose refinements were extending the cosmopolitan. The ultimate results to the national life were undoubtedly beneficial. But meanwhile the conquest was a real conquest and involved the inevitable suffering which accompanies the degradation of a proud nation. The new civilization involved class distinctions which had never before been felt so keenly in England. For almost three centuries the upper classes spoke French and only French so that even kings who sympathized and were loved of their people could not speak their language. As the years wore on and the inevitable fusion did its work the foreign element was merged into the English. The foreign idiom became the despised French of Stratford at Hebo and this is but significant of the triumph of the strong subsoil of English life over the Norman elements which had meanwhile done so much for its improvement. The conscious policy of the first Norman king made for such fusion from the first for the conqueror was a statesman even more than a soldier. There was no immediate confiscation of lands from the English after Hastings. There was ample from which to reward William's Norman followers in the lands of those who had died for herald. The English landowners paid homage for their lands and received them again with a difference. But Hastings was not the conquest and in the passionate revolts of the next few years the English race of nobles and gentlemen was swept away and the English aristocracy became Norman. Though an English leaven was provided by the choice of wives from among the English. William made no immediate difference in the form of government of England. He discerned in the democratic basis of the English courts or moots and element which might be taken into alliance with the crown in the struggle which he inevitably foresaw between his own conception of kingship and the anarchic forces of feudalism. In 1067 William left England for his lands overseas. For henceforth for centuries the interests of an English king were thus duplicated. He tactfully took with him most of the English nobles but the reaction which he thus strove to avert was precipitated by the reckless tyranny of the Norman nobles who were left behind and whose aim was merely to exploit the conquered country. The English rose as one man in all parts of the country except the southeast which had had first hand experience of William's power. The king returned to stamp out a revolution which was the more formidable for the support of the Danes and Scotch which it won. It took William four years to kill resistance but he did it so thoroughly that he left no hope for another such movement among the English. The struggle has a romantic and heroic interest as we dimly discern the figures of the Saxon leaders fighting hopefully or desperately for their racist cause. There were the earls Edwin and Morcar the former three times foresworn yet so fascinating in his fair beauty that William wept for his fate when Edwin was murdered by his own followers. There were two bishops like Ethelwyn taking the revenge for their dethronement in favor of the Norman prelates whom William favored. There were figures like Walthy of son of Cyword the Stout doing wonder deeds in the north against the Norman and Heraward the Wake who joined Edwin and Morcar in the camp of refuge at Eli. And held it was some hundreds of desperate Englishmen until William bridged the fens with a causeway and compelled them to come into his allegiance. Earl Walthy of two had given in at last and held faithful to his word but he was made the victim of a belated plot. Betrayed some say by his wife Judith the conqueror's niece he died a martyr's death being beheaded at Winchester and laid to rest in the abbey he loved Ed Crowland. Heraward was slain sleeping by a band of Bretons under Ralph of Tuxbury jealous of his favor with the king. These heroic figures are the sublimated types of the Englishmen of their day. Brave unquestionably spiritual with little of the element of fear which played so large a part in the religion of the Normans whose religion acted in reaction from ruthlessness. But they seem to have lacked something which the Norman had of forethought and organizing power. The great gift of that race to the English nation. The hold of William on the English was finally secured when in 1072 Malcolm Canmore of Scotland who had married the saint at Margaret, niece of Edward the Confessor and sister of Edgar the Ethelang, definitely did homage to the conqueror at Abernethy on the tey and reconcile with him to the Ethelang whom he had been helping. The outstanding result of the struggle besides the prime fact of the renewed submission of the English was the devastation of the north. For William deemed it a solitary lesson to lay waste the land between the umber and the tees. Burning the cottageess and killing man and beast so that the land lay literally desert for nearly a decade. The English resistance was dead but William had to reckon with the turbulence of his Norman followers. All the broad lands of England were his now to give and he satisfied their greed. The feudal theory by which all the land of the kingdom was the kings to give out as he would was taken for granted but William had seen the workings of the feudal system in France. He knew the power of a great vassal like himself when he chose to oppose his leech lord the king of France. Whether by accident or design these conditions were not reproduced in England. The Normans who received the largest grants of land found that their possessions were scattered over the country so that it would not be easy for any one man to concentrate an army against the king in case of rebellion. Only in the great Palentine, earldoms on uncertain border country did he swerve from this policy and give to the tenant almost regal power as at Durham and Chester. Such was necessary in the cause of order. Nevertheless, William had to face many vexatious feudal revolts for years. At his wedding feast at Norwich in 1075, Earl Ralph of Norfolk joined Roger of Hereford in a plot against William. They, and wealthy of, if he would join them but he refused, should share the power between them. The English support on which they counted was reserve for William and defeated the hired Breton soldiers of the rebels. Robert, William's eldest son, one of the most interesting figures in this period for a modern touch of indifference, which acted in a curious contrast with feverish births of striving, rose in revolt against his father in 1079, demanding his heritage of Normandy in Maine promised to him on his father's death. Father and son met in arms at Gerberoy and Normandy. The son wounded the father in the hand unknowingly and there followed immediately a characteristically medieval scene of passionate remorse and reconciliation. Robert had the support of William's Norman vassals, who hoped for greater license under a rule less stern. The fact was further illustration to William of the evils of continental feudalism and he took a further step for the prevention of its growth in England. In 1085 he was advised by the wise men at Gloucester to make an inquest into the state of the country to find out how much land there was in every shire, how many landholders and lesser men, and the worth of them all. The results were written down in Dome's day book from which we glean nearly all we know of the conditions which prevailed in the England of that day. In 1086 William summoned all military tenants, whether holding from himself or from his tenants, to swear an oath of allegiance to him on Salisbury Plain. It has generally been considered as an act of great significance, though some recent historians have suggested that it was not without precedent. According to a pure feudal system, subtenants, men holding land from the king's tenants or the tenants-in-chief, owed allegiance only to their immediate lord, who could and did, lead them against their king. The Salisbury oath prevented this. The king in such matters was to have precedence over the lord. In William secured thus for the English crown a direct hold on the military forces of feudal England. It may be well to realize here that England had now become feudal in a very real sense that forces were tending towards this state before the conquest is certain. But equally certain is it that the conquest and the assumptions of the Norman lawyers made universal what was before but local. Many Englishmen had in the disturbed days of the Danish invasions commended their lands to richer neighbors and received them back again with the promise of protection and return for homage and perhaps some service. Here is the germ of feudalism. But there were parts of England and especially in the northeast where free men dwell on what would now be called small holdings and owned allegiance to no man but loyalty to their king. There was no place for these in the feudal system as known by the Norman lawyers whose tendency was merely to assume their dependence. The net result was a degradation in the status though not always in the mode of life of many such men. English feudalism as a political system had from the first the hiatus caused by the centralizing policy of the Norman kings. But it triumphed in England as a system of land tenure though disintegrating forces such as the growth of burrows were early at work undermining it. The feudal system had as its unit the manner with agricultural land some worked in the interest of the Lord the mezzan land the rest in the interest of the tenants. There were an infinite variety of tenures according to the service owed by the vassals. Some were servile tenures and some were free. A free tenant might and would generally pay rent and kind or he might owe labor but in a definite and moderate degree. The essence of a servile tenure was that the tenant was at the bailiff's disposal in the matters of the times and places at which he would serve. The Dome State report was made in terms of manners though the inquest was made through the English divisions of Ville, Hundred and Chire. The Norman tendency was to find a menoreal unit and the term was applied even to the numerous free villages in the Danish part of the land north of Wattling Street. Where no other Lord existed the King was assumed to hold the matter. By the 13th century the menoreal system was practically universal in England and the manner is approximated to one type. An open field village with two roads intersecting each other along which the tenants had their dwellings with the church in the hall at the center. The fields were laid out in strips which belonged some to the tenants some to the Lord of the Manor. The Manor even in 13th century England was self-contained and self-sufficing. Still more was it so in the early Norman period. Money was hardly used and the few specialized artisans were paid in kind. Dome's day book accounted for 280,000 people. These were chiefly the heads of families. And when allowances made for remissions of certain classes the population of the country may be computed at about one and a half millions. About 200,000 are enumerated whose tenure was such that it was natural for the Norman lawyers in a generation or two to write it down seraphile. Besides 20,000 actual slaves a class which was merged into the rank of Villain early in the Norman period. Of higher classes of tenants 35,000 are enumerated so that even before the conquest these were already in the minority. The effects of the feudal system on the social life of medieval England can hardly be exaggerated but the most characteristic aspect of continental feudalism had little place here. The Lords of the Manors did justice in minor manners but they could not deal with cases in which life or limb were involved. These were reserved for the King's Court. One side of the conqueror's policy toward the land of England has earned for him a sinister renown. He loved the great deer as though he were their father and he passed severe laws imposing cruel mutilations on all who should interfere with the royal hunting. The story has been told endlessly of how William reserved the new forest for his pleasures and sacrificed whole villages to its cemetery. But the light of modern research tends to discount the amount of destruction involved. Certain it is however that the forest laws were horribly severe and show a brutality which is not characteristic of the policy of these first Norman kings. The conqueror maintained the old English policy of avoiding the death penalty for mere felonies. William's treatment of the English church affords better than any other sphere. Illustration of the manner which continental standards were imposed upon the English. A century before the conquest a monastic reform had spread over Saxon England but its inspiration was exhausted and the standard of life among lower and higher clergy alike was extremely easy. His sympathies and his policy alike inclined William to take measures to bring the forces of the Hildebrandein revival to bear upon the English church. The movement by which the great Pope Hildebrand had breathed new life into the western church was then in full force on the continent. The Norman prelates whom William brought to England were impregnated with it. In 1090 a complete reorganization of the English church was begun. Three papal legates took part in the council which determined the drastic measures of reform. The pluralist Stigand who had hitherto found some measure of favor with the king was deposed from Canterbury and from Winchester. It was an outstanding example of the grass-weened spirit which pervaded the upper clergy. In the lower ranks there was but little observance of the cannons imposed by the church, married priests abounded. Within two years two or at most three English bishops remained in English seas. Stigand was replaced by Lanfrank, abbot of St. Stephen's at Cannes, whether he had gone from the famous Benedictine Abbey of Beck. He was a man outstanding for his scholarship and piety. He had been a lawyer before the Cloister claimed him and in his zeal for reform and efficiency he illustrates the better type of the great ecclesiastics of that period. It has been stated to his discredit that he forged documents proving Canterbury's privileges with regard to York, but the standard of honor in these matters differed from that of today. If the cause were acknowledgedly good and irritating absence of evidence to support it might surely be supplied. It was probably he rather than William who decided that the separation of the ecclesiastical from the lay courts was necessary. Hitherto the bishops had sat in the lay courts and though they probably had the preponderance they had no monopoly of the meeting out of justice in cases which the church would have claimed as being liable to spiritual jurisdiction. Even these very councils which reformed ecclesiastical matters in England were held in the presence of the king and the lay lords. William seems to have consented readily to decree the future separation of church and lay courts. This was really a corollary of the acceptance of the Hildebrande standard of spirituality in the church. The measure had in its inevitable seeds of friction, but William felt his own strength too great to lay stress on this. The seats of English bishoprics were in several cases removed from small and decaying places to towns whose progressive spirit made them a better setting. A general bracing affected all sides of ecclesiastical life. A spirit of labour and study led to a revival of English scholarship, though it took the form of dogma and dialectics. Norman Abbots reformed the monasteries and many new monastic foundations were made. The change was for the better, though here again hints of suffering come to us dimly. At Glastonbury Thurston the new Norman Abbott called in French soldiers to enforce a new method of chanting on a community which seems to have been dulled to learn, but in no way recalcitrant. After the fray many monks lay dead or wounded, cut down in the very sanctuary. Thurston was deprived by the king and the case was probably without parallel. But it may well have been an exaggerated example of the obscure suffering which so relentless a reform imposed from without must have caused. During his visit to Normandy in 1067 the conqueror had lavished on Norman churches rich treasures taken by way of fines from the English monasteries. William ranked as a loyal son of the church, but he was careful to uphold his position as an independent sovereign. Though he had come to win the realm under a papal banner, he made it clear that he would owe no fealty to the pope for his kingdom. A chronicler tells us that William also laid down certain rules which prevented undue intrusion of the ecclesiastical powers into lay spheres. No pope should be acknowledged or papal bowl received without the king's consent. The separate church councils must have his sanction too to make their acts binding and none of his barons or servants were to be excommunicated without his permission. Whether formulated or not, such was in fact the stand which William almost inevitably took. On his deathbed he could boast that he had never hurt God's church, though he was stained with rivers of blood. It was while pursuing that continental policy which was to haunt so many English kings that William met his death in 1089. He claimed the overlordship of Maine and had temporarily secured it with English help in 1073. Roused by an incursion into Normandy of the people of Montes early in 1087, he revived an old claim on the vaccine of which Montes was the capital and went to war for it. His anger was aggravated by the report of a jest of Philip of France on the increasing corpulence of the English king. The land round Montes was savagely laid waste and the city itself burned. The exertion and excitement aggravated the results of a violent knock against the pommel of his saddle caused by the stumbling of the king's horse in the streets of Montes. On his deathbed William bequeathed Normandy and Maine to Robert, a reluctant recognition of his claims as eldest son. To William he gave England and to Henry a sum of money with, so the chroniclers said after the event, the assurance that he would one day hold all that his father had ever had. William I, in his gigantic strength, his sane spirituality, his stern and conscious zeal for justice untempered by mercy, at once sublimates and typifies his race. His son William resembled him in spite of the sinister impression some strange quality of him made on his contemporaries so that tradition has made of him almost a monster. Physically he was not unlike his father, though with a less handsome bearing and a more marked corpulence, he had a loud voice but not remarkably deep like the conquerors. His full-blooded complexion, indicative of his caloric temperament, brought him the nickname of Rufus. The red king was indeed terrible in anger as his father was, that he could boast that he never did in anger what he would not have done in cold blood. He showed, however, none of the conqueror's scrupulous observance, politic rather than sympathetic, of the rights of his subjects and his rule soon shaped itself into a tyranny. In the beginning the Norman Barons rose against William's rule on Robert's behalf, whose proverbial weakness would have made him an acceptable overlord to them. Lanfrank rallied the English in William's favor, promising them good laws, and the result was soon stamped out. But in 1089 Lanfrank died and with him the traditions of the conqueror's rule. Randolf Flambard, as justiciar, became the foremost man in the realm, and with his clever connivance William embarked on a course of tyranny. It is often difficult to state with precision the exact nature of misrule in the Middle Ages, and this applies the more to this period, as the exact details of the working of the Constitution, what was preeminently a time of transition, are not very clear. Much dissatisfaction may have arisen from the mere crystallizing of futile practice, and it is recorded that the justiciar was careful to give a show of legal right to his tyranny. In his capacity as Judge II, Randolf sold justice, and any crime might be committed with impunity if the wrongdoer were able to give sufficient financial compensation. We here too have forced an excessive labor, for the King was a great builder, London Bridge and the Great Hall at Westminster were built by him. All through history great building works have typified the power of tyrants, and in periods when feudalism broke bounds, forced labor at castle building was always a crying grievance with the oppressed. Moreover, William showed little respect for the rights and dignities of the church. Grossly immoral in his private life, in health he was allowed in shameless blasphemer, but in illness he cringed to religion. He kept abysses and bishoprics in his own hands when they fell vacant, and administered them with a heavy hand. Not for four years after Lon Frank's death did he appoint his successor, and then in 1093, ill and repentant, he forced the primacy on Anselm, the saintly abbot of Beck. Anselm was one of those meek men who were obdurate where a principal is involved. Like many another medieval prelate, he was more ultra-montane than the Pope himself. He had no inclination to be yoked to a wild bull, but once in harness he would not allow himself to be run away with. Already in 1093 there was friction. The King, preparing for an expedition to Normandy, refused the liberal contribution of Anselm towards his expenses as too small. He refused to fill several abysses which he held vacant. Finally he declared that he had no need of the Archbishop's blessing to his crossing over and departed unblessed. After William's return in 1095, an open quarrel took place over Anselm's recognition of urban as the rightful one of two rival popes. William regarded this as an infringement of his own rights over the English Church. Ultimately he recognized urban independently. Two years later the King complained bitterly of the equipment of the knights furnished by Anselm for his service in Wales, for every bishop was a baron too, and even Anselm had so far borne himself as such towards the King. He refused however to answer for his neglect in person, and left England for Rome where he received little encouragement, and so withdrew to France where he remained until after the Red King's death. William's prowess justified his father's choice of him as King of England, and one particular at least. He was glorious in arms. Normandy, cut up and bartered among the three brothers for some years, fell at last to the English King in 1095 when Robert elected to go on crusade, and mortgaged his heritage for the needful goal. The conquest of Wales was in process, and was only prevented from completion by William's death. As it was the south and east were won by Normans who became the Marcher Lords. North Wales alone remained under native control. Cumberland was reft from Scotland, and Malcolm had once more to acknowledge himself, the man of the English King. He died before William, and his saintly wife Margaret soon followed him. Disappointed in her hope for the life of the Cloister, she had devoted all the force of her idealism to civilizing and in some sort, anglicizing her husband's realm. William's triumphant course was cut short by his tragic death from the arrow of his friend Walter Tyrell while hunting in the new forest. It was probably quite accidental. Men saw in it the appropriate judgment of God. His body lay all day in the forest for Walter, stricken with panic, had fled. At sunset it was taken up and drawn in a charcoal burner's cart to Winchester. In the cathedral there the second Norman King was laid to rest, unhouseled, unanointed, unannealed. End of Chapter 1. Chapter 2 of England in the Middle Ages. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. England in the Middle Ages by Elizabeth O'Neill. The Menace of Futilism. 1100 to 1154. Henry of the Red King's brother was hunting with him when he fell and immediately rode off to Winchester to secure the royal treasure. There were some who would have withstood him in Robert's name, but he had the advantage of being on the spot. Quick to act and diplomatic he won his ends. The wise men claimed him king. There was in no sense an election, for though in those days the rule of secession was vague, the elective element only entered in as putting the seal on established fact. Robert was on crusade, and in any case could only have been acceptable to the worse or futile element in hope to make profit of his foibles. Henry I ranks as one of England's best kings, yet it is in the same sense as the conqueror. He acted in the interests of the people because it was the straightest way to power. In person he resembled his father, perhaps more than did his brother being dark in complexion. Stout too, but not so tall. He had inherited his father's pleasant deep voice. He was a scholar and was sometimes called Bo Clerk, and he had all a Norman lawyer as passion for order and definition. He has for us little of the personal interest of his father, still less the morose fascination of his brother, his work rather than his temperament or his attention. Certainly it is that Henry made up his mind to pursue his father's policy of encouraging English institutions at the expense of the more objectionable traits of futilism. Time had been wanting, to the first William, to form any definite and lasting amalgamation. It seems that Rufus used the English institutions only to abuse them. Henry was loud and constant in his assurance that he would put down all unrighteousness that had been in his brother's time. Within a few days of his coronation he issued a charter of liberties to be sent into every shire, embodying his intentions to reform. It was the first English charter of so many. Its essence was the promise to the church and to the lay lords that they should be free from unjust exactions. The barons must extend similar treatment to their men. The law of King Edward was to be restored with the changes made by the conqueror. This was always the ideal. In point of fact Henry taxed the nation heavily throughout his reign and in his futile relations leaned to severity. But he kept order and he established a centralized administrative system which made for routine and equal justice. Above all he maintained peace and the familiar formula of praise was applied once again to him. In his days a man or woman might fare through the land with their bosoms full of gold and no man daresay ought to them but good. The work of organization which Henry wrought can best be examined in the light of its development under his grandson Henry II. Suffice it to say that he established a central system of justice which sent out itinerant judges who sat in the local English courts and under old forms gave new and royal justice. The new system, a trial by dual which became the rule in criminal cases, is first heard of under Henry. It was the beginning of the process by which the King's justice practically took possession of the shire courts. For the future two courts were to meet at set times in the old accustomed places. Stipulation which arbitrary actions on the part of the sheriffs during a period of disorganization had probably made necessary. Lionel Flambard had been in prison at the beginning of the reign but had had the ingenuity to obtain a rope in a barrel of wine and escape from the tower. The justiciar in this reign though he probably had not the title was Roger Bishop of Salisbury who controlled the whole administration and created the ex-checker system. An illuminating anecdote tells that it was his quickness in getting through the saying of his mass as a simple priest which first attracted Henry's attention to him. Roger was a Norman but Henry had sufficiently shown his English sympathies by his choice of a wife. He married in the first year of his reign Edith, daughter of Malcolm and St. Margaret and thus a representative of the old West Saxon house. She now took the Norman name Matilda. The interpretation put on the marriage by contemporaries is illustrated by the nicknames which the Normans duringly applied to the king and queen of Godric and Gacifu. The feudal elements rose and revolved almost immediately. Robert was back in Normandy from the Holy Land where he'd won by his brilliant prowess offer of a crown only to refuse it. The duchy naturally lapsed to him again on the death of William. The leading barons in England offered him their help to win the crown of England. He gave a willing ear and came to try his luck in 1101. Henry had mobilized the English feared and taught it how to fight but as always he preferred the methods of diplomacy. A yearly payment and some minor concessions of land in Normandy satisfied Robert and Henry was free to punish the barons who had turned traitor. Some less prominent rebels were immediately disinterested and went back to Normandy. In Normandy the more prominent were dealt with with deliberate revengefulness each in turn men like Robert or Lacy or the cowardly Ivo of Grant Messuel who had run away from the crusade. Most prominent and defiant of all was Robert of Bellame who had lands and castles scattered all over England. These were taken piecemeal and Robert allowed to withdraw a landless man to console himself with his Norman possessions. Two years later he went to war with the Duke and anarchy reigned in the duchy. The conditions invited Henry's interference. He restored order but did not yet show his hand. The banishment of William of Mortain and other of the dangerous barons with possessions on both sides of the channel reinforced Robert of Bellame who again took arms. In 1105 Henry once more crossed to Normandy and took Khan and Bayou for his own. A third expedition in the next year found all the forces of the two Roberts and William united against him at Tuchibri. Henry won the battle and Robert of Bellame fleeing in panic before the issue alone among the leaders saved himself. Duke Robert the brilliant crusader who had lightly foregone so much and caught always at Chathos was brought back to England to live out his days a captive. The English and Henry's army boasted that they had avenged Hastings when they conquered Normandy at Tuchibri. In effect the duchy did now take the character of a mere appendage to England. Resistance there was not dead and intermittently discontented barons rose against Henry's rule in favor of William Cleatho Robert's son. The French king too when it suited him aided his cause. The year 1110 again saw barons driven from England to Normandy. As a result of these vast confiscations the king had much land to give. He found it as it were a new nobility drawn largely from the increasing class of skilled administrators produced by the development of a more elaborate system. Henry I was a loyal churchman in much the same sense as his father ready to give the church its due but determined to maintain royal and national rights against any attempt at encroachment. And in his day there came a trial of strength for which the time had not been ripe under the conqueror. The Hildebrandein revolution had won to itself all the churches in Europe and with growing power the papal claims grew too. The conflict with Anselm which played so large a part in the reign of Henry was on a different plane from that between the Archbishop and the Red King. There is no question of arbitrary abuse on Henry's part. It was a conflict of principles which were being brought into fresh prominences in Europe at large. The investiture struggle in England was as it were a miniature copy of the duel between Pope and Emperor which wound so prominently in the history of the period. Henry immediately on his accession invited Anselm to return from his wanderings. The temporalities of his sea confiscated by Rufus were in the king's hands. He prepared to restore them expecting from the Archbishop the homage customary on such occasions. To his surprise Anselm made de Mure. The Pope so informed Henry did not approve of lay investiture. Henry was dumbfounded. He was anxious to be on friendly terms with the church. If only to keep his support in his claim to the English throne. But every bishop was a barren tool and he could not forego his authority over them. That the attitude of the Archbishop was new and startling is proved by the fact that Anselm had received unquestioningly investiture from the king's predecessor. The attitude of the papacy on the subject of lay investiture was part of a conscious policy which hoped to build up an imperial church. Homogeneous and independent able to show a united front to the nations which in their secular aspect should be subservient to it and accept its standards. It represented the most characteristic ideal of the medieval papacy in the period of its greatest predominance. Henry wisely suggested that a settlement should be postponed. Meanwhile the Archbishop was allowed to enjoy the revenues of his sea. In 1102 an embassy to the Pope to present both sides received no satisfaction. But Henry by this time felt himself fairly secure on the English throne and took courage to demand that Anselm should do him the customary homage. His own envoys to Rome assured him that the Pope had given them private assurance that he would not interfere with Henry should the king take things into his own hands so long as suitable men were appointed to the bishoprics. For necessarily the right to investment ultimately the power to choose. Anselm however proposed a new embassy to Rome and so things dragged on in a state of suspense and in 1103 Anselm himself went out of England to plumb the papal politics in person. At length the question was settled by way of compromise discussed lengthily in the intervening years and legalized in 1109. For the future the king could not invest with the ring and staff symbols of the spiritual office of the bishop. But he was to retain the investiture with the thief. Elections were to be made in the king's chapel with the consent of the king and homage done for the thief before consecration. On the whole question the victory was to the king though it must be remembered that in individual cases where dual authority enters into the battle will be to the strong. The settlement of the question anticipated the letter of that between pope and emperor in the concord head of worms in 1122. But the spirit was different. In that case the substantial victory was won temporarily by the spiritual arm. Anselm died in 1109 and for five years the Archbishop Rick was vacant. The king applying his revenues apparently without protest to his own various purposes. An illustration of the limitation the observance of his charter promises. Meanwhile forces in the English church were making for a new balance between church and state. Bring about naturally the state of things which Anselm in deference to the papal ideal would have imposed artificially. The ideals of the Hildebrandean papacy came to be the stock mode of thinking in the English church. And the king's victory in the matter of Episcopal appointments came to mean nothing when every possible nominee was an ardent papalist. Before the end of Henry's reign the forces of monasticism were strengthened by several houses of Cistercians. The new French order of white monks which under the inspiration of Stephen Harding the Englishman had formulated a new and severe interpretation of the Benedictine rule. The order founded safeguard against the looseness of practice which had beset the black monks in an emphasis of that element of manual work which Saint Benedict had prescribed. The form this took was agricultural labor and the Cistercians became famous farmers. In England especially in the north they settled in remote spots as in the wilds of Yorkshire and devoted themselves to pastureage and the production of wool. The labor of the choir monks could not suffice alone for the maintenance of their farms and the employment of lay brethren bound to the religious life but not to the recitation of the office became a feature of the order. In the economic sphere the settlement of the Cistercians is important because the export trade in wool was one of the most important sources of English wealth in the Middle Ages. Already in the second generation of the Norman settlement there were found lay landlords like Richard of Ruevos who were remembered for their generosity in their wise and conly administration of their lands. The monasteries for the most part were much larger than the manors probably acted on similar lines. The Cistercians represented only one wave of the monastic reform. Before the end of Henry's reign fifty houses of black cannons of St. Augustine in order theoretically uniting the active with the contemplative life had been founded in England. These regular cannons were often attached to hospital and lasar houses as were the nuns of the order. But there were too many large houses of cannons whose practice differed little if at all from that of the ordinary black monks of St. Benedict. The great monastic movement in Henry's reign had once signified and furthered the growing power of the church. The church courts developed freely, appeals to Rome became frequent. In 1125 a papal legate, the first to come to England since Henry's accession, made a full visitation of England and henceforth the Archbishop of Canterbury became standing papal legate in England. Thus the cause which Anselm had fought and seemingly lost was slowly asserting itself and when under Henry II the wills of church and state clashed the balance of power had shifted considerably. Henry was probably hardly conscious of these things or he may have deemed it impossible to stem the tide. He was busy with many things. For twenty years after the compromise with Anselm he was engaged intermittently in a struggle with France. Louis VI the French King was the first to conceive the idea of a national France whose realization was to be deferred so long through the centrifugal forces of French feudalism. Not the least impediment to the French King's policy was the anomaly by which the English kings held so much of French territory. It was hardly a fair fight but it was hard fought. His irritation made him a ready supporter of the unruly Norman Barons with their spurious support of William Fitzrobert. Henry strengthened himself by marrying his daughter Matilda to the Holy Roman Emperor as the ruler of the Loose Federation of German states was styled. Another daughter to the Earl of Brittany and his son William to the daughter of the Earl of Anjou. It was after a satisfactory peace in 1120 resultant on a brilliant English victory at the Battle of Brémuel in the previous year a battle which had seen the French King a fugitive that the tragedy of Henry's life occurred. His son William the heir to the throne was drowned with his illegitimate brother and sister in the wreck of the white ship crossing the channel on a fair sea. The sailors being demoralized by drink the results of the bounty of the young Prince. Henry was a self-centered and self-contained character but he seems to have loved his son passionately and tradition had it that he was never again seen to smile. Queen Matilda had died two years before in Henry married in 1121 at Elisa of Louvain but the marriage had no issue. William had been his only legitimate son and he bent all his energies to secure the secession to the English throne of his daughter Matilda the wife of the Emperor. In 1125 her husband died and the Empress returned at her father's bidding from the land with her she had gone fifteen years before as a child of eight in which she loved as she could never love England. The secession of a queen and her right to the English throne had as Henry knew no president though feudal law permitted the secession of women to baronies. Nevertheless Henry demanded in 1126 an oath from all the baronage of England lay in spiritual to support her secession. David of Scotland's war and after him the King's son Robert of Gloucester and his nephew Stephen of Bologna. The French King on realizing that Matilda was also to secede to the Duchy of Normandy and the great impediment to French unity thus prolonged again took up arms on behalf of William of Normandy. Henry met the crisis by the marriage of Matilda to Geoffrey son of Folk Duke of Anjou the natural enemy of Normandy. The step was most important to the Norman barons and Henry would probably not have taken it if he could have foreseen the death of William Fitzrobert which occurred in the following year. Henry remained in comparatively peaceful possession of Normandy until his death in Normandy on the first of December 1135. The traditional surfeit of lampreys if it did not cause accelerated his end. He was a man of rare physical strength and his reign of 35 years was remarkably long for a medieval sovereign. His body was carried back to England and buried in the Abbey he had founded at Redding. The forces of conservatism was stronger than Henry's pre-vision and Stephen his nephew was chosen to rule England in spite of the pledges in favor of Matilda. Stephen was the son of Adela the conqueror's daughter and Henry count of Blois and himself married to Matilda. The heiress of Balon and granddaughter through his mother of Malcolm and Margaret of Scotland. He was a favorite of Henry who does not seem to have doubted his faith and of the Londoners who knew him well personally. He had all the graces of manner which Matilda out of tune with her fate and environment lacked. He was ambitious and rightly calculating on the unpopularity of a woman's rule increased in this case by the Norman Barron's hatred of Matilda's Angevan husband. He made a bid for the English crown and wanted like Henry himself he realized the importance of being on the spot. He first enlisted the support of the Londoners who had all the townsmen hatred of disorder. In the Middle Ages the death of a king was always a crisis at which the bonds which held society loosely were apt to give way. And the Londoners saw in Stephen's accession the nearest way to the good order they most desired. How far they were mistaken as shown in the chaos of the next two decades for Stephen's abilities were not equal to his ambition. And the weakness of his position added to the weakness of his character gave a unique opportunity for the display of a rampant feudalism acting as it were in reaction from the bonds in which the Norman kings had bound in. At first few lay lords came into Stephen's allegiance but he won the great churchmen to his cause including his brother Henry of Winchester. Their scruples about their oath in Matilda's favor being overcome by the assurance of the perjured Hugh Big Oat who declared that Henry had regretted it on his deathbed. The lay lords had no scruples and when Archbishop William had crowned Stephen at Westminster on midwinter day 1135 they submitted to his authority and took the gifts he gave with lavish hands. It is to be noted once more how small a part election in any real sense played in the appointment of the sovereign. Stephen ruled England for 19 years. During most of this period the country was in a state of civil war more or less active between his partisans and those of Matilda. Matilda had many chances of success through Stephen's alienating his supporters but when Stephen being a prisoner she was actually crowned king in 1141. She lost her supporters by her absurdly arbitrary behavior. Two or three incidents stand out in the struggle the battle of the standard in 1138 when David of Scotland came to his nieces aid with the Eucharist born before his army. The scotch king's piety availed him little for neither his male knights nor his light armed Galloway men could resist the force of the arrows let fly by the English longbow, a weapon whose use had lately been borrowed from the South Welch and which was to play so large a part in medieval methods of warfare. Stephen conceived mistrust of Roger, Bishop of Salisbury and his son and nephews, the clever administrators of Henry I and arrested them to the indignation of his own brother, Henry, Bishop of Winchester, who transferred his support to Matilda. So the party shifted until 1153 Stephen weirdly agreed to the Treaty of Wallingford which secured him the crown for life but provided as his successor Matilda and Geoffrey's son, Henry of Anjou. Stephen died in the next year. The importance of his reign, whose tale reads so barrenly, is the illustration it affords of the nature and value of the policy of the kings who preceded and followed him. His reign is the one period of the Middle Ages during which England experienced the horrors of continental feudalism. Stephen with his handsome bearing and frank chivalry seems to have inherited the strain in the conqueror's family represented by Robert of Normandy. It was in no sense indifferent to the welfare of his reign but he was too weak to cope with its disorders for he was a mild man and soft and good and did no justice. The chroniclers are loud in their planks on the sufferings of the kingdom while Stephen and Matilda fought for power and none wielded it. The whole royal administrative system broke down and there was no justice but the feudal justice which it had been the aim of the Norman kings to limit. Adultering castles rose all over the land and the English people built them with forced labor. The greed for gain led the worse kind of barren to imprison and torture even the poorest to wring their possessions from them. Every man in those days we were told did what was right in his own eyes. They cared nothing for the ban of the church for they were all forecursed and force-worn and forelorn. The oppressors said openly that Christ and his saints slept and the people were feigned to believe them. One other significance this interlude has for us. It shows the entire powerlessness of the English people, leaderless before their conquerors and the value to them of the alliance with the crown against the forces of feudalism. Henry II had to take up the work where his grandfather had left it. The church alone gained some fruition from this time. The process towards independence which had been going on under Henry I was hastened and a prescriptive right strengthened its increasing jurisdiction and its growing privilege. The desire for refuge from a troubled world probably accelerated the growth in the number of monasteries which went on apace. In the buildings of this period is seen already the transition from the round arches in simple solidity of the architects which the enormous brought to the pointed and lighter forms which are characteristic of the full Middle Ages. The death of Stephen and the accession of Henry II marks at once a revival of old customs and the beginnings of things which were to transform the new time. End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 of England in the Middle Ages. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org England in the Middle Ages by Elizabeth O'Neill The Angevin Despotism 1154-1216 Henry II of England was the first of a new line of kings but he had much in common with his mother's race. Not so tall or handsome as the conqueror and his sons, he had the same sturdy build. He is described as round-headed with reddish hair and keen gray eyes, a description reminiscent of Rufus. Men remarked on his tough coarse hands and his bowed legs, for he was ever in the saddle. Nor would he sit except at meals or in council. He was tireless in energy and terrible in anger, uncontrolled as were all the Angevins. He was 22 years old in 1154 and he had a vast inheritance in France. He was a Frenchman in his sympathies but too much the lawyer and statesman not to enter with zest into the task of administration in England. The work he did was finally to crush the anarchical elements in English feudalism. His method was centralization and he took the people into his alliance. His ideal was not above those of his day and was circumscribed by the outlook of feudalism, but his vigor wrought to a better end than he dreamed. There was a hidden danger in the despotism which the first Angevin built up. The crown itself might become the oppressor of all classes. This is what happened under the third Angevin, John, and in a minor degree under Richard. A new rearrangement of forces in the state was brought about to resist this tyranny. Henry's policy had fostered the amalgamation of Norman in English institutions in time aided in the amalgamation of the two races, so that the resistance to John was a national movement which all classes had some part. Henry's first care was to restore as far as possible the system of Henry I, with the aid of the ministers who had survived from that reign. Stephen's mercenaries were sent out of England and the adultering castles destroyed. Henry met with very little resistance, for he acted at the same time with firmness and judgment. In 1159 he instituted the Great Scottish by which barons were allowed to commute their military service for a payment of money with which the king could hire mercenaries. This was at once a blow at feudal custom and a step towards military efficiency, for the mercenaries were not hampered by any time moment as the feudal knights were. Their forty days service was of little use to the king when he gave battle overseas. Later in the reign the size of arms decreed that every man in England, even the lanes who were rich enough, should be armed according to his means. This was really a revival of the old English militia in an excellent measure for national defense. The development of the administrative and judicial system on the lines laid down by Henry I went on a pace. Originally the term curio regis was used to denote two different things. It described the commune concilium, the whole assembly of tenants in chief, which in a limited sense replaced the old English witton or meeting of wise men as general advisors to the king. It described two of the ministers who administered the royal finance and justice. In the former aspect it became the first exchequer and as a special trained class was told off to do its work the exchequer, even under the first Henry, divided itself from the curio proper. The methods by which the king's accounts were kept, not just in slips of wood, bring home to us the primitive nature of 12th century civilization. The name curio regis was gradually limited to the body which administered royal justice. The greater part of its activity was spent in the shire courts for Henry II made the system of itinerant justices or justices in ire which his grandfather had conceived a regular institution. The hundred courts sank into ing significance for the private feudal courts usurped their functions, but royal justice practically took possession of the shire courts. Henry secured this in two ways, the inquest of sheriffs in 1170 resulted in a wholesale removal of the sheriffs who were largely local magnets and in so far had feudalized the courts. Royal officers were put in their places and the justice which they dealt was in so far royal justice, but the most important cases were reserved for the justices in ire. Practically all criminal justice and the greater number of civil cases felt to them and as they gave law they made it. The common law of England was fashioned from their findings. The centralization of the source of law triumphed over local peculiarities and alone made a common law possible. In time the shire courts became mere historic survivals and as such remained today. The policy of Henry or the more enlightened legality of the age revolutionized to the methods of judgment. The method of compurgation which seems intolerable to us now can hardly have been satisfactory even in the simple conditions of medieval society. There had been a growing tendency to reject oath helpers for fiery or watery ordeal to modernize even more impossible as is to the Norman system of trial by duel, especially when this came to be performed by proxy. Trial by jury in our modern sense was a thing of very slow growth. Its germ has been discerned in a hundred of our ancestral institutions. Alfred used to be acclaimed its father. In point of fact it was the Norman kings who began tentatively to apply the principle on which it rests and it was Henry II who made this application in any sense common. The system of trial by inquest in which juridors were sworn to inquire impartially into the truth of a case and declare it now became common in civil cases. Henry II restored the use of the grand jury of pre-sentment but the growth of a real jury system was slower even in criminal than in civil cases. In the methods of justice remained throughout the Middle Ages marvelously crude to our modern notions. One aspect of Henry's policy was not so successful. He was anxious to round off his system by defining and limiting the power of the church. It was partly to this end that he gave the Archbishopric of Canterbury to his friend Thomas Beckett, a courtly deacon whom he had appointed Chancellor. Beckett was a brave soldier and an excellent boon companion, a lively talker, frank and excitable, handsome too with his tall figure and clear power set off by his dark hair. Henry had found him active in the chancellorship and had every reason to hope much from his cooperation in his ecclesiastical measures. As Chancellor he had taxed the church heavily for Henry's wars, plunging his sword into the bowels of his mother, but there was an incalculable element in medieval religion. Beckett seems to have taken his appointment as a call from God and never a bad man. He disgusted Henry by a sudden conversion into a saint with some of the asperities of sanctity which were bound to clash with the policy of the king. He resigned the chancellorship and stood as it were on the defensive. In 1164 Henry issued his program for the church in the famous constitutions of Claridan. The clerk in those days did not correspond exactly to our modern priest or clergyman. There were hundreds of scholars and minor orders who never aspired to the priesthood and in the later Middle Ages any educated man could claim benefit of clergy. It was said that during Henry's reign already more than a hundred murders had been committed by clerks. In one prominent case when a canon of Bedford was accused of murder he was acquitted on oath in the bishops court in flout at the king's justice who summoned him. Henry swore by the eyes of God to bring him to submission, but the archbishop declared the competence of the church courts to try clerical offenders. This case probably merely accelerated the issues. The constitutions of Claridan formulate much that had been common practice and to which Beckett could not have objected. But there were clauses which represented an innovation on the practice which had grown up and it is round these that the controversy grew. Henry desired that a clerk accused of a crime should first be brought before the lay court where he could plead benefit of clergy. He should then be taken before the church court in a foul guilty receive the appropriate unfrocking in spiritual deprivations and then be handed over to the lay court to be tried again as a layman and punished as such. Beckett regarded this as grossly unfair and as insulting to the ecclesiastical arm. He seems to have agreed to the king's policy before its definite formulation. But he rejected the constitutions and reproached himself bitterly for his lapse, suspending himself from his functions and craving pardon from the pope. An attack of a particularly invidious nature was made on the archbishop by his enemies, referring to a point of his administration as chancellor. Beckett fled to France, where the pope then was, but found less zealous support than he could have wished. On several occasions in history the papacy has resented the action of two zealous Englishmen in pitting their power against English practice. For six years the archbishop remained in exile and then a kind of truce being called he returned to his sea in 1170 to find himself forgotten and looked upon a scance by all say of the poor who remembered his charities. He was armed with power from the pope to suspend Roger, archbishop of York, who had crowned the king's son Henry, the king being anxious to secure a certain secession, and two other bishops. The news that he had issued the sentence on Christmas Day reached Henry overseas. Four days afterwards, armed knights, animated by the bitter words which Henry had let fall in his anger at the news, burst into Canterbury Cathedral at the hour of Vespers and brutally killed the archbishop, taunting him as a traitor. He met his death with the courage of a soldier and the resignation of a saint, but when the monks took him up and marked the hair shirt beneath his vestments, a revulsion of feeling spread among the people, and he was acclaimed saint. His shrine became the richest in the land, and at it Henry did public and sincere penance. He renounced the constitutions, but it is difficult to say which side had won the victory. The church kept its jurisdiction over clerks accused of crimes, though not in cases of high treason or offenses against the forest laws. On the other hand, minor offenses, whether by clerk or layman, were judged in the lay courts, as also were all suits involved in the right of property, even presentation to livings. The church, however, monopolized jurisdiction over marriages and wills. On the question of appeals to the Pope, Henry simply laid down his arms. The new age was to see new disputes, but the ground of the quarrel shifted. Henry's position as the head of a great empire impressed his contemporaries greatly, but he does not seem to have formed any great scheme of extension or organization beyond an anxiety characteristic of the age to aggrandize himself through the marriage of his children. He inherited Normandy and Maine from his mother, Anjou from his father, Aquitaine when he married Eleanor of that duchy, and the former wife of the French king. Eleanor was ten years older than her husband and had proved as incompatible with him as with Louis. By his son Geoffrey's marriage he got control of Brittany, and thus the English king held more of French territory than the French king himself, who was his natural enemy. Henry showed a feverish anxiety to have the secession to his territories settled, and by crowning his son in his lifetime roused his ambition unduly. The brothers were always quarreling amongst themselves, and Eleanor, who was finally imprisoned, encouraged them in revolt against their father. In 1173 the young king rose in rebellion. Louis and William the Lion of Scotland helped him, and the discontented barons in England, chiefly those who had lands also in Normandy, made one final bid to overthrow Henry's despotic and ordered rule. Henry beat down all opposition, and the warm support which the English people gave him in the struggle showed the Norman barons the hopelessness of their aims. William the Lion was taken prisoner. Henry had at the beginning of his reign recovered Northumberland and Cumberland lost to the Scotch under Stephen, and now once more a Scotch king did homage to his brother of England. In 1183 the young king Henry died, but his three brothers continued their quarrels. The favor which Henry showed to John the youngest was one great motive of dissension. Earl John showed something of his character and his outrageous behavior as governor in Ireland in 1185. For Ireland had been added to Henry's empire in the casual way in which these things were sometimes done in the Middle Ages. It may give the modern reader a thrill to read of the beginnings of that relation, which have been pregnant of so much, but the imagination of contemporary seems to have been stirred hardly at all when Henry quietly annexed Ireland. The two Williams had probably both intended the conquest of Ireland, but time failed them as it might have failed Henry too, but for the appeal which Dermott, king of Linnister, made for help to recover his wife from the Lord of Latrim, who had carried her off. Ireland was still in the tribal state. She had received Christianity in the fifth century at least, and realized it vividly, but her church remained missionary and monastic. And though Irish learning and Irish sanctity had been proverbial for some centuries, the people seemed to have no genius to guide them to political unity. They were a natural prey, but in 1166 Henry could not give them his attention. Dermott was, however, allowed to get what help he could from the barons, and Strongbow, Earl of Pembroke, fought his battles, married his daughter, and set all Ireland by the ears. Henry himself went over in 1172, and many kings, including the High King, Roderick O'Connor, did homage to him in a dim, blind way, probably realizing nothing of the significance Henry put on his suzeranity. The king left a viceroy. The Norman adventurers won lands at the point of the sword, northeast and south of the pail, enter married, and became more Irish than the Irish themselves. Henry's plan to interest John and Ireland, designing it for his patrimony, was not a success, but the Earl's woody tutor, Gerald of Barry, has left us a lively account of the people and their character, which differs hardly at all from that of Frosard, or even Edmund Spencer, in which allowing for the difference in the external details of civilization might stand as a sufficiently accurate description of the Irish of today. Henry's last years were spent in a grief-stricken struggle against his sons, aided by the new French king, Philippe Augustus. Ill and weary, he made peace on 4 July 1189, and sick at heart at finding that John too was among the rebels. He died three days after, in his fever forgetful of his successus in the past, and crying shame to himself as a conquered king. A glamour has been set over the reign of Richard of the Lionheart, who seceded his father, the titular sovereignty of Ireland alone falling to John, his only surviving brother. He was almost an ideal knight as the age understood knighthood, but a very indifferent king. He did England the service of neglecting her and allowing the system of Henry II to go unsteadily working under men more capable than himself to direct it. Though the memory of Richard has been cherished by the English people, he was perhaps the least English of our early kings. He was much more interested in the French empire, which he inherited almost intact, and he valued England mainly as a source of income. The country was drained for his enterprises, and but that the times were prosperous and just as strictly given, much misery might have ensued. Richard's rule must be described as essentially a tyranny, mitigated by its character of routine. The king's first thought was to raise money to join the Third Crusade, an enterprise which was drawn the leaders of chivalry all over Europe. The great Sultan Saladin had rested Jerusalem from the Christian kings who had held it nearly a hundred years since the First Crusade. The Third Crusade was the greatest of all, on a larger scale and enticing greater personalities than any other. Its progress is interesting as showing medieval chivalry at its worst and best, its courage and high aims, its capacity for endurance, its charity, and with all its jealousies and bitter hate. The Crusades had an enormous effect on the general progress of Europe, but they do not touch the political history of England very nearly, except through the financing of Richard. He was reckless to raise money, selling the chancellorship to William Longchamp, Bishop of Eli, and foregoing for payment the homage which the Scotch king had done his father at Philaeus. Richard was animated by his love of adventure, with the added motive of repentance for his conduct towards his father, for which he sorrowed in characteristic medieval manner with almost shameless penitents. Philippe Augustus, his erstwhile ally and now his inevitable rival, went too, but quarreled with the English king and soon came back. Richard stayed and quarreled still, but did marvelous deeds at the Siege of Achre, once he marched for Jerusalem, but could not take it for want of support, although the Frenchmen were as loud in his praises the English. Finally the Christian secured a footing on the east coast of Palestine and access to the holy Sepulchre. On his way back to England Richard was captured by an enemy, Leopold of Austria, and handed over to another enemy, the Emperor Henry VI. England was drained once more to raise his enormous ransom. He returned to find his brother John in revolt. William of Eli had proved a faithful minister to the king, but offensive in his ostentation to the barons, and John had led resistance to him. Walter, Bishop of Rouen, replaced him, but there was no more peace. John gave the new minister no loyal support, and Richard's return found him in alliance with the French king in a design upon the crown. John was in Normandy, and Richard, having declared his lands forfeit in a great council at Nottingham, and having had himself re-crowned at Winchester, crossed over to face his brother. John came into his allegiance, and Richard in his grand manner forgave him. The French and English kings then gave vent to their public and private grievances against each other in open war, in intermittent struggles with the French king or his French vassals, fill up the tale of Richard's remaining years. He devoted himself with enthusiasm to the building of Chateau Gagliard on the rock of Andel's by sign, the Saucy Castle, which was to protect Normandy against French invasion. It was, however, in fight against William of Limoges over a question of treasure trove that Richard met his death from an arrow shot while storming the castle of Chaluse. Richard had the curiosity to question the crossbowman who had let the arrow fly and who had been taken prisoner, as to his motive. It was he boldly told him revenge for the death of his father and two brothers. Richard bade his attendants give the man money and let him go, but after the king's death his sister, Countess Joan of Sicily, saw to it that the man was slain. Richard, with his tall, fond figure, his blue eyes and fair hair, with his lordly condescensions and his fine arduous, was the most notable prince in Europe and the archetype of medieval chivalry. It was lettered to and wrote quite reputable poetry in the South French style. He asked that his heart might be buried at Rouen and his body at his father's feet at Font Evreude, and there it was lain by Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, the Carthusian saint who had been called from his charter house to fill that sea. He is one of the most striking figures of the period in his gentle asceticism and practical courage. Though a close friend of the king, he had resisted in 1179 a grant of military service, which Hubert Walker, the justiciar, who had replaced Walter Rouen, demanded. The exact ground of the resistance is not very clear, but Hubert's action in defending what he considered Englishman's rights has been held in grateful remembrance. It may have been resultant on this refusal that a great survey of England was carried out in the next year by the new common method of inquest. It is to be noted that two local knights were added in each county to the body before whom the local jurors swore, a remote foreshadowing of the constitution of the parliament, whose growth was to be the chief feature of the 13th century. Richard on his deathbed, named as his assessor, his brother John, known as Lachlan, because Henry II had not originally given him a share in his continental possessions, as he did to his other sons. Richard had originally intended that Arthur of Brittany, his brother Geoffrey's son, should secede him, but his own premature death found Arthur but a boy, and Richard prevailed on the barons to swear allegiance to John. The French king supported Arthur, but John, with the help of his mother Eleanor, who showed herself as discreet and helpful towards the sons she loved as she had been factious with the husband she disliked, prevailed, and Philippe made peace in 1200. John's repudiation of his wife Isabella of Glauchester in his marriage for an amorous whim with Isabella of Agolayne, the promised bride of you of Louison, alienated the French king once more, and with his support Arthur made a new attempt to seize John's French possessions. He was taken prisoner in April 1203, died in the new tower at Rouen. No one doubted that he was murdered, and John's French subjects, quite alienated, made no further resistance to the French king. John sat feasting at Rouen in the spring of 1204 with his wife, while Philippe annexed Normandy, boasting in a mad way that what was lost so easily could be as easily won back. Anjou was taken as easily, and later Porto. Within two years nothing remained to the English king of his father's vast possessions in France but Guillaume and southern Aquitaine. The Gascones were as foreign to France as they were to the English, and preferred the more distant rule, and so remained under English rule for two-and-a-half centuries longer. The loss of the Battle of Bovines in 1213 put the final seal on the loss of John's French possessions. The defeat was due to the failure of the Emperor Otto IV to cooperate in John's well-conceived plan, for John was no mean strategist in the periods of energy which alternated with his curious moods of indifferent luxury. The final severance came approximately at the moment when an ultimatum, prepared by the leaders of the Church and the Baronage, was ready for presentation to John as a protest in the name of all the people against his misrule. From 1204 onwards John had perforce spent most of his time in England. He combined the indifference of Richard to England's welfare with some of the positive personal vices, shamelessly avowed which had marked Rufus. His tyranny was not unlike that of the Red King, allowing for the march of time. But there was an element of gross cruelty in John which made his misrule more monstrous. He slowly starved to death the wife and son of William de Arous, the first Baron who rose against him. And he had twenty-eight youths, left as hostages by Welch, Princess, their fathers, hanged in a row. Discontent was first aroused by his continual levying of scutitchous and tallitchous, with which he performed no public service. He alienated the Church by his defiance of the interdict, which the great Pope Innocent laid upon the land when John, on the death of Hubert Walter, obstinately refused to accept his archbishop of Canterbury, Innocence, nominee Stephen Langton. The quarrel between the King and the Chapter of Canterbury over their respective nominees had given the chance for papal interference, and the greatest of all the Popes was not the one to prove diffident in interference. After two years of menace, England was put under interdict in March 1208. The churches were closed and no services held or sacraments administered, except baptism and extreme unction allowed for the safety of souls. Most of the higher clergy fled, dreading the reprisals of the King, who enriched himself with vast confiscations of the Church's goods and lands. For five years John held his wayward course, and then suddenly demoralized by the Pope's sentence of deposition, whose execution he entrusted to the French King. He rendered to Innocent a groveling submission through the legate Pandove. The French fleet lying at Dom, ready for the invasion of England, was destroyed, but the English nobles would not follow John to France to follow up the victory. Stephen Langton landed in England, absolved the King, and tendered to him the coronation oaths again. John had done well to keep Stephen out of England, for he proved a great patriot. He was an Englishman, probably a Northerner, and in so far his leadership of the opposition to the King's misrule, typifies the consolidation of the Norman and English races, which had been a steady process under the Angevin rule. Stephen's first act was to assemble the barons and read them a lecture, with the charter of Henry I as text. They decided to take it as their watchword. Meanwhile the battle of Bouvains was fought and lost, and John returned to England full of angry plans of revenge against the barons who had refused to follow him. He mustered his mercenaries. Meanwhile the opposition presented their ultimatum. He must confirm the charter of Henry I. It is significant that neither Richard nor John had found it necessary to issue a charter at their accession. John tried to foil them by meaningless negotiations through Langton, who did not openly join the rising. At Easter 1215 a baronial army under five earls mustered at Stamford and marched upon London. The citizens received them with open arms, and John drew off to Windsor. At running meat nearby he was forced to set his hand to Magna Carta, the famous great charter of English liberty, in which Langton and his advisors had striven to formulate all the grievances under which the nation groaned. A committee of twenty-five barons was to be elected to enforce its provisions, a clause significant of the faith given to John's promise. In point of fact he never meant to keep it. After the thing had been done and the barons had withdrawn, he rised on the ground in an agony of rage, shrieking hysterically that they had given him five and twenty over-kings. He shortly obtained from innocent absolution from his promise. The barons desperate to fly the pope's threats of excommunication and took the false step of inviting Louis, the son of the French king, to England to lead their cause. This gave John a party. From May to October 1216 they fought, when John's sudden death ended the struggle, and made a rearrangement of parties possible. The king had narrowly escaped drowning and crossing the wash, where he lost his treasure, and angry and exhausted he persisted in eating fruit and drinking cider to his own destruction. He was buried in the church of St. Wolfston at Warchester, and his memory remains most odious among English kings. The great charter which he had signed became the rallying point for a new age. A long document of over sixty clauses, it has been traditionally regarded as summing up the principles of English liberty, and as being adequate for the interpretation of the nation's rights at any period. In point of fact it is little but a feudal document, and the rights it would enforce were feudal rights. Its very minuteness illustrates this. It was a charter of liberties rather than of liberty. Provided against the king's misuse of his feudal rights over his tenants, the kernel of a wider liberty is only discerned in the stipulation that they in their turn were to do likewise towards their vassals. The liberties enumerated do not touch the face of the great mass of Englishmen who were still villains. The church was to have its freedom, freedom that is from royal encroachments, whereas it was the papal power which was growing in this century and resented in the next. From some points of view the great charter had a retrograde aspect in as much as it sought to check the growth of royal justice. In short, if it is to be accepted as one of the three great charters in the Bible of the English Constitution, it is because Englishmen have read into it the hidden significance of an inspired text.